Drawing Down the Moon (24 page)

In the past, attitudes within Paganism and the Craft concerning persecution were evenly divided between two schools: “If we're respectable and quiet, we won't get persecuted—only flashy troublemakers do,” and “It's time we stood up and fought for our religious rights.” Today most Wiccans lead very normal lives and do not experience much discrimination. There are occasional incidents that play out in the courts and the media and there are continuing battles to give Pagans in the military and in prisons the rights that members of other religions receive. These efforts require political action and vigilance. But they are the exception and not the rule.

—C. A. BURLAND
⁴³

 

 

Most popular talk about Witchcraft is about
trappings.
This misleads and mystifies. Our society teaches us to regard objects as the essentials. Thus we are apt to focus on ritual daggers and spells and strange herbs and all the paraphernalia of modern Wicca, thinking that these
are
the Craft.

“Why did you put a
red
cloth on the altar?” a novice asks a priest of Wicca, framing the question softly, as if a big secret is about to be revealed.

“Because I just happened to
have
a red cloth,” the priest replies.

We should not make the novice's error. Rather, we should heed the words a woman recently wrote to me:

The Witch, as we said, is the changer—the one who bends. Wicca, at its best, is the most flexible and adaptable of religions, since it is perfectly willing to throw out dogmas and rely on these types of experience alone.

By the time you read these pages, some of the covens mentioned may have dissolved and entirely new ones may have sprouted. Don't look to find exactly what has been described here. You may not find it, or, everything may all be a little different. That is the real beauty of Wicca when it is true to itself.

THE FOLLOWING INTERVIEW took place in the winter of 1976, in Oakland, California. The woman, Sharon Devlin, is an American of Irish descent. She is a member of the Craft; she is a mother; she is a weaver, a player on the Irish harp; she is an Irish civil rights activist; and she works in the field of health. She is
not
typical—if there is such a thing as a “typical Witch,” which I doubt. Devlin's views would be considered very controversial by most modern Wiccans. In particular, her views on drugs, sex, and politics must be considered a minority position within the modern Craft. Still I chose this interview out of all of the others because of its peculiar richness and depth, because it is my favorite interview, and because it touches on many of the themes in this book.

 

Q.
How did you come to be a Pagan and a Witch?

A.
First of all, I am a hereditary Witch, but this does
not
mean that I have a direct lineage from mother to daughter, although [laughter] I did allege this as a neurotic teenager. What it does mean is that I am from a Witch family. My great-great-grandmother on my father's side was named Mary MacGoll. She was a fat, little, pudgy, brown-eyed woman of Scots descent (whom I am supposed to resemble). She was a local midwife and healer, basically a faith healer. I doubt she would have described herself as a Pagan. She was raised as a Presbyterian and she remained a devout Christian, but her Christianity was of the peasant variety ; it was centered on the Virgin Mary. She got her power from the Tuatha De Danaan. Most people called them the Gentry or the Sidhe or the Shining Ones. And there are many stories about the fairies that are associated with her.

She fell in love with an impoverished but apparently terrifically lovable Catholic named Jenkin Devlin, who is my great-great-grandfather. She eloped with him after she became pregnant and her family disinherited her because she had married a Catholic. She was an intense clairvoyant and she foretold to her family that because they had robbed her unborn child of its inheritance, they would be childless, and that someday they would come begging her descendants to take back what they had not freely given. And this prediction was fulfilled. I was told many other stories of things that she did. She apparently was taught artificial respiration by the fairies and she revived “dead” children. She did not live long. She died during the potato famine in County Tyrone.

I was brought up as a strict Irish Catholic, but this did not have the negative connotations people generally associate with it. My family was basically working-class Irish. They were not lace curtain in any way.

Q.
How did you come to enter the Craft?

A.
It was an independent decision on my part because at the time I didn't believe that anyone else had the same interests. When I was a young girl I was deeply religious and I was looking desperately for an ecstatic and deep religious experience. As a result I wished to become a nun and enter a contemplative order. My parents were radically against it. They felt it would be a copout. For a young girl faced with the terrors of sex, chastity is a very comfortable way out. The convent situation is one which lends itself to safety, and I found that attractive. Of course, as I matured, this alternative became less and less attractive.

The peak of my “convent period” was when I was about fifteen. I entered a convent for a bried time—about six weeks—and then was forcibly removed by my parents. My mother went to bed and simply refused to get up unless my father removed me. My father told the Mother Superior that he didn't want my tits to dry up on me as hers had. So I was spirited from my spiritual refuge and back into the world.

