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.”
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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. . . .
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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 âMonster,' ending with us all shouting, âI am a monster!'
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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.
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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 âthe fatherhood of God' and âthe brotherhood of Man' and âhe' and âhim.' 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, âMother. 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 beingâwhat shall I say?âon the fringe. My feminism was considered âin 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 âreal life'âgoing to work, having relationships, getting sick, doing or not doing politics.”
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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 longingâoh 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.