[This description of Wicca is highly Goddess oriented, and the
Witch described herein, Starhawk, has since become a lot less
feminist oriented. Her book _Spiral Dance_ is a wonderful
introduction to Wicca and magic --Amythyst]
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B L E S S E D B E
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Touching The Power Of Witches
By, Andrea Behr (San Jose Mercury News Staff Writer - 11/28/87)
When I look back on it, I think I may have been a witch
even as a kid.
Although I recieved no religious training as a child,
something in me, some sense of connection or gratitude, demanded
expression. I tried to believe in God, as I understood him. I
would stare at the sky and try to convince myself that some real
entity was staring back at me. I'd manage it - for a second or
two.
The stars were certainly real, though, and miraculous
enough. I could imagine them looking at me.
When I was only about 8 or 9, I used to go alone to
secret places in empty lots near my suburban house to commune with
plants and trees. Without knowing that anyone had ever done it
before me, I celebrated the solstices and equinoxes with rituals.
I would stand on a certain boulder, for instance, and say certain
words to greet the new season.
It mattered to me when the season changed. New moods
would sweep over me; everthing smelled different; the world
shifted. I had a mystical relationship with each season.
Twenty years later, when I encountered witches and their
religion, known as Wicca, I realized that they were doing with
their full adult power what I had done instinctively as a child.
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Modern witches worship the physical world - the earth, their own
bodies, the cycles of the sun and moon, life and death, light and
darkness, and change, according to Starhawk, a San Francisco witch
and writer. They have no deity but nature, though they use as a
symbol and focus the earth Goddess, who was worshiped in various
forms by people in ancient times.
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Witches such as Starhawk believe that re-creating a modern version
of the old pre-Judeo-Christian, female-centered religion is the
best way to heal ourselves and others, find power and wholeness,
and perhaps rescue the earth from the successes of its dominant
species. Witches for centuries have suffered persecution at the
hands of those who have labeled their craft evil, heretical or
satanic. I never rejected Wicca on those grounds. But at first I
was skeptical, even satirical. I'd lived in California long enough
to have had my fill of vaguely beatific people who don't believe
in using the brains they were born with.
-----
But the witches I met seemed surprisingly solid and
sensible, and they radiated a sense of power - and a sense of
humor - that attracted me.
"Witchcraft has always been a religion of poetry, not
theology," Starhawk has written. It doesn't have a great deal to
offer the intellectual. On the other hand, you don't have to
"believe in" anything other than yourself. The rituals and
practices tap into archetypes that speak to deep psychological
truths.
I liked the way Starhawk and her followers combined their
political passions - anti-nuclear work, environmental issues,
feminism - with their religion. They seemed to be having fun, too:
cutting loose, getting bigger and deeper as people. I felt a
kinship with them.
But in my life, people don't go around talking about the
Goddess, saying "Blessed Be" and singing songs to the moon, not to
mention casting spells. It was embarrassing. It was dumb. I was
torn.
Finally I took a deep breath and signed up for a weeklong
workshop in "Goddess spirituality." I drove to the Quaker Center
in Ben Lomand on a warm Sunday evening in August in a cold sweat
of anxiety.
I felt as if I were about to jump off a cliff.
There were about 45 of us - including several men -
ranging in age from about 20 to about 60, about equally divided
between gay and heterosexual We came to the workshop from many
directions, and not just geographically. There were former
radicals, professional witches, lesbian farm couples, a hal Indian
punk-rock enthusiast, a middle-aged West German man, a quiet woman
who lived in her mother's house in a small town in Illinois and
talked to trees. I feared that I was the most "normal" person
there.
That first, utterly black new-moon night, we formed a
circle in a clearing sheltered by redwoods and performed a ritual.
We faced each of the four directions in turn and called
in the elements - air in the east, fire in the south, water in the
west and earth in the north. We "cast a circle" around us to
create sacred space, imagining a boundary of energy separating us
from the rest of the world and binding us to one another. We sang
simple songs over and over to invoke the presence of the Goddess
in her triple aspects of maiden, mother and crone. Then we called
on the Horned God, her child-lover, who, in the Wiccan tradition,
dies and is reborn.
Of that first ritual, I mostly remember the strangeness
and beauty, the way I felt that half of me was outside the circle,
making fun of how silly it was, while the other half was doing it
anyway, and feeling something stir inside.
That internal war raged all week. Making magic required
the most delicate suspension of disbelief. I struggled to quiet
the howls of outrage from my rational, tough-minded side in order
to reap what I wanted from the practices I was learning.
