Craft ritual usually starts with casting and creating this magical space and ritually purifying it with the ancient elements: fire, water, earth, and air. The circle is cast with a ritual sword, wand, or athame (a small, usually black-handled and double-bladed dagger that is used by almost all covens, whatever their tradition). Different covens have different symbologies, but often the sword represents air, the wand represents fire, the cup water, and the pentacleâa round, inscribed disk of wax or metalâearth.
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When the circle is cast, often the gods and goddesses are invoked.
Some covens use music, chanting, and dancing to raise psychic energy within the circle. Psychic healing is often attempted, with varying degrees of success. The most common form of “working” is known as “raising a cone of power.” This is done by chanting or dancing (or both) or running around the circle. The “cone of power” is really the combined wills of the group, intensified through ritual and meditative techniques, focused on an end collectively agreed upon. Usually a priestess or priest directs the cone; when she or he senses that it has been raised, it is focused and directed with the mind and shot toward its destination.
Many covens also engage in more “spiritual” or “religious” workings. Many of the revivalist covens have rituals in which the Goddess, symbolized by the moon, is “drawn down” into a priestess of the coven who, at times, goes into trance and is “possessed by” or “incarnates” or “aspects” the Goddess. Similarly, there are rituals where the God force is drawn down into the priest who takes the role of the God in the circle. In these rituals Witches
become
the gods within the circle, actualizing that potentiality. When done well, these can be among the most powerful experiences. I have seen people really change in such rituals. I have also seen these rituals become shams.
This is perhaps the place to talk about sexual rites, which are often described in popular books on Wicca. I have found very few covens that engage in explicitly sexual rituals. Many use sexual symbolism and poetry, but rarely is the sex act actualized. The reason for this is a strange one. Most coven leaders I have talked to feel that incorporating sex into rituals is playing with explosive chemicals, because the people in their covens are simply not ready for it. Of course, there are some groups that do use sex in ritual. And, in its highest form, the “Great Rite,” often alluded to by the media, is a sublime religious experience. Properly understood, it is notâas the press would have us believeâthe carryings on of bored suburban swingers. The idea behind the “Great Rite” is that a woman who, through ritual, has “incarnated” or
become
the Goddess, and a man who, through ritual, has “incarnated” or
become
the Godâin other words, two people who have drawn down into themselves these archetypal forces, or, if you will, have allowed these forces within them to surfaceâcan have a spiritual and psychical union that is truly divine. It is the modern form of the sacred marriage, or “hierogamy,” that appears in many ancient religions.
Most covens meet for spiritual, psychic, and social types of “work.” I have known covens that wrote poetry, others that put on mystery plays or simply worked for the good of their members. I have known covens that created astral temples to Athena and Demeter, or spent most of their time in reforestation work, or put their energy into the feminist movement.
Most covens meet at “esbats.” Most scholars believe Murray invented this term. These are working meetings that can occur at the full moon, or the new moon, or every weekend, or once a week, or whenever. Covens also usually meet on the “sabbats,” the eight great festivals of European Paganism, the Quarter days and the Cross Quarter days. The lesser four are the solstices and the equinoxes. The greater sabbats are:
Samhain
(Halloween or November Eve), the Celtic New Year, the day when the walls between the worlds were said to be thinnest and when contact with one's ancestors took place; Imbolc, or Oimelc (February 1), the winter purification festival, the time of the beginning of spring movement;
Beltane
(May 1), the great fertility festival, the marriage of God and Goddesses;
Lughnasadh
(August 1), the festival of first fruits and, in some traditions, the time of the fight between the bull and stag god for the Lady, or the death of the Sacred King. These are the briefest of descriptions, and different Craft traditions, following different myth cycles from different parts of Europe, treat the festivals in diverse ways. But almost all traditions at least celebrate Samhain and Beltane.
