Robinson,
I'm not a witch like Owlswing, and I'm not a coven member, so I wanted to put an alternative point of view.
My path's very personal to me. I don't have liturgy, or a ritual script to work from. In fact I don't have any kind of formal ritual. When I decided to open myself up to the pagan path most of the books I found were derived from Wicca one way or another, and the vast majority had instructions filled with 'and now say' 'and say this'. Not only did I find it prescriptive but a lot of the books came with dire warnings about the consequences of getting it wrong. For a while it put me off paganism altogether, given that I'd been raised a Christian and taught that paganism was evil. And having left one formal religion I didn't want to adopt another one, especially one where someone else told me what to do.,
Yet I knew I needed the freedom of the wildwood and connection to the land as my path. Time, and experience have taught me that the only things to be feared are those things that we conjure up with our imaginations. Now my path doesn't have a name - I guess there's some hedgewitch in there, given my use of herbs and moon cycles, maybe some Druid given my love of trees, and some shamanism - I drum, I smudge, and I am interested in the psychological aspects of totem animals, using our native UK ones. For me much of what I do is about intent, and above all, connection.
I'm a pantheist - all is god. I don't experience personal deities as real - if only - but I'm respectful of them and their stories do make up a part of my path - in my case it's the Welsh deities that speak to me. Well, it's not too hard to guess that one. Anyway, I have had experiences that have felt real to me, but I now think came from my imagination. It doesn't matter. I keep on my pathway, open to new changes and whatever it brings me. Through dark times and good, I wouldn't have it any other way. And I never look back to my old life with regret.
A lot of books referring to Wicca are, i regret to say, from the Llewellyn Press in the U S and over there they use the word 'Wicca' instead of 'witchcraft' and 'wiccan' instead of witch. I met a young American witch and her father at a Festival in Holborn quite a few years ago and they were amazed at the fact that we were so open about being witches to the poiint of about 500 of us parading around on the 'Pagan Pride' march. They were convinced that it would be, at the very least, social suicide for any witch to do the same in the States.
That aside, in the UK, Wicca (captialised) is the jealously guarded perogative of those who are 'Hard Gard', who follow the rules laid down by G B Gardner in his Book of Shadows back in the Fifties and is copied out, by hand, by each new initiate to a Gardnerian Coven and has added to it all the rituals done by the owner and any spells and other activities.
The Hard Gard consider themselves the Elite of the Craft and anyone not Gard is considered to be a mere week-end fair-weather witch, at best and is only allowed the title wiccan (uncapitalised) to show our lower status. Sod 'em I use the capital regardless.
As I have posted the danger from 'doing something wrong' very much depends upon what you are doing or trying to do!
On your path, Lady Rhi, I would suggest that you would have to get about a hundred miles off it to do anything wrong!
