Wicca for Beginners

About Thea Sabin

Thea is a professional editor, writer, and Web geek. She has been practicing Wicca since she was a teenager, which was longer ago than she cares to remember. In college, she reluctantly co-founded an eclectic Wiccan-pagan student organization. After this intense lesson in Wicca 101, crowd control, interpersonal politics, academic red tape, and politely wrangling protesting fundamentalists, she took her practice “underground” and spent the next decade working with a private women’s group. When that group disbanded, she sought out formal training in a British Traditional path, and over time was initiated and elevated to third degree in that tradition. Currently she and her husband run a British Traditional coven in the misty Pacific Northwest.

Thea has written for numerous pagan and nonpagan publications, and served as editor and astrology columnist for a large-circulation pagan newspaper. When she’s not glued to a computer writing something, she likes to do tai chi and watch bad Hong Kong gangster movies (but not at the same time).

Llewellyn Publications

Woodbury, Minnesota

Wicca for Beginners: Fundamentals of Philosophy & Practice
© 2010 by Thea Sabin.

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Conents

Acknowledgments

1
. What’s Wicca?

2
. Some Basic Wiccan Principles and Ethics

3
. Fundamental Wiccan Tools: Energy, Visualization, Grounding, and Shielding

4
. Trance, Meditation, and Pathworking

5
. The Circle: A Wiccan’s Sacred Space

6
. The Four Elements and the Four Quarters

7
. Getting to Know the Wiccan Gods

8
. Tools, Toys, and Altars

9
. Wiccan Holidays and the Wheel of the Year

10
. Putting It Together: Using What You’ve Learned

11
. So You’re Curious about Magic

12
. Where Do I Go from Here?

Further Reading

Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank
my grandmother, who always believed I would write a book, so I finally did. She believed that the power of positive thought could conquer anything; that home-baked bread and strawberry jam were some of life’s finest treasures; that astrology shows us the pattern of our full potential; that it’s okay to allow yourself one cheat when playing solitaire; that the fairies and Harvey the rabbit made off with her glasses and an entire chocolate cake; and in scaring the living daylights out of little girls by reading to them in the dark about the giant spiders of Mirkwood Forest while illuminating her face in ghastly shadows with a flashlight held under her chin.

I’d like to thank some of the other mystics and shamans who have had a profound influence on me and my spiritual path—Shekinah, Otto, Eran, Akasha, Dot, Helga, Mary, Pajaro, Abuela M., Sylvana, Melanie Fire Salamander, Bestia, Star, Tom, Alicia, and Grace. Each of you has given me wonderful gifts, whether you know it or not. My love and appreciation to all of you.

I’d like to thank my guinea pigs—I mean coveners—who teach me a hell of a lot more than I teach them.

I’d like to thank Pam for inspiration, low-rise jeans, Voodoo rituals, and toothless drag queens. Everyone should be lucky enough to have a friend like you.

Most important, I’d like to thank my husband, a scientist, Zen boy, and priest whose life is a study of the arts of being rationally irrational and finding the spiritual in the mundane. He lived with me while I wrote this book, and he still loves me anyway. By that measure alone he’d be a Wiccan saint, if we had saints. I love you, baby. Chop wood, carry water.

1

What’s Wicca?

Recently my husband and
I went to a coffee house to meet a man who was interested in becoming a student in our Wiccan study group. Like many Wiccans who lead teaching groups, we always arrange for our first meeting with a seeker—someone searching for his or her spiritual path—to be in a public place, for everyone’s safety and comfort. Over tea, we asked the seeker why he wanted Wiccan training. We ask everyone who talks to us about training this question. If they tell us they are looking for a nature-based religion, a path of self-empowerment, a way to commune with deity, or something along those lines, we continue the conversation. If they tell us they want to hex their ex-lovers, brew cauldrons full of toxic stuff, make others fall in love with them, worship the devil, or fly on broomsticks, we tell them they’re out of luck and politely suggest that they seek out a therapist.

When we asked the question of this seeker, he told us about how he had searched for information about Wicca in books and on the Internet, attended public Wiccan rituals, and visited metaphysical bookstores, but there was so much information available on the topic that he wasn’t sure what was Wicca and what was not. He was also at a loss about how to separate the spiritual stuff from the rest. As he put it, “I know there’s got to be a religion in there somewhere.” He decided to find a teacher to help him sort it all out.

