11

Decentralizing Your
Working Group

Examining Power Structures

As we do the work of deconstructing our relationships with power and solidly claiming sovereignty, we will by necessity begin a process of questioning authority. This deep examination is sure to spill over into relationships, and it will show up if you work in groups. Remember: the more conscious this process is, the less painful it is likely to be.

Power is a thing. It is a thing that some have more of, and others have less of. It is a malleable, shifting, palpable thing. Power is magick. It is held in different ways. Femella holds power differently than Potens, Creatrix, Sapientia, and Antiqua. And in different instances, each of those faces may hold more or less power in relationship to her other faces.

Power can be used for good or ill. Power is not a constant. Power is relative. Power is relational. It is mercurial, but may also be ponderous. It is fluid by nature, but it may appear rigid.

Power is not synonymous with authority, though it is often thought of that way. Power does not exist in one place and not in another; power is everywhere present. In some places it is more concentrated, in others more diffuse.

The examination of power and how it works is a multivalent, complex, ongoing process. For a theory of power to be graceful, it must hold constant across the microcosmic and macrocosmic levels. Our ideas of divinity, ourselves, and relationships with deity, our spiritual circles, associates, bosses, students, parents, children, forebears, descendants, beloveds, and our enemies all hold together on some level.

The more consciousness we generate regarding the shifting tapestry of connections between our concepts of power in the personal sphere, the political, and the spiritual, the more integrated we become. Knowing that linearity doesn’t tell the whole story, it becomes clear that we cannot separate the ends and the means; the means is the ends is the means is the ends. The process is the product. What we are doing is what we become.

Power is not a constant, but our relationship with it can (perhaps must) have more or less consistent parameters. Regardless of how much power we might be holding in a moment—relative to the power others might hold in that moment or to the power we might have held in another moment—or where the power in an interaction may be weighted, we may create and adhere to negotiated structures, guidelines, agreements about how we choose to interact with power, hold power, and share power.

If you participate in a magickal working group, working with this book is an excellent opportunity to go to the root of your personal and collective power ideologies and agreements, examine them, discuss them, and—where desired—reshape them to fit your shared visions and experiences.

When we look at power in a group context, it is essential to also bring authority into the picture. What gives a person power? Authority? Are they the same thing in some cases, or are they unrelated? Is power assumed, and authority conferred? Or is authority also sometimes assumed?

Many of us have never had an open discussion designed to address how we share power with others. If you are part of an existing group, perhaps when you joined it already had a power structure in place. Or maybe the group was informal, and certain people gravitated toward positions of power and authority, and others allowed them to.

Perhaps the structure of the organization feels static, or perhaps the opposite is true; perhaps the group is losing cohesion because there isn’t enough structure.

Different practitioners and groups have different ideas about how power and authority can or should be shared. Some groups have static structures where a single high priestess and/or high priest may lead every ritual. Others have offices such as high priestess but everyone in the group may take turns leading rituals. Other groups still have little to no hierarchical structure or a hierarchical structure that shifts according to need.

The Reclaiming Tradition, founded by Starhawk, is a contemporary Witchcraft tradition with roots in anarchism, ecofeminism, and Anderson Feri tradition. Reclaiming exists as a decentralized organization. There are regional groups that operate as collectives. Most decision making is done by consensus within groups. There is no central authority that governs all the regional Reclaiming collectives.

It is important that these—and all—power agreements are negotiated. And in working with the aspects of Femella, Potens, Creatrix, Sapientia, and Antiqua you will find different ways that power plays and lands and molds and dances and shifts and stabilizes and shifts again. You will interact with and see in her and hold in yourself the power of insistence and the power of direction and the power of making and the power of knowledge and the power of duration. You will experience the ways in which power is informed by necessity and the ways in which power becomes expression.

As you do the work of decolonizing your magick, crafting your traditions, creating relationships and dreaming into the new aeon, you will have ample opportunity for reexamination and learning through application.

In addressing issues of agency, sovereignty, feminism, and intersectionality, unexamined assumptions and structures of hierarchy are sure to bubble to the surface. We must question our own inherent biases and our collective defaults. We must examine race, gender, age and the ways in which they intersect.

This is part of the work of decolonizing our minds, bodies, and spirits; we get to—and must—decide which forms of organizational structure work for us and which don’t.

	JOURNAL: What are your ideas of how power structures work? Are you applying your ideas in practice? Where does your spiritual belief tie into your ideas about power?
	ACTION: Observe where the power lies in different interactions. Can you feel your power? Can you sense the power of others?

Resilient, Evolving, Responsive Structures of Power

For a structure to be resilient, it must be able to withstand disturbance and still function. For a group process to be resilient, it must be able to take a blow and keep thriving. It must be able to lose members—even long-time or founding members—and continue with its work.

In order to continue actively evolving, a system must not get stuck. For a structure to evolve it must adapt to new parameters, let go of parts that are no longer working, allow itself to be shaped by past experience and by current need.

In order to be responsive, a group must be able to absorb new members and adapt to new input. It must be able to sense, listen, and take appropriate action at the right time. Static hierarchies are often poor at evolution and responsiveness. And while decentralized group structures in theory would be resilient, in actuality they are often very vulnerable to destabilization by outside forces and ideas.

There is a middle ground where both hierarchy and decentralization may offer strengths to a group model or process. Collectivism, some forms of anarchism, and cellular organization all employ structure while taking the needs of the whole above the needs of the individual or even the group.

