It must be clear to the reader by now that sexual polarity and the role which masculine and feminine play within the individual psyche, in interpersonal relationships and in the Cosmos as a whole, are central to Wiccan philosophy and practice. The gutter Press seize on this (and on the fact that many covens work skyclad) to imply that modern witchcraft involves orgies, promiscuity and God knows what, because such salaciousness sells their newspapers. Everyone who has studied the subject without bias, or who has attended a genuine Wiccan meeting, knows that this is simply not true. So let us, here, not waste time being defensive about it, but get on with discussing the actual Wiccan attitude to sex.
Most dissertations on sex are concerned either with the biology and technique of sex (which is fair enough) or else with trying to discipline it through legislation or dogma (which is purely negative, except in such obviously desirable aspects as laws against rape or child abuse). Wicca on the other hand takes a positive approach. It starts off by accepting sexuality as wholly natural and good, and goes on from there to seek a fuller understanding of masculine-feminine polarity and of how to make constructive use of it — both psychologically and magically. Wiccan sexual morality arises from this attitude, instead of (as happens all too often) being imposed on it.
We shall be talking a good deal here about the patriarchal epoch and its attitudes, so let us start by defining it and trying to explain it. It is the period of male domination of human society which established its hold, approximately speaking, during the last couple of millennia BC. That process was piecemeal but inexorable, and gained particular impetus from the arrival and increasing supremacy of the strongly patriarchal Indo-European peoples in and around the Mediterranean basin. Patriarchal rule, both political and psychological, has been pretty well universal in the two millennia AD and is only now being seriously challenged. It has been characterized by the dictatorship of the God, the King, the Priest, the Father, and the total subordination of the Goddess, the Queen, the Priestess, the Mother; even, in the case of the Goddess and the Priestess, to their total banishment from the major Western cultures at least. There have been exceptions to this process, of course, and late pockets of non-conformity; for example, pre-Christian Celtic society gave remarkably complete freedom and equality to women at all levels (on this, read Jean Markale’s Women of the Celts). But such pockets vanished one by one, mostly under the pressure of Christianity or Islam.
There is much argument among scholars as to whether there actually was a Matriarchal Period in human prehistory. But one thing is certain: the Goddess preceded the God in human worship, which gave its first attention to the Womb and Nourisher of all things, and even after the concept of the God evolved, Goddess and God remained in dynamic partnership until patriarchal monotheism ruthlessly widowed the God.1 And even politically — Ancient Egypt for example, remained matrilinear at all levels of society right up to the time of the last Pharaoh, Cleopatra; as Margaret Murray said (the Splendour that was Egypt), ‘The queen was queen by right of birth, the king was king by right of marriage’ — and this same rule governed noble and peasant inheritance as well.
What brought about this male take-over of human politics, economics, theology and social attitudes? A take-over so complete that for many centuries now it has been accepted (even by most women) as the natural order of things?
It was, we suggest, an evolutionary stage in the relationship between the conscious and unconscious functions of the human mind. The conscious Ego, which distinguishes homo sapiens from all the other land animals, has only been with us since its first rudimentary awakening perhaps half a million years ago. For most of that time, it has been growing, learning and making its contribution to human survival and achievement. It had reached a high level of development long before the patriarchal take-over took shape; we are not suggesting that there has been a sudden evolutionary leap in the inborn quality of human consciousness in the past four or five thousand years. But there certainly came a stage (comparatively suddenly, in terms of that half-million-year timespan) when the conscious Ego began to flex its muscles and upset the balance.
It may well be that the trigger was technological development. A hunting tribe lived by what Marx and Engels called ‘primitive communism’. When the hunting was good, they fed well, and when it was sparse, they went hungry. There was no appropriable surplus, and therefore no class structure. Clan leadership would fall naturally to the cleverest, strongest and most experienced hunter whose co-ordination of the group effort would be as willingly followed (because it meant more food) as is that of a good football team captain today (because it means more goals). Specialists there might be, such as shaman or shamaness whose magic was also looked to for better hunting, or a gifted flint-knapper relieved of other duties to keep the hunters supplied with arrowheads. Division of labour between the sexes would be largely self-determining because of the demands of childbearing and rearing.2 But these would be specialities, not economic classes — much as when a family entrusts the garden to its most green-fingered member, or a football team puts an agile long-armed player in goal.
In this tribal hunting stage, survival (and good or meagre living) would be entirely a communal matter, to which all abilities would be devoted — both conscious planning and action, and unconscious intuition and instinct. Ego and Unconscious would take co-operation for granted, because survival demanded it.
The development of class structures which began after the introduction of agriculture, with its increasing specializations and its appropriable surpluses, has been very thoroughly written about and there is no need to repeat the story here. But it must have had some increasingly significant repercussions on the human psyche. Conflicts must have arisen in the Ego between the demands of tribal survival and those of personal or class advantage. Group consciousness had dominated the hunting tribe, and individual self-awareness would have been comparatively dim. (This phenomenon persists today in the few environments where a hunting tribe culture is still found; an Australian Aborigine subjected to ‘pointing the bone’ sees it as ritual exclusion from the tribe and quickly dies because he feels that he no longer exists. Other factors enter into it, of course — we do not doubt the genuine psychic powers of Aboriginal witch-doctors — but the ‘non-existence’ feeling is certainly a significant one.) But with a class structure, individuation would proceed by leaps and bounds. Pawns were being queened in large numbers; the self-conscious Ego was rapidly differentiating from the tribally conscious Ego. (Class-consciousness, involving as it does the rat-race within the class, is often more an extension of self-consciousness than a contraction of tribal-consciousness.)
