Tradition is a big deal among Pagans. Your tradition defines your religion, how you practice, what you practice, your morals – sometimes even your lifestyle. It’s divisive and inclusive all at the same time.
That way of casting a circle, that method of purification, that ritual for blessing an athame – there is more than one way to do all of those things. Do each one according to set words, set rituals – each one of those steps and choices makes up a tradition.
It’s also an artificial construct. None of these rules are divinely handed down. They are created by people, guided by the gods or not, to deal with immediate concerns. Sometimes the practice stays after the concern has gone. Sometimes it creates additional concerns.
I’ve always found the popularity of tradition in a religious grouping that cherishes so much nature peculiar. Tradition isn’t physics. It’s not about whether the magic works or not – it’s about upholding inventions that work until they don’tanymore. Some traditions, even among Pagans, go so far as to say things like “Christian prayer doesn’t have power,” or “Science will catch up to magic!” as part of their official beliefs. It’s strange, inappropriate to the big picture religious people ostensibly uphold. Sometimes it feels like the clamor for tradition has gotten so loud that few people actually practice any actual magic – it takes too much energy to practice a tradition instead.
I’ve always seen tradition as a double-edged sword.
It preserves. It also limits. Limitation can help set boundaries. It can also prevent learning when applied wrong.
The insistence that tradition matters isn’t appropriate to all situations. To insist on following a “tradition of my ancestors” would be as much of a disaster as declaring Christianity the state religion in the US. My ancestors did a lot of stuff that does not fly in the 21st century. It served then but just because it did doesn’t mean it applies to now. Oh, some stuff does – like pausing to remember the ancestors. But reliving their lives does not seem like a good way to learn anything.
To insist that one Wiccan tradition is more correct than the other also troubles me – it seems that if the gods show up, it’s not for the page justification or because the athame got dunked in the chalice just right.
English: Primary School in “open air”, in Bucharest, around 1842. Wood engraving, 11x22cm (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It must be that time of year. A few folks have approached me in the past three months about teaching them about “Pagan religions,” and while I’m not averse to taking students, it’s a lot of energy for very little reward on my own part. I’m not someone who finds the “joy of teaching” a privilege or a reward … I find it a drain. A drain I rather resent. At the same time, there are people that come to me that really do need a teacher, who are like me and don’t fit with a tradition in the traditional sense, or who really just want to learn enough magic to do what they need to do to make their daily life functional. I don’t necessarily enjoy the approaches, but I also won’t turn away people who a)genuinely need some help b)are willing to make the changes to make that help matter (this is not the same as doing it my way, though those resistant to change might read it that way) and c)are mature enough not to blame me or project onto me when it comes to the fucked up religious and spiritual messages they’ve internalized over the years.
My requirements:
If you’re genuinely serious, compatible, and willing to commit, you must:
1)Complete the Artist’s Way. You don’t have to do it in the allotted 12 weeks, but you do have to do it. As you do the program, you will start to see why, yourself.
2)Complete Money Drunk/Money Sober – the less fucked up you are, the better you’ll do with any endeavor.
3)Present me with a proposed syllabus of what you aim to study after you have completed the first two requirements.
This will take you at minimum 6-9 months. And I would insist you do that before I even consider putting you on a dedicant year. And I don’t do it the way covens do with dedication leading to initiation. You do a dedicant year, and then you do a pre-initiate year, and THEN there’s initiation. My religion and magical practices are serious stuff that changed my entire life. I’m not going to fuck around with any Playgans.
I can initiate you into Wicca, but I have obtained no other initiations that I can confer. I am not associated with any traditions at this time because there are no Wiccan traditions that really fit who I am as a complete adult. There is no regulatory system determining what initiations are valid or are not, so if you go through all this with me and then move onto a coven, you’ll most likely have to go through their entire training system from the beginning as well – as you should. Wiccan traditions are not the same as simply being Wiccan.
If you ask my permission first, I will answer questions you have about Paganism. What teaching I do generally comes through writing. While I have in the past taken 1 on 1 students, I don’t normally.
Why I don’t take students in most cases
Why?
I’m following my new rule of looking to my own needs first. When you’re just starting out in Pagan study, or in anything, you don’t even think about the needs or realities of the people you want teaching you. That’s normal, and many react badly when they’re turned down because they want what they want for themselves so badly that it doesn’t occur to them that the person they want teaching them always has to do so at some personal cost that is physical, emotional, financial, and time-consuming.
