Wicca for Beginners (2 page)

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 Experiential

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.