I've been hanging out on Yahoo!Answers for a few years now answering questions. In the beginning, I answered practically every question I came across about Wicca. Over time, however, I've grown decidedly jaded. I understand that there are a lot of misinformed and uninformed people out there, and in some cases I appreciate them seeking answers, but there's a lot of stuff that just make me want to bang my head into my desk.

One of my biggest pet peeves is the number of questions about how to do rituals "correctly." I'm not talking esoteric meanings here. I'm talking about "I want to do a ritual for Samhain but I only have blue candles. Will it still work with blue candles?" I have to restrain myself from replying somewhere along the lines of "Well, you could, but the temporal energies are likely to backfire, obliterating your coven," or "No, the Goddess abhors blue in October. She thinks it makes her look fat."

These questions come from a mentality that is, to me, quite contrary to Wicca and bred by our fast-food society: I want spirituality. Publish a quick guide with easy to follow step for me to gain understanding of the universe. Please avoid big words. Thanks.

if people who ask these questions would sit back and think for even a minute about what they are actually asking, it should sound ludicrous. Can you imagine someone asking if a Catholic Mass would still "work" if they changed the colors of the candles?

We have all of these marketers emphasizing crystal wands and fancy athames and blessed candles, and newcomers fall hook line and sinker for them. Heaven forbid our faith require thought and patience and energy and trial-and-error. That would be practically unAmerican.

just fyi ravenwolf is my mentor's friend. while you have the right to say as you wish, tread lightly please.

The above email arrived in my box this week. No name. No email address. (Way to express your sincerity.)

I'm not quite sure what to even make of it. "Tread lightly please." Why, because it makes you feel bad? Because you think I'm off the mark? Because you fear Ravenwolf will stalk me in the night if I don't?

"Ravenwolf is my mentor's friend." OK, and...? Does your mentor require you to stick up for all of his or her friends? Does the fact that Ravenwolf's friends are sometimes mentors somehow make Ravenwolf less nonsensical? Are you pointing out that Ravenwolf does, in fact, have friends? (I've always presumed she does, for the record. I don't depict her as some sort of social shut-in.) Seriously, inquiring minds want to know. Why should any of this matter to me?

I have no wish to unnecessarily trample Ravenwolf. I comment on her published works, not her personally. (I don't even know her pesonally.) And I do it to warn people away from her highly problematic and erroneous materials, not specifically out of any spite directed toward the woman.

And, heck, if someone reads my article and STILL thinks Ravenwolf is a good source, that's their business. It's a free country. I'm just offering information...information I can regularly source, which is more than Ravenwolf does. What the reader does with said information is up to them. But so long as she puts out clearly false information, or makes clearly unethical recommendations, I'm going to warn others about it.

I've been on Yahoo!Answers a long time as Nightwind (not my craft name, BTW, just a funny username that has stuck over the years), and I figured I'd share a few gems from over there in a new box on the right of this blog. Normally I'll be highlighting questions I've answered, although occasionally I'll highlight one that already has good answers and I have nothing more to contribute to them. Some of them are helpful. Some of them are snark. Some are both.

I just love how certain people think that so long as you claim an action has something to do with religion, you automatically have a right to it. Today I came across a question where a Wiccan was asking "do any laws protect my rights to have days off" to celebrate the Sabbats.

The language here is important. He isn't asking if he has the right to days off. He is asking if there are laws to protect rights he already presumes he has. And from where do these magical rights come? Rights are about being treated decently as human beings. It's about things like equality and not being tortured. How spoiled do we have to be to start claiming the inalienable right to vacation days?

The issue of religious requirements conflicting with employee duties can be sticky...but generally not for Wiccans. Wicca doesn't require us to do or avoid particular things. We aren't required to do anything special on the Sabbats. It's simply something we often prefer to do. And there's certainly nothing that says we have to do such rituals during work hours. It's not like we have to avoid pork or keep ritually pure or not drive a car from sunrise to sunset.

What the Sabbats off? Spend vacation days like the rest of us.

If Wicca is an accpetance [sic] that they're are many gods, male and female, and that we are unable to live without one or the other, then does that mean that a wiccain cand [sic] also believe in God?

It's not like we kick you out if you believe certain things. The question is whether it is logical to call someone Wiccan based on what they believe or disbelieve.

By "God" I presume you mean the Judeo-Christian god, a monotheistic god. If one believes in many gods and goddesses, he simply can't also believe in a single all-powerful god. It simply does not compute. Personally, I suspect that there *is* a deity listening to the prayers of Christians, Jews and Muslims. But I don't believe he's the only god out there. So I think his followers have some very basic errors in their concept of him.

This is one of the reasons I think the idea of "Christian-Wicca" is so poorly constructed, or at the very least poorly named. You cannot honestly be both a Christian and a Wiccan. You cannot be both a polytheist and a monotheist.

I have to agree that [Ravenwolf] does seem anti-Christian at times (not to mention, the book I own contains little in the way of actual, helpful information).  However, you seem very anti-Silver Ravenwolf, and I wonder why you expend the energy.  Also, what do you think of Scott Cunningham?  And finally, I can't tell if you are pro-Gardner or anti-Gardner. 

I said everything I felt I needed to say in that article. Every point I make is a problem of which I think people should be aware. If they read that essay and still run out and buy Ravenwolf's books, that's up to them. I've said my piece. Expend the energy? It's one essay. It's over and done with. heck, when people ask my opinion of Ravenwolf, I point them back to the article, so it actually saves me the energy of stating the same concerns over and over online.

I grew up on Cunningham. There was an intermediate period where I blew him off as fluffy (which might have been more because of hearsay rather than what he actually wrote, I confess. When I reread him my opinion returned to high praises), but for several years now I've been highly recommending his books for beginners, including on this site.

I'm not really pro- or anti-Gardner in any clear-cut meaning of the terms. I believe people who say "my practices have nothing to do with what Gardner taught" clearly are practicing something other than Wicca. I do not believe that you have to be slavishly dedicated to every Gardnerian teaching (right down to Wicca being ancient religion) to be Wiccan, however. He started something wonderful. He had lots of good ideas. He also had lots of kooky ideas (although not nearly as kooky as some of the people since him!). He's human, like the rest of us. I recommend his books for intermediate students so that they can better understand where our ideas come from. I strongly don't recommend his books for beginners, because there's too much bad stuff (like wonky history) that will confuse them.

My apologies for the silence of the last several weeks. There are things going on in my life that have taken precedence over blogging, and I fear that may be the case for some time.