Pagan Coffee Talk
We will discuss topics related to the Pagan community. All views are from a traditionalist's point of view. The conversations are unscripted (no preparations have been made ahead of time). A special thanks to Darkest Era for the use of their songs: Intro- The Morrigan, Exit - Poem to the Gael. Check them out at http://darkestera.net/.
Pagan Coffee Talk
Disentangling Pagan Philosophies: A Deep Dive into Wicca and Witchcraft
Ever wondered about the differences between Wicca and witchcraft? Or perhaps, pondered the philosophy behind Old Guard Paganism? Tune in as we journey through the spiritual, pagan, and witchcraft movements that emerged pre-World War II. Discover the distinction between Paganism and Christianity and how the New Age movement, often mistaken for Paganism, evolved. We are hoping to shed light on why we, at Life Temple and Seminary, avoid the label 'Wiccan'.
From the nuances of Wicca and Witchcraft to the core beliefs of Old Guard Paganism, we delve into each philosophy's unique aspects. Uncover a belief system that disassociates from radical feminism and holds a stance distinct from Wiccan ethics. We peel back the layers on topics such as socialism, magic, hate, and the importance of self-assertion. As we merge into the marriage of the New Age movement with witchcraft, we underscore the imperative nature of personal choice in adopting beliefs. Don't miss out on this enlightening discussion reminding us of unity's power as we navigate through life's challenges hand in hand.
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Welcome to Peg and Coffee Talk. Here are your hosts, Awan and Lord Knight. Today's topic is why we don't refer to ourselves as Wiccan.
Speaker 2:For me to try to explain this, we have to go back to right before World War II. I'm not going to say I'm right about this, but bear with me for a minute. Right before World War II, there was a movement that started called the Spiritual Movement. This is where we started getting the psychics and the ghosts and all these tales where Harry Houdini went through and was starting to debunk some of these so-called psychics. This started the Spiritual Movement. Underneath the Spiritual Movement, Paganism, Witchcraft and all that was starting to reemerge In a way, yes, you could say we sort of used it as a smokescreen.
Speaker 1:It would have been around the same time, so it would have been easy to do that.
Speaker 2:Right, where some of these ideas came out. Now, what you have to understand is the way we're looking at. This is right. Now we have Christianity and we have the Pagan religion. The Pagan religions are any religions that do not believe in the birth, death and resurrection of Christ Right, which paces Muslims, hindus, even Jews to a certain extent, into the Pagan category, according to Christianity, to some extent, yes, alright. Which Jewish house this special space in Christianity? They don't necessarily consider them Pagans, but they're not Christians either, even though we do know that Muslim and Christian faiths all came from the Jewish faith, from the Abrahamic religions.
Speaker 2:Right, alright, so we only have two categories at this point. Basically, we have Paganism and we have Christianity. Okay, again, pagan is this and not Now we jump ahead a few years. Alright, the spiritual movement is still growing and they're also doing this whole entire predicting a quote unquote new age is coming of enlightenment and wisdom, because we see the second recurrence of this during the sixties. Right, all the spiritual and the pagan movements and all this started to come about. Gerald Gardner's stuff starting to become a little bit more popular, along with Margaret Murray and all this other stuff, and then, with the hippie movement in place as well, again another nice smoke screen.
Speaker 2:Another nice smoke screen, and then we start getting the whole age of Aquarius Right.
Speaker 1:The whole new age.
Speaker 2:Alright, there's a reason I keep on doing it this way. Okay, so in this, in the pagan religions, we wind up with paganism and those are basically what they're starting to refer to as all the witchcraft, wicca. And then you have the new age movement, the side of it, which some people put that in the same category as paganism. Okay, this is the first time we're in a world we sort of see in religions develop out of the pagan cultures. So again, this is more the European witchcraft cults and blah, blah, blah. Then we start seeing a division there. All right, we have Wicca and then we start getting witchcraft. Okay, so we have the Gerald Gardner's and the Alexandrians who are being Wiccan, and then we have the Lafars and all that who are basically going under the context of, or the label of, witchcraft.
