In and about the year 2001 I became hooked up to the internet and threw the internet I discovered Wicca: real witches practicing real witchcraft. Not only that but I discovered that the 'dead goddesses' I had been worshiping and giving praise to in my heart for most of my life were real, alive and waiting for me to find them.
A decade (more or less) ago I was a part of the Wiccan counterculture. That is, the Hunters of the Fluffy Bunny. Me and my fellow Hunters were on a crusade to keep Wicca pure. We used phrases like, "Wicca is NOT like, whatever you want it to be!" and passed around witty emails about the Know-It-All High Priestesses and Indigo babies.
Most of you will hopefully not ever be accused of being a Fluffy Bunny (which used to be abbreviated to FB, but that was eons before Facebook came out), but if you ever have then you know how much it hurts to have someone so thoroughly disrespect your religious views on such a deep a profound level.
In the same manor as most of you did, I probed the internet for information because I didn't have access to the books or teachers to teach it to me properly. I picked and chose which parts of the Wiccan religion I wanted to practice. For me it was about reverence to the Gods and staying in tune with nature. Spell craft was never really my big thing, at least not till I had the reverence down.
In 2004 I discovered The Obsidian Mirror and the seed of hatred was planted.
The Obsidian Mirror's message was clear: Kill the Fluffy Bunny, and all his articles are very good and damn near spot on. Even deconstructing the Rede ("We need some Rede be Gone") is poignant and revealing. The message: Question Why!
In that same year I discovered Fluffy Hossenfeffer, a yahoo group designed to allow 'true Wiccans' to swap stories and mock those among our community who arnt truly Wiccan. That is, we all sat around cackling to each other and pointing fingers, drinking up our spiritual superiority and gloating about how we were doing it right and everyone else was wrong, wrong, wrong!
This was also where I met Harlequin, the pen name of a man who took one of my posts and published it as an article on his own website. I have my original post, but I never did the get link to his website and now it has shut down. (Most of us have moved to other areas since then.)
Then, in this group I discovered Daven's Journal. Keep in mind that when I was original reading this journal it looked a LOT different. Daven was still Daven and a disciple of Raymond Buckland and his particular brand of Wicca. What Daven has done since then I'm not sure, but all of the older articles are still up and I highly recommend reading them even if you are an Elder of the Wiccan community.
I went on a crusade and took a lot of other people along for the ride. Not just Harl, but Bodica and a lot of other members of various groups I was a member of. We crusaded and we taught; we infiltrated newbie groups and set things in order; we led threw example and we changed a LOT in the online Wiccan community. For about three years our little group of Bunny Hunters shot ever Fluffy we could fined, skinned them alive and hung them up for the rest of the newbie Wiccans to see. Lessons learned the hard way.
Why, you ask? Because we didn't want our religion to dissolve into nothing. Wicca is NOT an umbrella term meaning "Pagan". The word "PAGAN" is the umbrella term and Wicca is under it. We didnt want to be laughed at anymore by people who took our circles names at face value and though we were trying to become a Wolf or Silver Sun; we didnt want to be discredited because our rituals only date back 50 years; we didnt want newbies telling everyone Wicca was thousands of years old; we didnt want people thinking we believe our way is the only way; we wanted to get away from Satan and his influence over the Christian hearts; we wanted to reconstruct an older path but make it work for the modern world.
In the end I discovered that we were fighting to hold a religion together that was made from pieces of other religions to begin with. Garner invented Wicca. Alex Sanders invented Wicca. Raymond Buckland invented Wicca. The list goes on, and with every new piece of information added from another source it grows further and further away from being 'real Wicca'. That it, it quits being what Garner invented and starts being something else.
This is what we crusaded for the hardest: to keep Wicca pure. To keep it free of other influences. To keep ALL the traditional practices together. To not allow seekers to just cast off the parts they dont like, gloss over the ones that only mildly interest them, start invoking unicorns for protection and start casting spells from some random glitter-clogged internet site where they have you invoke a goddess from a damn list (!), who's name they cant even pronounce and who's story they dont know, and believe that there is no such thing as wicked in this world.
The magic circle does not stop the Goddess from smacking you with the Cosmic 2x4. If you disagree then YOU are part of the problem with the direction Wicca is going.
In the end I left the Wiccan community. Most of the so-called Wiccans cant even tell you which way widdershins is, most can make a sound argument against having a boline and they probably have no clue that, YES, WICCANS HAVE LITURGY.
You can only take so much away from something before it quits being something else. The amount of authors out there (R.I.P. Scott Cunningham, you should have wrote fiction) who are saying that you should always do what is best for you, what feels right and if anyone tells you otherwise they are missleading you... are misleading you.
More on this:
Teachers Distorting Religious Teachings
(Found this in another blog, so glad I did!)
No one ever learned to write because scribbling worked for them so their teachers let them do it. Wiccan seekers NEED a strong foundation of ALL the basics before they are allowed to 'pick and choose' what is right for their own personal practice.
And for heaven sake, admit when what you're doing isn't Wicca anymore. I have two altars, one for Isis and one for Hekate. When my room mate asked me why I dont just say I'm Wiccan I responded, "Because I'm not Wiccan. I'm Pagan."
You dont have to force yourself to be something you are not. If you find yourself ignoring directions for invoking circles (i.e. not invoking them at all), rewriting the Charge of the Goddess to be about your specific Deity, incorporating rosary into your practice, working with totem animals, practicing Voodo, calling on angels or Saints or in general doing anything that is not an integral part of practicing Wicca, then YOU may dear are a Fluffy Bunny if you keep calling yourself Wiccan. You arnt. But that's ok.
The whole Anti-Fluffy-Bunny movement spawned something else years and years latter: Project Pagan Enough
This project is moving and growing within the Pagan community. People like that Hunter I am (no longer active, but still hold these beliefs, articles to come) now have to contend with people like Mr. Lyte. I hope we can work together to allow people to express their true selves threw religion while still maintaining the integrity that Pagans are striving towards and value so much.
I do NOT want to take a step back to the days when $ilver Ravenwolf was the number one author on every Wicca 101 list. Thanks to crusaders like me the seekers of that community no longer need to contend with the likes of her. Unfortunately, we cant make the likes of her go away. Fluffy Bunnies like her are not true Wiccans, teaching her own brand of spirituality that is more in tune with Dutch magic and animism than Wiccan Lord and Lady worship, but ...
... they are Pagan Enough.
Salutations,
Sesh
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