That’s mysts, buddy :mad:
And a myst is as good as a kilometre.
Wow. That is a big ol’ load of horseshit right there.
But that’s ok.
Tristan- recovering pagan.
Kindly point out what you consider horseshit. I’ll admit readily to being glib in my description of generic Neo-Paganism (though it is wibbly-wobbly, just like space-time), so don’t spend too much time on that.
Heh, fair enough.
I’ll start.
Wicca (or Wica if you like, the spelling variations do go on and on) is a word which now refers in its broadest use to any neopagan, nature based religion. One of the more notable features is that it lacks a pope, a hierophant, a metropolitan, or any other person who gets to lay down the law about its doctrine and practice, or authorize any form of excommunication.
Many people involved in the various groups (or denominations or whatever you want to call them, I am not at all particular about this) British Traditional Wicca (just to make things more confusing, most of which actually started in America during living memory) appear to believe they own the name and also the concept and nobody else gets to use it. Or at least that if they do, this is a good reason to look down one’s nose and sniff.
Which is of course their privilege, just as the Big RC has the privilege of maintaining that it alone has the magic key to Apostolic Succession. But that folks say so, does not make it so.
And even the Oathsworn Initiated into the Mysteries and blah, blah, blah have to have some word or other to refer to their god, goddess, the dryghtyn and so on. So in general people use some word that other people have heard of – as otherwise it would have to be the >looks around< Ultra Secret True Name which one would of course be oathsworn not to reveal.
Marienee, I think you’ve hit on the key issue: I’ve been taught to only use “Wicca” to refer only to British Traditional Wicca or very closely related practices, and shun its use as a synonym for nature-based neopaganism, especially since most of the “Wiccans” I’ve come across have been teens who know essentially nothing about paganism outside of films and one or two Llewellyn books. (I was one when I was 13, but I stopped calling myself Wiccan earlier in than most, and I feel rather proud of myself for never buying into the “Burning Times” legend.)
And I could have phrased the god name thing better, for sure. What I meant was something closer to, “If they claim their patron gods are Thor and Pele, they’re not a traditional Wiccan.”
Right, but much of what you have been taught is, in fact, what the OP is going on about, which brings us full circle in about 5 pages. Your own use of language is something you are privileged to develop yourself, and if you want to use it as a way to mark yourself as a member of – or at least knowing about – a particular group, well, nobody likes to be confused with people they think of as noodle headed, I as little as anyone. But other people get to do that, too, and they get to call what they think wicca also. Or pagan or druid or what have you.
Very few people really may be said to know anything about paganism/druidism/wicca other than what they themselves or people they respect made up, and even fewer may be said to know anything about traditional british (er, celtic in some cases but let’s not split hairs) wiccan practices – if you define traditional as “having gone on for more than about thirty five to fifty years, mostly in the united states oddly enough”. This is also true of course of religion generally – possibly its defining characteristic is that at some point somebody made it up.
I know a woman who makes an excellent argument that there is more of use about witchcraft in selected works of Terry Pratchett than in all the BTW reference works combined.
As far as Terry Pratchett goes I agree 100%. Headology is an often overlooked part of what makes witchcraft work half-or-more of the time and I do not say that as a joke.
The rest I shouldn’t touch right now, since it’s nearly 4:30 am local time and I’m afraid I’ll misinterpret something and look rather noodle headed.
This strikes me as what my impression of much occultism/religion/philosophy seems to be about for most people. Feeling superior to others. That’s it, they find some obscure standard by which they can feel like some kind of secret elite. It becomes about knowing that they have some super important secret that no one else has. It’s the key to Scientology, Mormonism, or even Dennett/Dawkins ‘Brightism’. It’s all just about thinking you are extra special and better than the hoi polloi. It’s not deeper or better than gaining money for the same reason, though many people believe it to be so.
That’s the unfortunate thing about human culture, we are spending so much of our energy trying to set ourselves apart and above in imaginary ways, that we often don’t act as brothers and sisters to each other.
It’s interesting to me that Wiccans take that opportunity to scoff and exclude other Wiccans from their practice rather than trying to live in Brotherhood and Sisterhood with them when they are a derided minority as a whole.
You mean the tradition started in 1954?
I don’t think you’ll find many human institutions that can’t be characterized this way. If you lived in a trailer, I could guarantee you that your neighbor could point out something about his own trailer that made him less white-trashy than you, et vise versa.
It does rankle, and somehow it seems like it must be a sin of some kind. But what kind of sin? If you’re prepared to stand on the point that no one is superior to anyone else, you’ll have a lot of trouble condemning other people for feeling superior, because that is tantamount for making a case for your own superiority. But even if we allow that it is possible to be superior to someone else, what are the moral consequences?
