Photo by Anna Shvets via Pexels
by Christopher Penczak, edited by Tina Whittle
Recently I read a critique of modern Paganism, one I’ve seen many times before, a lament that we have enough books of correspondences and rituals and need a tradition to tell us how to live and how to be. That is what is missing.
I disagree. We live in a world with plenty of religions and groups telling us how to live and be, and while I understand the cultural longing for a new way of life clearly modeled for us, any religion that does this will only lead back to dogma.
It is in experiencing the mystery that we learn how to live and be. Occult training—including the many lists of correspondences, rituals, and meditations—gives us endless opportunities to break the collective societal programming, the collective materialistic worldview, as each ritual provides an opportunity for mystery. We can tell people that the world is alive and full of gods and spirits and to behave accordingly, but until we experience it, we don’t believe. We can teach that thoughts are things, but until we experience it, we won’t believe. We can cast a spell in a moment of need, and when the herb or stone speaks back to us, we realize that those lists of correspondences led us to it. We feel a subtle force flow. A veil of perception lifts… these are all in the experiences. To make them into a living tradition, we must then integrate them into our worldview. It’s a subtle process.
I remember someone online talking about how an indigenous worldview is out of reach for most modern people, as they have been conditioned to see all the teachings as symbolic, while the indigenous person takes them literally. It’s the difference in the acknowledgement of a tree’s personhood as you know all life is sacred versus the tree actually talking to you and telling you something objectively true that you had no prior knowledge of. One is a mental romanticism, and the other is living in an enchanted world and realizing that enchantment is the natural default state of everything. Disenchantment is a purely modern human problem. A Paganism that teaches the personhood of a tree without the experience of it directly will fail us. Yet we have to be curious enough to be present with an unfolding process and ask ourselves the bigger questions as we go. It’s true a lot of spellcraft. Neopaganism often focuses on self, in manifestation and prosperity, and many never leave that stage, but it’s purposeful if it provides a foundational level of needs met, giving us the space to ask the bigger questions with a larger, enchanted framework and actual techniques to seek the answers.
Breaking the idea that everything is symbolic (which is still better than the mainstream mechanistic material views of reality) often requires a radical reorientation of your reality. This can be a shattering experience or an initiatory magick. Sometimes it’s both. Magickal training provides a philosophical framework to establish a new paradigm and function in this radical reorientation. It also provides a community of peers and elders who were not raised in this paradigm but likewise had a reorienting initiatory experience. This is the reason why even though Paganism can be taught to our children, we still don’t see Witchcraft growing rapidly through families. Converts mostly come through a quest of disquiet and discontentment with the world. A religion of priesthood is different from a religion for the masses. Navigating that will be one of our growing community challenges.
Some think of Paganism as logic and reason, quoting the classical philosophers, but the reason of ancient Pagan philosophy and the logic of secular science today can leave a wide gap. Speaking with gods, ancestors, trees, mountains, and the organs of your body—and getting answers back—is seen as far outside accepted convention in our current society. Without some acknowledgement of that, often with some self-deprecating humor referencing the symbolic and not literal nature of such communication, you’ll end up having a 24-hour psychiatric evaluation. We have even classified “magical thinking” as a psychological symptom of disorder in our modern society.
When leaders seek to teach us how to live and be, they will speak of “living in harmony with nature” and some form of “doing what is right.” How does one do these things without the complete dismantling of modern culture? And if you have a plan of dismantling that causes no harm to the most disaffected in society, please share it. Until then, we have to all figure out what those look like in the context of our current lives. Individuals model it, and groups can do more and more to model the changes, but I fear religious mandates from Pagan leaders. Part of magickal training is in the discovery and then implementation of your own magickal will, not someone else’s. We work cooperatively, but one answer will not fit all. Teaching can help us discover answers for ourselves rather than have them dictated. Any mandates need to be social and legal contracts, not religious ones, in a secular society; otherwise we risk trying to merge our own church with the state, repeating Christian mistakes. We are past the point of being any one Pagan culture, and the old ways of tribal law, while romantic, would be regressive for secular society. Witchcraft, indigenous cultures, religion, and philosophy can inform the greater conversations, but they can only inform.
Many looking solely for religion are looking for answers, not a process in which to find answers or techniques that are “right” rather than techniques that are useful. I remember fairly early in my teaching career when I lost a student who demanded I provide her a food blessing from the tradition. We didn’t have an official food blessing for the tradition, but I felt I gave more than sufficient training for her to write her own. That was not good enough; she needed the food blessing that we were all using. Of course there are times in rituals where the words do not change, and the esoteric reason is to build power for a specific technique and marker point on the path of initiation. As important as recognizing and blessing your food it, it does not require the same words to be used by everyone all the time. She required that level of not just like-mindedness, but same-mindedness to feel confident that what she was doing was correct. I was bewildered. Eventually, she found a Witchcraft tradition that gave her a specific prayer for not only food blessings but for starting the day, ending the day, and all manner of life experiences. For myself I need a system that allows for the art of flexibility, creativity, and a sincere uprising of my own thoughts, feelings, and words.
How to live in a multicultural, multi-religious, cosmopolitan society is a complex and ultimately very personal question to answer. A lot of Pagans are looking for a replacement religion to their birth religion without dismantling their past belief systems. I often say people like to file off the serial numbers to Jesus, Mary, and Yahweh and paint in the names of the deities from their current polytheistic pantheon. This is particularly true for those who are seeking an occult training or mystery tradition and are the first to critique the manuals of the past. They are often mad at their birth religion and feel indigenous traditions will solve all their problems, so they thereby reject association with the Western mystery traditions that acknowledge the influence of things like Qabalah and alchemy upon occult philosophy. They often reject occult philosophy itself while simultaneously practicing it without full awareness. I remember serving as minister for a predominantly Heathen group in a prison. They were adamant in not “doing Wicca” despite my background and my being the only non-Christian/Buddhist religious volunteer. After crafting something definitively non-Wiccan, they didn’t like it and cited all the things missing they wanted from a ritual, all which were very Wiccan.
While I understand the desire for something pure, clear, and bereft of monotheism, we live in an interconnected world where all things touch and influence us, even if the influence is in our opposition. The desire for purity is dangerous as it is the road to fundamentalism and dogma. For me, always learning that Witchcraft is an art, science, and religion becomes the focus. The art and science give us balance, flexibility, and the power to adapt. The art and science are as much a part of the answer on how to live and be as the religion. It’s through the integration of our experiences—asking the bigger questions of ourselves and each other and making room for how we will all have different answers yet still function in community—that we craft a living Paganism, a truly living Witchcraft.