[Lady Sheherazahde's Wiccan Ways : Fun and Games]
This was sent to via E-mail. If I am violating a copyright let me know.
Send comments or complaints to sheherazahde@yahoo.com
Lady Pixie Moondrip's Guide to Craft Names
Intro
In the Olde Days, when our pagan ancestors were going through the
persecutions which we now invoke to justify various kinds of current
silliness, witches took craft names to conceal their identities and avoid
those annoying visits by the Inquisition. Over the course of years, it
was noticed that these aliases could also be used as a foundation for
building up a magical personality, carrying out various kinds of
transformative work on the self, and the like. It's clear, though, that
these were mere distractions from the real purpose lying hidden within
the craft name tradition. It took contact with *other* sources of
ancient, mystic lore - mostly the SCA, role-playing games, and assorted
fantasy trilogies - to awaken the Craft to the innermost secret of craft
names: they make really cool fashion statements.
It's in this spirit that Lady Pixie Moondrip offers the following
guidelines to choosing your own craft name. Such a guide is long
overdue; the point of fashion, after all, is that it allows you to
express your own utterly unique individuality by doing exactly the same
thing as everyone else. (Those who are particularly drawn to this element
of the craft name tradition will find the Random Craft Name Generator
near the end of this guide especially useful.)
The approaches given here can be used separately, or combined in a
single name to produce any number of interesting effects. Given enough
cleverness (and lack of taste), the possibilities are endless!
Starting Off Right
Whatever else you do, you should certainly begin your craft name with
"Lord" or "Lady." First of all, it's pretentious, and that's always a
good way to start. Secondly, it makes an interesting statement about a
religion that supposedly has its roots in the traditions of peasants and
rural tribespeople. Thirdly, since most Craft groups use exactly these
same words for the God and the Goddess, this creates a (by no means
inappropriate) confusion about just who it is that we worship.
Divine Names
Along the same lines, you can always take the name of a god, a goddess,
a mythological being or a legendary hero as your craft name, thus putting
yourself on the same level as the powers you invoke.
(Having once watched two fifteen-year-old boys get into a fistfight over
which had the right to call himself "Lord Merlin," Lady Pixie has a high
opinion of the possibilities of this approach. She notes, however, that
there seems to be an unwritten law among those who have made use of this
type of name already, and it's no doubt wisest to follow suit: the more
grandiose the name that you choose, the more of a complete nebbish you
should be. Nearly anyone can carry off, say, "Lady Niwalen," but it takes
a special kind of person to handle a name like "Lord Jehovah God
Almighty." Fortunately, there are those among us who are equal to the
task.
Nonhumans
A related approach involves taking a name that implies (or, better yet,
states openly) that you are an elf or some other kind of nonhuman,
magical being. This works best if you are willing to act the part
obsessively, and to get really petulant when anyone fails to respond
accordingly. Subtlety should be avoided; nobody will catch something
like "Lord Elrandir" unless they know Tolkien inside and out. Try
something more like "Lord Celeborn Pointears the Real Live Elf."
Fantasy Fiction
The burgeoning field of fantasy fiction offers another source for
fashionable craft names, and in many cases, for interesting
complications as well. One popular approach is to choose the name of
your favorite character; as with nonhumans, this works best if you play
the part, and throw a tantrum unless everyone else plays along. Given
luck and a sense of the popular, you may be able to choose everyone
else's favorite character, too, and end up tussling over a name with a
dozen other people. (Mercedes Lackey is a good author to try if this is
your goal.) Both this and the last category have the added advantage of
making it clear that, as far as you are concerned, the Craft is simply a
setting for make-believe games; this can help spare you the annoyance of
actually having to learn something about it.
Inventing A Name From Scratch
The best way to do this is to come up with something that sounds, say,
vaguely Celtic, perhaps by mangling a couple of existing names together,
and then resolutely avoid looking it up in a Welsh or Gaelic dictionary.
