Excerpt
from Wicca for
Beginners: Fundamentals of Philosophy & Practice
What's Wicca?
Recently my husband and I went to a coffee house to meet a man who was
interested in becoming a student in our Wiccan study group. Like many
Wiccans who lead teaching groups, we always arrange for our first
meeting with a seeker-someone searching for his or her spiritual path-to
be in a public place, for everyone's safety and comfort. Over tea, we
asked the seeker why he wanted Wiccan training. We ask everyone who
talks to us about training this question. If they tell us they are
looking for a nature-based religion, a path of self-empowerment, a way
to commune with deity, or something along those lines, we continue the
conversation. If they tell us they want to hex their ex-lovers, brew
cauldrons full of toxic stuff, make others fall in love with them,
worship the devil, or fly on broomsticks, we tell them they're out of
luck and politely suggest that they seek out a therapist.
When we asked the question of this seeker, he told us about how he had
searched for information about Wicca in books and on the Internet,
attended public Wiccan rituals, and visited metaphysical bookstores, but
there was so much information available on the topic that he wasn't sure
what was Wicca and what was not. He was also at a loss about how to
separate the spiritual stuff from the rest. As he put it, I know there's
got to be a religion in there somewhere. He decided to find a teacher to
help him sort it all out.
It was easy to understand why he was confused. During the last several
years, Wicca and magic have stormed the American pop culture scene.
We've been watching Bewitched for quite a while, but Sabrina the Teenage
Witch, the Harry Potter films, The Lord of the Rings, Charmed, and Buffy
the Vampire Slayer have spurred a new wave of seekers, despite the fact
that most of these shows and films have precious little to do with real
Wicca. It's gotten to the point where someone has coined the term
Generation Hex for all of the teenagers and twenty-somethings who have
been turned on to Wicca by the current magical media blitz. There are
more Wicca books on the market than ever, and more than 6,000
Wicca-related Web sites on the Internet. There are Wiccan radio shows,
Wiccan umbrella organizations, and state-certified Wiccan churches. And
there's even Secret Spells Barbie, complete with glittery costume,
cauldron, and magic powder. Okay, technically she's not Wiccan, but she
definitely contributes to the confusion.
With all of this sudden popularity, you'd think that Wicca and magic had
finally made it into the mainstream. For better or worse, this isn't
true. The Wicca media glut has only given people more false, confusing,
and contradictory ideas about what Wicca is. Although it's probable that
more people are familiar with the word Wicca than ever before, there is
no cohesive, accurate image of Wiccans in pop culture. Thanks to films
and prime-time television, Wiccans may have graduated from the
green-faced hag with the pointy hat to sexy women with navel rings in
scanty clothes who help others with their powers, but this is not a more
accurate portrayal (there are plenty of male Wiccans, for one thing),
and it's not an improvement.
Even Wiccans get confused about what Wicca is sometimes. In the Wiccan
community there is a lot of discussion (okay, arguing) about what makes
a Wiccan. I'm not going to jump into that fray here. Instead, I want
this book to give you a broad-based understanding of Wicca so you can
decide what the truth is for yourself.
For the purpose of this book, here are some definitions:
 | A Wiccan is a person
who is following the Wiccan religion/spiritual path and has either
undergone a Wiccan initiation or has formally and ritually declared
him- or herself Wiccan.
| Some Wiccans use the
words Wiccan and witch interchangeably, but there are witches who do
not consider themselves Wiccans. Wiccans are a subgroup of witches.
| Wiccans and witches
are both subgroups of a larger group: pagans. Pagans are
practitioners of earth-based religions. Most Wiccans and witches
consider themselves pagan, but not all pagans are Wiccans or
witches. Christians sometimes call anyone who is not a Christian,
Muslim, or Jew a pagan, but we're not going with that definition.
| In this book, when I
use the term witchcraft, I'm referring to what Wiccans and witches
do: religious ritual and spell work. I use the term Wicca to refer
to the religion itself. So, just what is Wicca? There are a lot of
answers to that question. Here are a few of the more widely accepted
ones.
