(A follow-up to my post, What is Magic?)
Wicca is a made up religion.
You can argue that all religions are made up, and that may be true, but Wicca is a bunch of different traditions thrown into a velvet pouch with a dash of Gerald Gardner's mind, shaken around randomly, and dumped out in a pentagram shape. Pretty much every Wiccan is an eclectic Wiccan; some just choose to give a bit more structure to it based on one person's ideas such as Gerald Gardner, Alex Sanders, etc. (notice that these people are men. This is a Goddess religion!) by adding unnecessary rules.
Wicca, oh, Wicca. I don't even want to bother to explain the history. It's that confusing. I'm going to use this post to explain what I like and don't like about Wicca, and to debunk the misconceptions-- not the misconceptions held by Christians that most Wiccans pay attention to, but the misconceptions held by Wiccans. I will also use this chapter to analyze neopaganism in general. I might rant a little bit (see above), so please don't hate on me. I do not mean to offend anyone who is Wiccan, just as I do not mean to offend any honest Christians with my debunking of certain Christian ideas in my writing. I personally do not fully identify as Wiccan, but it tends to be easier to describe myself as Wiccan and attach witchcraft to a religious practice, rather than have to say what witchcraft is.
One of the most common Wiccan misconceptions that is one of my biggest pet peeves is the idea that Wicca is "the Old Religion". Let's get this out of the way right now: Wicca is not an old religion. It's not. All the early books about Wicca (pre-1990) support the idea that Wicca is a revival of an ancient paleolithic matriarchal religion. This idea was created by Margaret Murray. As far as we know, this is false. There is no historical evidence of such a practice. If such a community did exist, it is unlikely that it would have remained completely concealed for centuries. As far as we know, Wicca started in the 1950s.
It is unknown if Gerald Gardner actually created Wicca, or if he just added to an already existing faith and publicized it. Until 1951, it was actually illegal in the UK to say you had magical powers (all of a sudden, the Harry Potter Statute of Secrecy makes a bit more sense!). As soon as that was repealed, old Gerald came forth and publicized a neopagan religion focusing on witchcraft. Wicca is mostly a combination of Celtic and Anglo Saxon ideas, with some things taken from Aradia, or the Gospel of Witches and a bit of Freemasonry, but it has a lot of unusual elements that seem original to Gardner. For instance, there is absolutely no purpose for athames. Athames are ritual knives used for directing energy and casting circles. They do not cut anything. You could do all these things with a wand. They symbolize fire and masculine energy, just like wands. Athames were clearly added by Gardner, because he loved knives. He wrote whole books on his knife collections. So of course, he wanted to make knives part of his religion, even though there's no real purpose for them. I should talk; I have not one but two, just because they're cool. Where did the word "athame" come from, anyway?!. The Oxford English Dictionary said that the word comes from the 1930s, with unknown origin.
Gardner also made up the term "Book of Shadows". He thought this would be a cool name for a witch's journal. He got the idea from an ancient book written on palm leaves that told a person's fortune by measuring their shadow. Of course, I use the term because I invented the word "Shadowbook" as the title for one of my novels.
Gardner took the classic Charge of the Goddess from a book called Aradia, or the Gospel of Witches, by Charles G. Leland. It is an account of a witch cult in Italy, which may or may not be based on any kind of fact. Personally I hate the idea of Aradia; she is supposed to be Diana's daughter, and the whole point of Diana's "character" (if you will) is that she's a maiden goddess! She is the matron of feminists everywhere! She does not have a daughter!
Whatever. The whole thing is a mix of Catholicism and Paganism, two faiths that quite frankly, do not mix.
When Gardner's High Priestess, Doreen Valiente, read his original Charge of the Goddess, she saw that it was almost an exact copy of the Charge that was in Aradia. Gardner replied that if she thought she could do it better, she could write it. She did, and that is the Charge as we know it.
One of the other things that bothers me about the Charge is the line, "to show that ye be truly free, ye shall be naked in your rites." Does anyone else realize how incredibly ironic that statement is? Though that line appeared in the original book, Gardner made the whole skyclad thing a much bigger thing than it needed to be. Gardner was a naturist, and threw nude parties in his concealed backyard. Of course he wanted this to be a big part of his religion. He even called it being "skyclad" to make people feel better about it ( and I might mention he lived in England, where it's cold most of the year and as a pagan religion you should ideally be doing rituals outside in nature). The irony of this line in the Charge is almost hilarious. Do I think that the United States should be a lot more lax about nudity than it is? Yes. Do I think we should not be ashamed of our naked selves? Yes. Do I think that a solitary skyclad ritual is a great way to connect to nature? Yes. But "to show that ye be truly free, ye shall be naked in your rites." HOW IS IT AN EXPRESSION OF FREEDOM IF IT'S A RULE?!!
