Whirlwind of WTF

Wish I had a good excuse for not posting much....again....and I sort of do.

Thank the gods I'm nearly at the end of this "year 42" where I'd asked the Lord and Lady after my last birthday to help rearrange my life to get me on the proper path I should be on.

Wow.  Be careful what you wish for....yes!

So as you'll recall, I've been divorced, moved out of my home and into an apartment...then comes this latest bit of "AAARRRRRGGGGGHHHH!!!" this month, just to wrap up the final few days before my 43rd birthday later this week.

September Recap:

• Had a small car accident involving the parking situation here at the apartment complex.  No serious damage, but did jack up the custom paint and gave my door a few dings, which I cannot afford to get fixed right now.
• The reason why I cannot afford it is because I was informed just after Labor Day that the place where I've been working for the past 8+ years will not be renewing my contract and as of October 5, I will be unemployed.
• As a did just come through this divorce and moving thing in recent months, I have zero in the way of a nest-egg saved up, and so it looks like it is a good thing that I never fully unpacked in this apartment, because I'm going to have to leave it since I won't be able to afford the place anymore.
• Have been sending out resumes and interviewing like crazy, but my niche-type job is such that there isn't a likelihood that I will find something local anyway, so it looks like I will be moving to PA, TX or FL in a matter of two weeks.  Either that or wind up sobbing on a friends couch while I contemplate how to give my two cats up to the Humane Society since I probably can't bring them with me wherever I end up.

And so, as you can see, I've been a little preoccupied.  Insomnia, mild panic attacks and low-grade depression have been the ghosts that haunt me and have my writing muse hiding under the blankets of late.  Just not in the mood to rant about all things witchy when I can't seem to rouse myself up for much more than watching reruns of RuPaul's Drag Race and eating what's left of the canned goods in the pantry so that there will be less to pack.

I'm somewhat joking/exaggerating, but only just so, when I say that I'd thought my midlife crisis was supposed to be about bemoaning the lack of a second childhood...not being fearful of having to eat Ramen because I don't have a job or a place to live or a romantic love interest or a frigging clue as to what sort of regimen the Mighty Ones are trying to kick my ass with for opening my big frigging mouth when I blew out the candles on my cake last year.

Well, gonna ride this out for another week and hopefully once that happens, I'll have a better grip on where I'm going, what I'm doing and who may or may not be a part of that.

In the meantime, hope this Equinox energy balances me out too.  I could use something to stop the mental-emotional seasickness I've got going on.

Deja Broom: "So you want to be a Gardnerian?"

"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, skip this repeat and await more modern mayhem.

So you want to be Gardnerian?

If you are seeking to become a Gardnerian witch, the only way to do so is to become an initiate through a vetted, properly lineaged Gardnerian group. That is not to say you cannot be a perfectly wonderful witch of an eclectic stripe, but being a part of the Gardnerian tradition, or any lineaged tradition for that matter, denotes some very specific things.

Gardnerians are one of the various types of British Traditional Wica (BTW), that is to say one witchcraft variants whose origins stem from the New Forest area of the UK. Other BTW groups may include Alexandrian, BlueStar, Kingstone, Mohsian, Central Valley Wicca, Georgian, Protean and others.

Gardnerians, specifically, are of an initiatory mystery religion with various, traceable lines of initiates who are all linked with a common ancestry back to Gerald Gardner. Gardnerians all share a core set of materials --- written, demonstrative and oral --- which have been taught to every member of the tradition in a somewhat standardized method of hands-on/directly communicated, experiential and relevatory practices. These practices include certain rituals and techniques which can only be transmitted from teacher to student, in person, and via an alternating male-to-female, female-to-male fashion.

Ok, now that we've gotten the "legal mumbo jumbo" of our rough definition out of the way, I do have to stress that one cannot become a Gardnerian without being initiated by an existing member of the opposite sex, most often by being adopted into an existing coven. You cannot "pick it up" through reading books written by known or purported Gardnerian authors, nor by following along with one of those alleged copies of the BOS found in the public domain.

There is a word common to all BTW folks....that is the notion of "vetting."

