The Politics of Wicca
In the late 1960s, Laurie Cabot (b. 1933), the “Witch of Salem,” represented the public face of witchcraft in the United States. Her father’s ancestry was British—he was born on Jersey in the Channel Islands. Cabot, like so many before and after her, claimed she was descended from a long line of hereditary witches. As a child she was psychically aware, and inherited a love of science from her father that she later combined with witchcraft to create a unique version of the Craft. While living in Boston in the 1940s, she studied comparative religion in high school. This meant spending hours doing research in the library. She said that one of the librarians revealed herself as a witch, and as a result the teenage Cabot was initiated in a ritual that involved her being anointed with oil and dubbed with a sword (Guilley 1989: 48).
After a short career as a dancer, Laurie Cabot married twice and had two daughters. After her second divorce in the late 1960s, she made a vow that from then on she would live openly as a witch and devote the rest of her life to practicing and promoting witchcraft. Part of this vow was to wear only black, outline her eyes in black make-up, and wear a pentagram in public. In this respect she was probably the first goth witch. A friend suggested that if she was going to take on this public role as a witch she should move to Salem, scene of the famous seventeenth-century witch trials. The two women rented a house in the town’s historic quarter, and Cabot discovered it had been built in the 1700s by the father of a young woman she believed she had once been after experiencing a past-life regression.
Once in Salem, Cabot began teaching witchcraft courses as a science. She taught adult education classes at Salem State College, gave tarot readings, and offered her psychic assistance to the local police department to solve crimes. She also opened one of the first occult stores in America and established an annual Witches’ Ball at Hallowe’en that is still held today. In 1977, Cabot was made the official “Witch of Salem” by Michael Dukakis, the governor of Massachusetts and an ex-presidential candidate. She also joined the Salem Chamber of Commerce, and in 1986 founded the Witches League of Public Awareness, specifically to protest plans to film the movie Witches of Eastwick in the county. The League also took on other civil rights issues relating to witches, including harassment by the police and Christian fundamentalists.
In one of the programs in his BBC television documentary series Stephen Fry in America broadcast in 2008, the British comedian, writer, and actor interviewed Laurie Cabot in her shop. Fry was also invited to attend the Witches’ Ball at a Salem hotel. He commented it was “a very charming party” in which Cabot-style witches from all over the world dressed up and danced to retro 1970s and 1980s music. At the end they came together in a circle in which “a sword is waved, incantations are made and ‘energies’ invoked.” Fry commented that as far as he was concerned all religions were equally nonsensical, and that how Christians with their “invisible friends, virgin births, immaculate conceptions, and bread turning into flesh could mock people like Laurie Cabot was appalling humbug” (Fry 2008: 34).
Around the same time Laurie Cabot was establishing herself in Salem, the second publication (after Charles Cardell’s 1964 book), and the first in America of the Gardnerian Book of Shadows took place. It was published by Lady Sheba (Jessie Wicker Bell, 1920–2002) and she claimed it had been passed to her nearly forty years before. Bell was born in the hills of Knott County, Kentucky, of Irish and Native American (Cherokee) ancestry. She claimed her family had been practicing witchcraft for seven generations, and that as a child her grandmother taught her about Irish faery lore and Cherokee spirit guides. In the late 1930s, Bell was initiated into a local coven and took the witch name “Lady Sheba,” a name she’d once had in a previous incarnation.
By 1950, Jessie Bell had moved to Michigan and started her own coven practicing her family’s Celtic tradition, now called “American Celtic Wicca.” She also founded a more public group called the American Order of the Brotherhood of Wicca (AOBW), which was accepted as a legal religious organization in August 1971. The aim of the AOBW was, like the old Witchcraft Research Association in England, to bring together the different witchcraft traditions in the United States. According to the website PaganWiki on the Internet, American Celtic Wicca practiced rituals that were very similar to the Gardnerian and Alexandrian ones, but also drew heavily on ceremonial magic.
