Image from Twitter
While I was writing my review of Teen Witch: Wicca for a New Generation, I came across an interesting controversy that exists in the Wicca world. So of course I had to dig deeper.
Apparently, a lot of Wiccans think Silver RavenWolf and her writings get Wicca wrong in a substantial number of ways. Her writings are still popular enough, especially to those who are curious or deciding if they actually want to practice, that this is a big concern in the community.
The blog Wicca for the Rest of Us lays out the case against RavenWolf in their post Continuing Anger Over Silver RavenWolf, from 2014. Below I compare that post to what I noticed while reading Teen Witch.
Off-putting relationship to Christianity. This I saw in Teen Witch, although it seems to go a different direction in To Ride a Silver Broomstick. The blog post mentions that RavenWolf is contemptuous of Christianity and its trappings, but in Teen Witch, she seemed pretty determined to prove it and Wicca are two ways of tapping into the same cosmic deity power by calling spells prayers, saying you can call on your guardian angel for help with magick, and equating the Christian god with the god and goddess of Wicca. The first attitude just seems rude for no reason; the second seems like a marketing trick.
Literally rewrites history (and other facts) for personal superiority. In both books, she talks about the Burning Times as an extensive era of persecution for witches that, she claims, killed more people than the Holocaust. Historical research shows that’s not true.
Treats Wicca and witchcraft as interchangeable.It's not, and that’s important because it underminds the very foundations of each religion when they’re not acknowledged as separate and distinct.
Wicca for the Rest of Us goes into far more detail than I can about other stuff she gets wrong, so go read the whole post.
Other folks in the Wicca community hate her writings because they say she peddles a fluffy, junk-food, “lolz i’mma witch now” version of Wicca that functions best as an Instagram aesthetic. Other Wiccans say this type of visual definition denudes the religion of any real spiritual meaning and just gives wanna-bes excuses to buy candles. (I am vaguely guilty of this, having a writing candle set up on my desk that I light while working on my fiction and a tub candle that I light up while taking bubble baths.)
Here are other main points of contention with RavenWolf:
Treats Wicca as something you can make up as you go along. RavenWolf’s detractors accuse her of doing this herself in her books as well as preaching it as a valid way to practice. RationalWiki calls these users of selective bits “fluffbunnies” because they only want the easy and light stuff Wicca offers without doing the serious work necessary to truly earn it. The article is snarkier than I generally use for sources, but points for the Buffy quote up top and I do agree that a religion shouldn’t be an accessory, a way to shock people, or something to use only when it’s convenient for you.
Tells you to lie to your parents. I covered this in my review, and I’m going to stand behind my defense of this. If lying keeps you safe until you can set up your own independent life, do it. However, Wicca blogger Fire Lyte who is also LBGTQ+ mentions how painful it was for him to remain in the closet because he feared reactions to that.
Some Wiccans defend RavenWolf because of her accessibility and how many folks she brings to the religion who otherwise might not have gotten to it, but even they tend to admit that her expertise falls apart once they got past their first phase of learning the craft.
The most interesting rebuttal I found from RavenWolf herself is a post from her blog in October 2014 where she was fighting Facebook to keep her pseudonym as the name on her profile.
So that was interesting! Any Wiccan MTCRs out there who want to add anything?
A note on the sources I use for this article: they’re more personal-based than I would usually be comfortable with (lots of blogs and such), but since this is a matter of what people in a specific community feel, as opposed to outside events and consequences that can be empirically shown, they do seem the most reliable amongst the knot of 401 and Anglefire pages that reference lists keep linking me to. The blog post from Wicca for the Rest of Us comes up again and again, so it along with the RationalWiki article on Fluffbunny are my main sources on why Wiccans dislike RavenWolf so much.
Ravenwolf says often to create your own rituals and if you read EVERY SINGLE WITCHCRAFT BOOK EVER, they are different as each author made their own rituals and spells up, so saying it is bad to make stuff up, no its not.