The Principles of Witchcraft Belief

In the spring Witch meet held April 1974 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, The Council of American Witches adopted this statement entitled “The Principles of Wiitchcraft Beliefs.”

Of course Wiitchcraft Beliefs can vary from this from area to area, coven to coven and individual to individual there is no strict tenet laid down by a central council, this is just one particular bodies ideas.

Principles Outlined

1: We practice rites to attune ourselves with the natural rhythm of life forces marked by the phases of the Moon and the seasonal Quarters and Cross Quarters.

2: We recognize that our intelligence gives us a unique responsibility toward our environment. We seek to live in harmony with Nature, in ecological balance offering fulfillment and consciousness within an evolutionary concept.

3: We acknowledge a depth of power far greater than that apparent to the average person. Because it is far greater than ordinary it is sometimes called supernatural, but we see it as lying within that which is naturally potential to all.

4: We conceive of the Creative Power in the universe as manifesting through polarity ~as masculine and feminine~ and that this same Creative Power lies in all people, and functions through the interaction of the masculine and feminine. We value neither above the other, knowing each to be supportive to each other. We value sex as pleasure, as the symbol and embodiment of life, and as one of the sources of energies used in magickal practice and religious worship.

5: We recognize both outer worlds and inner, or psychological, worlds sometimes known as the Spiritual World, the Collective Unconscious, Inner Planes, etc. ~and we see in the interaction of these two dimensions the basis for paranormal phenomena and magickal exercises. We neglect neither dimension for the other, seeing both as necessary for our fulfillment.

6: We do not recognize any authoritarian hierarchy, but do honor those who teach, respect those who share their greater knowledge and wisdom, and acknowledge those who have courageously given of themselves in leadership.

7: We see religion, magick, and wisdom in living as being united in the way one views the world and lives within it ~a world view and philosophy of life which we identify as Witchcraft~ The Wiccan Way .

8: Calling oneself “Witch” does not make a Witch, but neither does heredity itself, not the collecting of titles, degrees, and initiations. A Witch seeks to control the forces within her/himself that make life possible in order to live wisely and well without harm to others and in harmony with Nature.

9: We believe in the affirmation and fulfillment of life in a continuation of evolution and development of consciousness giving meaning to the Universe we know and our personal role within it.

10: Our only animosity towards Christianity, or towards any other religion or philosophy of life, is to the extent that its institutions have claimed to be “the only way,” and have sought to deny freedom to others and to surpress other ways of religious practice and belief.

11: As American Witches, we are not threatened by debates on the history of the Craft, the origins of various terms, the legitimacy of various aspects of different traditions. We are concerned with our present and our future.

12: We do not accept the concept of absolute evil, nor do we worship any entity known as Satan or the Devil, as defined by the Christian tradition. We do not seek power through the sufferings of others, nor accept that personal benefit can be derived only by denial to another.

13: We believe that we should seek within Nature that which is contributory to our health and well-being.

Source: Wicca Chat

Zsuzsanna Budapest, founder of Dianic Wicca. Z Budapest fought for the right to get paid for tarot readings and WON

Dianic Witch

Origins of Dianic Wicca:
Born of the feminist movement and founded by hereditary witch Zsuzsanna Budapest, Dianic Wicca embraces the Goddess but spends little time on her male counterpart. Most Dianic Wiccan covens are female-only, but a few have welcomed men into their groups, with the intention of adding some much-needed polarity. In some areas, the phrase Dianic Wiccan came to mean lesbian witch, but that is not always the case, as Dianic covens welcome women of any sexual orientation.

Budapest says specifically, “We always recognize, when we say “Goddess,” that She is the Life-giver, the Life-sustainer. She is Mother Nature.”

“There are only two kinds of people in the world: mothers and their children. Mothers can give life to each other as well as to men, who are not able to do the same for themselves. This constitutes a dependency upon the Female Life Force for life renewed, and was accepted naturally in ancient times by our ancient forebearers as a sacred gift of the Goddess. In patriarchal times this sacred gift was turned against women, and used to force them to give up roles of independence and power.”

