opinion
by Melanie Fire Salamander
When I first entered the Craft, I learned you weren't supposed to charge money to teach it. I don't remember exactly when I learned this -- in the Wicca 101 class I took? From the leader of the first coven I joined? From my omnivorous reading on witchcraft and occult subjects? Not that there was much to be found on witchcraft in those days, 20 years ago.
Wherever I got it, the idea of not charging to teach the Craft chimed with something in me, so deeply that now it's part of my mental furniture. Every time I see someone offering classes for more than cost, looking for profit, this value of mine gives me a twinge.
My compunctions are several. First, money always has the potential to corrupt spirituality. If you sell spiritual teachings, it's too easy to bend your teachings for a profit. The Catholic Church of the Middle Ages is a good example of this, with priests selling indulgences, a shortening of the believer's time in purgatory, in exchange for cold, hard cash. One doubts whether there was much correlation between a believer's true wish to repent sin and the amount of cash in hand. Later on, the Anglican Church in practice made benefices the property of the local gentry, to dispense as they chose to their hangers-on. Did such a system lead to the most qualified shepherds tending the spiritual flock? Again, one doubts it.
The Spiritualism of the 19th century provides other examples. Take the Fox sisters, Margaret, Leah and Catherine, American women who built a career around mysterious rappings they said came from spirits, which Margaret later admitted were a fraud. They organized performances in theaters to which they charged admission. Perhaps they originally had a psychic gift, but the lure of money led them to fakery. Similarly, H.P. Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, demonstrated many psychic phenomena that her followers accepted as miracles, but published claims of fraud in the 1880s and 1890s undermined her reputation. By many accounts, she had real psychic gifts from an early age, gifts she seems to have punched up with tricks, leaving her credibility in shreds. Pure charlatanism is easy to deplore, but the sad thing is that the potential for material gain can create charlatans out of people with genuine talent. If you have a paying audience, the temptation is great to make your miracles a sure thing.
But spiritual transformation is never a sure thing. And that illuminates another potential problem: If you teach the Craft for money, what if your students don't feel they got their money's worth? If you fix people's cars, the proof of your work's success or failure is clear: The car runs better, or it doesn't. Troubleshooting a car's problems follows standard steps; consumers can tell if they're being ripped off. If you're trying to teach people to fix their lives spiritually, the proof of success or failure is less clear. Some people can learn to meditate; some people can learn to do effective magick; others, usually because of psychological or spiritual blocks they won't or can't address, cannot. If I attempt for money to teach a thing the student can't learn, I'm not sure that the student isn't right in wanting his or her money back.
The desire to make money from teaching spirituality often leads to the idea of a church, to which I admit I'm allergic. With a church, you can squirrel away the money you make, pay the clergy, buy yourself a nice building and so on. With a church, you create the consolidation, hierarchy and power to make ever more money from spirituality, and keep it. Yucch.
Oh, consolidation, hierarchy and power are effective for some things. You organize better using these tools; you get things done. But do they mesh well with spirituality? When a church is formed, often every idea that is the enemy of centralization of power goes by the wayside. Where are the Gnostics now? Where are the Cathars? The Catholics wiped them out so as to centralize the power of the Catholic church. With consolidation, even without armed brutality, all the lovely radical ideas fizz out of the system, leaving you the solid, material church. That's not what I want from spirituality, myself. The lovely radical ideas are what turn me on.
That all said, I haven't witnessed a lot of damage done by pagan charlatans raking in big dough for Craft classes, then splitting town. And our churches are still small, weak and often very spiritual. There's not enough money in the system yet truly to corrupt. So far we've been protected from the problems of materialism by our ineffectuality.
That, to my mind, is the second big problem with teaching the Craft for money: Mostly you don't get much money doing it.
I've been watching people try to make money by teaching spirituality for 20 years, and I've never seen anyone reputable support themselves that way, let alone get rich. When I was 18, a friend and mentor of mine, a visionary woman who helped organize a spiritual learning center, complained in my hearing that she wanted to live off teaching spiritual subjects and that she couldn't; she couldn't make rent. I've heard the same complaint from another friend within the last year. Both my friends are deeply good at teaching what they teach. The latter friend has talent as a marketer as well. But no go. It's my observation that you can make money from a store, selling books or products; you can make money selling services such as astrological or Tarot readings; you can make money writing books, though in general not much. I've never seen anyone make good money teaching the Craft.
I do know people who support themselves solely through spiritual teaching, generally also doing psychic work, but so far each of them has punched my "charlatan" button, if lightly. I think of a woman who does psychic readings and spiritual classes. My hackles rose when I saw from a flyer she was teaching a class on witchcraft, including what she called "first and second degree Wiccan rites." So I went and quizzed her.
The results were mixed. She had a magickal practice, solitary in town; apparently she was part of a larger group that met occasionally in person, mostly via the Internet. She wasn't part of a tradition, and she'd had run-ins with locals who'd challenged whether she was a witch. In my opinion, she had no idea what "first and second degree Wiccan rites" meant, let alone any right to present them. She had some training, but overall, to me, she seemed half-baked.
Yet, as an elder told me at the time, no one owns the word "witch." The woman planning to teach the class told me that she made no profit from teaching; what she charged merely covered the materials she provided. Maybe, maybe not. I would never recommend anyone take her class, and at the time I was looking for someone to whom I could send people, since my coven's classes are small and held only once a year. One of the main things that tipped me off to her bogusness was that she charged, and charged a tolerable amount, for classes.
I would always recommend a free class on the Craft, or a class that truly charges only enough to cover costs, over one for profit. To me, one mark of a true spiritual teacher is that it's not about money for him or her. Would anyone reputable refuse to give what spiritual knowledge he or she could just because someone couldn't pay? It's like healing (in many cases, it is healing). If you're a doctor, and someone falls unconscious to the floor in front of you, you don't ask if that person can pay your fee; you rush to help. Despite the exorbitant costs of health care, in each city I know, there are provisions for care for the indigent; it's part of the profession's ethos. So too, I believe, should we make spiritual teaching available to those who desire it, regardless of ability to pay.
I don't say my ideas on the subject are final. And I don't argue that teachers are obligated to poverty, either. I see all sorts of grey areas. Is writing a book on the Craft teaching the Craft? Yes, and yet I feel that all artists, including writers, should be compensated for their work if their work is worth it. Is doing a Tarot reading teaching the Craft? Not directly, to me, which is why I read Tarot for money. It's a skill I have, a talent, intimately related to my Craft work but not identical to it. Yet several times people have come to me specifically with questions about entering the Craft, and I felt I couldn't charge to answer those.
Fritz Muntean, who has worked in the Craft since 1963, told me that the best advice he'd ever had on the subject was from a rabbi teaching a class in the Kabbalah about 15 years ago in Portland. "According to him," Fritz says, "there's a tradition that on each sphere of the Tree of Life there's an angel and a devil, and it's the task of the pilgrim to discern which is which (they're not wearing name tags). In fact, much of what the devil has to say is sweet to the ears, and the angel's words are often quite challenging.
"On the sixth sphere -- The Sun -- tradition has it that what the devil says is: `Did you know you could make good money teaching this shit?'
"The angel, by way of contrast, advises us not to quit our day jobs."
I myself would like to be only a priestess and writer and skip the day job. But maybe knocking around the real world keeps us honest.