which witch is wicca?

It’s true that many influential sites in many different spheres of life are now offline, and there’s little to be done about it except to hope that the Wayback Machine picks up the pieces. I like to look through it at times, and recently found myself browsing one of a peculiar, religious nature. A notorious website was simply called Why Wiccans Suck.

The author certainly thought they did, and was ready to explain why in long, lingering detail. Bigoted Christian scared about devil worshiping pagans out to indoctrinate kids? A panic over Silver Ravenwolf books in schools? Not quite.

The time has come when I can hold my tongue no longer.

Every day I see "Wiccans" defile the religion of Wicca, just as "Christians" have defiled Christianity.

I used to be Wiccan. Used to be. It's important to note that I moved on to other things a few years ago. And below are a few of the reasons why I left.

Read, take heed, and honestly ask yourself if you are part of the problem.

It would seem that Why Wiccans Suck was an essay about Wiccans by a disillusioned former Wiccan who felt that Wicca had become cheapened, misunderstood, defiled by those who found it in the late 20th century. The author (and I will refer to the author as they, for I don’t know the gender) had been Wiccan, and still practiced the occult arts, but was now critical of Wicca as it presently existed - and itching to tell us why! The author of Why Wiccans Suck seemed to think these people - most of them young - were, in general, not serious mystic seekers, but rather, looking for attention, mystique, community, and shock value.

"Look at me, I'm a witch!" That oh-so-dangerous leap out of the broom closet, which usually occurs within the first week you buy a book about Wicca. You want to let everyone know about your change of religion, for some godawful reason, especially parents and authority figures. Religious beliefs can't possibly live quietly inside of your own head, they have to be shared! (But you aren't pushy about it, oh no... don't you just hate those Jehova's Witnesses?)

You don your little pentacle necklace and wear it in public, just -itching- for someone to walk up to you and start an argument. Then you'll be able to correct them about dozens of things you've learned word-for-word.... ("Male witches aren't called warlocks!") Oh! Don't you just love the attention you get?

Let’s back things up a bit, though. Maybe you know a bit about Wicca. Maybe you don’t. Let’s look at it a little more in detail…

Wicca as a religion began in the 1940s or 1950s as far as anyone can tell. It was the creative work of a man named Gerald Gardner. As an initiate of Aleister Crowley’s magical system and orders (the Ordo Templi Orientis and the A∴A∴), Gardner learned the basics of the Western magical tradition. He also practiced Crowley’s own religion of Thelema, known for its creed of Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. and Love is the law, love under will. Gardner took some inspiration from Crowley’s work when creating Wicca, a new religious movement founded based on Thelemic ideals and inquisitorial folklore about witches, such as stories of the witches’ moonlit forest sabbath, dancing in circles, and more.

These ideas were initially presented to seekers as nearly Paleolithic (or at very least quite old). Gardner often claimed they were handed down to him by older mentors. They arguably were, but these older mentors were likely Crowley and other figures in Western esotericism rather than shadowy witch-cult members in rural thickets. Later, when it became rather hard to hide that Wicca itself lacked the long historical pedigree Gardner had claimed, Wiccans began to claim it was a “reconstruction” of ancient beliefs… which just happened to neatly resemble modern Thelema and ceremonial magic, but anyways…

None of that says anything about any value judgement on Wiccan beliefs in and of themselves. One can still follow a Wiccan path (whatever that means to you - I really cannot say!) without it having a strong historical basis, I suppose. My own religious beliefs don’t have an ancient pedigree. I do, however, think that by claiming an ancient lineage and engaging in such heavy deception, both personal and public, early Wiccans set themselves up for complicated situations where the basics of their beliefs were misunderstood. Wicca quickly morphed into an anything goes New Age religion, commonly called “eclectic Wicca.”

From what I've seen, "Eclectic Wicca" is one percent Wicca and ninety-nine percent "make it up as I go along." Anything that you don't like gets thrown out. Getting spanked with a stick some forty times sounds too kinky? Forget the symbolism, just throw it out. Don't want twelve other people to see you naked? Just go buy a book called Solitary Wicca instead, and nevermind all that stuff about a witch's power being blocked by cloth. The Horned God looks too scary? Forget Him, just ignore that half of the religion. Everything agressive and masculine and dark should be avoided, not revered, right? If you can call yourself a "witch" then you can call yourself "eclectic," too, and be a Wiccan without actually following any of the Wiccan religion.

In in 1990s, it was easy to become a Wiccan witch right from your bedroom as a teenager, by purchasing one of those glossy Silver Ravenwolf paperbacks. If you were a little more discerning than that, there were other books on offer which, while a little more high-brow, offered similar lessons at base. You even had things like Silver Ravenwolf’s Teen Witch Kit, a sort of Wiccan playset for teenagers featuring salt and a plastic-feeling crystal that was supposed to be quartz.