My primary reason for turning away formal students right now:
I’m still looking for a suitable, on-my-level magical working partner. It’s my unicorn, my holy grail, my TARDIS. I’ve muddled along with working partners that I’ve had to teach, but you can’t have a wholly healthy friendship and spiritual connection with a person AND be their formal teacher – not until you’ve had a few years of space between teaching relationship and personal friend. Both my parents were public school teachers at various points in their lives, and it was visible to me every day how even twenty years after a kid graduated from high school, that power dynamic never faded. Right now there are bugaboos – if that person is in a coven that does oathbound stuff, inevitably something we’re doing will come into conflict and from my point of view, unnecessary, “those people are controlling assholes,” conflict. Of course I can’t know the other side other of the situation, and except when it comes to protecting the identity and safety of your fellow coveners or preserving the sanctity of initiation, most secrecy is a load of steaming bollocks. I’ve also been informed that my choice to be public about my Paganism risks making other coveners I’ve been involved with publicly identifiable – another load of steaming bullshit.
My experience with covens has led me to feel that for whatever reason, when I personally get involved with a coven I will be treated with disrespect and my voice will go unheard or be silenced when I do speak my mind. I am well aware this is not the case for other coven members, but this is how my two coven experiences have gone thus far, and I have zero interest in repeating that pattern further. So while I don’t object to a prospective partner being involved with a coven, I generally anticipate some coven-based interference that I’d rather not deal with.
You’re really just interested in dabbling
Don’t fucking waste my time. I don’t care if you don’t like reading books.
Your boyfriend/girlfriend is an asshole
Sadly, I’ve had to have students drop because they just couldn’t get their non-Pagan partner to trust them. The worst was the girl who was convinced I was out to have sex with her boyfriend. I do NOT have the bandwidth for that kind of drama, especially of the “I imagined it so it must be true,” kind of bullshit. If you’re in a relationship like that, you’re in a bad relationship, and you need to sort that out before you go pursuing a religious path that will alter your place in society.
You’re still focused on a previous religion, or you just want to piss someone off
My religio-magical practice is not petty, and is too important to constantly refer itself to Christianity, monotheism, or the usual patriarchal clutter. If you’ve got something to prove, don’t prove it to me – all you’ll do from my perspective is demonstrate yourself to be a jackass.
You don’t want to feel uncomfortable
There’s bad uncomfortable i.e. “I’m being taken advantage of” and “this is new” uncomfortable. You need to be mature enough to know the difference before you pursue any magical practice.
The vast majority of people that approach me fall in the “no” category for the above reasons. You need to demonstrate you’re serious, because otherwise, you’re not just treating the material dismissively – you’re treating medismissively.I’ve had enough of that shit from people that were ostensibly my teachers in the past – I’m certainly not going to tolerate it from teachers OR students now.
It’s the reason I insist prospective students do the Artist’s Way first. This way they’re clear with themselves what they’re really trying to do, and since about 98% of the time Paganism is a possibility and not an answer, they can define their paths for themselves by following Cameron’s program. Honesty takes courage, and most people try to defer telling the truth which makes it worse and worse until it blows up. If you have the right attitude – “I want to learn, I won’t be good at everything, and I need to speak up right away if this isn’t right,” is hugely important in the spiritual work that I do.
And if you haven’t figured it out yet, if you’re just looking to smoke up and camp out with a bunch of hippies, I’m the wrong person.
There was that survey years ago that had some religious leaders freaked out because Americans began describing themselves as “spiritual, but not religious.” There was a lot of “what does that mean?” and arguments that unless you took part in religion, you couldn’t possibly be spiritual. The meaning is pretty clear: these people believed in a higher or other power, but did not need a church, nor did they need a list presented of “this is right, this is wrong, and this is what to be selective or conveniently amnesiac about.” The churches also knew exactly what it meant – you can’t keep doors to a church open without butts in the pews.
I am religious AND spiritual. I actually need rituals and prayer as part of my daily life. I feel this as a physical thing, not as a “should” theoretical thing. I have warmed to the theory that religious belief is a neurological condition. Note I do not say “illness.” If it doesn’t interfere with your health, it is not an illness. However, having a mix of humans biologically inclined towards religion and those inclined towards the here and now makes sense to me in the “let’s look into every genetic permutation possible to see what makes the Best Human!” My interpretation is, of course, intuitive and thus likely invalid in the harder discussions of the science. But when it comes to religious faith as we’ve socialized it, you either feel it, or you don’t. It just isn’t reasonable or fair to demand another person believe as you do; it’s like forcing someone else to eat when you’re hungry or go to the bathroom when you need to relieve yourself.
Religion is supposed to be a foundation that helps you get through life, not one that orders you who to be right down to what you think and who you love. While most people don’t think of it that way, it’s not necessarily something you choose. Sometimes more than one religion might choose you at the same time – yes, that happens. People CAN be bi-religious. It’s religious slipped out of its proper place in life that makes it a problem.
Religion does NOT
Solve your problems
Guarantee an afterlife
Guarantee an afterlife you will like
Make you a better person just by espousing a belief
Define absolutely right and wrong
Guarantee an outcome you’ll like
Save you
Any religion that claims final authority on absolutely everything is lying to you. Religion ain’t God.
