Paradigm wrecker!
I am teaching a magic(k) class in the later summer, and I was interviewing a local thirty something as a potential student. I realized fairly quickly that she wasn't what I wanted or needed in the class, but that is not what this quick entry is about....this is about the fact that I destroyed her paradigm, because she never had met a single Wiccan for whom actions, not lineage, determined a person's Wiccanness.
I won't make claims about the reality of her lineage claims, mostly because I generally have to pull in favors to do so and since it is of no benefit to me, I've no reason to waste good longstanding favors!
To put it in the bluntest of terms, she was a "grace not works" Wiccan. In this case, she was Wiccan by the grace of her lineage (or the one she claimed) not by virtue of any of her actions.
What we had was a complete breakdown. She asked me about my own lineage, which I answered with data pertinent to the course I am teaching, namely my training in Ceremonial Magick (remember, the class is not Wiccan, but on Magic(k), and, indeed, I'm not touching on Wicca at all in the course) and she began to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, only with Gerald Gardner being her Kevin Bacon.
In CM, there is no such thing as the lineage. Either you were taught by masters who knew what they were doing or not. EVEN if you were taught by the Master of Masters, you are considered as good as your works demonstrate. She illustrated her three degrees from Gardner (which, knowing some of those she claimed connection to, seem spurious at best) and I was supposed to be in awe of her despite her ideas which were pretty far from Wicca (and based on Grimassi, 100%) and very far from CM.
The thought of religion being who you know not who you are makes me sick. As many of us know, there was a student of Gerald Gardner's most would call a warlock. Under the rules of this lady's paradigm, someone who learned of Wicca from this guy would be more valid than, oh, one of Raymond Buckland's students student's, by virtue of a closer relation to Gardner. The fact that the imagined person would know didly about Witchcraft wouldn't matter.
Chief amongst the reasons I suspect this woman's lineage claims was the idea that proximity not ideas make the Wiccan. She did not get this from a Gardnerian group. If she was Gardnerian trained she promptly forgot her own training when she arrived at this conclusion...
But I really didn't come here to rant about people, but to make it clear-if you want to impress me, show me what you know, not who you know (or who you claim to know.)