Elementary, My Dear

A really great topic was mentioned the other day about why some groups tend to follow the East=Air, South=Fire, West=Water, North=Earth associations commonly mentioned in modern occult books...while other folks instead ascribe the elements in relation to what may be visibly found in their environment.

I mean, what do you do when your "living room by day/ ritual space by esbat night" has a lovely fireplace on the western wall and your tropical fish aquarium is happily bubbling on a shelving unit in the north?

Well, here are my thoughts about the "elemental directions" as used in ritual undertakings. Take from this whatever you wish or disregard it entirely.


From what I've learned, there are several schools of thought about how crucial the prescribed directionality is when used in conjunction with Circle conjuration, and it will be dependent upon which model of ritual style you are working.

Some ritual styles utilize the physically and scientifically measurable, cardinal compass points (N, E, S, W) as focus loci in rites. These may be discerned and conveniently marked out as reference common to all observers/participants of the rite; that is to say, they are not individual-biased in their definition of the space. From this, some folks choose to incorporate old or historically-used attributions for these cardinal compass points....coming out of Greek, Roman, Egyptian or occult sources. As many modern witches use "whatever the book says" (be that a BOS or any written manual, Llewellyn book, etc)....the ceremonial magic usage is common....East is Air, South is Fire, West is Water, North is Earth.

These affiliations may or may not be reflective of the immediate physical geographical landscape in which the magician using them finds himself. In such cases, the magician would be "plugging into the archetypal usage" of these attributes and finding that there is enough accrual of energy associated with them being used in this manner for thousands of years and by countless other magicians preceding him, that "connecting to that upload" is relatively easy to "tap into" when attempted. I like to think of it in an electrical metaphor.....it is easy to make the connection because the primary circuitry is already in place and I'm just putting my plug into the pre-existing socket!

The other idea for the compass points (N, E, S, W) is to engage them literally and use them in conjunction with real, observable space --- that is to say, if you have a major body of water geographically located to the East, then it visually makes more sense to connect "East" as "Water" rather than "Air." This type of usage then, would be biased towards wherever the participant(s) of the ritual were working at the time, and would therefore be in flux from rite to rite unless the magician(s) worked in the same location for every ritual (thus also building up and accruing energy for those ascribed attributions over time and making them stronger, more easy to "tap into" each time). The genus loci, or spirit of place, would be beneficial to aiding in building such a connection too. The only 'disadvantage' here, if it could be called such, would be that the amount of accrued agreement with those attributions would come only from repeated usage.....as in, going back to my electrical metaphor....the current would be able to jump to that association because the concept is conductive in that situational observance, but if the electrical source is modified in any way or moved, it wouldn't necessarily remain observable or active to others --- you'd only garner enough 'juice' as you often as you keep "repeating the exact experiment."

A third option involves folks who prefer to use less specifically delineated situational positions than the scientific compass points. Instead, they may build their working circle space or astral temple in relation to where they themselves stand and what they tangibly observe --rather than N, E, S, W they'd indicate the borders of the space with explanations such as "before me", "behind me", "above me", "beneath me", etc. Everything in this model of ritual space construction then is dependent upon the individual and his unique views and vantage point. It is tougher to sustain as an exacting group function since each person's observation point will be a bit different given their orientation and position in the Circle. Also this type of directionality lends itself to the geographically observed elements --- since Earth is what the magician would be standing on, Air would be all around him, etc --- the "traditional" elemental associations don't exactly fit.

So to summarize, I think the manner of associating an element with a direction depends upon which method of ritual style you wish to pursue. If you work as an individual practitioner, you may want to "test drive" all these methods and see which one feels more conducive and comfortable to your solitary work.

If you're working in a coven or group setting, however, the model of attributions would likely have to be agreed upon by all participants in advance in order to avoid having "confused and conflicting" energetics operant in the Circle's construction.

Or, if you are working in a specific Tradition, your mentors and teachers could give you some explanation and practical exercises to illustrate why the way they are showing you to use is their preferred method and fits in with other Trad-specific practices.

