You're viewing a single thread.
I'm loosely pagan on a spiritual level and I vibe a lot with druidism and many of the things that witches do, but as much as I enjoy the culture, I never fail to cringe over the collective hubris of self-proclaimed witches. It's always the edgiest 30-45 year old women who wear House of 1000 Corpses t-shirts and extreme amounts of eye shadow, who post "Proud Bitch" memes on social media and exude an undeserved air of confidence because they believe so deeply their spells are real.
While I admit that Wicca is quite beautiful and largely misunderstood, the things most witches/hexers are practicing only date back a few decades. They're not speaking the ancient magicks or communing with old gods. I can't speak much on the divine feminine because I'm not informed enough on that subject, but for the other half of their belief system they have taken the rather ambiguous depiction of Cernunnos and turned him into a sexy, big-dicked goat man, and have fabricated their own lore to explain the workings of something that is in reality unfathomably old and lost to man, with no surviving origin story and little to no oral tradition.
We can certainly make some educated guesses, but the bulk of that information died with the druids.
Wicca and paganism in general has always had those cornball types. Back in the 70s and 80s, every tool who renamed themselves after a cool animal and weather condition/celestial body claimed to have a grandparent who secretly initiated them into an ancient unbroken lineage of witches. In the 90s and 00s, it was appropriation gone wild with white ladies from Iowa claiming they had a lineage in closed religious communities like conjure and Vodou. Now it's fucking deluded 20-somethings on TikTok who "godspouse" or work with Naruto characters.