a moral compass

I wrote this awhile back for the British Reclaiming Newsletter. Seems a good time to put it up and out in cyberspace..

Spiritual Authority, Ethics, and Community - A Reclaiming Feri Perspective

To be a Witch, and especially a Reclaiming Feri Witch, is to ultimately create and live by your own moral compass. Reclaiming and Feri both encourage us to be our own spiritual authority, which means picking and choosing the tenets by which we live our own life and deciphering and abiding by our own moral code. This is challenging enough, but even more challenging is creating community with people who are also in this process. Spiritual authority, like any other authority, is not gained overnight, but is something that is attained with time, study, practice, and mistakes made and learned from. Spiritual authority does not come easy, neither does consciously creating our own sturdy moral compass that we can turn to, rely on, and that guides us towards behavior and actions which have integrity.

Creating an effective moral compass means learning from others who've created ones that work effectively, that move thru the world with an integrity we admire. It means examining the foundation of spiritual systems we are drawn to, and making them our own. It also means looking at what tenets from our own upbringing we want to hold on to, what beliefs we were raised with that have guided us on a path that we feel is right for us. Many of us were raised with religious and moral systems that didn't completely work for us; that stated sexuality outside of procreation was shameful, or that God would punish us for eating bacon and shellfish. However, most religions do have kernels of wisdom worth keeping. Loving your neighbor, doing unto others as you would have them do unto you; this is stuff worth holding onto. Becoming our own spiritual authority means combing thru our old belief systems, keeping what fits and leaving the rest.

To create magical community, it helps to have some agreement on what we can expect from each other ethically, and to have a common understanding of what principles we will hold each other to. Reclaiming is a tradition that puts a big emphasis on creating community. This is problematic if everyone's moral compass is pointing in a different direction. To this end, right before the original Bay Area Reclaiming Collective dissolved, we created the Principles of Unity. One of the core principles is that everyone is their own spiritual authority, yet we also laid out explicit spiritual principles we expect those who practice within our tradition to agree with, and better yet live by. To practice within a community of witches means embracing this paradox. We all are our own spiritual authority, but it's nice to know what guidelines we agree to live by.

Anderson Feri Tradition, which is one of the strong roots of Reclaiming Tradition, claims itself to be amoral, and practitioners are not required to adhere to either the Rede, (which is one of Reclaiming's principles of unity), or to abide by the Threefold Law. The Rede commands us to "harm none", which means the magic we do must be done in the spirit of healing and never to hurt or hex. To live by the Rule of Three means to accept that everything we do comes back to us by the power of three. To me, this is also a law of nature. For every action, there will be reaction. What we do effects us mind, body, and soul, as well as affecting our Triple Soul. Some Feri practitioners scoff at the Rede and the Threefold Law, and others, like myself, are guided by them.

Anderson Feri Tradition is fierce in its belief that we are our own spiritual authority, and there is a wide spectrum of ethical beliefs and practice in the tradition, noticeably around hexing. The only thing all Feri practitioners need adhere to is our oath to not reveal certain materials to non-initiates. Anderson Feri Tradition claims to be amoral, but this does not mean all of its individual practitioners are. As Bob Dylan says; "To live outside the law, you must be honest". I'd expand on this to say that to live a true spiritual life outside of any preordained religious law demands honesty, strong ethics, and constant grounding in love and compassion. Those just interested in power end up corrupted.

Reclaiming Feri, which is an integration of the two traditions, has the fierceness of Feri's demand that its practitioners be their own spiritual authority while also demanding that Reclaiming's Principles of Unity not only be agreed on, but truly taken apart, line by line, and made our own. What does it mean personally to commit to a feminist radical analysis of power and to have a questioning attitude? How does this play out in community? Are we truly committed to sharing power or are we focused on self-promotion and threatened by open leadership roles? How do we balance our individual autonomy with social responsibility? Are the principles of unity mirrored in how we operate as community?

Reclaiming's Principles of Unity, as they include the Rede, ask us to forgo ever using magic to cause harm. If you ascribe to the Threefold Rule, cursing or hexing is self destructive magic , as everything we send out will come back. Working with the Threefold Rule we learn to ground all our work in love, even when we are protecting ourselves from attacks, psychic and otherwise.

In Reclaiming, there is a lot of talk about "coming into our power". Those who come into power and don't balance this with compassion and a commitment to honesty and accountability become bullies. This is problem not only in Reclaiming and in Feri, but in the pagan community at large. Witches are drawn to power, and too many of us become accomplished at throwing it around as opposed to learning to ground it in service to the common good.

Reclaiming, with its emphasis on public witchcamps, has engendered an insidious narcissism in its glamorization of the position of teacher. Extroverts and those who are drawn to power over spiritual depth find Reclaiming a great network for finding a audience to admire them. Casting a glamour, having a rudimentary understanding of magic, and charming one or two key people can get you a position as witchcamp teacher, without any real soul development and any compass except self interest.

To walk a spiritual path in our lifetime is to invoke a challenging journey. To be our own spiritual authority is to take on rigorous responsibility. To do this in the context of building and sustaining community requires conscious and consistent review of what makes up our moral compass. As both individuals and as a community it is important to regularly review what values are guiding us and what core principles our actions spring from. Reclaiming is lax in training individuals to do this, and Feri tradition is so ruggedly individualistic that it has no community standards.

Both Reclaiming and Feri are ecstatic traditions. Spiritual journeys within ecstatic traditions such as Reclaiming and Feri call for a strong ethical compass, otherwise they can quickly veer towards spiritual narcissism, where we are guided only by pleasure and self-involvement, becoming addicted to the drug of being in the center of a cone of power rather than the rigor of being a decent human being.

The integration of the two traditions, Reclaiming Feri, brings with it the best of the two traditions, challenging us to thoroughly examine and keep examining what spiritual and ethical principles are guiding us on our spiritual journey, both as individuals and as a community, helping us to come into a seasoned spiritual authority. Having strong principles serve as a compass, and without a strong compass, we can easily loose our way on this most challenging of journeys, the journey of spirit