Wicca: A comprehensive guide to the Old Religion in the modern world. Vivianne Crowley

      

Copyright

      Element

      An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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      London SE1 9GF

      The website address is: www.harpercollins.co.uk

      and Element are trademarks of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

      First published by Thorsons 1996

      This edition 2003

      © Vivianne Crowley 1996, 2003

      Vivianne Crowley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

      Source ISBN 9780007169627

      Ebook Edition © FEBURARY 2016 ISBN: 9780008191627

      Version: 2016-02-25

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Dedication

      To my initiators who have walked the way,

      to Chris with whom I make the journey

      and who wrote the chapter on God,

      to those in many lands with whom we have danced

      the Spiral Dance

      and to the Wicca who are and who are yet to come:

      Blessed Be.

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword

Introduction

1 Wicca Today

2 The Roots of Wicca

3 Witchcraft Revisited

4 The Circle of Being

       5 Making Magic

       6 The First Initiation: Opening the Door

       7 The Journey Onwards

       8 The Goddess: Wicca and the Feminine

       9 The God: Wicca and the Masculine

       10 Invoking the Gods

       11 The Second Initiation: The Quest Perilous

       12 The Steep Path

       13 The Third Initiation: The Gateway to the Self

       14 Afterword

       Keep Reading

       Wiccan Resources: Where to Find Information, Books and Contacts

       Notes

       Bibliography

       About the Publisher

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