R E C T O RU N N I N G H E A D

Enchanted Feminism

Many today feel the need to restore a magical, spiritual ground to human
existence. One of the most visible responses to this need has been the rise of
contemporary pagan Witchcraft, and one of its most interesting voices,
Reclaiming. This community was formed over twenty years ago by feminist
Witch Starhawk and friends, to teach others about goddess spirituality and
reinvented pagan rituals. It has since succeeded in developing an independent
spiritual tradition, fostered partly by the success of Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance
and other books, and now has sister communities throughout North America
and Europe.
Enchanted Feminism presents the first in-depth study of this important
community and spiritual tradition, from a consistent gender perspective. In a
unique interdisciplinary approach, Dr Salomonsen adopts the perspectives of
both social anthropology and theology to analyse the beliefs and practices of
the Reclaiming Witches. Among many issues, she considers their spiritual
search for the ‘Real’, their renunciation of patriarchal religions and attempts to
build a new religious identity, their use of ritual and of feminine symbols for
the divine, and their involvement with feminist–anarchist politics. The results
of her research provide challenging and insightful reading.

Jone Salomonsen is Senior Research Fellow in Theology and Social Anthro-

pology at the University of Oslo.
Religion and Gender
Series editors: Ursula King and Rita M. Gross

The relationship between religion (religious institutions, rites, symbols, language

and thought) and human genderedness represents a fast-expanding area of
interest to which no single series of publications has been devoted until now.
This series will look at how gender ‘differences’ are embedded in religious
institutions and practices around the world and shape approaches to religious
authority and sacred power everywhere. Each title will show how debates
about women’s and men’s identity, about their images, roles, status, power and
authority, and about body and sexuality, are deeply influenced by and
intertwined with religious teachings, even when these are explicitly rejected.
Enchanted Feminism
Ritual, Gender and Divinity among the
Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco

Jone Salomonsen

London and New York

First published 2002
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.
© 2002 Jone Salomonsen

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Salomonsen, Jone, 1956–
Enchanted feminism: the Reclaiming witches of San Francisco/Jone Salomonsen.
p. cm. (Religion and gender)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Reclaiming Collective (San Francisco, Calif.) I.Title. II. Series.

BF1577.C2 S25 2001

299–dc21 2001049062

ISBN 0-415-22392–X (hbk)

ISBN 0-415-22393-8 (pbk)
ISBN 0-203-16028-2 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-16031-2 (Glassbook Format)
Contents

List of plates vi
Series editors’ preface vii
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1

PART I
Guardians of the world 31
1 The Reclaiming community: a feminist, social construction 33
2 Wicca revival: Starhawk and the myth of ancient origin 67
3 Utopian and generic Witches: revitalizing western spiritualities 97
4 Holy hermeneutics: how to find truth 129

PART II
Priestesses of the craft 155
5 Elements of magic: learning to ritualize 157
6 The Spiral Dance ritual: a celebration of death and rebirth 189
7 Women’s mysteries: creating a female symbolic order 214
8 Initiation: transforming self 248
Conclusion: Reclaiming Witchcraft and theology 282
Appendix A Question guide interviews, 1989–1990 298
Appendix B Reclaiming principles of unity 301
Bibliography 303
Index 313
vi Contents

List of plates

(between pages 154 and 155)

1 Starhawk at the goddess camp Her Voice – Our Voices

2 Goddess-worshipping women gathered for ritual at Her Voice
– Our Voices
3 Goddess-worshipping women in the act of ritualizing at
Her Voice – Our Voices
4 Paleolithic and neolithic images of “the Goddess”
5,6,7 The northern altar at Reclaiming’s Spiral Dance ritual
8 Woman adorned with mask during ritual
9 Street parade in San Francisco’s Mission district on El dia de
los muertos (Day of the Dead)
10 Stone labyrinth at Sonoma, California
11 Starhawk leads a ritual dance around the maypole in
downtown San Francisco
12 The Reclaim May Day demonstration in San Francisco,
1 May 2000
13 Celebration of Beltane, one of the Witches’ eight sabbaths
Series Editors’ Preface

Gender research has now become more gender-inclusive rather than just
women-centred, a change of great theoretical significance. The Religion and
Gender Series is dedicated to publishing books which reflect that change. It
will feature innovative, original research which moves away from predominantly
western to global perspectives, including comparative and interdisciplinary
approaches where appropriate. Firmly grounded in religious studies, books in
this series will draw on a wide range of disciplines, including gender studies,
philosophy, theology, sociology, history, anthropology, as well as women’s
and men’s studies in religion. By recognizing the limitations of previous,
exclusively androcentric approaches to the study of religions, this series will
help overcome earlier deficiencies in scholarship about religion and open new
intellectual horizons in the field.
Although a relatively new area of enquiry, the materials relevant to the
study of religion and gender are as old as humanity. They include the roles,
lives, and experiences of women and men, as shaped by diverse gender norms,
stereotypes and symbols prevalent in different religious, cultural and historical
contexts. Issues of gender – what it means to be male or female, and ultimately
what it means to be human – are central to social, philosophical, doctrinal,
ethical and practical questions in every religion, and gender symbolism is of
great significance in all religious worship, spirituality, and doctrine. The
Religion and Gender Series publishes new research on these and all other
aspects of gender and religion.

Ursula King
Rita M. Gross
Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to a considerable number of people and institutions who have
actively supported my studies of Reclaiming Witchcraft and who have
patiently waited for the results from the research period 1984-94 to be
published. First, I want to thank the Norwegian Research Council and the
University of Oslo for having funded my research and work and the Faculty
of Theology, which has been my home base, for having furnished me with an
infrastructure in a wide sense until both the PhD dissertation and the book
were completed. I am particularly grateful to my supervisors at the University
of Oslo, Professor of Social Anthropology Eduardo P. Archetti and Professor of
Systematic Theology Svein Aage Christoffersen. In the crucial years they
provided inspiring readings and comments, well-founded critique and good
support. Second, I want to thank my two women mentors, Professor of
Cultural Anthropology at Stanford Carol Delaney and Professor of Feminist
Theology at Bristol and Oslo Ursula King, who gave wonderful encourage-
ment and detailed comments in the final round. The Norwegian Research
Council made the transition from dissertation manuscript to book possible by
generously consenting to pay for highly skilled editorial assistance from the
American scholar Kalbryn McLean.
I also want to thank my other colleagues – theologians and anthropologists
– for sustaining and spirited discussions, as well as friends, women’s circles and
family who have offered themselves as supporters, advisors, readers or lay
editors in the process: Helle Giset, Sharon Ghamari, Luis Kemnitzer, Irene
Kiebert, Moher Downing, Janie Kesselman, Kim Berry, Laurie Trupin, Sabina
Magliocco, Sarah M. Pike, Serene Jones, Halvor Moxnes, Trygve Wyller, Inge
Lønning, Kjetil Hafstad, Kari E. Børresen, Oddbjørn Leirvik, Marit Melhuus,
Signe Howell, Paul Heelas, Kjersti Larsen, Sidsel Roalkvam, Jan K. Simonsen,
Nancy Frank, Asbjørn Dyrendal, Inger Vederhus, Signe Fyhn, Inger Lise
Olsen, Christian Børs Lind, Linda Salomonsen, Synnøve Ness, Toril Røkenes,
Sissel H. Pedersen, Lisbeth Mogensen, Johannes Sørensen and Jannike Willoch.
Warm thanks to my husband Tor, my daughters Andrea and Katinka, my
step-sons Kim and Kristian, and to my large and loving family for incredible
patience and care and for having kept my spirits up throughout. In particular
thanks to my mother, Birgit Salomonsen, who for long periods of time
x Acknowledgements
generously assisted Tor in guarding the domestic hearth in my daily absence.
Connie M. Alvestad had this role during fieldwork and did a wonderful job.
Finally, I want to thank the Reclaiming community in San Francisco for
having included me as “the one who was sent to study them” with so much
friendship, love and respect and with an amazing willingness to teach me
during all these years. I am in particular indebted to Starhawk,Vibra Willow,
M. Macha NightMare, Rose May Dance, Pandora O’Mallory, Cybelle and
David Miller, to the women in the coven Gossip, to my room mates at Group
W and Flamingo Towers, and to all the Witches and pagans in the Bay Area
and beyond who willingly shared information with me and agreed to be
interviewed. Thanks also to George Franklin, editor of the Reclaiming
Quarterly, who patiently helped me to gather photos of community activities
from more recent years, and to those who actually gave permission to print
them: Ben Read, Bob Thawley, Ewa Litauer and Mer DeDanen. I certainly
hope that all will receive something back from this book!
I also want to offer my thanks to scholar and priestess of the Goddess, Carol
P. Christ who generously read and commented on the whole manuscript in
an early phase, and to Anodea Judith and Wendy Hunter Roberts, priestesses
in Church of All Worlds, for inviting me to experience their community rites.
Thanks also to my dear friends Carol O’Connell and Turi and Hal Reynolds
for love and sustenance throughout and to the late Sedonia Cahill, Raven
Moon Shadow, Judy Foster and Geoff Yippie! for their blessed gifts.
Last, but not least, special thanks to Professor Clare B. Fischer at the
Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley for great support and affirmation
ever since my initial studies in 1984, and to the very same institution for
profoundly having aided my research by first accepting me as a student and
then as a visiting scholar!

Jone Salomonsen
Oslo, 7 November 2000
Introduction

This book represents an in-depth study of how contemporary Witches in the

Reclaiming community of San Francisco attempt to construct new cultural
visions and new religious agency and identity by means of nature-oriented
goddess worship and magical, ritual performance. In late modernity we are
witnessing increased religious pluralism, including swift alteration of old
spiritual traditions and the invention of new ones. Despite its missionary,
universalist efforts, traditional Christianity has not succeeded in replacing
other historical religions, such as Judaism, Islam and Buddhism, nor the
indigenous spirituality of third-world peoples. Indeed, non-Christian religions
have also spread in the west, primarily in the form of new religious move-
ments. Consequently, there is a growing interest in the alternative knowledge,
spirituality and ritual practices represented by religions other than the biblical
faiths, including shamanism and long-dead ancient paganism. Furthermore,
many third-world Christian congregations are attempting to gain new theo-
logical insights about the givenness of life through, for example, closer contact
with the abandoned pagan religiosity of their ancestors, dead and living. An
important aim in this rapidly spreading inclination to reorient oneself toward
the past in order to improve or transform the human conditions of the present
is to restore a felt loss of a living cosmos and a magical, spiritual ground of
being to human existence.
An important contribution to this manifold enterprise is contemporary
pagan Witchcraft and one of its most interesting voices, Reclaiming. This
community of feminist Witches was formed in 1979 by two Jewish women,
Starhawk and Diane Baker, who intended to teach others about their newly
found goddess and her emancipatory rituals. Twenty years later, Reclaiming
has grown into a large movement, with sister communities all over the US,
Canada and western Europe. An important factor to Reclaiming’s success is
the fame and distribution of Starhawk’s books to a wide public, in particular
her first one, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great
Goddess (1979a).
The name “Reclaiming” refers to a spirituality these feminists feel they
have reclaimed from ancient paganism and goddess worship in order to heal
2 Introduction

experiences of estrangement occasioned by patriarchal biblical religions. In

fact, they believe that western culture suffers from severe spiritual and social
disease because its founding religions apparently deny significant aspects of the
nature of reality: (divine) immanence, (ecological) interdependence and the
sexed nature of the elemental birthing power (female Creatrix). From this
stance, and with a working model of the universe that includes interconnected
realms of matter and spirit, feminist Witches have created a compassionate
alternative.
Reclaiming has a mission statement to educate the public, both women
and men, in their visionary path work. A good example of how Starhawk
communicates this work lies in her rewriting of the “Declaration of Human
Rights” into a “Declaration of the Four Sacred Things”, attempting hereby a
general interpretation for a general public of the pre-Socratic doctrine of the
four elements, a doctrine that all Witches endorse:

In company with cultures of many different times and places we name

these things as sacred: air, fire, water, and earth. Whether you see them as
the breath, energy, blood and body of the planet, or as the blessed gifts of
the Creator, or as symbols of the interconnected systems that sustain life,
we know that nothing can live without them.
To call these things sacred is to say that they have a value beyond their
usefulness for human ends, that they themselves become the standards by
which our acts, our economics, our laws and our purposes must be
judged. . . . It is everyone’s responsibility to sustain, heal and preserve the
soil, the air, the fresh and salt waters, and the energy resources that can
support diverse and flourishing life.
All people, all living things, are part of the earth-cycle, and so sacred.
No one of us stands higher or lower than any other. Only justice can
assure balance; only ecological balance can sustain freedom. Only in free-
dom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit flourish in its full diversity.
To honor the sacred is to create conditions in which nourishment,
sustenance, habitat, knowledge, freedom and beauty can thrive. To honor
the sacred is to make love possible.1

When Starhawk invokes the four elements, she tries to reestablish and re-
interpret the notion that humans are created beings and, therefore, part of the
soil and water, breathing in air and fierily digesting the fruits of the earth, and
that this cosmological perspective on human living is necessary for “that fifth
sacred thing we call spirit to flourish”. Her stated aim is not merely to
venerate the natural elements but to free the spirit so that love becomes
possible.
As a gesture toward understanding Reclaiming Witchcraft and its contri-
bution to contemporary religious life, this book offers a joint ethnographic
and theological study of Starhawk and Reclaiming’s spiritual and communal
alternatives as these were formed and formulated in the period 1984–94. A
 Introduction 3

major concern when critically describing and analysing their alternatives is to

demonstrate how and why the notion of having left the Father’s House
(Jewish and Christian religions) and returned “home” to the Self (Goddess
religion) is a basic theme. It manifests, for example, in their favourite image
of the Witch as “healer” of the self and “bender” of the world: she is a
modern magician whose work is to liberate patriarchal culture and heal its
wounds, at both a social and an individual level, and initiate a “new age”.
Foundational to her “regenerative magic” is the retrieval of ancient names,
figures and myths that are believed to predate patriarchal western religion
and, therefore, to represent divine reality and the human self, female and
male, more truly and more vividly. Also important is the development of new
magical rites, such as rites of calendar, rites of passage, and rites of crisis or
celebration. They constitute a social and symbolic field within which new
models of agency and religious identity are formed, for both women and
men. They are also instrumental in Witches’ attempts to induce personal
growth in individuals or groups and in their anticipation of much-desired
social reforms through symbolic action.
The theological concepts and ritual courses endorsed by Reclaiming Witches
both challenge and contribute to academic feminist theology, not least by how
they rework space and agency and humans’ need for spiritual and personal
regeneration. They also have something to say to mainstream theology and
society, especially as their modus operandi is both a derivative of and a logical
revision of that society. In particular, they reflect how female human beings
may relate to divinity and community in contemporary society through ways
of knowing, modes of thinking and forms of representation other than those
usually associated with theological hermeneutics.

Background
Reclaiming is not an isolated social experiment, either in North America or
Europe. It rather signals the rapid spread of a new multifaceted religious
movement that has not immigrated from Asia or the Middle East but is more
genuinely a new western creation: (neo)pagan Witchcraft.This movement was,
to a large extent, crafted in post-war Great Britain in the 1940s and 1950s as
part of a conservative rejection of modernity, socialism and Christianity
(Hutton 2000:360). The motivation, at the time, was not to reform western
religiosity in any radical sense but to return to spiritual and aesthetic practices
that could conjure up the “good old days” of humankind. This nostalgic
return was amply nourished by romantic notions of the nobility, sensuality and
wisdom of ancient paganism, as well as by the occult philosophy and ritual
magic of the European brotherhoods, such as the Freemasons and Rosicrucians.
When this spirituality was finally introduced to the public in 1954, the father
of modern Witchcraft, Gerald Gardner, claimed direct historical lineage to a
presumably peaceful and natural pre-Christian and premodern “Old Religion”
in Europe.
4 Introduction

This bold attempt was not solely a product of Gardner’s imagination

but was substantiated by selective reading of contemporary scholars in folk-
lore, anthropology and mythology adhering to German romanticism, such as
Margaret Murray (The Witch Cult in Western Europe), Jane Harrison (Prolegomena
to the Study of Greek Religion), Robert Graves (The White Goddess), C.G.
Leland (Aradia: Gospel of the Witches), James Frazer (The Golden Bough),
Edward Tylor (Primitive Culture), and J.J. Bachofen (Das Mutterrecht). For
example, Murray contributed the idea that people burned as “witches” by the
inquisition were killed because they practised an old fertility cult that could
be “traced back to pre-Christian times, and appears to be the ancient religion
of Western Europe” (Murray 1921:12). Were there still any survivors of this
heritage in modern Europe? This is where Gardner’s story begins: he claims
to have met a group of Witches in the New Forest in England and been
initiated to their supposedly age-old rites and mythology by a Dorothy
Clutterbuck in September 1939, a woman he met through the Rosicrucian
Theatre (Crowley 1989:20). Their tradition was, however, very fragmentary
and in the process of dying out. In order to prevent this, Gardner broke the
oath of secrecy that the Witches presumably required of their initiates and
published their secrets, first in a fictitious form in the novel High Magic’s Aid
in 1949. After Old Dorothy’s death in 1951, and the Witchcraft Act was
repealed in Britain, he published the nonfictitious Witchcraft Today (1954) and
The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959).2
This British civil servant and hobby-folklorist presented Witchcraft as an
esoteric, initiatory religion with a magical system kindred to the Mysteries of
Eleusis and Isis. He assured the reader that he had faithfully woven together
old fragments and only created new ones when necessary. This was in parti-
cular the case with the Witches’ “lost rituals”, which he himself practised in a
so-called Witch’s coven. Apparently he was the coven’s “high priest”. After
her initiation in 1953, Doreen Valiente became their “high priestess”. She
worked with Gardner as co-creator until they split apart in 1959”. In order
to perform the Witches’ rites, Gardner had obviously used his experience and
knowledge from being a member both of the Hermetic Order of the Golden
Dawn, the Co-Masons – an offshoot from Freemasonry that admits both
women and men – and Ordo Templis Orientis, which after 1925 was headed by
the notorious Aleister Crowley. When Valiente finally published The Rebirth
of Witchcraft in 1989, she did not veil that Crowley, until his death in 1947,
actually played an important role in “reconstructing” the Witches’ rites. In
fact, when Valiente explained why she entered into close collaboration with
Gardner to further refine the rituals, it was because “the influence of the
late Aleister Crowley was so prevalent and obvious within the [Witch]cult”
(Valiente 1989:60, 54). She resented this impact, partly because of Crowley’s
unpleasant personality and reputation as a Black Magician.3 Gardner admitted
to having received help from external sources in order to reconstruct the
Witches’ rites but never to having invented Witchcraft as such, or its contem-
porary existence.
 Introduction 5

The existence of a New Forest “Witch’s coven” in England, with an assumed

lineage back to pre-Renaissance Europe, has, however, never been docu-
mented. Furthermore, the academic faith in Murray’s thesis regarding the early
modern witch trials collapsed in the 1970s when attacked by three historians:
Trevor-Roper (1970), Keith Thomas (1971) and Norman Cohn (1975). They
criticized Murray’s methodology and came up with new evidence to support
the opposite thesis: that people tried for witchcraft by the inquisition were not
practitioners of a reviving pagan nature religion.4 Thus, from an academic
point of view, Gardner (with Crowley and Valiente) must be regarded as the
sole inventor of modern Witchcraft, including its practices.
This is not to say that the Witches’ Craft was imagined out of context:The
historical roots for Gardner’s creative inventions can be ascribed, as already
mentioned, to occult societies and theosophical ideas, burgeoning in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to modern anthropology and to the
rise of a new, nondenominational spirituality in the west (“New Age”). But
there are no direct, genetic connections between the complex beliefs of
ancient paganism and the present, only indirect traces. According to the
British historian (and archaeologist) Ronald Hutton, these are: 1) the marks of
pagan philosophy in high ritual magic and occult philosophy; 2) the leftover
practices of “hedge” witchcraft, or the popular magic of the local wise woman
and cunning man; 3) the general love affair of the Christian centuries with the
art and literature of the ancient world, including Romanticism; and 4) folk
rites and feasts connected to seasonal celebrations, like the May-pole dances or
the Summer solstice fires (Hutton 1996:4-13). Hutton has elaborated further
on these collateral connections in his most recent book, The Triumph of the
Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (2000), and has left no doubt that
Gardner’s historical claims, beyond this pool of sources, are unfounded.
Furthermore, because of the obvious connection between Witchcraft and
western esoteric traditions, correlations must also be assumed with the religious
heritage Gardner insisted to have rejected: Jewish and Christian religions. A
British religious studies scholar, Linda Woodhead (1996), has suggested that
the “new spirituality” that today flourishes in contemporary western societies
represents a single form of religiosity, and that pagan Witchcraft is merely
one of its expressions. This “new spirituality” is deeply rooted in European
Protestantism and has arisen as a response to an increasing dissatisfaction with
Christianity (and Judaism). We find its forerunners among radical Protestant
sectarians (including the Quakers, Unitarians and Shakers). Although the self-
understanding of Witchcraft is to reject this whole tradition, not to revitalize
it, nor to purify it from within, Woodhead argues that the most important
context in which to understand pagan Witchcraft is a Christian context:
Witchcraft is not a new religion, but a new reformation.5
If Woodhead is right, this reformation is characterized by public reevaluation
of western mysticism and esoteric symbolism, including its pantheism, animism,
and emphasis upon the “feminine divine”. At the same time, it is also heavily
influenced by eastern religions, shamanic traditions, modern anthropology,
6 Introduction

emancipatory political movements and the forces of globalization – as well as

by the anti-globalization movements that aim at preserving ecological balance,
local agency and ethnic authenticity, and to liberate the oppressed.

Witchcraft and feminism in the US

Even though no genetic lineage back to ancient paganism can be established
for these modern pagans, and their religious authenticity may be said to be
fake, their ideas proved to be so vital and powerful that a new religious
movement was instigated.Throughout the 1950s, Gerald Gardner and Doreen
Valiente trained many wanna-be Witches in their coven and started to name
their newly “found” religion “Wicca”. As time passed, new covens formed and
new, slightly different, interpretations of Wicca developed.6 In the early 1960s,
Gardnerian Wicca immigrated to the US and was soon to take a radical new
turn: it was adopted by a handful of feminists in Los Angeles who were
seeking a womanly expression of spirituality. Although occult, conservative
and sociologically rather deviant, the Gardnerian Witches seemed to represent
religious ideas befitting a new age: they worshipped a goddess as well as a god,
ritualized on nights when the moon was full in small, autonomous and
perfectly gender-balanced covens, and stripped off their clothes to dance in
natural nakedness and ecstasy around the elements of nature: fire and earth.
And even more peculiar, when compared to the hegemonic position of the
male priesthood in western congregations at the time: Witches not only
obeyed a priest, but also a priestess. In fact, she was considered superior to
him, as the “Great Goddess” was said to be to the “God”, alternately her
consort and son.
To religious women, who had responded enthusiastically to the second
wave of feminism from 1967 onward and presumably abandoned the patri-
archal institutions of church and synagogue, Witchcraft offered itself as an
exciting alternative. Its practitioners not only welcomed women as priestesses,
they also employed female symbolism to represent the face of God/ess and
seemed to organize in an anti-hierarchical manner, almost in conformity with
the egalitarian principles of the “consciousness-raising” groups in the women’s
movement. Although pagan Witchcraft also needed reform to fit with radical
feminist perspectives, invented as it was in the conservative, androcentric7
lineage of European secret societies, it obviously promised empowerment and
fulfillment of a kind that was felt to be very different from their previous
experiences with Christianity and Judaism.This process of transformation and
reinterpretation accelerated when six Los Angeles women in 1971 formed the
first feminist Witchcraft coven in the US, called “Susan B. Anthony Coven no.
1”, under the guidance of their then lesbian-separatist high priestess, Zuzanna
Budapest. Eight years later, in 1979, another branch of feminist Witchcraft was
established in San Francisco,“supervised” by Starhawk: the Reclaiming tradition.
Neither Budapest nor Starhawk admits to having inherited the basic
structure of her spiritual practices fully fledged from Gerald Gardner. They
 Introduction 7

either refer their knowledge to personal revelations, everyday experiences,

common sense or a good library. Or, they insist upon hereditary sources,
either by birth or initiation, of their own. In the last decade they have also
become more reserved about employing the name “Wicca” since European
Witches seem to have reached consensus with the Gardnerians that only they
are entitled to this label.8 The feminists do, however, continue to believe in
Murray’s (and Gardner’s) outdated thesis that Witchcraft is of ancient origins
and that “somebody” has been able to reconstruct this new/old spiritual path
through personal initiation into leftover practices of pre-Christian goddess
worship and magic. The witch burning in early modern Europe is still
regarded as the climax of an ongoing war between a patriarchal Church and
nonpatriarchal indigenous beliefs, and the witch-hunt itself is made into a
model that can explain the brutality of later European colonializations or,
more recently, the holocaust of the Jews.9
For this reason, feminist women have taken on the negatively loaded name
“Witch”. They want to remember the immense suffering of victims inno-
cently persecuted and killed by the Inquisition, for being pagans or (Christian)
heretics, healers or midwives, or just weird.10 They also want to honour these
people’s lives by merging their memory with a certain romantic notion of the
female hero: a “natural” person who dares to be “herself ” and act against the
powerful and mighty, and contrary to accepted norms about what it means to
be a “woman”, in order to “do good” and “be true”. The other reason for
being a self-proclaimed Witch is intrinsic to how these feminists define the
inner, semantic meaning of the name itself. According to Merriam-Webster’s
Collegiate Dictionary (1995), the word witch is derived from the Old English
wicca, being related to wigle, meaning “divination”, and perhaps also to wih,
meaning “holy”. But irrespective of its associated linguistic meanings, Webster
defines witch as someone “credited with unusual malignant supernatural
powers, especially a woman practicing usually black witchcraft, often with the
aid of a devil or a familiar”. Modern Witches overrule this conventional,
sociological definition by tracing the root meaning of witch and wicca further
back historically. They claim that the linguistic origin of wicca is the Indo-
European wic, weik or the Norse vikja, meaning “to shape, bend or twist”. A
witch is, therefore, somebody who is “skilled in the craft of shaping, bending
and changing reality” and not somebody involved with supernatural evil doing
(Adler 1986:11).
On one hand, then, to reclaim “the witch” – who by most people is wrongly
associated with evil women of the past who were said to have collaborated
with the devil (as defined in Webster) – is regarded as an act of solidarity.This
argument for choosing their name is an expression of the feminist, political
consciousness of contemporary Witchcraft. On the other hand, the name
“witch” is not at all regarded as negatively loaded but as a proper name, really
meaning “bender” or “wise person”, or someone who is committed to nature
worship and the goddess-within, the immanent life force. The name is not
polluted but is a pure name for pure religious worship, believed to reach back
8 Introduction

to the “beginnings” of human culture.11 As such, it is a name to be proud of, a

name that should be capitalized: it refers to a religion and its adherents.12 This
argument for choosing a “true” name is an expression of the esoteric side of the
same movement.
It should be noted, however, that most feminist Witches – also in Reclaiming
– choose to refer to their religion as Wicca as soon as they enter public space.
This is so because the word “witch” is still too loaded with negative associa-
tions, for example, to black magic or gothic-styled teenagers’ fascination with
vampires and “dangerous, mysterious things”. Most young people on a spiritual
quest, including young feminist women, thus seek Wicca, not Witchcraft. As
feminist Witchcraft ideas have spread, people have just abandoned the word
“witch” as too problematic. In this book, however, I will to a large extent keep
the distinction between Witchcraft and Wicca.This way the differences between
Reclaiming and Gardnerian Witchcraft will not be blurred.

Social significance and academic research

Since Witchcraft was imported to the US, it has grown tremendously and
branched off in a variety of schools and interpretations, both feminist and
nonfeminist. It has also sparked a general interest in indigenous European
pagan worship beyond Witchcraft, represented by pantheons such as Norse,
Celtic and Minoan. These pantheons have been superimposed on the funda-
mental structure of Gardner’s Wicca, resulting in the revival of various “nature
religions” of European origin (Adler 1979:10). This differentiation of Wicca
into paganism means that all Witches are pagans, but not all pagans are
Witches.13 Nonetheless, Witchcraft continues to be the largest and most
influential branch within this broader pagan movement, which already in
1978 could count committed members in the tens of thousands. American
paganism was then to be rated among the three largest new religious
movements in the US, the other two being Black Islam and Christian Science
(Melton 1987:47). At the turn of the century, the number of practicing
Witches and pagans in North America is probably closer to 200,000 (Berger
1999:9).
Why is it that a movement can be so large but still relatively anonymous to
the public? Primarily because the new American paganism is constituted as a
large network of small, completely autonomous groups or covens. Although
they may offer education and usually have a P.O. box address, they seldom
proselytize with any real efforts or keep membership lists. Since they mostly
prefer to worship in small circles, either outdoors or in private homes, they
rarely own congregational buildings. They enjoy gathering at large festivals in
remote places and sometimes cluster within certain affinity-based communities,
similar to Reclaiming. But communities are seldom delimited geographically.
More likely, they are subcultural networks within a broader cultural context in
which the participants live and work. The fairly reliable Circle Guide to Pagan
Groups in 1996 listed a total of 273 pagan communities in 20 American states
 Introduction 9

and in Canada. Forty-seven of these were registered as churches and 71 as

annual festivals and large-scale gatherings.14 Furthermore, 107 different pagan
periodicals, newsletters or journals were published in North America within
this period. In the San Francisco Bay Area alone Circle Guide listed nine
communities/groups and eight periodicals. “Reclaiming” is only one of these
communities and the Reclaiming Quarterly only one of the journals.
The single most important reason for this growth of Witchcraft and
paganism, and for the spreading of pagan ideas and practices in the US, is
probably Starhawk (Orion 1995:8). Her first book, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth
of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess from 1979, is a continuing bestseller
and regarded the best manual and introductory book to Witchcraft by all its
different traditions.15 By 1989, it had sold 100,000 copies. In 2000, the
number passed 300,000 (sales numbers obtained from Harper & Row).16
Obviously Starhawk has more readers than there are practitioners of the
Witches’ Craft, markedly among feminist theologians and women in the
feminist spirituality movement. To the extent that these women are still
affiliated with church and synagogue, (neo)pagan ideas and practices will, once
again, be brought back into active dialogue with the institutions of Jewish and
Christian religions, contributing to their ongoing reformation in new and
challenging directions. For example, Starhawk has been an inspirer both to a
post-Christian theologian like Carol P. Christ (Laughter of Aphrodite) and to a
Catholic feminist like Rosemary R. Ruether (Woman Church). Her works
have also had an influence on the public in general by adding to the modern
notion that religious reform and ritual invention is the privilege of any human
being, skilled or not, who is able to imagine, honest to her “spirit within” and
willing to do the work.17
In recent years, many well-researched and mind-opening studies of paganism,
Witchcraft and goddess spirituality have been published. Social scientists
have been engaged in mapping paganism more adequately onto the new
religious scenery, and in particular to distinguish it from the “New Age”
movement (Melton 1991; Miller 1995; York 1995; Hardman 1996; Heelas
1996; Lewis 1996). Anthropologists have conducted fieldwork in selected
pagan networks and compiled new knowledge through comparative, thematic
surveys (Luhrmann 1989; Orion 1995; Magliocco 1996; Berger 1999, Pike
2000). Historians have tried to depict the history of contemporary paganism
and Witchcraft through its sources and references (Kelly 1991; Hutton 2000).
Religious studies scholars and theologians have either contributed updated
descriptions of the feminist spirituality movement, including its entanglement
with goddess worship and Witchcraft, or presented their own endeavours in
developing feminist theology or feminist ritualizing that also include discourse
on the G/goddess (Ruether 1986, 1992, 1998; Christ 1987, 1997; Eller 1993,
2000; King 1993; Procter-Smith 1993, 1995; Gross 1996; Northup 1997;
Raphael 1999). Besides these, there are numerous books out by pagans them-
selves, describing and promoting their own spiritual paths (Adler 1986;
Crowley 1989;Valiente 1989; Jones and Pennick 1995; Harvey 1996; Roberts
10 Introduction

1998). Many of these I will not regard as scholarly contributions, but rather as
further “primary texts” for the study of modern pagan religiosity.
Starhawk’s books are either referred to or discussed in almost every single
title mentioned above. Nevertheless, the authors seem to be unaware of the
existence of the Reclaiming community or of Starhawk’s profound commit-
ment to this community and spiritual tradition.They rather relate to her texts
as if they are produced in majestic isolation, as if she has no social grounds
within which she lives and works, or as if she does not represent a particular
perspective but can be used as a general referral to “what Witches do” or
“what Witches believe”. This noncontextual reading of Starhawk’s books has
resulted in a peculiar situation: when, for example, a conscientious scholar
like Luhrmann describes Gardnerian Witches in England, she quotes from
Starhawk’s texts on and off to substantiate her claims. The same is true with
Berger’s more recent study of a Gardnerian network in New England, US:
she often relies on Starhawk and the Reclaiming tradition when filling in her
own field notes from this very different community. Northup, who discusses
spiritual patterns in women’s ritualizing, misinforms us that Starhawk formed
the Covenant of the Goddess (and not Reclaiming) in California. She
also claims that women’s contemporary ritualizing has a purely horizontal
dimension without making exceptions to feminist Witches. Even in Hutton’s
intriguing historical records Starhawk is basically read as a single feminist
interpreter, not as the most important founder of a new social and spiritual
community.
This lack of differentiation between feminist and nonfeminist versions of
Witchcraft, between Californian, East Coast and British customs, or between
visionary texts and social practices, is like quoting from Luther when
describing the Catholics. An explanation to this odd situation may be that
most academic works on Witchcraft so far have been thematical surveys with a
large number of pagan groups, not in-depth studies of one community or of
one textual body. Instead of examining Witchcraft as a contextualized lived
experience, involving power dynamics, conflicts and disagreements within
each and every one of the traditions, they have chosen instead to synthesize
and generalize. Some scholars even seem to assume that they ought to
romanticize Witches’ egalitarian self-presentation as actual facts and so legiti-
mize magical groups.18
But this approach prevents us from gaining a more comprehensive view of
Witchcraft and of what the feminist alternative really is all about – for
example, as encountered in the Reclaiming community of San Francisco.The
motivation for my own inquiry has thus been to move beyond idealized
narratives, sweeping generalizations and superficial surveys to present a joint
ethnography and theological analysis of a single community (Reclaiming) and
a single author (Starhawk). I believe this interdisciplinary approach is much
needed, both to gain adequate knowledge about feminist Witches’ hermeneutics
and visionary practices and to critically argue with prevailing theories about
contemporary women’s religiosity and ritualizing strategies.
 Introduction 11

Methodology and conceptual frameworks

The theoretical perspectives discussed in this book have been discovered

through “indulging” in the material as a participant observer and finally
selected during the process of writing.This inductive strategy is consistent with
a hermeneutical approach to reading that moves from text to theory and back
to text, assuming that careful reading and listening will eventually disclose from
the text its implicit theory about itself: how it “asks” to be read to make sense;
its rhetorical devices; what it conceals “between the lines”. This originally
“exegetical” method resembles the empirical aim in anthropology of inter-
preting a phenomenon horizontally, in solidarity with the indigenous points of
view and conceptual frameworks and not from a priori theoretical assumptions
or claimed philosophies. From this epistemological stance it is not primarily
interesting to apply external theoretical models, that is, models established on
the basis of having read “another text” to explain textual meaning in “our
text”. It is more interesting to extract implicit theory and models and then
discuss these “extractions” with adequate, already established, theoretical dis-
course.19 Therefore, to the extent I use the theories, concepts and ideas of
others, it is only as tools to build a “deep” account of Reclaiming Witchcraft
(its women, communities and rituals) and to help analyze the interrelated
themes of this book (holy hermeneutics, female agency, human growth and
regeneration). I shall not prove a general theory or verify a chosen, first
hypothesis; nor do I align my theorizing with only one systematic school of
thought. In turn, this approach to theory will, I hope, also contrive to refine it,
which is always a goal.
Enchanted Feminism is the result of interdisciplinary research. I have tried to
balance my primary training as a theologian with my secondary one as an
anthropologist, although theological interests mainly determine choice of
subject. My theoretical and methodological approaches to feminist Witchcraft
are, however, primarily gathered from the field of anthropology, although I seek
to balance anthropological discussions with theological requirements of rigorous
contextualization of meanings and events. One unavoidable consequence of this
approach is that both theologians and anthropologists may find, when measured
with the requirements of each discipline separately, that whatever the book may
have gained in detail, composition and originality, it probably lacks in depth.
Theologians will, for example, look in vain for updated theological discussions
of a general order; anthropologists will miss unmitigated theoretical discussions
and a broad, holistic analytical approach. Some theologians are likely to find the
emphasis on multidimensional lived experience and detailed ethnography to be
not so relevant to their discipline; some anthropologists will find that I indulge
too much in textual and exegetical inquiries. A common critique may be that
there are too many discussions, too many themes – all in all, problems one
generally encounters in interdisciplinary approaches.
But again, my approach was not a fixed idea but was “required” by the
material itself. For the theologian it was necessary to learn to listen to “the
12 Introduction

other” without having to reach consensus or state disagreements, that is, to

learn the methods of participant observation and gain the competence required
to study living communities, not only texts. For the anthropologist, then
coming into being, it was important that she discard reductionist and biased
approaches to religion and regard feminist Witchcraft as a genuine and qualified
religious (and theological) expression. It is my experience that this inductive,
interdisciplinary approach has proved fruitful; and I hope, in the end, the reader
will confirm that the choices made were appropriate. But first, let me intro-
duce some of the premises set on my quest to learn about feminist Witchcraft.
Although “modern Witchcraft” would not have been a concept without
Gerald Gardner, and his ideas still prevail, the particular spiritual path offered
in Reclaiming has primarily been developed by women. The men who
participated in Reclaiming up to 1994 constituted a minority group and did
not yet mark the community’s spiritual work in any substantial sense, although
there were important individual exceptions, for example Raven Moonshadow,
Rick Dragonstongue, Jody Logan and David Miller. Most men seem to have
found a place here not because they were men, but because they were feminist
men, or sympathizers of feminism.20 This gives us a unique opportunity to
actually be acquainted with an expression of “religious woman” in contem-
porary western culture. It also gives us an opportunity to learn how (some)
women may construct theology, ritual and community, and express their
“womanly” faith, when they feel unrestricted by male power, traditional
dogma and institutional demands. But, if feminist Witchcraft is predominantly
practised as a woman’s religion, is it also possible to distinguish specific features
of these women’s religiosity, features that can be attributed to gender differences
in general?
This is a difficult question, not least since Reclaiming is a mixture of
woman-identified women and feminist women and men. In addition, it
essentializes women as a social group and “genderedness” as an analytical
construct and takes us right into the core of the essentialist–constructionist
controversy. It implies that there are such things as “women’s experiences” and
“women’s theology” that stand apart and above differences between empirical
women, differences determined by psychosocial factors like class, race, culture,
sexual orientation, personality, beliefs, family background, and so forth. But, as
will be documented in this book: the differences and disagreements among
Reclaiming women are so obvious that to analytically reduce them to one
unified body with “common experiences” and “common thoughts” would
not be in accordance with the data.
On the other hand, without some level of generalization, people cannot
share identities and visions or act politically for common goals. And, as Lesley
A. Northup has pointed out, “carried to its logical extreme, the particularist
approach would eventually make it impossible to perform any meaningful
analysis of a subject” (1997:4). Furthermore, Reclaiming women (and men)
do consciously come together with the intention of extracting commonality
from their experiences. After years of discussion, experimentation and consensus
 Introduction 13

processing, they were (in 1997) to produce the “Reclaiming Principles of

Unity”. These principles describe their mutual values when inviting “all
genders, all races, all ages and sexual orientations” as welcome to join. But do
these principles express (feminist) women’s religiosity any more than they
express (feminist) men’s, or is feminism the active denominator here?
Another crucial feature of Reclaiming’s version of Witchcraft is constant
reflection on questions of sexual difference: what is a woman and who is the
goddess; what constitutes sexual difference and who is the god? Since Witches
are continuously on personal quests for the Real, not only for its meaning, this
quest also implies the felt reality of sexual difference. To most Witches this
difference is not regarded as essential, but as paradoxical: as both ontological
and accidental at the same time, as an awareness of being a historically
situated, bodily sexed self.When further defining this “bodily sexed self ”, they
may disagree. But as a rule they will contest, to varying degrees, the culturally
coded “feminine” and “masculine” of the west and the hegemonic position of
the “heterosexual matrix”.21 Apart from this, they have no coherent gender
theory.
In order to conceptually grasp the genderedness of social beings Anglo-
American feminist theorists have for the last three decades suggested that we
differentiate analytically between “sex” as biological facticity and “gender” as
the cultural interpretation of that facticity (cf. Rubin 1975). But this
differentiation is highly problematic. First because it presumes that a pre-
discursive, natural category can be separated from – and therefore also
included within – the frameworks of analytic language (cf. Butler 1990).
Second because the distinction itself is dualist and superficial in terms of
grasping the idea of the lived body as a situation that is open and
undetermined although deeply intertwined with the world and other bodily
subjects, that is, with what it encounters (cf. Heinämaa 1997). On the level of
lived experience I claim that one cannot separate natural from cultural as
suggested by the sex/gender social theorists.
Furthermore, my goal in this book is not to present an explanation for
gender differences by elaborating on a theory on the socio-cultural production
of gender, or say, on the foundations of the gendered field of religion, but to
describe how actual, empirical women develop a spiritual alternative to Jewish
and Christian religions, how they understand themselves as cultural agents and
womanly subjects in the midst of this process, and analyze the meanings of
their sexed, bodily experiences when interpreted in the context of ritual action
and symbolism. Thus, in accordance with my initial remarks on inductive
versus deductive strategies, I shall be content to separate between two different
approaches to the subject matter: empirical versus analytic. While gender
analysis may be both relevant and helpful on a meta-social level it may turn
out to be rather reductionist if we try to conform the lived experiences of
empirical human beings with its theoretical horizon.
Consequently, when I use the term “sexual difference” it shall connote a
philosophical notion that may help any person (including a scholar) to come to
14 Introduction

terms with the ontology of being situated as a woman’s and/or as a man’s

body, while “gender” shall connote an analytic category and meta-perspective
that may help the scholar (but not necessarily any person) understand (and
contest) historical and cultural assumptions about what it means to hold the
subject position of a “woman” and/or “man.” The first perspective does not
necessarily rule out the second, or vice versa; they just belong to different
levels of discourse (irrespective of whether the subject of enunciation is a
scholar or an informant).
Thus, when describing Reclaiming women empirically, it is both relevant
and meaningful to ask how they perceive of themselves as “women” and how
they attempt to create an alternative to male-oriented western religiosity in
terms of a new female symbolic order. Aided by the philosophical language of
Luce Irigaray, I will document that such creativity tries to respond to the
following problems: the envelopes22 that situate and hold us (body, ecology,
society) and the elementals constituting the sexed body; the nature of
sisterhood and women’s shared experiences; maternal origins and female
genealogies from mother to daughter; the interpretation of human existence
by means of goddess symbolism and sexualized cosmologies. Furthermore, all
Reclaiming Witches seem, irrespective of gender, to build a religious identity
in accordance with mystical experiences of “merger”23 and “regeneration” and
with the imagery of “coming home”, both to oneself and to the universe.
Their chosen symbols are created in extension of, and through confirming
analogies to, ordinary human life and the human body, sexuality and parent-
ing, as well as the earth and the seasonal cycles of the natural world.Advocating
a spiritual “transfiguration and regeneration of the ordinary”, they show
no desire to permanently flee the world, nor to symbolically become “like
children”, but rather to develop and grow as mature adults. Pious western
ideals of world renunciation are interpreted as an escape from initiation into
adulthood, since such models of piety do not demand the initiatory pattern of
leaving mother and father, cultivating one’s sexuality and taking on adult
responsibility for family, community and society.24
The kind of religiosity represented in Reclaiming shows some of the same
features that historian Caroline W. Bynum has documented to be characteristic
of medieval Christian women. By analyzing medieval texts she found that
women were inclined to use religious symbols that were in continuity with
their sense of both social and biological self, being deepenings and appre-
ciations of what “woman” at the time was perceived to be, rather than being
based on gender reversals or negations, which were more typical of men
(Bynum 1987:289). These differences between empirical women and men
were again reinforced by social stratification: male authors were priests, female
writers represented laity. Men’s authority was derived from their education
and ordination; women’s religious power derived from inspiration or ecstatic
visitation.Thus, the opposition between knowledge received externally (priests)
versus knowledge received internally (mystics) was represented as a dichotomy
between the learned and the ignorant, which in medieval Europe coincided
 Introduction 15

with the hierarchical opposition between men and women. The situation
today is slightly different. As is the case with Reclaiming, gender similarities
are more striking than gender differences, meaning that the basic features of
Reclaiming Witches’ religious identity summarized above apply as much to
men as they do to women within this particular feminist community.
If the typical features of the new symbolic order created by Reclaiming
women (and men) cannot be attributed to gender differences in general, then
how are they generated? A more comprehensive analysis of the cultural and
sociological conditions for the creativity observed in Reclaiming is beyond
the scope of this book. I shall be content to show how concrete people
choose, in this case, the hermeneutic primacy of (mystical) “experience” and
(magical) “ritual”.When Witches confess to a theology of “immanence, inter-
connection and community” (Starhawk 1990a:73), their discourse resembles
to a large extent a subcultural heritage line in the Christian tradition which in
medieval times was primarily associated with women (and heretics).The basic
theological premise of this heritage line is the postulation that the divine spirit
is a gift of creation, not of baptism. It is poured out irrespective of institution,
clergy and authority, and “to have” the spirit does not receive meaning on the
basis of the continuum “fall–redemption”.This heritage line anchors religious
authority in the inner self, not in external institutions. It also turns the
redemptive scheme of the reforming fathers upside down and praises the
created world and the human person “as she is”. As will be documented in
this book,Witches do not demand repentance and conversion before a person
is sanctified and called “holy”, nor is this model fundamental to their rituals. A
person is first empowered and given plenty of self-confidence and praise for
being exactly who she is.Then she is challenged to change and grow and take
responsibility for agency in the world.
But the spatial tension between inner and outer in this Jewish and
Christian heritage line takes a new turn with Witches’ approach to ritual.
Ritual in radical Christian sects has always been classified as external and
secondary to the internal, primary religious locus: the faith. Magical rites
have not even been considered part of Christian religion but attributed to
primitivism, superstition and the domain of paganism, and ranked as inferior
and prior to pure religious worship and personal devotion (Searle 1992:53).
This theological resistance to ritual has marked modern culture fundamentally
but is about to change. A liberal protestant theologian like Tom F. Driver
argues, for example, that the gifts of ritual are social order, community and the
transformative power to change both people and their traditions.
In his affirmation of ritual, Driver relies on anthropologists like Roy A.
Rappaport, who is very clear that “ritual is not simply an alternative way
to express certain things, but that certain things can be expressed only in ritual
. . . certain meanings and effects are intrinsic to the ritual form, which is
further to suggest that ritual is without equivalents or even alternatives”
(1979:174). Driver also suggests Van Gennep’s term “magico-religious” to
express the conjunction of religious theory and practice to remind us that
16 Introduction

religion cannot be religion without performance or praxis, meaning a certain

way of acting or attempting to act in the world. Religious praxis is also
established through a certain way of acting ritually, namely, magic. In other
words, a ritual not only has meaning, it also “works”; it is also “magical”
(Driver 1991:168–9).
What magic is more specifically will vary with indigenous definitions.
Reclaiming people seem to have appropriated theirs from two British
occultists: Aleister Crowley, who argued that “magic is the Science and Art of
causing change to occur in conformity with will”, and Dion Fortune, who
taught that “magic is the art of changing consciousness at will” (Starhawk
1979a:108ff.). Magic, then, as a way of acting ritually, can simply be defined as
religious practice undertaken to consciously effect transformation in people and,
eventually, in their environment. Within this framework, the most intriguing
theological challenge is not whether to classify prayer as magic, or the
Eucharist as a magical rite, but rather to evaluate the philosophical assumptions
in theories intended to explain why magic works and their implied ethical
tenets.
This affirmative attitude toward the uniqueness of ritual in human life and
the implicit critique of the Protestant ritual avoidance did not originate among
theologians. Rather, it was influenced by a new academic perception about
ritual in general. With the growth of the counter culture from the mid-1960s
and the fame of works by Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz and Roy A. Rappaport,
scholars began to distance themselves from the notion of ritual as legitimating
the status quo and instead began to think of ritual as having “subversive,
creative and culturally critical capacities” (Grimes 1990:21).
Ritologist Ronald L. Grimes25 does in particular attribute this new critical,
cultural creativity to feminists, a fact he thinks is ignored by most scholars:

For the last twenty years or so feminism has been a consistent source of
ritual creativity; it provides an ongoing context for ritual experiment
unparalleled in any other sector of North American society. This pheno-
menon is regularly and, I think, wrongly ignored by most theorists of
ritual.
(1990:119)

One of those he has in mind when linking the growth of ritual creativity and
the US feminist communities is Starhawk, the work of whom he returns to
several times in his argument and analysis (cf. Grimes 1990:118–20). For the
very same reason I have chosen my ethnographic field: I regard feminist
Witchcraft, as constructed by Starhawk and Reclaiming Witches, as one of the
most interesting and successful manifestations of this new feminist-ritualist
consciousness. Furthermore, in terms of its success, it should not be under-
estimated that young Jewish women founded Reclaiming, and that ex-
Catholics and ex-Protestants came in when ritualizing and teaching had already
attained a basic rhythm and outline. Being raised Jewish, ritual avoidance was
 Introduction 17

not part of the founders’ religious ancestry. This particular feature is the
charter of Protestantism and of those raised in Protestant cultures.

A method of compassion
This book is based on long-term fieldwork after a method developed by social
anthropologists: participant observation. The intended goal when using this
methodological approach is to be able to interpret the Reclaiming com-
munity horizontally, in solidarity with their own points of view, not vertically
and from externally applied norms.To learn to understand “the other” but still
be cognitively distant and loyal to the normativity of scientific reality
constructs, classical anthropology has developed what Peter L. Berger calls
“various rituals of detachment”. The academic penalty for failure to remain
detached from indigenous religiosity is “to go native”. One is, however,
encouraged to “go native” behaviourally (participant observation), even
emotionally (empathy). But “to go native” cognitively to such an extent that the
fundamental articles of a-theistic belief in the scholar’s own normative
community are questioned is a sign of no longer being able to do social
anthropology (Berger 1970:21).
The inadequacies of this native/nonnative scheme and of the dishonest
position of the detached “objective” observer have been exposed and criticized
by leading anthropologists (for example, Rosaldo (1980), Crapanzano and
Garrison (1977), Lewis (1980), Daniel (1984), Jackson (1989) and Csordas
(1994)). Instead they encourage their colleagues to empathetically “take belief
seriously” in the actual research process and acknowledge the unavoidability
of subjectivity, narrative and emotion when studying other human fellows.
Reclaiming Witches identify as modern mystics. Mysticism can be
approached textually. But according to Witches this is not enough. In order to
really grasp their beliefs, they insist that the scholar engage in ritual, magic and
trance work as well. The problem is that the notion “participant observation”
does not specify accurately the kind of participation required. The “genuinely
social interaction” (Ellen 1984:17) of this method is often conditioned and its
requested “direct observations of relevant events” may easily resemble pre-
tension. Such an attitude obviously belongs to the outsider, to one who enters
in order to gather data, but whose first obligation is a normative commitment
to “not going native”.
Yet the main reason it is not enough to conduct fieldwork from such a
normatively chosen “outside” position is that, in Witches’ rituals, covens
and classes, there is no outside where an observer can literally put herself.
Regarding the practice of modern mystery religions, you are either in, or you
are not there at all. Therefore, in my study of feminist Witches, I had to
establish a research position for myself in which I became a co-participant and
an apprentice, taking my own experiences seriously, observing the develop-
ment of my own possible new insights, presumably determined by my
willingness to put myself under the discipline of magical training and by my
18 Introduction

abilities for religious imagination, theologizing and engagement in general.

Along with, and parallel to my studies of Reclaiming Witches, I did, in other
words, become my own informant.26
The obvious demands for involvement and subjective experiencing,
required from the ethnographic field, have led to my deliberate choice of the
label “method of compassion” to designate this approach. “Compassion” in
this context does not refer to a wholesale positive embrace, nor to passionate
criticisms and arguing, but to something in between: to honesty. It shall
designate an attitude in which belief is taken seriously, both cognitively and
emotionally. This means to leave behind the anthropological “method of
pretension”, which is mainly used in order to gain access, be it to rituals, to
secret knowledge or to initiations, and instead take on the attitude that “the
subjects of one’s research might actually know something . . . that is personally
valid for the anthropologist”, as suggested by anthropologist Katherine P.
Ewing (1994:571). On the other hand, when something is taken seriously
cognitively, it may also turn out that they do not know something that can be
personally valid. A method of compassion is necessarily critical since it cannot
be operative without continual assessments and evaluations (cf. Grimes 1990:
137). It also means respect for the integrity of the people studied and for
myself. Anthropologists may, for example, be eager to gain access to esoteric
traditions and learn the knowledge of the initiates. But, if religious initiation is
accepted entirely against one’s own beliefs or solely in order to publish secret
knowledge, the act is incompatible with the ethics embedded in a method of
compassion.
The benefits and challenges of becoming my own informant, of simul-
taneously exercising engagement (vivid participation) and holding a general
view (distant observation) apply in particular to the study of ritual. Regarding
magical rituals, engagement is important to understand, distance is important
to observe, remember and record details.27 Since one of the goals of ritual
is to alter the consciousness of all the participants through trance work,
engagement and distance are counter-productive. To the extent that I have
managed to be involved all through the ritual, I will also come out with an
altered consciousness. Engagement is more than participation, and something
else than pretending.To allow oneself to become engaged is to take the intent
of ritual seriously. It is to be willing to let the trance induction take you into
trance, to be willing to be emotionally moved as is intended by certain ritual
elements and to go with what then happens. Distance, on the other hand,
means observation, remembering the lyrics and symbols used in trance
induction, remembering the ritual proceedings step by step, seeing what
happens to the other participants, noticing the social interaction, the
symbolism, the artifacts, the movements. However, this very subjective element
marks a limit as to how deeply into a religion of this kind one can go.Another
aspect is the uncertainty about where a scholarly project like this will lead
because an intrinsic part of becoming a “visiting member” of a mystery
religion is to make a contract with oneself to change.
 Introduction 19

The present study is, however, not about me in any postmodernist sense (cf.
Clifford and Marcus 1986). I have become my own informant for methodo-
logical reasons only, in order to understand “the other” deeply and from the
inside. This is also my reason for wanting to experience the full range of
Witches’ rituals, including the initiation process and its ultimate, secret rite.
But, when finally deciding to become initiated into the Reclaiming tradition,
which I have been, it was after six years of careful consideration and discussion
with myself, my informants and my theological and anthropological
supervisors (at the University of Oslo). I met Reclaiming in 1984, I asked for
initiation in 1991, and it finally happened in 1994. I could not do it only for
curiosity or for empirical insight, which, of course, was tempting all the time;
the act had to be consistent with a minimum of my own beliefs and values,
not violating my integrity as a theologian.28
When I first met Reclaiming, I had little knowledge about what an initiation
actually was. I was, nevertheless, sincerely against it, regarding any form of
initiation ritual as undemocratic, hierarchical, patriarchal and exclusive,
emphasizing human “deeds” instead of divine “grace”. To ask for initiation at
that point was out of the question, even though it would have been helpful to
my studies. Ten years later I had changed my mind, partly from being a close
observer and witness to another person’s initiation process (described in
chapter 8), partly from realizing that the absence of working initiation rituals
and its embedded notion of the unfinished state of the human person in
modern society probably represents as much loss as progress. Thus, to be the
subject of an initiation process would perhaps give me a unique opportunity
to experience the practical consequences of very different notions of “grace”
and the “human person” than what have gained momentum in Protestant
churches in the wake of the reforming fathers. In the controversy between
Luther and Erasmus over the freedom of the will, Luther conceptualized
“grace” as the promise of new life for a will that is so perverted it first must
die, whereas “grace” for Erasmus meant help for the weak. For this humanist
and mystic, “grace meant help to move persons beyond their present abilities;
in Erasmus’ own metaphor, grace is the parental boost that helps the child to
its feet and enables it to walk” (Gerrish 1993:21). Although “grace” is not a
notion in Witchcraft, the analogy to Erasmus’ theology is still valid, for the
initiation process is interpreted as an opening of “the envelope” for the
crafting work of the spirit, visualized as the goddess of rebirth, growth and
regeneration.29
Since I have been initiated into Reclaiming Witchcraft primarily for
hermeneutical and experiential reasons, I am not entitled to initiate anybody
else into this tradition.The apprenticeship is over, and although I have learned
a lot, I do not intend to bring about any further magical currents from having
been initiated except this book and its various receptions in the reader; for my
suggested method of compassion demands that we never forget that we are
scholars. By this I mean two things. First, we must abandon the luxury of
engaging in only those aspects of the religious tradition we are studying that
20 Introduction

immediately seem attractive or intelligible to us. We must dive as deeply into

the religion as possible and let go of the desire to choose from its well only
what may suit our own biases. Second, we as scholars are indeed permitted
spiritual and personal development from our work, but we may not end up as
scholarly converts and proselytizers. Proselytizing and sound academic analysis
are two different genres.
The necessity of studying mysticism from an experiential position “within”
is not only part of feminist rhetoric. Frits Staal already argued for it in 1975 in
his book Exploring Mysticism. Considering the superficial knowledge one gets
from studying yoga when not entering the experience of actually learning
yoga, Staal suggests that the academic student of yoga learn it from a guru,
but without “going native”. The way to keep the awareness of a scholar
throughout the period of learning is, according to Staal, to remember that we
have entered the path of yoga to leave it when our learning is completed. We
cannot enter it to stay. After leaving the path, Staal designs the scholar’s task to
be the development of a language to describe mystical yoga.
I agree that we, as scholars, must enter the path of mysticism in order
to develop a descriptive terminology. Nevertheless, Staal’s scientific belief in
the possibilities of learning to be a mystic by the same mental and emotional
equipment one uses to learn to cook seems to be put forward by somebody
who has been some kind of an “outsider” throughout the process. He does
not consider what compassion and the contract to be willing to change –
which are both required conditions to actually be able to enter and learn from
a mystical path – will actually do to him and his study. Nor does he
contemplate how the admission unto such a path challenges the ideology of
observer–observed and highlights the ethical dilemmas and co-responsibilities
of any researcher in regard to actual happenings and processes among
the people studied. And finally, he does not seem to be willing to reflect
hermeneutically on the way in which he partakes in the development,
twisting and diffusion of the tradition solely by writing a new text. How, for
example, do Witches learn about yoga, or manage to incorporate yoga
practices into their modernist mixture of meditative techniques? Maybe they
have learned from a guru, maybe from having read Staal and his colleagues.
A majority of Witches are educated at western universities and well read in
the basic humanistic disciplines, including religious studies and classical
anthropology. In the process of constructing their own religious alternative,
they appropriate ethnographic and religious literature with the intention of
turning what they learn into normative vehicles for cultural reforms, not in
some exotic country, but in their own community. Academic texts are
therefore never merely descriptions or representations of “other” forms of
life but participate in cultural changes in western societies as well, totally
independent of the scholar’s perhaps “purely descriptive” intentions.
In my own discipline, which is systematic or constructive theology, it is not
regarded as a fundamental methodological problem to move between “outside”
and “inside” positions, or to gain personal experiences from the phenomenon
 Introduction 21

studied. Nor is engagement regarded as something that might blur the

objectivity of the descriptions. The situation is rather the opposite: first-hand
experience may open the possibility to deep insight and the best description
possible. Questioning the positivist and conflictual ideology of observer–
observed is an inherent part of this theological discipline. In fact, the father of
modern constructive theology, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), has
formulated the experiential nature of theology thus: “Anyone who has not
experienced will not understand” (cf. Gerrish 1993:32). Hence, the art of
competent constructive theology is to evolve and deepen religious (and
theological) experience, compassion and understanding in the student, at the
same time that she learns the skills of critical analysis and acquires the ability
to deconstruct or revise the very same phenomenon that triggers her interest.
Thus, my experience when studying the mystery religion of feminist
Witchcraft cannot report on the problems proposed by Frits Staal, namely, the
supposed dilemma of moving back and forth between inside and outside and
the temptation to go native.To move back and forth between compassion and
analysis is not at all the difficult part. But to stay in, in touch with “the native’s”
affirmative compassion, is indeed difficult. To accept those symbols as sacred
that to my taste were vulgar, to play with pagan names as if they were real
names for divine reality, to let go of criticism and be open to the ecstasy of
ritual, to meditate on certain symbols “until they revealed their esoteric
knowledge”, and to grant exception to the belief that this really was impossible
– when taken altogether – this is what has been difficult, challenging and
rewarding.
No academic discipline has developed adequate methodology for the study
of modern mystery religions because such a task requires a thorough
interdisciplinary approach. In my case, anthropology has contributed the basic
qualitative tools: fieldwork, participant observation and the skills of active
listening to “the other”, including that which we do not like to hear.Theology
has contributed the training of being in two mindsets simultaneously, which
means to be able to engage in the phenomenon studied as well as to be
critical and analytic.
As merely a sociologist or anthropologist I would never have been
admitted to Reclaiming’s inner circles. But as a theologian and feminist I was
regarded as a religious being with a personally motivated interest for the
subject of my study and, therefore, possessing the necessary qualifications both
to understand and to learn (about) Witchcraft.Without being a co-participant
guided by empathy and compassion I would not have been able to conduct
my study as intended. All in all, the benefits from a method of compassion are
either visible in the present text, or there are no benefits. If the reader finds
my research interesting and convincing, and agrees that I have managed to
understand the phenomenon of Witchcraft deeply and more thoroughly
through this method, I have reached an important goal. But I also hope the
text reveals the vulnerabilities, not only the strengths, of becoming my own
informant as well.
22 Introduction

Fieldwork
Fieldwork in Reclaiming was formally conducted in the periods 1988-89 and
1990 for a doctoral dissertation, with a predoctoral research period in 1984–
85, and several return trips in 1991 and 1994, a time span of 10 years. Every
fieldwork and return trip has either been funded by the Norwegian Research
Council or the University of Oslo.
When I first came to the San Francisco Bay Area in the academic year
1984-85, it was to study Witchcraft for my MA thesis in theology.Three years
later, when I came back to conduct more regular fieldwork for a doctoral
dissertation, I split the required year in two: eight months in 1988-89 (from
mid-November to August) and four months in 1990 (from August to mid-
November). During my first stay, I lived outside the San Francisco Reclaiming
community together with my family and a woman friend I had met in 1984
(a practicing pagan who had moved toward New Age shamanism). In the
second period, I lived with my three-year-old daughter in one of the
Reclaiming-identified collective households in the Mission in San Francisco,
Group W house. I returned in 1994 for two months in order to be initiated
and to work. This time I also stayed in a Reclaiming-identified household in
San Francisco, Flamingo Towers.
The foundation of my fieldwork was already established in my predoctoral
research in 1984-85, when I enrolled in Reclaiming classes, participated in
rituals and eventually became “a friend of Reclaiming”, at the same time that
I was a student at Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Early in the fall of
1984, the Reclaiming Newsletter announced a class called “Women’s Magic”. It
addressed women “who have taken a Reclaiming class, or who have other
experience in working magic in circle with women”. Nine women were
accepted to the class, including me, although I had just arrived in the US and
had no previous experience “working magic in circle with women”. In fact, I
had no idea what “working magic” really meant.Yet the teachers were satisfied
to hear about my work with feminist theology and liturgy back in Norway,
and that became the entrance ticket to my first Reclaiming class and, from
there, to the community.
A Witches’ “coven” or “circle” grew out of this class, and I have been
included as one of its members since the very beginning (1984) to the
present. As mentioned earlier, a “coven” is the basic unit of Witchcraft: a small
and intimate group of people who usually meet for rituals once a month. If
I had not been accepted to the “Women’s Magic” class in 1984, or if the
women taking the class had not liked each other well enough to form a
coven, I would not have belonged to any coven, and my fieldwork would
probably have taken a very different turn. It is unlikely that any already
existing covens in Reclaiming would have included a stranger like me for a
year or so, and certainly no group would have done it to help my research or
provided a role for me as “participant observer”.30 In other words, without
the coincidences that made me a member of this coven, eventually named
 Introduction 23

“Gossip”, I would not have found a way into the inside of daily ritual work,
nor to the intimacy of feminist women’s (and men’s) magical communities.31
I met, to begin with, a rather reserved attitude from Reclaiming people,
probably because I was a foreigner, was educated in the tradition of Christian
(European) theology, knew no funny jokes (in my broken English) but asked
too many questions (also in my broken English). When I did not understand
something that happened in the ritual and asked “why”, some took this as a
sign that I was not “ready” to be taught. This led to my being excluded from
certain rituals and conversations. When I finally learned to pose questions by
expressing an opinion myself, the atmosphere slowly changed. But altogether,
it took a long time until I gained Reclaiming people’s trust, in fact not until
springtime in 1985. Then I had been in Gossip for half a year, participated
in all ritual events accessible to me, and socialized as much as possible with
my coven sisters and the Reclaiming teachers I knew by then, including
Starhawk.
When finally accepted, reservations faded away. Upon my return in
November 1988, one of the Reclaiming teachers, as a joke, gave me a button
to wear stating, “I have been sent here to study you people”, implying that I
was an alien, from an advanced civilization in outer space, sent to study
“strange” people the way anthropologists used to study “primitive” cultures.
Thus, since my presence was the result of supernatural intervention, it was
perfectly okay. After this I was very much accepted even on my own premises:
as a student in theology and social anthropology doing a piece of work and as
a critical feminist on a religious journey.Yet my reputation in Reclaiming to
this day is that my magical talents are poor, whereas my intellectual appetite is
greedy.
For most people this acceptance lasted, while a few got tired of my
questions and of being around a person who was also a continuous observer.
Some dealt with my observer role by deciding that I was “off work” when we
had coffee: then they felt I was just “one of them”. Others realized I was
always “on duty”, just as I was always also “myself ”, an opinionated and com-
passionate woman, feminist, mother and Norwegian scholar, having no trouble
with any of my roles.32
To be able to position Reclaiming on the pagan scene, but also in order to
be acquainted with ritual language and behaviour, I took part in a variety of
ritual events, including classes, available in the area (in 1984–85, 1988–89 and
1990). I ritualized with other feminist pagan spirituality groups (Ariadne, UU
Pagans, Z. Budapest as well as independent feminist circles), with nonfeminist
pagans and Witches (NROOGD, Ancient Ways, Corytalia/Bloodrose, Fellow-
ship of Isis, Church of All Worlds) and ceremonial lodges like the OTO, as
well as with New Age shamans and their Native American inspired rituals.
Through this broad participation I discovered that Reclaiming had many
features in common with groups invoking very different traditions and that
ritual structures and elements probably originated from a common, though to
me, at the time, indefinable source.
24 Introduction

To be able to understand Reclaiming people’s rigorous social and political

engagements outside their own community, I worked, once a week, as a
volunteer at Martin Deporres soup kitchen in San Francisco in the fall of
1990. I also participated in three direct actions, one at Nevada Nuclear Test
Site, the other at Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Laboratory in California, while
the third one took place in the streets of San Francisco: illegal needle
exchange with poor drug users in order to prevent the spreading of AIDS.
In addition to the regular fieldwork in 1989–90, I conducted qualitative
interviews with Witches, of which a majority was taped. The course of an
interview was to a large extent determined by the fixed set of questions,
which is included as Appendix A. But, since I also used the interviews to
establish contacts, in addition to the information I was seeking, I often
departed from the set-up questionnaire. In 1984-85 I conducted formalized,
taped interviews with four Reclaiming women and three men, including
Starhawk. In 1989-90, the interviews were less formalized, but still taped and
with almost the same set of questions as in 1985. In this period I interviewed
26 women and 17 men in Reclaiming, and 11 women and seven men outside
Reclaiming. The interviews were mostly done in people’s homes or in cafés,
and lasted about 1.5–2 hours each.33
During these years, pagans from all traditions have been very cooperative,
and only one person asked refused to be interviewed.Those interviewed often
expressed satisfaction at being able to talk about the history of their religious
path with me. Because of the confidentiality of the situation, some people also
used the interviews as a setting for gossip, or to voice their concerns about
people or occurrences they felt uncomfortable with. I was informed about
concealed conflicts, personal “wars”, and the “shadow” sides of the “good”
people, the kind of things that may happen in human interaction when a large
number of people are cross-related through many different activities and
through very challenging personal relationships.34
“Reclaiming” is not a fake name, but a real name for a real community. As
long as I wanted to use Starhawk’s texts in combination with my research on
Reclaiming people’s practices, there was no point in trying to hide the
identity of the actual community studied. The advantage of this approach is
that the community is left with an academic text that gives them a place in
the historical records rather than in the history of anonymous case studies.The
community and its people are named and acknowledged for their work, and
readers who are eager to gain knowledge specifically about Reclaiming, and
not about one Witchcraft community concealed behind a fake name, can be
content. On the other hand, I need to protect individual identities. I have
tried to balance these concerns by using public Witch names, that is, names
that people are already known by publicly, when concerned with historicity,
and fake names and identities when analysing cases, or whenever I find it
necessary for protective reasons.
Those Reclaiming Witches who have read a draft of this book have voiced
no objections to my analysis. Some are very happy with how the book has
 Introduction 25

turned out; some have made it clear that parts of the book were hard to read,
although they “believe I am right”; some are content to see the founding
history of Reclaiming documented, but repeatedly tell me, “your perspective
is only one out of several possible”; one woman is worried that I have
included a chapter on initiation. Even though Starhawk and many other
Witches have written at length about initiation, she feels that I take away its
power by exposing a possible experience. This is always a dilemma, and I can
only hope that a potential initiate in Reclaiming will not read this chapter
until the process is completed or, if she does, that she will know that her
experience and the one described will be completely different. But as long as
Witches and pagans themselves continue to publish initiation narratives, I do
not regard it as my responsibility as a scholar to end this practice. I have,
however, put one restriction on myself: nothing is revealed about the secret
part of the initiation ritual that is not already published, even though some
people have told me in detail about it (and I finally also experienced it
myself).
The thematic development of the book will, from this point on, follow the
course of a typical apprentice to feminist Witchcraft. As she gains knowledge
and skills, and as she enters more and more deeply into the Reclaiming
community of San Francisco, she is given more and more information and
insight. The textual representation of this journey is organized in two parts.
Part I, Guardians of the World sets the scene by describing who the people are,
where and how they live, their community-building activities, the myth of
origin that holds them together and their similarities and differences from
normative western spirituality. Part II, Priestesses of the Craft presents ethno-
graphic description and analysis of several different rituals, including the
efforts of the (predominantly) female priestesshood of the Reclaiming Witches’
Craft to create a new symbolic order based on a transfiguration of the sacred
within the ordinary and thus balance and regenerate human dilemmas of
difference, unity and separation.
The first chapter in Part I, The Reclaiming community, introduces the political
and spiritual visions (and conflicts) of these political and spiritual “guardians of
the world”, including Reclaiming’s history and structure in the period 1984-
94 and its reorganization in 1997 to accommodate the fact that this particular
Witchcraft tradition has rapidly spread all over the US, Canada and western
Europe.
In chapter 2, Wicca revival, I describe and analyze Witches’ myth about a
paradise lost as represented in Starhawk’s writings.The myth – which in parti-
cular was significant to the first generation Reclaiming Witches – celebrates a
time when “Goddess was worshipped and women respected” and thus claims
to hold a cultural key to future bliss: a reawakening of the goddess is said to
have the power to instigate a new non-patriarchal society – a vision highly
criticized by historians and sociologists.
In chapter 3, Utopian and generic Witches, I illustrate ideological diversity
among Reclaiming Witches and contextualize their joint Witchcraft tradition
26 Introduction

within a millenarian lineage, stretching back to the heretical Christian sects of

medieval Europe. I discuss continuity and discontinuity in regard to western
spiritual traditions and Reclaiming people’s perception of Witchcraft as a
“coming home” from spiritual exile. To be able to report an updated and
personal response to heritage, I asked a handful of Witches to join me for
Catholic Mass and here recount their subsequent comments. I also present a
case in which a person is said to have found both “herself ” and “home”
through a ritualized performance called “processing”.
In chapter 4, Holy hermeneutics, I analyze the ethno-hermeneutics of feminist
Witches, that is, their notions of experience, truth, reality, sign, religion and
magic (“sacred possession”). In my analysis I apply Starhawk’s implicitly spatial
distinction between the horizontal magic of everyday life and the vertical
magic of ritual.
The first chapter in Part II, chapter 5: Elements of magic, introduces and
discusses ritual theory and defines theoretical tools. By describing the pro-
ceedings of an introductory class in the Reclaiming tradition, I suggest how a
person learns to ritualize and to interpret herself as a sacred being, that is, as a
manifestation of the Goddess.
In chapter 6, The Spiral Dance ritual, I describe, in an emotionally marked
narrative, the Witches’ Samhain ritual (at Halloween) and the mythical and
magical journeys of gendered bodily selves toward regeneration and renewal
“conjured” by this ritual process.
In chapter 7, Women’s mysteries, I describe women’s community within the
larger Reclaiming community as expressed in coven work, healing rituals and
rites of passages, where the mysteries of women’s bodies are celebrated as
mirror images of the divine. I describe women’s perceptions of themselves as
gendered subjects of body and spirit and their efforts to gain “the power of
womanhood”, which also includes the painstaking labour – at least for the
baby-boom generation – to balance the dilemmas of being woman and being
man, of being joint and being separate.
In chapter 8, Initiation, I analyze in detail Catherine’s initiation process,
which covered a period of four years. The ritual offers a solution to the
existential split between joint and separate through “rebirth”, “regeneration”,
“personal growth” and “new knowledge”.
In the concluding chapter, Reclaiming Witchcraft and theology, I recapitulate
findings, outline some ways in which Reclaiming Witchcraft may contribute
to and challenge the agenda of contemporary (feminist) theology and suggest
further research.
A focused theological and ethnographic study of a single pagan community
has not, to my knowledge, been conducted before. I hope that the reader will
experience in my descriptions a meeting with real people and that these
descriptive parts of the ethnography can suffice as an empirical foundation for
further analysis, including to scholars other than myself.
 Introduction 27

Notes
1 Starhawk “Declaration of the Four Sacred Things”, Reclaiming Newsletter, 38/1990.
2 When Gerald Gardner published the textual midwife of modern Witchcraft,
Witchcraft Today in 1954, Margarat Murray wrote the preface. Here she supported
Gardner’s claims, legitimating his enterprise (cf. Gardner 1954:16).
3 Aleister Crowley’s ideas and writings were not only a source to early Gardnerian
Wicca but also a major influence on Anton LaVey’s construction of Satanism
(LaVey 1969).This common literary source, which still can be recognized in some
symbols and ritual elements, is one of the reasons Witchcraft has been confused
with Satanism. In Doreen Valiente’s transformation of the Gardnerian tradition, a
lot of Crowley-inspired occult ideology and high-flown terminology has been
stripped away.
4 Trevor-Roper criticized the empirical status Murray gave to testimonies given
under torture as scientifically improper (1970:121–46). Norman Cohn argued that
the witch never existed, except as a sole product of the imagination. This image,
then, was used strategically and psychologically by the Inquisition in its persecution
of heretics (1975:104–25).
5 I present Linda Woodhead’s viewpoints based on my own careful notetaking from
listening to her: she read a paper on the subject in April 1996 at the Ambleside
international conference on “Nature Religion Today”.
6 The first “offshoot” came with Alex and Maxime Sanders.Although Alex supposedly
was never accepted into a real Gardnerian coven, he nevertheless taught Witchcraft
and initiated hundreds of people (Farrar 1971). Those Witches whose lineage
derives from this couple are called Alexandrian Witches.
7 The notion “androcentric” (which is less comprehensive than “patriarchal”) has in
particular been developed by Kari Børresen, professor in Feminist Theology at the
University of Oslo (Børresen 1995).
8 Since the mid-1990s, some of the more influential non-Gardnerian practitioners
of the Witches’ Craft in the US (such as Reclaiming’s M. Macha NightMare) have
very consciously decided to call themselves “Witches” (not Wiccans) and refer
to their religion as “Witchcraft” (not Wicca). They have also (but without much
success) tried to educate their other Witch friends about the correctness of this
choice.To their dismay,Witches in the US have all come to be called Wiccans and
a child in public school who is raised by Reclaiming parents will probably write
“Wicca” as the family religion.
9 Pagan scholars themselves (e.g. Jenny Gibbons 1998) have also criticized simplified
black and white narrative about the witch craze.
10 Who were the witches? The popular feminist image of the witch as a woman of
independent power (an heretical thinker, a courageous lesbian, a benevolent healer
or a skilled midwife) killed by evil men, was established in 1968 by a New York
organization called WITCH: Women’s International Conspiracy from Hell. In
their manifesto they stated that Witchcraft had been the religion of all Europeans
before Christianity, and thereafter of the peasants and independent women. The
witch craze therefore represented the destruction of an alternative culture and, in
reality, a war against feminism (Adler 1979:174). How many were persecuted?
Mary Daly picked the number “9 million” from the old suffragist Mathilda Joselyn
Gage and argued that it was a reasonable estimate (Daly 1981:183). According
to historians, the number may be as low as 15,000 in all of Europe and America
combined (Gibbons 1998).
11 This view is not derived from Gardner, but rather from the archaeologist Marija
Gimbutas, who elaborated on this theory in her later works. She has been severely
attacked by her colleagues for letting herself be “seduced” by a “false” feminist
historiography (in which goddess-worshipping cultures are believed to have sparked
28 Introduction
all civilization), and thereafter superimposing it on her own findings in Balkan
Europe (cf. Renfrew 1992; Hayden 1998).
12 I will follow this convention and capitalize Witch and Witchcraft. The word
“goddess” will be capitalized when I quote the Witches or refer to the Goddess as
a proper name, while “pagan” will not be capitalized. It should be noted that in
Witches’ discourse G/goddess sometimes is used to apply to a number of goddesses,
at other times a female version of the deity (like the Jewish and Christian God), at
other times it is used almost adjectivally.
13 When I write “pagan”, this classification includes the “Witch”, but not the other
way around.To become a Witch is in most Craft traditions like becoming a Druid:
it usually involves initiation (self-initiation or traditional) and is often regarded as a
more esoteric and committed act than just becoming a pagan. According to
Gardnerian definitions, the name designates a priesthood, or a pagan population
that exclusively contains priests and priestesses. It is, however, not used so strictly
in Reclaiming since anybody can call herself a “Witch” if she so desires, regardless
of whether she is an initiate or not.
14 Selena Fox and the Circle Sanctuary Community in Wisconsin publish Circle
Guide to Pagan Groups.The guide is compiled from listings submitted by groups who
choose to be known and accessible, besides meeting certain theological and ethical
requirements set by Circle.
15 Until Starhawk’s book became popular, the most widely read introduction to
Witchcraft was What Witches Do by Stewart Farrar (1971). He was trained by Alex
and Maxime Sanders, but the “Book of Shadows” on which the book is based, is
of Gardnerian origin.
16 Her next book, Dreaming the Dark. Magic, Sex and Politics (1982a), had at the
same time sold 100,000 copies, while the figures for her third book Truth or Dare.
Encounters with Power, Authority and Mystery (1987) showed 53,000 copies sold.
17 From 1982 to 1990, Starhawk was a permanent staff member at the Dominican
Holy Names College in Oakland in the Bay Area. In 1988 the Vatican silenced the
college principal, Dr Matthew Fox, for a whole year for his refusal to discharge
Starhawk from the staff. Two years later Fox was, for the same reasons, dismissed
from his position. This received a lot of publicity in the US and made headlines
in the major newspapers. Indirectly, it gave Starhawk and her branch of Witchcraft
“good” publicity.
18 Cf. also Sarah Pike 1996:353, 355.
19 The suggested methodological movement text–theory–text does not imply that
I dismiss the insights of the “hermeneutical circle”: I do not believe that I am
“without theory” when confronting a new text or a new ethnographic field. But,
I do not believe that our cultural, semiotic predispositions are total, or that we can
only learn what we already know. For further discussions on this topic, see Iris
Marion Young (1997).
20 Like Reclaiming women, they regard the Jewish and Christian religions as intrin-
sically oppressive, to women and to men, and say they joined Reclaiming because
this feminist community offers freedom from stereotyped role models. Although
the personal and individual interpretations of Witchcraft among Reclaiming men
are interesting, and add to the complexity of the tradition, this is not the focus of
the book.
21 The notion “heterosexual matrix” is taken from Judith Butler (1990).
22 “Envelope” is a concept (or metaphor) developed by the French philosopher Luce
Irigaray to signify the basic material structures that determine and support human
life.
23 The notions “merger with the divine” or “merger with nature” as well as “trans-
figuration of the ordinary” were introduced to the study of contemporary Witch-
craft by Dennis D. Carpenter in his PhD thesis from 1994. He and I may use these
 Introduction 29
notions slightly differently, especially when I use them to enter into dialogue with
Caroline Walker Bynum’s study of medieval women mystics. Nevertheless, I find
them useful as designators of what is characteristic in Witches’ spirituality.
24 Theologians like Uta Ranke-Heinemann support the Witches’ concerns. She
maintains that the ideal for the pious life of holy men in contemporary Catholicism
has not really changed since medieval times: pious men are not encouraged to
“mature and grow up”, neither intellectually nor emotionally, but to remain “as
children”, both cognitively (by accepting “offending” dogma and Papal decrees)
and sexually (by vowing to celibacy); cf. Ranke-Heinemann (1990, 1994). The
lack of an initiation theme from immature adolescence to mature adulthood in
the Christian rite of passage (i.e., baptism) is also the focus of the Rev.William O.
Roberts Jr’s work (1982) and has inspired him to construct a new initiation rite
for Christian youth.
25 Grimes names the study of ritual “ritology”, its scope reaching from “ritualization
among animals through ordinary interaction ritual to highly differentiated religious
liturgy” (Grimes 1990:9).
26 My choice of method is to a certain extent informed by McCarthy Brown’s
influential work (1991). Favret-Saada (1980) also ended as her own informant
when studying malignant witchcraft in contemporary rural France. But this
happened against her own will, out of fear of the spells people presumably made
against each other. She became her own informant to the extent that she observed
her own fear and realized that without her own emotional reactions she would
not have discovered this magical, but hidden, discourse.
27 During Reclaiming rituals, tape-recording is not comme il faut. Continuous note
taking is impolite and would also spoil the subjective experience of ritual. In later
reconstructions, the informants are seldom of any help. My questions about ritual
proceedings and meanings are experienced as intruding on their own personal
experience in ritual, desacralizing it, and the answers are mostly,“I don’t remember
very well.”
28 This theological “minimum” is as follows: I can relate to Reclaiming Witches’
efforts to establish female symbolism to represent the face of God/ess, and to their
dedication to create new patterns for ritualizing in western culture, although I do
not necessarily agree with all its contents. I cannot relate to their non-christo-
logical consensus as a final goal in theology, and I am deeply critical of their self-
identification as “Witches”, including their uncritical embrace of an occult lineage
and its very problematic and mythological historiography. But I am not morally
offended by how they misread the historical past or misrepresent Judaism and
Christianity, or other institutions in western civilization. I believe that the invocation
of simple, critical and imaginative approaches to social (and religious) reality by so-
called ordinary people (nonexperts) has always contributed to, and been a necessary
part of, ongoing cultural changes in the western hemisphere: they hold the key to
powerful, rebellious visions and actions.
29 I started to change my mind after having been invited to and undergone a 10-day
“Vision Quest” in the Inyo Desert in California in April 1989. This meditative
quest was built on a model imitating the Lakota tradition, with four days in
solitude on a mountaintop, fasting from food and shelter. For further reflections
on this experience, which was meant to clarify a personal calling and induce
growth in the participants (which it probably also did), see Salomonsen 1991 and
1999.
30 Such an act would have been regarded as spiritual “prostitution”. As I have pointed
out several times, there is no room for outsiders or observers in Reclaiming’s
circles. All circles and covens are built on mutual trust and equal commitment.
Either you are in for personal (and not strategic) reasons, or you are not there
at all.
30 Introduction

31 For obvious reasons, the women in Gossip have become some of my best
informants (as well as friends) and have guided my understanding and knowledge
of Reclaiming in a profound way.
32 In addition to participation in Reclaiming-related social activities, classes, rituals,
Witchcamps, direct actions etc., my activities also included (but were not limited
to) Caradoc ap Codor’s apprenticeship programme in the Faery tradition Corytalia
(once a week from October 1984 to August 1985), Z. Budapest’s six-week class
The Path of the Grey She Wolf, one Women’s Music Festival in Michigan, two women’s
solstice camps in the Nevada mountains called Her Voice–Our Voices, one California
Men’s Gathering in Santa Cruz, two Ancient Ways festivals in Harbin Hot Springs
and, finally, several rituals arranged by Church of All Worlds, including the wedding
rite for Anodea and Richard, as well as for Morning Glory, Otter and Diane, and
the coming of age ritual for LeSarah. I went on a 10-day Vision Quest led by
Sedonia Cahill, and participated in ceremonial circles led by the Starmaiden Circle,
the Blue Water Lodge, and the Council of Earth Lodges in northern California.
33 The study material about Reclaiming community includes:
• about 1200 pages handwritten fieldnotes (from 1984–85, 1988–89, 1990, 1994);
• transcriptions of 63 (of the total of 68) taped interviews (the guiding question-
naire is included as Appendices A and B);
• Reclaiming Newsletter, 1980–94 (56 volumes);
• Ritual manuals, including the Spiral Dance, for 1988 and 1989
• Starhawk’s books and articles from the period 1979–1993 (cf. bibliography).
34 Even though it is important in this study to also emphasize social tensions and
discrepancies in Reclaiming, I have not exposed any conflicts confided to me,
unless they were already public themes in the community. This has been very
disappointing to some of my informants, who themselves have experienced pain-
ful conflicts.They find my ethnography too idealizing.
Part I

Guardians of
the world
1 The Reclaiming community
A feminist, social construction

The public appearance of ritualizing women, men and children in urban areas
in the western world is no longer unusual. For example, an occasional Sunday
walker in Lincoln Park in San Francisco, California, may one day have observed
the following: thirteen women of many ages, all dressed up in red party clothes,
are gathered for the ritual celebration of a teenage girl’s menstruation. As it
happens, these women belong to the Reclaiming Witchcraft community. The
girl, Sonia, has just had her first period. She is excited and nervous and keeps
her mother, grandmother and friend Nicole close at hand. Nicole, who is now
eighteen years old, had a similar celebration when she started menstruating
five years ago.
The ritual begins as the women form a circle by holding hands, declaring
the space to be sacred and “between the worlds”. Starhawk holds a bottle of
water in her left hand. She has gathered the water from different lakes, rivers
and oceans around the world during her travels teaching the animist, egalitarian
worldview of feminist Witchcraft: that divinity is a congenital (personal) power,
birthing and animating all of life, and that the earth is “her” sacred “body”.
Now she anoints Sonia by lightly touching her forehead, breasts, belly and
genitals, while declaring, “Remember, nobody can give you power.You already have
the power within.”1
Then a cord is tied around Sonia’s right and her mother’s left wrist. Hera,
Nicole’s mother, says to Sonia,
When you were born, you came to the world tied to your mother’s body.
As the umbilical cord had to be cut at that time for you to live, so the
cord between the two of you has to be cut now. But the bond between
you shall never be cut, because that is a bond by heart.
Mother and daughter are instructed to run tied together in the park for as
long as they can. We watch them. Anna, the mother, does her best, but after a
while she cries out that she cannot keep up with her daughter’s speed. They
are asked to come back to the circle. In the meantime, Hera has shown Sonia’s
grandmother how to cut the cord with a black-handled ritual knife called
athame. When mother and daughter return, the grandmother cuts the cord
between them. Later that day the knife is given to Sonia as a gift.
* * *
34 Guardians of the world

This passage from a ritual celebration for a young pagan woman, about to
enter the first phase of adult womanhood, marks the beginning of a long
ritual process that was completed in the evening with a large gender-mixed
community ritual and party (described in full in chapter 7). It also marks the
beginning of this chapter, which is an introduction to the Reclaiming
community and to the people who have dedicated themselves to the path and
rituals of “the Goddess”.
The name, “Reclaiming”, presently refers to a tradition of Witchcraft, a
community of people and a religious organization.The Reclaiming tradition is
a specific feminist branch of contemporary American pagan Witchcraft, while
the Reclaiming community refers both to the local Witchcraft community in
the San Francisco Bay Area (SF) of California and to the people, primarily
in North America and western Europe, who identify with the Reclaiming
tradition of Witchcraft. In fact, the tradition arose from a working collective
within the SF community, naming itself the Reclaiming Collective in 1980.Thus,
for almost 20 years, “Reclaiming” was the name of a small, founding com-
munity of approximately 20 people (the Collective), of a larger community of
at least 130 Witches and pagans (primarily in SF) and, finally, of a distinct
spiritual tradition, practised by thousands of people far beyond SF. In 1997,
however, came a major shift: the SF Reclaiming Collective of elders2 dissolved
itself to give way to a new generation and a new social structure that could
meet the needs of an emergent Reclaiming movement – not only spreading
rapidly in the US, but also in Canada and western Europe (Germany, England,
France and Spain) through so-called Witchcamps.
The SF Reclaiming Collective/community was organized differently before
and after 1997, when “the Collective” was replaced with a local “Wheel” and
a transnational “Spokes Council”.Yet, the continuity in regard to basic ideo-
logy and structuring principles is obvious: no overall central authority, no
implementation of dogmas or required beliefs, no formal hierarchy of priests
and priestesses, no formal membership, no “church” that can be joined and no
congregational building for worship and community gatherings. Reclaiming’s
social structure was and is founded on working “cells”, which operate on a
voluntary, nonhierarchical and independent basis, with a majority of active
women. A small cell or circle may break down to an even smaller “circle
within a circle” or expand to a large one when needed, for example, when
performing rituals. People become involved in the organization known as
Reclaiming by becoming involved in the work and activities of the various
cells and circles.3 For that reason, Reclaiming is not a regular church, but
rather a network of like-minded people cross-related – socially, ideologically
and emotionally – through common activities for common goals in a still
evolving and living religious tradition.
The social structure particular to Reclaiming takes its point of departure
from a radical analysis of power, while attempting to create a just alternative
by combining an “anarchist political agenda” of equality, diversity and local
autonomy with a “feminist liberation agenda” of empowering women, both in
 The Reclaiming community: a feminist, social construction 35

public and domestic spheres. In fact, Reclaiming as a movement may be

regarded as a conscious effort to break away from the hegemonic sociological
worldview that sexual asymmetry is trans-historical and universal and that a
sexed dichotomy between public and domestic domains is inevitable as long as
women continue to give birth and raise children.4 Women in Reclaiming are
instead encouraged to reclaim their authority/power within both domains: to
re-form the structures of domestic life (division of labour, parenting, the
marriage contract) and celebrate their reproductive capacities as life affirming
and sacred; and to value feminist Witchcraft as a new public and social in-
stitution with the potential to change American society and instigate a new,
nonpatriarchal culture.
The people who constituted this visionary, networking community in the
period covered in this book (1984–94) primarily lived in the Mission District
in the southeast area of SF. Most of their activities, such as rituals, actions,
classes and meetings, also took place in, or close to, this area. Mission is the
oldest neighborhood in SF. The city was founded here in 1776 as a Catholic
mission to convert and “civilize” the Costanoan Indians. In the 1980s and
early 1990s this area was considered one of the poorest working-class neigh-
bourhoods in the city, with a predominance of Mexican American and African
American citizens.5 Street people, drug addicts, prostitutes and unemployed
youths and older men marked the area. Crime rates were high, and the news-
papers reported daily about robbery, assault, fighting and shooting. After dark
it was unsafe for women to walk the streets alone.
But the Mission was also known to be picturesque, with old Victorian
houses and a swarm of specialized shops, grocery stores, cafés, restaurants, bars,
colourful murals and ethnic community centres. And because of low rents, the
area also attracted a considerable number of white, middle-class “bohemians”
such as artists, students and political activists. Street theatre, alternative book-
stores, a Women’s Building and radical Christian parishes were therefore
integrated into parts of this neighbourhood’s atmosphere, as were the
possibilities for visiting a Catholic candle store (selling candles, incense, oils,
crystal balls, amulets and figures of the Saints), a Voodoo supply store and the
area’s first Goddess-shop on the very same block.
The experimental lifestyles of the Mission bohemians and of those living in
the adjacent vicinities of Eureka and Noe Valley, Bernal Heights and Potrero
Hill, had some similarities to the earlier counter-culture in what is now the
more fashionable Haight-Ashbury neighborhood northwest in the city, where
the hippie movement reached one of its heights in the summer of 1967.
Yet, two striking differences were that the Mission alternative scene was
predominantly anti-drug and that its intentional communities were often
committed to idealistic projects addressing bilingual, multicultural and working-
class people. Also, while a majority of SF’s gay men preferred to live in the
Castro neighborhood, not far from Haight-Ashbury, the less wealthy lesbian
women had at the time a large community in the Mission.6 During the
last decade, however, this typical Mission atmosphere is about to change.
36 Guardians of the world

Increasing commercial interests and upper middle-class people who buy old
houses for renovation and profit have created a commercial culture that slowly
transforms Mission into a more trendy and white neighborhood, forcing poor
people of colour to leave.
Reclaiming represents one of the intentional communities in the Mission
resisting these tendencies and which can still be recognized by some of the
social (and moral) features that applied to the bohemian culture in general at
the turn of the century. One basic feature characteristic is the value attributed
to “individual diversity”. Although Reclaiming is primarily a white, middle-
class and well-educated community, it is composed of people from many
different walks of life. It had room for women, men and children; gays,
lesbians, bisexuals and heterosexuals; vegetarians, meat-lovers, drinkers and
total abstainers; those of a Jewish heritage as well as former Catholics,
Protestants and Buddhists. It includes people who are committed to being
sexually monogamous and those who live with multiple relationships, people
who shared income in a large collective household and those who choose to
live as a traditional nuclear family. Some are deeply involved with politics,
while others are primarily interested in Witchcraft as a spiritual practice. Some
are mainly pagan feminists and perceive of the Witches’ Craft as a simple
nature and/or goddess religion, while others regard Witchcraft as a magical
and secretive initiatory path. Some identify clearly as belonging to the
Reclaiming community; others are more reserved and say they are only
“friends” of Reclaiming. A majority participates in other communities as well,
such as in the anarchist or direct action communities, in the twelve-step or
performing arts communities, in the gay or lesbian communities, or in other
pagan or non pagan spiritual traditions (many Jewish Witches do, for example,
celebrate the Jewish holidays with non-Reclaiming friends and family).
I shall give a detailed description of how this community was founded and
how its social order could be experienced in the early 1990s. A major goal is
to provide the reader with a general idea of the social context for Reclaiming
Witchcraft and the themes discussed in this book (such as human growth,
ritualizing, and a female symbolic order). In addition to presenting Reclaiming’s
history, people and structuring principles, I will also discuss some of its
struggles not to become esoteric, but to live up to its own social visions of
practising freedom of thought and of welcoming all those differences of life
situation, background and ability that increase human diversity.
The portrait given of work cells, classes, rituals, social dynamics and the
Reclaiming way of thinking is still valid for today’s community. The account
of the Reclaiming Collective, including its structure and work tasks, applies
less today since the Collective was dissolved in 1997. The different organi-
zation of Reclaiming in the SF Bay Area, including the new foundational
“Principles of Unity” and the local SF “Wheel”, must therefore be briefly
presented as well.Yet the focus of this chapter is Reclaiming before this shift
from local SF community to transnational movement took place. This is due
to the fact that my data from the field cover the period prior to 1997 and
 The Reclaiming community: a feminist, social construction 37

were gathered with the intention of writing an in-depth study of one singular
community, not of presenting a broad survey of a movement. Additionally,
the historical period up to 1997, and the community it fostered, has been
foundational to the development of Reclaiming Witchcraft and, therefore,
essential to understanding both the ways in which it differs from other pagan
and feminist spiritualities and why the unity of pagan spirituality and feminist,
anarchist politics has become such a predominant feature of what is presently
associated with the Reclaiming tradition.

