Nature as tutor: seasons, cycles and polarities as didactical tools in Swedish Wicca

Lecture by Olivia Cejvan, project researcher, Department of Society, Culture and Identity, Malmö University.

Abstract

This ethnographic study of Sweden's Aine tradition (founded in 1995) examines the role of nature as tutor within contemporary Wiccan ritual practice. I analyse how the coven's educational system integrates lunar cycles, seasonal festivals, and cosmological polarities to create what I term "cyclical scaffolding”, a pedagogical approach where repeated ritual encounters with core mysteries deepen understanding through iterative experience. In the coven, initiates repeatedly encounter Wiccan mysteries at progressively deeper levels through three initiatory degrees. This becomes a spiral learning process, intertwined with moon phases and seasonal celebrations—creating a system where each new cycle touches new layers of meaning through nature's rhythms of death and rebirth, darkness and light. As practitioners mirror seasons, phases and polarities in their spiritual development, each return to ritual themes prompts progression from basic understanding to advanced insight.