This Wicca religion sounds pretty cool don't you think?

Question

I asked a question earlier about Wicca and got a few links all about nature and stuff, I can believe this more. One quote I did like was this one.

"If you take [a copy of] the Christian Bible and put it out in the wind and the rain, soon the paper on which the words are printed will disintegrate and the words will be gone. Our bible IS the wind and the rain." told by a Native-American woman.

I suppose you could say the same about any of the religious books, I am going to study some more. Cheers.

I suppose cool may have been the wrong word to use, interesting sounds better, sorry.

Answer 1

It is not that Wicca is "cool" - it has deep meaning to those of us that are Wiccan, such as myself:

Balance in All Things

An idea that Wicca has borrowed from the Eastern religions is the idea that the world is made up of opposites. Each and every thing that has meaning is defined by what it is not. In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu writes "When the world recognizes beauty, only then does ugliness exist. Only when there is evil can there be good."

What this means is that we must have both in order to understand each separately. If all we ever experienced was light--if the sun always shone and we could never close our eyes--then we would never have dark. Without dark, however, we don't truly understand the nature of light. We take it for granted. So it is true with everything. The only reason we can appreciate the good and kindness in other people is because we know that evil exists and we know what evil is like.

That is what we mean by balance. We accept that all things are dualisitc: they exist as they are, and they exist as the negation of something else. This is important in Wicca because this is how we define our Deity, too: our Deity is made up of all things and their opposites, becuase our Deity is Perfect (as in Complete). Whenever we ignore one aspect of life and only concentrate on its opposite (light instead of dark, good instead of evil, masculine instead of feminine) we are cheating ourelves, because each idea and each reality has something to teach us. We need to learn the lessons of the Goddess in all their forms, not merely the forms which are pleasing to us.

Finding the balance of the masculine and feminine within ourselves can be a very difficult task. For women, it can be a painful process to identify with the masculine qualities we possess because we may feel that the overly masculine tnedencies in our culture have strangled us and hampered our progress as a gender. We may feel that we are doing a disservice to other women when we acknowledge and explore the masculine element within us. For men, tapping in to the feminine energies and tendencies within can be equally as difficult, for we are taught as a society that feminine aspect of life are considered weak, submissive, or even dirty. Men are not supposed to cry. Men are not supposed to be soft or caring. Men are not supposed to express affection for male friends. So within our own bodies we experience a degree of alienation, because whether or not we recognize it, and whether or not we readily accept it, each of us contain elements of the masculine and the feminine to differing degrees. This is how we are created, and to deny even the smallest inkling of that element within ourselves does us a disservive, because it throws is out of balance. Just as we learn to accept our flaws and idiosyncrasies, our inabilities and shortcomings, but also our talents, skills and character, we must accept the feminine and masculine within ourselves in order to truly see the world as a reflection of our inner selves.

The idea of balance has practical applications in life as well. We are supposed to live our lives in balanced ways, so that we do not swing wildly from one extreme to another. With regards to our health, this means maintaining a body weight that is healthy for us, and not constantly gaining or losing weight. With regards to the Earth, this might mean only taking from the Earth what we can immediately use and what can be replensihed in a reasonable amount of time. We do not plunder from the earth and rob her of her gifts, and we do not take from her or each other that which we do not need. These things also require balance.

Politically we tend to swing from one end to the other. We find a cause that we feel passionately about, which is a good thing, but sometimes we go too far in our ardor and we overlook opportunities for compromise, and almost always, compromise creates a pathway towards progress. When we agree to live our lives in a way that promotes balance, we keep our eyes open to the possibility that there are other methods, other venues, other ways of solving a problem.

Excess leads to waste. Our culture is very interested in getting the most for its money, in "getting more than the other guy", even when that situation isn't even necessarily beneficial to us. We live this way without even thinking about the harm that excess can cause. When we keep for ourselves that which we do not need, we may be keeping it from someone who may need it. When we allow ourselves to consume that which we do not need, whether physically, mentally or spiritually, we do ourselves a disservice because we may be hampering our ability to discern exactly what it is that we do need.

The idea of balance in Wicca and Witchcraft is an essential philosophy that goes hand in hand with other base tenets of our beliefs. We take all things in moderation, we recognize that duality of all things, including god and goddess, and we see within ourselves that which is reflected by all that we are, and all that we are not.

