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Traditional Practicers?

To: alt.traditional.witchcraft,alt.magick.tyagi
From: catherine yronwode 
Subject: Re: Traditional Practicers?
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2002 06:49:17 GMT

Aetyr wrote:
> 
> "catherine yronwode"  wrote in message

> > For what it's worth, i do not consider the word "traditional"
> > or "tradition" to refer to initiatic lineages in the least,

> Initiation confers membership in a group. It also recognises
> achievement in art. Whenever any group does this, they usually
> have something to mark this passage. If you use the term
> initiation to refer to rituals designed on the masonic model,
> which wicca does use, then the lack of initiation is a feature of
> trad craft.
 
I agree, for the most part, as regard Euroean witchcraft. Some other
cultures do ractice initiation as part of traditional wichcraft. I was
not claiming that there are no initiations in any system of traidtional
witchcraft, but rather that the word "traditional" itself, when used in
this context is not intended by me to be a synonym for "initiatic." 

> > nor  do i think the term "traditional witchcraft" refers to 
> > any religion. 

> Trad witchcraft does not refer to any Specific religion.  But
> european based trad craft does have a cosmology that shares
> certain features.  These features could be classed under
> religious in belief, simply because they embody a sense of the
> holy.  If you learned european trad practices from a book, then
> this structure is going to be missing.  Most trads that I have
> known learned this structure in a family setting.  In fact, this
> shared cosmology is one way that european trads recognise each
> other.
 
I agree completely -- and i might add that the larger family of African
and African-diasporic witchcraft traditions share their own set of
similairties despite their crossing tribal and ethnic boundaries.

And then we have the native American (North, Meso, and South) witchcraft
traditions, which again have certain cross-cultural similarites that
distinguish them as a larger family. 

And ditto for the SAsian witchcraft traditions. 

Where it really gets interesteing to me (but then, i am a hobby
folklorist as well as a witch) is where several of these larger,
meta-cultural trads blend and join togetehr 

-- as for instance in Pow Wow magic, a.k.a. Pennsylvania Dutch
hexenkraft (witchcraft), where the Germanic branch of the pan-European
trads gets mingled with Native American magical and medical herb lore
and the whole trad is semi-subsumed under a veil of Christian practice
that only thinly conceals the paleo-pagan Euroean religion underneath 

--  or in African-American hoodoo, where African witchcraft, comprised
of mingled Congo, Yoruba, and Fon magical and religious beliefs, is
mixed with almost equal parts Germano-British witchcraft with a
Christian overlay on top of paleo-pagan Euroean religion, to which is
added Native American witchcraft, resulting in a "creole" set of hoodoo
family trads that look vaguely Christian on the surface but are
remarkably uniform in their African religious core structure no matter
where in the African-Amercian community you choose to sample them. 

cat yronwode 

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