A Priestess Of The Great Mother Earth

This past Wednesday was a pretty incredible day for me. I won a really big case that I've been working on for the past five years and the amazing Atrios linked to a post of mine. We all need days like that once in a while!

As a result of Atrios' link, several other folks linked to my post as well, which I also appreciated. (There's some irony here -- I can blog day in and day out about the dangers of global climate change, overpopulation, the fact that America has been taken over by a coup; I can post transcendent poetry or write long, link-seeded posts about sacred spaces in the modern world; I can rail against sexism -- and I wonder if anyone even reads what I write, but post a silly picture of Darth Vader and, blam!, my hits go through the roof!, but, hey, I'm happy for the hits however they happen!)

One of the people who linked to me was a nice, young man named Jake who lives in my wonderful city of Washington, D. C. Jake says that he's obnoxious, but it's difficult for me to imagine how anyone who loves Toni Morrison could really be obnoxious. He posts interesting, well-reasoned discussions of important and varied topics, and I agree with him on most of the topics he's got up on his blog. And, he clearly has a sense of humor, or he wouldn't be linking to silly pictures of Darth Vader!

Next to the Pastel Vader, Jake wrote: "Credit to this lady, who is a *sigh* 'witch' and 'priestess of the Great Mother Earth' apparently. Oh well. " Now Jake was, sans the sigh and the "Oh well," quoting from my profile, which, along with his link to my blog, was a nice thing for him to do. But his comments on the silly picture got me to thinking.

Just the day before he sighed about the fact that I'm a witch, Jake posted on the Mel Gibson drunken anti-Semite fiasco and he made a very good point. Jake said, "If your inclination is to downplay the severity of what he said, try imagining that he said 'niggers' instead of 'Jews,' then ask yourself why what he actually said is any less despicable."

What happens if we apply that same sort of imaginary exercise to Jake's comments about my religion? I doubt that Jake, or anyone else to the sane side of despicable whackjobs like Mel Gibson would ever link to a post by a Jew and say: "Credit to this lady who is a *sigh* 'Jew' and a 'rabbi at Beth Israel,' apparently. Oh well." Nor can I imagine anyone linking to a post by a Catholic and saying: "Credit to this gentleman who is a *sigh* 'Catholic' and a 'priest' with the 'Jesuits,' apparently. Oh well." We can keep going. Who would link to a post by a Buddhist nun and say: "Credit to this lady who is a *sigh* 'Buddhist' and a 'Buddhist nun,' apparently. Oh well"? Or: "Credit to this gentleman who is a *sigh* 'Methodist' and a 'pastor at the Church of the Holy Cross,' apparently. Oh well"? Enlightened, polite people don't disparage other people's religion that way, any more than they use the word "nigger" -- regardless of how much tequila they may have consumed. (I'm not talking here about criticizing specific actions that members of various religions take. When the Southern Baptists tell their members not to waste time cleaning up the environment, when evangelicals try to impose "Intelligent Design" on the rest of us, or when the Taliban makes it illegal for women to work, I'm more than happy to criticize them for those actions. In the immediately preceeding post, I rail at the xians for their historic and continuing attacks on science.)

Yet, Jake's comments about my religion -- meant to be mildly disparaging and to indicate that I'm sort of an embarrassment to the liberal blogsphere -- aren't really any different than those often used when writing about Wicca. I had occasion not too long ago to note that in an otherwise respectful obituary for a prominent local Wiccan, WaPo described her as a "self-proclaimed" witch -- but I've never seen an obit for a "self-proclaimed Catholic" or a "self-proclaimed Jew." And the mild disparagement, the rolled-eyes, the quotation marks, and the voice laden with irony would be problematic, even if they didn't have real-world consequences. But they do.

