Fascination with the psychic - or the psychological - can be a dangerous sidetrack on any spiritual path

The word "Witch" carries so many negative connotations that many people wonder why we use the word at all. Yet to reclaim the word "Witch" is to reclaim our right, as women, to be powerful; as men, to know the feminine within as divine

Magic has always been an element of Witchcraft, but in the Craft its techniques were practiced within a context of community and connection

The symbolism of the Goddess is not a parallel structure to the symbolism of God the Father. The Goddess does not rule the world. She is the world. Manifest in each of us, She can be known internally by every indivdual, in all her magnificent diversity

Through the Goddess, we can discover our strength, enlighten our minds, own our bodies, and celebrate our emotions

The truth is that while men, in our society, are encouraged to have strong egos and to function in competitive, aggressive, intellectualized modes that may indeed cause them pain, for most women the ego is like a fragile African Violet, grown in secret from a seed, carefully nursed and fertilized and sheltered from too much sun

The ascetism of early Christianity, which turned its back on the world of the flesh, had degrenerated, in some quarters of the Church, into hatred of those who those who brought that flesh into being. Misogyny, the hatred of women, had become a strong element in medieval Christianity. Women who menstruate, and give birth, were identified with sexuality and therefore with evil. All witchcraft stems from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable, stated the Malleus Maleficarum

If Goddess religion is not to become mindless idiocy, we must win clear of tendency of magic to become supertition. Magic - and among its branches I include psychology as its purpose to describe and change consciousness - is an art