There were novels about teenagers practicing Wicca (yes - Wicca specifically). These included the Sweep series about a girl named Morgan who learns she’s a sort of Wiccan princess. There was another, more sedate series, Circle of Three, about three teenagers studying the religion (mostly) seriously. Silver Ravenwolf herself wrote a series of teen mystery novels called Witch Chillers. And who could forget the movies and television shows piping Wicca directly at us? There was The Craft, of course, a classic now for many reasons. In it, a group of girls worship a shadowy unspecified deity labeled “Manon” while wielding arcane magical powers in Wiccan-style circles. And of course,

Charmed was a big one. I never watched it, nor Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which features a Wiccan character). They both no doubt helped to popularize the concept of the “good witch” in Hollywood, though, and, ultimately, made Wicca palatable to Middle America. At one point the author of Why Wiccans Suck accuses Wiccans of being secretly terrified of “going to hell,” seeing the average Wiccan’s beliefs as disingenuous, I guess…

So, you want to rebel? You might consider a complete 180, right down to devil-worship and black magic... but you don't have the guts to go that far, since you're still secretly terrified of going to Hell.

Hey, Wicca is perfect! It's actually not that evil, but your family doesn't know that. You can creep everyone out and keep your soul safe at the same time!

It’s true that in the 1990s early 2000s, Wiccans put a lot of effort into showing that witches were not evil nor going to hell, guys, totally not. As the author of Why Wiccans Suck notes, this attitude kind of threw a lot of non-Wiccan occultists, up to and including myself, under the bus for a while there…

Some of the most talented adepts I've ever met are left-handers. It's sickeningly arrogant to assume that all witches are, in fact, White Wiccans just like [insert fluffy author here] tells you to be. There are Real Witches who worship Satan. There are even athiest witches who don't believe in karma. The other pagans are sick and tired of reading dire warnings about the threefold law and the ethics of love spells. It's been said a thousand times already, and it still only applies to the Wiccans, so get out of the way -- some people are trying to practice serious hexcraft and blood sacrifice out here.

Charmed in particular seemed, in retrospect, to have done a lot of heavy lifting with that. I say this because I still hear pagans and witches quote that show as if it were there reality, ie, claiming that one can never do magic “for personal gain,” or against free will, or curse, etc, talking about a “law of three” etc. None of this is accurate even to Gardner’s original vision for Wicca, but has worked its way into popular consciousness.

I’m certain some people found occultism and Wicca and that sort of thing through pop culture and ended up with very enriching experiences. The entry point wasn’t the problem. In the 1990s, finding your way in the occult was easier said than done. Materials (outside of the newly-born internet) were difficult to come by outside of specialty shops at times. Books in mainstream shops tended to be mass-produced and poorly-researched (again, stuff like To Ride A Silver Broomstick or the Teen Witch Kit). Most people glommed onto the latter sort of thing over the years, and that I’ll admit.

Weirdly? Like I said, the author of Why Wiccans Suck didn’t seem to have given up occultism itself, just Wicca. In fact, they state at various points that their belief in magic is much stronger than that of your average Wiccan, whose magic they equate with “fancy prayer.” They argue that the “flashy” stuff should be investigated before being discarded as impossible. Not sure what could be meant by that. Maybe me, as someone skeptical of the “flashy” magic, someone who did snicker a bit just now at WWS’s epic takedown of the Wiccan community circa 2004, maybe just maybe I suck too, despite not being Wiccan!

I AM TALKING ABOUT YOU.
Anyone who comes to this webpage
intending to snicker at how wrong it is
or to get angry at the Stupid Fundie
is one of the people I'm talking about.

Do I mention crystal-hugging New Age
mental case flakes on this page
a n y w h e r e ? NO.
And yet, people keep mentioning them.
"Agreeing" with me, for God's sake...
-- too dense to realize that
I'm talking about THEM.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled rant...

A lot of the site draws a great degree of sympathy from me. It’s understandable that someone would (even as early as 2004) call out Wiccans for their bizarre cultural appropriations, pseudohistories and pushiness in the broader community, for example. At the time this all was publicized, I was actually very thankful for all that. I remember posting this site places myself, in chatrooms and sharing it with friends. Other people were bolder and would share it in other places, of course, where they knew it would spark discussion, and I’d watch this happen at times.

Reactions were often overt hostility. Most Wiccans wouldn’t even visit the site. They’d just see the URL, decide it was by an “Xian” and respond with some long diatribe about how the Bible is a lie anyways. The ones who did sometimes still couldn’t grasp the idea that someone would’ve been Wiccan, stopped being Wiccan, became another sort of occultist, and now written this diatribe. They also couldn’t wrap their heads around non-Wiccan occultists existing at all sometimes, or why someone other than one of those dastardly Christians would ever insult Wicca.

I’ve never been Wiccan. When I was about twelve, I got a book on the occult. I’ve practiced magic and divination on and off since, but my spiritual life has varied. So, do Wiccans really suck? It isn’t my place to say one way or another. This site made some interesting criticisms of the occult community as it existed in the early 2000s, though. I like to think that, with the site’s sheer notoriety (it was popular in pagan circles) it changed some minds about things, and I know it helped to formulate the backlash against the so-called fluffy bunny pagans of the 1990s.

Perhaps sites like this were, in part, why some of today’s pagans read Ronald Hutton instead of just thumbing through whatever gets shoveled out into the New Age section next. It was good that finally, people were questioning what made-up nonsense we were being told about “Ancient Irish Potato Goddesses” for once. Maybe a small subset of folks who stumbled across this kind of thing grew up to be more informed because of it, but possibly also more bitter, more cynical and harsh.

Tradeoffs can be rough...