The history of the Reclaiming Collective, 1979–1997

Reclaiming started in 1979 as a teaching collective for a “school” in Witch-
craft. One evening in the early summer, Starhawk, at the time 29 years old,
and her friend Diane Baker were sitting in the backyard of Starhawk’s house
in the Haight-Ashbury district in SF, talking about Diane’s decision to move
to New York. Diane was concerned that she did not know any Witches on the
East Coast and wanted some tools with which to teach the Craft so that,
eventually, she would be able to establish a coven, which is a small group of
Witches celebrating lunar rituals and personal rites of passages together. They
decided that to co-teach a class in SF in the fall would be the right thing to
do and a way for Diane to acquire teaching skills. Also, Starhawk’s book, The
Spiral Dance, was due to be published later that year by Harper & Row, and to
establish a “school” was an additional way for Starhawk to spread the “good
news” about the “rebirth of the ancient religion of the Great Goddess”.
Prior to that time, Starhawk had been teaching Witchcraft classes through
the open universities and occult bookstores, and since 1976 had managed
to mother three covens: Compost, Honeysuckle and Raving. Compost was
a mixed coven, while the other two were women-only circles (Diane was
Starhawk’s coven sister from Raving). But, according to her own story, which
conforms to an average Witch’s conversion narrative, Starhawk (then Miriam
Simos) “experienced” the Witches’ goddess already in the summer of 1968.
That summer, when she was only seventeen, she apparently lived so closely
attuned to nature that she “began to feel connected to the world in a new
way, to see everything as alive, erotic, engaged in a constant dance of mutual
pleasuring, and myself as a special part of it all” (1989a:2). But she did not yet
have a language to name her experience or a notion of a female deity.
Language came when she started college at UCLA in southern California
and a group of Witches came to her sorority house to read them the so-called
“Charge of the Goddess”, written in the 1950s by Doreen Valiente. Starhawk’s
feeling was not that of hearing something new, but of finally being given
names and interpretive frameworks for experiences she had already had. In
addition she felt empowered by the concept of a religion that worshipped
a goddess. By that time, Starhawk was already an active feminist and she
instantly felt “a natural connection between a movement to empower women
and a spiritual tradition based on the Goddess” (1989a:3).
38 Guardians of the world

She searched out Zuzanna Budapest in Los Angeles and started parti-
cipating in the public rituals she offered. Budapest was at the time a lesbian
separatist who taught Witchcraft to feminist-lesbian-separatists as a pure
women’s religion. She called herself a hereditary Witch because she claimed to
have inherited secret knowledge, magical spells and rituals from her mother
and grandmother in Hungary, practices which presumably go back to pre-
Christian pagan Europe. She identified herself as a priestess of the Roman
goddess Diana, and her Witchcraft was therefore called Dianic. 7
Even though Starhawk was a feminist, she was neither a lesbian nor a
separatist. She therefore did not really fit in with Budapest’s Dianic Witches.
The summer she turned 23, she decided to take off with her bicycle and travel
in the US for a year.This year turned out to be a sort of a “vision quest”: she
was challenged by people and the natural world and learned to trust her
intuition and let it be her guide. As part of her “initiation” she claims to have
had a series of powerful dreams in which she met the Goddess, and was given
the names “Star” and “Hawk”.To mark this point of “no return” and to name
her new being, she decided to change her Jewish birth-name, Miriam Simos,
to Starhawk – mainly for the purpose of teaching Witchcraft. Teaching and
writing now became her vocation. It also became her method to deepen her
knowledge of the “path of the Goddess” and meet with soul mates.
In 1975, Starhawk decided to move to Berkeley (near SF). At the time,
Berkeley and the Bay Area already had a small networking community of
nonfeminist Witches and pagans, consisting of groups such as Corytalia (Faery),
Church of All Worlds, The Fellowship of the Spiral Path and the New Reformed
Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn (NROOGD), as well as traditions imported
from Britain, like the Gardnerians and Alexandrians. Although magical com-
munities are characterized by their overlapping membership structure, a
majority of the Berkeley Witches did at the time belong to the NROOGD.
This group did not claim to have inherited any tradition but openly admitted
to having made it all up from reading (amongst others, Gerald Gardner) and
from experimenting with ritual.8 In 1976, this networking community joined
together with some solitary Witches to form an umbrella organization, the
Covenant of the Goddess (COG), which soon incorporated as a legally recog-
nized church.9
After Starhawk had taught Witchcraft her own style in Berkeley and SF for
a year, she finally decided to approach a well-known hereditary male Witch in
the area:Victor Anderson. Since the late 1960s he had offered initiations into
Faery Witchcraft, a tradition that claims heritage from African Shamanism,
Celtic paganism and Hawaiian Kahuna Magic. He claimed that this mix was
not his own brew but partly passed on to him by his grandmother in Virginia
as an oral, secret tradition, partly revealed when he was initiated into the
Harper coven in Ashland, Oregon, in 1932 (cf. Kelly 1991:21). According to
Starhawk, she wanted to be trained by him and initiated into this supposedly
hereditary, fixed tradition to acquire a deeper understanding of Witchcraft, to
develop her own curriculum when teaching, and to be acknowledged as a
 The Reclaiming community: a feminist, social construction 39

priestess of the Craft within the larger pagan community. She was indeed
accepted and in 1976 elected first officer and public spokesperson for COG.
But Starhawk’s feminist, nonseparatist interpretation of Witchcraft, which
became more and more important to her, needed a different audience from
COG people to prosper and take form. In 1977, she even broke with her first
coven Compost, of which she was a high priestess and founder, because it
included women and men who did not share her growing political concerns.
She moved to SF and decided to concentrate her work exclusively on
women, at least for a period. The first result of this priority was Raving, a
coven for women only. It had no position for a high priestess and put greater
emphasis upon personal and inner experience (in contrast to inherited
tradition) as religious norm and authority than was common in more tradi-
tional Witchcraft covens at the time.
So, when Starhawk discussed co-teaching with Diane Baker, she had both
been trained in the Faery tradition, been initiated a “Witch and Priestess of
the Goddess” and had taught Witchcraft (disguised as feminist spirituality)
on her own for three years. This, she felt, was a foundation on which she
both could build a “school” (Reclaiming) and publish a “curriculum” (The
Spiral Dance).
Starhawk and Diane called their first class “The Elements of Magic”. It was
a six-week introductory series directed toward women. Classes were taught
within sacred space and focused on different aspects of magic associated with
one of the elements air, fire, water and earth. In addition, students learned
about goddess spirituality, the ethical foundation for the practice of magic, and
how to create their own rituals. The class was a success, and the students
pleaded for more.With help from members of their coven Raving (Kevin and
Lauren), Starhawk and Diane created a second series of “Elements” as well as a
more advanced class called “The Iron Pentacle”. Its main focus was meditations
on the five-pointed star (the points being sex, self, passion, pride and power)
and discoveries of the healing powers of the human body through breathing
exercises, visualization techniques and trance work. Again, success generated
another class called “The Rites of Passage”.This third class taught the students
about the structure and symbolism of rites of passage cross-culturally, and
how myths, fairytales and personal stories could be incorporated into pagan
celebrations of birth, puberty, marriage and aging, and, not least, to make
religious initiation happen.The class ended with the students initiating them-
selves as “Witches” and starting their own coven, the Holy Terrors, followed
soon thereafter by Wind Hags.
From there, more classes were formed, more covens arose, more people
began teaching, and more people kept gathering for solar rituals to celebrate
the Witches high holidays in a so-called Reclaiming-style. Starhawk describes
their style of ritual with the acronym EIEIO: Ecstatic, Improvisational,
Ensemble (many priest/esses take different roles at rituals), Inspired, Organic.10
The first public ritual arranged by Starhawk and her friends was the Spiral
Dance. Starhawk wrote the ritual script herself to celebrate and promote her
40 Guardians of the world

first book (with the same title). It took place at Samhain (Halloween) in
November 1979 and has, since then, become a permanent institution. The
ritual itself (described in chapter 6) is regarded as Reclaiming’s annual gift to
the larger pagan community.
Since 1979, public rituals and the three core classes mentioned above have
been continually offered by the Reclaiming Collective, so naming itself in
1980. In fact, when Raving made the transition from coven to working
collective aimed at teaching and ritual facilitation, it needed a new name.The
name “Reclaiming” was picked because Starhawk, Diane, Lauren and Kevin
were convinced that contemporary Witchcraft was the claiming back of an
ancient goddess religion, although reinterpreted through the lenses of feminism.
In alignment with this ideological stance, they decided to make decisions
through a consensus process model, to always have two teachers in every class,
and to run all classes in private homes – mainly to counteract people’s urge
to make an exclusive authority of the teacher and to keep a low monetary
profile.They also made a policy to teach within the structure of ritual so that
the class itself could become an experience of how a coven (ideally a
community of equals) might function. The ritual form in Witchcraft is the
circle. People sit, stand, lie down or hold hands, always in a circle.There are no
chairs, tables or pulpit, only an open floor with altars set up around the walls.
By choosing this structure also for teaching, the women hoped to increase the
chances that people would form covens when the classes ended. These
principles are still guidelines for most classes offered by Reclaiming, even after
1997.
To announce their classes and public rituals, the four women decided
to put out a small bulletin, the Reclaiming Newsletter. This is their mission
statement and self-presentation as printed in the first issue in 1980:

RECLAIMING – a centre for feminist spirituality and counseling.

RECLAIMING means:
We reclaim the Goddess: the immanent life force, the connecting pattern
to all being.
We reclaim the creative and healing power of women.
We reclaim the God/ess: the source for nurturing, feeling, healing ways of
being male.
We reclaim our visions, our personal myths, our heritage and lost histories.
We reclaim our magic: the “art of changing consciousness at will”, the art
of training intuition and awareness in order to shape reality.
We reclaim our personal power, and transform blocked energies into
freedom, intimacy and strength to change.
We reclaim our culture through art, poetry, performance, music, dance,
writing and ritual.
We reclaim political and social power to counter the destructive and
oppressive forces in our society.
We reclaim the human community of all races and classes, and the
 The Reclaiming community: a feminist, social construction 41

interconnected community of plants, elements, animals, energy and

resources . . .
RECLAIMING is a collective of four women who combine spiritual
and political visions . . . We use the word “Witch” as an affirmation of
women’s power to shape reality.

Early in 1981, the Collective expanded by taking in new members from the
two covens it had fostered: Holy Terrors and Wind Hags. These were Rose,
Cerridwen, Sofia, Bonnie Bridged, Bone Blossom and Thyme. At this point,
the Reclaiming Collective numbered ten women.The notion of a community
separate from the Collective was not yet born: Starhawk’s circle of goddess-
worshipping friends who were looking for a new pagan community was still
fairly small.
This changed during the fall of 1981, which in many ways became a
turning point for Reclaiming: Starhawk and Rose (now coven sisters in Wind
Hags), participated in a large nonviolent civil disobedience demonstration at
Diablo Canyon in California to stop the opening of a nuclear power plant.
Together with several thousand other American leftists and alternativists, they
were arrested. It was the first time they did ritual and magic in a politicized
field and the first time they met the anarchist community in SF, which also
demonstrated at Diablo Canyon (cf. also chapter 3). From that point on,
Reclaiming’s feminism was extended to include anarchism and direct political
action, and the first men were accepted into the Collective: Feather, David
Kubrin, and Raven.
After weeks and months of discussion, the Collective that constituted itself
after the Diablo Canyon action wrote an updated mission statement about
their visions for Reclaiming. Since 1982, this statement has appeared in each
issue of the Reclaiming Newsletter:

Reclaiming is a collective of (San Francisco Bay Area) women and men

working to unite spirit and politics. Our vision is rooted in the religion
and magic of the Goddess – the immanent Life Force.We see our work as
teaching and making magic – the art of empowering ourselves and each
other. In our classes, workshops, public rituals and individual counseling,
we train our voices, bodies, energy, intuition and minds. We use the skills
we learn to deepen our strength, both as individuals and as community, to
voice our concerns about the world in which we live and bring to birth a
vision of a new culture.11

The unexpected alliances formed at Diablo Canyon opened a new epoch for
Reclaiming: large numbers of SF anarchists and political activists, with no
former experience with Witchcraft or paganism, started to take Reclaiming
classes. Some worked their way into the Reclaiming Collective; others
were satisfied to belong to a growing Reclaiming community. By 1990, the
Collective counted 19 people, and most new members had been recruited
42 Guardians of the world

from this new coalition between paganism and political activism. In fact, only
Starhawk, Rose, Bone and Macha represented the times before the Diablo
Canyon action, meaning that Diane, Kevin and Lauren were gone, as were
Cerridwen, Sofia,Thyme and Bonnie.
The result was a working collective consisting of two paired generations:
older feminists (women) and younger anarchists (both women and men),
ranging between 57 and 22 years of age. While the older women represented
experience and knowledge, also about the larger pagan community, the younger
anarchists represented new ideas and new networks.To them, Reclaiming was
the representative of Witchcraft, and they had a rather vague idea of actually
belonging to a large, new religious movement.
As many as 52 people were members of the Reclaiming Collective for long
or short periods of time between 1980 and 1997 (when it dissolved). They
composed an autonomous, self-recruiting body of people who never repre-
sented a larger assembly, at least not formally. Membership in the Collective
was an organic process. New people were not voted in, but suggested by
mentors and invited to join. The primary criteria for being accepted were
commitment to and experience in the ongoing work cells, the need for more
people in the Collective and, most importantly, everybody’s like and trust of
the prospective member. A person who only wanted a place to discuss Witch-
craft and politics, or to socialize and find community, was not welcome, for
the Collective met primarily to do business (four times a year): to make
decisions about teaching policy, public rituals, money matters and the news-
letter’s editorial profile. But once inside, membership was unlimited by time
and many long-lasting social friendships and personal relationships were formed.
That a modern “mystery school” came to be headed by such a large,
multigenerational, multigendered and mutable group of people, who also
attempted to be equally influential in terms of decision making, was and is
unique to Reclaiming. Common practice in magical communities is to have
only one teacher, or two if they are a (married) couple. Everybody else is put
in various positions of “the adept”, admitted to inner circles exclusively by the
teacher-guru, either to receive secret knowledge or move up the ladder of
initiation.This more or less authoritarian style is also the case with many other
Witchcraft traditions, be it a Californian Dianic or a British Gardnerian coven.
Yet this is not to say that decisions in Reclaiming were always reached
without conflicts or that a covert hierarchy between insiders and outsiders did
not exist. Conflicts surely existed and, as could be expected, they often
centreed on the seniority of the elders versus the inexperience of younger
members. But people have left the Collective for other reasons as well. Some
have wanted to charge more money for teaching classes and decided to turn
toward New Age and Shamanic traditions instead. Some have disagreed with
the anarchist bent, beginning in 1981–82, and felt that the feminist intention
of empowering women was put to the side. Some have left because of
personal conflicts with others in the group or because a new family situation
required more time at home. Some have just left because they wanted the
 The Reclaiming community: a feminist, social construction 43

Collective itself to focus more on building and being community. In 1990,

one person was asked to leave because of drug abuse, while four others took a
leave of absence for an unspecified period due to overwork and unresolved
conflicts. Leaving the Reclaiming Collective was not, however, equivalent to
leaving the Reclaiming Community. So, in spite of people’s moving in and
out of the Collective, the Community continued to grow.
A major reason for the growth of the community has been Starhawk’s
influential writings and the spread of the so-called Witchcamps. In 1985,
Reclaiming offered its first week-long summer intensive apprenticeship. It was
mainly directed at people who lived out of city or state but who were willing
to travel to SF for the occasion. This week-long “summer school” became a
big success and was soon to be known as Witchcamp (it was held in camping
retreat facilities). Two additional camps were taught in Mendocino, North
California, the following year. In 1987, Witchcamps spread to Vancouver, BC,
and to Ben Lomond, Michigan. In 1989, Reclaiming teachers were invited to
Europe, and the first Witchcamp was held in Germany.
The people trained in those camps in turn trained others in their com-
munities. Today, Reclaiming tradition Witchcamps are organized throughout
the US (Georgia, California, Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Texas,
Vermont, Virginia), Canada (Vancouver) and western Europe (Germany and
England). They are run autonomously, although some SF Reclaiming elders
are usually asked to teach together with local people. Between 50 and a
hundred people attend each one of these Reclaiming-identified camps. This
means that more than a thousand people go through Reclaiming’s “educational
system” every year without becoming identifiable members of the SF com-
munity. In fact, more than 15 communities in the Reclaiming tradition have
been established around the world as a result of the expansion of Witchcamps.

The Reclaiming Collective and its working cells in 1989–1990

In 1990, the Reclaiming Collective started the process of incorporating as a
nonprofit religious organization under state and federal law and writing by-
laws based on a consensus process model of decision making. Incorporation
was a reality in 1994. Shortly thereafter the Collective gained 501(c)(3) tax
status with the US Internal Revenue Service. This was the first step in
formalizing themselves as a religious organization, which eventually happened
in 1997 when the Collective wrote the “Reclaiming Principles of Unity” and
reorganized from a working Collective (a cell in its own right) to a repre-
sentative Wheel (or spokes council) for all the actual working cells. By that
time it was clear that there were perhaps thousands of Reclaiming Witches in
the US and also many abroad. And more importantly, as time passed, a new
generation of SF Bay Area Witches was knocking at the door, wanting to
have a say and take leadership. Formalization and reorganization had become
unavoidable. Let us therefore turn toward the SF Mission vicinity and recollect
activities and struggles emblematic of Reclaiming in these crucial years,
44 Guardians of the world

just before the SF community expanded exponentially and the Collective

dissolved.

* * *

In 1989–90, the Reclaiming Collective counted 19 people (13 women and six
men).12 They represented a diverse body, and not only in terms of age. For
example, only eight of the 19 identified as heterosexuals (five women and
three men) whereas four women identified as lesbians, two men as gay, while
four women and one man said they were bisexuals. Seven were married or
lived with a domestic partner and five were parents. When the Collective
started in 1979, the founders (Starhawk, Diane, Kevin and Lauren) were all of
Jewish heritage. In 1990, only three were Jewish, while seven were ex-
Catholics, seven were ex-Protestants and one raised as an atheist. Except for
one African-American man, all of them were white. When interviewed, six
told me they came from a working-class background, nine from the middle
class and three from the upper-middle class.Their educational level was higher
than that of an average American: two had taken a PhD (in History and
English Literature); two had a Masters Degree (in Psychology and Literature);
one was a Juris Doctor and Lawyer; and one was a graduate student in
Biology. Of the remaining 13, all had either a BA or at least three years of
college. Except for Starhawk, who makes a living from her writing and
teaching Witchcraft and feminist spirituality outside of the Reclaiming
community, all had ordinary jobs.13
These statistical findings from the Collective in 1989–90, conform with
the demographic data I gathered in the same period when interviewing 68
Witches and pagans (41 women and 27 men) who either were part of,
affiliated with or friendly toward the Reclaiming community.14 An interesting
pattern is that a relatively high percentage of the people interviewed reported
having a working-class background (39 per cent), high education (80 per
cent) and skilled work (84 per cent), middle income (40 per cent), Catholic
(35 per cent) or Jewish (21 per cent) upbringing, were bisexuals (27 per cent)
and practised multiple relationships (37 per cent), were from the East (38 per
cent) or West (33 per cent) Coast, and lived collectively (47 per cent). To this
we may add that a majority of Witches and pagans in the US are women (60
per cent), which also conform to Reclaiming’s profile. This social profile fits
fairly well with my impressions from doing fieldwork and conforms with the
research literature.15
The time-consuming labour performed by this Collective of people was
planned in work cells, defined according to tasks: teaching, newsletter, and
bookkeeping. In addition, they organized ad hoc committees to help plan and
facilitate public rituals and other short-term projects. Such committees were
usually open for participation by any pagan. A Collective member could
belong to all three cells or to only one of them, and to as many ad hoc
committees she wanted.The more cells she participated in, the more influence
 The Reclaiming community: a feminist, social construction 45

she had. Authority was also gained with age, experience and personal
charisma. Being its founder, Starhawk was the most influential person in the
Collective, closely followed by Rose, Pandora and Raven.
The most prestigious group in the Collective was the Teaching Cell. This
was the only formal cell with a limited membership since, essentially, the
teachers themselves controlled membership by deciding whom they would
allow to student teach. Teachers not only taught classes and Witchcamps, but
“priestessed” (or led) most public and communal rites. They were therefore
regarded as more skilled with rituals than others and acknowledged for
spreading the “word of the goddess” through teaching and active dedication.
Through these functions, some of them were highly respected, and given a lot
of power. The ideology behind Reclaiming’s classes and Witchcamps was to
teach spiritual practices, not theological dogma. This way the students might
learn that ultimate spiritual authority is within themselves and stop turning to
taken-for-granted authorities. They were, for example, not given lectures
about the goddess, but taught meditations in which to “meet” her.The policy
of having two teachers in a class was meant to strengthen the students’
individual autonomy, independent thoughts, self-confidence and engagement
with the world. The teaching couple was expected to demonstrate disagree-
ments and diversity in the Craft and stand out as embodied examples of how
symbols can have multiple meanings, all of which may be true.The couple was
ideally a woman and a man or two women, but never two men. This “pro-
hibition” was meant to counter the students’ predisposed attitude of seeing
men as religious authorities.When a class or a summer intensive (Witchcamp)
was completed, the students were expected to feel at home with Reclaiming-
style public rituals, able and confident to facilitate simple rituals on their own,
and ready to participate in the ad hoc committees to help prepare public
rituals.
The curriculum in the Reclaiming school of Witchcraft always included
the earlier mentioned core classes: “Elements” (I), “Pentacle” (II) and “Rites of
Passage” (III). Additional classes and teaching tracks (at Witchcamp) were
offered, depending on the individual teacher’s skills and concerns. A woman,
Cybelle, was a body-worker and incest survivor who regularly offered Breath
and Body for Survivors of Incest and Abuse (women only). A man, Bird, whose
background was black working-class Catholicism and Voodoo, liked to teach
Spellcrafting and Mundane Magic (mixed class). He claimed to have learned
magic and spells from his grandmother.Vibra, who had had several abortions,
led healing workshops called Abortion and Feminist Spirituality (women only).
Macha and Bone were skilled herbalists. On and off they offered Herbs for Food
and Healing (mixed class). In these non-core classes the teacher was free to ask
whoever she wanted to co-teach, also somebody who was not a part of
Reclaiming, as long as she/he was skilled and sympathetic to Reclaiming’s
mission statement. In that case, she/he would automatically become a member
of the teacher’s cell. Nearly half of the classes offered in SF were for women
only and, on request, Reclaiming taught a Pentacle class for men.16
46 Guardians of the world

Traditionally,Witches do not actively proselytize, and neither does Reclaim-

ing. It was therefore expected that the students would find them, and not the
other way around. If people complained about how difficult that was, the
teacher’s attitude would be that this was “healthy”. They believed that some
consistency in the effort to learn magic was pertinent on the part of the
seeker, so that the not-serious could be weeded out early in the process. But
once inside, the students were informed about the opportunity to subscribe to
the Reclaiming Newsletter (after 1997, the Reclaiming Quarterly), which was
actually an option for anybody.
In 1989 the Newsletter was published quarterly in 1,500 copies, of which
500 were mailed to subscribers outside of SF. Sample copies ($2 a copy) were
distributed and sold through the alternative bookstores in the SF Bay Area and
other major cities. The newsletter size varied from 30 to 60 pages and
according to the Newsletter Cell, which functioned as editorial board, its
main function was to inform about classes, workshops,Witchcamps, Starhawk’s
teaching schedule around the world, and public rituals (the eight solar sabbats).
Advertisements from other pagan “mystery schools” recognized by Reclaiming
were also printed, as were notices or reports from ongoing political actions.
The newsletter was also an important forum for discussions. Since most
groups in the community were work- and goal-oriented, people lacked the
time and opportunity to voice different opinions beyond a small circle. This
need was to a certain degree made up for by the newsletter, which might
include articles, poetry and book reviews on feminism, gender, the symbolism
of goddess and god, magic, ethics, New Age, Neoshamanism and money policy.
In 1988, the Collective decided to expand their business to include the
production of tapes, CDs and books.17 By 1994, they had produced four
different tapes: two with chants and songs to be used in rituals, one with songs
from the Spiral Dance Ritual, and one with a trance-journey-meditation read
by Starhawk. Another outreach service created was the Reclaiming Events
Line.This was a phone number (listed in the Newsletter/Quarterly) connected
to an answering machine. In 1989, a caller dialling the number, would hear a
message about happenings on the pagan scene in general (in the SF Bay Area)
and in the Reclaiming community in particular. The Events Line continues
in a similar format today, although most people probably get information
about Reclaiming through the internet, from reading Reclaiming’s web site
(http://www.reclaiming.org).
The Reclaiming Collective and Newsletter were supported by money
earned from teaching, the sale of music tapes, CDs and books, fundraising at
Spiral Dance rituals and individual donations. The Spiral Dance could raise
as much as $15,000, tapes/CDs/books $1,000, and donations $2,000. The
Bridged or Candlemas ritual was also a fundraising event, not for the Collective
but for responsible social projects and direct actions, such as the “Prevention
Point” needle exchange action for AIDS and HIV-positive drug users in San
Francisco, or the support network for political prisoners in El Salvador. At
fundraising rituals in 1989–90, people were asked to give at least $5.
 The Reclaiming community: a feminist, social construction 47

Money matters and communication with the mundane world were in 1990
administered by a Triad: Rose,Vibra and Pleiades. Pleiades was paid for doing
part-time office work, including bookkeeping and handling mail. She reported
to the whole Collective on the status of their money and the whole
Collective would decide how it was spent. In between scheduled meetings,
the Triad was empowered to make small financial decisions that could not
wait. The Reclaiming Collective receives mail to a post office box. In 1990
Pleiades collected 50 to 60 letters a day. The most common questions were
about classes, rituals, Starhawk’s books, how to subscribe to the newsletter, and
how to find other Witches in their neighbourhood.
Money brought into the Collective by any Cell was allocated to the work
of the Collective. In principle, everyone in the Collective was entitled to
payment for their work, but most donated most of their time. Teachers paid
13 per cent of the student fees back to the Collective and could keep the
rest. This practice was intended to prevent a teacher with a full class (15
people) from earning a lot more than a less successful colleague. Income from
teaching was in any case low and only meant to compensate and add to a
person’s professional salary, not to replace it. Every year, the Collective
donated surplus money to help support political actions or humanitarian
work.
Reclaiming’s money policy was distinctly different from the New Age
movement: a six-week New Age course in 1990 would cost at least $200.
Reclaiming therefore called its money policy an “option for the poor”.
Another reason to keep the fees low was to avoid attracting teachers who
wanted to become professional Witches/clergy and who would therefore be
prone to pushing Reclaiming in the direction of what Witches associate with
“church”. Three earlier Collective members left because of conflicts over
money.They wanted to charge more, and for a whole year (1984–85) this was
a subject of lively debate in the Newsletter.
Students paid for their classes on a sliding scale, depending on income.
The minimum course fee for a six-week class in 1990 was $45, in 2000 $75.
Unemployed and others with meagre financial means could pay by doing
work exchange for the Collective. Reclaiming did not normally charge money
for public rituals or community rituals, although the celebrants could be asked
to contribute financially to cover expenses, such as the renting of space and
equipment.

Ritual circles: sabbats, esbats, coveners and initiates

The Reclaiming community celebrates three different types of ritual: rites of
calendar (solar and lunar), rites of passage, and rites of crisis or celebration.
Lunar rites of calendar (“esbats”) are usually celebrated in small, gender-
segregated covens, preferably on the nights when the moon is dark or full.
Only the solar rites are public. They are celebrated according to a “Wheel of
the Year” as eight so-called “sabbats”:
48 Guardians of the world

1. Yule (or winter solstice), 21 December

2. Bridged (or Candlemas), 2 February
3. Eostar (or spring equinox), 21 March
4. Beltane, 1 May
5. Litha (or summer solstice), 21 June
6. Lammas (or Lughnasad), 1 August
7. Mabon (or fall equinox), 21 September
8. Samhain (or Halloween), 1 November

Samhain and Bridged are the largest public rites and in the 1980s and early
1990s they were usually arranged in the Women’s Building or at Martin
Deporres Soup Kitchen in the Mission District. They were open to anyone,
whether a “member” of the Reclaiming community or not, and could have
several hundred celebrants. In the fall of 1989, when celebrating both the
tenth anniversary of Starhawk’s book The Spiral Dance and Reclaiming’s
Samhain ritual “The Spiral Dance”, the Collective rented Herbst pavilion at
Fort Mason at the SF harbour. Twelve hundred pagans and Witches attended
the ritual, which was planned by a small ad hoc committee from the
Collective, but with a core group of at least 150 volunteers working on it to
make it happen. In addition to priestesses and priests for the strict liturgical
tasks, this core group included dancers, choreographers, musicians, songwriters
and composers, mask designers, dressmakers, prop people, media people, and
childcare people.When celebrating the twentieth anniversary 10 years later (in
1999), the same ritual gathered 1,500 people. The other (six) Witches’ sabbats
were usually celebrated as smaller community rites with an average attendance
of about 30–50 people, including children. They usually took place outdoors,
on hilltops or at the Pacific Coast beaches.Today these rituals easily get twice
as many participants.
If a person wanted to become more deeply involved in Witchcraft, the next
step after having taken classes and attending public rites was to become a
member of a coven. The concept of a coven is shared by all Witchcraft
traditions. Gerald Gardner imagined, from having read Margaret Murray and
encountered what he claimed to be surviving Witches in England, that the
practitioners of “the Old Religion” gathered for secret ritual celebrations in
small groups called covens. Each coven supposedly had thirteen members,
symbolizing the phases of the moon, and was headed by a high priestess and a
high priest. Ideally it included an equal number of females and males who
performed the rituals naked or “skyclad”, as Gardner writes. A coven was
independent, both in terms of rites and mythology, and educated new people
inside its own structures. Graduation was equal to initiation into the coven
secrets. Covens were, in other words, the smallest assembly and basic ritual unit
in the Old Religion, and initiation its educational form.
Reclaiming has reformed Gardner’s historical projections of what a coven
might be. In accordance with their egalitarian ideology, the notion of a high
priest/ess has been omitted. All coven members are regarded as ministers, and
 The Reclaiming community: a feminist, social construction 49

most covens only have four to seven members.They do not stress the polarity
between women and men; and, except for one circle, all Reclaiming covens
in 1990 were either for women or men only. But covens are still treated as
theologically independent, an attitude which fits well with anarchist and
feminist ideologies. New covens are not off-shoots from older covens, but are
generated by people who have met in class and share the same basic know-
ledge. A coven’s first year is regarded as critical to whether it will prosper and
continue or fall apart. Once established, the covens in Reclaiming do not
easily break up; and in 1990 there were nine covens (or circles) in the com-
munity.
Covens usually meet once a month to ritualize according to the rhythms of
the moon. Since lunar cycles are documented to influence human as well as
natural life, Witches believe that certain kinds of magic are more successful if
performed when the moon is full or dark. The lunar cycle also corresponds
with women’s menstruation cycles, a reason in and of itself for Witches to
stress its importance. The covens meet in private homes or outdoors and are
primarily concerned with the participants’ daily life affairs in regard to work,
partners, household matters and children. A coven also celebrates a variety of
rites of passages for its members and their significant others, such as birth,
puberty, marriage, menopause and aging. On these ritual occasions, a coven
may invite a large group of people.
A stated goal for a coven is to cultivate personal and spiritual growth in
each individual and bring about “perfect love and perfect trust” among
themselves. An obvious result from coven work is intimate friendship and
deep emotional bonding. A coven may, to some extent, resemble a long-term
therapy group or, rather, a consciousness-raising group from the early women’s
movement. But, a coven also goes beyond the concerns of such groups by
interpreting daily life as part of the sacred, as manifestations of goddess, and,
further, by bringing people’s ordinary life experiences into a spiritual circle for
healing, prayer or celebration. The multiplicity of the coven’s tasks has been
formulated thus by Starhawk: “The coven is a Witch’s support group,
consciousness-raising group, psychic study centre, clergy-training programme,
College of Mysteries, surrogate clan, and religious congregation all rolled into
one. In a strong coven, the bond is, by tradition, ‘closer than family’: a sharing
of spirits, emotions, imaginations” (1979a:35).
In addition to the self-initiation performed in connection with the “Rites
of Passage” class, Reclaiming also has a tradition of secret initiation for one to
be made “Witch and Priestess of the Goddess”. Initiation is regarded as the
ultimate option for personal growth and healing and requires hard work and
deep commitment from both the initiate and her initiators. In order for
initiation “to happen,” the candidate is asked “to willfully give up her own
will” for a limited period of time and to submit herself to be acted upon by
initiators, spirits and goddess herself.
This requirement is, of course, a hot topic in a community which other-
wise adheres to nonhierarchical structures and equal access to knowledge.
50 Guardians of the world

Between 1979 and 1989, only 23 people had been initiated. Of these 19 were
women and four men, and 10 were members of the Reclaiming Collective.
But the trend has been changing, and by 1990, eight more people (three
women and five men) had asked for initiation. The initiation ritual as such
is based on Starhawk’s initiation into Faery Witchcraft, although radically
reformed into what is now recognized by other Witches as a separate
Reclaiming initiation.
A hallmark of the Reclaiming tradition is that initiation does not lead
to any sort of entitlement. Neither is it required for teaching or priestessing
at public rituals, an attitude unique to Reclaiming in comparison to more
traditional magical communities.Yet, according to some informants, there was
in 1990 a status hierarchy between those who were initiated, those who
belonged to a coven and those who only went to public rituals. The initiates
were said to represent “first-class” Witches, those who presumably had gained
access to special knowledge and magical powers. Coveners thus represented
the “second-class” Witches, whereas those who only went to open rituals
represented the eternal novices. But this status hierarchy was constantly
fluctuating. Someone who had low status in one circle because she lacked
magical skills, could in another have high status because she had been involved
in, for example, direct political action. Another aspect to coven life was its
contribution to social integration: people from different households and work
projects created intimate bonds and networks across various segments of the
community by virtue of being coveners.
The Reclaiming classes and the solar and lunar rituals constitute the
spiritual “trunk” of the Reclaiming community. All other rites are only
“branches” grafted onto “the trunk”, adding depth, complexity and options
for personal growth. The earlier mentioned rites of passage and rites of crisis
or celebrations are “branches” of that kind. Rites of passage include coming of
age rituals (such as the puberty rite for Sonia, initiation to adulthood,
menopause and aging), rituals that mark change in social rank (such as
graduation, handfasting/wedding, childbirth/baby welcoming, parenthood and
dying), and the secret initiation ritual. Rites of crisis and celebration are typical
ad hoc rituals. They comprise rituals for personal healing as well as magical
spells to influence political decision making, like those performed at Diablo
Canyon. A celebratory ad hoc ritual can simply be a housewarming or
birthday party ritual.
Reclaiming is a community founded on shared visions and common goals:
to evolve a pagan version of feminist spirituality that, in essence, is inseparable
from radical leftist politics. In daily life, unification unfolds as a rhythmic
alternation between public and private domains: large communal rituals, work
projects and actions on one hand, and intimate, autonomous circles of close
same-sex friends on the other. To a majority, this alternation is also a
materialized expression of a viable, nonhierarchical social structure, which in
and of itself bucks the notion of a universal, gendered dichotomy between
public and private. An alternative angle from which to perceive the totality
 The Reclaiming community: a feminist, social construction 51

of what Reclaiming is, may perhaps be found in Victor Turner’s famous

distinction between “communitas” and “structure”: since liminality, which is
the hallmark of communitas, is unrestricted by conventional binary oppositions,
communitas may be said to cut across the static differentiation between public
and private and create new social grounds for experimentation and trans-
formation. Reclaiming is “communitas” when re-modelling the theological
notions and gendered personalities fundamental to western religiosity, and
“structure” when interacting with the institutions of the world in order to
effect cultural and social change.

The Reclaiming community: “circles within circles”

Where is the SF Reclaiming community and how does it become visible to
seekers? In 1990, some informants insisted that the whole “Reclaiming
community” was a fiction and that what existed was only the “Reclaiming
Collective” plus some people who were affiliated with members of this
Collective through friendship.They had become friends by attending Reclaim-
ing classes and rituals over a number of years, from living in the same
household, or from doing joint political actions. Especially people from the
Collective itself were eager to delimit the concept of community to their own
circle of friends. One reason was that they were repeatedly confronted with
questions from newcomers in their classes, formulated as applications for
entry: “Where is the community, and how do I become a member?” They
were usually answered that the so-called community could not be pinned
down geographically, had no membership list and was not located in any one
“house”. It was not an organization or a church which could be joined.What
existed was a network of people bonded together through love, work and
shared visions. To become part of this community was possible only through
friendship. A way in was to offer oneself as a volunteer to one of the work
projects or by being accepted into a collective household as a new resident.
Otherwise, people were encouraged to build small-scale community networks
in the areas where they already lived.
But this restricted use of the concept of community did not prevent people
from identifying with their Reclaiming-related activities to such an extent
that they stated that they were part of the “Reclaiming community”. When,
for example, in 1990 I asked Rose, a long-time member of the Reclaiming
Collective, how many people belonged to the community, she said 50, and
started to name former members of the Collective, her friends and friends of
her friends. She added, however, that her small community surely overlapped
both with the anarchist community and the broader pagan community. “So it
depends,” she said, “on where I stand and what I am looking for.” When I
asked Hannah, who lived at Paradox House, about the size of the community,
she said that, if we referred to the anarchist, pagan community in SF as the
Reclaiming community, it included at least 200 people. But then, she had not
counted people affiliated with Reclaiming who did not identify as anarchists.
52 Guardians of the world

She believed she would have to add another 50 to be fair to them. Both
estimates were wrong, the first being too low, the second too high. But both
women took one thing for granted: The Reclaiming Collective was at the
time the heart of the Reclaiming community. It was the inner circle, from
which they counted outward, “circles within circles”. Rose stopped at the
second circle, while Hannah added maybe three more.
In connection with his study of the gay community in San Francisco,
Manuel Castells, defines a community as an “urban movement in search for
cultural identity through the maintenance or creation of autonomous local
cultures, ethnically based or historically originated” (Castells 1983:319). A
movement, to Castells, is first of all defined by its goals, and the goal of
community is “defense of communication between people, autonomously
defined social meaning and face-to-face interaction” (p. 320). The cultural
identity sought in Reclaiming is that of being a practising Witch in
contemporary American society and, at the same time, a person who takes
responsibility for the world in which she lives. This identity is historically
originated and manifests itself through the creation of a new, autonomous
culture and social arena. But this culture is not really local or based on the idea
of territory or ghetto, nor is it self-absorbed. Focusing on the Mission
District was a construction I used for practical reasons. Since the community
has no official building where members gather and can be counted, I needed
some criteria to delimit Reclaiming in order to have a context for further
description. When I point to the Mission, it is because most Reclaiming
people lived here in the time period under study. But many also lived in the
more affluent areas of the SF Bay Area or in adjacent towns and counties.
Living in adjoining neighbourhoods can strengthen the feeling of belonging,
but it is not essential. Reclaiming is rather an ideologically founded culture,
open to anybody who has the skills to work her way in. To understand
Reclaiming’s social grounds, we have to supplement with the term “net-
work”.
If, for example, we look at Freya and her 1990 network, we find that
she was engaged with ten groups and committed to steady relationships with
at least 60 different people: she lived collectively at Dragon House in the
Mission, with seven other adults and two children. She was a member of the
Reclaiming Collective, and on the board for two of the three cells. She taught
magic and ritual six evenings each semester and Witchcamp in the summer
and participated regularly in appointed ad hoc committees to plan public
rituals. She was a member of the coven Wind Hags and the Circle A affinity
group and one of 15 volunteers in the illegal “Prevention Point” needle
exchange in SF.18 From time to time she helped out at the Martin Deporres
Soup Kitchen, run by the Catholic Workers. One Saturday a month she went
to the social gathering/happening called “Anarchist Coffeehouse” and on
Friday nights she socialized with her pagan and anarchist friends at the El Rio
bar in the Mission. Professionally, she worked in the AIDS prevention
programme for Hispanic women under the State of California.
 The Reclaiming community: a feminist, social construction 53

These activities and the Reclaiming community were never identical.

Some of the groups were not even run by Reclaiming, or included people far
beyond the community. They were nevertheless equally important in Freya’s
identity as a Reclaiming Witch. Further, cross-affiliation in other communities
was not specific to Freya, but was typical of Reclaiming people in general.
Groups constantly formed and dissolved and most of them worked as
concentric, fluid circles, deeply interacting with the circles of other intentional
communities as well. If I map Reclaiming in 1990 as a network of circles
within circles, spreading out from an inner core circle, it looks like this:

12 step therapy
Green Movement
12 step therapy Feminism
Other pagans Peace Movement
Ancient ways Neo-shamanism
festival Pag Multiculturalism
nity a n–
COG mu an Gay/lesbian/bisexual
Goddess Movement c om a rc communities
an hi s
g i ly C o ll e tc COG
pa Fam holds house ctive o
– e hold
ous

m
h s
an

m
ua
g

un
rit n
Pa

Aff
c atio

it y
olar ini
r p s: S – ty
ep o

ual g
pr d h

ou
gr a

rite
Rit

M
so
ro
A

ar
up
f

ti n
Covens
s
s

pa
old

De
Ci
ss

r
por
s eh

s
ag

Chil
cle
n

Reclaiming
tio

re s
S in g le s ho u

s
Initia

dren’s playgrounds

Collective
Call a circle

Direct action c
Financial Teaching
l members

Needle ex

cell cell
rites of
cts

Luna

New Age
p r oj e

Gay/lesbian communities
rr

cris

c ha

Feminism
a

itu

al
vidu

om m
is /
rk

Goddess Movement s
Other political
n

Newsletter
Wo

ce

g
Ac cof n
Cl
i

action groups:
le
Ind

ss cell
u ni
a

br
io

tio fe

es ati
lR

“Food not bombs”

ns

on
ty

rE e “Movement for a
A

Ba ar ho
ch us New Society”
is t e Peace Movement
Latin America
solidarity work
S tr ee t th e atr e

Perfo ity
rm ing arts com mun
Neo-shamanism
Co-counselling therapy
Renaissance Fair
Other arts communities
Men’s spirituality

Underneath this network of groups and circles, which were all clustered
around one core, centre cell, the Reclaiming Collective, was another social
order: interrelated households. This social web was more invisible but equally
important. Furthermore, it contributed a functional criterion by which to count
Reclaiming people that at least conformed with the community’s unofficial
agreement about where Reclaiming was located and who its people were.
In 1990, I lived in a collective household named “Group W” in the southern
part of Mission. This household of four women had a community list with
54 Guardians of the world

phone numbers to 123 other households (collectives, families and singles),

including a total of 281 people. The list was made and distributed to other
households in the larger pagan–anarchist community, both in the SF Bay Area
and in neighbouring towns by my roommate Vivianne, who loosely identified
with Reclaiming. When I asked where I could find her community, she gave
me this phone list.
Most of the households I regard as core to Reclaiming in 1990 were of
course on Vivianne’s list. On the basis of interviews, visits to a number of
households, and my own counting and impressions from being an active
participant observer in the community, I suggest that the Reclaiming com-
munity in 1990 numbered approximately 130 people spread between 42 house-
holds. Of these, 23 were collective households, 13 nuclear family households,
and six composed of a single person.19 This small community in turn served a
much larger community of maybe 2,000 people through classes, workshops and
public rituals, but also through political projects, like training circles for civil
disobedience direct actions, needle exchange or the soup kitchen.
The conclusion is that the SF Reclaiming community in the 1980s and
early 1990s was a network of people who were personally and emotionally
bonded due to common activities for common goals and who recognized
each other as belonging to the same community network. People who merely
attended public rituals and otherwise remained anonymous to their fellow
celebrants (which was also possible when attending Sunday services in large
Christian congregations) were not part of the community in this sense. They
had to have some social links, either from class, via friendship or from
commitment to a work cell, to be included in this definition. But since
community in this organic sense is primarily built on personal work relation-
ships, there is a limit to how large it can grow (two to three hundred people).
When the Collective reorganized into a “Wheel” in 1997, one reason was that
the community was growing too large, splitting up people in subgroups
who no longer knew each other. In order to foster the new, independent
communities which were forming, a new structure proved necessary also for
the founding collective in SF.

Conflicting circles: magical houses, feminist politics,

and insiders versus outsiders
As stated above, Reclaiming’s social vision is to treat any human being as a
unique manifestation of the goddess, to welcome any serious seeker into their
classes and to help those who ask to find their way among ritual circles and
work cells. How does this seemingly horizontal pattern of circles within
circles actually materialize socially, and why is a newcomer to Reclaiming
more likely to experience this pattern as a hierarchy and as a structure
representing insiders versus outsiders? The Anarchist Coffeehouse organized at
Dragon House in October 1990, is an exemplary case to start with since both
gatherings and houses could participate in the creation of this structure.
 The Reclaiming community: a feminist, social construction 55

The two single most important social scenes in the pagan community in SF
were in 1990 the Reclaiming public rituals and the Anarchist Coffeehouse.
Coffeehouse was a monthly cultural gathering organized by Urban Stonehenge,
but hosted by different collective households (a normal situation for a
community lacking common space). It was open to any anarchist, pagan or
not, and gathered between one and two hundred people.20
They came to socialize, discuss, watch shows and performances and help
raise money for various political projects. The performances were the most
popular part, and favourite pieces were comic sketches in which pagan or
anarchist lifestyles were made fun of. A highlight was when Pandora and
Starhawk entered the scene in dialogue as “Hannah Clancy” and “Mimi”.
Hannah was an urban village hag, who gave magical advice about such things
as cleaning toilets while twisting the lofty, quasi-academic language of
Witchcraft. Mimi was a New Age hippie-like pagan, overloaded with jewelry
and politically correct clichéd opinions. Nobody made more fun of Starhawk
than Starhawk herself, and people respected her deeply for that quality.
The location for the gathering, Dragon House, was one of the most active
Reclaiming households at the time and, with a square area of about five
hundred feet, it could pride itself on being a perfect place both for Coffee-
house and for small rituals. The residence was a huge Victorian house in the
heart of the Mission, beautifully renovated by its ten inhabitants. It had three
floors and twelve rooms. People had separate bedrooms, while other rooms
were common space. The combined kitchen and living room on the second
floor was the main room. It was huge and originally consisted of three
separate rooms. By the eastern wall was a house altar. The altar decoration
changed according to the Wheel of the Year. Anarchist Coffeehouse was held
in late October, close to Samhain. The altar was therefore covered with
symbols representing decay, death and rebirth, including pictures of beloved
dead.The private altars, for private magic, were in the bedrooms. On the third
floor, there was a large attic. It had been newly renovated into a space that
alternately could accommodate rituals, classes, meetings and parties. A wooden
staircase was built on the outside, from the backyard garden up to the attic. At
each floor, the staircase had a little deck and an entrance door.
The official programme for Coffeehouse took place in the attic. Snacks,
bagels, refreshments, beer and wine were sold in the kitchen-living room,
which was also a place for socializing. Smokers hung out on the decks and in
the outdoor staircase. Others visited the private bedrooms. Everybody paid $1
as an entrance fee, and altogether AC collected $280 that evening.The money
was a benefit for organizing the “500th Anniversary of Columbus Invading
the Americas” (which took place in 1994).
There were 15 performances in the attic that night and many received high
applause. Starhawk and Pandora (from Avalon) played their comedy; Neil
(Treat Street) spoke humorously about mental depression and explained how
it is supposedly related to monotheism. Three people (from New Moon and
Urban Stonehenge) performed an ironic act about promiscuous relationships,
56 Guardians of the world

showing how difficult it is to make them work ethically. Ann (Treat Street)
read intimate passages from her diary, from the time she was a prostitute. Max
(Group W) entertained with Jewish folksongs and told a dramatic story about
a strip search when she was arrested for squatting in Berkeley.
In the listening crowd I saw many young people and many unfamiliar
faces, people who were probably anarchists but not pagans. Some of the
Reclaiming elders and a majority of those living as singles or in family
households were missing. But the people present still represented most of the
circles in the community. People who felt at home constantly moved between
the attic, the kitchen and the decks, while the newcomers observed the
performances until they were finished. All the group conversations in the
kitchen and on the staircase outside the attic were carried on by inner-circle
Reclaiming people (those active at plural levels). Especially the young and the
newcomers tended to stay the whole evening in the attic. Downstairs on the
first floor, in Freya’s room, a group of inner-core people (those affiliated with
the Reclaiming Collective’s teaching cell) was gathered.The door was locked.
They opened when I knocked.The people inside exchanged news and gossip.
Not only Dragon House, but any Reclaiming household, was divided into
spaces of public and private character. The social status of a guest became
visible through watching what area she was allowed to enter. At Dragon
House, the attic was both the most public (when having meetings) and the
most private (when doing rituals).This room could be transformed according
to purpose. Furthermore, the kitchen-living room was semi-public and the
bedrooms were private. A person who was let into the attic at meetings could
still be an outsider in the community. Whether she belonged depended on
whether she was welcomed to socialize in the kitchen, or knew people at that
level. A person who, in addition, was invited to Freya’s bedroom was about to
enter the inner circle. In this room, Freya had altars, spells and all her magical
props exposed. It was not for everybody to see.
The double character of the attic, and its potential to be transformed from
public to private, was expressed in the fact that the actual night a huge carpet
covered up a certain painting on the floor:
 The Reclaiming community: a feminist, social construction 57

This painting is a magical symbol, a so-called “power vortex”. It consists of a

red circle, a golden spiral within the circle, a black octagonal figure wreathing
the circle, and a black pentagram within the octagonal figure. All these
symbols, except the octagram, are used separately in Witchcraft rituals. The
octagram symbolizes the “eightfold path of initiation” and is used only in that
context. To cluster them together in a painting on the floor is an effort to
express the “natural power” that has apparently been accumulated at this spot.
Feather, a former member of Reclaiming Collective, had dowsed the house to
find out how the earth energies ran underneath and had pointed out this spot
as a powerful and natural energy reservoir.The vortex was first painted in the
basement, just above the earth, and then later in the attic. It was not meant to
be visible to the public eye, that is, to those who only came to meetings or
parties. On these occasions, the painting was covered, as it was at Coffeehouse.
Witches believe that a physical house not only has power spots within it,
but that the house itself constitutes an energy body. As such, it is a living
substance with its energy peak in the power vortex. Therefore houses have
names, families and persons have names, and a collective household is listed by
its house-name in the phonebook and on the community list. To choose a
name is to designate both the energy of the material building and the earth it
stands on. It also names the spirit of the household, of a joint group of people.
The name “Dragon House” points to some of the Witches’ words of wisdom:
“Where there is fear there is power.” The dragons of European fairy tales are
awe-inspiring creatures at the same time as they may be enchanted princesses.
Also the Sumerian primordial mother, the goddess Tiamat, was/is a dragon.
Her image arouses fear, but is really an expression of the Creatrix. To live in
her “House” (or belly) is to be nourished by the female powers of birth and
creation.
Not everybody who belonged to the Reclaiming community in 1990
went to the Anarchist Coffeehouse and not everybody was welcome to see
and feel the power vortex at Dragon House. It depended on whether they
sought a “total identity” of having come home to their “true tribe”, or if they
were content with the less involved “religious identity” of practising feminist
Witchcraft. Only those with a “total identity” were reckoned as inner-circle
people in the community. Michael was a typical example. He grew up as a
run-away child and spent some time in jail in his early youth. All his life had
been a search for home, until he found Reclaiming, “My challenge has been
to learn to accept love and to trust it . . . .Then I met the Witches; it was like
coming home. Like tying together all the previous stuff I have done, and
finally focusing it . . . . This community is my family”. Michael became
involved in rituals, a coven, teaching, political actions and communal living.
He got many friends, was invited to most parties (including Sonia’s blood rite
party), and managed to bond with several women through sexual relation-
ships. He became a close friend of Rose and Starhawk, and his age and
experience gave him a position close to an elder. Reclaiming had indeed
helped Michael fulfill his needs: he was provided with an identity of being a
58 Guardians of the world

valuable and successful person, with a place and a purpose for his life; he even
found a “home” within himself.
Everybody connected to the community in 1990 would agree with Michael
that the particular spiritual practices they had learned from the Reclaiming
Witches provided them with an opportunity to find a spiritual family.
They would not necessarily agree that they had found a social family. One
of those who didn’t go to Coffeehouse or El Rio bar, lived collectively, did
direct actions, or received invitations to parties was Fallon. Thus, she disagreed
strongly with Michael in his positive affirmation of Reclaiming as “home”.
Fallon was a lawyer and worked as an attorney. Fallon was Macha’s friend
and work fellow and was introduced to Reclaiming through her. She was 38
years old, was married and had a daughter 5 years old. Her husband accepted
her religious quest but did not participate himself.The three of them lived an
ordinary family life in a flat in Noe Valley, west of the Mission. Since 1984,
Fallon had taken five Reclaiming classes. She regularly went to the Sabbat
rituals and often brought her daughter, whom she tried to raise as a pagan. For
a year she belonged to a mixed coven, which dissolved because people started
growing in different directions. She was a very competent attorney and had a
sweet and friendly personality, although quite reserved. When I asked her to
describe her particular magical skills or healing gifts, she answered, “love”.
Fallon was a committed worshipper of the Goddess and told me that

To be a Witch is to honor and revere . . . the earth as a living, breathing

being. And also to use that energy to work change in different ways in my
own life and in the lives of people around me, in positive healing ways.
This knowledge and this practise is a gift I have received from the
Reclaiming teachers.

In 1989, she decided to ask for initiation, both to symbolize the commitment
she already had and to take a step toward a deeper connection. The tradition
recommends that one ask at least three initiators to perform the ritual for her,
and since initiation in Reclaiming (which is customized to the individual
seeker) involves very exposing and personal challenges, it is a requirement that
the candidate already know her initiators intimately as friends. They have to
know her weak points, and still accept her, to really be able to challenge her.
The problem was that Fallon, after all these years, did not really know
anybody as a friend except for Macha. All the other women she asked to be
her initiators therefore answered “no”; they did not know her well enough.
They suggested instead that she became more involved in the community and
asked again later.
These women gave Fallon a hard time because they were right: she did
not really belong to the community; she said, she was only associated. She
explained her distance partly with reference to her commitment to family and
work, partly with reference to the difficulty of being locked into the inner
circle of initiated Witches:
 The Reclaiming community: a feminist, social construction 59

Reclaiming is notorious for having an inner circle which is very hard to

break in to. I just haven’t wanted to put out the energy to try to do that.
Also, I think you need to have an “in” . . . . My experience with these
kinds of groups in general is that if you have something, a particular
quality, or a particular experience in your background, or you just happen
to connect on some level with someone in the group who can bring you
into the group, then you are in. And if you don’t have any of those things,
then you are not.That was true in high school and in college.This group
dynamic is not unique to Reclaiming, but it is very strong in Reclaiming.
And I think it is ironic because of the values that Reclaiming represents,
which are community, openness, tolerance. But these are not practised; it
is exactly the opposite. And that leaves me with a bad feeling too.

Fallon was here making a vertical and normative distinction between “out-
siders” and “insiders” in relation to a particular circle: the influential core
members of the Reclaiming Collective. And she was slowly moving from the
self-identified position of being a voluntary “outsider” to the position of an
involuntary “outsider”, the position of those who lack something. When
identifying herself as a victim of exclusivity (Reclaiming is here interpreted as
representing exactly the opposite of community, openness, tolerance), she
ignored her close friendship with Macha, who was in the inner circle and
who had kept the door in open for Fallon all those years.
But Fallon did not resign herself to this situation. Her determination to be
initiated “forced her” to act counter to her identity as shy, modest and loving:
she insisted on relationships with people. She took initiative and demanded to
be seen and heard and taken into account. She started to work in ad hoc
committees to prepare public rituals. She went to parties and made an effort
to talk with people, to bond and be involved – for example in the community
ritual celebrating Sonia. In Witches’ terminology, Fallon “claimed her power”
when she stopped complaining and took charge of her own life in order to
reach her goals.
Witches regard everything a person experiences after having asked for
initiation (whether she gets a “yes” or “no”) as part of her initiation process.
The women’s rejection of Fallon ended up as her challenge to change her
relationship with herself and become a more outspoken and “needy” person.
In Witches’ language, Fallon had been challenged to cultivate the element
“fire” (involvement and will) and balance her “water” (emotional tenderness
and loving attitude). For Michael the challenge had been the other way
around, to cultivate his “water” (learning to accept love) and balance his “fire”
(restless activity and running away). Fallon succeeded and eventually she was
initiated.
Michael and Fallon are examples of two people who both belonged to the
community, but for a long time with two different positions: as insider and
outsider to the core circles. Fallon, though, worked hard to change her
position and finally did so. A majority of my 1990 informants agreed that
60 Guardians of the world

classes were fairly easy and welcoming places to meet Reclaiming and that the
teachers gave a lot of themselves at that level. But as soon as they stopped
being in class and tried to approach the mysterious Reclaiming community,
for example, by going to Coffeehouse or parties, that level of intimacy was
gone. Now there was no more interest in getting to know new people; rather
the opposite. Some thought that was perfectly acceptable; others complained
about the same fact.They were disappointed over the experienced gap between
welcoming classes and beautiful rituals and the elitist interaction pattern in the
community at large.
It is obvious that the construction called “Reclaiming” was not as welcoming
and inclusive in 1990 as intended on a social level, no matter how alternative
and good-intentioned. Instead of representing “paradise lost”, Reclaiming was
rather a community of ordinary people who gossiped, hurt each other, had
loud discussions and insisted upon humour and irony as primary criteria for
belonging. At the same time, they made a lot of compassionate demands on
each other in terms of experimenting, caring, speaking up, processing,
forgiving and helping each other grow. But passion has a tendency to take
sides, to differentiate between likes and dislikes, between friend and not friend.
Sometimes people did not manage this process of “growth”. They simply
ended up as enemies, and somebody had to leave the larger group for peace to
be restored. Those who stayed and those who left showed the power balance
within the community.
Why is it that the elitist structure of insider–outsider became such a deep
reality in the Reclaiming community? At least four factors seem important:
first, an explicit redefinition of the traditional roles of females from being
caretakers to being powerful.Women in Reclaiming had consciously disconnected
themselves from traditionally gendered expectations and proclaimed that their
task was not to create a cosy community, but to effect changes in the
American culture. Nothing less. In Reclaiming’s first mission statement, the
word “Witch” was even invoked as “an affirmation of women’s power to shape
reality”.The second factor was the extensive use of consensus decision making,
and the authority attributed to experience and, therefore, to age. This ethical
universe was double-edged because it could invite power games from those
who actually had experience and age. Also, where there is no explicit
leadership and open hierarchy, a covert hierarchy is likely to develop, at least in
a large group.The third factor was the goal of unifying politics and spirituality.
As long as politics was defined as direct action, this goal would inevitably
establish a creed demanding continuous involvement from its followers and
implicitly value people differently according to time and resources invested.
Fourth, Reclaiming people offered no distinct keys to enter their informal,
organic community, except for “hanging around” or starting to work in a
work cell. Although this was an intended strategy in order to stay small and
intimate, it was still frustrating to many.
Consequently, the ideal associated with the Reclaiming community, which
was to empower the individual and build nourishing social and spiritual
 The Reclaiming community: a feminist, social construction 61

relationships, could be experienced as just an ideal by a person who did not

easily meet these requirements. A defender of Reclaiming’s social order would
say that the ideal as such was the problem: people were drawn to feminist
Witchcraft because they felt that institutional Judaism and Christianity had
betrayed them; and now they wanted to create a politically correct religion
that conformed with their utopian visions about “paradise lost” but forgot the
fact that humans are still complicated beings, and visions always ambiguous
and preliminary.

The Reclaiming Wheel in SF (since 1997)

Although Reclaiming has tried over the years to deal with failure, and a less
intimate strategy for household arrangements started to evolve in the mid-
1990s, the elitist structures in Reclaiming continued to flourish. These were,
in the long run, dissatisfying to all. New people complained that they did not
get a chance to become involved. Old people, who held tremendous power,
felt burned out and tired from hyper-activism. If younger adults and a second
generation of those born and raised in the community were to come into
leadership, and those who continued to yearn for inclusive community were
to be heard, time was ripe for a change.
After Reclaiming in 1994 became a tax-exempt, nonprofit religious
organization, many felt the need to create “a home” for the community, a
place where people could come together and express themselves apart from
the household network. With a central space, information would be more
accessible and structures feel more inclusive. They started to look at how
churches and synagogues raise money as a model for how Reclaiming might
be able to afford a space. But the more they looked, the more they realized
that Reclaiming is no regular church, that they were creating a new structure
for which there were no models.The idea of a house was thus frozen.
In order to open up the perceived central authority of Reclaiming to
the many who, by the mid-1990s, identified as Reclaiming Witches, the
Collective started instead a process of reformation by creating a statement
called “Reclaiming Principles of Unity” (cf. Appendix B). Here they tried to
answer the following questions: what is the Reclaiming tradition, and what
entitles somebody to say that they teach in this tradition? The result was a
statement of core values, for example, that all of life is sacred and inter-
connected, and that ultimate spiritual authority is within each and every
person, not of propositions of faith. A Reclaiming tradition was thus defined
for the first time, not in terms of a theology, but in terms of a worldview and
methodology. By this carefully configured move, those among the Reclaiming
Witches who always had argued (in opposition to Starhawk) that Witchcraft
was not a religion, but merely a magical and spiritual practice, seemed to
augment their position.
This configuration of the Reclaiming tradition happened at a retreat for the
Collective in November 1997. At the same retreat, the Collective dissolved
62 Guardians of the world

itself, creating basic suggestions and guidelines for the structure of Reclaiming
in the Bay Area which exists today: the Wheel and the various working cells.
Today, this Wheel of Reclaiming holds the legal identity of Reclaiming as a
tax-exempt religious organization. It is the only assembly empowered to act in
the name of Reclaiming in a legal context, to make policy decisions and
recognize new cells. It works as a council with representatives from each cell
and makes decisions by consensus. Reclaiming cells now number fifteen
(Teaching; Advisory; Prison Ministry; E-Cell (website); Community Building;
Spiral Dance; Special Projects; East Bay, North Bay and SF Ritual Planning;
North Bay Teachers; SF/East Bay Teachers; Quarterly Magazine;Administrative;
and Youth), but a procedure in which a new self-appointed work cell can apply
for recognition and membership in the Wheel after a year and a day has been
developed. Each cell sends one or two representatives to the Wheel, which, like
the former Collective, meets at least four times a year. A representative must be
chosen by her cell and it is preferred that she sits for a period of two years,
which is a major difference from the life-time membership in the old
Collective.The members of the former Collective constitute an Advisory Cell,
which has two representatives on the Wheel. Some former Collective members
are present on the Wheel as chosen representatives from their work cells, but
most representatives are young people. If we compare this reorganization with
the figure on p. 53, the inner circle called “Reclaiming Collective” has been
replaced by the “Reclaiming Wheel”, and the three cells “financial”,“teaching”
and “newsletter” have been extended to fifteen cells, related to the Wheel as
independent suns around a shimmering, although highly dependent moon.
Reclaiming Witches in other places organize themselves (or not) as they will.
We find Reclaiming-identified communities in Los Angeles (“ReWeaving”),
Oregon (“Strand by Strand”), Missouri (“Diana’s Grove”), Texas (“Tejas
Web”), and in the Mid-Atlantic region (“SpiralHeart”), although they are not
incorporated as religious organizations. The Teaching Cell for Witchcamps,
however, was separated out from the local Wheel structure and organized as an
autonomous transnational Spokes Council. It has representatives from the local
Witchcamp organizers and teachers in North America and western Europe
and meets twice a year.
The reorganization of Reclaiming also affected the Newsletter, which in
1997 transformed into a magazine and became the Reclaiming Quarterly
(printed in 2,000 copies, $5 for a sample).The self-presentation “Reclaiming –
a center for feminist spirituality”, followed by the old mission statement, is still
printed on the cover page. But, since the magazine now addresses Reclaiming
Witches all over the world, the four words “San Francisco Bay Area” have
been omitted. Fifty per cent of the magazine’s total volume is authored by SF
pagans. The other half are articles and announcements from Reclaiming-
identified communities throughout the US, Canada and Europe.The editorial
policy is to feature anything that will inform Reclaiming’s work and meet the
needs of a new generation of Reclaiming Witches. A teenage column has
therefore been started, as well as a kids’ page for those up to the age of eight.
 The Reclaiming community: a feminist, social construction 63

Although Starhawk is one of Reclaiming’s founders, and a most important

architect behind the new Reclaiming structure, she renounced a position as
nonelected leader-guru at the top. In fact, she is not on the SF Wheel at all,
only on the Spokes Council for Witchcamp. Her action is not typical for
leaders of magical communities and new religious movements, but maybe is
for feminist visionaries: instead of mummifying herself and “the old days”, she
gave up her power and handed over the leadership of the Reclaiming Collective
and community to a new generation of young people.
Although the Reclaiming community in SF has a new organizational heart
and has refocused from the friendship circles of the household to that of
public, representative space, its activities still revolve around classes, public
rituals, covens, initiations, work projects and parties. But restructuring has
made the informal networks less important and helped to integrate a new
generation of Reclaiming Witches. Restructuring has, in fact, made the
Reclaiming community in SF more open and inclusive to all parties, both
young and old, and helped to revitalize the old visions from the early 1980s.
In the following chapters, I shall describe the pre-1997 Reclaiming com-
munity in present tense.There are two reasons for why I take this liberty: first,
it adds more life to the narrative and the analysis. Second, it reminds us that
the San Francisco Reclaiming community before and after 1997 are not two
different entities. Reclaiming’s mission statements in 1982 and 2000 are for
example almost identical – as are the core values stated in the Principles of
Unity from 1997 and those anticipated in every single issue of the Reclaiming
Newsletter/Quarterly since 1980. Present day Reclaiming Witches obviously
identify with the mythological past and the ritual practices invented in the
1980s and early 1990s. Through this book they also get a chance to be
acquainted with its larger contexts and meanings.

Notes
1 Quotations by Witches taken from my field notes are written down after the ritual
process was completed. Thus, some words and phrases may, in fact, have been
spoken slightly differently as the ritual took place.
2 Since Reclaiming has no authorized body of elders, this is not a Reclaiming term.
But the expression “elders” is sometimes used with reference to “experienced and
respected Reclaiming teachers who have been active for many years”. To the
extent I use the term, it is in this latter sense.
3 My description of the community is primarily based on interviews, newsletters
and fieldwork notes. But I have also found and used valuable information in
recent Reclaiming Quarterly articles written by Reclaiming elders, such as Vibra
Willow (“A Brief History of Reclaiming”), M. Macha NightMare (“Reclaiming
Tradition Witchcraft”), Starhawk (“A working Definition of Reclaiming”) and
Jody Logan and Patti Martin (“Reclaiming: History, Structure, and the Future”).
These articles can be found on Reclaiming’s web site: http://www.reclaiming.org
4 Feminist scholars believe that the universal division of (sexed) labour between
public and domestic activities stems from the fact that women give birth and raise
children. Therefore, the most egalitarian societies are those in which men value
and participate in the domestic life of the home and where women “are able to
64 Guardians of the world

transcend domestic limits, either by entering the men’s world or by creating a

society unto themselves” (M. Rosaldo 1974:41).
5 According to a US census from 1980, SF had then a population of 678,974, of
which 42 per cent belonged to the Black, Hispanic, Chinese and Filipino ethnic
groups. About 50,000 people lived in the Mission District (Godfrey 1988:3, 146).
6 Castells 1983:138. San Francisco had in 1980 an estimated 115,000 homosexuals,
about 17 per cent of the city’s population.Two-thirds of the total were men, one-
third were women.The Castro ghetto were primarily populated by white, middle-
class gay men. According to Deborah G. Wolf (1979), lesbians tended not to
concentrate in a given territory or to give priority to spatial communities but
rather as loose social and interpersonal networks. On the whole they were poorer
than gay men and had less choice in terms of work and location. Their Mission
community was at the time centred around a feminist bookstore, the Women’s
Building, two women-only cafés and a women’s bathhouse. Cf. also Castells
1983:140.
7 In the early 1970s, Budapest founded the “Susan B. Anthony Coven no. 1” (named
after a famous suffragist) and opened a Goddess bookstore in Los Angeles. In 1976
she published The Feminist Book of Light and Shadow. Ten years later, Budapest
moved to Oakland, close to SF. There are other branches of Witchcraft also
identifying as “Dianic”, but they are neither lesbian nor separatist.
8 NROOGD was already established in 1967–68 and their name was meant to be
a humorous twisting of the famous British occult order “The Hermetic Order
of the Golden Dawn”, established in 1887.The rituals of the latter group probably
influenced Gardner’s creation of Witchcraft (cf. Introduction and chapter 2).
9 The magical communities in the SF Bay Area are still characterized by their
overlapping membership structure, a feature also documented by T.H. Luhrmann
(1989) when she studied magical communities in London. My experience from
having participated in rituals in many different magical traditions confirms
Luhrmann’s assertion that magical groups are highly interrelated. Except for the
feminists, it is not unusual that people belong to several communities simul-
taneously or frequently visit each other’s rituals.
10 “A Working Definition of Reclaiming”, taken from Reclaiming’s web site, 25
August 2000.
11 The words “San Francisco Bay Area” were the only ones omitted when Reclaiming
reorganized in 1997.
12 Listed chronologically from the year they joined (with their 1989 age in paren-
theses), members included Starhawk (38) since 1979; Rose May Dance (41) and Bone
Blossom (41) since 1981; Deadly (36), Pandora O’Mallory (38), M. Macha NightMare
(45), Judy Foster (57), Raven Moonshadow (29) and David Kubrin (50) since 1982;
Rick Dragonstongue (42), Roy King (43) and Roddy (33) since 1984; Cybelle (34) and
Vibra Willow (42) since 1985. In 1989, they decided to take in more young people.
Pleiades (28) and Rosemary (26) came in that year, while Jody Logan (22), Suzanne
(22) and Beverly (24) became members in 1990.
13 Of those with a BA or less, two worked in an AIDS/HIV educational program,
two were secretaries, two were dancers, one was a computer programmer, one was
a bank data analyst, one was a body-worker/healer, one was a cook, one was a
carpenter and two of the younger were unemployed. Their income varied con-
siderably, largely determined by their educational level.
14 I have taped interviews with 68 Witches/Pagans, 41 women and 27 men. A total
of 50 of these interviews are with Reclaiming people, 30 women and 20 men.The
interviews were fairly organized, although I did not asked the same standard set of
questions of everybody (the question guide for the 1989/90 interviews is included
as Appendix A). Information about life histories, therefore, varies from sparse to
very rich. But there is certain core information which is repeated: a total of 61
 The Reclaiming community: a feminist, social construction 65

gave information about age, 60 about religious upbringing, 60 about housing

situation, 60 about sexual identity, 59 about civil status, 59 about present work, 58
about education, 57 about income, 57 about class background and 41 about
birthplace. Of the people I interviewed, two were Black and one was Latino. Most
of the Catholics reported having Irish ethnic backgrounds. All together, the people
interviewed had 32 children. A reader who wants to go into the statistical data in
more detail can consult my PhD dissertation “ ‘I am a Witch—a Healer and a
Bender’. An Expression of Religious Woman in Contemporary USA” from 1996 in the
University Library in Oslo, Norway.
15 Loretta Orion (1995) writes that of the total US population, 39.4 per cent are
Protestant, 36.5 per cent are Catholic, 4 per cent are Jewish, 0.1 per cent are
Unitarian and 20 per cent are Other. In 1991, J. Gordon Melton reported the
religious background of (neo)pagans to be: 42.7 per cent Protestant, 25.8 per cent
Catholic, 6.2 per cent Jewish, 25.3 per cent Other (Melton 1991:467). In 1995,
Loretta Orion reported their religious backgrounds as: 59 per cent Protestant (32
per cent in Reclaiming, compared to 39.4 in the US population), 26 per cent
Catholic (35 in R. compared to 36.5); 9 per cent Jewish (21 in R. compared to 4),
4.2 per cent Unitarians (5 per cent in R. compared to 0.1), 3 per cent Other (7 in
R. compared to 20). Orion’s reports on education were: PhD 4.2 per cent (9 in
Reclaiming); MA 22.8 per cent (31 in R.); BA 31.7 per cent (40 in R.); 1–3 years
of college 11.5 per cent (19 in R.); High School only 23.8 per cent (1 in R.).
Reclaiming does, in other words, score very high on education. Carol Matthews
(1995:345) writes that 40 per cent of Americans have attended college whereas in
Reclaiming 80 per cent report having completed a college or graduate degree.
Orion reports that of (neo)pagans 61 per cent are heterosexuals (55 in Reclaiming);
11 per cent are homosexuals (18 in R.); 28 per cent are bisexuals (27 in R.). The
national average is 10 per cent homosexuals and 13 per cent bisexuals. Regarding
age, Orion refers to a San Diego study that found the highest percentage of
(neo)pagans to fall between 31 and 40 years (50 per cent are between 30 and 40
years in R.).
16 How many people were educated in Reclaiming’s “mystery school” annually? In
the spring term of 1989, Reclaiming offered 22 classes in SF with a total of 14
teachers. If we count approximately eight students in every class (which is a low
estimate), it means that 176 people in the SF Bay Area were educated in the
“religion and magic of the Goddess Reclaiming-style” within this period only. In
addition come a couple of thousand who sign up for 10 to 12 Witchcamps and
participate in workshops given by Starhawk and other Reclaiming teachers
outside of SF (Starhawk carries out extensive travelling in the US and Europe
every spring).
17 Books published by Reclaiming people are listed under Starhawk in the biblio-
graphy since she, so far, has figured as the main author.
18 “Prevention Point” was started as an illegal direct action in November 1988 by
pagan anarchists and members of the Reclaiming Collective. The goal was to
prevent the spread of AIDS among drug abusers in the streets of SF caused by
addicts sharing the same needle by exchanging old needles with new. The new
needles were sent to them by anarchist friends in Canada, where needles could be
bought at the pharmacy. Once a week drug users in SF could exchange an equal
number of used needles for an equal number of new ones, and during the first
two years of the action, 200,000 needles were exchanged. Before “Prevention
Point” entered the streets, they held hands in a circle while grounding and bond-
ing. In their homes people burnt magic candles to help the activists be invisible to
the police. This was a highly successful action, resulting in the legalization of the
action by SF city and county governments. Since 1993 the action has been
financed by the city. It has a director, several full time officers and 200 volunteers
66 Guardians of the world

to do the street work. In 1994, they gave out 65,000–70,000 needles per week,
interacting with around 4,000 drug users. Legal needle-exchange programmes
have also been started in many other large US cities.
19 At the time there were 15 households in the Mission, seven in Noe Valley, Bernal
Heights and Potrero Hills, eight in the Haight-Ashbury and two at the Golden
Gate Park. Each house was named, for example Urban Stonehenge, New Moon,
Black Cat, Casa Sanchez, Group W, Avalon, Castle Discordia, Paradox House,
Garlic Moon and Suburban Palace. In 1990 there were four Reclaiming affiliated
houses in Berkeley, four in Sonoma County, one in Santa Cruz and one in Grass
Valley. Some of these out-of-city-members had earlier lived in collective house-
holds in SF.
20 Several of my 1990 informants maintained that the anarchist political scene in SF
at the time included 2,000 active people, of which 200 were believed to be pagans
as well – but this number was not restricted to those active in Reclaiming. By
“anarchism” in America I mean a political ideology inspired by writers such as
Emma Goldman and Dorothy Day. Many European anarchists immigrated to the
US in the early twentieth century, and Goldman was among the more influential.
Today’s anarchists have local government and decentralization as their basic
political guidelines.They believe societies can be organized on premises other than
the nation state, the judicial system, the institutions of private property, the army
and the police. Consequently, they distance themselves strongly from traditional
communist or socialist politics in which state economics replace market economics.
2 Wicca revival
Starhawk and the myth
of ancient origin

If we ask Reclaiming people how the Witch movement came into being, the
sceptical and ignorant will say it was invented by Starhawk and other
feminists. The sceptical and well read will say it was invented by Gerald
Gardner on the basis of the European esoteric traditions. The non sceptical
lovers of myth, who represent the majority of feminist Witchcraft, will refer us
to a certain myth of ancient origin. This myth, in different versions, is met
with in all variations of the Witch movement (Adler 1979:45). In fact, it is not
really a myth, but a genealogical account which, when clothed in terms of the
history of religions, describes how some of the Witches themselves understand
their origin and evolution.The Reclaiming version of the myth is formulated
by Starhawk. She claims to have inherited it from the Faery tradition, although
its narrative elements are similar to Gardner’s accounts.1 Briefly, Starhawk’s
version is as follows.
Witchcraft has its spiritual roots in the tribal religions of Europe some
10,000 years ago. Therefore, in spirit it is related to the surviving shamanistic
“Earth religions” of the contemporary west, including those of Native
Americans, African Americans, the Sami and the Inuits. The old Europeans
originally worshipped the “Great Goddess”, as divine giver of life and fertility,
and her son–lover, the Horned God.These tribal peoples celebrated the cycles
of the seasons, and their religion provided tools to establish bonds between
individuals, the community and the earth. Just as religion was goddess-
centreed, society was woman-centreed and organized around the mother and
her kin as a basic social principle. These matrifocal and matrilineal cultures
were egalitarian, peaceful, just and creative, and laid the foundation of our
civilization. In time, the cultures were invaded by patriarchal warriors from
the east. They conquered or drove out the matrilineal goddess-worshippers
and laid the foundation for patriarchal and oppressive societies in Europe.The
invaders worshipped a male warrior-god as the supreme godhead and they
degraded the indigenous worship of the goddess and her consort. In the
British Isles, the invading Celts conquered the goddess-people by adopting
and assimilating many elements of “the Old Religion”, which later became
the Druid Mysteries. But the “Goddess religion”, or now, Witchcraft, also
continued to live in folk customs, esoteric traditions and in the covens of the
68 Guardians of the world

Faery people, led by women, or now, Witches. Later, during the Church’s
persecution of heretics, the Witches were forced underground. Many of the
traditions were forgotten, but some of them lived on in great secrecy in
certain families. With the European immigration to America, some families
also brought the Craft with them. When England repealed the ban on the
practice of Witchcraft in 1951, the Witches’ Craft emerged from hiding, first in
England, then in the US.
The true genesis of Wicca is not the topic of this book. In this chapter we
shall, therefore, trace the historical roots and recent revival of Witchcraft
according to their own indigenous exegesis. While scholars emphasize the
literary and folklorist sources, most Witches also insist upon a spiritual
continuity with the past in terms of magico-religious practices. Claims of
historicity are very important to the Witches since the past is a major resource
on which the Wiccan identity is built.To most Reclaiming people, Starhawk’s
books, and not Gerald Gardner’s, are the primary source for answers about the
origin and revival of Witchcraft. Her books are also extensively referred to in
interviews. I shall, therefore, give an extract of her position, which differs from
Gardner by her typical feminist interest in prehistory and archeology.
However, parallel to her interpretations of the historical lineage of
Witchcraft, Starhawk also formulates a cultural theory of “Paradise, Fall,
Persecution, and Regeneration”. This theory is of great importance since it is
used both to explain and legitimate Americans’ current search for an identity
as Witches. In addition to describing mythical-historical outlines, we must,
therefore, investigate the rationale Starhawk uses when producing such a
theory, specifically her concept of the natural, and her interpretations of the
assumed link between religious symbols and social reality.
In the Introduction, I described some features that seem to be characteristic
of women’s religiosity. One of them was how women use religious symbols in
continuity with social life. Regarding feminist Witches, we must expand the
continuum: they also argue to create a religious symbolic order in continuity
with natural life as well. When they regard Jewish and Christian religions as
patriarchal and oppressive, it is exactly because they believe they are based on
wrong perceptions of the natural world and therefore, inevitably, lies about the
nature of reality. First, they lie about humans’ fundamental relationship with
nature. Second, they resist any experience of nature as animate.Third, they deny
that the elemental power that gives birth is female. Consequently, patriarchal
religion is said to make use of symbols which represent natural reversals, as when
“Dea Creatrix” is symbolized as God and not as Goddess, although it is the
females of the species who, in fact, give birth to everything living.
Hence, the first and basic question to a Witch is not, “how do we create
new life-affirming symbols?” but, “what is true?” As is the case with any
religious path, theirs is a search for the Real, as they understand it, and an
effort to approximate their lives to it. The Real to Starhawk is what is
expressed through notions like “immanence” and “interconnection”: the earth
is alive, and all living beings are interconnected manifestations of the divine
 Wicca revival: Starhawk and the myth of ancient origin 69

life force. When composing such a view of the world, she is leaning on a
western occult tradition that has already reformulated ancient, pre-Socratic
concepts into a so-called esoteric cosmology. According to Antoine Faivre, this
cosmology has six phenomenological characteristics, of which I shall briefly
mention three: (1) the Universe is alive and the natural world “bound together”
through a network of elementals, of which the basic four are air, fire, water
and earth; (2) because of elemental correspondences between all parts of the
visible and invisible universe, microcosm can be said to mirror macrocosm;
(3) the universal net of elemental correspondences can be mediated and
manipulated by the human imagination, an activity often labelled “magic”
(Faivre 1992: xv–xx).
Esoteric cosmology is of course only a symbolic expression of human
assumptions about the Real. But, to Starhawk, this symbolic discourse repre-
sents objective ground, an ontological platform necessary for any apprentice to
Witchcraft. After reformulating them in her own language and clothing them
with her own favourite metaphors, Starhawk contends that the essential
principles, which are the true basics of nature and operative in all human
cultural activity, are to be named energy, spirit and matter.This knowledge stems
from a magical consciousness

that sees the world itself as a living being, made up of dynamic aspects, a
world where one thing shape-shifts into another, where there are no solid
separations and no simple causes and effects . . . . Magic teaches that
living beings are beings of energy and spirit as well as matter, that energy
– what the Chinese call Chi – flows in certain patterns throughout the
human body, and can be raised, stored, shaped and sent. The movements
of energy affect the physical world, and vice versa.
(Starhawk 1987:15, 24)

The world or cosmos “as a living being” is ultimately symbolized as “the living
body of the Goddess, in whose being we all partake, who encompasses us
and is immanent within us” (Starhawk 1987:7). The Goddess is regarded as
the great life-force. The energy and spirit embedded in nature are only
manifestations of her breath and soul. But energy and spirit are not only
contained within what we traditionally conceive of as nature. According to
Starhawk, they dwell in all matter, whether a human body or a work of art.
In this magical worldview, everything seems to belong to the domain of
“nature”. And in her writings, Starhawk seldom distinguishes between “nature”
and “culture”; rather she distinguishes between the physical and nonphysical
worlds. They are believed to be mutually influencing parts of a system, a
continuous feed-back loop. In fact, Starhawk regards the hierarchical opposition
between nature and culture as an expression of patriarchal dualism. Instead
she seems to operate with a distinction between natural and unnatural. When
Starhawk advocates Witchcraft as a “natural” religion, it is not in opposition to
“cultural”, but to “unnatural” religion.2
70 Guardians of the world

In the origin myth Starhawk’s discourse implies that a social utopia/paradise

must express the natural order of the universe and be a mirror of those cosmic
laws mentioned above.Thus,Witchcraft is understood to be in alignment with
cosmic laws and to represent both a natural religion and a true cognition
about matter, energy and spirit.This knowledge is regarded basic to fostering a
just social organization. The natural has thus become ethically normative:
“natural” is made identical with organic, normal and good (feminist), “un-
natural” with inorganic, abnormal and evil (patriarchal). Accordingly, the com-
bination of true knowledge of and reverence for the universe gives rise to
natural religions (meaning paganism), natural societies (meaning egalitarian
and matrifocal), and natural people (meaning healthy/happy) in a moral sense.
Patriarchal religions, such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam, on the other
hand, are examples of unnatural religions and function to legitimate social
oppression, sexism and ecological/personal estrangement. Patriarchal religious
symbolism represents a distorted imagery of how the laws of nature really
work and an ignorance of nature’s constitution as matter–energy–spirit.
Aided by this analytical distinction, we shall now investigate how Starhawk
unfolds her theory about the natural beginnings of time, cultural fall and
possible resurrection, and how the unnatural patriarchal culture built on
symbolic reversals and misrepresentations in regard to social life and the
natural world came into existence. I shall base the examination mainly upon
Starhawk’s books, The Spiral Dance (1979a) and Truth or Dare (1987) and also
signal the development of her thinking from the first to the second book.

Paradise lost
Starhawk’s paradise is characterized by what she terms a “consciousness of
immanence”, as opposed to a patriarchal “consciousness of estrangement”.The
consciousness of immanence is holistic and sees the world as interrelated and
interconnected. This is the natural perception of reality, which people appro-
priate when they live attuned to and in harmony with the natural world.
Starhawk believes that the context for the rise of Witchcraft thousand of years
ago was a Paleolithic culture in which

gifted shamans could attune themselves to the spirit of the herds, and in
so doing they became aware of the pulsating rhythm that infuses all life,
the dance of the double spiral, the whirling into being, and whirling out
again. They did not frame this insight intellectually, but in images: the
Mother Goddess, the birthgiver, who brings into existence all life; and the
Horned God, hunter and hunted, who eternally passes through the gates
of death that new life must go on. Male shamans dressed in skins and
horns in identification with the God and the herds; but female priestesses
presided naked, embodying the fertility of the Goddess. . . . As isolated
settlements grew into villages, shamans and priestesses linked forces and
shared knowledge. The first covens were formed . . . villages grew into
 Wicca revival: Starhawk and the myth of ancient origin 71

the first towns and cities . . . The year became a great wheel divided into
eight parts: the solstices and equinoxes and the cross-quarter days
between, when great feasts were held and fires lit . . . Within the [stone]
circles . . . priestesses could probe the secrets of time and the hidden
structure of the cosmos. Mathematics, astronomy, poetry, music, medicine,
and the understandings of the workings of the human mind developed
side by side with the lore of the deeper mysteries . . . The covens, who
preserved the knowledge of the subtle forces, were called Wicca . . . They
were those who could shape the unseen to their will. Healers, teachers
poets and midwives, they were central figures in every community.
(Starhawk 1979a:3–5)

This extract is from The Spiral Dance and according to Starhawk is to be read
as a legend, although she refers to a variety of “scientific sources” like Joseph
Campbell, James Mellaart and Margaret A. Murray, to prove the validity of her
reconstruction (Starhawk 1987:15). Legend or not, her goal is to establish a
normative image of a natural culture. Its hallmark is that symbolic repre-
sentations are metonymical rather than metaphorical: every symbolic act is
understood to be in continuity with its social meaning and natural function.
Goddess, femaleness and that which constitutes the essential principles of
fertility and procreation are associated through their embodiment in the
woman, the priestess. God, maleness and the animals that die in the hunt,
sacrificing their lives as food in order to feed life, are associated through their
embodiment in or with man, the shaman. Natural death does not reverse life;
it transforms life into new forms and is, therefore, nothing to fear. Both life
and death are understood to be a continuous stream of stages through which
life is reincarnated, again and again. The ritual cycle of the year mirrors the
natural cycle. People are able to receive and understand the secrets of cosmos
directly. Magicians can shape the unseen to their will and for the best of the
community.
A natural culture’s evolution from a simple social organization (tribal) to a
more complex one (urban) does not generate war and oppression. It is exactly
when a society lives in attunement with the laws of nature that it develops
high culture and peaceful civilization, city-states and a unification of science
and religion. In other words, in a natural culture there is deep continuity
between the symbolic, social and natural worlds, a state of being which
Starhawk labels holistic and whose central figure is the Witch, the symbol of
continuity and balance.
This ideal, holistic society is not located anywhere specific and, in The
Spiral Dance, Starhawk seems to grant universal validity to its embodied
evolutionary pattern. Eight years later, in Truth or Dare, Starhawk wants to be
read literally. Her historical reconstructions are no longer advocated as legends
but as research. Now she limits herself to one geographical area, of which we
have the oldest written sources available, namely, the rise and fall of Sumer in
Mesopotamia 3000 BCE. She chooses this area because she considers it to
72 Guardians of the world

contain the roots of western culture (Starhawk 1987:33). Starhawk’s study

materials are edited secondary sources, containing poetry and myths as well as
summaries of royal lineages, food supplies and utensils, crops and herds, the
production of clothes and ceramics – all listed and preserved by Sumerian
temple accountants. Her focus is the symbolic and social position of women
and how it changes when the social and natural worlds are split apart,
distorting a natural culture’s conceptualizations of sexuality and fertility and
divinity. In this enterprise, Starhawk does not discuss different theories but
refers only to those scholars who support her own perspective. Primarily, these
include Ruby Rohrlich (1980), Gerda Lerner (1986), Samuel N. Kramer
(1963), James Mellaart (1967) and Marija Gimbutas (1982, 1989).
Once again, Starhawk starts out with what she calls the “matristic times” or
“mother times”, a previous golden age in pre-Sumerian Anatolia in which the
society was presumably matrifocal and matrilineal and the supreme deity
was the Great Goddess, a goddess of nature as well as a goddess of culture.
Starhawk maintains that this goddess represented both life and death, fertility
and decay. The aim of religion was to ensure the continuity of life, and the
characteristics of a civilization worshipping goddesses were that “women were
leaders, priestesses, revered and respected members of the society” (Starhawk
1987:36). Starhawk holds that the imagery of art and objects did not reflect
structures of domination. There were no images of war, no indication of
animal sacrifice, and little differentiation was present in grave goods to
indicate class divisions. In the later, more stratified Sumerian culture, writing,
education, science and account keeping were still the domain of a goddess,
and women continued, according to Starhawk’s sources, to be scribes and
scholars, poets and composers of religious texts.
What seems to intrigue Starhawk the most is that “gender as a category . . .
was not seen as a necessary or natural correlative of power or powerlessness”
(Starhawk 1987:39). She finds this fact explicitly demonstrated in the mythic
representations of the sexual relation between goddess and god, representing
woman and man. In the Sumerian myths about Inanna and her consort
Dumuzi, the renewal of the world is enacted “through the life-sustaining
power of the erotic” in the rite of the sacred marriage. Through these myths
Starhawk is convinced that she finds a religion that is concerned to

celebrate the presence of immanent power in the natural and human

world, in the seasonal rhythms of renewal and withering, in food and in
sexuality. The erotic power of woman is venerated, seen as a force that
generates good for all the community, and as a power that woman herself
takes pride in.
(1987:43)

According to Starhawk, the erotic metaphors in the Sacred Marriage texts

centre on milk and cream. Inanna asks Dumuzi to make the milk yellow –
that is, creamy and fat – for her. She praises her vulva and compares it to a
 Wicca revival: Starhawk and the myth of ancient origin 73

field ready for the fertilizing seed plough. She praises her own body parts with
metaphors from the natural world:

(My crescent-shaped) “Barge of Heaven,”

so (well) belayed,
full of loveliness, like the new moon,
my untilled plot,
left so fallow in the desert,
my duck field so studded with ducks,
my hillock land, so (well) watered,
my parts, piled up with levees,
(well) watered. 3

Starhawk points out that Inanna never gets pregnant and that Sumer was
a society in which the erotic, not only motherhood, was seen as sacred.
Additionally, male sexuality was associated with fertility and procreation. Male
sexual power was symbolized as lifesustaining, as food itself; and nowhere in
the myths does she see any suggestions that male eroticism is linked with the
power of conquest, or force, or violence, or rulership, or suffering. Inanna sings
for Dumuzi:

He has sprouted, he has burgeoned,

He is lettuce planted by the water,
He is the one my womb loves best . . . .
Make your milk sweet and thick, my bridegroom.
My shepherd, I will drink your fresh milk. . . .
Let the milk of the goat flow in my sheepfold.
Fill my holy churn with honey cheese. 4

Starhawk’s message is that goddess worship is the oldest religion in the

world, flourishing when women still had important influence and power in
society. In her reading, Starhawk has confronted no split between the social
world, as portrayed in sacred myth, and the social world of actual women
and men. There was balance and equilibrium, and religious symbols
functioned to enhance and sacralize social life. Early Sumerian religion is
portrayed as a fertility cult in a broad sense, dedicated to the continuity of
natural and social life. Its basic worldview was erotic: the coming together of
goddess and god, of planets and stars, of women and men in an eternal
pattern of polarity; its proper rituals were fertility rites for the fecundity of
people and their land.
Then came a shift. Goddess worship was slowly suppressed during a
2000-year-long patriarchal war against nature, women and female sexuality,
resulting in male dominance and female subordination – well-known attributes
of western culture. Let us now turn to how Starhawk interprets this fall from
the originally good life, from paradise. First we shall discuss her explanations
74 Guardians of the world

of the driving forces that create an unnatural culture, and then her analysis of
the core ideology that maintains it.