In the self-conscious individual, encapsulated in an economic class, conflicts between the Ego and the Unconscious were inevitable. For a start, the tribal archetypes of the Collective Unconscious would often pull in opposite directions from the immediate demands of personal advantage, a situation unknown even to an abnormally self-aware genius in a hunting tribe. Again, each act which was tribally anti-social, but personally necessary for gain or survival or a step up in the pecking-order, would leave a guilty scar on the Personal Unconscious which would have to be sealed off in protection of the Ego, which has to be self-approving if it is to keep control.
Thus the Great Split began between the conscious Ego and the Unconscious, both Personal and Collective. And it was self-accelerating. The structures — first local, then national and finally imperial — created the split individuals and absorbed them into its framework and evolved appropriate ideologies. The split individuals, growing in their collective strength, created bigger, better and more victorious structures. And, of course, more monolithic ideologies.
Like all evolutionary phases, the Empire of the Conscious Mind has had its constructive as well as its destructive aspects. It has vastly extended man’s factual knowledge, his technical achievements and his command of his environment. Essentially, he has conquered the physical level of reality to the point where he can do almost anything he wants with it — including destroying the Earth we stand on. (Man, as somebody remarked, is the only animal clever enough to build the Empire State Building, and stupid enough to jump off it.)
But the cost has been tremendous — because of the functions which have had to be suppressed. A free hand for the conscious Ego has meant disciplining, containing, distorting and even denying the rest of the human psyche.
Moreover, the situation has now reached a crisis, in that whatever evolutionary purpose the Ego-Empire had has more than fulfilled itself. The knowledge and the techniques which it has won for homo sapiens no longer need the Ego-Empire to prop them up; indeed, they could now achieve much more without its dictatorship, which has become entirely restrictive. But like all dictatorships, the Ego-Empire fights to maintain its regime long after it has outlived any possible useful function. The reintegration of the Ego and the Unconscious, on a new and higher level, has become an urgent necessity for the individual and the race. With that process begun, we can look forward to a new and unimaginably fruitful evolutionary phase; call it, if you will, the Aquarian Age.
Necessity is not only the mother of invention; she is also the timely provider of potential answers. It is perhaps not surprising that it is within living memory that Freud paved the way for Jung and a clear understanding of the nature and structure of the human psyche — an understanding which poets, artists and story-tellers have always possessed intuitively (while being regarded as mere entertainers) and which orthodox religion has long ago ceased to be able to supply. And perhaps it is not accidental that woman is at last beginning to rebel against her millennia-long subjection — nor that paganism and our own Craft are going through what may seem an out-of-the-blue revival.
You may be wondering what all this history has to do with the subject of Witchcraft and Sex. It has everything, because the Craft is intimately concerned with the very aspects which have been (and still are being) suppressed, and with restoring the balance; and these suppressed aspects are precisely the feminine ones.
The patriarchal regime has never doubted this and has shown in practice that it regards Woman, and all she stands for, as its enemy. It has subjugated her socially, politically and economically. It has banished the Goddess and made priesthood a male monopoly. Ascetic Christianity branded woman as ‘the gate of the Devil’. Feminine intuition, instinct and attunement with Nature were the leak in the dam which must be stopped at all costs, lest the dam should burst and the Ego’s attempts to stand on its own be swept away by the flood of the released Shadow. The terrible witch persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were directed consciously (as the working handbook of the persecution, Sprenger and Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum, allows no doubt) against these feminine functions; of the millions who died, roughly a hundred women were executed for every one man, according to some estimates.
Patriarchy has stereotyped man and woman into patterns which reflect its demands and which have been all too thoroughly accepted by men and women alike: man as strong, logical, rational, reliable and the natural master, both politically and domestically, woman as weak, illogical, irrational, unreliable and the natural subordinate. Man’s sexual needs could not be denied even by Pauline Christianity, so she was allowed to be their outlet, as harlot or housewife — the former hypocritically despised, and the latter just as hypocritically idealized. Her own sexual needs hardly mattered; they were either regarded as a Devil-baited snare for the superior male, or even, during the more extreme periods such as Victorian England, supposed to be no part of a ‘lady’s’ make-up. Woman’s one inescapable monopoly — the bearing of children — was (and all too often still is) regarded as her main God-ordained function and her limiting horizon, beyond which it would be presumptuous for her to look.
It says a great deal for the indestructibility of Nature’s workings that, in spite of these stereotypes, and even before the present rebellion against them gathered impetus, so many millions of men and women have managed to achieve happy sexual partnerships.
