Wiccan's and Health Care

Slowly but surely the people who are closest to me have come to accept my choice of belief system. Mom has been reading and buying books on the subject, people see beautiful pentagrams and buy them for me as gifts, I am constantly getting curious and less judgemental questions about the Wiccan way of life and I am happy to hear them :)

So, I was pleased to see an email in my Facebook Inbox with the subject header "Give me your Pagan/Wiccan knowledge!" from a dear friend of mine. The body of the email was a query about how Wiccan's would react to being in a long term hospitalization situation, what would make us most comfortable, what our culture would have us do differently from the health care program, etc etc.

So - since it is a very interesting question and there is not much information out there about Wiccan's and modern health care I thought I would share my answer with you folks as well.

It was as follows:

Pagan's/Wiccan's/neo-Pagans are not a very demanding religion and have a large number of solitary practitioners so I would be inclined to say that a pagan may be more worried about having a positive influence on you rather than making individual demands to make your job more difficult than it already is.

The first thing that DOES come to mind is that we use sacred circles. On our altars they can be actually defined from colored chalk or ash or granulated minerals - but if we travel and need to feel safe a lot of us will cast a "Circle Casting Spell" in the area we wish to feel peace. Now - that circle can have people moving in and out of it at will - so again, that would not pose a huge issue with you and your job techniques.

Sometimes we wear talismans to help focus on what we want to achieve - so a healing stone would probably be worn on the body somewhere.

We have no special diet - some of us are vegans some like meat.

We do use herbs - so the brewing of a special tea would go a very long way.

Some don't mind being visited by clergy - some will not welcome the visit. Even though Wiccan's are overall a positive group of people - there are others who choose a "darker" path - they would be the type to hold a grudge on the prosecution of our religion by Christians in the past.

Another "challenge" you may find with a Neo-Pagan/Wiccan/Pagan is that since there is still a huge misunderstanding of our practices -we may never even tell you to begin with what our belief structure is. If someone was open about it - they may set up an altar - depending on their choice of altar items (for all pagans altar items are individualized and unique) it may pose a sanitary problem - but as previously mentioned if we thought it would cause your body undue stress - we are not likely to do that. As your body being stressed in our area brings negative energy with it - and negative energy is counterproductive to healing.

The practice of The Craft (which covers all "witchy" practices the way Christianity does for RC and Anglican etc.) is more about life than death so it is unlikely that there will be special requests upon dying.

If a Wiccan is not a solitary practitioner - they would have a coven - and covens can cast spells and send positive intentions to anyone anywhere without having to be around them - so large groups of visitors are not a huge issue either.

That is the best I can do with researching it myself some more - but that would be counter productive to you actually asking me as a person. Sorry it is so all over the place - but I typed what I could about what I actually know about.

Since Wicca is such an individual practice it is hard to predict how someone may act as a Wiccan. We have very few rules - and those walking the "darker" path often break them - but are still considered to be members of the religion.

We have our own healing spells - but we are not delusional and will seek professional medical attention if that is needed. There is no chanting and waving over serious disease or wounds. The basis of our religion is to be one with nature - and dying is only seen as the final step of our gift of life and the act of becoming physically one with mother earth as opposed to spiritually one like we are in life.

I would love to see your piece when it is finished - I am especially curious to see what your other resources provide since as a solitary practitioner I am always curious and interested to hear what others think and feel in our religion.

 

 

 

I was pretty pleased with my answer. I later discovered that my friend scored excellent on her paper - so I guess it sufficed.  :)