Drawing Down the Moon (39 page)

The feminist Craft is brashly political and spiritual at once. Many feminist Witches would argue that the split life ultimately leads to self-imprisonment, to being cut off at the roots, to alienation. These women might argue that to live such a life is to perpetuate an ultimately sterile fantasy, as opposed to making a real attempt to create an integrated life.

The feminist Craft can build a good case for this argument because it has so much vitality and spontaneity. In addition, its suspicion of hierarchy and structure is good medicine for the rest of the Craft. But its “politics” have upset many of the “mainstream,” who have accused the feminists of “using the Goddess for their own ends.” The feminists say the reverse: “The Goddess is using the feminist movement to bring Craft principles to a wider variety of women than could have been possible otherwise.”

The “mainstream” Craft can offer the feminist Craft the openmindedness characteristic of polytheists. Feminist groups often have a tendency toward dogmatism, substituting “Big Mama” for “Big Daddy.” The problem of Goddess monotheism will have to be resolved if the feminist Craft is not to become just another One True Right and Only Way. The feminist Craft groups often dismiss the “mainstream” groups as “hopelessly contaminated by patriarchy,” but the groups, having been around longer, have a rich knowledge about how rituals work and how the coven structure can function. Their healthy distrust of hierarchy often leads feminist groups to abandon all structure, and this has resulted in the dissolution of many groups. Likewise, the fear of ritual as too “formalized” has at times led to stagnation. Ironically, many women within the “mainstream” have visited feminist covens and groves, have gained new knowledge based on new experiences, and then have made significant changes in their original groups or formed new groups altogether. This has not often happened the other way around. Lastly, the Neo-Pagan movement as a whole is rich in humor and ease. These are qualities the feminist Craft often lacks.

One difference between the two Crafts can be seen in the lives of two women who shall remain nameless. The first is the priestess of a Gardnerian coven in the West. During working hours she is a top scientist with a major corporation. No one at her job has any idea of her religious affiliation. Despite her prestige and success, and her integration into “normal” society, she remains afraid that her job would be imperiled if her religious activities become known. The second woman is better known. She was once a political fugitive wanted by the FBI. She made a growing commitment to feminism, and during the period when she turned herself in and was brought to trial she was initiated into a Dianic tradition from the Southwest.

It can be said that, generally, most members of the “mainstream” Craft function outwardly as “ordinary” members of society, while at least some members of the feminist Craft live on the edge of society; that the feminist Craft serves, at least in part, as a source of renewal for women who are among the dispossessed and the oppressed—a function of the Craft that may be most “traditional.”

In 2005, when I read the passage about creating new Amazons—about howling with the bears and the wolves and the coyotes and uniting with all that is female and waging a war for mother nature—I have to admit, I cringed. As I said at the outset, it was written before Reagan, Bush, and a host of other changes in the United States and the world. At the time, it truly seemed that women were creating a revolution. Today, despite incredible gains, much of that revolution seems stalled. Where
are
those Amazons? What happened to that revolution? On the one hand, women's spirituality is all over the place: books, workshops, rituals, and music. Some of this has nothing to do with Paganism or Wicca. As Patricia Monaghan, the author of more than twenty books—quite a number of them on the Goddess—observed to me:

Women's spirituality has made huge inroads in Judaism and Christianity. A few examples: The May'an Seder, a feminist Passover observance for women has attracted more than a thousand women in New York City each year. Cakes for the Queen of Heaven and its follow-up, Rise Up and Call Her Name, are two Goddess spirituality study courses that were created by and for women within the Unitarian Universalist Church. The “Cakes” curriculum is now almost twenty-five years old; it has been used in hundreds of churches and religious education courses, and it has influenced thousands of women. It has also brought profound changes to Unitarian Universalist congregations, in some cases totally altering the liturgy.

The idea of the Goddess has entered mainstream literature and there have been countless non-sexist reinterpretations of various myths (
Mists of Avalon,
for the Arthurian legend, for example.) Feminist spirituality also led to the publishing of non-sexist reinterpretations of tarot, Kabala, and the I-Ching. Turning to Wicca, Starhawk's book
The Spiral Dance,
not to mention the score of annual Witchcamps created by Reclaiming, have led to the creation of hundreds of covens, many of them women's covens, not to mention an enormous amount of political activism, much of it with a feminist tinge.

