“Whatever works” does not equate to “anything goes“.
Wicca is not a tightly structured religion, and a lot of the time you are advised to use ‘whatever works for you’, or ‘whatever feels right to you’. This is not license to do just anything that you feel like. There are reasons behind the various practises in Wicca, and only when you understand why you are doing something can you think about changing it. I think a brilliant example of this is in Terry Pratchett’s Nation.
The natives of the nation in question create a traditional drink, and part of this involves spitting in the drink and singing a song over it. When foreigners come, they don’t know why these things are done and so omit them – with disasterous results. On the other hand, the girl that studies the culture learns that there’s some property in human spit that neutralises the deadly properties of the plant used in the drink, and the time it takes to sing the traditional song is the time it takes for the whole drink to be made safe.
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