Post by robincragin on Nov 5, 2015 11:21:09 GMT -5
Just hearing this topic----what words are running through your head?
These words can cause discomfort and embarrassment. They're difficult to explain to your friends and family. They can be downright hard to accept. It's all of those darn Witchy words! Wicca is a practice filled with terms that can enchant, amuse, and even bewilder.
Ironically, Wicca is not ultimately about words. Wiccan practices aim to take the practitioner far beyond the limiting worlds of language and terminology. The words of the Craft are meant to transport the practitioner into the heart of life itself, where words are ultimately limitations and qualifiers. More specifically, they can guide practitioners toward a direct mystical experience of deity, nature, and the individual spirit. Words literate and become meaningless when the practitioner achieves this experiential state of understanding. Wicks therefore first come to accept that words are only valuable as signposts and guides that point toward mystic experience.
To Wiccans, a word is not reality itself. For example: the word "apple" is not itself and apple. You ca hear the word and understand it intellectually. However, in order to know an apple you must hold it in your hands, smell it, and take a big juicy bite. Likewise, the word "god" is not deity itself. It is only a mental abstraction, a convenient symbol that we can all use to refer to something that goes beyond the word.
As you walk the Wiccan path, you will eventually have your own experiences of direct mystical contact with the divine. But before that happens, it is understandable and natural that you might struggle with the language of Wicca, which often flies in the face of convention and social norm.
Here is your assignment:
Wicca
Witchcraft
Power
Ritual
Magic
Occult
Pagan
Spell
Earth-Religion
With each of these words, explore the following questions:
What is my comfort level in using each word?
How do I understand each word?
How do I imagine that each word impacts other people who are not involved with Wicca?
Write each word down and commit your feelings about each word and ask these questions for each one.
WICCA
Wicca is both a religion of nature and a magical practice. It is a spiritual tradition centered in the earth-based, mystic practices of the people of Old Europe. Wicca is a shamanic spiritual path. The word “shaman” is an anthropological one that refers to a type of indigenous, natural-magic practitioner. A shaman is a person, usually in a tribal culture, who is a healer and an interpreter of the unseen world (which shamans refer to as the world of spirits). She or he conducts rites of passage, divines the future, and walks the path of magic. Although Wicca is not a path that can claim an unbroken lineage to the ancient past, many of the contemporary practices of Wicca are adapted from traditional shamanic practices that link us back to our tribal ancestry. Wiccans understand the natural world, the sun, the moon, the seasons, male and female bodies and the earth itself as expressions of sacredness. Learning to live in conscious connection with all of nature (including human nature) within each moment helps Wiccans forge a deep bond with the divine.
Contemporary linguists debate the origins of the word “Wicca.” Some say that it originated from the Indo-European root weik; it is a term that links the concepts of religion and magic. Other linguists assert that the word is of Middle-English origin, derived from the Anglo-Saxon root word wic, which means “to bend or the shape.” An alternative meaning of the root word is wise. From this root, it is believed that the word “Wicca” means both “the craft of the wise” and “the craft of bending and shaping.” Both meanings are applicable to contemporary Wiccans. Their simple spiritual practices such as meditation and mindfulness in daily activity help them acquire mental, emotional, and spiritual flexibility. Wiccan practice bending and shaping their consciousness so that they live in accord with each moment of life.
Wicca is not an “ancient” religion. It has practices that contemporary practitioners have derived from (and interpreted from) the ancient past, but it is a religion of recent development. The contemporary Craft traces much of its known lineage to approximately the 1950s in England. Gerald Gardner, a retired civil servant, is generally cited among Witchcraft historians and many practitioners as the founder of contemporary Wicca. Gardner claimed to have been initiated by a woman named Dorothy Clutterbuck into what he called the Old Religion in the New Forest area in 1939. He further claimed that the coven into which he was initiated was one of a cluster founded some forty years earlier by a man named George Pickingell. According to Gardner, Pickingell asserted that his “lineage” was founded on a succession of intimations that stretched back some eight centuries. Some Witchcraft history enthusiasts believe that Gardner pieced together his version of Wicca from elements of obscure occult literature and contributions from Aleister Crowley, a famous early-twentieth-cantury occultist, a contemporary of Gardner and founder of the Golden Dawn. Whether or not Gardner’s assertions or his claims of lineage are factual, we do not know for certain. However, he was the first of a succession of individuals to step forward and publish what was then considered authentic Witchcraft material.
