Exploring Modern Witchery

After years of being in a traditional coven, I’ve gone and veered to the extreme opposite by exploring a newbie tradition that is centered on women. Their teachings and structure are simple. Their structure modern and millennial. And French.

It’s so completely different to everything I have known and been taught but I am enjoying it because it’s helping me suss out what I have liked and disliked about Wicca over the years.

I have long struggled with the gender normative roles in Wicca. I chafe at the strictures that imply that a woman’s role is reduced to her fertility and beauty.

Don’t get me wrong. There are amazing elements to Wicca that come with this structure. But as a woman in her 40s with a trans sister and is a feminist at heart, there are problems in Wicca. There are things in the practice that make me wonder if it can survive the next decade.

I have long said that Christianity’s (especially Catholicism) greatest weakness is it’s unwillingness to adapt to the times. And I would argue likewise for Wicca. It is something that I fear for the tradition because at heart, I love this path. For all it’s flaws, the teachings I have been given have enriched my life and made me a more mindful and self-aware individual.

So for now I am exploring a dynamic that is so of this generation that it’s awkward and somewhat pubescent in it’s earnestness and black and white thinking. It valorizes feminine power with an intensity that is just is flawed as my previous tradition and it’s ritual’s are simple to the point of sparsity.

I know that my final home will likely land somewhere in between the two. But I am thankful for the time to explore and experiment by building connections with different lineages and practitioners before forging off on my own to build something that has the depth of my former practice and the modernity of the current situation I find myself in; a practice adapted to the time in which we live but that honours the legacy of the teachers who have come before us.