From time to time the topic of Pagans and Sacrifice comes up in various forums online. Unfortunately, the majority of people (including pagans) who talk about Sacrifice don’t seem to understand about sacrifice. Most think of sacrifice (in the connotation of Pagan religions) as dealing with human sacrifice or animal sacrifice. While those are ancient practices and valid forms of sacrifice, they are not all that is.

First we need to understand the definition of sacrifice. Sacrifice means simply “to make sacred”. It is from the Latin root and in modern times it is defined as giving up something of value to gain something you wish.

Pretty cut and dried, but when it is translated into Pagan Religion, all anyone can see is things like the Wicker Men of legend, bog drownings, burning bodies and cattle dropping dead.

Because of this persistent vision of what sacrifice is, the act of sacrificing something to the Gods has a VERY bad reputation.

But let’s think about this for a few moments. Sacrifice does not have to be bad, since it’s done all the time by most Pagans.

Ever think of the act of consecration? Cleansing it and going over it with the salted water and so on or whatever ritual you do to make that item sacred sacrifices it to the Gods. You just gave something to Them. Granted you still get to USE it in your rituals, but taking that special goblet that your grandparents drank their wedding toast out of and consecrating it to use in ritual has taken it from the realm of the mundane and special into the realm of the sacred. So that sacrifices it.

You have, in effect, given it to the Gods.

You can do this with any object; a knife, a harp, a person, a steer, a mouse, an owl, a candle, a poppet, a stuffed animal or anything else. Heck, you can even take food, already prepared and cooked food and sacrifice it to the Gods.

Time is another sacrificial object. Most people don’t realize that it can be sacrificed until someone points it out to them blatantly like this, but time, effort and energy can all be sacrificed. It takes time to do something, to make something, to create something of your own. That is a sacrificial act. Creating candles and dedicating them to the Gods is sacrificing them to those Gods, even if you go out and use them to burn on the altar or to light up the chapel or circle.

Creating a poem is a sacrifice. I wrote an article on Lugh and on Tailtu at one point and sacrificed them to them during a ritual to get a new job. It’s perfectly valid to do so and a good and original sacrifice as well. It represented my willingness to sacrifice something that I spent time creating for Them.

In my opinion these original sacrifices are worth more than all the gold and food in the world. They show that one was thinking and that you actually took the tastes of the deity you are sacrificing to into consideration. If it were up to me, I would be more inclined to look favorably upon someone who was sacrificing something that was original than something that everyone gave.

In some cultures and deity sets, the more valuable a sacrifice is to the giver, the more acceptable it is to the Gods in question. One story I remember hearing as I grew up is of a ritual where the Gods would bless this town with health, wealth and prosperity if a sacrifice made to them was valuable enough. The Gods favor would be shown by the bell in the main cathedral ringing with no hand touching it. There had been ten years straight of famine so it was very important that this ritual come about and please the Gods. So the entire town gathered to make their sacrifices to the Gods, and as time passed things became more and more worrisome. Hundreds of people paraded past the altar and made their sacrifice with no result. From the poor to the rich, each gave what they considered to be a proper sacrifice to the Gods, but nothing happened. Finally the King himself knelt before the altar and placed his crown on the altar, sacrificing it to the Gods. Still no bells. The people were crushingly depressed. Finally, the last person to make an offering was this little beggar boy. He approached the altar with a silver coin he had begged from passers by. With this coin he could eat for a month. He placed it on the altar and when he moved away, the bells rang out for hours. The Gods were pleased with the monumental size of the sacrifice the beggar gave.

The beggar boy had given his entire worldly goods and in the process directly harmed himself to please the Gods, so his town could prosper. It showed a willingness to give that is the core of sacrifice.

The ritual of Cakes and Ale is a sacrificial ritual. Yes, it is also a ritual of Thanksgiving, one of sharing the bounty of the Earth with the Gods, but it is a Sacrificial rite.

Most people have this idea that sacrifice has to involve a living thing. But what about burning herbs in honor of the Gods? Is that a sacrifice? I say it is.

You worked to find those herbs. You dried them, and now you are giving them to the Gods in a ritual of honor. It takes energy and time to do all that, plus the herb you grew/found is now not usable by you for any reason. It is therefore a sacrifice. It may look like it is not since the Gods grew the plant and all you did was harvest it, but you fussed over it too. Even if you wild-crafted the herb (meaning you went and searched for it in the wild), you still had to do the work to find the herb if nothing else.

This point I have spent many hours in debate with the Gods about. It basically comes down to this; if you feel the Gods would enjoy something, if it is something you enjoy or that is valuable to you, then sacrifice it to Them.

I didn’t believe this, so I tried it once. I baked a loaf of bread for the Dagda for a spell I needed to come to pass. He loves bread and porridge, and I thought it was appropriate since it was something that looked to me as though it would be of little importance. I mean, bread is bread.

My wife and I made a big deal of it, grinding the meal (we added oats to the bread), pounding and rolling it out, braiding it and putting it in the oven. And I offered it to Him. He was very pleased and even more so when I gave it all to the Birds who would be hungry for it. But it was such a little thing and it gave so much joy to many people around us. And the Gods were pleased.

Which brings up the point of what about the Voodoo custom of bringing cakes and alcohol to celebrations and giving them to the spirits? Well, understand that I’m not a practitioner of Voodoo, but I have learned (despite everything) from some of the specials on voodoo on channels like Discovery. What I remember one mambo saying about that was that the loa eat the spirit or the essence of the food offerings, leaving the physical behind. It is only natural at that point for the celebrants to have that to share in the bounty with the loa. It’s like a partnership where one animal eats only the forequarters, and another eats only the hindquarters. It makes sense for them to hunt together at that point so there is no waste.

Now, what I have talked about are the other forms of sacrifice. Your time, your energy, items you made, your attention, spells, poems, service and so on can all be sacrificed to the Gods. Let’s grasp the nettle here and talk about Human, Animal and Blood sacrifice.

Any discussion of these three topics needs to start with the disclaimer of these are special case sacrifices, and the people participating in them HAVE to know what they are doing. Those who have no clue are letting themselves in for a world of hurt and are going to spoil what is a sacred rite.

Here’s the point of these sacrifices; there should be no pain. The goal of these sacrifices is the energy bleed off.

When a life ends, there is a rush of energy that is released by that death. This is true for ANY living thing, plant, animal, human or whatever. It happens when a bacteria dies (but it’s so miniscule that most people don’t sense it). This life energy is exactly like the “Force” of Star Wars fame, and it can be channeled into the same purposes. That energy is simply lost when something dies, but those that know what they are doing can gather that energy and force it into spells or into other uses to boost it. BUT pain and anger and hatred and fear “taints” that energy. Just like using a paint stick that has mixed red paint to mix white paint without cleaning it first will result in a bucket full of pink paint, so too will fear and anger make this energy useless.

Blood sacrifice is exactly that, spilling your blood and offering that to the Gods. For some there is a mystic use for blood. Like Lugh (the Celtic God) had to store his spear (which had a flaming head) in a bucket of puppy blood to keep it from burning down everything from an unquenchable fire. For others, there is no greater essence of life than blood. Plus, it is nutritional all on it’s own. You can eat blood and live off it. Granted it’s very hard to do so and you will get sick, but what do you think Blood Sausage is? It’s mostly cooked blood.

But those that have been analyzing the attraction of Vampires have done a better job than I could do in telling you about the mystic use of blood. It is a primordial substance and an essential one. Because of CENTURIES of association with life, spilling blood voluntarily becomes a huge sacrifice for others.

Now, I’m not saying that every deity out there will enjoy a sacrifice of blood. Far from that, most will be repelled. However, there are some that do demand blood sacrifice and have demanded it in the past, therefore sacrificing blood to them will help your cause with that deity. Should you do this lightly? Not at all. It should be done only when there is little else that can be done and when there is great need.

Are there other solutions besides just letting it drip out of your hand/arm? Certainly. One of the most original blood sacrifices is dealt with in this article.

As to animal sacrifice. This one is a lot more problematic. There are traditions out there who practice it currently as part of their holy rites. There are some versions of Santeria, Voodoo and some pagan beliefs that do so as well. In EVERY case, the animal is treated with respect and honor. It is fed the best of the best, it is praised and sung to and the death it experiences is quick and painless. Great care is taken to ensure that the animal does not suffer during the actual sacrificial process. For the object of the sacrifice to suffer and to have a torturous experience is a terrible omen and will destroy the sanctity of the rite like nothing else will.

This is not about pain. This is about an offering to the Gods. The best animal in the herd is offered to the Gods, the energy is taken to fuel the ritual or spell the animal was sacrificed for, the soul of that animal is sent to the Gods for THEIR feast, and the flesh of that animal is eaten in a mirror feast among the practitioners. It’s not discarded or thrown into the ditch as some believe (that is an act of sacrilege and wasteful. Why praise and take care of the animal, thanking it for sacrificing itself and then throw it aside casually like day old bread?) but it is eaten and partaken of in a sacred rite. It also occurs to me that this act can have the same effect as other eating rituals.  Eating the heart of a deer one has hunted and killed ritualistically takes the power of the deer into oneself.  Ritually eating the body of a sacrificed animal takes the purity and those blessings of the Gods into oneself.

Human sacrifice is a different order of magnitude. Let me state that this is NOT practiced by any sect or religion that I know of currently. It may be done illegally, but if it is, the participants would be charged with murder under most laws of Western Nations. However, it was a valid form of worship back in the day.

Basically it’s the same as animal sacrifice with two differences: The first was that the sacrifice went to plead the case of those committing the sacrifice directly to the Gods themselves and second, the flesh was (normally) not eaten afterward. I say “normally” because some cannibal tribes probably did eat it.

Once again the sacrifice themselves was the best of the best, someone who was pampered and praised and made to feel special, then they were killed in a ritual that did the least amount of pain to them. When the soul got to the afterlife, they were normally under orders by the priests to plead whatever case they had to the Gods directly. This showed the Gods that the situation was very serious and that immediate help was needed. I mean, if you are willing to give up your life to talk to the Gods about a problem the tribe is having….

One special note on Human sacrifice; the people who were the sacrifices were volunteers. It may have been a case of “I can sacrifice you in a ritual, or we can starve/torture you to death, but either way you are going to die” kind of a choice, but they could trade a potentially painful death for one that would allow you to die at peace. But they were volunteers.

There are some who may still practice this, but it is not a matter of someone else doing it to them, but more along the lines of self-sacrifice in the form of suicide. Groups like the Heaven’s Gate cult can be seen as practicing self-sacrifice to bring about a specific end. It is simultaneously a form of protest and channeling their lives into a greater goal. Buddhists used to do this all the time.

Some notes on sacrifice: There are those who believe that sacrifice, especially willing human sacrifice, has the power to change the world. Not the extreme cults either, but Judeo-Christianity believes this. Let’s look at the biggest sacrifice in history, Jesus’ crucifixion. According to the belief of the followers of Christ, his sacrifice saved the entire world, past, present and future from the fires of Hell so long as they believe that he sacrificed himself for their sins. And that is a hugely powerful magickal act.

Scapegoating has been known for centuries by many peoples. It is basically a cleansing ritual in which the purest animal in the village is ritually “loaded down” with all the evilness, pettiness and sins of the people of the village, then it’s sacrificed to the Gods. That takes all the sins of that village to the Gods and the people are clean again. This allows for closure on many things that could fester and get worse and worse over time for those people.

And if you look at it, the sacrifice of Jesus was just another form of scapegoating. Ritually cleansing the whole planet so long as they buy into the ritual in the first place.

Now, all that said, I know of very few groups who still practice Blood or Animal sacrifice and I know of no groups who actively practice Human sacrifice. But this is not to say that those who do are wrong. It is saying that their practices are not my practices and may not be YOUR practices. It makes them different, not wrong.

If you think of it, there are mainstream practices of Animal sacrifice all the time. Kosher law (in which the blood is removed and the rabbi checks to make sure the animal is clean) is a sacrifice of a kind, and saying prayers before dining CERTAINLY is an animal sacrifice. In case you don’t get it, the animal is killed and made into hamburger patties. Then you bless and thank the animal for sharing its body with you. That is one definition of a sacrifice, since the food is now blessed and sacred. This happens every day. So don’t jump to conclusions too quickly about the need or evils of sacrifice. And this holds true for any meal you eat, it was a living thing that has given its life for you and you have thanked it, therefore it is now a sacrifice.

I mean, if you base an entire religion around a human sacrifice, it can’t be THAT bad, can it?

Let me add a personal observation here.  Sacrifice is not bad.  It simply is.  Animal sacrifice may not have any place in Wiccan practices, but that does not mean it is not a valid form of worship for others.  Human sacrifice isn’t bad either, so long as it is not done casually and care is taken for the person to be sacrificed, but unfortunately most law enforcement agencies aren’t going to see it that way.  Thankfully this is not that big of a problem, no matter what the fanatics try to convince you of otherwise.

Update March 3, 2006

I was contacted by a lady who read this article and had some things to add to it.  I’ll share her comments with you here:

By Cassi Dixon

Thoughts on Sacrifice, in specific animal sacrifice:

Animal sacrifice in which the animal is eaten afterwards also serves the purpose of connecting the participants with the cycle of life/death.  In industrial society most people get their meat prepackaged and are very removed from the actual process of animal husbandry and slaughter.  There’s little relationship between the cellophane wrapped bundles in the store and the animal that gave up its life to bring you dinner.  Most people have no idea of their place in the lifecycle because they have no relationship to their food.

