DEJA BROOM: Switching Sides...Babies and Bath Water

"DEJA BROOM" denotes a blog repost from my old site.  Feel free to read anew, or refresh your memory to re-live the ranty goodness.  Otherwise, feel free to skip ahead to more modern mayhem

Another misconception worth exploding --- the idea that if you want to make the leap from practicing witchcraft as an eclectic practitioner and want to explore the rigors of undergoing traditional style practice, your prior experiences are worthless. That is wholly inaccurate.

It would be incorrect to say that you deserve "automatically get credit for time served"....as in, the idea that you should be instantly promoted to third degree in the trad's framework just because you were the leader of an eclectic coven or have had X number of years of solitary or online self-study.

It would also be incorrect to say that everything you've learned to date gets tossed out completely because you aren't considered up to snuff to traditionalists' eyes. It isn't a judgment being passed here.

When switching over from the eclectic witchcraft camp to undergo traditionalist Wicca training, you do not have to discount or discredit or otherwise give up any of your previous study endeavors. Your previous study is not without merit.

I'm here to tell you that I was a fine eclectic practitioner and competent witch for 20+ years before I decided to study with and eventually become elevated within a Gardnerian group. At no time during or since my "graduation" to autonomous high priestesshood as a Gard, was I ever told that I needed to relinquish my previous experiences outside the world of my Gard pathworking.

What is correct and I was told ---and there is much wisdom if not really painful humility in this--- was that I needed to let go of whatever I assumed I knew about what Gard-style witchery was and to put aside my ego built up by my prior eclectic work in order to be open to starting from square one while unlearning and relearning a few things as a Gard path student. The only way I could really let those lessons reach me was to put aside my personal affectations and unfounded expectations associated with my prior eclectic work and come at this Trad version as a newbie.

What I found most surprising about doing this was that only when I let go of my preconceptions about what I'd believed things aught to be and stopped interrupting my teachers to decry "how in my old group we did things like so-and-so"...that's when the epiphanies started to breakthrough for me. When I instead experienced the new trad stuff with the fresh perspective of someone who set aside, temporarily, my prior impressions of the rites and exercises....only then was I really able to get to the core of them in the way that my trad was trying to teach me.

I had to let go and stop trying to steer and justify everything in accordance to my eclectic mindset and trust that by looking at things from the basics all over again, I would be open to seeing things I'd missed or at least being open to different trad-style perspectives because I wasn't already so full of ideas that didn't apply to this new trad pathwork I was trying to grok.

Like the Karate Kid movie.....I had to start my (re-)training by learning to "paint the fence" and "wax the car" before I could reach the right headspace to fully integrate the Mysteries as a Gard as opposed to an eclectic. I had to come empty in order to get filled. And that is why after my initiation and each subsequent elevation within my trad work has been so meaningful. Whereas before I had gone through the motions, had recited portions of the same scripts.....it didn't hold as much meaning nor expose me to the depths of understanding and relating to the Mysteries until I learned to do it the 'proper' way, the way this stuff was originally designed and intended to be passed.

The really amazing thing was that my prior eclectic study wasn't discounted or worthless in my coming to understandings in the trad system either.

Some of it did "translate" and was of great help to me when latching onto ideas faster....even if the building blocks were arranged differently in the trad world views. Ideas and concepts that I knew one way in eclectic-speak, meant something different or slightly off-what-I'd-previously-believed-was-center in the trad-speak.

It was like becoming someone who was multi-lingual....some words were the same in both languages, some had similar root etymology but now had different prefixes and suffixes that altered them a bit and some words were completely new identities for the same objects.

I just had to shift my brain around amongst different company to be sure that I was communicating properly and to the fullest extend of the meanings I was now trying to convey to folks.

So, yeah, I hate it when folks say "Trads do the FORMAL training and the Eclectics do the INFORMAL slap-dash." That's not accurately describing either one, in my opinion. And frankly, it sounds demeaning to both path styles. They are really two different systems entirely, even if they did somewhat come from a common root source.

