The worst of the fluffy bunnies, eclectics treat the cultural and spiritual possessions of other people like a huge salad bar, picking and choosing whatever suits their fancy. Their religion is just a frankenfaith, a mish-mash of things with no regard for context or the feelings of others. They may claim to be Wiccan, Christian or both, or neither, but the only way they can be accurately described is as spiritual predators that prey upon…

   …ugh. I have tried to portray in the above paragraph the general view of religious eclectics for a number of outspoken religious practitioners who are small minded, ignorant and often eclectic-themselves (though they’d never use that term.) I can only carry on like that for so long, before the cognitive dissonance gives me a migraine, so I hope you get the gist. While it is certainly true that some eclectics are obnoxious ignoramuses who leave destruction in their wake, the bulk of eclectics are actually eclectics for damn good reasons. Discovering those reasons requires a level of introspection that necessitates a move away from the self-centeredness of those phony eclectics described by the first paragraph.

   Those eclectics who have journeyed to the “way of many paths” without leaving damage in their wake are eclectics in the true meaning of the word. I call these eclectics “ethical eclectics” but, in reality, they embody the true meaning of the word eklektikos-those that gather to themselves and select from what is gathered. They are those that gather knowledge and use that knowledge, refusing to be told that only one way, or one source, is right.

   They are not salad bar consumers, but produce specialists, knowing which apples taste the best in pie or raw, and which potatoes taste best baked. This is not a result of randomly sampling things and hoping things come out okay, but a result of intensive study. Intensive study that, by its nature, makes one understand the effects of whimsical sampling and why to avoid it.

    That’s not to say that all eclectics are ethical, there are certainly a despicable few who leave a path of destruction in their wake. These eclectics rarely seem eclectic under close inspection as they generally have gathered their practices from one or two books, or something they read on the internet, or even from one tradition or school. By their nature, these “one or two source” people are not eclectics, but followers of one or two sources who refer to themselves as eclectics rather than commit to any one name for their practices. They are the few who describe themselves as “just eclectics” as if being eclectic were somehow a lesser state than being something else.

   Eclectic Christians, Wiccans, Jews, Hellenists, Satanists, Ceremonial Magicians and others are people who have carefully selected from many sources because any one source is not enough. I like to explain this best by asking people to compare cable news channels. There are certainly slants and specializations. You may tune to one for weather, another for political commentary and a third to try to understand the political views of those you disagree with. No singular station will provide all of these all the time, but by carefully switching stations, you can get all three.

   To take the metaphor to its logical extension, without remaining on one channel for any period of time, you will not get enough information to act upon. An eclectic, therefore, changes the station to learn more, and keeps it on the station they need when they need it. In short, and to reiterate, an eclectic takes from as many sources as possible and works with those things that can be integrated into their religious and/or spiritual practices, discarding or setting aside those things which cannot.

   There are a number of other, competing definitions of eclectic that I’d like to get out of the way before I continue forward, just so that we can be sure what we are discussing. I know the last thing I want to do is get fifty pages into a book and realize that it isn’t about what I thought it was about…

Eclectic does not refer to a religion, spirituality, a tradition or sect, a lack of a tradition or sect, or indeed, infer in anyway anything about a person’s beliefs beyond that they are gleaned from many sources.

   It is not uncommon today to hear people describe themselves as eclectic and mean that they are a Wiccan without a tradition (atraditional Wicca or tradition-less Wicca.) It is also fairly common to see people with Paganesque beliefs define themselves as an eclectic and mean that they are not dedicated to a specific form of Paganism. Eclectics come in all religions and non-religions.

Eclectic does not mean syncretic or combining two or more things.

   If you are a Wiccan who is also a Celtic Reconstructionist, you are not suddenly an eclectic. What you are is multifaithed or polyreligious. These terms may vary from group to group but essentially mean the simultaneous practice of two or more non-competing, non-exclusive religions. While that idea may sound impossible to those familiar only with Abrahamic religions, the religions of other peoples and times were often less possessive of their members, allowing people to simultaneously follow family religions, civic religions and the cults of individual gods. In some situations, polyreligious practice would only be seen within the same pantheon (family) of deities, but examples of polyreligious practice that was cross-pantheonic were not unheard of in the ancient world, and not as uncommon as some would lead you to believe today.

   If you combine competing, or exclusive religions into your practice, you may have to reevaluate your positions. For example, traditional Wicca (Gerald Gardner’s version, for instance) describes the Christian God as the god of the Christians, and describes Christians as being opposed to Witches. If one wishes, then, to follow simultaneously the god of the Witches and the god of the Christians, one must seriously question the validity of such a practice. That’s not to say such a practice must not occur, only that for such a practice to be reasonable, it must be very well reasoned, and in that reasoning, one may discover that such a practice is best discarded.

Eclectic does not mean “do whatever I want.”

