Monthly Columns

Wonderfully Wiccan with Derrick Land – January 2025: Spiritual Family: Traditions, Covens and Community

Bright blessings everyone and happy 2025!

I’m super excited to be a new columnist here at PaganPages.org and look forward to sharing my experiences with you fine folks. I live in Texas, and we are experiencing our “winter” right now, which is basically a week or two of temperatures that are right around freezing. We might even get a touch of snow! I know for Northerners that’s nothing, but for us down South, any kind of freeze is chaotic. Seriously, businesses and schools shut down. It’s a whole thing. For me personally, I love the colder temperatures and the longer nights! I often joke that I have reverse SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder).

One thing about Winter is that it is a time of togetherness. Traditionally the winter holidays were a time of feasting and spending time with family and friends. For many cultures, this remains true in modern times. In Wicca, this is a common theme kept for our Winter Solstice/Yule Sabbat. In my coven, for example, we typically include a gift exchange and decorate a Yule log containing wishes for the coming year that we burn in the hearth during our feast after the ritual. As we approach Imbolc at the beginning of February (which for us marks the beginning of Spring), the energy shifts to cleaning, cleansing and purifying our homes, temples and/or altars. It makes sense to me, there is always a clean-up after a party! The coming of Spring signals to us that the time for resting is over and that it’s time to get back to work – but we aren’t quite there yet.

Of course, spending time with family isn’t always a bed of roses. It can cause stress and frustration too, so it’s important to maintain healthy boundaries and it is absolutely okay to NOT spend time with those that will cause you anguish, even if they are family. Do what is best for your mental health. The thing is though, family comes in all forms. There is your biological and/or marital family, of course, which is perhaps the most commonly used definition of family and is what you are born into, but there is also your chosen family. The people that you choose to have in your life as family members because of the support and bonds you share with them. How many of us have a close friend that we refer to as family, even if they aren’t blood related? They are an example of your chosen family.

One sub-category, if you will, of chosen family that I think is not talked about enough is spiritual family. For mainstream religions, I think spiritual family is not as distinguished because most are raised in the religion of their household, so their spiritual family is largely the same as their mundane family. However, for anyone that follows a religion outside of their family religion (or never had one), which would include most Pagans and Witches, the search for a spiritual family to fill that void can be very real. Unfortunately, in our age of social media, where predators and misinformation can hide behind keyboards, screen names and avatars, that search has become all the more perilous, leading some to abandon it all together. But I’m here to say that it is possible to find a spiritual family, even in 2025.

In my opinion, spiritual family is not just finding people with the same or similar beliefs and practices as you, but ones that you are able to form a close bond with. People that share in your successes, failures and day-to-day life. People that support you but will also tactfully reprimand you when they think you’re going down the wrong path. Like any family, spiritual families are not going to be perfect. Some will be closer than others and sometimes you might have squabbles with each other, but it’s that bond you share that allows you to reconcile (assuming it hasn’t become toxic – remember, boundaries). My core spiritual family consists of my coven, with my extended spiritual family consisting of other members of my tradition. Of course, there are certain people outside of my tradition that I consider chosen spiritual family, just like the person you refer to as a sibling that is not biological family.

What exactly is a coven or tradition though? Let me preface this by saying that I write my column from a Wiccan perspective, so this may not apply to other religions, paths or groups, and that Wicca is a de-centralized religion, meaning that apart from some core beliefs and practices, one tradition, group or person may operate differently than another. I can only speak of my experience as a High Priest in the Rising Phoenix Tradition of Wicca. Your mileage may vary.

 

Tradition  

In Wicca, a tradition is similar to a denomination in Christianity. Late occult author Scott Cunningham gave my favorite definition of what a tradition is in his book, The Truth About Witchcraft Today (Llewellyn,1998):

“An organized, structured, specific Wiccan subgroup, which is usually initiatory, often with unique ritual practices. Many traditions have their own Books of Shadows, and usually recognize members of other traditions as Wiccan. Most traditions are composed of a number of covens as well as solitary practitioners.”

Right off the bat, we can see that members of a tradition are going to be taught the same core beliefs and practices of that tradition, which in and of itself creates a base level bond. There are things that I can discuss with other members of my tradition – history, teachings, beliefs, practices etc. – that would fall on deaf ears to those outside my tradition because they simply don’t speak our language. As someone that started out on my own, bouncing from book to book in self-study, I cannot tell you how comforting it is to be able to do this now.

Apart from speaking the same language, however, history and lineage are also of major importance to me when speaking of spiritual family. My tradition reached Austin in the early 1980’s, and since then there has been a continued lineage of groups that have passed down our teachings from one to the next. Our lineage is older than when it arrived in Austin, mind you, but that’s a story for another time. For me, there is something really special and meaningful about being a part of that. It’s something you simply can’t get as a solitary practitioner. Even if you decide to become a solitary later, being initiated into a tradition means that at some point you did group work.

My tradition is smaller and more concentrated in comparison to some of the other Wiccan traditions, but I think that makes the familial bond that much stronger. Being able to jump on a chat with my fellow priests, priestesses and elders, despite us being in different cities, states and continents, is priceless. Instead of chatting about movies, TV shows and who’s coming for Thanksgiving dinner like I do with my mundane family, we talk about teaching classes, magical workings and plan tradition gatherings/rituals – and then we talk about TV shows, movies, and other mundane topics. What? Did you think we ONLY talked about spiritual matters? We aren’t that rigid.