Patriarchal fall
Starhawk’s theory about the development of unnatural cultures is formulated
as a cultural critique. Its function is to explain why a culture in dissonance
with the founding principles of cosmos has come to be normal in the human
perception of the world.The foundation she wants to establish for her critique
is that the unnatural is the result of social and historical construction, not of
metaphysical origin.The fall is not due to human sinfulness, or the result of an
inner, existential failure in the human constitution; neither can it be explained
with reference to an evil creator-god or to evil spirits who have possessed and
blindfolded the human mind and her good will. Starhawk’s optimistic rhetoric
states: since the fall has a social origin, it can be counteracted by social means
and human invention.
Starhawk tells two different stories about the development of unnatural
cultures. In the first story, published in The Spiral Dance, Starhawk explains the
unnatural as resulting from invasion. In the second story, in Truth or Dare, the
unnatural culture is due to degeneration, meaning a real fall within society
itself (cf. Dyrendal 1993:28–30). As we shall see, Starhawk does not fully
succeed in avoiding metaphysical explanations in her dual effort to establish
the fall as socially constructed since she cannot elucidate the causality of its
happening – whether as invasion or as degeneration. Actually, she comes close
to turning the traditional Jewish and Christian paradisiacal narratives in the
book of Genesis on their heads, making of the male, instead of the female, the
generic weak spot.
In Starhawk’s invasion theory, what she describes as the peaceful, prosper-
ing goddess cultures in Neolithic Europe were suddenly attacked from the
outside. Since these people were innocent to the phenomenon of war, having
no defence or weapons, they became an easy prey. In the origin myth, the
invaders are simply called “conquering patriarchs” from the East.

But in other lands [as opposed to the peaceful Wiccan societies], cultures
developed that devoted themselves to the arts of war. Wave after wave of
invasion swept over Europe from the bronze age on. Warrior gods drove
out the Goddess peoples from the fertile low lands and fine temples, into
the hills and high mountains where they became known as the . . .
Faeries.
(1979a:4)
Through the invasions of Indo-European warrior tribes, the old era of goddess
worship slowly came to an end. The mythology changed to legitimate a new
social structure and a new religion, and the Indo-European male-dominated
pantheon as expressed in Greek and Roman, as well as Norse, mythology
became authoritative. But it was not before Christianity came to power, and
 Wicca revival: Starhawk and the myth of ancient origin 75

gained a position as state religion all over Europe, that the Old Religion and
goddess-worship were interpreted as devil worship and forbidden. According
to Starhawk, it is at that point that the persecution of pagans became
aggressive, with a special interest in the punishment of the women–goddess
analogy, of women’s bodies as sacred symbols, and of women as representative
of the earlier mentioned erotic worldview:

The persecution was most strongly directed against women . . . . The

asceticism of early Christianity, which turned its back on the world of
flesh, had degenerated, in some quarters of the Church, into hatred of
those who brought the flesh into being . . . .The terror was indescribable
. . . . The Witches and Faeries who could do so, escaped to lands where
the Inquisition did not reach. Some may have come to America . . . . In
America as in Europe the Craft went underground, and became the most
secret of religions. Traditions were passed down only to those who could
be trusted absolutely, usually to members of the same family . . . . Parts of
the tradition became lost or forgotten.Yet somehow, in secret, in silence,
over glowing coals, behind closed shutters, encoded as fairytales and
folksongs, or hidden in subconscious memories, the seed was passed on.
(1979a:5–7)

When the persecutions were put to an end in the eighteenth century, the
seed-carriers could again emerge and “counter the imagery of evil with truth”
(1979a:7). As mentioned earlier, Starhawk herself learned the Craft from
Victor Anderson, whom she believes is a seed-carrier of the Faery tradition
surviving in America. She concludes her reconstructions of the past with an
ethical and political programme:

The word “Witch” carries so many negative connotations that many

people wonder why we use the word at all. Yet to reclaim the word
“Witch” is to reclaim our right, as women, to be powerful; as men to
know the feminine within as divine. To be a Witch is to identify with 9
million victims of bigotry and hatred and to take responsibility for
shaping a world in which prejudice claims no more victims.
(Ibid.)
A Witch is a shaper, one who bends the unseen into form. It is the respon-
sibility of these few “shapers” and “benders” to give a true account of history,
of the patriarchal ideology and of the means to create a better society, that is,
of Witchcraft.
As we have seen, in the invasion theory presented in The Spiral Dance,
Starhawk operates with two simultaneous societies, existing independently of
each other, representing antagonistic social principles. They are both created
by humans, although one is a social paradise and the other an evil patriarchy,
characterized by disrespect for natural laws. The question of why this is
the case is never answered. In reality, Starhawk leaves the reader with no
76 Guardians of the world

explanations as to how and why patriarchy developed. The existence of and

contradiction between natural and unnatural therefore become permanent,
because the unnatural cannot be understood and analysed within the concep-
tualized framework of the natural (cf. Dyrendal 1993). In such a theory the
unnatural becomes identical with impure and alien, constituting an element
that cannot be changed except through cleansing and exorcism. The evil
element is naturally constituted as evil for mysterious and unknowable
reasons, splitting the world between organic good and evil.
This black-and-white fairy tale of Europe’s cultural history can perhaps be
accepted as a legend but not as history. Criticism even emerged among the
Witches themselves, and to meet this new attitude Starhawk changed her
perspective when writing Truth or Dare. As was the case in the paradise tale,
she now labels her work research and wants to be taken seriously by feminist
scholars. She dismisses the invasion theory and substitutes for it a theory of fall
and degeneration within the society itself – without blaming intruders for the
misery. She still believes that the fall is due to war, not so much because of
conquistadors as because of a slow distortion of a society’s own, internal value
system, splitting the human Self.
Starhawk tries to describe the rise of patriarchy by going back to Sumer in
Mesopotamia. She makes diligent use of Gerda Lerner’s and Ruby Rohrlich’s
historical research. Starhawk compares the parallel developments of society
and religion in this region, and the key concepts in her theory are “centrali-
zation/kingship” and “militarization”. She makes them represent a change in
mentality from egalitarian to stratified, from matrilineal to patrilineal, from an
attitude in which nature is worshipped as giver of life to a new attitude which
states that nature represents chaos, forces that destroy life and that must be
controlled. She sees this shift as the result of an increased accumulation of
power and wealth by the two parallel – and closely linked – social institutions:
the temple and the priesthood; the castle and the kingship. Traditionally, the
temple and the castle represented a gender-segregated power structure. The
head of the temple was a female priestess, while the king was male.They were
both elected and did not inherit their positions. As the mundane repre-
sentatives of Inanna and Dumuzi, they united once a year in a sacred marriage
rite. The kingship lasted only one year for each. Then the king was replaced
and the cycle was repeated.
According to Starhawk’s sources, the mentality shift came when the king
increased his power at the expense of the temple high priestess. First he
prolonged his rulership from a year to his lifetime, introducing heritage to the
throne through bloodlines and to property through patrilineal descent. His
daughter, now subjugated to his law and authority, became the new high
priestess of the temple. Her inferior and vulnerable position gave the male
temple priests more power. The material foundations for these changes were,
on one hand, increased crop production and, on the other, increased involve-
ment with warfare. Both crop production and herding were the domains of
the temple and its properties. Improved, extensive agricultural irrigation,
 Wicca revival: Starhawk and the myth of ancient origin 77

resulting in larger crops, demanded stronger and more centralized organization.

City-states developed slowly and increased tax collection strengthened the
material power of the temple. At the same time, the king’s involvement with
warfare demanded a different form of social organization and leadership.
Starhawk believes that, in order to be recruited as foot soldiers, the males had
to be raised with a new set of values.
To analyse these new values Starhawk reads the Gilgamesh epic, probably
dating back to 2100 BCE and written down 1600 BCE, and the creation myth
Enuma Elish from about 2000 BCE, including its story of Tiamat and Marduk.
Her aim is to name these values and to see how sexuality, gender and the
natural world were affected by new perceptions.
Gilgamesh was a king in Uruk who spread fear amongst his people because
of his constant hunt for young virgin maidens. He refused to engage in the
sacred marriage rite or, according to Starhawk, to submit himself to the power
of the erotic. Instead he made a lifelong commitment to comradeship with his
friend and companion in wars, the wild man Enkidu. Starhawk states:

In the Gilgamesh epic the view of the erotic has changed. No longer is
sexuality the source of fertility, joy and abundance. Now the erotic is
linked in the same breath with war and conquest. Sex has become a
prerogative of the ruler . . . . Now, women belong to men. Where the
erotic once linked the human and natural worlds, now sex is seen to
separate the wild man from nature.
(Starhawk 1987:49–50)

According to Starhawk, male comradeship came to supersede the old rites of

love and fertility, and the nonsexual love between Gilgamesh and Enkidu
replaced the sexual love for women. Gender relations were reduced to pro-
creation and the satisfaction of pure sexual drives, while men loved passionately
as comrades in war and undertook heroic adventures together. In a passage
where Enkidu feels fear, Gilgamesh answers him,

Dear friend, do not speak like a coward . . . . hold close to me now and
you will feel no fear of death . . . . When two go together each will
protect himself and shield his companion, and if they fall they leave an
enduring name.5

Starhawk maintains that we here find the ideology and psychology of

warfare. She makes a distinction between tribal wars and “civilized” wars and
holds that “civilized” warfare, from Sumerian times on, is characterized by the
need for masses of soldiers to act together as parts of a whole, to face danger
and relinquish the right to make an individual decision about whether to
stand or run. These wars require a level of organization, obedience and
discipline that “runs deeply counter to instinct”. The value gained by being
one of the company of warriors is a substitute for the “lost value of the
78 Guardians of the world

self ”. As warfare became chronic, Starhawk believes, Sumerian society was

restructured in the image of war. Myth, epic, religion and customs changed to
perpetuate a new ideology of control.
Dumuzi’s power had been a power-from-within, the erotic power inherent
in his magically rising penis associated with food and not with violence. By
the time of Gilgamesh, the erotic had been diminished for men. According
to Starhawk, the male body instead became a weapon, no longer a source of
nourishment, comfort and delight. The ideology of warfare is founded on
contempt for women and associates sex with violence and control.
In the religious realm this shift in ideology became partly visible through
the introduction of sacrifice. To Starhawk it symbolizes human subordination
and the separation between humans and the gods:“The appearance of sacrifice
marks the erosion of women’s power and the shift from the celebration of the
Goddess of life, to glorification of the divinity of rulers” (Starhawk 1987:47).
But more importantly, the natural world was degraded and associated with
women, while men came to represent culture and the agency transforming
nature. This ideology Starhawk claims to read in the Enuma Elish creation
myth. In this myth the god Marduk creates the world by fighting and
dismembering the body of his mother (or grandmother), the goddess Tiamat.
She is the chaos water out of which he creates form and order, and thus gains
kingship.
He split her like a shell fish into two parts:
Half of her he set up and ceiled it as sky,
Pulled down the bar and posted guards.
He bade them to allow not her waters to escape . . .
He spoke, and at his word
the constellation was destroyed . . .
The Gods, his fathers,
seeing (the power of) his word,
rejoiced, paid homage: Marduk is king.6
Starhawk reads the myth as a reflection of the triumph of the patriarchal order
over the older “matristic” order, represented as the battle between Marduk,
champion of gods, and Tiamat, original progenitrix, primal sea. Being defeated,
Tiamat is now turned into a demon, a dragon of the waters, something that
bears no resemblance to humans’ common being.The old snake symbolism of
life-renewing female power is twisted to make female power seem dangerous
and destructive.
Starhawk finds the imagery of the supreme godhead as king and the sole
creator of the universe to be repeated in the later Hebrew scriptures and in
the attributes given to Yahweh. She writes that everywhere patriarchal cultures
and values were moulded, “the work of Marduk was continued by those who
dismembered the ancient Goddess religion” (1987:65). In fact, Starhawk’s
favourite imagery to describe the misery of the present world is the myth of
Tiamat’s dismembered body.
 Wicca revival: Starhawk and the myth of ancient origin 79

According to Starhawk, Marduk’s splitting of Tiamat not only expresses

how a male god gained superiority over a female or how women lost social
status long ago in Sumer. The message given in metaphorical language is
that the roots of western civilization are based upon control and mastery
of nature; control, “dismemberment” and “demonizing” of women are an
integral mythological part of controlling nature. Starhawk often uses the
story of Tiamat and Marduk in her workshops, and in a ritual meditation
called “Remembering Tiamat”, she asks the participants to go beyond time
and space and become Tiamat, helping to re-member her dis-membered
body. Starhawk’s educational point is to remind women that the world
existed for thousands of years before Marduk and Yahweh gained rulership
and destroyed the goddess and that patriarchy is a relatively new cultural
invention from a historical perspective (we shall return to the Tiamat
meditation in chapter 4).
If we now compare the invasion theory with the degradation theory (the
internal fall), we find that war, and the social values connected to war, are the
primary explanation for why and how patriarchy and unnatural cultures
developed: “power-over is ultimately born of war and the structures, social
and intrapsychic, necessary to sustain mass, organized warfare” (Starhawk
1987:9). In the first theory, the unnatural culture of war was imported from
aggressive invaders; in the second, this culture developed within society by a
complex and long process. In Starhawk’s account, Sumer is made an exemplary
model to understand the mindset and social structures of patriarchy in all
societies.
I shall now describe how Starhawk understands the characteristics of a
patriarchal ideology and theology, regardless of any particular society, and how
they become internalized in the individual. I shall no longer make explicit
distinctions between her theorizing in The Spiral Dance and Truth or Dare. In
addition, I shall include arguments taken from Dreaming the Dark (1982a) since
in that book she explicitly turns her criticism against the Christian culture.

Disease: patriarchal consciousness

Patriarchy is, according to Starhawk, characterized by a mindset she names a
“consciousness of estrangement”. Its creative force is to divide and split apart,
and its first manifestations were seen when people allegedly changed from
worshipping the divine as immanent, and feeling a bond to all beings, to
worshipping the divine as transcendent, and feeling separated and alienated:

The history of Patriarchal civilization could be read as a cumulative effort

to break that bond, to drive a wedge between spirit and flesh, culture and
nature, man and woman . . . and impose[d] . . . a mechanistic view of the
world as a dead machine.That rupture underlines the entwined oppressions
of race, sex, class and ecological destruction.
(Starhawk 1982a:xii)
80 Guardians of the world

This fundamental splitting apart into not only opposing but also contradictory
categories Starhawk calls “dualism” (1982a:19). Dualism starts the moment
humans no longer consider themselves as part of nature but divorce value
from organic life and project it onto a transcendent deity. Humans thus
become alienated from the world, from other people and from themselves.
Starhawk maintains that patriarchal dualism and the consciousness of
estrangement can be recognized in certain cultural narratives and internalized
thought-forms about sacredness (1), knowledge (2), morality (3) and gender
(4). The cultural dualism expressed in these themes is given an almost
ontological status since it possesses every new individual born in patriarchal
societies.To become de-possessed from patriarchy is the struggle of feminism;
and, in fact, the Witches’ ritual magic is a significant means in this struggle.
The contents of these themes are all related to religion and religious
symbolism, although it is difficult to say which concrete religion Starhawk has
in mind. In her discourse, the expression “patriarchal religion” refers not only to
the monotheistic traditions but also, to a certain extent, to the pagan religions of
ancient Greece and Rome.7 Nevertheless, the concept of god that she criticizes
is a certain interpretation of the Jewish divinity,Yahweh, although she takes it for
granted that this theistic, transcendental figure also represents Christian versions
of the godhead. Let me briefly present her criticism.

1 Sacredness The most important characteristic of patriarchal religion is,

according to Starhawk, that the sacred as such is removed from the world and
located in a separate, transcendent reality. Since one of the attributes of deity is
to represent ultimate value, this value is thus removed from the world, from
nature and from human beings. When deity is no longer manifest in the
world, nature also becomes desacralized:“when nature is empty of spirit, forest
and trees become merely timber” (Starhawk 1982a:6). The separation of
the divine from nature and natural life creates attitudes in which nature is
regarded as a dead machine that can be manipulated without any knowledge
of its inner organic life. Starhawk maintains that the Jewish and Christian
traditions have been driving forces in this development in western culture
because they reject nature as something sacred. Patriarchal religion creates a
consciousness “modeled on the God who stands outside the world, outside
nature, who must be appeased, placated, feared, and above all, obeyed”
(Starhawk 1987:9). The existential consequences of emptying the world of its
inherent value are confusion and depression. People experience a constant loss
of the Self and their endless search for the unattainable object of desire, always
outside of the Self, will only bring temporary satisfaction and healing.8

2 Knowledge According to Starhawk, the meaning of divine transcendence is

not only to locate ultimate value spatially and structurally; it is also to claim
exclusive access to knowledge of its contents. Since god does not dwell inside
human beings, the knowledge about ultimate value cannot be available to
individual humans through their experiences, senses or bodies. Instead, people
 Wicca revival: Starhawk and the myth of ancient origin 81

are taught that truth is revealed to certain chosen, great Men and confined to
their Word. This Word – which mediates between the godhead and the
humans – becomes ultimate authority.9
The belief in the unity of a transcendent truth creates fundamentalists.
They preserve the unity by purging out heretics and declaring war on lies.
The war between truth and lies is identical with the war between rulers and
oppressed, men and women – as well as between good and evil, light and
darkness, culture and nature, soul and body, god and devil. The goal is always
to control and eradicate “the other”, the polluted. Starhawk believes that both
sexism and racism can be traced to this way of thinking.

3 Morality Starhawk believes that “the imagery of religion shapes the self by
defining what value is” (1987:64). By projecting ultimate meaning outside the
world of the living, mundane life is deprived of value; it becomes inauthentic
and alien. In their inauthentic lives, humans are unable themselves to distin-
guish good from evil, and ethics becomes a set of laws and rules which are laid
down by an outside agency through its representatives on earth. This way, all
humans are retained in a childlike relationship to all authority.Therefore, they
do not easily develop moral integrity, which, according to Starhawk, is a result
of listening to the god(dess) within and taking responsibility for one’s own
actions and choices, which, in turn, is the moral code of the Wiccan initiation.
This is the story of success and failure, in which value is not something
inherent by birth: “a person who lacks value gains it; a person who has value
loses it. . . .[the story] reinforces a consciousness and a power structure in
which some people have value and others don’t” (1982a:22–3). The structure
of Paradise and Fall in Jewish and Christian traditions is, according to
Starhawk, different from her own analysis of a lost garden and its succeeding
historical degeneration: the Jewish and Christian paradise is a perfect natural
place from which people have been cast out because of their sins and to
which they are denied entrance because of their shortcomings (unless they are
reinitiated through baptism).

4 Gender Starhawk believes that the degradation of the body, the senses
and sexuality – which is implicit in the “god against nature” ideology – is an
expression of the same historical process that has created patriarchy and
generated a gender shift in the symbols of divinity from “goddess” to “god”.
Control of nature and hatred of women are two aspects of the same dualistic
way of thinking. Dualism categorizes by opposing values, and extensive use of
analogies implies that the association god/male degrades its opposite pole: the
world/female.
Starhawk maintains that by degrading nature, changing the limits of nature’s
domain and worshipping transcendent gods, humans have achieved the illusion
of power and control over life itself. A model where a male deity governs the
cosmos from outside serves to legitimize men’s control of social institutions
and the subordination of women.
82 Guardians of the world

Since the consciousness of estrangement determines how people in general

are valued, it also has negative consequences for men. It creates attitudes of
psychological “splitting” toward other fellow human beings, an attitude which
she defines as “the inability to see people or things as wholes containing both
desired and undesired elements . . . . In the split world, spirit wars with flesh,
culture with nature, the sacred with the profane, the light with the dark”
(Starhawk 1982a:19).

In Truth or Dare, Starhawk gives a more detailed psychological description of

how people “lose their Selves”, thus becoming alienated from themselves.
Her theory is that the unnatural culture is reproduced through unconscious
internalization: the religious–cultural deep structures force themselves upon
every individual and take possession, although not completely because then
change and resistance would be impossible. She names this culturally con-
ditioned person the “self-hater”. Her/his character is to underestimate her/his
own value and to identify negatively with a mirror image of god, the King.
The self-hater may “possess” humans with masks that mirror the five roles of
the King: Judge, Conqueror, Master of Servants, Censor, and Orderer of the
Universe. Starhawk’s strategy for moving beyond this inculturated personality
structure she calls the magic of de-possession, a strategy to which we shall
return.

Dualism
Starhawk believes that profound social changes are deeply linked to profound
changes in religious symbolism and religious language. This is so because,
“Religion is the soil of culture – in which the belief systems, the stories, the
thought-forms and all other institutions are based” (Starhawk 1982a:72).
She has been able to identify the structures of domination by comparing
religious narratives, social institutions and human relationships. The most
significant deep structure considered is the separation between god and the
natural world. This split is regarded as foundational for the unnatural culture’s
worldview, for example in modern science, where objects are regarded as
separate and existing in linear time, and in modern psychology, where humans
are defined irrespective of their natural surroundings. Transcendence is,
therefore, not only a metaphysical concept. Inherent in the image of a trans-
cendent god is the principle of social transcendence over nature, women,
body, sexuality and emotions. This process of splitting up Starhawk labels
“dualism”.10
Let us now summarize the basic principles she has identified in a dualistic
way of thinking: first, reducing and categorizing the diversity of the natural
world into pairs of opposites, A–B. The problem arises when these categories
are not defined as binary or polar, but as contradictory. Dualistic contradiction
is something other than recognizing a binary structure that causes something
to move or to have meaning by being different from something else.“Dualism”
 Wicca revival: Starhawk and the myth of ancient origin 83

as used by Starhawk implies an essential contradiction between A and B; they

are not included as poles that are complementary to each other or to a third
dimension.
The second principle entails attributing different moral value to A and B
and then making hierarchies by naming A positive/good and B negative/evil.
This is the most important step because until good and evil are separated as
incompatible moral dimensions, we cannot really talk about dualism. Contra-
diction between A and B is not enough as long as they are not measured
within a hierarchy of moral values. Initially, evil is not defined as immoral
actions but as an unclean state of being. Evil is constructed by judging parts
of the physiology of natural life as polluted and, thereafter, sinful. When
statements like “the body is unclean”, “death is an enemy”, “nature is cruel”
have no room for ambiguities, chastity becomes only good, carnal lust becomes
only evil. To protect the purity of “the good”, grayness, uncertainty and
fluidity are not welcomed. A is symbolized as white and light and morally
good while B is black and dark and morally evil; and they are not to be
mixed.
The third principle involves finally degrading or annihilating B in the sense
that A alone has the power. The dualistic thinking in terms of opposites does
not stop at a hierarchical system of moral values; the very fact of recognizing
the negative pole’s right to existence is to accept sin. Therefore, dualism
declares holy war on evil and tries to eradicate it, either literally, for example,
by burning witches or by ideological control. Because of this fusion between
“the evil” and “the other”, “oneness” becomes the highest good. Oneness is a
quality that characterizes the monotheistic concept of god in orthodox
Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Implicit in dualism’s ultimate desire for
oneness is the concept of a fall from the original oneness which, in the
eschatological future, will be reestablished. Although dualism is defined as
separating the world into irreconcilable twos, it understands this split to be
ontologically determined: it can only be repealed in a new world. “Holy war”
is an aid to opening the door to the new world’s lack of differentiation here
and now.
Implied in Starhawk’s definition of dualism, and in the way I have structured
its basic pattern above, there is a crucial distinction between complementary and
contradictory binarity. She does not deny that humans think and order the
world in terms of opposites or poles. In fact, the erotic worldview of
Witchcraft is founded on polarity and attraction between “female” and “male”
energies. Her critique is rather directed toward the moral value judgement put
upon these opposites and their internal relationship: one of harmony or one
of war.
Starhawk’s concern that we ought not to confuse polarity with contra-
dictions can be illuminated by consulting Lévi-Strauss’s cognitive theory. He
finds “thinking in terms of polarity” to be a pan-cultural pattern, from which
he draws the conclusion that binarity is universal and a reflection of how our
brain works objectively (Lévi-Strauss 1979:10–13). Starting with the basic
84 Guardians of the world

couple nature–culture, he states that a part of our brain’s cognitive equipment

is to arrange opposed concepts in binary series of correspondences to produce
meaning, like cold–warm, death–life, woman–man, etc. According to Lévi-
Strauss, the decisive difference between cultures is not binarity but whether
they classify social status and identity by reference to metaphors from the
natural or from the cultural domain.To this we may add: whether they classify
according to polarity or contradiction.
Starhawk’s solution, within Lévi-Strauss’s conceptual framework, is to
transgress the either–or division between natural and cultural categories. The
social identity claimed in “I am a Witch”, is an effort to undermine this
distinction. The Witch represents neither “culture” nor “nature”; she is both.
She comes from the animal kingdom, not metaphorically but substantially,
meaning that she is nature, constituted by the substances matter–energy–spirit.
She has the ability to communicate with other animals, the plants, the whole
cosmos, because “these powers live in us, as we live in them.The mysteries are
what is wild in us” (Starhawk 1987:6). She is also a human being, with the
specific human ability to bend the energy–spirit embodied in her for a cultural
purpose, as well as to transform matter into cultural artifacts. Ideally, she is not
a prey to the forces of nature; nor is she a victim of the forces of culture
because she has power within both domains.
If women shall understand their true natures and their history and be able
to take agency and the responsibility for shaping the world “in the image of
the Goddess”, Starhawk claims that they must reenter the position of the
“witch”. In her opinion, Witchcraft represents a realistic (natural) worldview
about the interconnection between nature and culture that is true and valid
for all people, not only for the Witch. The reason Starhawk can be so
optimistic about the possibility of creating cultural change is that humans are
not seen as totally conditioned or possessed by an unnatural culture.There is a
vestige of the wild in every being, a place inside symbolized as “the child”,
from which new power and new knowledge can be drawn. Magical ritual is
seen as a unique tool for entering the domain between nature and culture,
inviting nature as essence and as domain to be represented simultaneously.

Medicine: the return of the Goddess

As her claimed ancestors did, Starhawk believes in some form of reincarnation
theology that every human spirit or soul is born from goddess in the beginnings
of time. It never dies but is physically reborn in new forms in time.This spirit is
identical with the Deep Self, which in fact is the immanent aspect of goddess. In
her worldview, humans are thus twice born: of goddess first (their spirit) and
then by a woman (their bodies, minds and feelings). Further, humans do not
enter this world as a tabula rasa; they are imprinted with inner knowledge about
the source of their beings, as well as with an ethical programme stating a will to
life on earth. So, even though Starhawk’s theory is that patriarchy has permeated
every inch of society, it never was and never can be completely in control:
 Wicca revival: Starhawk and the myth of ancient origin 85

We are not machines. We are not infinitely programmable, endlessly

reshapable. The self has demands of its own, and the body has needs that
cannot be denied. The Orderer’s belief that all can be known and
controlled is a delusion . . . . The Orderer’s false knowing keeps us from
seeing and understanding the true order inherent in our bodies, in nature,
in the ways we interact . . . . What needs to be reclaimed from the
Orderer is our own ability to create an order grounded in organic reality
and connected to the natural world, the order of the body’s own needs
and processes, pains and pleasures.
(Starhawk 1987:233)

Starhawk’s goal is a society “grounded in organic reality” that can heal the
“dis-membered” world and recognize the inherent value of each person and
the elemental life that makes up the earth’s living body. She believes that her
vision is not radically new and refers to the values preached – but never
practised – in the American Constitution. But, the old dream about “liberty
and justice for all”, proclaimed by the Founding Fathers, is not enough: “A
society that truly recognizes the sacred manifest in the living world must go
even further. For the earth herself becomes sacred to us, as do all her
creatures” (Starhawk 1987:315).
Starhawk’s vision is rooted in the knowledge and experience of “the
Goddess”.Toward the end of Truth or Dare, before introducing the chapter on
“Resistance and Renewal”, she repeats the myth of ancient origin, stating that
at one time, the Goddess, who is the spirit-soul of the earth and of all living
beings, was awake in everybody. All knew and honoured her and lived in
balance and harmony.Then the patriarchal fall came. People turned away from
the Goddess and created a “culture of death”. Suddenly confronted with the
possibility of final ecological destruction at the turn of the twenty-first
century, women and men began to remember the Goddess:

The reborn dead walked the earth in new forms; the Witches arose and
danced in the open.The peoples of the earth began to forge new links of
friendship.They reclaimed the sacred places and with them the sacredness
of the earth . . . they learned again the ancient knowledge and the
mysteries, and used that knowledge not to build weapons but to evoke
the will to life of the earth herself that burns in every living being . . . .
But the ending of this myth has not yet been written. Has the Goddess
reawakened only to preside over the destruction of the earth? Or will our
awakening come in time? For unlike other deities, the Goddess does not
come to save us. It is up to us to save her – if we so choose. If we so will.
(Starhawk 1987:310–11)

The return of the Goddess and the abilities of her devotees to re-create a new
natural culture, or a sustainable culture in Starhawk’s terminology, are therefore
an open-ended question, the outcome of which she is hesitant to describe –
86 Guardians of the world

although she proclaims a complete political manifest for the fictitious year
2040 in her novel The Fifth Sacred Thing. Her basic argument is that a goddess-
centreed culture must be holistic, growing organically from a consciousness
that is radically different from the consciousness of dualism and patriarchy:
“This is the consciousness I call immanence – the awareness of the world and
everything in it as alive, dynamic, interdependent, interacting, and infused with
moving energies: a living being, a weaving dance” (Starhawk 1982a:9).
Immanence is also a primary characteristic of the Goddess, defined in
opposition to the transcendent, patriarchal male god. The Goddess, therefore,
becomes the symbol of a new culture, and to worship her – through ritual and
right living – becomes the medium to cultural and personal transformation.
Starhawk’s optimism about the cultural effects of resurrecting the Goddess
is founded on a specific theory of symbols developed by certain feminist
scholars. From reading Mary Daly’s Beyond God the Father and Carol P. Christ’s
famous article “Why Women Need the Goddess”, Starhawk has learned that
the nature of religious symbols is to constitute the values of the human social
world. According to Christ, religious symbols and rituals create a cultural
ethos that defines the deepest values in a society and in the persons living
there. She supports her argument with Clifford Geertz’s definition of religion
as “a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive and long-
lasting moods and motivations . . . .” (cf. Geertz 1979:79). Regarding the
power of symbols, she asserts that “symbols have both psychological and
political effects, because they create the inner conditions [deep-seated attitudes
and feelings] that lead people to feel comfortable with, or to accept social and
political arrangements that correspond to the symbol system” (Christ 1982
[1979]: 72, 79).
Even if people no longer believe in “God” as defined in the Jewish and
Christian traditions, or participate in the church’s institutional structure,
they are, according to Christ, still bound by the power of the God–Father
symbolism. The effect of a symbol does not depend on rational agreement. It
works in the unconscious mind and makes it possible for people to deal with
frontier situations in life, such as death, evil, suffering, birth, sexuality. There-
fore,“symbol systems cannot simply be rejected, they must be replaced” (Christ
1982:23).
The God–Father symbol has, according to Christ and Daly, been shown to
have disastrous consequences for women. The symbol not only legitimizes
hierarchy between men and women, with men as the superior, but it also
legitimizes the oppression of women’s bodies and their sexuality. This is so
since a woman may see herself as created in the image of God–Father,
meaning in his likeness, only by denying her own sexual identity, affirming
instead God’s transcendence and sexual “identity” (cf. Christ 1982:73).
Religious symbols, then, are both models of divine existence and models for
human behaviour and identity, an interpretation that today permeates both
the Goddess Movement and feminist Witchcraft. Since religious symbols are
so powerful, both these movements argue that “the seeds” of a new society are
 Wicca revival: Starhawk and the myth of ancient origin 87

sown by creating new stories, myths, images and symbols. One of the tasks of
“Goddess thealogy” is, therefore, to develop “Goddess symbolism” that can
give new models of identification.
In the myth of ancient origin there is an assumed link between goddess
worship and a high social value attributed to women. Since Starhawk takes
it for granted that the link between religious symbols and social values is
deterministic, the resurrection of the old goddesses can be made equal to a
political programme for a futuristic, feminist society. But implied in this link is
a hidden argument about the priority of the natural, meaning that the symbol
of “Goddess” is not chosen because it is morally better than “God”, but
because it holds more empirical truth about the natural world: it symbolizes
that the birthing power is female and proclaims that humans are born of
women, not of men. As stated earlier, Witches believe in the occult (and
ancient philosophical) creed “as above so below”, which means that forces
operative in the human microcosm mirror the universal macrocosm – or vice
versa. In the human microcosms, women are empirically those who bring life
into the world. But if the human life-generating powers are of a female
nature, so must the cosmic life-generating powers be. To highlight this truth,
Starhawk suggests a female symbol for the divine creator:

We call her Goddess, not to narrowly define her gender, but as a

continual reminder that what we value is life brought into the world.
(1987:7)
She could just as easily be called God . . . .Yet the female nature of the
ground of being is stressed – because the process of creation is a birth
process.The world is born, not made, and not commanded into being.
(1979a:24)

That women give birth is a cosmic and not a cultural law. When a culture
values this cosmic fact by giving women high respect socially, it mirrors
natural laws and opens the door to the possibility of creating a social paradise.
When a religion expresses this fact through its system of symbol it supports
the social validation of women.
Starhawk is not fully convinced that people will retrieve this knowledge
unless they make a conscious choice; it is not likely to burst forth spontan-
eously. We find a similar argument when she states that it is not enough to
know the laws of nature in order to create justice. Nature must also be revered
from a strictly chosen ethical position, an ethics which gives life value above
death. For since death feeds life in the reproductive chain of natural life, it is
not a given from mere observations of nature that life should be valued more
highly than death, or that “life brought into the world” – as represented by the
goddess–women analogy – is of the highest moral order.
Since humans are born from the earth, which is the Goddess, they are
imprinted by her in their deepest state of being and, ideally, in no need of
rituals to be connected to her. But, given the conditions under which they
88 Guardians of the world

live, the Goddess has been suppressed and denied by patriarchal culture for
centuries and is in deep need of resurrection.To “reconnect” with the Goddess
is, therefore, for modern people equal to rebirth in a mystical sense, that is, to
entering the consciously chosen path of the Goddess. However it happens –
either by ethical choice or by mystical experience/revelation – Starhawk
promises great rewards for those who take the oath of initiation:

She is the bridge, on which we can cross the chasms within ourselves,
which were created by our social conditioning, and reconnect with our
lost potentials. She is the ship, on which we sail the waters of the deep
self, exploring the uncharted seas within. She is the door, through which
we pass into the future. She is the cauldron, in which we who have been
wrenched apart simmer until we again become whole. She is the vaginal
passage, through which we are reborn.
(Starhawk 1979a:77)

In Christianity, it is not common to perceive people as born twice (by God/ess

and by woman), with an additional third possibility of rebirth. Although created
by god, human beings are not generally regarded as born from God/ess prior
to their physical birth. They are first born by women; later, owing to the
fall, humans are offered symbolic rebirth by the Holy Spirit through the rite of
baptism. But this second birth is not generic; it is an option for choice, a rebirth
similar to Witches’ third birth (initiation).This is an important difference.
Also, within the theological framework of the baptismal ritual, birth from
woman represents a birth to death, meaning a life limited by death, while the
second birth by the Holy Spirit is a birth from death to life, meaning eternal
life unlimited by death. In Starhawk’s goddess theology, death is not an absolute
division line since she believes that death, by its very nature, continually makes
room for new life to grow. In her universe, every human being is, therefore,
granted the spirit of the Goddess as a gift of creation.This is so because humans
are regarded as a specific modus of the divine: at a deep level humans are divine,
made of the same substances (matter–energy–spirit) as the divine, part of the
cosmos and connected to all life. But as humans they are primarily separate,
with a mere provisional understanding of their deep nature. The alienated,
nonreligious human is therefore unnatural because humans’ basic natural
condition is to walk the path of the Goddess (cf. Dyrendal 1993: 88,102).
Summing up, we may conclude that Starhawk’s long perspectives on the
European and Semitic cultural developments, from matrilinear to patrilinear
kinship systems and from worship predominantly of goddesses and gods to
worship predominantly of one male god, are to some extent in accordance
with prevailing research. But her claim that these changes mirror changes in
women’s actual lives and social positions from influential and egalitarian to
marginal and oppressed is greatly disputed and criticized. Also, her filling in of
empirical dates and explanations in this long perspective must be regarded as
closer to mytho-poetry than to historical research.11
 Wicca revival: Starhawk and the myth of ancient origin 89

A crucial point of her misconceptions is her moralistic reading of history.

Prehistorical pagan society, of which we know very little except from more or
less interesting archeological interpretations, is conceived of as good; ancient
Greek and Roman pagan societies, of which we know a whole lot more,
are less good since these already represent militarism and patriarchy; while
contemporary “Christian” society is the incarnate evil since, amongst many
horrible things, it constructed “the witch” in an early modern phase to
identify its enemy and burned her as scapegoat.
The problem is, according to historians like J.B. Russell, that Christianity
did not invent the witch; paganism did (Russell 1985:25). Long before the
Inquisition started its witch hunt, she was produced as a social scapegoat by
pre-Christian pagan cultures, causing individual charges of witchcraft to be
raised according to the regulations of the civil law. This witch was not
regarded as a healer but as an antisocial, destructive element who needed to be
neutralized. In fact, the Christian Church initially dismissed pagan beliefs in
witchcraft as superstition. It was first when the Inquisition, in its hunt for
heretics in the fourteenth century, developed a comprehensive demonology
that the pagan witch was resurrected by theologians in order to serve as a
diabolic co-creator to the Devil. Anthropologist Andrew Sanders has docu-
mented how the witch is constructed as scapegoat cross-culturally and not
only in western countries. This figure was common in both the Navaho and
Ndembu societies, and Navaho people did admit that witchcraft accusations
could be used politically in order to destroy political competitors. In some
instances, the accused witch was sentenced to death (Sanders 1995:124, 143).
The difference between tribal pagan societies and Christian Renaissance
Europe is, therefore, not the creation of the witch as a scapegoat but of the
demonic powers attributed to her and the extent to which she was exorcised:
by the purgation of death during a time span of 300 years (p. 152).

Starhawk, pagan modernists and Wicca Revival

Starhawk is not alone when claiming historical lineage for her beliefs. As
pointed out, this is characteristic of Witchcraft as religion and social movement;
and, until the 1970s, Witches’ historical claims were not in severe conflict with
an academic viewpoint.As I wrote in the Introduction, many historians believed
that the people persecuted as witches in the European witch hunts were
members of a surviving pagan religion (Hutton 1996:3). This view had been
established as acceptable early in the century, in particular through the immense
influence of egyptologist and ethnologist Margaret A. Murray. When the thesis
of an Old Religion collapsed, it made the plausibility of Murray’s reconstruction
of this religion, as well as Gardner’s claims about its survival into the present, also
collapse. All of a sudden, there was no social heritage to a living religion, only
folklore, folk customs, literature and ceremonial fraternities.
The collapse of the theory of a surviving Old Religion has caused great
distress to the Witches’ identity, and during the last 20 years they have
90 Guardians of the world

developed different strategies to cope with this fact. One strategy is orthodox,
devotedly believing in Gardner’s story, insisting upon a real historical lineage
to the past in spite of the scholarly arguments.The other strategy is modernist,
conforming to the updated research published, maintaining that living con-
nections with the past are impossible to prove historically and, therefore,
renouncing the whole idea as really unimportant to legitimate contemporary
paganism. The middle group makes a hermeneutical distinction between
content (spiritual roots) and form (historical roots);

“The roots of the spirit of Wicca are the fundamental nature and the
needs of the human psyche in its relation to the universe.The roots of the
form of Wicca are many and various. A great deal of misunderstanding and
irrelevant criticism has arisen from confusing the two. By separating form
and content, it is possible to claim a lineage back to pagan spirituality,
even though the historical roots are shown to be fairly recent.
(Farrar 1983:19)

Starhawk takes a middle position of her own. As I have attempted to docu-

ment above, she considers the consciousness and spirit of Witchcraft akin to
ancient paganism, having survived into the present as “seeds”; historically,
she alternates between two different viewpoints. On one hand, she regards
Witchcraft as a religious path arising from experience, not dependent upon
traditions to survive or to be authentic. Even though Witchcraft is the “Old
Religion”, it has undergone so many changes that, in reality, it is recreated
rather than revived (Starhawk 1979a:8). On the other hand, she does not
completely give up the idea of historical lineage, since the pagan spirit was
obviously kept alive by something or somebody until it resurfaced. In fact,
Starhawk does not demonstrate a great interest in the recent history of
Witchcraft from the time it went underground until it was reclaimed by
Gardner. Her focus is rather toward prehistory and ancient history, and her
ultimate goal is to answer her own questions concerning why European
cultures gave up the goddess and instead encouraged a patriarchal social
development.
When Starhawk turns to the past, it is in order to “root” the identity of
contemporary, feminist Witchcraft. Apart from this, Starhawk is not interested
in origins. Neither in her writings nor in conversation does she give any
explicit account of the sources of her theology and ritual teachings. She will
refer to her own experience, to what she has learned from coven work, or to
her teacher and founder of the “orally preserved” Faery tradition, Victor
Anderson. Her authority of reference is usually stated as, “In my tradition we
say . . . ., we do . . . .” or, “Witchcraft teaches . . . ”. Her disengagement
in naming her sources and her apparent lack of interest in how modern
Witchcraft was really created have been adopted as a common attitude in the
Reclaiming community.They often rely on, and refer to, Starhawk’s version of
history and cultural development in order to meaningfully explain the choice
 Wicca revival: Starhawk and the myth of ancient origin 91

of Witchcraft as their spiritual path. In the fora in which I participated –

whether in classes, circles, ritual planning groups, political meetings or social
gatherings – I never experienced a discussion of the roots and recent develop-
ment of Witchcraft or Wicca beyond the level of mythopoesis. I also met this
ahistorical attitude within non-Reclaiming feminist groups, and it seems to be
a characteristic of the feminist branch of Witchcraft.
In more traditional Wiccan groups there is often a lively debate regarding
the contemporary roots of Witchcraft, and people take pride in being well
read and arguing consistently. Some of them have also contributed substantially
to the academic research record, for example Aidan Kelly, the founder of
NROOGD. By means of comparative textual analysis he has tried to prove
that contemporary pagan Witchcraft was invented fully-fledged by Gerald
Gardner from sources such as magical lore and grimoires, in particular The
Greater Key of Solomon (1888) and Aleister Crowley’s Magick in Theory and
Practice (1929). Although he keeps the door open for the possibility that pre-
Gardnerian, coven-like groups might have existed, also in the US, he dismisses
that these groups had access to any other or older sources than what Gardner
had, including Victor Anderson’s Faery tradition. Kelly blatantly states, “I call
all Neopagan witches Gardnerian witches, because, as far as I can tell [. . .] all
the current activity derives from widespread imitating of Gardnerian practices,
and from no other sources.” 12 Modernists, such as Kelly, do not agree that the
new-ness of Witchcraft is diminishing since all religions by necessity begin as
new religions. He simply regards the coming-into-being of Witchcraft as a
response to a Christianity not fulfilling people’s needs: “If the Roman
Catholic church were actually as [Andrew] Greeley describes it, there would
be no need for the Craft” (Kelly 1991:4).
Although Witchcraft was created under solid influence from ceremonial
magic, it also differs distinctly from this occult tradition, for the theological
ideas specific to Witchcraft are inspired by sources other than the mainly
Christian and Kabbalistic heritage of western occultism. As Kelly states,

the “ceremonial” or “high” magic of the grimoires and secret societies

were inherently Judaeo-Christian in concept and vocabulary [. . . .]
Gardner began with a Judaeo-Christian ritual that he later “paganized,” by
removing the obviously Judaeo-Christian terms, and replacing them with
terms that appear more neutral.
(Kelly 1991:36,50).

However, the Jewish and Christian heritage still shines through, for example
in the determinate gender relationship between divinity and priesthood, most
rigidly expressed in the Catholic Church, where God is exclusively repre-
sented by a male priesthood. Accordingly, when divinity in Witchcraft is
extended with a female side, the Goddess must be represented by a female
priestess.When the Goddess is elevated, so also is the position of the priestess.
If we now recall the theory of religious feminism about a supposed inter-
92 Guardians of the world

dependence between religious gender symbolism and social gender position,

we can conclude that this whole idea is not a theory but a theology. It is based
on the occult, but nevertheless also Christian, doctrine “as above, so below”. It
projects an ancient western idea as a universal given, presumably implied in
the nature of symbolism as such. But it is only in the western world that
heavenly gender prescribes social gender as a mirror image. In many other
cultures a male god will be served by a female priestess, and vice versa.
The Craft itself can bear witness to how difficult it is in western traditions
to break with Christian culture and, for example, introduce femaleness as the
primary principle of divinity or of leadership. Gardner and Valiente split up
in 1959 because Gardner’s success as a religious inventor “was going to his
head”. He suggested a new set of Laws for the Craft, which Valiente
considered sexist.The Laws set forth that

the Gods love the brethren of Wicca as a man loveth a woman, by master-
ing her . . . . [The High Priestess had to recognize that all power came
from the God, who had only lent it to her] . . . . And the greatest virtue
of a High Priestess be that she recognizes that youth is necessary to the
representative of the Goddess. So will she gracefully retire in favour of a
younger woman, should the coven so decide in council.
(Valiente 1989:70)

What Valiente failed to see is that Gardner’s sexism was not his individual
problem; his way of thinking is simply representative of the sexism embedded
in the western occult traditions, wholesale. When Gardner portrays the
goddess through her representative in a lovely, “sweet” woman, who is “Man’s
ideal” (cf. Gardner 1959:128) and with whom he seeks reunion, he only
reveals his dependence on a fundamentally androcentric western spiritual
tradition. The Kabbalah may be a nice, non-Christian mystical tradition to
lean on for pagans, but its whole raison d’être is to reconcile a man with his
god, manifesting as the Shekinah, the lost feminine who is believed to
graciously descend into the man’s wife every Friday night in order for him to
merge, not with her, but with the godhead manifesting in her (cf. Scholem
1946:225, 235). The very same theme is repeated in the romantic tradition,
which ultimately restores the feminine in order to save the Man and return
him “back home” (Abrams 1973:255).
Valiente disdained Gardner’s sexism and broke away. Since this, a series of
new Witches’ covens have branched off from the original covens constructed
by Gardner (and Valiente) in England in the 1950s, and in the 1960s, the
movement spread to the US via Raymond Buckland, a Gardnerian Witch
(Adler 1979:90). Except from what has been hinted at in the Introduction, I
shall go into no more detail about how the Craft then split, spread and
flourished, but refer readers to Adler (1979), Eller (1993), Orion (1995) and
Hutton (2000).
 Wicca revival: Starhawk and the myth of ancient origin 93

Reclaiming and Wicca Revival

How do we position Reclaiming and the Faery tradition within the frame-
work and history of Wicca Revival? As stated earlier, when confronted with
questions about the truth-value of their claimed historical lineage, most
Reclaiming Witches will resort to a position in which it is of no consequence
whether the myth of ancient origin and its recent revival are true or not;
Witchcraft as they practice it is perceived as a feminist religion of experience.
Although Starhawk supports this view to a certain extent, her basic attitude to
this approach is that she finds it possible and likely that Gardner’s Witch
tradition was created by him, while her Faery tradition relies on other
historical sources. What these sources might be she never states. As far as the
occult influence is concerned, she admits that Witches may have adopted
some of the ritual procedures of the Jewish Kabbalah, for example, in the way
Witches create sacred space for the ritual. She writes that this probability is
enhanced by the “fact” that it was common for witches in the Middle Ages to
hide Jews from the Christian persecutors (Starhawk 1979a:58). In this
argument, Starhawk turns toward orthodoxy, holding on to the myth of “The
Wicca Revival” and referring to her own initiation in the Faery tradition
in order to legitimize the claim that the religious path she presents is not
“invented”.
Why is it that the occult heritage and the kinship with Gardnerian Witch-
craft, to the extent that they are known, is denied by Starhawk and most
Reclaiming people? I find two plausible answers. The first is the sexism syn-
drome we already encountered in the conflict between Valiente and Gardner.
Reclaiming people are bored with, and do not want to be associated with,
what they regard as male chauvinism and the “obsession with sex, drugs and
rock ’n’ roll”, which in periods they have seen flourish within some of the
more traditional Witchcraft traditions. When I asked one of the long-term
members in Reclaiming why she did not go to pagan gatherings anymore, she
answered that she was fed up with non-feminist (neo)pagan Witches, “The
only reason they are into the Craft is because of a chance to get laid and have
free sex. I don’t go to festivals because I am sick and tired from listening to
how they boast of their orgies at breakfast.” This very emotional answer does
not really portray paganism and traditional Witchcraft as I have come to know
them, including at the festivals. But regarding the lack of a feminist con-
sciousness within these traditions, there are, in fact, tendencies toward sexual
games and manipulation, which are not found within Reclaiming.13
The second answer is that Reclaiming Witches insist on practising a
feminist religion and, therefore, try to hide their western occult and patriarchal
roots, both from themselves and from others. This is because of the dilemmas
that may arise when a feminist spiritual path has to admit to inheriting
important elements of its cult from such a male-dominated and dogmatic
tradition as the privileged men’s secret societies from the turn of the century
94 Guardians of the world

and their main pillar, the Kabbalah. Even though “unclean” heritage lines
seem to be the fate of all reform movements, Starhawk herself has an
understanding of Witchcraft as a break-up with all patriarchal traditions,
including Jewish and Christian, and as a return to a pure, natural prepatriarchal
religious practice. Having to admit that they cannot fully escape their Christian
and Jewish upbringing, which shows up in the Witches’ ideological luggage
disguised as occult philosophy, would probably be experienced by many as too
ironic and felt as a restraint on their visionary optimism about the potential of
Witchcraft to create a new nonpatriarchal culture. It is extremely important to
draw attention to this dilemma in order to undertake a serious analysis of the
religious practices of the Reclaiming Witches. It also indicates the complexity
of their religious symbolism, pointing to constant underlying tensions
between segments of the Witches’ theology and that of anarchism.

Notes
1 Starhawk starts both The Spiral Dance (1979a:3) and Dreaming the Dark
(1982a:xii) by telling her own version of the myth about “the Wicca Revival”, as
she has inherited it from the Faery tradition.
2 In western culture the category of nature (or the natural) is commonly used in
two distinct fashions: either to designate a class of objects, such as trees, animals or
human bodies, or to designate the constitutive principles (or essences) underlying all
objects. In the last case we cannot really separate between nature and non-nature.
A difference set up against nature (as chaos or culture) is necessarily a difference in
or of nature. Culture as cultivation and transformation of natural things is not an
opposition but a prolongation of (and included within) the category of nature. In
her theoretical constructs, Starhawk refers to nature both as domain and as essence
(cf. Dyrendal 1993).
3 Thorkild Jacobsen 1976:45–6, quoted in Starhawk 1987:43.
4 Diane Wolkstein and Samuel N. Kramer 1983:38–9, quoted in Starhawk
1987:44–5.
5 N.K. Sandars 1960:76–7, quoted in Starhawk 1987:51.
6 James B. Pritchard 1958:35 and 32, quoted in Starhawk 1987:51; Jacobsen
1976:176, quoted in Starhawk 1987:63–4.
7 By also presenting the old pagan religions as patriarchal, Starhawk differs signifi-
cantly from nonfeminist Wiccan authors (e.g. Jones and Pennick 1995).
8 Starhawk regards Christianity’s devaluation of nature as a primary cause for the
process of secularization, a fact of modernity which she resents (cf. Starhawk
1979a:190; 1982a:23).
9 Starhawk does not believe that Witchcraft is the only radical alternative to
patriarchal religion and says she hopes that the religions of the future will be
“multifaceted, growing out of many traditions” (1979a:196).
10 The contents of Starhawk’s critique of western religion are in particular inspired
by Mary Daly (cf.York 1995:107) and resemble viewpoints that are also shared by
other feminist theologians – although her form is more poignant and biased.
Ruether, for example, displays from Sexism and God-Talk (1983) onward viewpoints
largely similar to those of Starhawk regarding the question of religious dualism.
Ruether’s own quest for the God/ess includes, according to McCance, “a critique
of the dualistic, hierarchical thinking which she argues has informed the western
theological tradition, including its God-language and imagery . . . . Ruether
 Wicca revival: Starhawk and the myth of ancient origin 95

suggests that ‘God/ess’ language draws its imagery, not from models of kingship
and hierarchical power, but from female roles and experience” (McCance 1990:
173).
11 Starhawk has been heavily criticized (e.g. by Eller 2000) for the theoretical and
historical constructs that she and other goddess worshippers have inherited from
miscellaneous feminist scholarship. The critical voices argue that we cannot take
for granted that female cult figurines symbolize deities, and not simply women or
clan mothers; the alleged existence of an ancient, unified religion of the goddess is
rejected as a historic fallacy; the view that historical evolution shows a linear
development from matrilinear to patrilinear, which should be irreversible within
patriarchy, is discarded; the Indo-European migration from east to west was not a
conquest but more likely a slow, peaceful integration; there is no uniform evidence
for deterministic correlations between values expressed in religious symbolism and
those functioning in social life; those who read mythology as historical docu-
mentaries in search of historical identity have misunderstood the whole genre; the
search for a historical golden age is unfounded in any historical material except in
myths; the duo-theistic concepts of a goddess and a god are foreign to ancient
cultures and only an ideal projection onto history of a romantic, modern notion of
love.
4 The thesis of religious feminism, that there is a positive correlation between
religious gender symbolism and social gender hierarchies, has in particular been
contested. According to Caroline Walker Bynum, the thesis stems from a mis-
reading of C. Geertz in which the interpreters make too tight a relationship
between social fact and symbolic meaning. She finds no historical evidence that
female god(dess) language leads to higher social status for women, or a more
affirming female identity (Bynum 1986:9, n. 15). The problem with Bynum’s
criticism is, however, her purely formal categories for male and female. A conse-
quence is that individual qualities attributed to the deities become irrelevant. But
isn’t there indeed historical evidence that the religion of Yahweh and the early
Jesus movement had radically different social implications for both men and
women, not because Jesus was male (as was Yahweh) but because he differed from
the conventional male icon? A common example used to substantiate Bynum’s
argument is Mary, Jesus’ mother. She is venerated in all Catholic countries without
having “caused” a higher social status for women. Again, the problem with this
argument is that the identity the female figure of Mary points to is completely
conventional. It does not offer a break with the culturally accepted gendered
discourse. We may assume that if such were the case, she would have instigated a
breakup from patriarchal role models, as Jesus has done, again and again. Bynum
fails to notice that Mary’s gender is irrelevant as long as she does not transcend the
traditionally gendered (and heterosexual) western matrix.
4 A more balanced viewpoint is offered by anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday
(1981). She maintains, on the basis of extensive cross-cultural comparisons, that
arguments similar to Bynum’s are only partly to the point. Sanday tries to demon-
strate that people are more apt to antagonize and “turn literal”, making sexual
difference a key part of their struggle, in times of severe social pressure, harsh
competition over short supplies or during warfare. Values conferred to gendered
symbols of the sacred are then read literally and transferred directly to social reality
(and vice versa). Under such circumstances, divine maleness will more easily
become incitement for male dominance and for social subordination of women,
just as female deities are more likely to be conquered by their male siblings.
Times of peace, prosperity and abundance do, on the other hand, make people’s
symbolizing abilities more sophisticated and less literal. They are, according to
Sanday, able to worship a male god as divinity without reducing the worthiness of
96 Guardians of the world

females in the social world (e.g. modern Europe); they are able to worship female
goddesses as representative of deity without enhancing the worthiness of females
in the social world (e.g. traditional India).
12 (Kelly 1991:x). Kelly has a PhD from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.
13 The fear of sexual orgies has always lingered with the Witches, and the researchers
are accordingly mindful to tell that they have never experienced them (cf.
Matthews 1995:341), and neither have I. But my oldest informants tell another
story. They say that sexual orgies could happen during the 1970s, just as they also
can tell about occasions of sexual abuse. During my fieldwork there was a new
incident in the pagan community: a 40-year-old man and 12-year-old girl had
kissed intimately, laying on the ground within circle space, after the ritual was
completed. I talked with many who attended that gathering, and all had different
opinions. Some were upset and took it very seriously; others smiled and called it
“a silly little episode”. Such minimizing would not have been tolerated in
Reclaiming, and, in fact, the sexual safety one feels as a woman in Reclaiming was
one of the reasons I chose to study this explicitly feminist community.
3 Utopian and generic Witches
Revitalizing western spiritualities

In the previous chapter, I presented the cultural theory of Reclaiming Witch-

craft as interpreted by Starhawk. Contending that western culture suffers from
severe social and spiritual disease, she argues that a revival of paganism and
goddess worship is necessary to heal people, save the planet and restore cultural
sanity. Oppressive society is identified with Jewish and Christian traditions and
the force of social regeneration with contemporary paganism and Witchcraft.
This cultural theory is, however, a simplification of the Witches’ belief, even in
regard to the community of which she is the founder. Starhawk’s utopian
discourse is not the only norm in the Reclaiming community, and I shall
deliberately contrast two analytical options: utopian and generic Witchcraft.
Those I call “utopian” Witches interpret Wicca along Starhawk’s lines as a
religious and social gospel for the emancipation and rescue of the world.They
have chosen Witchcraft as their religion because it presumably conforms to
their politics: it represents an acceptable spiritual path for those dedicated to
creating an ideal society. Community is therefore understood to be a space of
commoners who have consciously chosen a certain worldview and a certain
lifestyle.
Those I call “generic” claim that Witchcraft is solely a position of personal
belief. They have not chosen this religion for ideological reasons; they have
been chosen by it, almost as if they are Witches by birth and constitution,
realizing it now. If so, their new identity is in fact an old identity finally let
out of the closet. The Witches’ craft is almost to be regarded as a genetic
disposition, their desire to join the pagan priesthood almost an obligation.
Community, therefore, is not understood as a common lifestyle, but as common
psychic ground for shared communication, despite differences in lifestyle.
Both utopian and generic Witches describe the choice of Wicca as a
spiritual path to personal growth and the path itself as a “coming home”. A
major difference involves notions of human nature, the relationship between
the human and the divine self, and the potential of Witchcraft to transform
people. Also, while utopian Witches represent a self-understanding of con-
sciously having broken all bonds with Jewish and Christian religions, generic
Witches are more likely to admit some form of ideological continuity or,
rather, similarity, between former and present religious beliefs. They distance
98 Guardians of the world

themselves from Starhawk’s unilateral and biased critique of western religion,

claiming instead that the tradition has marked them permanently, in both a
positive and negative sense.
When describing utopian and generic Witches I shall, therefore, emphasize
how they build a Wiccan identity in contrast and conciliation to their
perceptions of the Jewish and Christian traditions. Even though there are no
historical-genetic relationships between Christian communities of the past and
Reclaiming, there are plenty of ideological affinities; for in its utopian and
social representation, the Witches’ emancipatory project cannot be said to
be linked to ancient paganism. It rather resembles the eschatology of the
“counter-cultural” Christian Church.1 Although Witches also go beyond this
heritage line, a certain continuity to this sub-branch of western religion in
terms of ethical and spiritual values can easily be read in Starhawk’s books, in
the interviews given by informants and in their actual communal living.2
An important way in which Reclaiming Witches actually diverge, repre-
senting discontinuity with western Jewish and Christian traditions, is in their
persistent acceptance of a variety of interpretive trends along the continuum
“utopian/generic”.The conscious celebration and acceptance of differences and
plurality is not a quality inherited from western religion, but rather from
western modernism and, perhaps, from encounters with non-western cultural
traditions.This attitude conforms to the Witches’ self-understanding of leaving
behind an old religious paradigm and creating a new one and is fully expressed
within ritual space. In order to contrast heritage with new inventions, I shall
contrast the act of forgiving with the art of processing.
When in the following I describe how some typical Reclaiming Witches
manifest combined spiritual and political ideals in daily life affairs, the
narratives refer to the time period 1989–90. The information was gathered
from informal conversations and taped interviews conducted in June and July
1990.

Utopian Witchcraft: intentional living

Susan (35) is one of the Reclaiming Witches of a utopian bent. When she
encountered Reclaiming in September 1981, she was already identifying
herself as a feminist anarchist and anti-nuclear activist, and at that time was
involved in civil disobedience and direct action to stop the opening of the
Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in California. Together with several
thousand other American leftists and alternativists, she camped with her
friends outside the plant area in one of the largest non-violent civil dis-
obedience demonstrations in American history. The action did not stop the
Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant from opening, but it influenced the
future of many other US plants, preventing them from opening. Concerning
the building of a new political community and strong emotional bonding
between demonstrators, this particular action was summed up as being highly
successful.
 Utopian and generic Witches: revitalizing western spiritualities 99

Here at Diablo Canyon, Susan confronted Witchcraft for the first time.
Starhawk and Rose were active in the demonstration, and one day they went
around the camp, drumming and shouting, trying to gather people for ritual.
It was a simple ritual: the holding of hands in a circle, singing and drumming,
calling upon divine forces.The ritual goal was to work out frustration, helping
the activists to keep the focus of their intended work. Susan was intrigued
with the Reclaiming women’s ritual skills and ability to “work energy”, and
with their combination of politics with spirituality.3
Later that week, Susan encountered the real Witchcraft, the ritual working
of magic, and not only a simple circle gathering. She was invited to join some
Reclaiming Witches and other Pagans to do combined protest actions and
magic in the backcountry around Diablo. She was told that when Jews and
Christians intend to affect the world by means of spirituality, it is called
“prayer”. Witches call this intended formatting act “magic”. After arriving at
the hillside, they split into three groups. The first group called up “chaos
energy” in the ritual circle with the intention to protect the second group,
which was sent off to break through the fence lines. “Chaos energy” is
believed to be protective by confusing the police. Because the people who
entered the grounds managed to complete their action without being
discovered, the ritual action was interpreted as successful and the magic as
working. The third group did what is called “deep magic”, meaning that the
ritualists went into a group trance and visualized themselves inside the nuclear
reactor, trying to prevent it from going online.4 When the newspapers some
days later reported that Diablo had to slow down the construction of the
nuclear energy plant due to problems in the blueprints of the reactors, the
trouble was interpreted by Witches as caused by their joint magical actions.
Susan was so thrilled to meet women like the Reclaiming Witches,
who combined politics with spiritual practices and beliefs, that she decided
to join the pagan community in San Francisco (SF). For years, she lived in
a pagan–anarchist collective household in SF, took Reclaiming classes and
went to the annual Witchcamp. In 1984 she became a member of a women-
only circle – which she still is – and worked for a while in the Reclaiming
Collective. In 1989 she “returned back to the land”, meaning that she moved
to Sonoma County to help build a small pagan commune, the Compost
Ranch. Once a month she drives to SF together with her friend Artemis to
participate in their women’s circle. They also continue to join the SF
anarchists for political actions and celebrate many of the sabbat rituals with
the Reclaiming community in the city. On these occasions, Susan usually
stays at Barbara’s BQ with her “circle sister” and close friend Ruth, whom
she also met at Diablo Canyon. This is a collective household of five adults
dedicated to somewhat similar utopian values as those held by Susan and her
commune.
Susan is of Jewish descent. Although she holds on to the ethnic side of her
Jewish identity, she claims to have broken all bonds with Jewish religion. To
her, Witchcraft represents something totally new, a religious path for the
100 Guardians of the world

future. Susan considers herself to be primarily a political person, secondarily a

spiritual one, and ranks politics before spirituality within her own value
system. Over the years she has merged Witchcraft and anarchism into one
great utopian union;Wicca fits into her already held anarchist norms:

When I was introduced to Witchcraft I thought, this makes sense; this is

what I already believe . . . . I think to be a Witch for me is like being part
of a new paradigm, a new consciousness in which we see the earth and
nature as sacred and as alive. I was brought up in a cultural paradigm in
which you were disconnected from the earth. God was way up in the sky,
and if you were good you could get to go to heaven . . . . To be a Witch
is to see through a different lens, to have a whole different world
perspective, which is that all of life is a web. We can tune in and work
magically with it. I really like the rituals, the songs, dances, the altered
states. But to this day I have a hard time with the concept “religion” or
“worship”: it is too hierarchical. The words “goddess” and “god” give
associations to something outside myself. And I don’t believe that; I think
it is all inside, in all of us. I’m a free spirit: I don’t like theological dogma.

Susan lives at the Compost Ranch with two children and five other adults,
three men and two women, one of them being Artemis (40). Their adult
lifestyle is in accordance with typical utopian values. They do, for example,
identify as bisexuals and practice nonmonogamy. To manifest their sexual
independence, they live in small, separate cabins, spread out on the land. The
children live with their mothers. The cabins function as private space and
sleeping areas, whereas all other activities take place outdoors or in the main
building, an old trailer. Here we find the kitchen, the living room, a temporary
bathroom and the guestroom. Food wastes are composted and metal and paper
recycled.Their electricity is produced by solar panels and a generator is started
whenever they need to pump water. The Ranchers mostly cook vegetarian
meals, are non-smokers and consume very little alcohol. Some of them use
mild drugs occasionally.
The community tries to keep its participation in money economics at a
minimum. In addition to what they earn on gardening, they run a printing
business. They design and print T-shirts on commission. Artemis has a part-
time job at the local pharmacy.They have very low personal budgets and share
all their goods, property and income as equals. Money policy is discussed
weekly in their housemeetings, which function as “parliament”.They have no
formal rules in the commune, but anything can be put on the housemeeting
agenda.Then they discuss and listen to each other until they reach consensus.
The children do not attend public schools but are enrolled in a home
schooling programme. This means that the parents have the main respon-
sibility for their education. Teaching the children is a shared task between the
adults. The commune has no television because the parents do not want their
children exposed to TV commercials and war figures.They want to raise their
 Utopian and generic Witches: revitalizing western spiritualities 101

children as pagans, within the context of a commune, and protect them as

much as possible from what they regard as destructive influences and attitudes
in mainstream society. The reason for choosing home schooling is not the
curriculum, but the socialization of the children.
The Ranchers do not intend to withdraw from society and interact actively
with people outside their commune. New relationships with Sonoma residents
are mainly built through cultural work, such as dancing and chorus, ritual
circles, political actions, socializing and parties, but also through the home-
schooling programme and Artemis’s wage labour.They often have Reclaiming
friends visiting from SF, but only for recreational purposes. All the adults have
practical skills and take turns doing the different tasks necessary in a large
household. It is very important for them to be committed to and sustain an
egalitarian structure within the group.
As is common in all Reclaiming-affiliated collective households, the circle
and the principle of consensus are ruling norms in the commune. Every
morning, before breakfast, they make an outdoor circle. Adults and children
hold hands while singing an old Quaker song:

It’s a gift to be simple, it’s a gift to be free,

it’s a gift to come ’round where we ought to be.
And when we find ourselves in a place just right,
we will be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gained,
to bow and to bend, we will not be ashamed.
To turn and to turn, it will be our delight,
till, by turning and turning, we come ’round right.

After the singing they “check in”: everybody tells how they feel and what
work they plan to do during the day. This morning Karen (55) asks the other
women if it is okay to have a women-only meeting in the afternoon. They
close their circle by hugging each other, while repeatedly singing, “I just want
to tell you that I love you. I am so glad you are here and helping me grow.”
Although these are Quaker songs, they use them because they represent the
emotional and political values of their commune. Their goal is to build a
combined communal and psychic space where they can live a simple life, free
from material bonds and oppressive traditions, free to love and grow as people
according to their beliefs, being “beacons” and “seedcarriers” for a new
society. But ideals and reality do not always coincide, and they spend hours in
housemeetings processing disagreements or conflicts. This is not regarded as
a sign of weakness for the commune but as a necessary step in everybody’s
growth, because, as stated in the song, “by turning and turning, we come
’round right”. The processing is part of the so-called consensus decision
making, a practice American alternativists have also learned from the Quakers.
In the afternoon meeting Karen asks the other women for advice. She has
met a new man and feels that Philip (33) does not really handle it well. He
102 Guardians of the world

wants her attention and comes on to her more strongly, as if he is jealous.

Susan and Artemis suggest that she make it clear to herself what she wants and
that she states it to Philip, to the new man, and to the new man’s lover. She
does not want to create insecurity, either for Philip, the new man’s lover or for
the community. Karen is, therefore, encouraged to reassure Philip emotionally
that he is number one and to give him more attention, and to tell the new
man’s lover that her intention is not to intrude in their committed relation-
ship. She only wants “to have fun”, nothing more.
Later Susan tells me that for nonmonogamy to work everybody has to be
honest and open and continually work on and process his or her own jealousy.
She believes in free love and regards jealousy as a culturally conditioned
feeling. It is not something inherent in human nature and, therefore, it can be
worked on and changed. She has chosen her sexual lifestyle because she
believes that every person should have the freedom to do with her body what
she wants to and to be with whomever she wants to be with – as long as it is
mutual and beneficial to all parties. Sexual politics she regards as a funda-
mental part of nonhierarchical, egalitarian anarchism. Also her friends at
Barbara’s BQ have adopted Emma Goldman as a political role model and live
in separate bedrooms. To advertise that they practice sexual freedom and that
their ethical standard is “safe sex”, they keep a big bowl of condoms on the
table by the entrance door.
Susan believes Witchcraft is inherent to her lifestyle and that the prosperity
of the community and the personal changes she has been through could not
have happened without it.The name “Compost” is a reminder of the principle
of recycling and organic balance, both materially and personally.

I am always aware of the earth and the living creatures around me. I am
conscious about what I use from the earth, what I throw out, where it
goes, like being conscious of the cycles of life. Being a Witch, I also
believe that I, as a person, have a lot of power and that I can change
things. I can change the way I think, I can change the way other people
think just by my own process and by the way I come across to people, and
I can use ritual and I do use ritual and circles to help myself change and
to help other things change. And I think it works. Circle and commune is
to me a configuration of people who are trusted completely and loved,
helping me and helping each other in whatever we are going through in
our lives. In that atmosphere I was able to change – change myself. And
the magic we did was not at all mysterious. It was kind of a method to
focus energy and intention.

Susan and the Ranchers are utopian, idealistic Witches. They have not chosen
this religion due to personal revelation or an intense religious experience.
They are Witches because it fits with their already chosen political values.
They are also idealistic in a literal sense, meaning that the flow of movement
goes from imagination to action. They imagine the ideal life and then try to
 Utopian and generic Witches: revitalizing western spiritualities 103

live it.To reach their goal, they will incorporate into their lives whatever tools
are considered necessary. If multiple sexual relationships are the goal, pro-
cessing of jealousy and magical circles may be tools. If a lifestyle in ecological
balance is the goal, the worldview of Witchcraft is a tool to raise and
incorporate a new consciousness. If protection of children from violence and
TV commercials is the goal, home schooling is a tool.
Susan is well educated and believes that reality is socially constructed. Her
attitude is formed by appropriating anthropological knowledge and its
documentation of an “infinite” number of global, cultural forms, created and
chosen by human beings in order to construct social life and social norms.
Therefore, since lifestyle and sexuality are not subjugated to natural law, they
are open choices, limited by nothing except the self and her cultural possi-
bilities. But, even if one has been raised with the attitudes of jealousy, greed,
ownership, violence or racism, there still is hope, because deep inside,
everybody carries a pure and natural self, a self which already knows the
difference between good and evil since it, by birth, is connected with goddess.
In order to tend the good seed in every individual, the pagan communities
need to cast off the chains of oppressive religion, oppressive childbearing,
oppressive family structures, etc. In Susan’s life, the power of magic is a new
and optimistic tool that has already demonstrated its ability to instigate change
and transformation.
Many pagan anarchists in SF believe that their combined spiritual and
political visions were kindled in the past by late medieval heretics, such as the
Brethren of the Free Spirit, and their Renaissance siblings, the Diggers. Since
these movements renounced the priesthood and other authorities, they are
considered historical role models for anarchist lifestyles. They are also
identified with because people like the Ranchers need to convince themselves
that the efforts to create a society built on community, egalitarianism, non-
hierarchy, nonproperty and nonmonogamy have already been made in human
history before with some success and are, therefore, worth the struggle.5
In the early 1970s, one of the anarchist publishing houses in SF called
itself the “Free Spirit Press.” Frank (39), who now lives at Compost Ranch,
formerly worked there. I asked him if the name of the press was chosen with
reference to the medieval movement, which he confirmed. He also told me
that the Brethren of the Free Spirit was a heretical, anarchist movement in
the fourteenth century, preaching that divinity was immanent in humans and
that all people already had direct access to knowledge and wisdom from
within. Frank takes it for granted that members of the Free Spirit were burnt
as heretics. He parallels both the Free Spirits and the Diggers – a group
reviving the “free spirit” in seventeenth-century England – with today’s
anarchists since the latter also believe that every individual is knowledgeable
and ethically responsible and, therefore, in no need of laws and ruling
authorities. Similar to many anarchist households in SF, the Compost Ranch
has a poster with a poem about the Diggers called “The World Turned
Upside Down”:
104 Guardians of the world

In 1649 to St George’s Hill6

a ragged band they called the diggers came to show the people’s will.
They defied the landlords, they defied the law,
they were the dispossessed reclaiming what was theirs.
We come in peace they said, to dig and sow.
We come to work the land in common and to make the wastegrounds grow.
This earth divided we will make whole,
so it will be a common treasury for all.
The sin of property we do disdain.
No one has any right to buy and sell the earth for private gain.
By theft and murder they took the land,
now everywhere the walls spring up at their command.
They made the laws to chain us well.
The clergy dazzle us with heaven or they damn us into hell.
We will not worship the gods they serve,
the god of greed who feeds the rich while poor folks starve.
We work, we eat together, we need no swords.
We will not bow to the masters or pay rent to the lords.
We are free people though we are poor,
You diggers all rise up for freedom, rise up now.
From the men of property the orders came.
They sent the hired men and troopers to wipe out the digger’s claim.
Tear down their cottages, destroy their corn.
They were dispersed, but their vision lingers on.

The poem is written by a contemporary anarchist songwriter and was printed

in about two hundred copies in 1989 by a pagan anarchist in SF. The song-
writer has interpreted the Diggers’ revolt from a modern perspective, being
antimilitaristic (“we need no sword”), antiauthoritarian (“disdain the law”/
“bow to no master”), antiproperty (“sin of property”) and antichurch (“clergy
dazzle us”). He reclaims their utopian vision and carries it on.
Susan, too, sees herself as a contemporary carrier of these old, utopian
visions, both socially and religiously. But since she is not only a pagan but also
a Witch, she makes a point that those who really embodied the freedom,
egalitarianism and healing powers she yearns for were the Witches of “the
burning times”. Like Starhawk, she has deep faith in the powers of Witchcraft
and of communities like Reclaiming and Compost Ranch and their abilities
to move both the world and the individual in a much-needed new direction.
In Starhawk’s novel, The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993), some of their ambitious
utopian goals are played out as fiction. We are introduced to SF in the year
2040 and now, finally, every citizen is a pagan, a healer or a Witch, and magic
is taught in schools.The year is divided by the pagan holidays and every hill is
a sanctuary for multiple religious paths. People share the land, the food, the
water and the air in common. Pollution is eradicated and, instead of cars,
people commute in gondolas.There are no split subjects, no criminals and no
 Utopian and generic Witches: revitalizing western spiritualities 105

prisons because no children are neglected and nobody oppressed. All have
plural sexual identities and practice nonmonogamy. Jealousy is not a problem
because they always “work it out”. Governmental power is not structured
hierarchically but as a network of concentric circles. Every worker is organized
into guilds and every neighbourhood has its own community council. These
are all run by consensus decision making and take turns sending repre-
sentatives to the highest city council. The highest council is headed by a
majority of women and advised by women elders. In this utopian society,
Reclaiming’s community ideals have finally materialized.

Utopian Witchcraft and counter-cultural Church

Is the social utopianism of Witchcraft a revival of ancient pagan or
Renaissance Christian practices? As pure idea, without any goal-oriented
practices attached, utopianism can be traced as far back as the prophetic
movements of Judaism and to philosophers of the ancient world. But as social
practice, it does not reach further back than medieval times: utopian dreams
were not converted into social action until the millenarian movements arose,
writes historian Norman Cohn. Thus, it is within the ideological lineage of
millenarianism that I shall seek the first roots of Starhawk’s basic concepts –
community, interconnection, immanence – as well as of the social forms
experimented with at the Compost Ranch and Barbara’s BQ.7
The notion of the millennium is, according to Cohn, derived from the
belief that God, with the active help of elected holy women and men, was
soon to eliminate the existing social order of inequality and papal hypocrisy
and restore upon earth the original and natural state of affairs in the Garden of
Eden: equality, communality and sexual innocence and freedom (1981:19). He
describes the medieval movements as responses to social crises provoked by
poverty, class differences and social and spiritual oppression. Concerning their
intent to purify and redefine community and interhuman relationships, they
may be regarded as social revitalization movements.
Long before millenarianism converted utopia into action, the ideas were
developed both in Greek and Roman literature in the form of a myth about
the “original state of nature” that had existed on earth in some lost Golden
Age. The myth provided a theme for philosophical speculation: especially the
Stoics of the third century BCE stressed that all “men” were “brothers”, and
that all men were by nature free and equal. Cohn asserts that the version of
the myth as contained in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in particular, was echoed in
later literature, exercising important influence upon communistic experimen-
tation during the Middle Ages. According to Ovid, at the beginning of human
history

men used to cultivate good faith and virtue spontaneously, without laws.
Punishment and fear did not exist, nor were threatening phrases to be
read from fixed bronze tablets . . . . Earth herself, untroubled and un-
106 Guardians of the world

touched by the hoe, unwounded by any ploughshare, used to give all

things of her own accord.
(Quoted in Cohn 1981:187)

In order to emerge as social theory, the myth needed support from “natural”
examples. Seneca developed the myth/social theory by pointing to how the
sun is beneficent to all and how humans are equally dependent upon the air,
the water and the gifts of the earth to live. When this thought figure was
adopted by the Church Fathers, it turned into a doctrine in which the
original state of nature was interpreted as divine law, later undermined by
man-made law. In their writings it becomes “God’s will and decree” that the
sun shines for rich and poor, for ignorant and wise, for men and women. God
also made the vine and grain and all other fruits for the charity of all. It was
human laws that created the distinction between “Mine” and “Thine”; and it
was this violation of community and equality that gave rise to theft and all
crime. Cohn argues that, from the third century CE onward, it was agreed by
most of the Fathers that inequality, slavery, coercive government and private
property had no part in the original intention of God and had come into
being only as a result of the Fall.8
Since these egalitarian and communistic ideals were acknowledged among
many clerics long before medieval times, why is it that they were not
automatically projected into the future as ideals for building community here
and now? According to Cohn, this is because the ideals were regarded as
lost ideals, and necessarily so. Once the Fall had taken place, people were
irrecoverably corrupted by Original Sin. From that time on human nature
demanded restraints that would not be found in an egalitarian order.
Inequalities of wealth, status and power were not only consequences of sin,
but also arrangements for combating sin.The Golden Age was not simply lost,
but necessarily lost. Neither Ovid, Seneca, or the Church Fathers were
concerned with social and economic change.The only recommendations they
gave on behalf of the lost ideals were directed toward individuals, dealing
solely with problems of personal conduct, for example, that a landlord ought
to behave reasonably toward his labourer, and that a rich man should refrain
from using his wealth for evil purposes. The original state of nature was only
regarded as providing guidelines and ideals for individual life. The Church
maintained, though, that voluntary poverty was the more perfect way. It also
insisted that in a corrupt, fallen world, the original state of nature was an ideal
that should only be pursued by the elite. The institutionalized expression of
this attitude was found in the orders of monks and friars (Cohn 1981:197).
It was not until the end of the fourteenth century, with the outbreak of
the millenarian movements, that this changed. These movements called the
egalitarian state of nature out of its past and projected it into the future as an
ideal society. According to Carolyn Merchant, their vision was “the complete
overthrow of the established social order and its replacement by an egalitarian
communal society and state of nature like that anticipated during the millen-
 Utopian and generic Witches: revitalizing western spiritualities 107

nium – a thousand-year period when Christ would reign on earth and Satan
would be banished” (Merchant 1983:79). The movements had a historical
continuity dating from the medieval crusades of the poor (thirteenth century)
to the religious sects of the English Civil War (seventeenth century).9 Merchant
also connects the naturalism of these communal movements with the outburst
of occultism within the same time period.
Their revolutionary eschatology was based upon a paradisiacal notion of
“the real state of nature” as the original state of affairs in which all people were
equal in status and wealth and nobody was oppressed or exploited by anyone
else. It was also characterized by universal good faith and brotherly love, and
sometimes by community sharing of property and even spouses. They argued
that the original Golden Age was not irrevocably lost in the past but, instead,
predestined for the near future. To work toward its manifestation, either
peacefully or through revolt, was in their view an act of piety: now was the
time when God himself prepared to descend heaven upon earth and humans
and divinity would meet face to face within joint time and space, “finally at
home”. According to the adepts of the Free Spirit, they only prepared its way
by living as if “the Kingdom” were reality.10
Because of their communistic ideals and their actual obliteration of man-
made law, Cohn calls the Brethren of the Free Spirit “mystical anarchists” or
“revolutionary anarchists”. They left their ordinary occupations and obliga-
tions behind and gathered together in a new “perfect commune”. Cohn
claims that the adepts of the Free Spirit never formed a single church, but
rather a number of independent, like-minded groups (Cohn 1981:172). Each
group had its own particular practices, rites and articles of belief. But the
groups kept in contact with each other and were recognizable by a common
corpus of doctrine.
Like other counter-cultural movements of the time, the Free Spirits were
accused of so-called deification theology: the basic feature of their faith
was pantheism, developed within a neo-Platonic framework of successive
emanations from a first source.11 The Free Spirits stated their beliefs in
sentences like, “God is all that is”, “God is in every stone and in each limb of
the human body as surely as in the Eucharistic bread.” “God is me and I am
him.” Anything with a separate existence had emanated from God, but was no
longer God. On the other hand, whatever existed was compelled to find its
way back into the Origin, and at the end of time everything would, in fact, be
reabsorbed into God. Since divinity, through the spirit, dwells in each human
being, they were not dependent upon Scripture or sermons.They were taught
by the spirit directly and no other teachings, either by Scripture or otherwise,
were of any use to them (Cohn 1981:293).
Their spiritual goal was to be completely transformed into God. This they
believed was possible by the “subtle in spirit”. To reach this state, the novice
had to practice various techniques, from self-abjection to the cultivation of
absolute passivity, for several years. The reward was a state of mind known as
the “spirit of freedom”, or the Free Spirit, attained when a person experienced
108 Guardians of the world

being entirely transformed into God. In this state one is restored to one’s
original state before flowing out of the deity; the concept of sin no longer has
any meaning. The Brethren of the Free Spirit were free to engage in all
human activities without restrains.“The free man is quite right to do whatever
gives him pleasure.” ”Nothing is sin except what is thought of as sin.” “I
belong to the Liberty of Nature, and all that my nature desires I satisfy . . . . I
am a natural man.”12
The movement included men and women and, whether married or not,
they were considered free to have as many sexual partners as they wished.13
They regarded exclusive monogamy as a result of the curse.The brethren were
free from the curse and, therefore, free to mate as naturally and promiscuously
as animals or as innocently as Eve and Adam in the Garden of Eden.They also
attributed transcendent, mystical value to the sexual act itself. Some regarded it
as a sacrament, called “Christerie” (Cohn 1981:180). Cohn interprets their
libertine sexual activity as an affirmation of emancipation. The adepts also at
times practised ritual nakedness, arguing that “one ought not blush at anything
that was natural”. To be naked and unashamed they saw as an essential part
of the state of perfection on earth. Promiscuity and nakedness were thus
remedies in the effort to establish an earthly Paradise, beyond the cursed
knowledge of good and evil. Merchant writes that sexual freedom for both
women and men was also brought up among Ranters and Quakers, and in
their meetings it was not uncommon that people stripped naked in church. It
was, according to Merchant, a symbol of resurrection (Merchant 1983:124).
If we now recall Starhawk’s cultural theory of paradise-fall-regeneration, as
presented in chapter 2, as well as the philosophical themes and narratives
deduced from the theory, it becomes apparent that many of the ideological
elements in the ethos of feminist Witchcraft are similar to those expressed in the
utopian strands of western religion in general. In addition, many Wiccan beliefs,
as well as some communal and ritual practices – such as the immanent god, the
astral movements of the soul, ritual nakedness, sexual freedom, the autonomous
coven, the idea of brotherhood or community, egalitarianism and naturalism –
resemble the utopian eschatology of the counter-cultural Church, in particular
the ideas of the Free Spirit movement and their successors.14
In fact, when Catherine Albanese (1990) presents the history of American
nature religions, including paganism, from the eighteenth century onward, she
argues that these movements, in their advocacy for naturalism, were deeply
influenced by what I have called “counter-cultural Church”. The communi-
tarianism of European utopianism developed new forms after immigrants
imported it to the US. One example is the earlier mentioned consensus
decision making process, developed by the Quaker society and appropriated
among others by Reclaiming.
Feminist Witchcraft does, of course, also resemble occult ideas, which
materialized as social movements during the Renaissance. But this has already
been argued for in earlier chapters and is today well established knowledge
regarding more traditional forms of Witchcraft.
 Utopian and generic Witches: revitalizing western spiritualities 109
Generic Witchcraft: the priesthood of the goddess
Although most Reclaiming people are utopian Witches, a substantial number
have a more generic bent. They do not believe in Witches’ extraordinary
talents for creating a perfect community, a paradise on earth. They do,
however, still believe that they are among the Guardians of the world – if not
communally, then individually. As initiated Witches they have access to a
privileged place where they can see what others cannot see; they can sense
what others cannot sense, or induce change on the material plane through
ritual and magic.To them, the people of the world represent the laity, whereas
Witches are the priesthood with secret and special knowledge, serving the
people.
As chosen or gifted individuals, a certain moral responsibility for the well-
being of the world is bestowed upon them. Some believe that magical gifts,
such as clairvoyance and healing power, have been part of their natural
constitution since birth. Accordingly, their self-understanding is simply to have
been born Witches.To others, magical gifts are regarded as something anybody
can acquire through learning and ultimately through initiation. A generic
Witch will often make a clear distinction between those who are initiated as
Witches and those who are not, emphasizing the important function of the
initiation process. Even if this attitude is not announced publicly, it never-
theless exists inside the initiates’ own circles. A generic Witch believes that
only initiates’ can contact “the other side” and call the Mighty Dead.
We shall use Aradia (36), who lives in SF, and her circle of friends as
examples of generic Witches, although they inevitably also have some utopian
inclinations. In contrast to Susan, and typically for those she represents, Aradia
is an initiated Witch and she has taken a new name, a goddess name.15 She is a
long-term member of a coven and of the Reclaiming Collective, as well as a
teacher and a ritual facilitator. She is a highly respected elder and one of the
most important contributors to Reclaiming’s version of Witchcraft. Aradia
works as an intellectual, presently as an editorial manager in a large publishing
house. Her sexual preference is lesbian. She lives a quite ordinary, mono-
gamous, nuclear-family life in Bernal Heights south of Mission with her
lesbian Witch partner and their pets. Their house is full of books, although a
huge altar, decorated according to the “wheel of the year”, commands all the
attention in the living room. Aradia’s working altar is in her bedroom. Here
she keeps coloured candles, incense, imagery of the goddess, as well as ritual
tools: athame, wand, cup and pentacle. When she first entered Witchcraft
in 1981, Aradia did magical spellwork to achieve practical goals. When I
interviewed her in July 1990, she considered herself to be solely a devotional
Witch.
Unlike Susan, Aradia did not choose Witchcraft for intellectual or political
reasons. Even though feminism is a fundamental platform to her life, she
endorses Witchcraft exclusively because she considers it true. In fact, already in
1980 she was told by her inner voice that this was her true path. A year and a
day later (in 1981), she was initiated Witch and Priestess of Bridged, the Irish
110 Guardians of the world

goddess. To symbolize her new status and being, she took a new name, a
goddess’s name. Aradia recalls that she has always been a psychic, and as a child
she could simultaneously be in several realities: she could think of things and
they would happen. She also believes that she, in her core Self, has been a
priestess of Bridged in many earlier lifetimes. At least she feels completely
dedicated to her vocation. According to her, she did not choose Bridged but
was chosen by her; “I am hers, and she gets to do with me whatever she
wants”, says Aradia.
When teaching Reclaiming classes, Aradia emphasizes that she is an urban
Witch. She wants to teach her students to see everything that exists in three
dimensions as sacred and to understand that this outlook is the real political
power of Witchcraft. She regards Witchcraft as a religious path that in and of
itself sanctifies, which means that it calls holy that which exists in three
dimensions.Witches normally proclaim the land as sacred, the air as sacred, the
sky as sacred, the water as sacred, the animals as sacred, humans as sacred.
Aradia says:

But I go further and say the sidewalks are sacred, the buildings are sacred,
the telephone poles are sacred, the ground everywhere is sacred. Every
thing that exists in three dimensions is sacred. I don’t use this expression
geometrically but metaphysically. Not nature or “the other place” is sacred
but all places are sacred.That kind of thinking changes your political basis.
When we are brought up in a system that puts ultimate value somewhere
else, in another world, it is a political act to say that this very world of life
and death and decay is sacred. It is not the only one sacred, but it is the
one I’m focusing on now. Addiction is a way of being somewhere else: in
the past, in the future, some other reality, just not here. Healing from our
escape into other realities is a political act. I am a human here and now,
and I am not supposed to be anything else, or anywhere else.

In Aradia’s terminology, utopian Witchcraft can result in addictive behaviour

because the utopians often long to be somewhere else, in a better world. Aradia,
therefore, dislikes the utopian bent in Reclaiming. She finds it dangerous to
think – as so many Witches do – that a certain religion can save the world, or
that Goddess religion is inherently something that will help people not abuse
other people.

I think evil exists, and that the desire to abuse power is something human.
So, religion is not going to change the world: humans are in it.You know
what I mean? Please, give me a break . . . . I really think it’s a dangerous
sort of thing to think. It can lead you to start believing that the Craft is
what is going to save the world, which is such bullshit. It can turn right
into another Catholicism. We are not perfect and neither are we allowed
to be. Spirituality is not about fixing the world and feeling good about
yourself. It’s about trusting in something larger, giving yourself over to
 Utopian and generic Witches: revitalizing western spiritualities 111

something larger, exactly because you cannot fix it yourself. A spiritual

path has to entail some sense of willingness to surrender. I think the Craft
is one way to do that, but not the only one.

Aradia also differs from Susan by not being willing to dismiss her Catholic
Christian roots. In fact, she has become famous in the community for calling
herself both a Witch and a Catholic. This explicitly dual religious identity is
not very common among Witches who were raised as Christians. If a Witch
celebrates Christmas, she is likely to make it an extended part of Winter
Solstice. If she finds the ethics ascribed to the concept “love your neighbour as
yourself ” to be normatively valid, she will immediately point out the tenet’s
universality or what she considers its pre-Christian roots.
If we compare this situation with Reclaiming people of Jewish descent, we
find an interesting difference. Many Reclaiming Witches, including Starhawk,
are strongly attached to their Jewish ethnic identity. In addition to pagan
practices, such as celebrating the pagan cycle of the tangled lunar and solar
rituals, some also observe the Jewish holidays, like Passover and Hanukkah.
The main argument for holding on to dual identities, as Witches and Jews, is
that Judaism is not only a religion, but also – and primarily – an ethnic
identity. To distance oneself from an identity as Jewish would be equal to
suppressing one’s own ethnicity. To claim this identity involves claiming the
sacred history of the Jewish people and its sufferings.
This dual identity is not questioned or criticized by non-Jewish Witches.
Jewish Reclaiming Witches are “allowed” to communicate their dual identity
in the open, while Witches who are raised as Christians seem to under-
communicate theirs. A plausible explanation is that, although both Judaism
and Christianity are considered patriarchal religions, Christianity is regarded as
much more negatively loaded. It has a heavier “karma” stemming from its
aggressive conversion politics: crusades, persecutions and witch trials.
During fieldwork I realized that this generalization is not quite true.There
seems to be a difference between those of a Catholic and those of a Protestant
upbringing. While the Protestants are more likely to “trash” their religious
heritage, many Catholics more closely resemble the Jewish Witches, consciously
taking at least a partly dual identity.They do not fully identify with Starhawk’s
critique of western religion, but claim that the traditions they were brought
up with have marked them permanently, positively as well as negatively. They
admit to somehow carrying on western religiosity and recognize it as a
cultural heritage, although they also diverge from it, having created new
forms, searched out new beliefs.

