Ritual nudity is a general practice in Gardnerian and Alexandrian witchcraft and is to be found in other Wiccan paths as well. To those who, like ourselves, have been practising it for many years, nudity seems perfectly normal and acceptable — as it does to the thirty thousand or so naturists in the British Isles, and to anything up to two million on the Continent. We have to remind ourselves that other people find it strange.
By ‘strange', of course, the objectors mean ‘sexually provocative’ or even ‘orgiastic’. Nobody who has attended a well-run naturist camp, with its relaxed family membership, or a genuine Wiccan Circle, with its equally relaxed group identity, can really believe that. Familiarity with nakedness very quickly teaches one the actual truth: that the naked body in itself is no more, and no less, sexually arousing than the clothed one — and that even an attractive naked body may be less disturbing than the same body in deliberately provocative clothing. Sexiness is a matter of behaviour, of attitude, of ‘vibes’ — not of the presence or absence of clothing.
Patriarchal conditioning over the past couple of thousand years or so has ingrained the ideas that nakedness equals sex, and that sex equals danger. Sexuality — and in particular female sexuality — to the patriarchal mind stands for the Shadow, for all the unmanageable depths of the psyche which cannot be disciplined, ordered and contained by the rigid administration of the Ego-Empire. Commercialized nudity (the pin-up, the flesh that sells soft drinks or shampoos or automobiles) is something different; the Ego-Empire must make its profit to survive, and anyway debasing sexuality is one way of containing it. But relaxed, non-commercial nudity, whether social or ritual, is alarming. It is the Shadow refusing to play the patriarchal game.
Witches, too, refuse to play the patriarchal game. And taking off their clothes for their rituals is one sign of that refusal.
As the Charge puts it: ‘And ye shall be free from slavery; and as a sign that ye be really free, ye shall be naked in your rites.’ This is no Gardnerian innovation, by the way;1 it is an inheritance from the Tuscan witches (Aradia: the Gospel of the Witches, see Bibliography under Leland):
Sarete liberi dalla schiavitù!
E cosi diverrete tutti liberi!
Pero uomini e donne
Sarete tutti nudi, per fino.
(Ye shall be free from slavery!
And thus shall ye all become free!
Therefore, men and women,
Ye too shall all be naked.)
Ritual nakedness, particularly for shamanistic purposes, is an old pagan practice, certainly not confined to the witches of Tuscany. It was even a habit of the old Hebrew prophets: ‘And he stripped off his clothes also, and prophesied before Samuel in like manner, and lay down naked all that day and all that night. Wherefore they say, Is Saul also among the prophets?’ (I Samuel xix, 24). Even St Francis, that splendidly undevious saint, preached one of his first radical sermons stark naked in the Cathedral of San Ruffino in Assisi, to a large congregation of men and women. Shuttle and Redgrove (The Wise Wound,) quote E.A.S. Butterworth as saying that nakedness and prophecy go together: ‘We see that the offence of Adam and Eve was, in all likelihood, that they had cultivated a practice, at least akin to shamanism, in which they had attained a condition of ecstatic vision or consciousness, called eating of the tree of life, or of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. When their eyes were opened and they knew that they were naked, Adam and Eve knew that they were seers and persons of power and sacred quality in their own right.’ Shuttle and Redgrove comment that, ‘this must have exasperated any Deity dedicated to any authoritarian or hierarchical rule, or any church derived from a repressive interpretation of the legend, like the mediaeval Christian Church.’
There is much argument about whether witches in the British Isles regularly worked naked — though since in the climate of these islands it would mostly be indoors and certainly secret, evidence on the subject would be scanty. But, for example, naked dances for the fertility of crops unquestionably did take place (we quoted a living-memory instance of this from Co. Longford of Eight Sabbats for Witches). And many experts have written about the witches’ ‘flying ointments’2 which were rubbed all over the body and produced a feeling of levitation; the users of these powerful and dangerous substances would hardly have reclothed themselves while the ointment was still active on their skins.
Continental paintings and drawings of witches often showed them naked (see Plate 14 for a charming Flemish example), which suggests that the practice was known about.
But whether or not the widespread Wiccan habit of ‘working skyclad’ is mainly a phenomenon of the twentieth-century revival (in the British Isles at least) or the continuation of a secret custom of the underground days, is hardly important. Ritual nudity has always been a feature of pagan shamanistic practice, and even (as we have seen) of ancient Judaic; and its geographical distribution at any one period is secondary to the principle. What matters is its validity for witches today.
