My Pagan Path, Part 1: Becoming a Green Witch

Why I’m writing this

The ideas for this essay started bouncing around in my head when I proofread t!’s contribution to Arin‘s upcoming book, Out of the Broom Closet. Then Brendan Myers started asking some very interesting and thought-provoking questions on his blog, and so I’ve been thinking a lot about my pagan path lately. Also, it’s spring, the time for re-awakenings. This is mostly just for myself, to have thought about it and organized it in my head enough to write it, but it’s also for sharing – for my friends who might be interested to know more about my path & practice, and also as a public documentation of “What I do as a pagan and why I do it that way” because, as I’ll explain below, I found very little of this kind of material when I was searching.

How I got here, and where ‘here’ is

I sometimes joke that I “married into” paganism. t! is pagan, in fact when we met he was the president of the Montreal Pagan Resource Centre and a dedicant in a Wiccan coven. He passed the presidency of the MPRC on to someone else shortly after we started going out, and the rules of his coven meant he didn’t talk very much about what went on there, so I actually didn’t have a lot of exposure to his spiritual practices at first, except for his various personal practices. Which I would sometimes gently ask about, and he’d explain as much as he could. At the time, I was reading the Tao Te Ching in search of a spiritual path that suited me.

My religious or spiritual background is fairly pedestrian: I was raised Presbyterian (liberal Canadian Presbyterian, not scary strict Scottish Presbyterian) by a Catholic mother and Protestant father, until the age of 12 when I refused to be confirmed, because I wasn’t comfortable with standing up in front of our church’s congregation and saying that I believed in God when I wasn’t sure I did. I went through my adolescent atheist period, and then in my late 20s, while living in the UK, started going to Church of England services vaguely regularly with my friend Emma because the vicar was thoughtful and intelligent and had some very interesting things to say. I also started going to the local Friends (Quaker) Meeting House. I liked the fact that the Quakers were active in social justice, had no priests, and that you didn’t technically have to believe in Jesus, even though most Friends did. The fact that I didn’t need to stand and mumble my way through the Lord’s Prayer, feeling slightly guilty about it every week was also a big plus.

So almost five years ago I was looking into Taoism, but it didn’t ‘take’ with me, it’s a beautiful philosophy, but I couldn’t figure out how to build any kind of spiritual practice around it, and that’s what I was looking for – a personal spiritual practice that resonated with my life, my values, and, for lack of a better word, my ‘beliefs’.

Since t! and many of his close friends were pagans, and paganism was supposedly a “nature-based religion”, and ‘nature’ was a big part of my personal spirituality, I started to ‘poke at’ paganism, mainly by reading books, websites, elists, and LJ communities. Why didn’t I just ask t!, or someone else about it? A number of reasons: 1. t!’s coven had secrecy rules. He wasn’t allowed to tell me much about what they did. 2. Canadians in general don’t talk about their religion much, and I was raised to feel that it’s vaguely impolite to ask. 3. As an introvert, I’ve always found it much easier to learn things by reading books than by asking people questions 4. I didn’t really know what to ask.

In a way my teenage atheism never completely went away, because the biggest barrier that I kept hitting as I read various introductory-level paganism books and websites was Deity. What I was reading kept telling me how empowered I now was as a woman because as a pagan I believed in the Goddess (and possibly also the God). And that there was an entire pantheon of gods and goddesses, each with different attributes and specialties and personalities, so that I could choose which one(s) to worship / honour / work with / use in my majick spells.

The focus on the female aspect of deity seemed to be so central to paganism (understandably, as many of the world’s religions distinguish themselves by their definition of deity) that it excluded me. To put it crudely, I don’t “believe in” the Goddess and the God. But it has nothing to do with “belief” – I’m certainly not about to deny that the God and the Goddess (or Hecate, or Diana, or Pan, or Jesus or Mohammed) *exist*. It’s just that my concept of Deity is something that is pure energy, and exists primarily on the spiritual plane. The idea of Deity having the very human attributes of personality quirks and gender doesn’t make very much sense to me. And it certainly doesn’t fit into my personal spirituality. What I was reading about paganism was telling me that if I wasn’t willing to “believe in” or at least “work with” the Goddess and the God, then I couldn’t be a pagan. So I left it for a while.

