By Salamantis
In recent decades, several social and political movements have had
profound impacts upon the popular Western psyche. Collectively, they
pose a powerful challenge to religiously grounded relational
paradigms which until recently have been accepted almost without
question. These movements include the human rights trio
(ethnic/racial civil rights, lesbian/gay rights and feminism) and
environmentalism. The last two of these, feminism and
environmentalism, have been converging to the degree that a common
discipline, ecofeminism, has been born. Although some affinities
exist between these two and the others, the only solid connection
seems to be the choice by some feminists of lesbianism on ideological
grounds in spite of their personal sexual preferences. What could
the women's rights movement have in common with the attempt to
preserve and protect our planetary ecology which the homosexual and
nonwhite rights movements do not share? To answer this question, we
must take a look at the paradigm they are all opposing, and in what
ways each of them oppose it.
A. Our Present Paradigm
This paradigm is drawn from the moral laws set down in the holy texts
of the religions comprising mainstream Western Monotheism. These
religions mainly include Judaism, Christianity, Islam and
Zoroastrianism; their texts include the Bible, the Koran and the Zend
Avesta. For purposes of simplicity and brevity, we shall call this
the JCIZ paradigm. JCIZ postulates a single omniscient, omnipotent and
relatively benevolent male deity (Jahweh, Jehovah, God or Lord, Allah
or Ahura Mazda), who created and populated the world but is
essentially transcendent with respect to it. This deity is opposed by
another somewhat less knowing and powerful, relatively malevolent male
deity (Lucifer, the Devil, Shaitan or Ahriman), who is also
essentially supernatural. These two opposed forces of good and evil,
light and darkness, contend with each other by intervening in our
affairs. Each of us shall spend eternity with whichever one he or she
allies with; in any case this earth is a temporary inconvenience,
unimportant in the greater order of things. It is in our interest to
ally ourselves with the "good guy", and we know how to do this because
He's thoughtfully sent us a male savior or prophet or avatar (Moses,
Jesus, Mohammed or Zarathustra) to so inform us. We are now in a
position to understand the special affinity between feminism and
environmentalism. Homosexuality is condemned and slavery condoned in
the JCIZ, but if these tendencies were reversed, it would not
compromise the underpinnings of the theological structure; gay/lesbian
rights identical to those of straights and white/nonwhite equality are
no metaphysical threat to the integrity of the system. The religious
ramifications of feminism and environmentalism, however, strike it to
its very core. By criticizing the consequences of following the JCIZ,
they indict as immoral or unwise the premises upon which it is based,
and do so from the perspective of an alternative paradigm which
derives from many pagan sources past and present, but which is
crystallized in Wicca. B. Feminism
In the JCIZ, all deities are male, the first human is male, and any
central prophets or saviors are male. In the cosmic play, women are
relegated to the roles of dupe, slave, rebellious whore, broodmare and
submissive saint. Mary Daly's dictum that if God is male, the male is
God has the existential corollary, within the JCIZ, of reducing
females to nothing. In order to follow God's plan, women must submit
to their husbands' rule in particular, and to male authority in
general. Men may have to attend the school of hard knocks, but women
are stuck with their homework. They are to raise their many children
but not their voices, for fear of getting knocked about themselves.
This excision of the feminine from spiritual significance and their
resulting societal subservience has provoked, within many contemporary
women, a soul alienation of Marxian proportions. Revolt against the
predominance of this divine chain of being has followed, and the
guerillas have not been exclusively female. Some men have come to
feel cramped and pigeonholed in the role of overseer on the domination
plantation and degraded and ashamed of what is expected of them there.
They have therefore joined the rebellion against the JCIZ gender
hierarchy, agreeing with Martin Luther King that you can't hold folks
down in a ditch unless you climb down in there with them. As women
and men come to the practical conclusion that only equality of rights,
responsibilities and opportunities works, however, they also tend to
come to the spiritual conclusion that this is true because the sexes
equally approach divinity. This, however, would require deity to be
comprised of masculinity and femininity in equal measure, which of
course directly contradicts the JCIZ.