You cannot have an functional acknowledgment of the cyclic nature of life without seeing yourself in that lifecycle.  Animal sacrifice serves to drive home “something dies, you eat – you die, something else eats”.  This of course has even broader implications for most practitioners of Pagan religions because our gods are not only gods of life, but gods of death as well.  In many cases our gods have even died in order to keep the lifecycle moving.  Bringing our awareness to our place in the divine order brings us into unity with the Divine itself.  Sacrifice not only makes the food sacred and consecrated to the Gods, it makes the person who consumes the food sacred as well.

You can do this of course with plant products, but most people are not capable of easily making the leap that plants are also alive until we kill them for food.  Many sacred stories and practices were created in the past to try to illustrate the point to us, the God of the grain dies at harvest time and is consumed by the followers in a ritual manner, but even in modern day Paganism such practices and stories are rarely observed.

Sounds good to me.  I wish I had thought of this.

Originally posted 2009-12-24 03:02:58.

So, you want to create a website to tell the world about your new found spirituality and how happy you are about it? Fantastic.

Let me offer some pointers for you to think about before you start coding the HTML.

First off, think about what you want your website to be about. I mean this. It may seem obvious, but there are facets of your spirituality that are reflected in your website, and all of them are going to affect how your website looks.

Things to consider:

1. Is it going to sell products you make and dedicate to the Gods? Some possibilities are candles, oils, incenses, food, tools and many other things.
2. Is it going to talk about things you learned?
3. Is it going to educate those who find your website?
4. Is it going to deal with problems you have and how you over came them?
5. Is it going to be filled with all the things you find cool and neato about your spirituality?

Each of those questions are going to mandate a different style of website, and in some cases it may require you to buy some software to help you make the site.

For instance, an education website can be maintained by a couple different ways. You can do the coding by hand in something like Dreamweaver or Front Page, but you can do the same thing in what is called a CMS or Content Management System.

A CMS is basically just a program that comes with a lot of functions and a lot of features along with templates for different pages. All you have to do is plug the appropriate information into the correct places, and BINGO! you have a website. If you aren’t really concerned with how it looks, you can do this in under an hour or so. But you have to know what you are doing with a website to get it set up that fast. I have a friend who can create a whole new look and feel for a website using a CMS program called Mambo in about 2 hours. She sets up the asthetics, and you fill in the content. She also charges about $300 to do that.

I would make some recommendations to the above list.  (Please note that this list follows the above list. Each number corresponds to the same number above.)

1. Use a shopping cart software
2. You may wish to consider putting it in a blog
3. This one may be best if it is simply a series of pages that a visitor can click around in
4. Another blog is a possibility, but you may wish to put this on your own server instead of something like blogger or livejournal
5. This can be anything.

Any sales oriented site has to have a shopping cart. It’s the easiest thing to do and it offers the most choices for your customers and the most versatility for you. It reduces the PITA factor by about 500. Most of the work is already done, and similar to a CMS, a shopping cart will have blank areas for your content. They will also have a healthy community of users to help you with your problems. I have used ZenCart in the past and it’s free and very easy to set up.

Blogs: There are a number of websites out there who will allow you to make journal posts to them and then repost those posts to a page you can have display someplace else. The ones like Blogger and Blogspot are very versatile and customizable. I have known a lot of people to use those exclusively and make VERY good looking websites from them. But those sites have one major problem; versatility. They are limited in how some of the information is given to the web browser and sometimes they won’t let you do something that is very simple or necessary for you to do. So another option is to go with a Blogging Software set up, like TypeKey or WordPress.

Both of these are programs you buy, like the shopping cart software and the CMS software, which you upload to your webserver and then configure for your use. They also have theme capabilities. Once again, once you have the software in place and configured the way you want it to look, all you do is plug in your content.

I have seen simply AMAZING sites made on nothing but one blog. Some examples are WilWheaton [dot] net and Websnark. Both these sites are nothing but one blog running where the author can comment on whatever, and the readers can comment themselves.

But blogs function best when used as a Journal type thing. You think of a point you wish to make, you make an entry. It’s useful for keeping an electronic diary of information, kind of hard to do other things with it.

CMS work in that there is some incredible versatility in the components you add to the base part. But blogs are not generally part of it, and frankly everyone is using some type of CMS these days. The main reason for that is because it is EASY. You don’t really have to think much to plug content into a CMS simply because it is designed for Cut and Paste operations.

But with CMSs you get one HUGE drawback; gewgaws. Look the base term up. Go to Google and type define: gewgaw. I’ll wait.

Okay, what has that to do with online content? It is simply something that is useless but looks pretty. It adds nothing to what is there.

Look around the Journal. Notice anything missing? No forum. Want to know why? It’s a gewgaw. I don’t need one. At one point I had considered putting one up for those who wanted to talk to me, but then I realized that I had five other ways for that to happen. I had my email. I had my ICQ and other IM programs, I had three different Yahoo! groups that I ran, and I had a mailing list from the Journal itself for updates. Any of those venues would allow people to talk to me, to discuss things with me. But NONE of them were getting traffic and none of them were being utilized as they should be. So I closed them all, redesigned the functions I had for them to other things. When I closed the Journal Yahoo! Group, I had been using it for announcements of things on the Journal, such as new articles and updates. So I changed it so that the RSS feed for the blog which I DID use a lot took over in that capacity. It’s more versatile and does all that I want it to do AND it allows me to tell users who are signed up as well as those who just visit that I have a new article up.

But a forum would be useless. All it would do is take up space. If I need a teaching spot, I have some programs available and I have a LARGE forum available on other servers. Traditionally, however, forums fail when I get involved with them. I’m a pontificator, a preacher, a teacher, not one that does Socratic Method and I generally don’t talk unless I have something of substance to add to the conversation. So mostly I don’t talk. Which means that others would have to do all the chit-chat talks that keep a forum alive, or I would have to get 400+ members immediately. I’m popular, but not that popular.

So avoid useless programs and functionality on your site. CMSs, however, tend to make adding those features as easy as clicking a link and putting it in position. It becomes a matter of about 20 seconds work to add a fourm to a website that probably doesn’t need one.

This point I’m making is that just because something looks cool and pretty, that does not mean that your website will be helped by having it. Yes, there are a lot of things I would love to have on this site, mainly because my reaction is “Ohhh shiny!” but I resist because the Journal won’t be helped by them, and it just may drive my readers away.

That’s something you have to continually consider, the website visitor. The goal here is to make it as accessible to them as possible. Not everyone uses Internet Explorer, so creating a site that has a lot of coding that only Internet Explorer can use is counterproductive. Not all of them have T1 broadband connections to the internet where they can download the 2 MB movie on your site in under 10 seconds, and not all of them are healthy enough to keep from having a seizure when the flashy blinkie things on your website start playing. Heck, some of them may not even have vision, so they will have to have their text reader read your site to them. That means they won’t be able to turn off the MIDI you put on your site in the background since they have to have the sound on to hear the content of your site.

Also remember that thin code is preferable to code bloat. If you create a page in Microsoft Word, it puts all these extraneous formatting tags in there that only Internet Explorer can read. If you go and take them all out, you wind up with a page that is generally 1/10th the size you started out with. So a 240 KB page goes to 24 KB, and it loads up in 1/10th the time, from 20 seconds to 2 seconds or so. This gives you three advantages.

First off, it takes less space on your webserver, which means you can have more content there. When it’s loaded by a websurfer, it takes less bandwidth of yours, and it is more likely that the other people who requested the page will stay to read it, rather than get bored waiting for it to load up and surf to some other site.

These are the kinds of questions that professional web designers ask themselves all the time.

• Lean code?
• Cross browser/platform compatibility? (Can someone on Windows 98 see it the same way a UNIX box can?)
• Handicapped accessible?
• Is there useless functions incorporated?
• Can I get rid of the silly stuff that doesn’t add anything?
• Is this component I need already part of what I have there, or do I need to get another program?

Seems like a lot of things to consider when all you want to do is tell the world that you found Wicca and you are really happy, right? I’m glad I got that across to you.

I want to offer this advice: If you just want to talk about how wonderful you feel because of Wicca and you, do so on a site like LiveJournal, GreatestJournal or one of several other blogs that are already out there. Your page is not really needed. It’s not that you and your thoughts aren’t needed, it’s simply that there are five or six thousand pages out there that give basics of Wicca to those who don’t know about it, and many of them are probably better than you will be able to put together. Consider sending people you care about to those pages instead of repeating the same information that is already out there. Heck, consider sending them to a book.

If, however, you have something to say, perhaps the teen view of what Wicca is, then by all means, put up a website and say it. Just remember what I have said previously. They are as basic as saying “please” and “thank you”. It’s Internet Courtesy and it’s very important to the success of your site. Don’t simply duplicate what is already out there.

When I surf the Internet, I’m looking for what YOU have to say. If I wanted to know what Silver Ravenwolf had to say, I’d buy her books. If I wanted to hear what Fritz Jung was saying about Wicca, I’d ask him directly, and I’d go to his site. So you may reference their statements, but say what you want to say. Don’t cop out and have others saying it for you. That’s lazy.

Ten years ago, you didn’t need to know anything to put up a website, and these days you need to know even less. Tons of sites went up over night (almost) and most of them sucked. It seems that the intervening years not much more has been learned by new users, for the same mistakes are being made.

When I first put up the Journal, I had a cool site navigation. It was on the left, just where it is now, but it had buttons. Each button was a plain one, until you put your mouse over it, then it showed a pentagram on the far left, showing that you were looking at the “Articles” sub section. When you actually clicked on it, you got a sound that was a page turning. I was so proud of that.

Time passed, I took it off. I had a lot of people complaining about the sound screwing up their music, and the navigation not showing up properly and the JavaScript being disabled on their site so it wouldn’t let them get to other pages of my site. I had other pages they could use, just without the cool effect, and finally I decided to just get rid of it all together. It was taking up space and sucking up my bandwidth.

It was for a similar reason that I finally moved to paid webhosting. I had my site on Crosswinds, Homestead, Geocities, and a couple other “free” sites. I found out that those sites were only free if I permitted thousands of advertisements to be placed on my site, or if I allowed the “free” site host to keep my property. When I read the agreements, I was stating by hosting there that the people who owned that server could reprint my work as much as they wanted without asking or even telling me. That’s why it was free.

When I saw an advertisement on my site (in the form of a pop-up which I despise) advertising a lock picking set to instantly jimmy any car open, I got a paid host. I don’t advocate illegal actions and I won’t allow the people I host with to say that I do by putting that ad on my site.

Those free sites are good for personal pages. They are decent for telling grandma that you got an A in Honors Physics. They are okay for hosting the picture you want to put into an email to dear mom on her grandchildren. But for information sites, unless you are destitute, put them on a paid host. I am chronically short of money, most times I have to scrape to feed my family, but I can afford the less than $20 a month to pay for this website. With that I get probably 80 times the space of a free host, 50 different email addresses I can use, a domain name that is MINE, listings on various search engines, the capability to do a heck of a lot of neat things with my site (like keeping people from linking my images without my permission), the ability to save my files in a secure place so I can transfer them between my PC at work and the one at home. Then there is the free software I get along with it. Better than $8000 worth of software that is provided to me by my webhost simply because I host with them.

Please note, that I’m not USING it all, but I have it available should I need it, like for my blog. AND if something goes wrong, the paying customers get the attention first, not the free hosters. Last time I had a problem, it was fixed in a few minutes, not two or three days.

All these combine to make the Journal and many other sites like it the examples many people cite, and why most people tend to dismiss those sites that are on Homestead and so on. The basic point here is to help you design a good site to tell people what you learned and what you are not believing.

After all, you want people to read what you have to say, not click out of your website because it took so long to load up, right?

Originally posted 2009-10-27 16:08:33.

When the discussion topic of “can I charge for the reading I did” comes up in most forums, it really turns into a free for all fight. There are the proponents of “yes you may” and the opponents who say “no you may not”. I can see both sides of this discussion and I offer my own humble thoughts here.

First, the side that opposes payment.

Most often they point out that you are using a gift from the deities and that, as such, you will “contaminate” it by having money change hands for using it. They point out that since the future is always in flux and you could be wrong, that it is impossible to guarantee that you are accurate or that what you state will happen. They also (if they know their craft history) might point to the “ardanes” and show that Gardner didn’t want the Arte being sold, meaning that by his rules that one could not take money in exchange for the casting of a spell. They also point out that it’s traditional.

Next the side that proposes payment.

The proponents will point out that it’s only fair to exchange money for the work of readings or spells. I mean, they worked for the money; therefore it’s an energy exchange, them giving their energy (money) for yours (spell). That in those who have used their spells or their readings to make a living, that it didn’t corrupt them or make them less of a priest or priestess. There are assertions that you can exchange service for service, mowing a lawn, cooking a meal or what have you.

My opinion?

I will accept money for my service. I may not do it for religious services, like a Handfasting or a Wiccaning, definitely not for a Sabbat or Esbat, but I will take money for a Tarot reading (as shown by the ads I have for just that service). My reasoning is simple.

One goes to a lawyer to have legal documents drafted. It is his skills that create a binding legal document that says what you want done after you die, or that you have now set up a trust fund and so on. You pay him. You go to a doctor for medical treatment. You give your money to him, he gives you medicine and he tells you if you need to lose weight. You take your car to a mechanic. You give them money, they repair your car and give it back to you. You buy food from the grocer who takes your money and gives it to a farmer who gives him the fruits of his land, which the grocer gives to you so you may eat.

Where is it mandated that these professions must give away their skills or their knowledge or their components? Why should the doctor fix you for free? Should the mechanic expend several hours of work on your car and use many, many parts to correct a problem in your car for free?

It would be nice to have a communistic society where that happened, but it’s not reasonable. Greed and sloth, many human failings as well as the need to acquire all conspire to make most communistic groups fall apart fairly quickly. But this is neither here nor there.

