The Worst Witch Visits Amazon.co.uk

[thessalian]

I was browsing Amazon's pagan section (well, Other Religions / Earth-based Religions, actually). At first it was just to try to find the title of a book I own but don't want to have to dig around for, but then some interesting stuff caught my eye and I decided to add to my wish list while I was about it. Anyway, I hit "The Witch's Bible" by Janet and Stewart Farrar - do I know these people in a "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" kind of way? I suspect I do, but I am teh suxxors at names. Anyway, I was reading through the reviews and found the following comment:

I've been practising wicca for over a year now and had had my eye on this book for a while. Though when i got it all i can say is i was very disappointed! The content was what i didn't need because it was making the craft sound very serious. Plus me being a teenager the pictures in the book weren't for a person of my age! I knew clearly enough why the people in the pictures were that way but they should have some kind of warning to the content. I hardly think pictures of people skyclad (naked) should be put with no warning in a book.

If your a teenager and are looking at this book i suggest you wait a while until you are ready to set up a coven e.t.c because it is also very coven orientated.

The coven-oriented bit ... fair enough. I don't have a coven myself - not that I'm not interested in that, but I've no idea who (or rather, how) to ask and am happy enough in my solitary faith and practice for the time being in any case. One of these days I'm going to do an entry on exactly what the hell it is I believe and do just to get it straight in my own head, but I suppose the best way of putting it touches on the old White Wolf - 'polytheistic Chorister', or 'pantheistic polytheistic pagan with a touch of the Gnostic' for those of you not au fait with Mage - the belief in and worship in the One by acknowledgement and worship of (not to mention magics involving) the Many. Anyway, so the coven thing is fine. It's the rest of it that makes me lose all grip on the English language for a few minutes as I sit and either laugh or grind my teeth and make incomprehensible noises of rage.

So "it was making the craft sound very serious", was it? I fear and loathe in equal measure the people who read this stuff and say, "Oh, I don't like this, it's too serious". I mean, shit, I may not be a Wiccan per se (or an anything in particular, for that matter) but what I do, I take seriously. Oh, yes, I take some joy in it, because there's as little point to not taking joy in your faith and practice as there is in not taking it seriously. But I take it seriously all the same, because if I don't ... well, isn't that just dicking around with something that you don't understand and can't be bothered to learn about? Shit, that'd be like fart-arsing about with a grenade launcher with only a basic knowledge of firearms and not bothering to read the manual because "it was making armed assault sound very serious".

The worst part of this is that the reviewer claims to have been practicing Wicca for over a year. If she thinks that The Witch's Bible is too serious, I have the strong suspicion that she is practicing pretty much entirely out of stuff like Ravenwolf, Teen Witch and, lords bless and keep us, The Charmed Book of Love Spells. (Oddly enough, I had my character make a joke about this the last time I played in CbN; little did I know...) This is the kind of person that I want to shake and say, "Look, I may not be a Wiccan myself, but even I know that what you are supposedly practicing is not Wicca as Wicca is meant to be. What this makes you is a fluffy, part of the reason why pagans are almost never taken seriously, and generally making a mockery of someone's faith. It's idiotic, it's rude, and what you are doing is dangerous. Now fuck off and get some respect for the craft, you little twit." Or something to that effect, anyway.

I suppose it just depresses me whenever people twist a valid faith to suit their own ends and then get so loud about it that their twisted views become the public consensus view. Christians become 'Bible-thumping fundamentalist fascists' to a man. Muslims become 'fanatical terrorists-in-training'. And pagans become either 'Satan-worshipping freaks' or 'tree-hugging crystal-waving attention whores' ... or a combination thereof. I just wish the people who do this would just shut up for a moment, or at least that the people who actually have a sensible clue about their respective faiths would speak out a little louder. I know, that's not what reasonable people do - reasonable people don't feel a need to advertise their faith in this kind of way because they're comfortable with their faith and don't need to yell about it to get justification from the masses - but if it's a choice between that and being lumped in with, in my case, emo kids, fluffies and otherkin, I'm fully prepared to shout it from the rooftops:

I AM A PAGAN AND I ACTUALLY HAVE A CLUE!

Thank you, and have a nice day.

Comments

[prettyarbitrary.livejournal.com]

Hear, hear.

As an aside, when I read this, at first I thought you said, "I have the strong suspicion that she is practicing pretty much entirely out of stuff like Ravenloft." Which amused me mightily as a geeky option for an insult.

[endis-ni.livejournal.com]

And this is why I miss a website called Why Wiccans Suck. The deliberately provocative title was so that the fluffbunnies and the attention junkies would read it, and hopefully learn something.

The basic thrust was that Wicca is a specific religion, studied over time with the aid of experience, not Silver bloody Ravenwolf. Flipping a gaudy paperback that says at the end "Congratulations! You're a fully paid up witch! Especially if you buy the sequels!" isn't really the way to go.

