Anti Anti Fluffbunny


		Inauguration of the Anti-Anti Fluffbunny Backlash © Heathen Dawn
		Gals and guys, the party’s over. I’m going to rain on your parade, and rain hard. All you Anti-Fluffbunnies and Serious Wiccans™ are going to have your balloons deflated. Eines Tages… Once upon a time, there arose some people who took up Wicca as a fad. They took pride in Wicca’s being an ancient, pre-Christian religion, declared themselves HPS or HP after reading a couple of books, and went outside with a huge pentacle telling all and sundry they were Wiccans, to name a few things. Most of those left Wicca after the initial euphoria wore off, and that should have been the end of the story. But it wasn’t. It was to have a lasting effect in opening the Anti-Fluffbunny Movement. There was erected a website called Why Wiccans Suck which purported to combat the fluffbunnies and which effectively launched the Anti-Fluffbunny Movement. The author of that website (admittedly no longer a Wiccan—I wonder why…) did so in a self-righteous and haughty fashion, and that dictated the character of the Anti-Fluffbunny Movement to posterity. That site was a tremendous success. Loads, and I do mean loads, of pagans jumped on the Anti-Fluffbunny bandwagon. Not just Wiccans — in fact, a far greater part than of Wiccans who took the trend, was the part of the Reconstructionist Pagans who did. The Anti-Fluffbunny Movement spawned a new creature: the Serious Pagan™. And the bashing began: of fluffbunny Wiccans by the anti-fluffbunnies, of Eclectic Wiccans by Traditional Wiccans, and of all Wiccans by Recon Pagans. Great! Lookit me, I’m an Antifluff! The anti-fluffbunny is a mature pagan. She’s done her homework. She’s erudite. She spends most of her time doing research on the Gods and on the ancient cultures to whom They were first revealed. She doesn’t just pluck those Gods out of thin air. Paganism, she holds, should be based on scholarship. The underpinnings of mythology and magic should be technicalized, methodologized, academicized and scientified. After all, it has nothing to do with spirituality; it is more akin to getting a college degree. Woe be the pagan who sets more store in the electrifying charge of ritual than in the crouching over an ancient tome. That one is a fluffbunny for sure! No! No! We can’t have this; we want all pagans to be scholarly! For many Traditional Wiccans, the Anti-Fluffbunny Movement has been a golden opportunity to get their own back over the Eclectic Wiccans, calling them “McWiccans” in the process. People had thought Wicca was pretty elastic, that it could be bent to a considerable degree of freedom and still be Wicca. No, that’s fluffbunny type of thinking! Just as the color red has to be #FF0000, and nothing else, Wicca has to be as Gardner originally made it. Yes, Wicca properly is like the Catholic Church, with priests and priestesses having apostolic succession up to Gardner himself. That’s right, the Goddess and the God initiated Gardner once and for all, and since then have not initiated any other Wiccan directly, they all have to go through the lineage. Otherwise it’s not Wicca. And as for the Recons, the Anti-Fluffbunny Movement has been their springboard to a sweeping declaration of the entirety of the Wiccan religion as inherently fluffy. Yes, you see, religion is like breeding horses. Horses ought to be thoroughbred, not mongrelized (erm … you might want to talk to a geneticist about hybrid vigor, but let’s not put a few facts in the way, shall we?). Wicca is a mongrel, an eclectic mixture, while Recon religions like Ásatrú and Hellenismos are of pristine purity. And Wiccans are not only eclectic, they’re unoriginal. They take everything from other religions - stealing from them. Yes, stealing, like taking a chair from me, so I know don’t have a chair. You take my ideas, I still have those ideas, but people call it stealing anyway. Yeah, right. So, bottom line, if a God tells me to specialize in the Germanic runes, they say I have to become an Ásatrúar. Either-or: a practitioner of Ásatrú with the runes, or a practitioner of Wicca without. A practitioner of Wicca who specializes in the runes is a cultural thief. In short, the Anti-Fluffbunny Movement, in wanting to swat a fly, has used a sledgehammer, missed the fly and broken the glass pane. It has bred tons of needless hate, haughtiness, superiority-attitudes, self-righteousness and other things that are more suited to the world of politics than of religion and spirituality. It is on this note that I inaugurate the Anti-Anti-Fluffbunny Backlash, half-seriously appointing myself as its leader. The Backlash, and Not The Backlash First, I wish to make it clear that the Anti-Anti-Fluffbunny Backlash is not a pro-fluffbunny backlash: I don’t advocate thinking Wicca is an ancient religion and self-ordination after reading two or three books. But I don’t fight those things, as they don’t last long. They self-destruct. Real fluffbunny Wiccans either defluff or leave the religion altogether after a few years at most. The most important aspect of the Anti-Anti-Fluffbunny Backlash is the return to the pagan way of thinking phrased as “let a thousand flowers bloom.” One pagan may think Ásatrú is the best way; the other may think Gardnerian Wicca is; the other may think it is best to follow the initiatory path as expounded in Ellen Cannon Reed’s books; and yet another may think, rather like the Christians (gasp!), that the personal relationship with the Gods is the most important thing (that would be me). The point is that the Anti-Anti-Fluffbunny does not think his or her way is the best or the most mature or the deepest or the most becoming, and does not look down upon the others. What follows from this is a lack of haughtiness, of saying things like “you do A, B and C … but do you do X, Y and Z? If not, you are only scratching the surface of what it is to be (insert path here).” It is the recognition that we’re not in a race but each on our own pace - some slow, some fast - and that “I thank You, O Gods, that I am not like this fluffbunny” is a most unspiritual attitude to take. And there should be more openness to eclecticism, whether by Traditional Wiccans towards Eclectic Wiccans, or by Recon Pagans towards all Wiccans. There is no religion in the world that hasn’t copied from external sources. Christianity has immensely benefited by merging Jewish traditions with the pagan theme of a Risen Savior-God attached to the life-story of an itinerant reformer-rabbi. There should be an openness to various theologies and philosophies, however eccentric they may seem. I may not take a personal liking to the view of the Gods as metaphors and archetypes, or to duotheism. And a hard polytheist may not like my own soft polytheism. But to deride one as a fluffbunny because of it, says a lot about the insecurity of the one who derides. I really think all religious people should not do better than the others, but should do their own best. My Stake in the Matter I’m a Wiccan, an Eclectic, and a White-Lighter. Need I say more? I used to be a fluffbunny myself, and I learned quite a few useful things from anti-fluffbunny sources like WWS. But looking at it all, I can say it’s like trying to neutralize a corrosive acid with a corrosive base — the cure isn’t much better than the disease. The Anti-Anti-Fluffbunny Backlash is not another, equal turn of the pendulum (that would be a pro-fluffbunny backlash), but an attempt to steer things onto the middle of the road. Blessed be! * * * * * * I have not the space to list the peeves I have with the WWS website; they are too numerous. My favorite one (not!): the links page has a link to the Skeptic’s Dictionary, with the following caption: “An invaluable resource which should be at the top of every pagan’s bookmark list. Consult the listings every time you get an urge to have ‘faith’ in something supernatural — you’ll be surprised at how much weird stuff can be readily explained with science and psychology.” My reaction: are you EFFING CRAZY?! That website is poison! There isn’t a single tenet of neopaganism that it doesn’t attack! A thorough reading of it would only serve to boot the budding neopagan out of his or her path! I really hope that link is there because of stupidity and not malice. return

You can visit Heathen Dawn at his website:
The Eclectic Satyr
"I’m a neopagan university student of Arabic, Islam and history, working my way on the long and winding road towards the cherished PhD."

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