Secrecy in the Old Craft [View all]

“Hey, let me show you what I got just the other day,” my friend of 16 years told me in his living room. “It’s really complete, and it’s been edited with footnotes by this guy named Niklas!”

“Oh, yeah?” I asked. My mind was racing, as I knew there were precious few traditional Crafters that shared my name.

“Yeah! Here. Check this out,” he said. I thumbed through pages that I was all too familiar with, since I was the person who had originally compiled the version of the (non-Feri) Book of Shadows that he was exhibiting to me. How did this Book get out of my control? How did it make it into lineages that I’m not even connected with? How did it even make it out of my own personal coven? Questions for another day, I’m afraid. It seems in this day of information technology, this kind of situation is endemic. Books of Shadows can be downloaded from the internet by folks who aren’t even initiated, never mind affiliated with the traditions that I have worked.

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People were reading these books and thinking that they indeed understood the experience of this material without ever having undergone any of it. It was all based on a cursory reading of it, and not an experience of it. As a result, many “eclectic” (book-based) practitioners were left with the idea that they knew enough about Traditional Craft that the experience of it was left redundant. They already had “the idea” of what the ritual was all about. Why bother to experience it in a larger traditional context, when they could rewrite it and create an all-new and improved version that no one had ever seen? As a result, many have “adopted” traditional material without the experience of traditional ritual to inform it. Many have developed such overwhelming confidence in their “knowledge” that Wicca and Witchcraft generally threaten to become just as monolithic as Christianity has been during the last millennium, when doctrinal knowledge squelched the mysteries to be found in personal ritual experiences.
http://feritradition.org/witcheye/essay_secrecyoldcraft.htm