As a little gay witch kid growing up in a time and place when it wasn't safe to be either, I learned early on: Let them think what they want to. In my own heart, I can be free.

Not having to follow someone else's rules is freedom from one kind of slavery.

(I might add that I've spent the rest of my life working to make it so that no one else ever has to live like that again. We're certainly not there yet—maybe we never will be—but we're well on the way.)

A friend of mine prides herself on never following recipes. To her mind, this makes her free. Maybe so. To my mind, though, this makes her just as much as a slave as someone who slavishly has to follow every last detail of every last recipe. It isn't following the rules or not following the rules that frees; it's the choice to follow, or not to follow, in any given case. The choosing frees, and in this sense we free ourselves every day, with every action that we take.

Not having to follow your own rules is freedom from another kind of slavery.

Ye shall be free from slavery, the Lady of Witches promises her people. It's quite a promise. But hear how she goes on: ...and as a sign that ye be truly free, ye shall be naked in your rites.

There's physical bondage and there's mental bondage, and it's clearly the latter that she's talking about here. That's her promise to her people: that social norms that constrain others will simply not be binding on us.

Here's the kicker: what she does not mean here is that all of our rituals have to be skyclad rituals. That in itself would be a form of enslavement, enslavement to the Goddess herself. What she wants for us—what she expects of us—is that we not be slaves, not even to her. The essence of freedom is in the choosing.

Make no mistake, being free is a pain in the butt. It means that you can't just float through life unthinkingly. In fact, it means that you have to think about every blasted little thing that you do. Living consciously to that degree is, frankly, a whole world of bother.

Well, welcome to Witch World, folks.

No one ever said that it would be easy.