Note to the 2006 Edition: I have very complex emotions about this chapter. The passion and power is so striking. But today it reads as an amazing piece of history, and one that seems to have taken place a very long time ago. It was written in 1975, before President Ronald Reagan entered the White House and before Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. There was an incredible optimism about changing society and ending patriarchal oppression; from the perspective of twenty-first century America, there was perhaps a certain naïveté. But the power and spontaneity that came from the second wave of feminism and led directly from the consciousness-raising group to many feminist spirituality groups and covens changed the lives of countless women. I have decided to leave the chapter pretty much as is, with a few minor corrections, and address the question of feminist spirituality today at the end.

I.D.

Ex-centric
Extra-ordinary
Extra-sensory
Extra-terrestrial

Celestial subversive
Con-spiritorial
Spirita Sancta

Holy
Holy
Holy

And then some
And I have friends.

—BARBARA STARRETT ¹

For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft. . . .

—I SAMUEL, 15:23

THERE ARE FEW moments in life, for most of us, when one feels as if one has stepped into a Minoan fresco or into the life of a wall painting from an Etruscan tomb. But on a full-moon summery night, in the unlikely borough of Staten Island, I entered such a moment.

Nineteen women, including a visiting Italian feminist and a well-known writer, sat nude in a circle in a darkened room. Molded candles of yellow hung by thongs from a loft bed. The small, bright flames cast a pattern of light and shadow. The room seemed powered by the muted oranges and reds of the bed coverings, and by the sweet scent of damiana mixed with marijuana, and by the pungent incenses that permeated the air, incenses with names like Vesta and Priestess.

A bathtub was filled with cool water, scented with musk and flower petals. A flutist played soft music while the women, one by one, entered the water, bathed, and were towel-dried by the others. There was laughter and a sense of ease.

After a short ritual a goblet was filled to the brim with wine and passed sunwise around the circle. The most powerful moment was yet to come: the pouring of libations to the goddesses and heroines of old. Each woman took a sip, then dipped her fingers into the wine and sprinkled a few drops into the air and onto the floor. As she did so, she invoked a particular goddess, gave thanks, or expressed a personal or collective desire. The well-known writer asked for the inspiration of Sappho to aid her in the work on her new book. The Roman Goddess Flora was thanked for the coming of spring and summer. Laverna—Roman goddess of thieves—was invoked to help a woman gain acquittal in a court case. Laverna was invoked again by a woman who had been caught using “slugs” instead of tokens in the New York subways.² Demeter, Isis, Hecate, Diana—the names continued. The goblet passed to each woman three times and the requests became more and more collective. Concerns were expressed for the coven as a whole, for women in struggle everywhere, for women in prison and in mental wards, for the feminist movement. And great hopes for the future were expressed by all. The ritual ended with the music of drums and flutes.

Fruit was brought out and shared—a large bowl carved from a watermelon, filled with blueberries and pieces of honeydew and cantaloupe. There were plates filled with olives and dates. There was a foamy strawberry drink and a huge block of ice cream covered with berries, and one large spoon. It was easy to feel transported to another age, some great festival, perhaps, an ancient college of priestesses on a remote island somewhere in the Aegean. . . .

This meeting was not unique. Such rituals have been taking place in many parts of the country. Feminist covens are springing up all over the United States, some of them showing more creativity, more energy, and more spontaneity than many of the more “traditional” groups that have been in existence for years. I have had personal contact with nine of these covens, located in Texas, California, New York, Oregon, Florida, and Massachusetts. There are others in Missouri, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and, almost certainly, many other states.

The presence of the feminist movement as a force that connects with Neo-Paganism and modern Witchcraft has had many ramifications. Links have been forged between these groups and new strains have been created. Many men (and some women) in the more mainstream Craft groups are upset by the growth of feminist covens, since many feminist Witches have purposely rejected some principles, norms, and structures of the modern Craft. Moreover, a number of feminists have stated that women are Witches by right of fact that they are women, that nothing else is needed, and feminist Witch Z Budapest has at times declared the Craft to be “Wimmins Religion,” a religion not open to men. In addition, feminist Witches have stated that Witchcraft is not incompatible with politics, and further that the Craft is a religion historically conceived in rebellion and can therefore be true to its nature only when it continues its ancient fight against oppression.

In most of what we still may call the “counterculture,” the split between the political and the spiritual seems to be widening. In contrast, portions of the feminist movement seem to be combining political and spiritual concerns as if they were two streams of a single river. In the early ’70s there were a number of feminist conferences on questions of spirituality; several attracted more than a thousand participants. On the same agenda with discussions of Witchcraft, matriarchies, and amazons and workshops on the psychic arts, such as tarot, astrology, massage, psychic healing, and meditation, were discussions and workshops on the relationship between political, economic, and spiritual concerns.³ It became clear at these conferences that many women regarded political struggles and spiritual development as interdependent, and felt that both were needed to create a society and culture that would be meaningful to them.

Linking feminist politics with spirituality and, in particular, with Witchcraft is not a new idea; the connection, which may be very ancient, was noticed in 1968 by the founders of WITCH, a group of women who engaged in political and surrealist protest actions. In its first manifesto WITCH stated that the link between women, Witchcraft, and politics is very old:

WITCH is an all-woman Everything. It’s theater, revolution, magic, terror, joy, garlic flowers, spells. It’s an awareness that witches and gypsies were the original guerrillas and resistance fighters against oppression—particularly the oppression of women—down through the ages. Witches have always been women who dared to be: groovy, courageous, aggressive, intelligent, nonconformist, explorative, curious, independent, sexually liberated, revolutionary. (This possibly explains why nine million of them have been burned.) Witches were the first Friendly Heads and Dealers, the first birth-control practitioners and abortionists, the first alchemists (turn dross into gold and you devalue the whole idea of money!) They bowed to no man, being the living remnants of the oldest culture of all—one in which men and women were equal sharers in a truly cooperative society, before the death-dealing sexual, economic, and spiritual repression of the Imperialist Phallic Society took over and began to destroy nature and human society.⁴

The organization came into existence on All Hallows Eve 1968. The original name of the group was Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, a name that certainly ruffled the feathers of conservative members of the Craft. But actually, only the letters were fixed; the name kept changing to suit particular needs. At a demonstration against the policies of Bell Telephone the group emerged as Women Incensed at Telephone Company Harassment. This kind of change happened a number of times.

At the time WITCH was founded it was considered a fringe phenomenon by the women’s movement. Today its sentiments would be accepted by a much larger number of feminists, albeit still a minority.

Up to now we have seen the Neo-Pagan revival as a movement of men and women attempting to live a way of life and uphold values that have been a minority vision in Western culture. In general, Neo-Pagans embrace the values of spontaneity, nonauthoritarianism, anarchism, pluralism, polytheism, animism, sensuality, passion, a belief in the goodness of pleasure, in religious ecstasy, and in the goodness of this world, as well as the possibility of many others. They have abandoned the “single vision” for a view that upholds the richness of myth and symbol, and that brings nourishment to repressed spiritual needs as well as repressed sensual needs. “Neo-Pagans,” one priestess told me, “may differ in regard to tradition, concept of deity, and ritual forms. But all view the earth as the Great Mother who has been raped, pillaged, and plundered, who must once again be exalted and celebrated if we are to survive.”

Most women and men who have entered Neo-Paganism have done so because the basic tenets or the actual practices of one or another Neo-Pagan group came close to feelings and beliefs they already held. It “felt like home.” It provided a spiritual and religious framework for celebration, for psychic and magical exploration, and for ecological concern and love of nature.

But some women have taken a very different path to Neo-Paganism. These feminists have a history of political action. They view all human concerns as both spiritual and political, and they regard the separation between the two as a false idea born of “patriarchy,” an idea unknown before classical times and one that has produced much bitter fruit—the splitting of human beings into “minds” and “bodies.” In this country, as we shall see, the writings of Native Americans often make this same point: that there is a relationship between the political and the spiritual. What is the nature of this understanding? How have feminists come to it? And how has this led to an identification with Witches and Witchcraft?

The two women who edited the New Woman’s Survival Sourcebook⁵ describe what they found on a cross-country journey:

. . . we found wherever there are feminist communities, women are exploring psychic and non-material phenomena; reinterpreting astrology; creating and celebrating feminist rituals around birth, death, menstruation; reading the Tarot; studying pre-patriarchal forms of religion; reviving and exploring esoteric goddess-centered philosophies such as Wicce. . . . When we encountered this trend on our first stops, our initial reaction was indifference bordering on uneasiness and apprehension, a frequent reaction among feminists who are intellectually oriented or who are political activists.

Susan Rennie and Kirsten Grimstad said that they began to feel that their early impressions stemmed from a conditioning that had led them to suspect and ridicule anything that could not be “scientifically validated” and that they had always associated things spiritual with reactionary politics. They soon changed their view. As they traveled, they came to feel that women were becoming sensitized to “the psychic potential inherent in human nature,” that women are “the repository of powers and capabilities that have been suppressed, that have been casualties of Western man’s drive to technological control over nature.” They put forth the idea that women have an even deeper source of alienation than that which comes from the imposition of sex roles; that, in fact, patriarchy has created the erroneous idea of a split between mind and body and that women’s exploration of spirituality is “in effect striving for a total integration and wholeness,” an act that takes the feminist struggle into an entirely new dimension. “It amounts,” they said, “to a redefinition of reality,” a reality that challenges mechanistic views of science and religion as well as masculine politics.

As we listened to women (these were the long night sessions) telling about their discoveries, explorations, experiences of the spiritual, non-material in their lives, our conviction grew that this trend is not reactionary, not authoritarian, not mystical, not solipsistic. The effect we observed was that this reaching out for a broader conception of our natural powers, a larger vision of wholeness, is energizing, restorative, regenerative.⁶

Morgan McFarland, feminist and Witch, told me that for years she had kept her feminist politics and her Witchcraft separate. She said that when she first “blew her cover” and told her feminist friends that she was a Witch, she did so because she wanted to share with women a perspective that was broader than political action.

“I felt they were standing on a spiritual abyss and looking for something. And also, that I was looking for strong, self-defined, balanced women who were capable of perpetuating something that is beautiful and vital to the planet. Within my own tradition it is the women who preserve the lore and the knowledge and pass it on from one to another. I have begun to see a resurgence of women returning to the Goddess, seeing themselves as Her daughters, finding Paganism on their own within a very feminist context. Feminism implies equality, self-identification, and individual strength for women. Paganism has been, for all practical purposes, antiestablishment spirituality. Feminists and Pagans are both coming from the same source without realizing it, and heading toward the same goal without realizing it, and the two are now beginning to interlace.”

The journey of feminist women toward a spirituality that does not compromise political concerns took less than five years. It probably began with the consciousness-raising group, which gave women a chance to talk about their seemingly private, personal experiences and find them validated by thousands of other women. The great lesson of CR was that personal feelings were to be trusted and acted upon, and that the personal was political. The step from the CR group to the coven was not long. Both are small groups that meet regularly and are involved in deeply personal questions. Only the focus differs.

Consciousness-raising provided an opportunity for women (some of them for the first time) to talk about their lives, make decisions, and act upon them, without the presence of men. Women used such groups to explore their relations with women, men, work, motherhood and children, their own sexuality, lesbianism, their past youth, and the coming of old age. Many women began to explore their dreams and fantasies; sometimes they tentatively began individual and collective psychic experiments.

Most of the original CR groups no longer exist. Most of the women have moved on. Some became politically active. Others began to explore women’s history. Still others began to research the question of matriarchy. This research has turned up legends of the amazons and the myth cycles involving ancient goddesses and heroines; it has led women to the Great Mother Goddess in all her aspects. It has also led many women into magic and psychic work. Jean Mountaingrove, a coordinator of WomanSpirit, talked with me about this process.

“Feminism tells us to trust ourselves. So feminists began experiencing something. We began to believe that, yes indeed, we were discriminated against on the job; we began to see that motherhood was not all it was advertised to be. We began to trust our own feelings, we began to believe in our own orgasms. These were the first things. Now we are beginning to have spiritual experiences and, for the first time in thousands of years, we trust it. We say, ‘Oh, this is an experience of mine, and feminism tells me there must be something to this, because it’s all right to trust myself!’ So women began to trust what they were experiencing. For example, a woman has a dream about stones and she goes to the library to see what there is about stones. Then she finds Stonehenge. Then she gets interested in the Druids and discovers that people do ceremonies and that this is often called Witchcraft. Then this woman becomes interested in Witches, and goes to them to find out what’s going on. I think that’s how connections are made.”

Enter one of the many feminist bookstores in this country and look at the titles of poetry and literary magazines with names like Hecate, 13th Moon, Dykes and Gorgons, Hera, Wicce, and Sinister Wisdom, and you will have an idea of the connection between Witchcraft and goddess worship and the women’s movement.^q Almost all these magazines identify women with the Goddess and with Witches. The Witch, after all, is an extraordinary symbol—independent, anti-establishment, strong, and proud. She is political, yet spiritual and magical. The Witch is woman as martyr; she is persecuted by the ignorant; she is the woman who lives outside society and outside society’s definition of woman.

In a society that has traditionally oppressed women there are few positive images of female power. Some of the most potent of these are the Witches, the ancient healers, and the powerful women of preclassical Aegean civilizations and Celtic myth. Many women entering on an exploration of spirituality have begun to create experiences, through ritual and dreams, whereby they can become these women and act with that kind of power and strength, waiting to see what changes occur in their day-to-day lives. After all, if for thousands of years the image of woman has been tainted, we must either go back to when untainted images exist or create new images from within ourselves. Women are doing both. Whether the images exist in a kind of atavistic memory thousands of years old (as many women believe) or are simply powerful models that can be internalized, women are beginning to create ritual situations in which these images become real. Priestess McFarland writes:

We are each Virgin Huntresses, we are each Great Mothers, we are Death Dealers who hold out the promise of rebirth and regeneration. We are no longer afraid to see ourselves as her daughters, nor are we afraid to refuse to be victims of this subtle Burning Time. The Wicce is Revolutionary.