Religion Does
Give you one (or more than one, if you practice simultaneous religions, as some in the East do) or more than one possible ethical approach to a situation
Offer counsel, in scripture if you use scripture, or divination if you use divination, when the shit hits the fan
Organized religion often uses illustrative story to help people find their own ways in daily relationship; disorganized religionists often draw from mythological stories and even from the monotheist books for those same stories and reasons for them
Offers certain prescribed actions that, while not necessarily “reaching God,” can help build a daily sense of calm when dealing with life’s challenges
Religion will never have an objective, practical reason to it in and of itself. It can help organize communities, and in its proper place it offers counsel and guidance. In its improper place, its leaders demand control over your behaviors not just in a ritual/worship context, but when you are in private – even in your bedroom. A controlling religion is not a good one, but it is mighty common. There are versions of this among Christians, Pagans, Muslims, Hindus – and it’s often due to that slipper slope where religious leaders believe they should be taken as the authority of God/ess Him/herself all the time, absolutely, and not just in a ritual context.
English: Detail of Reconstruction of the Acropolis and Areus Pagus in Athens Deutsch: Ausschnitt aus der Idealen Ansicht der Akropolis und des Areopags (vorne) in Athen (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I don’t want to talk about my religion over a beer, or in the middle of a bar night. I just don’t. Ever. I make exceptions to this for bars full of Pagans.
I’ve had many MANY people ask me about my faith when there’s booze and people around, and it usually ends with some “let’s put on a show,” crap where the conversation is never completed and it’s very clear to me that the person was interested in appearing interesting, not in having a real discussion. On occasion, I get someone with hostility issues who wants me to be a performing monkey.
The whole thing is just really disrespectful. I dislike feeling disrespected.
I am an out Pagan. I am an out Wiccan. I am not necessarily a loud and out person. I don’t hide who I am from anyone, but until my religious practices offer something relevant and helpful, I don’t bring them up.
I did not choose to be Pagan, or Wiccan. I was called to it. My life would have been easier if I could have chosen otherwise. I’d be living the miserable life of quiet desperation my mother and her family approves of, and I could sustain myself off of constant body shame and my family’s soul-destroying version of approval. It would have sucked, but it would have been easier.
My coming out experience has been compared by a lesbian who is also Pagan to what it’s like for a gay person to come out – and it’s usually the same Bible thumping bullshit behind the bad behavior on the part of the people that you have come out to.
My religion, and my magical practices aren’t affectations. I am not Pagan just so I can appear interesting at the bar. I do not write about Wicca as a portion of my career pie because I want to shock the world with my witchy nature. I’m quite confident that I’m plenty interesting without my religion working its way into the picture. I am a woman of many interests, and consequently many joys. I am happy to share them, and I want to know what your joys are, too. But that better be a two-way street. The new narcissism is the only thing that bugs me more than the new, hate-based atheism.
I am also atypical on the Pagan/Wiccan spectrum. While I’m not opposed to common Pagan practices like camping, I genuinely don’t enjoy them. I don’t even like wearing tie-dye, although I’m down with recycling and upcycling – and I totally get that the environmental interest is actually a newer aspect of the faith I practice. I see no spiritual value in remaining poor. I don’t want to get back to nature or live on a farm – most farms are environmental disasters, and the rural life has been romanticized to the point where it’s as unreal as the witch in the fairy tale. I don’t see how I can do more for the earth by refusing to engage her gifts to heal myself and I sure as hell don’t see how choosing to disempower myself when She saw to it I was born into one of the richest countries on Earth. I keep the secrets I’ve been asked to keep, but I believe being too secretive is paranoia, which is in itself an actual illness.
Yes, I have a passion for occult material. Yes, I have a love for a not-merciful but not-malicious divinity. (Perhaps because that describes me, too.) My kitchen is packed with herbs and things I grew for the most part intentionally. I am a witch because witch-ness feels right inside and outside my body. It’s the only approach to God that has ever felt right. It has nothing to do with feminism (to me, feminism is simple self-preservation.) It has nothing to do with rebelling against my former religion – I loved blocking out the constant yapping of the pastor and listening to what God had to say, streaming through the stained glass windows and showing me prayer forms in the movement of the trees, or when the Bible would flip open to the passage I most needed to see.
My acts of faith are not acts of rebellion and anger. The things I create, the spells I cast, the prayers I speak every morning and night – they are out of a fundamental, physical need for me to do these things. I need to pray this way. My body needs it. No other prayer form has fit. Christianity itself never chafed, but the God-fearing Christian act was worse than a leather miniskirt. I’ve had direct spiritual experiences with Mary, Jesus, even Yahweh. But the way it’s practiced has always felt unfitting, and there are huge chunks of it both in the Bible and from the mouths of its leaders that I sense are outright lies just for the sake of keeping power, in that selfish way people do when they’d rather have their way then actually do what is good for the situation. What religion worth two lightning bolts would be about a God you’re afraid of? That’s baboon mentality – which only gives yet more credence to evolution.