It was easy to understand why he was confused. During the last several years, Wicca and magic have stormed the American pop culture scene. We’ve been watching
Bewitched
for quite a while, but
Sabrina the Teenage Witch
, the Harry Potter films,
The Lord of the Rings
,
Charmed
, and
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
have spurred a new wave of seekers, despite the fact that most of these shows and films have precious little to do with real Wicca. It’s gotten to the point where someone has coined the term “Generation Hex” for all of the teenagers and twenty-somethings who have been turned on to Wicca by the current magical media blitz. There are more Wicca books on the market than ever, and more than 6,000 Wicca-related Web sites on the Internet. There are Wiccan radio shows, Wiccan umbrella organizations, and state-certified Wiccan churches. And there’s even Secret Spells Barbie, complete with glittery costume, cauldron, and “magic” powder. Okay, technically she’s not Wiccan, but she definitely contributes to the confusion.

With all of this sudden popularity, you’d think that Wicca and magic had finally made it into the mainstream. For better or worse, this isn’t true. The Wicca media glut has only given people more false, confusing, and contradictory ideas about what Wicca is. Although it’s probable that more people are familiar with the word “Wicca” than ever before, there is no cohesive, accurate image of Wiccans in pop culture. Thanks to films and prime-time television, Wiccans may have “graduated” from the green-faced hag with the pointy hat to sexy women with navel rings in scanty clothes who help others with their “powers,” but this is not a more accurate portrayal (there are plenty of male Wiccans, for one thing), and it’s not an improvement.

Even Wiccans get confused about what Wicca is sometimes. In the Wiccan community there is a lot of discussion (okay, arguing) about what makes a Wiccan. I’m not going to jump into that fray here. Instead, I want this book to give you a broad-based understanding of Wicca so you can decide what the truth is for yourself.

For the purpose of this book, here are some definitions:

•
A Wiccan is a person who is following the Wiccan religion/spiritual path and has either undergone a Wiccan initiation or has formally and ritually declared him- or herself Wiccan.

•
Some Wiccans use the words “Wiccan” and “witch” interchangeably, but there are witches who do not consider themselves Wiccans. Wiccans are a subgroup of witches.

•
Wiccans and witches are both subgroups of a larger group: pagans. Pagans are practitioners of earth-based religions. Most Wiccans and witches consider themselves pagan, but not all pagans are Wiccans or witches. Christians sometimes call anyone who is not a Christian, Muslim, or Jew a pagan, but we’re not going with that definition.

•
In this book, when I use the term “witchcraft,” I’m referring to what Wiccans and witches do: religious ritual and spell work. I use the term “Wicca” to refer to the religion itself.

So, just what
is
Wicca? There are a lot of answers to that question. Here are a few of the more widely accepted ones.

Wicca Is a “New Old” Religion

Wicca is a new religion that combines surviving folk traditions and more modern elements. It is loosely based on Western European pagan rites and rituals that have been performed for centuries—before, during, and after the time of Jesus—such as reverence of nature, observance of the cycle of the seasons, celebration of the harvest, and doing magic. Some of the structure of these old rites still survives in Wicca, but most of the religion’s structure and many of its practices are more modern. Some of the framework of the religion is culled from medieval grimoires (books of magic), occult organizations such as the Golden Dawn, and techniques that today’s Wiccans make up on the fly because they suit their purposes or the situation. Wicca is a living, evolving religion.

Wicca isn’t the same thing as the kind of witchcraft you read about in most of the history books, but the histories of the two are intertwined. Witchcraft, in some form or another, has probably been around as long as people have been. Certainly it’s mentioned in classical literature, like in the stories of Medea and Circe, and of course in documents of the early Christian Church. One of the earliest and most famous church documents about witchcraft is the
Canon Episcopi
, which had a profound and long-lasting impact on the philosophy of Christians toward witchcraft and paganism. It was incorporated into canon law in the twelfth century, but it is believed to be much older (one possible year of origin is AD 906). The
Canon
said, essentially, that witchcraft was an illusion that originated in dreams, and to believe in it was heresy, or against the teachings of the church. A famous section of the
Canon
states:

Certain abandoned women, perverted by Satan, seduced by illusions and phantasms of demons, believe and openly profess that, in the dead of night, they ride upon certain beasts with the pagan goddess Diana, with a countless horde of women, and in the silence of the dead of the night to traverse great spaces of earth, and obey her commands as their mistress . . . but it were well if they alone perished in their infidelity and did not draw so many others along with them into the pit of their faithlessness. For an innumerable multitude, deceived by this false opinion, believe this to be true, and so believing, wander from right faith and relapse into pagan errors when they think there is any divinity or power except the one God.
[1]