Vetting is a means of vouching for or otherwise fact-checking amongst each other so that we can avoid frauds in our midst or so that we can confirm which level of attainment (degree) a person has reached and therefore not prematurely disclose teachings to which the person may not yet be privy. It is essentially the tracing of one's initiatory family tree showing the links of the claimant in the tree and up through their "who begat who" all the way back to Gerald Gardner, and at each level, the named people in the tree can verify their predecessors and antecedents in the transmission of initiations and subsequent elevations to prove that the claimant is a legit practitioner.

Know that such "avoidance of premature disclosure" is not designed for the purpose of higher-level members to lord things over those who are not of similar attainment or degree to receive the knowledge, but to ensure that the person who has not yet reached that degree may have the opportunity to fully experience the revelation directly and for themselves, without the influence of another's opinions. In short, we don't want to "ruin the surprise" of letting everyone come to the same epiphanies as we had done back when we were being trained using the same tried-and-true techniques and exercises.

Vetting is standard practice for BTW folks. Every tradition keeps records of who its initiates are, who is upline or downline from everyone else. And so we can do these periodic checks of folks claiming to be members so that we may: (1) confirm if a claimant was indeed initiated into the tradition as s/he has professed by verifying such attainment with his reported initiators and upline, (2) that the claimant has indeed been passed the requisite material (written, demonstrative and oral) which further verifies his/her understandings of the essential standards/core common to all other members of the claimed tradition and as befitting his/her professed degree and (3) as a method of recordkeeping so that when claimants are proven liars about being a part of a tradition as a deliberate act to defame or otherwise cause negative influence under the auspices of the tradition, we can confront such individuals and counteract their influence.

So it is important to note that as a seeker of any BTW trad, you too have a right to some level of vetting to ensure you aren't being led astray by someone claiming to be of a tradition that they may not be affiliated with.

If you are sincere in seeking out BTW training, I encourage you to join the Yahoo chat group called "Amber and Jet" but also to warn you that it is NOT your typical public pagan atmosphere. It is a group where various factions of BTW teachers, scholars and students come together to answer honest seeker's questions.

I strongly recommend before you jump right in with whatever questions you have there, that you read through the archives since most questions have been asked countless times before you. Speak little and listen much....get to recalibrating your understanding about how a traditionalist thinks versus how an eclectic person thinks about the styles and methods of practice. They are VERY DIFFERENT, VERY DISTINCT paths and not merely a dip of a different pantheon or the changing of a few words of poetry which separate the two.

Also, get to know the other styles of BTW beyond Gardnerian. It may well be that one of these other varieties appeals to you and you may not have known it existed. It is usually far more important to find a coven family that you connect with than it is to try for a specific BTW tradition. In the end, you'll see that the match more than the means makes all the difference.

Lastly, be prepared to have to actually seek out training for awhile. Do not hold the expectation that simply because you've expressed and announced your desire for it, that it should be given to you. BTW folks are selective about whom they are willing to take as students. This isn't an open cattle-call whereby we take anyone and everyone just because they say they want it. Like schools of higher education, we look for the best and the brightest ---you'll hear the term "proper personhood" bandied about--- before we consider passing on the tradition that we have grown to know and love, who will take care of it after us.

And be prepared that in some cases, you may have to travel to study with a group. There may or may not be a BTW group near you. Folks have been known to drive for hours or take flights several times a year to undergo training.

Deja Broom: The Rede and Flogging the Equine Carcass

"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, skip this repeat and await more modern mayhem.

I don't want to make this into yet another full blown beating of an already dead horse (hence the blog title), but comments I've heard lately make me think perhaps a gentle note concerning the Rede was in order.

First, not all pagans, nor all witches for that matter, acknowledge or follow the Rede.

Second, the Rede was not invented by Gerald Gardner. The version that Gardner used in his work is pretty widely accepted to have been derived from a few different sources, not the least of which came from Gardner's interactions with Aleister Crowley and the O.T.O.

