Like many neo-Pagan religions, Wicca is a belief which celebrates the divinity of life as we live it here. Wicca is celebration of our environment yet also a dedication towards altering that environment, not by warping natural patterns, but by understanding that we are those natural patterns and have control over our being. For Wiccans as for most Neo-Pagans, there is no full stop, no unbreachable barrier, between us and our outer world, between our minds and our soil, our dreams and the trees outside our window. We are all part of a whole in which we can fully participate, and what we can call magic is a simply, I believe, a dedicated effort towards this participation.
The word wicca – nobody knows. We can reach all the way back to Old English to find the word still in its current form, one who practises magic. But in Old English we also find the verb 'wican' to bend, and many have claimed that the words are related because to do magic and to bend are the same thing and, for some, to bend branches into baskets and to bend possibilities into actuality are not so very different either.
What do I mean by the divinity of life as we live it here?
In the South of France this summer, we went to see the cave paintings of the Dordogne. Caverns deep in the mountainside are carved and coloured with bisons and mammoths, horses and elephants and bears, deer and elk. Also on the stones are the triangular symbol of the vagina, carved again and again, as if in an attempt to comprehend and participate in the might of creation.
The paintings and carvings are too deep in the mountainside to have been decorative, nobody lived where they were made, instead, most scholars believe, they were temples. To what? To the living environment of these early men and women. While later religions believed that God was something external, something to be reached for, often, by cutting off from your own environment, the cave paintings in France are witness to a much earlier reaching, a reaching for participation of mysteries of life on the living and breathing planet.
Let's fast forward to the end of the nineteenth century. Religion has evolved, grown, through hundreds of complex moral and dogmatic systems which attempt to understand the human consciousness. We have grown, evolved, in our sense of ourselves as humans and our responsibility to each other. We are no longer tribal beings living on the edge of life and death, which is a damn good thing. But that particular religious pulse that was existent in the creation of the cave paintings is still very much alive. In 1886 an American called Charles Leland met an Italian woman named Maddalena Tulati. Leland was a folklorist studying witchcraft, and after years of study in Italy published Aradia, or a Gospel of the Witches, which claimed to describe the beliefs and gospels of Italian witches with traditions in a secret unbroken line from the Etruscans and quite possibly before. Aradia describes Diana as the supreme creator and her daughter, who came to earth and spread the teachings of witchcraft among the peasants. Aradia contains lines which later became famous through their incorporations, by Doreen Valiente, in the Neo-Pagan Charge of the Goddess.
Whenever you have need of anything, once a month, and better it be when the moon is full, you shall assemble in some secret place and adore the spirit of Me Who is Queen of all the Wise.
In 1921, two decades after Leland, anthropologist Margaret Murray published her 'Witch Cult of Western Europe', which, along with Leland, claimed the existence of an uninterrupted pre-historic witchcraft religion, the worship of a Horned God, which had survived Christianity and continued uninterrupted, though secret, through to the present day. At around this time, there was also a belief among many archaeologists of a matriarchal pre-Christian religion of a Great Goddess.
In 1939, civil servant Gerald Gardner was said to be initiated into the New Forest Coven which he claimed was still practising the ancient art of witchcraft. And thus the modern Wicca was born, a religion which had roots both in English folklore, and in the Mystery traditions of English magic, with which Gardner came into contact with through Aleister Crowley. Does it have roots in prehistory? Who knows. Historians now, largely discredit claims that witchcraft survived as an uninterrupted witchcraft tradition, and the idea of an idealistic, peaceful, golden age of matriarchy in which all of us worshipped a Mother Goddess has fractured into views of both more cynicism and more complexity. Most practitioners today would prefer to concentrate on the realities of worship in the present, enriched by history, but not dependent on a myth of past – and lost – perfection. Or, as Walt Whitman puts it so beautifully, enacting the idea that:
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the
beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
Thus which parts of Wiccan history are factual and which are mythical – and by mythical I mean in terms of both ancient and contemporary mythology, is, as Ronald Hutton suggests, largely irrelevant to modern Wicca, which celebrates today a Great Goddess as Creator and Her consort, a Horned God., who, as Vivianne Crowley puts it, “is hooved and in touch with the world of Nature, but his horns are a sign of Divinity, for they reach to the stars.”
On the old cave walls, we can imagine, animal – painted, human – painter came together in a ritual of divine worship and in the hieroglyphs of the vagina, the concept of life and death was repeated over and over until She was a Goddess. What has continued, described by Leland and Murray and formed into a modern religion by Gardner and many others is a celebration of the sanctity of life and death, of the place where we are as well as the place where we've been and the place where we're going to, because in the firelight of the cave walls or in the candlelit magic circle, these are all one. For some – though not all, or even many, the way – today – to celebrate this sanctity – is through Wicca.
