As a fertility religion and reincarnation cult, Wicca is based in the cycles of the natural world, finding profound spiritual meaning in both the flora and fauna of our Mother Earth, and in the cycles of human life itself—and those cycles include Children.
In The Tree, Buckland included a Birth Rite (in the Farrars’ Alexandrian-inspired Wiccan writings from the 1980s a similar rite is named a “Wiccaning”,) for welcoming a new-born baby into a coven family and introducing the little one to the Wiccan Lord and Lady. From this point onward the child is considered a “Ceorl” among the Seax Wica, an Old English word denoting a “free man” as opposed to a “Theow”, the ancient Saxon word for a slave. A Ceorl is also considered to be anyone who is studying the tradition in pursuit of Initiation into an existing Saxon Wiccan coven, or in preparation for the Rite of Self-Dedication to the Saxon Gods. Most importantly, in the thoroughly modern religion of Saxon Wicca, a Theow is not intended as a derogatory concept, but merely as way of designating in a non-proselytizing religion that is strictly Solitary or Coven-based, that a person has not Self-Dedicated or Initiated among the Seax Wica. Buckland repeatedly stated his strong feeling that no one religion was right for all people, and that no one religion has a monopoly on Truth, therefore this designation of “Outsiders” who are not Initiates, carries no implication of moral superiority or ethnic separatism. Unlike most other forms of coven-based Witchcraft, a Theow may even attend Saxon Wiccan celebrations by an individual coven’s unanimous agreement and invitation. In reality, the concept of a Theow in Saxon Wicca is best understood as a reference to the Wiccan Charge of the Goddess, wherein the multi-ethnic pantheistic Mother Goddess of Wicca, (known to the Seax Wica as “Freya”) promises to her people that it is through Witchcraft that they “shall be free from slavery, and as a sign that ye be really free ye shall be naked in your rites”. This also is the liturgical basis for the Wiccan practice of ritual nudity, a practice which understandably does not well lend itself to the inclusion of non-Initiates, nor of children under the age of majority, (whether recognized at birth as “Ceorls” in a Saxon Wiccan family or not).
This practical limitation of traditional Wiccan practice undoubtedly helped to lend energy to the “Asatru” and “Heathen” movements in North America, with which it has a complicated social and political relationship that we have no desire to examine in this particular post other than to note that the derogatory neologism “Wicatru” that one may encounter in “Heathen” or North American “Asatru” spaces is a term coined in large part due to a lack of historical perspective on where and why Wiccan philosophy so fundamentally differs from these other movements with which it is so closely associated. The most obvious difference is in its emphasis on a duotheistic fertility Goddess and God (fertility and love between individuals being the linchpin of the religion rather than tribal identity), -without- denying the existence or worthiness of other Goddesses and Gods, both Saxon and non-Saxon, in relation to those of the Seax Wica. It is important to remember that both Gardner and Buckland wrote of Witchcraft as an essentially polytheistic religion, and a coven’s focus on only two deities is not a denial of others, nor is it in any way atypical from temple worship in pre-Christian Europe, where temples and priesthoods were for the most part dedicated to very particular deities rather than entire pantheons. Wicca is also distinguishable from these other movements by its emphatic emphasis on a Multi-Ethnic Pantheism (see the “Full Moon” rite in The Tree), and the relation of this philosophy to the reclamation of the pre-Christian understanding of “Witchcraft” in its original positive Wisdom-associative context.
This brings us to the other Old English concepts of “Kith” and “Kin”. The first term roughly denotes one’s friends and neighbors, the second one’s family. As G.A. Embleton and D.R. Banting wrote in Saxon England (1975):
The word kindred infers a blood relationship, but an accurate definition is difficult to establish. Basically, in Saxon England a man’s kindred was his family, including a mother’s relations as well as a father’s; a son marrying outside such a grouping would become part of a different kindred, as well as retaining his ties with his parents. If a man were killed, it was his kindred who prosecuted those responsible for his death and collected the wergild, two-thirds of which went to the father’s family and one-third to the mother’s. …More pleasant responsibilities for the kindred were the arrangment of marriages and the care of young children and their inheritance. (It must be remembered that in Saxon times the kindred provided the only form of social security against personal accidents and losses.)
It is to this responsibility of the kindred for the care of young children to which we would now turn, and to how exactly they may be included in Saxon Wicca before they are old enough to determine their own religious beliefs and practice. In our own kindred, our practice has been to celebrate the eight Wiccan holidays with our coven Sabbat rite on the eve of each of the “Fire-Festivals” (see James Frazer The Golden Bough, 1922) after the children are asleep, and as a wider family celebration the following day, to whom close friends might also be invited, featuring a large feast, a mythological reading from Henry Adams Bellows beautifully poetic English translations of the Poetic Edda, (or “Lays of the Gods”), published by the American-Scandivanian Foundation in 1929, (“Edda” being the Old Norse word for “Grandmother”), and a simple seasonal ritual adapted, (one major adaptation being the use of sparkling apple cider as a non-alcoholic alternative to mead), from those published by Edred Thorsson in A Book of Troth (1989). Our choice of these particular rituals, while dropping Thorsson’s personal philosophy and honestly “re-Wiccaning” it for our own family-friendly purposes, is an intentional one, as these rites were some of the most commonly practiced among North American Pagans during the 1990s -before- the vastly accelerated diversification of the North American Pagan movement through the Internet, and because they are written in a way quite obviously inspired by The Tree for those “in-the-know”, (a fact to which Thorsson would admit by at least his second edition of Witchdom of the True, published in 2018). Most importantly for us is the way our adaptations of this basic set of seasonal rituals incorporating the wider pantheon and mythology of the Old English Gods is set in a solidly English-American framework, rather than approaching the recording of the ancient myths by medieval Icelanders as “Holy Books” and modern Iceland as a kind of “Mecca” and center of the only “authentic” expression of the modern Pagan worship of the Old Gods common to the long widespread and intermingled Germanic peoples, whom British historian Brian Branston called in 1955, the “Gods of the North”. If it is the English language itself as much as the significantly English cultural ancestry of many of us in North America that brings us to the Lord and Lady in the first place, looking primarily to modern Europe for “authenticity” rather than our own 19th (see Matilda Joslyn Gage and Charles Godfrey Leland), and 20th century American history, too often leads to unbecoming insecurities that fuel ethnic separatisms that have no place in American Wicca.
Lincoln Green 