   There is a prevalent myth that being eclectic means that you are a free wheeling loosy-goosy gentle spirit who moves, sylph like, on the wind, being buffeted about in whatever direction strikes your fancy. If there is one definition of eclectic I would strike from everyone’s mind if I had the opportunity, it would be this one. The idea that one who is eclectic is a “mere eclectic”- an unschooled, uncouth dabbler who is fueled only by personal whimsy (and more often greed and pleasure) who does whatever the heck they like and the consequences be damned.

   Contrary to the rantings of an ignorant few, acting like this is not acting “like an eclectic” but acting like someone who is unethical. Are there eclectics who are unethical? Hell yes! Their lack of ethics, however, is not a result of their eclecticism but a result of having blatant disregard for their fellow humans. It is to those people, and those who want to avoid becoming those people, that this monograph is most seriously addressed.

So what is an eclectic?

The second word of the first chapter of the first book I ever wrote was the word eclectic. While All One Wicca has its fans, it was written nearly a decade before it was published in its most common edition, so, in my opinion, it goes downhill from there. That’s not to say it wouldn’t be the first book I’d recommend to a beginning Wiccan or newbie to UEW, only that at the time I wrote it I was not so far from a beginner myself and really hadn’t been exposed to enough other eclectics to speak about the term in anything other than the most esoteric of language. I was not so far from the “because an authority said so” phase, myself.

An eclectic, I said then as well as now, takes from many sources. This can be, when mitigated with a basic sense of propriety, a really powerful state. You are not limited to one understanding of the divine or of reality, but are exposed to a huge wall of data from which you, like a character in a William Gibson novel, can pick up threads of meaning and coherence that other folk are absolutely blind to. To do this you use powerful filters on reality, and when those powerful filters have strong technique and a little bit of talent you can learn profound lessons from the smallest and most unimportant of things.

Yes, we can see the universe in a mote of dust dancing in a sunbeam, or figure out the plan the gods have for our lives by asking to have it shown to us, but these things aren’t intuitive. You can’t (usually) just glance over at a sunbeam and face the revelation of a grand unifying theory. You have to go looking for it, and learning to look for it is hard work.

Eclectics begin this work first by understanding the paradigm they are choosing to begin with, even if their eventual intention is to blast that paradigm to smithereens. The Wiccan, Pagan or other eclectic doesn’t start out eclectic. His first goal (and I use ‘his’ only because I see it as gender neutral when nonspecific) is to completely understand the path he first identifies with, even if he eventually comes to disagrees with said path.

For example, the GAM (Golden Age Matriarchy) theory is held, to this day, by a select group of Wiccans. An eclectic Wiccan, beginning his path, would be familiar with this theory; he would study it, understand it and probably reject it. If a traditional Wiccan who believed in this theory asked him about it he would be able to discuss it clearly. He may, in fact, reject it as the wishful nonsense it is, but he still knows what it is, why it exists, and probably the names of the core inventors. He can tell you exactly why he doesn’t believe it.

To the outsider, looking in, eclecticism looks like a jumbled mass of nonsense, and it is not surprising that this has resulted in the idea that eclecticism is nothing more than doing whatever you’d like. In fact, to say it is so small a thing is to both demean and misrepresent the vast majority of eclectic practitioners. The core foundational rule of ethical eclecticism is whatever works and a thing that is done without reason, harms other people or cultures or has unintended results, by definition, does not work.

Look at a common toaster, for example. I once had a toaster that made toast but shot out sparks while it did so, nearly causing a fire. This toaster made toast, so by some people’s definition of a toaster it did fine. I, however, gave it to my local fixer-upper as a weekend project and bought a new one for ten bucks because I wasn’t interested in paying about that in replacement parts and the darn thing was really ugly. It didn’t work just because it made toast-it didn’t work because in addition to making toast it had unintended side effects.

In ethical eclecticism we often proclaim “whatever works” with the unspoken knowledge that something does not work, by definition, if it produces unintended effects. The “whatever works” stance is often attacked as promoting cultural piracy, avoiding intellectual integrity and worse, but it is the pinnacle of ethical practice, the opposite of “whatever I want.”

Having therefore established eclectic as coming in two basic varieties-the genuine “whatever works” type and the erroneous “whatever I want” type, we can discuss the idea of eclectic religion as a whole without having to make these distinctions. As should be obvious from the title, we will return to the distinction between ethical eclecticism and its polar opposite, but for now a discussion of eclecticism itself should suffice.

An eclectic, I have said repeatedly, takes their faith from many sources, from the continuous stream of data that pours out of the universe on a daily basis. As the information flow gets larger and larger, the eclectic’s reality gets larger and larger until they begin to discover core universal truths in the seeming chaos of dataflow. It’s really not surprising, then, that Wiccans, with strong eclectic movements since the days of gopher and telnet, have taken over cyberspace, their websites a constant hum in the background of reality, their voice always heard in internet conversations. The only problem, and the cassandras who watched the internet become the nation’s information backwater predicted it all along, is that as the voice got louder and louder it became an easy way to get cheap attention and was mimicked and duplicated until it began to make no sense.

