10/31/2005
“Oral tradition,” to paraphrase Samuel Goldwyn, generally isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. That’s particularly true in an information-based society, where everything is predicated on fast and easy access to every imaginable type of knowledge. If you can sit down in front of your computer and in just a few clicks have spread before you a breadth of information that it would have taken our ancestors a lifetime or more to access, if it were even possible, then precisely how many hoops will you be willing to jump through to attain that same information in another way? Who has time to sit at the feet of a guru and hope that all the necessary bits will be transmitted? It just doesn’t seem to translate well into the modern vernacular.
There’s much made of Gardnerian Wicca (and the other variants of British Traditional Wicca) having an “oral tradition;” but (hehehehe) I question the validity of that model in modern times. I’m not convinced it was ever entirely workable; a system as complex and hierarchical as what Wicca has become seems to me eminently unsuited to being orally passed. There are far too many little details to keep straight. There might have been a time, in the dim and distant past, when it was still possible to share these details informally, in conversation, person-to-person; there might have been a time, in the dim and distant past, when there wasn’t such a climate of clench-butt conservatism where minor variations in transmission might not have caused such major schisms (oh, but I doubt it very much!). Somehow, somewhere along the way, the rather romantic notion of a good old-fashioned oral tradition got twisted into a method for control and manipulation. Want to screw a person? Neglect to tell them something, let them stumble, then claim it to have been a part of the “oral tradition” that they weren’t passed, thus rendering them “invalid.” Or pass different information to different people, then kick back and watch the fur fly. “That’s oral tradition,” they’ll claim, when pushed. It’s not written down. That’s a Secret. And while those who’d engage in such games will call you an Oathbreaker right to your face no matter how good your intentions, they’ll never cop to being Oathbreakers themselves–even though there’s a little passage in there about never denying the secrets to a brother or sister of the Art. I suppose there’s a caveat to that that’s also a part of the Oral Tradition, which they also conveniently neglect to mention!
Oral tradition, like the much-hinted-at but actually nonexistent Training, is a carrot on a stick. So many things are dangled enticingly, making you think–even when you damned-well know better–that there just might be something there, and if you only keep at it, keep looking, keep digging and working and struggling and reading and searching and dashing your brains out against the rocks, you just might find it someday. “And then what, taijiya-san?” You ask. “Once you find it, what then?”
That’s a good question; I don’t know. I never found it. Certainly not for want of trying. The only real Training I was ever able to detect anyone giving was more of a learning-by-example of how to behave very badly. The only Training in matters magickal was pretty elementary stuff; most of what you’ll learn you’ll be learning on your own, through independent study and research and experimentation. Most of the people I met–the great and almighty Third Degree High Priesthood types–seemed curiously flat and powerless, their rituals lacking any life at all. Perhaps that was because all of their energy was concentrated into politicking and backbiting and middle-school-clique antics, there was nothing left over to devote to the Craft they were ostensibly Protecting from those whom they believed were Profaning it.
I wish there had been something there, something more, something deeper, something of real value. I wanted to believe that for a long time. I was able to convince myself to keep looking, if only because I’d met a few people along the way–people who weren’t frauds or fools or utterly contemptible bastards–who seemed to be getting something out of it that I wasn’t. It was hard for me to accept that this was something that I really couldn’t bend to my will or reshape as I wanted, and I knew that I couldn’t/wouldn’t bend or reshape myself to fit the system as it stood. Did I “get it?” Some would claim that I did not; I would say that I did, but that I didn’t want what I’d got. It wasn’t what I was hoping for. Those were hard lessons, lessons that I did indeed Suffer to Learn.
I wish I could say I was part of something with roots that ran deep and true; I wish I was a part of a time-honoured tradition, a way of doing things, a clan or a tribe with its own teachings and knowings. I’m not, and I guess I never will be. I can imagine what that might be like; when I write Sango, I give her that kind of knowledge, handed down through her people and ending in her as the last of her clan. Having it vicariously will just have to be good enough for me–although as a writer I should be able to accept that as being the best way of all. I have another, original character in a story I’m working up who discovers rather late in life that she’s a part of a magickal line that she never even knew existed. Those are cool things, romantic things, exciting things. Those are things that perhaps a lot of people want rather badly, if only because it’s so alien to what most Americans have grown up with. I understand that. I lament that it’s just fantasy. I would have liked to have made it real.
(ETA–The above doesn’t exactly still hold true, here in 2009; I have in fact managed to bend certain things quite nicely to my will, and co-create something that is a workable blend of old and new, progressive and traditional. It just took a very long while and an intolerable amount of angst to get our minds back around to owning that.)
The Serpent and the Moon 
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