Mother Knows Best
Don’t look now, but your next-door neighbors may be witches. The probability is higher if you live in California or its antithesis, Massachusetts. How can you tell? Look for someone who is middle-class, white, well-educated and a responsible citizen, either straight or gay. Sound unremarkable? In many respects, so is the kind of witchcraft that these witches practice. They convene at established times in houses of worship set up primarily in their own homes. All of them have found new meaning for their lives and community in a world from which they became increasingly alienated.
Most witches believe in the efficacy of magic and imagine that they are reviving a venerable popular religion that had been driven underground by organized Christianity. The principal deity of this cult was not a god, the credo goes, but a goddess, who was known by many different names.
The process of conversion to the worship of the goddess follows a typical pattern: The candidate for the new creed finds herself alone, the deity appears to her and the epiphany reveals new understanding and deep emotional contentment. Perhaps some of their rites of passage do seem a tad eccentric, at least when compared with Christianity’s. Conventional baptism rituals are certainly less gory than the initiation ceremony for the newborn described by sociologist Helen A. Berger in her book “A Community of Witches.” The infant, held by its mother, is carried clockwise around a circle of power; then the father places the afterbirth (which has been kept in the freezer) in a hole in the center of the circle and anoints the child with its birth blood (kept frozen in a separate container). I couldn’t help wondering how this ritual could have been enacted in the days before refrigeration.
Phyllis Curott, a practicing lawyer, would seem at first like the last sort of person to be converted to “the Craft,” or “Wicca,” the term used to describe late 20th century witchcraft. The term is used to distinguish the modern practice from ancient witchcraft, but in fact the word “Wicca” derives from the same Indo-European root as “witch” and “guile.” She was attracted to witchcraft because it gave her strength and confidence and allowed her to become part of a supportive and nurturing community. In her partially fictionalized autobiography, “Book of Shadows,” she tells us that she became interested in witchcraft in an attempt to understand and cope with the stress and emotional strain of practicing law. Talking to older, wiser Wiccan women was a first step. Their ability to predict the future and their conscious connection with the past was another attraction. She responded enthusiastically to the idea of joining other women in worshiping a female deity. Using time-honored herbs in rituals and taking trips out of the city allowed her to reconnect with the natural world. Curott read about witches in the religions of ancient and medieval civilizations. As she attended meetings of an all-female coven and participated in its rituals, she began to take control of her life and to be able to stand up to the male attorneys who had been exploiting and harassing her for years.
Curott is now a Wiccan high priestess (and still practices law). She wrote her book to encourage others to follow her down the path to self-awareness. Any woman can easily put herself into Curott’s place because her story follows the familiar pattern of conversion stories (lost, now found; once in darkness, now in light). Its characters are good (mainly women) or evil (mainly men). The book can also be used as an introductory witchcraft manual. An appendix provides a calendar of the Wiccan year with its distinctive holidays, like Imbolc and Beltane, and the text of some spells to address the common problems of life such as depression or lack of confidence. Lists of recommended books and resource centers as well as recipes for brews are also included. As an academic fighting on the front lines of the culture wars, I was tempted to try the recipe for “Amulet of Protection and Empowerment: Artemis’ Shield.” But our local supermarket doesn’t have some of the key ingredients like rue and nettle. Something is always missing. Remember Zero Mostel, in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” looking for mare’s sweat?
Curott is a proselytizer for the Craft, but in “A Community of Witches,” Berger looks at goddess worship from the outside. She attended rituals as an observer and told the people she interviewed what she planned to do with her material. Although some covens require secrecy, she observes that the women’s groups are more open than the covens to which men belong, which tend to be more hierarchical and hostile to strangers. It’s no accident then that Curott, as a female, was willing to be so informative. Berger understands that Wicca is a bona fide religion and explains how it is peculiarly adapted to present-day America. More than anything, neopagans wish to connect to each other, to the Earth, to the past and even to the future. Because most Wiccans live in cities and suburbs, they are eager to renew their lost connection with the natural world.
Many of their important holidays follow the old agricultural calendar, which marks the solstices, equinoxes and harvests. Imbolc, Feb. 2, celebrates the beginning of new life without any need to watch the shadows of groundhogs. On Beltane (May Day), fertility is celebrated with the ancient traditions of the maypole and weaving dances and with nudity. Although no coven follows quite the same liturgy in these ceremonies, all of them cast circles, cast the quarters (i.e., the four points of the compass), recite verses and use old English words as much as possible--mote (past tense of “must”), widdershins (against the course of the sun--in practice, counter-clockwise) and deosil (apparently, the reverse). But as Wiccans throughout the country are becoming connected to each other electronically, there is more standardization: Nine years ago a collection of 50 yule songs was distributed on the Internet in the hope of reviving the old pagan festival that Christmas has replaced.