Re-Attending Catholic church

To better understand how these Catholic Witches balance a dual identity
between the religion of their childhood and their adult choice and why they
after all prefer Witchcraft, I invited Aradia and five of her ex-Catholic
112 Guardians of the world

Reclaiming friends and elders to an ordinary 10 a.m. Sunday Mass. We

decided to visit Mission Dolores because of its location, age and aestethics: the
church is located in their neighbourhood; the parish is the oldest in SF; its
architecture as well as interior decorations are very beautiful. The basilica has
two arches. One is dark blue, symbolizing the cosmos with a glowing light at
its center. The four directions of the universe are marked with different signs.
In the other arch Mary is painted inside the sun, holding the seven crosses of
the heart.The room is decorated with stained glass windows and small chapels
and altars for the saints, and smells of incense.
The Witches have all dressed up for the occasion and observe the pro-
ceedings of the Mass with both interest and respect. Except for Aradia, who
attends Mass regularly, none of them have been to church for many, many
years. The church is one of the largest in San Francisco, and they are all
surprised to see it so crowded, with people from many cultures and different
social classes. The service is reformed. In his sermon, the priest addresses the
social reality of the people present but also makes people laugh. In the final
announcements, people are informed that the church serves free meals to
victims of AIDS.The priest then reads the menu for the meals in the week to
come and asks for monetary contributions.
After the Mass, we go to a café to discuss the experience. I am aware that
had I asked them to come with me to a fundamentalist Christian meeting,
they would have answered no in addition to having interpreted and judged
their Christian heritage very differently. I believe, however, that a positive
encounter with Christian religion provides for a more sober evaluation and,
therefore, one which is more interesting. The sobriety of their evaluation is
also supported by the fact that I interviewed them collectively and taped
our conversation. Their feelings about Christian religion were not secret
confessions to me but open statements meant to be heard by other Witches as
well.
Aradia opens the floor by telling us that she is a Catholic but not a
Christian, and that she has a profound belief in Christ:

I deeply believe in all those miracles: that God descended in Jesus; that
the body of Christ is in the wafer and wine. The problem is that the
codification says there is a boundary here, and that nothing exists or is
true except for these events. And I don’t believe that. So I fit Catholicism
into my Goddess religion, not the other way around . . . . I believe that
the deities operate in an infinite number of ways, and this is one of them.
I am a priestess of the Goddess, and I am allowed this mutual path.

One of her friends, Andrew, a lawyer, says he used to be an altar boy both
before and after the Vatican II reform, and that he has many good things to say
about the Mass we just observed. He felt a lot of positive emotions around
shaking hands, calling in political events, and parts of the ceremony where
people were getting involved.“And yet, my overwhelming feeling is boredom.
 Utopian and generic Witches: revitalizing western spiritualities 113

They still do not know how to raise energy.That amazes me . . . . Also, what I
feel most uncomfortable with in Christianity is the cross. I walked into the
church and saw that cross again, and thought that for the twentieth century it
should have been the electric chair.”
Hera, a midwife, agrees with him that this is the reason why she is not a
Christian anymore: the cross and the concepts of suffering and martyrdom are
not central to her spirituality. She believes that we continually have to deal
with the mystery of pain and death and human shortcomings, finding mean-
ing in suffering,

but my problem is that it is made the centre, the exclusive centre, which
everything else is hierarchically descended from. Although it is important
in life, I simply do not believe that sacrifice, pain and suffering, is the root
of life. As a Witch I do not worship death, but life.

But Hera also agrees with Aradia and says that she still considers herself a
Catholic. To her it seems impossible to divorce completely from something
that was part of her formative years, from something she was raised with. So,
“the catholic” is still a part of her core being. She also admits to having
enjoyed the mass,

I really enjoyed it, even if I actually was not prepared to enjoy it. I was
noticing today that there are a lot of anchors that I have, that I am not
aware of till I step into a church that is structured like the one we were in
today. The architecture, the high ceilings, something about the visual still
hold a connection for me. I made peace with some parts of the service
today.The singing, the chorus, something inside me, some very good parts
of myself, a feeling of good will toward humanity, a very giving place that
I think developed in the Catholic Church.

They all agree that Christianity at different historical points has got lost from
“good will toward humanity”, which they equate with the teachings of
Christ. Instead it became a political instrument to conquer land and people.
Regarding such a central Christian doctrine as forgiveness for sins, they
believe Jesus had in mind something like,“you don’t have to pay for karma, or
be totally worn down in it. I am coming to cancel out a whole lot of karma
so we can have a fresh start”. But his gospel was twisted to mean “all you need
is a sacrament”.
Pan, a computer analyst, is very clear that he is looking for a bridge
between what he was raised with and the pagan spirituality that he practises
today:

Many people, including Starhawk, often talk of paganism as the popular

religion until the burning times, and then it was wiped out, and now we
are returning to it.There is some usefulness in the ideas, but I don’t think
114 Guardians of the world

of that as a historical reality. I think of paganism these days as being part

of western culture and spirituality, and that it has a relationship to nature.
So you can have pagan Catholics or whatever, if they do have a spiritual
relationship with nature . . . . I don’t think you can say that Christianity
only is patriarchal and in search of control over magic and mystery,
because a majority of western spirituality has been through Christianity.
Those who won, and took control over time, have revised the history.The
cult of saints, for example, is not what won in the conflicts inside the
church, and yet it existed all the time.

When I explicitly ask why they are Witches, not Christians, they all agree to
Freya’s statement:“The reason why I am a Witch is that I have found a way to
really have the ecstatic, the singing and the shaking, and also with an
extremely intellectual faith. I don’t see the Christian service satisfying any of
these concerns for me.”
To the extent these Witches agree with Aradia and differentiate between
Catholic and Christian, the term “Catholic” comes close to representing an
ethnic category, loaded with tradition, identity and “blood ties”.They perceive
of themselves as linked to their western ancestors and deceased family
members, honouring the positive ethical teachings and selected spiritual
practices handed down by these beloved ancestors, claiming that this heritage
has played a determinant role in their formative years. They seem to have an
overall good feeling for the liturgy, although they also complain that it is too
boring and nonecstatic for their adult taste. They identify strongly with the
doctrine of love and with Christianity’s social gospel and positive involvement
in the world. In this respect, they judge the Jewish and Christian traditions
very differently from the way Starhawk does.They honour it for caring about
individual people and social, worldly affairs; she criticizes it for emptying the
world and all life of inherent value. To make room for both statements to be
true, Pan invites a differentiation between the many traditions of Christianity
and the leading authorities. In order to explain the errors made by the
Church, the Witches also separate between “what Jesus had in mind” and the
doctrines developed by those in charge.
Christianity has disappointed them, but some of its basic teachings and
ideals still seem to be norms and guidelines. Have they moved to Wicca from
a feeling of betrayal, so that Witchcraft becomes what Christianity should
have been? By this question we immediately touch upon the dynamic
tensions between utopian and generic Witches. The first group believe that
the Jewish and Christian traditions must go because they cannot hold the
truth about the nature of Reality: they resist the experience of divine
immanence and of nature as animate; they deny that the elemental power
that gives birth is female. Therefore, they need to be replaced by a new
cultural paradigm.
The other group sees more continuity between now and then. According
to ex-Methodist/Unitarian Anna in the Reclaiming Collective, she has not
 Utopian and generic Witches: revitalizing western spiritualities 115

converted to a totally new worldview through Witchcraft, but primarily

broken with a patriarchal institution:

I think that as far as the morals go, and the connection between the
political implications of religious beliefs of what is sacred and what
is valued – that has always been there. The difference is the external
practices. I mean, I just couldn’t stand being in the Christian church any
longer. All the patriarchal language, the patriarchal imagery . . . just no . . .
I couldn’t be a woman in that context and just be ignored. Because the
fact is that even though people have practised it in a variety of ways, the
institution is abominable.The formal teaching is not so bad. But, certainly
the traditional and majority interpretations of the formal teaching are just
. . . they are worse than irrelevant.

Another difference between the two positions pertains to human nature.

Utopian Witches believe that humans are another modus of divinity. Evil is
not part of the human constitution but culturally constructed. People are
conditioned through upbringing and society, for good or for bad. But the
inner-core being is pure and innocent and can be restored through cultural
deprogramming and ritual cleansing. These utopian Witches also have greater
faith in the possibility of restoring “paradise lost” by means of intentional
living than have the other group.
Generic Witches are more cynical about the possibilities of changing the
world and do not automatically interpret the image of an inner divine Self,
which they also embrace, in ethical terms or as a guideline for action. They
believe humans are in constant need of help from a higher power and from
fellow humans to face their inner shadows and take responsibility for their
own actions. Generic Witches believe not as much in narratives about a social
fall from original bliss, but rather in the idea of a fundamentally split subject
who can never be all pure and good. In this respect they can be considered
ideological heirs to western psychologies and talking cures – with their
precursor in the Christian confession. In contrast, when utopian Witches
emphasize community and the idea of an original, undivided, deified Self who
can act according to divine will, they should be considered heirs to utopian
ideas also recognizable in the western counter-cultural Church.
However, as stated earlier in this chapter, a division between utopians and
generics is primarily analytical and a way to sort out and expose different
beliefs, attitudes and practices within a large, heterogeneous community. Let
me now end this hermeneutics of “splitting apart” by presenting a case in
which many of the beliefs just discussed are blended together in a highly
innovative social practice embraced by all Witches: the ritual circle. In this
particular circle, the meanings of Self and of “unconditional forgiving”
inherited from western and Jewish and Christian traditions are reinterpreted
in accordance with the karmic ideal of taking responsibility for one’s own
actions, of using every mistake as an opportunity for growth.
116 Guardians of the world

Case: forgiving and processing a rule-breaker

All my informants have opinions about what they regard as the “set-up” in the
Christian obligation to forgive unconditionally and the twisting of the gospel
to mean “all you need is a sacrament”. On one hand, they believe it stages a
scene in which both aggressor and victim lose their “selves”: the aggressor by
being treated like a child, the victim by being asked to accept abuse and
victimization. On the other hand, they have observed that the shadow side to
“unconditional” forgiveness is a daily practice in which transgressions are not
allowed at all, and the transgressors, therefore, are scapegoated and shamed
instead of forgiven.
Leila (28), a co-student in one of my Reclaiming classes, was the first
to teach me on these matters. As a child, Leila was sexually abused by her
Baptist minister father. She says she cannot forgive him because he has no
consciousness of what he really did. Leila does not forgive unconditionally but
demands change and emotional growth from the abuser. This is not only a
moralistic claim on her part, but she seriously believes that his actions will
continually stick to his karma unless he repents within himself and makes up
for his deeds.This is the only way he can forgive himself, which she believes is
a primary requirement for change. If she forgives him without demanding any
internal changes, he will only continue to hurt her and others in new and
subtle ways. The result is that he is kept in a spoiled child-like relationship to
the world, whereas she becomes the eternal masochistic victim. By not
forgiving him, she takes responsibility for herself and for not becoming
another passive female victim.
Leila strongly believes that a real possibility for the aggressor to forgive
herself/himself is lacking in the Christian demands about forgiveness that
she was raised with.The alternative is to be given the gift of a real chance to
forgive oneself. Then the aggressor might move on from only feeling shame
– to actually sensing the other person’s hurt. Without this empathic,
emotional act, there is no change – and without change, no forgiveness of
self by self.
The Witches’ alternative and gift is to offer “processing” of individuals if
they have broken common rules.This process will hopefully get them back on
the right track, and it may give both the aggressor and the offended a real
opportunity to forgive and forget and move on. This method is eagerly
practised at Compost Ranch and in other Reclaiming circles when serious
conflicts arise. To illustrate this method and to highlight the interaction
between ideas of human growth, definitions of the sacred and the importance
of community immanent within the processing itself, I shall present a case
where a person had violated moral rules and cultural codes within the
community and was worked on in a psychodrama ritual to induce internal
change. She was regarded as a person who, through her actions, had lost her
“self ”, and the community’s task was to help her gain it back. As we shall see,
shame and hurt were central feelings in the drama.
 Utopian and generic Witches: revitalizing western spiritualities 117
The person in this story is myself. To use oneself consciously as informant
within the framework of an academic text is always difficult, although it is a
method that is increasingly being called for (cf. Staal 1975; Favret-Saada
1980). Having dealt with methodological considerations in the Introduction, I
shall not enter this discussion again. So even if this story also illuminates the
peculiar and sometimes risky position of the participant observer in a research
process, we shall bracket that here. In the present context I choose to use the
story as a case because it so well illustrates our topic.
The social context for my case was Witchcamp, an event that took
place in the forests outside of Vancouver, Canada in 1989. This week-long
apprenticeship programme included 100 participants, and lectures, workshops
and rituals were offered from early morning to late evening.The overall theme
for the camp was “Building Community”. At this social arena I made a serious
transgression while in the position of fieldworker: the very last night I tape-
recorded parts of a ritual without permission – and was discovered while
doing it. This immoral action gave me an opportunity to experience full
membership in the Witchcraft community: my action was interpreted and
dealt with according to their – and not my – worldview. I was punished,
forgiven and “worked on” in the ritual called “processing.”Afterward the whole
happening was given a symbolic interpretation as my human growth, being
part of my healing from shame and detachment, ultimately bringing me onto
the path of the Goddess.
I shall try to record what happened as if I experienced it as a native. By this
I mean that I shall weave together the narrative with an account of my actual
feelings in the situation. My feelings are important in the processing ritual
and, therefore, an important key to understanding this therapeutic setting.
Consequently, I have to share my feelings to the best of my memory when
narrating the story. When Witches interpret growth, that is, emotional
development and the gaining of new insight, their interpretations are to a
large extent founded on the honest sharing of feelings.Without my expressing
feelings the processing would not have succeeded and the final symbolic
interpretation would have reached a different conclusion.

* * *
In Witches’ rituals, permission to record must usually be explicitly granted
beforehand. Otherwise, both tape-recording and taking photographs are
regarded as violations of ritual space. The use of recording instruments is
believed to disturb the energy called forth in ritual and to invade other
people’s sacred space – in addition to making the photographer/tape-recorder
an observer. Witches have no place for observers at their rituals and provide
no back seat for the detached and passive sceptics. Their ritual structure
demands active participation. When ritual is about to be performed, cameras
are always out of the question, though taping is sometimes permitted.
118 Guardians of the world

My problem at Witchcamp was that I had not asked permission to tape and
had, therefore, put myself in an extremely embarrassing situation. I felt both
shame and anger at being discovered: anger at myself for taking the risk and
not asking permission, and anger at the woman, Amanda, who detected the
tape-recorder, for not accepting my explanation. I wanted to persuade
Amanda that my behaviour really was reasonable and have her pardon me
immediately and put an end to the whole situation. I told her that I had taped
parts of the three-hour-long ritual to help me remember its structure and
contents; it was strictly for my own use when doing research. I had not asked
permission because I knew that the object itself might be regarded as alien
and disturbing to some participants. I had also learned that certain campers
associated tape-recording, as such, with the FBI and with potential “perse-
cution” due to their identities as Witches – an irritating and self-important
attitude in my opinion. I had not asked because, under these circumstances, I
was afraid of getting a “no”. It was selfish of me, but I was so tired from one
week of intense ritualizing and continuous notetaking that I felt I could not
handle a refusal.
Amanda was not convinced that this was a plausible reason to break
common rules. She was angry and more concerned with the community than
with my so-called repentance. She said she felt betrayed by me and claimed I
had abused everybody’s trust. She wondered what kind of “student of
Reclaiming” I really was, and she wanted to bring it up publicly in the closing
ritual circle the next morning. Then it could be dealt with by everybody,
including me, and processed there. With this judgement upon me, there
seemed to be nothing I could do to prevent the forthcoming punishment.
It was a very difficult situation, and I worried about the negative feelings
my trust-breaking action would create in the five Reclaiming teachers who
formed the leading team at the camp. I was studying their community in San
Francisco, partly with their permission. They were all valuable and supportive
informants and responsible for the decision to make room for my research at
Witchcamp. During the entire fieldwork I was told, over and over again, that
they let me study their “thing” because I was “trusted” and “loved”. Now I
was afraid of losing trust and friendships. I could see how hard it would be for
them to forget such a violation and to continue our confident cooperation as
if nothing had happened. I prepared to be either fully or partly “exiled”,
meaning that I would either be asked to end my research or to accept a more
restricted fieldwork situation. I tried to imagine their disappointment the next
morning when my “inner self ” in their eyes would be revealed, and I was
angry with myself for having created the situation.
Amanda informed the Reclaiming teachers and camp organizers about her
discovery. Early next morning a few of them came to see me. They expressed
disappointment and asked how I could have done what I did. I explained
again why, and their response was repeatedly, “But you could only have asked,
why didn’t you ask?” Their words made me even more worried for the pro-
ceedings at the forthcoming morning circle. One of the premises, though, had
 Utopian and generic Witches: revitalizing western spiritualities 119

been changed: now Amanda wanted me, not her, to inform everybody at the
public ritual.
Shortly thereafter we went to the outdoor ritual space, where I was to face
my fate. Rumours of my actions were out – everybody already knew. Almost
in complete silence, one hundred pairs of eyes watched me arriving. I wished
for a little miracle to end this embarrassment, but, of course, nothing happened.
Some of the women saw how I felt. They came over and said they wanted to
support me so that the whole task would be easier for me. Everybody else was
standing in a circle, waiting for me to speak. So I spoke and explained, and
offered my apology and expressed my willingness to destroy the actual tape.
When I was finished, Starhawk opened the floor to processing.This means
that people can express their emotions, but they may not comment upon
reactions from the others or start discussions. Neither could I respond or
defend myself. No emotion expressed is regarded as better or worse; and as the
word itself says,“processing” is a process and does not end with negotiated and
voted-for solutions. It is a therapeutic method to open a channel for feelings
to be heard and “worked on”. It addresses people’s “heart-level”, not only
their intellect. This method is also fairly common among political grassroots
activists in the US, and it is often utilized in consensus decision making. It is
believed that, in and of itself, processing is a cleansing and fosters growth. It
will eventually make people forgive each other, reassert mutual positive
feelings and rebuild community. To let go of what is “bad”, through speech
(or symbol), is regarded as necessary to let the “good” feelings prosper and
develop. Good feelings and close bonding are seen as necessary for a joint
action (or ritual) to be successful.
The processing had started. First there was silence and then people started
to talk, one at a time, in spontaneous succession. One woman smiled and said,
“It’s OK, Jone; it doesn’t matter.” A man said, “I think you are really brave,
making this statement here in front of everybody.” A third one said, “Even
though you have explained the situation, you have lost my trust. I experienced
something similar in my work as therapist, and I know that this will be a
learning experience for you.” Another said, “I get very angry with what you
did, and I am not prepared to forgive you easily. I have experienced espionage
from the FBI during the Vietnam War, and have strong feelings around things
like tape-recording.” This went on for five or ten minutes, then Starhawk
suggested that people finish the processing with me after the ritual.
The theme for this leave-taking ritual was “Celebrating our Community”.
The structure and basic elements of Reclaiming Witches’ rituals will be
described in chapter 5. In this specific ritual the most challenging part for me
was participation in the ritual dance at the end – the so-called Spiral Dance,
which was led by Starhawk. The dance leader is like a snake’s head; the
participants holding hands in a circle form her body. In the inward circling the
participants build a tight spiral pattern; in the outward movement, circling out
of the spiral, everybody must pass each other face to face, and all are expected
to meet the other person’s eyes. The dancers are building a metaphorical
120 Guardians of the world

“body” through weaving their bodies in dancing, a key ritual element when
celebrating community. I normally find the Spiral Dance very energizing, and
to Witches it gives a strong feeling of community and belonging. Meeting
eyes while singing in a sacred dance in a sacred space is interpreted both as
“looking at the Goddess” and as meeting your “Self ” in the other person. In
that situation I felt uncomfortable. I was still in a state of shame and wanted
to protect myself. Instead my body was surrounded by people who, in the
dance movements, were coming closer and closer. In the outward circling I
had to meet all these people’s eyes at a very short distance and receive all the
subtle energy they sent me. I tried to interpret eyes: Who accepts me? Who
dismisses me? Do they see the Goddess? Do they see themselves? Do they see
me?
When the ritual was done I felt better, even though I was still confused as
to the non-conclusion of this processing.Was I trusted by Reclaiming and the
extended Reclaiming community, or was I not? Suddenly Starhawk came
toward me. She smiled, and her eyes were twinkling. She said,“Well, since you
made this terrible mistake and tape-recorded the ritual, I would like to listen
to it. So don’t throw it away!” She gave me a hug and left. I felt relieved and
appreciated her humorous comment. Other people came and expressed their
feelings: some positive and some negative. But now I was starting to anticipate
the situation and really listen to what they said. I felt accepted and was able to
see their hurt and not only my shame. I was still being processed, but it was
okay – I was learning something new.
But what did they want me to learn? And what did they learn themselves?
Rachel, who earlier in the week had offered to be my hostess when we
returned to Vancouver, was the first to teach me. In the processing she had
expressed strong anger and disappointment with my trickery. I therefore took
it for granted that the invitation to be her guest was no longer valid, that she
would feel uncomfortable with my company. When I said this, she looked at
me really surprised and said,“No, Jone, it is not your person I don’t validate; it
is your behaviour. When we are done with ‘processing’ we are done, and the
you who acted out this behaviour is forgiven. I will be delighted to have you
as my guest.”To confirm her statement, she nicely prepared a bedroom for me
while I enjoyed a hot bath.
Since Rachel had opened the door to conversation and interpretation, I
decided to share some of my spontaneous thoughts and feelings with her. I
told her that the whole incident had been an unusual experience. I had never
before tried this method or been transformed publicly from feeling shame and
regret to feeling acceptance and peace. The experience also contrasted with
my upbringing, through which I had learned that I was a sinner – meaning an
imperfect human being dependent on the grace of God – with no chance of
ever really improving and growing. On the other hand, I was not allowed to
be who I was: an imperfect human being. I should not fail, and if I did, it had
costs. To help me learn and shape up, something would be “taken away” from
me – trust, privileges, things. I could ask God for forgiveness.Then, theoretically,
 Utopian and generic Witches: revitalizing western spiritualities 121

everything would be okay, even if it were not okay with people. In my up-
bringing, God and people were separate; in Witchcraft they merged.
Rachel, who has an Episcopalian background, was very pleased with my
“confession”. She decided to give me additional teaching:

We are building a spiritual community that is different from the ones we

had when growing up. At the camp we were all struck by your behaviour
because we are bonded emotionally and communally. When doing “pro-
cessing” we are helping each other to really forgive you. Not as a polite
saying, but as a real doing. And not only that, we are helping you to
forgive yourself and accept who you are. This we have never learned
before, how to forgive ourselves, or that it was even necessary. But
without forgiving of selves by selves there is no growth and no learning.
Instead you will repeat the same mistakes over and over and never change.
With self-acceptance you open up for your inner sacred being to come
forth, and you reconnect with the Goddess.When you feel shame you cut
yourself off from her. We help you to reconnect, to heal, to change and
become whole again. And when we dance in ritual the Goddess is
manifesting and helping us out. We can’t do it without her. We have to
open our hearts, just as you have to. We have to re-learn to see you as a
sacred being, you have to see us, as well as yourself. Repentance and
change can only take place when you see the other. And this “seeing” can
only be done from a place of love for self, which is love for the Goddess
inside.When this happens the “processing” becomes a healing ritual for all
of us.

Back in San Francisco, every teacher in Reclaiming was informed about my

transgression. In our conversation, one of them, Freya (who also participated
in the Catholic Mass at Mission Dolores), asked me how I felt after
Witchcamp. I gave a very short answer but made sure that my message showed
that I was troubled with what happened. She brushed me off, saying:

Listen Jone, Witchcamp always brings up a lot of ‘shit’ in everybody; that

is the way it is constructed. And not only in the students, but in the
teachers as well. Without making contact with your shadow, you can
never change. This is the work and path of the Goddess. So listen to her
and make it a learning experience.

Freya gave the response I naively had hoped for from Amanda. She did not ask
for explanations or show disappointment – she only stated reality and invited
me to use it as an opportunity to change.
The interpretation of my experience at Witchcamp was taken even one
step further by another generic Witch, Aradia. She told me that she saw the
whole incident as an initiatory experience, that I had touched upon a process
of death and rebirth. This was a signal, meaning that I was called forth by the
122 Guardians of the world

Goddess to enter a new level of experience and commitment: it was time for
me to ask for initiation. She added that she was waiting for me to ask. I was
very surprised by this openness because usually initiation is not something
easily acquired – especially not by a scholar. But I knew that if a Reclaiming
Witch said it was time for me to be initiated, it was not meant technically to
help my research: it was because she believed I had experienced something
that qualified me personally to enter the secret circle.
In contrast to these thoughtful and educational responses were those of my
six circle sisters, who did not give any verbal interpretations. They only
listened to my story, comforted me as if I were their wounded child by
reassuring me of their feelings for me, agreeing fully that Witches are
hysterical about tape-recorders out of fear of the FBI.Whether my action was
immoral or not was not commented upon. They expressed no disappoint-
ments and no doubts as to whether I still might be trusted to be in a
circle/coven and share their most intimate experiences. I was very surprised
and very pleased to experience an acceptance so close to being unconditional.
This coven ritual of “thoughtful listening” to one individual is the opposite of
the processing of a whole group. But the “ethics of immanence” are the same.
In processing the group itself holds the focus, and I was not supposed to
comment or judge the emotions being expressed about my behaviour. In
thoughtful listening I am the focus, and the others shall not comment, correct,
analyse or judge my action or emotions. All in all, the incident which I feared
could have ruined my whole fieldwork ended with the Witches integrating
me even more strongly into their community.

* * *
From the Witches’ point of view, my immoral act was an expression of
“power-over”. I acted as if I were above the stated common rules and made
other people the object of my manipulation. To Witches this is an act of
alienation: I severed myself from the community, and in this process I was
regarded as having lost my Self and the immediate contact to my “inner
voice” that is believed to separate right from wrong. After being caught, I
continued to act from this place of achieved “power-over”: I was concerned
with not losing face and jeopardizing my fieldwork. I was not dealing with
having lost myself, having violated my own moral standards.
To cleanse the situation, the Witches orchestrated processing. This is
regarded as a method for restoring “power-from-within”, creating emotional
balance and moral integrity in a person and inducing growth from temporary,
symbolic childishness to adulthood. The method is basically to force the
transgressor to see “the other”, to leave her severed position and recognize in
herself the emotional suffering of “the other”. A Witch shall not lie, not
because it is forbidden by moral law but because it disconnects her from her
inner Self, from others and from harmony with the Goddess.The punishment
is, therefore, believed to be embedded in the action itself.
 Utopian and generic Witches: revitalizing western spiritualities 123

Also, I identified my behaviour with my self and with my value as a person.

In Rachel’s worldview the only way to forgive transgressions is to temporarily
separate self and behaviour. It is not the behaviour that is forgiven, but the
person who displayed it. Abuse is wrong and can never be forgiven, but the
person who does wrong can be forgiven. This distinction is, to Witches, the
only way a person can handle facing her wrongs, her shadows, “her shit”. And
without facing “the shit” they do not believe there is any chance for
improvement. Rachel, Freya and Aradia each offered an interpretation in
which I could distinguish between my self and my behaviour. My behaviour
was wrong, but in and of itself it created an opportunity to connect with my
divine inner being and to grow. This paradox, that something painful and
immoral can create something good, is highly valued by Aradia when she
names it an initiatory experience from death to rebirth. As stated earlier, this
way of giving spiritual value to daily life events and including them as themes
for ritualizing are typical features of women’s religiosity.
Processing is a practice shared by Witches of utopian and generic bents. But
the case illustrates well how the generic concept of the human subject defines
the context: humans are fundamentally split, with the ability to repeatedly act
counter to their claimed norms. This ability is not judged as evil in itself but
stated as a painful part of reality, constitutive of the human condition. It
manifests outwardly as a constant tension between the values of estrangement,
commonly experienced in lived reality, and the values of wholeness, repre-
sented ideally as the core self, the so-called Deep Self. However, this inner split
in a person is not static. On the one hand, it may be turned into a subject for
healing and growth. On the other hand, the split can freeze or increase
through negative reinforcements from the social world. Did not “Jone” confess
how she was socially conditioned to alienate herself from her Self in her
upbringing? This split within a person is regarded as the challenge when
someone is called forth to grow and mature from child to adult, seeking to
balance the inner self with the outer world.
The Goddess is identified with the true nature of Deep Self and, in my
processing and the following ritual, this deity was actually called forth to
restore balance. She is believed to always dwell in me, but she manifests only
through actions. Anybody can alienate herself from the Goddess and lose her
sense of right living. But the Goddess can be restored again through ritual
action. Ritual, then, has the function of integrating a person more and more
into the values of wholeness and the harmony of Deep Self.
My “confession” to Rachel about my upbringing was a signal that the
processing was successful. Rachel evaluated my new attitude to be in harmony
with my inner Self, and once again I was credited with the ability to listen
and learn. I was reintegrated into the community when she educated and
interpreted for me. When I contrasted my upbringing with Witchcraft, my
speech also functioned as reinforcement of the truth-value of Wiccan
hermeneutics and ritual. My transgression was not only being turned into a
positive lesson for me, but everybody could use my mistake and its processing
124 Guardians of the world

as subjective mirrors for a positive validation of Witchcraft. Their worldview

was confirmed: 1 The Goddess is indeed identical with the deepest power of
inner Self (she transformed Jone). 2 Humans are indeed split subjects (even
the trusted Jone failed). 3 Humans can therefore alienate themselves from the
Goddess and behave badly (Jone focused only on her own ego, alienating
herself from her Self, and it had terrible consequences). 4 By means of ritual
and the support of community, wrong-acting can be forgiven and the Goddess
restored (my confession was a signal that this had happened). 5 A process
leading from emotional alienation to integration is structurally equivalent to
existential rebirth and is, therefore, a process of literal growth (Jone was
believed to never again be able to tape-record without permission; she actually
changed and was, therefore, offered the chance to continue this changing
process through the death-and-rebirth ritual of initiation). 6 Finally, Witches
are confirmed in their belief that they are in control of human behaviour and
know the tools for emotional modelling and growth. Freya’s statement that
“Witchcamp always brings up a lot of ‘shit’ in everybody; that is the way it is
constructed” implies that my mistake, as well as others, was almost calculated
and arranged for with the educational function for the campers to “meet
themselves” and grow.
Generic Witches display a close association between concepts of the sacred
and definitions of human nature. As humans are split and ambiguous, so is
divinity. The Goddess can be incarnated in humans, making the self an object
for divine programming. The Goddess can also be an external relationship,
making the self a subject for encountering the sacred in ritual. In the processing
ritual at Witchcamp, the human subject and the Goddess are perceived as
separate beings. The goal of ritualizing is to slowly merge the two. In the
thoughtful listening ritual in the coven, the Goddess is perceived as incarnate
in me, manifesting in my voice and being. The characteristic feature of both
rituals is that their initial themes are gathered from daily life, and not from
myths.The second stage of the ritual process, though, is precisely to reinterpret
daily life in terms of mythological imagery, as happens when my experience is
being interpreted as a spiritual death and rebirth.
This act of processing can also be regarded as an example of how feminist
Witches create a religion which is a “politically correct Christianity”: they are
finally able to accept wrongs, change them and forgive them, but without
necessarily reviving utopianism, for the goal in this context cannot be
said to be the perfection of human beings – understood as beings who in time
will never fail in relation to claimed norms – but rather self-knowledge and
growth in accordance with the principle of power-from-within.The distinction
between “power-from-within” and “power-over” as an overall norm in
Reclaiming is, to a certain extent, visible in this case.The community does not
act from a position of power-over with restricting punishment or ostracism;
rather, they confront truth in the open, contrasting with my attempt to
conceal my acts. The case also illustrates Witches’ methods for healing of
culture “at home”, at a community level. The individual, her community and
 Utopian and generic Witches: revitalizing western spiritualities 125

the extended ecological family are believed to be intimately interconnected.

My healing is, therefore, regarded as a healing of the body of the whole
community.16

Witchcraft and western traditions

For the first time in history, people raised as Christian Catholics, Christian
Protestants and Jewish Jews have found each other in a joint spiritual path –
which is mainly evolving as they go along. Some of these worshippers dismiss
their essential first names while keeping their family names and ancestral
heritage, ending up calling themselves Catholic Witches, Jewish Witches, but
not yet Protestant Witches. Due to a certain positive identification with parts
of their religious heritage, many of them cannot possibly keep up a concept of
religion as identical with one social institution. Instead they turn Christianity
(and Judaism) into multiple traditions of internal contradiction. Implicitly in
this manoeuvre, my informants support the option of positioning the Witches’
emancipatory project within western spirituality, not totally outside of it.
On the other hand, the religious innovations characteristic of Witchcraft,
such as those emphasizing human growth and the power of magical ritual, are
also striking. In exactly what respects, then, do I claim modern Witches to be
in debt to Jewish and Christian traditions? First, through the belief that life is
no accident but derived from an ultimately divine, beneficent source (the
Creator God or the Great Goddess); and second, through the adoption of the
concept of a holy spirit (or goddess) within the Deep Self, which can be
listened to beyond, and in opposition to, the context of tradition.Witches have
not inherited this concept of spirit from paganism or any other religion, but
from Christian theology and heresy.
Iconoclasm in reference to an autonomous, veritable voice – potentially
present in everybody, without regard to rank and deeds and not in reference to
God’s commandments or to the way of the ancestors – is, in western
civilization, genuinely Christian.17 The same is true of the enlightenment
movements, whose existence definitely is unthinkable without the tradition
of the anarchist Holy Spirit18 and the belief in God as a beneficent creator.
When embracing radical political projects, Witches place themselves within
this western heritage line. Whatever beliefs Witches might share with their
acclaimed pagan ancestors, these ancestors’ spiritual aim was not the eman-
cipation of people from form and custom, but was, rather, to pay homage to
tradition.Witches do not pay homage to any tradition and discount any once-
and-for-all “ten commandments”. They also reject the eastern tradition of
noninvolvement, where an individual is left to interpret suffering as personal,
bad karma, generated through bad deeds in an earlier life. As real western
radicals, they take responsibility for human fate globally and put themselves in a
privileged position as the guardians of the world, as its “healers and benders”.
But Witches also go several steps further. Unlike their counter-cultural
Christian predecessors, they do not settle for a new Church, a new priest-
126 Guardians of the world

hood, a new and, finally, correct interpretation of the Book of Scripture or the
Book of Nature. In accordance with the ideals of late modernity they simply
renounce this finite concept of truth and insist that viable religion can be
created from lived experiences by ordinary people, similar to the creation
processes of other cultural institutions. In so doing, Witches push the modern
idea of democracy one step further and suggest that the “institution of the
sacred” be fully incorporated into modernity, debarred from its premodern
and privileged authority structure. By this suggestion they take away from
theology and educated priesthood the exclusive authority to interpret the will
of God and perform ritual.
When studying Reclaiming Witches, we are obviously left with an
ambiguous tradition that holds conflicting views of the human Self. On the
one hand, a human person is regarded as a rational being who may create her
own life and her own religious forms autonomously, aided solely by her own
experiences and an inculturated inner voice, the conscience. On the other
hand, she is constructed from divine sources as a person with an indwelling
spirit. The notion of spirit represents a different voice, not coming from the
ego or the unconscious but from divinity – and it asks to be served. The
modernist slogan, “being my own authority” is modified by a mystical slogan,
the “authority of the spirit within”. When Witches claim to be in service
of “the Goddess” and her magical religion, as well as of “Democracy” and
modern rationality, they enter the domain of paradox.

Notes
1 This notion shall broadly refer to those (heretical) movements which challenged
the authority of interpretation after the Church ascended to power in the fourth
century CE.
2 Taking on the western utopian discourse inevitably means taking on the genre and
logic inherent in the discourse itself. New religious innovations like Witchcraft will,
from pure hermeneutical necessity, have to stand on the shoulders of their rejected
forerunners while, at the same time, stretching forward. Nobody can create new
forms by inventing or imagining tabula rasa, by completely stepping outside the
culture in which one was born and lives. Continuity is also reinforced by the very
acceptance of personal and plural interpretations, so characteristic of modern
paganism. To a certain degree these interpretations will, in all their diversity, be
based on and determined by previous religious configurations. The first Christians
interpreted their new personal experiences and beliefs on the basis of various
branches of Judaism and Greco-Roman paganism, just as modern Witches interpret
on the basis of both their Jewish and Christian and classical cultural heritage –
as well as going beyond it. Witchcraft is inevitably a product of modernism and its
“illness” and was unlikely to have come up in any other time period.
3 By that time Starhawk had already established a reputation as facilitator for large
political groups organized through the philosophy of consensus decision making,
as well as being known as a practising Witch. She was also well known in the San
Francisco Bay Area for being instrumental in organizing (together with her Witch
friends) the Three Mile Island Memorial Parade in 1979. She had also been
involved in rituals for the National Conference of Women and Violence (1976),
 Utopian and generic Witches: revitalizing western spiritualities 127

the Take Back the Night March (1978) and Inviting the Light Celebration (1979).
Today (2001), Starhawk is active in the anti-globalization movement (“Attach”)
and with permacultural farming.
4 Witches believe that any object, person or event has its invisible duplicate on an
energy level. This energy body of an object can be sensed, although not seen, and
is believed to be accessible within the framework of ritual, a space where ordinary
time and space dissolve.
5 One reason is that well known scholars, like Norman Cohn and Carolyn Merchant,
call these groups the first revolutionary anarchists and communists. Their scholar-
ship gave a major input to Starhawk when she wrote Appendix I, “The Burning
Times: Notes on a Crucial Period of History” in Dreaming the Dark (1982a). This
is obvious from her bibliography. The feeling of being linked spiritually to the
European heretical movements has also been reinforced by David Kubrin’s work
(1981, 1987). He holds a PhD in the History of Science, and since 1981 he has
been an opinionated and influential activist in Reclaiming and the broader
anarchist pagan community. Kubrin (1981) is listed among Starhawk’s literary
sources in Dreaming the Dark. Carolyn Merchant started out as Kubrin’s student
and attributes her Death of Nature to his inspiration. Since the two are not
independent sources of historical analysis, I shall only use Merchant’s (not Kubrin’s)
work.
6 According to Cohn (1981:288) and Merchant (1983:123), a certain Gerrard
Winstantly founded the Diggers in the 1640s as an anarchist community. In 1649
they took possession of St George’s Hill in Surrey and began to cultivate the
common and waste grounds until they were defeated by military troops.
7 In my presentation of this lineage I will rely solely on Cohn and Merchant.
8 Cohn 1981:192, who here refers to Augustine and Cyprian.
9 They included: the continental Free Spirit movement, dating back to the
beginning of the fourteenth century; the English Peasant Revolt, presumably
organized by the legendary John Ball from around 1380; the Amaurians and
radical Taborites, organized in Bohemia after the burning of John Hus in 1414;
Thomas Munster and the Anabaptists. As mentioned, the Free Spirit re-emerged in
Cromwell’s England in the seventeenth century as the Diggers. In the same period
religious enthusiasts known as Ranters, Seekers, Levellers and Antinomians multi-
plied rapidly (Cohn 1981:151; Merchant 1983:123). Also, in the early seventeenth
century, two utopian drafts were published:Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun
(1602) and the Lutheran pastor Johann Valentin Andreä’s Christianopolis (1619).
They formulated a philosophy of communal sharing and egalitarian distribution of
wealth and were both serious about making the utopian plans social reality.
10 The medieval imagery implied in the notion of the state of nature, could
be supported by Genesis (all are descended from one father and mother, Adam
and Eve, etc.), Acts (the first apostles apparently lived communally, sharing all their
common goods) and the Book of Revelation (the Kingdom of God is soon to
come).
11 They held some values in common with the Church and the monastic orders, for
example, voluntary poverty and the sharing of land, food, properties and com-
modities. But they disagreed strongly on the sharing of spouses and on the
deification theology.
12 Cohn 1981:178. According to Cohn, this freedom from sin took on certain
abnormalities, which gave the movement a reputation of being amoral. He argues
that certain members maintained that to murder a man was not sin as long as the
action came from a pure heart.
13 Some scholars include the Beguines as part of the Free Spirit spirituality, a lay
monastic movement led by women (cf. Neel 1989; Bowie 1990).
128 Guardians of the world

14 Some Witches identify with the heretical, Christian Gnostics and would have set
the date for comparisons to the first century. This identification is based on the
fact that Gnosticism was also regarded as heretical, that its spiritual path was a
search for gnosis from within, and that female imagery of the divine (Sophia) was
included in their theology. But, objectively, Witchcraft beliefs are not compatible
with Gnosticism. This tradition is fundamentally dualistic and degrades the body,
and the earth in general, by attributing them to an evil creation god, the Demiurge.
15 “Aradia” is the name of the Italian Queen of the Witches, as described by Leland
(1897). To take on a new name, and renounce one’s birth name, is a common
practice within the new religious movements.To be called “Aradia” means that the
goddess Aradia is invoked in the person every time the name is uttered. The
woman’s intention, when changing her name, is either to rename a quality already
present within herself or to pledge to manifest more and more of Aradia in her
daily life.
16 When one of my informants, let us call him “Bryan”, read a draft of this chapter,
he became very angry. He was, himself, involved in a severe conflict with some of
the leading Reclaiming women: eight years ago he said something extremely
offensive and deeply hurtful to one of them and, although he apologized, he was
never forgiven. When reading my draft, Bryan expressed anger at Reclaiming for
applying such high principles of “redemption” in my case, and not in his, and
anger at me for presenting my case as if it were what is generally done within the
community. He tried to figure out the differences that might explain the different
treatment of our respective transgressions in our two cases. He roughly ended up
with two possible reasons: that he already had a “weak social position” due to
previous conflicts with one of the women – which I had not; that he was a man –
I was a woman. His last guess implied that Reclaiming has a gendered morality
that discriminates against men. Bryan may be right: it is possible that my illegal
tape-recording would have been treated differently had I been a man. On the
other hand, it is hard to compare the two cases: I broke the law; he broke
somebody’s heart. I believe I too would have been punished differently had
I broken somebody’s heart. Furthermore, the conflict he initiated was actually
processed by the aid of two chosen mediators. The problem is, rather, that the
offended party in Bryan’s case felt that processing made no difference, whereas in
my case it was felt to make a difference.
17 The acclamation of this new authority beyond Scripture, priesthood and tradition
was also an ingredient when the first-century Jewish community in Jerusalem
decided to expel the “Jesus people” from their midst. It was this act that initially
forced them to create a new religion, Christianity.The Holy Spirit, believed to be
infused in every individual through baptism, is, therefore, the most anarchistic
principle in the Christian tradition. In reference to the voice of the spirit – against
the voices of pope, bishop, father and mother, tradition and custom – new
Christian traditions have continually been created.
18 According to Ronald Grimes (1990:25), the Holy Spirit refers to human experience
before language and narrative. It is a deep source of renewal in human life –
including in the art of ritualizing. The Holy Spirit is also Peter Berger’s criterion
when defining the church–sect typology: in the former, the Spirit is considered as
remote; in the latter, the Spirit is believed to be immediately present (cf. York
1995:321).
 Utopian and generic witches: revitalizing western spiritualities 129

4 Holy hermeneutics
How to find truth

Sofia is one of the Jewish founders of Reclaiming.When I asked her why she
became a Witch, she referred to a religious experience she had in 1974, when
23 years old. She lived by the ocean and usually walked on the beach in the
evenings. One evening she suddenly felt a presence. She looked around and
saw nobody. She finally looked at the moon and felt an intense stream of
communication, almost as if she merged with the moon. She heard a voice
from inside the moon, talking to her, telling her that it had saved her and
protected her from all kinds of dangers throughout her life:

What happened was that I was being picked out by the Goddess to hear
her message. She told me to meditate every full moon and said I would
start meeting women that would show me what I needed to know. The
Goddess also asked me to take back Sofia, my birth name – which also is
one of her names – and told me her creed, the “Charge of the Goddess”,
It almost had the same form as the traditional one.

This extraordinary experience changed Sofia’s life. She believed she had been
elected as a subject for divine revelation, and from that day she started
meditating every full moon, while waiting for the women who would teach
her to show up. First she met Z. Budapest in Los Angeles, and through her she
was in 1977 introduced to Starhawk. Sofia learned that the goddess who had
revealed herself at the beach was exactly the same divinity who was worshipped
in the religion called “Witchcraft”. She then, of course, joined this religious
path and is presently still a Witch.
This story is not unique to Sofia, and among generic Witches it is fairly
common to refer to one’s religious path as some kind of selection, a waking
up or even conversion, sparked by an extraordinary experience or revelation.
Francesca, a Faery initiate and friend of Reclaiming, told me that:

The sheer physical presence of the Goddess captured me and changed my

being.You get chosen; yes, Goddess kidnaps you; that’s it, and that’s how I
have experienced a lot of my path. But I cannot tell you that this is
130 Guardians of the world

objective reality.We do not believe in such a concept. If you are going to

understand something, you get involved with it. You get involved with
your whole being, with your God spirit, with your sacred animal nature,
with your passion – you bring all parts of you and experience it. If you
bring that being to your observation of nature, you will truly see nature
for what it really is. You will see the Goddess in it and understand her
mysteries. Anybody can find her mysteries if they just look with their
whole being and live it.Witchcraft is not a belief system which you adopt
intellectually. It is rather our understanding from being alive and inter-
acting with things.

One of the functions of stories like this is to assure the believers that their
religious path is not made up, in a fictitious sense, but refers to something
Real. My informants would repeatedly tell me “Even though we make up this
religion, the Goddess is not made up. She is more than a chosen metaphor;
she is real and she is alive.” “Experience” becomes a key concept to explain
the existence of the Goddess and her religion.To Francesca, experience means
total involvement, an embodied way of thinking, and is a fundamental
hermeneutic principle to “read” reality. Francesca’s reference to experience
resembles the Aristotelian notion empeira, meaning knowledge received from
interacting with things, being involved and skilled, in opposition to theoria,
which means knowledge from looking at, observing at a distance, as when
astronomers study the planets.
To Sofia, the concept of experience is a way to legitimize the possibility of
living with a consciousness of inventing religion but not of making up that
which religion is essentially about: the experience of divine reality. Witches
invent, while at the same time insisting on religion’s truthfulness. In Sofia’s
religion, people have decided that the moon is one of the normative symbols
of female divinity, and the core understanding of the essential being of this
divinity has been expressed in a creed called the “Charge of the Goddess”.
This creed is formulated as two speeches, one given by the Great Mother, the
other by the Star goddess, thus revealing their “essence(s)” to the reader: For I
am the soul of nature that gives life to the universe. From Me all things proceed and
unto Me they must return. Let My worship be in the heart that rejoices, for behold—all
acts of love and pleasure are My rituals.1 Doreen Valiente (and Gerald Gardner)
originally wrote this speech act of the goddess, but most Witches – among
them Starhawk – claim it to be both ancient and traditional.This information,
as well as the whole discussion on whether a religious element is ancient or
modern, whether it is a chosen metaphor or a true expression of reality, is
irrelevant to Sofia’s conversion narrative. She invokes another reality, in which
the moon itself speaks and tells the truth directly to her. Like Francesca, she
regards her own experience as her highest authority, and according to this
experience the creed is authored by the Goddess herself. It may also be true
that it was written down in the 1950s, but in her opinion this information is
only true in the reality of science and visible facts.
 Holy hermeneutics: how to find truth 131

To cope with multiple realities and several concepts of truth, the Reclaim-
ing Witches depend upon an implicit hermeneutic distinction between what
they understand to be presymbolic experience and cultural symbols. This
indigenous distinction between natural “truth” and cultural “invention” is
crucial to an understanding of their self-proclaimed authority and cultural
mission, as well as their worldview in general. Witches may disagree strongly
on certain beliefs, but they all agree on method: to contrast experienced
reality continuously with representations of reality.
However, the Witches do not claim the notion “hermeneutics”. It is solely
an etic category, which I utilize in order to develop a descriptive terminology
and to come to terms with presumably confusing, interpretive strategies and
multiple realities invoked by Reclaiming Witches.To be able to do so, we must
start by delimiting hermeneutics as a theoretical concept and then proceed to
contextualize the ethno-hermeneutics of Witchcraft in relation to the ways in
which prevailing academic theory reads reality and its signs. My presentation
of hermeneutics is based on Engdahl (1977), Daniel (1986), White (1987,
1988), Ricoeur (1988) and Petersen (1996).

Religion and hermeneutics

The word “hermeneutics” is derived from the name of the Greek god
Hermes. He was believed to be the carrier of divine messages from the gods
to the humans. Later he also became the mythical inventor of writing.
Hermeneutics, then, was originally the art of understanding holy messages
from the gods as these were revealed directly and experientially to a human
medium, that is, of bridging the divine and the mundane. It was a tool to
mediate between two kinds of reality, to overcome the gap between divine
speech and human reality and make them one (a vertical interpretive move),
while its contemporary meaning has become the art of interpretation in
general (a horizontal interpretive move).
In the classical period, hermeneutics was developed further as the art of
interpreting divine discourse that was already encoded in sacred text.The sacred
text in classical Greece was the Homeric Epic. But Homer’s anthropomorphic
portrait of the gods was considered all too human and amoral for classical taste.
The solution to this problem was not to question the authority of the narratives
as such and write new sacred text, but to find an interpretation that was not
literal, that created another, more acceptable meaning. This “translation” is a
metaphorical interpretive process, a prototype of horizontal hermeneutics.
The tension between direct experience (revelation) and encoded message
(text) in medieval times was expressed via the imagery of God revealing
godself through two kinds of books: the “Book of Nature” and the “Book of
Scripture”, representing respectively an immanent and a transcendent aspect
of deity. Each of “the Books” was true, or carried Truth. The way for human
beings to understand both divine (macrocosmic) and human (microcosmic)
reality was to interpret these books, one by means of the other.This reciprocal
132 Guardians of the world

interpretation was possible because the human microcosm was believed to be

a reflection of the divine macrocosm. Accordingly, the goal was not only to
read the sacred Books but also to be read by them.
The duality between nature (revelation) and scripture (text) eventually
received a this-worldly interpretation in Romantic hermeneutical theory:
divine duality was transferred to human psychology as a duality between
direct experience (nature/revelation) and indirect reflection (scripture/text).
In fact, the duality itself came to be understood as the basic dilemma in all
religious discourse (cf. Smith 1981). A Romantic theory of religion, going
back to Schleiermacher and Goethe, invokes several parallel realities. It regards
fundamental religious experience as mystical, since it belongs to a reality
beyond language. According to Thomas Aquinas’s brief definition, mysticism is
cognitio dei experimentalis, or “knowledge of God through experience”. But
mysticism is also bound to the paradox of language. The mystical knowledge,
which cannot be told, must be spoken and symbolized to have meaning.
Romanticism acknowledges both the power of language and that of experience,
but it does not subsume the one under the other.
In post-Romantic hermeneutic theory this is exactly what happens. The
duality between the realities of experience and language/reflection, between
nature and scripture is synthesized and reduced to a secularized oneness. The
most influential historical figure in this process was Feuerbach. First, he
transformed metaphysics into naturalism by merging the “Book of Scripture”
and the “Book of Nature” into one sacred reality immanent in the profane
world. Second, he completely merged the sacred with the profane, with the
consequence that the notion of the immanent sacred became lost in time.
Third, he proclaimed the institution of religion and the elevation of the sacred
to another reality to be a human projection (cf.Widmann 1989).
Feuerbach’s unification of heaven and earth has been essential to the
sociology of religion. In the positivist, empirical tradition going back to
Comte, the unified sacred–profane reality was reduced to empirical daily life.
Durkheim proclaimed religion to be nothing but society writ large, and
Mauss described the hermeneutics of sociology as completely horizontal: first
a description of facts, which are people’s actual beliefs in spiritual beings;
second an interpretation of these beliefs by placing their entire foundation in
social organization, not in a meta-human reality (Mauss 1985:31).
In the symbolist neo-Kantian tradition, reinterpreted by Durkheim and
later developed through influence from literary criticism, the formula “human
projection” became a norm for all kinds of cultural phenomena.The interest-
ing approach to religion was no longer to see it as a human illusion (which
it is, de facto, also to a symbolist) but to regard it as a system of symbols
conferring meaning upon human reality. The context is still human sociality,
but the focus has changed from social facts to social meaning.
In contemporary post-Romantic hermeneutical theory, in social sciences as
well as in the humanities, we still find these two major positions. From a
 Holy hermeneutics: how to find truth 133

Romantic point of view, they are both reductionist.The empiricists emphasize

ordinary experience and claim to study the empirical reality of daily life. The
symbolists emphasize language and cognition and claim to study the symbolic
reality of human culture.To the empiricists, language is not part of reality but
simply a medium to represent experienced reality. To the symbolists, language
itself is the problem.They regard language and signs as fundamentally arbitrary
in relation to reality. Language never represents reality; it creates reality and
interprets reality. Consequently, there is no nonlinguistic reality available for
direct experience. While the empiricists ultimately interpret meaning to
understand reality, the symbolists have totally given up on the concept of
reality (White 1987:281).
The goal of hermeneutics is to transform something foreign to something
familiar by the “bridge-building” act of interpretation. But what needs a
bridge? What is to be united? According to Ricoeur, the unification process
in religious hermeneutics is a translation of presumed divine reality to make
it relevant to this world of ordinary, daily life, overcoming experiences of
alienation from a human being’s point of view (Ricoeur 1988:55). But even
Ricoeur turns into a symbolist when he goes on to interpret this bridging as a
metaphorical, horizontal process in which language is discontinuous with the
things (that is, divine reality) it represents. Acceptable meaning, to him, is
created solely through interpretations and new names, by metaphorical trans-
lation of one universe of meaning into another.
None of these post-Romantic hermeneutical strategies is able to encompass
Sofia’s sensory experience of being addressed by extra-ordinary divine reality
without reducing it to a nonsensory, symbolic representation within ordinary
reality. In order to develop a language for Witches’ ethno-hermeneutics that
may comprise the magical and experiential aspects claimed, we need to go
back to an older notion of hermeneutics, extending the one unification axis
to include two. In addition to a horizontal, metaphorical interpretive process
on a cultural level, Witches may be said to operate with a second unification,
which is vertical, magical and individual. This axis is about the unification of
supernatural and natural, of sacred and profane, of emotion and thought,
of extra-ordinary and ordinary, the merging of “real substances” in the
experience of a single person beyond ordinary language and narrative.
Reshaped through this transformative experience, the individual is now
(ideally) made capable of invoking a magical language of action, not only of
signification. This magical language is, in contrast, conceived as continuous
with the things it represents.
We may say that the ethno-hermeneutics of magical religion unifies both
horizontally and vertically. But in order to name reality and position religion,
it also comprises symbolic and empirical positions.This presumed inconsistency
is due to Witches’ nonsynthetic, plural concepts of reality. Let me make this
explicit by presenting their dual definitions of religion, which eventually lead
to a third notion: magical reality.
134 Guardians of the world

Religion as symbol, experience and magical reality

As stated earlier, Witches confess to a Romantic distinction between pre-

symbolic experience and cultural symbol. This is integral to their acclaimed
cultural mission and to their argument concerning why it is worthwhile to re-
create dead or dormant traditions and invent religion. One argument is
existential, the other political and pragmatic. As existentialists, they are focused
on what is true. As politicians, they are concerned with strategies and
necessities and firmly believe that it is not possible to change western culture
without changing western religion. Therefore, it is only in accordance with
the differentiation between existential (what is true to the individual) and
political (what is necessary to create a better society), that we may say that
Witches separate functionally between religious experience and religious
symbols. Experience is viewed as authentic and true in a prelinguistic sense,
symbols and forms as secondary inculturations of those experiences. When
defining religion on a cultural level, they adopt symbolic anthropology,
embracing among others Clifford Geertz and Victor Turner. When defining
religion existentially, they adopt an esoteric version of Romanticism. Thus
they operate simultaneously with at least two different concepts of religion. In
Starhawk’s recreations of Witchcraft, this duality becomes rather visible.
First, Starhawk relies upon Clifford Geertz and maintains that religion is
constitutive of culture because it creates a cultural ethos that defines the
deepest values in a society and in the persons living there (cf. chapter 2).
Religion, in Starhawk’s language, is empirically “the soil of culture – in which
the belief systems, the stories, the thought-forms and all other institutions are
based” (Starhawk 1982a:72). She claims that there is no way to accommodate
cultural change without changing religion: not rejecting it, but replacing it
with another symbol system and structures that evoke other values. At this
argumentative level Starhawk accepts that religion as form is a human pro-
jection or construction. But it is a most powerful and necessary construction.
The question, then, is not whether this construction is an illusion; it is
whether the construction is life-affirming and nourishing to human beings or
life negating and oppressive. Metaphysics is measured by ethics. What is
considered true “dogmatically” cannot be true “in fact” if it does not liberate
people and sanctify all of life.The explicit goal of Witchcraft at this level is to
unite spirit and politics, to unite the values attributed to divine reality and the
values circulating in social reality: to realize religion as social utopia.
Second, Starhawk depends upon esoteric Romanticism and opposes Geertz
and symbolic anthropology. She states that religion is constitutive in human
life not only due to the power of symbols, but also because it deals with
substance, with real powers, life-generating powers, that can actually be
“tapped” by the art of magic (such as ritual invocations, prayer, meditation).
When talking about religion inside this realm of real powers, Starhawk defines
religion essentially, not empirically, as “a matter of re-linking, with the divine
within and with her outer manifestations in the entire human and natural
 Holy hermeneutics: how to find truth 135

world” (Starhawk 1979a:186). Divinity is ultimately defined as “life-generating

powers” in a very literal sense, even though “Goddess” can also be symbolized
conventionally as deity. Divine reality is not divided between immanence and
transcendence but between visible reality, as experienced in ordinary life, and
invisible reality, as experienced extra-ordinarily, abruptly as in revelation, in
ritual space or in altered states of consciousness (trance). Correspondingly, we
find two fluctuating meanings of the concept of experience. One refers to
ordinary life, the other to a mystical, extra-ordinary experience.
The double floor in Reclaiming Witches’ conceptualizations of reality and
the twofold definition of religion places them in the category that sociologist
Peter L. Berger calls “inductive strategy” in the renewal of religion: going back
to experience and, from there, assessing tradition. In The Heretical Imperative
(1980), Berger displays a Romantic theory of religion that, to a certain extent,
echoes Witchcraft. It is based on the thesis that the individual experience of
the supernatural is not coextensive with the social phenomenon of religion:
“Religion can be understood as a human projection because it is communi-
cated in human symbols. But this very communication is motivated by an
experience in which a metahuman reality is injected into human life” (Berger
1980:52). Berger claims that the distinction between experience and reflection
is crucial if the study of religion is to become something more than a history
of ideas and if we shall have any chance of understanding the strong energies
playing in religious fields, or say, new religious movements. From there
he defines religion empirically, but not essentially, as a human attitude that
conceives of the cosmos, including the supernatural, as a sacred order (Berger
1980:53; 43). Both the sacred and the supernatural must be present for Berger
to call a phenomenon “religion”.
If we apply Berger’s terminology to the Witches, “sacred” refers to a hori-
zontal interpretation of unity between self and cosmos, in which goddess is
experienced metaphorically as visible, ordinary reality itself, meaning that she
is manifest and present in all life forms in a nonpersonal form. “Supernatural”
designates, according to Berger, “the radically, overwhelmingly other, referring
to an experience of something being out there . . . having an irresistible reality
that is independent of one’s own will” (Berger 1980:42). Applied to the
Witches, “supernatural” refers to a vertical invisible reality in which goddess
may be experienced as substance, as life-generating powers or, personally, as
“the other”, as deity.
However, this is not all there is to say about the Goddess. She is also
believed to “exile” herself from transcendent supernaturalism and materialize in
a magical sense: to incarnate and descend into people – an act named “sacred
possession” by Starhawk. In order to understand how language is used for such
a possession to happen and to grasp the symbolic complexity of Witchcraft,
we need to deepen the Romantic theory of religion summarized above and
linger with the fact that Wicca is also a magico-mystical religion within
western esotericism. As such, it attempts to restore a magical worldview and
to seek extraordinary mystical experiences. A simple differentiation between
136 Guardians of the world

experience and cultural symbol does not fully comprise the “possessiveness” of
the Goddess and this other magical reality. Within a more esoteric frame of
reference,Witches no longer understand the function and meaning of symbols
exclusively as signifiers, as the “clothing” of experiences into cultural languages.
In addition, symbols are, in themselves, regarded as literal vehicles and pointers
to other realities.Within this magical-mystical framework we may ask: how do
they now read signs? How do they comprehend magical reality and position
themselves in relation to a more realist view of language?
Just as Starhawk operates with two concepts of religion, so she assumes,
simultaneously, two corresponding sign theories. One is metaphorical,
nominalist and horizontal, suiting her feminist, post-Romantic symbolic pro-
gramme. The other is magical, realist and vertical, suiting her personal–
spiritual transformation agenda and occult lineage. On one hand, Starhawk
claims that language, as such, is basically metaphorical and arbitrary, irrespective
of whether it is expressed through explicit metaphors (poetry) or implicit
metaphors (scientific concepts): “Scientific knowledge, like religious know-
ledge, is a set of metaphors for a reality that can never be completely
described or comprehended . . . . Religion becomes dogmatic when it
confuses the metaphor with the thing itself ” (Starhawk 1979a:190). On the
other hand, Starhawk adopts esoteric realism. In order to grasp the mystical
meaning of symbols, she recommends that as part of the initiate’s training she
is taught to visualize symbols, to meditate on them and play with them in her
imagination until they reveal their meaning directly (Starhawk 1979a:81).
The meaning referred to here is not metaphorical and arbitrary, but arche-
typal. Archetypal knowledge is eternal knowledge that “inhabits things”,
independently of the human subject, but it may become known to the subject
as “embodied thoughts” through her active involvement, play, emotionality
and meditation.
But then, at a certain point in the sign process, divine knowledge and the
question of semantics (whether archetypal or metaphorical) abate altogether,
whereas the symbol as a mediator for divine substance, for power in a realistic
sense, takes over. Within this linguistic framework, very different from meta-
phorism, Starhawk maintains, “The symbol tells us, look at this. Experience
this thing; become this thing; open a channel so the power can flow through
you” (1979a:74). In this context, the symbol is “of the object”, the trans-
cendent has become present as real forces, and the symbol acquires a literal,
almost material, magical character.
The sign theory confronted here is probably derived from esoteric neo-
Platonism, according to which language itself is constituted by cosmic, divine
law and activity, not by human creativity. Neo-Platonic language theory
maintains that some phonic archetypes are eternal, constituting a realm of
“phonic ideas” that underlies the phenomenal reality (Bakker 1990:295). Such a
realist view of language is necessarily part of all magical worldviews because of
the very fact that magic originates from belief in cosmological correspondences:
that there are real, invisible physical or energetic relationships between the
 Holy hermeneutics: how to find truth 137

elementals of nature as well as between words and things, that is, between
symbols of people and people, between sacred symbols and that to which the
symbols refer. According to Starhawk, magic opens the door to a reality that is
just as valid to human experience, as is the tangible, visible world, only it has a
different quality:

The tangible, visible world is only one aspect of reality. There are other
dimensions that are equally real, although less solid. Myths and metaphors
are maps to other dimensions. Tir-Na-Nog, the Land of Youth in Irish
mythology, is not a metaphor nor an archetype, it is a real place that can
be visited. But its reality is not a physical one and the visits do not take
place in the physical body. Beings also exist in those other realms, for the
gods are more than symbols. They are real powers . . . . When we reach
for Goddess, she reveals herself to us.
(Starhawk 1987:25)
In order to integrate a notion of multiple realities, Reclaiming Witches have
developed a corresponding concept of multiple selves in the individual: the
divine Deep Self, the emotional Younger Self and the rational Talking Self.2
Deep Self represents the core of the human body/mind, reflecting a funda-
mental aspect of divine reality, while the culturally conditioned person includes
the emotional body/mind of Younger Self and the rational body/mind of
Talking Self. The structure of human consciousness is also believed to be
organized according to these three selves: the ordinary consciousness of the
Talking Self; the unconscious or dream state of the Younger Self; and the
extraordinary consciousness of Deep Self. While Younger Self experiences
the world, Talking Self structures it by arranging, categorizing, classifying
and giving names. Deep Self, however, is “the Divine within, the ultimate
and original essence, the spirit that exists beyond time, space and matter”
(Starhawk 1979a:22) and is only accessible through Younger Self. It is not the
rational “I” that communicates with the divine (although this “I” may
communicate about the divine), but the intuitive Self. The content of this
communication cannot be categorized as rational knowledge, but is rather
spontaneous awareness, a discernment of the way things really are.
In A Rumor of Angels (1970), Peter Berger indirectly supports the Witches’
position when he argues that reality is never experienced as one unified
whole, neither by ancient nor by modern people. Rather, it is perceived as
multiple, as containing zones or strata with greatly different qualities. The
realities that differ from being wide awake in ordinary, empirical reality he
calls “sub-universes” and points out that these may be based on physiological
processes, such as the dream state, or they may be experienced as a radical
emotional rupture from daily life, such as in ecstasy. Starhawk’s conscious
rotation between different modes of being, then, is not a sign of irrationality
or regression. The fact that these sub-universes are questioned at all Berger
ascribes solely to the process of secularization: the social plausibility structures
supporting magical beliefs are weakened or gone. But secularization does not
138 Guardians of the world

mean that the consciousness of modern people has changed and developed en
bloc from irrational to rational.
In order to approach magical reality and the literal qualities of language, I
shall combine Berger’s concept of sub-universes with the Reclaiming Witches’
concept of the three selves, and investigate the magico-ritual framework for
the experiential category associated with “reaching for the Goddess” and
entering realms like Tir-Na-Nog, the Land of Youth in Celtic mythology.

Trance-induction: Remembering Tiamat

As elaborated by Starhawk, the sacred can be perceived and experienced at
two different levels: either as an awareness of divine presence immanent in the
visible reality of empirical daily life, or as an extra-ordinary experience of the
presence of divine reality within a “less solid”, invisible sub-universe. Witches
make use of ritual trance techniques in order to induce an extraordinary
consciousness of divine presence. Trance is a controlled form of hypnosis,
which alters the ordinary consciousness to a mode close to the dream state by
the conscious manipulation of fantasy and emotions (Goodman 1988:6–7). It
is, in fact, to enter the dream state while being awake. In Reclaiming, this is
regarded as a major magical tool. It helps a person to “leave” the sensual body
and travel somewhere else in her consciousness. This journey is believed to
take place on the astral plane, a place beyond time and space and the limits of
the physical body. In dream state a person can journey to a mythological
universe, enter the narrative and become simultaneous with narrative time.
In shamanic traditions this journey to another world is often induced by
strong sensory stimuli: fasting from food and drink, flagellation, exhausting
dancing or – most commonly – the monotonous and steady beat of a drum.3
The essence in trance work is not the drum, but guided visualization. The
medium is taken to another reality by a narrator’s voice.The body position of
the medium is that of lying down on the floor or walking slowly in the room,
in both cases with her eyes closed. She is taken into an altered state of con-
sciousness, into the dream state of her Deep Self, by letting her imagination
and feelings follow the guidelines of the narrator.
The goal of ritual trance is to arrange for people to have a deep experience
of truth, believed to be accessible through this journey to another reality. Here
they can find answers to important questions, meet their ancestors or another
part of themselves, merge with the elements or deep forces in nature, or
ultimately, meet the goddess and become “possessed”. The experiences in
trance are considerably heightened if the dream state is built to a level of
ecstasy.This is most commonly done by ecstatic techniques such as exhausting
singing and dancing. According to Reclaiming Witches,“letting oneself trance”
requires deep trust in the narrator as well as in one’s fellow ritualists.
This mental journey to a place where historical time and space dissolve
into mythical present is regarded as possible because Witches believe that some
 Holy hermeneutics: how to find truth 139

part of them, some part of their Deep Selves, actually reaches back to the
beginning of time in an unbroken line.The memory of the beginning of time
is literally stored in their DNA cells and can be called forth in every new
reincarnation of a human being. Trance is an aid to healing and becoming
depossessed from oppressive culture and imagery and is a means to dispense
with time and remember through the body, as Starhawk puts it, “that the
Goddess lives in us as we in her as in each other” and that she has been
incarnated in humans since the beginning of time. Ritual trance may,
therefore, also help the participants to “remember” their former lives, for
example, as hunters and gatherers in prehistoric Africa or as Witches burned
during the inquisition. In trance, the history of evolution and all time lags can
be merged into the memory of a single person.
Let us now enter the Witches’ ritual space to explore how trance can be
used.The following example is from Witchcamp in Vancouver in 1989, where
the Goddess was invoked by this method. The trance work was jointly led by
Starhawk, Raven, Deadly, Cybelle and Pandora. Approximately 100 people
participated.The ritual sequence lasted probably half an hour.

* * *
The ritualists are asked to slowly move clockwise in circle with their eyes
closed. Starhawk enters the centre of the circle while beating a certain rhythm
on her Palestinian doumbec drum. Raven moves counter-clockwise at the
circle’s edge, also beating his drum. Gradually people adjust their movements
to the rhythm of the drums. After a while Deadly starts speaking, slowly and
evocatively:4

Long ago, there once was a time when people knew that the earth was a living
being and that all of life was holy. They knew the Goddess and they worshipped
her as Tiamat, as Inanna, as the Goddess of many names and guises. This
harmony was interrupted when her sons all of a sudden wanted the power. They
came together in Babylon, cut her body into pieces and made the world as we know
it today, dis-membered and scattered . . . . Now, we who are alive in her as she in
us as we are in each other will go back to this time and remember Tiamat.We shall
re-member the Goddess, shed her old skin and re-create her anew.

Starhawk now starts singing, and people follow.

Snake Woman, shedding her skin, Snake Woman shedding her skin,
Shed, shed, shedding her skin. Shed, shed, shedding her skin.

The song is repeated again and again, building up energy. Then it fades and
ends, and only the drumbeat is heard. After a while, Starhawk continues the
trance induction.
140 Guardians of the world

Remember as you imagine how we who are alive in her as she in us were fettered,
beaten, raped, tortured, burned, and poisoned. Remember how we were dismembered
and scattered, almost destroyed. Remember the feeling of being lost and lonely, how
you are hurt and wounded by other people. Now, remember the times when you
feel that you fail, how you hurt and wound others . . . . Breathe deep, feel the pain
– where it lives deep in us (as salt), burning. Flush it out! Let the pain become a
sound, a living river on the breath. Raise your voice – cry out. Scream.Wail. Keen
and mourn for the dismembering of the world.5
As the ritualists start to embody the images and the sound of the narrating
voice, they cry out, wail and mourn. After quite a while, Starhawk continues.
Remember, there is a place within us all, deep within, where we still are whole and
can feel the wholeness, before we were cut into pieces. Now, reach for that sacred place,
which always has been there. Reconnect with Deep Self and remember that you are a
whole being and always have been.
The chanting starts again, builds up and fades.
Snake woman, etc.
After a while Cybelle continues to talk.
We are remade; we are whole; we are healed.You do not any longer feel lost or
scattered. Feel that place of peace and rest deep within, stretching back in time, and
make a vision for the future . . . . Now, imagine that every child on this planet is
fed and cared for. Imagine that we cultivate the land in harmony and respect for its
internal balance. Imagine a city in which women can walk the streets in peace,
without any fear. Imagine a culture in which the Goddess again is worshipped and
sanity restored . . . .What is your challenge to re-create the world? . . . Listen to
your inner voice; what do you hear, what is your challenge?
The chant starts again, and energy is slowly built into an ecstatic state, raising
what Witches call “a cone of power”. This energy is meant to actualize and
give an energetic form to the vision created by Cybelle, transforming it from
image to reality on the astral plane, which again can manifest on the
mundane. Pandora continues to talk.
Reach out and feel the energy in the centre of the circle. Place your hand on the lower
part of your belly, and feel the place deep within where the Goddess is re-membered .
. . . Now, bend and place your hands on the ground and give back to the earth the
energy you do not need. Reach for your challenge and keep it in your hand . . . .
When you are ready, return to this room. Stamp your feet hard on the floor. Open
your eyes and look around you. Clasp your hands three times, and say your own
name out loud . . . . Find two other people in this room, and form groups of three.
Share your experience of dismemberment, of wholeness and of your challenge.

* * *
 Holy hermeneutics: how to find truth 141

The mythic imagery used in this trance work is taken from Enuma Elish, the
Babylonian creation epic. As stated in chapter 2, it tells the story of how the
cosmos was created by defeating chaos, symbolized as the goddess Tiamat, the
primeval snake.
Starhawk does not read Enuma Elish as a creation story, but as a symptom
of the displacement of a prehistoric goddess religion and the subordination of
women by male warriors. As observed in the ritual sequence above, the
participants are asked to investigate and experience the mythical event by
entering the sub-universe of mythical time in their imagination and becoming
Tiamat, the snake woman; they are asked to unweave history by depossessing
or shedding their skins and being reborn; they are asked to remember what
they cannot possibly remember, the deep centre of their being that was never
cut in pieces and destroyed by priests similar to Marduk’s and to reconnect
with it. They are asked to remember the time before men where rulers and
gods were champions, to remember that women’s bodies and sexual power are
the oldest imagery used to symbolize divine creation. It is taken for granted
that the Goddess is a power manifesting in Deep Self and that merging with
the Goddess “who is alive in us as we in her as in each other” is conducive to
healing common cultural heritage as well as to psychological healing of
individuals.
The word “re-member” has double meaning; it refers both to “recall” and
to “put something together”. This putting together within a ritual context is
not only a symbolization but is considered a magical act with real impact
upon people and the state of affairs in this world. But, for healing actually to
take place, it is obviously equally important to leave the trance state of
collective merger and undifferentiation, to reenter the ordinary reality of
separation and individuality, and, then, to complete the healing process by re-
experiencing it at this level through the acts of communication, sharing and
putting into metaphorical language.
The energy experienced and raised in ritual trance belongs to rhetoric as
well as to the field of psychophysical emotional exercises. Energy is set in
motion by the compelling force of symbolic language, certain body postures
and the art of imagination. But energy is also affected by the materiality of
language itself: since the word is voiced as speech or song, it becomes a bodily
thing, not only a rhetorical sign. In addition, the symbolic figure Tiamat is
perceived by Witches as a living entity, concealed simultaneously, so to speak,
as linguistic tropes in the mythical text and as a virtual being in the Deep Self.
When retelling the myth as a ritualized trance induction, Witches maintain
that the Goddess becomes alive within the experience of the trance mediums;
they meet her as substance, as “the great powers” taking possession. In
accordance with a worldview of living nature and cosmological corres-
pondences, Witches believe in the possibility of real, although invisible
relationships between words and things. Therefore, as the transcendent
“becomes” present as real forces in the subject, the narrative of Tiamat is not
only regarded as a pointer to the thing (that is, divine reality), but emerges as
142 Guardians of the world

an indexical sign: the symbolic figure “Tiamat” is perceived as contiguous with

the divine subject/object Tiamat. The made-up sacred narrative is believed to
be “of the thing”: it is the material and medium through which Goddess takes
possession of the Deep Self.
Why is it that the range of experience reported in magical religion cannot
be grasped through the hermeneutics of symbolic analysis? Because of its
reductive sign theory: it trivializes questions regarding the existence of the
object and, in particular, the existence of the extra-ordinary.6 On this back-
ground, anthropologist E. Valentine Daniel has questioned the entire enter-
prise of the study of religion as merely a system of symbols. “From the
analyst’s point of view, a culture may be a system of symbols and meanings.
But from the native’s point of view, his culture is constituted of indexical and
iconic signs in addition to symbols” (Daniel 1984:32). Daniel differentiates
between symbol, icon and index according to how the sign is constituted:
in the symbol, “image” and object are arbitrarily related by convention; in the
icon they are related by similarity (some actual resemblance or quality of the
object is represented in the image); in the index, “image” and object are
related by contiguity (for example, smoke may be an index of fire), giving “a
fluid and potentially alchemical relationship” (Daniel 1984:29).
This is relevant to Witches: in their world, icons and indexical signs may be
perceived as pointers and doorsteps to magical reality and sacred possession.
They make the experiential category of magic more plausible, and bridge the
distinction between Witchcraft as an invented human symbolization on the
one hand, and as a truthful experience of extra-ordinary reality on the other.

Witchcraft in relation to unio mystica and esoteric sign theory

When Witches emphasize the authority of experience over dogma, using
symbols and myths as pointers and mediators to, and indexical signs of, divine
reality, they appear as seekers of the unio mystica, for the mark of mystical
religion is its emphasis on extra-ordinary experiences of the divine and the
effort to “merge with” the deity.The particular mystical tradition that has most
profoundly influenced Witchcraft and its occult lineage is an esoteric version
of the Jewish Kabbalah.7 According to the Jewish scholar Gershom G.
Scholem, a Kabbalist desires to “taste” God, not only “listen” to divine words.
This tasting can occur through ecstatic immersion in inner experience,
intuition, contemplation or ritual, but not through intellectual work. Neither
can mystical knowledge about God be expressed by the intellect using ordinary
language: “By its very nature, mysticism is knowledge that cannot be com-
municated directly, but may be expressed only through symbol and metaphor”
(Scholem 1946:4).
The Kabbalah is, however, characterized by being mystical and esoteric
simultaneously. That is to say, mystical knowledge, which cannot be com-
municated, exists side by side with a highly developed esoteric teaching that
seeks to reveal to the intellect exactly those mysteries surrounding the hidden
 Holy hermeneutics: how to find truth 143

God and the relation between deity and creation that can be communicated, if
only to the initiated (Scholem 1974:3). An important part of esotericism is
knowledge about the magical techniques used to achieve union with God:
prayers, meditation, spell work, trances, ritual performance or the correct
utterance of God’s secret name. In western esotericism, such magical acts are
divided into two groups: “high magic”, which seeks union with God, and
“low magic”, which uses the same magical techniques to achieve things in
daily life, such as good health, prosperity or a lover. In the Kabbalah, this latter
kind of magic is called “practical Kabbalah” (Scholem 1974:5).
The tension between the mystical and the esoteric parts of the Kabbalah is
to a certain extent similar to the Romantic distinction between presymbolic
experience and cultural symbol; for whereas mysticism represents silence,
seeking individual, immediate experience of divine reality, esotericism represents
doctrine and the desire to discover and formulate the truth about the universe
and the being of God in cultural language. Scholem points out that the
Kabbalists themselves experience a sort of paradoxical congruence between
these elements: intuitive experience (mysticism) on the one hand, and cultural
reflection (esoteric doctrine) on the other (Scholem 1974:3).8 An effort to
explain the paradox is, however, offered in the theory of the hidden and
manifest aspects of the divine. God is said to be both hidden (transcendent)
and manifest (immanent), and the seekers of unio mystica are invited to
experience the transcendent, hidden godhead through God’s manifestations in
something tangible and mundane.
Starhawk’s dual definition of religion as “mystical experience” and “soil of
culture”, resembles the Kabbalistic tension between experience and reflection,
or that between mystical encounter and esoteric mediumship. In theory
Starhawk dismisses dogma and religious tenets intended to generalize the
experience of the divine and establish Truth. In practice, however, there is
tradition and a need to teach newcomers and distinguish Reclaiming from
other Craft communities.Therefore, in the wake of its occult heritage, there is
a large amount of literature competing to present the esoteric teachings of
Witchcraft “correctly”. Starhawk’s writings must be included in this series of
explanation where dogma is replaced by tradition.
The fact that Witches embrace this Kabbalistic paradox is also pertinent to
understanding how they can combine the tradition of anarchism, revolt and
the autonomy of experience, together with the tradition of initiation, secret
knowledge and esoteric teachings.The dilemma is, however, solved by invent-
ing a depth–surface discourse for the concept of experience: to the extent that
human experience of the Goddess may be interpreted as a confrontation with
“life-generating powers”, it is, at its deepest level, universal. The encounter
only appears to be differentiated and diversified at a surface level, when it is
individualized and inculturated by means of language and the social environ-
ment.9 This topical structure also holds true for the concept of divinity, which
is interpreted in alignment with the idea of the hidden versus the manifest
divine.
144 Guardians of the world

In order to explain the paradoxical nature of the Jewish Kabbalah, Scholem

invokes a sign theory in which the distinction between metaphor and
religious symbol is crucial. He maintains that while a metaphor is descriptive,
translating one universe of meaning into another, a religious symbol is
representative. A metaphor can be replaced by any of its numerous meanings.
The religious symbol, on the other hand, cannot. It can represent or make
something else transparent, but this “something else” cannot substitute for the
symbol and make it superfluous.
To explain the peculiarity of mystical language, Scholem expands the
notion of symbol from religious to mystical. The mystical symbol is regarded
as different from the religious symbol proper in that it does not carry a
meaning, only an expression (image, sound/word or gesture) and a hidden
referent (object). It is more like an empty pointer/mediator in relation to a
reality which cannot be expressed in any other way: “The symbol ‘signifies’
nothing and communicates nothing, but makes something transparent which
is beyond all expression . . . the symbol is intuitively understood all at once –
or not at all” (Scholem 1946:27).
The vertical interpretive process implied here is different from a horizontal,
metaphorical translation of divine discourse already encoded in sacred texts.
The mystical symbol has no specific prescribed meaning and is not a
manifestation of something hidden, but reveals the hidden, makes it trans-
parent and clear. The symbol is like a doorstep to the invisible, pointing us to
another world. The Kabbalistic Tree of Life (beyond the doctrine of the
sephiroths), the symbol of the circle, encapsulating a point or a hexagram, the
letters representing God’s name (YHWH) – all are mystical symbols. The
mystical symbol is therefore closer to an icon: the expression (image, sound/
word or gesture) points to the object, that is, to transcendent (or invisible)
reality due to some mystical similarities between it and the object.
Although Scholem’s sign theory may be profitable for describing the
mystical aspects of Witchcraft symbolism, it does not really help us penetrate
the experiential category of magic and sacred possession. This is so because
Scholem hesitates to elaborate on the indexical aspect of the mystical symbol
operative in magic. When the hidden, transcendent object becomes manifest
in the symbol as magical power, the mystical symbol may be said to transform
into an indexical sign. This may, for example “take place” when God,
according to the Kabbalists, becomes fully present in the tetragrammaton (the
four letters YHWH), or when meditation upon the ten sephiroths of the Tree
of Life actually restores the universe and reconciles God from God’s alienation
within godself. Then, the object dissolves into the symbol and we are left
with (1) expression and (2) meaning: the symbol no longer has a separate
object/referent! For terminological consistency I shall refer to this new,
magical presence filled with meaning as an esoteric symbol.
Esoteric symbols are the real axis mundi between this world and the
invisible realms of the divine. In Witchcraft we will find that the Goddess, the
Deep Self, the four elements and the ritual circle have the potential to fulfill
 Holy hermeneutics: how to find truth 145

this function. When deity is called into ritual space, incarnating as substance in
everybody present, the circle is transformed from a mystical to an esoteric
symbol. When the Witch says “I am Goddess,” she confirms that deity is
herself. The people holding hands have become an index of divine presence.
At this point, the sacred circle represents and means what it refers to.
It is in order to grasp this magical and sensual dimension inside a theory of
symbols that I suggest splitting between mystical and esoteric symbols. In
contrast to the mystical symbol’s function of pointing to something hidden,
the hidden, in actual fact, becomes manifest in the esoteric symbol as power
or divine presence. This may happen in the Witches’ ritual circle, at the
orthodox altar (behind the iconostasia) believed to represent God’s indwelling
presence, and when Christ is proclaimed as fully present in the bread and wine
on the altar.

Interpreting divine indexicality: Goddess as deity

and other-than-deity
The goddesses of Witchcraft are obviously multidimensional symbols: they are
metaphorical; they point and reveal; they mediate real forces. Tiamat is both a
religious symbol and more than a symbol. To call upon her is to call upon
certain forces that are different from “what comes” if calling upon Inanna. And
finally, these forces are said to be more than archetypes: they are considered to
be real, separate entities.
Witches themselves may or may not experience all these levels of the
goddess symbol, or their relationship with her may be totally anarchistic. In an
interview given to Carol P. Christ in 1979, Starhawk insisted, “It all depends
on how I feel. When I feel weak, She is someone who can help and protect
me.When I feel strong, She is the symbol of my own power. At other times I
feel Her as the natural energy in my body and the world” (Christ 1982:76).To
Sofia, the Goddess is the moon but also an invisible agent who picks out
people “to hear her message”. To Francesca she is someone with a “physical
presence” who justs “kidnaps you”. In addition, Francesca speaks of the Goddess
as representing immanent reality and the “mysteries” of nature.
Nevertheless, the Witches’ goddess symbol seems confusing and difficult to
comprehend to many feminist scholars. Most frequently she is reduced and
defined as either a pantheistic principle or a psychological concept.10 Yet some
of the difficulty arises precisely because she is neither a purely pantheistic
principle nor a transcendent deity but a manifest goddess. And as Starhawk
points out, it is very difficult for westerners to grasp the concept of a manifest
deity (Starhawk 1979a:77). In fact, in order to comprehend this concept and
desist from reductionism, we must apparently claim two opposing theories at
the same time: that the Goddess is both deity and other-than-deity simul-
taneously.
Theologian Robert P. Scharleman has argued that most western people
carry an internal concept of the divine that is formed by a theistic notion of
146 Guardians of the world

YHWH and its implied opposite, a-theism. The problem, however, is that
theism’s image of God includes only two entities: Creator (God as subject and
deity) and creation (the object created by the deity) (Scharleman 1982:89).This
concept of God, says Scharleman, is incomplete because it does not include
God as other-than-deity, that is, it does not include God as part of creation:
“What cannot be thought, in the tradition of this picture, is that the world
itself is a moment in the being of God, what cannot be thought is that the
world is the being of God when God is not being deity” (Scharleman
1982:90). If the symbol of God is to contain the manifest divine in the world
beyond God’s historical incarnation as Christ, then “God” must, according to
Scharleman, be represented and understood both as deity and as other-than-
deity.
I find this differentiation very helpful since it provides a tool to move
beyond various reductionist interpretations of the Goddess and also include the
reflections already made on the mystical and esoteric aspects of the symbol. As
other-than-deity, the Witches’ goddess may be perceived as “internal force”: a
metaphor for life-generating powers and the principle of creation throughout
the universe. As deity, the Goddess may be perceived as “external force”: an
anthropomorphic symbol believed to mediate and express divine action and
being. But since we are dealing, in addition, with a mystery religion that
distinguishes between the manifest and the hidden, Goddess as deity and as
other-than-deity must be divided into another two levels. We thus get four
levels of the goddess symbol, which can be illustrated by the following
diagram:

Goddess

The Living Universe/other-than-deity The Great Mother/deity

(metaphor for life-generating powers) (anthropomorphic symbol)
1 Manifest 2 Hidden 3 Hidden 4 Manifest
other-than-deity other-than-deity deity deity

Goddess as Goddess as Goddess’s many Goddess’s virtual

immanent incomprehensible names and incarnation in all
being in all ground of being guises human beings
creation

Goddess as Goddess as Goddess as Goddess as

countless mystical symbol conventional esoteric, indexical
metaphors religious symbol symbol

As manifest other-than-deity, the Goddess represents the principle of creation

and is immanent in all beings. She is the earth and the world in all its diversity
and visibility. In this connection she is not a symbol that represents something
hidden, but a metaphor for those life-generating powers that constitute the
 Holy hermeneutics: how to find truth 147

universe: “To Witches the cosmos is the living body of the Goddess, in whose
being we all partake, who encompasses us and is immanent within us”
(Starhawk 1987:7). Countless names and images can describe Goddess, such as
“river”, “chair”, “Starhawk”, etc. endlessly. The human experience of the
Goddess as manifest other-than-deity may take place anywhere – in cultural
or natural landscapes, in interhuman relationships, as a sudden awareness of the
sacred “given” in the cycles of life and death. Goddess is thus a metaphor that
may be replaced by its numerous meanings taken from all these encounters.
As hidden other-than-deity, the Goddess is the ultimate mystery, indefinable,
before words, nameless, the fundament of being, the silent part of Deep Self.
In this aspect, the Goddess may also be described as “She whose name cannot
be spoken because she is the circle before it is broken by a name that separates
out” (Starhawk 1982a:73). As explained earlier, the mystical symbol has no
meaning in itself. It is an empty mediator for a hidden reality that reveals the
hidden without manifesting it. But in contrast to the metaphor, there is no
meaning evoked by the symbol that can substitute for it. The goddess symbol
points to an otherness that cannot be represented unless the symbol continues
to point. To “taste” the mystical Goddess as hidden other-than-deity is only
possible indirectly, as “recognition, in the midst of pleasure, of its deepest
source” (Starhawk 1979a:84). Goddess may be revealed in disguise in human
experience, but is not manifested.
As hidden deity, the Goddess separated herself from the all-inclusive categories
of nature and mystery, entered the circle and become available in language as
subject through the act of naming. Since she of necessity is also created by
the human languages, Starhawk proclaims: “She exists and we create Her”
(Starhawk 1979a:81). As life-generating powers or mystical ground of being,
the Goddess is One. But as personified, hidden deity, the Goddess appears as
plural goddesses with “a thousand” personal names, shapes and guises. The
deities are often represented with the formula “I am Tiamat”, “I am Inanna”,
etc. Traditionally the word “I” has no reference outside the speaking subject
itself since it is impossible to say the word “I” without being the person it
refers to (Scharleman 1982:91). But the speaking voice of a hidden deity does
not yet convey real forces; it has not yet manifested in substance; it still
belongs to otherness, to Tiamat. As hidden deity, Goddess is therefore perceived
as a mighty subject who represents otherness to the human subject. She may
also be addressed as a “You” in relation to an “I”, with a series of personal
qualities such as love, mercy and forgiveness projected onto her.
As manifest deity, Goddess and humans are able to meet, merge and become
as one.The Witches’ mystical insight is that the Goddess is virtually present in
all beings. Every time a person says, “I am,” she reiterates the hidden existence
of the Goddess in her own being.The very moment she says, “I am Goddess”
she confirms that the Goddess’s otherness has incarnated in her, which is
indicated by the negation of the subject’s own name. The symbol now
represents what it refers to: “I” represent Tiamat in actuality. Tiamat is no
longer a metaphor or a pure, religious symbol, but an esoteric, indexical
148 Guardians of the world

symbol that makes the absent present as distinctive forces.11 This takes place in
ritual when the Goddess is invoked in persona as external being but “in
reality” incarnates in the Witch as an awakening of the Deep Self: “To invoke
the Goddess, is to awake the Goddess within, to become, for a time, that
aspect that we invoke” (Starhawk 1979a:55). By means of various trance
techniques, the Goddess gradually transposes into a manifest deity, and
ultimately in the act declaring “Thou art Goddess.” When a priestess or a
single person enters this “bodily state of mind” on behalf of a larger group, it is
referred to as “aspecting” or “drawing down the moon”.
This particular experience of manifesting the Goddess as deity usually
happens in extra-ordinary consciousness in ritual and is essentially different
from the horizontal, everyday consciousness that the Goddess is “in me”, just
as she is in every thing, because she is the world. Furthermore, in “sacred
possession” we are confronted with an empirically felt reality of how a
religious symbol may transform into an esoteric, indexical symbol. But,
indexicality is not only a property of the sign or symbol. In fact, it is a
fundamental feature of religious ritual as such, being the foundation of its
efficacy, uniqueness and importance.

The hermeneutics of space

In the above I have tried to show the ways in which Starhawk and other
Reclaiming Witches perceive of and systematize ultimate Reality: by means of
sub-universes, multiple selves and plural states of the human consciousness
corresponding to plural meanings of “experience”, “goddess”, “religion” and
“language”. Since they take an interest not in developing a consistent meta-
theory, but rather in creating a symbolic universe in which the existence of
multiple realities can be true, their ethno-hermeneutics appears to be para-
doxical.
But as we saw when analysing the goddess symbol, there is an elementary
order in the paradox in terms of an implicit hierarchy and interpretive matrix.
This matrix is constituted by a depth–surface discourse or, more accurately, by
the “hermeneutics of space”: symbolic movements from one level of reality
to the next according to a vertical and horizontal axis, resonating with
the horizontal magic of everyday life and the vertical magic of ritual. For
example, Starhawk’s arguments develop along both axes as three successive
hermeneutical steps: she starts in the visible, ordinary reality of Talking Self
in which the Goddess is represented as countless metaphors, and language
said only to describe reality indirectly (1). This is Starhawk’s nominalist and
symbolic position. Her Nietzsche-inspired criticism is that metaphor in our
culture has turned into dogmatic concept, confusing the metaphor with the
thing itself. To cut loose from this language trap, the only way out is to dive
experientially into the source of invisible, extra-ordinary reality, that is, into
the bosom of the Goddess who conveys real truth (2).The path to the Goddess
or the divine within goes through Younger Self, and the status of language is
 Holy hermeneutics: how to find truth 149

now magical. This is Starhawk’s magico-empirical, or realist, position. After

knowing truth from diving into the source, she returns to visible reality and
Talking Self, where language again is metaphorical.
This whole process I place on a vertical axis, whereas the next one I place
on the horizontal one: now Starhawk is free to choose new metaphors for
ordinary reality depending on values implicit in names, not on whether they
are true or not in a conceptual sense. She is also ready for the horizontal
movement in the world to practice the magic of everyday life, where “talk” is
equivalent to “walk” (3). In this reality, she constantly moves between an
empirical-experiential and a symbolic position. Let me fill in this sketch by
describing Starhawk’s hermeneutics of space as matrix for personal and social
transformation.

