1954 AD - Wicca was publicised by Gerald Gardner

Wicca (English: /ˈwɪkə/), also termed Pagan Witchcraft, is a contemporary Pagan new religious movement. It was developed in England during the first half of the 20th century and was introduced to the public in 1954 by Gerald Gardner, a retired British civil servant. Wicca draws upon a diverse set of ancient pagan and 20th-century hermetic motifs for its theological structure and ritual practices.

Wicca has no central authority. Its traditional core beliefs, principles and practices were originally outlined in the 1940s and 1950s by Gardner and Doreen Valiente, both in published books as well as in secret written and oral teachings passed along to their initiates. There are many variations on the core structure, and the religion grows and evolves over time. It is divided into a number of diverse lineages, sects and denominations, referred to as traditions, each with its own organisational structure and level of centralisation. Due to its decentralized nature, there is some disagreement over what actually constitutes Wicca. Some traditions, collectively referred to as British Traditional Wicca, strictly follow the initiatory lineage of Gardner and consider the term Wicca to apply only to similar traditions, but not to newer, eclectic traditions.

Wicca is typically duotheistic, worshipping a Goddess and a God. These are traditionally viewed as the Moon Goddess and the Horned God, respectively. These deities may be regarded in a henotheistic way, as having many different divine aspects which can in turn be identified with many diverse pagan deities from different historical pantheons. For this reason, they are sometimes referred to as the "Great Goddess" and the "Great Horned God", with the adjective "great" connoting a deity that contains many other deities within their own nature. These two deities are sometimes viewed as facets of a greater pantheisticdivinity, which is regarded as an impersonal force or process rather than a personal deity. While duotheism or bitheism is traditional in Wicca, broader Wiccan beliefs range from polytheism to pantheism or monism, even to Goddess monotheism.

Wiccan celebrations encompass both the cycles of the Moon, known as Esbats and commonly associated with the Goddess (female deity), and the cycles of the Sun, seasonally based festivals known as Sabbats and commonly associated with the Horned God (male deity). An unattributed statement known as the Wiccan Rede is a popular expression of Wiccan morality, although it is not universally accepted by Wiccans. Wicca often involves the ritual practice of magic, though it is not always necessary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicca

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Gerald Brosseau Gardner (1884 – 1964), also known by the craft name Scire, was an English Wiccan, as well as an author and an amateur anthropologist and archaeologist. He was instrumental in bringing the Contemporary Pagan religion of Wicca to public attention, writing some of its definitive religious texts and founding the tradition of Gardnerian Wicca.

Born into an upper-middle-class family in Blundellsands, Lancashire, Gardner spent much of his childhood abroad in Madeira. In 1900, he moved to colonial Ceylon, and then in 1911 to Malaya, where he worked as a civil servant, independently developing an interest in the native peoples and writing papers and a book about their magical practices. After his retirement in 1936, he travelled to Cyprus, penning the novel A Goddess Arrives before returning to England. Settling down near the New Forest, he joined an occult group, the Rosicrucian Order Crotona Fellowship, through which he claimed to have encountered the New Forest coveninto which he was initiated in 1939. Believing the coven to be a survival of the pre-Christian Witch-Cultdiscussed in the works of Margaret Murray, he decided to revive the faith, supplementing the coven's rituals with ideas borrowed from Freemasonry, ceremonial magic and the writings of Aleister Crowley to form the Gardnerian tradition of Wicca.

Moving to London in 1945, following the repeal of the Witchcraft Act of 1736 he became intent on propagating this religion, attracting media attention and writing about it in High Magic's Aid (1949), Witchcraft Today (1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959). Founding a Wiccan group known as the Bricket Wood coven, he introduced a string of High Priestesses into the religion, including Doreen Valiente, Lois Bourne, Patricia Crowther and Eleanor Bone, through which the Gardnerian community spread throughout Britain and subsequently into Australia and the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Involved for a time with Cecil Williamson, Gardner also became director of the Museum of Magic and Witchcraft on the Isle of Man, which he ran until his death.