| Wicca
Is a New Old Religion |
Wicca is a new religion that combines surviving folk traditions and
more modern elements. It is loosely based on Western European pagan
rites and rituals that have been performed for centuries-before,
during, and after the time of Jesus-such as reverence of nature,
observance of the cycle of the seasons, celebration of the harvest,
and doing magic. Some of the structure of these old rites still
survives in Wicca, but most of the religion's structure and many of
its practices are more modern. Some of the framework of the religion
is culled from medieval grimoires (books of magic), occult
organizations such as the Golden Dawn, and techniques that today's
Wiccans make up on the fly because they suit their purposes or the
situation. Wicca is a living, evolving religion.
Wicca isn't the same thing as the kind of witchcraft you read about
in most of the history books, but the histories of the two are
intertwined. Witchcraft, in some form or another, has probably been
around as long as people have been. Certainly it's mentioned in
classical literature, like in the stories of Medea and Circe, and of
course in documents of the early Christian Church. One of the
earliest and most famous church documents about witchcraft is the
Canon Episcopi, which had a profound and long-lasting impact on the
philosophy of Christians toward witchcraft and paganism. It was
incorporated into canon law in the twelfth century, but it is
believed to be much older (one possible year of origin is AD 906).
The Canon said, essentially, that witchcraft was an illusion that
originated in dreams, and to believe in it was heresy, or against
the teachings of the church. A famous section of the Canon states:
Certain abandoned women, perverted by Satan, seduced by illusions
and phantasms of demons, believe and openly profess that, in the
dead of night, they ride upon certain beasts with the pagan goddess
Diana, with a countless horde of women, and in the silence of the
dead of the night to traverse great spaces of earth, and obey her
commands as their mistress . . . but it were well if they alone
perished in their infidelity and did not draw so many others along
with them into the pit of their faithlessness. For an innumerable
multitude, deceived by this false opinion, believe this to be true,
and so believing, wander from right faith and relapse into pagan
errors when they think there is any divinity or power except the one
God.1
The idea that believing in witchcraft and paganism was heresy
persisted until the reign of Pope Innocent VIII, who issued Summis
desiderantes affectibus, a papal bull reversing the Canon and
stating that witchcraft did exist and that to perform it was heresy.
Although several church letters advocating positions that would
reverse the Canon Episcopi had been issued prior to Summis
desiderantes affectibus, the new bull was most effective because it
was published in 1484, around the time of the invention of the
printing press, and attached as a prefix to the widely distributed
Malleus Maleficarum, the infamous manual on finding, torturing, and
prosecuting suspected witches, which was written by Dominican
inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger.
This bull cleared the way for the Inquisition, the European witch
hunts, and the deaths of thousands of people accused of the heresy
of witchcraft. And along with the Malleus, it helped to solidify,
codify, and spread several of the ideas that came to be associated
closely with medieval witchcraft. These included the notion that
witches signed a pact with the devil (often solemnized by kissing
his behind, something no self-respecting Wiccan would do). Of
course, this made the consequences for witchcraft much more serious
than they had been, and the witch hunts were born.
Pre-Christian rites were considered superstition at best, and
witchcraft or devil worship at worst, so, since witchcraft was now
formally considered a heresy by the church, people who were accused
of performing pagan rites were prosecuted. During the witch hunts,
many European pre-Christian pagan traditions died out, took on a
Catholic veneer, or went underground. Some of this would have
happened even without the hunts, since traditions rarely last
completely intact for thousands of years. However, pockets of pagan
practice and vestiges of the old ways survived. We see remnants of
some of them today in traditions like the Morris men and Maypole
dancers in England.
On one hand, this history of witchcraft and the church has nothing
to do with Wicca. The Satanic witchcraft that the church persecuted,
if it ever even existed, was a Christian heresy that included a pact
with the devil, black magic, human sacrifice, and other atrocities.
