[Opinion] What's your opinion on Wicca?

[MorganBlack]

it just seems like the romantic version of witchcraft

It was, but also was a originally a understandable response to the Dis-Enchantment the West resulting from scientific materialism.

Prof Ronald Hutton is the guy who nuked Wicca back in 1999. And feels bad about it. Links to his talks here: Wicca is bs?

Wiccan and modern paganism, it's ragtag orphan children, eventually jumped the shark - went rabid, starting attacking other peoples' religions, while make up total bullshit.

For a case in point on fakelore and what I'm starting to think of as "bad syncratism" - see Paul Kingsnorth, who was Wiccan, before converting to Greek Orthodox.

How to build a Goddess

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Sometimes I can imagine an alternate timeline where Wicca fulfilled its real potential, before it got derailed by identity politics, and became a hate cult. A timeline where it became about the total and complete reverence for all expressions of life and the sacralization of everything, instead of what it became - a subculture for maladapted, cramped weirdos to claim specialness over everybody, who try to own all magic (becasue 'they' came first, in their own minds). It just makes me sad.

 

[Asteriskos]

I feel like some Wiccan practice could labelled as appropriation.

I don't feel bad about "appropriating" anything into my practice at all, I've done a lot of it over time. The aboriginal and indigenous folks that we appropriate from though have voiced their thoughts on it. I think as long as you don't claim to follow their "tradition" completely and call it your own, you're not actually doing any one harm. Wicca though is such a "hodgepodge" it's difficult at best to see where "Ye Olde Craeft" went!

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Every piece "appropriated" needs to fit well, or be capable of adapting / modifying or it obviously must be rejected!

 

[Ohana]

Wicca seems to be a microcosm of greater societal trends I notice in America and American culture that spread.

In America theres a cultural trend of either being black or white instead of acknowledging the other identity (which probably most people hail from if they go back far enough) Mixed race.

Wicca doesn't seem to be just one cultural practice but multiple. Unfortunately since most people want it to be one way or the other it denies wicca its full identity.

Especially since historically in America multiracial people's identities were hidden. Either saying they were only from parents line or another.

Wicca may be inspired by both European influences and African practices in a cultural mishmash since African American people and Mexican American people have been in America for a really long time now. The erasure of their impact on history especially by denying the existence of even multiracial people is something this country has done for a while.

In fact I briefly looked this up and the way census data was taken back then is not fun

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Apperently I just learned this but they had enumarotors until 1960 and thier job was to record another person's race. That sounds a bit crazy to my modern ears. And mixed race people sometimes weren't even counted as mixed race but as Black due to antiquated veiws on racial purity.

 

[MorganBlack]

America is super fucked up about this stuff. It gets even more complex.

Mexican is not a "race" any more than being an American is. It's an ethnicity, a culture. Wonder Woman and Louis CK are Mexican Americas as is Mit Romney (not that it kept)

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So it's weird to me to have "blood and soil" types, be they Christian or pagan acting out and trying to tie a new "race identity" to modern nation states , fabricate them whole cloth as alternate, romanticized cultural identities by trying to revive cultures that died out eons ago, and that they only read about as footnotes in history books (or pagan authors selling basically what is fantasy lit for Anglos). I really don't get it, except here in the States it appears to exist only so white people can LARP as a oppressed class agaist other white people, and jump to the head of the entitlements que. Weird stuff.

 

[Ohana]

America is super fucked up about this stuff. It gets even more complex.

Mexican is not a "race" any more than being an American is. It's an ethnicity, a culture. Wonder Woman and Louis CK are Mexican Americas as is Mit Romney (not that it kept)

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So it's weird to me to have "blood and soil" types, be they Christian or pagan acting out and trying to tie a new "race identity" to modern nation states , fabricate them whole cloth as alternate, romanticized cultural identities by trying to revive cultures that died out eons ago, and that they only read about as footnotes in history books (or pagan authors selling basically what is fantasy lit for Anglos). I really don't get it, except here in the States it appears to exist only so white people can LARP as a oppressed class agaist other white people, and jump to the head of the entitlements que. Weird stuff.

Yeah I knew Mexican was technically not a race. I just didn't know how to refer to them since I didn't know if I wanted to use the word Latino and since I used the word African American I thought Mexican American would make sense there.

Mexico has white people there and black people aand mixed race people. So Mexican American technically is more of where your from than an actual racial identity.

And this is also still new here in America. Apperently also in that article the ability to select two or more races as an identity wasn't added to the U.S census till the 2000s which is kind mind boggling.

And I get what your saying about some white people wanting to do the oppression Olympics. I don't get why you want to be the most oppressed. Its terrible to be an oppressed group especially the most oppressed. I think it stemmed from the fascination American culture has about pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. If your the most oppressed but also successful that must mean you worked twice as hard and are amazing.

My teachers loved telling us stories about this one poor person and then they did something right once in thier life and now they are a zillionaire with an amazing life.

I didn't buy it because I came from a household that was different from most of my peers and it was terrible. I didn't want to be so different from most of my peers.

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(Adding on to it African American could be seen in a similar light since Africa has more than black people present in the country. But there might be historical context for African American being used so its different than Mexican American in that vein)

 

[MorganBlack]

Right right.

This is more speculative, and borders on conspiratorial, but in the wake of the Epstein files, I was revisiting this notion:

After reading McGowan's book a few years ago, (which I added below) - which is about how, among other things, a startling number of 1960's musical celebrities were the children of high-ranking US military and intelligence officials. Then you see the domestic and foreign neopagan movement is tied culturally to the American 1960's hippie movement.

Then notice how they go about attacking traditional element of their own countries... it naturally follows to wonder if Wicca was weaponized by US and British military intelligence services to make the modern pagan movement, and split up the domestic populations cultures of other countries we want to attack and harvest, by inventing ever smaller atomized, identifies and subcultures that are often activel hostile to their more traditional cultures.

Book – PDF - Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon-Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream -David McGowan (2014)

Laurel Canyon in the 1960s and early 1970s was a magical place where a dizzying array of musical artists congregated to create much of the music that provided the soundtrack to those turbulent times. Members of bands like the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, the Monkees, the Beach Boys, the Mamas and...

wizardforums.com

 

[juanitos]

art , music, literature can be indeed the most insidious weapons ever...changing completely the behaviour and one's way of being/thinking ..the results appear not immediately but are very powerful!
This is probably the main reason that in modern art was deliberately promoted the Ugly...in order to distort human perception, lowering the level of consciousness..becoming prone to manipulation!!

 

[MorganBlack]

Heh. Yeah. I actually like modern art (and we can think of Wicca and neopaganism as modern art fantasy lit...)

Man, I miss The Awl. My personal politics lean economic Left, so where else could you get awesome articles on....
Literary Magazines for Socialists Funded by the CIA, Ranked

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This was an effort by the CIA to get American communists to turn against the Soviet Union as a stodgy, uncreative, moribund, traditional culture... who can then be painted then as not us.. not the hip, cool, neoliberal capitalism culture, full of movies, McDonalds, 20 kinds of crackers, cocaine, anal sex , polyamory, and a whole slew of new hip religious identities to shock your parents. Yee-haw!

This does not mean Wicca, or paganism, polyamory, cocaine, or anal sex are bad in and of themselves ... but anything can turn bad when they are used to make an internal 5th Column in countries we want to harvest. Just standard US Empire tricks. Sorry about that, ya'll.