Drawing Down the Moon (22 page)

The term “Dianic” describes a number of different traditions. The name comes, in part, from Margaret Murray's description of Witchcraft as “the Dianic cult.” In the United States all groups that call themselves “Dianic” are linked by one thing: their emphasis on the Goddess.

Perhaps the earliest and most important stream of Dianic Wicca was created, revived, and inspired by author and activist Zsuzsanna Budapest in the early 1970s. Her first coven, the Susan B. Anthony Coven, in Los Angeles, led to many others—the Amelia Earhart Coven in New York, the Elizabeth Gould Davis Coven in Florida, and, later, scores of other groups. By the 1980s, there were many Dianic groups, some of them with no connection to Z Budapest and her teachings. Ruth Barrett, the priestess who inherited Z's ministry in 1980, and serves the Dianic Tradition in the Midwest, describes the Dianic Tradition as:

This stream of the Dianic Tradition is for women only. It is based on a cosmology centered on the Goddess as “She Who Is All and Whole Unto Herself.” The Goddess is the web of life itself. Barrett writes that the Dianic Wheel of the Year celebrates the traditional Pagan festivals—the solstices, equinoxes, and cross-quarter holidays, but unlike other Wiccan traditions, there is no focus on the heterosexual fertility cycle of Goddess and God. As Barrett writes in her book
Women's Rites, Women's Mysteries
(the second edition will be republished by Llewellyn in 2007):

Although there is a sense that the Goddess is a universal presence, there is also an understanding that the Goddess has been worshipped under many names and in many different cultural forms. Dianic rituals honor women's rites of passage. There's an emphasis on what Barrett calls “the five blood Mysteries,” which are birth, menarche, giving birth/lactation, menopause, and death. She writes, “These Mysteries acknowledge and honor women's ability to create life, sustain life, and return our bodies to the Goddess in death. Whether or not a woman births children, all women pass through the Mother phase as they choose life paths that sustain our species or other life forms.”
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All that is male in nature is seen as a variation of the Goddess, coming from her, birthed from the wombs of women. And women's wombs are seen as the source of creation, and the source of women's power, whether or not women have had a hysterectomy. As a result, Dianic Wiccan feminism is basically “essentialist” as opposed to a view that most of the differences between men and women are culturally produced. Most Dianics in this tradition do not accept transgender or surgically altered men as female, a controversy that has raged throughout the women's movement for years. They also tend to distrust most male goddess scholarship. Many classic works about the history of goddess worship, such as works by J. J. Bachofen, Helen Diner, Merlin Stone, E. G. Davis, Barbara Walker, and more recently Marija Gimbutas, among others, have not been accepted by mainstream academia. This has often put Dianics and other spiritual feminists at odds with the broader Pagan Studies Movement, which is described in another chapter.

In the past, Dianics have often emphasized creativity, psychic skills, feminism, and anti-patriarchal politics, and have often de-emphasized structure and formal rituals. They encourage improvisation over a scripted liturgy.

Another Dianic stream in this country began in Dallas with the Dianic Covenstead of priestess Morgan McFarland. This tradition exalts the feminine but does not exclude men from the worship. When I visited Morgan McFarland back in 1976, she was priestess of three covens, one of them exclusively female.

In this stream of the tradition, the Goddess is seen as having three aspects: Maiden-Creatrix, Great Mother, and Old Crone, who holds the door to death and rebirth. It is in her second aspect that the Goddess takes a male consort, who is as Osiris to Isis. To show this relationship, Dianics quote a phrase attributed to Bachofen: “Immortal is Isis, mortal her husband, like the earthly creation he represents.” So there is a place for the God, but the female as Creatrix is primary. Dianics also see the Goddess symbolized in nature as the Triple Creatrix: as the moon, the Queen of Mysteries; as the sun, Sunna, the Queen of Stars, provider of warmth and care; and as Mother Earth, to whom all must return.

Mark Roberts, who was McFarland's partner until 1978, told me that Dianics are also pantheists, since they recognize the sacredness of all that exists. But, he said, “The Goddess is the touchstone to this planet and this life cycle.” And at the time, Mark and Morgan seemed to be—of all those I interviewed—the most concerned with the ecological fate of the planet. In
The New Broom,
a former Dianic publication, Roberts wrote that there was less distinction between “mortal” and “deity” than there was between those who had lost touch with nature and those beings whose rhythms and pulse were attuned to the universe. He also wrote:

In connection with these principles the Dianic Covenstead had a very effective series of exercises and techniques for regaining kinship and attunement with nature.

The origin of the Dianic Covenstead in Dallas goes back about forty years. Morgan McFarland, the daughter of a minister, lived part of her youth in the Orient and then moved to the American South. She was trained in a Southern Witchcraft coven. It had no name for its tradition, simply calling it Witchcraft. She adopted the term
Dianic
later. The rituals of this coven placed great emphasis on the moon, were very “Gravesian.” They focused on the myths, lore, and mystery behind the thirteen lunar months and their connection with the Beth-Luis-Nion tree alphabet of ancient Britain.
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While both men and women could become initiates, those women who had experienced the rituals of all the lunar months could go through an additional five “passage” rituals, after which they could “hive” off and start their own covens. Within the tradition, it is the women who choose their priests, and they may revoke their choice at any time.

