LESSON 6 (pages 21-25)

In this section I review so very briefly the history of Wicca as a modern movement.  I mentioned Joe Wilson, although I did not go into how we first met.  After my second book, Living with Magic, was published, I decided to try out a course at my college on philosophy and the occult.  Initially I presented this as a community services offering, and it was there that I met Aislinn and Kishli as well as a few other people with Craft connections.  Then, in one of the first semesters of the regular course, I had an older student who somewhat fit my mental image of a satyr.  What interested me was that this individual, one Joe Wilson, seemed a lot more knowledgeable than the typical student, even someone who had done a lot of reading.  Then I made the connection with the Joe Wilson described in Susan Roberts' book Witches USA.  Joe fessed up and later in the course led a ritual for the students (we won't talk about whether this was violating the barrier between church and state, and I later did the same thing for a course being taught by Gary Kessler up at Cal State Bakersfield).

For more about Joe and what he is doing these days you might check his Metista website.

I count all of these encounters as instances of what Carl Jung calls synchronicity, the meaningful coincidences that remain one of my consistent reminders of the reality of magic.

This concept of synchronicity is one of the two things that I invite you to reflect on at this point in your reading.  The other is the importance of personal transmission.  Magic is not something just from books.  An incidental contact, a chance meeting, even maybe a reponse to an email--all these are the ways in which we find ourselves caught up in the path with others like ourselves.

One thing I have noted and pointed out to my students is that the strongest instances of magic calling to us are typically at the beginning of our apprenticeships.  These are analogous to the conversion experiences that William Janes wrote about in his Varieties of Religious Experience, still one of the best things to read for anyone trying to make sense of a spiritual calling.

Each of you has more likely than not had this kind of encounter.  It is probably why you are here now.  Reflect on it, and maybe share your reflections on the discussion pages for the course.  One of the things we need to do, I believe, is work at validating our personal encounters just through this kind of discussion.