From: cortese@netcom.com (Janis Maria C. C. Cortese)
Subject: Origin of Wicca, as in "Who cares about the --- ?"
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1993 01:39:03 GMT

You know, having someone attempting to shoehorn my spirituality just
because one guy whose works I've never even READ was a little
scholastically uncertain annoys the hell out of me.  Wicca is NOT
supposed to be a faith of Great Men who Hand Down the Truth from Ivory
Towers, and as such where Gerald Gardner got his ideas from doesn't
mean a damned thing to me.  I've never even READ his stuff, OR
Crowley's.  OR Sanders'.  I found my spirituality through Stone, and
Budapest, and Castleden, and Walker, and Adler, and Starhawk.  The
research I've done shows to me quite plainly that even though the
trappings of what direction means what and what the name of the
deities are might have been changed over the years, that the general
ideas of the Earth and Moon as the Goddess and the God as her annually
dying consort HAVE ALWAYS BEEN IN EVIDENCE.  Why are you people
niggling over the origin of the black-handled knife when the it's just
another stupid meaningless tool by which the Mother and her Consort
are celebrated?  You're straining at gnats, trying to say that just
because the details are fuzzy that the overall structure is garbage as
well.  You must not recognize the value of impressionistic artwork,
then.  Gardner may have made up the idea of the black handled knife
but:

a) I've never read Gardner so I don't CARE;
b) what the knife is used to SIGNIFY is the important part, and the
   celebration of the principle it represents is what you'll find in
   old religions and celebrations since time immemorial.  THIS is what
   dates Wicca to the stone age.  Who GIVES a shit about the tools? 

Let me restate this again for the especially dense -- I don't give a
flying damn WHERE Gardner got his ideas.  Gardner's Wicca is
meaningless to me; I've never read one of his books, and I resent the
hell out of someone trying to tell me that my faith is a joke because
THEY don't like someone I've never even read.  I also resent people
who say that just because the fine details may have been made up that
that means that the entirety of Wicca is some sort of joke.  How
frigging reductionist can you get?  Wicca is more tha some salt and a
black knife, damn it.  We may have made up our means by which we
celebrate the Goddess and her Kouros, but the CELEBRATION ITSELF is as
old as the hills.

Blessings,
Janis