E MB R AC IN G T HE WITCH

AN D T HE G O D DESS

Embracing the Witch and the Goddess is a detailed survey of present-day feminist
witches in New Zealand. It examines the attraction of witchcraft for its prac-
titioners, and explores witches’ rituals, views and beliefs about how magic
works. The book provides a detailed portrait of this undocumented section
of the growing neo-Pagan movement and compares the special character of
New Zealand witchcraft with its counterparts in the United States, Great
Britain and Australia.
Kathryn Rountree traces the emergence and history of feminist witchcraft,
and links witchcraft with the contemporary Goddess movement. She reviews
scholarly approaches to the study of witchcraft and deals with the key
debates which have engaged the movement’s adherents and their critics, and
ultimately presents what Mary Daly declared was missing from most histori-
cal and anthropological research on witchcraft: a ‘Hag-identified vision’.
Based on fieldwork among witch practitioners, Embracing the Witch and the
Goddess is an important contribution to the emerging profile of present-day
witchcraft and Paganism.

Kathryn Rountree is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Massey

University. As well as publishing widely in academic journals on aspects of
feminist witchcraft and Goddess spirituality, she has written texts on aca-
demic writing and a series of educational books on New Zealand prehistory.
 EMBRACING
THE WITCH AND
THE GODDESS
Feminist ritual-makers in New Zealand

Kathryn Rountree
 First published 2004
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, 2004.
© 2004 Kathryn Rountree
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
Rountree, Kathryn
Embracing the witch and the goddess : feminist ritual-makers in New Zealand
Kathryn Rountree
p cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Witchcraft—New Zealand. 2. Magic—New Zealand. 3. Goddess religion—New Zealand.
4. Neopaganism—New Zealand. I. Title.
BF1584.N45R68 2003
133.4'3'0993—dc21
ISBN 0-203-63388-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-63729-1 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0–415–30358–3 (hbk)
ISBN 0–415–30360–5 (pbk)
F OR H ER

v
 CONTENTS

Preface ix

1 Introduction 1

2 Approaches to witchcraft 13

3 Feminists and witches 33

4 Feminists and the Goddess 50

5 Researching witches: becoming enchanted 71

6 Feminist witchcraft in New Zealand: origins and development 85

7 The attraction of witchcraft 101

8 The attraction of the Goddess: witches’ worldviews 121

9 What witches do 138

10 Ritual as artefact 159

11 How magic works 170

12 Re-membering the witch and the Goddess 185

Notes 195
References 207
Index 219

vii
 P REFACE

Since the earliest days of the fledgling Goddess movement, New Zealand
women have eagerly consumed a stream of books about the movement, vir-
tually all published in the United States and the United Kingdom and almost
all referring to spiritual ideas and practices circulating among American and
British witches and Pagans. As well as the deluge of popular titles dealing
with ancient goddesses, modern Wicca, magic, women’s alternative ritual-
making, Paganism, indigenous spirituality and so forth, scholarly interest in
these areas has grown too, and a body of academic literature is developing.
The bulk of this material also focuses on the beliefs and practices of Ameri-
can and British witches and Pagans.
Meanwhile small groups of New Zealand women and many individuals in
all parts of the country have, since the late 1970s, been using the ideas in
these books to piece together a vibrant local variant of feminist spirituality,
one which nonetheless owes a great deal to the immediate New Zealand
landscape and socio-religious context. This very loose community of several
thousand women has a relatively low profile within New Zealand society
generally, and so it is perhaps not surprising that they have not registered in
scholarly discussions of the Goddess movement’s global demographics, let
alone in discussions about its adherents’ spiritual beliefs, worldviews and
ritual practices.
In 1997 anthropologist Lynne Hume’s excellent Witchcraft and Paganism
in Australia provided the first detailed examination of Paganism in the Antip-
odes. My book focuses attention on their Kiwi sisters in an attempt to remedy
New Zealand’s invisibility in the global profile of the Goddess movement
and, more importantly, to show as clearly as possible what these women
believe, how they conduct their spirituality and what it means to them. I
should emphasize, however, that I deal here only with feminist witches and
women involved in Goddess spirituality, not with New Zealand witches
and Pagans more generally. This is because, when I went looking for witches
to study for my doctoral research 13 years ago, feminist witches were the first
ones I came across. At that time they formed the largest and most visible
sub-group of Pagans in New Zealand – they probably still do, although