C. Environmentalism
In the JCIZ, the Creator packed a hostile and bountiful world like a
reluctant lunchbox for fallen humanity (read man) to suffer, endure,
dominate, subdue and exploit for his own benefit. This divine license
for exploitation without regard to consequences in the name of greed
has borne bitter fruit. Because we have not held our common home in
reverence, or honored her as sacred to us, we have felt free to
pollute, pillage, rape and otherwise profane her. Yet, after fouling
our own nest, we seem surprised to find ourselves surrounded by human
filth, with the blood of extinguished comrade species crying out
inconsolably from the bleak bare ground. We are coming painfully to
the understanding that the earth is our source and foundation, and
that poisoning and impoverishing her can only hasten our own hollow
demise. However, the grasping of the fact that we are only a part of
something much older, wiser, grander and more complex than ourselves
draws us inexorably to an experience of awe and sublimity in the
presence of the sheer marvel of it. We begin to see ourselves as tiny
threads, which, by some miracle, are able to sense the weave of a
gigantic dancing tapestry (and the reality is much more wondrous than
that). The earth becomes hallowed for us. But this contradicts the
JCIZ premise that it is transcendent Deity which is holy, not a nature
which, compared to the supernatural, must remain substandard.
D. Forbidden Fruit
Ecological degradation may be divided into natural resource depletion
and biosphere pollution, but both have overpopulation as a root cause.
Overpopulation drives us like lemmings to mow our global lungs for
farmland, lumber and cattle pasture, sapping species diversity in the
process. It drives us to strip-mine our eroding soil to build
skyscrapers, cars and soda cans. It drives us to burn our fossil
fuels, overheating our atmosphere and decimating our ozone sunscreen
for the sake of light, mobility, plastic containers and
air-conditioned comfort for a small percentage of our teeming
billions. It drives us to turn our over-fished oceans into toxic
cesspools when our rivers bear our pesticides, factory byproducts and
sewage to the seas. Furthermore, the resulting competition for room
and resources on a shrinking sphere has led our infant race to nurse
the barrel of the nuclear gun.
It is ecologically imperative that we control our rate of
reproduction generally, and the fundamental pillar of feminism that
women must have the right to control their own reproduction
individually. To this dovetailing of the calls of personal freedom
and global necessity, the JCIZ responds with an iron demand frozen
for thousands of years in the face of catastrophically changing
circumstances; you must be fruitful and multiply.
E. Ecofeminism
The realization that birth control is both a feminist and an
environmental issue is one of many pattern matches which ecofeminists
have found. They follow the clue given by the phrase 'Mother Nature'
to the conclusion that women and the earth have both been victimized
by the same attitudes of subjection, rapaciousness, violation,
penetration of virgin territory, stripping, despoiling and
defloration. They consider this an unfortunate result of the
separation of the sexes into godlike, transcendent man and earthy,
immanent woman, into man as mind and woman as body, found in the JCIZ.
This partition, for ecofeminists, is based on the differing positions
of the sexes with regard to childbirth; men observe, women
participate. Women also, like the earth, produce food, and can be
planted with seed when in season; hence the ancient occurrence of the
term 'plowing' for intercourse.
Sexist theological Cartesianism, however, is untenable; the JCIZ's
gender-based spirit/flesh dichotomy has been an injurious illusion.
Self-aware parts of nature are still woven into the web they
perceive. Mind, whether abstract or concrete, and of either gender,
is a bodily based, earthly and evolutionarily emergent phenomenon.
The main division within ecofeminism is between 'gender' and 'nature'
ecofeminists. The 'gender' ecofeminists believe that male-female
relationships are the source of a domination pattern that is
generalized to apply to culture-nature relationships, and that if we
replace it with an egalitarian sexual partnership pattern, our
environmental abuse will stop. 'Nature' ecofeminists believe just
the opposite; that replacing the egocentric, exploitative and
uncaring attitudes underlying environmental abuse with valuing,
consequence based stewardship will repair male-female relationships
by osmosis. I think that the domination pattern is imprinted during
child-rearing, and that to end it, we have to embrace noncoercive
methods of socializing our young.