WITCHCRAFT
Throughout the Middle Ages and particularly during the Renaissance period, the word “Witchcraft” was liberally applied by the Christian church and its authorities to the native religious practices and customs that existed for thousands of years before Christianity. Many people with indigenous European spiritual roots met their fates on the gallows or in the fire simply because of their religious expression. Aside from practitioners of native spiritual beliefs, there were other groups of people that the church targeted, tortured, and burned for the crime of “Witchcraft.” One might be accused of Witchcraft simply because of a bad dream, or because one was left-handed or had bodily imperfections (believed to be “devil’s-marks”). Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, unwed women, midwives, herbal healers, social outcasts, people who were too rich or too poor, the disabled, and the infirm were also convicted for the crime of “Witchcraft.” Some scholars claim that over 250,000 people were put to death for the crime of Witchcraft during the “burning times” in Europe, while others say the number reached as high as nine million. The contemporary spiritual practice of Witchcraft is based on many of the old customs and folk wisdom of old Europe. Because of this, practitioners have reclaimed the word “Witch.” Contemporary practitioners view the word as one of power and they reclaim it in an effort to be mindful of the cost or religious intolerance, to release negative associations and to forge a new future.
POWER
For Wiccans, power has little to do with control over people and things. Power is a natural state of being that comes from uniting with the vast flow of nature and operating from an experience of accord with that flow. In the Wiccan view, power is a shared, subtle energy that flows through all things.
RITUAL
Ritual is the enactment of a myth. In this definition, the word myth refers to a system of spiritual symbols. Rituals in Wicca usually involve symbolic words, sounds, colors, and gestures. Wiccans understand that each element of a ritual speaks the language of the deep mind (the unconscious mind), and thus awakens the movement of psychological and spiritual energy. The symbols in Wiccan ritual emerge from both time-honored, shared mythological correspondences (for example, traditional associations that orient the practitioner to time, place, color, sound, and movement) and personal associations that can emerge from dreams, meditations, and personal insights.
MAGIC
Magic is a term that sometimes causes confusion and fear. Many people recall scenes from movies, television shows, or fairy tales when they first think of magic. In the popular imagination, magic is about getting things that you want through forbidden, dark, or dangerous forces. Wiccan understand magic as a natural process. It is the ability to change one’s consciousness—-one’s frame of mind. It is the ability to arrive at substantial realizations and broadening insights that change one’s relationship as a human being to the world. Out of one’s change of consciousness comes change in the world. The processes of magic reveal out internal patterns that can help us to live in close contact with our full human power. The methods of magic are simple. Lighting candles, chanting, or focusing one’s intention with drumming or dancing are all methods that Wiccans use to create magic and change.
OCCULT
The word “occult,” derived from the Latin occultusanum, literally means”secret.” Few Wiccans today use this term when referring to their contemporary magical or spiritual practices. However, the word refers to hidden teachings that are available to adepts of any magical or metaphysical path.
PAGAN
Pagan comes from the Latin paganus, a peasant or country dweller. Formerly people used the word in reference to a non-Christian. The word then expanded over time to pejoratively mean anyone who was not “of The Book,” namely a person who was not a Christian, Jew, or Muslim. It gained negative connotations over time and came to mean someone who was an uncivilized “idolater.” In contemporary practice, a pagan is someone who follows a polytheistic/pantheistic spiritual system. Typically, a pagan is someone who believes that the universe, the earth, and all of its inhabitants contain divinity.
SPELL
A symbolic act through which anyone can channel nonphysical energies to attain some particular goal.