Cursing & Hexing:
While many Wiccan paths follow a belief system that limits hexing, cursing or negative magic, some Dianic Wiccans make an exception to that rule. Budapest, a noted feminist Wiccan writer, has argued that hexing or binding those who do harm to women is acceptable.

Honoring the Goddess:
Dianic covens celebrate the eight Sabbats, and use similar altar tools to other Wiccan traditions. However, among the Dianic community there is not a lot of continuity in ritual or practice – they simply self-identify as Dianic to indicate that they follow a Goddess-based, feminine-focused spiritual path.

The core belief of Dianic Wicca, as founded by Z Budapest, states that the tradition “is a holistic religious system based on a Goddess-centered cosmology and the primacy of She Who is All and Whole unto Herself.”

Recent Controversies:
Dianic Wicca – and specifically, Z Budapest herself – has been at the center of a few controversies lately. At the 2011 PantheaCon, transgender women were specifically excluded from a women’s ritual hosted by a Dianic group. Budapest’s statements afterwards regarding the incident led to accusations of transphobia against her and the Dianic tradition, when she said, “These individuals selfishly never think about the following: if women allow men to be incorporated into Dianic Mysteries, What will women own on their own? Nothing! Again! Transies who attack us only care about themselves. We women need our own culture, our own resourcing, our own traditions. You can tell these are men, They don’t care if women loose the Only tradition reclaimed after much research and practice, the Dianic Tradition. Men simply want in. its their will. How dare us women not let them in and give away the ONLY spiritual home we have!”

On her group’s website, Budapest states that membership is open to cisgendered women (“Open to women born-women”) only.
Following the PantheaCon controversy, a number of offshoot groups of the Dianic tradition distanced themselves from Budapest and her coven. One group, the Amazon Priestess Tribe, publicly retired from the lineage with a press release that read, “We cannot support a policy of universal exclusion based upon gender at our Goddess-centered rites, nor can we condone disregard or insensitivity in communications regarding the topic of gender inclusion and Goddess-centered practice. We feel it inappropriate to remain members of a lineage where our views and practices diverge significantly from those of the primary lineage holder.”

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The Dianic Tradition

Dianic Wicca, also known as Dianic Witchcraft and Dianic Feminist Witchcraft,[1] is a tradition, or Religious denomination, of the Neopagan religion of Wicca. It was founded by Zsuzsanna Budapest in the United States in the 1970s, and is notable for its focus on the worship of the Goddess, and on feminism. It combines elements of British Traditional Wicca, Italian folk-magic recorded in Charles Leland’s Aradia, feminist values, and ritual, folk magic, and healing practices Budapest learned from her mother.

It is most often practiced in female-only covens.

Beliefs and practices
Most Dianic Wiccans worship the Goddess only, believing that She is the source of all living and contains all within Her. There are Dianic witches who practice other forms of paganism (possibly including honoring a male deity or deities) outside of their Dianic practice. Some Dianics are monotheistic, some are polytheistic, some are atheist.

Most Dianics worship in female-only (as defined by Dianics usually as cisgender women, which excludes transgender women from their sisterhood) circles and covens, but there are mixed-gender Dianic traditions. Eclecticism, appreciation of cultural diversity, ecological concern, and familiarity with sophisticated concepts of psyche and transformation are characteristic. Originally lesbians formed the majority of the movement, however modern Dianic groups may be all-lesbian, all-heterosexual or mixed.

Most Dianic Wiccans as “positive path” practitioners do neither manipulative spellwork nor hexing because it goes against the Wiccan Rede; other Dianic witches (notably Zsuzsanna Budapest) do not consider hexing or binding of those who attack women to be wrong.

