I’ve just returned from a fabulous trip to the United Kingdom. While I was there, I had the opportunity to spend time with some online friends from the British Wiccan community, and doing so got me thinking about some of the broad cultural differences in Wicca between the US and UK. The three differences I […]
Read more "Video: Wicca in America Versus Britain"New on YouTube. In various religious and magical spaces, the concept of “tradition” is incredibly important. But what is tradition, really? Why is it valuable? And why do people get so weird about it? In this video, I talk through my thoughts on these questions, and provide my own proposed definition of religion: A set […]
Read more "Video: What Even is Tradition, Anyway?"Let’s talk a bit about the relationship between Wicca and Thelema. How was Thelema an influence on the early days of Wicca? In what ways are the two religions alike? And–just as importantly–how do they differ? In this video, I talk through some of the history of Gerald Gardner’s meetings with Aleister Crowley and his […]
Read more "Video: Wicca, Thelema, and True Will"Wiccan mythology (or at least, one strand of it) features a very specific kind of Goddess and God, and a particular understanding of the relationship between them. In this video, I talk about how this mythos is really modern in origin, how much of it can be traced back to James Frazer’s book “The Golden […]
Read more "Video: James Frazer and the Modernity of Wiccan Myth"I share some thoughts about the relationship between Wicca and sex, and the role that sex does and does not play in Wicca. The three main points I make: Sex is never, ever a requirement in the Gardnerian Tradition. Anyone who says differently is a predator. Our bodies are holy, and so are the things […]
Read more "Video: Wicca and Sex"In this video, I talk through the recommended reading list I give to seekers interested in Gardnerian Wicca. Different groups will have different recommendations, and some groups won’t have any suggested reading at all, but these are the texts that I, personally, think are the most helpful and informative for someone seeking traditional Wicca. The […]
Read more "Video: 13 Books for Gardnerian Seekers"In my previous post, I talked a bit about Erich Neumann’s book The Great Mother and how, despite the various problems with it and the need for context-sensitive critical reading, it can provide a great theoretical framework in which to understand the Wiccan Goddess. Wicca is about experience, not theory, and a theoretical perspective like […]
Read more "The Horned God, Schematized"Erich Neumann’s book The Great Mother is fascinating and maddening. Neumann was a Jungian psychoanalyst, and his book is subtitled An Analysis of the Archetype; understandably, then, it presents a Jungian approach to world mythology in the aim to establish an overarching cross-cultural archetype of the Great Mother. As a work of comparative mythology, the […]
Read more "Erich Neumann and the Wiccan Goddess"A few days ago, I announced the title and cover for my first book, “Qabalah for Wiccans,” which is coming out from Llewellyn in December of 2021. The title generated quite a lot of controversy, and many people voiced concerns about cultural appropriation, feeling that it was disrespectful and inappropriate for me, a non-Jewish white […]
Read more "Video: Qabalah, Wicca, and Appropriation"I talk about studying the history of Wicca and Witchcraft, ideas that are now outdated, and why I think it’s still worth reading the books those ideas came from so long as we contextualize them as primary sources. The five books I mention in this video: The Secret Doctrine, H. P. Blavatsky The Golden Bough, […]
Read more "Video: Primary Sources for Witchcraft"
Jack Chanek 