Horizontal magic of everyday life (I): possessed reality and oppressive

metaphors
Starhawk’s hermeneutical programme in regard to cultural analysis takes its
point of departure in empirical daily life, in the reality of Talking Self, in how
the world actually is perceived, named and valued through language. She
maintains that language is political and that the hallmark of power is to define
realities: “The root question is, how do we define the world? For it is an old
magical secret that the way we define reality shapes reality. Name a thing and
you invoke it. If we call the world non-living, we will surely kill her. But
when we name the world alive, we begin to bring her back to life” (Starhawk
1987:8).
In this context Starhawk is concerned with the values invoked in meaning
and not with referential truth. Her emphasis on the power of language and
symbols stems from a metaphorical theory of language in which meaning is
arbitrarily conferred upon the world. But, since meaning also embodies values,
the power of language is not a superficial question of naming, but of social-
ization. According to Starhawk, we live in a patriarchal world and experiences
power as forces of domination and control, as “power-over”.We are possessed,
so to speak, by the language of this culture:

Culture provides us with a “language” – a set of internal rules and

expectations for combining things and acts . . . . These patterns are never
accidental; they are the concrete manifestations of a culture’s deepest
assumptions, structures, and power relationships . . . . The patterns of
patriarchy become literally embedded within us.We are possessed.
(Starhawk 1987:96)

How is it possible to become depossessed and liberated, or even to reflect

upon one’s own oppression, if the human subject is totally conditioned by
society? The answer is that we are not fully conditioned. Deep within all
human beings is a precultural, natural core of “divine descent”. Moreover, due
150 Guardians of the world

to the structure of the three selves and the human consciousness, people are
forever split subjects and will never be completely continuous with the
dominant culture.

Vertical magic of ritual: sacred reality and indexical symbols

Starhawk’s medicine for becoming “desocialized” and confronting “power-
over” and the values of oppression is to turn inward by means of meditation
or ritual and make contact with the Goddess. It is to merge totally with divine
reality for a limited time period and experience sacred possession.This state of
mind is induced by the ritual techniques already presented, such as trance
work and exhausting singing and dancing. “Sacred possession . . . . is an
ecstatic state, and ecstasy reminds us that the sacred is immanent. When the
great powers are moving through us they also bring knowledge, abilities and
healing that go beyond our ordinary limitations. Equally important, the
knowledge of how to become possessed is also the knowledge of how to
become unpossessed” (Starhawk 1987:96). In this quotation Starhawk calls up
an esoteric reality in which knowledge is not conveyed through the symbol
system of language but directly from the divine source, from the things them-
selves. She leaves the manifest level of meaning and invokes a fundamental
“deep semantics”: the realm of archetypes, magic and esoteric, indexical
symbols.
Starhawk insists that her ability to define and delimit power-over comes
from calling upon another kind of power, a power from within the natural
world. She states again and again that “those powers live in us, as we live in
them” (1987:6) and maintains that nobody can control them or disconnect
from them. But they may be invoked to cleanse, rebuild and heal, and this is
what Starhawk defines as magic:

The technology of power-from-within is magic, the art of changing

consciousness, of shifting shapes and dimensions, of bending reality. Its
science is a psychology far older than Freud, Jung, or Skinner. And its
motivations are erotic in the broadest sense of the deep drives in us to
experience and share pleasure, to connect, to create, to see our impact on
others and on the world.
(Starhawk 1987:15)

It is to reach these sources of power of another kind that Witches conduct

magical ritual and work with energy. According to Starhawk, it is only the
magical language of the dream state that can call forth the power-from-within
whereby people can become unpossessed by power-over and start the process
of healing themselves and culture. The language of “power-from-within” is
poetry, metaphor, symbol, ritual, myth, “the language of magic, of ‘thinking in
things’, where the concrete becomes resonant with mysteries that go beyond
its seeming solid form. Its language is action, which speaks in the body and to
 Holy hermeneutics: how to find truth 151

all the senses in ways that can never be completely conveyed in words”
(Starhawk 1987:15).
Even though magical language is made from metaphors, its ability to name
reality truthfully is regarded as basic: when the Goddess is called, she will arrive.
The symbol becomes identical with its referent, transforming into an esoteric
symbol. In this realist, neo-Platonic view of language, linguistic meaning is
archetypically, not arbitrarily, conferred upon the world.The things themselves
are understood to reveal their essence and names to us if we are open to this
experience.

Horizontal magic of everyday life (II): depossessed reality and liberating

metaphors
After diving and cleansing herself vertically in divine (or supernatural) reality,
Starhawk returns to her Talking Self and ordinary daily life. Still, she is not
outside the realm of the sacred, which is believed to be immanent and ever
present. She has only changed consciousness. In magical reality the divine
encompasses her completely; in ordinary reality she carries the divine inside as
Deep Self and confronts it in “the other”. In Starhawk’s theology it is not
desirable or possible for human beings to merge permanently with the divine.
If they did, there would be no individuality and no creativity. An important
part of this creativity is the freedom to name according to certain values.This
is the area of the consciously chosen, liberating metaphors that name life-
generating powers “the Goddess”: “We call her Goddess, not to narrowly
define her gender, but as a continual reminder that what we value is life
brought into the world” (Starhawk 1987:7).
This is an example of Starhawk’s position as symbolist. Again, language is
basically seen as arbitrary and metaphorical. It does not represent reality, and
there are no true names for the Goddess. But, even if one metaphor is not
closer to reality than another, words have values. This is why the world must
be renamed in the image of the Goddess: “as a continual reminder that what
we value is life brought into the world.”
“Power” in the realm of depossessed, ordinary reality, is not defined as
power-from-within but as power-with. In the consciousness of power-from-
within, every being has the same value. In the consciousness of power-with,
people are valued as having a higher worth than worms. Politics is impossible
without rating and choosing one alternative before another (Starhawk
1987:15).To take on the name “Witch” is also an act of choosing, of ethically
separating out from immanent reality an identity more noble than another.
For to be a Witch is “to make a commitment to the Goddess, to the protection,
preservation, nurturing, and fostering of the great powers of life as they
emerge in every being” (Starhawk 1987:8). In fact, it is to choose life before
death. This is pertinent since, in the realm of undivided divinity that en-
compasses the whole circle of life and death, there are no immediate criteria
available with which to rank one lifeform above another, or one social structure
152 Guardians of the world

as more desirable than another. This is how Starhawk explains her biased
choice:
I am on the side of the power that emerges from within, that is inherent
in us as the power to grow is inherent in seed. As a shaper, as one who
practices magic, my work is to find that power, to call it forth, to coax it
out of hiding, tend it, and free it of restrictions. In a society based on
power-over, that work inevitably must result in conflict with the forces of
domination, for we cannot bear our own true fruit when we are under
another’s control.
(Starhawk 1987:8)
The goal of Witchcraft is eventually to liberate people, sanctify the world, and
unify spirit and politics. This means to unite the values inherent in divine
reality and the values circulating in social reality.
If divinity in its totality is understood to be cut off from this world, isolated
in a transcendent realm that is radically “other” to daily life, then the unification
will inevitably be a disqualification of earthly life. If the principles of radical
transcendence shall guide the politics of and hopes of daily life affairs, Witches
fear that the underlying message will be that this life is truly of little value.
But if divinity is defined as cited above, as immanent in the world,
permeating every cell of every living being, they believe the hierarchies of
values will turn upside down: if this world is the home of the gods, then the
unification of spirit and politics will be the ultimate sanctification of this life.
Union, therefore, is not sought “outside the world in some heavenly sphere
nor through dissolution of the self into the void beyond the senses. Spiritual
union is found in life, within nature, passion, sensuality – through being fully
human, fully one’s self ” (Starhawk 1979b:263). Instead of loosing the self,
Witches seek merger with nature and the manifest Goddess. Instead of refer-
ring spiritual experiences exclusively to a nonordinary realm, the path of the
Goddess leads toward a spiritual transfiguration of the ordinary.
Summing up, we may say that the Witches have three hermeneutical
programmes: to call forth and connect with life-generating powers; to rename
the world and redefine value; to walk their talk and live in accordance with
their beliefs and visions. Each programme invokes different realities, world-
views and theories of language/symbol. Although these realities are held to be
equally real, they seem to constitute a hierarchy, both in terms of profoundness
and semantics. This, however, cannot be known spontaneously from daily life
affairs or direct perception; only deep experience and hermeneutical inter-
pretation can convey the profoundly sacred dimension of ordinary reality: that
the Goddess constitutes its very being.

Notes
1 The “traditional” Charge of the Goddess is quoted in full in Starhawk 1979a:76–7.
2 The three selves were initially developed by the Faery tradition. In The Spiral
Dance, Starhawk talks about a “High Self ”. But, in line with her increasing political
consciousness (in the Talking Self!), the name of the third self has been changed
 Holy hermeneutics: how to find truth 153
from High to Deep. According to Starhawk, the three selves correspond to three
types of subtle or invisible energy: 1 Raith energy is the energy in the elements,
maintaining human beings’ physical bodies and bodily memories, and is the body
of Younger Self. 2 Astral energy consists of the conscious mind, thoughts and
fantasies, and is the body of Talking Self. Raith and astral energy together make up
a person’s aura or energy field. 3 Divine energy is that which comprises Deep Self
and the gods. This is the most powerful energy, and when the Witches invoke the
gods in ritual, they connect themselves to this energy. The theory of the three
energy bodies is a typical occult inheritance, a fact that Starhawk does not try to
conceal (Starhawk 1979a:134).
3 Cf. Eliade (1964) and Harner (1980).The shaman usually lies down on the ground
with her eyes closed. While listening to the drum, the shaman is trained to find –
in her imagination – a place in nature, like a rock or a tree, unto which she can
“enter”, to travel either to the underworld or the upper world. This technique is
also used in healing ceremonies. Illness in a shamanic worldview is often explained
with soul loss. When the shaman journeys to another world, accompanied by a
drumbeat, it is exactly to search for the lost soul and bring it back to the patient.
4 The actual ritual was not taped, and my retelling of it is primarily based on field
notes and memory. Even though all the words may not be exact, I choose to write
in present, as if I am quoting the ritual process word by word, to give a better
impression of “trance journey” as a magical method. A substantial part of the words
“said” by Starhawk are directly copied from her book Truth or Dare (1987: 28–31).
5 The lyrics of the invocation “said” by Starhawk in this context are taken from her
trance poem in Truth or Dare (1987: 28–31).
6 Symbolists usually define a symbol (or sign) as a binary correlation of two sets of
differences: signifier (expression) and signified (meaning).What is missing is both a
notion of the sign itself as substance, as materiality, and a triadic perception of the
sign, which – in addition to signifier and signified – can include the “native
experience” of the category of the Real: the actual object to which the expression
refers.
7 According to Aleister Crowley, Kabbalah is the foundation of modern magic,
including Witchcraft: “The whole basis of our (magical) theory is Quabbalah.The
method of operation in magic is based on this” (Crowley 1987:9). Kabbalah,
which means tradition, is the most commonly used designation for the Jewish
mysticism practised from the Middle Ages onward. The occult version of the
Kabbalah is a Christianized and paganized interpretation.
8 Antoine Faivre criticizes Scholem’s phenomenology as outdated for studies of
contemporary esotericism since the major difference between mysticism and
esotericism is no longer “experience” versus “reflection”: today esotericists also
seek experiential union with God. In contrast to mystics they do, however, prefer
mediators such as rituals, symbolic images, mandalas, and spirit-helpers to aid them
in their quest (Faivre 1992:xvii). “Real” mystics, on the other hand, tend to see
such intermediaries as hindrances, and this is, says Faivre, the main difference
between the two.
9 Starhawk 1979a:82. This is, however, not a very convincing statement considering
how Witches position themselves in opposition to interpretations of “life-generating
powers” in other religions, like Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
10 Naomi Goldenberg is a representative of this position when she in her famous
book, Changing of the Gods, defines feminist Witchcraft and the goddess symbol in
purely psychological terms (Goldenberg 1979:89).
11 Scholem writes that, in the Kabbalah, being able to speak God’s name means
becoming God/acquiring power with God, just as being able to speak a language
is being able to control it. The Kabbalists can draw the tetragram on a robe and
put it on, thus taking over the power from YHWH’s name, and carry out “practical
Kabbalah”, that is, perform magic (Scholem 1946:77; 96; 131).
Plate 1 Starhawk at the goddess camp Her Voice – Our Voices in America’s Nevada moun-
tains, June 1989. (Image: Jone Salomonsen, 1989.)
Plate 2 Goddess-worshipping women gathered for ritual at Her Voice – Our Voices, Nevada,
June 1989. Starhawk facilitated the ritual, although only some women identified as Witches.
(Image: Jone Salomonsen, 1989.)

Plate 3 Goddess-worshipping women in the act of ritualizing at Her Voice – Our Voices,
June 1989. (Image: Jone Salomonsen, 1989.)
Plate 4 Witches and pagans often prefer paleolithic and neolithic images to represent “the
Goddess”. These homemade clay figures are for altar use, labyrinths or private gardens.
(Image: Jone Salomonsen, 1989.)

Plate 5 Detail from the northern altar at Reclaiming’s Spiral Dance ritual in November
1990. Four ritual altars are usually erected, representing each compass direction.The northern
altar represents the earth, and therefore death and rebirth. (Image: Jone Salomonsen, 1989.)
Plate 6 Detail from the northern altar at Reclaiming’s Spiral Dance ritual in November
2000.This is the main altar, erected in honour of the dead. Published with the kind permission
of Ewa Litauer.

Plate 7 A baby doll in a coffin, symbolizing death and suffering among children, is placed
at the northern altar at Reclaiming’s Spiral Dance ritual in November 2000. Published with
the kind permission of Ewa Litauer.
Plate 8 On special ritual occasions,Witches and pagans may adorn themselves with masks
and body painting. The masks usually portray animals or ancient goddess imagery. (Image:
Jone Salomonsen.)

Plate 9 Detail from a street parade in San Francisco’s Mission district on El dia de los
muertos (Day of the Dead) in November 1990. Representing the dead by dressing up,
celebrating and dancing with them is an old Latino tradition. Celebrants at Reclaiming’s
Spiral Dance ritual may also wear death-costumes. (Image: Jone Salomonsen, 1990.)
 6 Contents

Plate 10 Labyrinths and spirals are favourite energy patterns in Reclaiming.This stone labyrinth was built by Reclaiming priestess
Mer DeDanan on her land in Sonoma, north of San Francisco, and has often been used as ritual space. Originally published in West
by Northwest online magazine, June/July 2000. Published with the kind permission of Mer DeDanan.
 Contents 7

Plate 11 A maypole with ribbons is erected in downtown San Francisco as part of the
Reclaim May Day demonstration in 2000. Starhawk leads a ritual dance around the maypole
in order to conjure fertility for just political causes. Published with the kind permission of
Ben Read.
8 Authors name

Plate 12 Reclaiming organized the annual Reclaim May Day demonstration in San
Francisco on 1 May 2000. All over the world this day is celebrated as a festival or as Labour
Day. For Witches, 1 May is also a major holiday (Beltane), and celebrated as a fertility rite.
Published with the kind permission of Bob Thawley.

Plate 13 Beltane is one of the Witches’ eight sabbaths and traditionally celebrated with
dances around the maypole. Coloured ribbons are woven around a large tree trunk in this
celebration north of San Francisco, organized by the pagan Church of All Worlds in May
1989. (Image: Jone Salomonsen, 1989.)
Part II

Priestesses of
the craft
5 Elements of magic
Learning to ritualize

Ritual has hermeneutic primacy in Reclaiming. When a person approaches

this spiritual community, she is taught their “mysteries” by being introduced to
ritual and magic. This usually takes place in the introductory “Elements of
Magic” class. By giving a thorough description and interpretation of the ritual
proceedings in this class, as well as of the meanings implied in the basic ritual
outline taught, I hope to construct a basis for analysing magical ritualizing
among contemporary Witches. This account will also yield knowledge about
how a person is directed into the identity of actually practising Witchcraft. But,
before I carry out the goals set, it is necessary to present both the ways in
which Witches understand ritual, and the theoretical perspectives I use to
interpret this activity.

Witches’ understanding of ritual

In one of her definitions, Starhawk proposes that religion is “a matter of re-
linking with the divine within and with her outer manifestations in all of the
human and natural world” (Starhawk 1979a:186). To be able to “relink”
requires a belief in somebody or something in here or out there with which
one may be, and probably once was, connected. Connection and linkage are
implied as desirable; disconnection and separation are apparently not. So, the
question is, how may one be “linked up again” and reenter the path of the
Goddess? Some people will explain that it happens spontaneously and as a
completely internal event. To others the Goddess is almost experienced as a
social agent, as happened to Francesca when she was “kidnapped”. But for the
majority, who probably never will experience immediate divine visitation (or
revelation), learning the art of ritualizing may be an option, for this is how
many Witches understand ritual, as a “technology” to evoke the Deep Self
and become “familiar with power-from-within, learn to recognize its feel,
learn how to call it up and let it go” (Starhawk 1989b:326). In a very short
definition, Starhawk maintains that ritual simply is “a patterned movement of
energy to accomplish a purpose”.“Energy” is a condensed, somewhat technical
term for “life-generating powers”, which is the mystical aspect of the Goddess.
This emphasis on “moving energy” and “purpose” may just as well be a
158 Priestesses of the craft

definition of magic; and to many Witches, ritual is nothing but a pattern for
working magic and adding to the transformation of the world.
But there is another aspect to religious ritual in Starhawk’s definition, just
as important as the subjective experience of relinking with the divine and
moving her energy: to relink with “her outer manifestations in all of the
human and natural world”. This cannot happen in solitude or independence
from other social bodies and is in particular believed to take place at the eight
annual community rituals or sabbats:

The Sabbats are . . . the interstices where the seasonal, the celestial, the
communal, the creative and the personal all meet. As we enact each drama
in its time, we transform ourselves . . . . We are not separate from each
other, from the broader world around us; we are one with the Goddess,
with the God.
(Starhawk 1979a:169)

It is obvious that Starhawk’s understanding of ritual is deeply linked to her

notions of human and divine nature and that she regards “connection versus
separation” as a basic ontological and psychological theme dramatized in
ritual. In her interpretation of this theme, she is strongly influenced by
transpersonal psychology and object relations theory, being trained – as she is
– a psychologist in an alternative environment (Antioch Community College
in San Francisco). In opposition to classical Freudian instinct theory, which is
more focused on a person as an individual entity, a separate subject, deter-
mined to a large extent by instincts and drives – object relations theory rather
depicts a person in her radical interconnectedness to other people, to her love
objects. A human being is said to evolve from infant to adult along the axis
unity–separation, and the key to psychic health and maturation is whether
bonding and separation in early childhood were successful.Although separation
is inevitable, if unsuccessful, it may inflict a life-long mourning process and a
feeling of alienation that will trigger an endless search for transitional objects
as replacement of the original maternal union.1
This antithetical side to human existence brings a lot of confusion and pain
into people’s lives; and according to most object relations theorists, mystical
religion and magical ritual contribute significantly to increase it:When focused
on the bliss of divine union and on rituals that attempt to effect merger with
an original love object, the adult is said to simply return to childish fantasies of
omnipotence. But this criticism does not take into account the fundamentally
temporary, mimetic and symbolic character of ritual as such, nor that its point
of departure is a conviction that the emotional conflict of merger and
separation not only dominates infancy and childhood, but extends into adult
life as a permanent existential conflict immanent to the human condition. 2
This existential conflict revolves, says object relations theorist Margaret
Mahler, around the struggle to become an autonomous separate person,
differentiated and distinct, and at the same time connected and bonded with
 Elements of magic: learning to ritualize 159

the love object, with significant others (Faber 1993:34). Although the struggle
may be different for women and men, the fact that they have to struggle is
regarded as essential to their shared humanity. Starhawk, who in Dreaming the
Dark (1982a) explicitly refers to Mahler (p. 233, n.8), believes that a resolution
to the struggle in terms of the solitary quest, of breaking free and discovering
one’s unique, individual self, really is modeled on an image of the tribe, of a
fundamental first belonging, where the individual self mirrors the collective,
the group mind, and where the break-up is necessary to bring something new
back to the group. Starhawk’s point is that this existential imagery does not
match western culture, in which both women and men “are raised separately
– to the point of pain” (1982a:48). Unless the journey toward individuation is
grounded in a relationship with “living, breathing, human beings”, people will
only end up confirming their own isolation. In other words, Starhawk does
not accept any conceptualizations of individual, autonomous life in opposition
to living in interdependence with the world as relevant to the agenda of
growth and self realization – neither to women nor men.3
Yet, when the rituals of feminist Witchcraft restage this classical existential
scenario of heteronomy versus autonomy, it takes place within a larger
interpretive context than object relations theory. The particular context
offered in ritual is a worldview in which the first human bonding is not
perceived as union with the biological or social mother, but with the Goddess,
the mystical source of the Self prior to individual birth. In alignment with
this worldview, humans may be said to be twice born: of goddess first and
primarily (their Deep Self/spirit), and from a human female secondarily (their
body/mind/soul). Witches claim the importance of acknowledging this
primary “ground of being” and of regularly “re-turning” to the real mother of
life in order to mature and grow as human beings. The primary aim of re-
turning is sacred possession or spiritual bonding – not only with the deity but
also with her living creatures, including any representative of the four elements
air, fire, water and earth. The secondary aim of re-turning is the accomplish-
ment of a magical purpose by means of healing, meditation, prayer or trance
work. To deny this dependency upon a larger power and reality may result in
human feelings of estrangement and a perpetual search for its replacements.
Hence, to recognize this dependency is believed to be the true path to
freedom and creativity, as well as to the embodied confidence of being at
home on this planet (cf. also Keller 1986).
Instead of being regressive, ritualizing in Reclaiming is claimed to be a
major method to actually induce change and establish new feelings of belong-
ing, as well as a medium to relate the present to the past and mark the pro-
gression of time and transformation – personally, socially and mythologically
(Goldenberg 1990:193). Magical ritual also challenges the notion of a linear
development from union to separation in the human growth process when
suggesting that this process is, rather, cyclical; for an individual will need again
and again to be nourished by the bliss of reunion – not with her biological or
social mother, but with her spiritual kin. She will also need, however, to learn
160 Priestesses of the craft

to let go, that is, to end the ecstasy of ritual and divine merger and reenter
ordinary consciousness in which she is a separate person in authority of
language, history and agency. In order to stress how important the temporary
aspect of ritual is, Starhawk equates ordinary consciousness with experiences
of the Goddess as she who creates structure and division (in opposition to the
extra-ordinary consciousness of the unifying circle):

Ordinary consciousness is a marvelous thing; it allows us to live in the world, to

think, plan, create, work, and do. Practicing magic, we respect our ordinary boundaries:
our goal is not to escape them, not to destroy the separations and divisions, but to
slip in and out of them at will, with flexibility. For the boundaries, the separations,
the names themselves are, no less than our experiences of oneness, manifestations of
the Goddess, who is that-which-creates-structure.
(Starhawk 1982a:56)

The most efficient and comprehensive restaging and recontextualization of

the human conflict between unity and separation, and of the paradoxical need
of an adult to be simultaneously joined and separate, related and independent,
autonomous and connected, is the initiation ritual to become a “Witch and
Priestess of the Goddess”. This particular Reclaiming ritual is also said to
make visible the continual importance of transitional love objects in the
process of emotional growth, whether in children or adults. But the path
toward initiation is long and crooked, and a first required step is learning the
Craft of the Witches: magical ritualizing. To the adept, this powerful Craft –
which she enters classes to study and pays money to achieve – represents a
different mode of knowing, being and relating to the world.

Theories of ritual, ritualizing and ritualization

Although academic ritual studies is a large and expanding interdisciplinary
field, there is no scholarly consensus defining this object of study. Presently
there seem to be as many definitions as there are researchers. The reason for
this confusion is, according to Ronald Grimes, that the essence of ritual
is misunderstood in definitions similar to Starhawk’s: as an essential and
delimited “what”. In her efforts to define a precious object, she has probably
imitated well-known “what” scholars, such as Victor Turner in his famous
definition of ritual as, “formal behaviour prescribed for occasions not given
over to technological routine that have reference to beliefs in mystical beings
or powers” (Turner and Turner 1978:243). This definition is, however, mis-
leading since ritual according to Grimes is not a formal “what” (a thing), but a
fluid “how” (a quality) of which there are different degrees: “Any action can
be ritualized, though not every action is a rite” (Grimes 1990:13).
The weakness of formal “what” definitions is that they from necessity will
exclude some expressions as not belonging to ritual proper. For example,
Turner’s definition limits ritual to religious ritual, to liturgy, and implies that
 Elements of magic: learning to ritualize 161

ritual is linked to religious belief. Also, when differentiating ritual from

“technological routine”, he excludes magical rites aiming at “empirical results
such as making crops grow or healing patients” (Grimes 1990:13). As an
alternative to “what” definitions, Grimes suggests a turn toward ritual under-
stood as “how” and offers a list of qualities (the “how’s”) scholars seem to
find in ritual action: performed, formalized, repetitive, patterned, symbolic,
dramatic, mystical, etc. Grimes’s point is that none of them is unique to ritual,
but together they compose a chart that makes it possible to explore boundary-
like activities such as ritual drama, civil ceremony, military parades and
museum openings, as well as religious ritual and liturgy.
Catherine Bell goes one step further by linking the distinction between
ritual as “what” and “how” with a sharp differentiation between “ritual” and
“ritualization”. She has observed that the notion “ritual” refers to an experi-
mential, folk-category and to an abstract category of academic analysis. In
order to differentiate these two levels of activity and meaning, Bell suggests
that “ritual” (“what”) be reserved for indigenous naming and description,
while “ritualization” (“how”), is a more fruitful focus for theoretical analysis
(Bell 1992:ix). While ritual, then, refers to a set of special practices and
ritualizing to the art of cultivating these particular practices, ritualization means
a social strategy or activity “that is not culturally framed as ritual but which
someone, often an observer, interprets as if it were potential ritual” (Grimes
1990:9–10).
One of the reasons that Bell suggests a move from “what” to “how”, is the
underlying problems she sees in the Durkheimian heritage in contemporary
ritual theory. In the Durkheimian conceptualization of religion (which is the
same as mainstream Protestantism’s), beliefs are regarded as primary and rites as
secondary. The function of ritual is to legitimize and reinforce beliefs by
“dramatizing or enacting prior conceptual entities in order to reaffirm or
reexperience them” (Bell 1992:38). In critical opposition to this theoretical
tradition, ritual may be seen as a legitimate means of knowing in its own
terms, as an embodied, incarnate means of knowing, and not primarily as a
reinforcing interpretation of something else, of another way of knowing
(Grimes 1990:169). This view was eagerly expressed by Roy Rappaport
already in 1979 when stating that “ritual is not simply an alternative way to
express certain things, but that certain things can be expressed only in ritual”
(Rappaport 1979:174).
Another problem in the Durkheimian conceptualization of ritual as a
secondary derivative is the theoretical branching off of ritual from the context
of ordinary social life and its implicit power games regarding insider–outsider,
privileges and hierarchies. This critique has in particular been aimed at Victor
Turner and Clifford Geertz and other symbolic schools that interpret ritual as
expressions of mental orientations in analogy to textual meanings.4 When Bell
redefines ritual from isolated symbolic practice to paradigmatic cultural acts,
she also contextualizes these “strategic ways of acting” in relation to the power
dynamics of social relations and socialized bodies (Bell 1992:8).
162 Priestesses of the craft

Since my aim also is textual exegesis, that is, to analyse the basic symbolic
meanings implied in Reclaiming’s ritual, I cannot totally give up the notion
of ritual as also being an analytic construct. I shall therefore use a charter
developed by the Danish theologian Anders Klostergaard Petersen (1996) when
listing the qualities (following Grimes) that I see in magico-religious ritual and
ritualizing, although I regard ritual both as “what” (A) and “how” (B):

A Ritual as “what”
1. A specific ritual is a local symbolic expression and a contextualized mani-
festation of a worldview of a general order (a Witchcraft ritual is a
manifestation of Witches’ worldview). If not, ritual would be self-absorbed
and self-contained and fundamentally meaningless.5 Ritual is also an
independent expression of a worldview, an embodied means of knowing,
also expressing things that can only be expressed in ritual. When ritual is
not seen as a blueprint of, or an acting out of, belief or myth, it becomes
obvious that ritual may also be an arena for conflict and for reconciliation.
For example, ritual is a place to practice living with dissonance between
things said and things done (Grimes 1990:166). It may also, through its
symbols and spatial organization, express neglected and displaced segments
of an otherwise hegemonic worldview (the “hidden” occult heritage in
Witchcraft is more visible in ritual than in other symbolic expressions).
2. Ritual is not only metaphorical or symbolic in a self-referential sense, but
has an important indexical character, meaning that it refers to circumstances
or powers outside of ritual, leaving traces in ritual itself or even becoming
magically present, as discussed in chapter 4.This feature is one of the main
reasons ritualization is used in religious contexts (Petersen 1996:12).Within
the present theoretical outline, religious ritual only differs from non-
religious ritual by its reference to a religious worldview – including
extensive communication between what are regarded as human and non-
human actors – and by the importance of indexicality.6
Petersen argues that the indexical function of ritual is to create a
reversed, realistic foundation for symbolic processes of signification (1996:
13–14). Petersen uses Charles S. Peirce’s triadic sign theory, in which all
signs are said to consist of representamen (word, thing, image, gesture),
interpretant (meaning) and object (that which the word, thing, image, gesture
refers to). The letters h-o-r-s-e are representamen for a concrete, living
animal (object), evoking a semantic, cultural meaning equivalent to the
English notion horse (interpretant). We may, in addition, differentiate
between symbol, icon and index according to how the sign is constituted.
The representamen in ordinary symbolic communication often consists of
an abstract, non-substantial sign, while the object will appear to be real,
material, substantial, as with h-o-r-s-e and the actual animal.
Petersen’s point is that in indexical (magical) rituals this relationship is
twisted. Now it is the representamen instead (for example, the bread and
 Elements of magic: learning to ritualize 163

wine in the communion) that receives a “real” material, present character,

while its reference, the object (for example, the body and blood of Christ)
is “unreal”, intangible and presumably absent. But, by virtue of the material
character of ritual, symbols/representamens create an “aura of factuality” to
the absent object as well. Petersen also mentions baptism, in which the
water represents the inner transformation from death to life. The inner
transformation is invisible; the water is visible and its visibility and
materiality help to guarantee the credibility of that which is signified. We
find a parallel in Witchcraft in the five material symbols (knife, wand, cup,
pentagram, cauldron) representing sacred space, the four+one directions,
the four+one elements, the three human Selves, divine life-generating
powers or vital energy. These symbols are manipulated in the context of
ritual in order to induce an embodied experience of merger and oneness
between macrocosm and microcosm within the ritualizing human subject.
The actual unity is invisible; the material symbols (and their associated
meanings) are visible and present. If we now recall chapter 4 and the
characteristics of the indexical, esoteric symbol, we find that in this
symbol, the object/reference dissolves into the representamen, leaving us
with only representamen and meaning.

B Ritual as “how”
3. Ritualization is a social practice and, therefore, also a form of social control.
It constructs and appoints limited and limiting power relationships (as in
initiation rituals and other rites of passages) as well as deconstructs non-
appointed power positions (as in my processing at Witchcamp). As social
praxis, ritual is a particular cultural strategy of differentiation between acts,
working either to confirm (preserve) worldviews or to transform them; to
confirm social beings and their social worlds or to transform them.Typical
qualities of the ritualizing strategy are performance (verbal or gestured
doings), formalization (organized, not spontaneous), repetitiveness (not
happening once but repeated according to cycles), pattern (the ritual
proceedings always follow the same basic pattern), and symbolic language
(including objects, imagery and words). But the most important feature of
ritualization is that all its strategies are rooted in the body, or rather in “the
interaction of the social body within a symbolically constituted spatial and
temporal environment. Essential to ritualization is the circular production
of a ritualized body which in turn produces ritualized practices” (Bell
1992:93). It is this bodily strategy that produces an incarnate means of
knowing, and that makes possible effective confirmation or transformation.
The primacy of the body in a ritualized environment is what, in fact,
distinguishes ritualization from other social strategies.
4. Through ritualization of the body, ritual (that is, a ritualized environment)
effect a change of being in the ritualists (shedding off old nature or social
position; embodying new nature or social position). It happens in baptism
164 Priestesses of the craft

when the ritualist is marked with water, words and the sign of the cross to
“make happen” (or to confirm) that she now is dead and resurrected with
Christ, and has received the Holy Spirit. It happens in trance rites such as
Remembering Tiamat when the ritualists, by internal means,“decompose”
and shed the present pain-struck body and re-create themselves as a new
healed being. It happens in rites of passages when the ritualist is
transformed from one social being to another by virtue of bodily acts in a
ritualized environment. In this reciprocal process the body becomes a
mediator between the individual and deity, between the individual and the
social environment, or between her social world and a greater cosmos by
virtue of communicating between the two or merging them completely
(Petersen 1996:8). According to Pierre Bourdieu, it is in the dialectical
relationship between the body and the space structured according to
mythico-ritual oppositions “that one finds the form par excellence . . .
which leads to the em-bodying of the structures of the world, that is, the
appropriating by the world of a body thus enabled to appropriate the
world” (Bourdieu 1991:89).

One of the reasons for the success of this dialectical process between body and
space is that physical acts may have indexical character. For example, a
kneeling human being not only symbolizes submission, but she becomes
submissive within ritual space through the act itself. By kneeling, the ritualist
merges with the system of symbols to which kneeling refers, expressing this
system indexically. When the act of having kneeled in submission also has
effects outside of ritual, stretching into the future, it is, according to Bell,
because the ritualist gains “ritual competence” that qualifies her to apply the
internalized values and meanings also in other social contexts, in order to
redefine and restructure reality.
However, what is missing in the theoretical outline above (and in the
theoretical approaches of Grimes, Bell, Bourdieu, and Petersen) is a more
specific suggestion as to how the apprenticeship between a ritualized body and
a ritualized space leads to individual embodiment of a certain worldview, or
rather, of the structures of the world. In order to explain “a body thus
enabled” I shall add perspectives from the anthropology of emotion.
First, ritualizing is an intentional act and a conscious decision: prior to any
paradigmatic acts that may be observed by Bell, a potential ritualist decides
to ritualize or, at least, to partake in an ongoing ritualization. This change
of consciousness is according to Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw
(1994) a must and can be compared to the fictional contract which is auto-
matically entered when one or two or more people decide to play on the field
or perform on the stage. If the autonomous decision to ritualize is absent, we
are talking about neurotic behaviour or social coercion (or convention).
Second, if ritualizing shall be efficient in terms of transforming/confirming
the ritualist and giving ritual competence (“a body thus enabled”) with which
 Elements of magic: learning to ritualize 165

to redefine social reality, it seems to involve some form of emotional

participation. The rhetorical intention of preaching the Word in Protestant
congregations is to move the heart and induce/confirm faith in the ritualist
(Aune 1994). In Witchcraft, emotional honesty and sensitivity are required of
any person who wants to learn their craft and engage with the existential
agenda of being joined and being separate – let alone to learn anything from
this work and establish an identity as Witch. Subjugating oneself to the
intentional and conscious manipulations of emotion and imagination is also
regarded as the method to alter one’s mind and enter into an extra-ordinary
consciousness or trance state, or to evoke energy and “magically” accomplish
a purpose. When people feel frustrated with “working magic” they often
blame it on themselves and their inability to get in contact with their own
feelings.7
But emotions do not manifest themselves in a cultural vacuum. They
involve both physical feelings and cultural meanings, all derived from cultural
experience, knowledge and thought. According to Michelle Rosaldo, emotions
are about the ways the social world is one in which we are involved.They are
“thoughts that are felt” or “embodied”: “embodied thoughts . . . bespeaks the
difference between a mere hearing of a child’s cry and a hearing felt – as
when one realizes that danger is involved or that the child is one’s own”
(Rosaldo 1984:143). In regard to ritual space, “embodied thoughts” imply a
linking together of thinking and affect, of the active narration or exegesis of
myth combined with deep emotional responses that involve physical feelings
and cultural meanings. Emotional discourse is, therefore, part of the language
through which ritual transformations are marked and new identity formed (cf.
Larsen 1995:40).
Summing up ritual as “what” (A):
• ritual is a local symbolic expression and a contextualized manifestation of a
worldview of a general order;
• ritual always has an indexical quality which, in particular, is important to
religious ritual;
• the aim of ritualizing is to cultivate rites in order to induce a different mode
of knowing and being in the world.

Summing up ritual as “how” (B):

• ritualization is an intentional social practice and a strategic, paradigmatic
way of acting that depends upon the interaction of a culturally situated
body and ritually defined space;
• through ritualization of the body – including the intentional manipulation
of emotions and the indexicality of symbols – ritual works either to confirm
or transform social beings and their worlds. While ritualizing refers to an
indigenous method with which to reach ideological and magical goals,
ritualization denotes what actually takes place from the stance of socio-
logical meta-analysis.
166 Priestesses of the craft

A Reclaiming class: learning magical worldview and the art

of ritualizing
In order to illuminate the hermeneutic primacy of ritual among Reclaiming
Witches and analyse ritual both as structure and as symbolic expression
(“what”) and as a culturally defined social strategy (“how”), I shall start by
describing a teaching session that took place the second night of an “Elements
of Magic” class. It was open to both women and men and taught by Aradia
and Bird in San Francisco in the spring of 1989. To make the descriptions as
rich as possible, I will in addition add elements that were taught in the same
course offered at Witchcamp in Canada in the summer of 1989. By the time
I asked to join and observe the SF class, it was already full. Instead it was
arranged that I participate as a student teacher. Because I had been a member
of a Reclaiming coven since 1984 and believed to be somewhat experienced,
Aradia and Bird offered me this opportunity to study their teaching from the
inside. I was, however, also expected to participate actively. In order to stress
the inevitable experiential perspective of this account, then, I shall use the
pronoun “we”, not “they”, when suitable.
As stated in chapter 1, there are usually two teachers in a Reclaiming class
and, when someone is being trained as teacher, there are three, including the
student teacher. Their teaching style is focused more on techniques and
practices than on theology, which is congruent with their ethno-hermeneutics
and the elevation of the category of experience. The emphasis on several
parallel teachers is also meant to be consistent with nonauthoritarian, anarchist
politics. A class is announced through the Newsletter and can have between five
and fifteen students. It usually runs from 7:00 to 11:00 one night per week for
six weeks. The students are given homework, mostly meditations, each week.
The classes are arranged in private homes as a continual reminder of the low
monetary and noninstitutionalized character of feminist Witchcraft.
The goals of an introductory class such as the “Elements of Magic” are as
follows: 1 to make the students familiar with the worldview of Witchcraft
through personal and ritual experience; 2 to help them feel at home in
Reclaiming’s public rituals and gain competence with basic ritual structures;
and 3 to teach them to ritualize and conduct simple Reclaiming-styled rituals
on their own. The members of Reclaiming’s teaching cell believe they reach
these goals successfully when teaching within the framework of ritual, work-
ing experientially with the four elements, the many symbols of goddesses and
gods gathered from around the world, the five ritual tools inherited from the
European occult tradition – along with doing trances and spell-work to get
people acquainted with some of the magical aspects of ritual.
The class course has a given outline, dating back to when it was first
created by Diane Baker and Starhawk in 1979.The first evening is focused on
the element air and its symbolic and magical associations, the next on fire, the
third and fourth on water and earth. On the fifth evening, a complete ritual is
 Elements of magic: learning to ritualize 167

performed with the students involved in all the leading parts. The sixth
evening the students invite the teachers to a ritual they have created them-
selves and receive feedback, suggestions and criticism from the teachers after-
ward. How the elements are introduced and connected to magical exercises
will differ with the teachers and their experience and knowledge. Teachings
about the goddesses and gods are not singled out to a separate evening but are
integrated when working with the elements. It is also expected that the
students gain an understanding of the sacred simply by participating in rituals.
When planning the class meetings, it was important for Aradia and Bird
to agree on exercises that would introduce the elements both as substance,
as real nature, and as metaphors (or symbols). For example “air” is regarded as
equivalent to bodily breath and breathing and oxygen on a real, substantial
level. But air also symbolizes the direction east, the east already being a
metaphor for social beginnings and mental work. The ritual tool associated
with “east” is the athame, a handcrafted, black-handled, double-bladed knife.
The knife is said to represent air because it makes people pay attention, it cuts
the food and separates “good” from “bad” – all of which are believed to
symbolize basic human activities.The other elements have different meanings,
but each of them is understood to represent a network of correlations
between natural worlds, social environments, material culture, esoteric sym-
bolism and the human body. Within ritualized space the body is simply
symbolized as a micro version of cosmos.
To convey all these meanings in the first class, the air class, Aradia and Bird
agreed to do a trance exercise that combines deep breathing with a mental
journey in which the participants play with a five-pointed star – a symbol
called pentagram – and the waxing and waning of food, represented by apples.
The students were asked to focus upon this symbol, concentrate and use their
imagination to turn the pentagram into an apple, to cut it in two, making the
pentagram-like seed pattern inside an apple visible. The apple then crumbled
and became a seed, which was put in the dark earth “to die”, until it again
returned as sprouts, growing into a new apple tree, giving imaginary fruits the
students could eat.
The texture of the apple itself, with an inner pip and an outer pulp, was
also used as an image of the human constitution. The fundamental principles
of nature are the pip, situated at the centre core of the human body (Deep
Self ), while the culturally conditioned person is the pulp, including the
emotional body/mind, (Younger Self ) and the rational body/mind (Talking
Self ).The inner micro nature of the human body is thus made identical with
macro nature, with life-generating powers.
In the air class, Bird and Aradia also wanted the students to introduce
themselves by describing what their internal “weather” was like, if it was
cloudy or sunny, rainy, whatever. Homework that week was to do daily
breathing exercises in which the students were to try to push their breath
deeper and further down inside their bodies by using the skill of “mind over
168 Priestesses of the craft

matter.” For the next class, the fire class, the students were asked to bring what
they considered fire things for the altar.

* * *
It is early Monday evening, and the three of us are gathered in Aradia’s house
to prepare the living room for the second “Elements of Magic” class, the fire
class. Furniture is removed to make space for a huge circle of people on the
carpet.Wooden boxes covered with table cloths in different colors (white, red,
blue, black) are placed in each direction east, south, west and north. These
clothed, wooden boxes function as altars. On top of the boxes are set candles
and a few things representing the natural elements. On north, representing
earth, we place stones and a goddess sculpture. On east, representing air, we
arrange some feathers. On south, representing fire, we place incense and some
crystals. On west, representing water, we put shells and a water bowl. In the
centre, we place an altar for the deities, for the ritual tools and for the sacred
objects people might bring to class. The ritual tool and primary symbol for
north is the pentagram, for east the athame, for south the wand and for west
the cup.Witches use, in addition, a sword to draw an imaginary, magical circle
around the physical circle of people holding hands. This is done in order to
separate ritual space from nonritual space and declare “the ritual to have
begun”. The sword, a doumbec drum, and a bowl with saltwater is placed on
the floor by the centre altar.The tool for the centre is the cauldron or bonfire,
which also may be a symbol of the goddess and her transformative power.
In this class we use neither of them. During the ritual, only candles light
the room. When the candles are lit, the room looks warm, welcoming and
colourful. By the way it is arranged, it is meant to speak to the students’ sense
of beauty and sensual joy from playing with things.
When the students finally arrive, they wear comfortable clothes and bring
pillows to sit on, altar things, food for sharing, pen and paper.The class counts
9 women and 7 men between 18 and thirty-five years old. A group of
four young men are gay and dressed up as punks, while the others give no
information about sexual identification or sub-cultural belonging through
clothes, symbols or oral statements. A woman tells us she has quit her job on
the East Coast, left her friends and family and moved to San Francisco. Now
she wants to learn more and live according to the path of the goddess.
We open the class by sitting in a big circle on the floor, doing check-in (1).8
Everybody says something briefly about how they feel right now, what kind
of energy they bring and how they experienced homework.Then the working
theme (2) for this evening is introduced. All Reclaiming rituals are intentional:
they are focused on something specific which is celebrated or aimed at in
terms of making changes. Working with the theme usually comes as an
elaborate sequence in the middle of the ritual, after having created sacred
space and invoked the powers of the natural and divine worlds. The theme of
tonight’s ritual is purely didactic, “getting to know the element fire”. The
 Elements of magic: learning to ritualize 169

theme is normally not introduced and explained outside a ritual context, but
since this is a class, the teachers make an exception. Therefore, after check-in,
Aradia and Bird start introducing some of their knowledge and ethics about
fire and the category of magic.
Aradia opens the lecture, stating that the four elements correspond to deeds
required of a magician: to know (air), to will (fire), to dare (water), to keep
silent (earth). To work with fire is magical work, which means to work
emotionally with energy and then use one’s will and imagination to form and
direct it as desired. During class, we shall soon experience this energy in an
exercise called the “Tree of Life”. Aradia explains two forms of magic: The
first is spell-magic, in which the goal is to affect the divine with one’s own will
and desires (“my will be done”).This is not an inferior or bad form of magic.
Its intention can be healing of illness, bringing rain when there is drought,
creating peace in El Salvador, or getting more prosaic but still very important
things, like a place to live, a job or a partner. The second form of magic she
calls path-magic, in which the overall goal is to experience the divine and to
give up one’s own will in service of the deity (“thy will be done”). Path-
magic can also include spell-work, but the desired outcome is never made
explicit. Spell-magic is to say, “I want this particular job”, while path-magic is
to say, “I will take whatever job the Goddess sends forth.”
Bird explains (in conformity with Starhawk’s definition of ritual just
presented) that to be a Witch is to work with energy/power and develop the
ability to shape or bend reality. This is something we do all the time anyway,
says Bird, because we act intentionally: we extend our own wills into the
world and we manipulate the world.To be a Witch is to become conscious of
this fact and do it consciously.This in turn is to become more in charge of the
course of one’s own life and be responsible for the consequences of one’s acts.
To live as a Witch requires deeply integrated, personal ethics and a sense of
what it is to act in balance, he says.
Aradia confesses that she no longer does political spell-magic because her
conscience does not allow her to force her will upon the world or to
magically “bind” an enemy. This is, to her, unethical. Regarding her own
ethical standards, she once failed deeply by doing exactly what everybody
warns against, namely, a “love-spell”, which is also intended to “bind” some-
body and receive their love in return.The essence of a love-spell, according to
Aradia, is that it fills the executant with total obsession but that it has no
influence upon the desired person. And if it has, the executant is so obsessed
that any love affair is doomed to fail. Love-spells are, therefore, exclusively
destructive and unethical, and the students are urged to listen to Aradia’s
advice and stay away from them.
Bird confirms Aradia’s experience by referring to his black grandmother. In
her Voodoo magic she had no ethics and lived by her-will-be-done only,
hexing other people all the time. But, the law in magic is that everything a
person creates magically comes back to her three times. His grandmother has
denied this and is, therefore, very sick and lonely. The evil spells she intended
170 Priestesses of the craft

for others have turned back on her, slowly destroying her. On the other hand,
Bird believes that magical techniques are like electricity.They are neither good
nor evil in themselves but can be used for either purpose. Bird learned his
magical techniques from an evil woman and maintains that he can – like her –
do weather-magic (making it sunny or rainy), change traffic lights, delay an
airplane so he can reach the airport in time, and so forth.The difference is, he
holds, that he does magic for the good of all, while she did it for evil. Bird has
no problems with spell-magic and makes it “all the time”.
While the two teachers lecture, the students take notes diligently. They do
not argue, but some ask clarifying questions. Suddenly one of them wants to
know whether I, doing research on Reclaiming and now acting as a student
teacher, have any magical experiences myself. The question really is, am I
competent to co-teach this class or am I there as a “spy” in disguise? I am
hesitant until Aradia rescues me: “Tell them the story about the birth of your
daughter, and how you probably stopped the labour with your mind.” I do as
I am told, and everybody is amazed and relaxed: I am accepted.
After this teaching session, there is a short break. When people return, it is
time for ritual. The first step in the process of ritualizing is to transform the
living room into ritual space, starting with an exercise called “grounding”. It is
important to note that there are no scripts read in these proceedings.
Everything said and done is spontaneously created in the doing, leaning only
on a well-known form. It is the form itself the teachers intend to hand over to
the students by the method of imitation and the knowledge of some few basic
principles. Except for statements like, “Now we shall ground ourselves; now
we shall purify; now we shall call the elements, etc.”, nothing further is
explained. At this point the students are not expected to ask why, or what
things mean, only to “hang on” as well as possible. Neither is it polite to take
more notes until the whole ritual is finally closed. Without being told,
everybody picks up this attitude.
It’s time for the grounding (3) exercise. Bird asks everybody to stand up, to
shake their limbs loose and relax. We hold hands and breathe deeply and
rhythmically, while Bird leads a guided meditation. The imagery used is the
world-tree, the Tree of Life, believed to represent cosmos.We imagine that we
are a tree with trunk, branches and roots. The roots go through the floor,
through the pavement, all the way into the centre of the earth, from which we
imagine that we bring up energy in the form of red fire. Entranced by Bird’s
rhythmical and evocative voice, we use our minds and breath to bring the
energy back up, into our bodies, up through legs and arms, following the
eastern chakra system.When the energy reaches our heads, we also accompany
our breath with loud sounds and imagine that our arms are like branches,
waving with the sound. The sound accelerates and builds up to a harmony,
while we stretch our arms/branches toward the roof. Since the students had
breathing exercises as homework, they quickly get involved and raise the
sound to its peak. The loud, harmonized hum is called a “power chant”, and
when done correctly it resonates in the head and in the body. It goes on for
 Elements of magic: learning to ritualize 171

about five minutes.Then it ends in a climax when, at a signal, the power chant
suddenly stops and there is complete silence. Everybody then lies down on
their knees, with the palms of their hands flat and their foreheads touching the
floor in order to ground the “left-over” energy by projecting it back into the
earth.
This psychophysical grounding exercise is meant to wake up earth energy
and to be a first step in reconnecting people with their birth ground, the
Goddess. To wake up earthenergy is also believed to balance and renew
individual energy, putting people into a light trance. This energy, which is
raised, distributed and stored in social bodies as well as in the earth, is always
emotionally loaded and, together with the power of will and imagination,
regarded as the main working tool in Witches’ ritual magic.
After grounding, there is purification (4). Everybody now sits in circle,
looking into a candle flame at the centre altar. With their imaginations, they
are asked to give to the candle the energy or feelings which they do not want
to bring further into the ritual and to take back from the flame whatever they
need or want and store it in the “third eye” at their foreheads. Usually Witches
use salt and water as purifiers, but tonight everything is focused on the
element “fire”. If the ritual were outdoors, we would have stared into the
flames of a bonfire.
After purifying, Witches cast the circle (5), an act intended to represent
cosmos in miniature inside the living room by symbolically separating ritual
time and space from ordinary time and space by drawing an imaginary,
magical circle around all the celebrants. Everybody rises, and normally Bird
would pick up the sword and walk to the north, kiss it and say: “Holy Mother,
in whom we move, live and have our being, bless this circle.”9 From there he would
begin to walk clockwise, pointing the sword in the four directions while
stating, “By the air that is Her breath, by the fire of Her bright spirit, by the water of
Her living womb, by the earth that is Her body, the circle is cast.” Tonight we do it
differently.We cast the circle together by imagining a pale, blue flame coming
out of our hands as a sword blade. With our hands stretched out horizontally,
we walk around the circle while imagining a circle taking form. In the end,
we stretch upward and downward marking the points called “above” and
“below”, as well as to the “centre”, setting axis mundi.When we have finished
casting the circle, which visually is more like a ball with a pillar in the centre,
Bird now proclaims, “We are between the worlds and beyond the bonds of time,
where day and night, birth and death, joy and sorrow meet as one.”The students are
informed that now we have created sacred space and an energy circle that is to
be respected. If anybody needs to go to the bathroom, they have “to cut”
themselves in and out with their imagination.
It is time to invoke the elements (6), the earth, air, fire and water. Within the
context of ritual, the elements are also believed to be personal energy forms,
guarding “each corner” of the world. They can be addressed as “Guardians of
the Watchtowers of the East . . . etc.,” as “Archangels,” as “Goddesses,” as “Powers of
Air” or simply with sound and body movements imitating the element air,
172 Priestesses of the craft

“Huuush”, while the arms and the body make wind-like motions. Aradia
informs the students that there is no right or wrong way to do this invocation
and asks whether there are any volunteers.The woman from Witchcamp offers
to call in air, while a totally inexperienced man bravely will call water. Bird
will call south, I will call north and Aradia the centre. It is done by each of us
walking to the respective altars for each element, turning our palms outward
and naming the actual element in our own personal way, for example:“Eastern
Morning/First breath of the soul, Worldview forming/Sacred and whole, Wind of
knowledge/simple and wise, bringer of the lightning/that strikes in our minds, Come to
us – be here now.” 10 Everybody then responds, “Air is here. Blessed be.”
We are still on our feet forming a circle, and after the elements, Witches
invoke the deities (7): “God” (sometimes) and “the Goddess” (always). Reclaim-
ing works with many named goddesses and a few gods, and they are mostly
called by singing and round dance. The God is called first, then the Goddess.
Since this is a fire class and Witches have just celebrated a Sabbat (Bridged’s
day on February 2nd), Aradia and Bird have decided to call in the Irish
goddess Bridged, goddess of fire, poetry and smith craft.The God called is the
non personal Horned One, the god of animal power and the principle of
compost. We call them separately by different songs, but with the same dance
movements: two steps forward, one step backward while holding hands. The
songs are more like chants, which are repeated again and again as the energy is
raised, peaks and drops.When finally done, we lie down on the floor – exactly
the way we did after the Tree of Life meditation.This invocation is equivalent
to the ritual element mentioned in chapter 4 called “aspecting “ or “drawing
down the moon”, in which the hidden deity becomes manifest. In a public
ritual, the ecstatic aspects of calling in and “indexically” becoming deity will be
emphasized much more than they are now in a class situation. After a while
we sit up, and Aradia states, “They are here. Blessed be.” She then turns to the
person on her left-hand side, looks into her eyes, kisses her on her cheek, and
says,“Thou art Goddess and God.”This person kisses the next, and so on around
the whole circle.
We have now created a magical circle beyond the limits of ordinary time
and space and declared the divine as manifest within ourselves as well as
present in the circle. It is time for magical work (8) or the working theme for the
ritual, which today is the element fire.To get more deeply in touch with fire,
Bird asks us to stand in circle, close our eyes and hold hands. We use the Tree
of Life imagery once more, pushing “roots” into the ground below us. But this
time we gather blue light from the centre of the earth instead of red fire.The
exercise is to form the invisible blue light into a ball which becomes so real
that we experience it as glowing in our hands.We then use our imagination to
feel and roll the ball – on Bird’s directions – all over our bodies and around
the circle. After a while we remodel the ball into a dove.With our imagination
we give the bird wings, legs and colour, everything it needs. Bird also asks us
to give it a piece of our heart and breath until it becomes an extended part of
us. Finally we give this magical bird or thought construction a message con-
 Elements of magic: learning to ritualize 173

cerning something we want, open an invisible window and let it fly into the
“other world” to complete what we asked for. Bird reminds us to be prepared
for the bird to come back in another form, and if it does, to still give it proper
thanks. When finished, we ground the leftover energy by lying down, with
foreheads and hands flat on the floor.
The next exercise is led by Aradia and myself. It is a demonstration of
energy changes in a person’s body field made visible by the aid of a pendulum.
Aradia sits on a chair; I stand behind her holding a pendulum in my right
hand, just above her head. I ask her, as I have been instructed, to ground
herself with roots into the earth and draw new energy into her feet with her
imagination (the pendulum now starts to move a little). I ask her to draw the
energy up through her legs and body trunk (pendulum moves a little faster)
and into the big branches coming out from her head (pendulum makes a
sudden shift and moves extremely fast). I tell her that all of a sudden she feels
a bowl of cold, mashed potatoes being thrown upon her head (pendulum
almost stops immediately), but then somebody comes and removes the
potatoes and cleans her head (pendulum now moves a little faster). I finally ask
Aradia to release the energy and ground it in the earth (pendulum stops
completely).
The exercise seems very convincing, to me as well (I had never seen it
done before). People are at this point excited and eager to try it themselves.
We divide the group into couples and give each pair one pendulum. Aradia
tells them that the person standing is the “reader” and the person sitting is the
“medium”. The point is not to read objectively, but to experience that both
the medium and the reader can influence energy – and therefore the
pendulum – with their mind and imagination. The students play for a while,
and to many of them this is the first time in their lives that they really have
“seen with their own eyes” how concentration and focus of the mind can
influence energy and the movements of an object.The excitement is formulated
as “Gee! I can move energy! I can learn magic!”
In an ordinary ritual, there would at this point be time to create a cone of
power (9). Such an energy-cone is made as the participants gather and focus
energy by repeated song and dance movements. The goal is to give power to
the magical work completed in the ritual, and help it manifest in ordinary
reality. Since the magical work this evening is more training than a proper
working, the students will have to wait one week before they are introduced
to this very important concept. We will return to this ritual element when
describing “The Spiral Dance” ritual in chapter 6.
We finish the circle with a ritual meal (10).The centre altar is removed, and
a big tablecloth is put on the floor. People bring food and drinks to share and
place them on the tablecloth.The woman from Witchcamp offers to bless the
food. She gives thanks to the gods for things given to us during the evening.
After the praises, she breaks off a piece of bread, turns to the person next to
her, hands her the bread while saying, “May you never hunger.” She does
likewise with the cup of juice, saying, “May you never thirst.” Then the bread
174 Priestesses of the craft

and drink are passed on to the next person, who repeats the procedures. The
class is told that ritual eating in Reclaiming is not a sacrificial meal, although
we eat substances, the body of the Goddess. It is rather equivalent to feasting –
being both celebration and thanksgiving. It replenishes the body after doing
magical work and is a way to bring people back into ordinary consciousness.
After we have eaten, the final ritual acts are to give thanks, dismiss the deities
and the elements (11), and the circle itself (12). These are regarded as very
important acts since they end a concrete rite, helping the participants to leave
the realms of magic and return to ordinary consciousness. It must be done
properly so that nobody is left in a semi-tranced, unfocused state. To say
“thank you and farewell” to all the powers called into the ritual is also
explained as politeness and showing respect. The person who did the
invocation also dismisses, “Thank you, Bridged, for joining this circle and for all the
gifts you have brought tonight. Stay if you will, go if you must. As you depart, we bid
you farewell.” Similar phrases are used for the god and each of the elements. At
the end, all the participants hold hands in circle while saying, “By the earth that
is Her body, by the air that is Her breath, by the fire of Her bright spirit, by the water
of Her living womb, the circle is open, but unbroken. May the peace of the Goddess be
in our hearts. Merry meet and merry part and merry meet again. Blessed be.”
The class is over and people prepare to leave. Their homework is to be
aware of energy and fire, to practice the Tree of Life meditation, and to be
able to create sacred space. Also, they shall look for water things for the next
class.

* * *
When everybody has left, Aradia and Bird express great satisfaction with the
class.They tell me that the second evening is always a test as to whether a class
will take off or not, whether the energy will get to the students and make
them mentally able to create and be responsible for a ritual.They believe they
already now can say that they will.
And they were right – the class became a success. Nobody dropped out and
on the very last evening, four weeks later, the students made a ritual together
that was regarded as well working and creative: it was more than a pure
imitation of what they had learned in class.When the class was completed the
students expressed gratitude and satisfaction, and a majority wanted to learn
more. Six women signed up for a “Rites of passage” class for women only,
while one of the young men joined a “Pentacle” class. When I completed my
studies in 1994, he had been initiated as Witch and had become an active
member of the Reclaiming Collective and teaching cell. Although 10 people
from this class formed a mix coven, which continued in a smaller version for
five years, only this young man found his way into the Reclaiming Collective
and community. The others felt more encouraged to bring the Goddess into
their already existing communities, and return to Reclaiming only for the
large public sabbat rituals.
 Elements of magic: learning to ritualize 175

Interpreting ritual as “what”: structure and semantics

We shall now move on from describing the ritual performed in this specific
class to the structures and contents of a generic Witchcraft ritual, that is, the
general ideas expressed and implied in the act of ritualizing and in the rite
itself.11 I shall also recapitulate some of the qualities of the ritualizing strategy
in Reclaiming and add “native” information and exegesis about ritual elements
and meanings not already given in class. I shall in particular point out and
make explicit aspects of the occult heritage as manifested in the implied
worldview of a Witchcraft ritual. I select this information from sources avail-
able, amongst them the other Reclaiming classes in which I have participated
and Starhawk’s books.
Bringing together the different stages of the ritual as described in the
previous section, the five major ritualizing strategies to build and end a ritual
in Reclaiming are ideally as follows:

I Preparing to leave profane time and space (horizontal magic of everyday life)
1 Check-in, lecture, discussion
2 Proclaiming intent and goal of ritual
II Creating sacred time and space (vertical magic of ritual)
3 Grounding
4 Purification
5 Casting the circle
6 Invoking the elements
III Becoming sacred space (“sacred possession”)
7 Invoking the deities
8 Magical work
9 Raise a cone of power
IV Thanksgiving for achieved intent and goal
10 Ritual meal and praises
V Returning to profane time and space (horizontal magic)
11 Dismissing deities and elements
12 Opening the circle

Following the chronological descriptions above, I will now add more infor-
mation – in particular to the parts I, II and III, which are the most elaborate
parts of the ritual.

I Preparing to leave profane time and space

The ritualizing process has a certain rhythm and direction corresponding to
the horizontal magic of everyday life versus the vertical magic of ritual, as
presented in chapter 4. The celebrants start out horizontally, in profane time.
After having spoken their intent and goal, they enter sacred time and space in
a vertical move, whereupon they return to the horizontal profane – presumably
176 Priestesses of the craft

renewed. As stated above, Witches themselves use the expression “creating

sacred space” about ritual.The initial stage in this creation is both formulated
by and addressed to Talking Self. In public rituals, there is no check-in.
Instead the gathering is begun by somebody in the ritual planning group
stating intent and focus for the proposed magical work (8), and explaining
the planned ritual acts step-by-step. A ritual is always staged because
something is lacking or needs celebration.“Lack” is the most common reason
(and theme), and the medicine offered is healing, repair, change or new
knowledge. At this point, people might ask questions and, in smaller rituals,
also come with other suggestions regarding the proposed magical work. This
is a purely intellectual conversation and an important part of the ritual
process. It may be repeated in the thanksgiving sequence, and definitely when
evaluating a completed ritual.
The ritual proceedings from this point on are consciously intended to
awaken Younger Self and Deep Self or, rather, to speak to Deep Self through
Younger Self. The interaction between the three selves can be described by
this image: Younger Self is the strings of a violin; the sounding board is the
semantic structure constituting the universe of Talking Self; and the trance
experience or ecstasy of Deep Self is the sound that is produced.The Witches
“become” their Younger Self by creating sacred space (II) and they “become”
their Deep Self when invoking the gods (III). The entrance to these different
states of mind follows the pattern identified as Starhawk’s hermeneutics of
space in chapter 4: 1 the Witch visualizes a mystical symbol; 2 the Witch
enters the symbol by meditatively becoming the power which the symbol
points to, and the absent becomes present in the esoteric, indexical symbol; 3
the Witch returns to ordinary consciousness and describes the esoteric
experience by a number of metaphors, many of which comply with occult
heritage.
But new knowledge and new metaphors to describe ordinary reality are
not all that is achieved. Witches also claim to be renewed and strengthened
on an energetic level from having ritualized; they also claim that whatever
social “problem” they brought to the magical circle has become easier to
handle – even when returning to ordinary life. Some even claim to be able to
influence and bend social reality directly with their ritual magic – be it the
delay of airplanes or the financing of a much needed soup kitchen. By
importing the category of magic, Witches suggest that they are in control of
their own lives.
Thus, to be in control seems to imply three possibilities: new knowledge
achieved through immediate revelation or through “a channel already dug”
(teachers and initiations); shaping reality in conformity with one’s will and no
longer being a passive object for cultural determination; being able to actually
change, grow and improve one self.This worldview is genuinely optimistic and a
protest against feelings of helplessness, victimization and anger often expressed
by ordinary people in western societies who have restricted access to power
and influence.
 Elements of magic: learning to ritualize 177

II Creating sacred time and space

When people sign up for class, it is in order to learn how to create sacred
space and temporarily separate themselves from the profane. They are taught
that the first step in this separating-out process is to delimit a place of power
by entering into an imagined centre point, and then greet each of the four
directions with their bodies. This event, casting the circle, can take place
anywhere: indoors, outdoors, in a forest, on the streets. The psychological
meaning of casting the circle is, according to Starhawk, to create a safe
structure within which people can more easily “change categories” and be
able to perform magic:

The circle is itself a structure; it says to Talking Self,“Look, you who need
so much order, within my boundaries you can forget your usual names,
you can change categories. You will be faced with many new sensations
and experiences, but don’t panic. I’m here, standing guard – and only
within my bounds do you take your holiday. When I am dissolved, then
you can bring back the usual divisions, the ordinary boundaries. Until
then, relax.”
(Starhawk 1982a:55)

This safe, sacred space in which Talking Self may relax and have her holiday is
also called a place “between the worlds and beyond the bonds of time”. It is in this
extra-ordinary dimension that the relationship between representamen and
object is twisted to the extent that anything may shape-shift into another.
Witches may now become a tree or a blue flame, journey into the earth (or
air, fire, water), or take the earth (or air, fire, water) into their own bodies.
Either way, they are expected to experience oneness with the elements as they
imagine the circle of bodies being the trunk of a tree instead of human flesh.
The circle as ritual form is also a symbol of nonhierarchical structures and
the equal distribution of power and energy, at least as interpreted by Witches.
The participants do not stand or sit in rows, facing a most holy altar or
sanctuary, but are facing each other. Each single participant is regarded as an
altar because the divine is manifest in every being.To enter sacred space, then,
is also to seek psychological and spiritual balance by holding a circle within.
The process in which the circle transforms from being a mystical symbol to
representing what it refers to is considered an act of magic. By imagination
and mediation Witches turn the circle into a mandala, whereas they themselves
are in the mandala. Trance techniques are the most common mediators, being
composed of relaxation, concentration, visualization and projection.Visualization
or imagination is the ability to see, hear, feel, touch and taste with the inner
senses. Through inner pictures and feelings Witches communicate with
Younger Self and, thereby, with Deep Self. Concentration is the ability to
focus upon a given image, restricting the field of attention and excluding
disturbing elements. Projection is the ability to “send out” energy.This shift in
178 Priestesses of the craft

consciousness creates what is experienced as an altered state of consciousness

in which solid things and visions become like one. Many celebrants now
report that they are able to “move around” in the universe in their “astral
bodies.” This technique was used in the Tree of Life meditation, in the apple/
pentagram exercise, in the ball/dove exercise, as well as when invoking the
divine. To help the Younger Self reach this particular altered state, Witches use
objects and techniques which they believe will talk to and enchant the child
within: sensual altar props, special symbols, compelling words and rhythmical
music, nice smells and candlelight.

Grounding
Teachers often make a point that Wicca is eclectic and that their altering
techniques are gathered from other religious traditions. It is commonly held
that the contents of the Tree of Life meditation, with its imagery, breathing,
chakra points and power-chant, are taken from Hatha Yoga. But the concept of
a cosmic tree representing axis mundi is probably appropriated from the Jewish
Kabbalah.12 The Kabbalistic Tree of Life is a graphic figure with roots in
heaven, top on earth and branches to the sides. The figure constitutes a
magical ladder between heaven and earth with ten power-spots distributed
along the trunk. Each spot or sephiroth represents one of ten divine emanations
or powers (Scholem 1974). The most High may descend all the way down to
Malkuth (the mundane sephiroth), where YHWH is believed to manifest as
Shekinah. Likewise may people climb the ladder in the opposite direction,
starting their divine ascent by uniting with Shekinah (who represents God’s
dwelling on earth). Witches turn this mystical figure upside down and insist
on a first and primary association between Goddess and Earth, not between
God and Heaven.They obviously see a profound difference between working
with sky-energy and working with earth-energy.

Purification
The idea of purification in Witchcraft is based upon energetic (not ethical)
assumptions taken from sources such as modern esotericism, eastern philo-
sophy and, more recently, humanistic psychology. “Purification” does not
mean restitution of fallen nature since no part of the human being is
considered “evil”. It is rather a cleansing out of negative energies, anxieties
and worries that may disturb the concentration and outcome of “magical
work”. In the candle meditation described above, negative energies were not
discharged. They were only projected onto the candle, transformed and taken
back. This exercise is in accordance with magical principles stating that
nothing in the universe can be thrown away (there is no “outside”). It can
only be transformed into something else. Or, as Starhawk puts is,“Magic is the
art of turning negatives into positives, of spinning straw into Gold” (Starhawk
1982a:99). The goal of purification is thus to prepare a person’s mental,
emotional and bodily channels to work energy efficiently.
 Elements of magic: learning to ritualize 179

Casting the circle

In occult, ceremonial magic, the ritual circle is cast and sealed with penta-
grams in order to keep out evil spirits. Witches do not believe in evil spirits
but draw the circle as a psychic boundary within which everybody may feel
emotionally safe and stay focused. They do, however, continue to use the
pentagram (#) to symbolize human beings and their mystical dependency
upon circles within circles.The esoteric tradition teaches that the five-pointed
star represents all of creation, including the four elements and the fifth, which
is essence (the centre point of the circle). The star also represents the five
stages of life: birth, initiation, mature love, repose, death, as well as the human
body with four limbs and a head, five senses, five deeds, etc. The pentagram
within a circle is called a pentacle. In the occult tradition, this symbol (✪)
represents the human microcosm within the universal macrocosm. Even
though the pentagram was not used in the “Elements of Magic” class (except
in one meditation), it is commonly drawn in the air at public rituals. This
drawing of an invisible figure with an athame is regarded as part of casting the
circle or calling the elements.

Invoking the elements

The goal of Wiccan worship is not only to commemorate elemental inter-
dependencies or to symbolize a cosmic kinship system. When they gather for
ritual, Witches intend to invoke and make present all the associated powers of
the natural, human and divine worlds by conjuring the four elements. To be
able to successfully do this,Witches have adopted the ancient dictum “as above
so below”, meaning that ritual micro-circles in fact may reflect cosmic macro-
structures, and that a quartered, magical circle in fact may embody the four
elements and their affiliated associations. They also believe that each quarter/
element is being “watched” by guardian spirits, addressed within ritual space as
“Guradians of the Watchtowers of the East.”
These figures and names are typical occult heritage, representing a mixture
of Greek nature philosophy, stoicism and neo-Platonism, as well as magical
spells. In ceremonial magic, the Guardians of the Watchtowers are thought to
ward a plurality of neo-Platonic heavens and usually named according to
Jewish and Christian archangels: Michael (east), Ariel (south), Raphael (west)
and Gabriel (north). The centre of the circle (the fifth element) is associated
with YHWH (the four sacred/secret letters representing the godhead in
ancient Israel. Each quarter/element is also associated with a ritual tool, as well
as with a series of symbolic correlations set between seasons, time, colours,
psychological moods, body parts, divine names, celestial planets, etc. This
network of proclaimed cosmological correspondences – in which everything
existing is regarded as a sign that can be substituted by another sign (within
the same sign-family) and eventually decoded by human beings – is in the
occult literature called “pillars of correspondence”.
180 Priestesses of the craft

Traditionally, these “pillars” are heavily gendered and therefore (according

to convention) hierarchically ordered in relation to each other: west is
associated with water and feelings, north with earth and body and both with
femininity; east is associated with air and intellect, south with fire and spirit
and both with masculinity; centre is associated with essence/divinity, trans-
formation and androgyny. This genedered cosmology has more or less been
used throughout history of western civilization to legitimize and reinforce
ideological and social hierarchies between men and women and to naturalize
notions of asymmetrical gender polarity. Thus, traditional occult cosmology is
not in harmony with contemporary feminist world-viewing.
Nevertheless, feminist Witch Starhawk listed the occult “pillars of
correspondence” in an appendix to the first edition of The Spiral Dance
(1979a:201–13). She even included the patriarchal Yahve and his archangels, a
fact that is rather anacronistic. Even though this has been modified in later
editions, Starhawk’s readers are still advised to use symbols that are related
through occult association to the same elemental pillar when working magic.
If, for example, a Witch wants to do magic for prosperity, it is suggested that
she chooses candles with the colors black, green or brown, or other symbols
representing material reality (“earth”). If her goal instead is to let go or
separate herself from something, the proper pillar/element is “air” and the
ritual tool the athame. Thus, the athame – which is believed to be a tangible
symbol for invisible powers – represents the intellect (air), the wand represents
spirit (fire), the cup feelings (water), the pentagram moulded in iron the body
(earth), and the Witches’ cauldron in the centre represents the fifth element:
the divine fire of transformation (essence). When fire burns on alcohol in the
cauldron, it is said to represent two different principles merging as one:
feminine water gives herself to masculine fire (Cirlot 1962:8). The occult
symbol for fire is L, and for water M. When they are combined to form a
hexagram, we end up with the esoteric symbol for the union between macro
(masculine) and micro (feminine), the so-called “great rite”.
In ceremonial magic, this rite is ideally performed as sexual magic, that is, as
actual intercourse between a female representative (micro/human) and a male
representative (macro/cosmos) in order to help sustain the powers of life and
fertility and make manifest the divine in the couple. In Reclaiming, sex magic
is regarded as incompatible with feminist politics and does not take place, at
least not within rituals with more than two participants. But the “great rite” is
often symbolized in public rituals by holding the athame vertically over the
cup as part of the invocation of Goddess and God.
Why have feminist Witches appropriated an erotic worldview and a symbol
system that have contributed to essentialize gender and glorify static, authori-
tarian power relations (such as equating femininity with feeling and inferiority
and masculinity with intellect and superiority)? Probably because of their
proclaimed urgency to restore – through a powerful holistic symbol – a felt
loss of a living cosmos and a magical, spiritual ground to human existence.
Being an all-inclusive, holistic symbol that predated Christianity, the quartered
 Elements of magic: learning to ritualize 181

circle proposed itself as a beautiful and innocent, pagan way to balance all
kinds of binary oppositions, such as those perceived between body and spirit,
intellect and feeling, female and male, gods and humans, merger and separation
– both in divine and mundane realms.
This dialectic ability ascribed to the “magic circle” has obviously contri-
buted to its unique historical position and made it a favourite strategy in
esoteric forms of ritualizing – in particular when attempting to establish a
tangible web between lived human life and a living natural world.The question
is whether the gendered, authoritarian parts of the strategy are integral to the
attempt as such, or whether they can be disposed of in times of feminist
politics and feminist gender shattering.
According to most Reclaiming Witches, they are dispensable. In their own
appropriation of elemental symbolism, the meaning of gender and other
uneasy associations from past historical times have been more and more
downplayed. They emphasize instead how important elemental symbolism
is cross-culturally, and how it can foster human growth and inter-human
community.This insight is thus applied to contemporary Witchcraft: the magic
circle is a means to integrate an embodied mode of thinking and a deep-felt
consciousness of cosmic interconnection in the worshipper:

The quarters balance each other; experiencing each one I can experience
the need for its polar opposite.When I see and think in the East, using my
knife to make divisions, I must also be able to feel, to flow, to merge, or I
become cut apart. If I burst forth with expression, with passion, in the
South, I must also be able to contain fire, to ring it with stones from the
North, or I risk burning down the forest. And if I allow myself, in the
West, to merge, I need the power of the East to separate again.The earth,
without the sun’s fire, remains dead, silence without expression.
(Starhawk 1982a:55)

In this quotation, gender is apparently gone, as are the potential hierarchies

in the symbolism of the “magic circle”. Thus, the enchanted feminism of
Starhawk and the Reclaiming Witches entails some problematic compromises,
and a few (the relations between human and divine gender) will be discussed
further in chapter 7.
But let me already now stress an important point, namely, that the
meanings of symbols from an analytical stance cannot be regarded as archetypal.
Meanings are not inherent in the symbol but attributed to the symbol through
cultural association. It is therefore absolutely possible to appropriate elemental
philosophy without adopting it wholesale. As with any other symbolic
tradition, occult philosophy can be reformed and twisted in anti-dualist, anti-
hierarchical directions. Consequently, in another passage from The Spiral
Dance, Starhawk states: “The Male and the Female forces represent difference,
yet they are not different in essence: they are the same forces flowing in
opposite, but not opposed directions” (1979a:27). Although cultural assumptions
182 Priestesses of the craft

about the dichotomized and essential nature of “Male” and “Female” have
been integral parts of the symbol system of the quartered circle until now,
Starhawk takes it for granted that they are dispensable. Yet, she is careful not
to erase the notion of gender or sexual difference.

III Becoming sacred space

If ritualizing in Reclaiming is about separating sacred and profane in order to
construct a magical person and magical space, its ultimate goal is to awaken,
reconnect and work with the spirit inside, the deepest aspect of Self, the
Goddess.When introducing Deep Self in a Pentacle class, one of the Reclaim-
ing teachers said,

As humans we share substances with each other, and yet we are unique.
The word “self ” refers to that uniqueness. The self sets us apart from
anything else, and yet all we need from the universe is really deep inside
us. This Deep Self is connected to the cosmos. Deep Self is who you are
originally, what you came in the world for, your medicine for the world.
It comes before all other selves; it is the best we are, the best we are
capable of.We should love that part and bring it through in all we do. It is
our spirit-self, and now it is time to awaken it.

On one hand, there are as many goddesses and gods as there are people,
animals, plants and other species. On the other, and in spite of this apparent
polytheism in which goddesses and gods from many selves and cultures are
venerated,Witches are philosophical monists: a named goddess is only regarded
as an aspect of divine reality, just as a human being is only a manifest sample of
the human species. This monistic thinking, however, does not perceive of
reality as a fixed state of being, but rather as a dynamic process of assiduous
creation, decay and re-creation.When defining ultimate reality as polar energies
symbolized by the “feminine” Goddess and the “masculine” God, Witches are
of course deeply affected by the (already) gendered, magical circle.
The Witches’ obligation to celebrate the eight solar holidays (sabbats)
corresponds to a myth in which the God is imagined as the power of love and
desire, the one who continually changes form and face in his forever yearning
for the Goddess, who is both lover and birthmother. When they finally meet
and merge, the year “turns” and a new season arrives. Furthermore, when
people act “like gods”, seeking and merging with the Goddess too, they are
promised that even the cultural wheel will turn and conjure social balance and
harmony.13
The Wiccan rituals are both occasions for and narrations of this yearning
for the divine. They are also oracles that can tell the tides of waning and
waxing in all aspects of life, including when certain political actions or creative
projects should be started or terminated in order to be successful.To initiate a
process that runs counter to general currents in nature or culture is likely to
 Elements of magic: learning to ritualize 183

fail. For example, spring with its ritual called Beltane is the proper time to
initiate or renew love relations and friendships, whereas Samhain in late fall is
the proper time to start a political action such as the “Prevention Point”
needle exchange. At these solar rituals, Witches connect inner and outer
cycles, permitting death to feed life and vice versa in a broad sense: “As the
cone of power rises, as the seasons changes, we arouse power from within, the
power to heal, the power to change our society, the power to renew the
earth” (Starhawk 1979a:169). Sabbat rituals thus designate the modes and
possibilities in nature, people and society.

Invoking the deities

According to Starhawk, an invocation “channels power through a visualized
image of the divine” (1979a:55). In ritual the participants may invoke the
goddess by using her anthropomorphic image, whereafter she is experienced
as incarnated in the Witches when simultaneously invoked from within.This is
an example of how the esoteric indexical symbol becomes a material figure,
and how her manifestation is pulled forth by repeated chanting and dancing.
When successful, chanting may induce an ecstatic state, which is proclaimed
“the heart of Witchcraft – in ritual we turn paradox inside out and become
the Goddess, sharing in the primal throbbing joy of union” (Starhawk
1979a:25).When the Witches then declare, “Thou art Goddess,” the Goddess-
as-deity is believed to be present in a mystical sense in each and every one.
She is also represented by an external symbol, such as the “fire of trans-
formation” burning in the Witches’ cauldron, making her an objectified
subject in relation to Younger Self.
The emerging paradox is that Goddess is simultaneously internal and external
to the human subject. This paradoxical interaction of Goddess and self is not
exclusive to Witches. Anthropologist Paul Heelas believes that all possible
human conceptions of self and authority may be analysed according to two
contrasting systems. One is called “idealist” because the self is regarded as
subject and the world her object.The other is called “passiones”14 because the
individual is now the object whereas the world represents agency (Heelas
1981:41). In addition, authority can be conceptualized as internal or external.
Heelas argues that the modern, “autonomous” individual represents pure
idealism: self is “in control” and authority is internalized in self, making her
subject vis-à-vis the world. The “plastic” human being, who has no clear
boundaries between herself and cosmos, represents pure passiones: self is
“under control” and authority is externalized in relation to the self, making
her object vis-à-vis the world.15
If we exchange Heelas’s concept of “authority” for “Goddess” (the ultimate
authority to Witches), we may conceptualize the already outlined dynamic
between Goddess and self as follows: when Goddess is understood as immanent
life force in the individual, authority is internalized and the self is subject
(idealist). When the very same life force is understood as an all-embracing,
184 Priestesses of the craft

cosmological power, Goddess is not only believed to be in the individual, but to

contain the individual within herself. The self is merely one of many “objects”
within divinity, and authority is experienced as externalized (passiones).
What is interesting in Reclaiming is that the fluctuating positions of self
and Goddess are wilfully chosen and included in their own meta-perspective
when explaining their spiritual path to new apprentices.This reality of having
a choice is, of course, typical to their identity as modern Americans. But
choice is also derived from their hermeneutics, from the belief that ultimate
reality may speak to them and reveal its knowledge if they dare to interact,
merge and be bent. For example, ritual practices are not only regarded as
symbolizing and confirming what is already held to be cognitively true by the
believer. In and of themselves they have the power – as has all true involve-
ment with people and the natural world according to Witches – to convey
new knowledge that otherwise would not be known. Alternatively, if people
do not choose or dare to interact, reality (including ritual) will be silent and
reveal nothing.16
After the invocation of Goddess and God, its time for magical work. I will
not analyse this part further since its possible ritual strategies resembles those
already introduced. In terms of the time span for the whole rite, this part
(including the raising of a cone of power) comes toward the end as an
energetic and emotional highlight. When all is completed, the ritual is quickly
finished with thanksgiving and “fare wells” to deities and elements.The rhythm
of the ritual consists of a long, elaborate beginning with a slow building up of
emotional and vital energy, a deep climax towards the end, and a short but
firm closure. Witches believe that without a proper closure, what has been
accomplished in ritual will not manifest in ordinary reality – only fade away.

Interpreting ritual as “how”: strategic interactions

between bodies and space
The ritualization (in Catherine Bell’s sense) taking place in Reclaiming’s
classes, covens and public gatherings has already been anticipated in the
former paragraph and will continue to be discussed in the following chapters.
But let me give a brief summary of this process so far: “ritualization” – as it
takes place in a Reclaiming class – can be described as a dialectical process of
interaction between “magical persons” (ritualized bodies) and “magical space”
(a ritualized environment).
Magical space is structured according to esoteric philosophy about living
nature and the cosmic pillars of correspondence. It is created by means of
symbolic acts homologous to this philosophy in order to delimit and structure
an imaginary all-inclusive cosmic circle: everything, also the social world, may
be represented in the circle through association.This ritually defined space can
be described as an imaginary natural landscape with height and depth, with
wind and water, fire and earth, and a deep-rooted world tree with large
branches as axis mundi.
 Elements of magic: learning to ritualize 185

A magical person is constructed as she physically enters magical space,

allows her self to be inscribed with complex layers of (gendered), esoteric
meanings, and positions herself vis-à-vis cosmos by imaginatively “becoming”
a world tree: a mediator between social worlds, elemental forces and the gods.
This ritualized body, however, is not only a mythological tree, balancing at the
interstices between the social and the biological, but a cosmic duplicate in
miniature which contains, within itself, all possible wisdom, all possible
genders and all the elements of being. This is fully expressed when the world
tree finally transforms into a manifestation of goddess herself.
A major strategy used in Reclaiming in order to differentiate ritual acts from
nonritual acts is a mutual consensus that, in profane time and space, carnal
people interact with solid things, whereas in ritual space they also attain
imaginary spirit-bodies – as they do when becoming a world tree – and
interact with imaginary things.The function of the solidity of ritual props is to
enhance this experience and help the subject to “decompose and re-create” her
spiritual body. Likewise does the materiality of the ritual tools and symbols
give an aura of probability/factuality to the proposition that the elements
simultaneously are natural and divine substances, indexical esoteric symbols and
correlative aspects of the (gendered) human body, psychology and sociality.
The meanings of all these symbolic associations converge neither in the
human body (a living temple) nor in the magical circle (a symbolic temple),
but in their systematic interrelatedness. In fact, they constitute a single system
of analogies.17 One consequence of such a circular interdependence is that a
(gendered) homocentric worldview continually is balanced by the notion of
living nature and cosmological interconnectedness.Thus, we may confirm that
the primary function of a monistic, dialectical worldview is not necessarily to
gender the world nor to determine the human body in terms of sexual
essences (although these may turn out to be secondary consequences), but
rather to recognize deep kinship between all beings as they participate in the
same, pulsating life force (as in Spinoza’s philosophy and ethics).
Ritualization in Reclaiming may be a hierarchized social practice in which
roles are distributed according to assumed experiences, accumulated knowledge
and power, and the primacy of the female sex. Its stated goal is, however, to
work toward the transformation of social values, social beings and their social
worlds.Visualizations for change and healing performed within magical space
and invisible reality are believed to manifest as changes in the mundane world
of solidity as well – not only because of magical spells performed in ritual, but
because the celebrants are believed to carry a circle within their own bodies
even after ritual has been completed and are thus capable of manifesting ritual
values in social reality. A prerequisite, however, for changes to occur, is that
people completely dissolve the magical circle and re-enter the solid reality of
everyday life.
Witches’ social strategy of separating solid from imaginary and performing
temporary magical rites may be read as an important means to gain a sense of
belonging in the world and a feeling of being in charge of one’s own life; for
186 Priestesses of the craft

the circular movements of bodies between what is regarded as profane–

sacred–profane seem to make Reclaiming people and their students spiritually
and psychologically stronger and less fatalistic about the way things really are
in the world.

Notes
1 This is in particular the danger in the individuation process of girls. Object
relations theorists hold that the process from primordial unity (with mother) to
subsequent separation (from mother) is very different for boys and girls (and,
therefore, fundamental when producing sexual identity). Because of a stronger
and more undifferentiated same-sex identification between mother and daughter,
Nancy Chodorow claims that women often never separate sufficiently from their
mothers, making them “eternal preys” for relational issues, ego boundary issues and
feelings of lack of separateness and a distinguished identity (Chodorow 1978).
2 Heimbrock (1990:33) writes that magical rituals in all the psychoanalytical
traditions are perceived as premature forms of reasoning. Religious rituals are, in
general, recognized as “neurotic symptoms, that are unsuitable means to overcome
underlying emotional conflicts”. The problem is, however, that if ritual in itself is
feared to be regressive, in a realistic, psychological sense, then the fundamentally
temporary, mimetic and symbolist character of ritual is misunderstood. Erikson is a
notable exception who has emphasized the importance of ritualization in identity-
development (cf. Ouwehand 1990:134), and so has feminist psychologist Naomi
Goldenberg. She claims that, actually, there are basic similarities between object
relations theory and Starhawk’s discourse: 1 to focus on the past as a central
source of meaning; 2 to focus on female images of power and desire and thereby
deconstruct central images of patriarchal authority; 3 to describe the individual as
formed within the context of community; 4 to recognize fantasy and emotion
as a key structure of “rational” thought (Goldenberg 1990:191). Goldenberg
underlines that both “schools” “look back in time for the purpose of healing the
present” and their common centre is the image of a powerful woman in the past:
“Woman” is the stuff out of which all people are made. It is this deep memory of
“birth union” (including pre-birth experience and post-birth mothering) that
people, according to Goldenberg, turn into philosophical and religious “reflection
on the interconnection of human beings with each other and with all the things
which make up the body of the world” (1990:202).
3 This observation about contemporary western psychology is taken from M.
Rosaldo (1984:142).
4 This was, for example, expressed by Pierre Bourdieu (1991) when reading Arnold
van Gennep’s and Victor Turner’s symbolic phase descriptions of rites of passage
(cf. chapter 8). Catherine Bell is deeply influenced by Bourdieu in her sociological
concerns.
5 This is what Frits Staal (1975) has suggested.
6 If C. Geertz’s “religion is a system of symbols” is combined with Turner/
Rappaport’s “having indexical reference to mystical beings or powers”, the result is
close to a “what” definition of religion that I utilize.
7 Emotions are often gendered, and occasionally Reclaiming men will identify with
the conventional, essentialist western label of being less emotional than women
if they don’t find access to their own feelings. But the terms “emotions” and
“feelings” have different layers of meaning, depending on context. In conformity
with the terminology offered by Lutz and White (1986), Reclaiming Witches may
 Elements of magic: learning to ritualize 187

be said to be split between universalist and constructionist tendencies in terms of how

emotions are understood.To the extent that they are universalists, emotions are seen
as natural, bodily determined and precultural – as psycho-biological facts (cf. Lutz
and White 1986:407). Culture does not constitute emotions; it only influences
their acceptance/denial and their meanings, and how they are expressed ideally in
terms of symbols and behaviour.When identifying with the cultures of prehistoric
womanhood, Starhawk takes for granted that she is dealing with a generic human
female who basically has a psychic (and bodily) constitution similar to her own, and
who therefore addresses the same deity:“Goddess is found . . . in mind, body, spirit,
and the emotions within each of us” (Starhawk 1979b:263).The immense cultural
differences between then and now are mainly seen as questions of social organi-
zation, cultural conditioning and technological developments. The human psyche,
however, is regarded as a constant. The aim of universalist Witches is thus to
expand the register of socially permitted emotions and states of mind in order to
prevent “culture” and “cultural psycho-logical discourse” from undermining natural
human existence.
To the extent that Witches are constructionists emotions are seen as embedded in
socially constructed categories, “made up” in order to regulate (or control) human
behaviour, morality and identity.The relationship between emotion and the physical
body is either more or less ignored or understood metaphorically. Emotions are
rather seen as powerful cognitive ideas and judgements that can take possession of
an individual, but without really originating from her. An example is the feeling of
jealousy. Many informants claim that this “bodily state of mind” is a product of
cultural conditioning: It results from and expresses western materialist possessive-
ness and competitive mentality. Many Witches, therefore, claim the identity of not
being jealous, or of having managed to outgrow “its bore”. The political merit of
such a cultural relativism is that it reinforces optimistic beliefs about the possibility
of changing any cultural institution, also monogamy.
However, the split between universalist and constructionist tendencies in
Reclaiming is only an apparent split: they join forces in a deeply cherished
romantic worldview in which natural emotions are proclaimed as the site of
the culturally uncorrupted, pure and “inner self ” of natural humanity. Thus
emotions are, after all, believed by all Witches to be natural, bodily determined
and universal, albeit only those emotions which are considered genuine (such as love,
passion, pride, fear etc.). Jealousy, on the other hand, is considered a conventional
emotion, a cultural product of alienation and oppression and, therefore, un-
natural.
8 The different stages of the ritual process are numbered from 1 to 12, and some of
these stages will later in the chapter be described in more detail.
9 This line is a modification of Paul’s speech at Areopagos in Acts 17:28, where he
supposedly said: “For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some
of your own poets have said.” But, according to the commentary in the
HarperCollins Study Bible, the quotation may come from the sixth century BCE
philosopher-poet Epimenides and therefore be genuinely pagan.
10 These lyrics are from the “Circle Casting Song” by Susan Wolf, taken from
Reclaiming’s “Second Chants” tape, produced in 1994.
11 Ronald Grimes differentiates terminologically between “rite” and “ritual”: rite
denotes concrete enactments located in concrete time and space, ritual denotes the
general idea of which a rite is a specific instance. Since “ritual” is an empirical
notion and Witches themselves are not familiar with this distinction I shall rather
differentiate between the generic idea of a type of ritual and the actual ritual
taking place.
188 Priestesses of the craft

12 The “Tree of Life” is actually a cross-religious symbol. According to anthropologist

James Preston it has often, in the occult tradition, been associated with the
feminine life force (Preston 1982:128).
13 The myth goes:“In love, the Horned God, changing form and changing face, ever seeks the
Goddess. In this world, the search and the seeking appear in the Wheel of the Year. She is the
Great Mother who gives birth to Him as the Divine Child Sun at the Winter Solstice. In
spring, He is sower and seed who grows with the growing light, green as the new shoots. She
is the Initiatrix who teaches Him the mysteries. He is the young bull; She the nymph,
seductress. In summer, when light is longest, they meet in union, and the strength of their
passion sustains the world. But the God’s face darkens as the sun grows weaker, until at last,
when the grain is cut for harvest, He too sacrifices Himself to Self that all may be nourished.
She is the reaper, the grave of the earth to which all must return.Throughout the long nights
and darkening days, He sleeps in her womb; in dreams, He is Lord of Death who rules the
Land of Youth beyond the gates of night and day. His dark tomb becomes the womb of
rebirth, for at Midwinter She again gives birth to Him.The cycle ends and begins again, and
the Wheel of the Year turns, on and on” (Starhawk 1979a: 29). Starhawk claims that the
myth is an “oral teaching of the Faery tradition” (1979a:29, 33 note 19), although
it is well known in Gardnerian Wicca.
14 The latin word passio means “the fact or condition of being acted upon or affected
by external agency; subject to external force” (Heelas 1981:41).
15 The mystical level of Tibetan Buddhism, New Age, Humanistic psychology and
Protestant individualism are given as examples of pure idealist systems, whereas the
psychology of the African Dinka tribe, Shamanism, Exorcism, Fundamentalist
Christianity and Behaviourism are passiones systems.
16 My contribution is not to make the distinction between “self as object” versus “self
as subject” conscious to the informants – because it already is – but to systematize
and rename according to my analytical position. I have theologized their world-
view and interpreted depths that perhaps were unknown and confirmed how they
perceive reality hierarchically.
17 Religious symbolism and self-symbolism do not converge on any point, says
anthropologist Mary Douglas. Actually, they “sustain the whole moral and physical
universe simultaneously in their systematic interrelatedness” (Douglas 1973:140).
6 The Spiral Dance ritual
A celebration of death and rebirth

The most famous ritual performed in Reclaiming is the “Spiral Dance”. It is

celebrated as a Samhain ritual, preferably on the night between 31 October
and 1 November. Samhain is one of the Witches’ eight sabbats. According to
themselves, this holiday is a pagan, Celtic precursor to the later “All Saints’
Day” or “Halloween”. In Celtic mythology, 31 October is “New Year’s Eve,”
marking both the entrance to the winter season and to the new year. The
Witches’ Samhain ritual is thus an effort to revive a pre-Christian new year
celebration connected to the changing cycles in the natural and human
world.
According to Witches’ mythology – dating back to Gardner’s and Valiente’s
constructions in the 1950s – this night in itself represents extra-ordinary time
and space. On this night the veil between seen and unseen, dead and living,
past and present is believed to be “thin”. Now is the time to talk to, grieve for
and remember the beloved dead, as well as to remember the limits of human
life, the limits of control, and that all must die, will die, when the time comes.
The consolation is that death is not a final destination but part of a natural
cycle in which new life arises and is reborn. Through the ritual, Witches seek
to experience the proclaimed mystery that death feeds new life at many
different levels: Every growth is said to be a painful dying, and every end a
new beginning, in human life as in nature, just as fall gives birth to winter and
winter to spring, just as a seed must die for a plant to come into being, and a
plant must perish and “give itself as food” for human life to be sustained.
In the Samhain ritual, Witches use the imagery of the Goddess and the
God to symbolize this theme. The Goddess is celebrated as the creative force
in nature and in cultural construction, symbolized as the Triple Goddess
“Maiden, Mother and Crone”. God, symbolized as the Horned One, is
celebrated as that which is forever untamed and wild inside, but who forever
seeks the Goddess in love. So, while the Goddess is the ground of being, the
giver and taker of life, the God is he who is born and dies in an endless cycle.
The God is said to die every year on October 31. He passes on to the
Kingdom of Death, which in the Faery tradition is called alternatively “The
Summer Land”, “The Shining Island”, “The Land of Youth”, “The Shadow
Land” or “The Island of Apples”, located somewhere in the ocean in the west.
190 Priestesses of the craft

Every soul that dies is said to be received by the earth and grow young again
in Summer Land.Then she is reborn among the living as a human child.
This variation of a reincarnation theme is found in a myth called the
“Descent of the Goddess” (cf. Starhawk 1979a:29, 159–60).The myth tells that
after a while the Goddess descends to the Kingdom of Death to restore the
God to a new life. In the meantime he has become the Lord of Death, the
Guardian of the Gates to the Shadow Land. The Goddess sleeps with him for
three days and three nights and transforms him, through love, into the Divine
Child Sun. In the intercourse she consumes him completely, absorbing him in
her own body like a seed, bearing him to new life on Winter Solstice, 21
December. In the myth, the descended Goddess addresses her consort like this:

Here is the circle of rebirth. Through You all passes out of life, but though Me all
may be born again. Everything passes; everything changes. Even death is not
eternal. Mine is the mystery of the womb, that is the cauldron of rebirth. Enter into
Me and know Me, and You will be free of all fear. For as life is but a journey into
death, so death is but a passage back to life, and in Me the circle is ever turning.
In love, He entered into Her, and so was reborn into life.Yet is He known as
Lord of Shadows, the comforter and consoler, opener of the gates, King of the Land
of Youth, the giver of peace and rest. But She is the gracious mother of all life; from
Her all things proceed and to Her they return again. In Her are the mysteries of
death and birth; in Her is the fulfillment of all love.1

But at Samhain, the God is not yet reborn. It is, therefore, the reality of death
and dying and of the pain within life that is the main focus of the ritual.

