Religious Beliefs of the Fellowship

It is undisputed that the Fellowship embraces a body of beliefs that may be termed "religious", and that the Fellowship expresses itself in its Texts largely in a manner that can only be described as "religious".

However it rapidly becomes apparent, if "zooming in" on the Fellowship's "religion", that the matter is nowhere near as clear-cut as may at first have appeared to be the case.

For example, so many of the core principles that seem to constitute the Fellowship's ethos can be situated, if stripped of whatever specific religious tags and names they may incorporate, quite comfortably within the framework of virtually any of the major world religions.
Moreover, although the Fellowship by custom refers to the Deity in a very specific manner ("the Goddess", etc), it has never been dogmatically insistent upon that usage, being fully prepared to embrace far less personalised forms of reference.

And it is freely admitted that the Fellowship as it now stands represents a composite of elements adopted from various Spiritual and Magical Disciplines. This also is reinforced by virtue of the fact that many of the participants have arrived here from a variety of different paths and belief systems.

It has to be questioned then whether the Fellowship's beliefs constitute a "religion" at all in the accepted sense.

That all the participants in the Fellowship have to date unreservedly acknowledged a "divine presence" that is experienced as mortal existence being guided by a trans-dimensional intelligence to a pre-ordained plan, and furthermore that they have referred to this as "the Goddess" is a simple statement of fact.
But - with possibly one or two exceptions - the majority of the Fellowship's participants would be equally as ready to acknowledge that this term is little other than a convenient label that, in a sense, acts as a focus around which we can construct our relationship with that ultimately unknowable and indefinable "divine presence".

It is perhaps for others to decide whether or not the Fellowship's aggregate body of beliefs and practises constitute a "religion" - we are unconcerned either way!
In this context it may be instructive to read our "Yardsticks of Belief".