In The Big Rock Candy Coven - by Dana Corby

You may not have noticed it, but the Craft is in trouble. Like many another esoteric group, the Craft sowed the seeds of its own ruin when it began deliberately to appeal to a broader range of people, not all of them, perhaps, truly suited to the life and beliefs of Witchcraft. When initiation ceased to be a requirement in all traditions, when people began to accept each other as "in the Craft" on the basis of attendance at a few festivals - in short, when the Craft ceased to require work – our numbers increased dramatically.

This delighted everyone, at first; going to a Summer Solstice rituals with several hundred fellow Witches in the countryside is vastly more exciting than timidly conducting one in your basement with the half-dozen members of your own Coven. After a while, though, some of us began to be alarmed. The "Craft" many of these new folks were practicing bore only a casual likeness to the Craft we'd been taught. It bore a striking resemblance, however, to both the transcendentalism of Christianity and other Oriental religions and the jargon-loaded hipness of EST and the whole "New Age" grab bag - and it was spreading fast.

It's a truism in the social sciences that a society which allows no cross-fertilization from outside soon dries up. There's a difference, though, between eclectic open-mindedness and bastardization. The Craft is a Western magical tradition, not an Eastern mystical path. To impose the transcendentalism of the East on the Craft creates only an emasculated hodge-podge. For example:

More and more, we hear the Craft spoken of as "of the light", meaning, one supposes, that we're "the good guys". It is clearly contrary to Craft teaching to identify the good, the positive, with the concept of light. That is an oriental and wholly patriarchal concept, associated also with the triumph of the spiritual (i.e., non-material) over the physical, of the intellect over the senses. It leaves no room for the Craft ideal of dynamic balance, and it certainly excludes that aspect of Our Lady which is the Dark Mother, the Primal Chaos from which all else arises. I feel that this concept has crept into our belief system partly due to the incompleteness of many people's Craft education, and partly out of pandering to the beliefs of others. Because they are afraid of the Dark, we begin to exclude it from our consciousness, lest we scare the poor dears! And if they aren't afraid of us, they won't persecute us, and they might even invite us to their swell interfaith breakfasts down at the Elks Hall.

Again, seemingly out of a combination of shallowness and too much respect for other people's idea of what's holy, our concept of the Gods has undergone a radical change. Rarely, now, is the Goddess invoked as the Mor Rigan, the Great Queen. Even more rarely is the God invoked as in any but His mildest aspects. We call upon the protector in Him, the shining youth, the gentle lover, but we refuse to face the fact that He has other aspects - Pan Pangenetor; Panphage; Ares; Apophis; even Dianus in His grove - which are worthy of our honor. Violence, too, can be sacred. We deny those aspects of the Goddess which can be uncomfortable or "dangerous", as well. We may call on the Dark Goddess as Hecate when the rite calls for it at Hallows, but we're afraid too put any conviction into the summoning and we banish as soon as decency allows. If I were She (and as Diane Duane has so eloquently observed, each of us is), I'd be insulted. We conveniently forget that Persephone is more than just the Kore; as Queen of the Underworld, She too is a Dark Goddess, wielding great power. But power is another topic not discussed much in the "New Craft".

Most under-forty adults in the U.S. today came into their first awareness of politics – of power and its applications in shaping the lives of ourselves and those around us – during the Presidencies of such sterling types as Ronnie Ray Gun, Cowboy Bush, and the Hill and Billy show. We continue to be royally screwed over by the Bush/Cheney machine and their ChristiRepublicans. We "know" about power, and we don't want any part of it! ( ) We don't want to exercise control over others, that's not nice. We even try to conduct Circle with no leader, to avoid the so-called "authority trap", and then we wonder why the Rite is chaotic and energy-less. Most of us (myself emphatically included) long resist the knowledge that there are other kinds of power besides abused power; some never do figure it out, so repelled are they by the mess they see made of power all around them.

Thanks in great part to "Dreaming the Dark", Starhawk's second book, personal power is beginning again to be understood and sought after among us. But external power, or as she calls it, "power-over", is still so abhorred that I see people refusing to teach or to accept instruction; refusing to act to stop wrong action on the part of others or to do (or stop doing) what they're asked, because to do any of these things would be to acknowledge power-over. Crowley defined power as "possession of control". I have yet to see a clearer description. It does not define the object of that control, only the ability to do so. In those terms, then, I feel it is time for power to be exercised over the path the Craft is taking, for it is clearly out of control.

We seem to be forgetting - or worse, abandoning – the very basis of our uniqueness as a religion: that we aspire not only to the heights but to the depths. That we worship not only that which fills us with joy but that which terrifies us, and that Life, to us, is precious and lovely precisely because Death is equally so. Our beloved Goddess and God cease to be the Queen of the Universe and the Lord of Life and Death, and start to resemble Barbie & Ken. ( )

I will not attempt to deny anyone their Lord and Lady of Joy; in these difficult times we need Them desperately. But we also need Their darker side, and the recognition that good and evil abide in both. We need to go back to what Witches have always been - passionate, involved, whole humans. We need to stop apologizing for our differences, and revel in them. But most of all, if the Craft is to survive as something more valuable (to us and perhaps to the Earth) than just another bunch of fringies, we must stop defining ourselves in terms of other people's second-hand illuminism.