Witchcraft is my practice; Gardnerianism is my faith, one of many Traditions of Witchcraft. In contrast to the Neo-Pagan usage of the word, along with my colleagues I consider 'Wicca' to be the name of our people: we are among the Wicca, one small group amongst the many. At the core of our faith is affirmation of the value of life, the inevitability of death, and the promise of reincarnation after this life has ended. We see the never-ending cycle of birth, death and rebirth all around us in nature.
I am a Gardnerian priestess, by virtue of training, hard thought, rites of passage, and working the faith of my people. I have experienced the Gardnerian Mysteries in both their original form and in a modern adaptation. I serve our Great Mother, and honour our Horned God, in much the same way as any other Gardnerian priestess would, and I fondly hope that a priestess of ancient Britain, if suddenly brought to our world, would recognise my ritual observances as being acts of devotion.
Like many other priestesses and priests within our Tradition, I have a real, honest-to-Goddess, day job that pays my bills. I have a post-graduate degree from a Canadian university, and work as a technical expert in the natural-resource sector of the Canadian economy, for a variety of public and corporate employers. I am learning how to offer my daily work as a devotion to the Gods, the earth and the people. The blue flame that burns in your kitchen gas-range may be there because of a natural-gas field that I helped develop at some time or another, and the coal in your fireplace may have come from a mine for which I have the technical reports in my book-case.
Enough with the day-job, and back to matters of faith. Ours is a matriarchal, matrilineal Tradition that primarily focuses on the Great Mother of all that lives, for Whom we have a name which we do not speak outside of the sacred precinct of the Circle. We also conduct certain rites in honour of Her consort, the Horned God, for Whom we also have a name which we hold precious.
The Great Mother's domain consists of life and the present world, and the Horned God's domain consists of death and the Netherworld. Therefore, to my way of looking it makes sense to focus our rites on Her, because in this incarnation we find ourselves in the middle of Her world. Ultimately, we need both of Them, for it is in Their interactions with each other and with us, that we gain understanding of the ways and purposes of the natural world.
As a Gardnerian priestess, I affirm the value of life, the inevitability of death, and the promise of reincarnation after this life has ended. Just as I see the never-ending cycle of birth, death and rebirth all around me in nature, I can imagine what comes after death, and it does not trouble me. I have experienced the power and presence of the Great Mother and the Horned God and neither of Them is frightful to me.
Religion is a funny thing: I can rationally look at it and say "this doesn’t make sense, and there’s no evidence for it anyway," but that scepticism does not carry into times of great need, when my thoughts turn to Her.
I’ll give you an example: I remember a morning spent fighting my way up over a mountain pass, through heavy snow that my car could barely negotiate, and the awful moment when a jack-knifed trailer slid into my lane of the road. I called on Her aid, for it came to me as a reflex to ask Her (in much the same way that the trucker was probably calling Jesus or Allah or Krishna to get him out of his troubles). It was no surprise to me that the world turned blue and quiet just then, and everything slowed down into slow-motion and stillness. The Lady got me out of that accident, where I myself had no idea what to do. Rational? No. Practical? Yes. And so I believe in the power of the Gods within daily life.
I may not tell the details of what happened when I was initiated: partly this is because to do so would rob any non-initiate who read these words of their own chance at surprise and transformation that awaits them within the Circle, and partly this is because I cannot find the words to describe a Mystery. What is the colour of a laugh or the sound of a rose, anyway? What does love taste like?
However, I can tell you how I felt, since that is my story to tell. I remember that night very clearly: the flickering candles, the warmth in the room, the sheer sense of joy that radiated from the High Priestess who cast the sacred Circle, and the kindly confidence of the High Priest who performed my initiation within that Circle.
In my meditations before that night, I experienced the sense of proximity to something larger than myself, and in the Circle I felt the sudden connection with all of the many other initiates who were conducting their own rites that same night, somewhere Out There beyond the walls of that room.
The same sense of joy accompanied my degree elevations. My Second Degree rite was anticlimactic, for I had been struggling with a sense of being somehow a draftee in the Lady’s service, and I had to come to terms with the fact that I was headed forwards of my own volition, not merely being swept along by Her whim. My Third Degree rite was celebratory and awe-inspiring: I saw visions and dreamt dreams that go beyond my ability to describe them. I did find it both comforting and entertaining to find out that some other priestesses had also experienced that same sense of epiphany.
Majesty, rather than joy, came at my rite of confirmation and swearing-in as an elder (we have a fancier title for it, but "elder" translates better), which happened three years after my Third Degree. The surroundings were prosaic: an upstairs bathroom in another priestess’s house, but the swirling clouds of incense smoke together with the vast quantities of water that we had managed to splash about made the moment. I haven’t been able to look at a tiled floor in quite the same way, since.