Months later, t! and I were away for a weekend, and he had brought a few of his tarot decks with him. We spent a couple of hours one evening with the cards spread out on the bed. He told me the story of the fool’s journey, showed me his favourite cards, explained the differences between different decks, and told me how he worked with the tarot. I’d had a tarot reading done for me once, years ago, and found it both interesting and useful. t!’s explanations confirmed for me that tarot was, at very least, a great tool for accessing one’s own subconscious mind, and possibly a lot more besides. I borrowed one of t!’s decks, and started to look into buying one myself. I spent all my spare time for a week on the Aeclectic Tarot website, and finally decided on my first (and still primary) deck: the World Spirit Tarot. I adore it. These days, every time I go back to working with it after a time away, I am struck again by how much I like it, how well it suits me, and how glad I am that I bought it.

I asked t! to buy me a nice notebook to record my tarot work in, which he did, and I started to work with my deck by doing a card draw first thing in the morning at my studio before I started my work for the day. I soon figured out that the tarot work went much, much better if I did that “centering and grounding” thing that I’d read about in the Paganism 101 books. Every day I recorded what I was discovering about tarot (and about myself, natch) in my nice notebook. Without having made any kind of decision to do so, the “centering and grounding” gradually evolved into meditation, and then into meditation and energy work.

So I’m doing a daily grounding & centering, meditation & energy work, and tarot draw, and recording it all in my special notebook. But I’m still not calling myself a pagan because of that pesky Goddess.

To be fair, though, it wasn’t just the Goddess and other deities. Heck, if it was I probably would have just called myself an “atheist pagan” and jumped right in! It was also the fact that much of the introductory material I found was somewhat Wicca-centric (or otherwise Gardner-derived), and so tended to “Here’s how to practice witchcraft: you need an athame and a wand and a pentacle and an image of the goddess, and here’s how you arrange them on your altar, and here’s how to cast a circle, and here’s how to celebrate the sabbats.”

And most of this stuff, though interesting, didn’t resonate with me. Having a pretty ceremonial knife that you were supposed to never cut anything with seemed slightly bizarre to someone who has spent most of her adult life with a Swiss army knife in her pocket. Knives are meant to cut things, that’s their function, their purpose. I really, truly don’t mean to mock other people’s beliefs here, or sound dismissive. I’m trying to explain, through example, why I felt at the time that paganism wasn’t for me. My way of seeing / interacting with the natural world (which is what my spirituality is all about) seemed to simply not mesh with the descriptions of paganism that I was finding.

Then I read Arin’s book The Way of the Green Witch which said,

“The green witch … does not necessarily worship the gods and goddesses that are expressions and representations of earth patterns and energy. The planet itself is an archetype of nurturing, but further refinement of that archetype is not necessary for the green witch.”

and

“…there are no instructions for creating a magic circle in which you must work, no calling on deities, no sequences of formal ritual that must be enacted precisely as written.”

and

“Some green witches are comfortable talking about fairies or devas, whereas others roll their eyes and get down to hoeing the garden.”

and I thought “That’s it! That’s me! I’m a ‘hoeing the garden pagan’!”

oh, and,

“An essential green witch tool is a sharp knife used to harvest herbs and other plants.”

Hah!

It also said a lot of other stuff about earth energies and the elements and gardening and cooking and crafting, most of which resonated strongly with me in a way that none of the other material I had read had.

And, perhaps most importantly, The Way of the Green Witch made it perfectly clear that I could do things my own way, that the book was just a bunch of suggestions for things I might find useful, or want to try to see if they worked for me. For example, when talking about invoking the elements, her wording was “you can choose to recognize them in your practice,” and “if you choose to invoke all four elements.” Unlike the other material I had read, I wasn’t being told that I would “need to write a little poem” (Marian Green, A Witch Alone) and invoke Air in the East by walking widdershins around my circle.

Now I had a starting point that felt right, and I could begin to develop my personal spiritual practice as a Green Witch.

 

Part 2: My Green Witch Practice (What I do and Why) will be posted tomorrow.