[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!

Post automatically merged: Tuesday at 7:42 PM

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.

Post automatically merged: Tuesday at 9:27 PM

(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.

 

[Asteriskos]

I feel like some Wiccan practice could labelled as appropriation.

From the get go Wicca had elements of Freemasonry (Gardner was a Mason), Crowley and Thelema, some Witchcraft, and that's from the start.
Let alone the additional cultural baggage it's collected up till now. To be fair though "some" variations have more, some less added baggage.
Something that I think fits right in here is a statement by Jason Miller ( irrespective of what anyone thinks of him personally ) and his view that:
"We no longer live in a purely cultural society" ( close enough to his view ) cross-pollination of cultures and systems is an everyday occurrence and is increasing. Not everyone is pleased by this, some view it as a dilution of "purity" and don't want to "see" it at all. Be your own judge!

 

[daraven]

I guess its a nice gateway for an actual occult practices but other then that it was never my jam . To quote Crowley during a talk with cecil williamson about wicca "all this ritual business is so complicated you never get anywhere, you never get results, and all it does is make the boys and girls happy till they get bored"

 

[OberonFromTheHills]

I guess its a nice gateway for an actual occult practices but other then that it was never my jam . To quote Crowley during a talk with cecil williamson about wicca "all this ritual business is so complicated you never get anywhere, you never get results, and all it does is make the boys and girls happy till they get bored"

Crowley was a chaos magickian before his time

 

[Ohana]

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 Then you see the domestic and foreign neopagan movement is tied culturally to the American 1960's hippie movement

No thats the 80s. The 60s had an anti-war message. Uncle Sam doesn't like that so the 80s spread the death of 60s and 70s cultural movements.

A lot of the children of high ranking official probably saw what was happening and wanted to stop that. These movements had a lot of anti-war sentiment and governments atleast the U.S prefer war sentiment for what you mentioned resources.

80s makes more sense for being that. 80s were more conservative and more pro-war.

 

[MorganBlack]

What is the 1980's? There is a good argument that the Hippie protests to Vietnam were not organic grass roots movements, but were designed to tie them up as useful idiots, so they sucked up all the attention oxygen, and kept out of the media other concurrent militarization in areas more strategic to US imperial interests.

Back to Hippie Boomer Neopaganism, or whatever it is. I prefer to call it Techno-paganism. Speaking as one whose job is to make culture, it seems to me to have been one of our major cultural exports for several decades. As a Gen-X proto-geek of the 1980's (think, the kids in Stranger Things.) I was there. I don't want to pick on them too much but as a native of this culture I can say it morphed into West Cost techno-hippie culture never died. It's kept alive in Techno-paganism. I have neopagan friends who attend the Rainbow Gathering each year to this day. Burning Man is also Techno-paganism. Again fine, but just saying it never really went away.

 

[Ohana]

Back to Hippie Boomer Neopaganism, or whatever it is. I prefer to call it Techno-paganism. Speaking as one whose job is to make culture, it seems to me to have been one of our major cultural exports for several decades. As a Gen-X proto-geek of the 1980's (think, the kids in Stranger Things.) I was there. I don't want to pick on them too much but as a native of this culture I can say it morphed into West Cost techno-hippie culture never died. It's kept alive in Techno-paganism. I have neopagan friends who attend the Rainbow Gathering each year to this day. Burning Man is also Techno-paganism. Again fine, but just saying it never really went away.

Yeah it did live on but there was still the death of disco movement. Disco broke a lot of cultural taboos with it being multicultural music that crossed a lot of cultural ties. Then literally what is called the death of disco happened and I cannot in good conscious not view that as anything apolitical.

Then the 1980s came along and the 80s are more of what your describing than the 60s and 70s. The 1980s had the cold war going on and the 80s are known for having hyperconsumerist culture with a sense of neoliberal twinge that got only to the bare bones of these movements sometimes.

But like any decade just because that became more of the dominant culture doesn't mean that these movements completely died down. It still made its mark on the world and the world did change more.

I don't buy it when people say change is linear its not. It goes through ups and downs

 

[MorganBlack]

Wicca was originally quite fun and forward-thinking.

When was a kid in the early 1980's a Wiccan High Priest of a seminal covern was a member of my Unitarian church. One Halloween he conducted a seance. It was cool.