Gardner is internationally recognised as the "Father of Wicca" among the Pagan and occult communities. His claims regarding the New Forest coven have been widely scrutinised, with Gardner being the subject of investigation for historians and biographers such as Aidan Kelly, Ronald Hutton and Philip Heselton.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Gardner_(Wiccan)

1952 AD - Scientology was created

Scientology is a body of religious beliefs and practices launched in May 1952 by American author L. Ron Hubbard (1911–86). Hubbard initially developed a program of ideas called Dianetics, which was distributed through the Dianetics Foundation. The foundation soon entered bankruptcy, and Hubbard lost the rights to his seminal publication Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health in 1952. He then recharacterized the subject as a religion and renamed it Scientology,^[4] retaining the terminology, doctrines, the E-meter, and the practice of auditing.^[5][6] Within a year, he regained the rights to Dianetics and retained both subjects under the umbrella of the Church of Scientology.^{[7][8][9][10][11][12]}

Hubbard describes the etymology of the word Scientology as coming from the Latin word "scio", meaning know or distinguish, and the Greek word “logos”, meaning “the word or outward form by which the inward thought is expressed and made known”. Hubbard writes, “thus, Scientology means knowing about knowing, or science of knowledge”.^[13]

Hubbard's groups have encountered considerable opposition and controversy.^[14] In January 1951, the New Jersey Board of Medical Examiners brought proceedings against Dianetics Foundation on the charge of teaching medicine without a license.^[15] Hubbard's followers engaged in a program of criminal infiltration of the U.S. government.^[16][17]

Hubbard-inspired organizations and their classification are often a point of contention. Germany classifies Scientology groups as an "anti-constitutional sect".^[18][19] In France, they have been classified as a dangerous cult by some parliamentary reports.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology

https://www.scientology.org/

1948 AD - The modern state of Israel was established as a homeland for the Jews

Israel (/ˈɪzriəl, -reɪəl/; Hebrew: יִשְׂרָאֵל‬; Arabic: إِسْرَائِيل‎), officially the State of Israel, is a country in the Middle East, on the southeastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea and the northern shore of the Red Sea. It has land borders with Lebanon to the north, Syria to the northeast, Jordan on the east, the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip^[13] to the east and west, respectively, and Egypt to the southwest. The country contains geographically diverse features within its relatively small area.^[7][14] Israel's economic and technological center is Tel Aviv,^[15] while its seat of government and proclaimed capital is Jerusalem, although the state's sovereignty over Jerusalem is not recognised internationally.^{[16][17][18][19][fn 2]}

The Kingdoms of Israel and Judah emerged during the Iron Age.^[20][21] The Neo-Assyrian Empire destroyed Israel around 720 BCE.^[22] Judah was later conquered by the Babylonian, Persian and Hellenistic empires and had existed as Jewish autonomous provinces.^[23][24] The successful Maccabean Revolt led to an independent Hasmonean kingdom by 110 BCE,^[25] which in 63 BCE however became a client state of the Roman Republicthat subsequently installed the Herodian dynasty in 37 BCE, and in 6 CE created the Roman province of Judea.^[26] Judea lasted as a Roman province until the failed Jewish revolts resulted in widespread destruction,^[25] expulsion of Jewish population^[25][27] and the renaming of the region from Iudaea to Syria Palaestina.^[28] Jewish presence in the region has persisted to a certain extent over the centuries. In the 7th century the Levant was taken from the Byzantine Empire by the Arabs and remained in Muslim control until the First Crusade of 1099, followed by the Ayyubid conquest of 1187. The Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt extended its control over the Levant in the 13th century until its defeat by the Ottoman Empire in 1517. During the 19th century, national awakening among Jews led to the establishment of the Zionist movement in the diasporafollowed by waves of immigration to Ottoman and later British Palestine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel

1947 AD - First nation in the name of Islam was created called Pakistan. British India was partitioned into the Islamic nation of Pakistan and the secular nation of India with a Hindu majority

Pakistan^[b] (Urdu: پاکِستان‬‎), officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan (Urdu: اِسلامی جمہوریہ پاکِستان‬‎), is a country in South Asia. It is the fifth-most populous country with a population exceeding 212,742,631 people.^[18]In area, it is the 33rd-largest country, spanning 881,913 square kilometres (340,509 square miles). Pakistan has a 1,046-kilometre (650-mile) coastline along the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Oman in the south and is bordered by India to the east, Afghanistan to the west, Iran to the southwest, and China in the far northeast. It is separated narrowly from Tajikistan by Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor in the northwest, and also shares a maritime border with Oman.

The territory that now constitutes Pakistan was the site of several ancient cultures, including the Mehrgarh of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilisation, and was later home to kingdoms ruled by people of different faiths and cultures, including Hindus, Indo-Greeks, Muslims, Turco-Mongols, Afghans, and Sikhs. The area has been ruled by numerous empires and dynasties, including the Persian Achaemenid Empire, Alexander III of Macedon, the Indian Mauryan Empire, the Arab Umayyad Caliphate, the Gupta Empire,^[25] the Delhi Sultanate, the Mongol Empire, the Mughal Empire, the Afghan Durrani Empire, the Sikh Empire (partially), and, most recently, the British Empire.