These festivals renew a sense of living communion with natural cycles, with the changes of season and land. But many Wiccans, almost always an innovative group, are perfectly capable of changing the festivals and their meanings. As one priestess from a city in Ohio remarked to me, “We were sitting around trying to decide what we were going to do for the Summer Solstice [June 21]. What did the solstice mean to us here? And we realized it didn't mean a hell of a lot. So why were we celebrating? We decided that we would try and celebrate new festivals, tied in to things that really mean something to us.”
In fact, a few Witches have totally rebelled against most of the festival rituals that have come down to them. One man wrote to me:
Most Craft rituals that I've observed are completely absurd, because they're rooted in traditions alien to the people who are performing them. Very few people involved in re-created Celtic Paganism even bother to learn Old Irish or Welsh, let alone go beyond that and really try to understand what the various symbolisms were supposed to mean. . . . I've been trying to get together a group of people to invent a Pagan ritual based on modern English and symbolism that has real meaning to a modern American.
Everyone says, “That's obvious,” when I point out the true modern equivalent to a sword to a modern American, even a “liberated” one, is a .38 police specialâlike they see on TV showsâor a military rifle, or possibly the Colt .45 of Western movies, but swords are still used in magical and Pagan rites and people think it's absurd to even suggest substituting guns.
Personally I have no desire to handle guns, and swords have a beauty and romanticism that I find acceptable, but the point is well taken; many feel that the festivals and rituals of Wicca must begin to fit changing times and needs.
The deities of most Wicca groups are two: the God, the lord of animals, lord of death and beyond, and the Goddess, the Triple Goddess in her three aspects: Maiden, Mother, and Crone. Each aspect is symbolized by a phase of the moonâthe waxing crescent, the full moon, and the waning crescent. In general, there is a great divergence among the Wicca as to what these “gods” are. Are they thought forms, built up over centuries? Are they archetypes? Are they literal entities? The answer depends on whom you talk to.
The names used for the gods also differ, depending on tradition and group. Most often the names are Celtic, Greek, or Latin. Most Witches do say that the polytheistic personification of the gods is what allows them to make contact with Divine Reality; that while Divine Reality may ultimately be unknowable, personification allows one to begin to approach it.
Most Witches believe in some form of reincarnation. Many believe in the “threefold law”: that whatever you do returns to you threefold. Some Witches don't believe in the threefold law, but most believe that you get back what you give out. And I must stress that I have met priests and priestesses in the Craft who are agnostic on all “beliefs,” who joined the Craft simply because they found its poetry beautiful or its “path” self-actualizing.
Some covens meet in robes, some in street clothes. Some work nudeâthe revivalist term is “skyclad”âgenerally because of the freedom they feel nudity engenders or because of its leveling quality. Gardner may be responsible for much of the nudity in the Craft. Many covens in the United States follow the sensible custom of nudity in the summer and clothes in the winter.
Most covens have an entry or initiation ceremony. Sometimes it's very simple; sometimes it's complex, involving a test, an oath, and a symbolic rite of death and rebirth. The concept of initiation is certainly a rich one. A woman who had just been initiated into a coven wrote:
The push in the Magic Circle was like the slap given the newborn, welcoming it into a new life. The room was crowded with people I could not see, but whose presence made me feel I was on a witness stand.
My ankle was tiedâneither bound nor free. What is this strange state of limbo that causes me to run in circles, stumbling as I do in everyday life . . . but not really circles? I felt I was racing through a long tunnel. In a sense I felt bound in a special way to living my life with a fresh consciousness, glowing and unconfined . . . a dedication of who I really am . . . a responsibility. My forehead on the altar awakened me: my mind must become the altar for the Mother, my body the living temple for the Gods.
The abrupt, almost harsh order to kneel reminds me of the kind of acceptance I must make when things in my life do not go pleasantly for me.
Blood rushing through every cell in my body felt warm and glowing.