What Gardner was passed by his initiators --- and yes, Virginia, Gardner had initiators, he did NOT invent this thing called "Wicca" --- was a skeletal system of beliefs, practices and rituals. Like other burgeoning occultists of his time, Gardner had often sought out and traded information with other practitioners, using his best judgment to reconcile the information he gleaned to from others against any then-known historic evidence in order to corroborate and supplement the set of practices, rites and ideas he had been given to work with.

This was not any mindless grabbing of whatever came across Gardner's path, as some of the more fluffy variety of eclectics do today. No sir!

Gardner took vast amounts of reference notes, had intellectual dialogs in person with other occult contemporaries and wrote many, many letters to others not within his immediate scope of travel. Most of these letters are not available or currently accessible to the general pagan populace, but as an initiate, I assure you they do exist.

Getting back to the Rede discussion...

Third, the Rede has often been cited and misconstrued in modern parlance (post the neo-Wicca explosion starting in the mid 1980s) as a morality tool or censuring of conduct. This is not the way the Rede was meant or intended as it was presented by Gardner to his students. That the meaning of the Rede has been altered into something used to "scare" practitioners into following a certain ethics standard or group of social mores is a recent affectation. The way the Rede is oft recited and defined today shows some meandering away from the original meaning and interpretation that Gardner had intended it for his students and downline initiates.

This, I believe, to be primarily due to the way the Rede and other elements of what had been material intended for a limited, properly trained and oathbound audience were subsequently modified and co-opted by the masses, being (re-)defined by folks who had...ahem..."come to such information through illicit means" by stealing such information from Gardner's work.

The Rede, like other documents collected and written by Gardner and his various HPS kindred were originally only supposed to be privy to oathbound initiates. As such, often the written material had accompanying oral lore and teachings that would be passed from teachers to students that would clarify, and further explain, the written items.

So when this material, that had once been the sole intellectual property of those who were duly trained in the way Gardner himself was trained, found exposure through...ahem….inappropriately published sources….the written material alone did not fully convey the whole picture.

However, because these now public voices and published authors were not exposed to these elements via the usual training from which they ...ahem..."borrowed"... the information, these people were not privy to the way the material was intended to be dispersed as part of the closed Tradition. They only saw what was "written" by Gardner and did not also receive the oral lore which accompanies the written and which would have further explained and defined the Rede in the way Gardner meant it to be understood by his students.

This left the door open for the publishers and plagiarizing authors to offer up their own opinions on what they felt was the meaning behind a pretty vaguely written sentence. Essentially, in so doing, they were taking Gardner's idea out of its original full context of the teaching, using only an abbreviated version and then changing it with their own theoretical understanding of the abbreviation.

It was like they got a recipe for a cake with a few ingredients missing and then attempted to pass of their lop-sided, inedible finished product to everyone as the same delicious cake with buttercream frosting as if they had indeed used all ingredients.

Add to this the passage of time (try like 50+ years worth) and the actions of "the telephone game" which can slightly alter things just by permutations upon permutations of individual interpretation....and you get the watered down, off-the-mark way you hear the Rede rattled off the cuff by a lot of folks today ---- that the Rede means "You're allowed to do absolutely anything you feel like but in doing so cause no harm to anything or anyone, ever!" ….as if this is hard and fast dogma.

A veritably impossible task if ever I've heard one! No wonder some witches think it is a bunch of horse-pucks!

Fourth, the real meaning of the Rede is not “You have carte blanche to do whatever you want so long as you don’t hurt anyone or anything.” That is logically impossible anyway. Anytime you affect a change, you alter the status quo and in doing so, you’re essentially hurting something that was accustomed to the status quo.

Nor should the Rede be taken as a dire warning about having your “karma” go up or down on some cosmic akashic tally sheet of the Gods. It is a euphemism all about being mindful of, and taking personal responsibility for, your words, your actions, your deeds and your witchery.

The accountability for same is not necessarily three-fold (another euphemism) but you’d better believe that when you will and enact a change, something will also enact a change in, for, or to you. Gee, sounds a lot like quantum physics and natural law, doesn’t it?

Hmmm, maybe some folks need a visit to the hard science section of the book store along with the usual jaunt down the New Age aisle, eh?

Now let's send this poor horse back out to its pasture in the Summerlands, shall we?