Keeping Secrets

Keeping secrets is rude and divisive, and British Tradition Witcca (BTW) gets a lot of crap for doing it.  My particular flavor of Wicca, Gardnerian, is one of the most secret squirrelly of them all.  In fact, Gerald Gardner’s books are littered with overtly provocative statements including “forbidden to speak,” “cannot tell,” and “must not divulge.”  That’s seriously immature. If you try to say that at a party, you’d get laughed out of the room.  So how does a modern urban witch, who believes strongly in the values of transparency and sharing, handle being oathbound?

Let’s back up for a moment.  What is oathbound?  When I was initiated as a Gardnerian, I repeated an oath.  That oath forbids me to discuss the initiation itself, any Gardnerian rituals, my Book of Shadows, and the identities of any other Gardnerians.  What happens if I break the oath?  Well, I’m not allowed to talk about that either.

As many of you know from reading books by or about Gardner, the Gardnerian tradition includes stuff from lots of different older traditions, so one way I was taught to get around the oath is to learn all of them.  If I’m having a conversation with you about rituals or magic and you ask me about something oathbound, rather than acting like a four year old and chanting “I know something you don’t know,” it’s more likely that I’ll pause for a moment and then start talking about a practice from ancient Mesopotamia.  That was me doing a mental runaround to avoid breaking my oath.

Other BTW traditions have oaths as well.  For instance, the Kingstone and Silver Crecent covens around my town – Seattle, won’t even tell their pre-initiates who is in the coven and who isn’t.  (Gardnerians are allowed to do that).  Kingstones consider Gardnerians to be equivalent to Kingstones, so they can talk to us about their practices and show us their books.  But we don’t consider them to be Gardnerian!  So they can tell us everything, but we can’t tell them anything unless we initiate them first!

Things tend to get more secretive over time.  People would rather be on the safe side of the oath, and each student who plays it a little bit safer than their teacher did contributes to this increase in secrecy. Where blogging falls into this whole cluster of oaths, I don’t think I want to know.

So I apologize to the greater pagan community that there have been some BTW cranks over the years. Most of us aren’t like that. Most of us wanted to practice traditional witchcraft, weighed our options, and decided that politely keeping our mouths shut about a few things was worth the trouble.