Let us begin by explaining why we do things the way we do. None of us profess to teach any courses, here. We have no clergy, and only one honorific title. That of "Brutus" (1), to be awarded to whomever most distinguishes himself in the effort to save the group and its tradition, from whomever would dare to claim the title of "Priest" or "Priestess". Even at that, it is a matter of individual judgement, to whom it has been awarded, as there is no general vote on expulsion, but merely a series of refusals to offer an invitation. One would be the Brutus of one of our hearths, not of the entire group. Click here for commentary on that.
It seems natural for someone new to a path, to seek guidance along it, does it not? But the question is, who shall offer the guidance, and what form shall it take?
Each of us, as he came to Paganism, must have had a thousand questions. After seeking out a teacher to guide one, often he had a thousand and one. "How insane must I be, if these are the guardians of the path I feel called to follow?" Many give up, discouraged. They see as a failure, what is really a lesson - that they should not be seeking others to do for them, what they may do for themselves. They think they've been seeking Paganism, when what they've really been seeking, is their old parish, only with a hipper priest. But the Pagan experience, in some very important and fundamental ways, will be different from anything they've experienced before. One must pursue it, on its own terms.
We go out with romantic images of ancient priesthoods teaching untold wisdom, passed down to them from the ages, waiting for a time when the world will be ready to hear it. In reality, Wicca, one of the oldest of the extant Western Pagan traditions, can not be definitively dated to before 1939, meaning that some of our parents are of greater antiquity, than this faith.
Yes, there are ancient writings, but they are fragmentary, incomplete. They are what survived thousands of years of hostile totalitarian theocracies, book burnings, the destruction of entire cities ... often by sheer chance, as an ancient text would survive as a palimpest. That is to say, by the recovery of words that had been scraped off a page that had been reused, by examining the indentations left in the paper. When you think about it, it is remarkable that any of that once forbidden literature, survived at all. So, if I tell you that we can not hold the Fontinalia, because nobody has the slightest idea of how it was observed, and that we can not offer Angerona her traditional honors, because noone even knows who she was, this should be no cause for astonishment.
The sad reality is, that we can not even know if the teachers of the ancient wisdom were especially wise, because little can be said of their teachings, and much of what can be said, is little more than conjecture. Let us note, that as Paleo-Pagan traditions go, those of Greece and Rome are among the best preserved. All that we can do, is read as much as we can, think about it, and piece it together as well as our understanding allows. But we have to face the truth of the vast breadth and depth of what it is that we do not know, and thus, how much of what we conclude, is little more than educated guesswork.
It would be vanity to speak of "teaching" under such circumstances. It would be a travesty, to try to offer "degrees". All we can honestly do, is say, come, talk with us, and let us try to find the truth together. All true learning begins with the full appreciation of what it is, that one does not know. If you seek out those who promise you certainty and clarity, where reality provides us with doubt and confusion, then you are humbly sitting at the feet of those who have not even begun to learn. To wait to acquire wisdom from these, is like waiting for another to fill one's glass, from an empty vessel.
This alone, would be reason enough, to refuse to establish a priesthood. In this area of study, we all stand on a level of primitive equality. But, also, we are left with the fact that a priest is to be a representative of his god. Who are we to presume to speak for another, without his consent? A priesthood can only be legitimately established by the deity it is intended to serve. It can only be legitimately maintained by apostolic continuity - by the existence of an uninterrupted chain of ordinations, each priest ordained by the priest before him, leading back to a first, divinely ordained. While we have witnessed the small miracles that come of answered prayer, we have not seen anything on the mythic, or biblical scale, that would be a sign that one of us may speak on behalf of either Olympus or Heaven (*).