The images are especially powerful for women who have made the biggest break with the society at large: the lesbian separatists, many of whom seek to remove themselves entirely from the mainstream of a society that they view as contaminated by masculine ideology. Thus, while most of the members of the Neo-Pagan movement are heterosexual or bisexual, and the feminist movement includes women with every conceivable attitude toward sexuality, the feminist Craft and the movement toward feminist spirituality seems to have a larger percentage of lesbians than either. But lesbianism today seems to be only partly a sexual orientation. It is also, perhaps primarily, a cultural and political phenomenon. For example, I have met a number of women who call themselves “lesbians,” but from a purely sexual definition would be considered asexual or celibate. A large number of lesbian separatists have essentially made a political choice, often leaving husbands and families as part of a reaction against patriarchal attitudes.

Special issues of such feminist magazines as Quest, Country Woman, and Plexus have been devoted to “spirituality” and its relations to feminist politics. For example, an editorial in Country Woman’s special issue noted that women’s experiences, both political and spiritual, have never been part of noticed events. Women political leaders have been figureheads for the most part; women religious leaders have usually been considered “minor” or “eccentric,” as opposed to the male “gurus” or “messiahs.” The editorial also noted that just as the private emotional experiences of women turned out to have been shared by countless numbers, “the hidden, private, unconfirmed experiences of our spiritual search” should be revealed, “in the belief that they too are shared by many women, and are significant.” The editorial then observed that while many women believe that politics and spirituality are incompatible, the division between the two is artificial, a product of the patriarchal misconceptions built into the language:

Two streams are developing in women’s consciousness—a political and a spiritual stream. Since women are noticing different parts of their experiences and categorizing them in terms used by the patriarchal culture, they feel suspicious of each other.

To “political” women, “spiritual” means institutions and philosophies which have immobilized practical changes and have channeled women’s energies into serving others to their own detriment. To “spiritual” women, “political” means institutions and philosophies which deny the unity of people and have channeled women’s creativity into destroying and fighting each other. But each stream is trying to examine deeply the human experience—on the material and on the non-material levels. Women are revolutionizing their consciousness in both directions and challenging the patriarchal ideas and institutions of religion and government by holding to their own women’s experience of life.⁷

An article in Quest took a similar position:

The so-called division between cultural feminism and political feminism is a debilitating result of our oppression. It comes from the patriarchal view that the spiritual and the intellectual operate in separate realms. To deny the spiritual while doing political work, or to cultivate the spiritual at the expense of another’s political and economic well-being is continuing the patriarchal game.⁸

The enormous response to the “spirituality” issue of Country Woman gave birth to the quarterly WomanSpirit. It comes out of Oregon, coordinated by Ruth and Jean Mountaingrove and a changing collective of women who often move around the country, issue to issue, to give a new group of women a chance to get involved with the magazine.^r WomanSpirit comes together in an unusually cooperative and collective manner. Nothing is “pushed,” and both Jean and Ruth have said that they feel the magazine is subtly guided. Each issue carries poetry, art, and articles filled with personal experiences—a kind of consciousness-raising effort of the spirit.

Jean and Ruth have described their editorial policy as open, growing, and evolving. “We feel we are in a time of ferment. Something is happening with women’s spirituality. We don’t know what it is, but it’s happening to us and it’s happening to other people. WomanSpirit is trying to help facilitate this ferment. Ruth and I feel that women’s culture is what we want. We want so much to live what we can glimpse. Now that we understand what our oppression has been, and have fantasized what it would be like not to be oppressed, we want to live like that. That is what we’re looking for; we want the world to be a wonderful place for us to live in; and we don’t want it in three thousand years; we want it this afternoon; tomorrow at the latest.”

Most feminist Witches feel the spiritual and political can be combined. They are moving toward a position that would, in the words of Z Budapest, “fight for our sweet womon souls” as well as our bodies.⁹

Others, such as writer Sally Gearhart, have maintained the division between spiritual and political, arguing strongly against the effectiveness of most present-day political action. Gearhart has written, in the pages of WomanSpirit, that the three known strategies of political action—political revolution, seizing power within the system, and setting up alternative structures—have failed, and that only a fourth strategy, “re-sourcement,” finding a “deeper,” “prior” source as powerful as the system itself, can threaten it and lead to change. She has noted that thousands of women have separated themselves from society and the world of men to lead isolated lives with other women, and she has called upon women who choose to remain in the mainstream of society, or women who have no choice, to set up a buffer state to protect the separatist women until they can gain the strength to create a new women’s culture.¹⁰

But other women, such as Z Budapest, believe in the firm, continuing connection between spirituality and day-to-day political action. As an exile from Hungary, feminist, Witch, and leader of the Susan B. Anthony Coven in Los Angeles, Z has made her life a vivid example of this connection. We have seen how she left Hungary in 1956, but soon found her oppression as a woman in the United States equal to her oppression in Hungary. Z brought the status of Witchcraft as a religion to public attention with her trial in 1975 on the charge of violating a Los Angeles statute against fortune-telling. This law is one of the countless vague antioccult laws that exist in almost all cities and states. Ostensibly they exist to prevent “fraud,” but they ban divination of all kinds, not merely divination for money. The Los Angeles law forbids the practice of “magic,” clairvoyance, palmistry, and so forth. Since Z does tarot readings professionally, she was “set up” by a woman police agent who telephoned for a reading. Z was brought to trial, convicted, and fined. Many witnesses, ranging from anthropologists to Witches, came to her defense.

Z told me she regarded the trial as important to establish the right of women to define their own spirituality and to practice their own talents independent of religious and behavioral codes set up by men. Since fortune-tellers are numerous in Los Angeles, Z felt she was singled out because of her feminist politics and the visibility of her small shop, The Feminist Wicca, which is a center for women and Witchcraft. Some Neo-Pagans objected to the manner in which the case was fought; they felt it could have been won if it had been argued differently, and that losing established a dangerous precedent. There were also objections to the slogan of the trial: “Hands off Wimmin’s Religion.” Z replied that most fortune-tellers pay their fines quietly and go on practicing, and that her court battle had been useful in awakening the community to the links between politics, women, and religion; “winning” was irrelevant.

Z Budapest is a dynamic woman full of energy and humor. Despite the fact that her feminist and separatist politics have alienated her from much of the Neo-Pagan community, she has inspired love and respect in California Neo-Pagans who have come to know her, no matter what “official” attitudes toward politics and feminism they hold. For a while, articles and letters in the Neo-Pagan press denounced her. But many members came to her defense, including one of the most esteemed bards of the Craft: Gwydion Pendderwen. Gwydion, to the surprise of many, went further than mere support. He repeated several times his view that the feminist Craft has some of the truest representatives of the Goddess; as might be imagined, this view has not won him praise from all quarters. “I have seen women in a lot of different head-spaces,” he told me in 1976, “but never, until this past year, had I seen the Goddess incarnate. I’ve seen the most supreme expression of Woman in these lesbian feminist Witches. Often the women are in their late thirties or forties. They have gone through an incredible load of bullshit in their lives; they have found their true selves and have risen above it. They look head and shoulders above the rest of us. The combination of feminism and Witchcraft has produced some Amazons, some true giants.”

Z Budapest, with a few other women, started the Susan B. Anthony Coven on December 21, 1971. When I visited Z in 1976, the coven had twenty to forty active members and a larger group of three hundred women who joined in some activities. Related covens had been started in at least five other states. The Manifesto of the coven says in part:

We believe that in order to fight and win a revolution that will stretch for generations into the future, we must find reliable ways to replenish our energies. We believe that without a secure grounding in womon’s spiritual strength there will be no victory for us. . . . We are equally committed to political, communal and personal solutions.¹¹

Z told me that “religion” was “the supreme politics.” “Religion is where you can reach people in their mysteries, in the parts of their being that have been neglected, but that have been so important and painful; and you can soothe and heal, because self-images can be repaired through knowledge, but only experience can truly teach. The experience is to allow us these conditions again. Let us be priestesses again. Let us feel what that feels like, how that serves the community.”

Z’s vision for the future is a socialist matriarchy. Like many feminist Witches, she has a vision of a past matriarchal age, during which “the Earth was treated as Mother and wimmin were treated as Her priestesses.” The manifesto accepts many of the theses proposed by Elizabeth Gould Davis in The First Sex: that women were once supreme and lost that supremacy when men, exiled from the matriarchies, formed into bands and overthrew the matriarchies, inventing rape and other forms of violence.

The Craft, Z wrote, is not a religion alone.

It is also a life style. In the time of the Matriarchies, the craft of wimmin was common knowledge. It was rich in information on how to live on this planet, on how to love and fight and stay healthy, and especially, on how to learn to learn. The remnant of that knowledge constitutes the body of what we call “witchcraft” today. The massive remainder of that knowledge is buried within ourselves, in our deep minds, in our genes. In order to reclaim it, we have to open ourselves to psychic experiences in the safety of feminist witch covens.¹²

Z’s interest in the idea of matriarchy is not unique among women involved with goddess worship and Witchcraft.

Matriarchy

It is not surprising that spiritual feminists, in their explorations of the hidden and distorted history of women, have been attracted by the idea of a universal age of goddess worship or a universal stage of matriarchy. These women have been reexamining those philosophers, historians, anthropologists, and psychologists who have argued that women in the ancient world held a position of relative power. Sometimes that power is political, as in the Marxist theories of a prehistorical classless society (as stated, for example, by Friedrich Engels and, more recently, Evelyn Reed); sometimes it is mythic or religious or psychological, as in the theories of J. J. Bachofen, Helen Diner, C. G. Jung, Erich Neumann, Robert Graves, and Esther Harding.¹³

The idea of matriarchy has ramifications that go beyond the question of whether or not the matriarchy ever existed in reality. When a feminist reads Strabo’s description of an island of women at the mouth of the Loire, or when she reads an account of an ancient college of priestesses or Sappho’s academy on Lesbos, or the legends of the Amazons, a rich and possibly transforming event takes place.

It is easy to get sidetracked by details, and that is the game many scholars play. We will play it also for a while. Prehistory is a wide open field. There is little agreement on what the word matriarchy means, and even less on whether ancient matriarchies existed, or if they did, on how “universal” they were. It is fashionable for scholars to dismiss the idea. This seems due partly to the lack of conclusive evidence in any direction and partly to (predominantly male) scholars’ fear of the idea of women in power. The question may never be answered satisfactorily. Sarah Pomeroy, in her careful study, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves, observes that most questions about prehistory remain unanswered. She allows herself to wonder why archeologists have unearthed four times the number of female figurines as male statues, why Minoan wall frescoes portray many more women than men, why the lyric women poets of Sappho’s time appear to have so much freedom and independence, and what meaning lies behind the strong, dominant women depicted in those Greek tragedies and myths that speak of the preclassical age. It is as foolish, she notes, to postulate male supremacy in preclassical times as it is to postulate female supremacy.¹⁴ According to Bonewits, we may have to wait until the field of archeology and prehistory is no longer dominated by men. Most women, however, are not waiting.

Many scholars have seemed to delight in showing certain weaknesses in the arguments of some of the more popular feminist writers on the subject of matriarchy, such as Elizabeth Gould Davis in her book The First Sex.¹⁵ It’s fairly easy to argue that one cannot always take myths literally, as Davis often does, nor can one assume that societies that venerated goddesses necessarily gave power to women. Such “reasonable” arguments have been used, however, to avoid dealing with the central thesis of the matriarchy argument: that there have been ages and places where women held a much greater share of power than they do now and that, perhaps, women used power in a very different way from our common understanding of it.

It is therefore important to stress that, contrary to many assumptions, feminists are viewing the idea of matriarchy as a complex one, and that their creative use of the idea of matriarchy as vision and ideal would in no way be compromised if suddenly there were “definite proof” that no matriarchies ever existed. In the same way, Amazons may prove to be fictions or creations of the deep mind, or, like Troy, they may suddenly be brought to the surface as “reality” one day. In either case, the feminist movement is giving birth to new Amazons, a process that is bound to continue no matter what we unearth from the past. An illustration may be helpful.

In Gillo Pontecorvo’s extraordinary film The Battle of Algiers, Algerian women confront the French by giving out an eerie yell, a high ululation that makes the flesh crawl. After the film appeared I occasionally heard the same cry in the demonstrations of the late 1960s, but never in the way I heard it later, in the 1980s in meetings of women. Amazons are coming into existence today. I have heard them and joined with them. We have howled with the bears, the wolves, and the coyotes. I have felt their strength. I have felt at moments that they could unite with the animal kingdom, or ally themselves with all that is female in the universe and wage a war for Mother Nature. These women are creating their own mythologies and their own realities. And they often will repeat the words of Monique Wittig in Les Guérillères:

There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember. You know how to avoid meeting a bear on the track. You know the winter fear when you hear the wolves gathering. But you can remain seated for hours in the tree-tops to await morning. You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.¹⁶

These spiritual feminists do not feel their future is contingent on a hypothesized past. They do not feel they need the words of scholars to affirm or deny their reality. “After all,” I was told by Z Budapest, “if Goddess religion is sixty thousand years old or seven thousand, it does not matter. Certainly not for the future! Recognizing the divine Goddess within is where real religion is at.”

In other words, the idea of matriarchy is powerful for women in itself. Two feminist anthropologists have noted that whatever matriarchy is, “the whole question challenges women to imagine themselves with power. It is an idea about what society would be like where women are truly free.”¹⁷

There is no consensus on what the word matriarchy means, for either feminists or scholars. Literally, of course, it means government by mothers, or more broadly, government and power in the hands of women. But that is not the way the word is most often used. Engels and others in the Marxist tradition use the word to describe an egalitarian preclass society where women and men share equally in production and power. A few Marxists do not call this egalitarian society a matriarchy, but most in the tradition do.

