Ostara Meet-Up... Some Thoughts on Wicca
Piggy speaking:
I was a teacher for almost twenty years for the community colleges, I taught computer networking and repair.
I'm a very practical person and book learning is useful but only useful to a certain point.
This brings us to Wicca, I am an Alexandrian Wiccan initiate, I was with an actual formal coven for awhile. I have studied the Kabbalah extensively, and from about the 13th century to 19th century occultism, Western magical traditions, Golden Dawn, a little bit of the Thelema.
Has anyone practiced in a group setting?
Most said No
Kind of what I wanted to bring up with you guys and see if there was any interest in it before I invest my time, is an actual formalized working. Wicca is a mystery tradition, it's not meant for public consumption, it's not meant for public ritual. Wiccan rituals are intimate, you get to know the people in the circle.
Unfortunately alot of what I see of Paganism has been commercialized, you pick up a book and it's about spells and this and that and I am the high muckity, muck of this.
Wicca first and foremost is a religion it is a faith and I approach it from that lens. I'm a firm believe that the divine reveals itself to people in a form that person will understand. So whether you are a Druid or a Christian or whatever, that is all the divine speaking to us, it takes many forms.
Alexandrian Wicca is one of the older traditions. I have in my personal practices deviated slightly from it. The other big problem with Paganism is the complete lack of structure. Where chaos reigns things tend to fall apart. Which in many ways the entire Pagan movement is in in danger of doing so, because there is no cohesion, everyone comes up with a list of adjectives to describe themselves and that has no meaning to the other person. While I know the dirty word is "dogma" but a little bit dogma is necessary to maintain cohesion.
What I wanted to do was hold a series of classes over the next year or two. Wiccans typically meet on the quarters, cross quarters and esbats. The esbats are typically used for teaching purposes. The cross quarters are the high holidays and the quarters are the solar holidays the equinoxes and solstices. The older versions of Wicca only have four holidays not eight. The other four were largely added just to create symmetry, but the equinoxes and solstices are excellent for magical workings.
In ceremonial magic we have this concept called the "Great Work". The Great Work is something that will NOT be completed in your life time it is the process, the perfection of the human soul. Which is the union of the human soul and the Devine. The Great Work is learning to understand ones place in the Universe and one's relationship with the Devine and to be able to step into the same room with it ultimately. Now what that means to an individual person varies.
To many Pagan groups are focused on reading book which doesn't teach you anything, it really doesn't Wicca is experiential, it's meant to be experienced. You can't describe what happens, there is nothing like the feeling of a properly consecrated circle with a while coven raising a cone of power for a healing spell. There is nothing like that, it's a rush it's almost like a drug. This is because you will have finally taken a step down that path of the Great Work, one step closer to the Devine.
Group working is radically different than solitary. Group working relies on trust first and foremost. The first rule of a Wiccan coven is you don't talk about it, ya know, just like Fight Club. In general if you know the person you are talking to is pagan friendly or might be interested you can mention it exists, but what happens in circle stays in circle. Things experienced in circle can be very powerful, I've seen people moved to tears during ritual. Ritual is about creating a groove in the mind. When you do the same thing over and over again it creates a groove that you like to fall into and it becomes automatic and reflexive, that is where power actually lies. You don't have to think about it you just feel it happening.
Take for instance the Quarters, everyone has seen the Craft where the call the powers of North, East and that jazz, but what are they? Most people don't know, but they are called a servitor*. A servitor is a thought form that is built up in the temple, which is a mental construct. Every time the ritual is done they become more and more real. It's kind off like creating a spirit in a way. These are the things that aren't taught in books. There are very few books, especially the books that people have access to that will teach them this.
When you start reading things like 14th century Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa who collected all of the lore of the Alchemists from the 12th-13th century and integrated it into one coherent structure. That became the foundational material, along with a bunch of Jewish stuff from the Kabbalah, of the modern magical traditions of the Golden Dawn which later became the basis for Thelma under Aleister Crowley. This is what Gerald Gardner borrowed very liberally from. If you look at early Wiccan ritual and then you look at Golden Dawn they are almost word for word in many areas. History teaches us quite a bit there.
The first things you would need to learn is to create the temple, Wiccans typically don't have physical temples we have mental constructs we can cast a circle anywhere. Some places are more desirable than others, gesturing around the pizza parlor, this place would suck! Way to many competing energies and to many sensory inputs, there's a reason ritual is done at night with candle light, it reduces the sensory inputs in the brain so you can focus on your task. Ideally when you are in the circle you are fully enwrapped you can actually see the circle and the quarters, they are there and they are real. This, however, like any other skill takes time to develop, and there will be screw ups.
On one such occasion, I remember it scared the Hell out of me, I thought I broke something. We had one ritual where we had a visualization of being a tree, drawing energy from the ground and all that. After we ended it, I couldn't move. It was as if my whole nervous system from chest down short circuited I could not move my damn foot. It freaked me out for 20 seconds or so until I realized what happened here. That's the thing, ritual is about programing the human mind and body to achieve a goal.
Another thing you would need to do is create your tools, they should be something personal. All the occult stuff you see in the stores is all crap. It should be something you made, and something personal to you. It could be as simple as a stick picked up off the ground used for a wand, or it could be ornate.