Differences between Dianic and mainstream Wicca
Like other Wiccans, Dianics may form covens, attend festivals, celebrate the eight major Wiccan holidays, Samhain, Beltane, Imbolc (or Imbolg), Lammas, the solstices and equinoxes (see Wheel of the Year) and the Esbats, which are rituals usually held at the full moon or dark moon. They use many of the same altar tools, rituals and vocabulary as other Wiccans. Dianics may also gather in more informal Circles.

The most noticeable differences between the two are that Dianic covens are usually female-only while other Wiccan covens are usually mixed, some aiming for equal numbers of men and women, and that most Wiccans worship the God and Goddess, while Dianics generally worship the Goddess as Whole Unto Herself; or if they worship the God, it is as a consort of the Goddess, rather than an equal.

It should be noted many Wiccans do not consider the Dianic path to be Wiccan at all as they only venerate, and sometimes espouse only the existence of, the Goddess.

Other Dianic traditions
Broadly speaking, Dianic tradition refers to the beliefs, practices, practitioners and history of woman’s mysteries, earth-religion, Neopagan Goddess worshippers. It is synonymous with the Neopagan religious traditions that place emphasis on the feminine divine. The term Dianic is derived from the Roman goddess of the moon, hunting and childbirth, Diana whose companion Nymphs were female.

The three main branches of Dianic Neopaganism are known as:
Dianic Wicca, a feminine tradition of Wicca started by Zsuzsanna Budapest and her 1980s book, The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries.
McFarland Dianic, a Neopagan Fairy lineage tradition started by Mark Roberts and Morgan McFarland. One of relatively few Dianic traditions which accepts male members.

The Living Temple of Diana, an emerging shamanic witchcraft tradition of Dianic witchcraft started by Devin Hunter. The Living Temple of Diana’s practices center around empowerment, sovereignty, and carries the motto “We were created whole” as its creed. The Living Temple of Diana does not recognize gender or gender variation as a point of interest in its worship or witchcraft and as such accepts male, female, and transgendered members. Its lineage pulls from the Cult of Diana and was created as an alternative method of Dianic worship and witchcraft for those who are not concerned with CIS only circles.

(Non-Wiccan) Dianic Witches, who may have been inspired by Z Budapest, the New York Redstocking’s W.I.T.C.H. manifesto, or woman’s spirituality movements, who emphasize self-initiation, womanism and non-hierarchical organization. Most Dianics fall into this category, even if some acknowledge Z. Budapest as a foremother, because they do not participate in the initiation/ordination lineage of Dianic Wicca.
Dianic tradition is difficult to define because it has a limited historical basis and no formally defined doctrine. For some, Dianic Wicca is every day folk religion, hedge-witchery or kitchen-witchery; for others, Dianic tradition is more formal, with highly developed liturgy and cosmology. For most, in its essence Dianic tradition is a Woman’s Mysteries tradition, linked to such traditions across time and across cultures. They are a celebration of woman’s bodies, woman’s experiences, the Divine Feminine, and the biology and culture of womanhood, rather than rejection or dismissal of men and masculinity.

Most Dianic’s conceive of and experience the pagan Wheel of the Year in terms of both seasonal reality and also the life stages of women and of the Great Goddess: maiden, mother, queen, crone and hag.

Some Dianics, like other Wiccans, celebrate together in large-group rituals and spell-crafting on the sabbats (seasonal holy days) or the esbats (full-moon days). There are Dianic covens and circles, however many Dianics are solitary practitioners by preference or circumstance.

References

Patti Wigington, ThoughtCo.com

1.0 1.1 Falcon River (2004) The Dianic Wiccan Tradition. From The Witches Voice. Retrieved 2007-05-23.

J. River (2004) The Dianic Tradition. From The Witches’ Voice. Retrieved 2007-05-23.

Teutonic Witchcraft

From ancient time the Teutons have been recognized as a group of people who speak the Germanic group of languages. Culturally, this included the English, Dutch, Icelandic, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish peoples. This is also known as the Nordic Tradition.

