Feminism, Spirituality and Kālī: Western Witchcraft, Śākta Tantra and the Quest for the Feminine Embodiment of the Divine | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Whenever I remind my mother that I'm a "feminist," she makes a sour face. Despite her own feelings that women are, in essence, equal to men, she has accepted a definition of feminism carefully constructed by the religious right-wing political movement. To my mother, "feminism" is a dirty word that invokes images of bra-burning man-haters who want to break up families. Or, as the televangelist Pat Robertson said in a fundraising letter in 1992:
The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.[4]
Robertson used language familiar to those who have sought to suppress free-thinking individuals demanding equal rights for women. As a stereotype, the word "witch" has been used throughout history to slander women who stand outside socially-acceptable behavior, who reject the demure and obeisant role designed for them by the ruling male class.
Even today, when the word "bitch" is considered too coarse a word in polite company, the word "witch" is substituted to mean an out of control, ornery woman. The word "bitch" is used in animal husbandry to describe a female dog in heat, therefore the substitution of the word "witch" in the pejorative sense also indicates a woman who is menstruating, or needs to be satisfied sexually by a man in order
to tame her wild behavior. We are all familiar with the stereotype of the menstruating woman, hair wild and hormones raging, making her irrational and dangerous (and irrelevant) to the patriarchal paradigm of rationality and control. [5]
But while this word has been used to oppress, it has also been used to heal. Many women (and men) have chosen in the last century to take on the title of "witch" for political and spiritual reasons. To be a "witch" is to advocate for social and environmental justice, and for many that means being intimately involved with the political process. In this way, the word "witch" can also be equated with "feminist" in a positive sense, in that both seek out equal treatment for women in the private and public world, and both movements have strong female leadership.
I believe that the history of the persecution of witchcraft as a crime in Europe and America is an important component to understanding the nature and attitudes of modern witches, because they are aware of this history when choosing to use the name "witch." As Ronald Hutton
points out in The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (1999), during the Romantic Period in England, there was an increased fascination and idealism associated with the ancient pagan religions, at least in literary and artistic circles. British culture became obsessed with ancient Greek thought and culture, and idealized
it as a simpler, better time. Poets and artists began creating their own versions of Greek gods and goddesses, creating a single archetype for the goddess that associated her with the earth and the moon, rather than the sun. The paleness of the moon was important in the imagery of the specifically white goddess, and was reflective of the ethnocentrism that is the modern legacy of those poets.
Historically speaking, popular literature was hugely important in shaping popular attitudes toward religion and spirituality. The pagan goddess and god became the subject of purely male fantasy, and a means of escape for homosexual men, who found no tolerance in everyday society.[6] However, the term "witch" was at this time still a pejorative term, as was the word "feminist."[7]
This philosophical landscape reflects the cultural attitudes of the time. Namely, that men were the ones doing all of the shaping and thinking, while women remained cloistered in their homes, the quiet property of their husbands. Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), goes back even further and deals with historical attitudes in Britain toward magical practices and accusations of witchcraft in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His work traces the survival of some religious practices and magical beliefs, and contemplates the power attained by the Church through encouragement of fear and superstition amongst parishioners. He also acknowledges the widespread use of various forms of magic in society, from occultists like the freemasonry to astrologers and gypsies, to priests and
royalty, making clear the social and hierarchical difference between the use of magic, and the (subaltern) use of witchcraft.[8] Many of these attitudes survive today in various forms.[9]
Modern witches have somewhat unconsciously adopted the idealism of the Romantics, but have applied a feminist interpretation to it. Starhawk, one of the leaders of the feminist spirituality movement, and one of the founding mothers of the modern witchcraft movement in America, has in her books crafted a thealogy that speaks to the needs of modern women through embracing the goddess, and liberating female sexuality.
To Starhawk, witchcraft is an expression of what she calls power-from-within, because it celebrates immanence, and thus rich, embodied experience. Her concept of spirituality is earthy, encompassing all of human experience, from the mundane to the mystical. Because sexuality is a taboo in the dominant religious paradigm, she makes sexuality a central, integral component of her thealogy. In describing the source of power-from-within, she calls it "erotic:"
The language of power-from-within is poetry, metaphor, symbol, ritual, myth, the language of magic, of "thinking in things," where the concrete becomes resonant with mysteries that go beyond its seeming solid form. Its language is action… The technology… is magic, the art of changing consciousness, of shifting shapes and dimensions, of bending reality… Its motivations are erotic in the broadest sense of the deep drives in us to experience and share pleasure...."[10]
Each of the methods she offers for expressing power-from-within has been used throughout history to express the sexual, as well, even when the sexual was forbidden at worst, or socially taboo at best. Furthermore, she re-defines "erotic" to encompass all ways of experiencing pleasure - not just sexuality (though that is certainly a recurrent component). Starhawk seeks in her thealogy to re-define sexuality and the language around it as sacred and necessary to spiritual experience, because it is part of the full human experience that has been denied by Judeo-Christian socio-religious paradigms.
