Question by Mackenzie: More probing questions in my ongoing quest to understand the “nothing is un-Wiccan” philosophy…?
This is for the “Wicca is a specific religion, not anything you want it to be” people:
1) Why do you think people seize on the word Wicca so much? They act like you are stealing Christmas from them by trying to explain that the practices they described to you are not actually Wiccan beliefs and practices, not even by fairly loose eclectic definitions.
2) Why do you think people act like you are somehow trying to invalidate their beliefs and practices if you are trying to point out that by generally accepted core tenets of Wicca, the practice they consider Wiccan is not in fact Wiccan? Where does this hyper-sensitivity come from? Is this like “political correctness” gone wild?
They seem to think you are judging the practices & beliefs, when in fact you are just trying to clarify what it’s called and what it is more accurately associated with.
3) Why do you think people apply this idea to some but not other er religions? Like no one would argue that someone is not Catholic if they’ve never been baptized and worship the Goddess Kwan Yin, or that eating pork and lobster at a Seder is not a Jewish practice.
Best answer:
Answer by Prometheus Unbound
This is just what we need here – more disputes among Wiccans on the finer points of Wiccan theology…
Give your answer to this question below!
Because for some,to many,it’s their way or no way. Anything implying different they either shut down or or get angry. They do not know how to converse rationally without feeling threatened that they may be wrong,let alone agree to disagree.
[Translate]
1. Somewhere along the way, due to the plethora of absolutely horrible and inaccurate “Wicca 101″ books out there, people got the idea that being Wiccan/a Wicce/Witch is about “beliefs” rather than about receiving the fundamentally necessary initiation by an initiate and the inner court, oathbound teachings that make up 90% of what Wicca/Wicce Craft is. We’ve got a bunch ot 10% “Wiccans” running around dripping with 1 inch wide pentagrams thinking that they’ve got something they don’t have.
2. I don’t know about you, but I AM invalidating their beliefs if they call themselves Wiccan/a Witch and can’t tell me who initiated them. Core tenets are important too, of course, but once you steal the heart of what Wicca/Witchcraft is (inner court teachings by established Traditions passed down by initiates), everything else is just dumb, anyway. You is or you ain’t. Period.
3. I think that Christianity has done this somewhat too, but they don’t tell you you’re not “Christian” if you haven’t been baptized. The difference here is that we’ve got a bunch of eclectic Neo-Pagans running around calling themselves “Wiccan.” To be Catholic, you’ve gotta be baptized. To be Wiccan, you’ve gotta be initiated.
EDIT: Lab-you’re right about the term “Wiccan” being a later incarnation of the term “Witch/Wicce” BTW used the term Witchcraft and called adherents “Witches/Wicce” I do refer to myself as a Witch but the vernacular has changed so much that I succumbed to the term “Wicca” so folks would know what I was talking about.
[Translate]
I really have no idea why they have seized on the word Wicca. When I started in Wicca (getting closer to 30 than 20 years ago, now, sheesh), in the dark ages, it was still unpopular among traditionalists to use the word Wiccan, or call the RELIGION by the name “Wicca.” If you did this, or if you called yourself Wiccan (or, frankly, pronounced it Wick-ka) you were considered a poseur, and small groups of us who had some problems with the other Wiccans (who exclusively called themselves Witches) such as the whole Golden Age Matriarchy and flawed personal history stuff, started using the term Wiccan exclusively. Basically, we started to go “If you are examples of “real Witches” and “Wiccans” are “Fake Witches,” we’d rather be the fakes, thank you very much!
For this reason, when neo-traditionalists try to claim the word Wiccan and say no one else has claim to the term, I (and many others around back then) laugh in their faces. They threw the baby out with the bathwater, and we raised it to adulthood, and now they want their baby back. Ha! [Actually, the majority of the people who claim that they have right to the word Wiccan and others don't in THIS manner are demonstrably *not* BTW, and are poseurs themselves. They seem to think this makes them look more Wiccan. Which is funny...but also sad.]
But that paradigm of “real witches” from the 1970s and 1980s *did* make many of us hesitant to define Wicca…we don’t want to be the same jerks who played these definition games when we were young. What we do, then, is instead of acknowledging Wicca is a big bus with room for lots of riders, we say Wicca is the whole highway…and it is not. There is a lot of room, but there does come a point when you’re not on the bus at all.
We do have books (that are fiction) that are teaching that Wicca (specifically) is a metaphysical thing, passed down in the blood, and is about doing what other people *CAN’T* do. We’ve got young ones coming up with that as a paradigm, where Wicca is something you can do, not something you are. That’s *one* source of the people who use the word Wicca without knowing a damn thing about Wicca.
There are a couple of authors who have written books that they say are about Witchcraft, and they use the word Witchcraft exclusively. We then have authors who are Wiccan, or nominally Wiccan, who use the words Wicca and Witchcraft interchangeably, and people get confused that the (often fiction) books they read about Witchcraft are about the same thing as the books about Wicca. That’s *another* source of the people who think Wicca is the same as the fiction thing, or who knows what.
We also have a few (thankfully very few) people who are teaching Wicca as if they are experts without knowing a damn thing. I don’t know about you, but I could sit here and enumerate every difference between my tradition and the tradition Gardner started. I could tell you why and when the change happened, and why I’m not in a different trad. I believe there has to be SOME evolution between where Wicca started and where you are in a trad…if you can’t go from here to there, if there isn’t some connection, some linear relationship, at the very least a *cognitive* relationship (I mean, look at the initial relationship of Alexandrians to Gardnerians, I’m not talking about a *high* standard of relationship here, just a relationship.)
This is why one of the questions I ask people who do the blending thing is “What makes it Wiccan? Name one thing you do that is exclusive to Wicca? One belief that is a Wiccan belief.”
…and they go away. They don’t know what Wicca *is* so they can’t define what makes their beliefs Wiccan, but they’ve been told (or think they’ve been told) that *feeling* like Wicca might be your religion is what makes you Wiccan, not what you do or believe.
People do do this with other religions. Catholicism is a bad example, because it has an authority on what makes it Catholic, and comparing Catholicism to Wicca is apples to oranges. (Apples to apples would be Catholicism:A specific Tradition) but if you compare Wicca (every tradition) to Christianity as a whole (every sect) you will find that there are forms of Christianity where people seem to believe little or nothing from “traditional” Christianity but still demand to be called Christians…so this isn’t just a Wiccan problem.
[Translate]
1. Cool factor. “Wicca” has been a fad for years, implying various things that don’t actually have anything to do with Wicca.
2. First, I think they feel required to have a name for their beliefs. Many times I’ve seen the question here “can I be religious without falling into a specific religion?” That boggles me. Who do they think is going to stop them? So I’ve got this handful of beliefs, some of which sound kind of Wiccan, so I must be Wiccan, and if I’m told I’m not Wiccan then somehow I’m going to lose my spirituality.
Second, they don’t understand the difference between having the right to believe whatever they want, and basic application of vocabulary. You absolutely can believe whatever you want. But when you say “those beliefs aren’t really Wiccan,” they take it to mean “You aren’t allowed to believe those things.”
3. Because Wiccans are supposed to be tolerant (unlike those evil, meany Christians), and they think tolerant means “lets me do whatever I want without thought to consequences.”
[Translate]
I’m still trying to find out myself!
I’m spiritually Eclectic, already, but the terminology of Wicca and other Pagan sectors is harder to get anyone to really define.
I’m trying to ‘get’ how to relate /show devotion with the Goddess, but not finding much help in definitions either, – just a lot of names & their special attributes.
[Translate]