F. The Challenge of Neopaganism
(1) Neopaganism Generally
The Neopagan alternatives to the JCIZ paradigm trace their roots to
prehistoric Eurasian and African tribal and shamanic nature religions,
and count the Amerindian and Australian aboriginal traditions as
siblings. From them, the Craft (as many refer to themselves) have
taken their reverence for the earth and their celebration of the more
feminine principles of divinity. They generally create sacred space
by casting a circle (which is the intersection between a sanctified
sphere and the ground), and calling the four directions, which
correspond to the four elements, and to the divisions of a day, a moon
cycle, a year and a lifetime, and much else. Their holy days fall on
the solstices and the equinoxes, on the midpoints between them (the
cross-quarters), and/or on full moons. In addition, they honor
personal rites of passage; such as birth, a naming of the child
(sometimes called wiccaning), puberty, marriage (known as
handfasting), menopause (croning), and death. Contemporary neopagan
groups include the Fellowship of Isis, Ar n Draiocht Fein (Our Own
Druidism), the Church of all Worlds, Asatru and the Church of the
Eternal Source.
(2) Wicca Specifically
All the above is true of Wicca, but when casting their circles most
also call the Earth Mother, Sky Father, and Center, this last
representing both the individual selves of the participants and the
common center they create by joining together. They also thank and
dismiss them when they open their circles upon the conclusion of their
ritual workings. Wicca follows a gender-complementary immanent
duotheism comprised of a God and a Goddess; for Wicca, deity is double
and non-transcendent. The distinctions between them entail neither
mutual hostility nor the subservience of either to the other, but
instead require the co-presence in dynamic symmetry of these differing
yet equi-primordial principles for circumstances to proceed. The
fundamentalist belief in the actual existence of these deities is not
a prerequisite for becoming Wiccan. In fact, many, if not most,
Wiccans view the Earth Mother and Sky Father as archetypes in the
Jungian sense, and as lenses through which to apprehend, and grasp in
concrete, human-friendly terms, a totality which is too vast and
ineffable to be circumscribed by finite minds. Wiccans consider all
Goddesses and Gods throughout history as cultural manifestations of
these principles, revel in the diversity of expression that they find,
and borrow whatever they find that works for them. In this sense,
Wicca does not enslave and use its adherents; rather it is the case
that Wicca is made use of by them, as a spiritual tool with which to
focus their passions and intentions upon the realizations of their
plans and desires. The conceptions and attributes surrounding these
deities are not inscribed for all time in any holy text, but are
flexible, for Wicca is an evolving, pragmatic religion with little
dogmatic baggage. Its central ritual, the Great Rite, consists of
dipping a dagger in a chalice of wine in symbolic intercourse. The
Christian Communion, in contrast, is symbolic cannibalism. Wicca has
one major law, the Law of Three (any action, whether well or ill
intentioned, is returned to its source threefold), and one
commandment, the Wiccan Rede ('if it harms none, do what you will').
While these admonishments do emphasize personal freedom, they link it
to personal responsibility, and the consequences of following them are
a strict self-discipline, since one is expected to strive not to harm
oneself, others, or the biosphere we share. Their more magickal
practices include a Santeria-like invocation of the masculine
principle by the priest and of the feminine principle by the priestess
(the Drawing Down of the Sun or Moon), and Raising the Cone of Power.
This practice involves an entering of the group into a shamanic state
of consciousness, usually by means of some combination of dancing,
chanting and drumming, preparatory to attempts at divination or
spellcasting. The Earth Mother represents the foundation or substrate
of change; the matter underlying form, the being beneath becoming.
She is omnipresent, although aspects of her may undergo periodic
change. She never dies. The feminine principle of divinity
encompasses the cyclical-intuitive, synthesizing, fecund-formative,
nourishing aspect, with its emphases on the personal and collective
dream worlds, and on relatedness. The Sky Father represents the
changes of form that must occur in the life cycle and food chain. He
withdraws and returns, and never lingers. He is the God of the
inseparability of hunter and prey, and of the cycle of vegetation. He
is born of the Mother, grows, flowers and dies, to be reborn of his
own seed the following year. The masculine principle of divinity
encompasses the linear-logical, analyzing, fertilizing aspect, with
its emphases on ego, task and individuality. A combination of these
traits is preferable to either alone, and all people are considered to
have their own particular ratios of these attribute sets; their own
yin-yang or anima-animus blend. Modern Wicca publicly began in 1949
when Gerald Gardner published "High Magic's Aid", a book of Wiccan
ritual disguised as historical fiction. He then, in collaboration
with Doreen Valiente, published "Witchcraft Today" in 1954 and "The
Meaning of Witchcraft" in 1959. Although other Wiccan forms exist,
Gardnerian Wicca and an offshoot (Alexandrian Wicca, after its founder
Alex Sanders) remain the core Wiccan traditions. Other important
Wiccan theorists include Janet and Stewart Farrar, Starhawk and Z
Budapest.