When
Drawing Down the Moon
was first published, it was pretty easy to describe Wicca traditions: There was Gardnerian, Alexandrian, Dianic, Georgian, NROOGD, and Continental, which meant anything from Strega (Italian) to several other European offshoots. There was something called “Traditional Wicca,” but it wasn't exactly clear what it was. At this point, twenty-five years down the road, there are many more traditions and many more offshoots from those traditions. But one truism is still valid. In the same way that judging a good psychotherapist usually has nothing to do with whether he or she was trained as a Jungian, a Freudian, an Adlerian, a behaviorist, or whateverâthat the issue is the art, the style, and the humanity of that particular therapistâsimilarly, the tradition of a coven may be somewhat important, or it may be the least important thing about the group. It's also important to note that thirty-five years ago, when I was first looking for a group, most seekers had no knowledge of different traditions. All of us neophytes ended up with the group that happened to be in the neighborhood. Today it is very different. Anyone can go on the Web, look up
www.witchvox.com
on the Internet and find pages and pages on different Wiccan traditions and their history, with accurate and even scholarly information on each one. At last glance, there were fifty-seven essays on different traditions on the Web site. Most, but not all of them were Wiccan. A simple Web search will get you hundreds of other articles on different Wiccan traditions. I am listing only a dozen traditions here; I included only five in the last edition.
Stewart Farrar had some fairly amusing things to say about “traditions” in his book
What Witches Do.
He wrote:
The Hereditary witches are those, of course, who have kept the Craft alive in a direct family line. The theory is that those lines descend unbroken from the Old Religion itself; how true this is only the families know, if indeed they do know.
Turning to the “Traditional,” Farrar observed wryly:
Quite what it is that the Traditionals do (except that they apparently wear robes for their rites) I cannot say. They keep themselves to themselves, and I have never to my knowledge met one. . . .
Then he turns to the Gardnerians and Alexandrians, whose history is fairly easy to chart.
Most descriptions of traditions fall flat because they concentrate on the
forms
âthe rituals, for example, which lose almost everything in descriptionâand ignore the eternals, the nonverbal things, the experience of people. To quote Farrar again, the “detail of form” does not matter, “but the spirit and whether it works” matter greatly. In all the descriptions of traditions that follow it should be remembered that these differences are important for their richness and diversity, but most people join “the Craft” and
not
a particular tradition. Farrar, for example, joined the Craft because he found “its symbolism beautiful, its ritual satisfying, its tolerance (and indeed encouragement) of individual attitudes civilized, its deep roots nourishing, its small-group organization comradely and effective. . . .”
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It just happened to be an Alexandrian coven he wandered into on a newspaper assignment.
Similarly, Valiente writes:
I have danced at the Witches' Sabbat on many occasions, and found carefree enjoyment in it. I have stood under the stars at midnight and invoked the Old Gods; and I have found in such invocations of the most primeval powers, those of Life, Love and Death, an uplifting of consciousness that no orthodox religious service has ever given me.
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The fact that Valiente worked with Gardner at one time really seems irrelevant. Most people who join the Craft join the “tradition” that happens to be “around,” that exists in their particular area. And no matter what “tradition” they enter, the stories of how and why they entered the Craft are similar. For example, New York City priest Lyr ab Govannon described his entry into the Craft:
“I entered a Protestant seminary at the age of nineteen, partly because I came from a cultural milieu in which this was a high calling and partly because I am an innately religious person. But within a very short time I began to have doubts about what I was being prepared to teach.
“Then one day, I came across
King Jesus
by Robert Graves. The book treats Jesus as a Sacred King in the old tradition. It was a startling idea to me. Midway through the book there is a chapter in which Jesus seeks out Mary the Hairdresser, a priestess of the older religion which worshipped the Goddess, whom Mary calls, âMy Lady of The First Eve,' meaning Lilith. Pow! There was a concept of the deity as feminine, not just a subsidiary Virgin Mary, but THE big one.