Drawing Down the Moon (33 page)

Z Budapest is a dynamic woman full of energy and humor. Despite the fact that her feminist and separatist politics have alienated her from much of the Neo-Pagan community, she has inspired love and respect in California Neo-Pagans who have come to know her, no matter what “official” attitudes toward politics and feminism they hold. For a while, articles and letters in the Neo-Pagan press denounced her. But many members came to her defense, including one of the most esteemed bards of the Craft: Gwydion Pendderwen. Gwydion, to the surprise of many, went further than mere support. He repeated several times his view that the feminist Craft has some of the truest representatives of the Goddess; as might be imagined, this view has not won him praise from all quarters. “I have seen women in a lot of different head-spaces,” he told me in 1976, “but never, until this past year, had I seen the Goddess incarnate. I've seen the most supreme expression of Woman in these lesbian feminist Witches. Often the women are in their late thirties or forties. They have gone through an incredible load of bullshit in their lives; they have found their true selves and have risen above it. They look head and shoulders above the rest of us. The combination of feminism and Witchcraft has produced some Amazons, some true giants.”

Z Budapest, with a few other women, started the Susan B. Anthony Coven on December 21, 1971. When I visited Z in 1976, the coven had twenty to forty active members and a larger group of three hundred women who joined in some activities. Related covens had been started in at least five other states. The Manifesto of the coven says in part:

Z told me that “religion” was “the supreme politics.” “Religion is where you can reach people in their mysteries, in the parts of their being that have been neglected, but that have been so important and painful; and you can soothe and heal, because self-images can be repaired through knowledge, but only experience can truly teach. The experience is to allow us these conditions again. Let us be priestesses again. Let us feel what that feels like, how that serves the community.”

Z's vision for the future is a socialist matriarchy. Like many feminist Witches, she has a vision of a past matriarchal age, during which “the Earth was treated as Mother and wimmin were treated as Her priestesses.” The manifesto accepts many of the theses proposed by Elizabeth Gould Davis in
The First Sex:
that women were once supreme and lost that supremacy when men, exiled from the matriarchies, formed into bands and overthrew the matriarchies, inventing rape and other forms of violence.

The Craft, Z wrote, is not a religion alone.

Z's interest in the idea of matriarchy is not unique among women involved with goddess worship and Witchcraft.

It is not surprising that spiritual feminists, in their explorations of the hidden and distorted history of women, have been attracted by the idea of a universal age of goddess worship or a universal stage of matriarchy. These women have been reexamining those philosophers, historians, anthropologists, and psychologists who have argued that women in the ancient world held a position of relative power. Sometimes that power is political, as in the Marxist theories of a prehistorical classless society (as stated, for example, by Friedrich Engels and, more recently, Evelyn Reed); sometimes it is mythic or religious or psychological, as in the theories of J. J. Bachofen, Helen Diner, C. G. Jung, Erich Neumann, Robert Graves, and Esther Harding.
¹³

The idea of matriarchy has ramifications that go beyond the question of whether or not the matriarchy ever existed in reality. When a feminist reads Strabo's description of an island of women at the mouth of the Loire, or when she reads an account of an ancient college of priestesses or Sappho's academy on Lesbos, or the legends of the Amazons, a rich and possibly transforming event takes place.

It is easy to get sidetracked by details, and that is the game many scholars play. We will play it also for a while. Prehistory is a wide open field. There is little agreement on what the word
matriarchy
means, and even less on whether ancient matriarchies existed, or if they did, on how “universal” they were. It is fashionable for scholars to dismiss the idea. This seems due partly to the lack of conclusive evidence in any direction and partly to (predominantly male) scholars' fear of the idea of women in power. The question may never be answered satisfactorily. Sarah Pomeroy, in her careful study,
Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves,
observes that most questions about prehistory remain unanswered. She allows herself to wonder why archeologists have unearthed four times the number of female figurines as male statues, why Minoan wall frescoes portray many more women than men, why the lyric women poets of Sappho's time appear to have so much freedom and independence, and what meaning lies behind the strong, dominant women depicted in those Greek tragedies and myths that speak of the preclassical age. It is as foolish, she notes, to postulate male supremacy in preclassical times as it is to postulate female supremacy.
¹⁴
According to Bonewits, we may have to wait until the field of archeology and prehistory is no longer dominated by men. Most women, however, are not waiting.

Many scholars have seemed to delight in showing certain weaknesses in the arguments of some of the more popular feminist writers on the subject of matriarchy, such as Elizabeth Gould Davis in her book
The First Sex.
¹⁵
It's fairly easy to argue that one cannot always take myths literally, as Davis often does, nor can one assume that societies that venerated goddesses necessarily gave power to women. Such “reasonable” arguments have been used, however, to avoid dealing with the central thesis of the matriarchy argument: that there have been ages and places where women held a much greater share of power than they do now and that, perhaps, women used power in a very different way from our common understanding of it.

It is therefore important to stress that, contrary to many assumptions, feminists are viewing the idea of matriarchy as a complex one, and that their creative use of the idea of matriarchy as
vision
and
ideal
would in no way be compromised if suddenly there were “definite proof” that no matriarchies ever existed. In the same way, Amazons may prove to be fictions or creations of the deep mind, or, like Troy, they may suddenly be brought to the surface as “reality” one day. In either case, the feminist movement is giving birth to
new
Amazons, a process that is bound to continue no matter what we unearth from the past. An illustration may be helpful.