Speaker 1:But no, aren't the Ferraris Alexandrian.
Speaker 2:If you really want to get into the connections of where in the world all this really started and blah, blah, blah redrawing down the moon, that book right there will give you to the point to where we are, where we really just don't give a crap about this shit. All right, but we're only doing this to help people put us in our little category.
Speaker 2:I guess, All right, we have Wicca, which is the Alexandrians, and then we have the Lafars, where they strip away a lot of the New Age or the spiritualism concepts, kind of like what you all discussed with on Caldronbury. Oh yeah, all right. Where there's these two separations, right? Okay? Well, let's bring this up to a modern. Times is about the 80s or so. The spiritualist movement relabeled themselves. The New Age movement and this starts to become more pronounced in American culture because of it surely reclines out on a limb. All right, because they got tired of well, we get tired of waiting for the New Age to start, so we're going to go out and create it, right, and that's where the difference was between the two philosophies. All right, the spiritual movement believe it, new Age was coming and we just had to wait for the donning of the Age of Aquarius. In the New Age movement, people were like, well, it's taken a little too long, so let's push it.
Speaker 1:But now the whole Age of Aquarius thing that was based on the star, that was based on astrology.
Speaker 2:Right, and again here's your problem is there are things in the spiritual movement in the space and this witchcraft movement that are very similar.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:But the thought or the theory of why behind them is completely different.
Speaker 1:Gotcha.
Speaker 2:So here's where the difference is is why, behind all of this, then we get up into more of the modern age and now we have the New Age movement. We have Wicca, which seems to be the more New Age movement. Now Wicca and New Age has completely, to me, merged together into one thing. This is the category for us, that we put all the eclectic, non-traditionally trained and solitaires and these spiritualist people in this Wicca category. Okay, I'm not saying we're right or wrong on that, but since we saw that movement, we're like no, we're not associated with this. There are certain concepts that the Wiccans believe, we do not.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:Now again, there's another branch off in witchcraft itself Witchcraft as a religion, because, everybody's got to remember, we refer to ourselves as a member of craft and as a member of craft we are called witches. It is a religion to us, a belief system, kind of like Christianity. We started to see a split in witchcraft and this split is basically coming where you have like the for lack of better ways to think about this, is the Thorn Mooney group, who want to be Wicca gardenarian or a Wiccan Alexandrian, where they want to take those Wiccan concepts and still somewhat hang on to the traditional framework too.
Speaker 1:Okay. So they're trying to you think they're trying to bring more of the new age aspect into the traditional craft.
Speaker 2:Witchcraft right, which is starting, I guess, for the lack of better words, the modern witchcraft movement.
Speaker 1:Okay, it's a new modern witchcraft movement Right.
Speaker 2:With me where we consider ourselves in the vein of traditional witchcraft, but we believe in the knit that all these traditional witchcraft were the ones that believe. What in the world it was like when it started, when it was first starting to come up, where it was sneaking up through the war. To own it up, you have to be initiated, you've got to be trained. There are mysteries here and that they're just not laying out. You sort of got to be powder guided, okay, and that we want to hang on to those traditions. It's the reason. Traditional witchcraft, right, all right. Now, no wonder a lot of people don't agree with that. And I know there's probably a ton of religions and blah, blah, blah left out of this. I'm not naming them all.
Speaker 1:Right, we can't cover everything, so Right.
Speaker 2:So now in our traditional witchcraft you have Gartnerians, you have Alexandrians, and notice, when you do not use the word, when we talk about these groups, we're not talking. We don't use the word Wicca because we're trying to make a distinction. It's Gartnerians and then there's Wiccan Gartnerians and of course, this is all up to the gardenarians. What the world they're gonna do with their little split that they got going on Right with some arguments? This is my suggestion Call yourself waking gardenarians and leave it that Everybody else call yourself gardenarians and be part of the traditional community again.
Speaker 1:That's not my argument to be in, so that makes better sense to me.
Speaker 2:In that branch of all those traditions, you have what we refer to as old guard. That's what we are the lack of any other better word to call ourselves.
