Marvin Kaye and Parke Godwin,
The Masters of Solitude
All this activity has made one thing obvious:
There is an abundance of sugary pretty things in the Craft community.
I am getting pretty sick of all the beatific Goddess pictures, and all the 15 year olds calling themselves "Lady* this" and "Mistress that".. They "kneel" and "pray" and "worship" at their altars, and call their dieties "Lord and Lady", and finish their every sentence with "it's ONLY my opinion, I apologize if I offended anyone".. Don't they get it?
The Goddess is not Jesus in a skirt, all sweetness and light. And come to think of it, if you look at some of the things Yeshua says in the Bible, he wasn't that sweet either (but that's a whole other rant)..
Witches don't need to pray - being a witch means you can change reality by wishing it to change, not by asking someone else to do it for you. The whole subservience thing - the kneeling, the praying, the worshipping - it's not witchylike! It's one thing to say "hey, thanks for such & such, Goddess" or to show appreciation - it's a completely different thing to say "it's all in the hands of the Lord and the Lady" - and deny the fact of your own power.. you have taken the words from a Creationist, Organized, Repressive religion and added "and the Lady" as an afterthought. The Goddess is not an afterthought. And she's certainly not a Lady.
Sure, she is the beauty of the pregnant or birthing woman, and the beauty of a newborn (and not just the freshly washed ones they show on TV, but the ones newly born with the "cone" heads, purplish tinge to their skin and white slimy stuff all over them too). But she isn't just youth, or life and birth and happiness, hope and love. She is also Death, Pain, Anguish, Hate, Betrayal, Despair, Disease and Distruction. She is not just the warm ray of sun on your face on a freezing cold day. She is also the mother zebra that has just given birth and is now passively watching the alpha stud of her herd stomp her baby to death because it isn't his. She is the cancer that killed my aunt. She is my dog's broken, mangled little body laying on the pavement, having been hit by a car.
My dog, whom I took from the pound only a few months earlier.. she was so skinny that her bones stuck out of her body. She was scared and insecure, and had lymes disease and mange. She has grown to be healthy, muscled, self-assured and loving. She learned to come, and sit, and catch the ball, but was still having trouble barking. She was my shadow wherever I went in the house, always asking for more love and attention. I was looking forward to her first summer and her first swimming lesson. I was looking forward to the day when she realized that she was powerfull and became my protector. And now all my hopes, my love, my life was lying on the pavement with a bloody mouth, slowly becoming a cold piece of meat. There is no denying that the Goddess is Death and Loss.
It seems to be problematic for most Wiccans to face the facts of life. They ignore the aspects of the Goddess that may be unpleasant and "worship" the aspects they like. They wish to "cleanse" themselves of all "negativity". They seem to think that being sweet and innocent is something to be proud of, and forget that knowledge is power. When confronted with someone else's opinion, they seem incapable of intelligent argument, and instead come back with insults. These people are really Christians (and not the good ones). They still retain the beliefs they were brainwashed with as children - that self-pride is a sin, that sex is dirty, that they are powerless playthings of some diety, that the world and everything in it was created for their convinience, and that they do not need to worry about all that is wrong with this world - the Lord (oh yeah, and the Lady) will protect them if they only prey and worship. It makes me sick to see these people call themselves witches.
SpinFrog, 2002