The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

I'm not saying this is a bad religion but why does it seem like this religion is treated as just a "beginner's religion" and books written on the subject seem so watered down and made for dabbler consumption?

I'm not saying this is a bad religion but why does it seem like this religion is treated as just a "beginner's religion" and books written on the subject seem so watered down and made for dabbler consumption?

 
Short version? Because publishers, unsurprisingly, want to make money from their books (so they can pay their authors and their editors and their artists, and so they can keep making *more* books.)

And because a combination of things happened in the late 80s and early 90s that made the exoteric forms of Wicca both particularly palatable in the larger culture *and* because there was growing access to other forms of information (the beginnings of the Internet) but not quite there yet for a lot of people in a lot of places.

The things that I think it's important to realise are:

1) The published stuff about Wicca, by and large, is not about the esoteric mystery-centered initiatory Wicca (or when it is, it's fragmentary and partial, and not a complete system/complete experience/etc.)

2) Writing about the exoteric parts of Wicca - the enjoyable rituals, the spells, the "this color goes with this sign goes with this deity" is really easy to do in a fun way (but really hard to do *well* in a way that respresents the complexity of the esoteric religion, or even a well-developed exoteric religion.)

That fun side has a place, but it can be very tempting for people not to go further, or realise there's actually a lot more there.

3) That all religions, really, have this happen - you see the same thing in Christianity with badly-done explanations of complex religious concepts. You see this in Judaism. I'm less familiar with it in other religions, but I'm pretty sure there's also lots of examples of how people take certain points, ignore others, and build up something different from there.

(Sometimes for really good reasons, sometimes not: there are reasons that, say, children's bibles exist. The problem is when people think that's all there is, or don't go back as adults to deal with the more complicated stories or issues.)

In other words, a lot of the published Wiccan material is on the level of "And now let's dye eggs for Easter! And make evergreen wreaths for Christmas!" Which on one hand can be a totally legitimate part of someone's life and celebrations. But on the other hand, is not getting at - well - almost any of the actual theology, ritual structure, ritual theory, or ethics of the religion.

So. What do people who are actually interested in the religion do? They seek out books that go deeper (and there have been those pretty much all along: there's tons of meaty stuff in Gardner, in Starhawk, in Margot Adler, f'instance. The 80s and 90s also brought us a lot of ritual theory discussion and Ellen Cannon Reed and Robin Wood's book on ethics, and a dozen other things I can think of. And there's more since, of course. Just you have to decide you want to do the work of coasting along the top of the pretty frothy happy stuff that's easy.

But again. Really, not that different from any other religion that has books about it.

Though, obligatory comment: Starhawk not Wiccan.  And because Starhawk not Wiccan you get a lot of weird shit emerging from trying to make her Craft and Gardner's Craft the same thing, somehow.

Which isn't to say there isn't depth to be had there, as well as in other sources, but not all commonly-accessible witchcraft books are operating in the same tradition, with the same theology, or with the same basic assumptions.

 
Yes, that, sorry. (And for that matter, Adler, also writing about a bunch of things that are not Wicca.) My point, in general, is that there have been people doing writing-with-depth all along, and in widely-shared resources, so it's not like it's not out there among the lighter things.

(And yes yes yes on trying to make a single cohesive tradition out of the published stuff. It isn't. It has a hundred different roots, and not all of them fit together. Many of them don't fit together, and were never meant to.)

I'm not saying this is a bad religion but why does it seem like this religion is treated as just a "beginner's religion" and books written on the subject seem so watered down and made for dabbler consumption?

 
Mostly, I think, because it's the only pagan religion a lot of people have even heard of.  So if you're disillusioned with Christianity or Judaism, not interested in Eastern religions, but don't want to just shrug and become agnostic, Wicca seems to offer the most obvious third option.  (Or I guess fourth option in this case.)  

I'm sure it varies a lot from region to region, so I don't know how much this holds true outside of Twin Cities area, but when I was 13-14 I was the fluffy, "I don't actually know what any of this even is" type of Wiccan --- and so were almost all of the girls I was friends with.  I don't know of any other pagan religion that has anything approaching that level of mass appeal.  

Also, I think Wicca has become appealing particularly in the US because it's associated with things that are largely absent in American Protestantism: female deity, an emphasis on ritual and celebration, a strong like of poetry and the arts, lack of clearly-defined dogma, etc.  The problem is . . . this mass appeal also makes it comparatively easy to take Wicca and repackage it as this glossy commodity that's so much better than Mean Ol' Christianity.

I'm not saying this is a bad religion but why does it seem like this religion is treated as just a "beginner's religion" and books written on the subject seem so watered down and made for dabbler consumption?

 
I saw an excellent list on another site I visit from time to time. Very NOT watered down, I assure you. :
"Witchcraft Today" by Gerald Gardner
"The Meaning of Witchcraft" by Gerald Gardner
"High Magick's Aid" by Gerald Gardner (fiction)
"The Witch's Bible Complete" by Janet and Stewart Farrar (Contains the
books "What Witches Do" and "Eight Sabbats for Witches"
"Lid off the Cauldron" by Patricia Crowther
"High Priestess" by Patricia Crowther
"Witch Blood" by Patricia Crowther
"The Training and Work of an Initiate" by Dion Fortune
"Wiccan Roots" by Philip Heselton
"Gerald Gardner and the Cauldron of Inspiration" by Philip Heselton
"Triumph of the Moon" by Ronald Hutton
"The Goat Foot God" by Dion Fortune (fiction)
"Lammas Night" by Katherine Kurtz (fiction)
"The Rebirth of Witchcraft" by Doreen Valiente
"Wicca: The Old Religion in the New Millenium" by Vivianne Crowley

And I very much agree with the other respondents - the exoteric is far easier to come by than the esoteric.
Even for myself, I was practicing a few years before I realized that the ritual and actions were only a part of it. One day things really clicked for me, and now the theology and the whole 9 yards really resonates for me.