Following the publication of The Book of Shadows and a follow-up called The Grimoire of Lady Sheba in 1972, Jessie Bell became involved in the newly formed American Council of Witches. This group put forward thirteen principles that all Wiccans could adhere to, and that were later incorporated into the US Army’s handbook for its chaplains. Unfortunately, not all American witches wanted to sign on to these principles and became suspicious of Lady Sheba when she started referring to herself as “America’s Witch Queen.” According to an Internet article on “Wicca Fundamentalism” by Ben Gruagach (dated August 11, 2007), Jessie Bell declared she was the leader of all American witches at a WitchMeet gathering in 1974. She also proposed that a single, definitive Book of Shadows should be written so everyone could follow it.
Doreen Valiente and other British and American Gardnerian elders criticized Jessie Bell’s decision to publish her Book of Shadows. Valiente was particularly annoyed because Bell’s version of the BoS contained one of her poems, reprinted without her permission and infringing her copyright. The Gardnerians said Bell had stolen the BoS, changed some of it, and was guilty of placing oath-bound material into the public domain. It has to be understood this was before Janet and Stewart Farrar had written their books revealing the Wiccan rites, or the many Wicca 101 books that followed. Also, the Gardnerians were still recovering from the betrayal by Charles Cardell. They were less than pleased to see their rituals published in a commercial book from a mainstream occult publisher that became a bestseller.
In her defense, Jessie Bell claimed she was told by the Goddess herself to publish the book. She continued to say she had been initiated in the 1930s and had copied out the coven’s BoS and then added other material from Gardnerian, Alexandrian, and other sources. However, faced with a mounting tide of criticism for both her books and her attempt to control the American witchcraft movement, Jessie Bell retired from public life at the end of the 1970s and returned to her native Kentucky. When she died in 2002, her final ironic wish was that her body be cremated with her personal copy of the Book of Shadows. Her ashes were scattered in the Wicker family cemetery in Knott County, Kentucky.
If Jessie Bell did not receive the Book of Shadows when she was initiated into the Craft in the 1930s, where did she get it? I was in correspondence with Jessie Bell in 1969–1970, when I was living at Harrow-on-the-Hill in Middlesex. At that time she was associated with a Cincinnati coven that combined the practice of Wicca with ceremonial magic. They worshipped the Horned God in the form of the Knights Templar deity Baphomet and invoked the four archangels at the quarters of their circle (see Holzer 1971: 138–150 and 1973: 77–78). Sybil Leek tried to join this hybrid coven, but was rejected. Margot Adler, later the author of the classic Drawing Down the Moon, was more successful. The coven sent her letters containing rituals and examination papers, and after a probationary period of a year and a day she was initiated.
During our correspondence, Jessie Bell expressed her desire to be initiated into British Gardnerian Wicca. This was obviously logistically difficult, if not impossible, because of the long distance involved and the fact she could not afford to fly over to England. However, as we have seen, there was a precedent with the Glasgow coven set up by Charles Clark with Gerald Gardner’s help, and the initiation of Margot Adler into the Cincinnati coven. Reluctantly, I was persuaded by my own Gardnerian initiator Rosina Bishop to pass on a copy of the version of the Book of Shadows we were using so Bell could be initiated into Wicca by proxy. This is also done in traditional pre-Gardnerian witchcraft where “the power” can be passed through a written text or a magical object.
However, as was the trend among other Gardnerians, we had made some important changes to the BoS. This included amending the Craft Laws and also adding a poem written by Doreen Valiente originally published in the WRA newsletter Pentagram. We had deleted the last few lines of the poem to make it more suitable for our purposes and were using it as an invocation to the Horned God. As our version of the BoS was for our personal use only, and it was never meant to be published, we did not see the private use of this poem to be a problem. However, as soon as it was published we were embarrassed, as its publication infringed on Doreen’s copyright.
One night I received a transatlantic telephone call from Jessie Bell, informing us that she was going to publish the BoS. I pointed out that despite the fact her initiation was long distance by proxy, she was still bound by the oath promising not to reveal the Wiccan rites and rituals to cowans, or outsiders. However, Bell was determined to go ahead, and said the Goddess had told her to publish the book. In her mind, this direct instruction from a divine source overruled any oath she had taken, and she was going ahead to find a publisher. The rest, as they say, is history.