Other writers have used the word matriarchy to mean an age of universal goddess worship, irrespective of questions of political power and control. A number of feminists note that few definitions of the word, despite its literal meaning, include any concept of power, and they suggest that centuries of oppression have made it impossible for women to conceive of themselves with such power. They observe that there has been very little feminist utopian literature. (The exceptions are the science fiction of Joanna Russ,¹⁸ Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères, and some of the fiction published in the feminist small presses.)

Elizabeth Gould Davis and Helen Diner do see matriarchy as a society in which women have power; and they conceive of female power as qualitatively different from male power. This has led many feminists to define matriarchal as a different kind of power, as a realm where female things are valued and where power is exerted in non-possessive, noncontrolling, and organic ways that are harmonious with nature.

Echoing that kind of idea, the late Alison Harlow, the feminist Witch from California, told me that for her the word patriarchal had come to mean manipulative and domineering. She used matriarchal to describe a world view that values feelings of connectedness and intuition, that seeks nonauthoritarian and nondestructive power relationships and attitudes toward the earth. This is far different from the idea of matriarchy as simply rule by women.

In addition to feminists, a number of Neo-Pagans have been exploring the question of matriarchy, and ending up with similar views about power. Morning Glory and Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, of the Church of All Worlds, told me they disliked that term “or any ‘archy’” and preferred to use the word matristic. The Zell-Ravenhearts call themselves matristic anarchists and, noting the views of G. Rattray Taylor in Sex in History,¹⁹ say that they consider matristic societies (generally matrifocal and matrilineal) to be characterized by spontaneity, sensuality, anti-authoritarianism; embracing, in other words, many of the values Neo-Pagans share today.

There are a number of ways to approach the question of ancient matriarchies. Many have their roots in the historical theories of J. J. Bachofen and Friedrich Engels. Both men wrote in the nineteenth century, and although they had very different perspectives, both set forth the idea of a universal matriarchy in terms of historical laws and universal stages of evolution. The idea of a universal stage of matriarchy was, in fact, widely accepted until the twentieth century; it is now, like Murray’s theory of the witch cult, out of favor.

Engels and the Marxists who followed him based their views on the theory of historical materialism. According to Marxist theory, a primitive egalitarianism prevailed before class society; women and men shared equally in production and power. Feminist writers such as Evelyn Reed continue to base their views on an evolutionary perspective and to define matriarchy as this kind of egalitarian society. Reed, it should be emphasized, has many original ideas in her book Woman’s Evolution, including a novel speculation on the origin of the incest taboo as women’s control of cannibalism.

J. J. Bachofen also sought universal laws of history, although he based these on religious organization, myth, and symbol rather than on materialism. In his Myth, Religion, and Mother Right (1861), he wrote that matriarchal societies were characterized by universal freedom, equality, hospitality, freedom from strife, and a general aversion to all restrictions. His works were attractive to poets, artists, and psychologists. Some of the feminists who come out of the Bachofen tradition, such as Davis and Diner, have dropped all reference to evolutionary theory, but accept the primacy of myth and symbolic forms. Davis has a cyclic and cataclysmic theory of history, influenced greatly by Immanuel Velikovsky. Patriarchy is seen as a degeneration, morally and even technologically.

Interestingly, it is non-Marxists such as Davis and Diner who are able to envision a dominance matriarchy with women in power, although that power is exercised in a very different fashion. Some feminist anthropologists have also noted contradictions in Davis’s work; for example, she says that the rule of the matriarchies was totally benevolent, but that one reason for their downfall was the revolt of men who had been cast out. One feminist, knowledgeable in both Marxist theory and current feminist thought, told me that she was sympathetic to the argument that wars exist because of masculine aggression, but she noted, “I’m suspicious of it. I’ve read enough Marxist theory to feel that such a view may be a reactionary way of looking at things.”

Since theories of stages of evolution in history are hard to “prove,” most leading anthropologists and archeologists outside the Marxist tradition refuse to concern themselves with them. Many feminists, likewise, tend to drop the arguments for a universal stage of matriarchy and instead simply state that goddess worship was widespread in many ancient societies, and that archeological evidence continues to mount, with the unearthing of ancient societies such as Catal Huyuk and Mersin. Matriarchy may not have been universal, and present matrilineal societies may be oppressive to women, but there is plenty of evidence of ancient societies where women held greater power than in many societies today. For example, Jean Markale’s studies of Celtic societies show that the power of women was reflected not only in myth and legend but in legal codes pertaining to marriage, divorce, property ownership, and the right to rule.²⁰

Many women are also looking at the idea of matriarchy from points of view other than those of political theory, history, archeology, and ethnography. They are reexamining those writers, poets, and psychologists who have talked for years about feminine symbols, feminine realms, the anima, and so forth. The theories of C. G. Jung, Esther Harding, and Erich Neumann are being reexamined, as well as those of poets who have claimed to get all their inspiration from the Great Goddess—Robert Graves and Robert Bly, for example. Neumann, in The Great Mother, asserts that matriarchy was not a historical state but a psychological reality with a great power that is alive and generally repressed in human beings today. Writers like Neumann and Graves, in the words of Adrienne Rich, have seemingly rejected “masculinism itself” and have “begun to identify the denial of ‘the feminine’ in civilization with the roots of inhumanity and self-destructiveness and to call for a renewal of ‘the feminine principle.’”

The recurrence of strong, powerful women in myth, legends, and dreams continues, and Rich observes:

Whether such an age, even if less than golden, ever existed anywhere, or whether we all carry in our earliest imprintings the memory of, or the longing for, an individual past relationship to a female body, larger and stronger than our own, and to female warmth, nurture, and tenderness, there is a new concern for the possibilities inherent in beneficient female power, as a mode which is absent from the society at large, and which, even in the private sphere, women have exercised under terrible constraints in patriarchy.²¹

Philip Zabriskie, a Jungian, has also noted the power and presence of the ancient archetypes of goddesses and ancient women, and has stated that they can be evoked in one’s present psychic life.²² It is obvious that even the Greco-Roman classical goddesses who were known in a patriarchal context are much richer images of the feminine than we have today, although it is equally true that such images can be used to repress as well as to liberate women.

As we have seen, women are looking at the matriarchy from a complex point of view. They differ as to the existence of past matriarchies, and even as to what a matriarchy means in terms of power. Some, such as Davis, see childbearing as the source of women’s ancient power, the innate difference that creates a kind of moral superiority stemming from closeness to nature and life. Other feminists, starting with Simone de Beauvoir and continuing through Shulamith Firestone, see in childbearing the root of women’s oppression.

Feminists also differ on the question of matriarchy as a “Golden Age,” a view expressed forcefully in Davis’s The First Sex. Some see matriarchy as, above all, an idea about women in freedom. They often picture the ancient matriarchies as societies governed by the kind of loose, supportive, anarchic, and truly unique principles that many of today’s feminist groups are organized around, principles developed from the tradition of consciousness-raising. But others see the matriarchy rather as a place that was better for women, but had problems and difficulties of its own. Alison Harlow, for example, told me that she once had a vision, a small glimpse of the matriarchy.

“I was standing with my mother, father, and sister as a long procession passed by. A priestess was being carried along. She pointed at me with a long wand. I was chosen. Suddenly I was taken away from everything I knew. Now, maybe I loved it, but the lack of freedom scares me. A theocracy is only good if the priestess is always right. Now perhaps they were more intuitive than us, but . . .”

The matriarchy, according to Alison, was a period of thousands of years when women functioned strongly in the world.

“I do not consider there was ever a matriarchy that was a utopia. I do not consider it the ultimate answer to all our problems. I do think there were values from the ancient matriarchal cultures that we would do well to readopt into our present lives. I’ve spent a long time trying to come to grips with what it would mean to live in a goddess-centered theocracy, where people belonged to the Goddess, where cities belonged to the Goddess, where you are born to serve Her will. Concepts of human freedom as we understand them are not very compatible with any sort of theocracy and I am very committed to individual freedom.”

If feminists have diverse views on the matriarchies of the past, they also are of several minds on the goals for the future. A woman in the coven of Ursa Maior told me, “Right now I am pushing for women’s power in any way I can, but I don’t know whether my ultimate aim is a society where all human beings are equal, regardless of the bodies they were born into, or whether I would rather see a society where women had institutional authority.”

In any event, most women who have explored the question do see a return to some form of matriarchal values, however that may be expressed, as a prerequisite to the survival of the planet. We might note that Robert Graves wrote in 1948:

I foresee no change for the better until everything gets far worse. Only after a period of complete religious and political disorganization can the suppressed desire of the Western races, which is for some practical form of Goddess worship . . . find satisfaction at last. . . . But the longer the hour is postponed, and therefore the more exhausted by man’s irreligious improvidence the natural resources of the soil and sea become, the less merciful will her five-fold mask be. . . .²³

The idea of a matriarchy in the past, the possibility of matriarchy in the future, the matriarchal images in myths and in the psyche, perhaps in memories both collective and individual—these have led spiritual feminists to search for matriarchal lore. The road is not merely through study and research. It involves the creation of rituals, psychic experiments, elements of play, daydreams, and dreams. These experiences, women feel, will create the matriarchy, or re-create it.

Ritual

In Chapter 7 we looked at the idea that ritual may be seen as a way human beings have found to end, at least for some few moments, their experience of alienation from nature and from one another.

To reiterate, theorists of politics, religion, and nature have often viewed the universe in a strangely similar way. Many have noted the interconnectedness of everything in the universe and also the fact that most people do not perceive these connections. Spiritual philosophers have often called this lack of perception “estrangement” or “lack of attunement”; materialists have often called it “alienation” or, in some cases, “false consciousness.” Perhaps theory, analysis, and the changing of society can end our experience of alienation on the conscious level. Ritual and magical practice aim to end it on the unconscious level of the deep mind.

By ritual, of course, we do not mean the continuation of those dry, formalized, repetitive experiences that most of us have suffered through; these may once have produced powerful experiences, but in most cases they have been taken over by some form of “the state” for purposes not conducive to human liberation. We are talking about the rituals that people create to get in touch with those powerful parts of themselves that cannot be experienced on a verbal level. These are parts of our being that have often been scorned and suppressed. Rituals are also created to acknowledge on this deeper level the movements of the seasons and the natural world, and to celebrate life and its processes.

Many strong priestesses in the Craft have talked about the primacy and importance of ritual.

Sharon Devlin: “Ritual is a sacred drama in which you are both audience and participant. The purpose of it is to activate those parts of the mind that are not activated by everyday activity, the psychokinetic and telekinetic abilities, the connection between the eternal power and ourselves. . . .We need to re-create ecstatic states where generation of energy occurs.”

Z Budapest: “The purpose of ritual is to wake up the old mind in us, to put it to work. The old ones inside us, the collective consciousness, the many lives, the divine eternal parts, the senses and parts of the brain that have been ignored. Those parts do not speak English. They do not care about television. But they do understand candlelight and colors. They do understand nature.”

Alison Harlow: “It is a consciousness-altering technique, the best there is. Through ritual one can alter one’s state of consciousness so that one can become perceptive to nonmaterial life forms, whatever you choose to call them, and through this perception one can practice subjective sciences.”

In what additional ways do feminists think about ritual? Jean Mountaingrove began by telling me that, since dreams seem to speak from our unconscious mind to our conscious mind, perhaps ritual is the way our conscious mind speaks to our unconscious mind. She and Ruth would occasionally share water from a stream, she said, to symbolize the sharing of the waters of life. She added, “If I want my unconscious mind to understand that I love Ruth and that she is my partner, then we engage in a ritual together and the connection is very deep. All the words we say to each other may not do that. Ritual makes the connection on another level.”

Jean observed that ritual has a particular and radical relevance for feminists. “Since our culture—the one we share with men—is so contaminated, often when a group of women get together we only have words to use, and these words are all conditioned. Often we can argue and use words to divide. But our actions have not been so limited by men’s definitions. So we need to find actions that have clearness about them, that do not have hierarchical connotations . . . because some of our symbolic behavior has also been contaminated. If I pat someone on the head, it may mean that I am bigger and better than she is; it may be condescending . . . but if we can find ways, like washing each other’s hands, actions that we do mutually and that have not been contaminated, we can use such actions as a kind of vocabulary that cuts underneath all the divisiveness and unites us.”

Women are creating this new language. They are developing psychic skills in workshops with names such as “Womancraft” and “Womanshare”; they are reinterpreting events related to women in a new light and using these insights to create new ritual forms. For example, a number of women are using “Moon Huts” for retreats during menstruation. In doing this, they are re-creating an experience common to women in ancient times and in many tribal societies today. These women are convinced that, contrary to popular scholarly assumption, such retreats were not forced on women because of “uncleanliness” but were introduced by women themselves to celebrate their mysteries and to have a time of collective interchange. It has also been theorized that before artificial light and modern forms of contraception all the women of a tribe often menstruated at the same time.

Some women have begun to work with their dreams. In one instance, twelve women spent a weekend in the wilderness together. They slept in a circle with their heads together, facing inward, their bodies like spokes of a wheel. They wove “dream nets” from wool and fibers and sewed “dream pillows” filled with mugwort and psyllium seeds. A woman who experienced this weekend told about her dream:

I am with a mass of chanting women under the deck of an old ship which we are rowing across the sea. All the women are looking for their city. We have come to this land and see a man standing on the shore. He asks, “Why have you come here?” We say, “We came here to find our city.” He says, “Go back. Your city is not here.” We pay no attention to him but start through this forest right at the edge of the water and walk down an inward-turning spiral road which leads us down to a city in its center. At the bottom is an old woman. We say, “We have come to find our city.” She says, “This is an old city. This is not your city. Your city is not here. You have to look further.” The women then disperse to look for our city.

