Progressive Witchcraft: Spirituality, Mysteries, and Training in Modern Wicca

The first Farrar-Bone text produced after Stewart Farrar's death, this book is an honest re-evaluation of modern practice of Wicca as it stands at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Overall, Progressive Witchcraft looks at what is outdated, and what is still important. Farrar and Bone focus on the concept of evolution, what it has meant in the early formative days of Wicca, and what role it has to play now. The book celebrates the evolutionary, flexible, and adaptable aspects of Wicca, and urges a return to the re-evolutionary identity it enjoyed for the first couple of decades, stressing the importance of experiential spirituality.

The concept of "progressive witchcraft" is not new for Janet Farrar and Gavin Bone. When Janet and Stewart Farrar left the Alexandrian tradition, they did so because of the limiting structure they saw as being imposed over a much freer practice. From that departure came years of experimentation and distillation of "traditional Wicca" into what has now been dubbed "progressive witchcraft."

According to the authors, there are ten main tenets of Progressive Witchcraft, which are, in brief, that: the phrase Progressive Witchcraft describes the process of "evolution of modern witchcraft into a coherent magical and spiritual path for the next millennia"; experiences are not good or bad, only valuable lessons which provide experience; spirituality is the core of Wiccan belief, training, and practice; as priest/esses, Wiccans serve the Divine for the good of humanity; the Divine initiates when the individual is prepared, and a human ceremony is not absolutely necessary; the secrets of the Craft cannot be given away as the path is a mystery tradition, requiring each person to experience the mysteries personally in order to advance spiritually; a firm moral and ethical base is required by which a practitioner must live; Spirit is immanent in nature, with various expressions; and practitioners seek the best for all, striving to balance themselves and the world. (pp. 56-8)

This book is essentially about the Mysteries and how modern practitioners can experience them, and how to experience them in a rewarding and informative fashion. Rather than exploring these Mysteries within a traditional structure, the authors trace the similarities through various Wicca-related cultural cosmologies to suggest a more universal approach. In conjunction with this, the text examines deity concepts, coven organisation and workings, training, ritual techniques, and much more. One of the arguments the authors make involves the proposal of undoing the amalgamation of various Western magical techniques, a product of the universal and eclectic traits of occult scholarship over the past century. In seeking to restore witchcraft to its re-evolutionary status, the authors point out that the use of Cabalistic and ritual magic techniques within Wicca further removes witchcraft from its shamanic roots. Farrar and Bone propose and outline a return to those shamanic roots, by way of a fascinating examination of Celtic/Norse cosmology as compared to Jungian archetype.

The concept which lies at the heart of this book is that progress and evolution exist as two of the foundations of Wicca, and that as practitioners of witchcraft seek to create change in themselves and in the world around them, change is still encoded into their beliefs. Traditional approaches are questioned. Study within a co-operative and supportive environment is not rejected; however, blind adherence to a tradition for the sake of the tradition is. Tradition can, over time, become limited by losing sight of why things were done in a particular fashion to begin with. By advocating the freedom to move beyond the limits of tradition, Farrar and Bone illustrate that modern practitioners can return to and/or restore the spirit of witchcraft.

(c) 2004 A. Murphy-Hiscock. Originally published in Wyntergreene Lughnassadh 2004.