Steph at The Witch Within (who is about to go on hiatus and will be missed) writes about her issues with Wicca in this post: Why it's not Mabon to me.

My biggest beef with Wicca is the practices and beliefs that were seemingly plucked from thin air decades ago. As more people study the historical records of ancient races they discovered that there is no historical proof that these peoples even worshipped this god or goddess or practiced a certain “sabbat”. There is no historical proof that a celebration called “Mabon” ever existed or that the Celts even celebrated it. To me that is highly suspect and I return to question the inventions of those who help foster the Witchcraft renaissance over 100 years ago.

I never really stopped to think about it that way. I've always been aware that Wiccans have had to "make up" much of the essence of our modern practice because the ancients didn't write theirs down. I'm also being trained in a tradition that encourages people to find what works best for them and use that in their practice, so perhaps from the get-go I've been more inclined to be accepting of this aspect of Wicca.

Without any direct influence from the Gardnerian tradition, I haven't experienced Wicca as a "creation of men based on vague ancient memories." I can understand why others who started on their paths as witches longer ago than I have might have chaffed under some restrictive influence of early Wiccan traditions, but my experience has been an entirely female-positive one. I don't accept the view that Wicca is solely a feminist religion either, but I do appreciate that Wicca enjoys far less institutionalized sexism than a number of other organized religions.

Hecate, in a recent post about celebrating Mabon with her new coven, quotes Carol Christ from The Politics of Women's Spirituality:

Religious symbol systems focused around exclusively male images of divinity create the impression that female power can never be fully legitimate or wholly beneficent. The message need never be explicitly stated (as, for example, it is in the story of Eve) for its effects to be felt. A woman completely ignorant of the myths of female evil in biblical religion nonetheless acknowledges the anomaly of female power when she prays exclusively to a male God. She may see herself as like God (created in the image of God) only by denying her own sexual identity and affirming God's transcendence of sexual identity. But she can never have the experience that is freely available to every man and boy in her culture of having her full sexual identity affirmed as being in the image and likeness of God.

Wicca allows us to celebrate the divinity within ourselves and gives us plenty of powerful role models to choose from.

Recently, I've come to accept the Wiccan mantle. Maybe I'm trying it on to see how it fits. But when I first launched this blog nearly a year ago, this is what I wrote about my beliefs on the subject:

A question that I have been asking myself is: am I a Wiccan? I think it's too soon to tell. As I said, I'm still not comfortable with the "religion" label - at this stage I see myself more as a practitioner of folk magick than a follower of Wicca as a formal religion.

While this is still partly true, I'm finding myself increasingly comfortable accepting myself as Wiccan. That said, I think it's more important to accept oneself and to follow a spiritual path that holds the deepest possible meaning rather than be overly concerned with finding a label to put on it.

Posted by Angela-Eloise at 5:36 PM