Wiccans do not believe in Satan, Wicca is not a Christian heresy
(it's a religion unto itself), and Wiccans find black magic and
human sacrifice as abhorrent as anyone else does. On the other hand,
the impact that the history of Satanic witchcraft does have on
Wiccans is twofold. First, the church equated even benevolent
pre-Christian pagan practices, which are a root of modern Wicca,
with Satanic witchcraft. Second, many people today still believe
that Satanic witchcraft and paganism are the same thing.
In 1921, Dr. Margaret Murray wrote The Witch-Cult in Western Europe,
in which she hypothesized that medieval witchcraft was in fact not a
Christian heresy, but an organized pagan fertility cult that had
survived, reasonably intact, through the Middle Ages. Her theory had
great romantic appeal, but she had no proof. Her book implied that
medieval witches were much more organized than they could possibly
have been without phones, cars, the Internet, or even a common
language (the vernacular of commoners was often different than that
of nobles), and that there was more consistency between covens of
witches than historians had previously believed. Over the years,
most of Murray's theories have been discredited, and the consistency
between accounts of medieval witchcraft has been attributed more to
the impact of the Malleus Maleficarum than to survival of an intact
pagan cult. If many of the inquisitors who tried witches and kept
records of the trials were operating from the same manual, so to
speak, they were likely to get the same results. But however
fanciful Murray's ideas about witchcraft, they had a lasting effect
on what would become modern Wicca, and several of them persist to
this day.
In 1951, the last witchcraft law was repealed in England, which
freed Gerald Brosseau Gardner to write Witchcraft Today, published
in 1954, and The Meaning of Witchcraft, published in 1959-two
nonfiction books that would have a tremendous impact on the Wiccan
religion. Gardner was a British civil servant who was born in the
late 1800s and lived most of the first half of his life abroad,
working in Ceylon, Borneo, and Malaysia. He studied foreign cultures
and became an expert on the kris, a Malaysian ritual knife. When he
returned to England, he looked for others who were interested in
esoteric teachings, and his search brought him to a Rosicrucian
theater run by a group called the Fellowship of Crotona. Gardner
wasn't too impressed with the theater or the Fellowship, but there
was a small group of participants that intrigued him. This group
later took Gardner into their confidence and told him that they were
witches and that they had known him in a previous life. Gardner
claims that through them he was initiated and became a witch
himself.
Gardner was very interested in making sure Wicca survived. However,
many of the Wiccans he knew were elderly, and young people weren't
drawn to Wicca at that time, so he was concerned that Wicca would
die out. He asked his high priestess if he could write a book about
witchcraft to spark new interest in it. Initially she refused to let
him do so, but she eventually allowed him to write a novel with
witch ideas in it, called High Magic's Aid. Later he left her coven,
started his own, and wrote Witchcraft Today and The Meaning of
Witchcraft.
It's important to point out here that there was and is another type
of modern witch, often referred to as fam trad, which is short for
family tradition. Family traditions are those that have been passed
down, either intact or in fragmentary form, through generations, and
some of them claim to have roots that reach back to the medieval
witch hunts or before. Most of them do not claim that witchcraft was
an organized pagan cult, as Margaret Murray did; rather, that it
consists largely of family folk magic and traditions. Most fam trad
witches do not call themselves Wiccans, and their practice is often
very different from what we would consider American Wicca. In fact,
when Gerald Gardner's tradition appeared on the scene, it was fam
trad witches who disparagingly called it the Gardnerian tradition.
They considered Gardner's Wicca inferior since it didn't have a long
history (or a verifiable history, for that matter) and because
Gardner, in his zeal to preserve Wicca, was a bit of a publicity
hound. The name stuck, however, and eventually lost its negative
connotations. There are still lots of Gardnerian Wiccans today, and
much of today's Wicca is descended from or inspired by Gardner's
work-including the word Wicca itself, which he didn't invent, but
popularized.
