Drawing Down the Moon (36 page)

It is obvious that these ideas easily come into conflict with notions of formal training, priesthoods, and hierarchical structures. The second assumption of WITCH was that Witchcraft is inseparable from politics.

The third assumption that WITCH made in its leaflets was that it was necessary to create new rituals, “festivals of life, instead of death.” These three assumptions have continued as the wellsprings of feminist Witchcraft, but they—particularly the first two—have often been at odds with the assumptions of the mainstream Craft.
³⁵

We end up with a kind of paradox. Thousands of women have suddenly found the Craft. They have come to it, as most people do, not by conversion but by a kind of homecoming. As the woman told me at the lecture, “I always knew I had a religion, I just never knew it had a name.” But often these same women find a Craft somewhat different from the one we've been talking about. They have defined it differently to meet their own needs. And, having found the Craft through inspiration, poetry, reading, dreams, feminist politics, and discussion, they are often ready to throw all the “traditions” and structures and initiations to the winds. The “traditional” Craft has frequently reacted with shock and horror, but then been forced to change from within. The impact of feminism on the Craft in the United States has been enormous. The impact of the mainstream Craft on feminism is harder to see. But each has been affected by the other.

Neo-Paganism in general and the Craft in particular have been good for women. Women have strong positions in almost all the Neo-Pagan religions discussed in this book, not only Witchcraft. This chapter concentrates on Witchcraft because most feminists do not seem to be interested in other Neo-Pagan religions. Witchcraft is one of the few “new age” religions where women can participate on an equal footing with men. Outside of Neo-Paganism in general, and Witchcraft in particular, the “Aquarian Age” new religions have not been particularly comfortable with the idea of women as strong, independent, powerful, self-identified persons. One has only to peruse the pages of “new age” journals such as
East West Journal
or the Buddhist
Maitreya
to conclude that most of the new spiritual organizations are still in the dark ages when it comes to women. Neo-Paganism, from its inception, has been less authoritarian, less dogmatic, less institutionalized, less filled with father figures, and less tied to institutions and ideas dominated by males. The religious concepts and historical premises behind Neo-Paganism and Witchcraft give women a role equal or superior to that of men. It is important to state these things before qualifying them. For while all these things are true, they are not always or completely true. It is important to find out how the role of women is defined in the Craft; how the “traditional” Craft is perceived by feminists; and how these feminists are perceived by the “traditional” Craft.

The question of attitudes toward women in the Craft, and in much of Neo-Paganism, is complex. For example, Robert Graves, whose book
The White Goddess
has had an enormous influence on women, the Witchcraft revival, and the creation of groups such as Feraferia, has often been viewed as a sexist. But
The White Goddess
is one of the few books by a male author that is easily found in most feminist bookstores. Published in 1948, it contains extraordinary passages about the Great Goddess, and Graves has often said that the return of Goddess worship is the only salvation for Western civilization. He writes:

Despite this, Betty and Theodore Roszak in their book
Masculine, Feminine
place Graves among notably sexist authors such as Nietzsche and Freud. They accuse Graves of placing women on a pedestal, one of the oldest tricks in the fight against women's rights. They contend that Graves, while appearing to support freedom for women, actually views them as outside the real world and maintains a position not far removed from orthodoxy. In “Real Women,” the selection chosen by the Roszaks, Graves writes, “A real woman's main concern is her beauty, which she cultivates for her own pleasure—not to ensnare men.” The real woman, he says, “is no feminist; feminism, like all ‘isms,' implies an intellectual approach to a subject, and reality can only be understood by transcending the intellect.” He says further, “Man's biological function is to do; woman's is to be,” and that “womanhood remains incomplete without a child.”
³⁷
Most feminists would find these statements highly objectionable.

To take a less-known example: Pagan theologian W. Holman Keith wrote in 1960 that the fundamental religious error of our time has been “to substitute force as the divine and ruling principle in place of beauty and love, to make destruction, in which the prowess of the male excels, more important in life than the creativity of the female.”
³⁸
Keith seeks a Neo-Pagan revival in which nature will be seen as divinely feminine, in which the divine Mother is worshipped again as the Goddess of love and beauty. Keith has also written, in articles for the Neo-Pagan press, that feminist liberation has to do with carnal sex and that “only the fair sex can ennoble eroticism.” He has said that “Beauty and graciousness are the ideal attributes of the woman; manly strength of the man,”
³⁹
and that therefore men must acknowledge the leadership of women in the movement of the human spirit.