EARTH-RELIGION
A pagan spiritual path that reveres the earth, the seasons, and all creatures.
These words can cause discomfort and embarrassment. They're difficult to explain to your friends and family. They can be downright hard to accept. It's all of those darn Witchy words! Wicca is a practice filled with terms that can enchant, amuse, and even bewilder.
Ironically, Wicca is not ultimately about words. Wiccan practices aim to take the practitioner far beyond the limiting worlds of language and terminology. The words of the Craft are meant to transport the practitioner into the heart of life itself, where words are ultimately limitations and qualifiers. More specifically, they can guide practitioners toward a direct mystical experience of deity, nature, and the individual spirit. Words literate and become meaningless when the practitioner achieves this experiential state of understanding. Wicks therefore first come to accept that words are only valuable as signposts and guides that point toward mystic experience.
To Wiccans, a word is not reality itself. For example: the word "apple" is not itself and apple. You ca hear the word and understand it intellectually. However, in order to know an apple you must hold it in your hands, smell it, and take a big juicy bite. Likewise, the word "god" is not deity itself. It is only a mental abstraction, a convenient symbol that we can all use to refer to something that goes beyond the word.
As you walk the Wiccan path, you will eventually have your own experiences of direct mystical contact with the divine. But before that happens, it is understandable and natural that you might struggle with the language of Wicca, which often flies in the face of convention and social norm.
Here is your assignment:
Wicca
Witchcraft
Power
Ritual
Magic
Occult
Pagan
Spell
Earth-Religion
With each of these words, explore the following questions:
What is my comfort level in using each word?
How do I understand each word?
How do I imagine that each word impacts other people who are not involved with Wicca?
Write each word down and commit your feelings about each word and ask these questions for each one.
WICCA
Wicca is both a religion of nature and a magical practice. It is a spiritual tradition centered in the earth-based, mystic practices of the people of Old Europe. Wicca is a shamanic spiritual path. The word “shaman” is an anthropological one that refers to a type of indigenous, natural-magic practitioner. A shaman is a person, usually in a tribal culture, who is a healer and an interpreter of the unseen world (which shamans refer to as the world of spirits). She or he conducts rites of passage, divines the future, and walks the path of magic. Although Wicca is not a path that can claim an unbroken lineage to the ancient past, many of the contemporary practices of Wicca are adapted from traditional shamanic practices that link us back to our tribal ancestry. Wiccans understand the natural world, the sun, the moon, the seasons, male and female bodies and the earth itself as expressions of sacredness. Learning to live in conscious connection with all of nature (including human nature) within each moment helps Wiccans forge a deep bond with the divine.
Contemporary linguists debate the origins of the word “Wicca.” Some say that it originated from the Indo-European root weik; it is a term that links the concepts of religion and magic. Other linguists assert that the word is of Middle-English origin, derived from the Anglo-Saxon root word wic, which means “to bend or the shape.” An alternative meaning of the root word is wise. From this root, it is believed that the word “Wicca” means both “the craft of the wise” and “the craft of bending and shaping.” Both meanings are applicable to contemporary Wiccans. Their simple spiritual practices such as meditation and mindfulness in daily activity help them acquire mental, emotional, and spiritual flexibility. Wiccan practice bending and shaping their consciousness so that they live in accord with each moment of life.
Wicca is not an “ancient” religion. It has practices that contemporary practitioners have derived from (and interpreted from) the ancient past, but it is a religion of recent development. The contemporary Craft traces much of its known lineage to approximately the 1950s in England. Gerald Gardner, a retired civil servant, is generally cited among Witchcraft historians and many practitioners as the founder of contemporary Wicca. Gardner claimed to have been initiated by a woman named Dorothy Clutterbuck into what he called the Old Religion in the New Forest area in 1939. He further claimed that the coven into which he was initiated was one of a cluster founded some forty years earlier by a man named George Pickingell. According to Gardner, Pickingell asserted that his “lineage” was founded on a succession of intimations that stretched back some eight centuries. Some Witchcraft history enthusiasts believe that Gardner pieced together his version of Wicca from elements of obscure occult literature and contributions from Aleister Crowley, a famous early-twentieth-cantury occultist, a contemporary of Gardner and founder of the Golden Dawn. Whether or not Gardner’s assertions or his claims of lineage are factual, we do not know for certain. However, he was the first of a succession of individuals to step forward and publish what was then considered authentic Witchcraft material.