It is understandable that the rebellion against the sexual stereotypes of the Ego-Empire has sometimes fallen into the trap of denying that there is any difference between man and woman, except for a ‘purely biological’ one. This is a forgivable reaction to being told that you are ‘unsuitable’ for some profession (usually one of the influential and well-paid ones) just because you are a woman. It is also forgivable in cases (and we have known several personally) where a woman is a sound professional in some predominantly male sphere but has difficulty in being taken seriously because she happens to be sexually attractive. ('I wish to God I were ugly!’ one such friend cried to us in a moment of frustration; we knew that she had too much genuine self-respect to wish any such thing really, but we could understand her outburst.) A woman denied equality by patriarchal society is naturally tempted to retort: ‘Stop harping on the differences between men and women! There aren’t any, except anatomical ones.’
But understandable or not, the unisex stereotype can be just as dangerous and distorting as the patriarchal stereotypes. There are basic differences between the male and the female natures — and these differences are as creatively important on all the levels as are the physical differences to sexual intercourse and procreation. Vive la différence has wider implications than ‘mere’ lovemaking.
The other danger (the one which virtually destroyed the American women’s liberation movement in America, after its exhilarating start in 1970, and finally caused the loss of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982) is the extreme radical feminist wing, the ‘misandrites’ or man-haters, mirror-opposites of the misogynists. Instead of seeing that the patriarchal stereotypes cripple men as well as women, and seeking the support of the millions of men who sympathize with women’s liberation, they regard man himself as the enemy. Instead of aiming at a creative balance which would liberate women and men, in effect they strive to replace the male Ego-Empire with a female Ego-Empire, which would of course solve nothing. Being strident out of all proportion to their numbers, they succeed in creating a false public image of the whole movement. The ironic result is that, on the lips of women who genuinely are dedicated to women’s fulfilment and equality, and to the creative balance, we hear the now-familiar declaration: ‘I’m no women’s libber.’
All is not lost, though, even in America. In an article headed ‘Who killed the Women’s Movement?’ in The Irish Times of 27 August 1982, American-born Mary Maher answers her own question: it was the radical feminists or ‘misandrites’. But she also says: ‘Something else has been born over the past few years, something that could most accurately be described as an “equality movement", subscribed to by both men and women, and it is small but healthy and growing. There’s been no symbolic christening or militant parading, just a lot of shifting and juggling and trying things out. There’s a recognition that it will take political change to end the misery so many women still endure, and a growing hope not to take power so much as adjust the axis of power.’
That is very encouraging news. ‘Adjusting the axis of power’ is another way of saying ‘achieving a creative balance'; so the Craft, which seeks this balance on all the levels, not merely the political and economic, is a natural part of this ‘equality movement’. And the Craft in America has certainly been paying great attention to the feminist question — also with much healthy ‘shifting and juggling and trying things out', fascinating information on which will be found in Margot Adler’s excellent book Drawing Down the Moon. (Though the Craft in America is developing so fast that Margot tells us wryly that, although it was only published in 1981, ‘a lot of it’s out of date already’ in 1982. She is too modest; it remains the only detailed survey of the Craft and Neo-Pagan scene in America.)
What, then, are the essential differences between man and woman that we have been talking about?
The most obvious difference, of course, is that every woman is potentially or actually a child-bearer. This is really the only difference which patriarchy regards as important, because there must be offspring. So the stereotype emphasizes this, while treating the other physically obvious difference — which is menstruation — as a mere nuisance, a ‘curse', a regrettably unavoidable concomitant of the ability to bear children. Men and woman alike fall for this; men by resigning themselves to the fact that a woman may become anything from temperamental to downright ill once a month, and women by accepting its pain and mental upset as ‘natural’ (which they are not necessarily; and if you think this statement is dogmatic, read The Wise Wound, Chapter II).
Yet in fact the menstrual cycle is more fundamental to woman’s nature — both physical and psychic — than the vast majority of men and women realize. In fact, its true importance has only just begun to be investigated. Jungian psychologists (in particular the women ones) have made a good start; but the only really important book on the subject that we know of is Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove’s 1978 work The Wise Wound: Menstruation and Everywoman. When Shuttle and Redgrove started working on their book, around 1971, they asked their College Librarian for some books on the psychology of menstruation. ‘Greatly to the Librarian’s surprise also THERE WERE NO SUCH BOOKS! … Astonishingly, this remained the situation until 1975, when Paula Weideger’s Menstruation and Menopause broke new ground in the US’ — and even that, though extremely helpful, provided ‘little guide to the inward experience and significance of the menstrual cycle’.
The Wise Wound is that rare thing, a truly revolutionary book. Its main theses, we believe, will be so immediately convincing to most women — and to most men who live with a woman — that we are as astonished as the College Librarian that they have never been set down before. It is essential reading for all witches, male or female — and incidentally it has some pertinent things to say about witchcraft, historical and modern. (It is a sad proof of how deep-rooted the stereotyped attitudes are, that the immediate reaction of some of our male witches, when we told them to read it, was ‘Ugh!’ — but their attitude changed when they did read it.)
