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, âOh, 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 symbolâindependent, 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 consciousnessâa 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 experienceâon 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 experiencesâa 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 actionâpolitical revolution, seizing power within the system, and setting up alternative structuresâhave 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.