Original Magic: The Rituals and Initiations of the Persian Magi - Michael M. Hughes 2018

Modern Feminist Witch Activists
Witches and Occultists versus Kings and Nazis

The feminist collective WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), in its initial form in the late 1960s, was not explicitly religious or spiritual, but it played on pop culture tropes of the wicked witch, complete with pointy black hat. It did, however, create a culturally resonant and influential connection between feminism and the rapidly growing practice of Pagan witchcraft. As British Wicca began spreading in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s, it dovetailed with the countercultural revolution and gave birth to a uniquely American form of witchcraft: the cult of the Great Goddess.

And the idea that witchcraft was inherently a feminist tradition, and the survival of a matriarchal folk religion extending into antiquity, was increasingly part of the zeitgeist.

A number of books contributed to this: Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) found a new, receptive readership, as did Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, which was rereleased in an expanded version in 1961. Feminists Mary Daly, Andrea Dworkin, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Deirdre English all began to use the figure of the historical witch as an emblem of resistance to patriarchy. Merlin Stone’s 1976 book, When God Was a Woman, used archaeological data to explore the existence of prehistoric goddess worship and ancient nature-worshiping matriarchal cultures that she believed existed before the patriarchal Abrahamic faiths destroyed them.

Feminists began embracing the (inaccurate) idea that nine million women had been murdered in the European witch hunts (the number is now believed by most scholars to be around forty thousand). According to many, the “Burning Times” was a holocaust that wiped out the remaining traces of the once-dominant matriarchal witch cult.

It was only natural that many feminists would begin to advocate for a return to the lost religion of the Great Goddess and her priestess cult of herbalists, healers, and midwives. And the burgeoning Pagan community in the United States was there to accept them.

Zsuzsanna (Z.) Budapest, a Hungarian refugee and daughter of a hereditary witch, started a women’s-only coven dubbed the Susan B. Anthony Coven #1 in California in 1971. Budapest came to call her brand of Wicca Dianic, and it was solely focused on goddesses and feminine concepts of deity—all male gods and male concepts from British Wicca were stripped from it. She initiated hundreds of women in the following decade, and the chant she wrote, “We All Come from the Goddess,” has become a classic in Pagan circles.

In 1979 Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today was published. Adler was a popular reporter on National Public Radio and a Wiccan. Her book examined the rising numbers of Neopagans and Pagan religious and spiritual practices in the United States, and received praise and glowing reviews from mainstream critics and academics alike. Its impact on the spread of Paganism was enormous.

Also in 1979, a largely unknown feminist writer, Miriam Simos, who took on the pen name Starhawk, published a best-selling book, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Religion of the Great Goddess, and a new form of feminist witchcraft exploded into the public consciousness. The book, and her several successors, linked Goddess spirituality not just with feminism but also with direct political action and a strong emphasis on social, political, antimilitarist, and environmental activism. Starhawk was a regular presence at direct actions, including the blockade of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, and says she stopped counting her arrests after two dozen.

To celebrate the book’s publication, Starhawk organized a Halloween ritual known as the Spiral Dance in San Francisco. Musicians, artists, and dancers collaborated to create poetry and music for the ritual liturgy, and each year it grew larger and more popular. In 1999, the twentieth anniversary of the ritual and the book’s publication, fifteen hundred people took part. The enormous success of the book, fueled by its practical and extraordinarily poetic rituals, also led to the establishment of hundreds of covens in the United States and Europe.

From this ritual dance emerged the Reclaiming Collective, which now boasts several dozen regional communities in the United States, Europe, and Australia. According to the organization’s website, “Reclaiming is a community of people working to unify spirit and politics. Our vision is rooted in the religion and magic of the Goddess, the Immanent Life Force. We see our work as teaching and making magic: the art of empowering ourselves and each other. In our classes, workshops, and public rituals, we train our voices, bodies, energy, intuition, and minds. We use the skills we learn to deepen our strength, both as individuals and as community, to voice our concerns about the world in which we live, and bring to birth a vision of a new culture.” ²⁷

In 1982 Starhawk published Dreaming in the Dark, which was more explicitly political. She described magic as “the art of evoking power-from-within and using it to transform ourselves, our community, our culture, using it to resist the destruction that those who wield power-over are bringing upon the world.” ²⁸

As the political winds shifted to the right in the 1980s with the election of Ronald Reagan and the rise of the religious right, Starhawk further expanded her activism to include other marginalized groups: African Americans, indigenous peoples, and the LGBTQ+ community. And her deepening commitment to environmentalism led to her embracing and promoting permaculture, a system of sustainable environmental and cultural design.

