How do I get started?

There is no right way.
If it speaks to your heart, if it works for you, it's right.

Now, I will clarify, to paraphrase Scott Cunningham in his wonderful book, Living Wicca, there are some things that if you do them, while you might very well be doing something that works for you, you're not practicing Wicca. So given that (and let me clarify, the following is MY opinion. Others may disagree with me. That's their right. If we wanted dogma we'd be in another belief system), what is required for something to be Wiccan?

1. Participatory reverence of both a God and a Goddess of immanence.
   This one's going to get me picked on by the Dianics, I know, who only reverence the Goddess. However, to me, that's Goddess-worship, a wonderful thing in and of itself, but not Wicca. Wicca is about finding the balance between dualities, and embracing both ends of a spectrum: as the Charge of the Goddess goes, "let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence within you". Both, not one or the other. Balance, embracing the whole, not going to one or the other extreme. To me, Wicca with only a Goddess, however understandable in this patriarchal world we live in, isn't Wicca, because it doesn't embrace the whole of male and female, masculine and feminine, the body and the spirit, the finite and the eternal.

   Participatory reverence is that we take part in both the revering and the being revered, by showing reverence to the God and Goddess in ourselves and each other. This is a complicated subject to address, because in one breath the Wiccan says "Thou art God/dess - the Lord and Lady are within you and of you" and in the other breath welcomes the Lord and Lady to join a Circle. This is possible because we recognize the Divine as immanent. What does immanent mean? Present in the world, the universe, not outside of it; within all things; comprised of all things. Some of us go on to the next step and describe Divinity as both immanent and transcendent - the Divine is comprised of the world, all things are a manifestation of the Gods; and yet the gods are also more than the sum of their parts, the Divine both is the universe and transcends the universe. So I can say "You are a manifestation of the Goddess", and "The Goddess is the transcendent creatrix of the universe", and I'm neither contradicting myself nor saying that I think that you-as-a-fellow-mortal-being-on-this-planet went out and gave shape to the void. Because the God and Goddess are more than the sum of their parts.

2. Celebration of the cycle of the seasons, and recognizing the mystery therein
   Wicca is a nature-based, cycle-based religion. We celebrate the changing solar cycle of the seasons and the changing lunar cycle during the month in recognition that everything is a cycle. Nothing really ends, have you noticed? The ending of one thing is always the beginning of another. This is why Wiccans generally believe in reincarnation, not as a matter of dogma, but because it follows quite logically from believing that life is a cycle, and that endings become new beginnings. If matter is neither created nor destroyed, as science teaches us, then it's sensible to also believe that souls follow the same law. And this is one of Wicca's primary mysteries, the mystery of the Cup of life which is the tomb of death that becomes the womb of rebirth. (And by the way, when a religion talks about a mystery it doesn't have anything to do with either Sherlock Holmes or deep dark secrets no one talks about. A religious mystery simply means 'something that can't be explained very well in words - you need to understand it through experience'. A religious mystery is one of those things that makes you go 'OH! I get it!' Wicca is a mystery religion, because it takes a bunch of ordinary stuff -- like the changing seasons that you experience every year, so what? -- and from that ordinary stuff extrapolates deeper meaning that carries over into other situations.) Wiccans generally celebrate the lunar cycles by celebrating Full Moon every month, believing that lunar energies correspond to personal energies - you are likely to have more personal power at the time of the Full Moon. So Full Moons are the times to practice magick. Wiccans also generally celebrate the solar cycle through holidays at the beginning and midpoint of each season, involving a mythology that involves the growth, death, and rebirth of the God in a cycle that corresponds to the agricultural seasons, when the crops are planted, grow, are harvested, and their seed planted for the next year. This mythology is called the Wheel of the Year. Exactly how you celebrate can be flexible, but there is a general Wiccan ritual format that if you vary terribly far from you probably won't be recognizably Wiccan. Mind you, that's fine, if you want to practice more generic Neo-Paganism. But again, that's not Wicca.