Not Suffering Fools

Sometimes a little fakery can be good.

Choosing to wear faux fur rather than farm-raised minks....donning sparkling Swarovski crystals instead of diamonds....viewing a trompel'oeil mural of a glorious ocean vista when your apartment window really faces a brick wall three feet across the alley.

But then, there are times when subsitutions are not called for.  Times when your internal BS-o-meter clangs like a fire alarm because you're being spoonfed something you know doesn't feel like the real deal. Times when you're getting the hard-sell pitch by someone with enough charisma or partial credentials or enough force of "popular" backing that they're foisting the verbal equivolent of pyrite on you as if it is 24 karat gold.

How do you recognize a charlatan who flaunts bogus credentials?  A huckster posing as a proper trad witch or teacher?  A con-artist claiming to be a font of wisdom and experience who can teach you all you'll ever need to know for the low, low price of $$$? What if you suspect you have encountered the real-life witch version of Gilderoy Lockhart, in all that glamour and glory that never seems to be able to be verified?



Joking aside....what about the other side of that coin?  What if you are the one who finds a pretender in your midst, riding on selective name-dropping and ill-begotten credentials?  What obligation do you have to warn the general, unsuspecting wicca-seekers out there?  Do you have any right to out someone else whom you know to be a fraud?  How far should you extend yourself to warn others about a known or suspected liar?

These are the questions I am pondering while I'm involved in some public pagan forums in person and online....

What if I come upon one of these opportunist jokers in the act of luring naive, unwary and credulous seekers into taking teaching from them?  What if I see or hear them coaxing or coercing newbies into joining their group/coven?  What if they are baiting innocents with the need to buy books they've authored or to sign up for online "classes" they get paid to teach or to purchase other "necessities" and tools from them in order to be validated? 

Should I call out these imposters publicly and verbally duke it out for all to witness, hoping that doing so won't backfire and make me look like a bigger asshole than the perpetrator? 

Do I try to intercede privately with the victims of this swindler and hope that they'll listen to me, a concerned witchy citizen over the pre-packaged, peer pressure, Pied Piper lullaby they're being serenaded with?

Do I bother to confront the alleged liar backchannel and give them the opportunity to explain themselves --- to see if they truly are ignorant of the offense (like they didn't know they were spreading untruths about themselves or their "credentials") and capable of making amends....or to see if they are wholly aware of their fraudulent behavior and just unrepentant and remorseless in their lies, fully intending on seeing how far they can get away with things before they are pegged as a fraud?

In what way should such knowledge of the liars be communicated and what are the rammifications of doing so?  What benefit is it to others if I get involved in this way? And what do I have to gain or lose through such involvement?  Is the sacrifice I make in putting my own reputation at stake worth the potential hassle I may or may not save for others?  Am I doing new folks a service or disservice by making this hurdle easier to navigate?

As evidenced by my earlier blog posting about why it is important to vet people who wish to be taken at their credentials to specific training or whatever....I was once "burned" by such a liar.  Yes, it pissed me off when I found out that what I'd thought was honest traditionalist training was not what I'd received at the hands of one of my teachers.

But the question remains: did I not learn something from my bad experience too?  Even the experience of being lied to?  What is the value of learning how to better calibrate my BS-o-meter in the face of similar liars in the future?  What is the value in gaining the knowledge about how I want to be as a teacher myself?  What is the value in sharing the story of my experience with others?

Some people learn when you tell them something.  If they have respect for you as a person, they are likely to take what you say to heart and weigh it against their own prior personal experiences to see if it "rings true" to them.  Other people need to have the experiences for themselves in order to do this internal comparison, in order to wholly internalize and "own" what you're telling them.  They need to build up a point of reference, a catalog of experiences by which they can guage future understanding.

So I wonder to myself each time I come across one of these liars....what service am I doing or not doing by calling this liar out, to himself, to his victims, to the rest of the community?  What is the greater good from what I can see as my current perspective.