Selling professional skills is a normal part of society. An author would count it theft if you took their words and republished them without his permission and without royalties being paid to him, after all, he wrote those words. The Music Industry has a long history of going after people who take their work and who don’t pay for it. So why should I, as a Tarot reader, be expected to give away MY professional skill?

It is a skill. I may have a talent for reading the cards, but there still has to be a connection to the Universe, an intuitive link, that will help me interpret the card correctly when they come up in a reading. I also must study and learn not only surface meaning of cards, but their deeper symbolism, expending my time and energy, something of value to me at least. I have to be aware of the cards, I have to be aware of the client, I have to be aware of the connection to everything, and I have to know when to depart from the “book standard” reading. I also have to supply my cards, replace those cards when necessary and invest in books to give nuances in meaning and so on. This is a pursuit that could take quite some time and significant amounts of energy and money.

Shouldn’t I be reimbursed for all that?

Gypsies certainly were. They would refuse to do a spell or a Tarot reading without an exchange of money first. Temples did this also. There were some temples in the past that would do oracular readings for money (or other service) for the clients. The Witches of the past did this too, taking their “payment” in many forms, just one of them being cash.

It is true that in a village, one can do a reading for someone in need and let the community take care of you in exchange, that the reading would be your contribution to the whole. I can see this happening in a coven situation where there are only a few members and each of them contributes to the health and welfare of the whole. I can see the one who is talented with the Tarot cards giving readings to the rest of the members of the coven, just as the High Priestess gives her home for the Covenstead, the High Priest supplies the candles and other alter items, the Maiden prepares the feast for everyone. I can see that and understand it totally.

I can also see in the “brotherhood of card readers” one that is skilled at doing readings being generous and allowing another who has a similar set of skills to do a reading for them. I exchange my Tarot readings for a rune reading or a dowsing. That is an equal exchange of effort and energy.

Those special cases are fine, but to believe that because I am Wiccan I must give my skills (which have taken me a lifetime to learn) to whoever asks, for nothing more than a smile, is asking me to bastardize my skills as nothing more than a sideshow trick.

Part of human nature is to value little what comes for no cost. The car that Mommy and Daddy gave to their child has little intrinsic value to a teen; therefore it is of no consequence when it is wrecked. But the car you bought for yourself is taken care of, it is pampered, it is treated like it was a one of a kind vehicle. Because YOU paid for it. It was your talents, your skills and labor that gained you the money to purchase that vehicle and therefore you prize it. That is the way it should be.

A reading or a spell is one of the most personal things one can do. A spell to protect, a spell to bring revenge, a spell to help someone over come an inhibition are all very personal and the person requesting them MUST hold them in value, pamper them and so on. But more often than not, if the spell is cast for free without the expectation of return, then they will go “Oh, pretty lights” and do nothing more with it, negating the spell in its entirety and thus “discovering” that magick is nothing more than mystic passes with the hand and chanted phrases.

But if you ask money for it, then they pay attention. They have ritually infused themselves into the spell or the reading. They have taken their labor and their effort, their sweat and blood, made physical by the money, and they are now completely and totally tied into that reading. They pay attention to each word, each hesitation and they hold onto that reading. They invest their soul and their energy into the spell, and by god they want it to WORK, therefore they believe in it. After all, they gave MONEY for that, they can’t buy that carton of cigarettes or that tank of gas. That’s a valuable reading now.

Because of this personality infusion in the process, because of this energy exchange, I believe that more people should charge for readings and spells. That any time a Tarot card is turned or a prophesy is spoken or that a stick of incense is lit, there should be an energy exchange of SOME sort, be it in labor, food, or cash.

If Priests, Monks and ministers in the churches (including Buddhist and Hindu) are willing to take money for prayer (through the medium of tithing or donations, which pay for their upkeep), then why can’t we for the same reason? It doesn’t make sense.

Oh, you can say that it cheapens the gift that by charging and that the person will feel ripped off. To that I say the only person who can cheapen it is the person who refused the money. When you are giving it away, you are inclined to do less than you may normally do, simply because you are getting no reward. So, asking for and receiving money is a way to make you work harder to give good value to others.

I know when I started Tarot readings, I gave them away. I did readings and I didn’t take any money. It was easy for me and my talents to do so. I did the minimum I could to answer the question, never really delving into the problem the person came to me with. And I did regret it.

When I started taking money, I knew the value of a dollar. I know what *I* would expect were it me paying for the reading, and I make sure I give value for that money. One reading I do costs $90 and takes about an hour. I had one lady purchase one from me, and I didn’t feel that I had given her full value for her money since one HUGE question went unanswered in my mind. So I did another reading for her while she sat there, answered that question and did some more explaining. That I felt was good value and I performed to my best. She commented later that she was satisfied with the first reading, and that the rest was icing on the cake, unnecessary but really good.

This philosophy can be applied to any discipline, not just to Tarot or divination or even spells. It can be applied to writing, singing, playing an instrument, teaching, computer work, secretarial work or anything. ANY professional skill and manual skills can be seen in this light. Paying for something makes it valuable, if SOLELY for the fact that one has given money for it. That is the textbook definition of value. That which has value is treated differently and is treasured. That which is free is treated as less and with no value, thus is treated with contempt.

I know that when I get done with a reading, I feel a sense of satisfaction in the reading, that I did my best. I want the other person to value that reading as well since I worked my backside off. To see my effort and energy treated with contempt makes me mad. To see them take what I have said to heart and believe it, to see them put what I advised into practice, well, it makes me very proud.

And if I have to take a few shekels or tuppence for that, so be it. I’ll take it gladly and use that money without shame.

Originally posted 2009-11-11 22:21:07.

Alister Crowley said that one’s True Will is one of the crucial things a magician should know, since the True Will is the basis of the being.

He goes on to talk at length about how True Will is the culmination of the basic core of the person. It is the most selfish part and is most concerned with the success and survival of the person – the part that is most likely to reflect what the person truly wants and needs.

It’s important to realize that just Knowing how to accomplish a goal or that Knowing yourself is not enough. You must also actively make the decision to do what you want, or all the training, all the experience is useless.

This is the essence of “To Will”. This is the actual decision point in the spell-casting process; it is when the magical process, the spell, actually begins. The training and study are the lead-in, the preparation to do the spell. Will is the stage where the decision that the spell is needed is made. It is when all the options are considered and the spell becomes one part of the overall process to cause the desired change to occur.

Many experienced magicians say that this point is when the spell is actually starting to be cast. This decision begins the Consciousness Shift to the altered states that are key to manipulating magic and successful ritual.

This act of deciding to cast the spell takes the process to the level of a goal instead of allowing it to remain as a simple desire like wanting to get a cola for lunch. It becomes a true desire, such as finding a job that will allow the caster to support their family better, one that motivates the caster to attain their goals no matter the cost or the obstacles placed in the way.

“To Will” also implies that the first leg of this pyramid has been attained. Knowing implies that you know what you really want, to the bottom of your soul. That is where your “True Will,” as Crowley put it, resides. Understanding your own Will, your own mind and desires, is paramount. How can you do a spell to bring success if you believe in the bottom of your soul that success of the spell means you will become something you despise? The ends are counter productive to your True Will.

Therefore knowing your True Will is another critical part of this whole process.

The True Will is one part of every Magician that should always be examined. Willing something into existence, as the Magician of the Tarot deck does, is a hard skill to master; you better be sure that this is what you want. There are no “take backs”, no “do-overs” when you create something out of nothing.

Remember the advice “be careful what you wish for, you might just get it”? That’s a heck of a double edged sword.

Human beings are essentially “wish generators” with no off switch. Think of how many times you say “I wish” in a typical day, without even meaning to. Once you start paying attention to that statement, you find that you say it a high number of times. You think it more than you actually say that phrase. And each of those thoughts and statements go out into the æther and have an effect there, even if we don’t see it.

Exactly like dropping a pebble into a pool of water, those ripples spread and start affecting other things and people. Eventually it does get reflected back, warped and diminished, but those reflections are still the original wish that was Willed into being.

So while a trained metaphysician and magician can create a situation that didn’t exist by will alone, they should always be cognizant of what can happen if they don’t watch what they think.

This discipline of the mind, of basic thought processes, should be one of the first goals for any training program of those who are psychically aware. Unfortunately, many of those who begin studying those who wish to begin immediately using power, to start casting spells without first understanding the discipline that is part and parcel of this path.

This series of articles is starting to show that there is a method to the Pyramid’s quick mnemonic, a level of depth that many don’t see. We can already see how “To Know” and “To Will” are fitting together and interlacing. It is becoming rapidly apparent that one cannot have just “To Know” without also having “To Will” and the other two legs of the Pyramid.

All this discussion on the Will may make you ask, “where do I train my Will into a razor-honed weapon?” I can’t help you with that because most of training the Will is about practice.

First you have to decide on a goal, preferably a goal that is difficult and which others say can’t be done. Then start on the journey to attain that goal. Along the way you must not despair and you must keep trying, believing even when it’s hard. Perseverance here is the key, although outsiders may see you and call you stubborn.

Keep doing that, over and over, keep ‘out-stubborning’ the nay-sayers and keep attaining your goals, even if the effort may not be worth it in the end. That is a good primer for a strong Will. When problems appear, decide immediately that you will overcome them instead of denying the problem or capitulating to the problem. Your first reaction to a problem should be “okay, how do I overcome this” instead of “no, this can’t be happening.”

Choose goals that are attainable and reasonable. Don’t pick ones that are easily attainable, for that defeats the purpose of training. Pick ones that are difficult to gain, and then keep going at it until you gain that goal.

For example, one of the proudest moments I have had in my life was in Martial Arts when I severely hurt my hip in the dojo. I kept going anyhow with the night’s exercises for kicks, especially side kicks, which work the hips strenuously. I kept going even though I was in a lot of pain, I would not quit. I saw a lot of admiration in the eyes of my teachers that night.

There are all kinds of opportunities that present themselves. Just watch out for them, and understand that when you are training your mind you can’t give in even once, for that tells the Subconscious that it’s okay to give in occasionally. It is the Subconscious that really needs to know that you have a strong Will. If you choose to give up occasionally, this action destroys all the headway you have made during your training..

When you decide to out-Will a situation that could defeat you, you must carry through to the end, no matter where that decision leads.

Humanity is the only species I know of that can create simply with their thoughts. It is a huge gift and an awesome responsibility. This ability must be tempered with experience and wisdom. Knowing when to use Will is as important as knowing how or why.

The Will then becomes the paintbrush of Creation, and like all tools, it should be kept in good working order and put away safely, so it is not used inadvertently or carelessly.

Originally posted 2009-11-10 02:53:28.

> I was just wondering has anyone gone to their local churches or
> communities and educated people about the Wiccan religion and the danger
> of doing spells with no knowledge of how and why to do it? Like a goddess
> or god invocation, and what it means to do an invocation. Or the
> unforeseen consensequences that doing spells can cause? The law of
> returns, ending a spell and closing a circle correctly. There are alot of
> young people drawn to doing witchcraft that don’t properly research or
> have the knowledge of what they are setting into motion. I am thinking
> about doing it because there are people who are interested, but want
> privacy, and not getting proper guidance from the massive contradictory
> internet about where they should start. So they jump right in and end up
> doing something unknowingly, like inviting then trapping a spirit in the
> house, without proper knowledge of what they did and how to fix it. And
> how to keep it from happening again.

What makes you think that we have not been doing this all this time? Many of us have been trying to educate the public about the dangers/rewards of magick, it’s just that you fluffy canars don’t seem to get the point. Let me illustrate for a minute…

I’m teaching a class online in magick and part of the course requires the student to be familiar with different schools and philosophies of magick. So far, I have been teaching this class for about 9 months and I’m only half way through it. This is an enormously complex subject and you can’t learn it by sitting in the Circle with your HPS and chanting for a bit. You cannot call yourself a witch because you make one potion of relaxation bath salts successfully ONCE. You don’t know everything when you walk into someone’s home and ask a benevolent ghost to leave. When you have walked into a house and forcibly ejected a malevolent spirit bent on destroying the occupants of the house and you have kept it from coming back, when you have successfully conjured the elemental ruler of Air, made him obey you and had him assign one of his dukes to be your personal servant, when you have cast enough spells to bring money to you that you realize that the Threefold return and the Rede are simply known as “cause and effect” THEN I will let you call yourself a mage and a witch. Until then you are a fluffy canar, and depending on the severity of the affliction you may even be a fluffernutter.

Has it occurred to you that 90% of humanity doesn’t WANT us sticking our nose into their business on a regular basis? Has it occurred to you that a Christian being told that by praying to God that he’s casting a spell doesn’t WANT to know that, even if it is true? Has it occurred to you that you would be so totally insulted and you would go immediately into “persecuted witch” mode if a Jew came in and corrected your pronunciation of the chants Gardner added from the Key of Solomon, and that you would be ready to hit something if a Catholic Priest decided to teach you how to conduct a ritual correctly? Has any of this crossed your puny pea brain? No? Why not?

Could it be that according to you, it’s good and correct for you to stick your nose into everything in the universe, but no one better stick their nose into yours? Guess what…. THAT’S CALLED KETTLEITIS IN MOST PLACES.

Oh, and by the way, can I watch as the Goddess slaps the crap out of you for breaking the Rede? How you may ask? Causing harm to these people by going in and condescendingly telling these people what they are doing wrong with spells and such you are causing so much mental trauma to them that you deserve to be bitch-slapped by Kali or the Morrigon. I want to watch it. After all, this could be their way of learning, through trial and error.

