Wyccad is to some extent about the imperceptible changes wrought upon knowledge and tradition over time. What would be regarded as magic or sorcery a few centuries later was at the time seen as the ability to bend the real world to one's will. The word had become both wicked and witch by the end of the middle ages, ultimately to be fused into a single alliterative redundancy by Hollywood. There are perhaps fifteen generations between Anya Donagmore, who discovers the disturbing secret of her past in Wyccad , and her unprincipled ancestor who's responsible for it.
Years can warp the meaning of a lot things over such a span of time.
The fluidity of pagan traditions is another salient aspect of the story, unlike orthodox European society, most of the followers of the old gods were neither equipped to write down their beliefs, nor were they well disposed to. Rural people were rarely literate until recent times, and in the centuries when the supposed practice of witchcraft was a capital crime, witchcraft being defined as the practice of any non-christian beliefs, it would have been unwise to write down anything which might later be read by magistrates or clerics. Left to the vicissitudes of oral transmission, the details of the ways of the goddess varied amongst their tellers. The prospect that Anya might really have been made love to by the god Herne, the lord of the forests, will no doubt provoke some small number of skeptics, not to mention the politically correct, a few parents' groups and perhaps enough born-again christians to shout down the second coming. She would certainly reply to them all that their distant ancestors forgot what it was to love their god, while hers did not.