Excerpt: How and What Witches Learn: Modern Witchcraft in Suburban Australia

by Ziggy Smith (author’s “muggle” name)

After years of academic research, writing and publishing, I’ve learnt a major rule of thumb. There’s a fine line between being an achiever and being absolutely batty…

Someone once asked me why I wrote this book and I must admit that it took me a while to find the answer. I’ve always been one of those annoying overachievers, who on the surface achieves so much but underneath constantly battles between sensible workloads and idiotic over commitment. I work full time, am a member of several national boards and committees, teach Wicca, paint, write, breed cats and occasionally sleep when I get the chance. A friend once introduced me to her mother fondly as, “This is my best friend Ziggy, the overachieving witch!” although I think she probably meant the “witch” to start with a “b”! So when I decided that apparently I had some spare time (there was the first sign of idiocy!) and that I’d like to do a PhD (there was the second sign), I think my family and friends finally knew I’d flipped my lid. With the firm acknowledgement from those I loved that I was now in fact completely batty, the next step was simply to choose the subject matter, get started and prove them right.

And here we are. Here’s the final product, the book that details the years of doctoral research, the resultant PhD outcomes and that also proves beyond any doubt that not only am I an annoying overachiever but that they were right all along. I am indeed most decidedly completely batty!

Seriously though, my two major drivers outside my family, have always been my longstanding career in the adult education industry and my passion for, and life of, Wicca and Witchcraft. Having lived in both worlds for many years, I couldn’t quite understand why there seemed to be this gaping hole between what academia considered as being legitimate learning methodologies and the actual, real life learning modalities that were happening within my Wiccan community.

On the one hand, academia was telling my working colleagues and I that people learnt cognitively with their heads and through behavioural shifts. Apparently they only learnt new skills, behaviours and attitudes via observable, predictable modalities that were accepted around the world as legitimate, credible learning theories. As a career professional who teaches others how to teach adults, that’s therefore what I also taught budding teachers to believe. After all, cognition and behaviourism have been the primal accepted theories of learning for several decades.

But in my Wiccan community I constantly saw people learning using quite alien tools, such as gut instinct and intuition. Wiccans and Witches meditated, they did visualisations, they did path workings and divination and all that non “head stuff” and they came out of those exercises with new knowledge and skills. If they weren’t using their heads, if they weren’t being stimulated to change learned behaviours, if they weren’t using cognitive and behaviourist modalities, then how the heck were they learning? How on earth could they have such wisdom and insight if they weren’t learning using conventional methodologies? It didn’t make sense to me.

So clearly, there was a mismatch, there was something missing. As a teacher of teachers, it seemed I was missing something too; in fact it seemed to me that accepted global learning theory was missing something. My PhD subject matter was thus a simple choice really. Why not combine my two loves and study how Wiccans and Witches learn to be Wiccans and Witches? No one else had done that before I realised and I felt that with this knowledge and experience, I might also contribute to bridging the gap between the world of traditional academia and the often experimental and creative world of Wicca and Witchcraft in which I also lived.

So off I went searching for a PhD supervisor willing (or idiotic) enough to support me as I endeavoured to manage five years of intensive research and writing while still maintaining a full time career, a family and, well basically, a life. Anyone who’s done a PhD will attest to the fact that it takes over your life till you have no life! How on earth I was supposed to do that and still do everything else I normally did was something I carefully and gracefully glossed over in my explanations to prospective supervisors! Eventually I found a willing idiot – I mean supervisor – who, bless him, spent hours with me helping to sort through exactly how I was going to approach this and exploring how my research connected with existing anthropological and learning genres and disciplines.

Once I became immersed in the initial study, it became apparent that existing anthropological research and discussion related to contemporary Wiccan and Witchcraft practice was growing and indeed had been explored by writers from the northern and southern hemispheres. However, it also became obvious that there had been limited discourse on how and what Western Australian Wiccans and Witches learn; in fact there has been limited research on how Wiccans and Witches living anywhere learn.

The results from this ethnographic research fill that gap by exploring, in two separate sections, how Wiccans and Witches have developed relevant skills in a social learning structure and what ritual practice they have learnt as a result. This book, and the PhD thesis from which it was born, proposes that the current theories of learning and ritual fail to adequately describe the social processes and outcomes observed.

In the first section, focusing on how Witches and Wiccans learn, I argue that cognitive, behavioural and even humanist learning theories, as well as the most relevant social learning theory, Communities of Practice, fail to explain adequately the holistic learning processes with which many people are engaged. Instead I propose a new and complementary theory of learning that I identify as ‘Whole Person’ theory. This new theory more effectively describes the holistic and intuitive nature of learning the research participants undertook.

In the second section I go further to show that the existing theories of ritual fail to explore and consider ritual as a product or outcome of learning and instead focus heavily on ritual either as a process contributing to and reflecting the social order in which it takes place, or they describe the structure of ritual. This research shows that ritual can be both a process of a social group as well as a product and an end result of learning and social interaction. The ethnographic material presented in this book therefore extends our understanding of both learning modalities and ritual’s purpose.

Having offered what I consider to be the beginning of important discussions that will hopefully further our understanding and appreciation for a broader and more intuitive sense of learning, I wonder if I can now shed my lovingly assigned title of ‘batty’. A nice thought but one that I suggest is probably somewhat mute. The research doesn’t stop with one thesis, one book, one discussion. Understanding the concepts and practices of intuitive, holistic, whole person learning and seeing ritual as an end product of a social learning practice, will take years of pain staking observation, detailed research and much more global debate. Thus it seems I am destined to continue being hopefully an achiever but most certainly batty…