Drawing Down the Moon (68 page)

4. Computers are simply the best way to communicate; they are practical tools.

5. Paganism provides a balance to people who are heavily involved in linear forms of reality and vice versa.

6. Oddball people are attracted to both.

 

There were a few people who disagreed with any attempt to find a relationship. They wrote things like: “A truly Pagan world would not have computers, but if we are oppressed by them, we have the right to fight back with them.” Others said, “Neo-Pagans tend to be faddish, so are computers.” “Don't be ridiculous; most Pagans are therapists or gardeners.” “Educated, intelligent people have computers—they also have cars.” “The only correlation is intelligence.”

The 1985 survey also asked Pagans if they were public about their identity as Pagans or Witches. There was a pretty even split. Of those who responded, fifty-nine said they were public, fifty-eight were in between: “I am public, except at work,” for example. Thirty-nine said they were very secretive. In the early seventies more Witches and Pagans were secretive, often by necessity. Some, like Carl Weschcke, were entirely open about their religious views. Others, like Bran and Moria, found their house stoned, or like Z, their psychic consultations considered illegal. The Frosts, of the School of Wicca, were militantly public. At one point, they lived in a small town in Salem, Missouri, and yet they sold pigs in the name of the School of Wicca. “The people who really get in trouble are the people who are semisecret; that's how rumors start. Be public,” they said. “The government will defend your right to the bitter end, because that's the way we're set up in the U.S. But if you're private and secret then people will come around and burn down your barn in the middle of the night. And then who will defend you.” Many more Witches are public today than ever before.

The survey asked about drug use. The majority said it was an individual choice, but most believed it was inappropriate and unnecessary. A minority talked about the importance of “sacred substances” when used properly.

The survey asked people to define “Pagan” and “Witch.” All but seven considered themselves Pagans. Several people simply defined Paganism as any religion outside Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Several others defined a Pagan as anyone who worships the old gods of any culture, but most expressed the notion that Paganism involves multiple deities and a concept that the earth is sacred. Several said Pagans based their religion on the laws of nature rather than the teachings of a “divinely” inspired individual or group. Others said that modern Neo-Paganism embodied a respect for the earth and nature's laws and a conception of deity as immanent. Many emphasized the sentience and aliveness in all nature, the importance of attunement to the earth and to lunar, solar, and seasonal cycles, as well as the need for human communities to, once again, have the experience of ecstatic celebration, rites of passage, and Mystery traditions. Others mentioned the idea of the earth as a living organism, as Gaia, and still others mentioned qualities such as life-affirming, fun-loving, non-dogmatic, flexible, pragmatic, and ecstatic.

In
Drawing Down the Moon,
I used the term Neo-Pagan to describe the broad revival, re-creation and new creation of earth religions in the United States. In the intervening years I have seen many slightly different spellings of this term:
neopagan, neo-Pagan,
and
contemporary Pagan,
a term I first heard about twenty years ago from members of the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans. I am going to stick with Neo-Pagan and Pagan because it is easier to be consistent, although I can see some arguments for neo-Pagan.

Two-thirds of those who answered the survey considered themselves Witches. Some felt the word would never be reclaimed and should even be abandoned. Others felt it was essential. We saw in an earlier part of the book that the word
witch
is a difficult word, with negative connotations not only among Christians, but also among anthropologists and most tribal peoples. Are modern Witches called
Witches
because Margaret Murray said so? Or, are they called
Witches
because those who persecuted them called them that? Or are there deep, important, archetypal reasons for modern Witches to use this word, with its notions of power, wisdom, healing, independence, and female strength? Those that defended the use of the word brought up the Inquisition and other persecutions. “The word carries a part of our past,” one person said. “It would be dangerous to forget it and leave it behind.” Others said that the very thing that made the word uncomfortable gave the word its importance. “The words of comfort are usually not the words of power.” Or this: “For years I fought against the term
witch,
” wrote a graduate student in religious studies. “I wanted the juice without the term. Now I think Starhawk is right—the ‘juice' goes with the term.”

Some people liked the word because of its association with mavericks, outcasts, and the unconventional. Others liked the word because of its association with ancient healers in touch with hidden forces in nature. One woman wrote, “I like the word . . . It's on the edge.” Many women said the word had simply claimed them and that there was no other word that brought together the concepts of women, solitary wisdom, isolation, healing, and power. “It feels right to say ‘Witch,' right from the souls of my feet!” “It emphasizes my woman self, wild, free, and strong.” “It is essential to what I am,” said yet another.

