It is better to keep silent, and be thought a fool....
This entry is the personal opinion of Kaatryn MacMorgan, and may or may not be shared by the individuals in the CUEW leadership triad, other members of CUEW, members of the Coven at MacMorgan Covenstead (called MacMorgan Covenstead for short,) other MacMorgans, other animals, vegetables or minerals. Readers are encouraged to please, please, please, not take anything as infallible, as I have no desire to be anyone's guru. In addition, readers are encouraged to look things up for themselves.
Wicca, especially traditional Wicca, contains an inherantly flawed system of magic(k) which is a result of the great Wiccan elders having training in Ceremonial Magick and having a CM worldview and expecting that their students would be so trained, even as Ceremonial Magical training became less and less common.
I won't lie, this blog entry was prompted by a wonderful student forwarding me the essay of an alleged Wiccan who was "highly trained in ceremonial magick"
which contained a number of profound errors which could be traced to Marion Green's Natural Magic (indeed, Natural Magic is not the problem, but students who think it, and Ceremonial Magick, are equivalent, and they are not.)
This is not a criticism of Green, as that is best done by those who are more familiar with her work, this criticism is of Wiccans, of any kind, who purport to be experts in Ceremonial Magick and "pump up" their Wicca by borrowing the works of John Dee, Jacob Boehme, Thomas Vaughn (whom I personally have a deep love and respect for,) Paracelsus and other Christian mystics while claiming Wicca is separate from Christianity, or while outright criticizing Christianity as a valueless entity.
This criticism is directed at those Wiccans who complain that Wiccans do not understand how the world works, and try to show their deep knowledge of the way the world works by borrowing heavy handedly from Christian Theology (however obscure) and declaring the rest of us are stupid for not knowing the way the world works!
I am not an Abrahamic mystic, and I don't believe that the god of Abraham sits above me taking judgement. As such, I also don't believe said god has placed towers at the four celestial points from which angels sit and keep watch for him, and which contain the Four horsemen, ready to be released when the world has become wicked enough, nor do they contain the "kings" of the elementals, named after the helpers of the Angels in Abrahamic mythology.
I am also a scientist, and I have looked through a microscope at the earth, and not found gnomes that the god of Abraham put there to see that everything was distributed perfectly.... Looked at water and air, too.
I have found that, just because it is shaped like a kidney, doesn't mean a kidney bean affects the kidney, and a god that would send that kind of signals would be pretty lame.
There is no place in my life for the god of Abraham, my gods keep me full enough, and I don't need to plunge the depths of Abrahamic mythology to make the metaphysical world make sense to me....
If you, too, are not an Abrahamic Mystic, you, too, don't need to fill your life with the works of the Abrahamicists to make it make sense.
The classically trained Wiccans (our traditionalists) omitted most of the Ceremonial Magick because they were trying to reconstruct what they thought was an ancient non-Christian religion, save for those who were trying to construct a new religion based on non-Christian views of the world, and it does a disservice to those elders to assume they omitted the CM because they did not understand it, and you, armed with some book, do understand it.
Most of them were trained in it far better than you and omitted it. Figure out why!