Praxis

Nature, tradition, and ancestors

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 6 Comments

I am very keen on rejecting, resisting, and repudiating the infiltration and co-opting of Paganism by the far right, and so I found Amy Hale’s article on The Pagan and Occult Fascist Connection and How to Fix It a very useful resource, particularly the questions at the end. I would encourage you to read the article, and use these questions as journaling prompts.

So here are my answers to those questions for initiatory Wicca (in some cases, I have previously written blogposts on these topics, so I will link to those).

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Witchy aesthetics

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 2 Comments

There’s a lot of talk about Halloween being “the season of the witch” and it is true that what sets us apart from many other paths and traditions is an enthusiastic embrace of both darkness and light. But that is not the full extent of witchy aesthetics.

There should also be winter witches and springtime witches and summer witches. We are a religion for all seasons!

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Spiritual bypassing

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 3 Comments

Recently there has been a pattern on social media of BIPOC people expressing their completely valid pain and anger and sadness over the continuing murder of Black people by police, and getting pushback from “spiritual” people claiming that their anger is too much, or somehow misplaced. I have also experienced this phenomenon. I used to call it “spiritualler-than-thou” syndrome, until I discovered that it already had a name, spiritual bypassing.

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Everything you think you know about Wicca is wrong

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 3 Comments

This blogpost was inspired by this conversation on Twitter:

The snark quotient of this post may be dangerously high — you’re strongly advised to put your snark goggles on, because I have a snark hammer and I am not afraid to use it.

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Dialogue with traditions

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 11 Comments

In initiatory Wicca, there have been some fairly heated arguments over the years about what tradition means, and what aspects of Wicca can be creatively altered to be inclusive. When I started talking about making Wicca more inclusive for LGBTQIA+ people, the response from some people was “but what about the tradition?”

In this post, I propose a new approach to questions of tradition: more of a creative dialogue, and a focus on the real purpose of a tradition (which is the approach I have tried to take all along, but some people assumed that I was throwing away all adherence to tradition).

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