While Keith, like Graves, is an ardent supporter of the matriarchy, while he supports the right of women to be lesbians, most feminists would argue that his vision has no place for the old woman, the hag, the crone, the woman who is “ugly” according to classical standards, the intellectual woman, the woman who desires to be celibate or who is simply uninterested in sex. Feminist Witches would argue that Keith's position denies certain aspects of the Triple Goddess—most particularly the Goddess of the waning moon, the dark moon, the Crone—that such a position condemns women to be maidens, mothers, and creatures of sensual play. They would say that archetypes are fine until they become stereotypes, whereupon they become repressive and destructive. One Neo-Pagan priestess put it this way:

It's no wonder that the pages of Neo-Pagan journals reflect a diverse spectrum of positions on women. Despite what some psychologists say, no one really has the slightest idea what a woman (or, for that matter, what a man) is. We do know that whatever a woman is, it is hidden under thousands of years of oppression. We will need at least a century of living in a society devoid of prescribed role divisions to begin to answer that question. Since everyone is operating in the dark, the two prevalent views among feminists, and the views of others, are all simply opinions, or perhaps intuitions.

The opinion of many women today is that there are no important differences between men and women, with the exception of anatomy; all the rest is simply conditioning. In most societies that we
know
about, child raising and domestic chores are done by women, but there are a few societies in which this is not true; anthropology has shown us societies where women exhibit those characteristics we tend to think of as “male”: concern and involvement in warfare, politics, and so forth. And there are societies where men exhibit characteristics we tend to label “female.” The advantage of this view is that it produces a great amount of freedom from role stereotyping. It leaves us free to become what we want to become. Devlin, for example, once told me that she had been raped by a woman, one of the most horrible experiences of her life. To repeat her words, “I think, that the great mystery of our society is that men and women are exactly alike and this truth is hidden from us under an incredible load of bullshit.”

Another view, accepted by many feminists, is that there is, in fact, a specifically female nature. Freud, we know, said that biology is destiny. And while most feminists would oppose his interpretations, not all of them oppose his idea. Feminist writer Sally Gearhart has repeatedly said that women
are
receptive; they are nurturers; they are the source of life, the symbol of creativity; they are more intuitive and more magical than men. “We are
not only
those things,” she writes, “but neither is it accurate to say ‘we are also aggressors, penetrators, attackers, etc.' ”
⁴¹
The advantage of this view is that it gives a convincing explanation for the present rape of the earth, the abuses of technology, and the desperate need to return to a world centered on woman and the idea of a Goddess. A world ruled by women would be a better world, the argument goes; end male dominance, and human beings will live again in harmony with nature.

Women have been discussing these issues seriously. When men like Graves or Keith begin to define the “real woman,” real women get angry. Then when male writers of less stature begin to echo these arguments in articles defining what a woman “is,” and what her “proper” role in religion and magic should be, the anger increases. Until quite recently Neo-Pagan journals were filled with self-congratulatory articles by men on how women in the Craft have no need of “women's lib.” Here is an example from
Waxing Moon,
in which the author first talks about the important position women have in the Craft. He then observes:

As Alison Harlow once remarked to me, “Until several years ago most Craft people had bought the media image of the feminists. For these people, the popular stereotype of the radical feminist and lesbian is more frightening than the traditional stereotype of the Witch is to people outside the Craft.”

Thus, for a period of time, a number of letters and articles appeared in the Neo-Pagan press denouncing feminist Witches as “sexists” and “bigots,” and expressing a general fear of any alliance between feminism and the Craft. A subtle reaction against a total emphasis on the Goddess began. Several articles called for more emphasis on male gods and on the male principle, a return to balance between male and female. Some of these were written by women. Also, a number of women and men expressed concern over the oppression of men, “tangled in the shadow of Yahweh's crippling image.”
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In return, some feminists called the Neo-Pagan movement “contaminated.” One woman wrote to
Earth Religion News
that the newspaper was simply “an extension of the patriarchy”
⁴⁴
and made a mockery of the Goddess. Z was more reflective. “
Green Egg
was just polluted with men's fears,” she said, “but then it cleaned itself up.” Among all these articles and letters, one truly serious criticism of feminist Witchcraft has emerged, albeit often under a pile of chauvinistic garbage: the fear that exclusive goddess worship can lead to a transcendent monotheism, whereas the diverse, polytheistic outlook of Neo-Paganism is the main reason for its freedom, flexibility, and lack of dogma. “Mother Hertha,” writes Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart, “spare us from Jahveh in drag!”
⁴⁵

In all fairness, several Neo-Pagan men have taken strong public stands supporting the liberation of women—notably Leo Martello, Gwydion Pendderwen, and Isaac Bonewits. Bonewits, in his short but brilliant editorship of
Gnostica,
refused any manuscripts of a racist or sexist nature. In one editorial he noted the tendency of Neo-Pagan articles to imply that any woman not interested in homemaking, religious activities, and raising children “is somehow a psychic cripple; that she is an incomplete and inferior image of the Goddess.” This notion, Bonewits said, was not so far from the Nazi conception of women:
Kirche, Küche und Kinder
(church, kitchen, and children). He wrote that Neo-Pagan men have a tendency to praise women “for the very qualities that many women consider sexist traps designed to prevent them from their full development as human beings,” an attitude reflecting the dominant Christian schizophrenia that treats women as either Virgin Mothers or whores. “The priestess of Artemis,” he wrote,