I still don’t think I’d call any anti-feminism that exists within Wicca an anti-feminist fringe of Wicca. Rather, I think it’s screwy individuals misnaming their religion or just confused or whatever. It’s not institutionalized, even to the minor extent that anything can be institutionalized within Wicca.

And I do appreciate your journey. I don’t think Wicca needs to recruit and I don’t get a pink Cadillac for signing up new members (which, wow, that would be cool), and I’m very comfortable with agnostics and mystics and mystical agnostics. Among my good friends, there are atheists, an Evangelical, a Mormon, and a Mennonite. So I’m pretty open to, as they say “the varieties of religious experience.”

However, that’s a fairly trivial point. I wanted to tell you how very true and important this paragraph seems to me:

People are used to the notion that a religion that isn’t all-inclusive is oppressive. But what’s oppressive is the denial of salvation. If you can’t be in the Catholic Church if you’re (fill in the blank) and you can’t know God or be saved or get into heaven or whatever unless you’re in the Catholic Church, you are oppressed. And screwed. But I’m pretty damn sure that there’s nothing oppressive about the chocolate tasting chocolatey. The people who don’t like chocolate are only oppressed if choosing another flavor is problematic, stigmatized, or not available.

I don’t belong to any religion and self-identify as agnostic, but I am also on a spiritual path, trying to “achieve conscious awareness of ultimate reality” (which just happens to be part of the Wikipedia definition of ‘mysticism’, thus explaining how I call myself an agnostic mystic!) That’s because I feel religion isn’t for ME — I am not other people. I love discussing the universe and our place in it with my pagan friends. They’re on a path, and so am I. Who knows, perhaps our paths are leading to the same place — but what’s beautiful is that we aren’t dictating to each other. You’ve captured that so splendidly above. Thank you.

Many people use “the Great Rite” as a euphemism for sexual magic or sexual ritual. It is more than that, and more complicated than that. It is a specific thing. I see “the Great Rite” as a ritual enactment of the creation of life; it is a fertility rite. And as I said above, we are all born of heterosexual union, and the GR is normally enacted heterosexually, symbolic of that.

Now, if you’re asking can a sexual ritual that is about love or intimacy or connection be enacted by a lesbian or gay couple, of course the answer is yes.

Where I am at in Florida it’s very hard to get the point across to people that you are not Wiccan. I see a lot of people who are Wiccan who drift from one “Wiccan” path to another: “Celtic”, “Seax”, “Shamanistic” with nary a thought for what they are actually trying to achieve, it makes me wonder if they aren’t really trying to practice Wicca, but limiting themselves because they think that’s all there is. And these same people are the the ones who stand back and sneer when you won’t categorize your Goddesses or asperge with salt-water.

I love your analogy about the chocolate. I am in total agreement, I just wish that people with synthetic chocolate flavoring wouldn’t stand in the way of my peppermint chocolate chip. The other Pagans (who aren’t Wiccan) can sometimes get really down on Wiccans because of this sort of thing and do start to feel oppressed because we aren’t Wiccan but can’t “do it the right way” unless we are Wiccan. I think that more info on “What Wicca is NOT” without the catch-all “but it is whatever you think it is…” (which it isn’t) would be very cool. At the very least, non-Wiccans could look at it and breathe a sigh of relief to know they’re not crazy.

Thanks for such a great peice on feminism and Wicca also. I was wondering, as a Wiccan, do you think that it is more about the mental/emotional than the physical (not to the point of denying the physical)? If that were the case then a lesbian couple could do the great rite just the same as a hetero couple if they felt the call to.

I think that other branches of Paganism have grown, and the perception within Paganism that there are options has gradually gotten out there; hence the interest in Recon and so on. I don’t know why people have latched onto “Wicca” as a generic word’; with “Pagan” available, it makes little sense.