In 1966, Raymond Buckland contacted Margaret and Eric St. Clair, a couple living in California, and initiated them. One of Margaret St. Clair’s friends was Ed Fitch, an ex-trainee of the Virginian MIT Institute. He had joined the US Air Force and served in Japan as a military intelligence officer. When Fitch returned stateside he worked as a technical writer and electronic engineer. Later he served in Vietnam where he studied Buddhism and learned Eastern martial arts. On his return, he joined the aerospace industry as a research and development engineer, working on missile systems. While Fitch was in the USAF, he was stationed in Massachusetts and, knowing his interest in witchcraft, the St. Clairs told him about Raymond Buckland and his coven. He visited the Bucklands on Long Island and was eventually initiated by Rosemary Buckland.
In 1970, Ed Fitch was responsible for the founding of the influential Pagan Way, designed to provide an open forum for beginners wanting to be initiated into covens. He became involved with Joseph B. Wilson, the founder of the American 1734 Tradition based on the teachings of Robert Cochrane and Ruth Wynn Owen of the Plant y Bran, and the British Gardnerian witch John Score. Fitch published a neopagan magazine called The Crystal Well, and the rituals devised for the Pagan Way spread far and wide after they were printed in booklet form. Some of the ritual material in the booklet was written by the late Donna Cole Schutz. She was running her own coven in Chicago and had been initiated by somebody who based their rituals on the ones published by Charles Cardell.
In 1968, Donna and her husband traveled to England, where they made contact with the Wiccan community and stayed for a year. As a result of their contacts, the Coles received a second-degree initiation from Madge Worthington and Arthur Eaglen of the Gardnerian Whitecroft tradition. Donna Cole then received her third degree from Theos and Phoenix in New York State, who had inherited the American Gardnerian tradition from Ray and Rosemary Buckland. In the Whitecroft Coven, the Coles took part in rituals working magic for animal rights, and they did one rite to stop the clubbing of baby seals in the annual cull by Canadian fur traders. During their stay in the United Kingdom, the Coles also met Ruth Wynn Owen, an ex-actress and drama teacher who was a member of The Regency and ran her own neo-Celtic Welsh group known as Plant y Bran (The Children of Bran). On their return to the States, the Coles started their own coven, known as the Temple of the Sacred Stones, in their hometown of Chicago (Donna Cole Schultz, August 2003).
One of those associated with Ed Fitch and the Pagan Way was Herman Slater (1938–1992), owner of the pioneering Warlock Shop in New York, later known as Magickal Childe, with his partner, Ed Buczynski. Raised as a good Jewish boy, Slater was initiated by Buczynski into his coven of Welsh traditionalist witches in 1972. The Welsh Traditionalists were among the first covens to take in gay people at a time when other Craft traditions refused to accept them. They worshipped the Welsh deities Ceridwen, Mabon, Arianrhod, and Blodewedd as described in the medieval legends of the Mabinogion. It was a robed coven and the High Priestess wore a crown made of a copper band surmounted by a silver crescent. The High Priest was known as the “King of the Woods,” and he wore a crown of bronze surmounted by a gold disc representing the sun. There were four degrees of initiation and the circle was cast using a wand instead of the athame. It was opened by evoking the elemental spirits of earth, air, and water, and closed by calling on the spirit of fire (Holzer 1971: 37–38). In 1974, Herman Slater was initiated into Gardnerian Wicca. Following this, the Welsh Traditionalists changed their name to the Earthstar Coven, practicing a mixture of Gardnerian Wicca and Celtic paganism.
Another leading American pagan and witch in the 1970s was the controversial Philip Isaac Bonewits (b. 1949), widely credited with the invention of the term “Burning Times” to describe the medieval witch-hunt. He attended the University of Berkeley in 1966 and was inducted into Reformed Druids of North America. He also spent eight months as a member of Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan in San Francisco. In 1970, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in magic. Bonewits was the first person to be granted such a degree by a university anywhere in the world. Unfortunately the university authorities were so embarrassed by the ensuing publicity they banned the study of witchcraft and the magical arts from the curriculum. As a result of his degree, Bonewits was offered a publishing contract, and his first book, Real Magic, appeared in print in 1971.