Is it worth making that "WARNING:  Bold-Faced Lying Idiot" poster and spamming the perpetrator far and wide?  Would people like to know when certain people or institutions professing to be honest and legit are fake?  Should they get warning labels?

Tell me, what do you do in such situations?  Would you give others a spoiler alert that "all that glitters is not gold?"

Sparkling Whine

Again on an online forum I'm trying to gently explain why the word "Wica" or "Wicca" is not an umbrella term or synonym for witch.  And again, I'm being told I'm an elitist snob for holding such an opinion.    *doing that sqinty eye thing and rubbing the bridge of my nose*

What many new-on-the-scene, freshly minted eclectic folks do not understand, is that to traditionalists, the words we use have definitive meanings, have clear-cut definitions, have specific associations which are implied by their usage. The point of the particular "Why do those mean BTWs say I'm not Wiccan" discussion was to show why there is such a disparity between the pop-culture usage and the original usage of the word "Wicca."

Thus starts the tired warcry of "BTWs are elitists!!  They're trying to tell us we're not legit!!  They're looking down on us!!" and all that other bogus nonsense.

Rather than read and see what is being said ---namely that BTWs don't waste time worrying about what folks outside our ranks are doing so long as it doesn't interefere with our stuff---- some newbies just insist on clinging to their self-induced suffering as if it is a security blanket.

I happen to be a big fan of the intelligent eclectic movement.  Having spent the majority of my own witchy experience in that camp, I can appreciate the dedication and the amount of work involved in having a functioning and fulfilling eclectic path.  What annoys the hell out of me are the half-assed, coat-tail riding poseurs...but I've ranted plenty about that before and continue to wonder why honest eclectic folks tolerate those people in their midst.  That said, as I'm now a traddie, that just isn't my battle to fight anymore, and I'm exhausted enough with what's in front of me.

Anyway....

That the original usage of the "Wica" existed before the pop culture usage is strangely disavowed by these  folks who refuse to research the history of when and how this word came to be in our lexicon of thought.  Furthermore, the newbies instead focus on the falsehood that those of us who do use the word according to the original meaning are elitist.

I contend that we are purists.  But elitists?  No.

To be elistist would be to say that BTW's hold the belief that we view ourselves as deserving of preferential treatment, emphasis or favor by virtue of perceived superiority. That is not the case. We do not hold ourselves as being superior or above or better than any other witchcraft practitioners. There is no implied judgement here.

We do, however, hold ourselves and what we do as distinct from what other witches are and do. We are different in our methods of training our members and in the gamut of orthopraxis by which we privately conduct our rituals.

Read that again. Not better than.....different from.

And it is in the distinction and acknowledgement of our differences from witchcraft practitioners of other cultures, other methods of training their members, other forms of practice....even the Gods whom they interact with.....it is out of clarification that we have our need to define and draw a closed off "if/then" type of comparison. That we BTW's are trying to explain this with words that hold very specific meanings and definitions to us, within our structures and systems, and that such words once were applied only to our insular and self-described distinctions is the point.

The undereducated folks say "elitist", but what I think the vocabulary word they're driving at is "exclusionary."

Yes, the original meaning of "Wica" is by its nature circumscribed and discriminating in its limitations. Thus the original usage to which BTW folks continue subscribe, does have a defined set of parameters one must adhere to in order for the word to apply.....so yes, it would be true to say that BTWs believe that the Brotherhood of the Wica, is by nature, exclusionary.

But something being exclusionary does not equate to it automatically having negative connotations. The separation and delineation itself has no value judgement at all. It is simply an indicator, a label, a classification.

Let's try another, more current and provable metaphor.

Once upon a time, the name "champagne" only referred to specific varietal of sparkling wine made in the region of France that is called Champagne. The French held proprietary rights to the name "Champagne" because it was part of their language and referenced the area in which specific hybrid grapes were grown by the producers who made and bottled the product for market.

