Drawing Down the Moon (40 page)

But even if the culture has absorbed many of these ideas, it does seem fair to say that there is less energy and vibrancy around them at the moment, at least in Paganism. After a decade where separate men and women's rituals took place at well-known festivals, it is no longer so common to find them. That may simply mean that separatist groups, which do still exist, are not spending much time connecting with the Neo-Pagan movement. But in talking to women who spent years in all-women groups, I have been struck by the fact that many are no longer working in them.

It's important to stress that the separatist current in women's spirituality was essential—and may still be essential for some women today. For many women it was the only safe harbor—a place where they could become strong and vibrant in a culture where women were silent and invisible.

Willow LaMonte, the editor of
Goddessing,
an international news journal that looks at the Goddess spirituality movement around the world, says there
has
been a loss of vibrancy and energy—of juice, if you will. She ticks off several factors. First, the loss of grassroots woman's organizations: bookstores, restaurants, radio shows, and local newsletters. Think back! There were hundreds of women's bookstores in the early 1980s. Many of them are gone. Lesbians led many of these efforts, but they provided space for all kinds of women. Women's radio shows on public radio—most of those are also gone now. LaMonte does not believe the Internet is a substitute for a grassroots newsletter, any more than
Amazon.com
is a substitute for a community bookstore. The Internet does not create real community, she says, and there is an access and class problem: there are still many people without easy access to computers. What about prisoners, for example? The loss of grassroots organizations means the loss of political consciousness.

LaMonte also believes that there has been an increasing “vapidness and vagueness” in the movement, and a shifting away from language that confronts the issue of power. She attributes this partly to so many groups stepping away from the use of the word “Goddess” and embracing more Jungian, and ultimately disempowering, descriptions like “Divine Feminine.”

The woman's spirituality movement does have vibrant women leaders. Leadership styles vary. The Covenant of the Goddess and Reclaiming both have based their leadership style on consensus. Many of the mixed Wiccan groups tend to be more hierarchical. British Traditionalist Wicca sees itself as a mystery religion: A seeker slowly gains knowledge by studying with a coven leader and rising through several levels. In contrast, as we saw, many early feminist Craft groups were quite anarchistic; they did not like the leadership style of the traditional Craft, and their own flaws went in the opposite direction: disorganization. But today, many of the feminist covens have inherited their style from powerful and charismatic women priestesses—such as Z Budapest and Morgan McFarland, and some current women leaders are following in that tradition. This is an oversimplification; there are many priestesses who share power well, who allow different women and their skills to flourish. But in doing the research for this edition, I was struck by the irony of coming across many Heathen kindreds that worship Northern European gods (that some feminists might consider extremely “macho”), yet have truly egalitarian organizations, while I came across a few feminist groups with charismatic leaders and more hierarchy.

Here are some other issues to think about when you compare feminist spirituality then and now. There have always been tensions between feminist scholars and mainstream scholars, over issues like matriarchy and the role of women in ancient societies. But mainstream scholars now include Pagan studies scholars, as the growing Pagan studies movement comes of age (see Chapter 13). The majority of Pagan scholars no longer accept Margaret Murray's theory of the witch cult, and they have come to accept that the persecution, torture, and killing of people accused of witchcraft in Europe involved a relatively small number of people: forty to fifty thousand over about a hundred and fifty years, not a holocaust of nine million, as many Witches and other women alleged for years.
⁶⁶

Many feminist writers still look at the witchcraft persecutions as clear proof of patriarchal oppression—the stamping out of midwives and healers, and the oppression of the poor and outcast. These theories are in dozens od books, many beautifully written with powerful prose. And what makes it so difficult is that they are part of the most important founding and empowering myths of Wicca, Paganism, and the entire Earth religions revival. Take Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English's groundbreaking work,
Witches, Midwives, and Nurses,
which argued that the persecutions were used to destroy the power of midwives and healers and bolster the emerging male medical profession, or Starhawk's exquisitely beautiful essay in the appendix of
Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics,
“The Burning Times,” which argues that persecuting Witches was a way to destroy community power and the common lands. Over the last fifteen years, most Pagan scholars have come to believe there is little hard evidence for these theories. Sometimes reading the current scholarship makes one feel like the title of that old Firesign Theatre album:
Everything You Know Is Wrong.
For example, Jenny Gibbons, in an article in
The Pomegranate,
“Recent Developments in the Study of the Great European Witch Hunt,” argues there were about fifty thousand deaths; the greatest number of deaths occurred during the Reformation, in places where both the church and the state were weak; and most deaths were decided by non-religious courts (in fact your best chance of getting off was going before a church court). Few of those killed were Pagans in any sense a modern Pagan might recognize. (See Chapter 4 for more on this issue.)