Isaac Bonewits went on to start the Aquarian Anti-Defamation League (AADL) promoting the civil rights of followers of alternative spiritualities such as witches, neopagans, Rosicrucians, and Theosophists. In 1973 he was the first insider to publicly state that the claims for antiquity put forward by Wiccans were “hogwash.” He said that modern witchcraft only dated back to the 1950s and was the product of a collaboration between Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente. For the many Gardnerians who still clung tenaciously to the belief that Wicca was the genuine survival of a Stone Age fertility religion, this statement was heresy, and his views were dismissed out of hand.
In the early 1980s, Bonewits upset many Wiccans and neopagans again by recommending the setting up of a specialist social services network to deal with the problems of drug abuse and domestic dysfunction in the pagan movement. He claimed 80 percent of neopagans came from nonfunctional or dysfunctional family backgrounds. At the same time, he was the first person to call for the establishment of a professional, paid neopagan priesthood. Again he was far ahead of his time, and the idea was rejected by his peers. In the 1990s, groups like Circle Sanctuary, founded by Selena Fox and Dennis Carpenter, and the Pagan Federation UK were actively supporting and promoting the concept.
Professor Chas S. Clifton of Colorado University has said that “When the new Pagan religion of Wicca arrived in the United States from England in the 1960s, it presented itself as the Old Religion, the ancestral Paganism of the British Isles, and as a mystery cult of both fertility and magic” (2006: 41). However, in the 1970s it changed from a magically based religion into a nature-based neopagan one concerned with environmental matters, feminism, “Goddess spirituality,” and the legal rights of its followers. It was the birth of “ecofeminist neopaganism,” and this was to have a dramatic and important influence on the future of Wicca. In fact, American Wicca “evolved from its British Wicca roots through the influence of four factors: (1) a ritual style developed by large outdoor gatherings or pagan festivals, (2) the presence of workshops on shamanic techniques, (3) the concept of Gaia or the Earth as a divine living organism or goddess, (4) the presence of a psychotherapy model and its application to political activism” (Orion 1995).
These developments that influenced the evolution of American Wicca, and later the British variety, arose out of the alternative counter-culture of the late 1960s. As early as 1968, a radical political group had formed called the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy (WITCH). It was created by a collective of feminist revolutionary guerilla fighters dedicated to opposing, by violence if necessary, what they saw as a patriarchal society. Its membership was mostly drawn from female college and university students wearing black cloaks, witches’ pointed hats, and crone masks. They famously marched on Wall Street in New York’s financial district to confront the “imperialist phallic society” ruled by men, with the “ancient magics” of the female witches. They danced outside the Federal Reserve Bank bearing the papier-mâché head of a pig on a silver platter (representing a capitalist banker) and also demonstrated outside the Stock Exchange. They told the security guards at the door they had an appointment inside with “Satan,” i.e., the Exchange’s CEO. The witches also demonstrated outside night-clubs and “girl bars,” chanting the magical mantra: “We are Witch. We are liberation. We are one [and] nine million women burned as witches,” and calling for a matriarchal insurrection and revolution (Morgan 1978: 70–79).
It is difficult to know how serious the WITCH was supposed to be. It has been described as “a combination of the put-on, the serious, the deliberately comic, and the profanely agonized, of the bizarre and the holy” (quoted in Guilley 1989: 367). Its leaders taught its members they did not need to be initiated into a coven to be a witch, and this was subversive in itself. All they had to do was repeat the self-empowering magical words “I am a witch,” and they became one. They also taught the concept of the Burning Times, during which allegedly nine million innocent women were burnt as witches in a patriarchal conspiracy instigated by the Roman Catholic Church.
In fact, this imaginary figure of nine million victims was invented by the nineteenth-century pioneering American feminist writer, Matilda Joslyn Gage. She had been in the campaigns to abolish slavery during the Civil War, women’s suffrage, and improved conditions for the Native Americans living on government reservations. In the 1880s, Gage became interested in Theosophy, Spiritualism, and witchcraft, and published her major work Woman, State and Church in 1890. In it, she argued the witches executed during the witch-hunt were murdered because they were militant feminists. In her view they were also early scientists, mesmerists, and workers with plant extracts, elemental spirits, and psychic forces (Gibson 2007: 112–117).
