Beginner Witchcraft

Beginner witchcraft is one of the most abused and misrepresented areas of witchcraft. It is difficult to find good information about beginner witchcraft, because so many vultures are hovering out there, waiting to prey on the earnest seeker of honest information about beginner witchcraft.

Bookshops and websites today are filled almost to the point of popping with guides to Beginner Witchcraft: Witchcraft 101, some inspiring, some uninspiring and some very close to expiring. You really, really don't need another explanation of how to pronounce "Samhain" or which end of an athame to hold or how to differentiate Witchcraft and Ceremonial Magic/Druidry/Satanism/Jo Rowling and so on. The truth is out there, along with any number of fascinating lies about beginner witchcraft.

What's a bit thinner on the ground is literature that leads from beginner witchcraft to the inner circles of Witchcraft, and books that do purport to do so can make for a pretty rum old read. Many of them work on the assumption that the more privy to secret traditions the author appears to be, the more humbly appreciative the beginner witchcraft reader ought to feel for such shadows of ghosts of secrets beyond beginner witchcraft are hinted at in the tome.

There's nothing very novel about this technique - it was used to great effect by many of the most influential people in the magical word, from Helena Blavatsky to Gerald Gardner (who was positively nutty about the notion). Aleister Crowley, no stranger to the technique, was memorably grumpy when on the receiving end, grumbling about an Order that "swore me to secrecy with terrible oaths and threats of death, and then revealed to me the Hebrew alphabet" - which is certainly something at the beginner end of beginner witchcraft, rather than an advanced magical secret!

The magical community (such as it is) is hardly alone in this. A great deal of mainstream religion has also been shaped by those who realised that it's staggeringly easy to appear to be keeping a staggeringly large secret. Magicians and Witches and the like do, however, have the advantage of being members of somewhat more secretive societies. Generally, though, alarm bells should probably go off whenever you encounter someone claiming to be part of an undocumented lineage going back to somewhere between the nineteenth century and the early Neolithic. Frequently, such people will claim to be able to prove this assertion should they so desire. Frequently, they won't so desire.

The talented ones will still be able to string their beginner witchcraft followers along for long enough to sell a book or three, start a tradition, and occasionally garner a sizable following. Insofar as they don't go all David Koresh on us, they don't really do a lot of harm and may, perhaps inadvertently, lead people into a degree of magical expertise in beginner witchcraft.

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