Ethnic offshoots of (neo-)Wicca

[Kaio]

I don't know whether I should call the Wicca on which the ethnic offshoots I refer to are based just Wicca, neo-Wicca or another name.

 By "ethnic offshoots" I mean forms of (neo-)Wicca that set their focus on a religious tradition associated with a specific culture. Maybe Seax Wica was the first of the ethnic offshoots of (neo-)Wicca I'm talking about on this thread.

 I've noticed that usually this focus is theological; I don't know whether there is an ethnic offshoot whose focus, for instance, affects the Wheel of the Year celebrated in its context.

 I don't know many ethnic offshoots of (neo-)Wicca. What are they besides, maybe,  Seax Wica and Tameran Wicca?

[Darkhawk]

I don't know many ethnic offshoots of (neo-)Wicca. What are they besides, maybe,  Seax Wica and Tameran Wicca?

 
I don't believe Seax-Wica is actually an ethnic offshoot so much as one of the deliberate open source things that led to the development of modern eclectic Wicca and neo-Wicca, but I'd have to get Sunf or some of the people who know more about the historical stuff in that period to comment.

I've personally seen culture-specific forms of eclectic or neo-Wicca for Norse, Hellenic, I think Celtic, and of course the Egyptian you mention.  I would not be surprised by the existence of a Roman Wicca but I haven't actually seen it, and that's making me want to poke at why that might be.  I am also sure that a lot of the lesser-known cultural polytheisms have used Wiccish structure in some groups.

[Jenett]

I would not be surprised by the existence of a Roman Wicca but I haven't actually seen it, and that's making me want to poke at why that might be.  I am also sure that a lot of the lesser-known cultural polytheisms have used Wiccish structure in some groups.

 
I know of a tradition that does Hellenic with a bunch of Roman mixed in (think later period Hellenic, and the Roman Empire mix of influences from Greece and Egypt, as well as Rome: their festival names are Latin.) Actually, more than one.

You're right though, there's fewer than you'd think, considering.

(And it's particularly weird since some aspects - the lares, for example - keep making me think that there's a particularly good fit with some forms of religious witchcraft. I may also just have rewatched the Fires of Pompeii episode in the last couple of days and been thinking about this anyway, mind you.)

[Darkhawk]

You're right though, there's fewer than you'd think, considering.

 
I'm actually wondering if the impression that some might have of Roman civic religion, empire, and, you know, marble temples and all might be offputting to those who are looking for the more ceremonial naturalism of a lot of eclectic Wicca?

So, scale and formality-mode mismatch, where obviously the northern European stuff would have that.  Hellenic still has marble temples but I think there's more familiarity with the nymphs and such to provide hooks for the ceremonial naturalism.  Which doesn't explain Egypt, but the best-known Egyptian mythset actually has a green man god, so, y'know.

[SunflowerP]

I don't believe Seax-Wica is actually an ethnic offshoot so much as one of the deliberate open source things that led to the development of modern eclectic Wicca and neo-Wicca, but I'd have to get Sunf or some of the people who know more about the historical stuff in that period to comment.

You rang?

Well, it's as ethnic as most of the other cultural variants - which is to say, it doesn't have much actual Saxon content.

On the other hand, as you note, it's not an offshoot of NeoWicca or even Eclectic Wicca, but rather a precursor, one of many efforts by traditional Wiccans (in this case, Raymond Buckland) to provide exoteric resources to seekers, at a time when the number of people interested in Wicca and other sorts of religious witchcraft was growing far more rapidly than traditional covens could accommodate. Of those efforts - specifically, avenues that were a) deliberately constructed, b) by Gardnerians and other BTW, c) in the early '70s, d) for use outside of established covens - it was, as far as I can recall, the only one that was structured to focus on a particular ethnic culture; as such, it was very likely quite influential on the concept of Wicca variants.

But that's just one strand of either the development of Eclectic and NeoWicca in general, or the development of culture-specific variants, in the '60s and '70s. On one hand, traditional Wiccans - along with initiates of other sorts of religious witchcraft, and various other folks already trained/initiated in one or another group/lineage in the neoPagan movement - were experimenting with culture-specific overlays on their existing core practices (Welsh, Greek, Cretan, Minoan, just to name a few I know were popular at the time).

And on the other hand, seekers unable to connect with an established group were reading, and listening to if they were fortunate enough to cross paths with an 'insider' willing to provide info, everything they could get their hands on, not just those intentionally-constructed exoteric resources, and bootstrapping practices from all of it. (IMO, Eclectic Wicca almost certainly would have developed without those deliberately-constructed resources, from whatever materials those seekers could access - but it might have been a slightly, or perhaps significantly, different shape.)

Along with this, there've been 'cultural revival' religions of various sorts, a good many of which included magic largely drawn from the stewpot of the Western Magical Tradition, for decades, starting long before the neoPagan movement proper developed. Some of these influenced various factions of the movement, some survived long enough to directly associate themselves with the movement (or even helped get it rolling, if you count Druidry as ethnic/cultural); this naturally was also an influence on culture-specific variants of Wicca.

As far as trying to compile a list of all these different variants, I doubt it's possible to come up with a truly comprehensive one. Name a culture, and someone has probably tried flavoring their Wicca (or what they thought was Wicca) with that culture (accurately or wildly inaccurately) - where does one draw the lines? How long does the variant have to survive to count, or is is number of people doing it, or how well-known it is? What about fictional cultures (Klingon Wicca, it is, or at least was, A Thing)?

Sunflower