The idea that believing in witchcraft and paganism was heresy persisted until the reign of Pope Innocent VIII, who issued
Summis desiderantes affectibus
, a papal bull reversing the
Canon
and stating that witchcraft
did
exist and that to perform it was heresy. Although several church letters advocating positions that would reverse the
Canon Episcopi
had been issued prior to
Summis desiderantes affectibus
, the new bull was most effective because it was published in 1484, around the time of the invention of the printing press, and attached as a prefix to the widely distributed
Malleus Maleficarum
, the infamous manual on finding, torturing, and prosecuting suspected witches, which was written by Dominican inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger.

This bull cleared the way for the Inquisition, the European witch hunts, and the deaths of thousands of people accused of the heresy of witchcraft. And along with the
Malleus
, it helped to solidify, codify, and spread several of the ideas that came to be associated closely with medieval witchcraft. These included the notion that witches signed a pact with the devil (often solemnized by kissing his behind, something no self-respecting Wiccan would do). Of course, this made the consequences for witchcraft much more serious than they had been, and the witch hunts were born.

Pre-Christian rites were considered superstition at best, and witchcraft or devil worship at worst, so, since witchcraft was now formally considered a heresy by the church, people who were accused of performing pagan rites were prosecuted. During the witch hunts, many European pre-Christian pagan traditions died out, took on a Catholic veneer, or went underground. Some of this would have happened even without the hunts, since traditions rarely last completely intact for thousands of years. However, pockets of pagan practice and vestiges of the “old ways” survived. We see remnants of some of them today in traditions like the Morris men and Maypole dancers in England.

On one hand, this history of witchcraft and the church has nothing to do with Wicca. The “Satanic witchcraft” that the church persecuted, if it ever even existed, was a Christian heresy that included a pact with the devil, black magic, human sacrifice, and other atrocities. Wiccans do not believe in Satan, Wicca is not a Christian heresy (it’s a religion unto itself), and Wiccans find black magic and human sacrifice as abhorrent as anyone else does. On the other hand, the impact that the history of Satanic witchcraft does have on Wiccans is twofold. First, the church equated even benevolent pre-Christian pagan practices, which are a root of modern Wicca, with Satanic witchcraft. Second, many people today still believe that Satanic witchcraft and paganism are the same thing.

In 1921, Dr. Margaret Murray wrote
The Witch-Cult in Western Europe
, in which she hypothesized that medieval witchcraft was in fact
not
a Christian heresy, but an organized pagan fertility cult that had survived, reasonably intact, through the Middle Ages. Her theory had great romantic appeal, but she had no proof. Her book implied that medieval witches were much more organized than they could possibly have been without phones, cars, the Internet, or even a common language (the vernacular of commoners was often different than that of nobles), and that there was more consistency between “covens” of witches than historians had previously believed. Over the years, most of Murray’s theories have been discredited, and the consistency between accounts of medieval witchcraft has been attributed more to the impact of the
Malleus Maleficarum
than to survival of an intact pagan cult. If many of the inquisitors who tried witches and kept records of the trials were operating from the same manual, so to speak, they were likely to get the same results. But however fanciful Murray’s ideas about witchcraft, they had a lasting effect on what would become modern Wicca, and several of them persist to this day.

In 1951, the last witchcraft law was repealed in England, which freed Gerald Brosseau Gardner to write
Witchcraft Today
, published in 1954, and
The Meaning of Witchcraft
, published in 1959—two nonfiction books that would have a tremendous impact on the Wiccan religion. Gardner was a British civil servant who was born in the late 1800s and lived most of the first half of his life abroad, working in Ceylon, Borneo, and Malaysia. He studied foreign cultures and became an expert on the kris, a Malaysian ritual knife. When he returned to England, he looked for others who were interested in esoteric teachings, and his search brought him to a Rosicrucian theater run by a group called the Fellowship of Crotona. Gardner wasn’t too impressed with the theater or the Fellowship, but there was a small group of participants that intrigued him. This group later took Gardner into their confidence and told him that they were witches and that they had known him in a previous life. Gardner claims that through them he was initiated and became a witch himself.