3. The recognition and use of polarity as a magickal and mystical tool
   Wicca as a religion is duotheistic - reverencing two deities, a God and a Goddess. However, Wicca is not dualist - treating everything as either black or white. Wicca recognizes that seeming polarities are actually parts of one another, in the continued dance of interconnectedness. Like the Chinese concept of yin and yang, the light and dark, active and passive that are interwoven with each other in the black-and-white symbol you see so often, Wicca sees that the obvious polarites, such as masculine and feminine, are actually united, and that in that union is a great source of power, one that can be used in magick. We tend to see this with all polarities - that's why one of our primary liturgical pieces says 'let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence within you' - standing at the balance of seeming opposites is a very powerful place to be. This is part of why one of the central points of a Wiccan ritual can be the Great Rite, a symbolic act of sexual intercourse, that is nothing more exciting than a knife lowered into a cup - but the mystery it represents is the mystery of union, the mystery that creates the world.

   And boy, does this get into the thorny parts of Wiccan cosmology, in more than one way. First, anything that has anything to do with sex in this society becomes heavily charged. If our society were anything resembling healthy in our attitudes about sexuality, it wouldn't be such a shock to have a religion proclaiming sexuality as sacred. But since sex has been so riddled with control, manipulation, double-standards, supression, and irreverence, a view of healthy, sacred sexuality is very difficult to attain. The Wiccan view of sexuality is one that comes from a much healthier time, and therefore looks strange to us today after hundreds of years of poisoning. Simply put, Wicca treats sexuality as one of the ways in which we are closest to the Gods. If God is love, then a respectful act of love-making is going to be the closest we get in our mortal forms to experiencing how we love as God and Goddess. Because when it's not glossed over by glamour, shame, or selfishness, a sexual act is simply the most barriers we can lower to another person - vulnerability and closeness in body and spirit both. Many people have told me that the only time they have ever felt 'telepathic' was when in bed with someone they loved. Wiccan sexuality is not about 'easy sex' - far from it. It is about rejoicing in your potential for love as a sexual being, rejoicing in your potential to create, for that's the other part of sexuality - it can be participation in the act of creating another life, and if that isn't the closest we get to being Gods I don't know what is (says the mother of two). No wonder the powers that be have twisted our views of sexuality for so long. It's powerful stuff. If we could accept ourselves as healthy sexual beings without shame, we might start realizing how much of the powers of Gods we have.

   The second thorny part becomes the 'male-female' polarity issue when applied to a gay couple. The problem becomes in seeing masculinity and femininity as fixed things. In mystical terms, when you are being active - moving, giving, changing - you are being masculine, and when you are being passive - stillness, receiving, eternity - you are being feminine. This quite obviously has *nothing* to do with the capabilities of males and females - again, this is a place where hundreds of years of improper attitudes make us touchy and edgy about anything that faintly looks sexist, and quite rightly. But in a mystical sense these are simply terms that are used, and if you'd rather use 'active' and 'passive' so you don't feel sexist you can. But it's about seeing the masculine and feminine principles as *processes* and not fixed things, so no matter what your physical gender, you can be acting as a mystical masculine or feminine at any time.

4. Using magick as a tool for transformation
   And here we get to the part that a lot of early practitioners are the most fascinated with. "How do I do magick? How do I cast spells?" Well, I tend to disappoint a lot of people at this point, because first of all my own approach to Wicca is much more primarily religious than magickal, and second of all Wiccan magick isn't the dramatic mind-blowing effects some people seem to expect it to be. (And if you wonder why we spell it with a 'k' a lot of times it's to distinguish it from the kind of thing a stage magician does.) If you're expecting to do something that looks like it was created by Industrial Lights and Magic, forget it. But if you're wanting to realize that you have the power within you to change yourself and the world you interact with, then you're well within the realms of Wiccan magick. What's funny is that the whole set of self-help and self-actualization books and tapes that so many people are interested in lately, like Anthony Robbins, the 'One Minute Manager' series, or pretty much anything else that is marketed under 'motivational' tapes and seminars, all use the same principles that Wiccans and other occultists have used for centuries. Wiccan magick uses tools, certainly, like herbs, spells, and rituals; but Wiccan magick also recognizes that these are specifically tools, with no power save that which they unlock within the mind. The powers of the mind are largely untapped. We try to find methods to unlock new potentials. With that in mind, Wiccan magick also often is involved in transforming ourselves - we believe that the goal of life is growth, and magick is one of the ways we develop ourselves to our highest potential.

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