If it’s possible to do something that makes you superior, is it immoral to do that thing? Or is it only immoral to recognize the superiority inherent in the act? If you find yourself, through no fault of your own, actually superior to someone else by condition of birth or by circumstances, what is the moral thing to do? Must you downgrade yourself? Or avoid corrupting recognition of superiority. And if you are willing to do that, isn’t that a superior-making act?
Wow 'luc that was touching! Lemme guess, Purple Haze flashbacks?
I’d disagree there. The “irony” (“iryny”?) implied by the song is specifically that he died after buying the lottery ticket. There’s nothing inherent to the purchase of a lottery ticket that would make us expect that he wouldn’t die, especially since he’s old and old people kick off with relative frequency, so it’s not ironic when he does. Just ironick.
… Uh, no. Everything else *appears *to be rotating around it. That is not the same thing.
We pick this frame of reference because it’s the one that contains all the units in motion. When you look at the Earth and the Sun together, AS WE MUST DO TO DISCUSS BOTH OF THEM, the Earth spins on its axis while revolving around the Sun. THERE IS NO WAY YOU CAN LOOK AT ANY SYSTEM THAT CONTAINS BOTH THE EARTH AND SUN and see it as the Sun revolving around the Earth. It will give the ILLUSION of such when observing from a fixed point on the Earth, but it’s just that–AN ILLUSION.
The closest you can get is to say, as **mswas **did, that both the Sun and you are in motion.
A real-world application of Pratchett’s headology isn’t “magick” anymore than cold-reading is being a medium, IMO.
Owning a trailer isn’t group affiliation and you don’t own the trailer for the purpose of feeling superior.
I’m not saying there is no such thing as being superior. I am arguing that this is the sole reason for many people to seek out such groupings. I am not saying it’s the only thing on offer, only that it’s the end goal and where people stop searching.
Nah there is nothing wrong with being superior, or even seeking to be superior. If you can win a marathon then you are a superior runner, and that’s a good thing. I am talking about joining a group with an abstract and subjective notion of superiority just so that you have an unassailable position for your superior. ‘We are superior because X abstract thing favors us and of course you should value it, that’s part of why we are superior because we value it and you are too stupid to know that you too should value it.’
The sin lies in how we exclude people who would naturally have an affinity to us and our grouping just because we want the superiority more than we want substantive relationships based around the grouping abstract.
Some people are smarter, and some of them got that way by learning how to learn, by earning critical thinking skills, and it is not wrong for them to think they are smarter than most people, because they are. The sin is jealously guarding those secrets so that you cannot teach them to others because you’d rather be better than them and denigrate them than accept them into your group.
Does that make any sense?
I disagree. In the case of Oedipus, for instance, we of course know his genealogy, Oedipus and Laius and Jocasta do not. This is good old-fashioned dramatic irony.
Likewise, in Morissette’s work, we know that the old man will die. The old man himself knows, rationally, that he will die. But the tragedy is he knows that, in the sense of knowing rationally, but it does not translate to what Aristotle would call phronesis. That is, he doesn’t (and we don’t!) “live” the knowledge of our ever-shortening stay on this mortal coil.
So the old man plays the lottery, believing, even as he stares death in the face, that material things will enrich his life. Rather than engaging the world, he buys these tickets, spending his last few remaining days waiting rather than “rage, rag[ing] against the dying of the light.” And amazingly, he wins! But we know, as he will all too soon know, that it is an empty victory. And Alanis stands there, like an ancient Greek chorus, reminding us that “Life has a funny way of sneaking up on you / When you think everything’s okay and everything’s going right.”
Buying a lottery ticket doesn’t stop one from doing other things. What if I bought a lottery ticket in the morning and went bungie jumping at night?
Kimmy_Gibbler, I’ll agree that that interpretation is ironic… but I don’t think that’s what the song was going for. Giving ol’ Morissette too much credit, if ya kna’mean.
No, that’s not ironic, either. 
What *would *be ironic would be buying a lottery ticket, winning, locking yourself in a panic room until a security service can come escort you to cash it in, and dying of asphyxiation because you never tested the room and forgot to put in any kind of ventilation.
ETA: For a really good discussion of what irony is, try to get your hands on a copy of *The Compass of Irony *by D. C. Muecke. You’ll probably have to try the library, 'cause it’s out of print.
My own impression is that what the people who follow the various groups associated with BTW do it indeed because they value something – and it’s the same thing the OP is talking about. It is learning and study and practice and so on. Because nobody wants to be associated with stuff we just made up or with thenoodle headed (well, other than practitioners of some other nature religions and aboriginal beliefs, which tend to be relentlessly practical).
Some measure of discipline I suppose, which is not at all a bad thing, the eternal message of Kung Fu Panda aside. On some level we feel that It (whatever it might be) ought to be earned, worked for – a notion deeply bound in our culture and possibly into people generally.
As I grow older I find that I am far less attracted to notions involving this kind of justice – as I begin to understand how little I truly deserve (despite having generally done what I thought was the best I could at various times) I find myself more attracted to notions involving grace or mercy.