ix
 PR EFACE

other branches of Paganism have grown up around them. Focusing on fem-

inist witches also fitted in with my desire to carry out feminist anthropology.
The thesis which emerged as a result of the first three years of my research
was completed ten years ago. Since then, I have continued to consort with
witches and those in the Goddess movement, and quite a lot of my academic
writing has been related in some way to this research area. It has been fasci-
nating to watch the movement grow up as well as to expand, to observe
important and heated debates arise, to see witchcraft achieve a degree of nor-
mality, or at least acceptance, within the liberal quarters of mainstream
society.
Pagan scholars are not so rare and less of a peculiarity than they were
13 years ago when I went tramping the corridors of my university (the Uni-
versity of Waikato) looking for someone who would agree to supervise my
research. I will always be grateful to Dr Patrick Day for taking me on, despite
my dubious topic; he was as fine a supervisor as any doctoral student could
wish for. In April 2001 I attended the annual conference of the British
Sociological Association’s Sociology of Religion Study Group in Oxford
and, for the first time, experienced being one of a company of Pagan schol-
ars – almost enough to fill one whole dinner table! This was wonderfully
stimulating (as well as reassuring) and it was one of these colleagues, Dr
Graham Harvey, who kindly introduced me to Routledge’s commissioning
editor who suggested I write this book.
The purpose of the book is to present an ethnography of New Zealand
feminist witches – to colour one small space in the global picture of Pagan-
ism – and to engage with a number of issues and debates which concern the
feminist spirituality movement as a whole. I have also compared New Zealand
witches with those in places where the movement is much better known,
chiefly the US and UK. The first part of the book deals more with global
concerns in relation to the study of witchcraft and the Goddess, while the
second part is a close-up study of feminist witches and women involved in
Goddess spirituality in New Zealand. Chapter five, which discusses my
methodological approach as a feminist anthropologist, introduces the New
Zealand ethnography. Because the readership for books about Paganism and
witchcraft is wide – including scholars and witches, and readers who are both
and neither – I have tried to write in a way that will be useful and accessible
for this broad readership.
Over the relatively long period that I have been researching this area, I
have become indebted to an enormous number of people who have taught,
influenced, helped and supported me in innumerable ways. My first and
greatest debt is to the hundreds of women ritual-makers with whom I have
worked over the past 13 years. Their honesty, wisdom, generosity, hospitality,
good humour and love have been remarkable. Above all, I thank the women
who belong, and have belonged, to the ritual group I joined in Auckland
in 1990, and those whom I interviewed: Juliet, Lea, Noreen, Sybil, Kez,

x
 PR EFACE

Galadriel, Joy, Scarlett, Bonney, Joan, Megwyn and Alex. The ritual groups I
belonged to for shorter periods in Hamilton and Wellington also provided
precious support and friendship.
Juliet Batten and Lea Holford have made enormous contributions to
women’s spirituality in New Zealand and to my research, and I am deeply
grateful to both for welcoming me as a researcher, for inspiring and teaching
me, and for reading my dissertation. I also wish to thank Céline Kearney,
who very generously sent me a copy of her book about New Zealand
women’s spiritual lives, Faces of the Goddess, when she knew I was working on
this book. Over the years Gillian Marie has been a wonderful friend and tire-
less champion of Goddess spirituality, facilitating numerous formal and
informal opportunities for New Zealand women’s healing and empower-
ment. My dear friend, Clotilde Mifsud, has facilitated the sacred journeys of
women from many parts of the world during her ‘Goddess tours to Malta’,
and I am thankful for all the help she has provided during my recent research
in Malta.
I wish to thank my colleagues in the School of Social and Cultural Studies
at Massey University, particularly the staff and postgraduate students in
Social Anthropology, for years of lively engagement and for helping to pro-
vide a stimulating and supportive environment for research. My Head of
School, Associate Professor Mike O’Brien, has been entirely supportive and
encouraging, offering institutional assistance for me to attend international
conferences and to take a period of sabbatical leave to complete the writing.
The librarians at Massey’s Albany campus have been extraordinarily helpful,
not only fulfilling, but also anticipating, my research needs. I am also very
grateful for the support given by anthropologists at the University of
Waikato where I was a doctoral student in the early 1990s. I am especially
indebted to Dr Judith Macdonald at Waikato and Dr Tricia Laing at Victoria
University of Wellington who, along with Dr Pat Day, supervised my thesis.
In writing some sections of the book I have drawn on previously pub-
lished articles. Chapter four draws on material from two papers (Rountree
1999 and 2001). An earlier version of chapter 11, titled ‘How magic works:
New Zealand feminist witches’ theories of ritual action’ was published in
Anthropology of Consciousness, volume 13, number 1, 2002, published by the
American Anthropological Association. Aspects of this work have also been
presented at a number of national and international conferences, and I am
indebted to all who have offered insightful and provocative feedback and
encouragement, especially at several meetings of the Association of Social
Anthropologists of Aotearoa/New Zealand and at the British Sociological
Association’s Sociology of Religion Study Group’s conference in 2001.
I owe a special debt to my amazing son, Sam, much of whose infancy was
spent bouncing on bean-bags or building tunnels in the corner of a room
while I participated in Goddess workshops, and whose five-year-old’s defini-
tion of a witch as ‘a wise, magical, healing woman’ is one I love to quote. His

