While Gavin has been in hospital several people have left questions on our blogsite regarding the meaning of Wicca; as a specific example, What is Wicca? How can it help me?
We have written nearly thirty books on this and associated subjects, so it is not possible to describe what Wicca is within the confines of a single blog. Instead, we recommend that you look at our website and perhaps read some of our many books. What we can say briefly is this:
Wicca is a spiritual path based on ancient ways of thought linked to nature and to the passage of the year. Its very essence is freedom: freedom to believe in and to revere any form of deity that you wish, and within that freedom to have your own construct of such a deity. (An aside here, and an important one: Wicca has nothing whatsoever to do with any of the abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Instead its roots as we know them are based in early Celtic beliefs.)
You can also believe in evolution and perhaps in an original creation, not the sudden creation of the whole universe that later evolved into the universe as we know it today. In having this freedom to believe and to worship as you wish, you must give others the same privilege. The fact that someone believes firmly in an interventionist deity like Jehovah or the Prophet, does not mean that such a believer is a bad, worthless person.
That freedom extends to such matters as sexual freedom. Almost every week we see accounts of terrible men breaking their marriage vows and if not divorcing, then actually murdering their present spouse so that they can be with a new inamorata. Of course this is absolute stupidity: a natural result, perhaps, of rules--"commandments"--designed to further the Eternal Trinity of guilt, shame, and fear. Ask yourself: Who stands to gain from those commandments? Either you are free, or you are going to abide by the group of ancient rules made by old men in countries far, far away: old men of nomadic sheep-herding tribes who used the same harsh guidelines to bully their women as they did their sheep.
Wicca allows you to be free. You might ask then, "Why get married in the first place?" The answer usually is "for the protection of the offspring." Even those cruel men know enough to make the "right" noises, whether or not they have sufficient testosterone to apply them to their own behavior. In a society that is genuinely free, the offspring should naturally be protected by a set of laws that govern the responsibility of parents, not by a set of laws that requires two people to live out their lives in disharmony. And further: In a society that is genuinely free, contraception is readily available at low or no cost. Every child born is a wanted child.
Wicca is the very essence of freedom. To learn its ways and to abide by its precepts, you need remember only
If it harm none, do what you will
--and the none, we hasten to add, includes yourself.