Of those who expressed reservations over the term, the basic argument, expressed in many ways, was that there were so many stereotypes surrounding the word that it usually took several hours, an afternoon discussion, perhaps, to dispel them. It certainly wasn't something you could achieve in a twenty-five second sound bite. “I call myself ‘Witch' in private,” wrote one person, “but to do so in public invites confusion.” Others said it simply didn't communicate the reality of the Pagan experience to most of the public. Haragano, an elder in the New Wiccan Church, told me, “I don't see myself as an apologist, spending my life reclaiming the word. I live my religion. Within the New Wiccan Church we identify ourselves to each other as Witches, but to the general public we are elders in our church.” Laurie Cabot, often called the “official Witch of Salem,” held a very different point of view. She and other Salem Witches have often said, “You can walk the streets of Salem in a black robe and pentagram and feel totally safe. That's because for years we have been on the frontlines every day as public Witches.”

There is another problem. For most people, the word
Witch
means someone with magical powers—and not the kind of “power from within” that people like Starhawk are talking about. There is also the dilemma that not even everybody in the Craft means the same thing by the term
Witch.
For some, it's a specific initiatory religion, for others, like Marion Weinstein, for example, it's something they knew in their bones from the time they were a child. For still others it is something that happened to them the magical moment someone looked them in the eye and said, “Thou Art Goddess, baby . . . This is it!” There is also a controversy over whether the word
Witch
means something different than the word
Wiccan.
Some British traditionalist Witches make the claim that Wiccan only can refer to their traditions. Some writers, including M. Macha NightMare, have adopted the term “Witchen, for the beliefs of Witches as opposed to the beliefs of Wiccans.” I will continue to use both terms interchangeably.

Many of those uncomfortable with the word
Witch
are more comfortable with terms such as
Pagan, Wiccan, shaman, nature religionist, earth-centered, nature spirituality,
and a bunch of other terms. But it is hard to get around the sense of the witch in its Jungian, archetypal sense; there are so many people who feel the word's connection with the hidden, primal forces of nature that often the arguments against using the word are tactical, and the arguments for using the word are spiritual, even if one can argue they are historically problematic. The arguments against the word are never quite able to counter the deep feelings expressed by those who consider the word a part of their essence. A woman named Oreithyia wrote me this letter after a discussion on the topic at a Pagan festival:

Then Oreithyia described the rest of the ritual. The women asked that what he did would return to him threefold. “We ask for nothing beyond what is just,” they said. “Only let him understand, at some time, in some way, that his actions cannot be disconnected from their results.”

The argument over language is still with us today. But looking back over that letter, twenty years later, I would argue that the word
Pagan
is as important, perhaps even more important in some ways, than the word
Witch.
The words
Pagan
and
Neo-Pagan
allow us to see modern earth religions, in all their diversity, as one growing movement—with certain values and ideas about the world. It's those values and ideas that
Drawing Down the Moon
has always emphasized.

One of the biggest changes since the last serious revision of
Drawing Down the Moon
in 1986 is the emergence of Pagan studies as a serious academic discipline. Ronald Hutton, a historian at the University of Bristol in England, and the author of a groundbreaking book on modern Paganism and Witchcraft,
Triumph of the Moon,
says “Pagan studies are now a recognized part of academic research in both the U.S. and the U.K.” And, it should be added, Canada as well. In the United States, there are three journals that get much of the credit for the emergence of Pagan studies:
Iron Mountain: A Journal of Magical Religion
published many of the first scholarly articles by Pagans. Begun in 1984, the journal was published by Chas Clifton and featured articles by Aidan Kelly and Doreen Valiente and many graduate students in religion and anthropology.
Iron Mountain
lasted only two years and was absorbed into
Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions,
a beautifully produced journal that lasted until 2000.
Gnosis
seriously examined transformational paths in the Western religious traditions, from Jungian psychology to philosophy and comparative religion. Clifton continued to write many articles, and in 1997, Fritz Muntean started
The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies.
Currently edited by Chas Clifton, who teaches at Colorado State University, it is the first peer-reviewed scholarly journal devoted to Pagan studies.