And what makes you think you are qualified to tell them that their spells are wrong in the first place? Don’t you fluffy canar realize that most of the spells you are going to be “correcting” came from the RCC in the first place, or at least from those who were members of the RCC? In fact, there are several Popes and Cardinals who were rumored to be magickians that could blow away those like Crowley. Did you know that Elphias Levi, one of the huge magickal minds of the 19th Century was a Catholic Monk for most of his life? Ever heard of the Grimoire of Pope Honorous III? Do you even know who Elphias Levi was?

In short, fluffy canar, you are doing to them what you have accused them of doing to us for centuries. Besides, if the infestation of the ghost is too severe, they can always call in an exorcist to drive it out. Yep, there is a whole section of the RCC that deals with JUST driving out malignant spirits that infest people and places, the difference is that they actually STUDY the problem before leaping in and deciding that THIS is the problem. Ya know, like they do some experimentation and actually use Occam’s razor to see if there is another explanation before chiding the occupants of the house for summoning a spirit they can’t control.

Ever walked into a chapel? Ever felt their Wards? What?!?!? You don’t even know what a ward is? Then how does that qualify you to chide these people for miscasting spells they don’t know how to control? They seem to be better magickians than you.

In short, silly fluffy canar, back the hell off and cast the beam from YOUR eye before touching the mote in theirs.

Why do people have to endlessly reinvent the wheel?

Is it that there are no original ideas left? Is it that if we stop speaking, the world will cease to function? Is it that we have been so inundated with chatter that we cannot stand to hear silence?

Let me relate this to you in a real life scenario. I do reviews of books. Some of you have seen my reviews, and you may have come to this site because of them. Well, I review a narrow range of books in an attempt to keep my focus on the topics I know and can comment intelligently about. It would do YOU no good for me to comment on a book about quantum physics when I don’t know a thing about the subject in the first place. It would mean that my review was worthless since I have no foundation to base it on.

Because of that I get a selection of books that I understand and most of which relate to the material I have on this site. Books on magick, Wicca, Druidism, Shamanism, healing and ritual are what I keep reading. I do this for several reasons, one of which is to educate myself.

Why then do many authors think that we have to be endlessly, mindlessly reintroduced to Wicca, as if we can’t read one of the hundreds of thousands of books introducing us to Wicca ourselves? Why does everyone who decides to write a book on a topic, like how to write a spell on paper, feel the need to talk endlessly about Wicca and the basics of Wicca? Why can’t they simply refer us to the books they used to gain an understanding of Wicca?

I talk endlessly on this site about things, mostly my spirituality. I have been told that I go on a LONG time in places. However, you will not see me going over the same Wicca 101 information that has been covered in other places. Yes, I have a copy of the Rede here on my site. You will not hear me talking about what it means nor the ethical constraints that bind one if that path is followed. I assume that you are intelligent enough to do a search for the words “Wiccan Rede” if you want to read more about it. Research is a good and necessary thing since it keeps the mind focused.

So, why do certain publishers think that we must be told over and over and over and over that the Rede is THE ethical statement of Wicca? As sure as a clear sky follows the rain, comes the “Threefold law”. It’s like the two are joined at the hip, and we can’t escape them.

Here’s a book dealing with Magick and it’s applications, talking about magickal activities and help for the budding magickian. Throwing out the above statement says to those who are reading it that it’s a rule for magick too, and that means that they can’t use magick to get what they want! What’s the point of the book then?

I would honestly like to see a book, written by someone in which the original sources for THEIR spirituality are referenced not regurgitated intact. That should send the reader to the books the author discovered Wicca from. The book would then fill in the sections between the knowledge contained in those books, like mortar. Ultimately, it leads to the reason that the book was written. That should take about one chapter at the front of the book. Instead, most books these days take up to 8 padded chapters to do this, leaving one or two chapters at the very back for whatever topic the book is suppose to be about.

Why reiterate the same thing others have already written about?

This is my dream. A book, level 201, 301, 401 or higher, in which Wicca is not mentioned anyplace after the first chapter. A book in which a subject is studied in depth without assuming that the reader is too stupid to make a few research material choices that will lead them to this knowledge AGAIN by repeating it AGAIN. I don’t know why this infects Wiccan books and metaphysical books over and over again. You don’t see texts on physics going into the basic laws of gravity and light again and again. They assume that because you purchased that book you already know the basics. Stop haranguing all us with the same material over and over!

Is anybody else as frustrated as I am? Is anybody there?

Time for another rant from yours truly. The theme this time, boys and girls is common courtesy.

Or should I say “Uncommon Courtesy”. I mean, if it were common, everyone would have it right? Everyone would think about other people. Everyone would hold the door open for someone with full arms and let others in front of their car during rush hour. More people would have good days because others would be thinking about how to reduce the stress on them through random acts of kindness, right?

Oh, sorry… < /sarcasm >

I don’t know why this is so extraordinary. My wife thinks I float above the water and earth simply because I went one night at 1 AM to get her Orange Juice when she was sick and this would bring her comfort. Now, it was Winter as well, and pouring rain, but you know what, her comfort and happiness meant more to me than my sleep. But she raves about this act to this day, 11 years later, because I was kind and considerate. (*Wife’s comment in an informal poll for the last 11 years, no one could honestly say their partner be they male or female would do the same thing the Daven did.)

What the hell happened to people saying “Good Morning”? What about “please” and “thank you”? My parents would have flayed me alive if I forgot “Sir” or “Ma’am” when speaking to an adult, and I demand that my daughter is courteous to others herself. Why is it society says casual rudeness is all right?

Think about this for a few moments…. What is your reaction when you are waiting in line at a store and someone cuts in front of you? Why is it okay for you to do the same thing? Why do people with full carts force someone with 2 items to stand there in a long crowded store line? Why can’t those people that are NOT at the cashier say “You only have 2 items, why don’t you jump in front of me.” And why is it such a big deal to say “Thank You” for doing that? Will it take any money from their pockets to do that? Will they become less of a person by doing this act? Will they be diminished by this and belittled, or will those nearby ridicule those who do this?

These are rhetorical questions, I don’t expect answers. I am truly confused by this, and I’m a normal person. But because I’m courteous to others, because I let someone who is trying to merge in traffic get in front of me, there are a lot of people who think I’m great. I got an award once for being the most consistently courteous person at a job I was in. What do you think a commendation for customer service is based around?

The impetus for this rant is my job, again. I had replaced the computer for one of our managers and the computer was pretty important. It had software on it that was necessary to bring cash into the company from a bank (electronic transfer of funds). So, I replaced it, and there was some problems. I had a modem there, but it was the wrong one and the software would not work with it, so I had to look for an older modem to replace this one. Frankly I didn’t think that it would work or that I had one, and I said so to the Manager. But I found one and replaced the newer one. Once I had the older modem in place, things went right and it worked as it should.

I get into work the next morning, there is a message on my phone where the manager called me and made a huge deal of my replacing the modem. He was so appreciative of my doing that, I was actually surprised. I sent him a quick e-mail saying “no problem” and he praised me to my supervisor, my manager and my Vice President in charge of Information Technology. The only person he didn’t mention this to was the owner/CEO. And I thought, “All this for doing my JOB?” This is what I’m paid to do, this is what brings in the money for the company, and ultimately myself. But simply doing my job with a cheerful attitude gets praise from everyone in the chain of command. This is from the one man in the company who always knows the glass is half empty and someone will drink the half that’s there.

So I started thinking about it, and looking for courtesy in life, then I discovered that common courtesy is really uncommon.

So, here’s what I’m going to ask you all. If you gained anything from my site, don’t tell me about it, don’t send me anything (well, okay if you must…). Take the time out to hold a door open for someone with full arms and to say “thank you” to someone who did something for you. That will pay me back.

Who knows, perhaps if this reaches enough people, courtesy will become fashionable again.

The theme of this rant is “the Universe is NOT a friendly place.“

I understand why many people think that the Universal Consciousness is kind and gentle, willing to take care of all of us and make sure that we all have what we want. It’s because we are scared. It’s comforting to think that we have a creator up there that wants the best for us and makes sure that we are completely happy in every aspect of our lives. No matter how adult, we all long for “mommy and daddy” to take care of us, allowing us to continue to play.

Let me tell you now that it just ain’t so.

I’ll illustrate this with a joke I know of….

A good man, who tithed, gave to charity, was humble, honest and kind, a saint of a man prayed every night to God, “Please Lord, I love you so much and I NEED to win the Lottery.” Every day for 50 years, he said this prayer, and every night he didn’t win.

Finally in the latter days of his life, he prayed a mighty prayer, “God, I have asked you and begged you every night to let me win the Lottery. That’s all I ever wanted. Now, I’m in the latter stages of my life, and I’m going to die soon, and I need to win the Lottery to pass this along to my children. Please let me win the Lottery, and I love you.”

That night, he heard the voice of the Lord and it said to him, “So meet me halfway already…. buy a ticket.”

Which illustrates the point, we have to do what we can to help the Universe help us. The Universe does not care that we are here, it does not care that we are on the Earth, it does not even care that the Earth is here. What it cares about is itself. That’s all. So, it behooves us to take care of ourselves, and ONLY when every other option has been used up and discarded should we put our trust in the Universe.

Now, yes, the Universe may be able to take care of us ONCE WE HAVE DONE EVERYTHING WE CAN, and we will actually succeed. At that point, we can and should put our trust in the Universe, God, the IS, whatever to allow the outcome we want to come to pass. That is the essence of every spell, after all. Putting trust in Magick, in ourselves and in the Gods that we have done everything. But, NOTHING will happen unless we have done the preparation work.

Here’s another example:

I have a bowling ball at the top floor of a 50-story building. I have to get this ball from the roof to the ground floor. Now, I have several choices at this point. I could just drop the ball off the roof, trusting the Universe to catch the ball and lower it gently to the ground, but I’m going to be really surprised when it takes a 5 story bounce and kills people at the bottom and destroys cars, so forth and so on. However, if I build a scaffolding, balance ramps and rails to channel the ball in specific directions, and THEN drop the ball into the beginning of the “route” I constructed, it will probably stay in that route and THEN I can trust the Universe to keep it in the channels and that route, and I can see the way it falls. However, I still had to do something in the beginning to have this outcome occur. I had to do a LOT of prep work FIRST in order to get the most out of trusting the Universe.

Can you see what I’m driving at? Can you see what I am trying to point out? It’s fine to trust the Universe and have faith, it’s alright to believe in “invisible men” who care about you and want what is best for you, but you HAVE to do everything you can do to take care of yourself before putting your trust in that universal energy.

I have been messed up in my life, here is a whole essay on that very subject, and I can say that the only times I have been messed up the worst was when I stopped working for myself and trying to do for me, and put all my trust in the Gods to do everything for me. What I don’t say in that essay is that I bought a Lottery ticket and BEGGED the Gods to let me win it, and I didn’t. I came to depend on that money, to the point of spending it before I had the check. I trusted that it would be there, and when it wasn’t, I was devastated in every way imaginable.

However, now that I know better, I put my trust in the Universe and the Gods to take care of me and my needs, and I still do everything I can to take care of myself first, then I am never disappointed. I DO have what I want, and what I need, and I do have a lot of lucky breaks, which I capitalize on quickly. But I do make sure that I have done everything I can to make things better before I put my trust in the Universe.

Mercedes Lackey, in one of her books, makes this point as well.  There was a man who was very lucky, who had come to depend on that luck to keep him alive and prosperous.  One day, his luck deserted him.  He went to the shaman of his tribe and asked if the Goddess would hear his pleas to help him live and prosper.  To which the shaman said “no, you are not dead yet.”  Meaning that he had not done nearly enough to help himself first.

Sometimes I get really frustrated at the level of education that some people exhibit.

I mean, I understand how not everyone can be a computer whiz, and need to be shown just how to turn on a PC, I understand that there being two separate power switches for the computer is confusing (one for the “hard drive” or “cpu” or “that box” and one for the TV screen). I can get behind this and somewhat accept it.

But how can someone who pays attention to the media, watches movies, TV, and other media outlets not know about basic things, like how a nuclear blast happens, why the US is really careful to give other countries an out or why an asteroid 100 miles across is known as a “Planet Killer”.

I mean, these topics have ALL been dealt with in the recent past, the media. Armageddon, the movie with Bruce Willis and the space shuttles, you know that one? It dealt with the concept of a “Planet Killer” asteroid in depth. It was the basis of the entire movie’s plot. There would be no way they could skip over this piece of trivia if someone was paying attention. EVEN CAUSAL ATTENTION WOULD HAVE GIVEN THIS PERSON THE INFORMATION I SPENT 4 HOURS EXPLAINING.

Sorry to be yelling, but I’m frustrated as hell. I have had to explain everything to this person who is supposedly writing an entire movie based on the book of Revelations and the final destruction of the Earth.

He is taking this section of the Bible, and trying to transpose it to a movie which he will make. He does pictures and CGI work, and it’s really good the work he puts out. But he should leave the scriptwriting to someone else. Someone with a brain.

Having to explain spacial mechanics and how centrifugal force and gravity work, how it’s highly unlikely that an asteroid would crash into the Earth, how the Japanese cultural mindset works, how a nuclear bomb will not affect the SUN at all, what a Supernova is, how Chernobyl affected him (and he lived through it) and he didn’t remember Three Mile Island either.

I really wanted to scream.

Since I’m in the office with 5 other people, while I was explaining this to him, they were throwing in their comments as well. All of them showed more knowledge than this idiot. If it were not for the fact that he kisses ass well, he would not be working here.

So, raise your glass to the stupid people of the world, the ones who don’t know who is buried in Grant’s Tomb, the ones who think a Water Closet is another word for a busted pipe, the ones who don’t realize that pantaloons are not filled with helium. Raise your glass for all those poor souls who will spend the majority of their lives going “Huh?” to everything, and most especially raise your glass in toast to those who make the rest of us look smart.