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[2] My use of capitals in the terms "goddess" and "god" are limited to specific references of proper names, including in relation to theories such as Gimbutas's Great Goddess theory. Pronouns are not capitalized when referring to deities, either. This should not connotate a lack of respect on my part, but rather I choose to demystify the subject of deity in part through my use of language and syntax, recognizing that each reader has her or his own ideas about the existence, or lack of existence, of the divine. In addition, my use of capitalization in relation to Tantra is thus: when referring to the religion, I will use the capitalized form. When using the term as an adjective, such as "tantric," capitalization is not necessary. Finally, Starhawk chooses to capitalize the term Witch in her many books on the subject, but I choose a lower-case form for the same reasons I do not capitalize the general term "goddess."
[3] See Jan Goodwin's investigative article "Does This Little Girl Look Like a Witch to You?" in the September 2004 issue of Marie Claire.
[4] Quoted in Washington Post article by Michael Isikoff,
October 11, 1992
[5] The connection between menstruation/PMS and the need to control women is currently less explicit in Western society than in Eastern society. In India, the image of Kali as the uncontrolled Shakti, or female energy, has been used as explicit rationale for the need to control women, even by Tantric practitioners who traditionally profess to see women as equal. See Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses. ed. Alf Heitelbel & Kathleen M. Erndl. New York: New York University Press, 2000.; Svoboda, Robert E. Aghora: At the Left Hand of God. New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 1986.; and Encountering Kali: In the Margins, at the Center, in the West. ed. Rachel Fell McDermott & Jeffrey J. Kripal. London: University of California Press, 2003. However, even in Western (specifically American) society, I have throughout my life heard both men and women use the argument that PMS is too obstructive to good judgement and rationality for a woman to be a combatant in the military, or to hold a position of power, such as the President of the United States. Such people generally ignore the contributions of women around the world in such capacities, such as women in the Israeli army, or the many female Prime Ministers and Presidents that have been elected and presided with success around the world.
[6] Hutton, 20-22. It is worthy to note that although gay men and women are still actively persecuted today, especially by the religious right-wing, social conditions were far worse for them in that era, and in fact throughout history in the West (until recently).
[7] Some would argue that "witch" and "feminist" are still pejorative terms.
[8] Court astrologers, such as the well-known Elizabethan magus Dr. John Dee, father of Enochian magic, were a popular example of "acceptable" forms of magic in history. A simplistic comparison could be made with the Varnas (the Indian name for the caste system) of India. In religio-magical terms, the Brahmins, the priestly, highest caste of Indian society, are comparable with ceremonial magicians. An equal comparison could be made between lower caste members (Kunbis, the peasants) and witches. What created the problem for witches is that ceremonial magicians were exclusively male, and worked their sorcery under the auspices of Christianity, gaining their powers from God. Accused witches were always female (their male counterparts were called "warlocks"), and therefore any power they had was attributed to an explicit pact with the Devil. My own interpretation is that this was an effective method of empowering the state through the disempowerment of women and cultural division of communities, something we still see in modern Western society, just in different forms. See Thomas, 438-9.
[9] Anne Llewellyn Barstow's groundbreaking work Witchcraze:
A New History of the European Witch Hunts: Our Legacy of Violence Against Women (New York: 1994) provides a diegesis of similar attitudes, specifically addressing witch hunts as gynecide and methods of control through fear. Spellbound: Women and Witchcraft in America (Wilmington, Delaware: 1998), edited by Elizabeth Reis, provides a collection of insightful essays on witchcraft from scholars and practitioners on the historical and contemporary phenomenon of witchcraft, addressing issues of power, money, gender and race in the history of marginalization of witches, usually by accusation of malice and community fear. Carlo Ginzburg's Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witch's Sabbath (New York: 1991) postulates that it was fear of death and disease that caused communities to use cultural stereotypes and folk tales to perpetuate myths that led to persecution of witches in Europe, and that the cult of the nocturnal goddess is rooted in folk tales.
[10] Ibid.
Feminism, Spirituality and Kālī: Western Witchcraft, Śākta Tantra and the Quest for the Feminine Embodiment of the Divine |