In contrast, a number of feminist writers and academics now argue that although nine million is clearly a mythical number, the current low numbers put forth by scholars have their own problems. For example, Max Dashu argues that records in many communities were not kept; others were destroyed, and, in a response to Gibbons, she writes:

Looking at this controversy, some of those involved in feminist spirituality say why should we be so different than every other religion? Patricia Monaghan, the author of many books about women and goddesses, observes that she has heard the following argument in some feminist circles:

When I asked Z Budapest about the scholarship issue, she said: “Is this really an important point to settle? I don't essentially care. Nine million, or fifty thousand. Bad is bad.” But since this notion of a holocaust of nine million has found its way into Pagan popular songs and into the film
The Burning Times,
often shown on PBS during fund-raising week, accuracy—not wildly inflated numbers—seems important. After all, for many,
The Burning Times
film is the only face of Paganism and Wicca that is seen by much of the public.

But historical accuracy is not the only issue. Sabina Magliocco, in her wonderful book
Witching Culture,
notes that these myths have helped create the oppositional culture that remains so very important to Paganism. She writes:

It is this alternative, ecological paradigm that made many of us embrace the modern Pagan and goddess movements. It's important to retain the oppositional culture, even as we correct mistaken notions and numbers.

Looking back on this chapter, it's important to say one more word about matriarchy. An important feminist scholar, who was barely mentioned in previous editions of this book, does give important weight to the idea of ancient goddess cultures: the late Marija Gimbutas. Gimbutas was a serious archeologist, with an extensive knowledge of the languages and cultures of Greece, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe. She argued in her books,
The Language of the Goddess
and
The Civilization of the Goddess,
that what she called “Old Europe” had once been settled by peaceful, women-centered cultures who venerated the Goddess. She further argued that these civilizations were matrilinear and egalitarian until the coming of the Indo-Europeans. Many archeologists have contested her theories, but as Hutton writes in
The Triumph of the Moon,
none of her theories have been disproved, and they “may well never be. The controversy has centered upon the issue that the evidence is susceptible of alternative interpretations.”
⁷⁰

As I come to the end of this chapter, I have also been mulling over a critique that I've occasionally heard from some scholars: that the women's spirituality movement is not really a religion, as much as a human potential movement. Since both religion and therapeutic ideas consider deep questions of being, of consciousness, and the meaning of life, it seems reasonable to assume the lines between religion and therapy will occasionally blur. I noted near the beginning of this chapter that the consciousness-raising group gave women the lesson that personal feelings could be trusted and acted upon, and that the “personal was political.” As someone who spent a number of years in a CR group during the 1970s, the experience was more life-changing than any therapy or education. It was also an incredible catalyst for political change, as women realized their issues were not simply personal and could be explored, challenged, and transformed through political action. Having said that, women's spirituality is not therapy. Many years ago I remember seeing a leaflet that advertised a goddess circle led by a therapist who was charging group therapy rates for her rituals; at the time it seemed shocking—it still does. But women's spirituality has given countless women a sense of health and empowerment, and this process clearly continues for a new generation of women. Patricia Monaghan says that doing slide shows on goddesses in small towns has given her great insight about what the idea of the Goddess means for women.

But looking back, years later, I do see a downside to the notion that one can always trust one's personal experiences: the possibility of self-delusion. Assuming that one's personal experience is “truth” can foster confusion between material reality and the psychic reality of dreams and daydreams. That confusion ripped through certain parts of the women's movement and the lesbian community in the 1980s, leading some to maintain false stories of ritual abuse. It might be noted that Jenny Gibbons, in her article on the Witch persecutions, observes that the Pagan community would have been more resistant to those claims, and would have seen how similar they were to the old false accusations of witchcraft, had they had a more realistic and historically accurate view of the scope of the witch persecutions in Europe.
⁷²

Today, a new generation of women is redefining feminist spirituality. Many of them have no real knowledge of the past, but they are also not overwhelmed with the same forms of oppression that burdened feminists in the 1970s. They may come up with different ideas and different forms of organization as a result. Many women have rejected the essentialist thinking that informed much of early spiritual feminism; they simply believe in equal rights for all; they believe that, as Lisa Jervis writes in an essay in
LiP
magazine: “The actual workings of power will not change with more chromosomal diversity among the powerful.”
⁷³
They have less hope than we had that a world of women will be more nurturing, more peaceful, and more cooperative. Their view may produce better politics, in the end, but it was not an idea we could easily hear when we felt our oppression so deeply that it was impossible to act from a non-oppressed place. One wonders what kind of feminist spirituality a new generation will create; what would feminist spirituality look like if it did not originate, in part, as a response to oppression?

The ancient goddesses are incredible models; whether or not you believe they are
real,
or archetypes, or simply images to emulate, they can be used to explore notions of power and possibility in the world as well as inform an exploration of ancient cultures and their gifts. In past editions of
Drawing Down the Moon,
I said that the women's spirituality movement had yet to define itself as either a monotheistic Goddess movement or a polytheistic movement with many goddesses, more similar to the rest of Neo-Paganism. The claim that there is one universal Mother Goddess worshipped widely throughout the ancient world is a kind of monotheism that only differs in gender from the religions most modern Pagans have rejected. It may also be a kind of universalism at odds with Pagan concepts of diversity and bioregionalism. The greatest strength of the Pagan perspective is that it looks to many goddesses and gods, not one.