Pakistan is the only country to have been created in the name of Islam.^[26][27] As a result of the Pakistan Movement led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the subcontinent's struggle for independence, Pakistan was created in 1947 as an independent homeland for Indian Muslims.^[28] It is an ethnically and linguistically diverse country, with a similarly diverse geography and wildlife. Initially a dominion, Pakistan adopted a constitution in 1956, becoming an Islamic republic. An ethnic civil war in 1971 resulted in the secession of East Pakistan as the new country of Bangladesh.^[29] In 1973 Pakistan adopted a new constitution establishing, alongside its pre-existing parliamentary republic status, a federal government based in Islamabad consisting of four provinces and four federal territories. The new constitution also stipulated that all laws are to conform to the injunctions of Islam as laid down in the Quran and Sunnah.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan

1939–1945 AD - Millions of Jews were relocated and murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust

The Holocaust, also referred to as the Shoah,^[b] was a genocide during World War II in which Nazi Germany, aided by its collaborators, systematically murdered approximately 6 million European Jews, around two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe, between 1941 and 1945.^[c] Jews were targeted for extermination as part of a larger event, involving the persecution and murder of other groups by the regime, including in particular the Roma, ethnic Poles, and "incurably sick",^[6] as well as political opponents, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Soviet prisoners of war.^[7]

Germany implemented the persecution in stages. Following Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933, the government passed laws to exclude Jews from civil society, most prominently the Nuremberg Laws in 1935. Starting in 1933, the Nazis built a network of concentration camps in Germany for political opponents and people deemed "undesirable". After the invasion of Poland in 1939, the regime set up ghettos to segregate Jews. Over 42,000 camps, ghettos, and other detention sites were established.^[8]

The deportation of Jews to the ghettos culminated in the policy of extermination the Nazis called the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question", discussed by senior Nazi officials at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin in January 1942. As German forces captured territories in the East, all anti-Jewish measures were radicalized. Under the coordination of the SS, with directions from the highest leadership of the Nazi Party, killings were committed within Germany itself, throughout German-occupied Europe, and across all territories controlled by the Axis powers. Paramilitary units called Einsatzgruppen murdered around 1.3 million Jews in mass shootings between 1941 and 1945. By mid-1942, victims were being deported from the ghettos in sealed freight trains to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, they were killed in gas chambers. The killing continued until the end of World War II in Europe in April–May 1945.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jews

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism

1932 - A neo-Hindu religious movement, the Brahma Kumaris or "Daughters of Brahma", started. Its origin can be traced to the group "Om Mandali", founded by Lekhraj Kripalani(1884–1969)

The Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University (Prajapita Brahma Kumaris Ishwariya Vishwa Vidyalaya or BKWSU) is a new religious movement that originated in Hyderabad, Sindh, during the 1930s.^[1] The Brahma Kumaris (Sanskrit: ब्रह्माकुमारी, "daughters of Brahma") movement was founded by Dada Lekhraj Kripalani, who later took the name Brahma Baba.^[2] It is distinctly identified by the prominent role that women play in the movement.^[3]

It teaches a form of meditation that focuses on identity as souls, as opposed to bodies. They believe that all souls are intrinsically good and that God is the source of all goodness.^[4] The university teaches to transcend labels associated with the body, such as race, nationality, religion, and gender, and it aspires to establish a global culture based on what it calls "soul-consciousness".^[2][5]

In 2008, the movement claimed to have more than 825,000 regular students, with over 8,500 centres in 100 countries.

Early history

The Brahma Kumaris, originally called Om Mandali, started in Hyderabad, Sindh in north-west India.^[5] It received this name because members would chant "Om" together, before having discourse on spiritual matters in the traditional satsang style. The original discourses were closely connected to the Bhagavad Gita.^[5]

The founder, Dada Lekhraj Khubchand Kripilani (who became known in the group as "Om Baba") was a wealthy jeweller who was respected in the community for his piety.^[5] He reported what he said were a series of visions and other transcendental experiences that commenced around 1935 and became the basis for the discourses. He said he believed there was a greater power working through him and that many of those who attended these gatherings were themselves having spiritual experiences. The majority of those who came were women and children from the Bhaibund caste^[6] - a caste of wealthy merchants and business people whose husbands and fathers were often overseas on business.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahma_Kumaris

http://www.brahmakumaris.org/