Halloween in San Francisco

Reclaiming’s ritual remembrance of the dead is not acted out in a cultural
vacuum. The old Anglo-Saxon celebration of Halloween has become very
popular in the US in a secularized version, especially in San Francisco. On 31
October, people carve big pumpkins to make them look like ghosts. In the
evening these are placed outside entrance doors with a burning candle inside.
This is a signal to the children, who walk the streets in groups – acting and
dressed up like ghosts returning from the dead – that they may enter this
house to play “trick or treat” with the living.The treats are candies, chocolate
and fruit. For the adults, Halloween is a time for masquerade balls and wild
parties. Castro, the gay area in San Francisco, has become famous for its lavish
celebration of Halloween, with drag shows, masquerades and fireworks.2
In the Mission District there is, in addition to Halloween, another tradition
for celebrating the dead on 1 November, namely, the Mexican “El dia de los
muertos.”3 For the occasion, the stores in Mission have grotesque death
decorations in the front windows and sell all kinds of death artifacts; the
children construct death imagery and masks in the Mission public schools; the
Mission art galleries put up exhibitions like “Rooms for the Dead”. This
 The Spiral Dance ritual: a celebration of death and rebirth 191

Latino tradition is not about pumpkins, children and “trick or treat”, but
about the extended family who feasts and visits with the dead, lightning
candles and serving food at the graves of departed family members.
As part of their growing cultural self-esteem, a young generation of
Hispanics and other Latin Americans in the Mission took the initiative in the
early 1980s to revive a more original form of “El dia de los muertos” and strip
away some of its childishness and commercialism. It was a success, and the size
of the celebration has been growing every year since.The new part is that, on
one evening of the Day of the Dead season, the streets in the old Mission are
closed to traffic to give space for a huge, noisy and colourful “Death Parade”.
The parade includes both children and adults. Its intent is to raise people’s
political consciousness about the forms of dying that take place among them
and rebuild a religious-cultural identity with the magical tradition of walking
with and talking to the dead – as if life and death were overlapping realities
within one continuum.
The number of people participating in this parade was in 1994 around
2,000, and just as many were spectators. The parade itself included as many
whites as people of colour. The individual paraders wore death costumes and
carried death associated artifacts. Musical groups and theatre troops participated
with huge dolls and masks, acting out death and oppression scenes along the
route. One narrow street was formed into a temporary birth channel, through
which everybody in the parade had to pass. The new life was celebrated in a
park nearby with music, dancing and free food.
Since the Reclaiming Witches consider themselves to be the spiritual
descendants of European indigenous people, they participate every year in this
parade arranged by their Latin American siblings. The Witches carry huge
masks and headdresses that a couple of days later are used in their own rite for
the dead. They have also adopted the political outlook of this Latino cele-
bration, with its strong emphasis on deceased ancestors, grotesque skeletons
and the special food served for the dead, and integrated it all into their own
powerful rites for the season. In return they contribute a spiritual element
to this highly ritualized parade: since 1993, Starhawk and the Reclaiming
Collective has been asked by the Hispanic arranging committee to set up
altars, offer prayers and lead a spiral dance in the park at the closing of the
parade.

The telling of an experience

When describing the Reclaiming ritual called the “Spiral Dance” (which is
not to be confused with the dancing in the park on El dia de los muertos), I
shall – to a certain extent – not use the distant, academic language. I shall,
instead, use a more narrative, empathic style and describe selected parts of the
ritual from a perspective of involvement. This way I hope to portray how
spectacular a ritual can be and to illustrate the ways in which emotions are
manipulated and triggered (including by “trance work”) in order to make a
192 Priestesses of the craft

ritual work successfully. With this emphasis on participatory hermeneutics,

I also hope to depict how my own “method of compassion” – in which I
become my own informant – may be acted out within the context of ritual.
The actual ritual was about three hours long and had an elaborate structure.
My description is not literal but a liberal reconstruction on the basis of several
similar, but still different Spiral Dance rituals. One reason for my liberalism is
that there already exist several literal manuscripts of the ritual, authored by
Starhawk and other Reclaiming people, of which I have two: from 1989 and
1990.They have the copyright to it, but the manuscripts can be acquired, read
and used by anybody. Going strictly through the contents of this ritual text
does not take us beyond a symbolic and intellectual analysis of semantics, and
it gives an incomplete picture of what is really taking place: leaving out the
atmosphere, the affections, the sound, the experience of being in the room.
Although they are similar, a ritual is not theatre, and manuscript and actual
happening are never identical.
However, I shall refer freely to parts of the ritual manuscript and other
sources when I find that exact representation of lyrics is important to convey
the theological meanings of the ritual. Some elements are taken from other
ritual contexts, and the journey to the “Kingdom of Death” is shortened.
The litany is close to being authentic and reproduced on the basis of: (1) the
above mentioned ritual manuscripts; (2) Starhawk’s books; and (3) my own
experience from participating in several “Spiral Dance” rituals in the years
1984, 1990 and 1994.
Since the ritual process is dependent on the skilled manipulation of
emotions to be successful, the ritual is very vulnerable to people’s evaluation.
Sometimes a ritual is experienced as boring or as not working. The actual
Spiral Dance ritual that I have chosen as the foundation of my description was
said to work, and this is an important aspect. It took place at the Women’s
Building in the Mission District in San Francisco, Friday night, 26 October,
1990. Approximately 300 people participated, and 40 were ritual facilitators.
The manuscript to which I mostly refer was written for the Spiral Dance
Ritual one year earlier, in 1989. It took place on 28 October, at the Fort
Mason Centre at the harbour in San Francisco.Twelve hundred people attended
the ritual, and about 120 carried it through. Its size was the reason to write a
full manuscript.
Let us now enter the Women’s Building, which is not a women-only
building, 30 minutes before the doors were opened to the public in October
1990, and go from there.

Ritual preparations
The biggest assembly room in the Women’s Building is about to be trans-
formed into sacred space (the Witches’ temple).The atmosphere is rather noisy
and hectic, and about 40 people are now finishing preparing for the ritual. Just
inside the entrance door, two men are arranging large leaf branches to make
 The Spiral Dance ritual: a celebration of death and rebirth 193

the entrance look more like a threshold or a veiled opening into non ordinary
reality. Others have raised huge altars around the walls, while the centre floor
is kept free from furniture. At the south altar, a group of eight drummers are
rehearsing.Two of them are African and play African conga drums; the others
are white and play Middle Eastern doumbec drums. Some young women and
men are dancing in the centre of the room, rehearsing their part in the
invocations of the elements. A man plays with a slide projector, to test that it
works and that the pictures come out right. Two women sit quietly in a
corner, trying to memorize their parts. They are both dressed in black,
wearing plastic skeletons as a belt around their waists their faces painted black
with ashes. One of them has a red cord around her waist, as a sign that she is
initiated. In the adjoining rooms, people are about to put on their costumes,
gossiping and eating.
The assembly room is beautifully decorated. To the right of the entrance
door, there is a table with different accessories for the participants to use:
bowls with ashes to paint on the face; old clothes and fabrics to tear when
grieving; beautiful flowers to smell; sheets of paper with skulls printed on
them. People are supposed to write the names of their beloved dead on the
sheets and tag them to the northern altar. This altar is next to the table and is
the largest and most important for the ritual to come.
The northern altar is constructed of tables, wooden boxes and black
tablecloths, measuring about six by eight feet. The wooden boxes are raised
irregularly upon the table, and inside the boxes are placed images of death:
pictures of beloved dead, pictures of politically caused death in concentration
camps in Germany, in Latin America, in Palestine; pictures of Witches waiting
to be burned; pictures of starving children, screaming mothers, drug addicts
and street people. In between the various pictures are placed miniature
skeletons and skulls, as well as pieces of broken glass and barren branches.
Candles are lit all over the altar. At the top of the altar, looking down on
all the objects, is the mask of the Crone, goddess of age, wisdom and
regeneration.The black tablecloth flows from her head and down to the floor,
giving the effect that she holds the whole world and its death and misery in
her arms and lap. On the floor, in front of the altar, is placed food for the
dead: pomegranates, pumpkins, apples, oranges, coffeebeans, baskets of acorns,
Indian corn, candy skulls, cakes, pan de los muertos and apple juice. Marigolds in
huge vases are placed in between.
The other altars, for west, south and east, are simpler. Large fabrics in
colours appropriate for each of the elements are draped from high up the
wall, down to the altar table. The west altar is blue with water-associated
things on top. The south altar is red, with fire-associated things on top. In
front of the south altar, somebody has arranged a dozen Tibetan bells to be
played during the ritual. The east altar is white and airy. Headdresses are
placed on the altars, and behind the southern altar is a mask of the Horned
god. Big goddess figures and skeleton figures are in position around the edges
of the room.
194 Priestesses of the craft

The Samhain ritual cycle in Reclaiming this year includes three rituals. In
addition to the genuine Samhain ritual, the “Spiral Dance” – also called “A
Ritual Remembrance of our Beloved Dead” – about to begin this Friday
evening, there is a Saturday night ritual the next evening called “Invoking the
Ancestors of Many Cultures” as well as a Sunday night ritual called “Building
our Visions of the Future.” To the altars already constructed, there will
tomorrow in this very same room, be added seven additional altars: altars for
the ancestors of “European”, “Latin-American”, “African”, and “Asian” descent,
and altars for the “Queer Nation (Gay and Lesbians)”, the “Jewish Nation”
and the “Arab-Palestinian world”. These altars will include a mixture of
objects related to cultural or religious heritage and they will be placed in
between the directional altars.The ancestral altars are arranged by people who
have bloodlines to the different cultures.The shape and content of these altars
are not prescribed, but dependent upon the emotions, fantasy and aesthetics of
the people who construct them.
Reclaiming’s altar practice differs from many Wiccan traditions.While these
traditions conventionally use altars as a place for the nonhuman reality, like the
elements and the gods, represented by their tools and symbols, to be
included/present, Reclaiming tends to use the altars more as a place for
staging the conditions of their own human lives, at least in public rituals. So,
instead of the altars being a communicational bridge from the nonhuman’s
point of view, altars in Reclaiming are bridges from the living to the other
world – not the other way around. When the northern altar is overloaded
with painful deathsymbols, it is not because death is a major representation of
goddess. Instead, death is representative of the human condition and for those
humans addressing the Goddess and is, therefore, also a part of the Goddess.
This use of altar also differs from the western Christian tradition and is more
similar to the old Israelite practice where the altar was the people’s place,
while Yahweh’s place was behind the altar wall. Reminiscence of this practice
is found in the Orthodox Church when the basilica is divided into a more
profane space in front of the Iconostasia and a most holy space behind it.4
The time is close to 8 p.m. About 300 people of all genders are lined up in
the street outside the building, waiting for the doors to open. Two-thirds of
the people are women. A majority have already bought tickets to the event
on a sliding scale of $5 to $10 each through mailorder from Reclaiming.
Leftover tickets are sold at the door. The ticketmoney is supposed to cover
Reclaiming’s expenses arranging the ritual, like rent, costumes, sound equip-
ment, etc. Some of the participants come from other pagan and Witchcraft
traditions, and most of the people in line have been to The Spiral Dance
before.To the arranging committee they have already sent in names and slides
of personal loved ones who have died this year, as well as names of the
newborn.Yet, many of them bring additional photos for the northern altar in
their pockets.
In the assembly room Rose asks everybody to finish their preparations
and gather in a circle. She asks how many graces and dragons there will be at
 The Spiral Dance ritual: a celebration of death and rebirth 195

tonight’s ritual, graces being the white-dressed who take care of newcomers
and disabled people, guiding them to the different altars and answering
questions – while dragons are the ones guarding the entrance door, having
responsibility for not letting anything disturb the ritual proceedings and
keeping potential trouble out. The 40 people in the circle inform each other
briefly about their particular responsibility during the evening’s ritual, like “I
have arranged and shall attend the south altar”,“I shall call the Mighty Dead”,
“I shall manifest the Goddess in the invocation”, “I shall drum”, “I shall do
child care”, etc. Then everybody holds hands while Rose offers a prayer for
good energy and a good ritual, asking the goddess to give her blessings, to
fulfill their intentions and give them strong visions. When the prayers are
finished, she says: “This circle has never been here before, and shall never be here
again. But remember, there is no end to the circle, no end. Are we ready to let people
in?” Everybody nods and the doors are opened.

Creating sacred space

The drummers play freeform; the lights are dim; the incense smells sweet; and
the celebrants5 start to enter sacred space through the veiled opening. As they
pass through the branches, or through what some Reclaiming Witches like to
interpret as an inverted birth-channel into the divine womb,6 they are
purified with the sprinkling of salt water and feathersmudging by children.
The graces move around quietly, like spirits, and ask people to write the
names of their beloved dead on the sheets for the northern altar. People place
their personal items on the altar and then walk slowly and informally around
the room. They greet friends, listen to the music, adore the other altars,
breathe in the atmosphere. Some are dressed in black costumes and are face-
painted; others wear ordinary clothes. When everybody has entered the
“divine womb”, a single blast of a conch shell announces that the ritual is
about to begin.
People gather in a circle, and priest Raven casts a circle around the space,
using Gwydion’s sword (Gwydion is a well-known Faeryinitiate, an elder and
a departed beloved dead). Raven starts in the centre in solemn silence,
pointing the sword to the north, kissing it and saying: “Holy Mother, in whom
we move, live and have our being. From you all things proceed, and unto you all things
return. Bless this circle.” He turns to the north, and from there he walks the
edges of the whole circle while proclaiming: “By the Earth that is Her body, by
the Air that is Her breath, etc.”
As soon as Raven is done, a small chorus of six start to sing an old English
ballad for the season, “This ae night”. The refrain is a prayer, “May Earth receive
thy soul”, that whoever gave hose and shoes, silver and gold, meat and drink
for sharing shall be received by the Earth, and not be burned to “the bare
bane” by the purging fire.
Then priestess Macha, one of the black-dressed with miniature skeletons
and a red cord around her waist, enters the centre of the circle. She greets
196 Priestesses of the craft

everybody, explaining briefly the ritual’s participatory nature, what the ritual
theme is about and the symbolic meanings of “Goddess” and “God”.

* * *
Priestess Deborah brings us “back” to the assembly room and to the ritual we
are about to create by asking everybody to prepare to enter an altered state of
consciousness by imaginarily “grounding themselves in the Earth, which is the
Mother” and together becoming a blossoming tree. She raises her voice and
talks in a slow, evocative manner while walking a big circle in the centre.
A single drummer is tapping with the rhythm of her voice,

Join with us now and breathe deeply, and be ready to enter darkness.7
Close your eyes, breathe deep, feel the Spirits gathering.
Breathe like a seed awakening in the soil, breathe power from the Earth
and from the Air.
Reach deep inside, to the centre and source within . . .

Except for Deborah’s voice and the sound of light breathing, there is complete
silence. We stand next to each other in circle, still a little shy, but crowded
and warm, with eyes closed. Graces place themselves in the crowd to help
Deborah raise and move the energy and mould our shyness into a free breath-
ing. Our chests move up and down, slowly. Some bodies are starting to wave
slightly, from one side to the other. This grounding is a most sensual exercise,
taking us directly from Macha’s intellectual explanations to a childlike sensation
of being a tree, tasting and smelling the earth and her energy, trying to create a
feeling of a centre within: a plaza maybe, with flowers and palm trees and a
water fountain.

Reach down with your breath; reach down with your heart; reach down with your
needs and desires. Reach down, the way roots reach down to the raw heat of the
Mother.To the source, beyond need and desire, beyond knowing . . .
Reach down to touch that power and pull it up . . .
up through your toes and legs, up into the cradle of your sex,
filling your belly, your lungs, your head . . .

The breathing becomes heavy, and the crowd noisy but relaxed. All the bodies
are now moving back and forth. There is a tingling of something in the body
when breathing in and up. Feet are stamped, efforts made to make the
breathing smooth.

Filling your self and beyond your self . . .

And reach up all the way trees reach with branches, up until you stretch from Earth
to Sky.
And open your heart to that power moving through you.
 The Spiral Dance ritual: a celebration of death and rebirth 197

Let it grow. Let it blossom, weaving through each of us.

Let it build on itself on your breath. Let it rise . . .

At this point, Deborah almost shouts, but her voice is hardly heard.The crowd
has built up the sound to a loud and noisy O-o-m, while holding on to their
internal imagery made according to Deborah’s instructions. A few add energy
with animal-like screams or the sounds of birds. Arms are stretched up, higher,
higher; voices are loud. Deborah is in the centre of the circle, leading and
raising the intensity of the energy, higher and higher. Then, all of a sudden,
when the sound has reached its peak, she gives the signal to stop by stopping
herself and lowering her arms.

Let it fall, gently, like petals, like rain, washing over us, connecting us all.
And down to the Earth, and down to each other, and down to our Deepest selves.
And know and drink in this blessing.

The energy has dropped to calmness. We kneel down on the floor, quiet and
breathless, warm and exalted. When we sit up, there is a peaceful atmosphere
in the room. Nobody says a word for a while. We just look at each other,
smiling, while tasting and relishing a feeling of bonding. A couple of women
next to me whisper to each other, “She is really good, Deborah, really good.
Its like she got a new power after her initiation.”
After grounding, it is time for invoking the elements.They are called as the
chorus, musicians and dancers perform “The Guardian Song”.8 When done,
the elements are blessed by priestess Deadly,

Blessed be the elements of life, Earth and Air, Fire and Water.They are sacred to us
because they sustain all life. And the circle of life is what we are committed to serve:
the cycle of birth, growth, death and regeneration, happening again and again, in
Moon and Sun and season, in fruit and seed and blossom, in the powers we name
Goddesses and Gods, in the lives of animals, and in our lives as women and men.

Change of self: becoming divine

In every Spiral Dance ritual goddess and god are called by a special song
composed by Starhawk. It is structured as a call and response between the
women, manifesting the Triple Goddess (Maiden–Mother–Crone), the men,
manifesting the Horned One, and the chorus, accompanied by drums. The
people manifesting the deities wear headdresses or carry masks,

3 goddesses For you can see me in your eyes

When they are mirrored by a friend
Chorus There is no end to the circle no end
There is no end to life there is no end
198 Priestesses of the craft

Maiden For I am the power to begin

I dream and bring to birth what’s never been
There is no end to freedom, no end
Chorus There is no end to the circle no end . . .
3 goddesses For you can hear me in your voice
And feel me in each breath that you breathe in
Chorus There is no end to the circle no end . . .
Mother For I am the power to sustain
I am the ripened fruit and growing grain
There is no end to my abundance, no end
Chorus There is no end to the circle no end . . .
3 goddesses And you can feel me in your heart
When it beats with the heart of a friend
Chorus There is no end to the circle no end . . .
Crone And I am the power to end
I am the Crone who cuts the cord that I spin
Though all things that are born must die again
Chorus There is no end to the circle no end . . .
3 goddesses For all proceeds from me and all returns
All that returns from me comes forth again
Chorus There is no end to the circle no end
God I’m the word that you can’t define
I’m the color that runs outside the line
I’m the shiver running up your spine
Break the pattern, I’ll make a new design
Chorus There is no end to the circle no end . . .
God I am the wild bird that won’t be tamed
The desires that you don’t need to name
I’m the branch that becomes the flame
When the fire’s done burning, I remain
Chorus There is no end to the circle . . .
Goddess and For all proceeds from me and all return.
God together All that returns from me comes forth again
The sun arises and descends
The seasons turn and turn again
Chorus There is no end to the circle no end . . .
Goddess and I am the honey taste of passion’s heat
God together the fear running through your heartbeat,
I am dancing through your lightened feet,
desire so fierce and love so sweet.
Chorus There is no end to the circle no end
There is no end to life there is no end
 The Spiral Dance ritual: a celebration of death and rebirth 199

Goddess and And you can touch me with your hands

God together Reach out and take the hand of a friend
There is no end to the circle no end
There is no end to life there is no end.

The first and the last verses contain the most important statements for the
ritual theme and for ritualizing as such: “And you can see me in your eyes/When
they are mirrored by a friend . . . . And you can touch me with your hands/Reach out
and take the hand of a friend ”. The goal of the invocation is to make the divine
manifest in the participants and to make us conscious of the sacredness of our
own being and of another being. Divinity is not merely conceived as narrative
at the level of myth and parable, but understood as manifest, as one who can
actually be felt by touching and seeing “the other”.
We do as we are told “by the gods”; we reach out and take the hand of a
friend. We join in the chorus’s singing as we look into each other’s eyes,
blinking and perhaps feeling timid as we try to see the other as sacred. We
change partners, we look into new eyes, seeing something different but still of
the same. The song is slowly urging us to begin to dance, to free-form chant
and to drum. When the energy has peaked, the dancing ends and we ground,
as usual, by lying down.

The litany: Ancestors, Beloved Dead and Mighty Dead

The priestesses Macha, Arachne and Pandora enter the centre of the circle,
turning toward the northern altar. Macha holds a pomegranate in front of her,
intended for the Mighty Dead. Arachne holds the bread, intended for the
Ancestors. She also walks with a three-feet-long Ancestor Stick, hung with
bells and colourful cloths. Pandora holds the chalice with apple juice, intended
for the Beloved Dead. Macha is the first who starts speaking:

This is the time when the veil is thin that divides the worlds, the seen from the
unseen, the day-to-day from the mysteries. This is the time when our Beloved
Dead return to us, to visit us.What is remembered lives!
Mighty Dead of the Craft, wise ones, you who have gone before.We have made
a feast for you, please come and be part of our feast. Teach us your wisdom,
celebrate with us and share with us our food and gifts.

Macha walks to the northern altar and places the pomegranate there, the food
that symbolizes our gift or offering to the Mighty Dead. Then Arachne takes
over. She pounds the Ancestor Stick three times, and says:

We remember the Ancestors. We have come to this land from many places, many
bloodlines, many cultures. Many races meet here. Our ancestors were poor and rich,
oppressors and oppressed, slave-owners and slaves. But in every heritage there is a
200 Priestesses of the craft

history of those who fought for freedom in every language spoken. In every blood
stream is a current, and these are the spirits we call:
We call on you, the healers, the namers, the risk-takers, those who dared to love,
those who dared to see, and those whose mistakes can teach us now. Here is our
feast for you. Our altar is filled with food and light, with acorns, pomegranates, pan
de los muertos, with flowers and fruit and the colors of all the quarters of the world.
May our songs, our poems, our voices and our moving feet make you welcome.
Come! May you feel at home among us! What is remembered lives!

Arachne walks to the northern altar with the bread as she invites the Ancestors
to join us. Pandora takes over, addressing the more personal, Beloved Dead.
She asks them to come and celebrate and drink the apple juice with us. She
too states that “what is remembered lives”, and places the chalice upon the
altar.
Then it is time for the scripted part of the litany, in which our personal
Beloved Dead are named very specifically. Pandora reads the list of names of
people who have died this last year, names that the celebrants have sent in,
while John shows us their pictures with the slide projector.We lie on the floor
on our backs, listening and watching the pictures, which are projected onto
the ceiling. Graces send fabrics around to tear if needed when grieving and
crying, and bowls of ashes to rub on the face. A man plays the Tibetan bowls
very softly as Pandora reads:

We remember you who have died this year, our mothers and fathers, our family,
spouses, friends, children and lovers, companeros and companeras.We name you and
honor you, your lives, your sorrows, your gifts, your deaths. And we release you to
make your journey.
What is remembered lives!
We remember Sara Hendrix, who died of cancer in September;
We remember William Robertson, who died as a newborn;
We remember Peter Frank, dying from AIDS;
etc., etc.

Pandora’s list is very long. Many people are crying; fabrics are being torn.
Some are sobbing loudly and are comforted by friends. Pandora is done, and it
is time for us, the celebrants, to raise our voices and remember our beloved
dead – whenever they died. Some speak out loudly; others whisper:

I remember my aunt, a closeted lesbian who loved me as her own child;

I remember my mother, who died when I was too young to know her;
I remember Wally; he was my lover;
I remember Wally; he was my lover too . . .9

Some are laughing in the midst of crying, while the sound of fabrics being
torn cuts through the room. Every time a beloved dead is named with a
 The Spiral Dance ritual: a celebration of death and rebirth 201

sentence or two, a whole story is told.When people weave together the threads
of the different stories about foremothers and forefathers, they strengthen the
bonds of community between themselves. By publicly naming and honouring
the dead, each one of us gives to “the other” value, remembering who we are
and where we come from.
Priestess Rose takes over the litany, naming the nameless and forgotten by
the way they died, a custom Witches have learned from the Nigerian Yoruba
tradition, which is strong in certain communities of Black people in Oakland,
a city close to San Francisco. Rose is accompanied by a drumbeat, while we
repeat with her the basic mantra “what is remembered lives”:
This has been a hard year. Many that we love are gone,
AND MANY THAT WE NEVER KNEW!
We remember
you who died of hunger,
and you who died of torture,
and you who died without shelter,
and you who died of the poisons in the air and the earth and the water,
and you who died in the streets,
you who died in wars – Jalapa, Belfast, Beirut, Soweto, San Salvador . . .
What is remembered lives – to change!
Remembering
all those who died from AIDS.
You who died in the arms of a lover,
and you who died unloved . . .
What is remembered lives – to teach us how precious life is!
Remembering
the women who have been sold,
the women who have been raped,
the women who were used until worn out and left alone to die . . .
What is remembered lives – to change us!
Remembering10
all those who have been burned.
The women burned for being strong and obstinate;
burned for a small profit;
burned for being sexual, for loving other women,
the men burned for loving men;
the heretics burned for unpopular opinions;
the scientists burned for revealing new truths;
the thinkers burned for their visions;
and the Witches . . .
Rose’s voice is strong and hoarse; she almost pushes out the words, while the
celebrants wail and cry – louder and louder when hearing the word “witch”:
202 Priestesses of the craft

We remember the Witches who danced in the dark,

and were burned for remembering that this life, this Earth, this world of
day and night,
is the true body of the sacred.
And She is in us, and needs us to care for Her.
We remember the flames rising,
the scorched smell of our own flesh, the pain and the ecstasy of rising.
What is remembered lives – to rise from ashes,
to be our beacon,
to change,
to be changed,
to change us.
So there is never again the burning, the bomb, the bullet.
What is remembered lives – so that we may live,
in the turning wheel,
in the endless spiral dance of life, renewing itself, endlessly.
Live to serve life.
Live so that all of life may thrive!

Trance journey to the “Island of the Dead”

The atmosphere in the Women’s Building is now dense and warm, and many
people are giving signs that they are deeply moved emotionally. It is time to
get up on our feet and set sail for “The Shining Island”, which means to turn
“this island and all its inhabitants” into an indexical symbol, whereafter the
celebrants may visit the island in trance. As noted in earlier chapters, to trance
means to be able to meet, talk to and dance with the beloved dead on this
island beyond the limits of the physical body.11

* * *
A shift in theological meaning is taking place. Our mourning and grieving of
the dead shall in a short while yield to our celebration with the dead. Our
despair and rage over the reality of political death, the killing and oppression
of people, shall give way to an experience of turning ends into beginnings. In
this theological universe, the dead are not really dead, but alive in another
world, a spirit world. From there they can teach us, give us healing powers and
visions to take care of worldly business. And also, one day, the dead will have
grown young and will be reborn among the living.
In the first symbolic universe, Witches express an attitude toward death
that is in accordance with the Jewish and Christian tradition and a modern
worldview: death is an enemy, a total destruction from which nobody returns,
a condition which causes complete and eternal separation from the living,
although the dead may live on as memory (“what is remembered lives”).
Therefore, death gives rise to mourning and rage amongst the next of kin; and
 The Spiral Dance ritual: a celebration of death and rebirth 203

to express the grief is, by modern culture, regarded as healthy and healing.
Even though Christianity offers belief in resurrection and in a life beyond
death, the attitude toward death as a state of being equal to annihilation is
common in western culture. Inclusion of celebratory aspects alongside the
mourning is often avoided because this, by most people, would be regarded as
a reduction of the worth of individual life – of its uniqueness and singularity.
Celebration of an assumed spiritual state of being beyond death would be a
degradation of the reality of life in a body. Belief in immortality and re-
incarnation threatens the status of death as the ultimate evil.
The second symbolic universe is premodern and pagan. Here we are
invited to accept a concept of reality in which a sharp division between the
living and the dead is regarded as superficial and illusionary. This outlook is
the privilege of the initiated, but in this particular ritual every lover of
the Goddess is persuaded to listen to its truth and to join the Reclaiming
priesthood on their journey to the Island of the Dead. Here they can also
meet the Goddess, who says, “Enter into Me and know Me, and you will be free of
all fear. For as life is but a journey into death, so death is but a passage back to life, and
in Me the circle is ever turning.”12 At the Island of the Dead the celebrants can
experience immortality and the promise of reincarnation with their inner
senses and Deep Self.

* * *
In the centre of the ritual circle, dancers are now about to create images of a
ship.The lights are misty and the trance drumming begins. Starhawk leads the
trance, which is unscripted. She moves around in the centre, tapping her
doumbec drum, while the rest of us walk slowly clockwise, with eyes closed.
Sometimes we bump into each other, but it’s all right.

Breathe deep, and let your breath take you down,

down to the place of magic where death and life are not separate,
and though a dark ocean divides us from the Ancestors,
this circle becomes the boat to ferry us across.
Listen – hear the lapping of the waves on the shore.
Smell the ocean breeze. See the water.
And prepare to set sail for the island where birth and death meet.
We are going to look for help from the Ancestors; help for our lives,
and the threatened life on the Earth.
We are going to the great cauldron womb of rebirth, were all possibilities are formed,
and the dead walk with the unborn.
Breathe deep. At the bottom of your breath is the way to the island.
You are at the sunless shore where the sun and the moon and the stars never shine,
A ferryman is waiting for you.Who is he? What does he ask of you to
take you over?
Are you willing to give it? . . .
204 Priestesses of the craft

Now, you take a step on board his ship, and you feel it rock beneath you
with the waves.
Together we set sail . . .

Priest Robin breaks into the trance, reading miscellaneous stanzas from Celtic
poems:

Far beyond those waves, there is an Island,

around which glisten the horses of the sea . . .
There it is always like May, the month of strawberries,
of fair weather, of wild garlic, of delicate roses, of prosperity.
There, there is neither “mine” nor “thine”; 13
every cheek there is the color of the foxglove.
There is a tree there; from roots to crown one half is aflame
and the other green with leaves. Its flowers,
its crest and its showers on every side spread over the fields and plains . . .

Starhawk continues the trance work, taking us to this Island described by

Robin:

Smell the breeze. Hear the scraping of the ship as it reaches the shore,
and see how the land is shining.
Here is all that ever was – the Ancestors, Goddesses, Gods, Spirits,
all the crowd around to greet us. Hold out your arms.They will help you ashore.
The air is fragrant here, and you begin to hear music.Your feet want to
move, to dance.
For this is the place everything is always dancing. Come and join the dance!

The drums play up, and the chorus start singing a song taken from the
repertoire of the popular, female soul group “Sweet Honey in the Rock”.14
People sing and dance, getting high and light-footed from being in trance.15
After a while the energy drops and Starhawk continues:

As you dance, somebody is coming to greet you, one of your Beloved Dead . . .
Hold out your hand; feel the clasp of a spirit hand, and look . . .
Take your time, and speak with your Beloved Dead.
Walk together in the apple orchards of the Goddess . . .
Now, let your Beloved Dead lead you to the rim, to the edge of the Island . . .
And when you reach the rim, look out, back to the world of night and day.
And feel how the earth calls to us, and what the world needs from us.
And let the dead give you power, to heal and to create.
Hold out your hands.Take in the power . . .
Now, let your Beloved Dead take you to the centre of the Island.
Take hands to bring our power together . . .
Make the circle. Hold it strong in your hands.
 The Spiral Dance ritual: a celebration of death and rebirth 205

The cauldron of the Goddess is placed in the centre. Look into its flames,
let yourself see the vision that can be born, the vision we can create together.
See it take shape for you, that world we want to create . . .
What step can you take toward this vision, small or large, in this new year? . . .
The time has come, now, to say good-bye to this island and to the spirits
we’ve met here . . .
Look, is someone hanging around you? . . .
If you want a child, open your womb, your seed and call.
If you don’t, tell the spirits firmly to look somewhere else . . .
Feel the ship scrape on the shore of the living world.
Say good-bye. Step ashore.
Smell the night air of this city. Feel the solid floor under your feet,
and let the ship, the sea and the island fade back into the night.

* * *
A few days later, Priestess Aradia tells me that she strongly dislikes utopian
paradises. She finds the “Shining Island” or the “Island-of-Apples-and-Always-
Summer-and-Good-Weather” to be extremely boring. She, therefore, closes
her ears to Starhawk’s trance work very quickly. Instead she immediately goes
to the rim of the island and finds herself a library. There she enjoys reading
until everybody is finished and ready to return to ordinary life. “I believe that
this life holds paradise, this life of change and movement.To follow the path of
the Goddess is to live in paradise. It’s not an easy path, but it’s a true path”,
Aradia says.
Witches also have different opinions about the Mighty Dead, and some do
not even know who they really are. In a break during the rehearsal, before the
ritual started, I asked a group of experienced Witches (whom I know well) to
tell me the difference between the Ancestors, the Beloved Dead and the
Mighty Dead. They all agreed that the Beloved Dead are ordinary people
whom they have known personally. They were not sure about the Mighty
Dead, but one of them believed they were identical with the Guardians of the
Watchtowers, being addressed earlier in the ritual when the elements were
invoked. During this discussion, Starhawk passed by. The Witches asked her
opinion. Starhawk answered,

The Ancestors are our bloodline or cultural heritage. The Beloved Dead
are the people we know and remember. The Mighty Dead are powerful
Witches that do not have to reincarnate, who live on the astral plane as
sources of power and protection, almost like semi-gods.

While this group was satisfied with Starhawk’s answer, Aradia was not. She
agreed that the Mighty Dead are departed Witches with special powers, but
not that they are beyond reincarnation. In her opinion, such an expression
connotes a value system in which this life on the planet earth is a place not
206 Priestesses of the craft

worth returning to. Instead, she believes that everything exists simultaneously
in common time and space. This means that when we call the dead, we also
call an aspect of ourselves. Aradia believes that she herself has lived before and
that a certain aspect of her will always be part of the reality called “Kingdom
of Death”. But, she states firmly that only initiated Witches know how to call
the Mighty Dead properly and actually make them appear.This is not because
the initiated have learned a formula, but because they have met and been
presented to the Mighty Dead during their initiation ritual. To have met
somebody qualifies one to know how to call somebody and ask them to be
present.
Aradia also tells me that some Witches are concerned with whether they
have the right to call on the dead, wake them up and disturb them. She thinks
this is a naive way of looking at reality. First, the dead will not listen and come
if they do not want to. Second, the dead are both dead and alive simul-
taneously. As she has already explained, Witches only call an aspect of a being
when calling the dead.
When I ask her why she believes that the dead know something we don’t,
why they have something to teach us, her answer is that they have experienced
death in their present state of being and that they love us. She believes that the
Christian Church warns against calling the dead because not all spirits are
benevolent,

But frankly, I think the reason why the Church and its priests dislike our
spiritual practice is that they in general are negative to any form of energy
work, of doing magic or addressing spirits.The one godhead takes care of
everything, while we are his passive children, alienated from the rest of
creation. This gives a powerful clergy and a dependent and submissive
laity, but it certainly is not my worldview. Each of us are priestesses and
priests, and we are free to cooperate with all of creation, the living and
the dead, the seen and the unseen, when we take responsibility to create a
better world.

Dislike of ritual elements can be expressed as sharp comments while the ritual
is taking place, especially if somebody, who is about to call in the elements,
uses cultural or ideological imagery that is not regarded as “politically correct”
by anarchist, feminist pagans. This is in particular the case if, for example,
women call in the Goddess by dressing up as imitations of Isadora Duncan, or
if men call the God by imitating the moves and cries of an illusory Wild Man,
which is not uncommon. Comments are also made if the ritual seems static or
the energy is not raised. In both cases, people may get bored. Intellectually flat
or non dynamic rituals are considered “boring”, and anything boring is a
deadly sin among many Reclaiming people. If and when such rituals are
performed, there are always people ready to call the Reclaiming Collective
“high church”,“Catholic”,“middle-class” or “mainstream” – which is the worst
insulting language thinkable in this particular community.
 The Spiral Dance ritual: a celebration of death and rebirth 207

Dancing the Spiral – raising a cone of power

The vision taking form as we were looking into the cauldron of the Goddess
at the “Island of the Dead” shall now be given a magical form (or turned into
a spell) and, then, be sent out into the world to manifest. In order to do this
we need a power-song and a power-dance, a Spiral Dance (cf. chapter 3).This
focused dancing and singing, building up energy around a concrete image,
is called “raising a cone of power”. People always wait for it to happen;
and, when done in the form of a Spiral Dance, it is experienced as the real
highlight of the ritual. Some of the reasons given are the affinity and con-
nection that are said to be felt with the other celebrants and the mystical
experiences that many claim to have when spiralling.

* * *

Raising a cone of power is regarded as the magical work of Witchcraft. It is

said to be exclusive for this spiritual path, meaning that it is not taken from
the western occult tradition but that Gardner/Valiente took the idea from
somewhere else.The energy form of a cone of power is literally imagined as a
cone.The circle of dancing Witches forms the bottom base of the cone, while
the top of the cone points toward the roof. When the energy peaks, the cone
– believed to hold the image/spell that the participants desire to manifest – is
suddenly “released”. This releasing is said to be a mental act in which the
leading priestesses imaginarily let go of the visual image of the cone holding
their spell, sending it out into the universe. When the dancing ends, the “left-
over” energy is finally grounded permanently.
Particular to Reclaiming is that they have developed this Gardnerian
practice to a level where they create room for ecstatic experiences by the aid
of shamanic trance and possession techniques borrowed from non-western
religious traditions. Such techniques are alien to, and regarded as primitive by,
western occultism. The cone-of-power work in Gardnerian-like covens is
often formalized, stiff and short. People may be exhausted because they are in
bad physical condition, but their state of mind, and the group’s state of mind,
does not necessarily have anything to do with ecstasy.The fact that this energy
work is done differently in Reclaiming is one of the reasons for its success and
why so many different people choose to be connected with Reclaiming. As
priestess Macha says, “My experience is that Reclaiming people know how to
work and raise energy like nobody else in the pagan communities.” Those
who don’t like their emphasis on ecstasy disparagingly call Reclaiming the
“Pentecostal Witches”.

* * *

The Spiral Dancing in the evening’s ritual begins when the chorus sings our
prayers for the new year while we hold hands in a circle.
208 Priestesses of the craft

A year of beauty/Let it begin now

A year of plenty/Let it begin now
etc.
May all who hunger now be fed,
May we heal the soil that grows our bread . . .
May all the forms of love be blessed
and all the colors of our skin be praised
Like sisters, like brothers
May we take care of each other
etc.
The celebrants answer repeatedly, all through the dancing:
And let it begin with each step we take
And let it begin with each change we make
And let it begin with each chain we break
And let it begin every time we wake.
The difference between an ordinary circle dance and the spiral dance is that in
the latter the circle is cut to make a head and a tail. Starhawk is the snake’s head
and the rest of us its body.We continue to sing, but we also start to move slowly
with her to the left, the direction of death: two steps to the left, one step to the
right. We dance toward the centre until the body of the snake is completely
coiled.Then Starhawk starts to coil the body in the other direction, to the right,
the direction of rebirth and life. As we dance out from the centre, we form two
rows facing each other. Every single participant passes everybody else’s face and
eyes and breath very, very closely. This “seeing the other” is by most celebrants
explained as the mystery of the ritual. They describe it with the words “com-
plete happiness”, “love”, “peace”, “ecstasy”, “immersion”, “communion”. The
dancing and singing go on and on, into the centre and out again, for maybe half
an hour or more. In the beginning, people quickly get inspired and happy, but
also tired and out of breath. But we continue, and continue, and it is first when
we reach beyond the point of tiredness and the feeling of having lost control of
legs and steps that the energy flows smoothly and starts to rise in a cone. The
singing builds up in rhythm and loudness, in the same manner as in the other
exercises described.The difference is the length of the energy work because the
goal is not only an altered but also an ecstatic state of mind.
It then happens again. When we are coiled together, the song ends in a
loud, synchronized o-o-m. We raise our arms, let go of the energy, and drop
down on the floor.We lie in silence for a long time – until our heartbeats and
breath are more normal. Priestess Ann tells me later that ecstasy to her is a
physical sensation:

Basically I let go of all resistance – to anything – and just trust.To trust is

easier in a coven, but to let go is easier in a larger ritual. The physical
sensation I feel is like tingling. I can feel the energy rushing, and then I
 The Spiral Dance ritual: a celebration of death and rebirth 209

know that we are starting really to raise energy. Feeling my mind step into
a trance, so I can sort of watch myself from the outside, that I am really
trancing, really connected to the words that I am saying, to the energy
that I am feeling. At the end there is complete exhaustion, and a true
amelioration of whatever psychic condition I had before we started.
As we lie and sit down, exhausted and peaceful, the names of the newborn
this year, in the community and among family and friends, are sung out loud
by priest Kelly.

* * *
The ritual is closed in the ordinary fashion: the blessing of the food and drinks
that sustain our lives in the form of a symbolic ritual meal; the thanksgiving
to the Elements, the Gods, the Mighty Dead, the Ancestors and the Beloved
Dead for their gracious participation.

Personal transformation?
In chapter 5, I anticipated a definition of ritualization as the intentional
interaction between social bodies and a ritually defined and structured space
in order to induce change or confirmation in the ritualists. In the case of
Witchcraft, ritualization involves the creation of a magical person and a
magical space for whom and in which death may shape-shift and be
experienced as the inner truth and seed of life. This fluidity of life and death
as if they were circles within circles may also be recognized in the symbolic
structure of the Spiral Dance ritual.
The celebrants continually move in a centrifugal fashion inward, always
inward. They do it when they go from ordinary consciousness to extra-
ordinary and when they leave one worldview behind, in which death apparently
is the last enemy, and enter another, deeper worldview, in which death is just a
passage back to life.They also do it when they enter the womb of ritual space,
from which they move on to the womb named the Island of the Dead, in
which they may have their powers and selves transformed in the cauldron of
visions, said to be the womb of the Goddess.
Many Witches, for whom the ritual works, use the word “immersion” when
they later make an attempt to describe this inward-spiralling process.They tell
me how important the anthropomorphic symbols of Goddess (associated with
femaleness) and God (associated with maleness) are to understand this process,
because no other symbolic representation can, in their opinion, convey a
complete immersion as well as the sacredness of erotic love between woman
and man. Some celebrants even claim that their own experience of a good
ritual can be compared with “making love” with their partners, except that, in
ritual, “it’s all in the heart and on a psychic level. But it’s that same feeling of
being taken over a little bit when surrendering; its that same feel of complete
happiness and fullness”.
210 Priestesses of the craft

In fact, many informants feel that the sexual embrace of the lovers as a path
to the sacred has been veiled in the Jewish and Christian religions of their
formative years. This path to mystical union, and its accompanying sanctifi-
cation of human sexuality and of the enveloped, gendered character of human
life, may be hard to imagine without some form of bitheistic conceptualization
of the divine. The monotheistic God of Judaism and Christianity, who is
believed to be radically transcendent but also radically present and active in all
aspects of human life and history, may easily be imagined to sanctify ecological
interconnections between all natural beings, as well as activities such as
befriending, peacemaking, forgiving, loving, creating, ordering, mothering,
fathering, even conceiving the fetus in the womb (the power to bring forth
new life). But as long as this godhead is lacking a female side, human sexuality
cannot be sanctified as divine mimesis. For although God conceives the Son,
and the Trinity is perceived to be related also through inner dance (trinitarian
perichoresis), it is rather unusual to imagine or symbolize God as present in
the embrace and lust between human lovers, in the lovemaking, in the orgasms.
Even Jesus, who is said to have lived a full human life (and to have experienced
friendship, hunger, temptation, pain, etc.), has not been commemorated with
narratives of his knowledge of the embrace of a beloved, at least not in the
official teaching. The only caresses his body apparently experienced were
those of his mother (and father) and of the anointing hands of a woman.
Starhawk repeatedly points out that without symbolizing the divine as both
Goddess and God, the human embrace will become peripheral to religious
discourse, as will the positive reality of sexual difference, love and attraction.
It will also rule out erotic imagery as appropriate means to convey the
experience of “immersion” in ritual without being accused of profanizing the
divine. The shadow side, however, to a bitheistic concept of divinity is the
temptation to rank female and male powers and to transfer their hierarchies
into social paradigms. Also, most lesbian and gay Witches do not feel com-
pelled by the imagery of a god-man who embraces a goddess-woman or vice
versa. Some are therefore deeply involved with developing a concept of a
divine queer spirit instead, beyond the heterosexual symbolic matrix they feel
is too dominant at Reclaiming’s public rituals.16
But priestess Ann, who does not venerate queer spirits, has no emotional
resistance to internalizing the teachings embedded in the divine embrace of
Goddess and God. She is convinced that the gift of ritual is
personal empowerment and a real love of differences between people. I
love meeting in ritual and giving everybody space, whoever they are.
Ritual basically helps me affirm life; it takes me right down to the deepest
reasons why I live. It gets me in touch with my centre, my inner-core
being. It is indeed very centreing and very grounding; it tends to open my
heart. And I think that’s the most basic definition of an affirming action.
From there I think you act in a new and positive way.
 The Spiral Dance ritual: a celebration of death and rebirth 211

As Goddess descended to the “Kingdom of Death” and restored the God back
to life through merging, most Witches claim to merge their hearts when
trancing and dancing in the Samhain ritual.They say they leave the ritual with
a feeling of having reaffirmed their friendships, community and their own
existential reasons for living. Despair and meaninglessness are declared as being
transformed into hopes for a good life. This is their frame of reference when
proclaiming ritual and ritualizing as a “method” to renew and regenerate con-
temporary culture: it is a potential tool for relinking with the divine and
bonding with human fellows and the larger natural world.
However, all confirming judgements about specific rituals depend upon a
first and primary agreement: that the actual ritual worked. So-called boring
rituals renew and regenerate nothing. Witches’ measurements for whether a
ritual worked include experiential, emotional and intellectual standards. But
the overall transformative aspects of ritual seem to be judged by what M.
Rosaldo terms “embodied thought”: that the subject can report having
experienced the affectionate and internal movements described above on
the basis of having been fully involved and of having “moved energy”. This
transformation from feeling separate to feeling temporarily joined, and
returning to daily life with a feeling of meaning, purpose and vitality, is, of
course, open to further interpretations. Is it caused by the Goddess (her
gift/grace)? Is it caused by ritual itself (intrinsic to the indexicality of ritual
and to the magical techniques used)? Or, is it triggered as a pure therapeutical
effect from manipulating emotions and having a good time? Such possible
interpretations are seldom discussed since the Goddess is regarded as final
cause in any case, acting on the self either as internal being (other-than-deity)
or as external relation (deity).17

* * *

In the above narrative I have attempted to show that ritualizing in Reclaiming

is constituted by bodily acts such as breathing, moving, reading, chanting,
dancing and imaginative journeying within the context of a worldview that
weaves together Witchcraft mythology, esoteric philosophy and contemporary
cultural thought. It is the totality of this process, not isolated elements, that has
the ability to construct embodied experiences of merger and separation.
Trance techniques borrowed from other cultures do not alone induce them. It
is only when bodily movements and mental journeys are performed within
the context of western, poetical language and imagery that age-old, shamanic
techniques seem to “gain” their powers to deeply alter the consciousness and
embodied thinking of western people.Whether these alterations are permanent,
and for the good, can in reality only be decided by the people involved and
their significant others.
212 Priestesses of the craft

Notes
1 Starhawk 1979a: 160.This is the Faery/Starhawk version of a myth that is used by
all traditions of Witchcraft. The myth is not read in the Spiral Dance ritual but
partly acted out “in trance” as a symbolic journey to the Kingdom of Death.
Except for the womb imagery and the meeting with goddess and god, the
categories sex/intercourse and the incestuous ‘lover and son’ relationship, central
to the myth, are passed over in silence. The myth is also used in connection with
the initiation ritual.
2 To some American Christians, and in particular to the Fundamentalists, Halloween
is an improper, heathen tradition. At Halloween 1990, this resulted in a big con-
frontation in downtown San Francisco.TV evangelist Larry Lee arranged a crusade
from his headquarters in Texas to San Francisco with 3,000 of his followers. They
rented the gigantic Conference Hall by the Civic Centre, from which they spoke
the last judgement over San Francisco, comparing it with Sodom and Gomorra.
Larry Lee condemned the city of San Francisco as a devil’s place, possessed by the
evil demons of Homosexuality, Feminism, Divorce, Murder, New Age, Witchcraft,
Anarchism, Social Welfare, Children’s Rights, Sexual Freedom, Free Choice (of
abortion), Liberation Theology, etc. He requested that his followers proclaim Holy
War against this place of sin and degeneration and, if necessary, shed their blood, as
their Lord Jesus once had done. Outside the Hall, armed police forces were
protecting Larry Lee from attacks from about 500 furious citizens, of whom many
were gay, alternativists and pagans, who had gathered in a spontaneous demon-
stration in the afternoon of 1 November. As the hours passed, the crowd got more
and more angry, reckless and ironic. They confirmed Larry Lee’s self-appointed
self-importance when apparently identifying with the imagery of the prototype
heathens of degenerate Rome, screaming: “Give us the lions; kill the Christians”.
3 This tradition is a mixture of indigenous (pre-Christian) religiousness and a Mexican
version of Catholicism.
4 This is information given in conversations with Professor Martin Ravndal Hauge
at the Faculty of Theology in Oslo about the Israelite practice. According to
Demetrios Delaveris in the Greek Orthodox Church in Oslo, orthodox believers
can express the realities of their lives in the profane area, whereas the altar is placed
in the holy area, where only priests can approach it. The altar table itself is a
meeting place between male humans and God.
5 The notion “celebrants” is indigenous. It is Reclaiming’s own name for the people
who attend their rituals, used when they are writing manuscripts or speaking
publicly.
6 The idea of the whole ritual being a womb, in which people are transformed, is
quite common among Witches. The image of the womb is also used in the
“Descent of the Goddess” referred to above. The mythical Island of the Dead,
which we shall encounter further on, is also perceived as a womb, as is the cauldron
of the Goddess, standing in its centre. A paradise in itself is like a womb: every
condition is unchanging; everything is automatically being taken care of; the
relationship between subject/acting and object/outcome is one of inseparability.
7 A grounding is never scripted. This one is taken from the 1989–manuscript, in
which it is written to suggest for the reader how it can be done and what kind of
imagery and words can actually be used.We can know for sure that Deborah never
said exactly these words.
8 I do not describe this part of the ritual but refer the reader back to the detailed
description of an ordinary Reclaiming ritual in chapter 5. “The Guardian Song”
calls in the four elements.
9 Words taken from Starhawk 1987: 308.
 The Spiral Dance ritual: a celebration of death and rebirth 213

10 This historical part of the litany is always the same, while the first, more updated
part changes for every year.
11 We are now about halfway through the three-hour-long ritual.
12 From the myth where the Goddess descends to the Kingdom of Death, cited in
full in chapter 5, n. 13.
13 This imagery is similar to that used in ancient and medieval utopian literature (cf.
chapter 3).
14 A song called “Breaths” with lyrics by the Senegalese poet Birago Diop.The lyrics,
important for the context, go: “Listen more often to things than to beings . . . /‘Tis the
ancestor’s breath when the fire’s voice is heard/’Tis the ancestor’s breath in the voice of the
waters/Those who have died have never, never left/The dead are not under the earth/They
are in the rustling trees . . . /They are in the wailing child . . .”
15 Priest Timothy tells me later that the dancing at the Island of Apples is a dance-
possession. The dead has no bodies, but this way they can dance and feast. He
describes to me a worldview very similar to contemporary Zanzibari’s (East
Africa) as outlined by Kjersti Larsen in her PhD dissertation,“Where Humans and
Spirits Meet. Incorporating Difference and Experiencing Otherness in Zanzibar
Town” (Oslo 1995).
16 Since the mid-1990s, lesbian and gay Reclaiming Witches have organized a separate
Witchcamp in the US that is open to all genders and people of queer spirit.
17 The Samhain ritual may also be read as a narrative that articulates Reclaiming
Witches’ worldview and discernments of the self and the sacred as such, inde-
pendent of individual proofs of its truth. According to this interpretation, increased
sensitivity in regard to imagination and emotionality is just an indication of
increased ritual and narrative competence.
7 Women’s mysteries
Creating a female symbolic order

The Reclaiming community is open to both women and men. Classes are
taught to anybody who seriously wants to learn the path of the Goddess.
Public rituals are planned and conducted by both genders. But, as described in
previous chapters, Reclaiming also identifies explicitly with feminist assump-
tions that western culture is profoundly patriarchal and with feminist political
strategies for the liberation of women and other oppressed people. As part of
the process of creating an alternative social contract, they invent new symbolic
universes and ritual acts that in particular aim at representing women’s sociality,
religiosity and sense of being in what they regard as new and liberating ways.
But they also experiment with new lifestyles and sexual identities and challenge
conventional gender roles on a deeply felt personal level:

The feminist movement has prompted the culture as a whole to re-

examine questions of maleness and femaleness. For the definitions are
no longer working. They are oppressive to women and confining to men
. . . . When we ask the questions “What is femaleness? What is maleness?”
we are stating our willingness to change in ways that may seem frightening,
for our conditioning to experience our gender in culturally determined
ways runs very deep and in a primary way determines how we experience
ourselves.
(Starhawk 1989a:8)

In this citation, Starhawk argues in her nominalist fashion, as if male and

female are solely human definitions that eventually have turned out to be
oppressive and possessive metaphors (cf. chapter 4).To experience ourselves in
new, liberating ways, we obviously need to break free from culturally deter-
mined gender roles and redefine sexual difference. The problem, however, is
that Reclaiming is not only a feminist but a spiritual community as well,
advocating goddess religion and magic as the new option for women (and
men).When Starhawk explains why this tradition has opened a new possibility
of “female identity” for women, her language and categories change. Now she
emphasizes more than anything her experience of being allowed to see her
own body as sacred,“in all its femaleness, its breasts, vulva, womb, and menstrual
 Women’s mysteries: creating a female symbolic order 215

flow”. She also feels permitted to see the wild power of nature as well as the
intense pleasure of sexual intimacy as central paths to the sacred, “instead of
being denied, denigrated or seen as peripheral”. Furthermore, because the
goddesses and gods are perceived not only as symbols but also as real channels
of real power, Starhawk believes they can “open doorways for us into new
dimensions of our possibilities” in the ongoing cultural transformation with
which she is involved (Starhawk 1989a:2–8).
Even though Starhawk never loses sight of the fact that our experiences of
gender are culturally determined, she hesitates to say that “sexual difference” is
a social construction. In fact, she takes the position that “sex is the most basic
of differences; we cannot become whole by pretending differences do not
exist, or by denying either male or female” (Starhawk 1979a:27). For her
feminism is, to a certain extent, determined by her magical worldview. As
witnessed in the citations above, this worldview demands of her, so to speak,
that she deduce sexual difference from the category of nature and correlate its
conceptualizations to the category of the divine, which are both linked to a
dialogical, androgynous Deep Self and experiences of essence: life-generating
powers, energy as vital principle, divine substance. Furthermore, vital energy is
said to be constituted as erotic and polar opposition between the two forces or
principles “female” and “male”.
The problem is that these principles, which flow in opposite but not
opposed directions, and which both women and men are said to contain –
otherwise they would not exist, are represented in her religious paradigm
by two gendered symbols: Goddess and God.1 Yet Starhawk underlines that
Goddess and woman are not identical. Goddess does not symbolize women’s
qualities but the power to create, regardless of sex. God does not symbolize
men’s qualities but the “compost principle” in all life. In their different aspects,
Goddess and God are apparently equally important and determinant in “the
cycles of birth, growth, death, decay, and regeneration revealed in every aspect
of a dynamic, conscious universe” (Starhawk 1989a:228).
But, although Starhawk is clear that the female and male principles should
not be taken as a general pattern for individual female and male human
beings, many Witches are not. And why should they be? Is not one of the
reasons for reclaiming Goddess, the female genus for divinity, that to worship
her is believed to empower women, strengthen their sense of Self, and
redefine the values associated with femininity? We only need to look to the
Reclaiming rituals to learn that gendered divine reality is a cosmic mimesis of
gendered human reality, or the other way around: I have not yet experienced a
case in which a man/male priest has entered the position of the priestess and
personified the Goddess by “drawing down the moon” (although people tell
me it may happen), and neither has a male Witch ever called himself Aphrodite.
To many Witches, Goddess and God are even perceived hierarchically:
Goddess is taken to be primary because she is seen as giver of life; God is taken
to be secondary because he represents that which is born. Their hierarchical
relation is not restricted to the level of symbolic language, but regarded as a
216 Priestesses of the craft

literal facts: Goddess is more than a symbol and has, in fact, revealed herself as
primary, as creator and nurturer, being identical with the inherent vital
principle of the human body, with spirit or Deep Self, to the extent that the
inner self is “sexed”.Women are therefore closer to the Goddess than are men.
If these Witches also call themselves feminist, we must ask: why is this gyno-
centric divine gender hierarchy ethically more advanced and liberating than
Jewish and Christian androcentrism?
There is a constant tension in Reclaiming between the radical extremes of
these viewpoints: Goddess as mystical symbol, equally important to women
and men, versus Goddess as birthing, female lifeforce; gender as structuring
and meaning-making metaphor versus sexual difference as ontological reality.
In order to situate the Witches within a broader feminist landscape and better
understand their cosmic version of feminism, I shall, for the purpose of this
chapter, reduce and divide current feminism into three main schools: sexual
equality (1), sexual polarity (2), and sexual difference (3) feminism. These
schools agree that the very reason women as a social group are oppressed is
that they differ from men. But they strongly disagree on what the difference
consists of and how far it extends.
The sexual equality school agrees with (a certain reading of ) Simone
Beauvoir that “one is not born a woman, one becomes one”. Both “woman”
and “man” are socially constructed, as are the hierarchical binary oppositions
associated with them in order to define “gender”. In the Marxist dichotomy
between biological and sociological, they choose the latter.The female body is
not perceived as an existential situation or as entailing a deeper mystery; it
represents merely the sign and site of oppression. In order to explain the
representations and the images attached to the corporeal reality of the female,
sexual equality feminists exclusively call upon history, social conditioning, and
the binary structure of thinking (Braidotti 1989:96).2
The sexual polarity school, on the other hand, has chosen the opposite
pole: the biological. It assumes that femaleness and maleness are congenital
predispositions in the individual. Women’s femininity is either set in singular
opposition to masculinity, or perceived as constituted by a certain, reified
mixing of female and male principles, energies, or even metaphysical sub-
stances, manifest in both women and men.3 The more radical essentialists do
not perceive of these principles as complementary at all, but, rather, as
antagonistic. They attach ethics to biology and claim that femaleness is
superior to maleness. There are a variety of branches of the sexual polarity
school, but all of them are preoccupied with women’s experiences as being
radically different from those of men and as reservoirs of new, feminist politics.
The sexual difference school, mainly influenced by French philosophy and
psychoanalysis, argues that sexual difference is an empirical fact universally but
refuses to choose between simple, causal explanations, whether biological or
sociological. Rather, the sexed body as the seat of difference is seen as the
threshold of subjectivity: it is neither a fixed biological essence nor a historical
entity, but an embodied situation and the point of intersection between the
 Women’s mysteries: creating a female symbolic order 217

biological and the social. Thus, sexual difference is perceived as ontological,

not as accidental, peripheral, or contingent upon socio-economic conditions
(Braidotti 1989:101). This school agrees with the “equalists” that “woman” as
defined in western culture is a confined social construction. In fact, we know
nothing about her except as a complementary mirror-image of “man”. But,
instead of eliminating the meaning of sexual difference, these feminists claim
the necessity of invoking she-who-is-not-yet-known (as well as “the he”) by
constructing a new sociality, a new cultural space in which otherness can
come into being and unfold a real sexual difference.4
While the political aim of sexual equality feminists is to realize equal rights
between women and men at all levels in (reformed) society, sexual polarity
feminists aim at retrieving original complementarity through a strategy of
reaffirmation of the feminine side, unmaking hierarchical notions of sexual
polarity created by patriarchal culture. When it comes to fighting for equality
in the cultural and economic order, sexual difference feminists agree with
both schools. Luce Irigaray, who is a leading figure of the sexual difference
school, argues that feminist politics must obtain a mimetic essentialist strategy
in regard to “what exists” and return to women’s community as a source for
alternative politics, affirmation and invention of “that which exists not”. She
believes the tactical question in feminism today is how to strengthen the
feminine side of the male–female dichotomy and the practical one is how to
construct a horizontal ethical relationship between women (cf. Irigaray
1993a). To find answers, feminists must dare to get involved with the
“hermeneutics of paradox.” For example,“motherhood” is foundational to the
patriarchal domination of women, while at the same time being one of the
strongholds for female identity (Braidotti 1989:96). Irigaray suggests that
women enter this paradoxical stance in order to reattend to and resymbolize
the foundations and ethics of “love”: the maternal body as the site of origin,
the relationship between mother and daughter, as well as motherhood itself.
Irigaray holds the mother–daughter dyad to be the prototype of female
relations. It is therefore pertinent that women attend to and symbolize this
vertical relationship in “externally located and durable representations” if they
shall succeed in their attempts to create horizontal relationships as “sisters”.
She argues that the mother–daughter prototype is non-symbolized in any
profound and positive sense in western culture – except in the “Demeter and
Persephone”5 myth – and that this is an urgent problem if woman is ever to
separate from “mother” and achieve an ontological status as a real other in
western society (Whitford 1989:120). Irigaray’s feminist programme implies
nothing less than the creation of a female sociality, a female genealogy, a
female symbolic and a female contract in which women may represent their
difference (also between themselves), whether in language or in another social
form, such as a religion.
Although individual Reclaiming Witches may adhere to any of these
feminist schools and even mix positions in complete confusion, I find that
Irigaray’s visionary, elemental feminism gives the best framework to under-
218 Priestesses of the craft

stand the sexual politics underpinning “cosmic” feminism and the path of the
Goddess: it recognizes the primacy of the bodily, material roots of subjectivity
and of the enveloped, embodied character of the spiritual self. In chapter 4,
I discussed the importance of applying a sign theory to Witches’ ethno-
hermeneutics that could include, instead of reduce, the acclaimed indexicality
of magical religion: that it is not purely a system of meaning, but also a
technology to interact with the elemental world. This nonreductive argument
is also valid in regard to Witches’ acclaimed indexicality of the magical person:
as twice born, with a sacred body and divine self. When listening to inner,
Deep Self, one may hear the voice of a culturally conditioned person. But, as
Witches insist, one may also hear the voice of the Goddess. When perceiving
the human body, one may see a culturally gendered and determined person.
But one may also see the body of the Goddess, manifesting as one of the two
ontological principles (female and male), or as an interesting combination of
the two (queer or inter-sex).
A main objective of this chapter is thus to describe how Reclaiming
Witches define “woman” and the differences between “woman” and “man”,
thereby making relevant among themselves a search for women’s spirituality as
something different from men’s. For although men and women work jointly
together in all community tasks and on most ritual occasions, both parties
recognize that the other – through birth and constitution – is part of women
and men’s “mysteries”. “Mysteries” refer primarily to bodily life cycles and are
usually celebrated in various rites of passage connected to childbirth, puberty,
menopause, etc. Gender-segregated circles, and in particular those of women,
are very important in Reclaiming Witches’ communal and spiritual life,
although they do not necessarily appear so from the outside, from Reclaiming’s
more public scene. When I asked Catherine, one of my informants, what
constitutes sexual difference, and what makes it so urgent to Reclaiming
women to regularly move in and out of a “room of their own”, she gave an
answer that is quite representative:

Obviously, it is the experience of pregnancy and birth. This is not

culturally relative; it is absolute. How is this relevant to “women’s
spirituality” as differentiated from “men’s spirituality”? I think it is this: we
are all, both men and women, born “alone,” and we die “alone.”These are
the most basic, fundamental phenomena of the human experience. What
they teach us is our aloneness in the universe. Yet, women, and only
women, also give birth, and that experience is the next most primal event
of the human experience that a person can have. And that experience
teaches us, profoundly and preconsciously, about our connectedness. The
moment and aftermath of delivery is, in spite of the pain and suffering,
also an event of overwhelming joy, even ecstasy. It is a body/mind/spirit
event that intertwines self/other/pain/joy. Yet at the same time, the
woman giving birth is face to face with death, or at least with “not-life”
because she is, at that time, in the gateway between the worlds. In my
 Women’s mysteries: creating a female symbolic order 219

coven we say that Goddess is this gateway. So there is a direct experience

of the sacredness of life which only otherwise comes when a person, man
or woman, actually faces his or her own death.
When women create religious paradigms, seeking the deepest, or
highest, truth, we somehow conceive of the most holy, the most sacred
images as ones of connection and interdependence. Conception is con-
nection; for a woman to conceive means that another human being grows
from within her body.Thus “women’s religion” is inevitably and essentially
about connection and interdependence. I think this has deep psycho-
logical roots. I think women and men experience and therefore under-
stand reality, i.e., everything from the human experience to the nature of
the universe, in profoundly different ways. It also informs our search for
spiritual fulfillment differently. How and whether women’s spirituality is
apparent in a particular culture, that is, how it manifests, is another matter.

According to Catherine, the whole idea of religion and of religious ritual as a

resymbolization of the existential dilemma between separation and connection,
independence and interdependence, and its emphasis on the importance of
repeated experiences of merger, is really a description of women’s spirituality.
We may also note that she does not thematize merger with “the most holy”, but
points out that experiences of connection and interdependence in ordinary
human life are most sacred images of divine reality.
Since I only have access to women’s circles, I shall concentrate on the
attempts in Reclaiming to define and give form to a women’s spirituality, or
in Irigaray’s terminology, to a female symbolic order. This implies how they
depict and experience the mysteries of women’s bodies, female friendship,
mother–daugther genealogies, and divine guidance in daily life affairs, and
how they construct horizontal relationships among themselves. To a certain
extent I will also discuss how essentialism and other feminisms are manifested
and contested and question the women’s apparent success: have they managed
to create a cultural space in which “real” sexual differences are brought forth,
or do they merely repeat a sexualized cultural discourse on the binarity of
being?
The ethnographic description, which is the empirical basis for the discus-
sions, will cover how a group of women explored “women’s mysteries” in a
Reclaiming class called “Women’s Magic”, the coven Gossip that grew out of
this class, and how the coveners have bonded since then – including their
performance of the puberty rite called “first blood” for a young girl (already
partially described in chapter 1). In the final part of this chapter, I shall discuss
some implications for Reclaiming’s sexual politics and for men’s position in
the community.
I have chosen the Gossip women and their social network mainly for
practical reasons: since I also happened to be in the “Women’s Magic” class, I
was a member of Gossip from the very beginning (1984). I also choose them
because they are representative of the community and of people associating
220 Priestesses of the craft

with it.The Gossip women are highly educated, participate in several lifestyles
and often confess to different opinions. Some of them are very active, either in
the Reclaiming Collective or in the community, and hold a lot of personal
power and influence. Others are nonactive and express a strong dislike for
Reclaiming as community, although they have embraced its teachings and
ritual practices as their personal worldview. Another striking trait of the group,
at least in its initial phase, was the mixture of sexual identities (heterosexuals,
bisexuals and lesbians), the practice of nonmonogamy and intense political
activism.6 During the course of time some of these traits have changed or
have become less dominant. They have, however, always added to the com-
plexity of viewpoints in the group.

Women’s bodies as sacred space

When I was introduced to Reclaiming in the fall of 1984, it was through the
“Women’s Magic” class, taught by Dora and Deadly. Their goals for the class
were stated in the Reclaiming Newsletter as “bringing magical change into our
daily lives using ritual, group work and our magical tools. Invoking the Triple
Moon Goddess and the Earth Goddess, asking Her inspiration for empower-
ment as we explore Women’s Mysteries.” When designing the class, Dora and
Deadly had been inspired by Z. Budapest, who represents a Dianic, lesbian-
separatist brand of Witchcraft. Dora had recently attended a Dianic ritual and
liked Budapest’s focus on the female body and its link to divine, lunar cycles.
She felt that it represented a powerful aspect of feminism, undercommunicated
in the Reclaiming community out of fear of offending the men and the
anarchist equalist ideology.
Another source for Dora and Deadly’s associative connection between the
Goddess, moon and female body cycles is Esther Harding’s Women’s Mysteries
– Ancient and Modern.This book was first published in English in 1955 and had
a major influence on feminist Witchcraft and goddess spirituality in the 1970s.
Harding’s essentialist thesis is that patriarchy is recognizable by a shift from
feminine moon-worship to a masculine sun-cult: “In the days of moon wor-
ship, religion was concerned with . . . the worship of the creative and fecund
powers of nature and of wisdom that lies inherent in instinct and in the at-
one-ness with natural law. But the worship of the sun is the worship of that
which overcomes nature” (Harding 1971(1955):31). Her medicine for modern
women is to return to ancient myths, symbols and rituals in which she
believes people celebrated the feminine principle and worshipped the “moon
goddesses”.
The “Women’s Magic” class met every Monday night for six weeks at Dora
and Deadly’s collective household in the Mission district and included nine
women (with me). Susan (30), Artemis (35) and Ruth (38) (introduced in
chapter 3) already belonged to the Reclaiming community and had taken
several classes. They were anarchists and active in the Direct Action com-
munity. Susan and Artemis lived in the same anarchist household and were the
 Women’s mysteries: creating a female symbolic order 221

mothers to two small children. Ruth lived in a collective and had two teenage
sons.Their intention in joining the class was to learn from Dora – whom they
admired for her magical skills – and to meet other women with whom they
hoped they could form a coven. Anna (38), the mother of two girls, had
recently been introduced to Witchcraft through a weekend workshop with
Starhawk at Esalen. At the time she was working her way into Reclaiming
socially through a love affair with one of the long-term teachers. Therefore,
she already knew Dora, who was a friend of her lover. Susan, Artemis, Ruth
and Anna were bisexual and lived in nonmonogamous relationships – Anna
within the framework of a nuclear family. Ruth and Anna had finished their
Masters in Social Science and had prestigious, well-paid jobs. Susan and
Artemis were craftswomen, working to establish the earlier described
Compost Ranch in Sonoma County.
Nell (20), Megan (31), Lisa (26), Judith (29) and I (28) had no previous
connection to anybody in the class, and when we undertook the transition
from class to coven, Megan, Lisa and Judith decided not to join. Megan was a
lesbian plumber and experienced with Dianic Witchcraft, which was being
taught in the East Bay area by Z. Budapest. Nell, Lisa and Judith were
heterosexual. Judith was a full-time political activist with affiliations with the
Democrats, while Lisa was a nonpolitical Zen Buddhist. Nell was raised as a
feminist by her liberal, agnostic parents and had recently discovered religious
feminism, such as Witchcraft, through reading. Her plan for Graduate school
was a PhD in Social Anthropology.

* * *
We are gathered at Dora and Deadly’s collective household for our first class.
We sit, drinking tea, in a circle in a cosy living room, lit by candles. The
atmosphere is relaxed and informal, and Dora invites us to do check-in. Since
Ruth, Susan and Artemis are friends with Dora, they go first and mark a level
of sharing that is quite intimate, later copied by the others following her. In
contrast to what was expected in the “Elements” class (cf. chapter 5), we not
only inform each other briefly about our energy level right now but tell life
stories, as if we are a regular “consciousness-raising” group in the women’s
movement. We hear about domestic partners, kids, lovers, jobs, struggles with
jealousy, demanding mothers, neglect, self-image and fear. Check-in lasts for
about an hour and a half and becomes a ritual in itself. For every new
gathering we add bits and pieces to our individual life stories, and deepen the
level of intimacy in the group. Parallel to this deepening of psychic and
emotional sharing, some of the women also strip off their clothes and reveal
more and more of their physical bodies. This is done without any comment,
or “because it is so hot in here”. The sweater goes at the first Monday
meeting; the trousers at the second; bra, watch and glasses at the third – until
most of them are completely naked, showing an attitude of pride about thick
thighs, scars and signs from having given birth, sagging breasts and bulging
222 Priestesses of the craft

bellies. A few of the more shy women are inspired by these “exhibitionists” to
let go of some of their clothes, while a couple of us don’t even loosen up a belt
– until it is explicitly asked for as part of the blood ritual (see below).
Just like in the “Elements” class, the teaching takes place within the frame-
work of ritual. After check-in, these undressed, half-dressed and fully dressed
women perform all the formal proceedings of a Reclaiming ritual.We cast the
circle, breathe as a Tree of Life, purify with salt and water, call the elements
and the Goddess. Dora and Deadly have chosen goddesses from around the
world whom they think fit the purpose of their teaching. Male deities are not
invoked; neither is the esoteric gender polarity associated with the elements
used.
As part of teaching the first evening, Dora and Deadly want us to tell what
we associate with the notion “women’s mysteries”. After some discussion, a list
is made. All the associations are characterized by an effort to distinguish
women from men by means of certain qualities believed to be essential and
innate to female beings. The women’s essentialist strategy is simply to invert
maleness as cultural norm and claim women’s specialness and superiority
instead – first of all within the field of basic life-and-death processes. Some of
the meanings associated with “women’s mysteries” are:

Women are closer to death than men since they often care for dying people and talk
to the dead
(men induce death through killing but are distant in the process of natural
death).7
Women give birth to new life, experience pregnancy and are deeply linked to future
generations
(exclusive for women; men cannot give birth).
Women’s bodies are related to natural, changing cycles such as the phases of the
moon
(exclusive for women; men’s bodies do not mirror natural cycles).
Women’s menstruation and blood are related to the elements of water (emotion)
and earth (body)
(exclusive for women; men represent more air (mind) and fire (spirit)).
Women’s menopause represents a new change in the body and in her emotional
state of mind
(exclusive for women; male bodies have no menopause).
Women have a capacity for transformation and channelling, in the birth process and
through work
(similarity between channelling and birth-giving capacity).
Women are shape-shifters and creators and have the skills to let go of their
“creations”
(similarity between letting-go and birth-giving capacity).
 Women’s mysteries: creating a female symbolic order 223

Women’s sexuality is floating and their orgasms slow and long lasting
(men’s sexuality is penetrating, reaches its climax fast).
Women have intimate communities where they love and support each other and
join their “powers”
(men’s community and power are more oriented toward status than
intimacy).
Women’s wisdom is gained through embodied experiences of change and trans-
formation
(men value the wisdom of the mind (secondary), not the wisdom of the
body (primary)).

* * *
At this point, I am deeply disturbed and disappointed about the course and
content of this class. When I decided to study Reclaiming Witchcraft for my
academic research and applied for grants to travel all the way to San Francisco, it
came from a fascination with Starhawk’s visionary writings (and Luce Irigaray’s
philosophy). Although Starhawk can also stumble in static, essentialist notions, I
had never read anything so mindless as these women’s statements about the so-
called female nature. Did they really believe this, that women according to “their
nature” were emotional and nurturing while men were brainy? Had they never
experienced evil and abuse from non empathic, fiery women? Didn’t they think
women were co-responsible for, and not only victims of, the misery of the
world? When I carefully tried to argue that their notions about essential woman-
hood were nothing but romantic, idealized constructions, nobody really cared to
listen. They just stared at me, until Ruth (one of the social scientists 10 years
older than me) said in a friendly tone: “We know, it’s just that it’s not relevant
right now.”
This was probably my first lesson in what Irigaray could have meant when
suggesting that women, for tactical reasons, would benefit from strengthening
the feminine side of the culturally defined male–female dichotomy. But it
took some years for me to apprehend.8 I continued to have similar reactions,
not least when participating in rituals in which the Goddess was invoked by
young women imitating ballerinas or pin-ups from men’s magazines. When I
asked the Reclaiming elders how they could let this happen, I did not really
get a “good” answer until Aradia took me aside:

Yes, you are right, these images of Goddess are politically incorrect and
very silly. And if we wanted our rituals to be nice and clean and theo-
logically consistent, we would of course dismiss these young women right
away, and perform all ritual acts ourselves. Instead we choose to involve as
many as possible in the public rituals, no matter how far they have come
in regard to personal development or theoretical insight, and just use
occasions like these to practice the very difficult art of tolerating those
224 Priestesses of the craft

not yet illumined by the latest fad in feminist theory, which really means
to accept people for who they are and where they are.

Her irony helped me finally get the point: people need affirmation and
acceptance for “what is” before they can change toward “what is not yet”.

* * *

Dora and Deadly obviously share Aradia’s attitude and do not comment,
correct or add to the associations listed above. Instead they explain that the
purpose of the class is to join in a common journey wherein we will learn
to appreciate ourselves as women, to honour our bodies as sacred and our
procreativity as divine (“woman” is the stuff out of which all people are
made) and to stop shaming ourselves for bleeding and being “restricted” by
natural cycles. They want us to exchange shame for pride, the feeling of
restriction for privilege, and to see a link between the western, cultural
degradation of women’s bodily constitution and the history of ecological
exploitation and misogyny. They believe the above is all based on a moral
hierarchy made between culture and nature, between men and women.
According to Dora and Deadly, natural human conditions, like bodily
constitution, are neither moral nor immoral; they are simply facts of creation,
of coming-into-being from the original birth union, and therefore sacred.
Consequently, they are pleased to see how the women in the class already feel
free to be naked and “unveiled”.They hope that when the course is over, we
will feel empowered as women and walk our lives with a new pride – having
learned that we all are living manifestations of the Goddess. Later in this class
we shall learn how to return to the “cave of the mothers” and bring about
embodied memories of ourselves as newly born, as foetuses, as unborn. We
shall remember first experiences of masturbation and find out how old we
were when becoming aware of “having a gender”. We shall also celebrate
female ancestors and political heroines, dress up in red and tell our experiences
of first menstruation.
After Dora’s lecture, we are asked to partake in an exercise in which we lie
down in a circle and look into a mirror in the centre. The mirror’s reflection
represents the Goddess, and when we see ourselves, we supposedly see her. A
drum beat takes us into a light trance. In this state of mind, we are asked to
turn the mirror into divine water. When we look into our own/her eyes
in the water we connect what we just named “women’s mysteries” with their
source: the Goddess.
As part of the meditation we may ask the Goddess/Deep Self for specific
gifts. The women ask for self-love, self-acceptance and self-pride, for strength
and determination in their jobs, for strength to be honest, for creativity and
self-discipline. Their requests are offered as prayers but often lack the initial
communication to another person typical in the formula “Dear God, please
 Women’s mysteries: creating a female symbolic order 225

give me . . .” The prayers may instead be phrased as: “I need strength, and I
open myself for strength right now.”

A delayed blood-rite for adult women

In the fourth class with Deadly and Dora, we tell first menstruation stories,
and in the fifth we perform a delayed “first blood” ritual for ourselves.We are
told that the ritual will take place in a “red atmosphere” in terms of decora-
tions, food and drinks, and it is expected that we are nude during its
performance. Two women find this to be “too much” and decide not to
come. Their absence is acknowledged by the other women, but not com-
mented upon. Since nudity is a key symbol this evening, it needs intro-
duction.
Ritual nudity is of Gardnerian heritage. Symbolically, it is related to the
utopian goals of intimacy and peace that Gardner suggested for the life and
work of a coven, labelled “perfect love and perfect trust”.This statement is also
a password used in the secret initiation ritual, denoting the dual character of
this social act: “love” refers to the level of friendship and mutual affection that
is required from initiators and initiates in order to successfully perform the
ritual; “trust” refers to the attitude of being willing to give up one’s will and
submit oneself to the will of another person (the initiator’s) and undergo
whatever this secret ritual process demands. This submissive act requires deep
trust that the other’s will is a good will. Love and trust are key notions to
describe the existential level of being promised to those who dare to enter
a magical circle. Ideally, these notions also express the Witches’ devotional
attitude toward the Goddess. Nudity is, consequently, the material, bodily,
ritualized symbol of this attitude, which, in a ritual context, is associated with
pride, vulnerability, sensuality, honesty, and equality, as well as with the
remembrance of how human life is brought into the world: as a naked body,
through a naked body. Ritual nudity symbolizes that the participants, at a deep
level, are one body, one being, one member, as it symbolizes the innocence of
beginnings, of conversions, of being born again.
We must go back to medieval Europe to find accepted expressions of
religious, ritualized nudity in western culture.According to Caroline W. Bynum,
nudity was then a typical expression of symbolic reversal. It was the property of
holy or pious men (not women) and was, on a symbolic level, linked with
imagery of poverty, weakness and femaleness.9 Witchcraft contests this tradition
by equating femaleness with strength and nudity with pride, making associative
links to nudity that are experienced to be continuous with the “natural” and
the “ordinary”. And, in the context of Witches’ naturalism, a naked man’s body
doesn’t symbolize femaleness, but masculine pride, vulnerability, etc., as listed
above. Nevertheless, ritual nudity is, for many obvious reasons, not common in
Reclaiming’s mixed covens and classes, and certainly not in public rituals. The
effect it has when actually being used in the “Women’s Magic” class is adding
“depth and daring”.
226 Priestesses of the craft

After casting the circle and calling the directions, we form a circle while
standing with our arms around each other. Deadly tells a story about the first
paradise – or the story about a girl growing up – going roughly like this:10

Once upon a time all women lived together on one island, and all the men on
another island. The women were like sisters and lived together in peace and love.
Mother Moon herself taught them all they needed to know. One day a man
arrived at the island in his boat.They had never seen men before, but invited him
to live with them and shared with him all that they knew. He liked it and was
happy with the women for a long time.After a while he started to miss his brothers
and asked the women to come with him and join a community with both women
and men. The women asked why, and what the men had to offer them. For the
first time there were disagreements between the women. Somebody wanted to go,
while others found the suggestion odd. Then the Moon Goddess showed her face,
and said: “I have always known that this would happen, that a time would come
when you who are sisters would be separated. But to help you remember your
origins and common roots, you shall bleed once a month. Even though you choose
different lives, you shall always know and remember that you are sisters. And you
shall celebrate the differences between you.” The women then celebrated the first
blood-ritual ever, and never before had the moon been shining so white and silvery.

Deadly gives no interpretation of “the myth”, and we respond by calling in

the Moon Goddess, “Holy maiden huntress/Artemis, Artemis/New Moon, come to
us.” The chant goes on for a while, and then we declare her presence. We kiss
the woman next to us and tell her, “Thou art Goddess.” It is time for magical
work, the proper celebration of our blood. We start to sing as we walk in a
long procession to the bathroom,

Power of blood, rain from the Dark Moon

Power of life and death, flow from our wombs.

We continue to sing, while each one of us is put into the bathtub and watered
with a red, warm liquid that Dora pours all over our naked bodies.The liquid
is made of three different herbs, including hibiscus, and symbolizes blood.The
bathtub is beautifully decorated with flowers, herbs and incense. Before being
“baptized” we stand in the bathtub and declare out loud a wish for ourselves,
witnessed by the others.
After the bath ceremony, we return to the living room. We form a circle,
and Dora brings out a jar with red ochre. She kneels down in front of Susan
and paints red ochre on the area between her navel and her pubic hair while
saying, “This is the blood that brings renewal. This is the blood that brings
sustenance. This is the blood that brings life.” Then Susan receives the jar to
anoint “the womb” of the woman next to her. The procedure goes on until
everybody has had her womb, including her genitals, symbolically sanctified
with red ochre.
 Women’s mysteries: creating a female symbolic order 227

Now is the time to tell stories or read poems, anything connected with
menstruation. We tell each other about menstrual cramps and emotional
turbulence when bleeding, we give advice and Nell, who has brought white
fabrics, shows us how to make our own sanitary pads. The round is ended
with Dora telling the story about Nicole and her “first blood” ritual. Nicole,
whom we met in chapter 1, was the first girl in the community to have a
menstruation ritual for real and, in 1984, the only one. Dora tells us how they
did it.This is a very moving story which in particular interests Anna, who will
be the first among the women present to have teenage daughters.
In spite of different sexual identities, lifestyles and values, and regardless of
whether we have experienced childbirth, we have bonded as a common,
naked body and, for now, defined “woman”: she is a being who bleeds
monthly.

Coven life: perfect love and perfect trust

Judith, Megan and Lisa felt overwhelmed with nudity, the demand for
intimacy and the untraditional lifestyles represented by a majority of the
women in the class, and decided not to partake in the transition from class to
coven. But the other women, Anna, Susan, Artemis, Ruth and Nell, were
enthusiastic – both with the class and each other – and decided to form a
coven. With Artemis’s friend Tanya, who joined at this point, and myself, the
group counted seven women.The coven constituted itself in November 1984
and has met regularly every month since. Seventeen years later (in 2001) it
includes exactly the same women, even though some have been gone for
periods of time due to travelling and “temporary” residence outside the San
Francisco area. Susan and Artemis have continued to come to coven meetings
even after moving to the Compost Ranch in Sonoma. I am on a life-long
leave of absence, but was included again in Gossip when I returned from
Norway to do regular fieldwork, starting in November 1988.
Every coven has its individual characteristics. What marks Gossip is: (1)
stability: no change of people; (2) multigenerationalism: differences in age
ranged between 20 and 38 years in 1984; (3) nondogmatism: strong anarchist
bent; (4) nonelaborate rituals: simple magic focused on supporting daily life
activities and turmoil; (5) emotional intimacy and support: check-in as an
independent, ongoing ritual element; (6) emphasis on sexual identity: affirming
interest in nonmonogamy and bisexuality; (7) sensuality: emphasis on body
celebration, nakedness, food, gossip, joking relations, and “having a good
time”; (8) a certain moral relativism: strong impact from the social sciences
and an academic way of thinking; and finally (9) low profile on marking
opinions: avoidance of intellectual arguing, standpoint-taking and confrontation
of differences and disagreements.
Some of these characteristics were already initiated in class and continued
to have an impact as the coven developed its own style. The heritage from
class is obvious in the areas that I have called (5) emotional intimacy and
228 Priestesses of the craft

support, (6) emphasis on sexual identity and (7) sensuality.The gossip element
was not introduced in class but was added by Ruth, Anna and Nell, who have
picked up the supposedly positive social importance of gossip from their
comparative cultural studies in the social sciences. Ruth, especially, firmly
believes that gossip is the social glue in small-scale societies, including both a
caring for other people, sharing of information across group membership and
social control of potential rule-breakers. One of her friends wrote an article
about the topic in the Reclaiming Newsletter, stating that

Gossip serves as an opportunity to mirror the events in our lives by the

reactions of others . . . . Gossip helps to establish “norms” of behaviours.
By circulating certain positive or negative information about individuals
or situations, communities sanction or condemn these behaviours . . . .
Don’t cease feasting and gossiping, just be more conscious of its power.11

The gossip-and-food element has become a strong identity for the coven, and
from early on the women for fun chose it as their slogan, “Gossip now, gossip
later, never cease feasting”.
Stability is another important feature of the coven. Stability is the result of a
highly developed sensitivity to not confronting differences and disagreements,
not “breaking” into the interior person but instead encouraging the skills of
active listening. A focus on discussions and disagreements, or a demand for
“complete honesty”, or for “political correctness”, will tend to split a group.
The elders of the coven, Ruth and Anna, have especially represented this
attitude with active support from Susan and Artemis.
Backing off from too much social interaction is also a strategy to keep the
coven intact.This avoidance is, of course, relative as long as Anna, Ruth, Susan
and Artemis are active in the broader Reclaiming community and thus meet
regularly on various social occasions, from political meetings and actions to
community rituals. Nell and Tanya only attend public rituals. They do not
identify themselves as belonging to the Reclaiming community, although they
are members of a Reclaiming coven. In any event, the goal for Witches’ coven
life stated above, is to experience “perfect love and perfect trust”. This goal
seems almost unobtainable in real life. Its modified version in Gossip can be
summarized as “respect for your sister’s identity and selfhood”. Learning and
practising respect within the frameworks of ritualized sisterhood obviously
involve abstinence from too much social interaction outside coven life, as well
as abstinence from opinionated discussions and moral judgement, and from
the urge to fix or correct other people’s lives. It involves, in other words, a
refusal to reenact the vertical and moralistic mother–daughter prototype in
our culture and its unclear distinctions between self and other. This, however,
applies only to the sociality of ordinary consciousness: in ritual space, Gossip
women merge as one unified “self ”, again and again.
Another reason that Gossip and other Reclaiming covens are of a relatively
long-lasting character is that the focus for coven rituals is always the joys and
 Women’s mysteries: creating a female symbolic order 229

sorrows of ordinary, daily life. The coveners work together on behalf of

themselves and not on behalf of abstract ideological/political goals or out of
an obligation to ritualize mythical narratives. The weakness of ideological
rituals in creating stability in small groups is that political climates and the
“good cause” always change. The weakness of only ritualizing foundational
myths is the implicit demand to believe in the basic narrative of the myth.
But, faith in myth is always in danger of turning into a loss of faith in myth,
and if such happens, it may split a small circle. To ritualize ordinary life,
however, is to interpret the here-and-now within the context of a simple
spiritual framework.This ritualizing strategy is relatively more stable because it
is experienced as more adventurous and more true. It is nonrepetitive and
nonpredictable, and its actuality and closeness to individual fate deeply engage
the people involved.12
A last important feature that has contributed to Gossip’s success, is the
women’s growing distaste for elaborate rituals and occult paraphernalia.
During the first years of coven life, a coven ritual was always well prepared by
one or two of its members. They would prepare the room, including ritual
equipment, in proper colours, propose a ritual theme, and have a planned
outline for how the ritual should proceed to work the theme. As the years
have passed, the ritual structure has become more and more relaxed. Today,
they do not agree upon the ritual theme or its procedure until after check-in.
Then is chosen a theme that is related to what is actually going on in one of
the women’s lives. Maybe she needs physical or emotional healing, strength,
clarity, etc. When a theme is chosen, the women in Gossip perform their
magic without any ritual tools and artifacts at all, except maybe candles if it is
dark and flowers to make the room pretty. They only bring to circle their
bodies and their voices, sometimes also a drum. Chanting, energy work,
trances, laying on of hands, spontaneous words, sounds and movements – these
are their modes of doing magic. But, even though they no longer use the
Witches’ tools or symbolic pillars of correspondence, they still use the
structure and symbolism of the basic ritual outline, as well as the mythological
imagery of the tradition when doing trances. And though there are no altars
in the room and no altar objects, they still cast the circle, call the elements and
the Goddess.
The coven Gossip has also changed vocabulary over time to designate its
internal changes regarding rituals. When they did ritual the “proper way” as
learned in class and observed in public rituals (well planned, with tools, etc.),
the women talked about “having circle”. Today, when they ritualize solely to
cope with existential matters in individual women’s lives, they call their
gatherings “doing magic.”The Gossip women are conscious and proud of this
change. One of the first things Anna told me about when I returned to San
Francisco in 1988 was the changes I would see when joining the coven again:

The circle has matured since you left. Now we move energy intuitively,
with no words at all. And when check-in is done, we just know what to
230 Priestesses of the craft

do and how. Probably because we are more sure about ourselves, and
really know the kernel in what we are doing. As you know, nobody likes
structure – except me. Can you believe it, I am the most conservative in
the group! The good thing, though, is that we experiment with the form
constantly, and do not feel restricted to the “right way”.You will soon see
it for yourself.