I can't forge a blade, so the knife I use as an athame is a store bought knife but it is the knife that has served me for most of my life and for the two and a half years I was homeless. This knife is intensely personal to me, that's the kind of thing you want as a ritual tool.
Now comes the faith, when you step in the circle you are going to meet your gods so there's prep work both mental and physical and creating your tools is part of that.
As I said before it's all about creating that groove so everything becomes automatic and reflexive and learning to operate as a group which is where the "Dogma" comes in. Group work requires everyone to use the same visualizations so one person can't be worshiping Loki while another is worshiping Satan. None of that works, you have to use the same god forms. I like to use the fairly generic forms of the Great Mother and the Horned God. I think everyone can work with that. If in personal work you want to use Isis or Osiris, that's fine, but for circle work everyone has to use the same visualizations.
Questions?
"I keep getting told that Wicca is just a New Age, Paganism?"
That is somewhat true, but I hate the term, "New Age," because "New Age" is a bunch of crystals and angels and bullshit if you ask me. Wicca is a Syncretistic Religion, do not believe the hype about Burning Times, that's all crap. Wicca did not descend from some ten thousand year old feminist, god mother, white goddess kind of deal. Wicca happened in the early 1900's, but every religion in a way is like that. Wicca is about a hundred years old, give or take a few.
Now the foundations of Wicca are much older. You look at the concept of a fertility goddess and a dying sun god, that goes back six thousand years before Christ. Wicca is really just a way of organizing that. See religion is a tool.
Every one likes to think of faith as something like there is this one true way-ism and it's not, that's all crap. Wicca is just like Christianity just like Ásatrú is a tool to help us visualize something that can't be visualized. The Devine is so far beyond the realm of our experience we can't approach it, but it wears a mask and we can approach those masks. In this way we can learn to understand the Devine. Wicca is just one lens to view the world, and that lens may not work for you. If it doesn't work for you, I am the wrong person to teach you.
I don't like one true way-isms, we've killed somewhere in the billions of people in the last few hundred years over one true way-isms. We can't let pagans fall into the same trap, we can't go, "we are right and Christians are wrong". They are just as right as we are and neither one of us can prove that we are right. It's the, "my sky daddy is better than your sky daddy" argument.
Questions?
"So you said New Age is like crystals and angels, so I was just curious with the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, you call in the angels..."
See, that is right out of Ceremonial Magic, Wicca typically deals with elemental forces. You sound like you have some familiarity with that ritual.
A Little bit :)
In Ceremonial Magic we will use the proper invoking pentagram, visualized in the correct color. Some people use the athame for that. I don't like using the athame for that, because the athame is a tool of command. When you use the athame you are commanding something, I don't command the god and goddess, I beseech them to attend.
One of the things I've always loved about the Watchtowers is you can grab a whole pagan group and ask them what are the Watchtowers, and no one can give you an answer. This goes all the way back to Aristotle, before Christ, he concept of the Watchtowers relates to some of the lessons of the pentagram. The pentagram is an incredibly powerful symbol, it's not just some star we write on stuff. There are lessons upon lessons there.
Anyone know anything about the Golden Ratio? Go look at the segments on a pentagram they are a perfect Golden Ratio. The pentagram represents the man and mankind the microcosm and macrocosm the world without and the world within. See we don't actually exist in the world without, we can't actually know that because we interface with the world through out senses, our intuition and our knowledge. There's almost a screen in front of your mind that is what your senses provide.
The pentagram tells us about that screen, the points on it represent the four elements plus the fifth later element that was added a few hundred years after the four classicals of spirit or ether or quintessence or whatever you want to call it. What that's actually showing you is a world view, it's showing you a magical world view.
We all know that things aren't composed of 1/3rd fire and 1/3rd air or whatever, but magically? We can can attribute elemental qualities to the item. For magical operations this is useful, because now I have hooks to interface with the object. Same thing with spirits herbs, we attribute them. This leads me to why I hate modern books, they are just tables of correspondences and recipes. They don't tell you how to actually cook it, magic requires intent, purification, consecration. Now if you want to play with things you have to know how it works before you break them or they break you.
Anyone ever been to a big Catholic Mass, like Easter Mass? What's interesting about it is the Catholics are good to study for two reasons a) they have preserved quite a bit of pagan things and b) they know how to use ritual.
Ritual is the pomp and circumstance, you will see alot of books that say, "all you need is your finger." For an experienced witch this is true. The reason for that is all the other tools are contained in the mind with the ability to visualize. An inexperienced witch needs the tools to help shape their mind, to force their mind into a specific state.
Take a look at Thelema, if you get real deep into Thelema it is largely solitary. However Crowley talks a lot about the body of light, the spiritual body and being able to reach an altered state of astral projection where rituals are actually performed in astral form. This is an example of an altered state of consciousness. Ritual helps us attain an altered state away from our normal state. Now our normal state is filled with worries and anxiety, how am I going to pay my mortgage, that detracts from kneeling before the gods. The ultimate goal of religion is union with the Devine.
*a servitor is a psychological complex, deliberately created by the magician for a specific purpose, that appears to operate autonomously from the magician's consciousness; i.e., as if it were an independently existing being.
