"Sound of Trumpet" <soundoftrumpet@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:dfdae94e-82a6-459a-aae8-ce6ca9eac2a7@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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> http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/123912.html
>
>
>
> Wicca Lies (conclusion): An Unsup****table Pack of Lies
>
> Dec. 17th, 2004 at 12:11 AM
>
>
> At virtually every occult shop in America, in towns both large and
> small, there's a course taught at least once a year. In the larger
> towns, teachers compete for chances to teach it, and it's offered year-
> round. It's called "Wicca 101: Introduction to Witchcraft." The
> curriculum is pretty well standardized, and basically covers an
> outline of the material from Silver Ravenwolf's book To Ride a Silver
> Broomstick (having recently supplanted previous books by Scott
> Cunningham, and by Janet & Stewart Farrar before that), sometimes with
> a smidgen thrown in from Starhawk's The Spiral Dance. Contrary to the
> impression these teachers convey, there's no material that isn't in
> the books. All you're really paying for is the egoboo of having
> someone that the occult shop owner ratifies as a powerful magick-user
> and witch fuss over you. It's the poor man's illusionary version of
> paying Stephen Hawking to coach you through Algebra 1.
>
> What you don't see anywhere nearly as often is a class called Wicca
> 200.
>
> Now, I know that no sooner do I say that than somebody will tell me of
> their Wicca 200 class. I'm not saying that it never happens. What I'm
> saying is that it's nowhere near as frequent. I'll also say that it's
> not terribly consistent from class to class, teacher to teacher,
> because there isn't nearly the consensus as to what comes after Wicca
> 101. And in my experience, the dropout rate from attempted Wicca 200
> cl***** is very, very high because the cl***** leave the students
> scratching their heads and asking a very im****tant question, namely
> what does any of this have to do with the stuff in the first class?
> You see, there isn't much actual magic in Wicca 101. There's not much
> psychic development, just basic grounding and centering, maybe a few
> breathing exercises and some chants. There's not much on group
> dynamics, on working with a group and managing the needs of such a
> group. And there's certainly no push to encourage students to study
> primary source material. So given these deficits, it's obvious that
> these should be the agenda for any cl***** beyond Wicca 101. However,
> there's an intractable problem that any would-be Wicca 200 (and above)
> course developer faces. If such a class were to be in any way honest,
> then class 2, lesson 1, sentence 1 would have to be this: "OK, all of
> that stuff we taught you in Wicca 101? Forget it. None of it was
> true."
>
> No world-wide, or even pan-Indo-European universal pre-Christian
> religion. No matriarchal or matrifocal golden age. No universal
> archetype of a triune goddess. No universal archetype of the goddess's
> dying and reborn consort. No nine million dead, no inquisition of
> witches during the middle ages at all, nor any organized conspiracy to
> label midwives as witches. No covens of any kind prior to the
> Renaissance. No Law of Contagion, no Law of Sympathy. Not always four
> elements, and nearly all ancient sources for elemental symbolism
> contradict the ones we told you in some way or other. No culture that
> celebrated 8 "sabbats" on the quarter and cross-quarter days. And all
> of those divination techniques we overviewed? Except for the ones that
> are Taoist, the rest were developed by Christians. (I find it a source
> of chronic amusement to watch teachers try to paper over this one. It
> is possible to teach tarot without admitting the modern tarot deck is
> drenched in specifically Christian symbolism, but the mental and
> verbal gyrations necessary are worthy of an Olympics gymnastic
> routine.)
>
> And oh yeah, whisper this one if you dare to say it at all: prior to
> the very end of the Renaissance, almost into the Age of Science, no
> human witches. If you look at the oldest historical and literary
> references to "witches," you see that witches are described as tiny
> little creatures, varying in size from a grain of sand up to maybe two
> inches tall, invisible, that flit along on the wind and blight crops,
> sicken cattle, and cause women to miscarry. What's a witch, the real
> historical reality of what our pre-Christian ancestors meant by a
> witch? A bacterium, a pre-scientific theory of the spread of
> contagious disease. That's why the first Vatican encyclical on the
> subject of witches didn't condemn people who were witches or people
> who called themselves witches. It condemned the belief that witches
> exist, as part of a broad campaign against superstition.
>
> Now, let's see you admit all of that to your students -- and then try
> to build something that you and they will still call Wicca.
>
> There are four things that no Wiccan can read without becoming deeply
> cynical about what they were taught in Wicca 101, or in any of the
> equivalent textbooks over the years:
>
> Sir James G. Frazer, The New Golden Bough. (1922) Or for that matter
> any edition from 1899 on, but the unabridged second-to-last version is
> too much to ask anybody to read in much less than a lifetime of study.
> Frazer's own final 1922 edition, the abridged but completed two-volume
> summary, will do a perfectly good job of demonstrating the point.
> Frazer's book is an im****tant one, in the sense that it had a
> tremendous impact on how intellectuals wrote about magic,
> superstition, and the origins of religion for several generations. To
> vastly oversimplify Frazer's book(s), he was one of the amateurs who
> created the modern science of anthropology as a hobby, the hobby of
> collecting pre-Christian legends from primitive people in hopes of
> recording them before the results of successful Christian evangelism
> erased all memory of pre-Christian religious attitudes or practices.