In the 1950s, Cecil Williamson used Gage’s nine-million figure in media interviews, and set up a memorial plaque at his Isle of Man museum to these victims of the witch craze. As a result, it entered Wiccan mythology along with the term “the Burning Times,” and is still repeated today in popular Wicca 101 books. It was widely circulated because it compared favorably with the six million Jews killed during the wartime Holocaust and reinforced the ghetto mentality and persecuted victim syndrome prevalent in early Wicca. In fact, the real figure of men, women, and children executed for allegedly practicing witchcraft as been put by modern researchers at about 100,000.
As late as 1990, a documentary called The Burning Times was produced by the National Film Board of Canada. It traced the roots of the historical witch-hunt and included interviews with prominent neo-pagan Wiccan feminists such as Margot Adler and Starhawk (Miriam Simos). The term “Burning Time,” is a misnomer as it was only on the Continent and in Ireland and Scotland that suspected witches were burned at the stake if they were found guilty. In some European countries they were beheaded instead. In England, and later the American colonies, convicted witches were hanged. The only possible exception to the rule was in the rare cases where a wife was found guilty of bewitching to death her husband. This was legally classed as “petty treason,” and the punishment for that was burning.
The new feminist movement that was emerging in the 1970s possessed a radical Marxist political base. Many of the first feminists adopted a materialist approach to religion in general and they rejected both the patriarchal misogynistic Christian Church and witchcraft and paganism. However, some of those who had rejected Christianity were looking for an alternative spiritual viewpoint compatible with their new feminist outlook. Some of these seekers found what they were looking for in Wicca with its worship of a female deity. However they also discovered that Wicca could be both patriarchal and misogynistic, and they set about changing and adapting it to suit their politics and world-view.
Although Wiccans worshipped a goddess, and women played a prominent part in its rites, Doreen Valiente said in 1989, “… it has only been in recent years that witchcraft has become feminist; and not all witchcraft by any means comes into that category.” She went on to say that although modern Wicca has priestesses, this was a role Gerald Gardner had designed for women to play within the Craft. Valiente said: “We were allowed to call ourselves High Priestess, Witch Queen, and similar fancy titles; but we were still in the position of having men running things and women doing as men directed. As soon as the women started seeking real power, trouble was brewing.” This was possibly a reference to the problems when she left the Brickett Wood Coven in 1957. Women in Wicca were told: “You may not be a witch alone.” Therefore, as a woman in Gardnerian Wicca, you have to have a man initiate you before you could call yourself a witch. Also you were required to find a man to work magically with before you could practice the Craft (1989: 182–183).
Oddly enough, it was a man who had the greatest impact on the emerging Goddess spirituality and feminist Wicca in the United States—the poet and writer Robert Graves, author of The White Goddess (1948). In 1973, Elizabeth Gould Davis, the feminist author of the classic The First Sex, wrote to Graves, hailing him as the “god” of the new women’s spirituality movement. She said it had many names because it was not coordinated yet. However, she told the poet, small groups of dedicated goddess worshippers were forming across the country from New York to California. These groups were rejecting Christianity and honoring the feminine principle in an attempt to bring back the ancient religion of the Great Goddess (Richard Perceval Graves 1995: 481).
One anthropologist who has studied modern Wiccan groups said: “The basis of much feminist witchcraft ritual is about re-connecting with an idealized previous state of existence, and healing the wounds of patriarchy” (Greenwood 2000: 109). This concept was reinforced by several influential books written in the 1970s and 1980s by a new breed of radical revisionist feminist historians. Books such as Merlin Stone’s When God Was A Woman (1976) and The Paradise Papers (1979), Monica Sjoo’s The Ancient Religion of the Great Cosmic Mother of All (1982), and the writings of the Lithuanian anthropologist Marija Gimbutas, claiming Neolithic society was a pacifist Goddess-worshipping matriarchy destroyed by patriarchal invaders, inspired neopagan feminists. Feminist historians such as Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin interpreted the witch-hunt as a patriarchal conspiracy aimed at suppressing survival of the old pagan worship of the Goddess, and the social role of women as healers. They overlooked the fact that accusations of witchcraft were often made by women against women, and were often the result of neighborhood feuds, family disagreements, and social tensions.
