In my experience, solitary wiccans either do not wish to be involved in any organized worship, do not have access to a coven or have their own personal reasons. And yeah, wiki is TOTALLY infallible.
Not anarchist...just allows for many chiefs and no indians...everybody is right and nobody is wrong...just one big "lets make shit up" love festival....and you have to accept it.
oh, cool! So no, pastors, reverends, rabbis, imams, or dogma? very cool! I never said that it was infallible.
I only meant that you have to take ANYTHING there that you haven't seen with your own eyes with one-half grain of salt. And don't let my other post bother you, it was totally tongue in cheek. Except the part about me being born a Jew, raised a Christian, and now an anarcho-pacifist.
Well I do agree with the sentiments of that quote, but most of the wiccans I know probably don't even know what anarchy actually is, so I don't think it's a concious thing. There are priests/priestesses of covens, but for the solitary they just go by the hip wiccan author of the moment. Most people come to it because they don't want to be told what to do; which probably works for them, but allowing 'anything to go' makes for serious dilution and trivialisation of the practises. If I'd wanted 'whatever the fuck you feel like' then I'd have gone with universal unitarian [which is cool, just not what I signed up for].
Anarchism isn't 'whatever the fuck you feel like' , that's more like hedonism... Anarchism is simply approaching interpersonal relationships and social institutions in a non-heirarchical fashion. Sounds like wicca is a religion in tune with that. do wiccans practice any type of animism or pantheism?
From what I understand is that a lot of different "wiccans" worship in a variety of ways. I've met some that worship the God and Goddess, while I've also met some that are more animistic (animistic, is that even a word?). While some self-proclaimed wiccans worship old patheons most of the wiccans I know worship the God and Goddess.
Both? I had thought that a wiccan generally worshiped either the God or the Goddess, and i had thought that generally they were talking about the same unknowable deity regardless of whether they called it god or goddess... I hadn't realized that Wicca so diverse.
That's what I get from self-proclaimed wiccans. When I used to consider myself a wiccain I worshiped both. The easiest way I can explain why is because they are like Yin/Yang. You can't really have one without the other. In my experience the Goddess is worshipped a little more because she is the creator of life, she is the mother and we owe her a lot. During rituals I would invite both the God and Goddess to my alter out of respect. Both were very important to me.
Makes sense. Have you ever read The Alphabet Vs The Goddess | by Leonard Shlain Talks about the decline of goddess worship and how the left/right brain hemispheres are out of whack due to an over reliance of one at the expense of the other. pretty cool. Sometimes i look at paganism, primitivism, animism, pantheism, anarchism, and psychoanalysis as if they were all puzzle pieces that no one has yet figured out how to put back together.... Maybe instead of searching through the various faiths for one that might fit me, i should be picking through them for pieces to a greater whole?
Joe, you confuse wiccans with pagans in general...."Wicca" has the doctrine of God and Goddess, all the others being but faces of the two. Pagans on the other hand, can be placed either Hard Polytheist, or Soft Polytheist. Hard being that there are individual gods of individual pantheons and do little or no mixing of...Soft are more like wiccans..and usually are wiccans, and believe that the many many different deities are all the same one, every god is the same god...etc...they mix shit up like crazy... sometimes it like oil and water. and yes..animistic is a word.
That's cool, thank you for sharing that. When I was being "taught" before I found out that I was shown a lot of wrong things. I don't want to use the word wrong because that's what the people believe but I don't think they were 100% on a lot of things. I'm very skeptical now about what I am told, I'm becoming more critical thinker about my faith then I once was. Right now I'm having a lot of...I guess you can say visions or visits by an animal spirit. She is everywhere, in graffiti, in other people's conversations, in my dreams and sometimes I see her physical animal form. The other day I seen her in my computer class. Anyways, that's enough about me. Just one thing for Heron, I really respect the amount of knowledge and the conviction you have for your faith. You seem to know a lot and stand up for what you believe in. These are good quailities. Well, have a good one everybody.
I have to say Wicca is not just a "lets make shit up" religion. There are very well defined parameters out there for anyone who cares to find them. People tend to confuse actual wiccans with "fashion wiccans". There is a big difference.
