Why I Charge Money for Magickal & Spiritual Training

This essay is kind of buried within the Reflections Mystery School web site. Since it is part of my extended rant on money, I thought it might be helpful if I published it here for completion. It will also provide some background for my next post.

Enjoy,
K

Why Charge Money? Money Exchange Pic

We charge for our classes because, first and foremost, it provides income for our teachers. Secondly, it insures that the exchange that is made between teacher and student is as clean as possible given the nature of spiritual instruction and training.

Money is a token of life force energy. A student receives life force energy from their teacher or mentor. If a student does not pay or provide for the instructor there is an imbalance in the energy exchange. This imbalance can create an energy debt that cannot be repaid fully, which over time can build up into a form of resentment. This kind of indebtedness can also later cause problems within the communication between teacher and student and inhibit further training. Students who pay for their instruction, are relived of this energy imbalance. This provides space for true indebtedness, the debt that should not be repaid, only honored and remembered. We become free to acknowledge the debt we owe to all our elders, teachers and ancestors.

We also charge for our classes because we do not buy into the notion that one should not charge for magical trainings. The notion of free training reflects the reality of another era and one that frankly has a cultural and class bias.

Early teachers in the wiccan revival, especially in England, discouraged witches from accepting money due to the restrictions against witchcraft within British law. However over the years, this early restriction came to be interpreted as a moral stance instead of as a response to a legal reality.

Many of the early British practitioners were also members of a privileged class. One of the ways to inhibit those of working class origins from taking on leadership roles in the nascent movement was to make participation at those levels contingent on not needing to supplement or earn an income from the work. Thus the moralist stance became embedded due to this class-based perspective.

This moralist stance has caused many elders in the craft, who over the years literally gave away all their time, talent and energy, to find themselves living at or below the poverty level in fairly destitute conditions in their old age. The only way to counter this dangerous trend is to re-examine the assumptions that caused it.

Many ministers, shamans, mullahs and rabbis are allowed to earn an income as spiritual leaders and clergy to support themselves and their families. Additionally, the legal restrictions against receiving monetary compensation for occult and Wiccan training no longer exist. All that is left is the false moralism that inhibits pagan teachers and elders from receiving adequate financial support. Maybe in days of old, the village routinely provided for the care and feeding of its wise women and men, but in today’s realities bartering can not assist our teachers in paying their rent, utilities, and healthcare costs or plan for their eventual retirement.

Posted in

Submitted by katrina on Wed, 08/02/2006 - 2:10pm.

Macha NightMare (not verified) | Sat, 08/05/2006 - 5:15am

I've always thought the hang-up about not charging money for training was the old dualism bugaboo inherited from the Abrahamic overculture, which places money/material/female/the joys of the flesh/Earth in opposition to (and inferior to/less evolved than) spirit/etherial/male/self-abnegation/sky.

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Recent comments

  • Claire-Marie Le Normond (not verified)

    Wish I could be there. Very well spoken.

    15 weeks 2 days ago
  • David Salisbury (not verified)

    Katrina,
    I wish you all the blessings and power you need on your journey. Thank you for these words. It is good to remember that returning to work (and thus returning to grace) bring a chance for us all to rest and have joy.
    Wishing you joy in the Work.

    David

    17 weeks 4 days ago
  • Sigre (not verified)

    Dear Katrina- Thorn reposted your blog and happy am I. Your passion, always so immense, comes blowing out in these words. So akin to my own heart and soul that it makes me have a bittersweet smile.

    The Storm is only now coming to the edges of our universe and yet it will sweep and consume all that is. In the end, our beautiful universe will be so much...more? Different? Complete? Who knows?

    All I do know is my soul came here to witness and be part in this period. I cannot shrink from the work. I am here with you, fae sister!

    17 weeks 5 days ago
  • Macha NightMare (not verified)

    Thought-provoking piece, Katrina. Thanks.

    I don't know what to call myself either. In Pagandom, I've taken to referring to myself as a Witch at Large. In the interfaith world where I'm active, I call myself a Pagan. Sometimes I call myself an uppity woman or a Second Wave Feminist. I've never really thought to publicly identify myself by my sexuality, het woman, which is very "white bread" and old-fashioned. Not only het, but serially monogamous for the most part. It seems almost a liability these days to say you're het, but I am proudly and happily so. I tend towards intellectualism but only have a BA, which doesn't carry much weight, at least in public and professional worlds, no matter how much you've studied, trained, and can articulate, even teach.

    My biological heritage is Irish, Dutch, French Huguenot, Euro-mongrel. My social heritage is Roman Catholic on one side and conservative Methodist, temperance-crusading, women's rights and education on the other, with distinct East Coast sensibilities, now mellowed by more than half a century living on the Left Coast. My maternal political heritage is conservative Republican (altho what my relatives might think of current trends in the GOP I cannot imagine, since they did have brains and they did think and they did have a social conscience), yet I am much farther left in my outlook than any elected official I know. My paternal political heritage is blue collar Democratic, except that my dad broke with his family on politics and allied with my mother's family's conservatism.

    I'm a former hippie, a home-birth advocate, a home death and green burial advocate, an opponent of capital punishment and resorting to warfare to resolve humankind's differences. I support the right to conscious self-deliverance. I rejoice in any and all consensual expressions of love and eros. I'm a lover and a mom.

    I have never missed voting in an election and I disrespect those who don't avail themselves of this hard-won right. (I have ancestors who fought the Brits in the American Revolution.) I support workers' rights. I recognize our interdependence on this planet, so could be called a greenie. I'm a committed environmentalist in my day-to-day life (in terms of eating locally grown food, expanding public transit, recycling, preserving open space and wildlife, opposing exploitation of natural resources [strip mining, oil-drilling, nuclear facilities, agribusiness, monocultures, clear-cutting timber, overuse of pesticides, genetic modification, etc.]) I want to make the city streets "safe for dancing," as my old friend Tony Serra said when he ran for mayor of SF on the Platypus Party ticket.

    Well, you got me going there, my friend. Thought-provoking read, as I said. ;-)

    xo,
    Macha

    34 weeks 2 days ago
  • Eridanus (not verified)

    Lovely azaleas!

    [cough][gag][snort][sneeze]

    Just lovely...

    I know what you mean.

    36 weeks 5 days ago
  • Anonymous (not verified)

    I feel you. There is too much bs- particularly when people decide that their temperament is tantamount to truthful and ignore everyone else.
    I get irked by immature extroverts or closet introverts who ignore you REPEATEDLY and then pretend you're out of line for being upset by the time they can't pretend you didn't say anything anymore. I find that the same people will ignore you if you blow up right away, too, and that it's because they just don't think that honoring what you value is important to maintaining a relationship, or even worse: that you don't know what you value at all and that it's all a mind game for their pleasure or annoyance. Then they call you passive-aggressive, aggressive, moody, touchy and temperamental. I call them "not listening".

    36 weeks 6 days ago