Shuttle and Redgrove point out that there are two peaks to the menstrual cycle — ovulation and menstruation, when the womb sheds its wall and renews itself. And these two peaks have quite different implications and are accompanied by quite different psychic states. In one sense, at ovulation the woman’s body belongs to the race; she is a carrier and potential passer-on of the racial DNA genetic codes, and DNA molecules are unconcerned with her as an individual once she has ensured their combination with those of a man and ensured that combination’s survival. At menstruation, she belongs to herself; she goes through a process of bodily and psychic renewal.
The quality of her sexuality differs also. At ovulation, typically she is receptive, passive, desiring penetration. At menstruation, she is more likely to be active, taking the erotic initiative, desirous of experience for its own sake, independently of her racial reproductive function.
The patriarchal stereotype only recognizes the sexual peak at ovulation, because it is related to reproduction, which is patriarchy’s only ‘valid’ reason for a woman having sexual feelings at all. Even some capable psychologists, conditioned to believe that woman’s sexual urge is essentially passive and receptive, have often missed the menstrual peak altogether — because in questioning women about their sexual peaks, they have naturally been looking for the receptive peaks; and the women, similarly conditioned, have answered accordingly.3 Stereotyped questions have produced stereotyped statistics. The idea of an active female sexual peak ‘could be disturbing to men reared on the idea that it is the male prerogative to initiate sex. The combination of bleeding and increased sexual capacity is a formidable one to the conventional view.’ (The Wise Wound)
Powerful taboos have always surrounded menstruating women. In pre-patriarchal times (and in many ‘primitive’ cultures still) ‘menstrual taboos and seclusions are for the purpose of safeguarding the woman at a receptive time, during which she may indeed go inwards and produce prophetic information or dreams which are useful to the community, or on the contrary have wrong kinds of experience which can affect her badly ever afterwards.’ In particular, ‘the menarche or first menstruation was regarded as a time of a particular mental opening, as well as a physical one, during which a girl would have those dreams or other experiences that would guide her in later life, and that if she were to be a shaman or witch-doctor, then this was the time at which she came into a special relationship with the powerful spirits of her menstruation.’ (The Wise Wound)
But with the patriarchal take-over, menstrual taboos became a protection against the woman, against her ‘dangerous’ magic, against all those faculties which the Ego-Empire strives to banish. Or to adopt and discipline them for its own use, where it could not banish them; for example, awe of the woman’s blood-magic, which if given its due respect is wholly beneficent, may well have given rise to the patriarchal cruelties of blood sacrifice (ibid.). Men could not menstruate — but there were other ways of producing blood for magical purposes. The rationale would be: ‘Blood is obviously magical. But the menstruating shamaness is dangerous. So let us neutralize her with taboos, and kill something — or somebody — instead.’ It is significant that cultures with strong male-imposed menstrual taboos (including our own) seem to be the most prone to aggressiveness and anxiety (ibid.).
Pagan societies, however, understood and took full advantage of the shamanistic powers of menstruating women. The colleges of Hera, for example, and the pythonesses (oracular priestesses) of Delphi, made their pronouncements monthly, and there are strong indications that in such places the women synchronized their menstrual periods by deliberate psychic disciplines. (This is perfectly possible; research has shown that it often happens spontaneously today in such female communities as convents or women’s colleges.) Shuttle and Redgrove argue persuasively that Delphi bears all the hallmarks of menstrual shamanism. They suggest that the famous omphalos (still to be seen in the museum at Delphi) is not a ‘navel’ at all, but a cervix or womb-mouth,4 and that the tripod on which a Delphic shamaness sat was in fact a speculum device for observing the first signs of menstrual onset. (It had always puzzled us why classical writers laid so much stress on the significance of a mere piece of furniture; this interpretation would explain it.) To which may be added that, in the case of Delphi, the patriarchal takeover is recorded in the legend of Apollo’s conquest of the Delphic Serpent (i.e., the pythonesses); but although Apollo’s temple took charge of Delphi, the pythonesses themselves were indispensable; for centuries, no decision of importance was taken in Greece without their oracular advice, so they continued in their role — but with male priests to control and administer them and the rich tribute they attracted.
What does all this mean for today — and for witches?
To sum up: woman’s nature is cyclic, from the monthly reproductive, outward-sensitive peak of ovulation, to the intervening monthly renewing, inward-sensitive peak of menstruation. The more she accepts and understands this (and ceases to regard it as a ‘curse'), the more fulfilled and effective she will be — and the more man accepts and understands it, the better he will respect and complement her.
Both these peaks are equally significant, forming a dynamic whole, a yin-yang total, interweaving up the levels. It is the cycle itself which is important, not one or the other pole of it; the cycle makes a woman what she is. The ‘values of ovulation’ and the ‘values of menstruation’ should complement each other; but patriarchy only recognizes the ‘values of ovulation', and bases its stereotype of Woman upon them.