In 1978, a Goddess conference was held at the University of California in Santa Cruz. Five hundred people listened to a talk by a feminist Christian theologian from Yale University with the unlikely name of Carol Christ. She argued that the divine should not be exclusively represented as male in nature, but must also be symbolized in a feminine form. Another speaker, Naomi Goldenberg, even coined the term “thealogy” to denote the teachings of female-based religions and the role taken by women in spirituality. She later taught classes in the new academic discipline of Goddess spirituality studies in the Department of Religious Studies at a Michigan University, and a graduate program at the University of Ottawa in Canada with Carol Christ and Starhawk (Rabinovitch and Lewis 2003: 117)
In his own study of the development of American neopagan witchcraft, Professor Chas S. Clifton has seen the celebration of the new environmental Earth Day as a turning point in the transformation of Wicca from a magical religion to a nature religion. He quotes Susan Roberts, author of Witches USA (1970), describing how a witch friend of hers was caught up in a traffic jam in New York on Earth Day. Afterwards her friend told her: “Now, no one loves the Earth and the purity of our air more than a witch,” and she did not feel the need to explain this comment further (Clifton 2006: 43).
However, not everyone shared these fashionable left-wing views, and it has to be remembered that the Wiccan old guard were often socially conservative ex-colonials who came from middle-class or upper-middle-class backgrounds. Many of these held private political views that leaned towards the right and they did not approve of their beliefs being politicized. Referring to the American neopagan magazine Green Egg, one prominent British Wiccan said its editors were trying to turn the Craft into an anti-establishment and anti-social movement with left-wing political overtones advocating drug use and sexual militancy (Holzer 1973: 188).
One of the leading figures in this process of the political radicalization of Wicca in the early 1970s was Dr. Leo Louis Martello (1930–2000), a homosexual Italian-American who said he had been initiated into a hereditary Sicilian witch tradition. He had also received a Gardnerian initiation from Patricia Crowther. In 1970 Martello founded the Witches’ Liberation Movement (WLM) and at Samhain that year organized a “witch-in” in Central Park in New York. He was refused a permit to hold the gathering by the city parks department, and with the support of the New York Civil Liberties Union threatened to sue them for religious discrimination. Later he founded other pressure groups such as the Witches Anti-Defamation League (WADL) and the Witches International Craft Association (WICA), dedicated to campaigning for the religious rights of witches. He condemned the Roman Church for its historical persecution of alleged witches and issued a lawsuit against the Vatican claiming $500 million in compensation. He also threatened to sue the Salem Town Council for another $100 million.
Another radical crusader for the civil rights of witches, especially female ones, was a Hungarian émigré named Zsusanna Mokcsay, who used the pseudonym of Z. Budapest, after her home country’s capital. She claimed her grandmother had been a herbalist and healer, and her mother was an artist who made nude statues of pagan goddesses. The family fled Hungary after the 1956 popular uprising against the Soviet Red Army, arriving in the United States in 1959. Z. Budapest enrolled at the University of Chicago and married an American citizen. After her marriage broke down and she moved from Chicago to California in the 1970s, Budapest saw the need for a feminine-centered spiritual theology and rebelled against the Marxist elements in the so-called “women’s liberation” movement, as it was dubbed by the media.
In 1971, Z. Budapest founded the Susan B. Anthony Coven, named after a leader of the American suffragette movement who had campaigned for women’s right to vote. The coven practiced Dianic Wicca, founded by Morgan MacFarland and Mark Roberts in Dallas, Texas, in the 1960s, and based on matriarchal lunar worship. Budapest also opened a shop called The Feminist Wicca and was arrested in 1975 by an undercover policewoman for illegally “foretelling [the future] for a fee” during a tarot reading under an archaic Californian statute. In the same year, she published The Feminist Book of Shadows, which was followed shortly afterwards by The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries.
One of Z. Budapest’s initiates was Ruth Barratt (b. 1954). She went on to found the Moon Birch Grove and the Circle of Aradia, the largest organization of Dianic Wiccans, whose open meetings in Los Angeles were attended by from fifteen to two hundred women. Budapest’s most famous student, however, was a Jewish woman called Miriam Simos (b. 1951), who adopted the pseudonym of “Starhawk.” She went on to form her own group known as the Compost Coven, and recruited its members from the women attending a class on witchcraft she taught at the Bay Area Center for Alternative Education in San Francisco.
