I'm rather confused about Wicca

My mother has been talking (romantically, kind of) to a Wiccan. This kind of piqued my curiousity, and so I decided to do some research... and it's fucking confusing. Every source I look at, including our own useful notes page, is schizophrenic on the subject. Are there any Wiccan tropers that can help me out a bit?

My name is Cu Chulainn. Beside the raging sea I am left to moan. Sorrow I am, for I brought down my only son.

I'm not a Wiccan, but I can tell you that from what I know about it, the reason it's so hard to find consistent information on it is because everyone does it a little differently. There is no rigid orthodoxy as with other religions. Wicca is very open to interpretation. There are monotheistic, duotheistic, polytheistic, and atheistic Wiccans, and there are many different traditions for each.

As such, there are often contradictions between two sources on the same subject.

Would you kindly click my dragons?

I'm not Wiccan, but I thought I wanted to be for a while and did quite a bit of reading. Do you have any specific questions?

Aye.

For instance, I've heard quite a bit (in ridiculous amounts of Purple Prose) that good and evil have to balance out, and that the god and goddess gave magic to the world... but apparently not to improve our lives. Yet, the three or four Wiccans I've met are rather optimistic and greet people with 'blessed be'. Isn't this kind of a You Fail Logic Forever?

My name is Cu Chulainn. Beside the raging sea I am left to moan. Sorrow I am, for I brought down my only son.

It's a vague new agey thing. If you just go with it, it can be fun, but unless you're an ingenious eleven year old wizard, you shouldn't try to apply logic to it. There's none to be found.

| DA Page | Sketchbook |

^^ On the "But not to improve our lives" part, I think that you've run into a badly-explained instance of "but not for selfish reasons only".

But yes, very few sources agree, because there is no central Wiccan religion; it has as many flavors as there are practictioners.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

That's not quite true. It's more accurate to say that there is a centralized Wiccan religion, but most of the people calling themselves Wiccan don't belong to it.

Orthodox Wicca, insofar as it exists, consists of the groups descended from Gerald Gardner's coven. This form of Wicca is a mystery religion and is gated by some fairly hardcore initiation requirements, and most of the people that practice it will get very indignant if you refer to anything without a lineage traceable to Gardner as "Wicca". (Despite the initiation requirement, though, it's not too hard to find information on its internal doctrine; that escaped to the Internet about as soon as there was an Internet to speak of.)

Most of the people calling themselves Wiccan, however, don't belong to lineaged groups but to splinter sects or to no well-defined group in particular. There are a lot of variations on the former, and they vary widely in doctrine and membership requirements; the latter are generally referred to as "eclectic Wiccans" and get a lot of hate from people that try to follow a more-or-less codified religion. The praxis of your average eclectic Wiccan doesn't have all that much to do with Gardner's stuff by now; it's more like a mishmash of highly degraded OTO-style ceremonial occultism, New Age philosophy, and often bits of reconstructionist paganism. Various bits of lore are still shared by most branches of the tradition, though; look for variations on the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, for example.

I will keep my soul in a place out of sight, Far off, where the pulse of it is not heard.

Wicca is essentially a collection of pagan reconstruction religions.

It's also a thing that many misguided goffik teenagers call themselves.

I spread my wings and I learn how to fly....

That's the thing, actually; if there's one thing that distinguishes all the branches of Wicca from the rest of neopaganism, it's that it doesn't really try to be reconstructionist. Sure, Gardner liked to talk about it in terms of restoring the (then academically respectable) European witch-cult, but essentially nothing about his mythology has its roots before Margaret Murray's 1921 The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, while his magical praxis was essentially straight-up ceremonial occultism of the Golden Dawn school.

Some more modern branches of Wicca borrow names from pre-Christian paganism, but names are about as far as it goes. Even neo-Druidism goes further than that, and it's pretty damned fluffy (largely due to the near-total absence of primary sources).

edited 6th Dec '10 1:02:26 PM by Nornagest

I will keep my soul in a place out of sight, Far off, where the pulse of it is not heard.

Is the modern orthodoxy concerned with reconstruction?

[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.

Most of the Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wiccans I've talked to are aware of its history and think of it (correctly) as a new religious movement, but there might be some selection bias going on there.

I will keep my soul in a place out of sight, Far off, where the pulse of it is not heard.

*shrug*

Okay, then.

My grandmother's a Wiccan, I suppose I should be asking her about this stuff if I want to know.

edited 6th Dec '10 1:14:44 PM by SpainSun

I spread my wings and I learn how to fly....