Enough of history.
How do we worship?
Polarity in Wicca is crucial, the concept of a Goddess and a God, the Great Goddess and the Horned God. Although, paradoxical as it may seem, many Wiccans are also comfortable with the worship of individual Gods and Goddesses from distinct pantheons. Personally, I like this quote by American High Priestess Deborah Lipp, who says that, while we can see each Goddess as different aspects or faces of a whole, 'I don't personally want to be the one to tell Kali that She is 'just an aspect' and I advise you not to, either'.
Discussing it recently, I realised for me, the concept of the sacred works very much like a river, that you have the one source, which divides into two, and then divides into many, none less real than any of the others. But of course, the image of the Quabbalistic Tree of Life is perhaps more relevant than a river, because after the One you have two, and it is the movement of energy from these two by which everything comes into being.
According to the Witches Janet and Stewart Farrar "an organic view of the cosmos cannot be fully expressed, and lived, without the concept of the God and Goddess. There is no manifestation without polarization; so at the highest creative level, that of Divinity, the polarization must be the clearest and most powerful of all, reflecting and spreading itself through all the microcosmic levels as well."
Wicca works in magic and in ritual very much with the idea of the five Elements, earth, air, fire and water, and the fifth, the aether, which is part of all and also not, the spirit. While the ancient Greek theory that all life could be divided into the four elements is no longer believable, they are symbolic as opposed to literal. They relate to different characteristics, different concepts, different phases of the year and of life – ways of understanding and thus participating in the universe.
Like most other Neo-Pagans, we celebrate the wheel of the year, eight festivals from Samhain, the Celtic New Year, Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasadh, the two solstices and the two equinoxes. For the Wiccan, this rhythm of the season is also a personal rhythm and in celebrating times of abundance and times of dearth we recognize that all possessions are momentary and fleeting, that we are born with the capacity to reach for everything and to lose everything, but what is loss but a rehearsal of death, and what is death but a beginning of life? A Wiccan finds stability in instability, in the sense that all is changing and this change in itself provides a permanence and a source of faith.
We celebrate a time of light and a time of darkness, and we also seek to recognise the times within ourselves when we seek the light from outside, or when we turn inwards and find a light within.
Wiccans also work in a magic circle, which sets up a time between the worlds. I was talking earlier about the idea of us being part of everything else. This is a truth, but its not necessarily a truth which we should be aware of in day to day existence. We need the separation of time and space in order to fully function. But a circle is an area in which time and space do not separate us from ourselves and from the gods.
The final thing I want to talk about and perhaps the most controversial is the fact that Traditional Wiccans work in closed groups, you have to be an initiated Wiccan to enter a Wiccan circle, and this takes, traditionally, a year and a day. Although thousands of books have been published about Wicca, the bulk of the teaching is oral, and experience – we learn from what is done, rather than what is written, and that which we learn in the circle, we don't discuss outside of it.
Why? In this era of shared information, isn't it bizarre? Fruitless, anyway, to even attempt to keep information passed on within a closed group when with the help of the internet, information is everywhere? Even dangerous, since openness provides democracy and freedom?
There are many answers to this question. Wicca is a Mystery religion – and therefore is, by its very nature, mysterious. You don't know what's happening behind those doors. And what does it mean – mystery, anyway? We can trace it back to the Greek mysterion meaning secret rite or doctrine, and thus from myein, meaning to close or shut. And why should religion be a closed thing? It shouldn't. Religion should be a shared experience, it should be the act of worship under the open sun. But not always.
Because a Mystery tradition is about going inwards as much as outwards – carved above the doors of the Mystery Temples were the words - Know Thyself.
I said at the beginning of this lecture that Wicca is a celebration of our environment, but also a crucial awareness that we are our environment. In order to recognise this, we have to travel inwards as much as outwards, and, just as the individual worshipper provides himself space from the busy world to pray, or meditate, just as the cave people found space at the centre of the mountain to draw the rest of the world, there are times when we must close off from the outer world in order to understand our vital connection to it. The world of our environment, especially today as we our barraged by our information, or capacity, or knowledge, is constantly in flux, growing, changing, living, dying, but at the centre of it is a stillness which is the space where everyone is a part of a whole, and where life and death are constants. This, for many of us, is the Wiccan magic circle.
0 comments:
Post a Comment