The book you now hold in your hands contains no
spells, no rituals, and not one word about the Wheel of the Year or ritual
tools. This is not just one more in the seemingly endless stream
of "Wicca 101" books recycling one more time all the basic lore and "do-it-yourself"
ritual design and spellcrafting hints you've already read a thousand times.
This is a book of Thealogy, the feminine form of
the word "theology," which my computer's internal dictionary defines as
the study of the nature of God and religious truth. Thealogy, then,
is the study of the nature of the Goddess of Wicca (and her consort, the
God, as well), and of religious truth as seen from a Wiccan perspective.
This is a book that takes the existence and power of the Goddess and God
of Wicca to be objective fact, that examines life as we know it through
the lens of Their reality, and that attempts to answer from the perspective
revealed through that lens some of the most basic questions any religion,
to be efficacious for its adherents, must successfully address:
What is the nature of Divinity? Of Humanity?
Where is the Goddess located?
What is Her relationship to the Universe?
Why are we humans here?
How should we live?
Can we communicate directly with Divinity, and if so, how?
Outspoken science fiction author and social curmudgeon
Harlan Ellison once observed that, in an honest world, every book ever
written, regardless of subject, would bear the title How to Be More Like
Me! I won't pretend in this intro-duction to have nobler ambitions.
This is un-questionably an exposition on Wiccan Thealogy as I, personally,
understand it, an understanding that differs wildly, in many respects,
from the Traditional Wicca taught in standard "Wicca 101" books.
I came to Wicca after more than twenty years of
questing study (and sometimes practice) of a wide range of religious, occult
and "New Age" systems including Christianity (both Catholic and Protestant),
Buddhism, Taoism, Gnosticism, Neo-Shamanism, the Gurdjieff "Work," Astrology,
Tarot, Jungian Psychology, modern science (especially physics and biology),
and a whole lot more along the way. I was lucky enough to pursue
a degree at one of America's last great Liberal Arts colleges, where my
minor in "religion" included course study in everything from Christianity
In The Movies to Gnosticism (ancient and Modern) to Vajrayana and Zen Bud-dhism
to Haitian Voodoo to you guessed it Wicca. In the years since
college that I have devoted myself to focused solitary Wiccan practice,
I have not forgotten or excluded what I learned from those many and disparate
sources. As I began to organize my thoughts in preparation for this writing,
it became clear to me that my personal brand of Wicca is a lot more "eclectic"
than are most Wiccan systems I've encountered in print, bearing elements
borrowed as much or more from Eastern religious and metaphysical paths,
contemporary science, and 20th Century spiritual and occult teachings as
from any traditional or historical Western (Celtic, Germanic etc.) cultural
sources.
"My Wicca" is also considerably more Thealogical,
more thought-out and academic than the Wicca to be found in the vast majority
of modern "plug and play" Wiccan publications. Considering the academic
path that led me to Wicca in the first place, it seemed only natural from
the start for me to studiously weigh every Wiccan concept I encountered
over the years, to measure how the religion held up to theological scrutiny,
how well it answered the fundamental questions of human existence, how
effectively it led to real communion with the Divine, how it meshed or
clashed with current science, philoso-phy, history, literature, etc.
I took this approach to the study and practice of Wicca, weighing and testing
its every teaching against my own experience, siphoning out what worked
and jettisoning the rest, not in order to be a "smarty-pants know-it-all"
(which, as I write these words, I suspect I am beginning to sound like),
but rather because I am a Capricorn with a natural tendency to approach
everything I do with caution and care, and also because by the time I encountered
the Wiccan religion, I had already passed through literally decades of
spiritual questing, and had learned by trial and error a great deal about
discernment, about the folly of accepting anything "on faith", and about
the ultimate value of personal experience, of what an individual can verify
directly, face to face, experientially, for themselves, as the only acceptable
final arbiter of truth.
And, for the effort, "my Wicca" turned out, in
the end, to be a lot simpler and more direct than many of the more obtuse
expositions on Wiccan Thealogy that I have seen, even in the "101" books.
"My Wicca" makes common, intuitive sense, and has its roots less in human
history than in the natural world around us, rising out of clearly visible
truths of Nature that anyone, anywhere can observe and verify for them-selves.
"My Wicca" is modern and wide open to the revelations of science and technology,
those prime vehicles by which we humans currently ex-pand our knowledge
and understanding of the world around us.
This is a different approach than a lot of Wiccans
take. I cannot rightly say "all," or even "most," but certainly many
of the Wiccans I have known or observed over the years appear to find in
Wicca a unique brand of escapism from the travails of our modern world,
a safe haven from the uniquely complex moral, environmental, social and
political issues that define our era. They appear to seek to turn
back the clock, to retreat into a pagan agrarian culture that no longer
exists, or to "resurrect" a Medieval, "thatched-cottage-on-the-edge-of-the-woods"
society that is far more a product of Renaissance festivals and paperback
fantasy novels than of anything to be found in real, recorded history.