Another prominent Wiccan author and activist is Selena Fox, a trained counselor and psychotherapist. She helped organize the first Earth Day in 1970 and began leading public Pagan rituals in 1971 before becoming an educator, lecturer, and activist. She founded Circle Sanctuary in Wisconsin in 1983 on a two-hundred-acre nature preserve. As executive director of the Lady Liberty League, a global Pagan civil rights network, she has been a leader in advocacy for Pagan religious freedom, and was instrumental in getting approval of the pentagram as a religious symbol on US military grave markers and memorials in 2007.

Before Z. Budapest, Starhawk, Selena Fox, and other feminists embraced and remade it, witchcraft was largely a private, insular religion. Its magic was confined to small groups, and the politics of its practitioners as often skewed right as left. Now, thanks to these pioneering women and those who followed them, witchcraft and Paganism have been transformed into a progressive social force; even more progressive than they were, in some cases, embracing a more intersectional feminism than the one they knew. Indeed, few other religions or spiritual traditions (with the possible exception of Quakers or Unitarians) can claim to be as broadly inclusive, egalitarian, pluralistic, and politically engaged as modern feminist witchcraft.

3. George Sinclair, Satan’s Invisible World Discovered (Edinburgh: Thomas George Stevenson, 1871), 100—102; Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, A Historical Account of the Belief in Witchcraft in Scotland (London: Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1884), 21.

4. Francis Young, Magic as a Political Crime in Medieval and Early Modern England: A History of Sorcery and Treason (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017), 87.

5. Linda Root, “The Devil’s Halloween in the Kirkyard of North Berwick and Francis Stewart, Earl of Bothwell,” English Historical Fiction Authors (blog), October 30, 2013, https://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-devils-halloween-in-kirkyard-of.html.

6. Emma Wilby, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Eastbourne, East Sussex, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2010).

7. Mambo Chita Tann, Haitian Vodou: An Introduction to Haiti’s Indigenous Spiritual Tradition (Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 201), 21.

8. Jason R. Young, Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 130.

9. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Company, 1903), 196.

10. Joseph Cephas Carroll, Slave Insurrections in the United States, 1800-1865 (Boston, MA: Chapman & Grimes, 1938; repr., Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004), 92. Citation refers to the Dover edition.

11. Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998; repr., New York: HarperPerennial, 1999), 162. Citations refer to the HarperPerennial edition.

12. Goldsmith, Other Powers, 162; Kate Havelin, Victoria Woodhull: Fearless Feminist (Minneapolis, MN: Twenty-First Century Books, 2007), 43.

13. Mary L. Shearer, “Who Is Victoria Woodhull?” Victoria Woodhull & Company, 2016, http://www.victoria-woodhull.com/whoisvw.htm.

14. Gerald B. Gardner, Witchcraft Today, with additional material by Judy Harrow, Ronald Hutton, Wren Walker, and Tara Nelson (New York: Citadel Press, 2004), 104.

15. Gardner, Witchcraft Today, 104.

16. Jack L. Bracelin, Gerald Gardner: Witch (Pentacle Enterprises, 1999), 52.

17. Dion Fortune, The Magical Battle of Britain, ed. Gareth Knight (Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, UK: Skylight Press, 2012; repr. Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire, UK: Golden Gates Press, 1993), 15.

18. Fortune, The Magical Battle of Britain, 34.

19. Charles Cooke and Russell Maloney, “Hexing Hitler,” Talk of the Town, New Yorker, January 18, 1941, 17.

20. Cooke and Maloney, “Hexing Hitler,” 17.

21. “LIFE Goes to a Hex Party: Amateur Sorcerers in Washington Try Black Magic against Hitler,” LIFE, February 10, 1941, 86.

22. “LIFE Goes to a Hex Party,” 87.

23. Abbie Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It: The Book That Earned Abbie Hoffman a Five-Year Prison Term at the Chicago Conspiracy Trial (New York: Dial Press, 1968; repr., New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2005), 39.

24. Ed Sanders, Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side (Boston, MA: De Capo Press, 2011), 281.

25. David Armstrong, A Trumpet to Arms: Alternative Media in America (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1981), 120—21.

26. Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 208.

27. Reclaiming.org home page, last modified March 13, 2015, http://www.reclaiming.org.

28. Starhawk, Dreaming in the Dark: Magic, Sex & Politics (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1982), xi.