This cycle of different kinds of awareness means that woman’s overall experience is deeper, and ‘the events of the cycle are also more deeply-rooted and physically widespread than anything the male normally experiences. Though this means that the female’s experience of life is deeper, it means concurrently that she is more vulnerable when she opens herself to these experiences, more vulnerable to aggression, and to derogation. The man who should be the guardian and student of these abilities in the woman, has in our age become the proud and envious aggressor.’ (Ibid.,) Also, as Gerald Massey pointed out a century ago in The Natural Genesis, ‘the female nature has been the primary teacher of periodicity.’
This may be hard for the proud male, reared on patriarchal stereotypes, to swallow; it seems to put him in the novel position of being the inferior sex. But this would be a mistaken reaction. Man, too, has a positive contribution to make.
Typically, the male nature is analytical, with concentrated awareness. The female nature is synthesizing, with diffuse awareness. He is linear, moving forward like a car chassis; she is cyclic, moving forward like a point on the rim of a car’s tyre (and note that both kinds of movement can get there just as quickly). He takes things to pieces to see what they are made of; she puts them together to see how they relate.
The two functions need each other. Left to themselves, his concentrated awareness can become tunnel vision, and her diffuse awareness can become disorientation. His analysing can become destructive, enthroning facts above feeling; her synthesizing can lose coherence, enthroning feeling above facts. Her sensitivity, unprotected by its brother strength, can become dangerous vulnerability; his single-minded vigour, unguided by its sister intuition, can become blundering aggression.
Working together, on the other hand, they can find their way through the forest. He may identify single trees and help her not to bump into them. She may have a better map of the whole forest and help him not to get lost.
Not only this — but each nature has within itself the seed of the other, like the white spot in the black yin and the black spot in the white yang (see Figure 6). In the woman, this is the Animus, her buried masculine component, integration with which enriches her femininity; it tends to manifest especially at the menstrual peak, as her ‘other husband’ or Moon-partner, who may be either frightening or vitalizing according to her degree of self-awareness and the balance she has achieved between her two cyclic sets of values. In the man, it is the Anima, his buried feminine component, integration with which correspondingly enriches his masculinity. Since man is linear rather than cyclic, the Anima’s impingement upon man’s awareness tends to seem spasmodic and unpredictable; she can perhaps best be identified (and fruitfully listened to) as the dream-figure of a woman who is well known to the dreamer but unplaceable in waking life. (When Stewart began recording his dreams, he labelled her ‘the X-woman', until he started reading Jung and realized who she was.) She, too, can be frightening or helpful, depending upon whether a man accepts and reaches out to her or resists her. But she is always there, an inalienable part of the total psyche; and as The Wise Wound vividly puts it: ‘This repressed feminine world must include the problem of menstruation, its shape and form, for man as well as woman. What should never have been forgotten is that the anima menstruates.’
It is worth pointing out here that the witches’ belief in reincarnation not only agrees with the Animus/Anima concept but must inevitably include it. The immortal Individuality, as we have said, is dynamically hermaphroditic, with both aspects in a balance which is imperfect or perfect according to its stage of karmic progress. But the Personality of any one incarnation is either male or female; so the other, temporarily subordinated, aspect will naturally make its presence felt — as Anima or Animus. So the degree of harmonious integration that a Personality shows with its Anima or Animus is a revealing pointer to the degree of karmic advancement achieved by the incarnating Individuality.
To turn for a moment from individual men and women to human society as a whole — and the perhaps astonishing fact that it was menstruation brought it about. As Shuttle and Redgrove point out (The Wise Wound — their italics): ‘It is received opinion in zoological science that the development of the menstrual cycle was responsible for the evolution of primate and eventually human societies.’ The majority of mammals have an oestrus cycle; they come ‘on heat’ periodically, and at other times they have no interest in mating. Ovulation is their only peak; sex means begetting young and nothing else, as a survival factor for the species. But ‘with the Old World Monkeys, the Apes and the human being, an immense evolutionary change occurred. This was the development of the menstrual cycle.’ The mating-signal of genital blood was wrenched from its former position at ovulation to a new position at menstruation, when it is very unlikely that ovulation can occur or offspring can be conceived. Sexual libido, too, was now spread over most of the cycle. How could this be a survival factor? ‘The answer must be that the sexual experience in primates (monkeys and humans) must have become of benefit and importance to the individual (and thence to the race) as well as to the species by breeding.’
‘Non-stop libido', or what The Wise Wound calls ‘sexual brightness', was an evolutionary adaptation favouring the development of social and economic co-operation and promoting insight during problem-solving. The patriarchal epoch may have tried to narrow sex down to copulation for breeding; evolution knows better. ‘Sexual brightness’ is the urge to relatedness, the thing which makes us human, in contrast to those species with whom sex is mere copulation for breeding. ‘The creation of children is one half of human joy. The other half is the creation of “mental children”: seminal ideas and insights’ (ibid. p.210) — and Shuttle and Redgrove pertinently add: ‘It is too much supposed that the creation of “mental children” is the sole province of men, because the creation of physical children is the exclusive ability of women.’
It is ironic that so many Western religions, from Catholicism to Christian Science, forbid the enjoyment of sex independently of reproduction — and thus, in effect, try to regress humanity to a pre-human stage of evolution!
