Witch School-a public face of Wicca

Witchschool.com is an online Wiccan, pagan, magickal training programme, though it now has a physical campus. The idea is based around a mentor system and a degree structure with clergy, yep clergy and there's badges and everything. The tradition it teaches is Correlian. Anyways, I am not here to promote them, you can find out what they do easily enough, am just going to rant a lil about what is wrong with them and how it reflects upon Wicca as a whole.

Any new religion, and Wicca is only over 50 years old, is going to change, adapt and mould. It is pretty difficult to see though now, what Wicca really is. Not many Wiccans know either. A big appeal of Wicca is the devotional aspect that emphasises self development, perhaps the bigger appeal though is that compared to main stream religions it is very unstructured. Undoubtedly that's a good thing, but it doesn't take too long before people have developed their path so much it doesn't resemble Wicca at all and yet that is how they identify themselves. I shouldnt care, but it does give serious practioners of Wicca a bad name (though I personally don't/can't identify myself as Wiccan any longer). Some may go as far to say as the only 'real' Wiccans are Gardnerians. If you take a look at Witchvox and do a search for traditions there is just a crazy amount and after 5 minutes of reading through them it won't be long until you realise why Wicca isnt taken seriously anymore. Which brings us back round to Witchschool, a public face of Wicca, from the amount of press coverage it has been enjoying of late. Their personal press releases don't help matters, from the school being likened to Hogwarts. That kind of comparison, Wicca can do without, it is plenty hard enough already for the public to not equate Wicca to a fantasy based path.

But, it is really the way Witchschool goes about things, and much of that boils down to the issue of Wicca being a Mystery Tradition, or at least it was. These kinds of paths are not for everyone, there has always been some king of filtering process. Witchschool prides itself on training anyone, for a fee of course. Therefore, all kinds of people become a representation of the religion, as well as those who are able to pass multiple choice questons who then get to become clergy and have degree badges. But, I guess there was a gap waiting to be filled of 13 year old High Priests. It is certainly a worry for those who may put trust in these on-line trained High Priests and Priestesses, the skills learnt and developed in pagan paths are not from online reading and multiple choice.

There's a ton of other stuff that is wrong with Witchschool and the set-ups that will undoubtedly follow, but neither will there be a perfect tradition or religion for that matter. It's not the religion that I have a problem with, I love Wicca infact, is just the Wiccans I guess and the mess that's gettin made. Hopefully though, Wicca will evolve into something beautiful again, and the Harry Potter types will move on soon enough.