> Based on the collected notes of his fellow folklorists, Frazer created
> a theory to explain how religion was invented, and how it evolved
> alongside human technology from the most primitive origins to its
> perfected form in the Church of England during the Industrial Age.
>
>
> Any good criticism of Frazer, written at any time after the mid 1950s.
> I had the good fortune to find a used copy of the 1959 Mentor Press
> edition. In that edition, Theodore H. Gaster left Frazer's text alone,
> but added footnotes of his own. Lengthy footnotes. In them, he point-
> by-point demolishes every argument, every theory, every interpolation
> of Frazer's. In the eighty-plus years since Frazer wrote his book,
> there's been a lot of advances in archeology, anthropology, history,
> linguistics, and textual criticism. By 1959, before Wicca even reached
> the United States, it was possible to compare and contrast three
> sources: Gerald Gardner, James Frazer, and modern scholar****p. In
> every case where Frazer contradicts later research, Gardner sides with
> Frazer, and nearly all of modern Witchcraft with him.
>
>
> Margaret Murray, The Witch Cult in Western Europe. (1922) Murray
> decided that there must have actually been some real witches, or else
> there wouldn't have been witch trials in the 1600s; where there's
> smoke, there's fire. So she came up with the idea of carefully
> studying the Inquisitional records to try to decide, on little
> evidence other than her own prejudices, which charges were actually
> credible, and then projected her own fantasy onto the evidence to
> "explain" what the Inquisitors were afraid of: a pan-European rural
> religion that wor****ped a triune Goddess and her consort the Horned
> God.
>
>
> Any modern analysis of Margaret Murray's book. As I said of the Golden
> Bough, which was a work of the same times, there's been a lot of
> archeology and historical analysis since 1922, and of Margaret
> Murray's hypothesis nothing substantial remains. Now compare what
> Gardner and his followers teach to Murray and to the analysis since
> then. Where Murray and modern scholar****p contradict each other, Wicca
> sides with Murray.
> For the preface to her 1979 book An ABC of Witchcraft Past and
> Present, Wicca co-founder Doreen Valiente put real detective work into
> checking up on Gerald Gardner's initiation story, in which he claimed
> to have been initiated by an elder woman who was one of the only
> remaining members of what they claimed was the last surviving
> witchcraft coven in England. Valiente's proof is not irrefutable, but
> it is suggestive; it is not unreasonable to think that Gardner is
> accurately presenting that part of the story. Interestingly enough, it
> is not necessary to claim that Rose, the witch who initiated Gardner,
> lied to him about these things. An elderly witch in the late 1940s
> would have been a young convert in the 1920s. We know that from the
> 1880s through the 1920s, there were wave after wave of
> "transcendentalist" attempts to build or rebuild alternatives to
> Christianity in the US and the UK. I think that an analysis of what
> precise mistakes were made in building the Wicca myth suggests a
> fairly narrow range of dates for its origin: no earlier than 1922, no
> later than 1948. The next generation were told that they were part of
> an ancient lineage that went back to the Stone Age; they uncritically
> passed this on to Gardner, who wrote it down, and that settled it for
> shallow students of Wicca for the next 50+ years. (If this theory
> sounds familiar, it should. It's also the plot of the marvelous art-
> house horror film The Wicker Man. Who knew then how true it was?)
>
> This is a big part of why it's so embarrassingly easy to be considered
> an elder in the Wiccan community. There's a turnover of about 1/3 per
> year. To oversimplify things, the first year we lose a lot of students
> because they figure out that the Craft is never going to be The Craft,
> or because the Pagan/Wiccan community freezes them out for being Too
> Weird even for the Pagans. The second year, about half of the
> survivors accidentally end up on the wrong side of some internal
> "witch war" or other, some personality conflict (or worse, thinking of
> a certain notorious shooting incident here in St. Louis) and drop out
> never to be heard from again, and there goes another third. In that
> third year, most of them figure out that their elders are never going
> to teach them the "real stuff," the really powerful ritual and magick,
> so they either find an elder who points them to the real historical
> sources or they go looking for them themselves -- at which point
> nearly all of the remainder realize that they've been lied to all
> along, and go elsewhere. A few stick around for another two, three,
> five, sometimes even twenty years if there's money involved, and
> become the Elders of the Community -- in some cases, after as little
> as 3 years. And how unreasonable is that, considering that if you've
> been in it for 3 years you were there before 90% of the community got
> there? Heck, that's what happened to me.
>
> A lot of the disillusioned go off to join or found various
> Reconstructionist Pagan movements, determined to abandon Wicca's lies
> and mistakes and replace them with a foundation of valid scholar****p
> on which to build something sound. Unfortunately, those that show any
> sign of succeeding, those that build anything that might be worth
> taking over, get zerged by the Wiccans, who insist on replacing
> whatever the founders of the group built with their old familiar
> Wiccan ways. Heck, even Isaac Bonewits tried it once; tired of
> Neopagan foibles, one of the earliest founders of Neopaganism tried to
> abandon it and create a non-Wiccan, non-Neopagan Celtic
> Reconstructionist path called ar nDraiocht Fein (ADF). Within two
> years, it got swarmed by Neopagans and Wiccans who tore down all of
> Isaac's carefully (if possibly equally dubiously) researched rituals
> and structures with the ones they brought with them from Neopagan
> Witchcraft.
>
It must really suck to have nothing better to do than type a book on the
'puter, then cross post it all across the world.
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