“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
âthe 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 âbad' 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.”