We can thus see the difference between the positive-creative and negative-restrictive approaches to sexual relationships and sexual morality. If all the aspects we have been discussing are genuinely understood and made part of our living attitude to one another, if we stop seeing stereotypes and instead see living human beings, then increasingly we view the other sex with a respect, and our own sex with an empathy, born of that understanding. Increasingly, we discern the essence of the God (and the Goddess-Anima) within every man, and of the Goddess (and the God-Animus) within every woman. Every relationship, from a sexual pair-bond to friendship, can become illumined with a magical sense of wonder. And with genuine love (at whatever appropriate level of intensity or closeness) problems of morality tend to solve themselves. Morality is not determined by a book of rules; it is determined by the actual nature of real relationships.
All that may sound a bit idealistic and too good to be true; yet in practice it is not.
It is our experience that coven work, sincerely carried out, fosters just this process. The coven join together in active worship of the Goddess and God; and on the principle of ‘as above, so below', Wicca does not place a gulf between the divine and the human. The Goddess principle is invoked into the High Priestess, and the God principle into the High Priest. Each strives to put herself or himself in tune with the invoked principle and to act as a channel for it, and is so treated by the rest. And it works, as every experienced coven knows; because you are not trying to relate to something imaginary, you are opening yourself up to an essence that is already there. Moreover, in Wicca there is also no gulf between priesthood and congregation; in the normal process of training, every witch is given opportunities to act as High Priestess or High Priest.
The ritual of Drawing Down the Moon demonstrates both the process and the mental attitude that should be taken to it. First the Priest gives the Priestess the Fivefold Kiss — greeting and acknowledging the individual woman herself, his sister witch. The Priestess accepts the salutation, aware of herself as an individual woman and of the Priest as an individual man. Next comes the invocation, in which the Priest brings together his awareness of the woman and his awareness of the Goddess, in the consciousness that they are of the same essence. The Priestess opens herself to this same consciousness. Then the Priest addresses himself to the Goddess directly in the ‘Hail Aradia’ declamation, and the Priestess hands over the control of her own individuality to the Goddess. Finally, as channel for the Goddess, she feeds back the manifestation of the Goddess to the Priest, in the ‘Of the Mother darksome and divine’ blessing.
Only those who have worked this ritual in all sincerity know what startling effects it can have.
The purpose of the Drawing Down the Sun ritual (Section VI) is of course the mirror-image of this.
Men and women witches get used to working together in full recognition of their psychic need for each other’s complementary essences. The psychic — and practical — results they achieve do build up their respect for each other, and their understanding of the true meaning of the male and female natures.
Every woman, if she can free herself from the conditioning imposed by the patriarchal stereotype, is a natural witch. Most men, unless they have a well-integrated and fully functioning Anima, have to work harder at it. Witches work primarily with the ‘gifts of the Goddess’ — the intuitive, psychic functions, the direct awareness, by sensitivity at all levels from bodily to spiritual, of the natural order of things. All this is a woman’s immediate inheritance; on the whole, a man approaches it best via the woman (and via his own Anima, which is the same process). The Lovers card in the Waite (Rider) Tarot deck expresses this perfectly; the man looks across at the woman, who looks up at the angel. As Eden Gray, interpreting this card in A Complete Guide to the Tarot, says: ‘The truth conveyed is that the conscious mind cannot approach the superconscious unless it passes through the subconscious.’
That is why Wicca is matriarchal, and the High Priestess is the leader of the coven — with the High Priest as her partner. They are essential to each other, and ultimately equal (remembering that the immortal Individuality, the reincarnating monad, is hermaphroditic), but in the context of Wiccan working and of their present incarnation, he is rather like the Prince Consort of a reigning Queen. He is (or should be) a channel for the God aspect, and there is nothing inferior about that; but Wiccan working is primarily concerned with the ‘gifts of the Goddess', so the Priestess takes precedence; for woman is the gateway to witchcraft, and man is her ‘guardian and student’.
All-woman covens do exist, particularly in the United States, and they can work, the cyclic natures of the members providing the necessary creative polarity. But an all-male coven, in our opinion, would be a mistake. Men wishing to work together in the occult field should stick to ritual magic of some such pattern as that of the Golden Dawn — though even there we feel they would do better with women fellow-workers.
It would be naive to pretend that the development of the kind of magically and psychologically creative intersexual attitudes which we have been describing always proceeds without a hitch in a working coven. Witches are human beings, and there will be setbacks, immaturities and the old deeply rooted stereotypes to deal with. But that is one of the purposes of group working; to help each other to develop, and to pinpoint weaknesses in a comradely and understanding manner. It is our experience that, given basically sound human material and a genuine common philosophy, the movement is forward overall. And the God and the Goddess do help those who help themselves.
We deliberately refrain from commenting on the ‘gay’ covens (another particularly American phenomenon) because we feel that we are not equipped to do so, and because anything we could say might be interpreted as anti-homosexual prejudice. We have homosexual friends to whom we related happily as people as we do to other friends — namely, on those things which we have in common, our sexual attitudes not being one of those things. We have always regarded their sexual attitude as their own business, and defended them against any attempts to make them suffer for it. We have even had one or two homosexual members during our coven’s history, when they have been prepared and able to assume the role of their actual gender while in a Wiccan context, and when their personalities have been harmonious with the rest of us.