xi
 PR EFACE

first-hand education about witches has instilled in him a healthy respect for
and scepticism about all religions and spiritual paths. My parents, Iris and
Brian Rountree, have supported all my academic endeavours and helped in
many practical ways during the years of my doctoral fieldwork: their love and
pride have sustained me. So, too, has the magnificent friendship of Jo Colyn
over many decades. I am indebted to Yon Ankersmit for her consummate
care and expertise in photographing the cover image for the book: it is a joy
to see the result. Finally I should like to thank, with much love, my husband
and colleague, Dr Joe Grixti, who read every word of several drafts of the
manuscript, helped check the bibliography, and offered numerous perceptive
comments, questions and editorial suggestions. His astonishing fortitude and
generous-spirited engagement with my work have been an invaluable bless-
ing, and my gratitude to him is inexpressible.

xii
 1
INTRODUCTI ON

I always associated the witch with magic. I was always very

curious about how the gingerbread castle got there. What skill,
expertise, or mastery did she have to work things like that? I
read The Lord of the Rings quite young, and I really identified
with the Elven women there. That was my image of ‘witch’ –
woman of power, prestige and magic.
(Galadriel)1

You say ‘witch’ and there’s an image that comes to mind. Until
that image is dispelled, it’s going to be a constant dilemma for
women. Identifying as ‘witch’, I feel more fulfilled in this time
of my life than I have in any other.
(Sybil)

We must learn to dis-spell the language of phallocracy which

keeps us under the spell of brokenness. This spell splits our
perceptions of our Selves and of the cosmos, overtly and sub-
liminally.
(Daly 1979: 4)

I met my first witch at the age of three in a children’s fairy story. She was a
warty, black-clad old hag who lived alone in the depths of a forest, snared and
dined on juicy children, and turned those who displeased her into toads. She
presented an image of menace, cunning, pure evil. My story books were full
of mothers who turned out to be step-mothers who made children’s lives hell,
grandmothers who were wolves in disguise, and godmothers who cursed the
infant in rage when not invited to the party.2 Witches could seem attractive and
enticing in these stories, but would turn out to be cannibals.
What the story books did not tell, but what the European witch-hunters of
the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries claimed, was that this wicked witch also
had sexual intercourse with the Devil, suckled demons and her familiars,
stole and ate penises as well as babies, and participated in orgies with fellow

1
 INTRODUCTION

witches. The image of ‘witch’ incorporated both the hideous hag and the
irresistible seductress.
I met my first goddess at primary school during a study of Greek mythol-
ogy. She glows in the memory as an image of marvellous beauty and power.
She had long golden hair and wore flowing white robes; she combined
sexual desirability with moral goodness, superhuman strength with super-
natural power. As an image, she represented the polar opposite of the wicked
witch.
But both images – the witch and the goddess – produced a kind of awe.
Both were female, but they existed outside the range of images acceptable or
even imaginable for ‘normal’ women – the goddess so far above ordinary
women that she inhabited the realm of the supernatural, the witch a terrify-
ing inhabitant of the margins of the social world. Both were images of
independent female power which was designated off-limits for ‘normal’
women. In any case, neither witches nor goddesses were ‘real’.
After the scary fairy stories and childhood romance with Greek myths, I
had nothing to do with witches or goddesses until I went to university. There
I learnt about the victims of the European and Salem witch-hunts and about
witchcraft in distant, exotic places – mostly in Africa. Whereas the evil-doing
hag of childhood stories had evoked fear and later ridicule, these scholarly
accounts of witches engendered pity or disbelief. Nonetheless, as an anthro-
pology student, I was fascinated with other peoples’ belief systems, especially
their religious beliefs however bizarre or irrational they might seem, and how
they governed peoples’ lives.
Years later, after I had returned to university and was casting about for a
topic for doctoral research – something that would remain fascinating for at
least three years – I was listening to a lecture on cross-cultural ideas about ill-
ness and wellness, medicine and magic, when the idea of studying witches
suddenly came to me. I knew witchcraft was quite an orthodox topic for
anthropological study, but to my knowledge Western anthropologists’
research on the topic had always been conducted in ‘other cultures’, rather
than in their own. I wanted to study witches ‘at home’ in New Zealand,
despite the fact that I knew no witches personally and had no idea how I
might come to meet some. I had heard vaguely about people who met in
graveyards at midnight to perform unsavoury rites, but was inclined to doubt
the truth of such stories. I imagined it would be difficult to find witches, and
more difficult, not to mention dangerous, to gain their permission to study
them. I had never heard of ‘feminist witchcraft’ or ‘Goddess spirituality’.
When I excitedly told people what I hoped to study, most responded with
smirks, serious doubt about whether the topic was substantial or serious
enough for doctoral research, or genuine alarm about what might become of
me. Witchcraft, it seemed, was a legitimate topic for study only so long as it
was witchcraft in an ‘other culture’. One woman, however, a student in one
of my anthropology tutorials, responded by cheerfully telling me that she