It’s sad sometimes to realize that half of the problems I have on a day to day basis are caused by these people. And my friend, the one I work with who started this diatribe, he screams and yells about stupid drivers on the road. Talk about kettleitis….

Okay, here is something that is hitting my “piss-off” buttons. Not listening.

I recently posted a theory that I have dealing with Druidism and Wicca, stating why I believe that Wicca=Goddess and Druidism=God. Here’s the text in full:

“I have a theory, but absolutely nothing concrete to back it up other than meditation and inspiration. I’ll share it, but can’t do more than share it.

I think that the trend springs from valid sources. Wicca is based on female worship, and in some cases, very few, direct traditions passed on in the form of teachings from mother to daughter, like herbalism.

It is my theory that when Druidism/Feminine worship were common, in the 200′s CE or so, that there were the Male Druids (with some few female practitioners) and the Female Priestesses (with a few male practitioners). That the mysteries of the male were shared among the Druids, and the feminine mysteries were shared among the priestesses. This was not to divide, but what the heck would a male care about the celebration of a young girl’s first menstrual blood?

This can be seen in some native magickal practices, like among the Native Americans, but once again I have no concrete references. I know that this happens, but I can’t cite examples.

Anyhow, when the Romans came in to the Isles, they saw the Druids as the visible representatives, and wiped them out. The female contingent saw what was happening and decided to hide rather than fight, and went underground. The practices and folk practices were passed down, and I have a past life where I saw my wife then continuing those traditions in 850 CE. Once again, subjective.

So, these traditions get mixed up and thrown together and homogenized until we now have superstitions and folk remedies, but enough can be extracted to make Wicca, with anthropological evidences showing a female worship cult and so on, and the records we have of Druidism, we now have Wicca = Female and Druid = Male.

Besides, look at the general gods of the respective practices. How many times does a Druid call upon the Goddess, and how many traditional and hidebound Wiccans credit the God with anything other than being a living dildo for the Goddess?”

Please note that even though I wanted to change this text, it is untouched.

Okay, everyone read that? Read it again. Now, that you have read it twice, can you tell me why anyone would think that I’m saying that Wicca is ancient? I am very clear in my statement that elements of Wicca go back that far, but that only those elements. I am very clear in stating that this is a personal theory, with no proof, so why would people start demanding that I prove it, and dismissing me as a know nothing because I have read the wrong books? What the hell is going on here?

Is it Mercury? I don’t think so, that retrograde action was over Feb 18 and I posted this March 6. Is it that people just aren’t reading what I’m saying? Probably. I have seen multiple emails stating that I’m wrong, that there is no evidences of this, that Wicca is NOT ancient, that there were Female Druids, that dividing spirituality like this did not happen, and so on. That Druids called upon the Goddess too, and still do.

Where the HELL did I say that they didn’t???? Can someone point this out to me?

The point of this rant is PAY ATTENTION. If someone is giving you something, money, their time, the benefit of their thoughts, their opinions, whatever, they are giving you something they have, and you, out of respect, should pay attention back. Make sure that you understand what they are saying, instead of jumping on them for being wrong. Make sure that you have some kind of mutual lexicon of terms so that there are no misunderstandings as to what the other person is trying to say. To do this, you have to pay attention.

Yes, you may still disagree after hearing them out, listening to them and understanding what they are saying, but at least you won’t be jumping to conclusions. Too many times these days, I see a statement posted on a Newsgroup or an email list stating something that can be taken multiple different ways, and it’s ALWAYS taken the worst way by the most people. Stop it. Listen to what the other person is trying to say FIRST, then figure out what they are trying to say in the context of your thoughts and opinions, THEN disagree with them if it is merited.

That’s the problem with the Western World. No one listens to anyone else. We all talk at each other, hardly anyone talks TO each other. We tune too much out as a matter of course. This is a trend that needs to get reversed desperately.

Okay, time for another “duh…”

If you know someone is having a lot of trouble in their personal life, why do you take advice on YOUR life from them?

Example: Don’t take advice on how to diet from someone who is 5 foot nothing and weighs 250 lbs. Obviously they either don’t know or don’t care about weight on them, and they don’t care about the health risks involved with high weight. Why should they care about your weight? If they DO care and know, then they are probably using their own techniques, and you can obviously SEE how much help it’s been to them….

The theme, in case you missed it, is “Don’t take life advice from someone with a messed up life.”

You wouldn’t go to a Doctor who has a reputation for killing all his patients, would you? You wouldn’t go to a “hair stylist” who can’t keep their own hair in any kind of pleasing style. You would not even think of going to a broke banker for financial advice.

So why would you go to a “Spiritual Counselor” who has a completely messed up life?

Point in my argument: “Miss Cleo”. Here is a woman who graces our television sets and harangues us about “love, life and money” and who (according to the ads) has a 100% accuracy rate, even to pulling facts such as “he’s tall and skinny with a wart on his cheek” out of thin air, to the telephoned amazement of callers.

However, this is the same woman who has been charged with violating the “Do not call” list in one state more than 100 times.

One wonders if her tarot cards showed her THAT.

(Details go here: http://www.atheists.org/flash.line/psychic1.htm and do a search on the Web for “Miss Cleo”. You WILL get a lot of hits on this one.)

So, now Miss Cleo has a messed up life. Do we still call her? Not this witch. I didn’t call her in the first place, and one wonders why anyone would.

Taking advice from someone who’s own life is a shambles is like asking Fate to kick you in the head. It’s stepping in front of the Mac Truck of Karma and letting it run all over your Dogma.

In other words, think first. Ask yourself a few questions before you ask everyone in your life for their advice, or listen to their unsolicited advice.

Ask yourself “What makes this person more qualified to run my life than I am?” Ask yourself, “What would I do in this same situation?” Ask yourself “What AM I going to do now?”

Start taking responsibility for your own life, rather than allowing someone else to run it for you. Let yourself be entirely responsible for your decisions as well as your mess ups. Don’t find someone to blame for the problems you are having, if it’s your fault, own up and view it as a learning experience.

And as a corollary to all this, don’t start giving advice that no one asked for either. One of the most irritating habits that some people have is to run around and start telling everyone else what they need to do when they can’t make their bills this month. If your life is in the toilet, you have no right to start telling others how they should be living/doing/being in whatever situation you see them in, even if you know exactly what they should do in this situation.

The only qualification that you have to have to be allowed to give advice to someone else is successfully coming through it yourself. In other words, if you have gone through a divorce, from either side, THEN and only then do you have the right to tell someone who is going through a divorce what worked for you. You do not have the right to tell them what they SHOULD do, but rather what you did.

I honestly believe that if everyone in this world started living their own lives as well and as accurately as they tend to live everyone else’s, then this world would be a much better place.

( 4-2-02) For more information on this scam, please see With Psychic Friends like these…

Okay, the theme today is “Paying for your Education“.

You pay out money to the colleges and Universities for them to teach you their knowledge on whatever topic.  You pay for books, you pay for supplies, you pay for the expertise of the instructor and so on, why don’t those in the Magickal and Pagan Community pay for their education too?

Is it fear?  “If I pay for this, it will cheapen the information”?  If that were true, then all the instruction from educational institutions would be valueless.  Saying that paying for information will invalidate that information is making all the classical instruction from the dawn of time to now worthless.  If this is true, we should only be giving degrees to those who go out and on their own time study Law and Jurisprudence, Anatomy and Physiology, so that they get their degrees sometime in their late 40′s so we have experienced doctors and lawyers getting those degrees, rather than these young pups who only study for 8 years or so to become what they want to become.

But, wait, that doesn’t make sense.  What do they do in the meantime?  How do they make a living?  And how many would fall into the “trap” of “there’s time, I can put off these studies until later” and then later never comes?

So, what then?   We honor the PhD holders because they have devoted themselves to this course of study to the exclusion of all other things, so that they can share their professional expertise with the rest of us.  In fact, most of society looks down upon those who do the same job, but don’t have that degree, and the only way to get the degree is to pay for it.

So, will the information and knowledge disappear when we fork over money to acquire it?  If we are giving money to get information, I don’t think it will ever disappear.  In fact, we are perpetuating it.  Let me make this assumption about you, the reader.

If you spent your time looking up facts and learning those facts, paying out money each time to get those facts, be it a quarter, a dime or whatever, you would value that information more.  This is information you got from another source with your sweat and effort and your means of income.  Because it has the price of giving up something you produced, you will automatically value it more than you will something that was given to you.

Think of the gifts you have gotten over the years to see this point in action.  The super-expensive gifts that you got were not that important to you, but the items you paid for were more important than something you got for free.  Right?

The same process applies to knowledge.  You have to pay for it in some manner in order to value it and cherish it.  If you don’t, then it’s just clutter in the vestibule of your mind.  This is why the teachers and mystical men of the past made their students go to great lengths just to get into their class, so that the student would pay attention and value the information.

Besides, having the dollar to give for information puts the power back into your hands.  If the information has no value to you, don’t pay for it.  This is the same consumer right that has been exercised since the founding of the Consumer mindset.  The quality is worth the cash.

But if you think that the effort of the researcher and teacher is worth it, sending a dollar won’t break you or make you any worse a person.  Mowing their grass won’t invalidate your education, cooking them dinner one night won’t make you teacher’s pet.

I will make this prediction, if people are unwilling to pay for the information they want to have, then there will be little reason for authors to write, researchers to look up facts, scholars to pontificate and teachers to teach.  They have to make a living too, and if no one is willing to pay them for knowledge and learning, then they will find other occupations where they will be paid.

(See the update to this article at the bottom)

I sit here and write this and think “Goddamn lady, just blow your brains out and get it the fuck over with.”

I type this because it is currently 2 AM, and I’m listening to some drunk lady next door crying over how bad her life is, and I’ve been listening to this for the past 6 hours. Every minute, I hear this whine about how no one loves her and blah blah blah….

I can’t tune it out either, it’s one of those cutting, piercing whines that go right through things like earplugs, cotton balls, pillows, music, noise and snores. I want to pound on her door and tell her to shut the fuck up, but you know what, that would only prove to her that her life IS really as bad as she says it is and how everyone is out to get her and no one loves her…

Why am I so pissed that I fervently wish for the death of a fellow human being to stop it? Because I’m sick of listening to her go on and on and on about how SHE is the one being put out and how SHE is the abused one here.

Mind me, I have been living next to her for the last week, and the walls are so thin that I could hear a fly crawling on the wall in the other room. So I have been an inadvertent eavesdropper on everything that has been going on in her room for the past week. I have yet to hear her being sober, I have not heard anyone do anything other than talk to her in a reasonable tone of voice. In short, she’s whining and having a pity party simply because she’s spineless.

Take this past weekend for instance. On Saturdays I get to sleep in for a bit. So, at 11 AM, my wife got me up so we could watch a show that has come to be a pretty good one for us, and a time of bonding. The drapes were closed and we were not partying. Why on a bright Winter day would we have the drapes closed you may ask, because we were all (including my daughter) stark naked.

Who should hear our voices and decide to pay us a visit? Yep. Her. She comes trotting over without so much as a by-your-leave, knocks on our door. I (being the trusting fool I am) step up to the door, pull the drapes back just enough to see who it is that is spoiling my Saturday. She stands there, viewing of booze fumes (I had not opened the door yet, so I can’t say “reeking or smelling”) drunk as a lord, holding a dollar in her hand. In the boozy condition she was in, she asks if she can come in and use our phone.

Okay, let’s back up for a moment here. We are in a hotel room. It has a phone in every room. It costs 35 cents to dial out on a local call. She has a phone in her room, she has a dollar in her hand…. Everyone with me here? Can you see my train of thought yet? Why didn’t she trot down to the front desk and get her own phone turned on?

I know it worked because I had been in that room with other former neighbors and helped them with their computers and hooking them up to the phones. So it’s not something that is wrong with her phone. I KNOW it works.

So, she’s standing there, with me in my skin and only my face visible through the window, and I say “Not right now…” and she wanders off in some sort of boozy haze with this look like I just kicked a crippled puppy because it is in my path. Like I’m abusing her. Let me lay a few facts out for her perusal.

My grandfather died almost two years ago, and we moved out of his house because it was being sold. We moved in here to live and we have been here for about a year and a half now. It sounds horrid, but we decided staying here was in our best interests for several reasons; a) we pay no utilities, b) there is a maid service 3 times a week c) the rent is lower than in most apartments in the area, d) you have bills to pay off, old debts that need to come off your credit report before you can get a house or apartment, e) we are saving money to allow us to get a house.

So, given that, the fact that I work a full time job, my daughter goes to school, my wife just got released from her job because they dissolved the position, I have little pity for her. I dropped the curtain back in place and forgot about her. Until that night when she started going on and on and on about how terrible her life is.

Mark my words, I would help her if she needed it. In my opinion, from what I have heard and overheard she is no where near that point yet. She does not leave her room except to go to the liquor store, she goes no place, has groceries delivered to her and whines. She is drunk 90% of the time. So she obviously has money to afford all this, it’s because she does not want to do and help herself.

It could be that she needs a friend. I will grant that I am not behaving in friendly manner, but I have had a LOT of negative experiences in the past with drunks and lushes, and I will not get into that type of co-dependant relationship again. I’m just getting my life straightened out, I don’t need another leech.

Come back and talk to me when you have been betrayed by everyone you counted as a friend. Come back when you have been sleeping in your car for two weeks along with your spouse and child. Come back when your spouse has lost track of both of her children by her first marriage and is almost frantic with worry because she has no idea if they are even alive anymore. Come back when you had to make the solemn decision whether to eat that day or get a room so you can have a shower for the first time in a week. Come back when you have nothing of value anymore to sell to raise money and you are waiting on your paycheck to try to make it through another week. Talk to me when you have decided to commit suicide simply so the stress and pain will end. THEN I may have some pity for you and help you out.