Since then, I have been privileged to guest at initiations conducted in settings as diverse as a suburban living-room (well-hidden behind heavy drapes) and a wild mountainside lit by the sinking crescent moon. One thing we seem to have going for us as a people is our ability to turn religious occasions into episodes of rare beauty.
Gardnerian covens are wholly autonomous. Each coven is ruled by its High Priestess in consultation with her consort (the High Priest) and with the aid and advice of the coven's Elders. In all matters, the decision of the High Priestess is final, even when she has chosen to delegate authority on certain issues to her High Priest or another Elder. In times of need, a High Priestess can function as a coven leader without a High Priest, but a magical partnership is by far preferred.
I do not presently have a High Priest; two men have in the past years served my coven in that office. Neither parting was easy, nor should it have been. My own religious partnership nowadays is with another priestess, who is High Priestess to her own coven on the other side of the continent from me; we are also life partners, having handfasted in the summer of 1994. We spend about a third of the time together, and speak to each other on the telephone most every night. I enjoy the status of honoured elder within her group, and have helped with the training of the most recent class of students there: the resultant bonds of affection extend across a continent and an international border. And, in the quiet way of such things, I am training new priests and priestesses of our faith.
In any event, whatever rites we might do don't seem to be much hampered by the presence or absence of clothing: the Gods can see us as we are, regardless of our fine haberdashery.
Our rites are conducted exclusively within a sacred Circle, properly and intentionally cast according to Traditional usage. We often work divinations as part of problem-solving, and we enjoy performing rites in aid of our people's needs, and occasionally the needs of our friends and neighbours (who do from time to time ask such things of us.) We often work healing magic, by prior request from the recipient. We do not work for evil or destructive purposes, for such actions are an affront to our Gods.
I never charge money for teaching, initiation, or magical work. I am quite certain that no Gardnerian High Priestess would (believe me: if she tried, she'd quickly have words from the rest of us!)
Of that which we do within the circle, we speak not outside the circle, for we are charged to keep silence concerning the Art Magical. To that end, Gardnerian initiates take religious names for use solely within the circle, where the use of 'legal names' from the outside world is strongly discouraged. My own nom-de-plume, "Brigantia Stone", derives from my religious name and the name of my coven. It could as easily have been "Twinkletoes Stone", except that I doubt that I could write it, let alone speak it, with a straight face.
If it is
that you are knowledgeable and have
kept the faith, then you may enter
within and become illumined in truth.And if not, then I cannot permit you to leave,
-- from Pellandrey’s Caution at the Mountain
I keep and use a Traditional Book of Shadows, consisting of rituals passed down from generation to generation among our people, augmented by additions and alternative rites, some of which I have copied from other priestesses' books, and some of which I have written by myself or in concert with my partner. I am always quite amazed to visit a bookstore and see on its shelves so many books that purport to be the Gardnerian Book of Shadows. The authors of such things must be befuddled, for every one of those books is quite different and in comparing them one for the other, I sometimes wonder that they even have anything to do with the same religion. To make it plain: a genuine or authentic Book of Shadows cannot be purchased; nor can it be obtained in any other way without the seeker's having first properly undergone the Gardnerian rite of initiation.
Alberta is an odd place to live, being as it is a place where creativity and pragmatism meet in an uneasy truce. Albertans, by and large, pride themselves on their rugged individualism, and the governing provincial politicians claim to be following the mood of their constituents as they industriously sell off the people's assets and gut our social safety net.
In this most libertarian of environments, a person's right to do as he or she will reigns paramount. Even so, a wise Witch soon learns to keep a low profile: our religion does not enjoy anything near the popular tolerance that it might enjoy in New York or in San Francisco. So it should come as no surprise that our coven does not participate, as a religious congregation, in local community initiatives. Some fine day, perhaps, but for now the bitter lessons of the past govern our actions. We bide our silences.
There are, at the moment, two Gardnerian covens in the province of Alberta, with a third likely to form sometime in the summer of 2000, and a fourth the hopeful dream of some young people now in training. All of these groups are in Calgary, and all of them are part of the New York lineage of covens, stemming from Lady Rowen's original New York Coven.
We are certainly not the only British Traditional witches in the province: there was at one time an Algard coven somewhere near Red Deer in central Alberta. There are several neo-Alexandrian groups in the province, descended from Janet and Stewart Farrar's coven in County Meath, Eire. One of these covens is in Edmonton, and the other (which may be inactive) is in Calgary.
Caveat: Insofar as all Gardnerian covens are autonomous, none of us may speak for all of us. The foregoing thoughts are my own opinions concerning the nature of the faith which I love and cherish. I can assure you that every Gardnerian initiate thinks for his or her own self, and would surely tell the story of their faith in their own, quite different terms. Rathaydhoya!
written by Brigantia, Lady of Stone and Mirror
updated: June 16, 1999
document COSMTRAD © 1998, 1999
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