In working with her five faces, we can see different ways that structures of power and authority can be crafted into containers for agreement and relationship. Your group may gravitate to the teachings of Potens, Sapientia, or another face. Your group may have a structure informed by Creatrix and a vision informed by Antiqua or Femella. Or your group may find itself flowing between her different expressions and emanations.

In the end, it is not so much an issue of what model is being used as it is an issue of how that model is being used. There are likely elements from each existing model that can be drawn upon in finding our way to balanced, flexible models that will shift, change, release, and accommodate as needed.

Flexibility is key, as is a central organizing principle. Once we have those dancing at a point of responsive balance, we may flow between different structures and agreements based in our moment-to-moment requirements and desires.

	JOURNAL: What experience do you have with hierarchies? With decentralized structures?
	ACTION: Observe how situations around you organize themselves. Does your social group lend itself to hierarchies? Are they static? Or are they fluid? Is your social environment collectivist?

Creating Group Agreements

A collectively agreed upon set of parameters may take some time to create, but if your group is committed to working together, whether working magick or doing work in the world, it will be time well spent. Having thoroughly thought out and constructed agreements will help your circle, family, community, or organization find or build its foundation, and it will make it possible for your group to decide its collective goals and to act in accordance with them.

Doing the work of this is also the larger Work. To create these agreements in a mindful way, we must be continuously doing the work of examination, decolonization, deconstruction, reflection, coming present in our desires—both personal and collective—and reweaving, renewing, rerooting, and creating.

In getting to the heart of the matter, the first thing to discuss will be power itself. Do you, as a group, have an agreement (or agreements) about power? Does that agreement hold consistent with a shared mythology? Is it a political concept? Both? Or are there other elements that stabilize your common agreement?

Who holds the power? How is it held? How are decisions made? Who is empowered to make decisions? How are decisions carried out? What is the purpose of your work together?

If you work through these and whatever other questions come up in the process of the inquiry as a group until you arrive at a core agreement, it may become the beginning of a shared vision statement and a set of guidelines that will allow your group to move into better accord.

It will be helpful to build in agreements about how you intend to handle conflict, how to transfer power and authority as needed, how to create openings for new members, how to accommodate new visions, and how to integrate and accommodate shifts in power distribution.

If you choose to craft agreements together, attempt to build in responsive elements. You may want to include a commitment to review your group agreements on a regular basis. At first it may be monthly, or quarterly, and then perhaps move to biannually or even annually over time.

	JOURNAL: What are some of the things that you see as being central to the purpose of your group, or to your purpose in the group?
	ACTION: Research the vision statements of a group you admire.

Group Ritual Workings

Even if you’re not used to conducting your rituals this way, your group may choose to take this as an opportunity to experiment with collaborative group process and ritual development. This means different people may take on different duties or charges for tending your magickal container. These roles or duties may be casting the circle, calling elements, calling a face or the faces of the goddess, and/or any of the other parts of ceremony you choose to draw in. These duties and roles may even land with a different group member each time you circle together.

It may also mean sharing the work and play of creating your physical ritual space and the ritual itself, from concept to manifestation; building altars, bringing offerings, sharing hosting at different homes or taking the crew to favorite out-of-doors spaces to perform rituals, crafting the ritual and performing it.

In group workings, I suggest that each person who feels drawn to take a turn at performing or leading different parts of the ritual have a chance to do so. This creates a more egalitarian, collaborative group and allows each person the opportunity to come into their own power and skill as a ritualist. Being able to perform any and all the steps to creating a strong ritual will make each practitioner a stronger priestess.

In creating ritual together you will also strengthen group cohesion, and have an opportunity to collectively step into application of agreements about power and authority.

If you work with calling in the goddesses, I also suggest that different members try playing with the different energies of her five faces. It’s easy to get stuck thinking of someone as holding this or that aspect of her, but at a deeper level we all hold all the aspects. Try working with them and allowing them to work in and through each of you.

	JOURNAL: What pitfalls might your group face in working magick in this more collective way? And what aspects of ritual working are you most excited about trying out?
	ACTION: Cocreate a ritual with your magickal working group.

Names Have Power

In revisioning our relationship with power and authority in group practice, it is important to recognize—and change as needed—the places where our shared language anchors us to ideologies we no longer hold.

As a step toward deconstructing magickal and ritual power and authority, I offer a new term: facilitating priestess.

The somewhat common term high priestess (HP for short), holds a hierarchical implication and is often a static position in a group. For use in an egalitarian, more hierarchically flexible group model, I suggest using the term facilitating priestess, or FP.

The FP has the biggest job in any ritual; she makes sure the ritual proceeds apace, makes sure the creation and dissolution of ritual space is done cleanly, and prompts the other participants to take their turns as needed. The FP facilitates the ritual’s flow. Like the high priestess would be in many cases, the FP is a director, orchestrator, and energy holder all at once.

In group work the role of FP may be a floating responsibility. In a group that’s working for egalitarian structure, taking turns holding the FP energy helps to keep things less static on both the mundane and magickal levels.

	JOURNAL: What are some other terms that you use in your magickal work that have subtle, or not so subtle, connotations of hierarchy?
	ACTION: Examine hierarchal assumptions in the world around you. Do you call a doctor by her first name? Would you if the doctor were a man? What about teachers? Is your hierarchical thinking prone to gender-based bias? Race-based bias?

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