Until then, either get the balls to do something or stop fucking whining about how horrid your life is. Whining does not solve any situation. The most it will do is drive those away who MAY be in a position to help you.

This rant is dedicated to all those who were in bad situations, and who had the courage to do something about it, rather than sit around and feel sorry for themselves. Some sorrow is natural, good and normal. However, feeling pity for yourself to the exclusion of doing something constructive to get yourself out of this situation is insane.

In short, grow up, get a life, get a clue and start behaving like an adult, rather than a 50 year old child who can’t have the toy they want.

Update Jan 31, 2001 This woman is with us no more.  She was evicted several days after this was written.  There had been multiple complaints against her, and the manager had begged those of us who were complaining (and I was one) to not call the police on this matter (due to there being one too many complaints and her job being on the line).  Probably stupidly, we agreed not to call the cops.

The manager, good as her word, evicted the drunk lady three days later.  The drunk had not been home too often in the ensuing days.

I found out some of the back story in this matter, and it’s not that sympathetic.  She was drying out (supposedly) from Alcohol.  She also had someone with her, either a husband or a lover or someone.  He brought the food and such into the room, but I think he was enabling her to continue to act in the manner she was doing.  I personally don’t know how he stood it.  If someone had been whining at me for that long a time period, I think I would have either killed her or myself just to get it over with.

Anyhow, we moved rooms as well, and so things are going alright now.

One thing that must be stressed, Wicca, Druidism, Celtic Spirituality, and Paganism are NOTHING like each other.  To say that a Wiccan is a Druid and that what the Druids are now is how the Celts believe, is to say that the the sky is purple and pink and yellow.  There are bits and pieces that are correct and accurate between the different groups, but that’s all.  Go here to see an article dealing with this subject of how Celtic Spirituality and Wicca not being the same thing.  And to equate a Pagan with any of the others is to make such a gross understatement that it boggles the mind.  A Pagan is any of many different religions, and individually they are all Pagan, but all Pagans ARE NOT Wiccan.  This is a misconception that has started creeping into common usage, and it must be stopped.

Paganism is “any religion that is not Christianity” to quote many different dictionaries.  That means, if you are Hindu, you are Pagan.  If you are Islamic, you are Pagan, if you are Buddhist, you are Pagan.  None of those religions are Wicca, so to say that ALL Pagans are Wiccan makes me wonder just where the author got their information.  Wicca is a specific religion, usually British Traditional Wicca (see, I’m not even Wiccan anymore), with it’s own set of rites and practices.  While all Wiccans are Pagan, not all Pagans are Wiccan.  All Druids are Pagan, but not all Pagans are Druids.  All Celtic Reconstructionists are Pagan, but not all Pagans are Celtic Reconstructionists.  All Asatru are Pagans but not all Pagans are Asatru.

This misconception needs to be stopped as soon as possible.  It’s a bad trend, and many Elders of the various Wiccan/Pagan communities are getting tired of being equated to something they don’t believe in.  And to be frank, so am I.

Originally posted 2009-11-05 19:23:48.

Astute readers of my Journal will have already noticed that the name has changed.  That’s what should be.  But let me tell you why.

As you may have read in earlier entries, I’m transitioning from Male to Female.  Well, in recent months I’ve made some major strides forward in that regard, namely I’ve come out to everyone I know that I’m transitioning, and I’ve legally changed my name from my male moniker to a more female name.

With this change came a LOT of soul searching, a lot of meditation and a lot of discussion with the Gods.  Finally after a long time, we all determined that I am Their daughter just as much as I was Their son.  I am Their Priestess and still Their Priest.

Confusing?  You bet you.  About as confusing as being female, dressing as female, being called “She” and “Her” and “Miss” and still being called “Dad” by my daughter.  But that’s okay, things take time, and I’m only partway through the hormone treatment.

So, with the new name, new gender and the acknowledgment of the world at large, I rededicated myself one morning near Samhain.  I abandoned the name Daven and took the name Erin to be my magickal working name.

You may be able to see some of the changes.

Juliet:
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”

So, the name of the Journal is changing to Erin’s Journal.  But the content is not.  It will still have the same content as any you have come to expect.  The look and feel will be the same.  It may have more personal focus and changes based on crossing gender lines and still being a representative of the Gods.

I am going to be taking time over the next months to find and change all references to Daven’s Journal and replace them with Erin’s Journal.  I am going to do this gradually since it will take some time for you, the reader, to adjust to this change too.  Everyone knows Daven’s Journal, but it will take time to realize that it is the same site as Erin’s Journal.  Thus the “new and improved” logo upstairs.  Hopefully by keeping something the same, it can become normal, then we gradually phase out the various elements of Daven and replace them with Erin.

But also, like the Shattered Tower, this is a change that has happened and cannot be undone.  But also like Death, it’s one that has been a long time in coming.

(Note from Daven: Poetry is a huge part of the life of a Druid or Bard. So it is appropriate that I do some poetry, even if it does stink, although, there are those who don’t think it does. Hurray for rose-colored glasses.)

Has anyone else ever

Has anyone else ever felt the Goddess?
Not just the Maiden, Mother and Crone,
But also the Warrior?
The woman who defends her cubs to the death?

Has anyone else felt the God?
His faces: Wanderer, Hunter, Guide and Guardian?
He who is all with the Lady
The man that balances the Goddess?

Has anyone else heard the stars sing?
Their songs of bright things in the sky?
Their tales of ancient times?
Their eternal mourning for those who died?

Has anyone else ever listened to the Earth?
To Her pain for what has been done?
To the life that beats inside her?
And heard the promise of a new life?

Have you ever listened to a baby’s heartbeat?
Thought about what they might become?
Wondered what kind of world they will inherit
And if they will grow in love and beauty?

If you have never done these things
I advise you to go and do them.
Life is too short to be wasted
But should be savored, bitter and sweet.

Stars light your path.

Originally posted 2009-11-11 18:52:41.

(Note from Daven: This is a song my daughter made up when she was 4 years old. It’s interesting.)

Horned One

By Rhiannon Landrum

Horned One tells me a story
Horned One tells me a story
Of rainbow smiles in all of my dreams.
Horned One tells me a story

A rose is gone to please
To take of the Goddess
To make me please

Horned One tells me a story
About flowers dancing in my head
He tells me about his adventures in my head.

Stars light your path.

Originally posted 2009-11-11 18:54:16.

I’ve been putting off doing this article for some time. This is due (in part) to life.

Life, when it smacks you, really smacks you. There were many things that I expected to happen, several things that didn’t happen that I thought would, and things that I didn’t see coming and had no clue about.

And guess what? That’s the topic of this article.

Mostly this article is going to talk about a trend that I’m seeing in Mainstream Wicca (as opposed to Traditional Wicca) and that’s the “One Book and I’m a Witch” attitude that is being espoused by many authors these days. They state (either outright or implied) that all you need is to read their books, follow their Way and you too will be a 20th level High Priest Warlock in Squirrel Society and authorized to act as the high priestess of any ritual there.

Not on your life. Not on your best day, not on MY best day and absolutely no chance of this happening.

It means you read a book. That’s all.

In Wicca, as in many other mystical traditions, personal experience is paramount. Knowing what is going to happen because you have done this before or because you have encountered a similar situation before is critical to this path. Knowing how to deal with Situation X because you have had this situation before is damned near a requirement.

There are going to be those who read this article and go “nope, I’m a High Priest Warlock, and I know what I’m doing. High Lady Suffandnonsence said so.” There will be those who think that just because I’m saying that experience trumps most forms of knowledge that I’m off my rocker. These are the very people that need this article the most.

It’s been said that Experience comes from Good Judgment and that Good Judgment comes from Bad Judgment. This is one of those statements that could have been said by anyone and it’s so important and pervasive that it transcends any one person’s cerebrum. This is a Universal Truth.

Book knowledge is good, but learning from a book can only take you so far. It can give you the framework to base experience on, but without that experience, the framework is useless.

An analogy of this would be a house. Take the house frame. It’s the foundation, the wall skeleton with the studs and window frames, then the floor joists and that framework, and so on till you get to the roof and the ridgepole of the house. That’s fine, but no one is going to be able to live in that house. All it is is a skeleton of wood that COULD potentially become a house.

It’s not until the drywall is attached to the studs, the floor is nailed down, the shingles put on, the water pipes run, the electrical wiring put in place, the doors hung that it becomes a house. A very important component is the insulation that protects guards the house from attack. That is what experience does to the framework of book knowledge.

Book knowledge can tell you about what you MAY have happen to you. It can tell you about the situations you might be in, and how the author dealt with them. It can tell you that if you feel this that you shouldn’t panic, it’s supposed to happen. But in reality, the book can only describe what the author has had happen to them, not what you may have happen to you.

Everyone has different feelings during a ritual, during a spell and during an initiation. That’s one of the Mysteries of Wicca and any other tradition that has transcendental experiences as part of its mysticism. When you get to the part where you have to feel something, my experience in the EXACT same situation is going to be different, if only because I am using my own mind with my own “spin” in it to interpret those experiences. This is what a subjective experience is. It is subject to your interpretation and only what you perceive.

Two people going through the exact same experience at the same time are not going to report the same thing happening to a third person unless they compare “notes” afterward. This is one of the reasons that police HATE witnesses to crimes, since every witness is going to have a different experience. The only way to have the same experience is to swap stories of what happened before reporting it to a third person.

Back to our house analogy. Both of us have the same framework to hang our experience on. When we finally get around to putting different experience in the house, our shingles may be different colors, the drywall may be from two different companies, the pipe may be routed in different ways, the electrical wiring may take a different route to the various points in the house and may terminate into plugs that are in differing locations. This is okay; these are little stylistic differences that make us unique. But the lights still turn on when I hit the switch, I can still run a computer, my head is still dry when it rains, and when I flush the toilet it still travels through the pipes.

This means that with experience, the framework now can function more fully as it was intended to do, and it can support more and more experience. Little stylistic differences are immaterial in the overall picture; the bare functions of this house are exactly the same no matter how many differences like this are pointed out.

“What about a construction company?” you may ask, meaning what about the “row houses” who are all built by the same company and who all are almost exactly the same. Good thought, but look at the statement closely, “almost exactly the same”.

No matter who it is, no matter what group is training them, what order or religion it is, there is no way to have the exact same set of experiences happen to another person, so it’s useless to say that your experience and my experience, even though we are both members of the same coven and have been trained identically, are the same. They are not the same and never will be.

The general overview and the gross characteristics are going to be the same, granted. But when I learn something, I may have a slightly different “take” on it, or understand the material a bit differently from you. While this makes us of the same group, I cannot say that I have the same knowledge as you do, other than in what we were taught. You may have had insights to your knowledge that I have not had.

So no matter what company builds our houses, or even if they follow the same exact blueprint and get the materials from the same companies, there will still be differences. Slight and subtle differences (the placement of the nails, where seams are located for floorboards and drywall and so on), but differences nonetheless.

Now, I have talked about the Framework (the book) and the Finishing (experience), now to talk about the Decorating (intuition).

Because your experiences and my experiences will be different, and I may have a different insight from you, my way of doing things will be different. I may even understand that it’s not necessary to do (whatever) but that I can substitute (this and that) for what I was doing. This is the intuitive process that makes for a great Priest, Priestess, Wiccan, magickian or practitioner. It is the customization and the stylistic stamp that will be on your personal practice.

This “stamp” is not a bad thing. It is an individual expression. Crowley said that Magick is the Science and Art of causing change yadda yadda yadda. This is the Art process, where you take your experience, which is hung on the framework of books, and temper it with your understanding into something that works for you and your mind. Make absolutely no mistake here, EVERY religion; EVERY transcendental process has this element in it. If not, it would be worthless to the individual practitioner.

Yes, Christianity has this element too. The core teachings are the same, Jesus is the savior, the Bible, the moral structure, God and Satan and so on. This is where the details get fiddled with, and it becomes very important as to whether or not you have a kneeler at your bedside or a home shrine to Mary. This is why there are so many sects of Christianity.

The same is true for Wicca and Druidism and Asatru and Chaos magick and on and on. Each of these spiritual paths has a time when you are allowed to put your own stylistic mark on the beliefs and practice them for yourself.

In our house analogy, we have the frame and the finishing done. This means that this house is ready for human habitation and use, but it’s not very pretty. It can be used, exactly as is, but no one is going to like it like that for very long. So, the house is cleaned up, paint is applied, carpet laid down, tiling done, furniture moved in, beams and so on stained, lamps and window treatments placed, and plants are put about the home. For it is now a home, something one person can be happy to be in and to live in and with. They have a place to sleep, a place to eat, a place to relax, a place to lounge about on the floor, a place to bathe and so on. Each of these places reflects their personality and their wants and needs. Therefore it is THEIR home. Doesn’t matter that the same exact wall studs appear in EVERY house around them, or that the same company which built their house built 40 other houses nearby, or that the layout is the same as all the other houses around. Nope, this is THEIR house and only theirs for it has their marks all over it.

It is the same thing in religion.

Now it has the marks of the individual practitioner, and it is customized for them and only them. It is THEIR religion in a way that could not happen any other way. It is meaningful and it answers their needs.

My wife pointed out something that needs to be mentioned at this point. There IS a maintenance phase that fits both these analogies. In both a religious structure and in house building, there is a phase where you maintain it, either the religion or the house. Maintenance of a religion consists of attending rituals, interacting with your gods, teaching and so on. Maintenance of a house is what is important to you in terms of the beauty of your house. This is just as individual as decorating the house. And it is necessary as well, since if you don’t use your religion and practice it, you loose it or fall away.

