Rain of Brass Petals said:
Oh, I agree that the term "Fluffy Bunny" is derogatory. It was meant to be. It was coined by those Neo-Pagans who got sick and tired of walking into their Occult stores and seeing $ilver Ravenwolf books on the shelves, telling their readers how evil and vile the Christians are. Or seeing D.J. Conway telling her readers to ask dragons to "frolic" in their energy (never, ever tell a dragon to "frolic" in anything, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup).
I guess I've been around too long and have read too many books on Wicca, witchcraft, and the occult but I find it hard to get all upset about Silver Ravenwolf and the other authors you've listed (and presumably others that are similar to those.)
Silver Ravenwolf in particular writes for a teen audience. That's no secret. I have no problem with authors choosing to target specific audiences. No book is perfect, no author is perfect, so if you don't like a particular one chances are there are others out there who present the same material in a way that you do prefer.
I wonder though about condemning authors based on their comments about past or present injustices. In an ideal world there would be no such thing as religious persecution but unfortunately we live in an imperfect world and do have to learn to deal with it. Perhaps it's politically correct in some communities to refuse to talk about history that might portray injustices but I have to be honest and say I'm not convinced that being politically correct really helps much.
There is a need, of course, to build respect and trust with those who follow other paths. There is always a need to build solid alliances with all sorts of religious groups including those who might have historically attacked us. They can certainly change and so can we. But I still have a problem with sanitizing history or sanitizing our own community from politically incorrect ideas in order to conform to some ideal of mainstream acceptance.
Oh, and I'd respectfully suggest that condemning others for how they perceive or choose to work with mythical creatures is a little silly. I'm sure that if dragons don't like being treated in a specific way they are perfectly capable of dealing with it themselves. As some wise people have said, if you don't like something, then don't get involved in it.
Rain of Brass Petals said:
They got sick of seeing authors re-hash each other's work, so that when you opened the bibliography you could see that S.R. drew her sources from Grimassi, and Grimassi from Conway, and Conway from S.R.
I agree that often new books are just a rehash of previously published material with only minor variations or some overall "style" applied to it. That is the nature of publishing (and the arts in general) and is not limited to just Wiccan books. How many novels about vampires that might not be completely evil have been published? How many movies have there been about aliens invading the Earth, with a ragtag band of unlikely heroes saving the day?
As particular fields grow it is also quite common for the same authors to crop up in bibliographies and quoted material, with one author quoting another in an apparently closed cycle. It's common for "experts" in any field to know each other and to refer to each other in their works. This, again, is not a new thing nor is it evident in just Wiccan writing.
If an idea is invalid it needs to be debunked with evidence, not by casting aspersions on the authors.
Rain of Brass Petals said:
They became fed up with the careless way authors used the term "Wicca" and "Witchcraft" interchangeably. Witchcraft is not a religion, Wicca is!
This is another example of a relatively recent idea in the Wiccan and modern Pagan community which has taken hold, where we seem to forget that it was different only a few years ago.
For the longest time, the word Wicca was a synonym for witchcraft (actually, to be precise, a synonym for witch.) Many authors didn't bother using the term Wicca at all. Gerald Gardner, who many today credit with founding the religion of Wicca, himself used the term only rarely and usually spelled it "Wica." Most of the time he just called what he was practicing and teaching "witchcraft." His books, after all, are called "Witchcraft Today" and "The Meaning of Witchcraft," not "Wicca Today" or "The Meaning of Wicca."
It's only really been since Ronald Hutton's book, "The Triumph of the Moon," which came out in 1999, that there has been anything like a real distinction between Wicca as a religion and witchcraft as something else. I suspect some of the distinction was starting to appear before that in a limited way, but it didn't really take off in the community until 2000 and later. And here we are in 2004, speaking as though this has always been the case and those who use the terms Wicca and witchcraft as equivalent or interchangeable are treated to public name-calling.
Rain of Brass Petals said:
So, out of frustration, they started a movement, and in their movement their anger needed to be vented. Their vented anger took the form of the derogatory term "Fluffy Bunny."
Rain of Brass Petals said:
I absolutely believe that we can out-grow this term. As the "Wicca For the Rest of Us" sort of movement gains ground and begins to put out books to give Lady Sheba a run for her money, we can begin to settle down, relax, and drop the verbal attacks.
I see the whole "fluffy bunny" bashing crowd, and the "Wicca for the Rest of Us" site and its supporters, as symptoms of our communities' growing pains. And I think we will outgrow this and move on to a more mature and accepting phase where the whole "fluffy bunny" bashing movement will be recognized as nothing more than political correctness in our community, and like political correctness in other communities, something that we can grow past.
I'm a gay man and I lived through the big "politically correct" movement back in the 1980s in the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered community in Canada. The university where I was attending at the time was in the national news in Canada over various politically-correct controversies and was a hot topic. There was a lot of fuss over people needing to fit into very strict roles in order for the glbt community to be accepted by the mainstream -- or so the politically correct pushers believed. If you were stereotypically gay or lesbian you were either treated as a role model or considered to be shameful and something to discourage and hide away, depending on which parts of the community you hung around with. It was all about conforming to some arbitrary ideal so that we could be accepted by the mainstream. But thankfully the glbt community (at least in Canada anyways) grew out of that painful phase and realized that we don't grow into a strong community by bashing each other. There are enough people out there who will dislike us no matter what we do that will bash us. We learned to accept and embrace our diversity and grew stronger as a result.
Sarah M. Pike has a very interesting and very important book called "Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves" which examines the modern Pagan community, particularly in North America, and discusses its development from the perspective of sociologists who have studied community growth. It points out that in the relatively early phases of community evolution it often happens that a group will spend a lot of energy on trying to define itself by focussing on what it's not. They emphasize the "other" and make loud noises about how they are not like that "other." Communities that mature and survive tend to grow past this phase and turn their energies to focussing on what they are rather on what they are not. They realize that it's more valuable to focus on strengthening their own core, deepening their sense of self, in order to mature. It doesn't really matter so much what you aren't when you realize it's more important to look at what you are.
Wiccans in the past have spent a lot of time worrying about saying we aren't Satanists, we aren't Christians, we aren't whatever. I see this "fluffy bunny" bashing as just another manifestation of that phase. I really look forward to seeing the Wiccan community growing past that phase, like the glbt community in Canada did, and realizing that what we are is more than enough to make us strong, happy, and healthy. And when we realize what we are, then suddenly that diversity that seems to annoy so many of the anti-fluffy crowd doesn't seem so threatening and can actually be embraced and celebrated.
And that, in a nutshell, is why I personally try to encourage people to focus on things other than what their neighbors are doing, whether so-and-so is "fluffy" or not, and instead put our energies on strengthening our core.
), so I really couldn't tell the difference between a fair title for a group of sub-intelligent pagans and the arrogance of "non-fluffy" pagans.