WITCHCRAFT
Throughout the Middle Ages and particularly during the Renaissance period, the word “Witchcraft” was liberally applied by the Christian church and its authorities to the native religious practices and customs that existed for thousands of years before Christianity. Many people with indigenous European spiritual roots met their fates on the gallows or in the fire simply because of their religious expression. Aside from practitioners of native spiritual beliefs, there were other groups of people that the church targeted, tortured, and burned for the crime of “Witchcraft.” One might be accused of Witchcraft simply because of a bad dream, or because one was left-handed or had bodily imperfections (believed to be “devil’s-marks”). Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, unwed women, midwives, herbal healers, social outcasts, people who were too rich or too poor, the disabled, and the infirm were also convicted for the crime of “Witchcraft.” Some scholars claim that over 250,000 people were put to death for the crime of Witchcraft during the “burning times” in Europe, while others say the number reached as high as nine million. The contemporary spiritual practice of Witchcraft is based on many of the old customs and folk wisdom of old Europe. Because of this, practitioners have reclaimed the word “Witch.” Contemporary practitioners view the word as one of power and they reclaim it in an effort to be mindful of the cost or religious intolerance, to release negative associations and to forge a new future.
POWER
For Wiccans, power has little to do with control over people and things. Power is a natural state of being that comes from uniting with the vast flow of nature and operating from an experience of accord with that flow. In the Wiccan view, power is a shared, subtle energy that flows through all things.
RITUAL
Ritual is the enactment of a myth. In this definition, the word myth refers to a system of spiritual symbols. Rituals in Wicca usually involve symbolic words, sounds, colors, and gestures. Wiccans understand that each element of a ritual speaks the language of the deep mind (the unconscious mind), and thus awakens the movement of psychological and spiritual energy. The symbols in Wiccan ritual emerge from both time-honored, shared mythological correspondences (for example, traditional associations that orient the practitioner to time, place, color, sound, and movement) and personal associations that can emerge from dreams, meditations, and personal insights.
MAGIC
Magic is a term that sometimes causes confusion and fear. Many people recall scenes from movies, television shows, or fairy tales when they first think of magic. In the popular imagination, magic is about getting things that you want through forbidden, dark, or dangerous forces. Wiccan understand magic as a natural process. It is the ability to change one’s consciousness—-one’s frame of mind. It is the ability to arrive at substantial realizations and broadening insights that change one’s relationship as a human being to the world. Out of one’s change of consciousness comes change in the world. The processes of magic reveal out internal patterns that can help us to live in close contact with our full human power. The methods of magic are simple. Lighting candles, chanting, or focusing one’s intention with drumming or dancing are all methods that Wiccans use to create magic and change.
OCCULT
The word “occult,” derived from the Latin occultusanum, literally means”secret.” Few Wiccans today use this term when referring to their contemporary magical or spiritual practices. However, the word refers to hidden teachings that are available to adepts of any magical or metaphysical path.
PAGAN
Pagan comes from the Latin paganus, a peasant or country dweller. Formerly people used the word in reference to a non-Christian. The word then expanded over time to pejoratively mean anyone who was not “of The Book,” namely a person who was not a Christian, Jew, or Muslim. It gained negative connotations over time and came to mean someone who was an uncivilized “idolater.” In contemporary practice, a pagan is someone who follows a polytheistic/pantheistic spiritual system. Typically, a pagan is someone who believes that the universe, the earth, and all of its inhabitants contain divinity.
SPELL
A symbolic act through which anyone can channel nonphysical energies to attain some particular goal.
EARTH-RELIGION
A pagan spiritual path that reveres the earth, the seasons, and all creatures.