I also sometimes felt overwhelmed. So much was being
addressed to me, so much dug into and stirred up, that I sometimes
felt that I couldn't contain it all. It was like trying to stuff a
rhinoceros into my back pocket.
Those of us in the beginning track - "Elements of Magic"
- spent the first part of the workshop learning a basic ritual in
slow motion.
We did a grounding exercise, imagining roots growing from
the bottoms of our feet, down through the earth to its center, and
then imagining "earth energy" being sucked up through our roots
into our bodies.
Then out teacher blessed some salt and a bowl or water,
mixed the salt into the water with her athame, or magical knife,
and told us to project into the salt water any negative emotions,
stray thoughts or physical discomforts that might distract us from
the ritual.
We imagined the water being tranformed and filled with
light. When we felt ready, we each touched the water or tasted it,
to take in the purified energy.
Next it was time to become acquainted with the elements:
- Air, the element of thought, morning, spring,
childhood, the sky, he eagle, laughter, clarity and knowledge.
- Fire, the Goddess' "bright spirit," the element that
corresponds to passion, energy, noon, summer, and the will.
- Water, the element that represents emotions, twilight,
autumn, the ocean, everything that flows and adapts, courage.
- Earth, the element of mystery and darkness, strength,
midnight, winter, the body, begetation, the power to listen and
keep secrets.
I got pleasure from the poetry of the elements, and I
explored their correspondences in myself.
Once the circle was cast, we danced and sang and beat
drums. Toward the end of the ritual, we "raised a cone of energy"
through our voices, making sounds together that rose to a peak we
could all feel and then fell away.
One morning, Starhawk led us in a drum trance. She tapped
a drum soft while she told us the story of our lives, puncuated by
chants that we sang over and over.
After a while, I really did fall into a kind of trance,
mesmerized by the singing, the ceasless drumming and Starhawk's
hypnotic storytelling.
We started, oddly, with the death. We were asked to
imagine what it would be like to let go of life right now, leave
everything unfinished, pass it along to others. I became
frightened, almost paralyzed. Some people wept.
The she described a beat, a rythym we could hear even in
stillness; next, a sense of structure coalescing in the darkness.
Soon we were growing and forming, and then being born.
We sang the song of our parents: "Welcome little one, we
are so glad to see you." Some of us now were weeping with joy.
As she talked us through our life spans, I realized that
Starhawk was describing life as it would be if everyone's human
needs were honored. What if babies were always cherished? If
puberty were celebrated publicly as the advent of a new kind of
power, and young people were expected to search out and accept
their unique spiritual path, and then were welcomed formally into
the circle of their elders as equals? What if everyone had work
that helped the community, and when we were old, we were allowed
to rest and were honored for all we had learned?
As I listened, places - desires, maybe, or hopes - that
in me, as in most people, are closed tight in despair began to
unfurl a little.
By the time the week concluded, I felt as high as if I
had taken a drug. The highway traffic, it occurred to me as I
drove home, was a ritual. Here we were, tooling down the road in
close formation, trusting our lives to one another's ability to do
the right thing moment to moment - except this time out magical
tools were huge metal juggernauts, and the ritual was far riskier
than anything we'd tried in the woods.
When I got home, I took a walk, thinking on the way that
by participating in Wiccan rituals, I had gone out on a limb. We
had pledged ourselves to pass on the healing arts we had learned
and had committed ourselves to keeping the energy we had raised
rippling out into the world. Some of the participants had
expressed what I thought were rather grandiose ideas about healing
the earth and transforming society.
I'd been defensive about that part of the work. It was
true that as a single, childless person, I often felt dissatisfied
about living so much for myself. But I could see no path, no
bridge to something wider.
As I walked home, I watched admiringly as five boys
whizzed past me on skateboards. Suddenly, one boy hit an
obstruction about a block ahead of me, flew into the air and
crashed onto the sidewalk.
He was pumping his legs in agony and his arm we bent at a
horrible angle. Blood was dripping slowly onto the sidewalk. His
friends were standing over him with pale faces. No one else was
nearby.
I asked whether they'd called an ambulance. They nodded.
I actually took another step, thinking, "It's taken care
of," thinking half-consciously, "This is a pre-adolescent black
kid. He won't want any help from a white woman. He'll be too
proud. He'll be embarrassed. He'll be too hostile."
I looked at him, crying on the sidewalk. and in an
instant I knew that those were crazy, alientated thoughts and that
I had just spent a week trying to fill myself with something much
more useful than that.
I sat down on the sidewalk, held him and soothed him,
using technique I'd learned from the witches, until the ambulance
came.
Then I went home, lay down trembling in the back yard and
thanked the Goddess for her message.