This is a book about bringing together the spiritual and the political. Or rather, it is a work that attempts to move in the space where that split does not exist, where the stories of duality that our culture tells us no longer bind us to repeat the same old plots.
That space is dark and half-forgotten but within it lies a power that runs counter to the principle of domination upon which our society is based. In essence, this is a book about power. It talks about the differences between power-over and power-from-within, about the stories and thought-forms that convey power, about ethics based on power-from-within. Although it moves in the dark it is also about vision and about action—that is, about magic, the art of evoking power-from-within and using it to transform ourselves, our community, our culture, using it to resist the destruction that those who wield power-over are bringing upon the world.
This book begins in a conversation that unrolls like the dark ribbon of the road as we pass by orchards of almonds and fields of wild mustard. We are driving home from a women’s conference—myself and my friends Lauren and Kerry. All weekend we have been hearing horror stories of rape, torture, footbinding, clitoridectomy, forced incarceration in mental hospitals, Witch burnings, mutilations.
We are questioning the value of telling the stories over and over again. We know them. We know particularly the stories of the Witches, because Lauren and I are Witches. That is, we practice the Old Religion of the Goddess, although we practice it in eternally new ways that change with every ritual, every moon. And our Witchcraft is entwined with our politics.
The Old Religion—call it Witchcraft, Wicca, the Craft, or with a slightly broader definition, Paganism or Neo-Paganism—is both old and newly invented. Its roots go back to the pre-Judeo-Christian tribal religions of the West, and it is akin in spirit, form, and practice to Native American and African religions. Its myths and symbols draw from the woman-valuing, matristic,1 Goddess-centered cultures that underlie the beginnings of civilization.2 It is not a religion with a dogma, a doctine, or a sacred book; it is a religion of experience, of ritual, of practices that change consciousness and awaken power-from-within. Beneath all, it is a religion of connection with the Goddess, who is immanent in nature, in human beings, in relationships. Because the Goddess is here, She is eternally inspirational. And so Witchcraft is eternally reinvented, changing, growing, alive.
Long after city dwellers had converted to Christianity, the Witches3 were the wise women and cunning men of the country villages. They were the herbalists, the healers, the counselors in times of trouble. Their seasonal celebrations established the bond between individuals, the community as a whole, and the land and its resources. That bond, that deep connection, was the source of life—human, plant, animal, and spiritual. Without it, nothing could grow. From the power within that relationship came the ability to heal, to divine the future, to build, to create, to make songs, to birth children, to build culture. The bond was erotic, sensual, carnal, because the activities of the flesh were not separate from the spirit immanent in life.
The history of patriarchal civilization could be read as a cumulative effort to break that bond, to drive a wedge between spirit and flesh, culture and nature, man and woman. One of the major battles in that long war of conquest was fought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the persecutions of the Witches shattered the peasants’ connection with the land, drove women out of the work of healing, and imposed the mechanist view of the world as a dead machine. That rupture underlies the entwined oppressions of race, sex, class, and ecological destruction.
The Craft survived, however—secretly, silently, underground, in small groups called covens whose members were related by blood or deep trust. Its reemergence in this century is linked to a growing realization among many strata of people that the dead world of mechanism, the world of domination, cannot sustain our inner lives, nor our lives in community with each other, nor the life of the planet. The rebirth of earth religion is a part of a broad movement that challenges domination—that seeks to connect with the root, the heart, the source of life by changing our present relationships.
I am not, however, speaking for Witchcraft in this book, or for any other political or spiritual group. The view of the Craft I present is my own vision, and it is meant to be challenging, to present not only what is but what could be. Certainly, not all Witches share my political perspective, and few of those whose political perspective parallels mine are Witches. They are as likely to be Quakers, Buddhists, radical Catholics, or atheists. Although I belong to many (perhaps too many) groups—a coven, several different collectives, and an affinity group—all have been important in helping me formulate ideas, but I am not speaking for any group. I am sure members of every one of my circles will find something in this book with which they disagree.
Lauren and I are in the same coven. We have met together for three—four—five years, performed the rites, cast the circle, chanted, raised power, honored the Goddess immanent in ourselves and each other, shared visions, shared pain, fought and made up, cried and laughed. And now, driving together on the road in the dark, I tell her that when I write and speak about the Craft and the Goddess, I like to speak about the bond and the strength and the connection, not the horror—of what we do, not what was done to us. But I question myself: is this perhaps, just my way of trying to avoid pain?
“All of that,” says Lauren, who is a poet as well as a Witch, “the torture stories and the rage come from the dark. But if you retell the horror without creating the dark anew, you feed it. You do not break the mold. We need to dream the dark as process, and dream the dark as change, to create the dark in a new image. Because the dark creates us.”