Starhawk also formed another all-female group called the Honeysuckle Coven, and she was initiated into Gardnerian Wicca and Victor Anderson’s Feri witch tradition, dating back to the 1920s. After achieving a master of art degree in psychology at Antioch University in 1983, Starhawk became a member of the faculty of the Institute of Creation Spirituality. This institute was founded by the heretical Catholic priest Father Matthew Fox, and it had moved from Chicago to Holy Names College at Oakland, California.
Along with other feminist witches in the 1970s, Starhawk thought “the Goddess does not rule the world. She is the world.” Many neopagans believed this statement had a scientific basis—this was proved when, in 1979, the British scientist Dr. James Lovelock published his groundbreaking and highly controversial treatise, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. In it, he put forward the theory that the Earth was a self-regulating, living organic entity, and he called it Gaia, after the Greek earth goddess. Dr. Lovelock never believed there was a spiritual or religious dimension to what was a scientific theory. When neopagan witches and followers of the emergent New Age movement eagerly took on board his concept, it was to his amusement and sometimes consternation. In fact he was embarrassed that environmentalists and the new nature religionists had hijacked his Gaian idea.
In the same year Dr. Lovelock’s book was published, Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess also appeared, and it was destined to become a best-selling classic. Professor Ronald Hutton has described Starhawk as “a writer of remarkable talent.” He praised her book, saying it was impossible to make notes from it without copying out whole sentences, “so perfectly are her thoughts expressed and so marked is her genius for aphorism.” He says that her prose is enhanced “by an underlying passion of feeling,” so that it “seems to heave with emotion” (Hutton 1999: 345–346). He thinks the virtue of Starhawk’s book is that it reworked the image of witchcraft, re-presenting the old coven concept as a modern training group. In this, women could be liberated from patriarchy, men could be educated about the feminine, and new forms of human relationship, free from gender stereotyping and power structures, could be established. She has even suggested that new covens of this type were capable of helping the transformation of society for the better.
Starhawk followed up her first book with Dreaming the Dark, in 1982, which applied her new image and concept of modern witchcraft to direct political action. This view may have been influenced by the anti-Vietnam demonstrations she took part in while at high school. She believed that magic was “the art of evoking power from within” to transform the individual, the community, and culture. This belief led her into advocating and taking direct action against the patriarchal system and manifested in a series of demonstrations at nuclear power plants, military bases, and atomic weapon sites. As a result, she and her fellow demonstrators were arrested several times and thrown into prison.
Starhawk believed passionately that witches should not be politically passive, but get involved in agitprop against the use of nuclear power to produce electricity and the international arms trade. She was arrested once outside the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California, which had been constructed over a known earthquake fault. During her imprisonment, Starhawk organized a skyclad ritual with two hundred female inmates and they danced in a circle to the improvised beat of a drum and a guitar. The women had been strip-searched, handcuffed, and herded into a gym used as a temporary prison, with only a blanket and a mat to sleep on. The idea behind the ritual was to prove to the (male) guards and those who had ordered their imprisonment that even in that situation the women were still empowered.
The Reclaiming Collective was founded by Starhawk in 1980 and still exists today. It arose from a teaching course she did with a colleague, Diane Baker, and was based on her experiences as a student of Z. Budapest and Victor Anderson. It was titled “Elements of Magic,” and consisted of a six-week series of workshops teaching women Goddess spirituality and basic magical practice such as casting a circle, trancework, and spellcasting. This initial course extended into several others and then finally led to the establishment of the Reclaiming Collective with workshops and public rituals open to all comers. It was a radical departure from the old coven system where members had to be vetted and then initiated before they could be trained and participate in rituals.
In 1985, the Reclaiming Collective held an extensive apprenticeship course for a week in the homes of members or in public parks. Students traveled from all over the States to attend and Reclaiming members in San Francisco provided their accommodation. Because of the success of this new venture, the next year a farm was rented as a country retreat with a series of training sessions for both the Reclaiming teachers and their students. Known as WitchCamps, these events have now become a regular occurrence with an international scope. Today they are held in Canada, England, Germany, and Norway. The English camps are held at the New Age capital of Glastonbury in Somerset and have proved very successful.