Despite a generation of excellent research, the history of witchcraft remains bedeviled by a host of misperceptions. Ordinary readers often assume that the major witch-hunts occurred in the Middle Ages, that they were conducted by the Catholic Church, and that they reflected the prescientific notions and sexual fantasies of fanatics and neurotics. Elsewhere one can read that huge chain reaction witch trials constituted a “women’s holocaust” accounting for millions of deaths, and that the witch-hunters especially targeted midwives and female healers. All of these conclusions are both wrong and misleading. The great age of witchcraft trials came after 1430, and primarily after 1570. The prosecuting magistrates were almost always secular officials, imbued with the best thinking of prominent theologians, philosophers, and even scientists. The numbers of those executed have often been exaggerated by a factor of one or two hundred. Men made up perhaps a quarter of those executed, and there is little evidence that midwives or healers were singled out for suspicion anywhere. But historical prejudices are hard to uproot.

UNDERSTANDINGS OF WITCHCRAFT

Depending on one’s definition, various histories of witchcraft are defensible. It was once common, for example, to understand the crime of witchcraft as consisting essentially of having a pact with the devil, an agreement in which one exchanged one’s eternal soul for monstrous powers. Such a crime of diabolism had not existed in the ancient world and only slowly emerged from the medieval campaign against magic and heresy, especially against medieval heretics such as the Cathars and Waldensians, groups who challenged both Catholic doctrines and papal jurisdiction. By the late fourteenth century, however, canon lawyers, prominent inquisitors, learned academics, and several popes came to agree that by means of a contract with the devil, whether explicit or only implicit, a magician might work genuine harm in this world. These theorists also gradually worked out a composite view of all the different sorts of crimes and activities their heresy involved. It was increasingly believed that witch-heretics flew off to a “sabbath” where they renounced their Christian faith and baptism, worshipped the devil, danced together, and enjoyed a cannibalistic feast, devouring children whom they had killed while using their fat or other body parts to make loathsome potions. They were also thought to receive instruction in working harmful magic by which they might destroy their neighbors’ crops, interfere with the fertility of their cattle, and with the sex lives of those around them. Most luridly, witches were thought to have sexual relations with the devil or with lesser demons. During the fifteenth century large numbers of heretical “witches” or sorcerers began to be discovered, and increasingly they were women.

Another definition of witchcraft emphasizes the continuity of magical practices that witches had used in the West ever since classical times and the similarities between such practices and those found all around the world. On such an understanding, witchcraft is the belief in and use of unusual, secret, or even supernatural forces in order to force or promote specific desired ends. The ancient Greeks had believed in such magic but had not seen it as much of a daily threat. They originally thought that “magic” (mageia) was the strange, foreign religious practice of Persian priests (the magi) and of beggars or other dishonorable Greeks. Magic seemed both alien and disreputable. In Greek literature, the figure of the witch included characters such as Circe and Medea, women who used destructive magic to express their anger, lust, and frustration, but magic does not seem to have been a prominent fear among the Greeks. With the ancient Romans, however, harmful magic (maleficium) was forbidden in the earliest set of laws (the Twelve Tables, 451 B. C.E.) and was punished with increasing severity. The Roman historian Livy (History 39.41.5 and 40.43.2f) recounts episodes when apparently thousands of persons were executed by jittery judicial officials, and, in the late first century C.E., the Romans began to crack down on fraudulent magicae vanitates (‘worthless magic’), practices that included healing, divination, and astrology. Thus, this understanding of witchcraft did not require a devil or a pact but insisted on the dangers lurking in the hidden practices of lustful and vengeful witches.

A third notion of witchcraft may be found in the injunctions of the Old Testament, in which the authors of Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Kings, for example, forbade necromancy and divination, practices that competed with the rituals of the Levites and sacrificial priests while also Click here to read the rest of this article Source: encyclopedia.com