The other side to this change is that none of these anarchist, “rebellious”
women has asked for formal initiation or actively pursued this particular path
of the goddess, except two (one being me; see the Introduction). To some
of the older, initiated Witches in the community, this is Gossip’s weakness,
keeping it away from real magical growth. But this is a dubious opinion, since
no other covens in the community (to my knowledge) have managed to stay
together in love and trust for 17 years.
Half a year later I interviewed my circle sisters individually and asked them
what the coven meant to them. Susan had no doubts, declaring:

The circle probably rates as the most important thing in my life – it really
does. It is almost as if Frank [her partner] could leave, and Minerva [her
lover] could leave, and if I still have the circle then I’ll be OK. I get so
much healing out of coming together with these particular women. The
magic that happened between us in the beginning has lasted throughout,
and the transformation of my problems with jealousy would not have
happened without the coven.

Anna, who at the time had been betrayed by her lover, was grieving. She took
some days off work, called me, and together we went to visit Susan and
Artemis in Sonoma. We circled together, listened to her, held her when she
cried – and within hours she expressed that “her spirit was returning”. Later
that evening she explained to some other women what a coven was like:

We can do magic for anything, personal or political stuff. But most of all,
we love each other and are always there for each other. Men and women
lovers come and go, children come and go, but we never leave. We
practice the magic of love.You know, the whole issue of perfect love and
perfect trust in Witchcraft. There is something totally unobtainable about
it, and also there is something to it.

Nell is the youngest in the coven, eighteen years younger than Ruth and
Anna. She emphasized her process from being a kind of outsider to becoming
a full member:

For a very long time I felt I didn’t know the other women that well. At
some point I was not sure what I was doing there. But something still
kept me going and I think it was really enjoying hearing about other
 Women’s mysteries: creating a female symbolic order 231

women’s lives – women who were very different from me, and much
older. I have learned a lot from this, and in important situations Ruth
and Anna have been my role models. Now I feel that the primary focus
is not the magic we do or don’t, but my close relationship with and love
for the women in circle. My magic has also changed. I don’t do spells
anymore. Instead of asking “my will be done” I ask to be on “the right
path”. My experience is that I don’t always know what is best for me.To
put a lot of energy into something that may turn out “wrong” is not very
meaningful.

To Tanya and Artemis, the coven was important because they felt accepted and
included as who they are. Over time, they had been given challenges from the
other women that helped each of them to grow. Ruth had, since day one,
been more intrigued by check-ins and emotional bonding than by trances and
spells:

For years we have shared a spiritual path and confessed our lives without
being judged.That in itself creates bonding and love. If I am sick, depressed
or broke, the first thing I’ll do is to call my circle-sisters, and not my other
friends. And I know they’ll be there, and that they can help me.

All the women in Gossip were sure they could never have developed this kind
of love and trust for each other in a mixed group of both women and men.
This is a common experience among Reclaiming women, often explained
with reference to the sexual tensions/attractions that always seem to show up
in mixed groups and that, over time, tend to split them. However, this is not
an argument to explain the social relations within Gossip since a minority in
this coven are heterosexuals, whereas the others are bisexuals and lesbians.The
potential for sexual tension/attraction has therefore not been ruled out. One
probability is that the group is merely manifesting a general ethical potential
present within any community of women, almost as if love and trust are
the “real secrecy” of womanhood when undistorted by socialization, male
dominance and patriarchal society. Another (and more likely) probability is that
Anna and Ruth’s cultural strategy (“active listening, no arguing”) represents the
true magic of the group.
Interesting, so far, is the fact that change of sexual identity from bisexual to
heterosexual or lesbian has not been celebrated or ritualized – neither in
Gossip nor in the larger Reclaiming community – although it usually involves
a major change in a woman’s life, not least if she has children. Choice of
sexual partner, on the other hand, qualifies for extensive ritual celebrations. Is
the fact that transformations of sexual identity are not celebrated or made
occasions for ritual reflection a sign that the Goddess, after all, is not connected
to the sensuality of human sexual activity, only to sexuality as a general idea?
Or is it simply that sexual identity is seen as an ideological preference, as a
disembodied, rational, free choice, which can be done over and over again,
232 Priestesses of the craft

limited only by the ideal options of modernity and not by any innate bodily
dispositions or desires?
Such questions are seldom raised in Reclaiming community, and never in
Gossip.Thus, the emphasis on blood as the basic commonality of womanhood,
rather than on women’s sexuality or procreative abilities – which might other-
wise be expected from people confessing an erotic worldview and a Goddess
who is continually birthing – may be regarded partly as an emic statement
that genderedness, after all, is more important than sexual identity, partly as a
strategy to avoid complicated reasoning. From an analytical stance, however,
women’s blood is nothing but a metonymic representative for the totality of
women’s bodies, including what is seen as its anatomical, libidinal, procreational,
mental, psychological and emotional features.

Women’s “first blood” and feminism

When Gossip had existed for four years, Anna’s daughter Sonia turned
thirteen. She soon started to bleed and a circle of women performed a “first
blood” ritual for her and with her. One purpose of such a modernist rite of
passage is to reverse the mainly negative connotations of women’s menstrual
flux in western culture. Furthermore, to revalue menstruation is an attempt to
revalue the female body, the female being, and female sociality, as well as the
female genealogies of mothers and daughters. Before discussing Sonia’s “first
blood” ritual, let us briefly look at the ideological reasoning legitimizing both
this ritual and the adult imitative counterpart performed in Dora and Deadly’s
class.
When constructing Sonia’s ritual, the women were inspired by menstruation
narratives of tribal cultures. Buckley and Gottlieb (1988) argue that in tribal
societies menstrual blood is usually regarded as a primal substance infused
with plural and ambiguous meanings. Depending on the context, it is seen
both as a polluting, malignant force and as a purifying life-force. A men-
struating woman is thus powerful and can affect nature positively as well as
negatively. As life-force, menstrual blood is viewed as a manifestation of
creative power, particularly in the sense of fertility.The use of menstrual blood
both in fertility rituals and in love charms is widespread.
In other contexts, a menstruating woman is regarded as polluted. She
cannot cook or approach holy ground, crops, cattle or men. Neither can she
participate in religious ceremonies. Otherwise she will pollute the surroundings.
A woman may also be defined as unclean for a certain period after childbirth,
in which case she has to be purified by a priest before reentering the
community.13 In the Ancient Israelite religion, such a pollution theory was
codified as normative, and the tradition was adopted both in Christianity and
Islam.14 To what degree prescribed rules of clean and unclean were actually
practised in daily life, in a rigorous way, is another question. But regardless of
the answer, western Jewish and Christian traditions have, on a symbolic level,
conferred upon women’s blood a negative value.
 Women’s mysteries: creating a female symbolic order 233

When Reclaiming women invent a ritual to celebrate “first blood” for their
daughters, they want to challenge any assumptions still alive in western culture
and in the girl that a bleeding woman is unclean. As witnessed in the
“Women’s Magic” class, they believe that such a notion is oppressive. To be
raised with menstruation as a shameful condition, a taboo or even as a non-
subject is said to mark girls’ and women’s apprehension of their female bodies
and selves negatively.
Menstruation in modernity is not so much associated with shame as with a
physical handicap that negatively differentiates women from men. A woman is
culturally encouraged to eradicate this “handicap” as much as possible, and she
is offered different means to help her in this effort. She can make her blood
invisible and without odour by using tampons and thereby appear as a man’s
equal. If she has menstrual cramps, a doctor can prescribe analgesic medication.
This way her “handicap” will not affect her labour and she can work on equal
terms with a man. In various ways she can try to “forget” the fact that her
body is part of a natural, reproductive cycle with intervals similar to the lunar
phase, and which repeats itself 10 to 13 times a year for maybe 40 years.
There has, to a certain extent, been a joint attempt of the corporate world
and “sexual equality” feminism to make women’s periods socially invisible or
unimportant. The purpose of this “alliance” is to help eliminate gender roles
and the notion that women’s biology is women’s fate. According to these
feminists, women have an equally efficient working capacity as men. The fact
that a woman bleeds and gives birth is not an indication of her natural
predisposition for housework and intellectual inferiority, nor of her lacking
talent for statesmanship. Psychological differences between women and men
are viewed as determined by socialization and imitation (culture) alone, not by
bodily constitution or bodily drives (nature). The body is rather seen as an
uninteresting biological constant and the circumstances around women’s
bodily reproductive capacities are perceived as purely “technical”. An un-
intended implication of this position is that western hierarchies between
culture and nature easily are repeated. Nature becomes raw material, a
technical object, to those cultivating, social forces that really creates human
beings and infuses meaning.
Defenders of “sexual polarity” are of a different opinion. They argue that
the modernist effort to make a woman’s bodily distinctions, such as menstrual
flux, invisible and unimportant is to ask her to suppress her femininity and
give away her female power.This suppression also implies the reinforcement of
“culture over nature”, which already – in western societies – is associated with
male over female. However, the danger of just turning hierarchies on their
heads in favour of women is always striking in essentialist feminism. This may
happen when menstrual blood is seen as a metonymic representative of both
womanhood and Goddess (divine life force). In the mythic narrative about the
origin of blood ritual told in the “Women’s Magic” class, negative analogies
were made between women’s paradisiacal sisterhood on a remote island and
the community of men. In fact, sexual difference was represented as a loss, and
234 Priestesses of the craft

the very presence of a man caused disharmony and quarrelling between

women, destroying their peaceful community. Their dispute could only be
healed by the Goddess, and only among those who listened to her and
celebrated her mandatory blood ritual. This theme is repeated by Anna when
describing coven life to some friends: perfect and divine love can only be
attained within a community of goddess-worshipping women. The Goddess
has now assumed a monistic, static character and stands in apparent contra-
diction to the erotic polarity usually ascribed to the universe; for as formulated
by Starhawk, “Desire is the primal energy [of the universe], and that energy is
erotic: the attraction of lover to beloved, of planet to star, the lust of electron
for proton” (Starhawk 1979a:25).
The social effects of performing “first blood” rituals may, however, be very
positive on the community at large; and the symbolic meanings structuring
this ritual process are of course more complex than the metonymic blood
component indicates. Let us, therefore, return to Sonia’s blood ritual to observe
how a young girl is taught to value her body, her sexuality, her “femininity”, as
well as her community, within the context of feminist Witchcraft.

Sonia’s blood ritual: learning from women and community

Reclaiming women, and in particular those in Gossip, were excited when
Sonia started menstruating. The celebration of Nicole’s first blood, which
Dora told us about in the “Women’s Magic” class, had been an important
event, and people waited for the second young Reclaiming girl to enter
puberty in order to establish this celebration as an option in the “Reclaiming
tradition”.
Sonia was raised as a pagan and agreed early to have a blood ritual per-
formed for her. When turning 13 she also attended her first Reclaiming class
for teenagers. Otherwise, she is mostly interested in heavy metal music and
classical ballet. She has danced since she was 5 years old and her goal is to
become a professional dancer. Sonia’s parents, Anna and Richard, who both
work as social scientists, joined Reclaiming when their daughter was 7. Anna’s
religious background is otherwise Methodism and Unitarianism, while Richard
is an ex-Catholic. In the late fall of 1988, Anna started to prepare for Sonia’s
blood ritual by making a long, hooded ritual robe in dark green wool with
black silk lining as a gift for her daughter. She also asked Sonia to think of a
new name for herself.
In early February 1989, the blood finally came, and everybody was happy.
Anna took the day off and Sonia skipped school. Mother and daughter had
lunch in a nice restaurant. Here the two of them made plans for the blood
ritual. They agreed upon which women should be invited to the “women’s
mysteries” part – and thereby to the planning group – and who was to be
invited for the community ritual and the party afterward.
Firmly guided by her mother, Sonia chose 11 women for the “women’s
mysteries”. They included all the women in her mother’s coven, as well as
 Women’s mysteries: creating a female symbolic order 235

Dora, Nicole, Hera, Starhawk,Terry (a friend of the family) and her Unitarian
grandmother (mother’s mother). I was lucky to be part of the event since it
happened during one of my fieldwork periods, and within the context of my
coven.15
The leading figure at the planning meeting for Sonia’s first blood ritual,
was Hera, Nicole’s mother. She agreed that Sonia’s ritual should be personal
and different from Nicole’s. But she was eager to make sure that we included
certain elements from that first ritual in order to create continuity and
tradition. She wanted these elements to cover a ritual tying of mother and
child, as well as the basic structure of the ritual process established with
Nicole’s ritual. This structure was, according to Hera, tripartite. It should
comprise ritual time for Sonia’s separation from childhood, a time for her
transition to puberty and a time for her reintegration back into community as
a new person. Hera had learned this ritual structure (separation, transition,
reintegration) from reading Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner’s “what”
theory on the essentials of coming of age rituals globally.
Sonia did not take part in the actual planning of her ritual and was
completely ignorant of the ritual structure and of what would happen to her
in the blood rite. She was only asked to find a new name for herself and to
prepare a personal gift to the community. Everything else was a secret.
In chapter 1, I described the first part of Sonia’s blood rite, how she was
separated from the larger community and taken by a group of women –
including her mother and grandmother – to Lincoln Park. Here she was tied
to her mother with a cord and later cut loose, accompanied with the words:
“When you were born, you came to the world tied to your mother’s body. As the
umbilical cord had to be cut at that time for you to live, so the cord between the two of
you has to be cut now. But the bond between you shall never be cut, because that is a
bond by heart.” Let me continue the narrative from this point on.

Transition and reintegration vis-à-vis women

The time has come for Sonia to confront her aloneness and be the subject of
a transitional journey. From Lincoln Park, there is a beautiful view to other
parks, paths and roads. In the remote distance we can barely see the head of a
statue depicting the Roman goddess Diana. Starhawk points to the statue and
asks Sonia to run over there alone. Sonia hesitates and argues that she might
get lost. Starhawk answers that now she has to run, alone, through the forest.
“The cord is cut, and this you must do on your own. And you will make it; don’t be
afraid. When you reach the statue, go close to her and meditate on the virgin goddess
Diana, and your own coming into maidenhood.”
Sonia does as she is told, and the rest of us follow at a slow pace. We carry
with us plenty of flowers, and when we finally reach the statue, Sonia is there.
We do not ask what she has experienced on her little journey or if she was
“taught” anything when meditating on the meaning of this ancient female
deity.We just form a circle in complete silence a few feet away. Nicole, the 18
236 Priestesses of the craft

year old among us, gathers the flowers still in our arms into a big basket, walks
over to Sonia, and hands them to her. Then she takes Sonia by the hand and
leads her into the centre of the circle of adult women. Sonia’s grandmother is
seated under a pine tree, watching the ritual from there.
We stand close together with our arms around each other. Starhawk starts
drumming as we teach Sonia who the Goddess actually is by repeatedly
singing, “Listen, listen, listen to my heart’s song; I will never forget you, I will never
forsake you. I will always love you, I will always be with you.” Some people,
walking by, stop to listen and watch. Sonia, still in the centre, is shy and blushes
all over her face. For a long time she only stares down at her feet. But we
continue to sing, and after a while she raises her head, as if the spirit moves
her to a place of strength. She then looks calmly into our eyes, one by one, as
she slowly turns clockwise in the circle. To watch this shift from shyness to
calm and conscious eye contact is a moving experience, and some of the
women, including her mother, start to weep (while still singing) over this
apparent sign of an emerging adult who dares to be acknowledged by a
community “of equals”. All kinds of feelings and memories are aroused in the
women present – their own menstruation histories, the way they were
introduced to the adult world, the privilege of being part of creating Sonia’s
blood ritual, dreams and hopes for their own daughters and their futures. For
not only are we participating in shaping Sonia’s gender identity and sense of a
spirit within, but we are also remodelling our own.
The second part of the ritual takes place in Anna’s living room, where all
share of their adult “women’s mysteries” experiences with her daughter
(Sonia’s grandmother does not come with us for this part of the ritual).We are
seated on the floor, with Sonia included in the circle, although not yet
integrated into the women’s community. She still experiences transition, while
we represent the elders – those who have gone before her. Now we prepare to
tell her the female heroines’ stories. Within the context of ritual space, our
speech may also be heard as the speech of Goddess.
This rite of puberty does not cut ties between mother and daughter by
physically (or permanently) separating the daughter from her mother, for
example, as in patrilocal marriage. But the old relationship between Sonia and
Anna is changed and takes on a new symbolic status: they are becoming
“sisters”. A taboo in the traditional mother–daughter relationship in the US is
broken, for Sonia shall not only hear about blood but also about sexuality and
the women’s experiences with men – the kind of men who, in Sonia’s eyes,
are “fathers”.
We have brought food for a potluck lunch, and as we eat, seated in a circle,
we tell Sonia our personal stories about blood. A majority of the women have
no good memories of their first menstruation. Ruth had no idea what it was
before the blood came pouring out of her. She was scared, and her mother
was shameful when telling her what it was. Susan’s Jewish mother was hit in
the face by Susan’s Jewish grandmother when she started bleeding. Nell, on
the other hand, says that she looked forward to her first blood and that her
 Women’s mysteries: creating a female symbolic order 237

mother was always open about menstruation as well as sexuality. Starhawk says
that we tell these stories in order to remember all women’s stories, so the
painful experiences do not have to be repeated. Instead we share with the
intention of creating something new.
The women then tell stories about how their partners react when they
“have their moon”. Terry’s husband cannot stand to see her sanitary pads nor
to caress her body when she menstruates. Terry herself feels strong and open
during this period, but her husband thinks that she represents the rawest in
nature and that her blood is disgusting. Hera’s husband regards her blood as
the most natural thing in the world. He always wants to make love to her
when she is “on her moon,” and afterward they make fun of his red penis.
Artemis wants to be alone when bleeding. She meditates a lot and looks at her
blood period as a renewal of body and mind.
Nicole gives advice about body flux and warns against certain contra-
ceptives. Tanya informs Sonia about how the body temperature drops during
ovulation and how day-to-day knowledge of body temperature can be used as
a natural contraceptive. Dora says that she uses her blood for working magic
and that there are different forms of magic corresponding to the cycles of the
body and the moon.The waxing moon almost pours out, in a literal sense, the
energy of extension and initiation of new projects. It is the time for magic
focused on exterior action and results. Full moon is a time for celebrations.The
waning moon contains the energy of contraction and inwardness. It is a time
for meditation and for the magic that truly helps to let go of what has been.
Anna tells Sonia that she does not choose whether she wants to bleed or
not. She shares this experience with all women throughout the world,
irrespective of race and culture, whether she likes it or not. When celebrating
blood ritual, women remember that all females are sisters, even though the
differences between them are as many as the stars.The blood is a sign that the
woman’s body is sacred, because the cycles of the blood have their archetype
in the universe.The same force moving the ocean between the tides is moving
the egg in a woman’s womb, and this force is lunar. That’s why women say, “I
am on my moon” when they bleed. A menstruating woman is similar to the
moon; she is powerful and energetic.
Sonia listens to these stories, advice and teachings in complete silence, with
a shy smile on her face. She is given the opportunity to ask us questions, but
has none. Then we dress her up in a new silk outfit and wrap her in Anna’s
gift: the ritual cloak of green wool. Anna says that the cloak is magical and can
be used for dual purposes: one side is ordinary, to keep warm; the other side is
magical, to enchant frogs into princes! Then Sonia reveals to us her new
magical name, Aurora, designating her new status. Mother and daughter enter
the centre of the circle and we sing to them, “It’s the blood of the Ancients that
runs through our veins/and the forms pass, but the circle of life remains.” We raise a
cone of power as we sing, which in the end is “grounded” in Sonia.
This new Sonia/Aurora, who is now reintegrated into social life as part of
women’s community, is finally honoured with gifts: silk underwear, necklaces,
238 Priestesses of the craft

goddess figures, a belt, condoms, a basket full of magical remedies (fabrics,

buttons, shells, etc.) to make spells, as well as the ritual knife, the athame, used
earlier to cut the cord between mother and daughter in Lincoln park.
Starhawk’s coven has made her a special necklace of black and red beads,
feathers and cowrie shells. A cowrie shell is said to have the form of the
female sexual organs. Sonia is told that when she wears the necklace with the
biggest cowrie shell turning inward, she is blessed by the Goddess. When the
shell turns outward, it symbolizes fertility. Sonia must wear it this way only
when she explicitly wants to become pregnant.

Re-integration vis-à-vis the community

The third and final part of the ritual takes place in the Women’s Building in
the Mission. We arrive in the early evening and are greeted by almost 60
guests, including Sonia’s little sister. Richard has arranged the room and
prepared the party together with his male coveners. They have made four
beautiful altars, one for each element, and a huge potluck dinner table in the
north. Many dishes on the menu are red, like salmon and strawberry mousse.
A big cake with Aurora written on top is the dessert.
The gathering begins with ritual. Richard bids his daughter welcome as
the young woman Sonia, who is now initiated to the women’s community,
and as the magical person Aurora, who has now decided to walk the path of
the Goddess and to learn to bend, and to be bent by, the world. It is time for
the Reclaiming community to honour and celebrate this person. The ritual
includes the traditional steps, and I shall describe only the magical work
designed in particular for this occasion:
1. After creating sacred space and calling the Goddess, women pick a red
bead and men a white one from a little jar that is passed around. They
“charge” the beads by blowing into them good wishes and blessings for Sonia.
Afterward the beads are given to Sonia, who is instructed to make a necklace
of them as a sign of this community’s love for her.
2. Sonia gives us her gift.While a singer performs “There is no end to the circle, no
end” – well known to the celebrants from the annual Samhain ritual (cf. chapter 6)
– Sonia dances classical ballet in a white robe in the middle of the circle.
3. We all dance the Spiral Dance in a new choreography.Women and men
are divided by gender and age groups. Starhawk walks first with her drum,
then Sonia, then the row of women from the eldest to the youngest child, and
finally the row of men from youngest to eldest. When the energy reaches its
peak in a cone of power, the women suddenly move to the centre of the
circle, pick Sonia up and set her on the top of the cone; they throw her in the
air and rock her. After grounding, there is another gift-giving ceremony with
Sonia seated in the centre of the circle. When the ritual ends, there is finally
rock music, dancing and a potluck dinner.

* * *
 Women’s mysteries: creating a female symbolic order 239

Whether this ritualized process helped Sonia to establish an identity as a

sexually mature young woman and to appreciate herself for who she is, was
too early to tell in 1989. Just after performing Sonia’s blood ritual, Nicole told
me that she was mainly embarrassed during her ritual five years before. She
recalls that her main reason for letting it happen was to satisfy her mother and
her expectations. But today she is happy she did it and feels that the event was
a special gift that marked her value as a female person. Even though Nicole is
not active in the Reclaiming community, it was important for her to
participate in Sonia’s rite of passage. She relived her own ritual and was an
equal member of an adult group of women – all of whom she highly respects.
To the adult participants, Sonia’s rite of passage was a major event and
commented upon for a long time afterward. One of the male elders told me
that pagan rituals performed for the younger generation give him a feeling of
being part of a profound process of cultural change. Another person made a
point of how such rituals strengthen the bonds within the community and
confer new meaning upon everybody’s experience of continually growing and
changing. A third one said that, to her, the ritual was a most beautiful
expression of kinship and lived life, and picked out Sonia’s dance in the centre
of the community ritual as the most moving point:

You know, in our rites of passage, a girl is celebrated because she starts
bleeding and enters a new phase. But the maid also shows the community
who this little puppet who is about to blossom eventually will become.
She tells us of her being and of her way, and this is what happened when
Sonia danced for us.

Some months after her initiation Sonia wrote a letter to the Reclaiming
Newsletter. She acknowledged the ritual and the gifts and told that she now –
after the ritual – was permitted to go to the late-night movies. She expressed
pride, but also confessed that the worst part had been to run up to the Diana
statue, “. . . because I was out in the public in my ritual robe . . . by the road,
with people watching!!” The best part of ritual was when the women lifted
her up in the middle of the Spiral Dance:“It was great! I felt secure, warm and
full of powerful positive energy.” She ended the letter by encouraging other
young girls in the community to also have a blood ritual performed, because
it is “special, powerful, memorable and something to cherish”.16
Later, I asked Sonia if anything now distinguished her from her friends
since they did not have a blood ritual performed and she did. She said, “Not
really. Maybe that I always look at the sky and am conscious about the
formation of clouds. I don’t think they do.” One and a half years later she
confided to me that she was tired of Reclaiming people and all their talk
about love, but never practising it. Similarly to Nicole, she insisted that she
only did the blood ritual because her mother wanted it. “I did the ritual for
my mom. I was not really part of it. It was more important for the women
than for me. But I liked the community ritual a lot.” At this point, Sonia did
240 Priestesses of the craft

not identify with the “inner circle” who defined her “women’s mysteries” but
with her father’s circle: the larger non-esoteric community.
Sonia went through some turbulent and rebellious years during her puberty,
but eventually turned out to be a mature young woman. She went to college
to study dance and has indeed realized her dream: she has become a professional
dancer and body worker. Like Nicole, she now appreciates her blood ritual
and identifies with its intimate “women-only” structure. She also identifies as
a pagan and participates in blood rites for other young girls in the community
as often as she is invited. When her sister finally came of age, she played
Nicole’s role in the “women’s mysteries” part, leading her into the sacred
circle with flowers in her arms.

Rites of puberty for girls and boys

When planning Sonia’s blood ritual, the women primarily wanted to give
Sonia an experience of women’s community as sacred space, to give her a
good feeling about her female body, and to encourage her to break away from
the bonds of childhood and take a new step. They also wanted to find an
acceptable way to include men in the ritual process. Nevertheless, the ritual
symbolism and acts also expressed a certain codified knowledge about what it
means to be a woman in contrast to being a man. Let us now look at the
different meanings conveyed through this ritual.
Reclaiming’s celebration of female puberty is, first of all, an extended part
of their critical discourse on nature and culture in general. The formalized
interactions between ritualized space and ritualized bodies were, therefore, not
meant as a tribute to conventional definitions of the categories “nature” and
“culture”, “woman” and “man” – a convention in which “female is to male as
nature is to culture.”17 A young woman is ideally celebrated for her earthiness
and connection with the lunar cycles, for blood and ovary and her potential to
give birth, for breasts and growth of hair, for the body growing in strength and
beauty, for sexuality, for separation from mother and father, and for her
abilities to create with head, heart and hands. A young boy is similarly
celebrated for his connection to the wheel of the year, for his sexuality and his
seed that carries the potential for new life, for cracking voice and growth of
hair, for the body growing in strength and beauty, for sexuality, for separation
from mother and father, and for his abilities to create with head, heart and
hands.The two young people are, in this ecological perspective, not celebrated
for cultural gender or gendered moral characteristics but for physiology, for
life itself.
Nevertheless, by its very happening, this celebration also integrates a young
girl in a symbolic discourse named “women’s mysteries”, just as a boy is by the
“men’s mysteries.” As already pointed out: from an emic point of view,
“mysteries” refer to those functions and cycles in women’s and men’s bodies
connecting them to the universe, to nature, to the sacred. A female is said to
pass through three monthly cycles (or mysteries) and three transitional stages
 Women’s mysteries: creating a female symbolic order 241

in linear time, all corresponding to three aspects of the “Moon Goddess”:

Maiden (new moon), Mother (full moon), and Crone (dark moon). During the
course of her life, a woman Witch will first be initiated to Maidenhood, that is,
to knowledge of her own body, its abilities and its relation to the larger world.
Second, she will be initiated to Motherhood, that is, to a sexually mature,
creative and powerful woman. Third, she is initiated as an elder, as an
experienced wise woman, a Crone, after her menopause.18
The picture is, however, more complicated. Sonia was not only celebrated
for physiology and as partaker in a cosmic drama mirrored in her body, but
she was also included in a social community of women. This community is
culturally determined, with its own narrative and interpretation of what it
means to be a woman. As explicitly accounted for when describing Dora and
Deadly’s class, “mysteries” also refers to this narrative. In this room, which has
the sexed body as criterion for membership, Sonia’s cultural gender identity is
created by reference to cultural definitions of sexual differences and by
pointing out similarities in women’s experiences as opposed to men’s.The fact
that women menstruate is, within this framework, transformed into a valuable
quality to the female gender as such. It links her to the universe in an
exclusive manner; it gives her a special capability for practising magic. As soon
as they enter this world of gender-segregated essentialism, Reclaiming women
do symbolically rank themselves above men.
Are there any similarities between Sonia’s blood rite and girl’s puberty rites
cross-culturally? According to Bruce Lincoln’s observations, the custom of
placing a novice on a symbolic pedestal in her menstruation ritual, even
speaking of her as “goddess”, is common in traditional cultures. But he regards
this as a purely illusionist strategy to teach the girl to accept social inferiority
since she, in most cases, is not expected to gain access to political power
(Lincoln 1981:106). The nature and significance of female initiations are
therefore more cosmic than social: “Rather than changing women’s status,
initiation changes their fundamental being, addressing ontological concerns
rather than hierarchical ones” (Lincoln 1981:103). If we, however, compare the
rites of puberty for girls and boys in Reclaiming, we find that both are
“feminine” as defined by Lincoln: also a boy’s puberty rite addresses onto-
logical concerns rather than hierarchical and social ones.This gender harmony
among young people in Reclaiming is the result of a conscious “sexual
equality” strategy in a late modern pagan community in San Francisco. It does
not stem from a desire to teach either girls or boys social inferiority.

The difficult politics of women’s mysteries

The “glorification” of femaleness and women’s community yielded in the
above is not necessarily in accordance with all Reclaiming Witches’ daily
life experiences or intellectual integrity. But most women seem to grant
exception to their intellectual struggle with these questions every time they
participate in gender-segregated rituals. Thus, these social occasions take on
242 Priestesses of the craft

the quality of liminal communitas in which it is fully accepted, again and again,
to equate femaleness with the powers of ultimate reality, to mirror the Goddess’s
cosmic movements in their own womanly bodies, and to confirm themselves as
beautiful, powerful beings, worthy of love and respect. When the ritual is over,
they return to their families, communities and society at large, apparently with
much confidence, ready to reenter social discourses that may or may not pertain
to deeper nuance and complexity in regard to sexual difference.
But some refuse, or lack the ability, or are not helped properly, to reenter
the consciousness and categories of mixed-gender society. Their discourse on
the Goddess and her supposed relation to sexual difference is disassociated
from its original context and formulated in terms resembling lesbian-separatist
Dianic Witchcraft.These Witches treat the Craft solely as a “woman’s religion”,
and in ritual they only call the Goddess. When I participated in Z. Budapest’s
class in Oakland in February 1989, I was taught a reversed Catholicism that
stated that the Goddess moves through women rather than through men
because only women represent her true image. Consequently, she can only be
served by women priestesses. High priestess Budapest explained that

Goddess always comes to us first because the female species is closer to

her – although she can, if she wants to, move through men. In fact, men
and women are not different, men are just another kind of woman.
The female X-chromosome is basic to both sexes, and not the male Y-
chromosome. Men have a little larger sex-organ, and they are not as pretty
as we are. But Mama made a variation for some reason.

In the 1980s, this degradation of men could also be heard in the Reclaiming
community, although mostly as jokes at women’s gatherings. Songs and singing,
and the accompanying twisting of lyrics, were a popular medium through
which it was accepted to ridicule men.
How did Reclaiming men respond to essentialist Witches, to those who
never left the liminal space of women’s spirituality groups but ended up
internalizing derogative notions of men as a normative, social paradigm, or to
the fact that they could be ridiculed at gender-segregated gatherings, a
practice obviously inappropriate for men to imitate? In the 1984 fall edition
of Reclaiming Newsletter, the same in which Dora and Deadly announced their
“Women’s Magic” class, another member of the Reclaiming Collective, David
Kubrin, addressed this topic with reference to his 11-year-old son. The boy,
who often accompanied his mother to women-only circles, was frequently
heard singing, “We don’t need the men/we don’t need to have them ‘round,
except for now and then.” Both the content of the song and the fact that his
son had picked it up worried David. He wanted to challenge the confusing
sexual debates in the community and address the role of the God in goddess-
centreed spirituality, “How are we to understand male sexuality? . . . Certainly
talk of the ‘male mysteries’ in whatever men’s magical group I’ve been in were
almost always dominated by nervous jokes”.
 Women’s mysteries: creating a female symbolic order 243

David’s concerns initiated a Newsletter discussion that lasted for several

years, engaging Witches far beyond the Reclaiming community.19 The male
essentialists referred to the occult thesis “as above so below”, and argued that
just as women had goddesses, men needed gods restricted for “male use only”.
Some gay men (Donald and Sparky) could tell of revelations in which a queer
god named “Singing Bear” had revealed himself: “He was all queer. And he
was for queers alone. He could come only when queer voices called to him.”
They introduced a concept of segregated divinity linked up to people’s sexual
differentiation, giving us one god for each orientation: Diana for lesbian
women; Singing Bear for gay men, etc.
Also a female Witch, Rowan, could witness that she had met a male god
who was exclusively for men, his name being “Night Singer”: “The sense was
so strong that this was a male mystery, that his knowledge was not for me . . .
. Where are the men? Will no one search him out?” The point of her
argument was to attract more men to Witchcraft and to make women rethink
their critical attitudes, “Instead of encouraging them to get on with the
important work of reclaiming the Gods and redefining the idea of male and
men, we greet them with suspicious diatribes on male character, and in most
traditions insist that they acknowledge the Goddess as supreme deity.”
Rowan’s essentialism is outstanding since she explicitly refers to the occult
thesis that mundane life mirrors, or should mirror, divine reality: “I want my
sons to grow up in beautiful strength with their special Gods to identify with.
. . . And for this to happen there must be a place for the Gods. In men, in
paganism, in women. As above, so below”.
Rick Dragonstongue, who also is a member of the Reclaiming Collective,
is a woman-identified man, but not gay. He argued against Rowan that, since
women have been oppressed for thousands of years and just recently have
started to claim their power, it is not yet time to balance the Goddess and
God: “Our society as a whole as well as most individuals need the Goddess
more than they need the God right now . . . the only way to approach a
balance of spiritual power between the sexes is for women to assume a greater
ritual importance.” Rick argued in a “sexual equality” fashion in favour of
idealized women against the male essentialist claim of a separate god, but also
against the non idealized, empirical woman, Rowan. Rick was credited by
many Reclaiming women for his bravery and for the politically correct
attitude they felt was expressed by his “courtesy feminism”.
In the years to follow, more and more Reclaiming people expressed being
uncomfortable with vulgar or radical forms of essentialism and with the
tendencies in the community to link morals with biology. And in 1989,
Starhawk finally questioned the traditional identification of Goddess as role
model and of femaleness as a specific quality. When reviewing the 1979
edition of The Spiral Dance in 1989, she wrote:

Today I don’t use the terms female energy and male energy. I don’t
identify femaleness or maleness with specific sets of qualities or predis-
244 Priestesses of the craft

positions. While I have found images of the Goddess empowering to me

as a woman, I no longer look to Goddess and God to define for me what
woman or man should be. For any quality that has been assigned to one
divine gender can elsewhere be found in its opposite. If we say, for
example, “Male energy is aggressive,” I can easily find five aggressive
goddesses without even thinking hard. If we say “Female energy is
nurturing,” we can also find male gods that nurture . . . . The Goddesses
and Gods are not figures for us to copy – they are more like broomsticks:
grab hold, and they will take us away somewhere beyond the boundaries
of our ordinary lives.
(Starhawk 1989a:8)

But, even though Starhawk disassociates herself from the idea of female and
male as “reified qualities, like liquids that could fill us” (1989a:8), she only
rejects a psychological reification theory and its implicit tendency to define
female and male in restricting moral categories, for example, that females are
loving and males are aggressive. But she still clings to “female” and “male” as
linked to life-generating divine forces, even though she hesitates to fill them
with content. As long as “female” is linked both to “woman” and “life-force”,
empirical women will inevitably be said to share an essential similarity with
Goddess that men do not: they give birth, although “this fact” only applies to
her aspect as immanent other-than-deity, literally being the body of the world.
The question is, is this consciously chosen value a fruitful strategy in terms of
creating a more humane society, or is it not? 20
My studies of Reclaiming’s subcultural women’s circles, organized within
the larger gender-inclusive (although predominantly female) community,
have demonstrated that essentialism is used as a strategic device to establish
women-only covens and conduct gender-segregated rituals. In Reclaiming’s
case, these activities have contributed significantly to produce a ritualized
body/magical person with a strong sense of self and of her capacities to love
and bond without submission – an obvious fruit of ritualizing according to a
female symbolic order. The ritualized devotion to Goddess in women-only
circles seems also to have opened a new sensual path to the sacred – in
addition to the powers of nature and the embrace of the lovers: the experience
of “perfect love and perfect trust” in the life and work of a same-sex coven.
These ritualized social strategies probably represent a qualitatively new trait in
the history of western women.
The shadow side, however, to gender-segregated communitas is the temp-
tation to rank female and male powers and transfer their hierarchies into social
paradigm, although this is the stumbling stone in all religious discourse. The
fact that such exercises still take place in Reclaiming is a sign that a major goal
of feminist Witchcraft, namely, to revalue and reinterpret the categories of
“nature” and “body” beyond cultural programming and without discrimination
of one sex against the other, has not yet been reached. Many Witches will,
however, respond that this goal cannot be reached successfully as long as they
 Women’s mysteries: creating a female symbolic order 245

live in a patriarchal society. For the time being, their challenge is more to
remain open to continuous reflection and refinement of any working concept
in the “house” they have “come home” to and stay true to their experiences
of multiple realities and choice of strategy: sexual difference is the existential
foundation from which they act and operate, sexual polarity is their affirming,
strengthening and tactical position, while the struggle for equality of the sexes
is their final goal both in their own community and in the global social and
economic order.

Notes
1 This way of thinking is expressed in the Faery tradition’s creation myth. According
to this myth, the Stargoddess, who represents undivided wholeness before creation,
created the universe by making love to herself. She saw her own reflection in the
curved mirror of black space and fell in love with it. She drew herself out as “the
other”, and called her “Miria, the wonderful”. Their ecstasy burst forth “in the single
song of all there is” and the Goddess became filled with love. “She gave birth to a rain
of bright spirits that filled the worlds and became all beings.” But in that great move-
ment, Miria is swept away, and the further away she moves, the more masculine
she becomes, until she is the Blue God. “But always desire draws Him back toward the
Goddess, so that He circles Her eternally, seeking to return in love” (Starhawk 1979a:17).
The ultimate being in this myth is a purely feminine omni-creatrix. She creates
“the other” as an extension of herself, another female, a mirror image of her Self.
After merging in ecstasy this other slowly becomes a male god, the Blue God. It
is the Blue God who includes both poles, female and male, and who is truly
androgynous, not the Stargoddess. When the Goddess gives birth, the birth is
proto-genetic. She is omnipotent and becomes pregnant through pure ecstasy and
joy, not through intercourse with a male god. All earthly and cosmic beings are
offspring of her body, created by her love affair with her Self. In addition, all
beings have, deep inside themselves, an androgynous Divine Self: the Blue God.
This is so, whether they are male or female.
2 The advantage of this position is a tremendous political optimism regarding the
social possibilities for full sexual equality: for men to learn and take over traditional
female tasks such as childrearing and housework, and for women to learn and take
over traditional male tasks such as political agency and warfare.
3 In the latter case, all empirical women and men “contain” female and male
principles, the male side being a woman’s animus in Jungian terminology. Jungian
essentialism is therefore labeled “double dichotomy” by feminist scholar Petra Junus
(1995:260).
4 Some of these feminists insist that modern, western culture in reality is homo-
sexual: it allegedly consists of one sex (the man) interacting with himself, i.e., with
his binary mirror image and complementary opposite called “woman”. Their goal
is thus to create a real hetero-sexual society, i.e., a society that de facto accepts
sexual difference, including sexual identities and practices. By twisting linguistic
semantics they have confused many contemporary feminists of a different opinion.
5 It was the sacred mysteries of Eleusis that in antiquity celebrated the finding again
of a daughter goddess (Persephone/Kore) by her divine mother (Demeter), although
Demeter had to compromise with Hades (Mylonas 1961). Gerald Gardner claims
that modern Witchcraft is spiritually kindred to the Eleusinian mysteries (Gardner
1954:82).
6 Plural sexual identities were also the marks of the group’s first teachers: Dora was
heterosexual and Deadly lesbian.
246 Priestesses of the craft

7 The contrasting definitions of men that I add in parentheses were in most cases
not stated explicitly, but indirectly assumed. I choose to state these definitions to
give the reader a more complete picture of the gendered dichotomies that were
operative in class.
8 In the summer of 1985, I enthusiastically put forth the preliminary results of my
research for a group of Reclaiming people. I spelled out the tacit patriarchal
notions of the pillars of correspondence in western occultism that I had found in
their symbol system and stated that Reclaiming Witches were not as radical as they
claimed to be. In fact, to a large extent they were only replacing one patriarchal
tradition (Jewish and Christian religions) with another (western occultism). But
nobody shared my enthusiasm over these findings. Finally, one male member started
to talk. He said my analysis sounded great, logical and convincing, except that it
made him completely depressed. A woman agreed with him and said: how could
it be that feminist Witchcraft was only a reproduction of esoteric, patriarchal
tradition when in fact this religious path had changed her life and given a
completely new meaning to what it meant to be religious, and what it meant to
be a woman and have “a life”? I was struck by her comment. What was the
revitalizing power of feminist Witchcraft that I was not able to catch with my
symbolic analysis? It had something to do with the transformative potentials of
ritual and the way in which the self was ritualized, respected and integrated into
the community. To focus my study entirely upon the reinvention of feminine and
magical symbols was missing the point, although “goddess” and “magic” were the
headlines through which feminist Witchcraft came across to new people. This was
an important incident when I, for my PhD, decided to enter this study from a
somewhat different angle, and with the methodological tools of anthropology:
now I wanted to study Witchcraft as a lived religion and ritualized practice, not
merely texts and textual symbols.
9 Bynum 1987:34. We have also encountered nudity as a ritual practice in the
heretical heritage line going back to the Free Spirits (cf. chapter 3).
10 I wrote my notes after the event and cannot claim to quote exactly the words said.
I heard the same story told at a women’s solstice camp in Nevada, called Her Voice,
Our Voices, in June 1985.
11 Reclaiming Newsletter No. 38, spring 1990.
12 Some Witches juxtapose magical ritual with religious ceremony to emphasize the
difference between ritualizing narrative for conservative goals and ritualizing lived
life for transformative goals. The distinction is taken from Max Gluckman (1962:
22).
13 Buckley and Gottlieb 1988:30–40. The authors address the shortcomings of
mainly using pollution theories in the analysis of menstrual meanings and call for
more positive and more complex approaches.They believe that one of the reasons
that pollution theories have been predominant in anthropological studies cross-
culturally is the fact that both informants and ethnographers have mainly been
men.
14 Mary Douglas 1988:57. Douglas proposes that holiness, for example in Ancient
Israelite society, was given a concrete physical expression by explicit rules of
avoidance of the polluted and unclean. Rosemary R. Ruether points out how
Moses instructed Israel – according to Exodus 19:15 – not to go near a woman in
order to be purified and ready to receive the commandments (Ruether 1987:143).
15 Anna was responsible for the “women’s mysteries” and the big community ritual,
while Richard took care of the party. In a boy’s initiation rite, these roles are
switched.
16 Reclaiming Newsletter No. 35, summer 1989.
17 This famous parallel was formulated by anthropologist Sherry Ortner in 1974.
 Women’s mysteries: creating a female symbolic order 247

18 Similar life-cycles associated with the Witches’ pantheon of male deities, like the
waxing and waning of the Green God have not – to my knowledge – been
developed for boys. The model for boys’ initiation rites in Reclaiming has been
inspired more by ethnographic accounts from tribal cultures than by traditional
Witchcraft lore.
19 The gender discussion in Reclaiming was launched simultaneously with an
escalating interest in men’s politics on the alternative scene in general, in particular
the so-called Men’s Mythopoetic movement initiated by Robert Bly (1992). This
movement wants to restore men to a new male power-from-within which
allegedly is grounded in Earth spirituality, and not conceived as oppressive to
women. It has attracted a lot of men who feel overrun by feminist women, even
men in Reclaiming. Those interested in spirituality want to reclaim a male earth-
God and not a female Goddess. Yet, the Mythopoetic movement has offended
many women and triggered fear that a new war between the sexes is returning.
Starhawk has also contributed to these discussions (Starhawk 1992), although not
in the Reclaiming Newsletter. Here she kept a low profile for a long time.
20 The strong position of essentialist feminism within goddess spirituality has also
been noted by Eller 1993, Greenwood 1994 and Junus 1995. According to
Greenwood, feminist Witches in Britain also view the body “in essentialist terms”
and in order to connect with true self “they have to strip away layers of patriarchal
conditioning” (1994:6). In fear of essentialism, many scholars, among them
Caroline W. Bynum, are critical of Witches’ and goddess-worshippers’ attempts to
“restore” a female face of God.
8 Initiation
Transforming self

Traditional Witchcraft differentiates between two aspects of religion and two

levels of knowledge: exoteric and esoteric. Exoteric aspects of religion are said to
deal with the “religious needs of society”, providing, for example, meaningful
rites of passage to mark natural and social rhythms, while esotericism concerns
mystical knowledge and personal change.1 Exoteric Witchcraft refers to rituals
and knowledge that are public and accessible to anyone, not least through
books and manuals. Esoteric Witchcraft, on the other hand, refers to exclusive
knowledge about the tools and meanings of inner, personal transformation.
This knowledge is claimed to be mystical, ancient and universal. It is passed on
as ritualized, special language and only to candidates seeking the Witches’
initiation. Although such terminology is not used in Reclaiming, its esoteric
heritage is apparent in the initiation ritual.
The mere fact of practising initiation tends to split Reclaiming Witches
into disputing camps. The camps range from “real anarchists” who condemn
initiation as elitist because of its esoteric modalities and, therefore, take a moral
standpoint against it; those who couldn’t care less and really are uninterested in
the whole subject; those who are intrigued by it and maybe would want it for
themselves, but “really don’t feel that witchy”; to those who identify 100 per
cent as Witches by dedication through initiation. All these viewpoints can
coexist, for example, within one and the same coven. But underneath the
pluralism we find a current working in favour of initiation. For every Witch
deciding to be initiated, at least two others are influenced by her decision.
Having witnessed the initiation process of a significant other, they feel pushed
to reexamine their own attitudes and role models. If the influence is marked,
questions might be: “When I see how much Catherine has changed since she
was initiated – maybe there is something to it?” And, “If Catherine could
decide to be initiated, maybe I should consider it as well?”
Reclaiming initiation is a reformed version of Faery initiation. Faery is
a highly secretive, ceremonial tradition that offers two levels of initiation
(Gardnerians have three degrees). Reclaiming has taken certain ritual elements
from Faery: the basic outline of the initiation, the most secret and sacred
inner-circle part, and the idea of (eventually) invoking the Goddess and God
by their secret, proper names. However, when Starhawk created a new version
 Initiation: transforming self 249

of Witchcraft, as published in The Spiral Dance, she and her female friends also
changed important parts of Victor Anderson’s Faery initiation. They ordained
one initiation instead of two and prolonged the whole ritual process con-
siderably.This applies, in particular, to the pre-initiation process: the Reclaiming
apprentice is given practical challenges that are intended to promote personal
growth and change. The women have added an extensive “meeting the
elements” to the secret ritual, arranged individually for every new candidate.
These are exclusive Reclaiming traditions, not common among other Witches,
which have resulted in a totally different focus and, therefore, also a different
meaning to the entire initiation process.The values of secrecy, esoteric know-
ledge and exclusive membership, often associated with men’s secret societies,
are moderated, whereas initiation as a path to personal growth, in order to
cope with the challenges of daily life, is emphasized. To a certain extent this
fact corresponds with Caroline W. Bynum’s thesis (cf. Introduction) that
women’s religiosity manifests itself as an extension of everyday life, while men’s
religious practice often tends to stand in contrast with or to reverse the social
order of things. In Reclaiming’s case, however, the thesis needs modification
since it pertains to feminists of both genders, not only to women, although
the ritual initially was created by women. Also typical for Reclaiming is the
fact that it is not a requirement to go through the initiation ritual in order to
become a member of a coven, the Collective or the community.
Initiation is an individual choice, and on this level it can be motivated by a
desire for a variety of “objects”, such as personal growth, wisdom, religious
experience, magical power, social position, adventure, feeling special, love,
protection, priesthood, ultimate meaning, meeting the Goddess, establishing
friendships. As an exoteric, social act, its meaning is more specific. First-degree
initiation is, generally, regarded as a personal commitment to the Goddess and
to the Craft of a particular tradition. But the ritual is also a celebration of a
transformed person who has demonstrated, by taking on all given challenges,
that she is “willing to suffer to learn”. By 1990, there were about 23 first
degree initiates in this sense in Reclaiming. Reclaiming as a tradition does not
offer further initiation degrees. However, the Faery initiates in Reclaiming
may offer them. The second Faery degree is primarily a sexual rite, in which
the secret names of the deities are said to be revealed, preferably at the peak of
orgasm in the arms of one’s beloved. As far as I knew in 1990, six Reclaiming
people had undergone this rite. Considering that the Reclaiming community
in SF at this point included approximately 50 people in its inner circles, with
a larger community numbering around 130, the number of initiates was
modest. A majority of the initiates of both categories were women. In this
chapter I shall discuss initiation exclusively as practised in Reclaiming.

Apprentice seeking initiators

In order to be initiated, the person must herself take an active step and ask for
it. One is typically not offered initiation or given the suggestion by anybody
250 Priestesses of the craft

that she is worthy of it.The wish to be initiated may be put forth after having
completed the three basic six-evening classes in Reclaiming, which equals one
week at Witchcamp, and after having been in the Craft for “one year and a
day”. Since the whole concept of initiation is alien to most modern, western
people, they usually need a lot more time just to become adjusted to the idea.
Anyone already initiated can be asked, and for this ritual there is no gender
segregation. Women may ask men, men may ask women, and quite often a
mixed gender group will facilitate the initiation ritual. The only rule is that
the apprentice must ask more than one person for initiation. She might get a
yes, she might get a no. The uncertainty of the answer is explained with
reference to karma, friendship and challenges.
To be an initiator is to build a “karmic bond” with the one being initiated;
that is a bond of mutual influence and destiny in this life and in the lives to
come. A relationship grounded in meta-physical bonding is serious, and both
parties have to consider carefully with whom they get involved. The require-
ment for personal knowledge through some kind of friendship has developed
as a minimum of protection. If an initiator is hesitant about whether she really
wants to build such a bond with the one asking, or if she finds that the
apprentice is not yet ready for initiation, she will probably say “no”. Personal
knowledge is also necessary so that each initiator can give the apprentice
suitable, or good, challenges.“Good” in this context does not mean “nice”, but
rather “pricking weak spots and shadows”. To be trustworthy when starting
somebody else’s change, personal knowledge is a presupposition. Very often,
this friendship grows deeper during the initiation process.
The challenges given are mostly aimed at people’s addictions. A man who
was drinking beer daily, but not considered an alcoholic, was challenged to
quit drinking completely for a year and a day. An overweight woman was
challenged to exercise three times a week for an hour. A woman with little
knowledge of, and strong prejudice against, non pagan religions was challenged
to study another religious tradition seriously. A challenge shall not be moral-
istic but is meant to come from the Goddess via the initiator. If the initiator
does not receive a challenge to pass on, she can tell the apprentice that the
Goddess will challenge her directly, and that she will know when it happens.A
challenge is meant to be met; “trying my best” is not sufficient. The beer-
drinking man did not accept his challenge but was angry and wanted to
negotiate it. This is rarely possible, and he was not initiated. Usually it takes a
year before the initiators agree that the challenges are completed. Only then
can the initiation process be set with the esoteric initiation ritual.
When Witches try to explain to me the essence of initiation, they call it an
intentional act to give up one’s will in order to surrender to the Goddess, who is perfect
love and perfect trust and perfect care. To some extent an initiation process
resembles religious conversion often associated with sect membership: it
reenacts an idealized imitation of the parent–child relation, a relation in which
the apprentice ultimately seeks to merge with the perfect love object.2 When
asking for initiation, the apprentice temporarily puts somebody in the position
 Initiation: transforming self 251

of authority, of Mother and Father. And because of challenges and the implicit
demand for obedience (equivalent to childrearing), she will probably regress
back to childish behaviour. In the process of giving and receiving challenges
she asks the other to see and name her “shadow” sides. From this “seeing” the
initiator shall extract a challenge which, on one side, shall promote self-
illumination by stating something essential about the apprentice today and, on
the other, give her a direction for change.To refuse the challenge is to pretend
that you did not ask for it of your own free will in the first place. It is to act
as if somebody is trying to control you by uninvited meddling in your daily
business and way of being.
But initiation is also radically different from conversion to a sect, first of all
in terms of pedagogics. In initiations, the authority structure is a conscious
and time-limited one, set up for the purpose of personal refinement to help
the individual develop inner authority. In sectarian conversion stories this may
or may not be the case, but an often-heard version is that the convert is set in
a continuous hierarchical relationship with an omnipotent, male authority
figure (Ullman 1989). The goal of Witches’ initiation is not to stay within a
human parent–child relation, but exactly the opposite: to grow out of it
forever by being “reborn” as a new and wiser being, as a child of the Goddess.

Modernists and traditionalists

If the goals of initiation are so idealistic, why is the phenomenon such a
delicate theme in Reclaiming? This is because dedication, obedience and the
supposed swearing of oaths are regarded as attitudes in conflict with anarchist
politics. Anarchism is a modernist ideology, basically rejecting any kind of
hierarchical truth holding and the making of esoteric, secret knowledge. This
modernist argument against initiation holds that all knowledge is exoteric and
that everybody already has access to power, to a power-from-within. Further-
more, all available knowledge is potentially inside every person, and an
exterior human teacher is really not necessary for an apprentice to learn.This
view was integrated into Witchcraft in the early 1970s by Z. Budapest.
Inspired by the women’s movement and a blend of sexual equality feminism
with essentialism, Budapest claimed that all women are already priestesses and
initiates to the Goddess by virtue of being women.This egalitarianism, which
in Reclaiming is made gender neutral, is official language in all branches of
feminist Witchcraft today.
Arguments explicitly favouring initiation I will call traditional. They state
that there is hidden wisdom in what is old, in what people have done before,
and maintain the value of esoteric knowledge, which is only accessible to
initiates. This kind of knowledge is, by the non-initiates, often believed to be
instrumental (like mathematical formulas), for example, knowledge about
advanced forms of magic to attain power, knowledge about the mystical
invocations to call spiritual beings, and knowledge about the true naming of
deities.Whatever this knowledge in fact might turn out to be, it is believed to
252 Priestesses of the craft

be handed down secretly from “the ancients” through the esoteric traditions.
The elders of contemporary Witchcraft have reobtained possession of this
tradition, which can open up the universe to a select few, to those who are
called as priestesses or priests. Being on this path, Reclaiming’s initiation is
among the most secretive of all the Craft traditions.3
At first glance, these two viewpoints do not easily harmonize. In Re-
claiming’s teaching policy the problem is solved by undercommunicating
traditionalism.The Collective does not act as elders, offering advanced teach-ing
to a selected few, but urges people to learn on their own or through common
efforts in the coven.They argue, in a democratic and egalitarian fashion, that the
power and the knowledge are already inside, available to everybody.This applies
to ritual acts as well, for example, the one in which Starhawk anointed Sonia at
her “first blood” ritual (chapter 1 (and 7)) while declaring, “nobody can give you
power; you already have the power within”. If the subject of initiation comes up
when Starhawk teaches in non-Reclaiming contexts, she is likely to talk about it
as devotion and commitment to the Goddess, and not as a tradition, and to insist
that anybody is free to initiate themselves. Mostly the theme is passed over in
silence, and neither Starhawk nor other Reclaiming teachers often talk about
initiation outside their own circles.
But people who are eager to learn more, who disagree with the concept
that “any knowledge is already inside” because they do not experience its
truth, will find that initiation really is the next “class” they need to take.They
will also be confirmed in this viewpoint by those who have already been
initiated and told that if they want to develop spiritually and personally, they
should ask for initiation. None of the initiated Witches I interviewed ever
regretted their choice; nor were they disappointed with the long initiation
process or the final ritual. On the contrary, they emphasized that initiation was
the most powerful, special event in their life. But what exactly did the
initiation offer them? Did they perform an act of piety, dedicating themselves
to the Goddess, or did they enter a sister–brotherhood of magicians, obtaining
secret, but instrumental, magical formulas? Initiated Witches are often reluctant
to answer these questions directly; instead they will repeat the specialness of
the event and insist that it caused profound changes. Over the last years,
several typical anarchist Witches have asked to be initiated. This is a sign that
initiation is observed to have a positive effect on those undergoing the rite.
With time it has resulted in more affirmative attitudes toward initiation in the
community at large.
By virtue of being an initiatory religion, Witchcraft is destined to operate
in terms of teachers and apprentices, initiates and non-initiates, differentiating
between those who have and those who have not. But as documented, this
unmodern heritage does not prevent anarchists from feeling at home in
Reclaiming. Those who join this diverse community seem to be drawn by a
basic desire: there is something the Reclaiming people have that they also
want to have. This “something” can be hard to name, but they clearly have
“it”. I will argue that this desire is not very different from the desire pushing
 Initiation: transforming self 253

people to ask for initiation, an act that transfers them from one camp to
another, but within one and the same community.

The desire separating insiders from outsiders

According to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the separation of insiders from
outsiders is an essential feature of all rites of passage. He therefore suggests that
we rename such rituals as rites of institutions. Bourdieu is therefore critical of
the theory developed by Victor Turner (and Arnold van Gennep), although he
agrees that Turner’s notion of a four-staged “social drama” underlying ritual
(understood as “what”) gives an adequate systematic description of its phases.
But the theory does not raise questions of the social function of the ritual or
of the social significance of its selection and boundary making:

This theory does not conceal one of the essential effects of rites, namely
that of separating those who have undergone it, not from those who have
not yet undergone it, but from those who will not undergo it in any
sense, and thereby instituting a lasting difference between those to whom
the rite pertains and those to whom it does not pertain.
(Bourdieu 1991:117)

One may ask whether there is a lasting difference between initiates and non-
initiates in Reclaiming. The two parties do not seem to be separated by an
absolute limiting quality as, for example, in the case of gender or royalty,
examples given by Bourdieu, in which one social group is defined through
initiation in opposition to another; for in Reclaiming, all individuals are
potentially initiates, even those opposing initiation. The qualities separating
insiders from outsiders are not external to the individual with respect to group
belonging, but rather internal. They become manifest as differences regarding
worldview, emotionality and social skills within a social group. The charac-
teristics of people choosing to undergo an initiation ritual seem to be (1)
profession of a traditional worldview that values knowledge that is “handed
down” from the ancients, and (2) an emotional desire for the unknown “it”,
believed to be in the hands of the already initiated, combined with an
emotional conditioning permitting the individual to perform the wilful act of
giving up her own will – for a certain period of time – in order to attain the
“it”. In this context there seems to be a strong interdependence between
worldview and emotionality, a condition also documented by Chana Ullman
in her study of religious conversion. She concludes that in the development
and function of beliefs within the self, “world views are adopted or rejected
not as isolated systems which may or may not have internal coherence, but as
congruent with the lives of persons, intertwined with their dispositions,
emotions, and desires” (Ullman 1989:193).
The third and final characteristic is (3) a strong social position, including
friendship with people already having been initiated. As stated earlier, without
254 Priestesses of the craft

this friendship, there is nobody whom the individual can ask to facilitate the
initiation, nobody to be given challenges by or to perform the rite. Being a
loner, you may still ask, but you are likely to get a “no”, as was the case with
Fallon in chapter 1. In other words, a person must be dedicated and willing to
take emotional risks, socially ambitious and/or successful, but not too
anarchistic to be initiated into the Reclaiming tradition. According to the
ethos of Reclaiming Witches, such social and personal attributes are potentially
available to everybody in the community and are, therefore, unable to create
absolute and lasting differences between groups in Bourdieu’s sense. One may,
of course, question this supposition further. However, that is not the subject
now.
Since in previous chapters, I have already accounted for worldview and
social relationships, I shall in the following be content to focus on the desired
“it” of initiation, that is, on the specific “object desire” that seems to circulate
in the initiation process. The narrative framework of initiation is set by the
existential dilemma of separation versus unity, within which the subject is
struggling to find and to name the precious object, the “it”, which is expected
to bring forth spiritual and personal fulfilment. However, the ritual process
gains its dynamics from the candidate’s belief that “it” is possessed, somehow,
by other initiates. Symbolic interaction between ritualized space and ritualized
bodies not only reenacts the dilemmas of this drama. It is also believed to
magically partake in their solution. The initiation ritual may thus be said to
process a basic human existential that is structured as an emotional triad:

Y
X (a)

which shall be read, the person X believes that the person Y has the precious
object (a); X therefore desires Y to get (a). The precious (a) is not necessarily
defined in any specific sense and, according to a psychoanalytic interpretation,
its existence is entirely created by the power of X’s more or less conscious
belief. X believes that the mystical (a) is ultimate truth, a truth so “potent” that
it may suspend the pain of separation and fulfil all desire.4 However, in order
to connect with (a), the real object of desire, X creates a displacement in
which Y becomes the object of desire instead, so that Y becomes (a) for X. The
triad (X–Y–(a)) is now reduced to a dyad (X–Y), in which Y=(a) for X. Y
changes position from a person holding the key to the desired object to
becoming a final desirable object herself. X now believes that Y embodies (a).
This triadic/dyadic structure can be found in all aspects of human life,
including religious belief systems as well as love and sexual desires. A typical
example is the X who longs for the desired object “love”. When X falls in
love with Y, he does not want “love” any longer, but the beloved Y, who is
believed to be a personification of love (a). I shall not discuss the general
claims of psychoanalytic theory. I shall merely use the formula as an entrance
to discuss what I will call initiatory desire. This particular desire can be
 Initiation: transforming self 255

formulated as an apprentice’s (X) desire for a helper (Y) to be incorporated

into an estimated space (a), which of itself is believed to hold truth, power or
love (a). In the context of initiation, the objects of desire (a) can be plural, but
still interrelated in terms of their spatiality.The primary desire is to be part of
an unknown circle, a spatial continuum attributed with high expectations
regarding its content, which eventually will be disclosed.
In this context initiation is to enter a “room” that cannot be known
otherwise. This implies that the room is of such a character, or is made into
such a character, that it is not intelligible in language alone. The quester must
embody it and be embodied by it. Until then, it will continue to represent the
unknown but highly desirable “it”. Furthermore, the door to this room can
only be opened by someone (Y) who has already “been” there, who is
believed to already have “it” (a). If the psychoanalytical observations about
displacement and transference are valid for the initiatory desire, we may then
expect the helper (Y) to slowly be projected as identical with the desirable
object (a), believed to embody the expectations of the unknown circle in her
persona, so that Y becomes (a) for X.
In a certain phase of the initiation process, we shall see that X displaces the
object of desire (a) with Y. But the displacement is temporary for when the
ritual is completed, the candidate is expected to have learned that Y has
nothing that she didn’t already have herself:Y is not (a); Goddess is. And the
Goddess is already inside X, as well as in Y.The ritual verifies for X that (a) is
in fact desirable, but not as a property of Y, and with a different content than
expected. Thus, the initiation process resembles a setting for personal growth
in which the basic human object desire is challenged to evolve and be
transformed onto a more mature level. A mature X can let go of objectifi-
cations and instead relate to Y as equal subject, a unique creation/manifestation
of Goddess, and nothing else. When this happens, the initiation process really
brings to light that the emotional structure X–Y–(a) is in fact immature; it
belongs to and describes the eternal child, the non-initiated.
Finally, we shall address the nature of initiation as an experiential rite.
Initiation is a ritualized process, and all its strategies are rooted in the body, or
rather, in the interaction of the social body within an environment constituted
by esoteric symbolism. To go through an initiation is to be willing to go
through certain performances and emotional processes which, by virtue of
being orchestrated, are believed to reveal new insights and to transform the
actual subject. Since these new insights are expected to be personal and
nonanalytical, initiations tend to be connected with secrecy and silence.
Religious initiations are sensory experiences focused on the active and direct
tasting of “the body of god” – in contrast, for example, to a traditional sermon
where the individual is more passive. If ritual as “what” can be defined as
prescribed patterns of symbolic enactment that express and move us into our
shared values,5 the definition of religious initiation rituals must elongate “the
symbolic” to include “the index” in order to take in the “mystical real”. For
initiation not only moves us into our shared values as represented symbolically,
256 Priestesses of the craft

but claims to offer an experience of real and direct encounter with divine
reality. It is more than a symbolic representation of religious beliefs/shared
values, since the meaning of the ritual and the transformations it brings forth
are believed to be immanent in and effected by the ritual itself.

Case: Catherine’s initiation process

We shall now examine the ritual process of a first-degree initiation ritual in
Reclaiming through an initiation story generously given to me by a woman
named Catherine. To get “it”, Catherine had come to Reclaiming in 1983.
She asked for initiation in 1987 and was initiated in 1989. When she joined
Reclaiming, Catherine was 36 years old, mother of a boy, married to Orion,
and just entering a career path as an Assistant Professor in Spanish. She has
been a political activist since the student revolt at UC Berkeley in the late
1960s.
Catherine is a typical intellectual feminist, critical and outspoken, but also
with a reputation for having a strong desire for control. She was brought up in
a liberal, Protestant home, and in her adult life she joined the congregations of
both Quakers and Unitarians. When she finally left the Christian church it
was because she could no longer bear up against its patriarchal language and
imagery. Catherine and I met in one of the Reclaiming classes and, because of
similar backgrounds and an aptitude for critical opinions, we very soon
established a friendship.
Catherine is bisexual, having an “open marriage” with her husband. This
means a mutual agreement permitting other sexual partners. Soon after
joining the community she found a lover among the leading women in
Reclaiming. This relationship made her move very fast into the inner social
circles. In the spring of 1985 she was already involved with a coven and had
become a member of the editorial board in the Reclaiming Newsletter.
Six months later she was asked to be a member of the Collective. Catherine’s
lover had been an initiated Witch for many years. Catherine was, therefore,
from the beginning exposed to the code of those who have “it” and those
who haven’t.
I will present Catherine’s initiation process through the stories she gave
during three different interviews. The first was recorded in June 1985, long
before she even considered initiation. It was rather structured, with prepared
questions. The second interview was conducted 10 days before her initiation
in the early spring of 1989, and the third we did five days after this event.
These interviews were more like conversations, but they qualify as interviews
– both to her and to me – for two reasons: they were recorded, and the intent
of our conversation was to answer my questions. The duration of the three
interviews was respectively 2, 1.5 and 3 hours. Together they portray how
Catherine changed her mind, from being against initiation in 1985 to favour it
in 1989, as well as her growing insight into what it means to become initiated.
In addition, Catherine and I socialize a lot and have discussed the topic of
 Initiation: transforming self 257

initiation on several occasions. In the process she made it clear several times
that she only gave me her story because I was her trusted friend and because I
said I needed it for my study.
As the process developed, it was difficult for Catherine to keep her commit-
ment to me, although she did. Especially the post-initiation interview, which we
did very soon after the actual event, was hard. It was hard for her to talk about
an experience that felt deeply sacred within the context of a recorded interview.
It was also hard for me to ask questions for the purpose of academic research
that would not, somehow, be intrusive or profaning to her experience.Although
Catherine’s attitude was to keep silent about anything secret, she did not want
to mystify the experience by not sharing it; so she shared it. And she did it
generously, honestly, knowing that she somehow laid herself bare.6
I shall describe Catherine’s initiation process, which purposely is surrounded
with secrecy, without exposing “secrets” other than those available to anybody.
I will, rather, try to deepen all my informants’ understanding of what initiation
is all about and acknowledge their pride at having undergone such a demand-
ing process. My concerns in this endeavour are two. First, I want to document
how the actual preparation for initiation and the ritual itself have the power to
transform – being a performative and emotional act of commitment and
devotion, rather than being a question of dogmatically joining prearranged
belief systems. Second, I want to demonstrate how Catherine’s attitude toward
the act of initiation is changed from modernist to traditional – and back again
– as she gets more involved with Witchcraft, the Reclaiming community and
with her lover.

The initial event: the crisis 7

Catherine asked for initiation into the Reclaiming tradition in January 1987.
She asked because she wanted to become a healer. At the time she had been
part of the community for three years. She decided to ask for initiation
because she felt that she somehow needed the particular healing techniques
and esoteric knowledge of the Craft to become a real healer. At that point she
had also started to coteach a class in Reclaiming called “Magical Healing
Arts”. She found that, besides being a successful scholar, she was able to learn
to help people heal.
The actual incident that made her consider initiation happened at
Witchcamp in the summer of 1986; and in my retelling of it, I shall use
Catherine’s own formulations. One day when Catherine was halfway through
Witchcamp, she needed a break from what she describes as “psychic
experiences and intense, hard work”. She therefore went to a laundromat to
wash clothes. While waiting outside for her laundry to be done, she suddenly
heard somebody screaming, as if being beaten, from inside the laundry room.
She went in to see if her help was needed and found a teenage girl, Miel,
lying on the floor in great pain. Miel’s friend asked people to help. She
explained that Miel would get these attacks on and off and that she didn’t
258 Priestesses of the craft

have any medication with her today. But everybody present in the room was
backing away. Somebody called the local chiropractor, but when he came,
there was nothing he could do either.

I realized that no one was gonna help her and that I had to help her
because she was not breathing – she was screaming and crying, and she
was not taking in oxygen and her color was changing. So when the
chiropractor came and I could see that he was completely useless, I just
decided to take over. And I did . . . . I instinctively used healing
techniques. I held her like a midwife; I helped her to breathe. And then I
called in the elements from the ocean. I was speaking to her. I ribbed a
window in her third eye, and then I brought in the water from the ocean.
In the meantime someone had called the fire rescue people, and all these
guys came to give her oxygen. But by the time they came I already had
her breathing.When they left the chiropractor turned around and looked
at me and said: “She was lucky you were here . . . . Are you some kind of
a social worker or something?”[laughter] And I said: “No, actually I am a
Witch. It was Witchcraft.” He acted very calm, and later in the
conversation he said: “By the way, that Witchcraft, that is a pretty strong
word.” And I said: “Yes I know, and I do not usually use it with people I
don’t know.” And then I looked him straight into the eyes and said: “But
you saw it in action [laughter].”

Catherine told me this story three times in the same interview, revealing new
details every time. The way she helped the girl was to sit down on the floor
with the girl’s head in her own lap, asking permission to help her, telling her
that she would help her to breathe, and then breathing with her as a midwife,
breathing in, and breathing out, for a long, long time. When the girl finally
relaxed and was breathing by herself, Catherine started to work on the pain in
her head. She put her into light trance by saying, “The cement [you lie on] is
cold because it is on the damp earth here on the coast by the ocean. And the
ground here is very cold because it is next to the ocean, and the water and the
breezes bring in the coolness.” Then she made circular movements on her
forehead to open a “gate” in the third eye for the coolness to enter the girl’s
head and release her pain. Catherine’s healing technique was to activate
the vital energies in her own body as well as in Miel’s through breathing,
“forming” this energy into a mental image of cold water and, then, imagining
additional, healing water being poured into Miel’s forehead. She worked with
all the elements but fire in the trance induction.
Doing this work, Catherine had a basic experience: the way she was able to
help the young girl was to connect with her, and not to separate from her:

My instinct was to connect with her. It is very strange, but I felt that the
way to help her was to be connected with her rather than to be separated
from her. And that that somehow was a key to healing.
 Initiation: transforming self 259

By acting on her instincts she found the power to heal, but she also experienced
her power in a context with other people in the room:

I controlled everybody with my eyes. It was incredible, because all of

these men [the chiropractor and the fire rescue people] with their
equipment also came in and asked her [Miel] questions! [laughter] And
then I would like go on and answer some questions, and then I would just
look at them and sort of—I cannot describe it—make them do what I
wanted them to do. And they would do it; it was unbelievable.

When she finally left the laundromat with her clean clothes and went back
to Witchcamp, Catherine was amazed with herself and what had happened.
There she told the story to Starhawk, who said she had done the psychic
equivalent of a mother’s lifting a truck off a child, something you can’t
normally do. Starhawk suggested that she go and lie down in the garden and
“ground herself ”. To ground in this context means to give the vital energy
that was at work in the healing process back to the earth. It would also help
Catherine cleanse herself from the illness of the girl’s energy. While lying on
the ground, she had another significant experience:

It is very hard to describe, but in words [this is] the way it would be: I was
lying on the ground, under a tree, kind of in an unconscious state of
mind. And then I kind of opened my eyes, or else in trance, I saw the trees
and the bushes and everything around me bend, leaning in towards me.
And the Goddess or something, some power said to me: “If you will do
this work, if you will do healing work, I will take care of you.”

Until then, Catherine was not considered by anyone in the community to be

in the possession of healing powers. She was usually categorized among the
antimystical sceptics, advocating the Goddess mostly for ideological reasons.
When I asked her if she had ever experienced anything like this before,
she replied, “No, of course not, are you kidding?” Her story was, therefore,
regarded as amazing by everybody. Because of this, and because it had an
element of objectivity to it (it was witnessed by many people), Catherine was
urged to tell her story in front of everybody at Witchcamp. The key message
to her fellow campers when telling the story was: “If I can do it, we all have
the power to do it.”
From this experience, Catherine says she learned that “the skills we are
talking about are real. It is not a metaphor; we can heal.” And she honours
Witchcraft for having provided the tools she used in the healing:

Much of what I did with this girl has to do with my own life experience
and my own wisdom. But the techniques, the ability to draw out from
myself what is there, that I learned from the Craft. So, that is why I am
interested in the Craft in particular. I mean, it wasn’t Buddhism, it wasn’t
260 Priestesses of the craft

Christianity; it was the knowledge of the elements, the knowledge of the

way to work psychically, which is connecting instead of separating.

When back in San Francisco, she started to coteach the healing class. After
doing that for a long time, she suddenly realized that, yes, teaching the magic
of self-healing was the healing work she was supposed to do.When Catherine
asked for initiation it was to confirm and respond to her revelations and
chosen path and to learn more skills.

The challenges 8
Lying in the garden at Witchcamp in the summer of 1986, Catherine had a
revelation: she experienced being called directly by the Goddess to do her
work, namely, to become a healer. In return for surrender she was promised
divine caretaking, that is, love and protection. However, in order to really
become a daughter and a priestess of Goddess, Catherine had to find midwives
who could ordain her into this new position. Initiation is such an ordination,
confirming her call, marking a new identity; and the initiators are the
midwives, who for a limited time period take on the deputizing role of the
Goddess. The question of their willingness to bond karmically with the
apprentice forever is a sign of their extra-ordinary and representative function.
In the early winter of 1987, Catherine asked five women, including her
lover, to initiate her – and at first they all said yes. None of her coven sisters
were asked because none of them were initiated. Later, one of these five
women withdrew her commitment, and for a time Catherine felt hurt and
abandoned. She never considered asking a man to help initiate her. She
explains that she does not trust men deeply enough on a spiritual level to have
them come so close. Catherine trusted her husband, who also identifies as a
Witch, but she believed he did not have the necessary knowledge.
In the process of choosing initiators and meeting their challenges,
Catherine’s emotional framework was dramatically changed from devotional
self-obliteration to self-righteous struggle, from obediently accepting the
grace of the Goddess to aggressively pushing her initiators to give her what
she was obliged to have. She was taken over by the structure of the initiatory
desire as described earlier, duplicating a parent–child relation as well as
displacing the object of desire into human relationships. This change in
behaviour might seem surprising and risky. What if the initiators had turned
their backs on her? But according to Starhawk, the initiation process always
“stirs up a lot of shit, both in the one being initiated, and in the initiators”.
This “stirring up of shit” is welcomed because it is believed to be the first –
and often necessary – step in personal growth (cf. the afterplay to the
processing ritual in chapter 3).
When I asked Catherine why she chose the particular women for her
initiation, she gave three different answers during our conversation, but in this
order:
 Initiation: transforming self 261

I chose women that I felt would be important for my path in the Craft
and for me as a person.

X takes initiation very seriously. She will see that I get the whole
experience; she won’t cut any corners. I respect her. But I think I mostly
chose her out from what I think she can give me, without me knowing
what that is.

I understand absolutely that I can initiate myself . . . and I don’t think

these four women really know anything that I don’t. It is because they are
initiated in a particular tradition; it is that knowledge. Because I am
wanting the tools and techniques of the particular knowledge of this
particular kind of training that it matters to me, and that I do it in that
way. I don’t know how, but it will turn out that I need it . . . . I just
instinctively trust that it will turn out that I need whatever it is that I am
gonna learn, you know [laughter]. So, maybe I am wrong.

In this phase Catherine seemed to be confused about what she really wanted
and why. In the first answer she admits that she chose the women positively,
for who they are qua persons. In her second answer Catherine objectifies and
introduces the mysterious “it”, saying, “I mostly chose her out from what I
think she can give me, without me knowing what that is.” But in her third
answer Catherine is very clear that the women do not have anything in
themselves; neither does initiation provide a mysterious “it.” The women are
reduced to a necessary link, almost in a technical sense, between herself and
the desired tools to become a healer. Catherine’s desire to be initiated was, at
this stage, not motivated by religious sentiments, but by pragmatism and
ambition: she needed initiation to become a healer and to gain the social
position of an initiated Witch, exercising the power to say “yes” and “no”.
Initiation had become instrumental, resembling an entrance ticket to a
workshop where tools are crafted, and had, for the moment, lost its initial
aspect of devotional act.
Catherine also expressed strong discontent with the time span of the
initiation process. An apprentice will usually be initiated within a year from
the time the question is put forth. In her case it took two years and three
months from the day she asked for initiation until it happened. This is a very
long time to wait, compared to the situation of others in the community, and
it made Catherine extremely upset. She tried to push the women to decide
for a date, but nothing happened. Once, when she had an argument with one
of the initiators about why she had to wait so long, she lost her temper and
yelled at her initiator. When she later tried to deal with this incident and
apologize, she was only told to meditate upon her anger.
Having chosen four initiators, Catherine was supposed to receive four
challenges from four surrogate mothers. The first challenge came shortly after
she asked for initiation in 1987. The last challenge she did not get until a
262 Priestesses of the craft

few weeks before her actual initiation in 1989. This also made her upset.
Catherine’s first challenge was to participate in six Wicca rituals outside the
Reclaiming tradition. The second was to be “sky clad” (nude) whenever
possible in ritual and not to wear either contact lenses or a watch for one
year and a day. The third was to develop rituals and ritual material for
children. And the fourth – which she received just before the initiation – was
to do four rituals, one for each element, and in this way explore her shadow.
“Exploration” in this context means trance work, the attempt in Witchcraft to
connect with Deep Self and attain true knowledge about her deepest
motivations and feelings. Catherine was asked to write down her experiences
when performing these rituals in a Book of Shadow, which is a personal
record book about the work done in ritual. She was somewhat disappointed
with all these challenges and felt they were not challenging enough. In my
interview with her 10 days before her initiation she told me that, “the
challenges have been interesting, but so far nothing more than that. I have
lived with my shadow a lot. You can’t be a nonmonogamous and bisexual
person and not have confronted your shadow . . . . I constantly live with a lot
of negative stuff.”
Catherine felt that the women perhaps, after all, did not know her so well,
or maybe did not care enough. To make the picture more complete she
therefore gave herself a challenge, a challenge to be honest and not give in to
her vanity, which was to please and impress.

My challenge to myself is to be as completely within myself as I can

possibly be during the initiation. And by that I mean to be absolutely true
to my core. Not to respond any time to any other purpose other than to
be true to myself. That may be hard, given who my initiators are. I think
that I would want to please them, want to impress them. I would want to
prove myself to them. And the challenge to myself is to keep the mirror in
front of myself all the time. I am very clear that I am proving myself to
myself only.

The basic initiatory desire determining this discourse is as follows: Catherine

(X) believed that initiated women (Y) had healing powers (a). Catherine,
therefore, desired a special relationship with these women in terms of an
initiation ritual to get healing powers herself, spelled out as Catherine (X)
desired initiation (Y) from initiated women to gain healing tools (a). The
positions of “women” and “initiation” are ambiguous; they can both attain the
status of (Y) and be objectified for another purpose. But we shall see how
Catherine, in order to gain healing powers (a), slowly undertook a time-
limited displacement in which the two possible Y’s (women and initiation)
became the object of desire instead, so that initiated women (Y) became the
source of healing powers (a) for Catherine (X), just as the initiation ritual (Y)
became the source of healing powers (a) for Catherine (X).
 Initiation: transforming self 263

Magical preparations
When Catherine asked for initiation, the four women never asked her why
she wanted it. Neither was she ever told what an initiation actually involved,
nor what would happen during the ritual. She was only told to wear black
(which in this context symbolizes a shroud, normally used to wrap a dead
body, to write a “magical will”, and to give her “magical tools” to her
initiators the day before the initiation ritual. The women never told her what
a magical will is, or explained how to get or make magical tools; and she
knew they would not answer if she asked. She, therefore, “just did it”.
Magical tools had never been an intimate part of Catherine’s pagan practice.
According to her it is because of her Protestant background, having been
taught a strong dislike for attachment to religious objects. Consequently, she
did not find time to buy tools until two days before initiation, and for the first
time in her five years with Reclaiming she entered an occult shop.The wand,
the tool for fire and south, she made herself. In the evening she purified all
the tools by salt and water and passed them over fire. The next day she took
them to her initiators.
As described earlier, the tools are four and correspond to the four elements
and the four directions. The fifth element, the centre, is thought of as pure
essence and most commonly symbolized with a cauldron. Catherine’s favourite
symbol for the centre is the mirror, which to her symbolizes that the Goddess
is inside and “that she does not have to prove herself to any other than her-
self ”. We recognize Catherine’s own challenge in this expression, which really
meant that she, Catherine, who has the Goddess inside, must stop doubting her
value as a person. She carries ultimate value inside and is worthy of uncon-
ditional love. Whether Catherine shares all the symbolic meanings normally
attached to the elements and the tools was never a question in our conver-
sation. Her attitude was to do as she was told and to see what happened when
she let go of opinions and, as we shall see, eventually let go of control.
Catherine interpreted both the magical will and the black dress as signs of a
death and rebirth theme that she would confront in the ritual. She also
expected to be tested in the final ritual (especially for courage and survival
skills), to be abandoned for a certain amount of time, to be purified, and then
to be accepted in some way into the circle of initiates.This knowledge she had
from being in the Craft so long and from impressions of what is done in other
cultures. Catherine claims that she deliberately had not yet read any books on
Witchcraft or about initiation. In her will she indicated that she wanted to be
remembered and to be called upon by her beloved ones after her death.

The initiation ritual 9

Catherine’s initiation took place on a Saturday night. She was told to spend
the whole day in solemn silence, leave the house at 6:30 p.m., and wear warm,
black clothes. She was told to walk to Lincoln Park half a mile from her
264 Priestesses of the craft

home, and sit down by the statue of the Thinker and meditate on “thinking
and non-thinking, and the un-thinking of non-thoughts”. She did everything
as she was told. She left home with nothing but her magical will, her Book of
Shadow and small gifts for her initiators in her backpack. She brought no ID
card, no watch and no money. From the Mother Peace tarot deck she brought
the “Charge of the Goddess”, and memorized the lyrics on her way to the
park. She was silent and dressed as if going to a funeral.
After she sat about two hours alone in the park, meditating and watching
the sun set, her initiators came. They were suddenly around her, and before
she could see them she was blindfolded. In this act, Catherine crossed over
and started “dying”. Not a word was said. The women led her to a car. They
took her to a place by the ocean and told her that she would be challenged
and tested by the elements directly. The process proceeded in complete
silence.
Catherine was first taken to the Gates of Earth to pass its test. They
removed the blindfold, gave her a tray of many different kinds and colours of
beads, a string and a flashlight and said she should make a necklace expressing
her relationship to the earth and the material world. When finished, she
lubricated it with dirt from the ground, consecrating it to the earth. Later she
is supposed to carry the necklace around her neck as a sign of her rebirth.
The blindfold was then put back on and she was taken to the Gates of Air
to pass its test. She was given a skull to hold in her hands. She guessed it was a
bird’s skull. She was then told to make a song for her ancestors. This was a
difficult task for Catherine. In the lyrics she called on her ancestors to come
and dance in her heart, “You who danced in the woods and sang with the
animals/you who once looked death in the face and smiled without fear.”
As part of the test for fire, the four women lit candles very close around
Catherine’s body. If she moved she would be burnt. This she knew, so she
stood very still. She trusted the women fully. She knew that, ultimately, it was
her own distrust and fear of being burned, potentially causing her to move her
body, that was being tested here.
After passing the test of earth, air and fire she was taken back into the car
and driven to another place by the ocean. All her clothes, except the
blindfold, were taken off, and she was sent into the cold waters of the Pacific.
Two women went with her. It was freezing cold to the other women, but
Catherine enjoyed it a lot and felt warm. She did not want to leave the water,
and was finally asked by one of her initiators to let them know when she had
passed the test of water. Catherine describes this experience as “ecstatic”,
even if she says she can’t describe what happened. She maintains that she was
in trance during most of the initiation and that it had already started in the
Park.
During the initiation, Catherine cried a lot. Her crying in the water she
felt to be connected to Yemaya, the Yoruba water goddess whom she met in
trance when working on the challenge to explore her shadow. She felt that
her whole initiation became water dominated.
 Initiation: transforming self 265

I met her [Yemaya] there as Aphrodite, who rises on the shell and, down
from the deep water, can read people’s desires. My whole initiation
became water oriented. In the water I felt that I really liked this initiation.
It was fun and silly and just beautiful. I completely gave my self over, I
gave my will over to these people. If they said stop I stopped, if they said
turn left I did. I had given it all to them, I did not decide anything . . . .
We held hands [in the water] and I felt a strong tie. I felt the stupidity in
going into the water in such cold, dark and rainy weather. It was just like
being a child, and playing in the waves with your friend . . . . Under the
whole initiation I did not feel left. I had that feeling of being cared for,
and in a way all this attention, being bathed in attention from these
wonderful women.

Being in the water was the beginning of Catherine’s transformative process,

which also included a symbolic change from adult to child, although she
actually played with the Guardians of the threshold of death. The autonomy
and individual freedom associated with the adult is exchanged for the purity
and inner freedom of the child. She is, temporarily, removed from defiled
adulthood and returned to the liminality of innocent childhood. Catherine
used the word “ecstatic” about her experience of “being just like a child”,
while repeatedly telling me that what happened is almost impossible to talk
about: “It is beyond words.” Somehow it was about giving herself over to the
women and feeling total trust. It was about giving herself over to the elements
and being merged with them. It was about dedicating herself to the goddess
and feeling the waters of Yemaya flowing down her cheeks as tears. When I
asked how all this could happen when they were not even talking together
and she was blindfolded most the time, she just stated, “Revelations and
understanding would come all the time, thousands every second.” When I
pointed out that it was interesting that she merged with the elements, that
they were not treated as metaphors or symbols but as real, she answered, “Yes,
and that is, of course, what the Craft is about.”
Having passed the test of all the elements, Catherine was put in the car
again and driven to one of the initiators’ houses. One room in the house had
been made into a temple.They sat her down in a chair nearby that room and
asked her to tell them about her challenges, why she wanted to be initiated
and why she picked each of them to initiate her. They also asked for her
magical will. Catherine was still blindfolded when giving her account.10
Catherine told them that she wanted to be initiated to become a healer
and that Witchcraft was the spiritual tradition she wanted to learn from. She
felt connected to her ancestors and believed that they danced in the green
fields with the animals and knew how not to be afraid of death. She told them
that she had meditated on her anger and that she had also been confronted
with her anger when doing trance work on her shadow. She had learned from
this work that hurt and pain and fear are the underside of anger: “I realized
then that what I was afraid of, was that they [the women] did not care about
266 Priestesses of the craft

me, that they would forget about me. Ultimately it [anger] is a fear of death, of
annihilation.”
After this confession to “the Knights of Death” (the four women), marking
her symbolic death, Catherine was taken to the bathroom for a ritual purifica-
tion and rebirthing bath. The room was decorated with flowers and burning
candles. Into the bathtub were put all kinds of herbs and flowers, and the
room smelled of incense. She was helped into the water and lightly washed.
Still blindfolded, she was left alone to search for a new name for herself. This
was given to her by several goddesses, among them Yemaya. It is a secret name,
connected to the elements of water and earth.
Half an hour later, her sponsor came into the room and asked if she had
been given a name and if she was ready to enter the sacred circle. She also let
Catherine understand that it was not too late to change her mind. Catherine
was told the questions she would be asked when entering the circle and the
right answers to them. She was then led by hand by her sponsor to the temple
entrance. After being tested of her worthiness to enter the sacred circle of
Witches, her blindfold was finally removed. From this point on she was part of
a secret ceremony, with permission to see secret things and to hear secret
words.
Catherine’s initiators have instructed her not to tell anybody what happened
in this very circle. She keeps this promise, not least by stating that she hardly
remembers anything because of her trance state, although everything that
happened was “beautiful and right”. She was asked questions; she made
promises, but not to anything that did not feel right. While talking in one of
our conversations about her feelings connected to the secret ritual, she
suddenly said,

All the oral things are exactly what you would think. It is all the forms
and the substances that we already know. And it is the closest to anything
I would call high magic, or ceremonial magic . . . . It was more solemn,
more scripted in a way, more formal, less individual, probably more
conforming . . . . But besides that it felt so intimate, so religious. It feels
sacrilegious to talk about it; it feels like a violation of that holy ceremony
to even talk about it.

The pledge she had made for herself to be fully her core self during the
initiation was not experienced as difficult at all. Nothing happened that did
not feel part of her, even though some parts came totally as a surprise:

I feel I did something in that part of the initiation, I feel as if I dedicated

myself to the Goddess in a formal way. I didn’t know I was going to do
that. I did not know that would happen. That’s a way in which I feel
different.You know, all the women in my coven would say they don’t join
anything. I have never had that. On the contrary . . . for me it is very
powerful in saying, of course, I have reservations; everybody always has
 Initiation: transforming self 267

reservations; of course, nothing is perfect. But there comes a time when

you have to do it, I mean you either are or you aren’t. I really feel that
way about being a Witch. I like to say “Yes, I am a Witch.” I am not just
studying Witchcraft; not, I am interested in feminist spirituality; not, I am
a goddess worshipper; not, I am a pagan. I am a Witch. I understand what
that means. It is an act of the Crone . . . . There is this Christian hymn
used in Protestant circles “Once to every man and nation comes the moment to
decide, in the fight between good and evil for the good or evil side” . . . . Just
changing the words from “Once” to “Often,” that is how I feel about a
choice like this.

After completing the secret part of the ritual, Catherine’s initiators gave her
presents, and she gave them some small gifts as well. Then they revealed for
her their secret names and closed the circle by feasting and having a good
time. The ritual was done at 3:30 a.m. Sunday. At that time it was nine hours
since the initiation ritual had started.