Having looked at the proper way of doing things, let’s spend the rest of this article looking at what happens if the “house” isn’t built to code.

First problem: Adding various elements together that don’t belong together without the knowledge or experience to make them work properly and having no structure to support them. Here you have an empty lot, it has beautiful bushes, a fountain, trees, a couple couches, some carpet, wallpaper laying around, a lamp or two standing up. It looks nice, but the substance of this home doesn’t exist. The decorations are nice, but there is no place to put any of them, and the first strong wind that comes along will blow away much of what is there.

This is the “one book and I’m a witch” or Fluffy Bunny syndrome run rampant. It looks wonderful, and the fantasy is astounding. It is pretty and seems comfortable, but the first hint of a storm or challenge, and it starts falling apart.

This comes when all that exists are the stylistic elements, the incorporation of unicorns and dragons into the religion, the myths of other lands as examples to be used, the invocation of Kali as a mother figure. All these elements actually work if there is a house to put them into, a framework to support them, but when left naked and alone on the lawn by themselves, they look absolutely stupid.

And what’s worse is the resistance that is encountered when a construction worker comes along and says that there’s a storm coming. All this beautiful furniture needs to be under shelter or it will be ruined. The owner fights and argues, cries and wails, and may deny the very existence of the storm. IF s/he becomes convinced of the need of the shelter, a tarp may be thrown over everything, and left. The person in question thinks that this tarp is sufficient to protect his/her wondrous possessions from anything, without ever seeing just how fragile that shelter is.

The solution is simple: Move everything into storage, and start building the foundation. Once the framework and the house are finished, everything can be moved in, placed where it should be, and it will work as a whole. Additionally, all of it will be protected from others, sheltered from the elements and so on. It will also become very plain which elements work and which don’t. But until the fluff actually admits that there is a need for something more solid than a tarpaulin, no progress can be made.

I know a lady, a good friend, whom I met under the fluffiest of circumstances. A friend of hers and I had an encounter, he asked her and many others to look at what I had said and they had a good time ripping it to shreds. Come to find out that she was not a fluffy idiot, as I had believed, but rather someone who had been badly misled by her friend. When she and I started talking, all the stylistic things I had seen from a distance that initially turned me off of her (and had me labeling her as fluffy) I actually saw for what they were, individual marks. I hadn’t seen her house for all the topiary bushes of dragons, motorcycles and unicorns in the way. But once I saw the house, they all worked together and presented a complete whole. At which point I said, “Okay, her home is not for me, and *I* wouldn’t want to live there, but it works for her.”

The lesson here is that just because you can’t see the home, does not mean it’s not there. There are irredeemable fluffiest out there, those that don’t know when to cover their stuff. But what could be taken as an excess of squishy marshmallow may just simply be you seeing only the surface of something that goes much deeper. So don’t be quick to judge.

Second problem, ONLY experience with nothing else.

Okay, this could be a major problem. It means that you do three times the work than if you just did things right from the beginning.

Imagine that you have the drywall, the floor tiles, the carpet, the siding and the shingles ready. So you start constructing the house from these materials. Except the drywall won’t stay standing unless you brace it against itself, using twice the drywall you might under other circumstances. The siding you nailed to the outside of the house is falling off since it’s only nailed to gypsum drywall, and the pipes are running all over the house, exposed since there is no place to put them. Sockets for lamps and electrical power are laying on the floor, and the power isn’t running to them since there is no way the Inspector will let you turn on the power to this “house”. There’s no second story since no matter how careful you are, you will fall through the plaster that is used on the ceiling.

So, your wall collapses, injuring people. You jury-rig something to hold it up. Then the pipe bursts since it’s not supported right and the joint isn’t done properly. That puts water all over the place. It takes out another wall, and ruins the carpet. So you fix that and buy new walls and carpet. It goes on and on and on ad nauseam.

Eventually, you start building a frame for the walls to hang on. Glory be! That works! So you keep building the wall framework. You take the carpet out and put down a floor. Then you go back and add a ceiling and so on. Holy crud, you now have a house. There is no foundation, and there are probably many things you missed in building a house like this, but it’s up and you stay dry. It may still fall down in a high wind or a storm, and Gods help you if there is an earthquake, but you have something that looks like a home. You have to be careful of the placement of your furniture, and forget about finishing some things since you are running around trying to keep the house erect.

This is what only “street smarts” does to you. You have to get your framework from the school of hard knocks, and Gods above does it knock hard. Many times there is a complete meltdown before there is ever a chance to correct the mistakes made out of pure ignorance.

There is actually a lot to be said for learning like this. Primarily among those strong arguments in favor is that you learn to do things that people say can’t be done. You have a thought about substituting a cigar for the athame. Your reasoning is that a cigar is phallic; therefore it looks like a wand. A wand can be substituted for an athame in other rituals; therefore the cigar can substitute for an athame. I laugh. “That’s fluffy-speak,” says myself. I say it can’t be done.

You go and try it anyhow. Since this is a ceremony for summoning Mars, it works much better than anticipated. You do a little looking and find out that one of the herbs sacred to Mars is tobacco. Ah HA! You exclaim, and shove it in my face. You were able to do this because you didn’t know it could not be done that way. Like putting an electrical outlet in the middle of the floor.

Classical training has some serious flaws, one of the biggest being that it ossifies and codifies the way of doing things into almost a holy writ, without allowances being made for those who actually can do it other ways and succeed. Improvisation and intuition are discouraged until it’s almost too late. Experimentation is not allowed since doing things THIS way is traditional.

Learning on your own is free of that flaw, and reasonable sounding associations can and do happen all the time. Still, there are many times when there are reasons for doing things the traditional way, most of which can be summed up in two phrases. Precedent and what works.

The experimentation and discarding of what doesn’t work is already done. What is left is what works. Learning through experience means that you will have to repeat someone else’s mistakes before you find his or her successes. So you may find, through long and laborious effort, that it’s much better to go clockwise around the Circle when casting it, and going counter clockwise seems to unravel it for some reason. This could have taken you years of effort to discover, when spending ten minutes training under an already experience teacher would have given you the same information and reasoning.

It takes quite a bit of additional time, effort and energy to do the entire discovery on your own. The trade off is that you may be able to do things those others say can’t be done. While it’s not worth it in my opinion, your mileage may vary.

As far as precedent goes, magickally any action creates a resonance in the Spirit Worlds, and that resonance adds energy to the spell or ritual. Doing it the same way every time pulls upon that energy and helps the ritual along.

The last problem in this essay is the “only framework” problem.

This is the chronic “I read a book” set that irritates so many. Just having the framework is as bad as only having the decorations. The difference here is that this state is curable.

Think about it, the foundation may be there, the walls may be framed out, but there is nothing keeping out the rain, there is no place to go to the bathroom, no bed to lay down on. All you have is the skeleton of what COULD be a beautiful house.

It’s being able to recite lists of associations for deities without knowing anything about the individual deities’ personalities to understand WHY that deity likes red and not green. With this, you will not be able to do anything when it falls outside the limited range of what you know.

Let’s say for a second that you want to call up a goddess of love to help you get a lover. You know red is the color of romance, so you use red candles to do your ritual with. Aphrodite shows up. You think “Great! Who’s better to help me than the goddess of Love herself?” Except you don’t know that Aphrodite, while certainly being a love goddess, is also a goddess of lust and infidelity, as evidenced by her bribery of Paris. So instead of romantic love and faithfulness, you get a lover who jumps from bed to bed to bed because of a need for sex, and who leaves a trail of broken hearts in their wake. You got what you wanted, but you didn’t know what was going to happen because you only knew a limited amount and had no experience to back it up. Please, don’t try saying to a deity, “I wanted what I meant, not what I said.” Scorch marks are hard to clean up.

Had you some experience to back up the framework of the tables of association; you may have remembered Aphrodite’s myths and how she acted toward others. (And if you really want to have your head spin, check out Artemis Diana of Ephesus.) You may have remembered that red is most commonly associated with passionate love, while yellow is the color of a steady love, a committed love and white is pure love. You may have known, from having seen other love spells go bad, that Cupid has two sides to his personality.

Fortunately, as I said back in the beginning of this essay, this bad judgment will bring experience that is the forerunner of good judgment or wisdom. If you have the learning curve of a snail, you will learn from this incident and do better next time. So the next time you work with Aphrodite, you will remember this incident, or you will work with a deity that you already know.

The point of this diatribe is that Experience costs. The best and easiest way of doing things, be they religious, magickal or just in life, is to build the framework first, from various studies (books or school or tutoring), take that knowledge and apply it in your life to gain experience, then put your own personal interpretation on your combination of studies and experience to have a system that is uniquely you.

Added to this is responsibility. If you are teaching others, you should be careful to teach the framework, share your experience, and keep your stylistic stamp to yourself unless and until you see that your student can handle and separate your interpretation of things from their own.

Don’t knock any one stage as being unnecessary. Intuition and understanding are just as important as the book knowledge. Conversely, don’t make the mistake of thinking that any one stage is the be-all, end-all of how to do things. One dowel does not a structure make; it’s only when you have three supporting legs that the tripod is born, and the tripod is one of the most stable structures there is.

Originally posted 2009-11-11 21:42:19.

Several things have combined lately to prompt me to write this article. I want to see this article distributed wide and far. Heck, I’ll let anyone repost it for any reason if they want to.

The focus of this article is going to be Debating others and Hatred. You may have figured that out from the title, but I think it’s going to come as a surprise to you where I go as I explore this topic.

I am not going to talk about how we should tolerate everyone’s point of view. Far from it, some of the greatest improvements to life and to society have occurred when one person disagreed with another’s position on something, like Rosa Parks’ disagreement of where she should sit on the bus. (To explain this for those of you in other countries, our Civil Rights revolution started when Rosa Parks, then a young lady, was told that she had to sit in the back of the bus because she was black. The back of the bus was crowded with many people and there was no one sitting in the front of the bus, so she moved to the vacant areas. She was arrested and that started a chain of events leading to the Civil Rights Fight, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and many other pivotal events of the mid 20th Century.)

I am going to talk about other people’s hatred of us, and by “us” I mean those with alternate lifestyles, be that religion or sexuality or living conditions or skin color.

One fact that you MUST understand is that every person on this planet is a minority of some sort. Pick the whitest white man out of the most insular and straight-laced community on the face of the Earth, and I will bet you that with enough knowledge of him I could find something that makes him a minority. There is always some aspect of his life that puts him outside the circle of the greater group and puts him smack into the little circle of “Minority”.

So people hating each other for not being in the same group as another is just stupid. Yes, it’s stupid. If everyone is a minority of some sort, then hating minorities is stupid because you wind up hating yourself. And it’s not what the major religions teach.

I watch some few television shows. Recently one of them to come on was called “Trading Spouses” in which the wives of two families swap places. The most recent show had a very Christian woman and a New Age Mother trading places. It was interesting to watch because the New Age lady was very calm, Zen and very little upset her. She took care of the family and did her best to relate to the various children and to help improve their lives overall. The Christian woman, instead of following the teachings of Christ and loving those around her, decided to take another road and hate the family she found herself with instead because they weren’t Christian. She caused contention and strife everywhere she went. The father was extremely accommodating to her, to the point of packing the whole family up and all of them going to Church to make her comfortable and happy.

And this is what I’m talking about when I speak of “hate”.

Why is this necessary? Why is it that we MUST have an enemy to destroy? What makes it worse is that I see it reflected in the eyes of my co-religionists, the Wiccans and other Pagans of the area I live in. It’s almost as though they have a license of “well, if THEY are going to hate ME, then I can hate THEM”. This makes me very sad to see.

What surprises me is when that same hatred is disguised in the best of motives, the advancement of humanity or the teaching of children. Let me give you a recent example.

As you have seen if you follow my site at all, I recently reviewed Richard Abanes’ book “Harry Potter, Narnia and the Lord of the Rings”. I did my best to be fair to him and his writing. I didn’t like it; I thought it was an unnecessary book. I say so, but I also grant him that taken on its own merits the book is a good one. I simply didn’t think it was for me or for Pagans, since it explores no new material; it simply covers the same tired chestnuts that have been around for some time.

Prominent in this book is an attack on Wicca. I had to question why it was there. That attack is a non-sequitor in the book and exists in this book (to my mind) to cloud the issue of how Harry Potter is bad for the children of the world. It is in there to link Wicca to Harry Potter as something that is dangerous. But the point of that book seems to be that Harry Potter is being used to recruit kids for paganism and Wicca.

One gentleman who recently wrote me asked the question “what’s wrong with that?”

Folks, I tell you, it was like a bolt of lightning from a clear sky. I was floored because that was the heart of the whole debate, everything else was just window dressing. Abanes tried to say that the occult is dangerous, or that witches themselves say the occult is dangerous, or that God says that it’s dangerous, and thus that Harry Potter is dangerous because it fosters an interest in the occult. But he never answered the question of why talking about it was bad.

See, the premise of the book is that good Christians should keep their children away from Harry Potter because it will recruit them into Wicca and Paganism, taking them away from Christianity. It will corrupt the children with thoughts of magic spells and flying on brooms and other such fantastic elements or that Cerberus and dragons really do exist and that they will hurt the psyches of the children.

But he still fails to address why this is bad.

What struck me in the email I received is that Christianity is allowed to recruit and to proselytize; they are commanded to do so in their holy writ. But that same courtesy is never extended to others. NEVER. I have yet to see a Christian sit down and listen, really listen, to another about their beliefs unless forced to do so. It is only when they have no choice but to listen that they do, and they do so with the contempt dripping off them and pooling on the floor. (Get the rag, we have to clean up all the pools of contempt all over. Wish they would stop dripping it all over my rugs. Watch out! Don’t step in the puddle of contempt.)