WomanSpirit commented:

Margaret’s dream tells me that we will not find our culture in the men’s world, but neither will we find it in our ancient woman culture. It is still to be found.²⁴

One example of a simple and powerful ritual is described in an early issue of WomanSpirit: an attempt to come to terms with the concept of Eve. Feminists and Neo-Pagans naturally feel that the story of Adam and Eve, as commonly interpreted, has probably done more to debase and subjugate women than any other such tale in Western history. In addition, the story has been used to inculcate demeaning attitudes toward mind, body, sensuality, and the pursuit of knowledge. WomanSpirit suggests that only by turning over biblical tradition and regarding Eve positively, as the bringer of knowledge and consciousness, can we end permanently the split between mind and body and the hatred of both that was foisted upon us by Christianity and much of the classical and Judiac traditions from which Christianity sprang. In an article titled “Eve and Us” a woman leading a class in theology speaks of coming to acknowledge Eve. She presents a counterthesis: Eve was “the original creator of civilization.” The Fall was really “the dawn of the awakening of the human consciousness.” The class notes that it is Adam who is passive. Eve is persuaded logically and rationally to become “as the gods.” “Eve and the serpent were right,” said the leader of the discussion. She opened up “a whole new world of consciousness. Every advance in literature, science, the arts can be traced mythically back to this event and in this light it is indeed Eve who is the original creator of civilization . . . and we women have the right and the responsibility to claim her as our own.”

At this point in the class a spontaneous ritual occurred. Unlike many rituals in the Craft, which are learned carefully, this came from an immediate need to affirm women’s being. A woman produced an apple and “the apple was ceremoniously passed around the circle and each woman took a bite, symbolizing her acceptance of and willingness to claim Eve as her own and recognize our mutual oneness with her.”²⁵

Women have also begun to create lunar rituals. The association of women with the moon is, of course, an ancient association.

Last night [one woman writes] we hung out of the east windows and howled at the moon, incredible orb gliding up over the eastern hills . . . and made up a song to her. During the night I fell into a dream that enabled me to undersee the belly of death, as the giver of life. . . .²⁶

Another wrote of a celebration of the New Moon in June 1974:

Women seemed to be coming up the hill for hours. I hear voices and flutes in the distance. . . . We sit in a large circle in front of the cabin. We join hands and follow each other down to the meadow, down into the darkness. We tell stories of darkness. Ruth tells the myth of Persephone being abducted by the lord of the dark underworld. . . . We begin a free word and sound association from the word “darkness.” This is very moving. Words and sounds come fast and flowing and die down again. There are images of fear as well as power and strength expressed, a lot of images of calm, warmth and rest. A large candle is lit. . . . [Billie] has made ten small bags with drawstrings, each from a different material. Each has a black bead attached to the drawstrings, signifying the dark moon. She gives them to us to keep. We are very pleased as the bags are passed around the circle. . . . We find seeds inside the bags. Seeds, the small beginning, the New Moon. . . . We stand for a farewell reading of Robin Morgan’s ‘Monster,’ ending with us all shouting, ‘I am a monster!’²⁷

Confronting the “Goddess”

It is not surprising that women involved with these rituals and perceptions should begin to confront the idea of a feminine deity. They have found the Goddess, or have been led to the Goddess, and the idea of “Goddess” is fraught with problems and potentialities for feminists.

No matter how diverse Neo-Pagans’ ideas about deities, almost all of them have some kind of “Thou Art God/dess” concept, even though a few whom I have met would say that such a concept as articulated by the Church of All Worlds contains a bit of hubris. Nevertheless, most would agree that the goal of Neo-Paganism is, in part, to become what we potentially are, to become “as the gods,” or, if we are God/dess, to recognize it, to make our God/dess-hood count for something. This is a far different notion from the common conception of deity in Western thought as something “exclusive,” “above,” “apart,” and “outside.” Oberon Zell-Ravenheart has said that in Neo-Paganism deity is immanent, not transcendent. Others have said that it is both immanent and transcendent.

But whatever “deity” is for Neo-Pagans, there is no getting around the fact that the popular conception of deity is male. And this is so, despite the countless esoteric Christian and Jewish teachings that say otherwise. The elderly Neo-Pagan author W. Holman Keith, whose little-noticed book Divinity as the Eternal Feminine came out in 1960, noted:

In spite of all that Christians say to the contrary, they conceive of deity as male. They will protest that they do not believe in anthropomorphism, that God is spirit, etc. But these protestations do not completely dispose of the above contention.²⁸

Mary Daly has written extensively on the idea that all the major religions today function to legitimate patriarchy and that since “God is male, then the male is God,” and that “God the father” legitimates all earthly Godfathers, including Vito Corleone, Pope Paul, and Richard Nixon.²⁹ Since this image called “God” is the image beyond ourselves, greater than ourselves, it becomes the image of power and authority, even for most of those who profess atheism. It functions as a powerful oppressive image, whether or not we believe in “him.” And this remains true whether “man” created “God” in “his” own image or the other way around. As many occultists would say: There is a continuing relationship between the human mind and its creations, and those creations affect all other human minds.

Western women have been excluded from the deity quest for thousands of years, since the end of Goddess worship in the West. The small exception is the veneration paid by Catholics to the Virgin Mary, a pale remnant of the Great Goddess. So, if one purpose of deity is to give us an image we can become, it is obvious that women have been left out of the quest, or at least have been forced to strive for an oppressive and unobtainable masculine image. Mary Daly has proposed to answer this problem with the idea of “God as a verb,” but many women find this too abstract and prefer to look to the ancient goddesses.

A female deity conceived of as all-powerful and all-encompassing can create contradictions and other problems in an anarchistic feminist community that emphasizes the value of self. But the attractiveness of the Goddess to women was inevitable. She touched a deep chord. Just listen to the Goddess songs that have come out of the women’s community, ranging from Cassie Culver’s humorous “Good Old Dora” to Alex Dobkin’s extraordinary hymn to the Goddess and the Goddess within all women, “Her Precious Love.”³⁰

Many women have had powerful experiences with deity as feminine. “It never occurred to me to create my own religion,” wrote one woman, “or more importantly, that god was female. Discovering that femaleness gave me a tremendous sense of relief. I felt her blessing touch me for the first time. I felt a great weight drop from me. I could actually feel my last prejudices against my own female mind and body falling away.”³¹

Jean Mountaingrove, who spent twenty years as a practicing Quaker, told me of her first experience of deity as feminine.

“There was this Quaker meeting at Pendle Hill, a Quaker retreat center outside of Philadelphia. We used to have meetings every morning and lots of weighty Quakers came to these meetings. And I sat in the back row, morning after morning, listening to all these messages coming through about ‘the fatherhood of God’ and ‘the brotherhood of Man’ and ‘he’ and ‘him.’ And one morning, after about thirty minutes, that feeling inside of me that I have always learned to trust as guidance just swelled and swelled until I was shaking, a feeling that I should say something. And I felt if I didn’t say it, I would be betraying something I had learned to trust. All I said was, ‘Mother. Sister. Daughter.’ And it fell like a rock through this still pool of fatherhood and brotherhood. But then, everyone in the stillness could reflect on what that might mean. I had declared myself. I had declared myself as being—what shall I say?—on the fringe. My feminism was considered ‘in poor taste.’ But several women came up to me afterwards and hugged me, and that meant a lot.”

Jean told me that years later, at a commune in Oregon, she began getting impressions from a special grove of trees. “I had a scientific background which makes fun of this sort of thing,” she said. “I thought it was pretty kooky. But Ruth had a background in Jungian psychology and had read The White Goddess, so she watched all of this happening with a lot of understanding which I myself did not have. I was drawn to the tallest tree in the grove and I would come to it and just cry; and it was tears of joy and relief; and I would feel that I was whole and perfect; my own judgment of myself was that I was very inadequate, but the spirit of the tree, which I called Mother, seemed to think I was all right.”

Some of the women I met had an easy and long-term relationship with the Goddess. One woman told me that she would go hunting with her father and brother as a child, and would call upon Diana as mistress of the hunt. This recalled my own invocations to Artemis and Athena when I was twelve.

Other women had a problem with the idea of “Goddess.” “It’s amazing,” one wrote, “how much the basis of my life now has to do with the things I was raised not to believe in and to some extent still don’t . . . that goddess business makes me very antsy too. I would like to know more about how spirituality ties in (or doesn’t tie in) with what I call ‘real life’—going to work, having relationships, getting sick, doing or not doing politics.”³²

In another example the editors of WomanSpirit described the results of a discussion among a group of women:

Many of us had a real difficulty with the concept of a goddess. Who was this goddess and why was she created? We felt she represented different forms of energy and light to different people. Even though we had trouble with the words, we felt that the force of the goddess was inevitable, she was flowing through us all by whatever name, she was the feeling of the presence of life. Goddess was a new name for our spiritual journey, the experience of life.³³

The obvious criticism is that the idea of a single Goddess, conceived of as transcendent and apart, creates as many problems as the male “God.” Trading “Daddy” for “Mommy” is not a liberation. A woman takes up this question.

I have been thinking for days and weeks about Goddess. The word, the concept, the idea, the projection, the experience. For many months I have been experimenting with the word, using it freely, reverently, longingly. That is my strongest experience in regard to it, one of longing—oh that there were a Goddess to pray to, to trust in, to believe in. But I do not believe in a Goddess.

Not a Goddess who exists as a being or person. Yes, the goddess who is each of us, the one within. . . . She is the inner strength, the light, the conscious woman who knows her own perfection, her own perfect harmony with the cosmos. . . .

This common existence of all things is holiness to me. . . . I understand that the word “Goddess” is used to express this unity reality in a symbolic way. So too is “God” used. There is no one called “Goddess” to seek outside of ourselves or to enter into us. There is only in each our own center of unity energy which is connected to all. . . .

But I do not believe that changing the sex of that concept does away with its problems. Not at all. To say Goddess instead of God still continues the separation of power, the division between person and the power “out there!” . . .³⁴

I doubt this dilemma exists as forcibly for women in the Craft, perhaps because some of them have never considered these ideas. But, more importantly, as priestesses, they are taught that within the circle they are the Goddess incarnate. And they have been taught to draw that power into themselves through the ritual of Drawing Down the Moon. Women who have come to the Goddess outside the channels of Neo-Paganism and the Craft are beginning to find rituals and concepts that allow for the same idea. They are finding the Goddess within themselves and within all women. And, as might be expected, those feminists who have found joy in ritual, and who have discovered that the concept of “Goddess” feels right inside, are often drawn into the Craft.

“Feminist Covens” and “Traditional Covens”

Today the Craft has been adopted as “the religion” of a large portion of the feminist spiritual community. In a few cases feminists have joined with other women (and very occasionally with some men) in the more “traditional” Craft. In other cases feminists have formed their own covens. The word traditional is used here as a convenient way to distinguish between feminist Witches and those who have come to the Craft and Neo-Paganism by routes previously described. To understand the differences between “feminist” and “traditional” Witches, it is instructive to look again at the leaflets put out in 1968 by the feminist group WITCH.

Almost all the qualities that distinguish feminist Witches from members of the “traditional” Craft appear in the leaflets. One assumption of WITCH was that any group of women can form their own coven and declare themselves Witches by simply making the decision to do so and enforcing it magically.

If you are a woman and dare to look within yourself, you are a Witch. You make your own rules. You are free and beautiful. You can be invisible or evident in how you choose to make your witch-self known. You can form your own Coven of sister Witches (thirteen is a cozy number for a group) and do your own actions. . . .

Your power comes from your own self as a woman, and it is activated by working in concert with your sisters. . . .

You are a Witch by saying aloud, “I am a Witch” three times, and thinking about that. You are a Witch by being female, untamed, angry, joyous, and immortal.

It is obvious that these ideas easily come into conflict with notions of formal training, priesthoods, and hierarchical structures. The second assumption of WITCH was that Witchcraft is inseparable from politics.

Witchcraft was the pagan religion of all of Europe for centuries prior to the rise of Christianity, and the religion of the peasantry for hundreds of years after Catholicism prevailed among the ruling classes of Western society. The witchcraft purges were the political suppression of an alternative culture, and of a social and economic structure. . . .

Even as the religion of witchcraft became suppressed, women fought hard to retain their former freedom. . . .

Thus, the witch was chosen as a revolutionary image for women because they did fight hard and in their fight they refused to accept the level of struggle which society deemed acceptable for their sex.

The third assumption that WITCH made in its leaflets was that it was necessary to create new rituals, “festivals of life, instead of death.” These three assumptions have continued as the wellsprings of feminist Witchcraft, but they—particularly the first two—have often been at odds with the assumptions of the mainstream Craft.³⁵

We end up with a kind of paradox. Thousands of women have suddenly found the Craft. They have come to it, as most people do, not by conversion but by a kind of homecoming. As the woman told me at the lecture, “I always knew I had a religion, I just never knew it had a name.” But often these same women find a Craft somewhat different from the one we’ve been talking about. They have defined it differently to meet their own needs. And, having found the Craft through inspiration, poetry, reading, dreams, feminist politics, and discussion, they are often ready to throw all the “traditions” and structures and initiations to the winds. The “traditional” Craft has frequently reacted with shock and horror, but then been forced to change from within. The impact of feminism on the Craft in the United States has been enormous. The impact of the mainstream Craft on feminism is harder to see. But each has been affected by the other.

Neo-Paganism in general and the Craft in particular have been good for women. Women have strong positions in almost all the Neo-Pagan religions discussed in this book, not only Witchcraft. This chapter concentrates on Witchcraft because most feminists do not seem to be interested in other Neo-Pagan religions. Witchcraft is one of the few “new age” religions where women can participate on an equal footing with men. Outside of Neo-Paganism in general, and Witchcraft in particular, the “Aquarian Age” new religions have not been particularly comfortable with the idea of women as strong, independent, powerful, self-identified persons. One has only to peruse the pages of “new age” journals such as East West Journal or the Buddhist Maitreya to conclude that most of the new spiritual organizations are still in the dark ages when it comes to women. Neo-Paganism, from its inception, has been less authoritarian, less dogmatic, less institutionalized, less filled with father figures, and less tied to institutions and ideas dominated by males. The religious concepts and historical premises behind Neo-Paganism and Witchcraft give women a role equal or superior to that of men. It is important to state these things before qualifying them. For while all these things are true, they are not always or completely true. It is important to find out how the role of women is defined in the Craft; how the “traditional” Craft is perceived by feminists; and how these feminists are perceived by the “traditional” Craft.

