WITCHCRAFT
Witchcraft is a word that frightens many people and confuses many others. In the popular imagination, witches are ugly, old hags riding broomsticks, or evil Satanists preforming obscene rites. Modern witches are thought to be members of a kooky cult, primarily concerned with cursing enemies by jabbing wax images with pins, and lacking the depth, the dignity and seriousness of purpose of a true religion.
But Witchcraft is a religion, perhaps the oldest religion extant in the West. Its origins go back before Christianity, Judaism, Islam - before Buddhism and Hinduism, as well, and it is very different from all the so-called great religions. The Old Religion, as we call it, is closer in spirit to Native American traditions or to te shamanism of the Arctic. It is not based on scriptures or a sacred book revealed by a great man. Witchcraft takes its teachings from nature, and reads inspiration in the movements of the sun, moon, and stars, the flight of birds, the slow growth of trees, and the cycles of the seasons.
The word "Witch" carries so many negative connotations that many peopole wonder why we use the word at all. Yet to reclaim the word "Witch" is to reclaim our right, as women, to be powerful; as men, to know the feminine within as divine. To be a Witch is to identify with millions of victims of bigotry and hatred and to take responsibility for shaping a world in which prejudice claims no more victims. A Witch is a "shaper", a creator who bends the unseen into form, and so becomes on of the Wise, and whose life is infused with magic.
Witchcraft has always been a religion of poetry, not theology. The myths, legends and teachings are reocgnized as metaphors for "That-Which-Cannot-Be-Told", the absolute reality our limited minds can never comepletly know. The mysteries of the absolute can never be explained - only felt or intuited. Symbols and ritual acts are used to trigger altered states of awarness, in which insights that go beyond words are revealed.
The primary symbol of "That-Which-Cannot-Be-Told" is the Goddess. The Goddess has infinite aspects and thousands of names - She is the reality behind many metaphors. She is reality, the manifest deity, omnipresent in all of life, in each of us. The Goddess is not seperate from the world - She is the world, and all thinsg in it: moon, sun, earth, star, stone, see, flowing river, wind, wave, leaf and branch,bud and blossom, fang and claw, woman and man. In Witchcraft flesh and spirit are one.
Theologians familiar with Judeo-Christian concepts sometimes have trouble understanding how a religion such as Witchcraft can develop a system of ethics and a concepts of justice. If there is no split between spirit and nature, no concept of sin, no covenant or commandments against which one can sin, how can people be ethical? By what sthandards can they judge their actions, when the external judge is removed from his place as ruler of the cosmos? And if the Goddess is immanent in the world, why work for change or strive toward an ideal? Why not bask in the perfection of divinity?
Love for life in all its forms is the basic ethic of Witchcraft. Witches are bound to honor andrespect all living things, and to serve the life force. While the Craft recognizes that life feeds on life and that we must kill in order to survive, life is never taken needlessly, never squandered or wasted. Serving the life force means working to preserve the diversity of natural life, to prevent the poisioning of the environment and the destruction of species.
The GOddess is immanent, but she needs human help to realize her fullest beauty. The harmonious balance of plant/animal/human/divine awarness is not automatic; it must constantly be renewed, and this is the true function of Craft rituals. Inner work, spiritual work, is most effective when it proceeds hand in hand with outer work. Meditation on the balance of nature might be considered a spiritual act in Witchcraft, but not as much as would cleaning up garbage left at a campstie or marching to protest an unsafe nuclear plant.
Witches do not see justice as administered by some external authority, based on a written code or set of rules imposed from without. Instead, justice is an inner seanse that each act brings about consequences that must be faced responsibly. "WHAT YOU SEND, RETURNS THREE TIMES OVER" is the saying - an amplified versions of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". For example, a Witch does not steal, not becuase of an admonition in a sacred book, but because the threefold harm far outweighs any small material gain.
(this information taken from "The Spiral Dance" by Starhawk)