The secret ritual part – according to literature

Even though Catherine was not permitted to reveal anything from the secret
part of the ritual, Starhawk has written at length about the initiation ritual in
The Spiral Dance (1979a:159–64). We also have an important source for what
actually happens in Witchcraft initiations in Stewart Farrar’s book What
Witches Do, first published in 1971. Farrar is an Alexandrian, British Witch, a
tradition close to the Gardnerians (cf. the Introduction). Although the Faery
tradition claims to be different from the Gardnerian, even in some respect to
initiation, one of my non-Reclaiming informants who is initiated in both
Faery and Gardnerian Witchcraft told me in 1990 that all Craft traditions,
including Faery, are influenced by Farrar’s very important revelations about
Wiccan rituals and beliefs. This informant also told me that The Grimoire of
Lady Sheba (1972) has the complete initiation text, if I really wanted to know
the exact details.
Since then I have experienced the initiation ritual myself (1994). Like
Catherine, I found the secret part to be very ceremonial and surprisingly
scripted, but, unlike Catherine, this part did not move my religious sentiments
onto any emotional level of really feeling transformed. To the extent I was
spiritually moved, it happened in the first part of the ritual, which is a
Reclaiming innovation that is not concealed behind the veil of secrecy. The
secret part, to me, was a little disappointing because it was just as occult and
stilted as I had thought it would be. In a way I already knew it. Its function for
me was more to finish the whole initiation process and to welcome me
ceremonially to a closed sister/brotherhood, among the living as well as the
dead. But in the end, I had the same feeling of gratitude toward my initiators
as Catherine had, finally recognizing how much work and time they had
invested just for me.
268 Priestesses of the craft

When entering the secret circle, I was – like Catherine – in a light trance
state. I was in this condition thanks to deprivation of food and drink, a very
long and extremely hot ritual bath and hours of blindfolding. My memory of
spoken words and symbolic details in the secret ritual is vague. What I
especially remember is the order and the sequence of the performative acts,11
and my memory is supported by a recognition of what I had already studied.
This means that when, for example, I remember the blessing that was said over
my body, it is because I have read it, or heard about it, so many times, that
when it happened, I experienced it as, “okay, so this is where the blessing
comes in”. It also means that the details that I did not expect to be part of the
ritual, are probably forgotten, or I remember them because they surprised me.
I will not be able to truly retell the ritual unless I eventually perform it
myself, being somebody else’s initiator and thereby in the position of having
“legal” access to the script (although this will not happen, since my work is
not to be a sponsor for Reclaiming Witchcraft). The only important thing to
note here is that the secret part of the ritual in 1994 was very close to the
version printed in The Spiral Dance in 1979, and that this version again is very
similar to other Craft traditions. It is, therefore, unlikely that the sources of the
Faery initiation ritual were different from those available to Gardner. And as
mentioned, one of these sources is a variety of Masonic rites. This is obvious
to anybody briefly acquainted with the tradition of Freemasonry and its
offspring.12
My purpose is not to reconstruct or analyse the exact content of Reclaim-
ing’s initiation ritual by finally revealing their secrets, but to document a story
of personal growth taking place in Catherine during her initiation process.
Since I claim that the total ritual process – including choice of initiators,
challenges given, ritual preparations, time span, etc. – is the medium of this
“transformation narrative”, I need to include a probable version of the secret
ritual part in my narrative to complete the picture. The secret part is, or may
be, a significant experience to the initiated and it also testifies to Reclaiming’s
occult heritage. I shall, therefore, very shortly suggest what might have
happened to Catherine in the secret ritual, using Starhawk’s text from 1979 as
a main source. I wrote this description before I was initiated myself and gave it
to one of my initiators. I did this to prevent any suspicion toward me for
revealing secrets that were not possible for the noninitiated to collect through
literary or oral sources.

* * *

While Catherine was in the bathtub, her initiators and priestesses put on their
ceremonial garments (black and brown ritual robes) and prepared a proper
ceremonial space for the ritual in the temple room. The circle was cast in a
traditional way, and the elemental guardians, the elements, the gods and the
Mighty Dead were properly called in with scripted, fixed lyrics.The initiators
purified themselves and raised energy from the earth into their bodies. The
 Initiation: transforming self 269

room was declared a magical place “between the worlds, beyond time and
space, where birth and death meet as one”, in order to make of Catherine a
priestess and a real Witch. These acts are believed to convert the circle into a
power vortex, a space where Catherine could merge with and embody her
longed-for magical healing tools. As we shall see, the circle also represents the
“Kingdom of Death” or the “Womb of the Goddess”, and the ritual form
corresponds to the Descent of the Goddess, the Witches’ myth in which the
Goddess enters the Kingdom of Death, stays for three days and makes love
with death, thus experiencing the circle of rebirth (cf. chapter 6). Catherine’s
ordination as priestess is, in other words, valid forever, even in future
reincarnations, and in all states of being, alive or dead, since it was staged in a
room believed to contain all possibilities simultaneously. We remember that
Catherine’s ritual intent was to move beyond anger and the fear of death
in order to experience an aliveness that is able to see through the word
“annihilation”, that it has no true reference in reality. She was prepared to take
in the message of the Craft myth, to leave the ritual bath as somebody not-
yet-born to human life, and to enter a room between the worlds of definite
form.

1 Before entering the sacred circle between the worlds, Catherine’s sponsor
tied a thin cotton cord loosely around her wrist, saying:
And she was bound as all living must be who would enter the Kingdom of Death.
Then another cord was tied around one ankle, and the Sponsor said:
Feet neither bound nor free.
The cords, according to Starhawk, symbolize that entrance into Witchcraft
is a free choice but that, once Catherine stepped onto this path, she set in
motion currents that would impel her forward.

2 Catherine was naked and blindfolded when presented to the circle. In this
state she was led to the Gate of the East in the circle, representing the
beginning. One initiator acted as challenger and asked:
Who comes to the gate?
Catherine answered:
It is I, . . . [her new name], child of earth and starry heaven.
Challenger:
Who speaks for you?
Sponsor:
It is I, . . . [her secret name].
Challenger pointed the athame toward Catherine’s heart and said:
You are about to enter a vortex of power, a place beyond imagining, where birth
and death, dark and light, joy and pain, meet and make one.You are about to step
between the worlds, beyond time, outside the realm of your human life.You who
270 Priestesses of the craft

stand on the threshold of the dread Mighty Ones, have you the courage to make
the essay? For know that it is better to fall on my blade and perish than to make
the attempt with fear in thy heart.
Catherine:
I enter the circle with perfect love and perfect trust.
Challenger pointed the athame to the earth, kissed Catherine, and pulled
her forward into the circle, as a midwife pulls forth a baby from her
mother, saying:
Thus are all first brought into the circle.
In Farrar’s version the challenger would go behind the apprentice, embrace
her and push her into the circle with the force of her own body to mark
the new birth.

3 The blindfold was now removed, and the new-born Catherine was given
the mirror to see “her Self ”, that is, the divine within.Then she was led by
hand and presented with her new name to the Guardians of the
Watchtowers of the four directions, or better, to each of the elements, as
one who would be made Priestess and Witch. Next she was led to the altar
in the north, where the priestess-initiator, by an act of social reversal, knelt
in front of Catherine. She was given the fivefold kiss on the parts of the
body here named, while the initiator “adored” her and proclaimed:
Blessed are your feet, that have walked the sacred path/Blessed are your knees,
that kneel at the sacred alter/Blessed are your sex, without which we would not
be/Blessed are your breasts, formed in strength and beauty/Blessed are your lips,
which shall speak the sacred names.

4 Catherine was measured with thin cord, from head to toe, around the
head and chest. Knots were tied to mark the measurements. Then she was
pricked in the finger with a needle, and the drops of blood were smeared
on the cord.With this cord in her hand, the priestess asked:
Are you willing to swear the oath?
Catherine:
Yes I am.
Priestess:
Are you willing to suffer to learn?
Catherine:
Yes I am.
Then Catherine swore to always be silent and keep secret what needs to
be kept secret. After that she knelt, placing one hand on her head and the
other beneath her heel, saying:
All between my two hands belongs to the Goddess.
 Initiation: transforming self 271

This is probably the part Catherine is referring to in the interview when

telling that she dedicated herself to the Goddess and that it came as a
surprise to her.

5 Catherine was lifted up by all her initiators and carried three times around
the circle. Then she was laid face down before the altar and pressed into
the ground. Gradually the pressing changed to stroking. They chanted her
new name and raised a cone of power over her, giving her power to open
her awareness, to heal and work magic. She was told:
Know that the hands that have touched you are the hands of love.
After this Catherine was supposedly told some of the Craft myths and
“mysteries and secrets [were] revealed”, as Starhawk writes in The Spiral
Dance (1979a:164).This might also have been true in 1989.

6 Catherine was consecrated on her forehead and on her breasts with oil.
And finally, the tools Catherine bought the previous day were handed to
her. They were also consecrated and their uses explained. After this part,
the feasting began. Catherine was honoured as a newborn and a wise one,
as one who knows the mystery: that all life is interconnected and that
death is not an end. She had died from her old consciousness in which life
is equal to separation and death, and experienced rebirth to a new
consciousness in which life is equal to bonding and living through
“dying”. She had attained a new identity, now being an ordained priestess
and a dedicated Witch.

* * *

As stated, this suggested description is not to be taken too literally. Many

rituals in Reclaiming have been changed since The Spiral Dance was published,
and, to some extent, this is true for the initiation. But the basic structure of
the secret part in Catherine’s initiation ritual (in 1989) was probably as
described above.

Post-initiation 13
After the initiation, late Saturday night, Catherine went home with her lover.
She explains to me that their relationship has now moved to “a whole new
level”. The whole ritual left her in a semi-trance state, which lasted for three
days. In her summary of what she learned from being initiated, Catherine says:

Most of it I have already said in the telling of the story. Some of it is only
insights into life, how it works and what religion is. Not in an abstract
way, but basic, like the lesson with my anger. I learned ways to use the
Craft; I got spiritual knowledge from the work I did. A lot of little things
272 Priestesses of the craft

that only are present in context. Not something you can write an essay
about [!]. It is certainly a bonding with the women that initiated me . . . .
And the secrets are not the kind that gives me power over anybody else;
it is not the formula of a neutron bomb. The only secret is that it is so
intimate; that’s what cannot be shared. It is just that it is so personal. It’s
for me.

On Sunday, the day after the initiation, Catherine went with her family to a
birthday party in the community. A few people congratulated her on the
initiation. She realized some days later that those were all initiates themselves.
The conclusion she draws from this is that somehow her relationship with the
initiated people has changed, not her relationship with others. The bond
between them is that “they share the willingness to do it”, to be initiated.

Catherine’s movements from scepticism to surrender

I have made a point of Catherine’s changing attitudes toward initiation and
the essential meaning of becoming an initiate several times. The process of
change can be observed from 1983, when she first became part of the com-
munity, to spring 1989, after being initiated. The process took several years,
and in that respect she is a typical Reclaiming initiate. But to what extent was
she aware of these changes herself? To my understanding, only retrospectively,
and only partially. The changes she went through derived from social and
ritual processes and were not deliberately chosen by Catherine. And her initial
desire, when first asking for initiation, was neither to change nor grow but
rather to achieve something instrumental. As we know, she very soon moved
from being in need of healing tools to being in need of women. This was a
crucial turning point. The beginning of her transformation started when she
dared to surrender her will and well-being to the admired women, trusting
that her role models did not represent an initiatory tradition alien to her
values and integrity. But it was first when Catherine was able to let go
completely of her object of desire, be it for tools, for secrets or for the initiated
women, that we may say she was changing. To let go of desire was, for
Catherine, identical to letting go of control and being satisfied to meet herself
as a child and as a goddess.
The process of her movements from scepticism to surrender becomes
obvious when we consult the interviews. In an interview conducted as early
as June 1985, I asked Catherine whether Witchcraft is a religion for the few
with a special vocation, and whether initiation was necessary to become a
Witch. In 1985 Catherine did not yet call herself a Witch: she felt that the
word did not communicate anything. Therefore, she found my proposition to
be rather silly because everything is already available to everybody:
I think that is silly. The religion is based on the elements everyone
participates in and is of reality. It is a recognition of the connectedness of
 Initiation: transforming self 273

everything that is. I don’t say that everyone practices the religion, whether
they know it or not. But certainly it is available and accessible and
valuable for everyone. I think that there are more esoteric aspects of
Witchcraft which are interesting and attractive to me, like trance work
and psychic stuff, but I don’t know that much about them, and I don’t
know how essential they are really to being a Witch.14

At that time, Catherine did not want to be nostalgic about the past or make
herself believe that the spiritual practices of the Witches of earlier centuries
were more advanced than what she and her community had at the time:

My guess is that we have everything available to us that everyone has ever

had because we get our teachings from nature and the earth. For me the
basis of the religion is in the physical world. So we have exactly the same
teachers as the women did anciently. What we may have lost is an
accumulated knowledge about it, and maybe a tradition of stories. But
fundamentally we haven’t lost anything because the wind still blows and
the sun still burns and the water still flows. I really do believe that is
where we get our lessons. I am not saying that symbolistically; I mean it in
a very profound way . . . . One of the most wonderful things about it
[Witchcraft] is that you don’t have to believe in anything stupid like
transubstantiation to be a Witch. All you have to believe in is that we need
air, fire, water and earth to live. Who can argue with that? It is so clearly
true that it is wonderful. We start from there so that we draw all our
lessons from that and our recognition of our connectedness with each
other and all living forms . . . .We are all part of the same thing, in a very
real sense, not as a metaphor, but real . . . . This recognition is not a
revelation; it is an experience.15

When I asked her what the point of initiation really is in feminist Witchcraft,
considering that the body of knowledge she talked about is something you
can get from inside yourself, she answered that to her the whole thing about
initiation was a little mysterious. She felt that initiation for the most part had
to do with defining oneself as community, that the secrets might be useful for
community purposes, for bonding, for creating a strong group.
When I met Catherine again three years later (November 1988), she had
asked for initiation and waited for it to happen. I was surprised and asked why
she had changed her mind. Catherine’s answered that she wanted “to know it
all and to have it all”, and that she was too curious to not want to see what
they had to share with her. She also wanted to be part of the group of initiates
because she had experienced the reality of its existence.
When going through Catherine’s statements from June 1985, November
1988 and spring 1989, before and after initiation, it is quite visible that she
moves from:
274 Priestesses of the craft

1 placing initiation in the realm of group psychology and sociology:

initiation as a group-defining act and key to entering the space of shared
values. She does acknowledge its positive function but also finds it a little
mysterious. This is a typical attitude toward initiation in Reclaiming, not
too rejecting, not too affirming. Having a love affair with an initiated
woman, who is active both in Reclaiming and in the pagan community,
gives Catherine small glimpses into the world of initiates. She has learned
to respect it. She holds the analytical view of an outsider, of one who does
not yet call herself a Witch (June 1985).
2 to placing initiation in the realm of education and social status. Catherine
has now become part of the discourse of initiation; she has stopped
observing it from outside. Initiation is not any longer an interesting
phenomenon but something she has to take a stand for or against, either in
terms of its educational value or in terms of the position it can give her.
Her decision to be initiated is motivated by what she needs, almost in a
practical sense, to become a healer and develop herself in the Craft, as well
as by the fact that initiation is a key to becoming a member of a new,
although vaguely perceived, social group (November 1988).
3 to placing initiation totally in the realm of vocation and education, but
still in a somewhat technical sense. She does not any longer talk about
initiation as a key that will open sociologically defined doors. Catherine is
now very close to the actual initiation and has completed all her challenges.
At this point she is committed to being initiated because she wants fully to
become a Witch. She believes she needs the tools and the knowledge a
Craft initiation can give her. Not only does she want to be initiated, she
is obliged to because the Goddess has called her to do it. She does not
choose a “reformed” version, as, for example, being initiated by her coven
in a ritual that is completely made up for that occasion. She chooses the
old, traditional way. And because she knows that her coven sisters are not
in favour of her choice, she hardly talks about it. Anyway, she is concerned
that the people who know her have respect for her decision and don’t
consider it superficial. She compares her initiation to the discipline of
doing art: it is when the aspiring ballet dancer has first undergone the
discipline of learning ballet that she is free to make up her own dances. So
also with the Witchcraft initiation. Catherine definitely looks upon the act
as something that will give her instrumental knowledge in the artform of
healing (spring 1989, before initiation).
4 to finally placing initiation in the realm of existential and personal trans-
formation. Going through initiation, Catherine gives birth to a “new
baby” whom she dedicates to the Goddess. The unknown “it” is finally
revealed as “a new Catherine, the true Catherine”. She moves on in her
educational path by finding her way “back home”, to the religion of her
 Initiation: transforming self 275

ancestors. She learns the path of the “give away”, meaning that in order to
become a healer and a bender in the world one has to “give oneself ” to
the Goddess. She gains wisdom and learns that the trial of initiation is
fundamentally ethical: it is to take a stand “for the good” and accept the
full consequence of her experience that everything is interconnected.
Healing is based on the principle of interconnection, not on separation.
Her dedication, then, is a pledge to manifest Goddess in the world through
healing work, through connecting and bonding. Other people’s opinions
about her initiation do not interest her. She claims that initiation is a very
personal, spiritual experience:“It is not an image; it is not an investment. If
so, it would then be a place where other people’s opinions would get in
the way.” She now tells me that she never previously considered, who was
initiated and who was not, and argues eagerly that initiation, in fact, has
nothing to do with elitism or with the making of a group within a group.
Instead it has to do with risking trust and love, says Catherine, who now
likes to say, “Yes, I am a Witch” (spring 1989, after initiation).

During these four stages, Catherine moved from a traditional outsider’s point
of view, in which initiation is interpreted in terms of group psychology and
the making of social identity, to an insider’s point of view based on a profound
existential experience “beyond words”. The wheel that turned and turned to
bring forth this process was not the reading of books or appropriation of
passed-on esoteric knowledge. In Catherine’s account, the turning of the
wheel was her willingness to bond and merge with the elements and with
other people, a willingness to be touched and changed. Through this act
Catherine relocated her spiritual focus from speculations on the social and
symbolic exegetical meaning of initiation, and its various occult subtexts, to a
more existential and experiential meaning.This new meaning is not a repetition
or internalization of a “correct” or “official” meaning, but the creation of a
new, individualized text.16 This text is recognizable as my retelling of Catherine’s
story as given to me.
When this is said, it is also true that Catherine, in addition to her core
experience of surrender, love and connection, did achieve all the social and
elitist qualifications listed under 1, 2 and 3 as well. She did gain higher social
prestige; she did attain membership in the group within the group. She was also
educated and given new social and symbolic power: social in the sense that
from now on she can initiate others, and hers is the power to say “yes” or “no”;
symbolic in the sense that she is believed to possess direct access to the power
source and that she is able to communicate successfully with the Mighty Dead.
As stated earlier (in chapter 6), the Dead are powerful Witches of many life
spans who have stopped reincarnating.They live eternally on the astral plane as
spirits and may be contacted and asked for advice, protection and help by
contemporary Witches – granted that they were properly introduced in the
initiation ritual. In other words, to be initiated is to enter a new kinship
276 Priestesses of the craft

structure. It is not based on biological bloodlines, but on spiritual affinity. It

extends beyond life and death, including Catherine, her initiators and the
Mighty Dead within the same family group – who now can meet across time
and space and gather, whenever they need to, inside a magical circle.

The elements of Catherine’s growth process

In Reclaiming’s initiation ritual, religion is reclaimed as meaning relinking:
making whole what was broken apart, relinking humans with their source of
being, with their fellow humans, with the natural elements, with their Deep
Self, relinking body and spirit. As discussed in chapter 5, one intention with
this definition is to be able to put psychological therapy back into what is
regarded as its original context: magical ritual. From this angle, it is not
difficult to see Catherine’s initiation process as a long therapeutic drama, in
which her whole life was acted out in front of her and through her, over and
over again. The ritual did in fact have a strong effect upon her, equipping her
with the unexpected tools of wisdom and higher consciousness, tools that
presumably will help her to live a deeper and more honest life.
The pedagogic underlying Catherine’s initiation process is closely linked to
Witches’ holy hermeneutics: it presupposes an alienating dichotomy between
body and mind that can only be healed by surrender and merger, also found
in the classical scheme for bringing up children. This scheme emphasizes the
category of experience and takes for granted that sensory experience is
primary in the learning process, whereas cognitive knowledge is secondary.
Children understand acts before they understand words. They express them-
selves through body language before they speak.They have a bodily experience
of the world before they learn to name and interpret it. A pedagogical
tradition derived from this childrearing philosophy must necessarily assume
that the most transformative tool to change a human being is the breaking
down of words and external, adult identities until she is like an innocent,
trusting, speechless and naked newborn, who thereafter is “forced” to learn
a new interpretation of life the way small children do: through bodily
experiences, symbolic language, emotional turmoil, mimetic games, intuitive
communication and performative arts – rather than through intellectual
analysis or appropriation of dogmatic beliefs.
Catherine’s most liminal experience was when she entered the darkness of
losing control because she was not yet able to see her blocks and blind spots:
she did not understand that her experience of control over the people at the
laundromat, and her unveiled excitement about it, was challenged by her
initiators’ prolongation of her initiation. She was also challenged to be nude in
ritual but did not see that this act symbolizes emotional nakedness and
honesty. And when challenged to meet her shadow, she did not manage to go
in deeply. She deluded herself into believing that she had always been in
contact with her shadow since she has a nonmonogamous lifestyle. But her
 Initiation: transforming self 277

chosen women “made her suffer in order to learn”, for without meeting her
shadow and “the stirring up of shit”, Catherine would not have experienced
growth or transformation.
To give priority to embodied, emotional experiences represents a rather
old educational tradition regarding human growth. We find it in initiation
rituals cross culturally and in the archetypal structure analysed forth by Victor
Turner: separation, liminality, communitas, reintegration.We also find it in the
subcultural teachings and ritualized traditions of western esotericism. The
modern “talking cure” to heal and make a person grow represents a somewhat
different tradition. Psychotherapy is commonly regarded as a derivation and
secularization of the Catholic confession, which values intellectual reflection
above bodily experience. But the process of transference, turning the therapist
into a temporary object of desire, is also crucial in this tradition in order to
heal successfully.17
The most important hermeneutical principle circulating in Catherine’s
story is the authority given to experience and to intuitive, embodied thinking.
In her preinitiation remarks, she repeatedly says that she does not know what
she will gain from being initiated, but, whatever it is, she knows she will need
it. She knows from her instinct, she says; she knows from inner experience.
This kind of knowing is experienced by Catherine as nonlinguistic. She is
acting from an inner source of knowledge, and its value as final authority to
the Witches is reinforced by the structure of the initiation process: Catherine
is not asked why she wants initiation until minutes before it happens. She is
given no information about ritual proceedings and never told what initiation
really is about – thereby making sure she knows what she asks for. When
instructed to write her magical will, Catherine says she knows instinctively
that she is not supposed to ask what that is; she is supposed to know. And, in
fact, she does know. She trusts that her intuition knows. In other words, the
initiation ritual in Reclaiming is built upon a structure demanding from the
apprentice a certainty about being initiated to such a degree that she is willing
to go through whatever it is, without the safety of being told in advance what
will come. The nature of this kind of nonlinguistic knowing is symbolized
both by the lack of conversation between Catherine and her initiators and by
the complete silence of the first several hours of the initiation ritual. Also,
when Catherine was angry because the initiation date continued to be
postponed and she never received her final challenges, she was not given
adequate answers, just told to meditate upon her anger.
By the end of Catherine’s initiation her confusion about the real object of
desire was finally resolved: not into a conclusion, but into a new perception.
She experienced that her object of desire was not in accordance with the
reality of things. Her new perception was born from the revelation that
neither the women nor the tools of initiation carried the truth, but rather that
she already possessed the object of desire inside herself. When leaving home
on the day of initiation, Catherine brought with her the “Charge of the
Goddess” text as printed on Vicky Noble’s tarot deck. In her post-initiation
278 Priestesses of the craft

reflections, Catherine interpreted this as a sign that she already knew in-
tuitively what her initiation was about, although she was not yet conscious of
it. In the “Charge of the Goddess”, the Goddess is believed to speak to her
children, and her speech ends like this:

And you who seek to know me, know that your seeking and yearning will avail
you not unless you know the Mystery: for if that which you seek you find not
within yourself, you will never find it without. For behold, I have been with you
from the beginning, and I am that which is attained at the end of desire.18

Catherine’s revelatory experiences of growing into a new level of conscious-

ness were brought forth by the final initiation ritual, which reenacted the
whole initiation process and, obviously, brought together for her that which
earlier had been only fragments.
However, if the final meaning of the initiation ritual is human growth, and
not to hand over instrumental knowledge, why the secrecy? Because it
triggers the initiatory desire for the unknown “it”. The whole initiation
process implies that without experiencing the pain of the never ending desire,
X desires Y to get (a) and the process of displacement, Y becomes (a) for X, within
a consciously staged setting, it is difficult to come to terms with this emotional
structure and move on. The motivation for Catherine’s wish to be initiated
is quite representative. She desired “something” badly, and its names were
mutually replaceable: healing tools, initiated women, to be part of a special
group, trust, care, love. The initiation process was not set before Catherine’s
desire was turned on its head and evolved into a new one: not to get but to
give. By asking for initiation, Catherine initially asked for the object “love, care
and acceptance”. Instead she learned that she already had love and that her
work was to manifest it, give it out.The ritual unveils the desired “it”, the holy
secret, in declaring that there are no secrets, except the secrecy of silence:
knowledge from inside, and the secrecy of growth: to be willing to suffer to
learn. Having undergone the initiation ritual, Catherine could finally end the
circle by, ironically, once again being reconciled with the egalitarian slogans in
Reclaiming, those stating that “all is inside”, that anybody has access to all the
powers and all the knowledge within themselves, and that self-initiation is just
as legitimate as the initiation she has undergone. But today she knows its truth
from an experience of humility and trust, not from ideological postulates.The
difference between ideologically and experientially knowing the same is
crucial. Ideological knowledge is regarded as superficial, and its truth can be
overruled and lost in power-over games in which the individual loses sight of
life as interconnected. Experiential knowledge, though, is believed to be of a
profound character, hopefully preventing Catherine from ever misusing
power-over or putting herself in separation from the web of life.

* * *
 Initiation: transforming self 279

In accordance with the view that initiation is an education for managing

daily life, as well as an ordination, it is regarded as a never-ending process.
Catherine’s initiation is believed to have set in motion currents that will
irrevocably impel her forward for many years to come. Especially the first year
after the initiation is said to be hard. Catherine’s emotional shadow sides were
expected to become really burdening, pushing her to make necessary changes
in her lifestyle. And in fact, for Catherine, the next few years were all
extremely turbulent. She changed identity from bisexual to lesbian, divorced
her husband, moved to another city and became a single mother of her
teenage son. The new sexual identity was a major change in Catherine’s life
and, in particular, to her son.
Catherine is still active in Reclaiming and her profile has continued to be
that of an outspoken and critical feminist. She strongly opposes exclusiveness,
although she advocates the necessity for women-only space and rituals,
offering teaching to women-only groups. With time she has also become a
respected elder, one who is often asked for initiation. Although she once
learned that the ancients did not have any access to knowledge different from
hers, she honours western esotericism for handing down a method for
personal growth which, according to Witches, was about to be lost in our
culture. Catherine values initiation as a powerful, transformative process and is
quite clear that there is a big difference between a Witch and a committed
Witch. The first one worships the Goddess; the second one you can, in
addition, count on.
Irrespective of whether Catherine’s felt transformation of herself can
be proved or not, Reclaiming Witches have contributed profoundly to the
gendered field of religion by reclaiming and reforming a traditional rite of
initiation and incorporating it into an otherwise elaborate expression of a
newly invented female/feminist symbolic order. Resistance against secretive
ritual acts and dislikes of hierarchical structures separating the learned from
the ignorant, is normally (and for good reasons) very strong among feminist
theologians and religionists. But blind resistance also risks throwing out
the gold with the garbage – the gold in this case being a certain form of
pedagogic, namely the mystery rite. The mark of a mystery rite is to convey
knowledge and insight through bodily thinking, feeling and acting that
otherwise cannot be known, and to actively stage a process of psychological
displacement and transference in order to induce personal and spiritual growth
in the candidate.
This esoteric method has been as controversial in the field of religion as has
Freudian analysis been in the field of psychotherapy. However, just as feminists
have appropriated psychoanalysis and reformed its theory and practice to
suit their own liberation schedule, time is ripe for twisting methodological
knowledge about the mystery rite from the hands of western esoteric societies
and other androcentric brother/sisterhoods, and use it in the service of
feminist theological reflection, women’s spiritual growth and maturity and
deepened experiences of autonomy and attachment (cf. Conn 1993: 254).
280 Priestesses of the craft

Reclaiming’s merit is to have managed to develop a form to the mystery rite

that is both traditional and accommodated to individual needs, and that
unanimously has been experienced as deeply meaningful by those who have
decided to enter this time-consuming and challenging quest.

Notes
1 Cf. Vivianne Crowley (1996:81). Such a differentiation among aspects of religion
was originally introduced by the perennial philosopher Frithjof Schuon (cf.
Knitter 1985:47)
2 Chana Ullman (1989) writes that religious conversion to sects is probably motivated
by a wish to merge with the perfect love object (p. 145) or, from a psychoanalytic
perspective, to install a perfect authority, replacing the biological parent with
another (p. 193).
3 To a certain extent we may say that religious feminism also proclaims the belief that
truth is hidden in the “Old Ways.” But for something to be old enough in
the goddess-worshipping spirituality movements it has to be at least 10,000 years
old. Paleolithic and neolithic cultures, of which we know very little, are acceptable;
European occultism, on the other hand, is embarrassingly close.
4 My reading of this triadic structure is inspired by the Lacanian psychoanalytical
school (cf. Lauridsen 1982; Mitchell and Rose 1982; Gallop 1988). I am aware
that feminists discuss in what ways the libidinal structure of “feminine desire” is
different from the “phallic sexual economy” and womens relation to jouissance.
This discussion is too complex and internal to psychoanalytical theorizing to be
considered by me in the present context (cf. also Lacan 1982).
5 This definition is almost identical with Caroline W. Bynum’s suggestion in 1991:29,
a reformed version of Victor Turner’s famous definition.
6 When Catherine read the first draft of this chapter (1989), she felt uncomfortable
when seeing herself exposed for analysis. But she continued to keep her commit-
ment, not withdrawing her permission, restraining her criticism, in order to help
me have my object of desire: good ethnography. She has, however, given me helpful
comments to factual points in the narrative.
7 Source: interview conducted before initiation in spring 1989.
8 Source: interview conducted before initiation spring 1989.
9 Source: interview conducted after initiation in spring 1989, and literature on
Witchcraft.
10 In my own initiation ritual (in 1994) the aspect of ritual dying was made more
explicit: still being blindfolded, I was taken through a huge stone labyrinth and laid
down in its centre. I was wrapped in my shroud and left alone on the cold ground
for a long, long time. When they finally returned the women encircled the
symbolic graveyard, which also symbolized the circle of death and rebirth, while
singing, “When we are gone, they will remain/Wind and rock, fire and rain/They
will remain, when we return/The wind will blow and the fire will burn.”
Afterward they read out loud my handwritten will. Finally they “woke me up,” led
me out of the labyrinth and put me, who now was an “unborn fetus,” in a hot tub,
the comforting and purifying waters of “the womb.”
11 My memory corresponds to a semantic theory claiming that performative acting is
primary, whereas spoken words are secondary when constituting meaning in the
individual (cf. Greimas 1974).
12 The heritage from nineteenth-century Freemasonry and its diverted lodges, such
as the Golden Dawn, is so well kept in Witches’ initiation rituals that we can even
find parallels, both in some structural elements and in certain formulations,
 Initiation: transforming self 281

between the Reclaiming tradition and that of the Christian Masonic brotherhood
in Scandinavia. Their rituals have been published by the Norwegian theologian
Sverre Dag Mogstad (1995).The revelations of secret texts and ritual forms are not
complete, but, still, the act of publication has been strongly annoying to the
brothers involved. Public knowledge of the rituals undermines their pedagogical
effect on the apprentice.This criticism is, to a certain extent, also valid in regard to
my writings about Reclaiming (cf. the Introduction).
13 Source: interview conducted after initiation spring 1989.
14 Source: interview June 1985.
15 Source: June 1985.
16 This viewpoint differs from Victor Turner’s theory on ritual symbolism. He suggests
that the scholar, for interpretive reasons, adds the indigenous ritualist’s exegetical
meanings onto the structural, immanent meaning in order to encompass the total
meaning of the ritual and of the ritual symbolism. Catherine’s sudden insights
suggest, however, that indigenous interpretations of ritual experience not only are
additions: they can twist the whole meaning of the ritual. Just as Witches slowly
are changing the symbol “witch” from meaning “wicked” to meaning “healer” by
living as if that were inevitable, they might have the power to change the symbolic
meaning of “occult initiation” by acting as if that had already happened.
17 It was Freud who discovered the process of displacement and transference as
crucial in psychological healing. It is also important to stress that psychotherapy
and psychoanalysis are not the same. Analysis is not primarily an intellectual talking
cure, reflecting on personal issues, but a technique to remember what is repressed
and to become more conscious of unconscious hidden drives and desires. The
psychoanalyst works with body memory, silence between words, the unsaid, asso-
ciations or intuitions connected to particular words, imagery and dreams, but takes
no interest in conferring a predefined symbolic meaning upon the patient’s
memory. His/her main healing tool is transference, that is, gaining so much trust
that the patient can project earlier experiences upon him/her and possibly solve
them by reliving them consciously and unconsciously (Freud 1980 [1917]). As we
see, there are many similarities between this healing tradition and the process of
initiation.
18 Starhawk (1979a:77).The “Charge of the Goddess” is also quoted in chapter 4.
Conclusion
Reclaiming Witchcraft
and theology

The aim of this book has been to demonstrate how Reclaiming people build
religious identity and agency from the position of a Witch: a person living at
the intersection of nature and culture, the ordinary and the extraordinary, and
constantly dialoguing with ancient European paganism, contemporary western
religiosity and personal experiences. I have shown how Witches perceive of
themselves as having left the Father’s House (Jewish and Christian religion)
and returned “home” to the Self (Goddess religion) with a call to heal western
women’s (and men’s) alienation from community and spirituality and to
become benders of human and societal developments. I have also sought to
describe the ritual processes and practices through which this complex
identity is embodied and how ritualization is used to create a sacred space
where divine merger and human growth may take place and where visions of
a new culture and new forms of spirituality can be born.
I have chosen these themes from my understanding of Witches’ discourse as
predominantly diagnostic. Witches interpret the existential scenario, which
makes necessary a transition from “my Father’s house” to “my Self ”, in terms
of a western culture that suffers from spiritual incompetence: it does not know
how to “grow people”; it has no sacred women (priestesses) “at home”; it has
forgotten that the givenness of the envelopes that hold us (body and eco-
system) cannot thrive within oppressive theological and clerical structures and
that an empowered sense of self and female agency grows from nourishing
homes, circles and dwelling places and from respectful remembrance that life
is something granted. Their ensuing diagnosticism implies distinctions
between cultural disease and personal integrity, theological lies and mystical
truth, social alienation and spiritual belonging or, more basically, the dialectics
of regeneration: separation and merger.
I have sought to approach these themes from many different angles, as if I
were moving around the circuit, throwing different colours of light on a
nonsynthetic, common theological centre. My goal, however, has not been to
analyse and criticize Witches’ contributions by the standards of systematic
Protestant theology, which is my field, nor to position myself in relation to
their beliefs. My goal has been to write a book that can serve as an example of
having listened to and participated and merged with “the other”, on premises
 Conclusion 283

set by “the other”, in order to understand and represent their reality constructs
as honestly as possible. Assessing this participation in terms of further
“positioning” would be nothing but obliterating and arrogant. Moreover, a full
discussion of Witchcraft in comparison with selected representatives of
academic theology is a subject of its own, beyond the scope of this book.
Let me nevertheless, very briefly, reiterate some of the findings and
conclusions from this predominantly empirical investigation in terms
generated by the discipline of theology.We shall start with the ideal narrative,
the one Reclaiming Witches happily embrace, and finish with a slightly more
critical story. The ideal narrative may be compared to generalized theological
discourses, the not-so-ideal narrative to revisions made in accordance with
updated historical knowledge, including individual experiences and beliefs,
which to a certain extent contest Reclaiming Witches’ ideal self-repre-
sentations. But before turning to these particular narratives, let me situate this
project in its broader theological context.
As stated in the Introduction, I have studied Reclaiming Witchcraft as a
qualified religious and theological expression, developed by contemporary
feminist lay women (and men) in response to spiritual and cultural experiences
of being exiled from biblical religion. From the perspective of social
anthropology, Witches’ alternative expression may sound just as deviant as
mainstream theology. From the perspective of feminist theology, however,
Witches may be said to formulate answers to some of its own concerns, for
example, to the conviction that universalist theological representations of
“woman” and “man”, and their shared human nature, are androcentric
colonialist notions and highly insufficient to express “first-world” or “third-
world” people’s sense of self and relationship with an ultimate ground of
being. Furthermore, favoured western theological images of the divine are
charged with representing a male symbolic order and thus inadequate to
express feminist women’s (and men’s) faith. If an ideal in feminist theology is
to include voices and perspectives from all genders and queer spirits, and
represent the realities of the world in which we live more meaningfully – at
least as it appears to feminists, witches, people of colour, third-world tribes,
and other “queer” persons – how may the discipline of theology be revised?
Some of the Reclaiming Witches’ contributions have been to rework
female agency and sacred space, including the idea of growing and revitalizing
the subject and her surroundings by means of religious ritual. By starting with
a working model of the universe that includes interconnected realms of matter
and spirit, they claim to have inherited/created a religious alternative that is
pagan and pre-Christian in essence. I believe this thesis needs modification
and have therefore attempted to show that Witches, explicitly and implicitly,
argue with western theology over issues regarding “the nature of reality” and
that their constructions are probably linked to a counter-cultural heritage line
in the Christian tradition itself, even though borrowings from ancient
European and indigenous cultures worldwide have obviously also been
incorporated. In fact, the contents and possible limits to their argument seem
284 Conclusion

to be determined by an accumulated pool of historical discourse in western

culture, which includes both hegemonic and deviant theological positions and
ritualizing strategies.
For example, Reclaiming Witches assume that the western hemisphere is
sick and ailing because it denies the immanentist nature of Reality: that the
universe is alive and interconnected at all levels; that the elemental power
giving birth and life is female and sacred; that humans are a mode of the
divine and that infants are “twice born” – of divinity first, of humanity
second; that community entails the mystery of being joined and being
separate; that the self is relational and gendered and that communion and
initiation is its goal; that ethical imperatives are derived from a universal
power-within, manifesting as inculturated human conscience. In Starhawk’s
language, these immanentist dimensions of the nature of reality are summed
up as “interdependence, community and immanence”.
However, to perceive of the world in immanentist categories is not totally
foreign to westerners, at least not to esotericists and mystics; neither is the
Witches’ subsequent, magical model of the universe. In historical theology, we
may confront immanentist arguments in disputes – for example, in those
between Luther and Erasmus – over whether God, in relation to humans as
imago dei, should be thought of in terms of categories of “being” or “relation”,
whether the connection between divine and human reality is one of
continuity or discontinuity. But the tendency to rank values associated with
transcendence above immanence and praise the rational, disembodied and
solitary self above the passionate, embodied and communal self, is more a trait
of modernism than it is of Christian theology, at least in a historical
perspective.
Nevertheless, Witches address this spatial order between transcendence and
immanence critically, both its philosophical and theological implications, and,
inevitably, call into question taken-for-granted notions about human and
divine nature – for both notions are intrinsically related to spatiality. For
example, images of God as a being who immanently indwells cosmos as an
enclosing, birthing and sustaining power both presuppose and give rise to
“mothering” and “femaleness” as root metaphors, whereas God’s extra-
terrestrial seclusion from creation, God as transcendent and wholly “other”,
although related, invites both female/mothering and male/fathering metaphors.
Theological disputes about the “location” of divinity, which can be inter-
preted as transcendence versus immanence, may thus be regarded as implicit
arguments over the “genderedness” of the divine (cf. McFague 1993;
Salomonsen 1994, 1999).
Therefore, when representing Reclaiming Witchcraft for a theological
account, I shall simply approach it as a distinct (sub)branch of western
theology. In addition to its immanentist, spatial orientation, feminist Witchcraft
is distinguished by being nonchristological, nonacademic, transcultural and
womanish. When presenting Witches’ alternative from this perspective, I will,
however, adapt to their terminology and idealized self-representation.
 Conclusion 285

Reclaiming Witchcraft as an idealized theological discourse

Reclaiming Witches’ suggestion regarding the relationship between humanity
and divinity is to perceive of their connection in terms analogical to birthing
and creation as process: never-ending, complex processes of formation and
growth, of separation and interdependence, in a lineage from procreation to
birthing to maturity to decay, with many and paradoxical levels of being and
relating. The nature of human beings is, according to Witches, not fully
determined in the act of physical birth; it is, rather, a slow coming into being
through parenting, communing and ecological enveloping in which “the
other”, understood in a broad sense, sets fundamental premises for becoming
and for how innate, natural potentialities for growth may be developed.
Humans may be “grown” in love and respect or in debasement and cruelty.
Thus, “growing”, not principles, determines human nature.
Physical birth is not the point of no return in which Goddess is revealed to
be either present or absent in regard to human nature. Neither are initiations
or baptism seen as authoritative, mediating acts in which “the missing part” is
finally invoked into place. By virtue of being ritual acts, they both symbolize –
for example, commitment, faith, growth, conversion and covenanting – and
make such experiences happen. But they do not represent miraculous events
altering human nature, infusing human beings with a divine grace that was
previously absent.They merely enlarge, sanctify and rechannel what already is.
Yet the initiation ritual is an option for rebirth and becoming once again.
Witches regard humans as embodied, passionate, gendered selves, inserted
in nature and culture and irrevocably left to create life in organic harmony
with this dependence. They are not constituted pointedly but along a
continuum, in which divine origin is found at one end and inculturation
at the other. The “indwelling Goddess” or “Deep Self ” represents all
potentialities, the very best in every being. Human parenting represents
limiting form, that which nourishes or prevents growth. In this sense are
humans said to be twice born: of the Goddess first and primarily (their Deep
Self or spirit-within) and from a human female secondarily (their
body/mind/soul). The human female mother is, however, also a manifestation
of the Goddess, as is the process of growth itself. Accordingly, to be a human
being, male or female, is to be another mode of the Goddess. The building of
spiritual connections with the extended family (including people, plants, trees,
sun, moon) is regarded as an integral part of the job of growing up and as
measurement of emotional maturity. Neglect in this process causes not only
ecological imbalance, but also personal immaturity. Rebuilding these
connections is part of healing and finally becoming an adult, that is,
responsible and at home in the universe.
The spatial universe invoked by Reclaiming Witches is multidimensional,
with depths and heights and inner and outer, hidden and manifest levels of
being and appearing. Immaturity and imbalance are, therefore, partly seen as
resulting from a dualistic model of the world in which the human subject is
286 Conclusion

forced to make choices according to “either–or”: either transcendence or

immanence, sin or grace, evil or good, female or male. Immaturity is also seen
as emanating from androcentric theology and the exclusive elevation of “male
experience” and worldviewing, preventing, in fact, both women and men
from gaining their powers-from-within.
A main error in the spatial orientation of contemporary, mainstream
western culture is said to be that of confusing “power-over” with “power-
from-within”. The first kind of power refers to external social positions based
on claims of authority, implying control and feelings of superiority in regard
to others.The ethics of power-over may also be conceptualized as an ethics of
transcendence, referring to a vertical axis tending to value that which is
transcendent, disconnected and above. This, in turn, may reinforce human
inequality and hierarchical decision making. The second kind of power refers
ideally to inner strength and integrity. The ethics of power-from-within is,
therefore, equal to the ethics of immanence, to consensus decision making and
the feminist-anarchist politics of small-scale communities like Reclaiming.
The hegemonic cultural patterns of corporate American society are believed
to support and reinforce power-over, thus impeding people from finding their
powers-from-within.The consequence is that people are prevented from really
growing up, which means cultivating their power-from-within toward the
realization of a third ethical principle: “power-with”. This form of power
represents the sensibility and ability to make choices for action, separating
morally right from wrong, distinguishing between the social forces sustaining
life and those promoting death.
Witches also criticize western religious traditions for having abolished fertile
rites of passage that can promote a child’s initiation to puberty, or an adolescent’s
initiation to adult maturity. Such rituals are believed to denote more than a
formal passage from one social group to another.They are seen as instrumental
in themselves, in a magical sense, for the development of inner authority and
integrity, primarily through their capacity for sublimating the dilemmas of
separation versus regeneration and for transforming emotional separation into
temporary unity. Growth is believed to take place exactly within these dialectical
movements. Ritualizing is also understood to have the peculiar ability of
combining two levels of human life: it forms and transforms people; it forms and
transforms community and culture. Religious rituals create bonds between
humans and gods, between humans and nature, and create interhuman fellow-
ship. But ritualizing also educates, mediating knowledge and values through
symbolic communication. Witches equate their own rituals with appropriating
the ethics of immanence and learning the path of the Goddess.
“Goddess” is conceptualized as partly inhabiting the subject already
(Goddess as other-than-deity), partly as only related (Goddess as hidden deity),
and as ritually invoked in order to temporarily possess the subject as being
(Goddess as manifest deity). In order to heal, Witches say they connect with
Goddess as “energy”, that is, as material divine forces, through so-called
 Conclusion 287

channelling or aspecting. While magically connected, they may move divine

energy spatially by manipulating their own emotions and mental imagery with
the (uncorrupted) power of the will.
The Witches’ rituals are, however, regarded as the medicine in promoting
human growth and change, and the initiation-to-Witch ritual is attributed
with the greatest of magical options. One reason for this attribution is the
therapeutic challenges given to the candidate; another is the amount of
rebirthing magic that they claim is being performed. Magic, as used in
Reclaiming, is both a cognitive and performative category: it represents a
different means of knowing and a special medium to effect and transform
reality. Witchcraft rituals are, in general, intended to re-symbolize divine
origin, recontextualize the bodily sexed self within the universe and process
human relationships.
Divinity is believed to manifest in and sanctify the world as it is: natural
cycles and seasons, mind, body, spirit and emotions. Spiritual union is sought
in mundane life, in passion, sensuality, and relationship – through being fully
human. Religion is simply said to mean relinking with the indwelling power
of being and with all her outer manifestations and is regarded as a constant in
human culture. However, Witches do not believe that their religious path is
the only true one.
The path of the Goddess is manifold. To find the path at all it is necessary
to acquire new knowledge. This knowledge is conveyed via two routes:
as teachings directly from the Goddess when “captured” by her (mystical
experience, intuition, revelation, visionary insight) and as teachings handed
over by humans trying “to capture” her (doxa, ritual symbols, magical
techniques, classes and books). Knowledge is measured as true and false on the
basis of feminist interpretations of our daily life experiences as bodily, sexed
selves, and by the overall norm of promoting women’s emancipation and true
humanity. A common denominator for all Witches is that they regard sexual
love and childbirth as most sacred events and the birthing power itself as
female and divine.
A person who enters the path of the Goddess as a “Priestess and Witch”
may become a healer and bender of the world. Like Ruth at Barbara’s BQ, she
may perceive of Witchcraft as “centreing to her existence” and as a way to live
her daily life. Or she may, like Michael, attempt to balance her various selves,
“learning to love and love deeper”. Either way, Witchcraft rituals will teach
her the path of emotional honesty and help her mature according to the
potentialities of her individual nature. This balanced life is regarded as
imperative to psychological and spiritual health. To run counter to the
givenness of life will in time create alienation and spiritual illness. In and of
herself a healthy person, as understood by this terminology, is believed to be
ethically and emotionally integrated, acting from the principle of power from
within. Ultimately, the path of the Goddess unifies spirituality with politics
and is regarded as the key to visions of a new, revitalized society.
288 Conclusion

Reclaiming Witchcraft as a not-so-ideal research narrative

In previous chapters, I have described feminist Witchcraft as part of a larger
new religious movement attempting to overwrite Jewish and Christian
religion and culture with (neo)pagan inventions. For many feminist Witches it
is important to assure others that their alternative is not fully invented but
somehow spiritually anchored in the peaceful cultures of prehistory, those
faithful to the Goddess and the sacredness of all life. In order to retrieve
foremothers, Starhawk has written at length about presumably prepatriarchal
neolithic cultures and, for example, attempted to analyse the passage in Sumer
from a supposedly “egalitarian and goddess-centred society” to a “stratified
and god-centred” one. In her constructions of Witchcraft, the past is obviously
a primary resource on which feminist identity is built. But her text does not
represent academic, historical research and should only be valued as inspiration
for reformist creativity here and now.
In this book I have attempted to point out how a large portion of the
contents of Reclaiming Witches’ spiritual practices and worldviewing stem
neither from “women’s experiences” nor the pagan past but from a subcultural
European heritage line. The initial knowledge of the Goddess is not gained
from “relinking with the divine within”; it is gained from relinking with
this heritage line and its inclination to continually re-interpret founding
mythologies to western civilization. The trunk of Witches’ deification
theology has an ideological lineage back to the counter-cultural Church in
early modern Europe. Esoteric symbolism and ritual structure are of occult
western heritage, first formulated as “Witchcraft” by the Briton Gerald
Gardner, whereas notions such as “energy” and “Deep Self ” are derived
from eastern influence, Theosophy, transpersonal and Jungian psychology.
Reclaiming women’s contributions have mainly been to reinterpret this
heritage line, launching syncretistic experimentation, ritualizing and mystical
experience as basic methods, and women’s emancipation and dignity as ethical
stances. Worshipping a female deity, reanimating the universe and perceiving
the sexed body in ecological terms may, however, be regarded as new and
original within recent western history.
Yet the phenomenon named “feminist Witchcraft” is a result of conscious
cultural choices and not of divine visitation or a brand new comprehension of
the reality of human life in western society. The people studied have been
raised with different religious traditions in the contemporary US, mainly
Jewish, Catholic and Protestant. In the book, Starhawk represents the Jewish
approach and the voice of the “founding mothers”, while Catherine stands for
the Protestant approach and Aradia the Catholic. Their joint agenda and
creativity may in and of themselves be regarded as interreligious dialoguing,
carried out in curious exchange with many non-western traditions as well.
Although dialoguing consistently takes place at the edges of western religiosity,
it never happens completely outside of it.
 Conclusion 289

My aim in pointing out unacknowledged contextual frameworks and

unadmitted origins is not to devalue Reclaiming Witches’ path or work but,
rather, to avow the interconnections, complexities, contradictions and
dialogues that are part and parcel of human sociality and, therefore, of
religious community building. I have also attempted to describe how
Reclaiming people construct individual stories of “coming home” from very
individual pasts to balance their reliance on “historical” roots. In order to
systematize, I have named one hermeneutic strategy “utopian Witchcraft” and
another “generic Witchcraft”. The most obvious differences between these
two approaches appear in definitions of human nature and in hopes invested
in the idea that Witchcraft and (neo)paganism might change society in a more
radical and democratic direction. While utopian Witches tend to localize the
origin of human misery to the external environment, almost turning cultural
conditioning into a reified power of its own, generic Witches operate with a
split human subject closer to Protestant theology and psychotherapy.
As I have documented, Reclaiming community is also the ground for
gender conflicts, power games and hierarchies between insiders and outsiders,
a reality that clearly opposes the proclaimed intention of valuing power-from-
within more than power-over. This is a disappointing reality to many utopian
Witches who have identified oppression with patriarchal religion, assuming
that a “re-linking with the divine within” will disclose a more noble nature of
the human inner self. This conflictual reality is not so disappointing to those
Reclaiming people who regard human beings as noncoherent subjects, always
continuous with the sacred reality of the elemental powers of life (goddess as
other-than-deity), often discontinuous with divine will (goddess as deity), but
successively growing and developing. Both groups agree that the competence
to differentiate between good and evil is innate; the question is rather how
much the will and its capability to manifest are corrupted.
However, all Witches strongly oppose the view that “original sin”
adequately describes the human condition.This was explicitly expressed in the
interviews conducted after reentering Catholic Mass and in the processing
ritual at Witchcamp (described in chapter 3). “Sin” is only part of reality, a
disruptive and destructive element, but not constitutive of it and never
stronger than those forces constantly renewing, healing and sustaining life. To
actually accept the notion “sin” as constitutive of human reality, Witches
equate with worshipping “death, crucifixion and suffering”, a spiritual trait
they project onto the “Fatherly house” they claim to have left.
This does not mean that they are ignorant of human shortcomings and
evil, but that a main theological platform is this: people need acceptance,
affirmation and sanctification of “what is” before they dare to encounter their
own “shadows”, not least to open up for the crafting work of the spirit and
change into “what is not yet”. This thesis – which stands in reversed ratio to
the Fathers of the European Reformation – structures the whole entering
process into the Craft, including the outline and progress of ritualization.
290 Conclusion

When a person approaches Witchcraft for the first time, she is invited to
affirm and celebrate a strong sense of self. In particular, women are mirrored
over and over in all the beautiful, powerful traits projected onto the Goddess.
Not until strong enough in their “ego” sense of self are they considered ready
to submit to the path of initiation. Walking this path, they are expected to be
ready to confront “their own shit”, turn around, move on, and change. But not
everybody asks for initiation, which in any case does not lead to any form of
entitlement in the Reclaiming tradition.
If we bracket the growth processes instigated in an initiation process,
Witches seem to have untwisted the Protestant succession of “justification”
and “sanctification” in their own ritual cycles: the self undone by justification
is not thereafter remade and sanctified according to the law of love, but
the other way around. What is at stake in Witches’ “liturgical theology” can
thus be compared to Serene Jones’ recent observations regarding the chief
Protestant article in relation to processes of “sanctification” and “whole-
making” in the mothering lap of Church or community. She argues that if
people, who have experienced nothing but fragmentation and disintegration –
which is often women’s felt situation, are met with a request for repentance
and a call to change, their undone self will just continue to fall apart. Instead
of recapitulating the abuses and losses of lived life, the history should be
turned around: first a centring of the subject, then a call to repent; for only in
sanctification, not in justification, is agency implied: growth, regeneration,
change and new becoming (Jones 2000).
Ritualizing is Witches’ primary social strategy for this centring and new
becoming. Rituals are thought of as prime loci for the invested optimism
regarding human growth and change and considered main avenues to insight
and renewed agency. Ritual space in Reclaiming is structured according to a
cluster of important symbols: the quartered circle and the esoteric pillars of
correspondence; the sensual visibility of the human body and its symbolic
function as axis mundi between human social reality and cosmos.Within ritual
space, Witches tend to symbolize natural life as a dwelling in cosmos and as
representing a state of being prior to sociality and the domain of culture.
Ritualization, therefore, is deeply paradoxical, since the natural can only be
reached through cultural symbols and by communing with socially and
ethically “other” human fellows.
Aided by notions like “magical work” and “emotional honesty”, Reclaim-
ing Witches have attempted to restage theological beliefs about original bliss
and the mysteries of love, community and creativity. They have also strived to
process the realities of human separation, isolation and hurt, particularly in the
initiation ritual. But, as described in this book, vain hyper-activism and hyper-
ritualism and elitist attitudes toward those who just live ordinary lives and
have no outstanding “deeds” to boast about (as was the case with Fallon), are
just as possible outcomes as personal growth and change.
Finally, the book describes an attempt to create a female symbolic order. By
this I mean the efforts to face up to sexual differences as ontological positions,
 Conclusion 291

formulated from an awareness of being a bodily sexed self in authority of

language, history and theology. I have documented that such creativity tries to
respond to the following concerns, noted in the Introduction: the envelopes
that hold us (body and ecology) and the elementals constituting gender, the
nature of sisterhood, maternal origins and female genealogies from mother
to daughter. In regard to the religious aspects of this female symbolic,
Reclaiming women interpret human existence, and reflect on the nature of
being female, by means of goddess symbolism and sexualized cosmologies. A
basic feature of Reclaiming women’s religious expressions may be regarded
“scandalous” in terms of its contextual particularity and self-centredness:
within the sacred space of covens, they link experiences of bodily elementals,
such as breath, feelings, menstruation, sexuality, procreation, birth, abortion,
eating, digestion, sensuality, aging, etc., with their basic life experiences, such
as belonging, love, hate, separation, reconciliation, mothering, letting go
of children, leaving mother, friendship, growth, work, repose, etc. Only
secondarily are they concerned with establishing doxa or considering the
universal and nonself-centred implications of their faith and ethicality, as is the
norm in academic theology.
My studies bear, to a certain extent, similarities to Caroline W. Bynum’s
historical observations on medieval women mystics: she found that these
women used religious symbols that were in continuity with their sense of
social and biological self, being deepenings and appreciations of what
“woman” was perceived to be, rather than being negations. On the other
hand, enhancement of daily life experiences is not specific to Reclaiming
women but to all Reclaiming people. While Bynum found that these features
were characteristic of women’s religiosity, they apply, in Reclaiming’s case, to
both women and men. The explanation is probably that Reclaiming
Witchcraft is not only formed by women but by feminist mystics, and that
their tradition resembles a subcultural heritage line in European culture
which, in medieval times, was associated with women (and heretics). My
work, therefore, seems to confirm contemporary findings that spiritual
experiences reported by Witches from various Craft traditions tend to
emphasize both merger with nature and religious transfigurations of the
ordinary, irrespective of gender (cf. Carpenter 1994).

Reclaiming Witchcraft in relation to feminist theology

and theory
What is Reclaiming’s contribution to contemporary theology? The European
Reformation was marked by a new interest in the phenomenon of personal
faith and believing, which in time replaced adherence to unchanging dogma.
As formulated by Calvin,“Our constant endeavor, day and night, is not just to
transmit the tradition faithfully, but also to put it in the form we think will
prove best” (Gerrish 1993). The urge to assess dogmatics with ethics and
ontology with epistemology and to critique every finite form of religious
292 Conclusion

expression claiming to conform with the authority of the infinite is

commonly called the “Protestant principle” (Driver 1987:215). Although
Reclaiming’s modernist endeavours are obviously determined by such a
relativist, hermeneutic position – for example, when they judge any form of
religion, including pagan religions, as oppressive and idolatrous if they
reinforce patriarchal social structures – they also go beyond the ethos of
Protestant epistemology, which is to symbolize meaningfully finite God/ess in
front of infinite God/ess. By retrieving conceptual frameworks from ancient
and indigenous cultures, they refocus questions of ontology and the givenness
of life, and add religious worldviewing as imperative to the moral agenda of
modernity. This priority shows up, for example, in their emphasis on magical
ritual. Magic is seen as the transformative, healing aspects of ritual, explained
as operative on the assumptions that the universe is interconnected for real –
not as a metaphor or image, but as an ontological truth about the nature of
reality. The way in which feminist Witches ritualize is therefore an important
contribution to Protestant academic theology: It describes a method to cope
with paradoxical levels of human reality and to integrate epistemological as
well as ontological notions of reality. Furthermore, its unifying aim is not only
to articulate concepts but also to stir the spirit and regenerate sexed, bodily
beings.
What, then, does Reclaiming have in common with feminist theology?
When assessing potential sexism and idolatry in religious language and
institutions, feminist theology – whether Protestant or Catholic – works in
alignment with the historical-critical methods of the Protestant principle: it
works from radical ethical norms prevailing in the women’s movement, such
as justice, equality and liberation, not from immutable traditional dogmas.The
dynamic and hierarchical relationship between applied ethics and inherited
dogmatics is summarized in the following question put forward by a Catholic
feminist theologian: “If something consistently results in the denigration of
human beings, in what sense can it be religiously true?” (Johnson 1994:30).
So, when feminist theologians expand the ethicality of the Protestant principle
to include the agenda of women and queer spirited people’s emancipation,
they converge on an interpretive criterion stating that whatever denies,
diminishes, or distorts the full humanity of women is not redemptive and is, therefore,
without theological authority (Johnson 1994:30, who here refers to Ruether).
Positively, this criterion implies that what promotes the full humanity of
women is of the Holy, a criterion we are already familiar with from
Reclaiming.
Furthermore, Christian feminism criticizes biblical revelations as being
“male revelations” (Ruether 1987:146). The burning bush did not address
women; the Word was delivered to representatives of a male world. Even Jesus’
prophetic criticism of religion included, according to Ruether, the sexism of
religion only indirectly. It was male suffering, in the hands of male religious and
political authority, that was exclusively lifted up as salvific paradigm in the
stories about Jesus. Why haven’t female suffering and subjectivity been taken
 Conclusion 293

seriously as a locus of divine revelation in this religious tradition? A common

answer, which Ruether also embraces, is that historical circumstances and
sexist, cultural gender assumptions prevented this from happening. It has been
conceptually unthinkable to experience Christ as a crucified woman or, say, to
make God/ess present in the torment of a woman who has been raped, in any
historical period of the Jewish or Christian tradition. Thus, since the feminist
challenge to Christianity cannot find sufficient response in previous historical
practices, or in the Bible, the tradition must be transcended. Ruether believes
it is time for women to speak their own experiences, of hurt and victimization,
survival, empowerment, and new life, as places of divine presence and, out of
these revelatory stories, to write new stories:

Feminists must create a new midrash on scripture or a “Third Testament”

that can tell stories of God’s presence in experiences where God’s
presence was never allowed or imagined before in a religious culture
controlled by men and defined by male experience. This Third Testament
is not simply a religion for women. Just as women have been able to
experience themselves in the crucified rabbi from Nazareth, men must be
able to experience Christ in the raped woman and thereby come to
experience the question mark this directs at a male culture in which the
tortured female body is regarded pornographic, rather than the expression
of the sufferings of God.
(Ruether 1987:147)

Ruether believes that this new womanly or feminist midrash will not only
have to dialogue with patriarchal religion, but also with feminists of many
other religious traditions: Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist, as well as those who
break away from historical religions and seek to revive visions from repressed
memories of ancient goddesses and burned witches. Ruether thus includes
feminist Witches in her dialogue about new possibilities for envisioning
“God’s presence”, anticipating a joining of forces in order to transform
androcentric culture and religion.
Reclaiming’s contribution to Ruether’s call is not a new midrash on the
Hebrew scriptures but an elementary outline of a new “third testament” under
the guidance of an indwelling spirit, favourite literature and their own
communal and individual experiences. Neither is their desire to make “the
suffering female” a paradigm of “God’s presence” but rather to instigate a
cultural turn from sacrifice and suffering to fertility and birthing power as the
genuine foundation of human life and sociality.1
Furthermore, the feminist theological tradition to which Ruether belongs
seems to lack an explicit theory of the genderedness of being. Ontological
claims about sexual difference as a primary position of the subject are
discarded for epistemologically based gender studies (semiotic studies of
textual, theological and cultural meanings). As a “sexual equality” feminist,
Ruether’s aim is to restore women to full humanity, as if human beings have
294 Conclusion

temporarily been attributed with a primary and universal human part and a
secondary, particular and transmutable gendered part. But this refusal to consider
sexual difference as something other than cultural decoration or essential
complementarity is probably an important reason that female suffering is not
lifted up as the locus of divine revelation in the Jewish and Christian
traditions: the anthropology of western theological thinking knows only one
human subject. It is therefore unlikely that theological sexism will abate until
subjectivity itself is understood as gendered, making it impossible to speak of
the ontology of being as anything less than the being of women and of men.
Thus, by their recognition of gendered subjectivity and of its rootedness in the
thresholds of the body, Reclaiming represents a challenge to the hegemonic
position of “sexual equality” in feminist theology.
In order to establish her subjectivity and achieve a goal of her own, Luce
Irigaray has encouraged women to symbolize the female roots of their
genealogy (mother–daughter) and the female image of origin (divinity). How
can we dwell on earth without goddesses? asks Irigaray. She traces the Indo-
European root meaning of Heidegger’s term “Being” to also signifying
“Dwelling”, concluding that both stem from the Greek goddess Hestia, who
was seen as guarding the flame of the domestic hearth. This divine space was
watched over by women in the home; and when a daughter married, her
mother would light a torch at the altar “of her own hearth”. According to
Irigaray, this transmission of “sacred flame” signifies the woman’s fidelity to her
divinity and female genealogy, which again attests to the sacred character of
the dwelling place called hearth/home (Irigaray 1993b:19).
Feminists from many places in the world, in particular those who belong to
the so-called Baby-boom generation and who were formed by the second
wave of feminism, are – as suggested by Irigaray – about to reclaim female
agency, genealogy and divinity and thus about to achieve ontological status for
women in their hemisphere. This whole project, which requires that female
subjectivity and the experiences of the bodily, sexed self be taken seriously,
demands an essentialist strategy: a willingness to listen to and enter into
dialogue with empirical women, that is, with beings who are socially
constructed within the cultural binary opposition woman/man, as though they
were expressing the otherness of a subject position really other than a non-
man.
In this dialogue we may surprise ourselves, as is true in the case of
Reclaiming, to find that female divinity and genealogy are appreciated by
women as well as men. For both parties in the Reclaiming community say
they turn to “the Goddess” and her emancipatory rituals because she enables
them to sustain their joint path toward “sanctification of the earth”, “spiritual
transfiguration of the ordinary” and “regeneration of Selves” as fundamental
symbols and magico-religious practices in contemporary religiosity and
society. The study of this path has just begun. As it grows in complexity and
differentiation, my findings will probably need to be modified and context-
ualized further, not least with respect to the forever unfinished questions
 Conclusion 295

regarding gender similarity versus gender difference in a given culture, in a

given community, as well as those regarding “gender” as such:Will it continue
to be a meaningful category?
The research that needs to be done next is a focused study of the
Reclaiming men and a follow-up study of Reclaiming’s own recent changes
to make room for the next generation, the so-called Generation X (cf. Berger
1999). How does this new generation, steeped in both postmodernism and
feminism and radically involved in gender shattering as well as bodily
experimentation, envision their spiritual path? They seem to be caught
between deconstructive and constructive impulses at the same time that they
are playfully breaking down gender categories in a way previously unknown
at such a broad level. How will this generation respond to Reclaiming’s
notion of gendered subjectivity? Will it continue to be relevant or will it be
perceived as hopelessly nostalgic? Is it merely one strategy among others (as
compared to those, for example, of the queer Witches), or will it turn out that
thinking in terms of gendered subjectivities will become a welcome relief for
the “ailments” of Generation X?
Irrespective of whether the Reclaiming tradition will prove to be inherently
adaptable to gender shattering or not, and irrespective of whether this
modernist playfulness is a short-lived fad or not, feminists in the Reclaiming
tradition have made a significant contribution to the gendered field of religion.
In a time when most ideological movements are afraid of truth-claims and tend
to narrow their field of action to epistemology and semiotics, Starhawk
advocates “a working model of the universe that includes interconnected
realms of matter and spirit” and adds, “most of us prefer the term ‘Goddess’ for
the weaver of this web”.2 In addition to being a metaphorical utterance,
conveying the outline of a simple cosmological model, it also represents her
understanding of the Real. For without certain ontological claims, it is difficult
to believe that magic is possible and that rituals may affect the world.
Furthermore, up against prevailing feminist attitudes, Reclaiming Witches have
dared to retrieve esoteric and pagan heritage lines within western spirituality
and to combine them with a radically new emphasis on ritual as a means to
personal and social transformation. Particularly interesting is their reformation
of a traditional rite of initiation and its intrinsic process of psychological
transference into a device for growth and transformation of feminist persons –
thus challenging conventional feminist critique of secretive clubs and rituals. As
documented in this book, inducing change is basic to all magical forms of
ritualizing; and some feminists of the twenty-first century obviously find such
activity deeply meaningful and life enhancing – at least as experienced in the
Reclaiming version of the Witches’ Craft and in other feminist circles (cf.
Procter-Smith and Walton 1993; Caron 1993; Northup 1997). Finally, the ways
in which Reclaiming Witches review the importance of rituals other than the
liturgy, the importance of symbols other than the theistic “God”, and the
importance of cosmologies other than scientific or semiotic creeds are, of
course, challenging to any theological discourse.
296 Conclusion

Continuing the reformation?

In late modernity, human beings in the western world have been able to
develop their self-reflexive, analytical rationality to a high degree of
sophistication. Correlatively they have gained full options for individual
freedom and autonomy. But, as many critics have argued, parallell to these
advances, they have lost kinship with cosmos and a sense of belonging to a
larger, spiritual web of life: they seem confused about their origin and goal,
about their dependence upon natural and communal life, about the fact that
their bodies and souls are engendered and not their own creations. The
question posed by new religious visionaries has therefore been: how may
we epistemologically put ourselves back “into” cosmos and restore a more
“capacious” spiritual ground of being – without losing freedom or rationality
and without resurrecting superstitious and deadly cosmologies?
This question is not very different from how modern theology may read its
own contemporary challenge as a harmonizing between those who regard the
connection between cosmic/divine and social/human realms in terms of
discontinuity and those who perceive of the same connection in terms of
continuity and mutual “embrace”. In chapter 4, I discussed Robert P.
Scharleman’s contribution, how he seeks to overcome this dividing line by
differentiating conceptually between God as “deity” (god as related to the
world) and God as “other-than-deity” (god as being incarnated in the world),
claiming that this all-inclusive image of God is genuinely Christian. Such
reconciling attempts, as demonstrated by Scharleman, are also attempts at
continuing the Reformation and may be called a third path in theological
inquiry. This path is not restricted to the western world. It may be
encountered in third-world Christian churches trying to explore new spiritual
directions and gain new theological insights through, for example, closer
contact with the (abandoned) pagan religiosity of their ancestors, and in first-
world indigenous traditions, like those of the Native Americans and the Sami
people of Scandinavia, striving to incorporate the spirituality “of the land”
into a position of an inherited “Old Testament” (cf. Charleston 1996). It may
also be encountered outside academic theology in “white man’s” religious
America, for example, when “queer” spirits – such as the Witches – seek to
revitalize western spiritualities by retrieving forgotten sources of ancestral
wisdom from an acclaimed pagan past.
Reclaiming’s response to the ventures of late modernity represents a major
challenge to contemporary third path theology, whether feminist or not: they
have returned to a highly literal description of the human condition as deeply
embedded in a living cosmos, a cosmos constituted by the four elements and
enveloped by the heartbeat and will of “the Goddess”.The aim of returning to
pre-Socratic pagan ideas is to ground the body and free the spirit and make
devotion, love and responsible action possible. But, since similar movements
and motivations may be found within the horizon of (Jewish and) Christian
 Conclusion 297

theology globally, we must also ask: are Reclaiming Witches really post-
Christians or are they merely post-church and post-synagogue?
Although Reclaiming’s spiritual alternative has been described in this book
as if it represents a new religion and the practitioners have been partly
portrayed as converts, I have also argued that historically it is probably more
correct to contextualize Reclaiming Witchcraft as a subcultural branch of
Jewish and Christian traditions. This also makes sense in light of the many
Reclaiming members with dual religious identities, especially the Jews and the
Catholics. Moreover, in 1997, the community made an important move,
confirming my reservations about naming their religious practices and beliefs
a new religion: in opposition to many other Witchcraft traditions, not least the
Gardnerians who explicitly define Wicca as a new religion, Reclaiming
people agreed to confine the definition of their tradition – as stated in their
Principles of Unity – to include only common values and worldviews and
exclude theological propositions of belief, even though such propositions are
usually shared by Witches.
Reclaiming Witchcraft is, in other words, not defined as a religion but as a
spiritual path springing from values that non-Witches are obviously also
welcome to agree with and eventually join.When the goal was to define their
tradition as open, affirming and still evolving, a shared – but simple – philo-
sophy of religion and ontology of being were regarded as more important
than to reaching consensus on which theological tenets appropriately express
Reclaiming Witches’ faith. The question is whether this explicitly non-
dogmatic attitude will isolate Reclaiming from other Witchcraft traditions or,
rather, result in new alliances far beyond (neo)paganism and thus promote the
growth of this unfinished spiritual tradition in directions that will actively
contribute to a much-needed continued Reformation under a much larger
ecumenical horizon.

Notes
1 The cultural theory of “sacrifice” as foundational to human life and society was
refined in 1987 by René Girard, Walter Burkert and Jonathan Z. Smith (cf.
Hamerton-Kelly 1987; see also Girard 1977).
2 From the article “A Working Definition of Reclaiming” (http://www.
reclaiming.org)
Appendix A
Question guide interviews,
1989–1990

A. Choosing Witchcraft
1 Do you call yourself a Witch?
2 Why did you become a Witch and not only a pagan or a goddess-
worshipper?
3 What does it mean for you to be a Witch?
4 Did you choose this spiritual path from any important personal exper-
iences?
5 Have you been involved in other religious communities or spiritual groups
before Witchcraft?
6 Have you told your parents that you are a Witch; are you public about it?
7 How/when did you find out about Witchcraft? What brought you to the
path? Books, people, etc.?
8 Is Witchcraft open to everybody? Why choose a religion with such a loaded
reputation?

B. Religious belief
9 Have you ever had what you consider spiritual experiences?
10 Can you tell me the essence (core beliefs/fundamental theology) of Witch-
craft?
11 What or who is Goddess/God to you?
12 Are the gods real entities outside of you, or metaphors for powers in you?
13 Do you believe in one goddess or several goddesses?
14 How is the relationship between you as woman/man and Goddess/God?
15 Why do Reclaiming men reclaim the Earth God?
16 What is the difference between women’s spirituality and men’s?
17 What did you learn about God from parents, church or school when you
grew up?
18 Which symbols in the Craft are most important to you?
19 What do you think is the historical origin of the symbolism?
20 What do you mean by the notion “symbol”?
21 Are the Craft myths important to you?
22 Do you work with ritual tools?
23 What do you consider to be the historical roots of the ritual tools?
24 Is there anything in the Craft tradition that disturbs you?
 Appendix A 299

C. Rituals
25 What is the purpose of Witchcraft rituals? What is the meaning of ritual?
26 What do you like most about doing ritual?
27 How do rituals affect you?
28 Do you experience Goddess in ritual?
29 What is the focus of the rituals you perform? What is the occasion for
performing them?
30 Why do you think Witchcraft has initiation rituals?
31 Are you initiated? Do you want to be? Why/why not?
32 Why do you think people have such different opinions about initiation?
33 Can you tell me about your initiation? Who did it? What kind of
challenges did you receive?
34 Why are there so many secrets associated with initiation?
35 Who do you think created the Faery/Reclaiming initiation ritual(s)?
36 Have you had a second initiation? In what sense did it add to the first
initiation?
37 How did the experience of being initiated affect your life?
38 Did initiation open doors to new knowledge and new groups?
39 Is initiation compatible with anarchism and grassroots politics?
40 Does initiation create elitism or a group within a group?

D. Coven work and magic

41 Are you in a coven or are you a solitary Witch? Women/men/mixed
coven? Why? How often do you meet? Since when?
42 What do you do when you gather for circle/coven?
43 Does coven work influence your daily life?
44 What have you learned from being a Witch? Have you experienced any
changes?
45 Can you heal? How do you do it?
46 Do you work magic? How do you define magic? Do you use any
divination systems?
47 What do you regard as the purpose of magic? Can you give examples?
48 Why do you work magic? Does it make you happier? Do you see any fake
magicians around you? Why call a ritual performance magical?
49 How do you feel when you read the news about people who use magic
for evil?
50 Can the use of a pentacle for evil purposes influence the power of
pentacles as such?
51 Are you sure that what you send out comes back three times (cf. Book of
Job)? Is the universe structured according to human morality?
52 Have you ever been hexed or involved in magical wars?
53 Is there nothing good in secularization? If 10 million Americans learn
how to work magic, will that improve this culture? Have you any fears
that superstitions will tangle with magic?
54 How can you guarantee that you are not teaching magic to the wrong
person?
300 Appendix A

55 Do you see differences between ceremonial magic and the magic practised
in Witchcraft? Ethics? Laws?

E. Roots of Witchcraft
56 Where does your knowledge of Witchcraft come from?
57 Who taught it to you and from what sources? Important people, books
and classes?
58 Have you read Starhawk’s books? Is Witchcraft an old or a new religion?
59 What are the historical roots of Witchcraft? A particular “Old Religion”?
60 There are many different Craft traditions; why did you choose Reclaim-
ing/Faery?
61 In what ways is Witchcraft related to the Goddess Movement, to New
Age, Neo-Shamanism,Voodoo and the Occult?
62 How important has the women’s movement been for the creation of
Witchcraft?
63 What are the roots of the Faery tradition? Is it an inherited living
tradition? Kahuna/Voodoo?
64 What are the main differences between Faery and Reclaiming?
65 Do you believe in a common source for all initiation rituals (such as The
Grimoire of Lady Sheba)?
66 Why are all Craft rituals so similar in form if they are not coming from
the same source?
67 Can you be a Christian and a Witch, or a Jew and a Witch, simultaneously?
68 Do you participate in the broader pagan community?

F. Community
69 Is Reclaiming your community? Why/why not? What other communities
are important for you?
70 Was it easy/difficult to become part of Reclaiming?
71 How many classes have you taken? Who were the teachers? Did they
check out your ethics?
72 Why are you a member of the Reclaiming Collective/the Newsletter cell?
73 What is decisive in regard to people’s opportunities for power and influence
in the Collective/community?
74 What are the procedures for selecting new members for the Reclaiming
Collective?
75 Is your household part of the community? Can you describe your com-
munity networks?
76. Why do you live collectively (or as single, or in a nuclear family)?
Appendix B
Reclaiming principles
of unity

“My law is love unto all beings . . .”

The Charge of the Goddess

The values of the Reclaiming tradition stem from our understanding that the
earth is alive and all of life is sacred and interconnected.We see the Goddess as
immanent in the earth’s cycles of birth, growth, death, decay and regeneration.
Our practice arises from a deep, spiritual commitment to the earth, to healing
and to the linking of magic with political action.
Each of us embodies the divine. Our ultimate spiritual authority is within,
and we need no other person to interpret the sacred to us. We foster the
questioning attitude, and honour intellectual, spiritual and creative freedom.
We are an evolving, dynamic tradition and proudly call ourselves Witches.
Honouring both Goddess and God, we work with female and male images
of divinity, always remembering that their essence is a mystery which goes
beyond form. Our community rituals are participatory and ecstatic, celebrating
the cycles of the seasons and our lives, and raising energy for personal,
collective and earth healing.
We know that everyone can do the life-changing, world-renewing work of
magic, the art of changing consciousness at will. We strive to teach and
practice in ways that foster personal and collective empowerment, to model
shared power and to open leadership roles to all. We make decisions by
consensus, and balance individual autonomy with social responsibility.
Our tradition honours the wild, and calls for service to the earth and the
community. We value peace and practice non-violence, in keeping with the
Rede, “Harm none, and do what you will.” We work for all forms of justice:
environmental, social, political, racial, gender and economic. Our feminism
includes a radical analysis of power, seeing all systems of oppression as inter-
related, rooted in structures of domination and control.
We welcome all genders, all races, all ages and sexual orientations and all
those differences of life situation, background, and ability that increase our
diversity. We strive to make our public rituals and events accessible and safe.
We try to balance the need to be justly compensated for our labour with our
commitment to make our work available to people of all economic levels.
302 Appendix B

All living beings are worthy of respect. All are supported by the sacred
elements of air, fire, water and earth. We work to create and sustain com-
munities and cultures that embody our values, that can help to heal the
wounds of the earth and her peoples, and that can sustain us and nurture
future generations.
http://www.reclaiming.org/cauldron/welcome.html
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Index

Abrams, M.H. 92 and feminism 292–3

academic research, and social significance heritage 15
8–10 rejection of 5
Albanese, Catherine 108 reorientation of 1, 3
Anarchist Coffeehouse 54–8 and Witchcraft 111–15
Ancestors, Spiral Dance ritual 199–202 circles, conflicting 54–61
ancient origin, myth of 67–96 circles within circles, Reclaiming
Anderson,Victor 38, 90, 249 community 51–4
apprentice seeking initiators 249–51 Coffeehouse, Anarchist 54–8
Aquinas,Thomas 132 COG see Covenant of the Goddess
cognitive theory 83–4
background, Reclaiming Witchcraft 1–6 Cohn, Norman 105–6, 107
Baker, Diane 37, 39 communitas, vs. structure 51
Bakker, H.T. 136 community
Bell, Catherine 161 defined 52
Beloved Dead 204–6 question guide interviews 300
Beltane 47–8, 183 Reclaiming Witchcraft 33–66
Berger, Peter L. 17, 135, 137–8 compassion, method of 17–21
bibliography 303–12 conceptual frameworks, and methodology
blood-rites 33–4, 225–7, 232–40 11–17
Bourdieu, Pierre 164, 253 cones of power 140, 173
Bridged 47–8, 110 Spiral Dance ritual 207–9
Budapest, Zuzanna 6, 38, 242 consciousness of estrangement 79–82
Bynum, Caroline W. 14, 291 correspondence, pillars of 179–80, 184
counter-cultural Church, and utopian
Castells, Manuel 52 Witchcraft 105–8
casting the circle, ritual 171, 177–9 Covenant of the Goddess (COG) 38–9
Catherine, initiation 256–80 covens/coveners 22, 37, 47–51, 48–9
Catholicism, and Witchcraft 111–15 Gossip 219–20, 227–35
Celtic mythology,Tir-Na-Nog 137–8 question guide interviews 299–300
challenges, initiation 250–1, 260–2 Creatrix 2, 68
Charge of the Goddess 37, 129, 264 Crone transitional stage 240–1
check-in, ritual 168, 175–6 Crowley, Aleister 4
choosing Witchcraft, question guide cultural theory, Starhawk’s 68–94
interviews 298
Christ, Carol P. 145 Dancing the Spiral 207–9
Christianity see also Spiral Dance, ritual
ascetism of 75 Daniel, E.Valentine 142
and death 203 death, and Christianity 203
314 Index
death and rebirth, celebration of 189–214, feminism
269 and Christianity 292–3
Declaration of the Four Sacred Things 2 and witchcraft 6–8
Deep Self 123–4, 125, 137, 144–5, 148, 151, feminist politics 54–61
157, 167, 176, 177, 285 feminist theology, and Reclaiming
trance-induction 138–9, 140–2, 203 Witchcraft 291–5
deities feminist theory
dismissing the 174, 184 constructionism 12–14, 216–18
invoking the 172, 183–4 essentialism 12–14, 216–18
demographics, Reclaiming Collective 44–5 feminist Witchcraft phenomenon 288
depossessed reality 151–2 fieldwork 22–6
Diablo Canyon action 41–2, 98–9 Fifth Sacred Thing 86, 104
Dianic witchcraft 38 forgiveness, and Witchcraft 116–25
Diggers 103–5 Four Sacred Things, Declaration of 2
disease: patriarchal consciousness 79–82 Free Spirit movement 103–5, 107–8
divine descent concept 149–50 Freemasonry 3, 4
divine indexicality 145–8 funding, Reclaiming Collective 46–7
divine reality, cf. human reality 131–2, 135
divinity, defined 134–5 Gardner, Gerald 3–4, 6–8, 130, 288
domination, structures of 82–4 on covens 48–9
Dragon House 54–8 Geertz, Clifford 86
Driver,Tom F. 15–16 gender
dual definition, religion 134–6, 143 patriarchal religion characteristic 81–2
dualism 80–4, 111–15 roles, challenging 214–20
sign theory 136–8 generic Witchcraft 109–11, 122
Durkheimian heritage 161 and human nature 124
cf. utopian Witchcraft 97–8
elements see also religious experiences
dismissing the 174, 184 Gilgamesh 77–8
invoking the 171–2, 179–82 goals
elements of magic 157–88 ritual trance 138
Elements of Magic class 166–74 this book’s 13
emotional triad, initiation 254–6, 262, of Witchcraft 134, 152
278 goddess worship 72–4
empeira, cf. theoria 129–30 return of 84–9
empiricists, cf. symbolists 132–3 goddesses
Enuma Elish 139–41 as deity 145–8
Eostar 47–8 as multidimensional symbols 145–8
equality, sexual 217–20 as other-than-deity 145–8
erotic worldview 72, 83, 180, 210 Goldenberg, Naomi R. 159
esbats 47–51 Gossip coven 219–20, 227–35
esoteric sign theory 142–5 great rite 180
esoteric Witchcraft 248 Grimes, Ronald L. 16, 160–1
evil, and Witchcraft 108, 115 grounding, ritual 170–1, 178, 199, 259
Ewing, Katherine P. 18 growth process elements, initiation 276–80
exoteric Witchcraft 248
experience, religion as 133–8 Halloween, in San Francisco 190–1
healing 257–60
Faery initiation 248–9 Heelas, Paul 183–4
Faery Witchcraft 30, 90, 248–9 Heretical Imperative 135
Faivre, Antoine 69 hermeneutics 129–53
family, spiritual 57–8 hermeneutical programmes 152
features, Reclaiming Witchcraft 12–15 religion and 131–3
female/male roles, challenging 214–20 of space 148–52
 Index 315
history (1979-1997), Reclaiming Collective Lammas 47–8
37–43 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 83–4
holy hermeneutics 129–53 liberating metaphors 151–2
horizontal magic of everyday life 149–50, lifestyle, utopian Witchcraft 100–3
151–2 Litha 47–8
horizontal unification 133, 135 love-spells 169
human reality, cf. divine reality 131–2, 135
Hutton, Ronald 5 Mabon 47–8
macrocosmic reality, cf. microcosmic reality
icons 142 131–2
idealized theological discourse, Reclaiming magic
Witchcraft as 285–7 defined 150, 157–8
indexical signs 142 elements of 157–88
indexical symbols 150–1 Elements of Magic class 166–74
indexicality cf. prayer 99
interpreting divine 145–8 question guide interviews 299–300
and ritual 162–3 magical houses 54–61
initiation 19, 25, 49–50, 58–9, 160 magical preparations, initiation 263
apprentice seeking 249–51 magical reality, religion as 133–8
case 256–80 magical work, ritual 172–3, 184
Catherine 256–80 Mahler, Margaret 158–9
challenges 250–1, 260–2 Maiden transitional stage 240–1
emotional triad 254–6, 262, 278 male-domination, origins of 73–9
Faery 248–9 male/female roles, challenging 214–20
and generic Witchcraft 109, 122 male sexuality 242–5
growth process elements 276–80 Marduk 78–9
initiates 47–51 Mauss, Marcel 132
insiders cf. outsiders 253–6 meals, ritual 173–4
karmic bond 250 medicine: return of goddess 84–9
magical preparations 263 men, and Reclaiming Witchcraft 12, 41
modernists 251–3 men, Reclaiming Witchcraft and 12, 41
post-initiation 271–2, 277–8 menstruation, ritual event 33–4, 225–7,
ritual 263–7 232–40
secret ritual 267–71 Merchant, Carolyn 106–7, 108
stages 273–5 Mesopotamia, Sumer society 71–4,
traditionalists 251–3 76–9
transforming self 248–81 metaphors
insiders, cf. outsiders 54–61, 253–6 liberating 151–2
invoking the deities, ritual 172, 183–4 oppressive 149–51
invoking the elements, ritual 171–2, methodology, and conceptual frameworks
179–82 11–17
Irigaray, Luce 294 Mighty Dead 204–6
Island of the Dead, trance journey mission statements, Reclaiming Witchcraft
202–6 40–1
modernists, initiation 251–3
Jones, Serene 290 morality, patriarchal religion characteristic
Judaism, rejection of 5 81
Mother transitional stage 240–1
Kabbalah 93–4, 142–5, 178 Murray, Margaret M. 4, 89
Kabbalistic Tree of Life 144 mysteries, women’s 214–47
karmic bond, initiation 250 myth of ancient origin 67–96
Kelly, Aidan 91
knowledge, patriarchal religion natural religion, vs. unnatural religion
characteristic 80–1 69–70
316 Index
nature Reclaiming Collective
basics of 69 demographics 44–5
cf. scripture 131–2 formalizing of 43–7
Newsletter 40–1, 46–7, 62–3 funding 46–7
Northup, Lesley A. 12 history (1979-1997) 37–43
nudity, ritual 225–7 social profile 44–5
Teaching Cells 45–6
Old Religion 3, 89 Wheel formation 54
oppressive metaphors 149–51 working cells 43–7
outline, this book’s 25–6 Reclaiming community, circles within
outsiders, cf. insiders 54–61, 253–6 circles 51–4
Ovid 105–6 Reclaiming Newsletter 40–1, 46–7, 62–3
Reclaiming principles of unity 301–2
pagan modernists 89–92 Reclaiming Quarterly 62–3
paganism Reclaiming Wheel 61–3
American 8–10 formation 54
and Witchcraft 113–14 Reclaiming Witchcraft
paradise lost 70–4 background 1–6
patriarchal consciousness 79–82 community 33–66
patriarchal fall 74–9 features 12–15
patriarchy, characteristics 79–82 and feminist theology 291–5
Peirce, Charles S. 162 as idealized theological discourse 285–7
pentagrams 167, 179 and men 12, 41
personal transformation 209–11 mission statements 40–1
Petersen, Anders Klostergaard 162–5 as research narrative 288–91
pillars of correspondence 179–80, 184 social structure 34–7
possessed reality 149–50 and theology 282–97
post-initiation 271–2, 277–8 and Wicca revival 93–4
power-from-within 150–2, 157, 286 reformation, continuing the 296–7
power-vortex 56–7 reincarnation theme 189–90
prayer, cf. magic 99 religion
principles of unity, Reclaiming 301–2 defined 134–5, 157
‘processing’ ritual 116–25 dual definition 134–6, 143
puberty, rites 240–1 as experience 133–8
purification, ritual 171, 178 hermeneutics and 131–3
as magical reality 133–8
Quaker songs 101 natural vs. unnatural 69–70
queer (spirit) 210, 292, 295, 296 as symbol 133–8
question guide interviews 298–300 religious belief, question guide
interviews 298
Rappaport, Roy 161 religious experiences
re-integration Sofia 129–30
vis-à-vis community 238–40 see also generic Witchcraft
vis-à-vis women 235–8 religious heritage, and Witchcraft 125–6
reality religious pluralism, increasing 1
aspects of 137 religious symbols 68–70
depossessed 151–2 Remembering Tiamat 164
divine, cf. human 131–2, 135 research narrative, Reclaiming Witchcraft as
immanentist nature 284 288–91
macrocosmic cf. microcosmic 131–2 revelation, cf. text 131–2
magical 133–8 Ricoeur, Paul 133
possessed 149–50 rites, development of 3, 286–7
sacred 150–1 ritual
rebirth, death and 189–214, 269 aims 159
 Index 317
defined 157, 160 esoteric 142–5
as ‘how’ 163–5, 184–6 signs, indexical 142
and indexicality 162–3 sin, and Witchcraft 289
initiation 263–7 social profile, Reclaiming Collective 44–5
magical work 172–3, 184 social significance, and academic research
question guide interviews 299 8–10
theories of 160–5 social structure, Reclaiming Witchcraft 34–7
as ‘what’ 162–3, 165, 175–84 song, ritual 197–9
Witches’ understanding of 157–60 space, hermeneutics of 148–52
ritual circles 47–51 spatial universe 285–6
ritual events 23 Spiral Dance, book 70–1
menstruation 33–4, 225–7, 232–40 Spiral Dance, ritual 39–40, 119–20,
‘processing’ 116–25 189–213, 238
see also Spiral Dance, ritual cone of power 207–9
ritual meals 173–4 Dancing the Spiral 207–9
ritualization fundraising 46
features 163–4 Halloween in San Francisco 190–1
theories of 160–5 personal transformation 209–11
ritualize, learning to 157–88 preparations 192–5
ritualizing sacred space 195–7
art of 166–74 song 197–9
strategies 175–84, 185–6 spiritual family 57–8
theories of 160–5 spirituality, female/male 217–20
Romanticism 134 Staal, Frits 20, 21
roots of witchcraft, question guide Starhawk
interviews 300 on covens 49
Rosaldo, Michelle 165 cultural theory 68–94
Rosicrucians 3, 4 history (1979-1997) 37–43
Ruether, Rosemary R. 292–3 strategies, ritualizing 175–84, 185–6
Rumor of Angels 137–8 structure, vs. communitas 51
Russell, J.B. 89 Sumer society 71–4, 76–9
symbol, religion as 133–8
sabbats 47–51, 158, 182–3, 189 symbolic order, creating a female 214–47
sacred reality 150–1 symbolists, cf. empiricists 132–3
sacred space 182–3, 195–7 symbols
women’s bodies as 220–5 goddesses as multidimensional 145–8
Sacred Things, Declaration of the Four 2 indexical 150–1, 163
sacredness, patriarchal religion characteristic religious 68–70
80
Samhain 47–8, 183, 189–90 Talking Self 137, 148, 149–50, 151, 167, 177
scapegoats, witches as 89 Teaching Cells, Reclaiming Collective 45–6
Scharleman, Robert P. 145–6, 147 text, cf. revelation 131–2
Scholem, Gershom G. 142–5 thanks, ritual 174, 184
scripture, cf. nature 131–2 thematic development, this book’s 25–6
secret ritual, initiation 267–71 theology, and Witchcraft 282–97
selves, multiple 137 theology, Reclaiming Witchcraft 282–97
sexual difference 214–20 theoria, cf. empeira 129–30
terminology of 13–14 Tiamat 78–9
sexual equality 217–20 trance-induction 138–42
sexual identity 231–2, 278–9 Tir-Na-Nog (Land of Youth) 137–8
sexual polarity 233–4, 278–9 traditionalists, initiation 251–3
sexuality, male 242–5 trance-induction 138–42, 191–2
sign theory 136–7 trance journey, Island of the Dead 202–6
dualism of 136–8 transformation, personal 209–11
318 Index
transforming self, initiation 248–81 Witch, defined 7–8
transgressions, and Witchcraft 116–25 Witchcamps 34, 43, 45, 62
transition, vis-à-vis women 235–8 forgiveness 116–22
triad, emotional 254–6, 262, 278 processing ritual 116–22
Truth or Dare 71–2, 82, 85 trance-induction 139–40
Turner,Victor 51 Witchcraft
Catholicism and 111–15
Ullman, Chana 253 Christianity and 111–15
unification, horizontal and vertical 133, 135 and evil 108, 115
unio mystica 142–5 and forgiveness 116–25
unnatural cultures, development of 73–9 goal of 134, 152
unnatural religion, vs. natural religion and religious heritage 125–6
69–70 rise of 70–1
US, witchcraft and feminism in 6–8 and sin 289
utopian Witchcraft 97–108 spiritual roots 67–8
and counter-cultural Church 105–8 and transgressions 116–25
cf. generic Witchcraft 97–8 and western traditions 125–6
intentional living 98–105 see also Reclaiming Witchcraft
witches, as scapegoats 89
Valiente, Doreen 4, 37, 92, 130 women’s mysteries 214–47
vertical magic of ritual 150–1 difficult politics 241–5
vertical unification 133, 135 Women’s Mysteries – Ancient and Modern
220
website, www.reclaiming.org 46, 302 Woodhead, Linda 5–6
Wheel, Reclaiming 54, 61–3 working themes, ritual 168
White, Hayden 132–3
Wicca Younger Self 137, 148–9, 167, 176, 177,
origins 6–8, 70–1 178
revival 67–96 Youth, Land of 137–8
spirit of 90 Yule 47–8