But we are utterly heterosexual ourselves, and our own concept of Wicca is built around natural maleness and femaleness of mind, body and spirit. We are therefore personally out of tune with the whole idea of a ‘gay’ coven, and would be very ill at ease if we were guests at one, however much we liked the people involved. So in the interests of pagan harmony, we leave discussion of the question to those who are in tune with it.
(Incidentally, we very much regret the adoption of the term ‘gay’ for homosexual; quite apart from making a happy little word unusable in its original sense, it implies that homosexuals are in a permanently manic mood, and therefore not ordinary human beings — which is the very charge that homosexuals rightly fight against.)
What about ‘sex magic’ in the literal sense?
As we explained in Eight Sabbats for Witches, the use of man/woman polarity in magical working is of two kinds: the ‘magic of gender', which is simply a man and a woman each contributing his or her characteristic mental gifts and psychic power to a magical task; and ‘sex magic', which uses sexual intercourse between the partners as a psychic dynamo.
‘The magic of gender’ is the basic pattern of most coven working — as when a man and a woman hold opposite ends of a cord in cord-magic, or men and women sit alternately in a ring for linked-hand magic, or a man and a woman consecrate the wine or a working tool. It is as essentially intersexual, and as completely removed from coitus, as ballroom dancing. Brother and sister, father and daughter, mother and son, can and do work this kind of magic together, just as effectively and just as free from any ‘improper’ overtones, as they would partner each other on a dance floor.
‘Sex magic’ is something quite different; it can be very powerful, both in its effect in terms of the intended outcome of the work and in its effect on the couple concerned (even if they have been lovers, or married, for years).
And we would say categorically: sex magic as such should only be worked by a couple for whom intercourse is a normal part of their relationship — in other words, husband and wife, or established lovers — and in complete privacy. For them, it is an extension (and may well be an enrichment) of their customary lovemaking. For a couple not so related, it could be very dangerous indeed; if they approached it cold-bloodedly as a ‘necessary magical operation', that would be a gross abuse of their sexuality and their supposed respect for each other; if they rushed into it with a sudden and ill-considered warmth, it could have effects on unexpected levels for which they were quite unprepared — worst of all, it could affect them unequally, leaving one emotionally overwhelmed and the other with a burden of guilt.
Sex magic without love is black magic.
That being said — how can a husband and wife (or established lovers) work sex magic in practice?
There are two simple ways: by harnessing the psychic power of intercourse and by post-coital reverie.
Dion Fortune says (The Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage, p. 114): ‘When the act of sexual union takes place the subtle forces of the two natures rush together, and, as in the case of two currents of water in collision, a whirlpool or vortex is set up; this vortex extends up the planes as far as the mating of the bodies takes place’ (i.e., as far as the couple’s seven component levels — are united with each other — our note) ‘so that should two people who idealise each other, and whose love has elements of a spiritual nature in its composition, meet in coitus, the vortex so created will extend on to one of the higher planes.’ In other words, the more united the couple on all the levels, the higher up those levels will the vortex take effect; when soul-mates make love, the vortex reaches all the levels; and at the other extreme, the callous copulation of a pair with no higher-plane contact will produce a vortex that may be very powerful in the murky waters of the lower astral, but quite uncorrected by the balancing influence of the other planes — which underlines our statement that sex magic without love is black magic.
A closely united couple who wish to use sex magic for a worthwhile objective will first discuss that objective and make sure that they have it clearly in their minds. They will then cast a Circle around themselves and make love unhurriedly and tenderly, with the maximum possible awareness of each other and of the magical objective. Once they have joined their bodies in coitus, if they have sufficient control they may even keep quite still for a while, building up the sexual tension-in-unity to the highest possible peak, so that their awareness of each other and of their purpose reaches as great a level of intensity as they can bear. When they are ready, they will aim at simultaneous orgasm, at which point they will hurl the whole power of the vortex into the achievement of the magical objective. Even if their orgasms should not coincide, they should both ‘hurl the vortex’ at the moment of each orgasm.
Sex magic of this kind should not be used too often, because it is a memorably heightened experience and is better not devalued by over-familiarity.
One occasion when we used it ourselves is worth recording. We had been in Ireland a few months, having handed over our London coven to other leaders, and we were feeling frustrated because we now had no coven except for one already-initiated witch who had contacted us and who lived a hundred miles away. So we worked by this method to ‘set up an astral lighthouse’ over our home, which would attract the kind of people we wanted. The very next day, we met the couple who became our first Irish initiates, and from then on our coven grew. The original couple were a great strength to us in this growth and are now running their own group. (It is perhaps significant of the kind of resonance our ‘lighthouse’ set up, that the very first people it attracted were a married pair.)
That is active sex magic; the second kind is more receptive. The power of the vortex is reabsorbed by the couple for their own benefit.