They translate into the Veterans Administration dragging its feet for 9 years on requests to approve the Pentacle for the gravestones of fallen Wiccan soldiers, even though they've approved symbols for everything from an atom for atheists to the Angel Moroni for Mormons to a symbol that I am not sure how to describe for a faith I've never heard of: Soka Gakkai International - USA. They won't deny it outright, anymore than a polite young man like Jake will actually call me a crackpot or a devil-worshipper, but they sure as hell have no intention of giving Wiccan soldiers the same respect that they give to Catholics, Jews, Moslems, atheists, and members of the Church of World Messianity (Izunome).

They translate into Wiccans staying in the broom closet at work for fear of not being taken seriously. They translate into parents afraid to teach their religion to their children for fear that they'll get teased or disciplined at school. And they translate, at some level, into a disrespect for the concepts that Wiccans hold dear -- the sacredness and imminence of Earth, the value and divinity of the Sacred Feminine, and the holiness of sex.

When I ask myself why Wiccans are subject to the "quotation marks" and eye-rolls that polite people like Jake would never apply to a Moslem worker fasting through Ramadan or to a Jewish attorney who speaks up at a prehearing conference and notes that she won't be able to attend a trial set for Yom Kippur, I think it has to do with the feminist nature of Wicca.

Wicca, especially modern American Wicca, has male adherents but it is overwhelmingly a religion composed of women members and is overwhelmingly a religion that -- as a religious belief -- values women and their bodies. For most Wiccans, to honor a woman, to honor the processes of her body (all of them, from birth, to maidenhood, to meses, to sex, to menopause, to death, to decomposition) is THE SAME (just as for a Catholic, eating the bread and drinking the wine at Mass is THE SAME as partaking of the body and blood of Jesus) as honoring the Earth, which is, for us, honoring Divinity. In a reversal of the situation in most religions, most of our "clergy" are women -- priestesses -- rather than men -- priests. And, unlike most, but not all, of today's major religions, Wiccans specifically worship Goddesses. They conceive of divinity as feminine (sometimes, Dianics, for example, exclusively feminine and sometimes, Gardnerians, for example, feminine along with masculine).

And women, and what they do, and the matters with which they concern themselves, have always been subjects of condescension in our society. It helps men to feel superior and -- more importantly from the patriarchy's point of view -- makes women feel inferior, silly, scared to speak up, embarrassed to tell their truths.

The notion of real witches -- of women who claim to exercise power, who aren't afraid to go into the dark and do what they do outside of established churches and society --that notion would, if taken seriously, be threatening to people (both men and women) living securely within the patriarchy. So it's safer, psychologically, to roll your eyes, make fun, and insist that any woman who calls herself a witch is some gentle, lonely old crackpot, rather than a Priestess of the Great Mother Earth and all the chthonic power that implies. The process of disempowering such women in the public's mind is not a new process. There's a reason that powerful Pagan women were first depicted as "temple prostitutes," and then consorts of the devil who were tortured and burned, and then into the ugly old woman who hates beautiful young women and must be killed by a prince, and then into a green-skinned harpy who could be dispensed with by a bucket of water, and then into a "self-proclaimed witch" or a "*sigh* witch."

So, tonight, I'm going to cast a circle and create sacred space, going between the worlds and reminding myself that what happens between the worlds affects all the worlds. I'm going to call the quarters and Hecate and ground myself to do magic. I'm going to light incense and I'm going to raise energy. I'm going to direct that energy into our world and visualize it undermining the patriarchy, bit by bit, creating a world where a woman can be "a witch, a mother, a grandmother, an eco-feminist, a lawyer, a gardener, a reader, a writer, and a priestess of the Great Mother Earth," and where she'll no more be disparaged for being a witch than for being a mother, where being a Priestess of the Great Mother Earth will be as worthy of respect as being a lawyer or a gardener or a writer or . . . . Well, you get the idea. And, I'm going to call for blessings for Jake, who I think is, far from being obnoxious, a smart, funny guy who writes well and who would no more consciously ridicule my religion than he would rail against "the Jews" or call anyone a "nigger."

So mote it be.