Waning Moon Conrad

I haven't met many Wiccans.

Unfortunately the few I have met have in fact been simpering mediocrities and I truly do not mean that in a light way.

If I told you the story of an evening spent with "Count Robin Steiner", a wanker from school who only reads cheap fantasy novels and refuses to grow up and the Count's "apprentice" who is "very, very advanced" I swear that you would vomit.

(assertion - he's really a Count because it says so on his passport, he showed me....
reply - he changed his name by deed poll so that Count is now his "christian name"),

Having seen a lot of the Wiccan literature, my question is, are there any Wiccans who aren't fluff bunnies?

Maybe there are. I sincerely hope so but I confess that I am very, very cynical about the whole thing. I just don't think there's anything there except for the histrionic leading the credulous.

It seems to be very easy, cheap and very, very corny.

But I'll say this again. I sincerely hope that there are Wiccans who are genuine and unpretentious and I hope that there's some sort of noumenal experience, gnosis or enlightenment that they can arrive at through their practices.

Heathen Dawn

It seems Wicca was headed that way ever since its creation. Gardner made the religion up from a mixture of so many sources. So a further "ecclectising" of the religion is no surprise at all. And the fusion of Wicca with the New Age is truly deplorable. But then again, neopaganism and New Age have become pretty indistinct.

Well, I think Calzaer is a serious Wiccan.

Calzaer

Nice to know I get a mention in a positive manner. Thanks, HD, I appreciate it.

Although there are certainly time when I feel like I might be growing some fluff around the edges...

I think I've about decided that fluffybunny Wiccans (hereafter called 'Fundamentalist Wiccans' since the word 'fluffybunny' makes them sound harmless... and in many cases, they're pretty damaging) are the vocal wing of the Wicca movement. Sort of like how Southern Baptists are a vocal wing of the Protestant movement. There are lots of nice, calm, serious Protestants out there, but the only ones you hear from/about are the frothing-at-the-mouth types.

The difference between Wiccans and Protestants is that the non-vocal wing of Wicca goes to great length to distance itself from the fundamentalist wing of Wicca. Unlike, say, Methodists and Baptists, where one is vocal and one is not but they're both "brothers in Christ" so the distancing that goes on is rather minimal.

Waning Moon Conrad

Fluff Bunny Wiccans as fundamentalists!

It doesn't surprise me that someone in the movement would say that.

I've know a fluff bunny New Ager who is very huffy and indignant about the fact that Vajrayana Buddhism does not teach that the cosmos is all kewchie pie and ickle and padded with cotton wool.

Fact is, not only is she a fundamentalist New Ager, she's an ignorant, arrogant bully and a Nazi as well.

Incidentally, regarding "high magicke" there is no shortage of fundamentalist Crowleyans and Golden Dawnists as well. Fact is Crowley, for all his faults, probably wouldn't have pissed on them if they were burning.

Karalora

I like to think that I'm not a fluffy bunny. Then again, I don't know whether to consider myself Wiccan, per se, or just a Neo-Pagan "kitchen Witch".

This quiz says I'm "a Scholar....by no means a Fluffy Bunny", but I'm not foolish enough to consider amateur personality quizzes to be gospel (so to speak) authorities.

Jabu Khan

Most of the tales of human sacrafice and "The Wicker Man" are taken from Julius Ceaser who was the very man who recruited legions to wipe out the Celts. The Archeological record does not support it. Why Ceasar would be troubled by these autrocities when his reign was opened with men being slaughtered by every available beast known to man escapes me. Pythagoras is believed to have been trained by a druid during his time in a Greek colony in Italy(in a region held by the celts). Recent archeology suggests that they had unversities and hospitals long before the Greeks and Romans(Pythagoras started most of the origional universities in Greece.) What Greek and Roman scholars wrote about the Celts describes them as having three branches of government represented by red, white and blue robes. They elected their representatives and you didn't have to be a merchant or higher to vote. Women were more equal then in other western societies and the closest thing to slavery that they practiced ws a form of indentured servitude thar was sentenced to criminals and prisoners of war. This is not to say that people were not killed ritualistically and that heads of fallen enemies were not considered trophies to be brought back home but they were no more barbirous, perhaps much less, than thier Grecco-Roman counterperts. Celtic sayings that have been handed down are "even the gods most yield to the truth," " I die a free man of a free nation," "above all else the truth." I think the romanticism comes from the fact that the philosophies of the Celts seem to mirror more the principles of current society then the Theocracies of the Greeks and Romans. It has been exagerated perhaps by the noble-savage myth but it seems that much of their views of democray and science later examined by the Greeks and Romans are the things that we revere those cultures for.

Jabu Khan

To say that you cant call cultures Celtic because of their involvement with other cultures and their changes over time is like saying Grecco-Roman is a misnomer bacause all their citizens weren't Etruscan or Dorian. I think the the religious influence on western society that we like to downplay likes to deny the possibility that so much scientific reasoning and individualism could be represented by a culture that had little need for an all powerful creator. Even our accounts of Greece and Rome seem to ignore the philosophers who did not search for universals and one thing that all else sprang from. We emphasize these philosophers as great men of reason even though others had already calculated the distance around the equator and established that the earth was not a cylinder or flat but a sphere that revolved around the sun. It seems most of our philosophy books start with the so called pre-socratic philosophers giving examples of very few and trace a steady line of establishing a system of argumentative discussion that leads to the conclusion that God exists based on premises that fly in the face of the very logic they just discussed.

contracycle

IIRC this is essentially down to the development of European Nationalism. Many of the European nationas started investigating their "ancient heritage" in an attempt to assert some soret of internal universalism. This was accompanied by anoutbreak of monumentalist art, such as the Boadicea statue and whatnot. France, Germany, Belgium, Britain, all built "racial histories" based to greater or lesser degrees on ficiton. The nivbelinglied is of course the most famous of these today, becuase it was Germany that toook this nascent ethnic Fascism all the way.