Coming out of the broom closet isn't easy. You're surrounded by people who flinch at the sight of a Pentacle, think you perform "black magic", and consider you to be, frankly, scary. Well, here's something you need to know: I couldn't care less if you're scared of me, just don't tell me I worship Satan.
Witching Hour on Female First
I am Wiccan. I am also a witch. The two are not mutually exclusive. Wicca is my faith, witchcraft is my practise. Not all Wiccans practise witchcraft, as not all Jewish people practise the Kabbalah. One thing I am NOT, however, is a Satanist.
Being Wiccan means I believe and worship a God and Goddess; divine entities that live and breathe inside all aspects of nature, the cosmos and ourselves. These archetypes have many different names, the most popular of which can be found in the Greek, Roman, Norse, Hindu and Celtic pantheons. But I tend to refer to them as the Horned God and Mother Goddess. Of course, the term "horned God" is enough to convince people that I'm a Devil worshipper.
This particular God archetype has been known as Cernunnos in Celtic paganism, Pan in Greek mythology and Faunus in Roman. As Cernunnos he is depicted with stag antlers, the legs of a goat and clutching a metal ring known as a torc. He's the God of fertility, animals and the wild, as well as the underworld as the seasons see his constant death and rebirth. As Pan and Faunus he also has the legs of a goat, but with ram horns and a panpipe, and they are similarly Gods of the wild.
It is unfortunate that when one mentions the "horned God", the first image that comes to most people's minds is that of Baphomet. He's the deity that the Knights Templar were accused of worshipping during the Inquisition in the 1300s, with the most famous image of him being a 19th century drawing of the Sabbatic Goat by occultist Eliphas Levi. This image has since been adapted by the Church of Satan - which only makes life more difficult for Wiccans and other non-Satanic witches.
Don't get me wrong, Baphomet is symbolically relevant to many a Wiccan practise. I even have a cute statuette in my living room sitting next to my succulent. Baphomet as depicted by Levi is actually a symbol of duality; male and female, good and evil, black and white. It's the "equilibrium of the opposites" and represents harmony, light and universal balance - quite the opposite from what many would have you believe. It doesn't help, of course, that a similar image is used in the traditional Rider-Waite Tarot to represent The Devil card. As a Tarot reader, I find myself forming a very non-traditional interpretation of the illustration.
Wiccans don't actually believe in a Devil figure at all. We believe in the ever-weaving web of fate; that our fortunes are dictated by our actions in the past and present, not through punishment and reward by God and the Devil. We don't believe in heaven and hell. The vast majority of us believe in the Summerland and reincarnation - that is, after our death we look back on our life in the eternal Summer which represents neither heaven nor hell, before we are born again into a new physical body.
Strangely enough, most modern Satanists don't believe in the Devil either. To the Church of Satan, it is but a concept related to living your life by your own conscience rather than by an old book, embracing pride, individualism and wordly enlightenment.
As commendable as these values may be, I'm still not a Satanist. I feel like you have to be anti-Christian no matter how you define Satanism, and I'm not somebody who likes to criticise another person's belief system unless they are deliberately disrespectful en masse (such as the Westboro Baptist Church or the Ku Klux Klan). There is no Christian iconography within my faith, though there may be similarities. To include a purely Christian sentiment such as the Devil in my belief system wouldn't make any sense to me.
It is pleasing to see that, as a generation, we're becoming more open-minded about Wicca and other Pagan belief systems. I don't want people to fear me because of my faith and my practise. Yet this idea that we're all into human sacrifice and black mass is so ingrained in our collective psyche thanks to centuries of brainwashing, that even I was worried about what I was getting into when I went to my first Pagan Moot. I know now that such meetings merely involve beer, banter and gawping at each others crystal/tarot collections.
We're not Satanists, but if there is one thing you should know about us, it's that we know how to have a good time.
Tagged in Wicca witchcraft