Modern Wicca is blessed with not one, but two heritages. There is our spiritual heritage, including influences from the deep and mystic past that we have adopted and adapted; and our literal heritage, which began when Gerald Gardner synthesized the traditions of Dorothy Clutterbuck and her New Forest Witches with the rituals and rites of the Masonic Order. To deny or downplay either of these heritages would be a mistake, because it downplays the richness of our religion.
Our Spiritual Lineage
Virtually no member of modern Wicca can honesty lay claim to an unbroken tradition going back hundreds of years. Although it is true that there have been Family Tradition or "famtrad" witches of one sort or another through most of history, no two families practiced in the same way and, for many of them, the
traditions were just that--pragmatic family traditions that had nothing to do with religion. They used magick because magick worked, Gram taught Mom, who
taught daughter, who taught granddaughter but in many cases their magick had little to do with their spiritual life.
Yes, there have been cultures where magick was an intrinsic part of the spiritual life of the people. But magick has also been an intrinsic part of the mundane culture of some peoples; it has been seen as something in which everyone participated, and without participation, had no official place in society. It is the "matter of fact" approach to magick that gives the ancient cultures such immense spiritual clout. Unfortunately those cultures have been overrun time and time again, and other than the words left to us in history (and those often written by the aggressors) we have lost much of the knowledge these people had.
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Older simply doesn't mean more sacred. |
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For the most part we are recreating what we can of this knowledge as best we can, based on family lore, cultural tradition divorced from its spiritual roots, and from writings of the conquerors about the "quaint and superstitious customs" of their victims. Thus any direct information we have from these cultures was carried forward, not from father to son and mother to daughter, but through successive incarnations, as souls carried their accumulated wisdom from one lifetime to another, to be tapped, used, and built.
To deny that and lay claim to a long unbroken history for the modern Craft that exists primarily in folklore and myth, is to deny one of our greatest strengths. Older simply doesn't mean more sacred. One of the greatest strengths of the modern Wiccan religion is that it is a synthesis, begun by Gerald Gardner and continued over the last 70 years, of the best of spiritual wisdom throughout time and across the planet.