G. Wiccan Theo/alogy and the
Foundations of Feminism and
Environmentalism
In a religion in which the God and the Goddess are equi-potential
(possess complementary and equal status), gender equality is mandated
rather than forbidden. Freedom of societally and planetarily
responsible choice belongs to all. In a religion that urges its
adherents to love the earth as a mother, rather than resenting and
coveting her as a rich, conquerable hostile kingdom, children would be
raised from birth to treat her with restraint and respect, and to
pass her on to their children in as pristine a condition as possible.
There is, in fact, a kind of Wiccan Eden myth; a vision of a
prehistoric peaceful eco-friendly agrarian matriarchy which was
overthrown by males banished for violence, who banded together to
conquer and enslave their former society and pillage its lands. This
Edenic vision is more admired than believed. Most Wiccans desire a
'return' to this Eden, even if humanity has never in reality been
there.
Feminists and environmentalists, particularly ecofeminists and deep
ecologists, share this vision for the future; it is what they strive
for. It is therefore to be expected that many of them would
appropriate a belief system possessing sensibilities so in harmony
with their hopes, goals, desires and dreams. If the Wiccan Utopia is
theirs also, adoption seems eminently reasonable. In fact, these
movements receive both support and guidance from Wicca, and give both
in return.
H. Wicca and Science
Wicca's attitude toward science is one of intense interest and
positive regard, for Wicca's perspective of pragmatic self-conscious
evolution and its anti-dogmatic character resemble scientific ideals.
Science, for Wicca, is attempting to reveal the underlying nature of
immanent divinity, and as such is performing a sacred service. In
addition, Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, that the entire biosphere is an
evolving, self-regulating totality, appears to be to Wiccans the
beginning of the confirmation of their ecological suspicions, and the
recent comparisons of gender, brain structure and cognitive style
bolster the validity of their chosen deity attributes. They for the
most part accept that humanity creates divinity in its own image, and
feel flattered that science is indicating that they in particular are
doing it rather well.
I. Difficulties
Wicca's deities form a heterosexual couple, and sex with one's
significant other is regarded as a sacrament. This has caused gays
and lesbians to sometimes feel uneasy with the energy in the circle.
For this reason, some gay men have formed Faerie circles and some
lesbians have embraced Dianic Wicca. Straight women will also meet in
full moon circles, or esbats, and straight men in wild man groups.
Although there are some differences, for instance in the deity or
deities invoked, the thaumaturgy, or ritual structure, remains similar
throughout. General meetings are held on the sabbats eight times a
year, and networking is constant. Wicca and Neopaganism remain far
more gay-friendly than JCIZ. Although racial diversity endures as an
ideal in Wicca, it is sadly lacking in reality. This failure to
rainbow the Craft is deeply disturbing to its members. It is almost
certain that the reason for the phenomenon of whitebread Wicca is
that, for racial minorities, the intensity and immediacy of their
oppressed condition drives gender and ecological concerns to the
periphery if their awareness. Also, it only stands to reason that
they would feel uncomfortable participating in ritual as the token
minority, or at best as one of the few. It is very likely that,
despite the best intentions of the other participants, such an
experience serves to reinforce, rather than relieve, the awkwardness
and sense of difference for which racial minorities would seek
religious comfort. Wiccans, having experienced discrimination
themselves on the religious front, understand these impediments, and
continue to remain open and hopeful. Lastly, the Wiccan division of
deity has inadvertently had the corollary of evolving lists of
masculine and feminine gender attributes that seem disturbingly
similar to those of the JCIZ, only wrapped in positive-regard
packaging. Also, in some cases, the Wiccan backlash against
patriarchy has swung the pendulum too far in the opposite direction,
subjecting men to the same ridicule and discrimination that the
phallocentrists previously reserved for women. Wiccans must be on
guard that they do not pigeonhole individuals into these archetypes,
and thus descend the slippery slope into the very bigotry and gender
expectations that many have joined Wicca to escape.