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Suleiman -> RE: BDSM and Pagans (10/26/2004 2:57:46 PM)
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Erm... it's easy to get into labels, and this sort of labelling has started many a flame war on other lists. However, this isn't a room full of hypersensitive wiccanoids (most of whom have no experience outside of lighting a few candles and reading a few books, which is a great place to start and a great way to live, but dosen't really count as experience or knowledge), so I'm going to weigh in with a comment here...
Wicca has some peculiarities to it which stem from the Gardnerian tradition which established the religion. Many sects have broken away from the Gardnerian mold (and many of these claim to be "older", in spite of being offshoots of the Gardnerian path), but there are a few things to keep in mind about wicca.
Despite what any number of people would have you believe, it is not an old religion. It was founded less than a century and a half ago, based on a fragmentary mishmash of folk tradition and fable. It began as a form of "secret society", much as the Rosicrucians, Golden Dawn, and other occult orders.
There is a direct literary tradition, going back many centuries, which attempts to unify all of the pagan religions of bronze age europe into one monolithic cult. This tradition eventually led to two seminal works, "Witch Cults in Modern Europe", which claimed to have found evidence of modern pagan practices in the folk traditions of various isolated villages throughout europe, and of course "The Golden Bough", which was for it's day what Joseph Campbell is to us. This literary tradition seriously influenced Gardner, and is an underlying tenet of wicca.
The ritual trappings for wicca, the cup, wand, blade, et cetra, as well as the tradition of casting the circle and calling the quarters, is taken from traditional, christian hermetic ritual. Thanks to the Golden Bough and similar reference materials, these trappings were given the pagan stam of approval because, for instance, the altar of Hecate was always adorned with a knife, which must therefore be the prototypical athame, thus the athame is an ancient tradition of witchcraft. Hecate was the goddess of, among other things, midwives, and the knife attributed to her was emblematic of the one used to cut the umbilicus. The symbolism works for some uses of the athame, but that does not make it an athame.
Because the victorians were lovers of pomp, ceremony, and elaborate mystery ritual, the early founders of wicca were obligated to fill their carefully researched faith with ritual and mystery. Whenever possible, they drew from reputable (for the time) academic sources for how a certian thing was done (but keep in mind that, at the time, the malleus malificarum was considered veritable, which is where the basic initiation ceremony comes from, as do some aspects of the great rite), but when in doubt, they were quite willing to add a few more levels of ceremony. It was, for them, a means of heightening the ritual itself, and absolutely mandatory for the suspension of disbelief. To us, it's a lot of unnessesary brou-ha-ha. What a difference a century makes.
There are other, non-wiccans (we call them "episcopagans") who insist on elaborate pomp and ceremony. It's a lot of fun. I can't be bothered with it, but then I can't be bothered with the catholic mass, either. I know that the mass has a special place for some people and fills a particular need, but I get bored and fidgety after about five minutes.
Personally, I'm not very religious. I figure the gods are out there, and if I yell at them, they'll hear me, but that still leaves me on my own to solve my own problems. Religion is, to my mind, mostly ceremony, which fills a certain need, and community, which I get elsewhere. The rest is the art of storytelling, taken to its highest degree. We tell stories in order to make sense of the insensible, and to give meaning to our lives, which are often filled with large voids of meaninglessness. I have faith, which gives me comfort, and I have philosophy, which helps me to live my life and gives me something to argue about, but mostly I just live.
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