My religion isn’t just something I have ideas about. And thankfully, it’s not a religion that requires me to be right about it, so I’m under no pressure to teach or seek converts. My religion is an integral, possibly physical, part of who I am. It isn’t fandom, or me talking about the cool Doctor Who plot of the week. It’s the core of how I get myself in harmony with the rest of my life.
I’m not about to devalue that by treating it like bar entertainment fodder.
Admittedly, I haven’t been online active in the Pagan web since the heyday of Medea’s Chariot, and that site is the now dead-from-neglect child of divorce. I’ve grown up a lot since then, so while my religion is still the same, my spiritual perspectives have changed quite a bit. This also means it’s much more difficult for me to find a conversation online or in-person that I want to engage in: it’s not a judgment of right or wrong, it’s simply a disparity between my own values and thematic outwardly-shared values of my neopagan brethren that makes it a little hard to get a satisfying conversation rolling. There’s also the issue that the same subjects keep coming up over and over again, little controversies (robed or unrobed? 9 foot circle with a rope or with energy direction? Is fluffly a familiar?) that aren’t intended to have resolution. And there’s also the matters of time, and reputation. I have interests expanding far beyond the occult and Wicca, but if that’s all people ever want to talk to me about it, I feel like I’ve fallen culturally short.
Still, sometimes I just need a fix, or a few perspectives. I go to these sites because I usually get something out of them, although my extended periods of silence on a few of these sites often causes people to take me for a noob and engage in some really patronizing shenanigans. But, like in all things: the negative is what grabs your attention, but for the most part, they’re all pretty good.
1. Wild Hunt – arguably the best and most comprehensive coverage of Pagan interest at the moment. I don’t much listen to podcasts, but the blog itself is extremely satisfying and well done.
2. Facing North. Lisa McSherry has gathered some of the more thoughtful book and material reviewers to write for this site, and it gives sincere and deep perspective on what’s out there, more than the walk-too-lightly approach many publications take for fear of hurting feelings. These are thoughtful evaluations, sometimes as much intended for the author of the work as they are for readers determining whether to buy, and it does gather and observe all paths. (Full disclosure: I am a contributor to this site.)
3. Letters from Hardscrabble Creek, Chas Clifton’s blog, turns up some academic and Paganism as we’re relearning it points that always give me some food for thought.
4. Barbelith forums. This isn’t a place (usually) for daily chatter, but it is a collection of really thoughtful, mostly sane people who explore with seriousness concepts in magical practice – along with thousands of other topics. You do have to apply for admittance to the forum, but once you’re in, it’s well worth the efforts.
5. Twitter. That’s right, you read that. If you download Tweetdeck and use the search feature to highlight discussions about the occult, Wicca, and so on you will sooner or later find conversations you want to pursue. I use Twitter for multiple venues and interests, and it’s been useful for me in meeting people and getting to know them better.
6. PaganSpace. Part of Ning network’s confusing “diy” social networks, it is reasonably well-run, although it can take some time to develop a little savvy about how to make it work for you. While this site does have a user-fluff factor, it also has a series of private groups and plenty of ways you can go and make your own conversation in the groups section.
Children/teenagers were recently banned from the network, and while that has created some upset, I consider it a favorable and responsible act on the part of management. The entire situation with parents and their children is a messy legal minefield, and until there’s a major corporation setting it up, there’s just no safe way to guarantee a kid-friendly Pagan network without close person to person networking and vetting.
7. Witch’s Voice. Not so much a community these days, but more an information portal, it’s now the “old school” way of connecting to Pagans locally, using their considerable listing pages. While some essays are interesting and Wren’s nest continues to find news and information of interest to all pagans on what might be considered the first Pagan news blog, the fall off in managed content has made the site a little bit scattershot. It is still, however, probably the one place everyone entering the Pagan community needs to go first – but where they need to go after that remains a little vague.
8. The Magical Buffet looks to need a little help with coming to for with technology, but is an interesting buffet of politics, magic and esoteric thought.
9. Occult Corpus is a pan- occultism discussion forum that I sometimes lurk on. While the conversations can be maddening, the links to general information are very interesting reading. You could arguably get a full electronic library of classic occult texts in your head if you took the time to read every single link in their stickies.
10. Occultforums is very similar in spirit and style to the above forums, but sometimes gives you a different perspective.
I’m sure I’m missing great big chunks of excellent out in the Pagan sphere. If I were in my 20s I would be spending hours a day building an encyclopedic knowledge of what resources are available to me. This is my 30s – I’d like there to be more to me than my religion.
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