I asked Mark the obvious question: how it felt to be a priest in such a heavily matriarchal tradition. He said, “I'd rather be first mate on a ship that is solid than captain on a ship that has a rotten hull, a ship that is sinking. Patriarchy is such a ship.”

I asked Morgan to talk about her feelings on the difference between her two covens that include men and the one that doesn't. She said, “We have found that women working together are capable of conjuring their past and reawakening their old ascendancy. They are capable of putting together many of the pieces. This does not seem to happen when men are present. Perhaps this is a societal thing. It seems that in mixed covens, no matter how ‘feminist' the women are, a kind of competition begins to happen. Among the women, alone, none of this occurs, and a great reciprocity develops, unlike anything I have seen before.”

Morgan McFarland has been a housewife, a lecturer on feminism and Witchcraft, the owner of a small business in plants and baskets, and a woman working up the professional ladder at a large corporation. She has two children. I spent a week with Morgan and Mark during the period they were working together. I found them to be lively, spontaneous, and wonderful people.

Their circles were primarily celebratory. As Mark wrote in
The New Broom:

Within the circle, all were equal, despite the “feminist” edge, and there was much room for innovation in regard to ritual, tools, clothing (or lack of it), size, and structure. In 2005, Morgan McFarland says she is watching the new generation of Dianics from the sidelines. She is no longer running a coven and describes herself as a reclusive matriarch. But there are many active groves and covens that are continuing her work.

There is a third stream of Dianic Wicca that should be mentioned—The Reformed Congregation of the Goddess, International (RCG-I). RCG-I began in 1982, when Jade River moved from Kentucky to Wisconsin and began searching for women who wanted to “serve the Goddess.” In 1983, Jade and Lynnie Levy began publishing
Of a Like Mind,
which quickly became the most important networking magazine of the Women's Spirituality Movement, and remained so for years. That same year they incorporated the Re-formed Congregation of the Goddess in Wisconsin, and since then the RCG-I has grown and expanded, with more than two thousand members. There are circles and priestesses in about seven states. RCG-I has a Women's Thealogical Institute with several different training programs, as well as an ordination program for priestesses. While they do not call themselves “Dianic,” it is a woman-only tradition, with exclusive emphasis on the Goddess.

The Minoan tradition is an initiatory path of Witchcraft, based primarily on Cretan sources, with some Aegean and Ancient Near Eastern mythology. It was founded in 1977. Edmund M. “Eddie” Buczynski, the founder of the tradition, was extremely creative at writing ritual and poetry. He was trained in Gardnerian and Welsh Wicca. Later in his life he became involved in studying classical and Near Eastern archeology. He broke with the Welsh and Gardnerian traditions and went on to found the Minoan Brotherhood. It was created in part to celebrate male mysteries and to create a safe place for gay and bisexual men in the Craft. Soon after founding the Brotherhood, a group of priestesses in New York created the Minoan Sisterhood. Eddie Buczynski died of AIDS in 1989, but the tradition continues. There are Minoan Brotherhood groups in California, Michigan, Florida, Washington, Louisiana, Indiana, and Canada. The Minoan Sisterhood is active in the New York City area. There is also a meeting ground between the two sexes called the Cult of Rhea, or the Cult of the Double Axe. Like many Wiccan traditions, the Minoan tradition has three degrees of initiation. It celebrates rites at the full moon and the eight festivals of the Wheel of the Year. Although the framework of the tradition is similar to Gardnerian Wicca, the core beliefs of the Minoan tradition center on the worship of the ancient Cretan Snake Goddess—the Great Mother—and her divine son. The Minoan Brotherhood continues to be influenced by the current of queer spirituality. There is no published information on the inner workings of the tradition, and the elders say that is as is should be: “As a mystery tradition we value our privacy and secrecy to preserve the sacredness and wonder of the spiritual quest.” The most important ethical law of the Minoan tradition is “Love Unto All Beings.” Elders of the tradition write: “While the Wiccan Rede is neither taught nor ascribed to as an absolute that must be adhered to, many Minoan Elders see it as good advice against which to measure one's actions.” In the interest of full disclosure, the first Craft group I entered, in 1971, was a Welsh Wiccan training group in New York City. Eddie Buczynski had written most of the rituals and almost all of the poetry, and much of it was extremely beautiful.

The School of Wicca is a large U.S. correspondence Witchcraft school. It is also a legally recognized church.

It is debatable whether the School of Wicca should be included in this book about Neo-Paganism and about Wicca as a branch of Neo-Paganism. The School of Wicca does not consider itself “Pagan,” and Gavin and Yvonne Frost, who head it, have always defined Witchcraft as a monotheistic religion.