Other Wiccan rites commemorate stages in personal development: birth, maturation, commitment to another person or people, croning (becoming a crone) and death. Some of these supplement what is offered in the established religions. In Wicca, puberty rituals are gender specific: Boys are confronted with a symbolic death; girls learn that menstruation brings wisdom and understanding. Ceremonies of commitment to more than one person (of either gender) offer formal recognition to a pattern of behavior that is certainly practiced (though never preached) by conventional society. Croning endows menopause with a positive meaning: Crones (women of a certain age) can at least be wise. Less specific ceremonies emphasize empowerment and healing for all women, which they are believed to need because they have to live in a male-dominated world. To symbolize their break with patriarchal society, Wiccans of both sexes assume new names within the coven and sometimes out of it. These names are usually evocative of some ancient person, place or practice, for example, O’Gaea (“of the Earth”).
Like Curott, Berger observes that Wiccans are particularly keen to stress their connection with witches in the distant past. In the course of her conversion, Curott spent many hours reading about goddess religion in early cultures. In this way, Wiccans reject modernity, which is resolutely patriarchal, for something that is not so much postmodern as pre-postmodern or late modern. Like many postmodern theorists, they are comfortable with multiple realities. Intuition is as valid as rational argument; science works, but so does magic.
Of course all religion involves a certain degree of self-deception or, to put it another way, a willingness to be credulous. For Wiccans, one feature of this credulity is their eagerness to believe in the power created by their common desires; for example, Curott believes that wishing for a coven member’s recovery from cancer is as effective as chemotherapy. Another feature of Wicca is their insistence that they are following a time-honored tradition. But as any student of the ancient world knows, there was never a time in the past when people worshiped a single goddess. Rather, they worshiped many goddesses and gods, who often conflicted with one another. Although the Wiccans seem unaware of it, a goddess who manifests herself in all women is a modern idea, based directly on the modern notion of a universal God.
Anyone interested in the true origins of Wicca should read Philip Davis’ “Goddess Unmasked.” He discusses with great precision and clarity how Wicca does not draw on ancient traditions themselves so much as on relatively recent theories and speculations about ancient traditions. He explains how and why nothing like a unitary goddess ever existed in antiquity. Wicca instead is a product of, or a reaction (like Romanticism) to, the rationalism of the 18th century Enlightenment. Although it claims to represent women’s ways of knowing, both prehistoric and non-European, its intellectual ancestry can be traced back only as far as the symbolic and semi-magical mysticism of the early centuries AD, as manifested in Hermeticism and Gnosticism. But even these connections were acquired secondhand from the theories of later European male writers, such as the utopianists Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and Jules Michelet (1798-1874).
Wicca as practiced today derives primarily from the occult revival in the 19th century and has little to do with the destructive magic employed by the envious, the lovesick and the powerless, like the Weird Sisters in “Macbeth” or the mother in “The Return of the Native,” who thinks her dying son has been bewitched by the eccentric Eustacia Vye. Under the influence of Sir James George Frazer, author of “The Golden Bough,” writers like Margaret Murray (1863-1963) reinterpreted pagan orgies as celebrations of nature and fertility.
Wiccans rely on the bogus reconstructions of Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) and Gerald Gardiner (1884-1964), rather than on scientific studies of witchcraft by more recent historians Hugh Trevor-Roper and Norman Cohn. The notion of a lost matriarchal past comes primarily from a long since discredited work by another European male, Johann Jacob Bachofen (1815-1887). But even Bachofen’s ideas have not come to Wicca directly but rather via a modern condensation of his work “Das Mutterrecht”--called “Myth, Religion and Mother Right” in English translation. Also influential in the formation of Neopaganism is Jung’s notion that all people instinctively understand particular symbols in the same way. Though widely accepted, this idea appears to have been based more on a willingness to believe than on verifiable evidence.
As Davis shows (most ironically), Neopaganism, which appears to offer so much to feminists, derives from myths that were devised not in the remote past by wise, even if unlettered, women but relatively recently by men who were generally more interested in enjoying women than empowering them. Not that this knowledge will stop Wiccans from believing what they want to believe. Davis is troubled by the Wiccans’ insistence on their ancient origins, even though these have repeatedly been shown to be of relatively recent vintage. He wonders if society will not ultimately be harmed if traditional religions are replaced by Neopaganism. I am not persuaded that there is much to worry about. Americans have a way of normalizing even the most aggressive extremes. Neopaganism is becoming organized and will slowly be assimilated. It’s better to think of it as an environmentally friendly, politically correct, occasionally bizarre version of Christianity.