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Willow Firesong's
Here you will find our beliefs, our myths, our holidays and their meanings, all of the foundations for our religion. Our ethics and our actions all arise from our basic beliefs about the nature of the world.
Circle of Firelight is a neopagan religion as defined by Willow Firesong and BarleySinger, and followed by anyone who believes and act in accordance with those definitions. That simply means that it is a recently described nature-based faith unrelated to Christianity or any Biblical faith. The individuals in question make no claim about the validity of the path for others, it is simply a definition of the path on which they find themselves.
No. While Circle of Firelight has much in common with Wicca, it also has certain areas of difference.
Among these, we do not feel that we can hand off the responsibility for defining our beliefs and judging the rightness of our actions to others. Because of this, we do not recognize the writings of any person, including Alaistair Crowley, Gerald Gardner, or the founders of any branch of Wicca as the definitive guide to our actions and ethics. If you wish to understand what we believe, you must turn instead to reading our own writings, asking us questions, or observing our actions for yourself.
We acknowledge that the duality of nature, encompassing polar opposites only in equal proportion, does not require our efforts to ensure that balance, and we should therefore not emphasize one aspect or gender of god/dess over another, even in an attempt to redress apparent imbalance. When the pendulum has swung off-balance, this is best corrected by removing the obstructing force that keeps it there, not pushing on it even harder until it swings at least as far off-balance the other direction. When we emphasize one gender over another, we feel that we are encouraging imbalance, a violation of our ethics due to the harm inherent in such actions. Many Wiccans feel that the Goddess is the preeminent defining aspect of their religion, neglecting or omitting the balancing male God element. Please note also that many other Wiccans respect this balance, and are often disturbed by the gynocentric view of their religion promoted by only a portion of its followers.
That depends on your definition of WitchCraft. There are so many definitions for that term, many of them emotionally loaded, that we prefer to let the individual make that judgement for themselves.
We are not the classical "witches" of the Spanish Inquisition, the image that has been passed on to modern times; no one was. That image was created to persecute anyone who believed something other than was believed by the religious sects responsible. The descriptors were such as would describe any older woman of the peasantry, thereby terrorizing the entire population with the image of their mothers and grandmothers being accused of witchcraft, a crime that required forfeiture of the "witch's" property. This was often then split by the church, which acted as judge and jury, with the very person who brought the accusation. Over the many years of the Spanish Inquisition, most of the opposition to the power of the Church fell victim to the tortures of the Inquisition. Educated men and women of all kinds, midwives and artists fell to the accusations. None of them were any more likely to follow a non-Christian or nature-related religion than their neighbors, their crime was having something someone wanted, or being in someone's way, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
We are not the "witches" of "The Craft", "The Witches", "Hocus Pocus", "Practical Magic", "Sabrina", or any other recent movie or TV show. They aren't real. Someone made them up to entertain us and make money. We can be entertained, or not, but we should not confuse these fantasy worlds with reality.
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