This nostalgic (from the Greek nostos algos, or literally, "To look homeward
with longing") brand of Wicca generally embodies an abdication of responsibility
for the ills of modern society, rather than the conscious creation of resolutions
to those ills and a brighter future for everybody. The powerful drive
within Wicca as a movement to find its roots in a prehistoric global Goddess
culture for which little evidence actually exists is one manifestation
of this trend. In part, I have written this book in reaction to this
pervasive nostalgia in Wicca, in an attempt to drag the Wiccan movement
out of its identification with the imagined past into the real present
moment, in hopes of empowering Wicca to take its rightful place at the
table of forces around the world who are seriously working (and often competing)
to define tomorrow.
But I understand those nostalgic feelings, I really
do. Society, at this present moment in history, is frighteningly unbalanced
in favor of violence, fascism, misogyny, corporate rule, the industrial
rape and pillage of the Earth and its parallel attack on the human spirit
in the form of rampant consumerism, etc. We are clearly headed at breakneck
speed toward almost certain disaster. Faced with our present real world
situation, who wouldn't "Look homeward with longing?"
There's an episode of the old 1960s Star Trek television
series in which Kirk and company beam down to help evacuate a planet whose
sun is about to go supernova. But when the "away team" reaches the
planet's surface, they find nobody home. The residents have all vanished,
having used a historical video library/time machine to escape the destruction
by slipping into their own past, years, decades, even centur-ies prior
to the explosion of their sun. Faced with similar impending disaster
in our case, looming environmental collapse, prefaced by probable economic,
political and social upheavals many people would like to follow that
imaginary TV example, to escape into the past and avoid the consequences
of the last thousand years or so of Western history.
Some of these folks, as described above, are drawn
to Wicca but not only to Wicca! This exact psychological phenomenon
is the force behind the empowerment of Christian and Islamic Fundamentalism
in America and through-out the world, as well. Knee-deep in the drek
of our post-modern, post-industrial, in many ways post-Christian, and our
clearly post-certainty world, the "Golden Ages" of the past look pretty
good, even if they have to be spun out of the whole cloth of our imaginations
to grant us relief from the pain and fear of the present moment.
But, unlike the lucky extraterrestrials in that
Star Trek episode, we do not possess time travel technology, or even a
truly accurate record of our past to escape into. For us the arrow
of time moves in one direction only forward and the only thing we can
say about the future with absolute certainty is that it is coming into
being for all of us one day at a time, and all too often with the most
frightening, "nostalgically" Funda-mentalist elements of our species at
society's helm. No global Goddess culture of the ancient past is
going to save us from the self-fulfillment of their apocalyptic vision.
But a global Goddess culture now, today a world
in which "An' It Harm None, Do What You Will" forms the ground for all
human morality, ethics and law would make (pardon the expression) one
hell of a difference! A gentle global culture that revered the Divine
Feminine, that taught reincarnation, karma, self-respons-ibility and the
spiral of constant improvement in circular time as opposed to the prevailing
Middle Eastern paradigm of life as a battleground of absolute Good and
Evil, sin and salvation, and Humankind's downward spiral of continual decay
toward Apocalyptic destruction would send 90% or better of the dilemmas
plaguing Humanity to the dustheap of history overnight. Just like
that. Wiccans, would not wage religious wars, or kill over access
to natural resources. Wiccans would not hijack planes and crash them
into populated buildings any more than they would bomb Third World countries
out of existence in retaliation for such crimes. Wiccans would neither
work to homogenize the world by "Americanizing" foreign cultures, nor destroy
the biosphere of the Earth we all rely on for every breath, drink and meal
in the name of corporate profits.
We are the good guys, and it's high time we stood
up for that fact and put our collective shoulder to the wheel of history.
It's time we stopped pleading with the larger Christian cul-ture not to
label us "Satanists," and started boldly defining ourselves to the world
and advancing a Wiccan agenda that goes way beyond "Please don't persecute
us!"
And so we must fight. We must work.
We must struggle. We must abandon the inner nostal-gia that has crippled
our political power, and attack the outer forces of nostalgia that threaten
to shape our reality into a post-nuclear-holocaust, Judeo-Christian/Islamic
Apocalypse desert. In small ways and large ways from "coming out of the
broom closet" to our friends and coworkers, to legislating for the environment,
to running for President and beyond we must heed the call to action,
take back the reigns of society, and, as those in possession of higher
knowledge and clear vision have always done in times of great social upheaval,
we must lead our species past this present moment of global crisis. We
must use our minds and hearts, our bodies and magicks to create a world
worthy of our Goddess and our highest ideals not just as Wiccans, but
as human beings.
It is my sincere hope that this slim treatise outlining
a clear and coherent Wiccan Thealogy will serve as a first step in that
process, providing a nucleus around which a new order can emerge a New
Wicca, free of the nostalgic ballast of the past, grounded in the present,
and committed to proudly crafting a Nature-wise, Goddess-loving, efficacious
future for all Humanity.