2
 INTRODUCTION

was a witch herself, and that I should read Starhawk, an American writer, if I
wanted to find out more about contemporary witchcraft. I borrowed
Starhawk’s first book, The Spiral Dance, from the university library and read it
in an evening.
Another friend passed on a newspaper clipping she had saved about a
local woman artist which described her as a ‘modern day witch’. In the clip-
ping I learnt that a number of women’s ritual groups met in Auckland and
that the artist, Juliet Batten, had written a book called Power from Within: A
Feminist Guide to Ritual-making. From this book I learnt that the author taught
courses on ritual through the University of Auckland’s Department of Con-
tinuing Education. (I later discovered that Juliet called herself a ritual-maker
rather than a witch, as the newspaper had described her.) I checked out the
university’s publicity brochure and found two courses offered: a weekend
workshop taught by Juliet and a second – due to start in a few days time –
called ‘Rites of Passage for Women’ led by another facilitator. There was one
place left on this course so I enrolled and, with some trepidation, took the
course. Two weeks later I attended the first of many workshops on ritual
with Juliet Batten. That was 13 years ago.
Most of the women I met in those early workshops, and hundreds like
them I have met in the years since, are involved in a movement known in
New Zealand both as ‘feminist witchcraft’ and as ‘Goddess spirituality’. At
first I baulked at the idea that these two names referred to a single phe-
nomenon. I was used to thinking of the hideous hag and the divinely beauti-
ful goddess as polarized images. But the women I met were re-examining the
witch and the goddess as images of womanhood and deconstructing their
stereotypical meanings. They claimed that far from being opposites, the
witch and the goddess were one. Moreover, they claimed that ‘ordinary
women’, like themselves, could legitimately self-identify both as ‘witch’ and
as ‘goddess’.
Most of my early research focused on trying to understand how and why
these women should want to do so. Why would any feminist, with the know-
ledge that many thousands of women had been victims of the European
witch-hunts, embrace a label which epitomized the misogyny of patriarchal
cultures, not to mention the terrors of childhood? Wasn’t it presumptuous,
even heretical, or at least unnecessary, to call oneself a ‘goddess’?
In the course of the research I came to see the women’s self-identification
as ‘witch’ and ‘goddess’ as having dramatic symbolic value. In their view, the
reason for the traditional designation of the witch and the goddess as illegiti-
mate models of ‘normal’ womanhood is that both constitute images of
female power which lies outside male control: hence their appeal to this group
of feminists (but not to all feminists, as we shall see in chapter four). By self-
identifying as ‘witch’ and as ‘goddess’ the women I studied symbolically lay
claim to the independent female power which the two symbols represent: they
image themselves as strong and autonomous, as having the right to choose

3
 INTRODUCTION

and direct their own lives. Identifying in these ways is a symbolic act of self-
empowerment by which these women permit themselves to connect with and
legitimate both the sacred, strong and the dark, dangerous aspects of them-
selves. They are attempting to re-member themselves, to reclaim aspects of
themselves to which they believe they have been denied access. By re-
membering the witch and the Goddess and assigning them with new mean-
ings and values, women are re-membering and re-valuing themselves.3
By employing the symbol of ‘goddess’, they are recalling a time when, they
believe, Europe was peopled by societies whose religions centred on female
divinities, especially various versions of a ‘Great Mother’ Goddess who was
responsible for the fertility of crops, animals and human communities. This
period of ‘pre-patriarchal religion’, the evidence for which they say stretches
from 30,000 to around 4,000 years ago, is claimed to correspond with a
period of pre-patriarchal social relations when women were valued as highly
as men and both sexes participated fully in society. Modern followers of God-
dess spirituality trace a direct connection between the demise of the Goddess
and the demise of women’s position in society. The shift to patriarchy and
patriarchal religions in Western societies, with the eventual dominance of
Judaeo-Christian monotheism, they argue, meant that women were alienated
not only from social and political power but also from powerful parts of
themselves. Gadon (1990: xiv) writes:

When the balance changed, the dark side of the feminine was also
suppressed. The Goddess had been a model of women’s nature in
all its fullness. The irrational, the chaotic and the destructive, which
had been acknowledged when the Goddess reigned supreme, were
split off from divinity and became feared. Women could no longer
express their complete psychic reality.