Well let's say that folks really liked the sparkling wine, but not the price. Let's say someone took some of those region specific grapes and grew them in another climate....like California. The Californians may have used the same growing methods or not....may have followed the exact same recipies as the French originators or not....may have spliced the grapes genetically to make them more hearty to their Californian atmosphere or not....may have blended other grapes into the mix...may have used different fermentation additives, may have used American or English oak barrels rather than French ones...etc. You get the idea.

Well, there was a time that these Californians started taking their resultant product to market and selling it under the name "champagne".....and the French people got really irked.

It was not champagne as the French had known it to be. It was not anything at all relative to their usage of the word and they were highly incensed that these other folks usurped their time-honored word usage for another purpose.  The French growers and producers of the Champagne region fought to have the licensors and regulators of the wine industry delineate and set parameters on the usage of the word so that the classification, the label, the word itself did not become a mere blanket term to encompass things which, to the French, were outside the parameters of the original definition.

In this case, they..the French...won...and today, you will see that sparkling wines made outside of the French region of Champagne are known as sparkling wines, not champagne.

So even if the Californians (or whomever) followed every standard and every bit of the recipe to the letter and used only the French grapes and aged in French oak barrels, making the wine as precisely as the French do...in this example, the deal-breaker was that it wasn't done on French soil...so they had no rights to use the word.  The viticulturists and enologists agreed, those sparkling wines not 100 % of the same origin and pertaining to exactly the parameters of the original definition --- no matter how tasty and beautiful they were in their own right--- could be referred to as "champagne."

This is sort of what the BTW folks feel about the word 'Wica,' however the difference is that witches as a whole do not have any sort of overarching governing body or authority to whom we can complain about the rampant misappropriation of the word....the pop cultural usage which is a departure from the original definition.  Coupled with the wide spread of eclectic witchcraft ---which is a GOOD THING by the way, don't misunderstand me--- there is now an overwhelming majority of people using the word "wica" or "wicca" in ways other than those using it as it originally was intended.

That means that now, trad folks and eclectic folks have to deal with what amounts to a translation dance about these words.  Sort of like that "when in Rome, do as the Romans do" idea. The word usage must be clarified for the audience to understand the definitions in play.


For example, If I am speaking amongst my traditionalist brethren and I say "Wica" then I know that they know I am only speaking of the specific type of witchcraft that comes out of the New Forest area of England. If I want to speak about a form other than that, then I'd say "witchcraft" or further clarify with either a tradition by name or maybe state the country of origin....like "Basque Witchcraft" or "Helenic Witchcraft."

If I am speaking amongst a group of mixed practitioners, trad and eclectic together, then I know I have to add further clarification if I want them to know I'm saying something specifically about witches out of the New Forest area....I have to add the prefix about "British Traditionalist" before "Wicca.

Does that make more sense?

Bottom line, some things in life ARE EXCLUSIONARY. That they are doesn't make them evil overlords bent on the subjugation of those outside their membership. That they are doesn't mean they have all the answers that you need and they're not willing to share because they like to watch you squirm.

There are unions in the employment world, doctorates in the medical fields, licensees who hold trademarks and copyrights which give them a certain amount of exclusivity to artistic domains....there are Freemasons, Elks, Rotary and Knights of Columbus clubs which have certain criteria that folks must meet before they can claim membership....there are demographical separations and cultural separations and educational separations and even age separations that give demarcations about who is and who is not privy to certain subject matter.

The world is built upon the strata of classification and hierarchy. There's a food chain and a pecking order and a learning curve and a structure in everything. There's beauty in a field of wild flowers as much as there is in a cultivated botanical garden.

The value judgments about good/bad, beneficial/baneful, and the rest are of the perceiver's assessment. No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. Everyone has the opportunity to learn, to grow, to achieve....the routes each chooses for himself to get towards what he feels are his goals....now that's where the differences lie. No one way is correct because we are all individuals.  You are a unique snowflake. Just like everybody else.