Why do some Wiccans and witches call themselves metaphysicians?

Tagged:

When Gerald Gardner devised Wicca, he tapped into a vein of spirituality whose mines had been abandoned since the 1800s, when Protestant Christianity managed to overtake popular folk cults and all but wipe them out. People have always had the urge to make their own gods, to study and practice the esoteric.

Wicca, and the New Age, brought these ideas back with a vengeance, culminating in the 70s with the hippie movement. Scores of writers exploring all manner of themes around alternative spirituality created a plethora of terms and practices.

How to cut through it all? Well through comparative study and historical analysis, we can come to a few broad distinctions that ultimately stem from human nature. Our personalities largely determine whether we can be happy in, say, a church congregation, or something like a Wicca coven.

What makes people want to escape the world of Christianity and pursue spirituality under another banner? Well, the term at hand is gnosticism, and fundamentally it’s a choice of how to worship, and how you want God to reward you. Gnosticism focuses on and rewards knowledge rather than faith.

Another important distinction is whether you want your deity or deities to be personal or not. A personal deity, such as “the Goddess,” Hermes Trismegistus, or Jesus, is a being you can relate to, and contact and communicate with through meditation, prayer, or divination. When you depersonalize spirituality, you focus on divine forces, math, and accumulating divine power for the self over submitting to an external, incorporeal person.

Really they’re two sides of the same coin. It’s not like one is really better than the other. So long as you’re thinking spiritually and discovering what you love out of the world and existing in it, creating movement and delight and joy out of an otherwise meaningless place, that is something that will be rewarded, the pedantic distinctions are inconsequential in the long run.

And so a ‘metaphysician’ as described by the question is a follower of gnostic spirituality that chooses not to work with a personal deity. It’s the forces and ideas that drive them, not divine submission to a higher will.