Speaker 1:All right what is old guard? I hear this question all the time.
Speaker 2:It's very hard to define All right old guard paganism. You're not going to find too many radical feminists in our tradition. Lady Kagan's a stay-at-home mom. None, I have never heard any of my other priests or priests this is ever say anything negative because she decided to be a stay-at-home mom right. Lady Abba is a business woman. She owns a business right. Nobody ever gives her that is. Our philosophy is women have a choice. If they choose to work, they choose to work. If they choose to stay at home, they choose to stay at home. That's the kind of feminism we tend to like.
Speaker 3:Make sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, not one better than the other or anything like that. All right, I'm sorry Lady Abba has gone to have been around more of the Closer to the dianic groups and as upset of them, when she turned around to fix a plate for a guy that was in for one of the high priestesses that she was around when she fixed him a plate, took it to him and is like, well he's here, he did all this work for us, right, we do take him some food. I mean, come on right, it's not like we're asking them to sit down and actually eat with us.
Speaker 1:Oh, Wait, we are oh.
Speaker 2:But again, that's our tradition. This is more what oh guard is. We're not the big feminist people we're not going to be. We don't believe in socialism. We don't believe in, well, we don't believe in socialism as a form of government. Okay, yeah, all right. We believe it takes a witch to make a witch. We also believe that magic is magic, you know, just like. Just like they do with the whole socialism thing. But they look at national socialism or this kind of socialism, or that kind of socialism, right?
Speaker 2:And at the end of the day you know, we're all still socialists right.
Speaker 1:It's still social rule.
Speaker 2:Nazis were socialists. I mean come on. Magic is magic. I don't care what word you put in front of. Our belief is magic is just magic, and whatever it takes to get you across that line I don't know how else to explain this. We have Our ethics and our morals, which we've gone over Mm-hmm, I don't know. What else would you say about us?
Speaker 1:I mean, I think that's pretty much it in a nutshell. I mean, we don't play around with all these labels.
Speaker 2:We don't play around with hate. I for crying out loud.
Speaker 1:do you teach a class for our first degrees in an attempt to get them not the hate Christians, right, I mean come on, we do have a lot that come in and they have an extreme bias towards Christianity and that's not something we teach. It's not something we agree with and, yeah, we do. We try to turn their minds to a more open state where they can see some of the similarities or they can see the beauty of the religion itself and get past all their biases and discriminations.
Speaker 2:And respect the religion for itself versus for its people. Right, you know again, you know we got bad people on our side that do all sorts of weird things, absolutely you know. Don't get me started with the people that do the book howls and God forbid the unboxings that just sound like freaking infocomersals for two hours. Well, yeah, but that's us. We believe that we should be more capable of doing. We believe that we should reliance on a group or the government is considered in that stance for work and certain. Okay, we also believe that, yeah, you have to learn how to stand up on your own before you can start helping other people. But no, we're not wicked. Reason we're not is when you read the, when you read what a wicking is. We don't believe in the wicking read as an ethical framework. Right, it's just. I considered impossible because the harm none. I'm sorry, it seems to always have the same.
Speaker 1:Don't want to get it right, yeah Well, I was going to just simply say with the harm, none there's. There's always implications somewhere.
Speaker 2:Right it just when you take it to extremes and stuff like that, it starts breaking down and makes no sense. Right To a certain extent. I'm not saying all these other religions and stuff are wrong. I can't say that.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:All right, it's working.
Speaker 1:It's working for those people, so yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean right, you know again where our most of our problems is when people sit there try to tell us or we feel like people try to tell us what we are supposed to believe.
Speaker 1:And when we're here in this podcast and when we're talking about what we believe, we're not telling anybody. You got to believe this way. We're not telling anybody. We're right. We're just telling you this is the way we believe.
Speaker 2:Well, I sort of get tired of having to repeat myself every 15 seconds to remind people. But yeah, you know, and it really don't help because you know you always have that least that one person. You know how dare y'all whatever?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean there's always going to be those people.
