Wiccan Beliefs & Practices: With Rituals for Solitaries & Covens - Softcover

Cantrell, Gary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1567181120 ISBN 13: 9781567181128

Verlag: LLEWELLYN PUB, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

Modern Wicca is a vibrant, uplifting nature religion practiced by hundreds of thousands of people in the United States alone. But wearing "witchy" jewelry and casting a few spells does not make one a witch, for Wicca is a lifestyle and those who walk its path have solemnly dedicated themselves to the service of the Goddess and God.

Wiccan Beliefs and Practices was written for the solitary witch or non-traditional small coven. Written by a Wiccan High Priest and retired aerospace engineer, Wiccan Beliefs & Practices includes crucial information not found in other introductory Wiccan books, including:

• Ethics of a Witch, including the Code of Chivalry
• How to write and develop your own spells and rituals
• The physically-challenged Witch
• Out of the broom closet: is it right for you?
• Know your rights: the legal protection of Wicca as a legitimate religion

Author Gary Cantrell speaks from personal experience with Wiccans of all ages and degrees of physical ability, bringing you an earnest examination of modern Wiccan beliefs and a practical guide to the Craft of the Wise.

In the following excerpt, the author explains why he chose to "come out of the broom closet."

I elected to reveal my practice of witchcraft publicly simply because I personally feel that the time for intentionally hiding ourselves has come to an end. We are practitioners of a kind, gentle, and peace-loving religion. We are not the bloodthirsty or depraved, orgiastic fanatics all too often portrayed by the entertainment and news media. The general public has been misled about witchcraft for over a thousand years, and now with our numbers reaching an all-time high, possibly in excess of one million people worldwide, we need to stand up and set that record straight.

We are out there by the hundreds upon hundreds of thousands. We are in the arts, the sciences, and the humanities. We are law enforcement officers, engineers, builders, doctors, and farmers. We are a legally recognized religion under the protection of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and our isolation from the rest of the religious community should and must come to an end. With the phenomenal growth of witchcraft since the 1970s and with the free and easy interchange of information afforded to us by things like the Internet, that time will come to pass and it will happen soon. It may be happening now.

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Gary Cantrell was a Priest in an Eclectic-Celtic Path of Wicca and High Priest of a small Coven. He recognized the divinity of nature since the early 1970's but did not fully realize that he had been following the Pagan path until about 1991. He began a study of witchcraft in 1993, initiated as a witch and Priest of Wicca at Imbolc of 1995 and accepted the responsibilities of Coven High Priest in 1998. He retired after forty years as an engineer in the aerospace industry, and then wrote books on witchcraft and related subjects as a hobby.

Wiccan Beliefs and Practices: With Rituals for Solitaries and Covens is Cantrell's second book, the first title being Out of the Broom Closet? In addition to authoring two books on the Craft, Cantrell had several articles on Wicca published in local newspapers as well as in Pagan publications and had been the featured guest on a Los Angeles area television talk show to discuss Out of the Broom Closet.

Gary Cantrell passed away on June 28th, 2002. He is survived by his wife, son and daughter, and three grandchildren.

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Definitions

Before starting down this rather detailed road of definitions, let me be perfectly clear and state that virtually any definition one can attach to the words witch, witchcraft, or Wicca is in many ways dependent on the person making that definition. My own experience has taught me that if you were to ask one dozen people who claim to be Wiccans exactly what that word means, you would probably get at least a half-dozen different answers, and each answer could probably be tied to some acceptable reference source.

This seeming discrepancy is not due to any attempt to mask the truth or to a lack of information among Wiccan practitioners, but is due in large part to the fact that our Craft is growing and diverging today at a phenomenal rate. Many of the newer Wiccan Paths, sometimes referred to as Neo-Wiccan, have evolved with their own definitions or interpretations of these basic words. Their definition of Wicca may not always coincide with that held by the older Anglo-centered, British Traditional forms of Wicca that originated in the United Kingdom.

There are many Traditions of the Old Religion and many Paths within each Tradition. They each differ sufficiently to make even some basic definitions somewhat open to the interpretation of the practitioner. The definitions I present in this chapter are essentially my own and are based on my research sources and my personal understanding of my chosen Tradition and Path, which is generally understood to be Eclectic-Celtic Wicca. These definitions may not reflect those of other Wiccans who follow other Traditions. They may use reference sources that differ from mine and may therefore arrive at definitions that differ from what I present here. Nonetheless, I believe the definitions and explanations I provide offer as good a beginning as any.