Gardner believed at least some of Margaret Murray's theory about
witchcraft being a surviving pagan religion (Murray even wrote the
introduction to Witchcraft Today). He claimed that rituals and
spells his teachers had given him were fragmentary-that pieces had
been lost over time-and that he took the pieces and put them back
together, borrowing things from other occult sources to fill the
gaps. These reconstructed rituals are still in use by Gardnerian
Wiccans today. Whether he himself was initiated into an existing
tradition or not, the rituals he passed on, although possibly
containing old witch material, were not themselves an intact
tradition from before the witch hunts. (This didn't stop him from
occasionally letting the press believe that they were, hence the fam
trad witches' distrust of him.) Wherever it truly came from,
Gardner's Wicca became the root, source, or inspiration for most of
the Wiccan traditions we have today.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Gardnerian Wicca, Alexandrian Wicca (a
tradition that is very similar to Gardnerian Wicca), and other
Wiccan and witchcraft traditions jumped the pond from the United
Kingdom to the United States. Here they found fertile ground. The
traditions took root and grew, and several new traditions sprouted
up that were either direct offshoots of the British trads and fam
trads or inspired by them.
The feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s left its mark on Wicca
too. During this time, when American women were discovering and
testing their power, women (and some men too) embraced Wicca because
of its worship of the Goddess and the divine feminine, something
that they yearned for but didn't find elsewhere. Whereas the Wicca
of Gardner's time honored both the God and the Goddess relatively
equally, during this period the Goddess became more prominent in the
practice of many Wiccans, and some Wiccans dropped worship of the
God altogether. Other women began Dianic Wiccan groups, which were
named after the goddess Diana and consisted only (or mostly, in some
cases) of women.
Fed in part by the feminist movement and in part by good old
ingenuity, eclectic Wicca began to be popular in the U.S. in the
1970s and 1980s, and it's probably the largest subgroup of Wiccans
today. Eclectic Wiccans create their own rituals and practices by
pulling together materials from many sources. An eclectic friend of
mine affectionately calls it shopping cart Wicca because she equates
it with rolling a cart down the aisle in the grocery store and
picking from the shelves only the things she wants, likes, or can
use. In this way, eclectic Wiccans are able to customize their
practice to their own personal needs and beliefs. With the rise of
eclectic Wicca, Wicca truly became a new old religion.
| Wicca
Is an Earth-Based Religion |
The Wiccan path is based on the earth rather than the heavens. While
practitioners of many of the world's religions focus on what will
happen to them after they die, Wiccans focus on participating in the
cycle of life, here and now. As one of my teachers puts it, Wiccans
aren't trying to get off the wheel. What she means by the wheel is
the wheel of the year, a term that Wiccans use to describe the cycle
of the seasons through the eight major Wiccan holidays, or sabbats.
Wiccans believe that they actively participate in turning the
wheel-in nature, essentially-while practitioners of some other
religions try to transcend it. Wiccans celebrate all that nature,
the earth, and the physical body have to offer: the experience of
life and love, sex, and even death.
A lot of the symbolism of the Wiccan religion is based on nature and
earth imagery. Wiccans work with the four natural elements: earth,
air, water, and fire. They see the sun as a symbol of their god, and
the moon as a symbol of their goddess. They celebrate the earth's
renewal each spring and its sleep each winter. Most importantly,
they strive to be in tune with nature and its changes and walk
lightly on mother earth. Many Wiccans are environmentalists or
vegetarians because of their reverence for the earth, but forgetting
Earth Day or grabbing a burger for lunch won't get you kicked out of
the Wiccan country club.
Wicca is an experiential religion. What this means is that how Wicca
works in a person's life is heavily influenced by that person's
experiences. There is no central church of Wicca, and no Wiccan
Bible, Torah, or Koran to outline the beliefs, rules, and teachings
of the religion. You learn Wicca by living it. Your experience tells
you what is true, what works for you, and what you believe. We walk
this path somewhat like scientists, testing things out and shifting
our beliefs according to the outcomes.
Once you have experienced something, you own it. It is part of you.