Luck is an important factor here, but there is always the chance that
you'll manage something striking. It took one person of Lady Pixie's
acquaintance only a few minutes to blur together Gwydion, son of Don, and
Girion, Lord of Dale, into the craft name "Lord Gwyrionin," and several
months to find out that the name he had invented, and used throughout the
local pagan scene, was also the Welsh word for "idiot."
Following a Grand Tradition
Though the ink is barely dry on most of our modern pagan "traditions,"
there's at least one ancient European tradition that many people in the
Craft follow: the tradition of stealing things from non-Western peoples.
Fake Indian craft names are always chic, especially if the closest thing
to contact with Native American spirituality you've ever had is watching
"Dances With Wolves" at a beer party. Better still, mix whatever Craft
teachings you've absorbed with a few ideas you picked up from a Michael
Harner book, break out the buckskins and the medicine pouches, and
proclaim yourself a shaman. Mind you, there are people out there who have
received real Native American medicine teachings, and they may just turn
you into hamburger if you piss them off; still, that's the risk you run
if you want to be really trendy.
The Random Craft Name Generator
On the other hand, if you are individualistic like everybody else, you
may be looking for a name that expresses the uniqueness of your
personality but still sounds like all the other craft names you've ever
heard. Fortunately, this isn't too hard. Several years back, a
gentleman of Lady Pixie's acquaintance told her that the best way to get
laid at a pagan gathering was to have the PA system announce, "Will
Morgan and Raven please come to the information booth?" Since the
resulting crowd would include at least a third of the female attendees,
he went on, it wouldn't be too hard to meet someone interesting. While
Lady Pixie has not tried this out herself, she has tested the principle
behind it in a series of controlled double-blinded experiments, and discovered
a rule that she has modestly named Moondrip's Law: 80% of all craft names are
made up of the same thirty words combined in various not particularly
imaginative ways.
The discovery of this principle has allowed her to make the once
difficult task of creating craft names easy, by means of the Random
Craft Name Generator, release 1.0.
To use the RCNG, take either two or three of the following words (using
any convenient randomizing method, including personal preference). If
you take two, simply run them together; if you take three, one of the
words becomes the first part of the name, and the other two are combined
to form the second.
Wolf | Raven | Silver | Moon | Star | Water | Snow
|
Sea | Tree | Wind | Cloud | Witch | Thorn | Leaf
|
White | Black | Green | Fire | Rowan | Swan | Night
|
Red | Mist | Hawk | Feather | Eagle | Song | Sky
|
Storm | Sun |
Try it out: "Rowan Moonstar." "Raven Blackthorn." "Silver Ravenw.." -
uh, never mind.
For the expanded version (RCNG 1.01), come up with a name by any of the
methods covered elsewhere in this guide, or take some ordinary American
name, and add a two-word name produced on the RCNG to the end: "Gwydion
Silvertree." "Sybil Moonwitch." "Squatting Buffalo Firewater." The
possibilities are endless!
(Note that this list will change with shifts in fashion; Lady Pixie
expects to bring out an upgrade to RCNG 2.0 in a year or two.)
Outro
It may be objected by the narrow-minded (who are probably all covert
Christians, anyway) that members of the Craft have better things to do
with their time than the above guidelines would suggest. This shows a
complete lack of insight. First of all, in an increasingly blase and
tolerant culture, it's becoming hard for white middle-class Americans to
get that rush of self-righteous gratification that comes from pretending
to be members of a persecuted minority; we may not be able to get burned
at the stake by calling ourselves silly names, but at least we can get
laughed at, and that's something. Secondly, if we keep on
treating craft names (and the Craft as a whole) as fashion statements,
that spares us the unpleasant drudgery of actually learning magic and
making it part of our lives. Finally, if we're pretentious enough, those
people who actually know enough to magic their way out of a wet paper bag
will roll their eyes and go somewhere else, and we can keep on fighting
our witch wars, casting vast astral whammies and invoking powers we don't
have a clue how to control, all in the serene certainty that no one is
actually going to get hurt.
On the other hand, we could take the Craft seriously...but who wants to
do that?
- Lady Pixie Moondrip
This page hosted by
Get your own Free Home Page