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January 04, 2008

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Ophiussa

Greetings,

Found you blog by some unrelated - but fortunate - search terms in Google, and this article is especially insightful.

All that you say about Wicca is, alas, true, in the sense that "Wicca" has been progressively watered down to transform it into some self-help group for intellectual lazy people. This is especially unfortunate for those that like me do follow that path, although the resemblance of the Wicca I know from the "fluff bunny" variety that only requires wishful thinking and some banalities about "The Burning Times" is such to the point of sometimes being utterly embarrassing.

Apart from Wicca - which is an initiatory path simultaneously rooted in the Western occult tradition and Paganism - I'm in religious terms a Pagan (Wicca isn't a Religion, or if it is it is merely in an esoteric sense: the religious background of Wicca is Paganism) and rather active in, for example, Reconstructionist Neo-paganism (that seems to fit broadly your path, since Germanic Paganism of the "Asatru" kind is generally of that school). The Pagan/Heathen/etc. question is, I think, a matter of both preference and scope: circle within circles, if you wish, in that Pagan and Paganism refer more broadly to native Indo-european religiosity and Heathen seems to invoke a narrower scope, directly related to the Germanic branch. The main problem here is again the banalisation that the word suffered at the hands of the new-agers with their beads and inanities.

I also found you comment on the Traditionalist view of modern Wicca interesting, and while I agree with you there are also several key problems with Traditionalism even when considering more serious Pagan endeavours: the insistence on the evils of "naturalism" and "telluric inferiority", the idea that Paganism shouldn't really be revived by reconstruction, etc, etc. It's no coincidence that several of them ended up either in Hinduism or Islam, while at the same time scorning the efforts of those who resisted and vowed to be faithful to the Gods of their kin and their land, and still went on talking about Tradition...

From an Iberian to a Teuton, best regards and health!

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