Stifling the urge to laugh, or why ignorance in the pagan community should be a source of horror, not mirth.
Cruising Witchvox’s homepage is generally a mistake for me. I was a donor, back when I lived in Philadelphia, and I have never renewed my membership for a number of picayune reasons that add up to enough reasons to spend my hard earned cash elsewhere. We’ve never been well-off at Chez MacMorgan and are only now learning what it is like to own a home, not have the debt collectors be around every corner and be able to afford frivolities like cable and a menagerie of animals. We made a choice, Phoenix and I, to live our values even though we knew that meant taking a pay cut. We have turned down jobs that would’ve given us more but meant living in ways we disagree with, and we are invested in making our adoptive home town a better place for our kids to grow up.
But my morals aren’t why cruising that homepage is a bad idea for me. What bothers me is the one or two (often highlighted) articles that are written incredibly well, citing their sources and even giving links to supporting documents, followed by well-written but factually incorrect articles by people claiming spurious authority. We have, for example, the alleged Gardnerian who claims Gwen Thompson’s Rede of the Wiccae is the Gardnerian law written by Gardner (it is not, and the Gardnerians *I* know who follow it acknowledge it as something new to their trad) we have the alleged traditional priestess whose version of Magick is that of Marion Green’s Natural Magick, not traditional Wicca OR traditional Ceremonial Magick, although she claims it is both (this same author makes the same mistake as the alleged Gardnerian, by the way, in a different piece) we have the light-hearted Diabolist who outright lies about what is in Crowley and Mather, knowing that those who know better will see right through to his “inside jokes” and understand his point, we have a scad of bright young things declaring that they do something despite the teachings of “traditions,” otherwise, when most traditions believe as they do and we have a number of fake, trumped up “witch wars,” ranging from the “Gardnerians hate eclectics and vice versa” (some of my best friends are Gardnerian, and while I would never be interested in their groups personally, we have great respect for the validity and power of each groups respective rites) to “All the Christians are out to get us” to “all adults hate teens and are unfair to them.”
Our first reaction is often to laugh at the mistakes. I mean, when someone claims to be a third degree muckety muck and doesn’t know the difference between Rede of the Wiccae and The Wiccan Rede, it is funny (and, by the way, a direct contradiction to the two persons who emailed me regarding Wicca 333 to say The Rede “wasn’t an advanced topic.”) When someone claims to have been practicing for thirty years and got their charm of making from Excalibur, it is funny. When someone claims that, as a Gardnerian, they are oath-bound to fight the Alexandrians, when that dispute is going on forty-years POST MORTEM it is funny. It’s very funny.
The problem is that the intellectual have-nots (the people who don’t know the good websites and good books and don’t know how to get them or get to them) are being taken in by this tripe. If such a person reads that The Rede of the Wiccae was written by Doreen Valiente and is High Gardnerian Writ (continue reading after you catch your breath) from a person (self)promoted on Witchvox as a third degree whatsits since the days of New Wave and that person is ELOQUENT, GRACIOUS AND CAN SPELL, as compared to some of the intellectual haves who have websites of their own, they are going to believe this person-even though they are wrong.
If some obnoxious loser who comes up as NOT INVOLVED WITH ANY TRADITIONAL GROUP WHATSOEVER whenever vetted dominates a message board with claims of being obligated, as a Traditional Witch or “Traditionally trained but not a tradition member” (whatever that means,) to bash all other Wiccans, the intellectual have-nots think that the “war” between Eclectics and Traditionals, largely settled by the start of the 1970s, is active and taking casualties.
We get sick, as intellectual haves, with having to state the same twenty factual facts (not opinions) again and again and again, but we are left without a choice-we are actively fighting people who are spreading ignorance and making more of those intellectual have-nots.
To make the point clearest, I’d like to talk, briefly, about a completely unrelated group of intellectual have nots- people who live in the US and don’t speak English.
People of the extremes of the right and left (extreme liberals and extreme conservatives) have both promoted forms of English-only rules for citizenship. On the right, this is often motivated by greed and racism, but on the left the campaign to teach people who want to live in the US English-even if it involves some harm to them at first is based on the simple fact that those that don’t speak English are many times more likely to be scammed by bilingual fast talkers. We have had women forced into prostitution and children forced into sweat shops because they could not watch their local news and understand it was illegal. They were not STUPID, they just had people who they saw as authorities out to do them harm.
The intellectual have-nots of Wicca are non-English speakers in the English speaking world, and the scam artists are salivating over them even as you read this. Your choice is to do something, or let them live in their little segmented communities, cut off from the rest of the world. Like Cubans in Miami, they may one day be big enough in numbers to be safe in their community without the ability to communicate outside of it, but that day has not yet passed.