Speaker 2:Here's what we believe Old Guard paganism is. We're a little bit more. We are a lot more traditional than the average.
Speaker 1:All right, we have been referred to as the stiff shirts of the pecking community.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:I mean just saying.
Speaker 2:So I hope this defines where in the world we are and you know, want the world where we get our tradition from, and you don't want me to sit here and say it's the same. It's the exact same as Lord, me, and no Right, I have put my slant on it as the years of go-no, but then so is Lady Abba and Lady Keegan.
Speaker 1:Well, sure, and that's gonna happen. I mean, that's a natural evolution.
Speaker 2:Yeah, lord, and you know, Lord Graceland, it really baffles me because, well, not too long, guys just teaching a class in which I was explaining to the students that, well, you are technically more Christian, where Lady Abba is a little bit more Italian witchcraft Straga yeah, that's what I'm looking for. Mm-hmm, lord Graceland tends to be a little bit more ceremonial magic. Mm-hmm, lady Keegan, well, she's just a apothecary.
Speaker 1:Well, not Justin apothecary but. I mean, she does have a master's degree.
Speaker 2:So she's got a few degrees, just saying, just saying. And then what was funny was the guy was kind of like looking at me going well, this makes no sense. How in the world do I while function together?
Speaker 2:It's because we will, because when we come together, we come together and say this is the way we're gonna worship when we are together, this is the way we're gonna worship, that we don't really hurt too many people Feelings, and they still get a good spiritual time, or right. What were you gonna say? What would you call it? What is that spiritual?
Speaker 1:ritual yeah.
Speaker 2:Ritual, because the whole ritual thing is up, is a treat in and of itself, right, at least it is for me. I don't know about the rest of you right, but no, it is, it is.
Speaker 1:It is a good spiritual experience for everyone right, this is traditional.
Speaker 2:This is the way we operate. This is the way covens do. Everybody wants to make it harder. Our want to go with what they see on TV and all this other stuff.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm and what you see on.
Speaker 2:TV is not necessarily real.
Speaker 1:Well, I was gonna say it's also. It's also what they heard from other people in the past mean there are disgruntled people who leave covens and spread bad Information about what goes on well, it's kind of like.
Speaker 2:It's kind of like going to one McDonald's and having a bad experience in declaring that all McDonald's are terrible. Yes, of course. Yeah, all right, don't get me wrong. No, the food is terrible.
Speaker 1:That's because we're used to home cooking. Plenty of people disagree.
Speaker 2:Hey, it's nice that people finally figure out that we do preach some of the stuff we preach. I mean, come on right, I Mean for crying out loud. You know, when you are home you get what homemade creamer, oh yeah for my coffee, absolutely, you know the last time, what you could you we actually ate out was just to go pick up some burgers at the local joint.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean those nice, those, a nice little restaurant down the road. Occasionally we eat out, but not very.
Speaker 2:You would rather have home cooked meals? Yes, I would. Again, this is the philosophy of ogard. This is what we would rather do. We would rather sit at home and enjoy each other's company. We would rather have home cookie. We would rather have marinara sauce made with fresh tomatoes out of your garden, right? So I think that's all I got to say about this. What about you?
Speaker 1:I think that pretty much says it all.
Speaker 2:You know. If you're still confused after this, I'm sorry. Any much we can do about that, you know again, like I said, I know I didn't mention everybody or all the whole entire thing, but this is the way we're looking at right. Yes, we get to us is finally merged with the new age, has become new, the new age wicka movement, whatever, yeah, whatever you want to call it.
Speaker 2:But whatever you want to call it and that's fine, y'all can have it, that's it. You know, I'm not gonna tell you how to believe or what to believe. Not my job.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Thanks for listening. Join us next week for another episode. Peg and coffee talk is brought to you by life temple and seminary. Please visit us at life temple seminary org for more information as well as links to our social media Facebook, discord, twitter, youtube and Reddit.
Speaker 3:Just hold my hand as we pass by. See your blazing fires, and so it is the end of our day, so walk with me till morning breaks. And so it is the end of our day. So walk with me till morning.
