Great Throughts Treasury

"Our purpose is to live in harmony with those cycles [birth, growth, death and regeneration] to develop our peculiar organs of consciousness and creativity to add to the beauty, love, humor, diversity and general interest of the world."

"Any ritual is an opportunity for transformation. To do ritual, you must be willing to be transformed in some way. That inner willingness is what makes the ritual come alive and have power."

"On every full moon, rituals such as the one described above take place on hilltops, beaches, in open fields and in ordinary houses. Writers, teachers, nurses, computer programmers, artists,lawyers, poets, plumbers, and auto mechanics - women and men from many backgrounds come together to celebrate the mysteries of the Triple Goddess of the Dance of Life. The religion they practise is called Witchcraft. "

"A spiritual organization with a hierarchical structure can convey only the consciousness of estrangement, regardless of what teachings or deep inspirations are at its root.The structure itself reinforces the idea that some people are inherently more worthy than others."

"As women, however, we need to look very closely at these philosophies and ask ourselves the hard-headed, critical question, “What's in it for me? What does this spiritual system do for women?” Of course, the gurus, teachers, and ascended masters will tell us that, even by asking such a question, we are merely continuing in our enslavement to the Lords of Mind; that it is simply another dodge of the ego as it resists dissolution in the All."

"All began in love, all seeks to return in love. Love is the law, the teacher of wisdom, and the great revealer of mysteries."

"Beware of organizations that proclaim their devotion to the light without embracing, bowing to the dark; for when they idealize half the world they must devalue the rest."

"Each being is sacred -- meaning that each has inherent value that cannot be ranked in a hierarchy or compared to the value of another being."

"Fascination with the psychic - or the psychological - can be a dangerous sidetrack on any spiritual path."

"In Witchcraft, each of us must reveal our own truth."

"If Goddess religion is not to become mindless idiocy, we must win clear of tendency of magic to become superstition. Magic - and among its branches I include psychology as its purpose to describe and change consciousness - is an art."

"In a culture where profit has become the true God, self-sacrifice can seem incomprehensible rather than noble."

"Love for life in all its forms is the basic ethic of Witchcraft."

"Life demands honesty, the ability to face, admit, and express oneself."

"No true Witches today practice human sacrifice, torture, or any form of ritual murder. Anyone who does is not a Witch, but a psychopath."

"Magic has always been an element of Witchcraft, but in the Craft its techniques were practiced within a context of community and connection."

"Spirituality leaps where science cannot yet follow, because science must always test and measure, and much of reality and human experience is immeasurable."

"That would be great, but I am not so sure it will be that easy."

"Our way out involves both resistance and renewal: saying no to what is, so that we can reshape and recreate the world. Our challenge is communal, but to face it we must be empowered as individuals and create structures of support and celebration that can teach us freedom. Creation is the ultimate resistance, the ultimate refusal to accept things as they are. For it is in creation that we encounter Mystery."

"The asceticism of early Christianity, which turned its back on the world of the flesh, had degenerated, in some quarters of the Church, into hatred of those who those who brought that flesh into being. Misogyny, the hatred of women, had become a strong element in medieval Christianity. Women who menstruate, and give birth, were identified with sexuality and therefore with evil. All witchcraft stems from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable, stated the Malleus Maleficarum."

"The cosmos is interesting rather than perfect, and everything is not part of some greater plan, nor is all necessarily under control"

"The terrain of the mysteries is the ordinary. To seek out mystery, we don't have to go anywhere. We must simply change our perception, our description, our consciousness of where we are."

"The consciousness of people whose natural bent is to support the president and the military and the status quo is shifting. If America ever rises up, Camp Casey is what it will look like--not an anarchist street party."

"The test of a true myth is that each time you return to it, new insights and interpretations arise."

"The word Witch carries so many negative connotations that many people wonder why we use the word at all. Yet to reclaim the word Witch is to reclaim our right, as women, to be powerful; as men, to know the feminine within as divine."

"The Crone, the Reaper... She is the Dark Moon, what you don't see coming at you, what you don't get away with, the wind that whips the spark across the fire line. Chance, you could say, or, what's scarier still: the intersection of chance with choices and actions made before. The brush that is tinder dry from decades of drought, the warming of the earth's climate that sends the storms away north, the hole in the ozone layer. Not punishment, not even justice, but consequence."

"The symbolism of the Goddess is not a parallel structure to the symbolism of God the Father. The Goddess does not rule the world. She is the world. Manifest in each of us, She can be known internally by every individual, in all her magnificent diversity."

"These people are comfortable with authority from above,"

"The truth is that while men, in our society, are encouraged to have strong egos and to function in competitive, aggressive, intellectualized modes that may indeed cause them pain, for most women the ego is like a fragile African Violet, grown in secret from a seed, carefully nursed and fertilized and sheltered from too much sun."

"Through the Goddess, we can discover our strength, enlighten our minds, own our bodies, and celebrate our emotions."

"To work magic is to weave the unseen forces into form; to soar beyond sight; to explore the uncharted dream realm of the hidden reality."

"What shames us, what we most fear to tell, does not set us apart from others; it binds us together if only we can take the risk to speak it."

"We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been - a place half-remembered and half-envisioned we can only catch glimpses of from time to time. Community. Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power. Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free."