The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

This is not an uncommon problem! One of the things that really confuses a lot of people is that people use the term Wicca to describe a wide range of things - things with rather different origins and sets of practices.

You might find the following article on my website about the differences in the way the term Wicca gets used helpful: http://gleewood.org/seeking/basics/range-of-uses/

Beyond that, you should also be aware that the material in the Internet Book of Shadows (or, really, anything else like that) is of dubious origin in the sense of determining what Gardner did: the Gardnerian Book of Shadows is considered oathbound, which means sharing it on the web would be a problem.

And basically, that means you can't tell from the outside whether a given piece from an oathbound practice is what.

To lay out the options, such a thing could be, possibly:

- What people actually do, in a fairly complete form (but someone broke significant religious agreements to post it)

- A fragmentary part of what they do (I often describe a book of shadows as being like the script to a play: it gives you reminders about things you might forget, but it is not everything that goes into the play or making it a living thing: for that you need people and movement, and a lot of things like costume and set and pacing and staging and what the acting is like to see what it is.)

- Something someone wrote up because it looked good. (And maybe other people now use it, and maybe they don't. This is part of where this gets really tricky.)

- Something that got written up, and has been combined wiht lots of other stuff that got written up, but the whole thing was never any one person's cohesive practice (this is true for the Internet book of shadows: there's bits that really just don't fit together.)

And so on.



There are still people around who follow Gardner's direct line of practice (and Alex Sanders, and so on.)

In general, these people are private about sharing their religious beliefs, but it's not "never ever admit". They may certainly tell famly or friends, they may be public about being Pagan in the larger community. (What they will probably *not* do is tell people much about where their coven meets, or who else is in it.)

Many of these people do have permanent tools, but they're stored in a way where they're not obvious unless they're in use. (So, for example, they may have a household shrine to a deity, but they don't have a full set of working witchy tools laid out all the time: those only are out when they are about to do ritual.

 

This is another variant of practice, and it's one that's much more common among people whose practice of religious witchcraft does not come from learning an oathbound tradition from specific other people over an extended period of time, but rather learn from books, online, less formal interactions with others.

You can make a totally excellent practice out of that, but it's different from a practice that is shared with a specific group of other people.  

(To put myself in context: I'm an initiate and priestess in an oathbound tradition that involved learning it in-person over a period of years. I generally don't identify myself as a witch at work, but do in my private life, but I also don't talk much about the tradition-specific parts of my practices except with close friends or people I'm actually doing ritual with.

At the same time, if someone wants to learn my tradition, I have an obligation to teach them the whole thing - even the parts I don't routinely use on my own - in a way taht someone who came up with their own set of practices probably wouldn't, and I can't make changes in some core practices without talking to other people in the tradition and/or expecting they wouldn't recognise the end result as something different from what they were doing.)

If you could give some more examples, people might have some more ideas for this part, but in general it's often frustrating to try and defend yourself against something someone read online - especially if it's a thing from lots of different sources like the Internet Book of Shadows.

And that's especially true with people who are relatively new (by which I mean 3-4 years or so of practice) of talking about what they do religiously. It's a thing that taes some experience to feel comfortable with.

The book says that you should never admit to being wiccan even if it kills you. You should destroy your book of shadows if you ever get caught and you should hide your tools and make nothing permanent.

In my observation, just as far the opposite as possible happens. My roommate, who I previously mentioned, never takes off her huge pentacle, and many of the people I've met through her started telling me about their personal beliefs before I had even learned their name.