What We Have Here, Is a Failure to Communicate

A reader's comment on the foregoing post reflects some basic misunderstandings between Wiccans and Christians that I really feel the need to address:

"Very interesting...As a teen nerd, I checked out Crowley, et al, briefly, realized it was about power, self-pity, and vanity---in other words, Evil. Wicca seems to be to me the "Episcopalian" (or Unitarian) form of Satanism (hope I stated that right). Animism is attractive to immature minds, but it inevitably leads to de-valuing of human life."

Aleister Crowley:
First, let me say there is no Crowley "et al". There is just Crowley... and everybody else. He is one of a kind. For Aleister Crowley it was always "all about him". To judge the occult by Crowley is like judging medicine by the physician/torturers at the Nazi camps.

He was a disturbed man, a drug addict, a sex addict (if I guess correctly), a media whore. He revolted against superiors, he dissed his mentors, he cast out on his own on a tide of crass and self-propelled publicity. He is hardly the wise man of Magic that most practitioners emulate.

He openly and publicly called himself the Great Beast, and used 666 as his sign. But, even at that, he was not worshipping Satan. Crowley didn't believe in "the Devil"...which is entirely a Christian concept.

But he did know how such a name and number would play in the press of the Christian west, and how much attention he would receive because of it among the foolish and the idle who were attracted to anything they thought of as "wicked". I'm sure such attention was very flattering to his vanity—and his bank account.

Having once been a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, whose goals, like all legitimate religious/spiritual orders was enlightenment and communion with the divine, he left, and strayed from the True Path, and paid the price. His very life is a warning to us all.

The reader's perception of him is entirely correct. He errs, however, in assuming that legitimate students of the Occult or practitioners of Magic are remotely like this sorry, damaged, needy man.

And finally, Crowley has nothing whatever to do with Wicca.


Satanism:
I am frankly more than a little surprised that anyone would equate Wicca with Satanism! Wiccans don't believe in "the Devil" either. Their religion does not use any Christian symbolism, demons or deities. Like Buddhism or Hinduism, it is uniquely its own belief system. There are thousands of books on the subject of Wicca, by Wiccans. You will not find "devil worship" in a single one.

(Indeed, the original sources equating Witchcraft to Devil Worship were homicidal Christian zealots who de-valued human life in the extreme—and did a swift and profitable business identifying and murdering so-called witches, and confiscating their property for their own purses.)

Wicca is a supremely lovely, loving religion...albeit populated by many silly people who refuse to acknowledge that evil exists at all. It's greatest attraction, and one that I find most delightful is the supremacy of the Divine Female. Frankly, after centuries of women being inferior creatures in our own churches, in thrall to all things male, it's high time for the elevation of the eternal, divine feminine. That sometimes, in some adherents, this results in squishy, frothy emotionalism does not diminish the power or glory of the Goddess, or her rightful place as the Queen of Heaven, our Divine Mother.

You may not subscribe to this splendid image, but it is certainly no less true, or more foolish that any idea of the divine masculine, King of Heaven, our Divine Father.

Indeed most Wiccans believe in a Divine Couple. The God and the Goddess...which makes a great deal more practical sense that either one alone.

"...in their likeness, male and female they created them." Remember "Elohim" of Genesis has a plural ending.

This is hardly Satanism. Only a Christian can worship Satan—the King demon incarnate. He's the only one that believes he actually exists. Satan is a Christian myth...a Christian deity, if you will. I don't think he appears anywhere in the Old Testament. (Lucifer, the light-bringer, who is not at all the same personage—despite the common misunderstanding—is more analogous to Prometheus than to any sort of demon. In the myth, Prometheus too was condemned to eternal punishment for bringing fire (en-LIGHTen-ment?) to mankind!)

Animism:
Animism, the attribution of individual living souls to plants, inanimate objects and natural phenomena, is a very primitive notion, not be confused with the Divine Immanence of Wicca, which is the idea that all creation has the Goddess "indwelling", as it proceeded from the Divine Center; flowed, as it were, into time/space to become the material world. This has much in common with Buddhism and Taoism. In much the same way that everything IS the Tao, or has a "Buddha-nature", it has a "Goddess-Nature".

The universe can symbolically be said to the the "body" or "divine child"of the Goddess, as it flowed directly from her essence; it was not created as a willful act of separateness, as in the Christian/Judeo myth. Human beings, being particularly evolved with higher consciousness, through whom the Universe becomes aware of itself on the material plane, as part of, or direct children of, the Goddess herself, cannot be "de-valued".

Christians believe that each unique soul has but one life. Once chance. One test. And upon it eternity depends. I think they are therefore much more likely to deny the flesh in anticipation of the reward of Heaven. I think that anyone who holds such a belief is much more likely to have disdain for earthly human life than those who believe that their bodies, their lives, and those of all around them, are the very life of the divine.

The Gunslinger*

*Who is NOT a Wiccan.