This continued fighting over which one is more dominant, more preeminent; more right is such a waste of time. They both work, but they are both very different breeds of witch. It is just that simple.

DEJA BROOM: Saying "Tradition" when you mean "Denomination"

"DEJA BROOM" denotes a blog repost from my old site.  Feel free to read anew, or refresh your memory to re-live the ranty goodness.  Otherwise, feel free to skip ahead to more modern mayhem.

Let's have a vocabulary lesson here, shall we?  There's a difference between calling something a denomination and calling it a tradition. Nowadays, people tend to confuse those words or attempt to use them synonymously.

Which is why you'll hear more than a few snickers from the older generation of pagans (those older than say 40 yrs) when  newbie folks announce to all and sundry your shiny-happy intentions to "create my own tradition."

Whenever someone creates a system anew and practices their own formula for witchery, they have in fact built a new denomination, not a tradition.

Something only becomes a tradition once there is a provenance of material and practice which can be tracked over time and through several generations of progeny (literally generations within a family-like setting, or like an upline/downline system) all sharing in the same unique formulaic practices.

As such the members of the same tradition all agree to certain parameters about what defines their trad. This they mindfully share with others who also adopt it, exactly as passed, and continue to follow it, intact in orthopraxy and methodology, if not also in written/oral/demonstrative lore and material.

Here's an example:

Let's say that you always wear a blue shirt on Tuesdays and that might be YOUR unique thing.If you find others who also like the Tuesday blue-shirt thing.....like say you teach your kids to do it and they carry on the practice every Tuesday and then teach their kids, your grandkids to do it....then you'd all be a part of a blue-shirt-Tuesday-tradition.

Notice that the key points that are hallmarks to the path have been kept intact: the "blue shirt" AND the specific day "Tuesday" as day of the week. The material is the same, as is the practice of applying it and teaching it to others in the same way.

If however let's say you do it on Tuesdays but your kids decide to rebel a bit and each chooses a different day of the to wear their blue shirts instead. Does this mean they are still related to you in the tradition? The answer is no.

While they could be said to be tangentially related to you under the wider umbrella of "blue-shirt-wearing" as a denomination or sect of society who likes blue shirts on a weekly basis, but they would no longer be, by definition, carrying on your Tuesday-based tradition because they've deviated from your starting point, in this case, your chosen day of the week as Tuesday. They aren't technically carrying on your idea exactly as passed.  Get it?

Ah, but for some all this talk of tradition or denomination is just semantics anyway.  Some folks don't care about following a pre-existing path and instead prefer to carve out their own way entirely.

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter WHAT KIND of witch you are...only that you are living this path the way you best see fit and it works for you, and you don't snatch others labelling systems when they don't apply to you.

DEJA BROOM: Humility, a state of grace

"DEJA BROOM" denotes a blog repost from my old site.  Feel free to read anew, or refresh your memory to re-live the ranty goodness.  Otherwise, feel free to skip ahead to more modern mayhem

I really don't understand where this concept of working through a traditional, degree-based system has been misconstrued by some as a pecking order indulgence, as if the sole purpose of having the hierarchy is to establish a one-way track toward declarative, ego inflation.

*Huh?*

Well, I'm here to tell you, that just hasn't been my experience of things at all.

In fact, progressing through the various levels of teaching and mastery of practice, working of oral and written lore and the like....well I have found that further one progresses into working within the constrains of an established tradition, the more the system calls upon you to let go of your ego. Certainly not to offer bragging rights or give you reason to feel inflated.

Heck, my coven sis and I used to joke with our HP and HPS: "Hey, I thought this was called 'elevation'...so why do I feel like my life is going to hell?!"

Well, it is that old adage coming into play: "The more you learn, the less you realize you know and the more you have yet to learn." So it was with my personal experience of things that progress I charted at each level of each degree only led me to know that there was more undiscovered territory that I had to become acquainted with. It is ongoing, lifelong...heck, several lives long if you think about it...and continues to be a remarkable the way toward being exposed more deeply and openly to deity. Truly, ego smashing stuff.