 

Coven

I’ve talked about my extended spiritual family, but what about my core? That would be my coven. In broad terms, a coven is a group of witches that meet regularly for a common purpose. Doreen Valiente, in her book An ABC of Witchcraft: Past and Present (Phoenix Publishing, 1973) discusses the traditional characteristics of a coven. It should consist of no more than 13 people with 13 being the ideal (6 men, 6 women and a leader). The regular meeting place for the coven [covenstead] should not be within 1 league (3 miles) of another to avoid competing interests. The members of one coven should not know too much of the personal affairs of another, with only the coven leaders being in contact with each other. This was mainly for protection as was the practice of taking on a nickname or magical name. After all, the persecution of Pagans and Witches has lasted well into the 21st Century.

Like with Cunningham’s definition of what a Wiccan tradition is, I think Valiente’s description is mostly applicable to modern times. I do not agree with striving to have an equal balance of gender, especially since I recognize that gender is a spectrum and something different than biological sex. It is true that Wicca works in a binary structure, but I believe we contain both masculine/active and feminine/passive energies within us and therefore have the ability to tap into either/or as needed, regardless of sex. Including or excluding membership of a coven solely on perceived gender to “get the right number” is antiquated and better left in the past. However, I do tend to align with the rest of the characteristics, especially smaller numbers.

I personally have never been part of a group or coven that consisted of more than 13 core members. It is more difficult to manage larger groups, that’s true, but more so it’s much rarer than most realize to find people that will harmonize in a group setting, both in personality and energetically. Because we form more intimate bonds with our coven mates, it stands to reason that being admitted into an established coven is a selective process and why some covens, once established, will no longer consider new members at all. After all, it’s not just anyone that you can comfortably complain to, joke with or share your fears, hopes and dreams with. At least not for most.

That’s what it’s like in my coven. We have an Inner Court that is composed of initiates only, and an Outer Court that consists of initiates, non-initiates and friends of the coven (what we call hearth-kin). Naturally the higher you go in degree, the deeper your bonds become because you are doing more intricate and consistent work and spending more and more time with the same people. But between the classes/training and ritual gatherings, we have an active chat where we have spiritual discussions, mundane discussions about day-to-day life and plan mundane group activities, such as bowling, camping or seeing a movie (we are currently discussing going to see The Wolfman). Like a family.

I don’t have biological children, but in a way my students are my spiritual children. Teaching them, watching them grow and mature is what I imagine it would be like for parents raising their child. Where I was once a student, now I am the teacher. And some day, my students will become teachers and might branch off (we call it hiving) to form their own groups. But like with many things, it’s the journey, not the destination, that is most important. We swell with pride when one of us reaches a spiritual (or mundane) milestone. We band together when one of us is going through a rough situation to support and lift them up. And we laugh at ourselves when things don’t go quite the way we anticipated (the story of my dog locking us out of the house one Samhain comes to mind). Like a family.

 

Community

I would regret it if I didn’t give an honorable mention to my chosen spiritual family. I think of this as those members that are part of the wider Pagan/Occult/Witchcraft community that, while not necessarily part of my coven or tradition, feel like spiritual family just the same. After all, there are many things we can share with others, spiritually, besides being of the same tradition. Maybe they don’t speak my language per se, but their language is similar enough to where we can have a conversation and understand each other. Of course this isn’t just the local community. Thanks to social media and the internet, we can connect with folks all over the world! And the central theme for family is connection.

I am fortunate that Austin has a robust local Pagan community. Markets and meet-ups occur monthly, filling in the space between the larger events such as the multi-day camping festivals put on by organizations like Earth Spirit People of Texas and Spirit Haven, or the annual day-festival I organize, Austin Witchfest, in the city proper. I’ve lived in Austin for 14 years now, and I have met so many beautiful souls through these events. People I have shared sacred space with at meaningful rituals, many of whom have turned into precious, life-long friends; chosen spiritual family. As I write this, my mind is flooded with the faces of these people, along with so many wonderful memories. You know who you are my beautiful, beautiful tribe!!!

 

How to Find a Spiritual Family

Finding a spiritual family is going to vary from person to person because we all have different needs and experiences, but I think the best advice I can give here is to reflect on your own beliefs. A major reason I’ve seen with people feeling so disconnected is because they don’t know what they actually believe. Without that knowledge, they end up fishing on the wrong side of the lake and become frustrated because they aren’t getting any bites. Like with most things, you should take some time to look inward and figure this out. Meditate. Contemplate. Journal. It’s okay to not have all the answers and your beliefs may change or evolve over time, but reflecting on what you believe will help you figure out where to start looking. From there, you can start to look at local things happening in your area that align with your beliefs and start making connections. Hopefully, at least a couple of those connections will turn into bonds and the beginning of your own spiritual family.

 

That’s a Wrap!

As I bring this to a close, I encourage each of you to look at your existing relationships and at who you consider family – biological, marital, chosen, spiritual or by any other definition you prefer. The harshness of Winter reminds us that not everyone makes it through to the Spring. So, take some time to spend with family while you can. If you can’t physically be with them then give them a ring, send them a text or do a video call. Take a nostalgic trip down memory lane but also try to make new ones! And if you want to seek out a spiritual family, start to contemplate your beliefs and needs so you know what you are looking for and can recognize it once you find it.

Until next time! Blessed Be!