It was this ‘dark side of the feminine’ which, they claim, was distorted and
eventually came to be imaged as the witch (Walker 1985). I discuss the his-
torical development of the witch stereotype in more detail in chapter two.
While many women in the Goddess spirituality movement see the early
goddess-worshipping societies of Europe in a utopian light with respect to
gender relations, they do not yearn to turn back the clock several millennia,
advocate de-evolutionary cultural change, or idealize everything about ancient
societies. They would not, for instance, wish to embrace Stone-age tech-
nology, carry out animal sacrifices, or endure high infant-mortality rates; nor
do they imagine that goddess-worshipping societies were free of injustice or
cruelty. They do believe, however, that the past offers different models for
more balanced gender relations and for a more sustainable relationship
between humanity and the earth. In recalling the religions of ancient soci-
eties they also want to point out that patriarchy and god-worship are not
normative and that ‘goddess’ can be a useful symbol for women today (the

4
 INTRODUCTION

best known article on this topic is Christ 1982, originally published in 1978
in Heresies 5).
It must be noted, however, that throughout its history (a little over 30 years)
the modern Goddess movement has come under fire from many feminist
and other scholars in relation to, among other things, what are regarded as
romantic, utopian and plain false beliefs and claims about goddesses and
ancient societies. The Goddess movement is accused of mythologizing and
misrepresenting the past to serve a contemporary socio-political and religious
agenda. The debate became extremely heated in the wake of the publication
of Cynthia Eller’s book The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past
Won’t Give Women a Future (2000). The movement has also been savagely criti-
cized by some feminists for re-invoking unhelpful essentialist ideas about
‘woman as nature’ and nurturer. I discuss these debates in chapter four.
By creating and embracing a spirituality in which the primary image of
divinity is a goddess, feminist witches are not only re-conceptualizing the
nature of the divine, they are also re-conceptualizing the nature of the femi-
nine. They reject the image of the feminine as inferior, weak and passive as
an oppressive legacy of Christianity.4 The symbol of ‘goddess’, on the other
hand, is seen as opening up a great range of images of the feminine: virginal
maiden, enchanting seductress, nurturing mother, warrior, protector, creator,
death-dealing crone, and so on. The Goddess, feminist witches say, has a
thousand faces.
Collapsing the witch/goddess dichotomy is one aspect of a much broader
challenge these women are making to the worldview which has long been
dominant in Western societies, one founded on dualism in which women
come off worse than men, Blacks come off worse than Whites, the body is
subordinate to and in conflict with the spirit, and the natural world’s value is
measured in terms of exploitable resources. Instead they prefer a holistic
worldview which emphasizes connection, balance and cyclic processes. This
alternative worldview is explored in detail in the following chapters.
Of course feminist witches are not the only ones who have been challeng-
ing the dominant worldview in Western societies. In the past three to four
decades, feminists more generally have been challenging the hegemony of
Western patriarchy, the hegemony of Western colonialism has taken a further
battering, the civil rights, gay rights, environmental and peace movements
have become increasingly vociferous, active and effective. The call for a more
holistic worldview is coming from many diverse quarters: eco-feminism,
psychotherapy, alternative healing, the New Age, self-help and ‘human
potential’ movements, scientific theories such as James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia
hypothesis’, and so on. Feminist witches see themselves as part of this larger
amorphous ‘mood’ or ‘movement’ abroad in contemporary societies which is
challenging the ‘dominator model’5 which has framed social relations with
regard to gender, ethnicity, age, class and other social distinctions, as well as
human relationships with the rest of the natural world.

5
 INTRODUCTION

While feminist witchcraft is broadly connected with the diverse move-

ments listed above, its closest relationships are with two umbrella movements
whose own constituencies are large and diverse. Feminist witches form a sub-
group both within feminism and within modern Paganism. The latter is
known also as ‘neo-Paganism’, a name which draws attention to the fact that
this is a newly created religious movement (although some Pagan traditions,
like Druidry, extend back to the late eighteenth century). Paganism, which the
‘Introduction’ to Paganism Today says is ‘fast developing as the new religion of
the twenty-first century’, incorporates Wicca, Goddess spirituality, Druidry,
Shamanism, Heathenism, Sacred Ecology and a number of other traditions
(Hardman 1995: ix). Griffin (2000b: 14) quotes sources which estimate that
there are up to 500,000 in the American Goddess community and between
110,000 and 120,000 in the United Kingdom.6 While numbers of Pagans are
greatest in the US and UK, there are also Pagan communities in continental
Europe, Scandinavia, Canada, South Africa and Japan. Many branches of
Paganism are also active in Australia (see Hume 1997).
Essentially Paganism today consists of a group of modern Earth religions
whose first principle is love for and kinship with nature, and reverence for
the life force and its continuous cycles of life and death (Hardman 1995:
xi).7 ‘Paganism is a religion at home on Earth’; for Pagans ‘every day is
sacred and all the Earth is holy’ (Harvey 1997: vii, 1). The word ‘pagan’
comes from the Latin paganus meaning ‘country dweller’, and of course it
came to be associated with those who followed older religions which Chris-
tianity sought to replace. While there is no codified set of beliefs and
practices, most Pagans acknowledge the concepts of Goddess and God (and
often many gods and goddesses) and follow the ethic: ‘Do what thou wilt,
but harm none’, which stresses individual freedom alongside responsible
concern for all other beings and for the planet. Most Pagans celebrate a
series of eight seasonal festivals (two Solstices, two Equinoxes and four
others) within an annual cycle called ‘The Wheel of the Year’. These are dis-
cussed in chapter nine. There is now a substantial and growing literature on
various forms of Paganism, a small proportion of which is academic, almost
all of it referring to the United Kingdom and the United States.8 An excel-
lent introduction to Paganism, covering a range of traditions, is Graham
Harvey’s Listening People, Speaking Earth: Contemporary Paganism (1997).
Under the ‘Pagan’ umbrella, witches are probably the most numerous
group.9 Although most witches assert that their Craft stretches back millen-
nia before ‘The Burning Times’ of the European witch-hunts, most scholars
credit Gerald Gardner, a British civil servant, with being the originator of
the specific practices of modern witchcraft, or ‘Wicca’ as it is known.10 In
1954, three years after the Witchcraft Act was repealed in Britain, Gardner
published Witchcraft Today wherein he set out the beliefs and ritual practices
of witchcraft which, many have since argued, he largely invented, or at least
creatively assembled from a variety of sources, himself. Gardner claimed to