In a way, Wiccans did this to themselves. There were always people and traditions that manipulated the basic concepts of Wicca in new and creative ways. Rather than be recognized as innovative modern traditions, these people were seen as doing whatever tickled their fancy at the time, and both the attacks of the conservative Wiccans and the views of the outside public promoted these movements as doing whatever the heck you wanted.

These post-modern and deconstructionist Wiccans are, in a way, much like abstract artists. You really can tell the difference between a bowl of fruit painted by Matisse and a bowl of fruit painted by someone with no artistic ability and passed off as abstract, impressionistic or modern. You can also tell the difference between an “abstract” type of Wicca and something that is given the title Wicca but is just bits of the new age slapped in with some old-sounding terminology.

Where a Matisse differs from a photograph is where these abstract Wiccans differ from traditional Wicca. They manipulate deity concepts, ritual language and ideas about energy based on a firm knowledge of those things. Where they do not do things exactly as their spiritual ancestors did they do so with a thorough knowledge of why their ancestors did what they did and why they don’t do the same. They cannot manipulate energy and ideas without a place to begin from, no more so than you or I could use a laboratory to genetically alter something without knowledge of DNA, the organism being manipulated and the ways the equipment works.   

Therefore we are defining as eclectic as not merely a person who takes from many sources but a person who takes from many sources with knowledge of their core theology, whether said person is Wiccan, Pagan, Satanic, even Christian. The difference between the successful eclectic and the unsuccessful one is the difference between cogent beliefs and nonsensical ones, a difference that begins with discrimination.

Discrimination gets a bad rap in our society as it is often used to mean “discrimination with respect to race” without any qualifiers. Despite this, we still use it in phrases like “discriminating connoisseurs” and “discriminating guests.”  It is this second usage, the older one, which I refer to when I say discriminating. Discriminating eclectics can tell the difference between things that will render their paths nonsensical and things that will render their paths more personal or simply better.

Like our discriminating connoisseurs and discriminating guests, the discriminating eclectic must have a good idea of what is functional in order to gauge things as exceptional. To a person who has never tasted a great wine, for example, the difference between an average wine and a poor one is little more than shelf price or color-their range of wine experiences is so slight that the variation from their high end to their low is quite little. Eclectics work much the same way in spirituality: if their idea of a good work on Celtic Spirituality is DJ Conway’s Celtic Magic and their idea of a bad one is Edain McCoy’s Witta, they not only have a tiny range between good and bad but that range is so small, comprised of such minutia, that an expert on Celtic Spirituality is unable to see any difference between the two works at all-both are just the lower fringes of a bell curve, so much worse than average that they become impossible to distinguish.

This hinges on an understanding of the greater problem, that the eclectic focused, for example, on the Celts, must become a sort of quasi-expert before he adds those things into his practice. He must acquire a baseline of expertise that would, at the most minimal of levels, involve asking the Celts we have today what books they find good and reading them. This is what has been called “borrowed expertise” and it consists of nothing more than finding a person whose discrimination in your preferred field is based on a strong knowledge of the field and trying to replicate that knowledge as needed to coherently assemble an opinion of what is and is not good material. As we say in academia, ask an expert what’s good, and why it is good, and what’s crap, and why it is crap.

This may be counter-intuitive to the way many eclectics are taught to operate, namely as solitary practitioners, often with the idea that this means they must do it all themselves from start to finish. They feel they must design rituals, found a tradition and create a mythology even if what they create is crap (or worse- identical to what someone else has created in all but name.) A person who operates in a vacuum, without any help, without using the vast resources available to him -not just other pagans and pagan books but secular books, libraries, the internet, television shows, grandparents, friends- is not a solitary practitioner. People like that are just loners, and better suited to shacks in the wilds of Montana than pleasant company. While it is true a person is quite capable of being an eclectic without other eclectics to help, you can’t truly be an eclectic alone. If your idea of taking from all sources is to take from two books, you’re not an eclectic, but a follower of the “Book A and B” Tradition of whatever you call your spiritual quest. That, in and of itself, is not a bad thing, those two books might be really excellent material, but to limit your many sources to two-or even several dozen-sources is not eclecticism. Eclectics take from every source they encounter. Sometimes all they take, the full extent of it, is complete rejection of what they’ve encountered, but that in and of itself is a lesson that goes towards the greater body of truth and source material an eclectic uses to move through life.

Ethics, expertise (borrowed and actual,) a core theology or philosophy and the ability to filter vast mounds of data are all parts of the eclectic’s palette. A person without these things who tries to be eclectic is simply holding a dozen puddles of paint in their hands and hoping that the drips and slops will make a pretty picture. True eclectics, on the other hand, are drawing brushes through the paint, applying the brushes to the world and regularly stepping back with wonder to see what they’ve made, often amazed at what they see, sometimes confused and sometimes enlightened. It is these people whose works most resemble the greatest works of all time- The Pyramids, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the Golden Gate Bridge, while still being unique. Their works, like these monuments, take more than one person’s labors, a mason to cut the stone, an architect to design the church, an engineer to figure out tension and sway. An eclectic is often many things, and he may well be many of his sources, but he knows, deep at his core, that he is not all things, and that makes all the difference.