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interviews was knowledge of and love for your particular spiritual path, or for Paganism or Wicca in general. Anne Marie Forrester commented:
    Teaching should never be undertaken for selfish or ego-driven reasons. It has to be about having a deep love of the Craft and wanting to see it continue and prosper. More than that, it’s about having so much love for the God and Goddess that you are driven by a burning need to help others find it too.
    And Oberon Zell-Ravenheart said:
    Well, first off, a good teacher has to know their subject intimately and really love it with a burning passion. They have to be constantly and obsessively researching and learning more all the time. Intense curiosity is essential!
    He also gave some advice for potential teachers who want to feel well-grounded in their subject matter and ready to teach:
    Before you even begin to try and teach, take the time to study as many different paths and traditions as you can. Undergo initiations into the Mysteries. Study with different teachers, read many books, attend Pagan festivals, and go to lots of presentations and workshops. Hang out around the campfire or the conference party rooms and ask questions of the more experienced elders, teachers, and leaders who’ll be there.
    Humility
    Humility was also mentioned frequently. It’s easy to let teaching go to your head, especially if you have a bunch of attentive students hanging on your every word. But there are some potential pitfalls for teachers who are too arrogant or proud (more on those in C hapter 10 ).
    Patrick McCollum described it this way:
    I would say the first thing teaching requires is humility. Because when we think that as Pagan teachers or leaders we know it all, that’s when we really lose the ability to fully gain the respect of the people who want to learn from us. And it’s also when we cut off our own ability to expand and move forward from where we are….
    Over the last forty or fifty years, I’ve observed a number of teachers and leaders and such. Many of them are now not with us anymore, not in the sense that they’re dead but rather no one listens to them—they sort of faded into the woodwork. And those were the people who came forward and said, “I’m the Grand Poobah of whatever, and I know everything, and you all have to take everything I say and believe with no questions.” Our community does not respond to that well.
    So we really have to be humble and have the people who we’re teaching know that we’re open and willing to learn more, and that we don’t know everything, but that we do know something. You can’t have been around experiencing what we’ve been experiencing without having something to share.
    Pete “Pathfinder” Davis, archpriest of the Aquarian Tabernacle Church, had a similar take:
    It takes somebody who has a handle on their ego and recognizes when they start to slip into that sort of a mode. Because it’s way too easy to start to strut around like a rooster, and then you’re not conveying anything…. You have to recognize that what you’re doing is sharing information that you learned—probably the hard way—with people who might or might not learn it from you.
    And Sylva Markson drew a connection between love of your path and humility:
    Ultimately, I think, to be a good and effective teacher, you need first and foremost to love the Craft and be thinking of what is best for the Craft rather than what is best for you…. Because we have no higher authority or human authority that says “This is the way it has to be”—we don’t have a council or a senate or any of that stuff—since each priest or priestess is basically doing it their own way, it’s very easy for it to become all about me and self-aggrandizement. And that, I think, is the downfall of a lot of groups and a lot of coven leaders. So, to me, I think you have to have a level of