Devotion and Solitude, The First Part

The witch, the shaman, the druid, is a devotee. At least in what is somewhat arbitrarily lumped together as Traditional Craft, or let’s call it Old Craft. For a solitary of 1734, there is a complicated and freeing aspect of this, because though a devotee, there is no set myth or tradition or religion to which we devote ourselves. You are going directly to the bone temple, and that demands passing through many houses. A Wiccan will have their own gods, and so will those who practice Asatru of course. Their stories have been told. A Druid will practice more or less in some sort of Celtic fashion, praying to Irish or Welsh gods, usually. But for the Young Traditions, it is a different matter because you are a priestess or priests who is forging always your religion. This means delving deeper into the Christianity you walked away from, deeper into the Judaism that opened up your world, deeper into the Hinduism that illumined you, picking one up, putting it down for another, perhaps putting one away forever. It means, in some way, practicing a particular faith on a deeper level than you did before.

This is not like a Chaos magician who is concerned about power and thinks getting power happens by taking it from made up gods and pretending to worship them. This is an act of true worship, and in worship, meetings your gods through the gods who have often come to you either in the church, the synagogue or the ashram.

            The… danger is the wrong word… caution, is that in practicing these religions, becoming deeper in them, you may attempt to become a full of on Catholic, Orthodox Jew, Hindu, and end up right back where you started---on the inside, in the common congregational world. What you are doing may feel so good you may stop identifying as a witch and identify as a Hindu or a Buddhist. You may, in the end, turn from the Craft altogether.

            The truth is, there is no crime in this. In fact, it may even be that your place is another place, and the Craft was just a path to that place. But, on the other hand, you may have learned by long experience just the opposite.

            In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis says that Christianity is a house with many rooms, and though you may become a Christian, in the end, you must leave the hallway and enter one of those rooms, that it is in the rooms one actually finds comfort, light and shelter and (though he does not say this) conventional acceptance and the fulfillment to the quest for identity most people crave.

            For the witch it is a different matter altogether. There is a great mansion indeed, with many, many wings, many forms of many religions. But for us the comfort is not found in one room, but in traveling from room to room to take what is needful and establishing outside of them our own habitation. This is where the light and heat and fire are, and this is such a very difficult task, one that you really have to be driven toward. It resist the comfort of being reassured that one is in the right group with the right revelation. It resist, to a large extent, the comfort of being part of a group. We so much love to be in a group that we will forsake freedom, the desire for truth,  and the quest for God just to say we are “in” something. Small wonder few people ever find this way.