6
 INTRODUCTION

have discovered an ancient coven in the area of the New Forest into which
he was initiated in 1939 by one of its members, Dorothy Clutterbuck. Schol-
ars and Pagans alike have long debated the truthfulness of Gardner’s story.11
While Gardner’s name is the one associated with the founding of modern
witchcraft, its origins can be traced to various philosophies and experimental
groups active in the nineteenth century, the most relevant of which was the
magical group called the Order of the Golden Dawn, formed in 1887 by
three dissident Freemasons, which in turn spawned the Society of the Inner
Light in 1922. But the important ideas and rituals of modern witchcraft have
much older heritages within the Hermetic tradition of the Renaissance, neo-
Platonism, old European folk-beliefs, magical practices and seasonal festivals,
various polytheistic mythologies (for example, Greek, Egyptian, Celtic and
Near Eastern), pre-Christian ‘pagan’ religions and European Shamanism.12
Just as witches form the most numerous group within Paganism, most lit-
erature in the field by both practitioners and academics (a number of authors
fall into both categories) is about Wicca. Wicca differs from feminist witch-
craft in significant ways: while both share a holistic worldview, revere nature,
use the same basic ritual structure and are polytheistic, Wiccan covens are
mixed and stress gender polarity and complementarity in the working of
magic, and embrace gods as well as goddesses (although the Goddess is
thought to be pre-eminent). There are many books introducing Wicca and
witchcraft: the first I read (also the first book many witches read), The Spiral
Dance by Starhawk, is an excellent introduction. (By 2000 sales had exceeded
300,000.) Feminist witches, on the other hand, usually meet in women-only
groups and focus exclusively on the Goddess and a wide range of goddesses
from ancient and living religious traditions. Their feminist politics deter-
mines a strong emphasis on women’s self-empowerment and healing during
rituals. Their beliefs and practices, especially those of New Zealand feminist
witches, are explained in detail in the following chapters.
Historically, on the global scene, feminist witches (or ‘Dianic witches’ –
after the goddess Diana – as they are sometimes called in the United States)
are generally seen as an offshoot of Wicca and as a relatively small compo-
nent of the neo-Pagan movement generally. However the situation is rather
different in New Zealand. Here, until very recently, feminist witches have
had a much stronger presence in terms of visibility and numbers than other
witchcraft traditions or forms of modern Paganism. Undoubtedly, as was the
case in Australia, followers of other witchcraft and Pagan traditions were
practising their religion well before feminist witchcraft emerged on the New
Zealand scene in the 1980s, but they kept a very low profile and continued to
do so into the 1990s. This has changed only in the last few years, helped by
the growth and increased public profile of Paganism and New Age spiritual-
ity globally, the development of a local ‘critical mass’ of Pagans and witches,
and the internet.
In the 2001 New Zealand census 5,862 people, out of a total population