My other biggest pet peeve is the meaning of the word wicca. Wicca is an Anglo Saxon word for witch. It does NOT mean "wise one". It means "to bend or twist" (as in the forces of nature to your will) and is the masculine term for someone who does so. The feminine term is wicce. This really bothers some (female) witches, who refuse to call themselves Wiccans because of it.
Now I will provide these two articles so I do not have to discuss everything in them. They describe the lack of historical background surrounding Wicca, Gerald Gardner's ironic sexism, the fact that the Sabbat cycle doesn't make sense, and other eye-openers. Sorry about the sparkles, but it's not my site and I can't do anything about it. I recommend looking through the rest of this site for more information on Witchcraft.
hecatescauldron.org/gardner_unvei...
hecatescauldron.org/Valentiee%20o…
You can argue that all religions are made up, and that may be true, but Wicca is a bunch of different traditions thrown into a velvet pouch with a dash of Gerald Gardner's mind, shaken around randomly, and dumped out in a pentagram shape. Pretty much every Wiccan is an eclectic Wiccan; some just choose to give a bit more structure to it based on one person's ideas such as Gerald Gardner, Alex Sanders, etc. (notice that these people are men. This is a Goddess religion!) by adding unnecessary rules.
Wicca, oh, Wicca. I don't even want to bother to explain the history. It's that confusing. I'm going to use this post to explain what I like and don't like about Wicca, and to debunk the misconceptions-- not the misconceptions held by Christians that most Wiccans pay attention to, but the misconceptions held by Wiccans. I will also use this chapter to analyze neopaganism in general. I might rant a little bit (see above), so please don't hate on me. I do not mean to offend anyone who is Wiccan, just as I do not mean to offend any honest Christians with my debunking of certain Christian ideas in my writing. I personally do not fully identify as Wiccan, but it tends to be easier to describe myself as Wiccan and attach witchcraft to a religious practice, rather than have to say what witchcraft is.
One of the most common Wiccan misconceptions that is one of my biggest pet peeves is the idea that Wicca is "the Old Religion". Let's get this out of the way right now: Wicca is not an old religion. It's not. All the early books about Wicca (pre-1990) support the idea that Wicca is a revival of an ancient paleolithic matriarchal religion. This idea was created by Margaret Murray. As far as we know, this is false. There is no historical evidence of such a practice. If such a community did exist, it is unlikely that it would have remained completely concealed for centuries. As far as we know, Wicca started in the 1950s.
It is unknown if Gerald Gardner actually created Wicca, or if he just added to an already existing faith and publicized it. Until 1951, it was actually illegal in the UK to say you had magical powers (all of a sudden, the Harry Potter Statute of Secrecy makes a bit more sense!). As soon as that was repealed, old Gerald came forth and publicized a neopagan religion focusing on witchcraft. Wicca is mostly a combination of Celtic and Anglo Saxon ideas, with some things taken from Aradia, or the Gospel of Witches and a bit of Freemasonry, but it has a lot of unusual elements that seem original to Gardner. For instance, there is absolutely no purpose for athames. Athames are ritual knives used for directing energy and casting circles. They do not cut anything. You could do all these things with a wand. They symbolize fire and masculine energy, just like wands. Athames were clearly added by Gardner, because he loved knives. He wrote whole books on his knife collections. So of course, he wanted to make knives part of his religion, even though there's no real purpose for them. I should talk; I have not one but two, just because they're cool. Where did the word "athame" come from, anyway?!. The Oxford English Dictionary said that the word comes from the 1930s, with unknown origin.
Gardner also made up the term "Book of Shadows". He thought this would be a cool name for a witch's journal. He got the idea from an ancient book written on palm leaves that told a person's fortune by measuring their shadow. Of course, I use the term because I invented the word "Shadowbook" as the title for one of my novels.
Gardner took the classic Charge of the Goddess from a book called Aradia, or the Gospel of Witches, by Charles G. Leland. It is an account of a witch cult in Italy, which may or may not be based on any kind of fact. Personally I hate the idea of Aradia; she is supposed to be Diana's daughter, and the whole point of Diana's "character" (if you will) is that she's a maiden goddess! She is the matron of feminists everywhere! She does not have a daughter!
Whatever. The whole thing is a mix of Catholicism and Paganism, two faiths that quite frankly, do not mix.
When Gardner's High Priestess, Doreen Valiente, read his original Charge of the Goddess, she saw that it was almost an exact copy of the Charge that was in Aradia. Gardner replied that if she thought she could do it better, she could write it. She did, and that is the Charge as we know it.