Most of the Wiccans I knew in the late 1980s were younger Boomer computer programmers, college students, or writers, or involved in the nascent tech and game industry, or comics, table top RPGs. They were older than I, but we could talk esotericism and Crowley. They threw great parties. It was a blast.

Then, in the late 1980s, something started to change. .I met my first Dianic Wiccan around 1992 or so. Upon meeting her she made many ugly, bigoted, disparaging comments about all men that I, as a Latino, took it as outright racism. It only got progressively worse from there.

Soon everyone was reading Starhawk. Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade, and Marion Zimmer Bradley. The Chalice and the Blade was called 'Maybe the most significant work published in all our lifetimes.' by the LA Weekly. If you read it now, it basically reads like fantasy lit for suburbanite white women.

It progressively got weirder and weirder: polyamory, lots of drugs, weaponized therapy speak, and a shit ton of spite and bitterness. I had stopped hanging out with them before it got too bad. I felt at the time it became less about magic (I mean, what little they actually had at that time.) and was morphing into a social club for bored white folks looking for things to be upset about.

 

[sarsippius]

I feel like these systems are a distraction mostly, Wicca runs along the lines of Astrology in the sense the mysticism has been made corporate in many ways to the point where the practitioners rarely engage with the more esoteric elements of the beliefs. For many of the people I've spoken to that believe in the pop-occult magic systems... I've noticed reluctancy to engage in anything that pushes cognition past just the tangible ritual. I speak from anecdote, of course.

 

[ModernMagus]

The virtue signaling is tiresome and often factually incorrect. I'm old which means nothing more than I've experienced and witnessed many things directly. As mentioned previously, Gardner created Wicca for his personal reasons and some were to appeal to the feminine ego and understanding. Originally it was almost directly from Thelema with a new, pleasant to many, skin. Later, in an effort to remain fashionable, it would acquire other traditions (voodoo, hoodoo, chaos magic, pgm, etc.). It will continue to do so. There is nothing righteous about any of it. It's simply a different way to practice that some enjoy.

 

[Ohana]

Wicca was originally quite fun and forward-thinking.

When was a kid in the early 1980's a Wiccan High Priest of a seminal covern was a member of my Unitarian church. One Halloween he conducted a seance. It was cool.

Then, in the late 1980s, something started to change. .I met my first Dianic Wiccan around 1992 or so. Upon meeting her she made many ugly, bigoted, disparaging comments about all men that I, as a Latino, took it as outright racism. It only got progressively worse from there.

Soon everyone was reading Starhawk. Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade, and Marion Zimmer Bradley. The Chalice and the Blade was called 'Maybe the most significant work published in all our lifetimes.' by the LA Weekly. If you read it now, it basically reads like fantasy lit for suburbanite white women.

White people in general or atleast the culture tend to use morality as shield to blind themselves. As if there is something pure that can be "tainted" or to them "tinted"

White women have to deal with misogyny but are also white. So becomes the people who can relate to oppressed non white people more. Ruling parties know that so they pushe women that are white to be "pure" the most.

Its why I think the culture of purity is pushed more towards women and less towards men. Men generally are allowed to be less "pure" because white men don't have to deal with misogyny so white supremacist culture can remain even without them being "pure" or nobler. But that was a lie for white supremacist culture.

Now I think trying to reach a higher goal and help others is nice but when it becomes the sole identity and their is no self to it. Its mmm. That part of culture is kind of creepy not going to lie.

 

[Accipeveldare]

I feel like some Wiccan practice could labelled as appropriation.

It is a legit system. However, given the current culture surrounding it, i would not recommend anybody start out with wicca. Once you have eyes and mind that are careful enough to discern what is true vs what is false in most things and to not blindly believe everything they say and come up with your own conclusions, then yes, wicca is good. Id recommend applying the scientific method to it as with all other occult things just as Crowley did.

 

[Reizo]

I think individuals who are coming up on things now are lucky to have a proliferation of material available at their fingertips on a diverse array of subjects, and a lot of good culturally sensitive discourse, too. Back in the day I pretty much thought occult equals "witchcraft" or "Satanism." After discovering the most popular witchcraft books were tissue paper-thin on content I was fortunate enough to discover "Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick" by Frater Barrabbas, originally of Alexandrian Wiccan lineage I believe, which was fairly crunchy. There's definitely some good stuff out there, its just a bit underground because it probably doesn't sell. The Golden Dawn-informed rituals ended up not being for me, but it got me checking out everything under the sun now that I knew more was out there