You understand it at a level that you couldn't by just reading about
it. It's like skydiving. You can guess what it's like to jump out of
a plane-feeling the wind buffeting your body, watching the earth
rush up to meet you-but until you actually do it, you don't really
know what it's like. You have not integrated skydiving into your
personal repertoire of experiences. It's the same with the Wiccan
religion. Until you have performed Wiccan rites or tried to do a
spell, you have no frame of reference for it. You can read books
like this one and guess what it would be like, but you're not a
Wiccan until you do something Wiccan. Ours is a religion where
actions truly do speak louder and more powerfully than words.
Does that mean that Wiccans don't learn things from books? Quite the
contrary. Many Wiccans keep a book of shadows, a collection of
spells and rituals, and I know Wiccans who will run out and buy
newly published Wicca books instead of groceries on payday. But
Wiccan books do not tell us how to think, believe, or behave. They
give us inspiration and a framework for our own experimentation with
the religion.
| Wicca
Is a Mystery Tradition |
There are certain spiritual experiences that are nearly impossible
to put into words. Many of them have to do with big topics such as
death, love, deity, and birth-things that are core to our existence
as humans and yet otherworldly at the same time. If you've ever had
a transcendent moment where you just knew that deity was real or you
felt particularly connected to nature or the cosmos, as if every bit
of you were a part of it, you have probably touched the mysteries.
Mystery religions are those that create a setting or a venue where
people can have an immediate experience of the reality of the
divine. These paths teach that there are things that are beyond the
reach of our five senses, but are nevertheless integral parts of us
that we can touch directly, although the method will be different
for each of us.
Each religion has its own mysteries, or revelations. Some of the
Wiccan mysteries-for example, the interplay between the God and
Goddess-are mirrored in our sabbat rites. When we participate in the
rites, we act out what is happening on a cosmic level, be it the
change of seasons, the union of the God and Goddess, or any other of
a number of Wiccan mysteries, and for that moment we are aligned
with the gods. One of the best historic, non-Wiccan examples of this
is the Eleusinian Mysteries, the ancient rites of Demeter and
Persephone that were held for thousands of years at Eleusis in
Greece. At a certain time of year, many Greeks made the pilgrimage
to Eleusis, purified themselves in the sea, and participated in the
rites, which included secret revelations and teachings and built-in
triggers for mystical experiences. Once they had seen and
experienced the mysteries of the rites, they were not allowed to
reveal them to others. There were many reasons for this. No two
people experienced the rites the same way. Telling someone what the
rites were beforehand would color and possibly ruin their experience
of them. And the secrecy kept the rites sacred and protected-apart
from daily life and intact for coming generations. Punishment for
revealing the mysteries was severe, and the threat of it appears to
have worked, because to this day no one really knows the exact
content of the rituals. The secret died with the participants.
Some Wiccan mysteries unfold during meditations or dreamwork. Still
others come during an Aha! moment when a Wiccan has been walking the
path for a while, and suddenly important teachings click into place.
As I said, the experience is different for everyone. But Wicca, with
its focus on natural cycles and emphasis on meditation and psychic
abilities, provides many opportunities to touch the mysteries of the
divine and the cosmos.
| Wicca
Is European Shamanism |
One of the best ways I've heard Wicca described is that it is
European shamanism. In America, we are used to hearing stories about
Native American shamans who do magic and healing for their tribes,
but people of European descent have a shamanistic tradition too:
witchcraft. Historian Mircea Eliade, in his classic 1964 book
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, defines the word shaman as
a person who enters an altered state of consciousness in order to
take a spiritual journey to retrieve information, heal, work magic,
tell the future, or commune with the dead. A shaman is more than a
medicine man or a magician, although he or she is often both of
these things; a shaman may also be a priest, mystic, and psychopomp
(one who can move back and forth between the worlds of the living
and the dead).