A friend of mine tried to convert me to Wicca once. That was one of the freakiest days of my life.

Eating a Vanilluxe will give you frostbite.

Ha ha.

I spread my wings and I learn how to fly....

Roman, I'm going to take a moment to thank you for not only introducing me to one of the greatest stories I've ever read, but giving me an appreciation of fanfiction, which I previously found appalling.

To whomever: I am a neo-Druid. Don't screw with me, or I'll reincarnate you as an Orc. Just kidding, of course. But I HAVE noticed a ridiculous amount of similarities between the two, and it's making me incredibly curious.

Marudraga (I think that's how to spell it): That is definitely a valid point. I'll have to ask... shit, I dont' know any Wiccans.

edited 6th Dec '10 3:39:35 PM by Diamonnes

My name is Cu Chulainn. Beside the raging sea I am left to moan. Sorrow I am, for I brought down my only son.

The trouble with pegging Wiccans is that, under our Rede  ^*

, we're pretty much allowed to follow our beliefs as we see fit... and hoo boy do we all take that advice. (There are some rather politically-incorrect jokes about us being worse than Unitarians in that regard.) I have met fellow Wiccans who could be classified as theists, atheists, pantheists, monotheists, polytheists, and any combination thereof.

Mind you, this is also why this bothers me:

Under the Rede, the free will of everyone has to be respected... which means that any Wiccan who tries to convert anyone else to Wicca is violating this rule. Usually, the more a person talks about their "kewl majikkal powerz" and how you should join them, the more likely they're just a fluffy bunny. (A good litmus test: see if they can pronounce "Samhain"  ^*

correctly.)

Also, relevant.

Ooh, editing quick to bring up another point- most of the time, you have to study on your own as a Solitary/Eclectic Wiccan for at least a good year before a coven will even look at you twice, let alone invite you in for apprenticeship (helps weed out aforementioned bunnies)... but unfortunately, yes some coven members do get a little uppity towards some Solitary practioners (and vice versa for that matter.) It's sort of a bizarre case of Failure Is the Only Option.

edited 7th Dec '10 8:10:11 AM by Mamanerd

"An empty stomach is not a good political advisor" - Albert Einstein Anime list

I've read the page. It has multiple personality disorder big time.

What if they're Irish and already know how to pronounce Samhain?

edited 7th Dec '10 12:12:19 PM by Diamonnes

My name is Cu Chulainn. Beside the raging sea I am left to moan. Sorrow I am, for I brought down my only son.

If you get three neopagans in a room you'll get five definitions, I'd swear.

Norn is correct that Wicca is not, at its core, a reconstructionist religion. It borrows some things from the past, but generally in highly degraded form with little interest in actually doing serious research into them. The same goes for most modern neopagans.

There are exceptions, the most visible of which are the Norse reconstructionists (Asatru is one word that some of them use and that you may hear), though there are fairly substantial numbers of Egyptian and Greek reconstructionists as well. At least some portion of all of those groups are quite serious about scholarship and discovering as much as they can about the original religious practices they strive to recreate. All three have some degree of usable historical record, which is what makes accurate reconstruction of druidic practices fundamentally impossible.

A brighter future for a darker age.

So, what's keeping you from asking your mom's friend?

Well, if his mom's friend is an Orthodox Wiccan, she's very likely not to be able to answer many questions. 'Tis how mystery religions work.

"I can't imagine what Hell will have in store, but I know when I'm there, I won't wander anymore."

Because mum's Christian and he's Wiccan, and they're going out.

I don't want to cause problems.

Maybe if I could get him alone sometime...

EDIT: , reread the first line.

It's not him I'm worried about, it's my mother. She was married to a Christian preacher, for blood's sake. I don't think she's quite ready to go any further than 'he's Wiccan'. If she knew the specifics she'd probably be a bit uneasy, and this dude is really genuinely cool and I don't want them to break up without cause.

edited 10th Dec '10 4:49:00 PM by Diamonnes

My name is Cu Chulainn. Beside the raging sea I am left to moan. Sorrow I am, for I brought down my only son.

As long as you ask in a polite and respectful manner there shouldn't be any problems, given that Wicca stresses a couple things like, say, harmony and nonviolence.

Ask him to meet you somewhere for coffee (or whatever). You don't need to involve your mom in this, and if he's dating her, I suspect he has a decent handle on how much to go into his beliefs with her.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.