Since I'm horribly eclectic (unless there's some unknown trad called "British gently ecentric"- and now I want to see a breed of rose called that!) I tend to refer to myself as pagan rather than Wiccan. I could possibly argue "with some Wiccan influence," but nothing more than that.

[(Anonymous)]

Yay. It's that sort of people who make me very hesitant to associate with "Wiccans" at large. I'm pagan, and I lean more towards Witchcraft than Wicca--as far as terminology goes--but I am definitely solitary. Pratchett had us pegged when he wrote "The natural number in any coven is one." Or something thereabouts. I read it a long time ago.

I've encountered more fluff than substance in most of the outwardly pagan/wiccan people I've met. They're in it for the shock value of a non-traditional Faith. Or they like its lack of taboos on sexual experimentation and experience. Many of them should have just signed up on the Dionysian bandwagon and been happily Orphic for fuck's sake (pun intended). Others take "do as you will" to be an absolution from any social or moral responsibility beyond attending to their every own whim.

Few and far between are the well read, articulate, insightful witches. I'm not sure that's entirely a bad thing, though, because the haze of fluffy bunnies obscures the deeper magics of the truly Awakened (to twist a term familiar to Thess, here). A Tradition that empowers the individual and implies that they are immanently divine may be troubling or intimidating to Faiths that preach a transcendent divinity. In some ways, we get a lot of negative press... but at least it's largely bullshit and misunderstanding, and not hateful attacks on foundational tennants. I'd much rather argue about whether spells do or don't work, or do or don't resemble prayer than whether or not we actually embody the Goddess and have any right to work them.

If this teen has been practicing Wicca for a year and is scandalized by the human body... then she's missed something in her apprenticeship. With its flaws and foibles, the human body is a vessel for the divine. This does not elevate our flesh and bones to the level of relics--for most of us--but the "your body is a temple" thing is pretty resonant for most pagans. Sure, mine's a bit of a fixer-upper, but the plumbing is sound and the electricity works and it's probably slightly haunted and I'm okay with that. Working skyclad isn't about running around naked and, contrary to most people's perceptions, it's not mandatory or even advisable for most rites. But it's about owning your physical presence, whatever that might be, and being comfortable and confident in it. Most teens are not comfortable or confident about their body--most adults are not either--which is why working skyclad isn't really a teenage witch concept. I doubt To Ride A Silver Whatsit suggested that the underage Seeking population get nekkid with each other and contemplate the Great Rite. Then again, I didn't read that one, so maybe she did.

I'm preaching to the choir here, but I can sadly understand how a first year solitary would come to these conclusions. Most young wiccan/pagans are self-inducted. Very few have coven structures to learn from, or get enough encouragement to be wide-read, well-experienced and inrospective before deciding on their governing beliefs. Some of them grab Ravenwolf before reading Adler, because Adler's book is a cultural study not a how-to book. If we took away most of the pre-digested information and left the reference and theory books out on the shelves, maybe they'd think more critically and study harder. But there's a smattering of love spells, grimoires, every day spells, turn-your-ex-into-a-toad spells all at hand. Why learn the hard stuff when someone's made you a cookbook and promised it would work? Maybe I'm just feeling snarky, but doesn't it feel like we're training more Hermeticky witches this way than actually empowering them to work? At least we don't have to work about newbie-teen knowing how to grab a handful of things out of her kitchen cupboards, garden and desk drawer and Working on the fly... there's no "To Improvise..." yet in Silver's library.

Okay... I'm gonna stop there, because my rant is probably longer than yours now. =( And, you know, it's time to stir my magick cauldron. *winks*

~Kyr

The Witches' Bible

[theperfumer.livejournal.com]

Think of this as a source work. It outlines more-or-less the Alexandrian tradition, as it was practiced circa 1974, by the Irish Farrars. Stuart Farrar died a few years ago, and Janet has continued writing and publishing with her partner and co-author Gavin Bone. Back in the day, this was the only coherent book on Wiccan religion as it is really practiced within what the US calls "British Traditional Witchcraft" though when I was on your side of the pond, most old-school practitioners choke on the hilarity of such a concept as BTW (Gardner was a lot of things, but coherent wasn't one of them). You're not going to find much in the way of magic and spells as people have come to know them in the 90s; you're going to find religion, which is offputting to many.

The most valuable contribution of the Farrars are the books the Witches' God and the Witches' Goddess; it examines the archetypes most frequently used within Wiccan ritual construct and points out where these archetypes are linked to Wiccan theology.

Also, this site has long since replaced Why Wiccans Suck, and quite frankly has some real class to it, something that the aforementioned page did NOT have:

http://wicca.timerift.net/

Re: The Witches' Bible

[thessalian.livejournal.com]

Ah. Then they are the people I'm thinking of. dodgyhoodoo mentions Janet and Gavin a lot. *nod* Thanks in general. :)

Re: The Witches' Bible

[endis-ni.livejournal.com]

Thank you for that link, I'm having a good look at it now.

[lunarwhirl.livejournal.com]

ICK. >O