The concept of the world tree exists in one form or another in
cultures across the globe. The world tree is a symbol for the
connection between the spiritual realms and earth. The roots of the
tree lie in the underworld, the trunk is the human material world,
and the branches and leaves are the heavens or celestial realms. The
tree can be real or a metaphor. The shaman travels up and down the
world tree and between the spiritual and earthly realms to perform
his or her tasks for the tribe or group. Shamans use many techniques
to travel the world tree, including trance, shapeshifting, and
magic.
According to Eliade, a person can be either born a shaman or made
one through a shamanic crisis or an initiation ceremony. Children
born with special features-like a caul or birthmark, certain
disabilities, or unusual abilities-were considered potential shamans
in many cultures. The idea was that if a person, by way of some sort
of physical attribute, was different enough from the rest of the
group or tribe, he or she would naturally be able to see and
experience things that others could not, and therefore would be more
suited to travel between the worlds. It makes some sense; people who
are blind perceive their surroundings differently than people with
sight do, and the world looks different to a person in a wheelchair
than it does to one who can walk.
A shaman could be made if he or she went through a shamanic
crisis-an event so traumatic that it changed his or her life
irrevocably. The shamanic crisis could come on naturally, such as
with a severe illness or near-death experience. It could also be
induced from the outside by an initiation ceremony or trial.
Wicca incorporates a lot of these ideas. Wiccans are taught to be in
tune with their psychic abilities. Magic circles, the sacred space
of Wiccans, are said to be between the worlds, and Wiccans travel
between the worlds to meet the gods, get information, and heal.
Wiccans often enter ecstatic or trance states in order to work magic
or commune with the divine. Many Wiccans have life-altering
experiences that lead them to the Wiccan path, and Wiccan groups
often initiate new members in a symbolic death and rebirth ceremony
meant to provide a mini-shamanic crisis and shift the initiate's
perspective.
This death and rebirth stuff may sound frightening, and frankly,
sometimes it is, but it is not negative or dark or bad. It is meant
to spur us to overcome our fears, step into our power, and take
charge of our spiritual paths, which is difficult to do if nothing
in our lives ever challenges us.
| Wicca
Is a Magical System |
Last, but not least, Wicca is a magical system. There is more than
one kind of magic. There is everyday magic, where you do spell work
for things like finding a new job or protecting your home. Wiccans
make use of this type of magic all the time. But there is also the
kind of magic that you use to manifest your own personal power and
divinity. In essence, it's working your will to find your purpose in
life and align with your higher self. We'll talk more about the will
in chapter 2 and magic in chapter 11, but for now, the thing to know
is that Wicca is a framework in which to work these two types of
magic.
As you can see, there are a lot of interpretations of Wicca. Now
that you have made it through the philosophical stuff and you know
something about what Wicca is (or what others think it is), you're
ready to explore what Wiccans actually believe in chapter 2. But
there is one important thing to take from this chapter before you
move on: If you choose to walk this path, your Wiccan experience can
be pagan, experiential, shamanistic, mystical, magical, or all or
none of the above, but the one thing it certainly will be is your
own. Wicca, from any angle, is a path of empowerment and personal
growth. Like many things in life, Wicca is what you make of it. The
joy-and the challenge-is discovering what it will make of you.
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Wicca
for Beginners: Fundamentals of Philosophy & Practice
"In her first book-length
work, Sabin presents a first-rate, fresh, and thorough addition
to the burgeoning field of earth-based spiritual practice
volumes...written in a light, informative style that magically
mines depth, breadth and brevity."--Publishers Weekly
Due to the sheer number of Wicca 101 books on the market, many
newcomers to the Craft find themselves piecing together their
Wiccan education by reading a chapter from one book, a few pages
from another. Rather than depending on snippets of wisdom to
build a new faith, Wicca for Beginners provides a solid
foundation to Wicca without limiting the reader to one tradition
or path.
Embracing both the spiritual and the practical, Wicca for
Beginners is a primer on the philosophies, culture, and
beliefs behind the religion, without losing the mystery that
draws many students to want to learn. Detailing practices such
as grounding, raising energy, visualization, and meditation,
this book offers exercises for core techniques before launching
into more complicated rituals and spellwork.
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