The question of attitudes toward women in the Craft, and in much of Neo-Paganism, is complex. For example, Robert Graves, whose book The White Goddess has had an enormous influence on women, the Witchcraft revival, and the creation of groups such as Feraferia, has often been viewed as a sexist. But The White Goddess is one of the few books by a male author that is easily found in most feminist bookstores. Published in 1948, it contains extraordinary passages about the Great Goddess, and Graves has often said that the return of Goddess worship is the only salvation for Western civilization. He writes:

The age of religious revelation seems to be over, and social security is so intricately bound up with marriage and the family . . . that the White Goddess in her orgiastic character seems to have no chance of staging a come-back, until women themselves grow weary of decadent patriarchalism, and turn Bassarids again.³⁶

Despite this, Betty and Theodore Roszak in their book Masculine, Feminine place Graves among notably sexist authors such as Nietzsche and Freud. They accuse Graves of placing women on a pedestal, one of the oldest tricks in the fight against women’s rights. They contend that Graves, while appearing to support freedom for women, actually views them as outside the real world and maintains a position not far removed from orthodoxy. In “Real Women,” the selection chosen by the Roszaks, Graves writes, “A real woman’s main concern is her beauty, which she cultivates for her own pleasure—not to ensnare men.” The real woman, he says, “is no feminist; feminism, like all ‘isms,’ implies an intellectual approach to a subject, and reality can only be understood by transcending the intellect.” He says further, “Man’s biological function is to do; woman’s is to be,” and that “womanhood remains incomplete without a child.”³⁷ Most feminists would find these statements highly objectionable.

To take a less-known example: Pagan theologian W. Holman Keith wrote in 1960 that the fundamental religious error of our time has been “to substitute force as the divine and ruling principle in place of beauty and love, to make destruction, in which the prowess of the male excels, more important in life than the creativity of the female.”³⁸ Keith seeks a Neo-Pagan revival in which nature will be seen as divinely feminine, in which the divine Mother is worshipped again as the Goddess of love and beauty. Keith has also written, in articles for the Neo-Pagan press, that feminist liberation has to do with carnal sex and that “only the fair sex can ennoble eroticism.” He has said that “Beauty and graciousness are the ideal attributes of the woman; manly strength of the man,”³⁹ and that therefore men must acknowledge the leadership of women in the movement of the human spirit.

While Keith, like Graves, is an ardent supporter of the matriarchy, while he supports the right of women to be lesbians, most feminists would argue that his vision has no place for the old woman, the hag, the crone, the woman who is “ugly” according to classical standards, the intellectual woman, the woman who desires to be celibate or who is simply uninterested in sex. Feminist Witches would argue that Keith’s position denies certain aspects of the Triple Goddess—most particularly the Goddess of the waning moon, the dark moon, the Crone—that such a position condemns women to be maidens, mothers, and creatures of sensual play. They would say that archetypes are fine until they become stereotypes, whereupon they become repressive and destructive. One Neo-Pagan priestess put it this way:

Those who insist upon seeing the Goddess as a stereotype as opposed to an archetype have lots of “Tradition” on their side. For instance, I’ll bet you can’t think of a single mythic Goddess whose attributes include being a musician, poet, painter, sculptor, or any other example of what we would call a fine artist. The exception being Isis/Hathor who is sometimes shown with a sistrum. The Goddess appears as a Muse but never as an artist. So much for Pagan “Tradition” . . . I will not be bound to the albatross of patristic Paganism, no matter how bloody traditional it is. Traditions are merely roots and roots are only one part of the whole tree.⁴⁰

It’s no wonder that the pages of Neo-Pagan journals reflect a diverse spectrum of positions on women. Despite what some psychologists say, no one really has the slightest idea what a woman (or, for that matter, what a man) is. We do know that whatever a woman is, it is hidden under thousands of years of oppression. We will need at least a century of living in a society devoid of prescribed role divisions to begin to answer that question. Since everyone is operating in the dark, the two prevalent views among feminists, and the views of others, are all simply opinions, or perhaps intuitions.

The opinion of many women today is that there are no important differences between men and women, with the exception of anatomy; all the rest is simply conditioning. In most societies that we know about, child raising and domestic chores are done by women, but there are a few societies in which this is not true; anthropology has shown us societies where women exhibit those characteristics we tend to think of as “male”: concern and involvement in warfare, politics, and so forth. And there are societies where men exhibit characteristics we tend to label “female.” The advantage of this view is that it produces a great amount of freedom from role stereotyping. It leaves us free to become what we want to become. Devlin, for example, once told me that she had been raped by a woman, one of the most horrible experiences of her life. To repeat her words, “I think, that the great mystery of our society is that men and women are exactly alike and this truth is hidden from us under an incredible load of bullshit.”

Another view, accepted by many feminists, is that there is, in fact, a specifically female nature. Freud, we know, said that biology is destiny. And while most feminists would oppose his interpretations, not all of them oppose his idea. Feminist writer Sally Gearhart has repeatedly said that women are receptive; they are nurturers; they are the source of life, the symbol of creativity; they are more intuitive and more magical than men. “We are not only those things,” she writes, “but neither is it accurate to say ‘we are also aggressors, penetrators, attackers, etc.’ ”⁴¹ The advantage of this view is that it gives a convincing explanation for the present rape of the earth, the abuses of technology, and the desperate need to return to a world centered on woman and the idea of a Goddess. A world ruled by women would be a better world, the argument goes; end male dominance, and human beings will live again in harmony with nature.

Women have been discussing these issues seriously. When men like Graves or Keith begin to define the “real woman,” real women get angry. Then when male writers of less stature begin to echo these arguments in articles defining what a woman “is,” and what her “proper” role in religion and magic should be, the anger increases. Until quite recently Neo-Pagan journals were filled with self-congratulatory articles by men on how women in the Craft have no need of “women’s lib.” Here is an example from Waxing Moon, in which the author first talks about the important position women have in the Craft. He then observes:

This is not to say that female witches are domineering, mannish creatures . . . nothing could be further from the truth.

Likewise they are not Women’s-Lib types. Most Witches view the Lib as a “masculinizing” outfit reminiscent of the “Anti-Sex League” in Orwell’s 1984. There are advantages which society must grant to women, as their right, but not at the cost of throwing away a woman’s deepest strengths and most splendid powers.⁴²

As Alison Harlow once remarked to me, “Until several years ago most Craft people had bought the media image of the feminists. For these people, the popular stereotype of the radical feminist and lesbian is more frightening than the traditional stereotype of the Witch is to people outside the Craft.”

Thus, for a period of time, a number of letters and articles appeared in the Neo-Pagan press denouncing feminist Witches as “sexists” and “bigots,” and expressing a general fear of any alliance between feminism and the Craft. A subtle reaction against a total emphasis on the Goddess began. Several articles called for more emphasis on male gods and on the male principle, a return to balance between male and female. Some of these were written by women. Also, a number of women and men expressed concern over the oppression of men, “tangled in the shadow of Yahweh’s crippling image.”⁴³

In return, some feminists called the Neo-Pagan movement “contaminated.” One woman wrote to Earth Religion News that the newspaper was simply “an extension of the patriarchy”⁴⁴ and made a mockery of the Goddess. Z was more reflective. “Green Egg was just polluted with men’s fears,” she said, “but then it cleaned itself up.” Among all these articles and letters, one truly serious criticism of feminist Witchcraft has emerged, albeit often under a pile of chauvinistic garbage: the fear that exclusive goddess worship can lead to a transcendent monotheism, whereas the diverse, polytheistic outlook of Neo-Paganism is the main reason for its freedom, flexibility, and lack of dogma. “Mother Hertha,” writes Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart, “spare us from Jahveh in drag!”⁴⁵

In all fairness, several Neo-Pagan men have taken strong public stands supporting the liberation of women—notably Leo Martello, Gwydion Pendderwen, and Isaac Bonewits. Bonewits, in his short but brilliant editorship of Gnostica, refused any manuscripts of a racist or sexist nature. In one editorial he noted the tendency of Neo-Pagan articles to imply that any woman not interested in homemaking, religious activities, and raising children “is somehow a psychic cripple; that she is an incomplete and inferior image of the Goddess.” This notion, Bonewits said, was not so far from the Nazi conception of women: Kirche, Küche und Kinder (church, kitchen, and children). He wrote that Neo-Pagan men have a tendency to praise women “for the very qualities that many women consider sexist traps designed to prevent them from their full development as human beings,” an attitude reflecting the dominant Christian schizophrenia that treats women as either Virgin Mothers or whores. “The priestess of Artemis,” he wrote,

or Morragu, or Kali is not going to be a simpering idiot or a Kirche-Küche-Kinder sort of woman. She is more likely to be a strong, domineering, combative intellectual. If you find that frightening, go ahead, admit it. But don’t accuse her of being “unfeminine” or of trying to castrate every man she meets. . . . Similarly, a priest of Apollo, or Oberon, or Balder is quite likely to be gentle, intuitive, receptive, and very creative. This you may find frightening too. But again, it is more honest to admit your fear than to call him “unnatural,” “a queer,” “unmasculine,” etc.

“Why,” he asked an unnamed author whose manuscript he rejected, “do you forget the Norse and Mongol women, who picked up their swords and fought beside their men? Why do you forget the many societies of Pagans in which the men did the cooking, weaving, and art while the women plowed the fields and handled the trading?” Bonewits concluded that these articles continue to appear because millions of men are struggling with the question of liberation, and because it is easier to sound liberated than to go through the difficult psychological changes necessary to become liberated from sexual stereotypes.⁴⁶

Leo Martello, author, graphologist, and Witch, has defended the feminist movement from the beginning, as he has defended all civil rights movements. Martello once wrote that in medieval times “the only liberated woman was the witch.”

All others were programmed into roles of wife, mother, mistress or nun. The witch was totally independent. She slept with whom she damn pleased. She was a threat to the establishment and to the church. . . . Of all the religions, especially Western, witchcraft is the only one that didn’t discriminate against women.

Martello went further; he struck to the root of the problem in a number of articles by noting that women within the Craft are still oppressed and unfree. He pointed out that many women came to the Craft because it offered them a sense of self-esteem, and their self-esteem had been “badly bruised by the male chauvinism-sexism predominating in our society.” These women then overcompensated for their sense of personal inadequacy or inferiority by becoming big fish in a small pond (the coven). They might be forced to play housewife-mother-mistress in their daily lives, but they held great influence over a coven of five to thirteen people. Instead of becoming feminists, they perceived feminism as a threat to their status in the coven.⁴⁷

This is a common problem. Many priestesses I have met lead lives that are not fulfilled in regard to work and other endeavors outside the Craft. Often they remain meek and silent, allowing husbands, who are often less intelligent, to hold forth. But magically, when the candles are lit and the circle is cast, these women become, for a short while, priestesses worthy of the legends of old. Two Witches, Margo and Lee, write about this problem in The New Broom.

When a Witch steps into the consecrated Circle, she steps beyond time. Within that circle, the High Priestess assumes Woman’s rightful role as a leader with power equal to and sometimes greater than man’s. The woman of Wicca, like the women of the matriarchies of old, are proud, free, confident, and fulfilled . . . within the Circle.

The two women note that it is chiefly men who speak for the Craft; men write most of the books about the Craft, found the Witchcraft museums, and give their names to the traditions, such as Gardnerian and Alexandrian. “The truth is that today no Wicca woman speaks with authority to the public outside her Circle.”⁴⁸ This is not completely true. The most notable exception is, of course, Sybil Leek. But all you have to do is leaf through the pages of this book to see how true it is most of the time.

One might almost say that the Craft at times acts as a “safety valve” for the establishment, providing an outlet for oppressed women but stopping short of true liberation. If so, the Craft in these cases becomes a conservative force, making real change even more difficult.

I. M. Lewis, in his study of ecstatic religions, makes a related point: that the cult of Dionysus and other cults that produced ecstatic states were often forces for real change, centers of defiance and rebellion. He observes, however, that women’s possession cults in Africa often existed in those societies where women lacked more direct means for getting their aims. These women would use the cults as a method of protest against men, but were always contained by mechanisms clearly designed to stop true insubordination.⁴⁹

The Craft is a religion using ecstatic states that has been a force for change. It has put women in touch with powerful energies within themselves and it has given them a self-image that equates women with the divine. But in our society it operates within the same kinds of constraints that Lewis is talking about. And so it is no wonder that many fear the coming together of feminism and the Craft. Together, they might be a truly revolutionary force.

At any rate, a few women within the Craft who also consider themselves feminists have explored these questions. They have written articles in Nemeton and The New Broom, the two Neo-Pagan magazines that included a regular, specifically feminist column.

Margo and Lee, in their New Broom article, note that many in the Craft have been disturbed by the appearance of feminist Witches outside the “traditional” Craft, as well as the emergence of all-women covens.

A Feminist calls herself Witch and claims, “Witchcraft is totally ours.” The Craft rustles uncomfortably. She has never been initiated into a Coven. She knows little of Coven Law and myth, but proudly states, “I worship the Mother, I am a follower of the Old Religion, I work for the restoration of matriarchy under the Goddess.” Wicca squirms. Witch is our name, our identity, our life. How, we demand, can these political women drain our identity of its deepest emotional and religious significance? Do they have any right to our name?

Yes, say the writers.

