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Empty Womb and Dead Seed: Reconciling Infertility in a Fertility Religion
So much of Wicca is bound up in the idea of fertility — fertility of the land, of the animals, and of humanity. As a religion, we understand this fertility to mean the ongoing survival of the planet and the life that lives on it, but often the first thing that comes to mind when…
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Oaths and Why Not To Make Them (Unless You’re Ready)
Categories: ArticlesA witch is only as good as their word. It’s a lesson I try to teach each of my students. Maintaining good boundaries is an important exercise in living — not just living magickally, but living in general. So are being reliable and appropriately committed. As people, witchy people and just people, we are judged…
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The Wiccan Rede: The Supreme Ethic of the Craft
Categories: ArticlesHigh Priestess Judy Harrow wrote Exegesis on the Rede in 1984. As an advancing student, my teacher Susan Stoddard recommended this essay to me to help me better understand what the Wiccan Rede was and what it did — and did not — tell Wiccans to do with our lives. What it taught me was…
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Paperback Grimoires: An Annotated Bibliography of Recommended Intermediate Books
Categories: ArticlesTags: reading listsPaganism is mainstream enough that there are books available on nearly every topic of interest in major bookstores. And if there isn’t a book available yet, someone’s probably writing it. That is great progress from fifteen years ago when I was seeking to advance my knowledge and become more than a beginner in the Craft.…
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Circle/Wheel: A Crash Course in Circle Symbolism
I’ve quoted him before and I’ll quote him again. Author and teacher Ivo Dominguez Jr. remarked in his book Casting Sacred Space: The Core of All Magickal Work that “In its fullness, a Circle can contain a richness so complex that if all of Wicca were lost except for the way to cast a Circle, and…