Later, she writes to a friend:
“When we tell of the turning dark, the velvet dark, Hecate’s birthgiving dark, the shadow listens to that also. And what we name feeds into the open imaginations that are listening. So their concept of what is narrowly called death can change.”
The dark: all that we are afraid of, all that we don’t want to see—fear, anger, sex, grief, death, the unknown.
The turning dark: change.
The velvet dark: skin soft in the night, the stroke of flesh on flesh, touch, joy, mortality.
Hecate’s birth-giving dark: seeds are planted underground, the womb is dark, and life forms itself anew in hidden places.
The question of the dark has become a journey, as our conversation took place on a journey. How do we face the dark on the edge of annihilation? How do we find the dark within and transform it, own it as our own power? How do we dream it into a new image, dream it into actions that will change the world into a place where no more horror stories happen, where there are no more victims? Where the dark is kind and charged with a friendly power: the power of the unseen, the power that comes from within, the power of the immanent Goddess who lies coiled in the heart of every cell of every living thing, who is the spark of every nerve and the life of every breath.
For me, the journey began in a place of despair. During the writing of the early versions of this book’s first chapter, I was haunted by visions of annihilation. Images of the city destroyed, of curling flesh, of the sudden flash in the sky—then nothing. I could not look at a friend, at my family, at children, without picturing them gone. Or worse, the long, slow deterioration of everything we love. Perhaps the value of the horror stories is that they bring despair to the surface, make us face it instead of feeling it as a drain on our lives so constant as to remain unnoticed.
Despair pushed me into an obsession with history, in particular, the crucial sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I had to know how we got into our present predicament. Understanding that history helped me see more clearly the relationships among consciousness; power; and the reality—structures and institutions—that they shape. I compiled the material and wrote what is now Appendix A. It was later, pulling the threads of the book together, that I began to feel that history had an oblique rather than a central relationship to the question of the dark. (Nevertheless, if yours is the sort of mind that likes to start from the past and move forward, you may prefer to read Appendix A, “The Burning Times: Notes on a Crucial Period in History,” first.) For me the question ceased to be: how did we get here? and became: where can we possibly go, and how?
So the journey became one of action. It was no longer enough for me to think about these issues, to talk and write about them. I needed to act on them in a more direct way than the cultural work of spinning Goddess circles and spawning community, more direct even than organizing marches or planning rituals for demonstrations, all of which I and members of my coven had been doing for many years.
In the summer of 1981, several of us from different groups within the Pagan community decided to take part in the blockade of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, which was constructed close to an earthquake fault in an ecologically sensitive area of the California Coast. Fifteen years of opposition, including two previous occupations of the plant grounds by members of the Abalone Alliance, had not deterred the Pacific Gas and Electric company from proceeding. Testing and operating licenses had been delayed for over a year during the freeze on licensing after the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, but that summer Reagan was pushing hard for nuclear power and licensing was imminent.
The Abalone Alliance is organized into small, autonomous groups called affinity groups. Members of each affinity group decide together how they want to participate in each action, though all are unified by a commitment to nonviolence. Our group, called Matrix, particularly wanted to bring our knowledge of ritual and group energy to the blockade.
The blockade was called early in September, after the security clearance was granted, the last step before licensing. I spent nearly three weeks on blockade altogether, was arrested twice, and each time spent about four days in the women’s jail.
The blockade became a crucial experience in my understanding not only of the theory, but also of the actual practice of political/spiritual work based on the principle of power-from-within. Coming as it did between the writing of the first and second drafts of this book, it also furnishes a number of stories and examples.
Since then, my commitment to action has deepened, has become a matter of ongoing organizing, training, speaking, and participation in civil disobedience. There have been other actions, and I have been back to jail under other circumstances. Each experience teaches me something new, and some of those insights found their way into final revisions of this book. But although a book must end somewhere, the journey continues.
The Diablo blockade was an initiation: a journey through fear, a descent into the dark, and a return with knowledge and empowerment from within; a death and rebirth that began with a stripping process and promises something at the end.
For me, the journey that began in despair now reaches a place of hope and a sense of empowerment. That has been my experience writing this book. I hope your experience as you read it is one that evokes your own power.
Because alone no one can dream the dark into love. We need each other for that. We need all the power we can raise together.
These are not comforting times in which to make promises; the stakes are too high, we are playing with forms of death from which there may be no return, and all the endings are still uncertain.
We can only begin.
Take hands; for we are the circle of rebirth. If there is to be renewal, it begins with us. We can touch—through these words, these pages. We can know the dark, and dream it into a new image.
As life, friends. As source.