Feminist “witches” are seeking their own heritage as women. They are reaching back, beyond five thousand years of patriarchy. Independent of any help from the Craft, they have found the Goddess. They have found Her in the past; they have witnessed Her rape in the man-ravaged earth; they have found Her within themselves.

What the feminist Witches hold is a new, yet ancient, essence of pure worship. They hold the future.

And they come, as the North Wind: with the chill of change, and the freshness of rebirth.⁵⁰

Another article suggests that women in the Craft, instead of criticizing feminism, should come to terms with the idea that they continue to be oppressed in this society.

Despite the criticisms, we feel that Wicca women must admit to one thing: as women, we are surrounded in day-to-day contact with the Outside World, so to speak, by open and accepted chauvinism in our male-run, male-dominated, man-made society. The temporal power and spiritual sway of its majority are male-oriented. No matter how early or late in this, our present life, we came into Witchcraft, no matter what position we hold within it, no matter how self-assured, self-identified, self-confident we are as Witches, we are none of us isolated from the contemporary state of everything. The twentieth century woman is the end product of two thousand years of suppression and oppression. The Craft, too, has suffered drastically in this same time. The deliberate erasure of truth and history, both about women and about Wicca, seems to go hand in hand. It helps little, in our opinion, that Witchcraft is being more open and openly tolerated if women are no closer to their proper, egalitarian position as people than they are at this moment.

The writers note that many in the women’s movement are “feeling a flash of recognition, a call from a distant past,” and are reexamining their religious as well as their political beliefs. “Somehow to us, the touching of Feminists and Witches happens at numerous important points . . . these two groups are entwined closely and irrevocably.”⁵¹

Alison Harlow expressed much the same point of view when she wrote in Nemeton that the Craft and the feminist movement were “two tributaries flowing to form a single river”⁵²—the Old Religion providing the psychic interaction and the women’s movement the political context, both seeking to transform the society and provide a more open life for all.

It must be emphasized, however, that positive reactions to feminism have not been prevalent in the Craft; Alison Harlow worked with a coven composed mostly of women, although she was far from being a separatist; The New Broom spoke for the Dianic tradition of the Craft, a tradition that conceives of the Goddess almost monotheistically. Other articles expressed opposition to any feminist direction in the Craft as a whole, and stated that such a direction lacks balance.

But those women who accepted feminism as an integral part of the Craft began to compare the feminist Craft with the Craft into which they were born, brought, or trained. Some began experimenting with all-women covens, and by the mid-1980s all-women covens were accepted as a valid form by some of the larger Craft organizations, such as the Covenant of the Goddess in California. (There have also been some experiments with all-male covens.)

In the past, the idea of an all-woman coven was considered impossible by much of the Craft. The traditional Craft is solidly based on the idea of male-female polarity, which is basic to most Craft magical working and ritual symbology. The Craft Laws within the revivalist traditions state that Witchcraft must be taught from male to female and female to male, and books and articles on Pagan and Craft magic often say that the use of male-female polarity is absolutely necessary to produce psychic energy, that it’s “more natural,” “better,” “stronger,” and the like. The new feminist covens don’t work with such polarities.

For example, a coven of eight Dianic women, many of whom had worked previously in mixed groups, told The New Broom in an interview that they had decided to work with women because they felt “free enough as women together to totally know our strengths and weaknesses and to trust each other and ourselves because of this knowledge.” In response to the argument that they were going against “the natural current,” they said, “If the natural current isn’t within each person, just where is it?”⁵³ History and legend, the article noted, give many examples of all-women mystery religions and colleges of priestesses.

Some feminists have also challenged the idea that energy works male-to-female. Deborah Bender, writing in The Witches Trine about her coven, Ursa Maior, said that the “male principle” had not been found to have any usefulness in their work.

The original study group, “Woman, Goddesses, and Homemade Religion,” out of which Ursa Maior developed, was offered through a feminist free university. The people who came to our first meeting were women who would have greeted the statement, “You can’t do it without a man,” with extreme scepticism. Most members of the study group had previously participated in various woman-directed and -operated enterprises (bookstore, health clinic, theater group, newspaper, living-group) and expected working in the exclusive company of women to be a source of strength and creativity, not weakness. This has proven to be the case. . . .

Our rituals are the expressions of the energies of seven very different personalities, energies which are different every time we begin a ritual and continue to change during it as we respond to the ritual and to each other. If a polarity exists, it is not twofold, but sevenfold.

We take as a working hypothesis that there is such a thing as specifically female energy. However, we do not have some model in our heads of what that energy is like, which we then attempt to achieve. Rather, we try to set up circumstances such that each of us feels encouraged and accepted however she chooses to express herself. Whatever good energy is released in such a situation is female energy as far as we are concerned. The ideas any of us might already hold about female energy are likely to be distorted by the repressions and lies we have been subjected to in our upbringings in a patriarchal society. Only by growth and experimentation can we find out our true powers. To impose male and female polarities upon ourselves would not only be irrelevant to our work, it would interfere with our ability to notice the kinds of exchange of energy that are taking place between us.⁵⁴

Another difference between strictly feminist and mainstream covens is evident in their use of symbols. The Craft in general has a fairly fixed set of symbols, stemming from Western magical traditions. The God is represented by the Sun; the Goddess is the Moon in her three aspects and phases. The Horned God is more often pictured as lord of animals, lord of the hunt, lord of death. The Goddess is the lady of the wild plants and growing things, as well as the giver of rebirth. Symbols and elements that most of Western occultism has long associated with the “male,” such as air and fire, sword and wand, are similarly associated in the Craft. Likewise, the “female” is most often associated with water, earth, cup, and pentacle.

These polar opposites have much less application for feminist covens. Typically “female” symbols are often still used: the moon, the cup, the cowrie, the turtle, the egg, etc. But feminists celebrate sun goddesses such as Sunna and Lucina. They look at all goddess myths worldwide, and often take the attitude that it is merely certain cultures that have determined what is “masculine” and what is “feminine.” The moon, after all, is a masculine word in the German, Celtic, and Japanese languages, and there are a number of myths with moon gods and sun goddesses. In other words, feminists reject most of the polarizing concepts common to Western occult circles: male-female, active-passive, lightdark, and so forth.

In an article called “I Dream in Female: The Metaphors of Evolution,” Barbara Starrett, a feminist poet, writes that “male” structures are dependent on such pairs of opposites. She notes that women have long been associated with the “unknown, the irrational, the ‘bad’ half of the good/evil binary.” Men, in contrast, are always linked with “the logical, clear, luminous, systematic half of that same binary.” Starrett says that women should embrace both sets of symbols. They must see the traditional feminine symbols equated with the dark, the unconscious, the receptive, and so on as positive, but, she adds, “We need not relinquish their opposites. We will, in embracing the female symbols, incorporate within them the meanings of the male symbols, nullifying the binaries.”

When women replace the symbol of the father with that of the Mother, we, too, are committing a political act. The image of the Mother does not lose its old connotations of earth, intuition, nature, the body, the emotions, the unconscious, etc. But it also lays claim to many of the connotations previously attributed to the father symbol: beauty, light, goodness, authority, activity, etc. . . . What is significant here is that the duality, no matter which opposite is preferred, gives us only two choices. We may choose the reasoning, observing, dominating ego; or we may choose the annihilation of the personality. But if we learn to think beyond that binary, beyond the given choices, we can honor, equally, the conscious and the unconscious mind.⁵⁵

Women in feminist covens seem to agree with Starrett, and so their rituals differ greatly from those in the “traditional” Craft.

Deborah Bender described the kind of ritual that might take place at a meeting of Ursa Maior. First the women might do a breathing exercise to achieve an interconnectedness within the group, “to make the ‘circle’ a present reality instead of an abstraction.” Bender then described one case where the group worked to help one of its members, a woman who was upset and had been threatened with losing her job. The purpose was to replenish the energies of the woman and give her new strength. After all the women breathed and chanted together, a woman began to chant the woman’s name, let us say “C”: they chanted, “C strong woman, C strong woman.” Other women joined in, adding new verses created spontaneously: “Like a redwood, strong; like a she-bear, strong; mountain-strong, strong woman.” Bender said, “We spent a good half hour singing and praising C, calling out images of strength and sending her energy through our clasped hands.” The woman in question said she felt much more self-confident, and she kept her job.⁵⁶

It’s important to stress that feminist covens, like most of the Witch covens we have been talking about, are diverse, autonomous, and difficult to generalize about. Since most successful covens are places where personal growth is a major concern and no dogma prevails, they are constantly changing. This situation of great flux has been noted by a member of academics who have judged, rightly, that the Neo-Pagan scene is even more fluid than the general situation pertaining to “cults.” Since they believe in the great value of stability, they judge such fluidity to be a weakness. Only if a religion becomes institutionalized, is it judged “successful.” But Neo-Pagans and Witches often regard fluidity as a strength, since the more institutionalized groups are less able to put primary emphasis on the personal growth of their members.

Occasionally, a feminist Witch coven will come together because of the energy and leadership of one particularly dynamic woman. Such was the case with the Susan B. Anthony Coven and Z Budapest. But most feminist covens do not have, and in some cases do not want, a strong, leading priestess. These covens have certain advantages and certain weaknesses. Many feminists have had strong experiences in collective decision-making beginning in their consciousness-raising groups and continuing in other feminist organizations. It is therefore not surprising that most women who come to the Craft from the feminist movement favor a nonhierarchical, informal structure. In general, they are suspicious of rules and formalized rituals—at least at first. Bender stated it this way:

We take a questioning, even sceptical attitude toward all traditions, formulas, the ways of talking about the Goddess, covens, magic, and Witches. We have two final criteria for using anything: Does it feel right? Does it make sense to me? If one member feels uncomfortable with something we are doing or saying, we drop it and look for another way that feels right to all of us.

Feminist Witches seem to prefer the loose types of decision-making that have evolved in other radical feminist groups. This includes rotation of responsibility and leadership. In Ursa Maior, for example, leadership was based on initiative and knowledge rather than degree or length of experience. And any commitments, any bonds or oaths, were purely voluntary.

Bender gave me a series of characteristics that seem to distinguish many feminist covens:

1. They have no men.

2. They do not work from a handed-down Book of Shadows. Bender said she personally believed that such books were a nineteenth-century innovation, adding, “The medieval and premedieval traditions must surely have been oral. Ursa Maior adapts freely from published books of shadow and from the poetry and ritual of tribal peoples.” The main source for rituals, however, is the women themselves. If a good ritual is created by the coven, or a song or dance or new mode of organization, it might well be published in a feminist magazine or newspaper.

3. While feminist covens generally adhere to the basic Craft Laws pertaining to ethics, money, and self-defense, they often disregard those pertaining to coven structure and regulations. Bender said, “Since we regard our circle as an institution with roots in time preceding the persecutions and the adoption of the secret-cell coven structure, we do not regard ourselves as bound by those laws regarding initiation and coven governance.”

4. Feminist covens often attempt to recover matriarchal ideas and institutions through means of research, art, play, psychic exploration, and daydreams. These covens, in contrast to heterogeneous ones, are attuned to women’s experiences, bodies, and needs.

5. Feminist covens, unlike most mixed covens I know of, actually serve a viable community: the feminist community. Bender told me that Ursa Maior devoted about 10 percent of its time to work within the community, and that this was one of the reasons for the coven’s existence.⁵⁷

In 1976 Ursa Maior was a small, intensive, active group of women who worked well together. Their experimentation and spontaneity apparently led to great creativity and growth. This has not been the case with all such groups. In some covens, where the group has not solidified or where the group is too large, the distrust of structure and formal ritual can lead to none at all, and an unwillingness to take responsibility for making things happen. As one woman wrote to me, “These covens and groves seem to melt like spring snow.” In contrast, the mixed covens that exist in more “traditionalist” Wicca have a large body of formal ritual and practice, rules, chants, psychic exercises, and oral teachings, but often lack the energy and spontaneity of some of the feminist groups.

In the winter of 1977 the members of Ursa Maior dissolved their coven by mutual consent. Two of the members wanted to explore more deeply the “traditional” Craft. The others wanted to continue to involve themselves in feminist spirituality and holistic healing. In 1978 one former member wrote to me:

At present, I am putting my energy into learning more of the hierarchically structured, semi-secret side of the Craft (Dianic when possible, but this is difficult when there are not trained Dianic priestesses in the neighborhood). I am working to some extent with men. I do not see this as canceling out what I was doing before. I am trying always to find solutions to certain weaknesses in the feminist Craft. Also, I have always wanted to learn the Craft in its fullness and not just a few parts of it. Perhaps after some years I will be able to find a synthesis.

Meanwhile Deborah Bender and another feminist Witch began the Women’s Coven Newsletter,⁵⁸ “to provide some kind of accessible institution outside of the small groups that appear and disappear,” as well as “to help build a large body of formal ritual and practice, rules, chants, psychic exercises and oral teachings, that seem to be one of the strengths of the mixed covens.”

The Streams Converge

On a Friday night in Boston, April 23, 1976, some one thousand women sat down on the benches and pews of the old Arlington Street Church. The benches filled up and the women spilled over onto the floor and into the aisles, and became silent as the flute music of Kay Gardner created a sense of peace. The lights were dimmed and Morgan McFarland, Dianic High Priestess, came to the front, wearing a long white robe, accompanied by four members of her women’s coven, the same coven that we have seen mentioned in The New Broom. The occasion was a ritual: “Declaring and Affirming Our Birth,” to mark the beginning of a three-day women’s spirituality conference, with the unusual name “Through the Looking Glass: A Gynergenetic Experience.” The conference was attended by over thirteen hundred women, and besides an address by feminist theologian Mary Daly, the conference was most noteworthy for the large number of Witch priestesses who attended from as far away as Texas and California.