Again, the couple make love within a Magic Circle — but this time there is no outside objective to bear in mind. All their attention is directed to awareness of themselves and each other, and to activating all their levels in unison with each other. It is after orgasm that magic is invoked. As The Wise Wound says ‘Reveries in enhanced body-consciousness after one’s sexual intercourse are probably the deepest of all — with second-stage labour possibly the only exception, when the woman is overwhelmingly “suggestible” — and what is called “sexual magic” is often no other than introducing images into such a reverie.’
A couple who are experienced witches or occultists, and who have developed a high degree of intercommunion on all the levels, can use this method to great advantage — and unlike the ‘hurled vortex', it can be used as often as they like, and even made their normal post-coital habit. The insights gained in such a reverie, especially if they are shared and interwoven by a harmonious couple, can be of tremendous value. And as for ‘introducing images’ — post-coital reverie can be a very effective time for building up and energizing active thought-forms, for the magical purposes explained in Section XXII — ‘Spells’.
The subtleties and refinements of sex magic are as varied as those of lovemaking — and as unique to the individual couple. But the principles we have outlined should give a firm foundation on which any couple can build, if this is a path they wish to explore.
This Section would not be complete without some reference to two problems which raise much controversy, nowhere more than here in Ireland: abortion and contraception.
We would not go so far as those who assert that abortion is never justifiable. It is an evil, but there are sad situations where it is a lesser evil. A living foetus is the initial stage of the reincarnation of a human entity, and to thrust that entity back so that it has to find (or be drawn into) a new foetal vehicle is a violent act, the traumatic effects of which on the entity may be serious, as well as being a load on the karma of the person who does it. But if the mother’s life is at risk, or her health is seriously endangered — or if, because of rape-induced pregnancy or other reasons, the circumstances into which the child would have to be born would be so disastrous for it that the trauma of having to re-start the incarnation process genuinely appears to be the lesser evil — then abortion may be the only solution.
Given a choice between the life of the mother (who is halfway through an incarnation and almost always with many responsibilities and relationships) and that of the unborn child (who has barely started on an incarnation, has acquired no responsibilities and has no direct relationship except the foetal one with its mother), then it seems clear to us that it is the mother who must be saved.
But to use abortion as a lazy alternative to contraception is unforgivable. So, too, is the family pressure which often forces a girl into abortion because of what the neighbours may think. Equally unforgivable is the practice (growing in America, we understand) of determining the sex of a foetus and then aborting it if it does not happen to be of the desired sex.
Abortion and contraception (like ‘sex-and-violence') are all too often lumped together by propagandists. This is quite illogical and very wrong.
We cannot see any theological, social, psychological or ecological justification for the Vatican ban on contraception. Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae was one of the most disastrous pronouncements of this century. Fortunately, ‘the arguments used obviously failed to convince the majority, even within the Catholic Church, and in the years which followed the use of the methods referred to increased rather than declined.’ (Hans Kung, Infallible?,)5 Millions of good Catholic wives are on the Pill; and many good priests know that they are right, and thus suffer painful stresses of conscience and obedience in the confessional box.
The declared intention of the ban on contraception is the defence of the sanctity of marriage. Its actual effect, on those couples who abide by it, is often the destruction of the harmony of marriage, with love at loggerheads with fear of pregnancy. The one permitted method of pregnancy-avoidance, where ‘you make love with a calendar in one hand and a thermometer in the other', is hardly more conducive to a happy sex-life; and its reliability is reflected in its nickname, ‘Vatican roulette’.
The insistence that deliberately childless couples are ‘selfish’6 and that parenthood is the obligatory purpose of marriage — and the further insistence, by implication, that a couple may not even choose to limit the number of their children, unless it be by abstinence from marital sex (a dogma in which Mary Baker Eddy antedated Paul VI) — is part and parcel of the patriarchal attitude, which basically hates sex as one of God’s incomprehensible afflictions, and fears women as dangerous disrupters of the Ego-Empire.
In the present state of the world, this insistence is also blindly anti-social. If the world-wide population explosion is not checked, civilization (whether capitalist, communist or on any other pattern) will become unworkable and the Earth uninhabitable. That is not panic-mongering; it is plain, unavoidable fact. In this situation, a couple who opt for ‘mental children’ instead of physical ones are anything but selfish; they are making their own small contribution to avoiding world disaster. And a couple who produce only as many physical children as they can conscientiously and lovingly rear, while continuing to benefit from their own sexual harmony, are making their contribution to the quality of the next generation.
Sexuality — ‘sexual brightness’ — freed from the shackles of obligatory breeding is what makes us specifically human. Zoologists, psychologists and witches all agree about this. Sexual relatedness is a great creative force at all levels, not merely the procreative; and when the patriarchal system, particularly in the shape of a celibate hierarchy, tries to deny or distort that truth, it is blinding itself to reality. Celibates dogmatizing about sexuality are like colour-blind men legislating for the composition of artists’ palettes.
Discovering and making use of the true natures of men and women, in mutual respect and wonder, means moving with evolution and even helping it forward. It reaches to the heart of white magic. Attempting to imprison those natures in stereotypes, or to regress them to a pre-human stage, is flying in the face of evolution. And whatever works against evolution is — by any occultist’s or witch’s definition — black.