I supposed it was inevitable. Maybe I was fooling myself more than I was others. I'm somewhat of a geek, I love Cadillacs, my family is the most important thing to me, and I enjoy working out regularly. I'm a homeowner, I'm a freelance professional, I've worked at the 9-to-5 jobs, I've been a retail manager, landscaping, I enjoy auto mechanics, and recently I stepped into the birth of a new business. I'm somewhat successful in pretty normal... Besides the fact I'm also a Wiccan. Yep that's right, I'm a bona fide Wiccan, and I guess I've kept my stump thumping to private circles and cliques way too long.

I tend to be an elitist when it comes to my religion. Okay let me take that back, I am an elitist when it comes to my religion, and I am so without prejudice. I don't care if you're a Wiccan, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or whatever; if you have a misconception about my religion than your best to keep it to yourself, because I really don't tolerate somebody else telling me what I believe and what I actually do all that well. I try to be accepting and open-minded, but that doesn't mean I have to be a doormat, and I very seldom am.

So what I supposed to be inevitable was that I would actually start writing about it. I guess it was just bound to be that at some point I would find myself talking about in such a way that anybody could easily find out just what I think and feel about my own religion, its adherents, and what other people think about. I suspect that a lot of what I'll post here will not be taken well by either side. I'm not taking the gloves off, because I never had them on, and I don't believe in sugarcoating anything. That's just the way I am; simple, relatively speaking, and strongly forward.

Over the past 50 plus years Wicca has seen some tremendous growth both in form and followers. Just over the past decade or two I have seen so many "traditions" spring up from nowhere that I have absolutely lost count and interest. For the most part they are all just variations of eclectic Wicca, Ganderian, Alexandrian, Dianic, and Seax-Wica. I know a lot of people would like to believe that their tradition stems from some other source, but unless it came from the Regency or Gardner, maybe even Sanders, I would strongly suspect that it was just recently hatched in their own minds. I also know that a lot of people would say that it's just fine that people cook up their own traditions all day long, and I won't dispute it, but I don't agree. I'm not saying everybody has to be a "traditional" Wiccan but it leaves don't make claims about your tradition that just aren't true. Of the few hereditary witches out there, it is most unlikely that you actually are one, and you can save you time writing me to convince me otherwise. Also, you older folk who want to claim that you've been practicing for 50 or 60 years can also take a hike, since it was my generation that followed the old Wiccan guard. We know you are phony. Likewise, to all the authors out there who are spewing that regurgitated and fictional exposition on Wicca and go the way of the dodo bird too. When Ellen Cannon Reed passed we lost one of the last great voices we had.

I'm sure a lot of the older and more seasoned Wiccans will be quick to point towards our ecofeminist Dianic witch warriors and political evangelists as remaining authorities and role models for our craft. Please put your fingers down. While I applaud their effort and in some cases actually enjoy what they have to say about the craft, I'm not quite sure I'm comfortable with the idea that such a sexually unequal crew makes for good spokespeople representing a community of believers in gender equality, and dual gendered divinities. Plus, they are not quite in keeping with the earliest Wiccan ideas about gender balance in conception, and in religious observance. I think they miss the point.

In addition to all the subjects and topics on a go off on one of my biggest is going to be on Wiccan legitimacy. I don't simply suspect, I know firsthand that many Wiccans who have come to the craft in the past decade or so aren't possessions of some pretty twisted misconceptions, and the largest of those happens to be Wiccan ideas concerning the divine. I hate to break it to you, and I really feel bad for this, but Wicca is not pantheistic or polytheistic. Wicca is monism plain and simple. We do believe in a single principal source of creation, and individual power responsible for all creation, and I strongly believe that if somebody is going to call themselves a Wiccan that they do their homework more thoroughly before claiming otherwise. Gardnerians refer to this power as the "Dryghten", Scott Cunningham describes this power in his discussion of deities in his "Wicca for the solitary practitioner", and where to get this ball rolling by looking at this idea first;

It is a Wiccan belief that there is one principle source of all creation and that this power periodically manifests through nature. Not of, for, by, or over, but through. Because nature is gendered, so is our recognition of the divine as it manifests through nature, and thus we have the Goddess and God. Two equal and gender opposite manifestations of the same power. Approachable and knowable. It's much easier early on for the mind to wrap around the ideas of the god and goddess than it is to grasp the idea of a single source of creation.

Let's repeat this; Wiccans believe in one principle source of creation which periodically manifest through nature, which has been conceived to be engendered just as nature has gender definitions, and thus the divine becomes approachable and knowable.

That idea might be a bit of a shock to new Wiccans. Very few authors in the present day even touch the subject. However, it was and remains a fact that has been with us since the earliest revelations of the Wicca, and if this is cause to reconsider one's choice of her religious path, then they better get to reconsidering. This is an issue which really boils down to sincerity and seriousness. If a person was to really consider Wicca as a religious choice then you would assume they would take the time to learn as much about that religion before jumping in.





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