The key elements of the Reclaiming tradition, distinguishing it from orthodox old-style Wicca, is its emphasis on non-hierarchal groups that have no specific pantheon. There is no formal requirement for intiation into these groups and no set ritual liturgy. In addition, political activism related to the environment, feminism, sexual equality, pacifism, and social responsibility is encouraged. At a philosophical and ritual level, Reclaiming members are expected to cultivate self-experiment, self-discovery, and their own innate creativity. In the few rules it has, there is a focus on the achievement of ecstatic states of altered consciousness. This is achieved without the use of narcotics and through the traditional magical techniques of chanting, deep breathing, and dancing.
One of Starhawk’s closest associates in her environmental activism was the late Tom Delong (1946–1982), known by the Welsh pseudonym Gwydion Pendderwen. At the age of thirteen, he got in a fight with a fellow schoolboy who was the son of his neighbor Victor Anderson (1917–2001). As a result of this violent encounter he became friendly with Anderson and his wife Cora. Victor Anderson claimed he had been inducted into the pre-war Harpy Coven, and in the 1950s had founded his own Feri (Faery) tradition. Pendderwen attended California State University studying theater, obtained a bachelor of arts degree, and became an actor. He also learned Welsh by corresponding with a pen pal in Wales, and later visited the country, where he was inducted into a secular order of bardic druids. He also visited England in the 1970s, and met Alex Sanders and Stewart Farrar. He was initiated into Alexandrian Wicca, and on his return to the States incorporated elements of it into the Feri tradition.
In 1970, with his fellow Feri initiate Alison Harlow, Pendderwen founded an environmental group called Nemeton. The name was taken from the Celtic term for a sacred grove, and its aim was to preserve the surviving remnants of America’s ancient forests. Seven years later he founded a similar group called Forever Forests with the task of planting new trees across the country to replace those cut down by logging operations or killed by disease. Forever Forests survived his premature death in an automobile accident in 1982, and its work now continues under the auspices of the neopagan Church of the All Worlds. Pendderwen was also politically active with Starhawk at a demonstration outside the Lawrence Livermore Weapons Laboratory in California shortly before his death.
In the same year that Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance was published, Margot Adler produced her classic guide Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers and Other Pagans in America. Adler had been a radio producer and journalist since 1968 and pioneered talk shows discussing religion, politics, women’s issues, and ecology. She went on to be the New York bureau chief for National Public Radio and the host of Justice Talking, a radio program dedicated to constitutional issues.
Margot Adler was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the so-called Deep South of the United States, but grew up in the metropolis of New York. From 1964 to 1968, she was involved in the civil rights movement and the infamous demonstrations at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago. While visiting England, Adler read a copy of The Waxing Moon, a magazine produced by Joe Wilson and Tony Kelly of the Pagan Movement. She then joined the Welsh Traditionalists’ coven in New York and in 1973 was initiated into Gardnerian Wicca. In 1988, she was married Wiccan-style in a handfasting ceremony conducted by Selena Fox of Circle Sanctuary. This was favorably reported in the New York Times.
Basically, Margot Adler wanted to write a book “which treats the resurgence of the Craft and Paganism as a response to a planet in crisis.” She planned to “talk at length about the relationship of the Craft to our environment, the technology, the ecological theory, to society and even politics” (letter to John Score of the Pagan Front dated December 11, 1975, in the MOW archive). In a sense, this reflected the current developments in Wicca and its transition in the United States from a magical mystery cult to an environmentally friendly nature religion.
When Margot Adler began researching her book in the early 1970s by meeting and studying neopagan groups and Wiccan covens, she came across the term “nature religion” in use for the first time to describe these organizations. She also read an article in the Earth Religion News magazine, founded by Herman Slater in 1974, that referred to “pre-Christian nature religions.” Around the same time, Tim Zell of the pantheistic Church of All Worlds published a pamphlet describing modern paganism as a “natural religion.” Under this heading Zell included witchcraft, animism, pantheism, the pre-Christian old religions of the ancient Britons, Irish, Gauls, Germans, and Norse people. He also added the indigenous religious beliefs of the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Australasia (Rabinovitch and Lewis 2002: 166–167). While this was to define how neopagan witchcraft was to be seen and experienced in the coming decades, Margot Adler was also surprised that some of the Wiccans she encountered, especially the older ones, were not interested in environmental matters at all.