I want to be very clear at the start of this book that the comments, thoughts, and opinions you will read here regarding Wiccan theology, rituals, and such are mine as I understand them based on my own experience and learning. They reflect my interpretations of how I live and practice Wicca from the perspective of my own Tradition and Path and from my own sources of information. I am by no means touting the material in this book as being something that speaks for all Wiccans. I have no intention of making that claim, nor, I believe, should any other author. When I use the words we or our in this book, I am simply referring to Wiccans in general. The use of these words is not meant to imply that a statement under discussion is accepted exactly as I have written it by all who practice Wicca. There is indeed no "one and only way" to work the Craft and worship our deities. We all have some differing understanding or interpretation of many aspects of the Old Religion, and each one of these interpretations is, by definition, the correct one for those who embrace it.

In any event, I encourage you to read what I present and use that information as a starting point in developing your own understanding of the Craft. Read as many sources as you can, do as much research as you can, and do not regard any one source as presenting the pure and unimpeachable truth over all others.

Wicca and Paganism

What does the word Wicca really mean, and where did it come from? Wicca is only one of many religions of the world that can be grouped under the umbrella of Paganism. So before we can define Wicca, we must first define the word Pagan. Pagan comes from the Latin word pagani or paganus, which translates into "hearth or home dweller," generally meaning a country person. In the days of the Roman Republic, the word pagani was somewhat derogatory in its application since those so addressed were considered "country cousins" and were usually thought of as being somewhat inferior to their more worldly, city-dwelling counterparts. With the expansion of Christianity, the word Pagan was redefined as one who worshipped the old gods and goddesses and did not seriously worship the new Christian god. In the early years of the Christian movement, being a Pagan had not yet taken on the ominous overtones of heathen or heretic that later lead to the persecutions and horrors of the Dark Ages, that period in history generally referred to as the Inquisition or the Burning Times.

The current definition of the word Pagan from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language1 is "a practitioner of any of the non-Christian, non-Muslim, or non-Jewish religions, typically holding a polytheist or pantheist doctrine, philosophy, or creed."1 A Pagan is thus anyone who follows a religion other than the Christian, Muslim, or Jewish religions. This obviously includes such diverse religions as the Hindu, Taoist, Confucian, Buddhist, Pacific Islander, American Indian, and, of course, all the nature-oriented or Earth-worshipping Eod and goddess religions. According to information culled from both The 1993 Encyclopedia Britannica and the The 1998 Cambridge Fact Finder1, the total of these so-defined Pagan religions accounts for approximately 50 percent of all the religious adherents in the world, which is, needless to say, a significant number of individuals.2

Figure 1 gives a general graphic representation of how Paganism, the Traditions of Wicca, and some of the various Paths within Wicca can be visualized from the standpoint of my own perspective and learning. Others may not agree with my arrangement of some of the figure components, disagreeing on how I have represented or depicted the relationships between some of the Traditions or Paths. I appreciate and understand this disagreement, since few of us will see these concepts in exactly the same way.

In any case, this figure is only meant to give some visual form to the concepts of Tradition and Path, and is obviously not meant to depict each and every form of Pagan Tradition or Wiccan Path. There are far too many of these to include in one simple graphic, and only a select few of the major Traditions and Paths are represented. Please note that the arrangement of figure 1 is alphabetical; there is no superiority implied by the order of appearance or by the absence of other major Pagan Traditions or Wiccan Paths.

That brings us back to the original question¿what does Wicca mean? There are those who, with justification, may say that anyone who invokes a deity and addresses that deity through magick in order to bring about change is practicing witchcraft and is therefore a witch. Given that definition of witchcraft, one could assume the title of witch if magick were practiced by invoking a deity associated with virtually any theology, and no one could tell you that you were not practicing witchcraft as you understood it.

There are also those within Wicca who may not totally recognize your claim to be a witchcraft practitioner since that claim may fall outside of what their Tradition or Path may define or recognize as the practice of witchcraft. This may sound like splitting hairs, but I think it has some validity in that the title of witch and the understanding of what witchcraft is can be related directly to how one interprets the origin of those words. That is not to say that a person initiated as a witch under a theology outside of Wicca has no validity as a witch¿far from it. I am only saying that the validity of one's claim to be a witchcraft practitioner may not necessarily be recognized by all those who practice under other Traditions or Paths of Wicca. This analysis, however, is probably more germane and firmly anchored to the teachings associated with the previously mentioned British Traditionals, such as the Gardnerian and Alexandrian Traditions, and much less so in the newer and generally more eclectic Craft Traditions that have...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: LLEWELLYN PUB
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1567181120
• ISBN 13: 9781567181128
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 312
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar