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Foreword

After hundreds of years of suppression and distortion, the Old Religion has exploded from the broom closet. Today, contemporary Wicca, the various traditions of Witchcraft and the related paths of modern Neo-Paganism constitute the fastest growing spirituality in the United States, England, Canada and Australia. We are doctors and lawyers, therapists and television personalities, teachers and truck drivers, soldiers, secretaries, and students – a cross-section of the culture in which we live, and we are increasingly visible not just in English-speaking countries, but all over the world.

And what does this mysterious and long misunderstood spirituality have to offer millions of modern, sophisticated people?

The birth of a new religion – or the rebirth of an ancient one – is the most profound historical phenomenon in human culture. A new religion arises when the old one no longer fulfills our spiritual needs and when it fails to provide meaningful explanations for the relationship between humanity, the Divine, and the world in which we live. At no other moment in human history are these needs greater, and is this relationship more crucial.

We are in crisis because the Western world is devoid of divinity. For thousands of years our dominant cosmologies have taught us that God (a male) is not present in the world. Both the theological view, that God created the world and left (returning, perhaps, only through the agency of a unique male prophet), and the scientific view, that God does not exist at all, have left us disoriented, alienated, and empty. This separation from the Sacred has created a terrible wound at the center of Western civilization, a laceration that gives rise to the violence, despair, and environmental collapse that threaten our future and the future of our planet.

But our yearning for wholeness is rooted in the deepest center of our collective and individual souls. Wicca has become one of the fastest growing religions in the world because it offers a very different understanding of the interrelationship between the earth, humanity, and the Divine. But Wicca is not a belief system. It is not a system of religious dogma handed down thousands of years ago by a single prophet and then interpreted by religious (and invariably male) professionals.

Practitioners of Wicca do not require faith in a transcendent God because they experience an immanent divinity that is beyond gender (being both masculine and feminine), infinitely diverse in its forms, unifying, and ever-present.

It is a spirituality of accessible practices empowering each of us, in our own unique ways, to discover the Divine that is present everywhere in the world.

Wicca speaks to the modern soul and sensibility because it honors the capacity and the responsibility of each of us to encounter this immanent Divinity. And one of the greatest discoveries on this life-altering quest is that our journey to the Sacred is a journey to our true and authentic selves. Wicca is a path to the indwelling Divine – it enables us to embrace the numinous within ourselves.

We are undertaking an initiatory journey – to the self-knowledge and transformation that occurs through our communion with this inner truth. It is an awakening to who we really are, where we are, and why we are here. Having found the Sacred within, we can emerge from the Underworld of our unconscious and our social conditioning to see the world with eyes from which the veil has been lifted. We can see with new and holy eyes that penetrate beneath the culture’s confused illusions to the ceaselessly flowing, generative and numinous life force from which all of creation springs and through which all of life is joined. We recognize the Divine embodied in the natural world around us – in the wilderness and our gardens, the eyes of a loved one and the call of a wolf, the first flowers of spring and the richness of harvest, the silver light of the moon and the golden heat of the sun, the sweet pleasures and the wisdom of the body – in all the infinite beauties and grace of life.

Vivianne Crowley describes this quest with illuminating clarity, analyzing the classic Wiccan rites that enact our pilgrimages inward to confront the Shadows that stand between the Sacred and ourselves. She skillfully brings the science of psychology, and specifically the remarkable wisdom of fellow traveler Carl Jung, to enrich our understanding and our experience of this voyage as one that expresses and nourishes our inherent spirituality. It is a perspective of inestimable value to beginner and experienced practitioner alike.

Wicca is a profound spiritual process by which ordinary life becomes extraordinary and our everyday lives become infused with holy meaning, empowerment and pleasure. It is a path bridging the gap of false consciousness that has separated us from our true and sacred selves and from the sacred world in which we live. It is a spirituality that enables us to live in a sacred manner because we live in a sacred world. This is the knowledge that heals all wounds and restores spirit to the world and world to spirit. There is no greater expression of love, and no greater magic.

PHYLLIS CUROTT, NEW YORK 2003