You’ll have noticed that I only very rarely use the word “Wicca”
in reference to my practice. “BTW,” you may say, “generally refers to ‘British
Traditional Wicca,’ doesn’t it?”
Well, yes. Generally it does. And what I, and my initiates and their initiates,
do, certainly often looks like what you’d term Wicca—at least, of the
traditional, initiatory kind.
All this is true, and yet… That word. It bothers me,
somehow.
I got involved in this initiatory Craft stuff back in the
mid-90s, when witches were pop-culture hot and the word “Wicca” was seemingly
everywhere. The bookstore shelves groaned with titles, each progressively
blander and less inspiring than the one before it. Wicca! Not nasty old
badly-behaved witchcraft but a shiny modern Religion, safe and sanitary and
approved for veterans and convicts and suburbanites and teenagers alike! Not
some stodgy old hidebound thing with rules and regulations, but a real do-it-yourself
Spirituality to be made and remade as your whimsy takes you. Wicca! Easily
found on a hundred websites with sparkle text and spinning pentacles, shared by
a hundred youthful elders quick to assure you that there was no right or wrong
way to be Wiccan. And anyone with a dialup connection and a Geocities account
was well on their way to the priesthood. Wicca!
I’ll admit, the word was making me twitch before I was even
an initiate—hell, before I’d even set foot in an Outer Court circle. I had some
books. They seemed so safe. Colorful
and inoffensive and about as mysterious as the local Vacation Bible School. I
wanted Mystery. I wanted THE OCCULT. Feel-good fluff had its comforting appeal,
but it was not in my nature to be satisfied with the superficial. I wanted
WITCHCRAFT, brooms and bats and pointed hats, spooky and special and more like
the stuff in those exploitative little paperbacks from long ago in the 60s and
70s. I ended up first as a solitary practicing a half-assed homegrown Egyptian
paganism, but I still held out hope for the Craft. WITCHcraft!
I stumbled into it, rather by accident, around the time That
Word was exploding everywhere. Wicca! OK, fine, Wicca it is, then—as long as it’s
being used more as a safeword for Actual Witchcraft. I got in. I was initiated.
And I was Initiated as a Witch, not a Wiccan (I was paying attention!)—that overused
and mispronounced term did not appear anywhere in the proceedings. But of
course, the two were forevermore linked.
Skipping over the years between then and now, and you’ll
find that I’m about as averse to the term now as I ever was, though I’m slowly
desensitizing myself to it. (These days it’s also fashionable to be very anti-Wiccan
among the skulls-for-your-craefte traditionalists, but that’s not really me,
either.) My practice is rooted in the stock that was the early template for all
the Wiccas to come after it, no matter how diluted they became. If I told you
that I cast a quartered circle, used specific tools, made specific invocations,
etc., you’d look at me and say “oh, you’re Wiccan.” Well, fuck it, I guess I
am, if you look at it that way; but I will always think of myself as a Witch,
and only grudgingly concede the upstart, sanitized term.
You’re going to find the two words used interchangeably,
especially by older traditional folk. If you look to my Recommended Reading
page, you’ll see both Witchcraft and Wicca in the titles. I can read and enjoy
books that use “Wicca” predominantly or exclusively, and I can even see myself
and my Craft there. I’m desensitizing. Trying not to come off as a complete
asshole while still maintaining the distinction between the kind of “Wicca”
that I practice (initiatory, oathbound, esoteric, occult) and the kind that I
do not (eclectic, open, exoteric).
It’s the 21st century now, and those
spinning-pentacle sites are long gone, replaced by the rabid wolverines of
Tumblr and the fabulously photogenic Insta-witches. I’m not sure what the founders
of this feast—say, Gardner or Valiente, for example—would make of all this; but
I am sure there’s room for all of us beneath the moon-drenched sky, no matter
what words we prefer to claim.