This relationship between feminist spirituality and the Craft is complex. Perhaps, if we had to choose one instant to catch all the qualities, problems, strains, and enormous potentialities in that uneasy relationship, this ritual would be such a prism. There are Morgan and the women in the coven standing in the church, looking a bit apart, somewhat too elegantly dressed, too stereotypically “feminine.” I remembered how much more at ease they were working a ritual in a Dallas living room, where none of us wore anything except a string of beads. But here they are, standing in front of the altar of a church, holding candles, while a thousand women watch and wait. Morgan steps out in front and speaks.

“In the infinite moment before all Time began, the Goddess arose from Chaos and gave birth to Herself . . . before anything else had been born . . . not even Herself. And when She had separated the Skies from the Waters and had danced upon them, the Goddess in Her ecstasy created everything that is. Her movements made the wind, and the Element Air was born and did breathe.”

A candle is lit in the East. Morgan speaks.

“And the Goddess named Herself: Arianrhod—Cardea—Astarte. And sparks were struck from Her dancing feet so that She shone forth as the Sun, and the stars were caught in Her hair, and comets raced about Her, and Element Fire was born.”

A candle is lit in the South.

“And the Goddess named Herself: Sunna—Vesta—Pele. About her feet swirled the waters in tidal wave and river and streaming tide, and Element Water did flow.”

A candle is lit in the West.

“And She named Herself: Binah—Mari Morgaine—Lakshmi. And She sought to rest Her feet from their dance, and She brought forth the Earth so that the shores were Her footstool, the fertile lands Her womb, the mountains Her full breasts, and Her streaming hair the growing things.”

A candle is lit in the North.

“And the Goddess named Herself: Cerridwen—Demeter—the Corn Mother. She saw that which was and is and will be, born of Her sacred dance and cosmic delight and infinite joy. She laughed: and the Goddess created Woman in her own image . . . to be the Priestess of the Great Mother. The Goddess spoke to Her daughters, saying, ‘I am the Moon to light your path and to speak to your rhythms. I am the Sun who gives you warmth in which to stretch and grow. I am the Wind to blow at your call and the sparkling Air that offers joy. I give to all my priestesses three aspects that are Mine: I am Artemis, the Maiden of the Animals, the Virgin of the Hunt. I am Isis, the Great Mother. I am Ngame, the Ancient One who winds the shroud. And I shall be called a million names. Call unto me, daughters, and know that I am Nemesis.’”

Later, the cauldron is filled with fire and the chanting begins, at first very softly: “The Goddess is alive, magic is afoot, the Goddess is alive, magic is afoot.” Then it becomes louder and louder until it turns into shouts and cries and primeval sounds. Morgan speaks for the last time.

“We are Virgins, Mothers, Old Ones—All. We offer our created energy: to the Spirit of Women Past, to the Spirit of Women yet to come, to womanspirit present and growing. Behold, we move forward together.”

At the end of the ritual the women in the church begin to dance and chant, their voices rise and rise and rise until they shake the roof.

Later, a few women said they didn’t want priestesses standing apart on pedestals and altars; they did not want to see energy sent “upward”; they wanted it aimed “at the oppressor.” Despite this, acknowledging this, the uneasy, explosive, potentially powerful alliance between feminism and the Craft was apparent for all to feel, during this conference where many women said they felt, for the first time, that a new “women’s culture” was a reality.

Morgan and her priestesses stand at the crossroads. This Dianic coven was perhaps the most feminist of the “traditional” groups. But that night in Boston many women found it too formalized and structured. These women were determined to set their own terms and start from scratch.

Alison Harlow also stands at the crossroads. She told me that her greatest mission is to be a bridge between feminism and the Craft. Still, she has doubts. She wondered out loud what, if anything, feminists want or need from the “traditional” Craft. She talked candidly about the intolerance she has felt from some separatists toward her bisexuality and the personal enjoyment she gets from associating with Neo-Pagan men. We both wondered if separatism was the ultimate answer for these women, or whether it was but a necessary time of healing and renewal. We both felt that one thing the Craft did have to offer feminists, outside of its knowledge of ritual and lore, was the polytheistic perspective and its view toward diversity and flexibility. And I expressed to her my own feeling that some of the feminist groups had a startling lack of curiosity about other forms of working outside their own.

What can the two Crafts give each other? Perhaps the most important thing that the feminist Craft can give the “mainstream” Craft is the understanding that Witchcraft is a religion and a practice rooted firmly in rebellion. Feminists see the Craft as a people’s survival tool; as a source of affirmative power and strength; as a way of living and working creatively with vital energies; as an empirical folk wisdom, but one that is never far removed from daily life and from human needs, human problems and “mundane” concerns. “Paganism,” Z once told me, while remembering her youth in Hungary, “fits the common people like bread.” Many feminist Witches see the Craft as a kind of village woman’s wisdom, the knowledge of village midwives and healers. This notion of folk wisdom is often denied by more “traditional” groups, who still tend at times to be impressed by ideas of royalty and by titles such as “Lady soand-so,” and by “bloodlines” and lineages. These groups also fall victim to the illusion that they can exist and practice comfortably within our society by simply pulling the blinds and dancing in secret in darkened rooms. “Mainstream” Craft members often split their lives in two; they have two sets of friends, two sets of interests. This kind of split life leads easily to the notion that something called “politics” is separate from something called “spiritual life.”

The feminist Craft is brashly political and spiritual at once. Many feminist Witches would argue that the split life ultimately leads to self-imprisonment, to being cut off at the roots, to alienation. These women might argue that to live such a life is to perpetuate an ultimately sterile fantasy, as opposed to making a real attempt to create an integrated life.

The feminist Craft can build a good case for this argument because it has so much vitality and spontaneity. In addition, its suspicion of hierarchy and structure is good medicine for the rest of the Craft. But its “politics” have upset many of the “mainstream,” who have accused the feminists of “using the Goddess for their own ends.” The feminists say the reverse: “The Goddess is using the feminist movement to bring Craft principles to a wider variety of women than could have been possible otherwise.”

The “mainstream” Craft can offer the feminist Craft the openmindedness characteristic of polytheists. Feminist groups often have a tendency toward dogmatism, substituting “Big Mama” for “Big Daddy.” The problem of Goddess monotheism will have to be resolved if the feminist Craft is not to become just another One True Right and Only Way. The feminist Craft groups often dismiss the “mainstream” groups as “hopelessly contaminated by patriarchy,” but the groups, having been around longer, have a rich knowledge about how rituals work and how the coven structure can function. Their healthy distrust of hierarchy often leads feminist groups to abandon all structure, and this has resulted in the dissolution of many groups. Likewise, the fear of ritual as too “formalized” has at times led to stagnation. Ironically, many women within the “mainstream” have visited feminist covens and groves, have gained new knowledge based on new experiences, and then have made significant changes in their original groups or formed new groups altogether. This has not often happened the other way around. Lastly, the Neo-Pagan movement as a whole is rich in humor and ease. These are qualities the feminist Craft often lacks.

One difference between the two Crafts can be seen in the lives of two women who shall remain nameless. The first is the priestess of a Gardnerian coven in the West. During working hours she is a top scientist with a major corporation. No one at her job has any idea of her religious affiliation. Despite her prestige and success, and her integration into “normal” society, she remains afraid that her job would be imperiled if her religious activities become known. The second woman is better known. She was once a political fugitive wanted by the FBI. She made a growing commitment to feminism, and during the period when she turned herself in and was brought to trial she was initiated into a Dianic tradition from the Southwest.

It can be said that, generally, most members of the “mainstream” Craft function outwardly as “ordinary” members of society, while at least some members of the feminist Craft live on the edge of society; that the feminist Craft serves, at least in part, as a source of renewal for women who are among the dispossessed and the oppressed—a function of the Craft that may be most “traditional.”

And thou shalt be the first of witches known;
And thou shalt be the first of all i’ the world;
And thou shalt teach the art of poisoning,
Of poisoning those who are the great lords of all;
Yea, thou shalt make them die in their palaces;
And thou shalt bind the oppressor’s soul [with power] . . .
And ye shall all be freed from slavery,
And so ye shall be free in everything;
And as the sign that ye are truly free,
Ye shall be naked in your rites, both men
And women also: this shall last until
The last of your oppressors shall be dead. . . .⁵⁹

—Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches (1899)

Feminism and Paganism in the Twenty-First Century

In 2005, when I read the passage about creating new Amazons—about howling with the bears and the wolves and the coyotes and uniting with all that is female and waging a war for mother nature—I have to admit, I cringed. As I said at the outset, it was written before Reagan, Bush, and a host of other changes in the United States and the world. At the time, it truly seemed that women were creating a revolution. Today, despite incredible gains, much of that revolution seems stalled. Where are those Amazons? What happened to that revolution? On the one hand, women’s spirituality is all over the place: books, workshops, rituals, and music. Some of this has nothing to do with Paganism or Wicca. As Patricia Monaghan, the author of more than twenty books—quite a number of them on the Goddess—observed to me:

Women’s spirituality is quite large and includes women in drum circles, indigenous women, lots of nuns, Christian women who honor Sophia or Mary, Jungian psychologists, literature professors—lots of people who do not ritualize the Sacred Feminine but who object to strictly patriarchal constructions of spirituality. Ninety percent of these people, I would estimate, would hesitate to define themselves as Pagan; some would flee from the term. Even fewer, I think, would call themselves Wiccan.⁶⁰

Women’s spirituality has made huge inroads in Judaism and Christianity. A few examples: The May’an Seder, a feminist Passover observance for women has attracted more than a thousand women in New York City each year. Cakes for the Queen of Heaven and its follow-up, Rise Up and Call Her Name, are two Goddess spirituality study courses that were created by and for women within the Unitarian Universalist Church. The “Cakes” curriculum is now almost twenty-five years old; it has been used in hundreds of churches and religious education courses, and it has influenced thousands of women. It has also brought profound changes to Unitarian Universalist congregations, in some cases totally altering the liturgy.

The idea of the Goddess has entered mainstream literature and there have been countless non-sexist reinterpretations of various myths (Mists of Avalon, for the Arthurian legend, for example.) Feminist spirituality also led to the publishing of non-sexist reinterpretations of tarot, Kabala, and the I-Ching. Turning to Wicca, Starhawk’s book The Spiral Dance, not to mention the score of annual Witchcamps created by Reclaiming, have led to the creation of hundreds of covens, many of them women’s covens, not to mention an enormous amount of political activism, much of it with a feminist tinge.

Tensions between feminist groups and “traditional” Craft groups seem less evident today. By the middle of the 1980s, women’s circles and men’s circles were happening routinely at Pagan festivals. Dianic Witches came to mixed Pagan festivals, and women from the traditional Craft experienced all-women rituals. For many years there seemed to be increased contact between feminist women and Neo-Pagan men, although there are still many within British Traditional Wicca who do not believe that feminist Witches should be called Wiccans. Within the mixed Wiccan traditions, and at Pagan festivals there was a dramatic decrease in sexism. Although some would argue that it depends on your perspective, and the pendulum simply swings back and forth. Todd Allen of Wysteria, the nature sanctuary, recently told me that he feels the biggest change within Paganism over the last fifteen years is the incorporation of men and families into the movement. He remembers that the emphasis on the Goddess was so strong and intense that: “If you were a guy you had to lay low, there were a lot of areas you were not allowed to go.”

But what seems noticeable, at least within Paganism and Wicca, is that the energy seems very different today. Jean Mountaingrove, one of the founders of the magazine WomanSpirit, who is much quoted in this chapter, and who turned eighty in 2005, says, when she thinks back to the time that chapter was written, much of women’s spirituality was a challenge—a pushing of boundaries: Z Budapest getting arrested, Mary Daly challenging academia. Today, there are “many teachers, books on rituals and stores filled with items about goddesses and tools for ceremonies,” she says. And living as she does, in Oregon, women’s spirituality seems a “given” in her community, with frequent seasonal rituals and socializing. Women’s spirituality doesn’t seem to be “a controversial topic,” she says, “nor does it seem to be as central to one’s being as it was in the 1970s and 1980s.” She adds:

In this time of “bread and circuses”—TV, fast food, multiple jobs, massive advertising to consumers (not citizens)—our active commitment to the growth of spiritual experiences and information is not happening.⁶¹

She and others note that a new generation of women has little knowledge of the second wave of feminist foremothers. In fact, the history of feminism is foreign to them.

Morgan McFarland—now the matriarch of the McFarland Dianics—looks back and says, “We were optimistic and naive and serious and exuberant. When you came to Dallas in 1976, it seemed as though there were only a handful of us, and certainly very few feminists among us. What controversy we stirred! Now I go to places like Witch Vox and am constantly amazed at how widespread Neo-Paganism has become.”

There was a freshness about everything in 1979, an enthusiasm, a certain and sure belief that we could open doors and minds and create change, that isn’t there anymore. This next generation of Neo-Pagan women are frankly confused by any discussion of feminism and Craft: they either believe that all the barriers are gone or they have no idea what feminism even means, much less in relation to spirituality. They seem to be confused by the idea that we grandparents protested, agitated or took our livelihoods in our hands when we came out of the broom closet.

Somewhere along the line, my generation birthed a bunch of conservatives, and that I do not understand at all! In the process, we also birthed a group of Neo-Pagan folk who seem to lack spontaneity. I’ve recently spent weeks trying to persuade one of the most gifted McFarland Dianics that doing sharings within her Circle as an extension of Moon Ritual expands the meaning of the ritual. The reason she was hesitant to do them? She might do the sharing “wrong.” But there is no wrong way to share! After all, it isn’t how the mystery is presented so much as how it’s received. So what does it mean if a whole new generation out there doesn’t know about sharings or feminism or what it took to have one’s face all over the Dallas Morning News?

