It bothers me, sometimes: being a man (however queer) with aspirations to leadership in the NeoPagan community.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Witchcraft is supposed to be Womyn\u2019s Religion. We honor a Goddess before a God, exalt the role of the High Priestess, assert that the \u201cfeminine principle\u201d is the dominant power on the inner planes.\u00a0 And yet \u2026 too often our leaders and teachers are men.\u00a0 Gerald Gardner.\u00a0 Alex Sanders.\u00a0 Raymond Buckland.\u00a0 Carlos Castaneda and Michael Harner.\u00a0 Raven Grimmassi, Ed Fitch, Oberon Zell.\u00a0 There are great women, too, of course: Doreen Valiente, Margot Adler and Starhawk and Z Budapest.\u00a0 But what does it say that I \u2013 a man who once called himself Scholar Mage, who has read as many histories of witchcraft as how-too manuals \u2013 can think of so few ladies who had as much influence on modern NeoPagan witchcraft as these.<\/p>\n
(I\u2019ll leave alone entirely, for the moment, the overwhelming preponderance of gentlemen over ladyfolk in ceremonial magick which has been so influentialon the NeoPagan movement as a whole.\u00a0 I\u2019ll also leave for another time the discussion of such inseparable couples as\u00a0 Gavin and Yvonne Frost, or Janet and Stewart Farrar, and the erasure of Rosemary Buckland and so many other influential wives and partners.)<\/p>\n
To make matters worse, when we think of the grand disasters, whose are the names that come to mind most readily?\u00a0 Amber K, Edain McCoy, Silver Ravenwolf.\u00a0 Really, what makes Ravenwolf (whose work I won\u2019t touch) so much worse than Penczak (whose work I\u2019m embarrassed about, but make extensive use of)?<\/p>\n
Witchcraft is supposed to be Womyn\u2019s Religion.\u00a0 So where are the women?\u00a0 That\u2019s a silly question: of the groups I\u2019ve worked with, women made up a little more than half their number; of the solitaries I\u2019ve known, women made a solid 2\/3 majority (leaving Heathens and Not Wiccan Damnits out of the count for the sake of this discussion).\u00a0 Instead I should ask: where are the women leaders?\u00a0 The lady-writers reshaping the movement with their brilliance?<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a part of me that wants to cop out and take an easy answer: the good ones are at home, leading covens \u2013 too busy with the real Work to publish self-aggrandizing through publishing.\u00a0 But Deborah Lipp (brilliant and under recognized, at least in the circles I run in) manages both; that\u2019s part of what being brilliant is about.\u00a0 An even easier answer is that they\u2019re squeezed out by a sexist publishing industry that\u2019s too afraid of risk to print anything but another idiot Witchcraft 101 \u2013 With a Twist<\/em>!\u00a0 This feels closer to the truth, at least.\u00a0 Maybe a portion of the truth, a part of the problem.<\/p>\n But I wonder sometimes \u2026 if I\u2019m not part of the problem, too.\u00a0 Not me, personally (I hope), but man-witches in general \u2013 still struggling (or not) to escape the patriarchal paradigm that privileges our worst ideas over any woman\u2019s most brilliant.\u00a0 If the preponderance of male writers and leaders is a passive (or active) force keeping women out of the public sphere in this community, even as it is in the mainstream world.<\/p>\n What, then, is my role as a male witch?\u00a0 How can I serve the community that has sheltered me?\u00a0 How do I pass on the knowledge I\u2019ve acquired after a decade and a half of struggling with Mysteries and a sea of mediocre books (spotted rarely with islands of genius)?\u00a0 How do I create the small, intimate, power magical community \u2013 the coven, ideally, or temple failing that \u2013 that I can\u2019t seem to find ready-made?\u00a0 How can I do these things without furthering the problem?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It bothers me, sometimes: being a man (however queer) with aspirations to leadership in the NeoPagan community.\u00a0 Witchcraft is supposed to be Womyn\u2019s Religion. We honor a Goddess before a God, exalt the role of the High Priestess, assert that the \u201cfeminine principle\u201d is the dominant power on the inner planes.\u00a0 And yet \u2026 too … Read More<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[38,76],"class_list":["post-107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-witchcraft","tag-by-the-way-im-crazy","tag-ethics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8kUcm-1J","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}