7
 INTRODUCTION

of 3.7 million, identified themselves as some variety of Pagan, of which

2,196 said they were Wiccan.13 In September 2000 a Federation of New
Zealand Pagans was established and in 2002 the first New Zealand Pagan
Festival, attended by 160 people, was held (although many festivals focusing
on alternative spirituality had previously been held, some attracting several
thousand). The opening ritual was led by Janet Farrar, a well-known British
author of practical books about witchcraft.14 Festival-goers spent their time
listening to lectures and music, swimming and bush-walking, shopping for
crafts, watching a medieval fighting re-enactment and telling late-night stories
about elves and fairies by candlelight.
A string of groups and covens practising a variety of traditions – Gard-
nerian Wicca, Heathenism, Druidry, Shamanism, Fellowship of Isis and
others – now meets up and down the country. The Universities of Auckland
and Otago, the country’s two biggest campuses, have Pagan networks. One
city’s Wiccan Association hosts a ‘Witches’ ball’. All New Zealand cities and
a few large towns have shops catering for Pagans selling everything from
candles, incense, crystals and herbs to organic menstrual cloths, individually
crafted wands and freshly mixed potions. Workshops on topics such as
‘Introduction to magick’, ‘Dream-sharing’, ‘Drumming’, ‘Belly-dancing’ and
‘House clearing’ (recommended for real estate agents in particular) are on
offer, and there are the inevitable web-sites and publications.15
While the pace of Pagan activity has recently picked up in New Zealand, it
is clearly far from being as well developed or on the scale one sees in the
United Kingdom, the United States or Australia. This is unsurprising given
New Zealand’s much smaller population. Interestingly though, despite their
much lower numbers in New Zealand, Pagans form a percentage of the total
New Zealand population which is only a little lower than their percentages in
Britain and America. Indeed, they may well be similar, given that one can
probably assume that the New Zealand census figures under-represent actual
numbers of Pagans because of the wariness of some about declaring their
religious affiliation on the census form.
The relationship between feminist witches and other witches or Wiccans
differs from one local context to another. Greenwood (2000a: 165) says that
in Britain ‘there is an uneasy tension between feminist magical groups and
the wider subculture’ because the feminist groups do not work with the cen-
tral Wiccan idea of gender polarity, and because of their overt feminist
politics. In the United States, where feminist witchcraft first developed, there
is usually a happier relationship with Wicca (Eller 1993: 50), with writers like
Starhawk apparently sliding across the two. Hume mentions no tension
between feminist witches and other witches or Pagans in Australia, although
there Dianic Wicca seems to represent only a very small portion of Pagan-
ism as a whole (Hume 1997: 88). In New Zealand there is no animosity
between Wiccans and feminist witches, but they know little about and have
little to do with each other, apart from perhaps patronizing the same Pagan

8
 INTRODUCTION

shops. Feminist witches here, as I have noted, have had a more open public
profile than other witches and have always been more closely affiliated with
the women’s movement and the ecology movement than with Paganism as a
whole. There seems to have been less strain (although there certainly has
been some) between so-called ‘spiritual feminists’ and ‘political feminists’ in
New Zealand than has been evident in some quarters, particularly in the
United States.
Although I have said that the names ‘feminist witchcraft’ and ‘Goddess
spirituality’ both refer to the one movement in New Zealand, women in this
movement identify in a variety of ways: as ‘feminist witch’, ‘witch’, ‘feminist
ritual-maker’, or as ‘involved in the women’s spirituality movement’, ‘feminist
spirituality’, ‘Goddess spirituality’ or ‘the Goddess movement’. Some will say
they practise Wicca, although they have probably never heard of Gardner,
have never been initiated or trained according to strict Wiccan protocol, and
may well be ignorant of its existence. In this case ‘Wicca’ is used simply as a
synonym for witchcraft. Not only do different women define themselves dif-
ferently from one another, but one particular woman will define herself
differently in different contexts for reasons which I discuss in chapters three
and seven. Within a single group whose members share the same beliefs and
practices, there will be some women who call themselves ‘witches’ and the
group a ‘coven’, while others say they are ‘involved in women’s spirituality’
and refer to the group as a ‘ritual group’.
In the literature about the movement, the labels ‘women’s spirituality’ and
‘feminist spirituality’ are frequently used. I find these terms problematic to
use in this book because of their vagueness and broadness: sometimes they
are used elsewhere to include Christian and Jewish feminists and neo-Pagan
women generally as well as feminist witches. ‘Women’s spirituality’ may also
be taken to refer to an ill-defined spirituality which all women possess
whether they think about it consciously or not. I use the terms ‘feminist
witchcraft’ and ‘Goddess spirituality’ synonymously to refer to the move-
ment I have studied because of their greater precision and because they are
the names with which most women in the movement are familiar and com-
fortable. I frequently abbreviate ‘feminist witch’ to ‘witch’ for the sake of
economy when it is clear that I am talking about feminist witches. The
women themselves make the same abbreviation.
I also had to decide whether to write ‘goddess’ with a capital or lower-case
initial letter. I follow the practice of using a lower case ‘g’ when referring to
specific goddesses – for example, the goddess Demeter or the goddess Kali.
I use a capital ‘G’ when referring to ‘the Goddess’, an overarching term
embracing all goddesses and used by women in the movement to refer to the
sacred feminine, the life source, ultimate reality, the Great Mother, the divine
being of women and the creative energy in the universe at large.16 This God-
dess, as we shall see, should not be taken as the Pagan counterpart of the
God of monotheistic religions like Judaism, Christianity or Islam.