We always felt that we could take the traditional and present it in non-traditional ways. We felt free to invent. I think that’s what feminism contributed to the Craft. It didn’t seem to matter whether we were Dallas Dianics or Z’s women, for example. We invented something new each time we cast a circle. I felt that Z was too excluding, and I’m certain she felt I was too lenient when it came to having men in some of my covens. But we were tolerant of each other and willing to share the term “Dianic” and quite happy to share rituals. I’m quite often amazed at the rigidity of some McFarlands when it comes to sticking to the written word. I wonder if Z is amazed at the direction of her Circle’s circles. Although I have a feeling they may be the last bastions of revolutionary Craft!⁶²

And they may well be. As Z watches the nine priestesses that she has ordained, including her first spiritual daughter, singer and musician Ruth Barrett, who is continuing Z’s ministry in Wisconsin, Z says that most of her priestesses are ardent feminists. Those nine women have, in turn, created a new generation of Dianic priestesses—about twenty-five of them. And they are a much more diverse group than years back, including African American, Hawaiian, and Filipino women. With the exception of one group, all remain women-only. As Z put it to me:

There was never any payoff letting men into women’s circles. Except men’s fluttering egos. My most fervent objection is: women must learn to OWN something in this universe alone. If not even Dianics are women only, what is left?⁶³

Z notes the many women’s studies courses available in colleges; she ticks off a couple of colleges that have women’s spirituality curriculums, and she notes the large number of Goddess sites on the Internet; she sees women’s spirituality reaching an ever wider audience.

But besides Z, and her daughters, and annual events like the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, it doesn’t seem as if there is much energy behind separatism. Feminist writer Sally Gearhart, the author of Wanderground, who once argued that women should set up a buffer state so separatist women could gain the strength to establish a new society, now believes that much of cultural feminism has been assimilated. She says that “much of what is happening in the environmental movement, in the Goddess movement, in Queer Theory, and in New Age metaphysics is actually good old cultural feminism in new (and even higher) drag.”

What you find on the web seems to me to be proof that the dominant culture is now infected with feminist theories and practices. With the exception of cultural feminism’s requirement of a separatist stance for women, the consciousness rising to meet the escalated violence of patriarchy is teeming with the ideas, values, practices, structures, and personnel of the (cultural) feminism of the 1970s.⁶⁴

Gearhart argues that many groups have come to believe that the earth (with its biosphere) is, “ultimately, the Mother of us all, constituting the (evolutionary) Source from which all of life springs and to which it ultimately returns.” She notes that many values our society thinks of as “female”—compassion and cooperation, the valuing of emotions and inclusiveness—have been embraced by these groups, and the men in these organizations are often “praised and respected for their courageous embrace of these too-long dormant social values.” Gearhart says she believes the rise of fundamentalism is the last ditch gasp of a dying ideology. “The future,” she says, “is and will continue to be female, whether or not it is so labeled.”

I truly feel that these changes, so rampant globally and in such stark contrast to the violence we are so tempted to be absorbed by, are the best fruits of all our earlier labors in the ranks of feminism’s First and Second Waves. The world, in short, is awash with the best of what feminism has meant to so many of us.⁶⁵

But even if the culture has absorbed many of these ideas, it does seem fair to say that there is less energy and vibrancy around them at the moment, at least in Paganism. After a decade where separate men and women’s rituals took place at well-known festivals, it is no longer so common to find them. That may simply mean that separatist groups, which do still exist, are not spending much time connecting with the Neo-Pagan movement. But in talking to women who spent years in all-women groups, I have been struck by the fact that many are no longer working in them.

It’s important to stress that the separatist current in women’s spirituality was essential—and may still be essential for some women today. For many women it was the only safe harbor—a place where they could become strong and vibrant in a culture where women were silent and invisible.

Willow LaMonte, the editor of Goddessing, an international news journal that looks at the Goddess spirituality movement around the world, says there has been a loss of vibrancy and energy—of juice, if you will. She ticks off several factors. First, the loss of grassroots woman’s organizations: bookstores, restaurants, radio shows, and local newsletters. Think back! There were hundreds of women’s bookstores in the early 1980s. Many of them are gone. Lesbians led many of these efforts, but they provided space for all kinds of women. Women’s radio shows on public radio—most of those are also gone now. LaMonte does not believe the Internet is a substitute for a grassroots newsletter, any more than Amazon.com is a substitute for a community bookstore. The Internet does not create real community, she says, and there is an access and class problem: there are still many people without easy access to computers. What about prisoners, for example? The loss of grassroots organizations means the loss of political consciousness.

LaMonte also believes that there has been an increasing “vapidness and vagueness” in the movement, and a shifting away from language that confronts the issue of power. She attributes this partly to so many groups stepping away from the use of the word “Goddess” and embracing more Jungian, and ultimately disempowering, descriptions like “Divine Feminine.”

The woman’s spirituality movement does have vibrant women leaders. Leadership styles vary. The Covenant of the Goddess and Reclaiming both have based their leadership style on consensus. Many of the mixed Wiccan groups tend to be more hierarchical. British Traditionalist Wicca sees itself as a mystery religion: A seeker slowly gains knowledge by studying with a coven leader and rising through several levels. In contrast, as we saw, many early feminist Craft groups were quite anarchistic; they did not like the leadership style of the traditional Craft, and their own flaws went in the opposite direction: disorganization. But today, many of the feminist covens have inherited their style from powerful and charismatic women priestesses—such as Z Budapest and Morgan McFarland, and some current women leaders are following in that tradition. This is an oversimplification; there are many priestesses who share power well, who allow different women and their skills to flourish. But in doing the research for this edition, I was struck by the irony of coming across many Heathen kindreds that worship Northern European gods (that some feminists might consider extremely “macho”), yet have truly egalitarian organizations, while I came across a few feminist groups with charismatic leaders and more hierarchy.

Here are some other issues to think about when you compare feminist spirituality then and now. There have always been tensions between feminist scholars and mainstream scholars, over issues like matriarchy and the role of women in ancient societies. But mainstream scholars now include Pagan studies scholars, as the growing Pagan studies movement comes of age (see Chapter 13). The majority of Pagan scholars no longer accept Margaret Murray’s theory of the witch cult, and they have come to accept that the persecution, torture, and killing of people accused of witchcraft in Europe involved a relatively small number of people: forty to fifty thousand over about a hundred and fifty years, not a holocaust of nine million, as many Witches and other women alleged for years.⁶⁶

Many feminist writers still look at the witchcraft persecutions as clear proof of patriarchal oppression—the stamping out of midwives and healers, and the oppression of the poor and outcast. These theories are in dozens od books, many beautifully written with powerful prose. And what makes it so difficult is that they are part of the most important founding and empowering myths of Wicca, Paganism, and the entire Earth religions revival. Take Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English’s groundbreaking work, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, which argued that the persecutions were used to destroy the power of midwives and healers and bolster the emerging male medical profession, or Starhawk’s exquisitely beautiful essay in the appendix of Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics, “The Burning Times,” which argues that persecuting Witches was a way to destroy community power and the common lands. Over the last fifteen years, most Pagan scholars have come to believe there is little hard evidence for these theories. Sometimes reading the current scholarship makes one feel like the title of that old Firesign Theatre album: Everything You Know Is Wrong. For example, Jenny Gibbons, in an article in The Pomegranate, “Recent Developments in the Study of the Great European Witch Hunt,” argues there were about fifty thousand deaths; the greatest number of deaths occurred during the Reformation, in places where both the church and the state were weak; and most deaths were decided by non-religious courts (in fact your best chance of getting off was going before a church court). Few of those killed were Pagans in any sense a modern Pagan might recognize. (See Chapter 4 for more on this issue.)

In contrast, a number of feminist writers and academics now argue that although nine million is clearly a mythical number, the current low numbers put forth by scholars have their own problems. For example, Max Dashu argues that records in many communities were not kept; others were destroyed, and, in a response to Gibbons, she writes:

My own count would have to include those who were drowned, branded, beaten, fined, imprisoned, scored, exiled, shunned, expropriated, and deprived of their livelihoods. This much is certain: no one knows how many were killed.⁶⁷

Looking at this controversy, some of those involved in feminist spirituality say why should we be so different than every other religion? Patricia Monaghan, the author of many books about women and goddesses, observes that she has heard the following argument in some feminist circles:

Why are we the ONLY religion in the world that has to be based on historical truth? So is there any real evidence for the Virgin Birth? The scholar in me winces; I sort of want to say, yes, we should be based on actual verifiable truth, and not the kind of lies that made my Catholic childhood miserable. But that’s holding Paganism to a higher standard than any religion ever before.⁶⁸

When I asked Z Budapest about the scholarship issue, she said: “Is this really an important point to settle? I don’t essentially care. Nine million, or fifty thousand. Bad is bad.” But since this notion of a holocaust of nine million has found its way into Pagan popular songs and into the film The Burning Times, often shown on PBS during fund-raising week, accuracy—not wildly inflated numbers—seems important. After all, for many, The Burning Times film is the only face of Paganism and Wicca that is seen by much of the public.

But historical accuracy is not the only issue. Sabina Magliocco, in her wonderful book Witching Culture, notes that these myths have helped create the oppositional culture that remains so very important to Paganism. She writes:

While the sacred narratives of the Burning Times and the Paleolithic Origins of Matriarchy are not literally true, like all myths they have a kernel of metaphorical truth: experiences and ways of knowing that belonged to a pre-Enlightenment, interconnected view of the universe have been banished from modern Western Consciousness. In conjuring an oppositional culture, contemporary Pagans seek to reclaim that worldview.⁶⁹

It is this alternative, ecological paradigm that made many of us embrace the modern Pagan and goddess movements. It’s important to retain the oppositional culture, even as we correct mistaken notions and numbers.

Looking back on this chapter, it’s important to say one more word about matriarchy. An important feminist scholar, who was barely mentioned in previous editions of this book, does give important weight to the idea of ancient goddess cultures: the late Marija Gimbutas. Gimbutas was a serious archeologist, with an extensive knowledge of the languages and cultures of Greece, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe. She argued in her books, The Language of the Goddess and The Civilization of the Goddess, that what she called “Old Europe” had once been settled by peaceful, women-centered cultures who venerated the Goddess. She further argued that these civilizations were matrilinear and egalitarian until the coming of the Indo-Europeans. Many archeologists have contested her theories, but as Hutton writes in The Triumph of the Moon, none of her theories have been disproved, and they “may well never be. The controversy has centered upon the issue that the evidence is susceptible of alternative interpretations.”⁷⁰

As I come to the end of this chapter, I have also been mulling over a critique that I’ve occasionally heard from some scholars: that the women’s spirituality movement is not really a religion, as much as a human potential movement. Since both religion and therapeutic ideas consider deep questions of being, of consciousness, and the meaning of life, it seems reasonable to assume the lines between religion and therapy will occasionally blur. I noted near the beginning of this chapter that the consciousness-raising group gave women the lesson that personal feelings could be trusted and acted upon, and that the “personal was political.” As someone who spent a number of years in a CR group during the 1970s, the experience was more life-changing than any therapy or education. It was also an incredible catalyst for political change, as women realized their issues were not simply personal and could be explored, challenged, and transformed through political action. Having said that, women’s spirituality is not therapy. Many years ago I remember seeing a leaflet that advertised a goddess circle led by a therapist who was charging group therapy rates for her rituals; at the time it seemed shocking—it still does. But women’s spirituality has given countless women a sense of health and empowerment, and this process clearly continues for a new generation of women. Patricia Monaghan says that doing slide shows on goddesses in small towns has given her great insight about what the idea of the Goddess means for women.

I find that women, especially, though some men too, are literally dreaming Her back to life. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve had a woman come up to me in some small town in Indiana or Nebraska or somewhere, and say that she was at the lecture because she had a dream in which a female figure identified herself as a goddess. (Hmm, I can’t think of a single man telling me that.) So there seems to be some conduit to the collective unconscious, or the spirit, or whatever you want to call it, that is seeking to rectify the balance in these out-of-whack times.⁷¹

But looking back, years later, I do see a downside to the notion that one can always trust one’s personal experiences: the possibility of self-delusion. Assuming that one’s personal experience is “truth” can foster confusion between material reality and the psychic reality of dreams and daydreams. That confusion ripped through certain parts of the women’s movement and the lesbian community in the 1980s, leading some to maintain false stories of ritual abuse. It might be noted that Jenny Gibbons, in her article on the Witch persecutions, observes that the Pagan community would have been more resistant to those claims, and would have seen how similar they were to the old false accusations of witchcraft, had they had a more realistic and historically accurate view of the scope of the witch persecutions in Europe.⁷²

Today, a new generation of women is redefining feminist spirituality. Many of them have no real knowledge of the past, but they are also not overwhelmed with the same forms of oppression that burdened feminists in the 1970s. They may come up with different ideas and different forms of organization as a result. Many women have rejected the essentialist thinking that informed much of early spiritual feminism; they simply believe in equal rights for all; they believe that, as Lisa Jervis writes in an essay in LiP magazine: “The actual workings of power will not change with more chromosomal diversity among the powerful.”⁷³ They have less hope than we had that a world of women will be more nurturing, more peaceful, and more cooperative. Their view may produce better politics, in the end, but it was not an idea we could easily hear when we felt our oppression so deeply that it was impossible to act from a non-oppressed place. One wonders what kind of feminist spirituality a new generation will create; what would feminist spirituality look like if it did not originate, in part, as a response to oppression?

The ancient goddesses are incredible models; whether or not you believe they are real, or archetypes, or simply images to emulate, they can be used to explore notions of power and possibility in the world as well as inform an exploration of ancient cultures and their gifts. In past editions of Drawing Down the Moon, I said that the women’s spirituality movement had yet to define itself as either a monotheistic Goddess movement or a polytheistic movement with many goddesses, more similar to the rest of Neo-Paganism. The claim that there is one universal Mother Goddess worshipped widely throughout the ancient world is a kind of monotheism that only differs in gender from the religions most modern Pagans have rejected. It may also be a kind of universalism at odds with Pagan concepts of diversity and bioregionalism. The greatest strength of the Pagan perspective is that it looks to many goddesses and gods, not one.