Low church witch

It seems that every witchcraft & pagan blog except this one has had a post about 'Samhain' this week. I was thinking about this as I got off the bus & walked to work one morning this week. For me the year is divided into two halves, which don't really have names for me, so I suppose could be arbitrarily called - guess what - summer & winter. The division into winter is when I first go to work for a morning shift and the street lights are on, & obviously the division into summer is when they are first off. The strange irony is that while some modern pagans may feel that I'm in some way not a 'proper' witch or pagan for not keeping the wheel of the year that it seems *everyone* else does, the modern pagan wheel of the year only dates back to the twentieth century. In Britain (I may conceivably mean England when I say this, I'm not absolutely sure of the boundaries of this practise) the year had an overall division into two seasons, in reality making my practise much more historically authentic.
To my surprise I've wound up a very 'low church' witch from a liking for bells & smells. This is another way in which we as witches can seek & find authenticity. This blog originated in my dissatisfaction with the 'how to' books about modern witchcraft that I have some across. My opinion is that beyond a basic learning of techniques (which anyway I would feel free to pick & choose) witchcraft can only be learned experientially: it is a path on which you soon get beyond any signposts & how-to books. That is why, after several attempts at writing a book, which invariably turned into how-to books or became so vague that they could be written on the back of a fag packet, my book has become a blog. This is what it is like to be a modern witch, this is the experience, this is how it feels.
Don't forget that the word 'pagan' started off as an insult: the early Christianised city Romans saw the pagans as country bumpkins who did not accept their sophisticated new faith. And of course the word comes from the word for field, which like our concept of the hedge can represent a feeling of rootedness in a particular location. This is what makes my 'low church' approach authentic *for me*: I am rooting my personal way in what I personally experience, so that it means more to me than an invented calendar based on an agricultural life which I have never experienced & don't understand. If you want to accept the wheel of the year cobbled together in the mid-twentieth century be early leaders of Wicca & Druidry, feel free, I don't have a problem with that, but don't claim an ancient origin for it & don't attempt to impose it on me!
Similarly I'm getting much less ritualistic: how I want to scream when I see instructions in books for how you simply must set up your altar! I started off with the Children of Artemis's simple circle cast & have never got much more complicated than that. I'm finding I don't need to follow instructions for ritual: when the time is right it comes together, sometimes without me having to do anything at all! And in case you're wondering, I did have a little chat with my dad on Wednesday, but then I can do that anytime, I don't have to wait for a particular day.
To end, this is Robert Cochrane's definition of what a witch is (don't forget his bitter feud with the Gardnerians, and my only caveat to this is that a witch may frequently be particularly gifted in a particular magical art but not always others):
If one who claims he or she is a witch can perform the tasks of witchcraft, that is they can summon spirits and spirits will come, they can turn hot into cold and cold into hot, they can divine with rod, fingers and birds, they can claim the right to omens and have them. Above all they can tell the Maze and cross the Lethe. If they can do these things, than you have a witch"

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