In Gillo Pontecorvo's extraordinary film
The Battle of Algiers,
Algerian women confront the French by giving out an eerie yell, a high ululation that makes the flesh crawl. After the film appeared I occasionally heard the same cry in the demonstrations of the late 1960s, but never in the way I heard it later, in the 1980s in meetings of women. Amazons are coming into existence today. I have heard them and joined with them. We have howled with the bears, the wolves, and the coyotes. I have felt their strength. I have felt at moments that they could unite with the animal kingdom, or ally themselves with all that is female in the universe and wage a war for Mother Nature. These women are creating their own mythologies and their own realities. And they often will repeat the words of Monique Wittig in
Les Guérillères:

These spiritual feminists do not feel their future is contingent on a hypothesized past. They do not feel they need the words of scholars to affirm or deny their reality. “After all,” I was told by Z Budapest, “if Goddess religion is sixty thousand years old or seven thousand, it does not matter. Certainly not for the future! Recognizing the divine Goddess within is where real religion is at.”

In other words, the
idea
of matriarchy is powerful for women in itself. Two feminist anthropologists have noted that whatever matriarchy
is,
“the whole question challenges women to imagine themselves with power. It is an idea about what society would be like where women are truly free.”
¹⁷

There is no consensus on what the word
matriarchy
means, for either feminists or scholars. Literally, of course, it means government by mothers, or more broadly, government and power in the hands of women. But that is not the way the word is most often used. Engels and others in the Marxist tradition use the word to describe an egalitarian preclass society where women and men share equally in production and power. A few Marxists do not call this egalitarian society a matriarchy, but most in the tradition do.

Other writers have used the word
matriarchy
to mean an age of universal goddess worship, irrespective of questions of political power and control. A number of feminists note that few definitions of the word, despite its literal meaning, include any concept of power, and they suggest that centuries of oppression have made it impossible for women to conceive of themselves with such power. They observe that there has been very little feminist utopian literature. (The exceptions are the science fiction of Joanna Russ,
¹⁸
Monique Wittig's
Les Guérillères,
and some of the fiction published in the feminist small presses.)

Elizabeth Gould Davis and Helen Diner do see matriarchy as a society in which women have power; and they conceive of
female
power as qualitatively different from
male
power. This has led many feminists to define
matriarchal
as a different kind of power, as a realm where female things are valued and where power is exerted in non-possessive, noncontrolling, and organic ways that are harmonious with nature.

Echoing that kind of idea, the late Alison Harlow, the feminist Witch from California, told me that for her the word
patriarchal
had come to mean
manipulative
and
domineering.
She used
matriarchal
to describe a world view that values feelings of connectedness and intuition, that seeks nonauthoritarian and nondestructive power relationships and attitudes toward the earth. This is far different from the idea of matriarchy as simply rule by women.

In addition to feminists, a number of Neo-Pagans have been exploring the question of matriarchy, and ending up with similar views about power. Morning Glory and Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, of the Church of All Worlds, told me they disliked that term “or any ‘archy'” and preferred to use the word
matristic.
The Zell-Ravenhearts call themselves
matristic anarchists
and, noting the views of G. Rattray Taylor in
Sex in History,
¹⁹
say that they consider matristic societies (generally matrifocal and matrilineal) to be characterized by spontaneity, sensuality, anti-authoritarianism; embracing, in other words, many of the values Neo-Pagans share today.

There are a number of ways to approach the question of ancient matriarchies. Many have their roots in the historical theories of J. J. Bachofen and Friedrich Engels. Both men wrote in the nineteenth century, and although they had very different perspectives, both set forth the idea of a universal matriarchy in terms of historical laws and universal stages of evolution. The idea of a universal stage of matriarchy was, in fact, widely accepted until the twentieth century; it is now, like Murray's theory of the witch cult, out of favor.

Engels and the Marxists who followed him based their views on the theory of historical materialism. According to Marxist theory, a primitive egalitarianism prevailed before class society; women and men shared equally in production and power. Feminist writers such as Evelyn Reed continue to base their views on an evolutionary perspective and to define matriarchy as this kind of egalitarian society. Reed, it should be emphasized, has many original ideas in her book
Woman's Evolution,
including a novel speculation on the origin of the incest taboo as women's control of cannibalism.

J. J. Bachofen also sought universal laws of history, although he based these on religious organization, myth, and symbol rather than on materialism. In his
Myth, Religion, and Mother Right
(1861), he wrote that matriarchal societies were characterized by universal freedom, equality, hospitality, freedom from strife, and a general aversion to all restrictions. His works were attractive to poets, artists, and psychologists. Some of the feminists who come out of the Bachofen tradition, such as Davis and Diner, have dropped all reference to evolutionary theory, but accept the primacy of myth and symbolic forms. Davis has a cyclic and cataclysmic theory of history, influenced greatly by Immanuel Velikovsky. Patriarchy is seen as a degeneration, morally and even technologically.