Answer 2

Well just make sure not to believe that Wiccans worship nature. We have deities. Now the deities are often represented by things in nature but the emphasis is on the lord and lady, not on the sun and moon. Nature definitely plays a role in the religion but I sometimes want to snort with laughter when I hear people saying that Wicca is a "nature-based religion". It's not really. Its most important aspects are balance, rationality, and responsibility.


edit: haha pay no heed to the answer below this one. You can't think someone credible if they actually believe that Wiccans take Silver Ravenwolf seriously.

Answer 3

If you're looking to do some reading, I'd recommend "Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner" by Scott Cunningham, and "The Triumph of the Moon" by Ronald Hutton. I advise you to stay away from anything by Silver Ravenwolf, for reasons outlined in the following essay:

http://wicca.timerift.net/ravenwolf.shtml

Best of luck to you on your path. :-)

Answer 4

oh yes, I quite agree. But don't limit yourself to wicca, explore other neo-pagan pathes. I personally find wicca to be "silly" and I have trouble accepting it. I love paganism in general though. (my opinion- I would love to really get to know some devoted wiccas.)

Answer 5

Good on you! Even if you decide your path lies elsewhere, no knowledge is ever wasted. Kudos to you from this long-time Wiccan.

And, Perky gurl, Wicca does promise "rest and peace and reunion with those who have gone before", whether for a time beyond life in the Summerland, or back here, in new bodies and with new ways to experience the love we feel for each other.

Answer 6

Funny how a religion that 'supposedly' has its base in the British Isles is quoting NAs now. Besides, that's a cop-out quote: it doesn't really mean anything, but it sounds good. That woman should have pursued a career in politics.

Go ahead, because Wicca is one of the "cooler" religions, and that's why it has so many followers. Similar to how MTV is a "cool" television channel, but there's not much substance there.

And good luck finding some sort of authoritative source for your studies, or even a book on the subject written before 1995.

Answer 7

I see God/dess in all things out in nature....it's a beautiful thing.

I advise you to read as much as u can on Wicca and the belief system.

Answer 8

I thought Wicca was the coolest thing ever back when I first read Scott Cunningham's Guide for the Solitary Practicioner. I now know better...

OK, first, read about the lives of famous occultists:

http://usminc.org/famous.html

Then decide if it's worth persuing. If you want to wind up broke and forgotten, go for it!

If there is any truth to the old saying "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.", that truth is found in the occult, and Wicca in particular. Silver Ravenwolf has written close to a dozen books on the subject of "The Craft", and claims she has been studying it since about 1969, which is almost as long as I’ve been alive. She has written a book on how to cast money spells, and includes a chapter on how to do so in her Teen Witch book. But the thing is, she doesn't particularly sound all that prosperous herself. Ravenwolf writes,

" For years I couldn't afford to go to a hair stylist (still can't, it's shop and chop for me). I got pretty good at stying my own hair from looking at magazine pictures" [SOURCE: Teen Witch, Llewellyn Publications, 2003 edition, page 145]

OK, she so rich she can't go to the hairdresser. Hey, get me a copy of that Prosperity Spell book!

Silver Ravenwolf seems to have inadvertently discovered that Wicca makes things worse, but won't ever admit it as such.
In Teen Witch she says

"A lot of people tell me how bad their lives have gotten after casting a spell and tell me they won't do Witchcraft anymore. I tell them their lives would have been much worse for not having cast the spell".

Gee Silver, you would think a lot of people would be saying things like "Hey, Silver Ravenwolf, my life has improved tremendously with Wicca!" if Wicca is as great as they claim. Instead it makes lives much worse, and even Silver Ravenwolf admits she hears this a lot!!!

Why? Because sometimes, things are just as you think they are. Most people woukd tell you the occult will bring misery into your life, and most people are right. When you stop trying to rationalize it with inaccurate data and just use common sense you will realize this. There are two forces at work in this universe: the counterfeit and the genuine. Wicca’s source of power is not the genuine. There’s just simply no way Wicca (and thus the copycat Neopagan religions) can be created from the black magic writings of “The Great Beast 666"(where much of Wicca is plagarzed from), the bizarre sexual practices of Gardner, the spiritual “guidance” of the Watchers (fallen angels) and still be a source of good!
mentioned by writers like Grimassi and Huson
None of the people who have answered your question can make it work either, Don't delude yourself. It's an incredible waste of time and money, and it's spiritual poison.

Answer 9

O.K. you go study some more from your wicca bible that is full of wind and all wet from rain.

Answer 10

This form of God is called His Universal expansion. (as stated in the Bhagavad Gita)


very interesting