Tensions between feminist groups and “traditional” Craft groups seem less evident today. By the middle of the 1980s, women's circles and men's circles were happening routinely at Pagan festivals. Dianic Witches came to mixed Pagan festivals, and women from the traditional Craft experienced all-women rituals. For many years there seemed to be increased contact between feminist women and Neo-Pagan men, although there are still many within British Traditional Wicca who do not believe that feminist Witches should be called Wiccans. Within the mixed Wiccan traditions, and at Pagan festivals there was a dramatic decrease in sexism. Although some would argue that it depends on your perspective, and the pendulum simply swings back and forth. Todd Allen of Wysteria, the nature sanctuary, recently told me that he feels the biggest change within Paganism over the last fifteen years is the incorporation of men and families into the movement. He remembers that the emphasis on the Goddess was so strong and intense that: “If you were a guy you had to lay low, there were a lot of areas you were not allowed to go.”

But what seems noticeable, at least within Paganism and Wicca, is that the energy seems very different today. Jean Mountaingrove, one of the founders of the magazine
WomanSpirit,
who is much quoted in this chapter, and who turned eighty in 2005, says, when she thinks back to the time that chapter was written, much of women's spirituality was a challenge—a pushing of boundaries: Z Budapest getting arrested, Mary Daly challenging academia. Today, there are “many teachers, books on rituals and stores filled with items about goddesses and tools for ceremonies,” she says. And living as she does, in Oregon, women's spirituality seems a “given” in her community, with frequent seasonal rituals and socializing. Women's spirituality doesn't seem to be “a controversial topic,” she says, “nor does it seem to be as central to one's being as it was in the 1970s and 1980s.” She adds:

She and others note that a new generation of women has little knowledge of the second wave of feminist foremothers. In fact, the history of feminism is foreign to them.

Morgan McFarland—now the matriarch of the McFarland Dianics—looks back and says, “We were optimistic and naive and serious and exuberant. When you came to Dallas in 1976, it seemed as though there were only a handful of us, and certainly very few feminists among us. What controversy we stirred! Now I go to places like Witch Vox and am constantly amazed at how widespread Neo-Paganism has become.”

And they may well be. As Z watches the nine priestesses that she has ordained, including her first spiritual daughter, singer and musician Ruth Barrett, who is continuing Z's ministry in Wisconsin, Z says that most of her priestesses
are
ardent feminists. Those nine women have, in turn, created a new generation of Dianic priestesses—about twenty-five of them. And they are a much more diverse group than years back, including African American, Hawaiian, and Filipino women. With the exception of one group, all remain women-only. As Z put it to me:

Z notes the many women's studies courses available in colleges; she ticks off a couple of colleges that have women's spirituality curriculums, and she notes the large number of Goddess sites on the Internet; she sees women's spirituality reaching an ever wider audience.

But besides Z, and her daughters, and annual events like the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, it doesn't seem as if there is much energy behind separatism. Feminist writer Sally Gearhart, the author of
Wanderground,
who once argued that women should set up a buffer state so separatist women could gain the strength to establish a new society, now believes that much of cultural feminism has been assimilated. She says that “much of what is happening in the environmental movement, in the Goddess movement, in Queer Theory, and in New Age metaphysics is actually good old cultural feminism in new (and even higher) drag.”

Gearhart argues that many groups have come to believe that the earth (with its biosphere) is, “ultimately, the Mother of us all, constituting the (evolutionary) Source from which all of life springs and to which it ultimately returns.” She notes that many values our society thinks of as “female”—compassion and cooperation, the valuing of emotions and inclusiveness—have been embraced by these groups, and the men in these organizations are often “praised and respected for their courageous embrace of these too-long dormant social values.” Gearhart says she believes the rise of fundamentalism is the last ditch gasp of a dying ideology. “The future,” she says, “is and will continue to be female, whether or not it is so labeled.”