Hypocrisy like that makes me madder than anything else.

Yes, as a general rule Pagans and Wiccans don’t go out and start proselytizing to the masses about Wicca and other pagan faiths. We write books and those books spark an interest and those who are interested find us on their own. It keeps the numbers down and it allows Pagans in general to be selective of those they teach rather than teaching anyone who comes down the pike.

But even if that were not the case, there is the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. It says (for those of you who don’t know) “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Now, while most religious sites like mine focus on what’s called “The Establishment Clause” or “The Free Exercise Clause” which is the part about establishing a religion and the free exercise thereof, what I’m focusing on the Freedom of Speech.

In the United States and in most Western societies, people have a recognized right to freely speak their mind so long as that speech is not a danger to others. You can’t yell “Fire” in a theater because that could harm others. Likewise you cannot make speeches about killing someone specific since that is a terroristic threat. But so long as your speech generally conforms to those two guidelines, you are allowed to speak out and act out to a limited extent. (Let me state here, I am not a lawyer. To get specifics on this please talk to a lawyer if you have questions.)

Speaking about Wicca in books, on TV, in the various media, in public or door-to-door is allowed. You can go out and recruit people for Paganism; it’s protected speech. You can, as long as you are within the laws governing demonstrations and solicitation, go door to door and preach about the Church of Satan or Agnosticism and try your hardest to recruit for those faiths if you wanted to. In fact, Isaac Bonewits actually did preach in public about the Church of Satan for some time when he was younger. http://www.neopagan.net/SatanicAdventure.html

You will note that in his adventure, he was heckled by the Christians, but never arrested. Why? This kind of demonstration is perfectly legal.

So I fail to see where Pagans are evil for publishing books on Wicca and paganism. If Harry Potter is being used as a Pagan recruiting tool, as Mr. Abanes claims, where is the problem? I have to put up with the Mormon Missionaries showing up at my door and trying to recruit me, I have to put up with the God symbolism in Narnia and The Lord of the Rings and in The Matrix. I have to deal with the bigotry of students wearing crucifixes to school while my daughter is persecuted for wearing a pentagram. I have to tolerate the channels full of church services on Sundays (and four full channels on cable TV that are all Christianity all the time) even if I don’t watch them. I have to put up with Christian Ministers standing center stage on TV and saying that the September 11th attacks are my fault because I’m ungodly. I have to watch as a judge tells Wiccan parents that they cannot teach their child about Wicca since they are going through a divorce.

When did this country and this planet become so preferential toward one religion? Did everyone become a bigot all of a sudden?

I even support the rights of the Hindus and Islamics to go out and preach. I would be riveted to my TV if they broadcast a ceremony from a mosque. I had the best time of my life when I went to a Ganesha celebration at a local temple. Stuff like that fascinates me.

I’m sure there would be many who would love to see a channel dedicated to All Wicca All the Time. And I’m sure that there would be an outcry from every Christian out there.

This is the basic quandary; why is it acceptable for one religion to have all the privilege and rights to do something, while at the same time hypocritically denying that same right to everyone else?

One of the big debates is the “right” for those people in the government to display the Ten Commandments in various governmental places, like courthouses or other buildings where the business of the United States is conducted. People have been arrested for doing so.

I have no problem with them doing so really. I oppose it vigorously, not because it’s inherently wrong or that the Commandments are not my religion’s rules, I oppose it because if I tried to get the Wiccan Rede in the lobby of the Library the entire world would come crashing down on my head. And that is unfair.

Religion is in the business of giving hope to people. None of us really know what happens to the consciousness once we stop drawing a breath and our heart stops beating. We don’t know what becomes of the mind and thoughts of ourselves. We can’t know unless we die, and then it’s too late. So that is unknown and it is scary because it is unknown. Religion gives answers that comfort us while we live and gives us hope on what will happen so that is no longer scary.

It’s a terrifying thing to think that everything I have done and am may cease simply because I no longer breathe; that all that I am might be lost to the æthers of nothingness. Religion says that my fear is unfounded and that I will continue after that state, that I will continue to live with something that is greater than myself. At its core, all religions strive to give hope to others. That is all that they do.

How is my comfort a threat to another person? My hope is my hope and to say that what I find comforting is a threat to another is as stupid as saying that I cannot wear the flannel sleep pants because you find them scratchy. It is my comfort and my hope that my religion answers, how is that a threat to your comfort or your hope? Just because I have a different way does not mean that it is true for all.

Ah, but here’s the rub; according to the sacred texts of the Christians, my way IS a threat to them. Their deity has said that he is the only deity and that anyone who does not worship him is doomed. That still does not mean that my way is a threat to them, since my worship of another is not taking their comfort away at all.

But their mandates continue. They must actively see to it that they are the only faith in the world because all others are wrong. If one person is wrong then another must be right, for you cannot have a wrong without a right, correct?

But that is flawed at its basic level. My belief does not detract from their belief at all, unless you live in a world that has no room for many to be right or all opinions to exist. I’m comfortable allowing another to believe that the world is flat. It does not affect my belief that the world is round at all, but if it gives them comfort then so be it.

It’s the difference between verifiable fact, one that everyone can see and experience exactly the same, and opinion where many people all with differing points of view are right. Your ecstatic trance is not going to be the same as mine, no matter how hard we try, so you and I will have different opinions on that. However, both of us can say that the blade of grass is green.

“The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” — Thomas Jefferson

Where I start objecting is when religious dogma becomes action on the part of those who profess that dogma. Speak all you want, but when you start doing in the name of what you spoke, THEN I have a massive problem.

“The freedom to swing your fist ends where the other guy’s nose begins.” — Harry Truman

That action is in most cases illegal. So I can preach Wicca as much as I want to, and those that object cannot stop me. When I start trying to drag others to a Circle, then I can be arrested.

These Christian proselytizers who use underhanded tricks to get converts, coming into schools to preach and ridicule others, coming to the door of those in a neighborhood, terrorizing children have my undying ire since they are taking talking into action.

But I have the same right, and all the protest papers in the world, all the attempts at censorship cannot change that fact.

There are some other points I want to make. Most often when engaging in these kinds of debates, a “straw man” will be set up by the other side. You must learn to recognize this fallacy and avoid it at all costs.

You and I are talking about the Wiccan Rede. I am against the Rede and you are for it. I state that I do not follow the Rede and I don’t need it since I have many many other ways of being an ethical person without it. You state that the Rede applies to everyone because all other religions have a version of the Rede already. You further state that if my religion doesn’t have a statement like the Rede then I must not be a very ethical person.

What you just set up is a two-target Straw Man fallacy. The first is the “all other religions have a version of the Rede” and the second is that “your religion must not be ethical without it.” What makes them straw men fallacies is that neither of these statements have anything to do with the fact that the debate itself is discussing the Rede itself and whether or not I think it’s a good thing. That is the topic of the debate and straw men like this serve only to pull the discussion off track to force me to defending a statement that has nothing to do with anything. We will lose the original debate in defending either of these straw men.

Apologists for any religion use these all the time and it seems that the Christian Fundamentalists are notorious for this kind of diversion. (An apologist for a religion is one who is trained to defend their religion from perceived attacks and explain away concerns people have about their religion.)

But this kind of diversion is not limited to just Christians at all. I have seen it happen multiple times with debates in Wicca and paganism. I have seen spurious facts put into a debate solely to divert attention from the actual point of the debate. It’s most commonly done when the person who sets up the Straw Man is in a bad position and looks to be losing the debate entirely.

Another fallacy that is pulled out with frightening regularity is the “No true Scotsman” fallacy. This is the desperate attempt to divorce themselves from a member of their group who is seen as less than a shining example by claiming that they aren’t a “true” whatever. The fallacy here is that for every instance where someone pulls this out, I can probably find ten or twenty “true” whatevers that actually DO what they are objecting to. A perfect example is “no true member of the clergy would rape children” when there are multiple priests who have done so. I was told in one debate that no true Wiccan would cause as much harm to me and my family as was done to us, when everyone acknowledged that the people in question were really and truly Wiccans.

There are literally dozens of logical fallacies that will be trotted out in a debate, but I will only mention two more. Ad hominim and Ad Neausium.

Ad hominim is when the person who is stating something is attacked rather than the idea he presented. If I, as a Wiccan, present the idea that I believe the Rede to be antiquated and unnecessary, and someone else who is debating me starts calling me immoral and a bad person, without ever relating it to my position on the Rede, then that is an ad hominim attack. It is used most often by those who have a position that is only supported by belief and very little else in an attempt to bolster their argument.

The ad neausium attack is an insidious one. It makes the statement true simply because it is stated over and over and over again until others get disgusted with it and give up. Saying something four hundred times in the course of a debate does not make it true. Saying that Harry Potter is dangerous does not make it dangerous simply because you say so for pages and pages and pages of text. It simply means that you are trying to cloud the fact that what you say is unsupportable by the evidence.

A full list of debate fallacies is available here: http://www.csun.edu/~dgw61315/fallacies.html and I highly advise you to read them.

One thing that you must remember when debating others on matters of religion and dogma is DO NOT LOSE YOUR TEMPER. The minute you lose your temper and get angry, you have lost the debate. From then on you are arguing from an emotional standpoint rather than from a logical standpoint. All of your arguments will be tainted then simply because the person you are debating will say that you only feel that to be true rather than having facts to back you up. From there, everything can be countered.

The last thing I want to cover is that in any debate or argument about the evils of what is not Christianity the topic will eventually become covered up with a list of other “issues”. But the root of the argument is simply this, it is an attempt to remove all non-Christian influences from the culture.

While I am willing to concede that Christianity has a lot going for it, and the fact that most of what we have wouldn’t be possible without Christian men and women working to make it so, removing everything non-Christian will do as much damage as removing everything Native American would.

Understand that while men and women of faith may have built this nation, even men and women of Christian faith, the United States is not based on those principles, nor should it be. Any nation should reflect it’s highest ideals. There are countries that are based around a theocracy, and that is correct for them. There are others that have a state religion, enforced or not. But the United States is not one of those countries and changing that would destroy the foundation of this country, irrevocably.

I could make a lot of snarky comments at this point, but I will refrain from doing so.

But when you talk to a rabid fundamentalist, reason like that does not enter into the conversation. Most often they simply want to remove everything except their own definition of God, Religion, Marriage, Family, Faith, Kindness, Charity or whatever. That is why it appears to other countries that we are losing our national focus and identity.

I have to say at this point that I am having a lot of trouble with this article. I am working very hard to make it non-confrontational except to those who should be confronted with their hypocrisy. But allies are needed on all sides. The moderates need to start speaking out and using their reason to control their more insane brothers. I am not only speaking of Christianity but also of Islam AND Paganism. Those who have common sense and who actually can see consequences of the current trends need to speak out. You don’t have to get in their faces and actively debate them, but you DO have to go out and use the tools at your disposal to make a difference. Rallies, political action, voting, supporting those clerics and clergy members who work to make a difference, rather than sending the money to those who spread hate and fear. Calling these idiots on their bullshit when they speak it. Supporting those politicians who are working to make a difference.

That’s how the very extreme fundamental elements of Islam took over an entire country. They started small and suggested this change to the law, then that change to the law, then another over there. They worked to get very strict interpretations of the Koran in the homes, the schools, and the government. They got one of their own elected to one of the positions of power. Then the cancer spread. Any one change, taken on its own wasn’t enough to make anyone cry out and protest, but with them all taken together it became a chain of events. Then when it came time for the laws and rules that would really make people protest, there was no way to prevent them from going through for many of the mechanisms for that reform had been removed.

I see it happening now in the United States. I see the President being elected, going on a nuts-o campaign against people that never hurt him or us directly, all the while ignoring the real threats, and then I watched in dropped-jaw shock when he was elected again, along with multiple people who supported him and his plans. Even when this was publicized and more and more lies were exposed, people still supported him enough to elect his cronies. Now it’s too late and all that can be done is to mitigate the damage as much as possible.

This is the kind of slow insidious creeping that destroys nations. Allowing one change and then allowing another and another, none of them protested against because there isn’t anything that can be done, and it doesn’t affect ME, only THEM.

“They came for the communists, and I did not speak up because I wasn’t a communist;
They came for the socialists, and I did not speak up because I was not a socialist;
They came for the union leaders, and I did not speak up because I wasn’t a union leader;
They came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak up for me.”

Martin Niemoller, 1892-1984

I watch this happening and I wonder if these insane policies are really what the United States wants because NO ONE is speaking out against them except those who have a vested interest in seeing that they don’t pass. No one speaks out against gay marriage except the gays or those who have sympathy for them. But slowly and little bit at a time, the rights of everyone are being taken away.

I wanted to address these concerns because there are things that can be done, by everyone. You stand up for what you believe is right. You talk to the fundamentalists and tell them they are wrong. You vote, you support causes that believe in the same things you believe in. You donate money and do charitable work. You go to your minister or clergy leader and you tell them you don’t appreciate them spreading hate and lies when they do so, and you vote with your feet when your beliefs are dismissed and go someplace that DOES support what you believe in. You talk to others about what you feel is right, and you attack stupidity where you see it. You don’t sit by and say “well, that’s how it is” and let it go. If you believe that it’s stupid for a government to tell someone they can’t get married because both people have vaginas, tell someone. Make one of the rabid proponents of it waste their time trying to convince you, and if your mother believes it’s right, find out why and try to convince her to your way of thought.

Because if we give up essential freedoms to obtain a bit of temporary safety, we deserve neither freedom nor safety, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin. The only way out of this morass is to do and be and to work for what we feel is right.

Standing up to hatred and debating stupidity is the only way to bring about the world we want.

And that’s enough for now.

Originally posted 2009-11-11 21:59:43.