Nothing confronts you more intensely than these ongoing lessons which drive the responsibility and desire to grow further and further home into your soul and cranium.

Each encounter makes me well up from the core of my very being, to nearly cry out to the power of All That Is and say, "I don't know yet" and "I don't quite understand," and leaves me begging for insight and sometimes for mercy, until the Lord and Lady guide and direct me ---sometimes forcibly--- to confront head on those situations that would help me grok, whatever it was They wanted me to register and fix in my life.

The Gods have a funny way of making you repeat your lessons...with ever-increasing intensity... until you finally let go of your preconceptions and self-indulgent thinking and just let go and let the messages wash over you. Hence the oft mentioned "clue-by-four" to the head you may hear tales of.

Trust me when I say there is nothing less of an "all mighty and powerful OZ" moment than that. It is very much a humbling experience, the antithesis of self-aggrandizing.

But what is miraculous about it at the same time is that even in the midst of your suffering to learn, you know that you are loved.

You are channel, vessel, priest/ess....yes, but you are also one of Their hidden children. What makes it special is that you have come into this path willingly, and as such are mindful of what is transpiring, aware of the process as it washes over and through you, your covenmates, and your connections on the warp and weft of the skein of all life. This, to me, is what makes a witch's relationship with deity so very intimate and personal, even as it is connected to what is universal. It is both microcosm and macrocosm, both omnipresent and immanent.

I am S/He as you are S/He and you are me and we are all together.....

And just when you feel most overwhelmed by it all, just when the solemnity and magnitude of discovering and coming to a more profound understanding of one's place in the strands of existence, of birth-death-rebirth...that is precisely when something humorous shatters through and breaks forth in an explosion of joy, of childlike wonder and ecstasy.

You find yourself laughing, expressing the whole gamut of human frailty and generosity in song, in dance, in the pure, unadulterated outpouring of love. Agape, philia and eros surge and abound as the creative comes out of the void and renews everything.

At all times, this experience of being at the epicenter and event horizon is greater than the sum of our human capacity. You cannot be belittle or reduce it with the mere flattery of your own ego ---you as but one practitioner, as if you alone are capable of exhibiting this great work of the Gods.

You are simply one man or woman as vehicle for Them acting in corporeal form. The trick to being an oracle is that one cannot be "home" when it happens. Learning to do this, to be a channel is an honor, yes. And it is fearful and blessed to be able to learn to do so. Yet at no time can anyone who has experienced this say that it is something which they themselves own or control.

It requires the distinct lack of ego, pretense and vanity, in order for it to be possible. Bragging is so not what this is about, especially since it is not even you, but Them, at the helm.

Which is also why, as a teacher of the version of the Craft I was taught, I would pass this great gift of knowledge, of material and experience and the safe space to come to understandings at one's own pace in due time through step-by-incremental-step revelation....I do this with humility.  Again, my role is as a vessel through which the understandings pass to the new practitioner.  It is not me, my ego, who bestows.  It is not me who gives that person "birth into the Craft."   Rather I am merely an access point that the Gods might use as a conduit, to help that acolyte get the tools they need in order to reach their own epiphanies and connections to the Mysteries.

I, me, the person who I am, is essentially unimportant to the transmission, other than I've been trained as a facilitator, a midwife for the experience of someone else.  I am the "training wheels" the acolyte uses for awhile until they learn the necessary techniques by which they too may make connection and communion with deity on their own.....and later, be taught, in turn, how to aid the next generation in achieving this remarkable work.

Being a priestess is absolutely NOT about me.  Being a teacher is absolutely NOT about me.  Being a keeper of my tradition's material is absolutely NOT about me.  I have been entrusted with a task, a part to play, and I am privileged to have been able to come into this task because of my training and with the assistance of, and great patience shown by, my teachers. 
I don't own anything that I hold.  I am its custodian.  Entrusted with its care and asked to ensure its continued existence and safe passage on to others.  It is an honor.....and I with grace, love and humility shall I wield it.