9
 INTRODUCTION

Another decision was whether or not to capitalize ‘witch’. According to

one line of thinking, ‘Witch’ should be capitalized in the way that the names
for adherents of other religions are. However, I see feminist witchcraft as
leaning in the direction of being a social movement; it is the spiritual wing of
feminism. I would not capitalize ‘feminism’. A woman’s decision to identify
as ‘witch’ is conditional upon her mood, context and shifting ideas; it is fluid
and often politically-motivated. Capitalizing ‘Feminist Witch’ would seem to
fix and formalize women’s identity more than many would want to do. More-
over feminist witches in New Zealand very seldom capitalize ‘witch’
themselves. However I do capitalize ‘Paganism’ and ‘Wicca’, because their
members clearly see these as names of religions.17
When I chose witches as a subject for doctoral research I was looking for
an exotic, risky topic. I have spent almost 13 years since then explaining to
people outside the movement that witches are not exotic or risky. They are
mostly middle-class, well-educated, liberal-minded feminist women with
whom, in fact, I have a great deal in common. They are good mothers and
devoted grandmothers, lesbian and straight, married and single, old and young
women who are socially responsible and deeply concerned about the envi-
ronment. Since I began this study the neo-Pagan movement globally has
grown enormously, and so has the literature about it. Among the academic
writing on the subject, a handful of ethnographies has been produced by
anthropologists, sociologists and scholars in religious studies who, although I
did not know it, were conducting fieldwork among witches at more or less
the same time as I was. It has been fascinating to compare witches in New
Zealand with their siblings in the US, UK and Australia, although studies in
these places have almost all focused on witches more broadly, rather than on
feminist witches in particular.
Of course New Zealand witches have much in common with witches else-
where, especially as many of their ideas derive from books produced in the
UK and US. But the New Zealand variant of the movement also has some
unique characteristics. These have to do with New Zealand’s diasporic loca-
tion, the personalities who have been influential here, the manner in which
the movement began and developed in the country, and various socio-
historical factors concerning the relationship between feminist witchcraft
and movements such as feminism, eco-feminism, Christian feminism and the
New Age.
It seems to me that there is also something unique about New Zealand
witches which relates to what New Zealanders see as the ‘national character’
(although I am wary of reifying that term to any great extent). New Zealan-
ders see themselves as possessing a ‘D-I-Y genius’ which derives from their
relatively recent pioneering roots.18 Kiwi blokes pride themselves on being
able to fix anything with ‘a bit of 4x2 and some number 8 wire’, and New
Zealand children grow up being told stories about heroic great-grandparents
who, with minimal fuss, established homes in the bush and transformed flour

10
 INTRODUCTION

bags into curtains and children’s clothing, dripping into soap, and kerosene
tins into baby-baths and bush toilets. New Zealand witches are mistresses of
improvisation: when the British ritual manual requires snow, the Kiwi witch
(who lives in Auckland where it never snows) chips ice off the freezer and
pulverizes it in the food processor. New Zealand witches cheerfully make do
with improvised or invented ingredients, tools, rituals and spells. The cele-
brated creativity of New Zealand witches’ rituals also has a lot to do with
the fact that many participants were introduced to feminist ritual-making
through workshops run by artists.
Compared with Luhrmann’s (1989) and Greenwood’s (2000a) descriptions
of British witchcraft, feminist witchcraft in New Zealand is less institution-
alized, formal or secretive. (However, such comparisons are not straight-
forward because British ethnographies have not focused primarily on feminist
witchcraft.) Compared with Wiccan and Dianic covens in the United States,
New Zealand feminist witches’ groups have fewer formal trappings – for
example, titles like ‘high priestess’, ‘initiate’ and ‘apprentice’ are not used, and
methods of initiation are usually made up for a particular occasion. Feminist
witches are a much more significant component of the Pagan scene in New
Zealand than they are in Australia. Comparisons between feminist witches in
New Zealand and their better known counterparts in other parts of the
world will be explored in later chapters.
My broad goal from the beginning of this research was to discover and
understand feminist witches’ beliefs, values and ritual practices and the rea-
sons why women find them attractive and compelling. I wanted to under-
stand how women come to identify as ‘witches’, why they choose a label long
associated with the mythical evil hag and with woman-killing. I was inter-
ested in how women saw the relationship between their spirituality and the
political goals of feminism. I wanted to find out how they thought their
‘magic’ worked, and about their relationship with goddesses. This book is
largely preoccupied with what I discovered in pursuit of answers to these
questions.
As an anthropologist I have tried to look at witchcraft through an insider’s
eyes, to give what Mary Daly (1979: 216) says is sorely needed in scholarship
on witchcraft: ‘a Hag-identified vision’. This has not been difficult. When I
sat up half the night reading The Spiral Dance before I embarked on this
research and before I knew feminist witchcraft existed, I discovered that
witchcraft was not the dark, dangerous or titillating phenomenon I had more
or less expected it to be. I found a worldview which embraces the earth, this
life, a sacred current which runs through all beings irrespective of gender,
ethnicity, religion or even species, one in which there was room for the imag-
ination and mystery. Although the ritual trappings of witchcraft seemed
rather outlandish at first, its worldview was not too far from my own.
During the years in which I conducted doctoral research and in the decade
since, I have never encountered anything sinister in my experiences with

11