Well, back in the world, I soon became aware of the narrowness of the philosophical viewpoint of orthodox Catholicism. At the same time a strange awareness began to dawn on me of something of far greater potency. Now, I had been into a thing of praying to the point of ecstasy. This is one of the more positive aspects of Catholicism. I have met a few priests and nuns who have actually achieved enlightenment this way. Most of their personal views were pretty heretical, and this was one of the tools my parents used to get me away from the convent. They located a famous artist and nun, Sister Corita, and I spent a summer working for her at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles. She told me that the best thing I could do for my spirituality was to
work out my own.

During that crucial sixteenth year I started to read philosophy. I read a lot of the classics, a lot of Attic and Roman philosophy. I stumbled onto the Hermetic tradition and I found some books on alchemy. I began to talk about alchemy with a wonderful high-school chemistry teacher, and one thing led to another, and before I knew it I'd gone to Larsen's Books on Hollywood Boulevard and had bought a copy of
The Greater Key of Solomon.
I began to work spells. It was at this point—after I had worked my first spell—that it flashed on me that I was fulfilling something to do with my ancestry.

After that I went down to UCLA and sat in on a bunch of classes on the language and mythology of the Welsh and Irish Celtic peoples. I read every book on Irish mythology that I could get hold of. Before the year was out I was calling myself a Witch because I knew that was what I was.

Later my grandmother gave me a beautiful cast-iron cauldron which had been brought over from Ireland as part of the personal possessions of our family. It had belonged to my great-great-grandmother, Mary MacGoll. In her time an iron pot was an investment of several months' cash money. Irish families cooked their entire meal of buttermilk and potatoes in the pot. This was probably the biggest possession my family had. So I have my great-great-grandmother's potato pot, which may or may not have been used as her cauldron. And although I told people some “ugga bugga” about being initiated by my grandmother and being given the cauldron, the fact is,
I was
given the cauldron and I was told the story.

Q.
What is your present relationship to Catholicism?

A.
It's an uneasy truce. I believe that Christ was a genuine avatar of the Great Mother—a Dionysus incarnation, pretty much. His worship has been desperately perverted. They have turned him into this dreadful sort of pathetic thing instead of the sacrificial god of Inspiration. I go and eat his Body and Blood every once in a while, and I consider that to be valid. But to “confess my sins” to people who refer to themselves as his “minions” but do nothing but assassinate his character and purpose, I would find that pretty sacrilegious. I know without doubt that if I lived in a Catholic community and if it were known that I was practicing magic, I would be asked not to communicate. I just go into various churches and take advantage of the social confusion that Berkeley offers.

Q.
Do you consider yourself a Pagan?

A.
What I actually am is an offshoot of Paganism and early Irish Christianity. I follow beliefs which formed the basis of the Culdee Church. The Culdee Church was the only true union of Paganism and the real teachings of Christ; it was brutally stamped out by the papacy. The Culdee Church continued to believe in the ancient Celtic gods. It continued to believe in the Danu and the Dagda and it considered all the ancient heroes and heroines of Ireland to be saints. They had women clergy. They did not believe that sexual intercourse was sinful and, as a matter of fact, on all the church doors was a big portrait of the Great Mother giving birth with her clitoris exposed and her labia pulled wide and her mouth open because she is in the birth ecstasy. Those are called Sheila-Na-Gigh.

Q.
Do you consider yourself a polytheist?

A.
I believe that all so-called gods are thought-form emanations of human beings toward the One Consciousness of which we are a part. I believe that there are many races of sapient beings in the universe, some of which are physically greater than we are or, perhaps, have nondelineated bodies, like the Shining Ones, or who live on a different dimensional plane. All these things are within the realm of possibility. It has been our nature to call these “gods.” What is a god? A god is an eternal being, and in that sense we, too, are gods. So yes, I am a polytheist. But I also believe there is a unity to the whole trip and in that sense I'm a monotheist. There is one Spirit, but a multitude of delightful forms from which to choose, or to create new ones, as you will.

Q.
What does it mean to you personally to be a Witch?

A.
Well, unfortunately, it means that I have set myself off from humanity to a large extent. I do not see myself as a leader and I have no desire to be a leader. I would, however, like to help initiate a change of spirit in the world. I think that it is time for humanity to stand up and take a pro-life stand on everything. To say
no
to killing,
no
to the destruction and rape of our environment,
no
to the valuing of goods above human life,
no
to the senseless divorcement from our aged parents and our little children,
no
to the force that cuts us off from our ancient past,
no
to all these things that are meant to enslave us.