Lately, when teaching, I have found myself saying more and more often, “Now I’m going to say something heretical” or “Now I’m going to go against the grain” or “Now I’m going to say something controversial.” And I started to wonder, when did Paganism and magical practices become dogmatic? And when did I become a heretic?! Dogma is an interesting thing to struggle with. When we’re teaching, when we’re learning, we need some level of fixedness to work with or we feel like we are running amok. We also need something against which to judge our own thoughts, revelations and personal gnosis. Without that, we suddenly think that every thought that wanders through our heads is divinely inspired… or that none of them are.

On the other hand, Ivo Dominguez always says “Be careful of the traditions and practices you accidentally set”. He tells a story of several generations of a family cutting off the end of a ham until it becomes almost sacred “Grandma always did this, its important”. Eventually someone asks Grandma why she did it only to learn that the pan she had to cook it in was too short to accommodate the ham.

We need to find our way between rigid dogma and a completely freeform approach. For much of my early life I was trained as a ballerina. While it taught me many things that I later worked for years to unlearn, it also taught me lessons that are still valuable. One of those is that the rules and structures exist for a reason. The reason is not to bind us, but to give us structure in which to learn. Only when we know the rules and are competent within the structures can we also be competent to know when they are no longer needed and when, in fact, they should be broken. The structures also teach us nuance – how do we work within them to do or learn something new or view it in a new way? And just as the structures are important, there are prodigies who come along whose bodies simply know how to dance and how to move both within and beyond the structure without the years of rigorous training. I have come to see these two truths as universal.

Within magical practice, we must learn the structures and “rules” in order to have context with which to judge our own or anyone else’s work. We must gain competence in the forms and practices in which we train in order to venture outside them, or even to see the nuance and complex beauty within them. And sometimes there are people whose talents simply make that unnecessary – though they are rare. And even they benefit from learning the practices.  We also have to keep ourselves from being so rigid that we don’t allow for that natural talent to show up, learn and be trained. And also, maybe more importantly, we need to keep ourselves flexible enough to encourage the questions, curiosity and learning of those students we teach, whether or not they come in order. Likewise, as students, we need to try to see the values in the structures and practices of our teachers so that we can both gain the value of discipline and grow beyond the need for the structures that taught us.