There are several good reasons for witches to work skyclad.
The first is that it is a deliberate antidote to the cardinal sin of the patriarchal period: the split between body and spirit. ‘In the split world, spirit wars with flesh, culture with nature, the sacred with the profane, the light with the dark’ (Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark,). This is patriarchalism’s debasement of the creative principle of polarity into a false dualism of good-versus-evil which we discussed in Section XI, ‘The Rationale of Witchcraft’. Witches deny this attitude. They maintain, with the Cabalists, that ‘all the Sephiroth are equally holy'; they insist that good is in fact the macrocosmic and microcosmic working of polarity, and that evil is its imbalance or denial. The Christian Church in particular (unlike Jesus who spoke of the ‘temple’ of his body) has been responsible for identifying the body with evil and the spirit with good, and putting them at war with one another, instead of seeing the body as the incarnated manifestation of the inner levels, through which those levels enrich and extend their experience.
Shame at nudity is one expression of this false dualism. It pretends that John Smith and Mary Brown are ‘really’ just spiritual and mental beings (with all their potential or actual good centred upon those levels) trapped in gross physical bodies (which are essentially evil, even though Christian dogma paradoxically maintains that they will ultimately be resurrected in ‘purified’ form — how clothed, one wonders?). Hiding the body is therefore seen as a spiritually virtuous act.
To the witch, on the other hand, John Smith and Mary Brown, as at present incarnated, are multi-level beings of spirit, mind, astral body and flesh; and each of those levels should shine forth with equal confidence and self-respect (not to mention mutual respect, between levels and between individuals) if integration and fulfilment are to be achieved. When John Smith and Mary Brown, as witches, take off their clothes to work their magic and worship the Goddess and the God, they are openly affirming that principle and striving to make it part of their everyday awareness.
A good reason for skyclad working — and the one most quoted — is a very practical one: experienced opinion holds that it is easier to raise psychic power with an uncovered body than with a covered one. Remembering that psychic power-raising is a two-sided process of input and output (increased awareness and increased psychic energy amplifying each other by mutual feedback) this may well be the original reason for shamanistic nudity — that the naked body is more responsive not only to sensory impressions (which is obvious) but also to psychic ones. And on the parallel process of output — sensitives who can see the human aura find that they can do so more clearly around bare flesh; and those few doctors who use auric examination diagnostically, including those who do not claim clairvoyance, examine their patients unclothed for this purpose (see Kilner’s The Human Aura, for example).
A witch at work brings all his or her levels into operation — spiritual, mental, astral, etheric and physical. Their interrelationships may vary according to the particular level on which the work is intended to take effect, which may be any one of them. But they must all be fully functional; so it may be that trying to work with one of them partly screened is like trying to play the piano in gloves, or to paint a picture in dark glasses. It can be done if circumstances demand it — but if they do not, why add to your difficulties?
There is an interesting biological footnote to this aspect. Everybody knows about hormones, the internal chemical messengers which carry information and instructions around in our bloodstream and regulate the balance of our bodies’ functions. But not many laymen have heard of their counterparts the ‘pheromones’ or external chemical messengers. Our bodies give these pheromones off in minute but very powerful quantities; so powerful that (to take a startling example from another genus) a single molecule of the appropriate pheromone enables a male moth to detect a female moth from nearly seven miles away. (Maurice Burton, The Sixth Sense of Animals,) So the air around us is full of important information which we emit and which we receive from others; much of it unconsciously, but we react to it all the same.
Obviously, the naked body gives off pheromones far more quickly and efficiently than a clothed one. So it may well be that in group working, a skyclad coven is exchanging unconscious information more effectively than a robed one; and this information may be highly relevant to the psychic Gestalt which they are trying to build up. Pheromones have been extensively researched by scientists, but so far as we know, no scientist with occult or psychic interests has looked into that possible aspect of their effects. There is room for investigation here.
A third reason for skyclad working is a psychological one. To be an effective witch you must above all be yourself; most of the work of self-integration is concerned with finding out who ‘yourself is, with seeing past the Persona, the Ego’s comforting mask, the image which the Ego presents to the world and to itself. And there is nothing more image-forming than clothes, which are a precious prop to the Persona. Consciously and unconsciously, how we dress is how we say to the world, ‘This is myself as I want you to see me’ before we even open our mouths. Taking off our clothes is a psychologically powerful gesture of image-shedding, a symbolic milestone on the road to self-realization. In group working, it not only means that John Smith finds it psychologically harder to project a false image of himself to Mary Brown; it also means he starts seeing past Mary’s Persona and relating to her as she really is; while at the same time Mary is going through the same revolution, with the two revolutions feeding each other.