One of the other things that bothers me about the Charge is the line, "to show that ye be truly free, ye shall be naked in your rites." Does anyone else realize how incredibly ironic that statement is? Though that line appeared in the original book, Gardner made the whole skyclad thing a much bigger thing than it needed to be. Gardner was a naturist, and threw nude parties in his concealed backyard. Of course he wanted this to be a big part of his religion. He even called it being "skyclad" to make people feel better about it ( and I might mention he lived in England, where it's cold most of the year and as a pagan religion you should ideally be doing rituals outside in nature). The irony of this line in the Charge is almost hilarious. Do I think that the United States should be a lot more lax about nudity than it is? Yes. Do I think we should not be ashamed of our naked selves? Yes. Do I think that a solitary skyclad ritual is a great way to connect to nature? Yes. But "to show that ye be truly free, ye shall be naked in your rites." HOW IS IT AN EXPRESSION OF FREEDOM IF IT'S A RULE?!!
My other biggest pet peeve is the meaning of the word wicca. Wicca is an Anglo Saxon word for witch. It does NOT mean "wise one". It means "to bend or twist" (as in the forces of nature to your will) and is the masculine term for someone who does so. The feminine term is wicce. This really bothers some (female) witches, who refuse to call themselves Wiccans because of it.
Now I will provide these two articles so I do not have to discuss everything in them. They describe the lack of historical background surrounding Wicca, Gerald Gardner's ironic sexism, the fact that the Sabbat cycle doesn't make sense, and other eye-openers. Sorry about the sparkles, but it's not my site and I can't do anything about it. I recommend looking through the rest of this site for more information on Witchcraft.
hecatescauldron.org/gardner_unvei...
hecatescauldron.org/Valentiee%20o…
There are things I do like about Wicca. I like how open and accepting it is of everyone. I like how it lets you believe what you want to believe. Wiccans have no set mythology because it is a very new and very eclectic religion, so you can honor any kind of god or goddess you want (if you want me to describe what I think gods, goddesses, and other spiritual beings are, I can). I like the duality of the God and Goddess. I like Beltane. I like Samhain. I like pentagrams. I like Drawing Down the Moon. I like the feeling of power. I came for the magick.
I enjoy my solitary practices. That way I can do things my own way. Things like coven structure are frustrating to me. There are three degrees (which were taken from Freemasonry by Gardner), and basically only the High Priest and Priestess get to do anything. Sometimes I wish I had a coven to celebrate Sabbats with, but for the most part, I'm happy. Wicca's confusing history and layers and layers of practices, and at times unneeded rules, make it so that every Wiccan's practices are different. Ask any two Wiccans about their beliefs and practices, you will get a different answer. Wicca's lack of mythology means that everybody follows different traditions. My practices tend to be Celtic, but until recently, I have only honored Hellenistic gods. Some Wiccans place not as much emphasis on witchcraft as I do. For me, Wicca is about spiritual discovery and magick, not the following of a pagan religion that flips everything on its head.
It seems as though paganism (or more correctly, neopaganism) in general has similar problems. The year before last, while trick or treating on Samhain Eve (I'm fifteen and I still trick or treat; deal with it!), I met a Stregan witch (Strega is the Italian order of witchcraft) who was handing out candy. At first I was shocked and excited that she was wearing a pentacle, but I said "pentagram" instead of "pentacle" (a pentacle is a physical object; the pentagram is the design of the star in the circle). She immediately corrected me. When I wished her a blessed Samhain, she informed me that due to quatrains of the year or something like that, Samhain was several days later. (I was quite sure I was in the right; traditionally, Samhain is on November first. It is a British and Irish Celtic tradition, not an Italian one). I felt naive. I was sure that I had presented myself as an ignorant teenager, interested in witchcraft without knowing what it was. It did not end well. This interaction haunted (pun intended) me for the rest of the night. When I looked up Strega on Wikipedia, I learned that the whole quatrain thing was part of their tradition, but not part of mine.
The cartoon below is my cautionary tale.
Like the girl in the cartoon above, some neopagans can be hard to take seriously. There is a stereotype of neopagans as being religious hippies with our heads in the clouds. Of course, that isn't true any more than the stereotype that all Christians are homophobic bigots is true, but it's definitely true of some people. (My question to them is, if you don't want Christian fundamentalists to let every aspect of their lives involve their religion, why should you?). Some pagans will have "More Persecuted Than Thou" syndrome, believing that the so-called "Burning Times" (the European witchcraft hysteria that started in the late middle ages and lasted through the renaissance) was a pagan holocaust. Regardless of how many pagans actually were killed during that time period, Wicca did not exist at the time, which means that Wicca has never been mass-persecuted in human history and Christianity has. As another example, the infamous pagan author Silver Ravenwolf claimed that nine million people were executed on charges of witchcraft. To be fair, she didn't create this statistic, but the number was actually closer to 30,000.
On a somewhat irrelevant note, I didn't think that Silver had an airy-fairy style of writing, until I realized that "To Ride a Silver Broomstick" was written for adults. I also guarantee that no real witch has ever ridden a silver broomstick. Ever. At least not on the physical plane.
Thank you for wasting your time to read my ranting. In a follow-up to this post, I will explain what I think witchcraft really is, aside from a religious context.
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