Wiccan Basics: Solitary Suburban Pagan Guide, #1

By Ashlyn Hawthorne

For those taking their first steps on a pagan path or experienced practitioners looking for a simpler approach, Wiccan Basics delivers a straightforward a guide to creating a pagan spiritual practice.

Offering a clear, uncomplicated overview of basic Wiccan practices, this book will walk you through everything you need to create to as a solitary pagan practice that fits your lifestyle, experience, and traditions.

Wiccan Basics is filled with easy suggestions and creative ways to:

    - Connect with deities and the elements
    - Celebrate the seasons with sabbats and esbats
    - Develop skills such as meditation and visualization
    - Select and use tools and altars
    - Create sacred space
    - Understand and magic and make it part of your everyday life
    - Pull all the facets of Wicca together to create a personal, practical daily practice
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ashlyn Hawthorne
• Release date: Sep 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781393937753

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

I first called myself a Wiccan when I was sixteen years old. At the time, the internet was in its infancy and, if there were any pagans in my neighborhood, I would never have guessed. My only teachers for many years were the books I could buy at the local bookstore. I learned by reading and experimenting and diving into possibilities headfirst. I made my faith an important part of my everyday life.

Fast-forward twenty-plus years. I had collected so many books, tools, rituals, beliefs, and random paraphernalia that I wasn't even sure what the basics were anymore. My practice had become an amalgam of varying ideas, cobbled together from a multitude of sources. Some of it was from within me and my own experience. A lot of it was from books, circles I'd belonged to and a wide variety of other collected practices. It was complicated and unfulfilling. I knew I had to step back, simplify, and figure out what was really important and what was no longer necessary for me.

It took nearly a year to strip it all down and build it back up to something that felt like mine. 

That's when the inspiration for this book was born. I realized this kind of guide would have been very helpful to me when I'd first started my spiritual exploration. Or when I'd first decided I needed to start from scratch. This book was born from the hope that I could help others who are in either of those places in their lives. Help others begin to build, or rebuild, a simple, effective daily practice.

It's not meant to be a step by step authority. Rather it's a framework and series of suggestions. It's laid out with the intention that the reader brings their own culture, traditions, philosophy and, most of all, comfort, in shaping the details of their own practice.

In addition to acting as a basic road map for creating a Wiccan practice, it's also meant to point out ways to fit a spiritual practice into our modern, hectic lifestyles. Career, family, and community commitments vie for every bit of our time, attention, and energy. I tried to include small, easy suggestions that could be done in those few spare minutes of our day. 

Bright Blessings,

Ashlyn

***One final important note. *** 

Please make yourself aware of safety precautions as well as local laws and ordinances. For example always have a fire extinguisher handy when using fire and keep flammables well away from flames. Be aware that when and where you are permitted to have outdoor fires is often strictly regulated. In some jurisdictions, double-sided blades are illegal, so you may need to consider other options for your athame. 

CHAPTER ONE

Basics, Tenets, and Ethics

THE MOST BASIC OF THE ALL THE BASICS we'll cover is defining what Wicca is. Unfortunately, that's not an easy task. If we asked five Wiccans for their definition, we'd be lucky if we only got five different answers.

The truth is, Wicca is an experiential religion. One defined by the practitioner. Our worldview, culture, desires, needs, hopes and expectations all play a part in how we practice, worship, and incorporate faith into our daily lives. Wicca is about what we bring to it and what we hope to get from it and how much we actively try to experience in our lives. 

Not being able to define it with absolute finality doesn't mean there aren't some general guidelines and commonly accepted components, however. (Though not everyone will agree on all of them.) A few of the generally acknowledged facets of Wicca are:

Belief in divine or conscious higher power and/or belief in a spirit world

Reverence for nature

Psychic experiences and abilities

Magic

Personal responsibility

Ethical action

My personal definition is simple. 

Wicca gives me the tools to connect to deity on a personal level. It helps me connect to the natural world, allowing me a better relationship with, and understanding of, of the earth's cycles and rhythms. It allows me to seek the power of divinity and nature both around me and within me.

BELIEF IN DIVINE OR CONSCIOUS HIGHER POWER AND/OR BELIEF IN A SPIRIT WORLD

We'll explore various aspects of deity and the spirit world in the next chapter. Briefly, however, the spirit world is another, or multiple other, planes, level of existence or reality that is separate yet overlapping with the more mundane world we live in. Depending on tradition, culture, and worldview these planes can include the dwelling place(s) of the elemental spirits, deities, nature spirits, the fae, the land of the dead, etc.

Many Wiccans believe the divine is immanent. That is, we all carry a spark of the divine power within us and divinity is also in everything natural around us. Animals, plants, rocks, stars, trees