Gavin Frost - The Soliltary Wiccans Bible

This book uses the metaphor of a solitary pilgrim walking a path and discovering natural and spiritual truths along the way. We have written it so that people from all walks of life, of every color, and of every religion may understand the basics of this new mundane and spiritual path.

We have tried diligently to use clear and concise language so that everyone may understand what changes can manifest in their lives when they walk the pilgrim path of Wicca with open eyes, open hearts, and open minds. The purpose here is not to enlist but to inform.

SOLITARY OR GROUP

When seekers enroll as students in the School of Wicca, for various reasons 95 percent of them are solitary seekers and practitioners. Some are incarcerated; some are captive in family situations without the freedom to deviate from orthodox beliefs. Some feel that their job would be at risk if their interest in Wicca became known. Most enrollees live in small apartments in cities. All of this means that we have a good deal of experience counseling people who have had to follow their spiritual path alone and in semisecret circumstances.

Yes, it is indeed wonderful when you can work with even one other person, and exhilarating when you can join with a group of like-minded individuals to thrash out matters of belief and practice. But the reality is that most people exploring Wicca are doing it on their own. Nevertheless, when books began to appear on solitarypractice, screams of anguish were audible within the community. People shrieked, Solitary is not the right path! It's not Wiccan!

Well, we have news for the self-appointed Wiccan fundamentalist religious police. Wicca is a solitary path, a path to understanding and to awareness. It has never been anything else. The reason is quite simple: The awareness and the growth that you experience are inside you. They are not inside someone else, nor are they out there. They are your own growth and developmententirely personal, entirely empirical. Have someone else do your spiritual growth for you? You might as well pay someone to do aerobics on your behalf.

ALONE TOGETHER

The seeker on a pilgrim path treads it alone. He may have a companion. He may meet a group in the hostel at night where, at least in the early days of the pilgrimage, evening activity consists largely in comparing the basics: the foot salves. Yet he is alone in his search for enlightenment.

It is the same in Wicca. It's great to compare methods of working and ritual, to grasp the underlying truth of a particular ritual systembut it is only the outward symptom of being on the path. It is not the internal growth, understanding, and awareness that we all need and seek.

If you go to Spain and travel the ancient pilgrim path to Santiago de Compostela deep into the country, you begin to notice others walking in the same direction. Their attire shows both their dedication to the path and a wide range of nationalities. Those who are learned in the ways of pilgrims carry a staff and wear a broad-brimmed hat, hiking boots, and a voluminous cloak. Everyone bears the outward sign of the pilgrimage: the cockleshell. When you get to the nightly rest stops, they are often full to overflowing; the scattered few have become a crowd.

In the same way, out in the real world you may have seen only a few people wearing a pentagram and may have come to believe that only a handful of like-minded people think as you do. When you go to a Pagan/Wiccan festival, suddenly you see hundreds if not thousands of pentagrams. Here, too, you see a wide variety of costumesworn by people from every stratum of society and every ethnic background.

Wicca is the fastest-growing spiritual path in the Western world. At last count well over a half million adherents were willing to be recognized. It is quite probable that another half million still linger in the broom closet, unwilling to face the rigors of coming out. However many there are, it is a very large number. All these people have come home to Wicca. This means that we are a larger body of believers than are many sects within the Christian cult.

You may have sensed that your ideas of the reality in which we all live are different from conventional ways of thinking, and perhaps you have been regarded as a little odd. Within Wicca you can surely find someone with ideas similar to your own. Nowadays in every city, town, village, and hamlet there are like-minded people with whom you can talk. This does not necessarily mean that you would join or form a group, but in time of need there is a support group out there who can help. If for personal reasons you are still deep in the broom closet, then we encourage you to go incognito to one of the hundreds of festivals around the world, where you find that there are other seekers.

YOUR GUIDES

Everyone who sets out to explore a new road through life needs a guide or a mentor. This book is your mentor. Your authors have the experience to guide you on a true path. We have lived by and taught the principles of Wicca for a total of more than eighty years. In that time we have formally taught more than fifty thousand students, and we have counseled by mail and e-mail more than five million querents around the world.

In 1968 we founded the Church and School of Wicca in an effort to correct widespread misinformation about Wicca. Attacked because of fear in the Christian community, we have successfully defended our spiritual path against bombers, bullets, the IRS, postal inspectors, and prison authorities. In a minor triumph in 1986 a federal appeals court declared the Craft to be a legitimate religion.addition we have asked our students to perform various tests. The Church now possesses the largest body of knowledge on Wicca in the world. From that vast databank, we have written twenty-seven books and eight lecture series.