Moura - Folk Magic, Fairy Lore & Herb Craft

The Green

I t is my intention to discuss the Green elements of modern Witchcraft and neopagan practices as well as relate those elements to my own Craft practice and the bits and pieces of Iberian-Celtic tradition handed down to me from my mother and her mother. My approach is both historical and personal; my interests lie in history, and I would be untrue to myself if I discarded history (which is so great a part of my perspective on life) in any presentation of Craft practices. My family associations with the Craft did not come through formal training or through recognized tradition, but by observation, activities, and verbal guidance.

Much of Craft practice has been softly muffled through its passage over the generations. It has only been in recent decades, with the formalization of Witchcraft traditions, that practices have been created to preserve oral traditions that otherwise might have faded. I am very grateful for the Gardners and the Bucklands and all the other writers of the Craft who have worked so diligently to preserve an ancient religion. My purpose here is to show the underlying thread that appears to run through most traditions and relate it to the ancient historical past, while also presenting insights as to how this thread weaves its way through three generations of my family, and is now entering the warp and weave of a fourth.

This does not mean that I know all there is to know about any one traditionI dont. I am a solitary practitioner and have been for over thirty years. My information on traditions comes from reading about them and keeping current with the Craft through newsletters and other pagan publications. I correspond with a number of Wiccans, some with coven traditions and some who are solitaries, and I have found that some issues are repeatedly addressed, which I will bring out in this book. I have found that there are terms and there are terms, which means that words like tradition can lose their generic, mundane inference and be seen as representing a formal school of the Craft. I shall avoid using this particular word except in its accepted Wiccan form whenever possible. The generic version will be substituted with words like custom or practice. Another word that sometimes carries negative inferences is Aryan. From the historians point of view, the Aryans were a people from the Central Asian areas that extended as far west as the Ukraine who were absorbed some three thousand years ago into the cultures they conquered. Any connection of Aryans with twentieth-century Nazis or modern racial, ethnic, and religious bigotry does not figure into this writing. The Aryans as a separate people simply dont exist anymore, although their heritage, like that of the Dravidic people of the Indian subcontinent, can be found throughout the modern world.

My own practices involve elements that appeal to me, but do not reflect an endorsement of any one tradition or practice. To be fair, many pagan usages recognized as belonging to a particular group are really older, common practices formalized by that group. To use a circle is not to be a Ceremonialist any more than to call upon Brigid is to be a Roman Catholic. Circles are a custom that pre-date Medieval Ceremonialism by many thousands of years, and Brigid was a Goddess long before she became a Christian saint. Just as old Pagan temples and holy sites are recognized today as Christian onesfrom Lourdes to Notre Damethe ancient beliefs underlying the modern ones cannot be claimed as a possession of the modern with any sort of historical validity. The four directions, the elementals, the center of the spirit, the five-pointed star, the star in the circleall these are primal images that go back ten to twenty thousand years with no formalized Wiccan or Ceremonial tradition. Yet it is due to the Ceremonialist and modern Wiccan traditions that these ancient symbols and usages have not lost their meaningfulness. Most of the images of the Craft and Ceremonialism can be found lurking in the dark recesses of modern mainstream religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but it took the neopagan movement to pull these out of the shadows and back into a primary focal point.