This rant is going to be about the celebrities in the neopagan world: Authors. Because the movement hasn't quite reached the mainstream yet, the neopagan community doesn't have the luxury of pitting their own clergy up against the likes of Pat Robertson on television. They don't seem to get the radio airplay, and they don't really control enough of the market to allow any economically stable charities to drive their cause to the public. Instead, they have to settle for authors.
Think of the first few names in the neopagan community that come to your mind...Silver Ravenwolf? Starhawk? Scott Cunningham? Gerald Gardner? Alex Sanders? the Farrars? Sybil Leek? Notice they're all authors. The neopagan community structure is enough to make a librarian cream her crotch: half a million people, most with psychological problems, swarming around BOOKS. Just sit in Borders or Barnes and Noble for about two hours within viewing distance of the New Age rack where they keep all the John Edward crap and the witchy books. Here's what you'll see: adolescent teens and unwed mothers with crumbling social lives trickling in by the ones and twos, sifting through the books, taking one and hiding it in her coat as though shoplifting, bullshitting around some of the other sections, and clandestinely tiptoeing to the register, carefully handling it as though she were buying a porno at Wal*Mart.
Yes, this sounds stereotypical, and it probably is. Of course, I was one of those recluses at one point in time, sifting through those books and trying to pick out just the one that "the Goddess told me to". But you know what? Now, if I even have the urge to buy a witchy book, I do it online...say, at Amazon. Why? Because I'm a solitary practitioner of my Craft and I don't want to deal with wannabes who worship $ilver Ravenwolf and the very ground she walks upon. Mostly, I buy reference books (almanacks, historical books, college textbooks, theological essays, cookbooks, etc.) and here's why: You can read all the witchy books out there and still not be able to predict a moon phase. You can consult all the charts in the world, but until you read a book on interplanetary astronomy, you'll never know the rotation or revolution in respect to the earth. I'll bet a third of you don't know why we only ever see the one side of the moon. $ilver Ravenwolf ain't gonna tell ya. Stephen Hawking might.
Of course, my real problem with these authors is that they seem to be involved in a lot of backscratching. What I mean by this is: read any three witchy books by any three different authors, and you will see that half the book is spent repaving the basics. Why? Because they want to be accepted into the New Wiccan Orthodoxy (NWO), which I have termed this new trend in the neopagan movement. These people spend so much time trying to corroborate what this author said or that author meant that they completely lose sight of the subject at hand. The NWO dictates that the words paganism, neopaganism, witchcraft and wicca are interchangeable. The NWO dictates that you have to cast a Circle and take a lustral bath to protect yourself before even so much as thanking Deity (of course, they don't do this themselves, but you're just a beginner, aren't you!). The NWO tries to tell you that the Rede is law, and that the Threefold Law applies to everyone (though they're not going to Hell because that's a Christian belief that doesn't apply to them!). They flaunt around this utter hodgepodge of beliefs and practices, and try to pass it off as an integral part of western European heritage! Here's a better thing to try and pass it off as: BULLSHIT. Accept the fact that your beliefs are a bag of mixed nuts. Accept that your belief in reincarnation stems from Buddhist dogma. Accept that your astrology is based upon primitive Sumerian understandings of our solar system that were negated when Copernicus committed heresy by looking into the sky. Accept that your numerology is dependent upon the alphabet in use and has no bearing on that Russian guy you hate because he writes in Cyrillic. But most of all, accept that half your religion is bullshit because Gerald Gardner had to make up half of what he was printing for fear of breaking his oaths, and borrowed some from Crowley, some from Murray and a lot from the practices of the Freemasons and the OTO. Even Gardnerian witches are practicing a bullshit religion!
Many witches will probably try and burn me at the stake for saying what I'm saying, but it needs to be said. Attention Wiccans: your religion is fifty years old, and half of it is made up. The Mists of Avalon is not fit to replace the Bible (especially when you claim to not have a set religious text). If Gerald Gardner could see the warped concoction that eighty percent of you practice, he'd probably go back in time and unpublish his books that started it all.
Now, before you go pissing and moaning about how I'm bashing Wicca, let me make clear that I'm not bashing Wicca. I'm calling it for what it is: a made-up religion. When you see that all religions are invented, you won't be so pissed off when you read this. Accept that your religion is a suckling baby as far as religions go, and accept that it's made up. Sure, it works...but it's an invented practice, just like every other fucking religion out there. It isn't so bad. Just be honest.
So fuck these authors who are only interested in belonging to a special élite club. Fuck this New Wiccan Orthodoxy that's being purported to be the gods' truth when they only ripped off a ripoff (Wicca) of a ripoff (OTO) of a ripoff (Freemasonry) of a ripoff (Judaism) of a ripoff (Zoroästrianism) of a ripoff (ancient Sumerian polytheism) etc. etc. etc. Fuck anyone who believes they have the truth in its entirety. They're WRONG. We're only human. I'm wrong about shit, you're wrong about shit, and your local pastor and/or HPS is wrong about shit too. We're all...only...human. No one is better than anyone else, and any author who pretends to be better than anyone else by having Starhywk or $ilver Ravenwolf or Pat Robertson endorse his book needs a full cavity search to clean all the bullshit from his internal organs. These cliques of superstars are only a detriment to any religious community, and when their imperfections fall through the cracks (after all, they're only human) it will cause pain to the religious community at large. Jimmy Swaggart, anyone?
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