I remember an animated conversation between two people at a pagan meeting. One was a Celtic Wiccan and the other a Kabbalist ritual magician. The Wiccan was insisting that doing a money ritual was best organized using green as the color motif. The Kabbalist was insisting that for prosperity the best color was blue.

Neither noticed until much later that they were not talking about the same thing. There is a fundamental difference between doing a ritual to manifest money and doing one to manifest prosperity.

The difference is in the difference between High and Low Magick. There are no Wiccans from far Northern countries or from arid deserts. Wiccans and the four seasons go together.

In 1991 I was talking by invitation to a group of pagans, mostly Wiccans, and someone raised the question of rituals like the Banishing Pentagram and Hexagram and other practices which seemed to be connected to magickal work based on the Kabbalah.

His question was: What does Kabbalah have to do with Wicca? Isn’t that all just Jewish stuff? My reply, though necessarily long, is still relevant, and may interest some readers. Here it is.

Josh Billings once said “It isn’t what folks don’t know that’s the trouble…it’s what they do know that ain’t so.”

EVERYBODY knows that witches worship Satan, kidnap babies for sacrifice, desecrate the Host, and enjoy cursing their innocent neighbors and anybody who offends them. And none of this is true.

Probably the two most widely used oracles today are the I Ching and the Tarot. The English translation from the German of Wilhelm's I Ching came out in 1950 with a famous foreword by Jung, describing how he used it, and explaining the principle of synchronicity. Since then many other versions have been produced in English. Some by Chinese Taoist scholars.

But since 1950 I have used it in one form or another as an oracle whenever reason and knowledge failed to cast light on a problem. It has never failed.