It is interesting to watch, incidentally, how a developing witch may even unconsciously acquire a more pleasing dress-sense in ordinary, clothed life. The reason is plain: his or her Persona is adjusting itself, with improved understanding, closer to the truth of the Self, and this in turn is instinctively reflected in the choice of clothes.
A fourth reason carries more weight with some people than with others: nudity is completely democratic. A few very new witches in a coven whose members come from mixed backgrounds may be a little self-conscious about differences at first. Years ago we had in our coven, at the same time, an Indian princess and a building worker. She was only a jeans-and-sweater law student, and he was a many-skilled and articulate young man; but he admitted to us, months after their first meeting, that for the first weeks he had only been able to feel completely at ease with her when we were all skyclad in the Circle together, because ‘then we were all just people.’ (Ironically, that girl was more ‘decent’ in the Circle than out; she was tiny, with long thick hair, and when she sat in the Circle with it spread around her like a tent, we used to tease her that we could only see her knees and her nose!) It goes without saying that, once the freemasonry of Wicca starts working, such differences soon become meaningless. But our building-worker friend’s initial reaction does bear out what we said about the image-forming function of clothes; he knew what she was, and they were very expensive jeans and sweaters.
Some people, while accepting the idea of ritual nudity without too much horror, qualify their acceptance by saying, ‘Of course, it’s all very well if you’re young and good-looking.’ We find in fact that this does not arise. We have had skyclad witches from eighteen to their sixties; men, women, tall, short, fat, thin, plain, stunning, raven, golden and grey; and nobody seems to mind. If anything, the less handsome ones seem reassured by the emphasis on our common humanity which skyclad practice brings; finding themselves treated as equals, they may even achieve a new poise and thus start making more of themselves, discovering attractive potentialities which they did not know they possessed.
A final advantage of skyclad working is particularly important with some personalities; the ones who have genuine occult potential but are glamorized by the appeal of splendid robes and trappings (a by-product, of course, of the Persona problem). To these, working naked brings home the lesson that psychic effectiveness comes from within; it is hard and dedicated work, and no romantic dressing-up will provide a short cut. We have had one or two of these people, and each of them had to learn the lesson the hard way.
All this does not mean, of course, that skyclad covens never work robed. There are occasions when robes are called for: when you are working ceremonial magic, for instance, as we and many other covens sometimes do. It is a different technique from normal Wiccan working, and should be recognized as such. It involves the extensive use of symbols, colours, perfumes, music and so on, to put yourself in tune with a particular and precisely defined aspect. It is not witchcraft, but there is no reason why witches should never work it — any more than classical musicians should never play jazz, or rock musicians chamber music, if they feel like it.
Obviously, too, there are occasions when a coven is working out of doors where they may be observed, or when the weather is unsuitable for bare skin; there is no occult virtue in goose-pimples or pneumonia.
But in general, when covering is called for, special robes are preferable to ordinary clothes if possible. We have a suitcase full of plain overall gowns with loose sleeves, suitable for men and women alike, which may be worn by themselves or over other clothes. The point is to emphasize the Circle as something special, ‘a boundary between the world of men and the realm of the Mighty Ones’ — just as a Christian will put on his Sunday best to go to church, or a Jew his Sabbath best to go to synagogue. For skyclad covens, ‘skin is the livery of the Goddess'; it is their Sunday or Sabbath best. But even if that livery must be covered, they still like the Circle to be seen as special, as well as being felt to be special.
To help newcomers over their first shyness, we always offer them a robe for their initial Circle. Some accept it and some do not; but we often find that even those who do, take it off halfway through because their feeling of shyness has transferred its focus to embarrassment at being odd man or woman out.
Most skyclad covens have one other exception to the rule: a menstruating woman may wear panties or a robe as she wishes.
The skyclad rule does not bar the use of particular robes for a symbolic reason in a particular ritual. An example of this is the High Priestess’s white tabard in our Yule ritual in Eight Sabbats for Witches: but even then she would take it off when the ritual was finished and the Sabbat party began.
We have given here the reasons why many covens work skyclad. They are good reasons, but in cold print, to someone who has never experienced skyclad working, they may appear a little intellectualized. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Witches who are used to working skyclad know how relaxing, natural, psychically powerful and utterly unembarrassing it is.
Skin is indeed the livery of the Goddess.