I had the most amazing experience on Friday night and, as is often the case, I've had to take a while to process it before being able to say what it means.
I blogged early last Spring about the fact that my coven had lost some members due to promotions that took women to other parts of the world. We were down to a "core-four" and felt that we needed to either "grow or go." In June, we took an entire day to do magic around our need for new women to join with us, our need for a circle of women, and our need to re-think how we do things. That's what witches do when they need something. They do the difficult spiritual, mental, and physical work necessary to tweak part of the cosmic web over here in order to produce the necessary vibrations over there. At the end of the day, we dragged our poor, tired asses out to dinner, sagged across the table from each other, and crawled -- stiff, sore, limp, empty, and way too full -- off to bed.
Oh. My. Did it ever work.
Friday, I sat in a living room where four had become twelve.
The energy, the simple heady smell of the estrogen, was amazing. My coven has, unlike many others, no high priestess (HP in the world of Wicca). We take turns leading rituals. The brilliant woman leading the Mabon/Dark Moon ritual led us in one of the simplest, yet most profound, rituals I've ever seen. We cast a circle and called the Goddess. Then, each woman went around the room and discussed her harvest this year, and added representative items to our altar. Polyamorous women discussed their joy at moving to be with their partners, mothers discussed their children, daughters discussed their mothers' illnesses and chances for recovery, career women celebrated their victories in court, in medical journals, at non-profits, and the victory inherent in retiring. Young women discussed the harvest of money from jobs they dislike but that will allow them to buy homes, in coping with married life, in screen-plays written, in trips taken to corners of the Earth. We crones discussed, of course, our grandchildren. But my description isn't doing justice to the joy and the amazing magic of sitting with eleven other women and having them rejoice with you in your victories, in the -- for women -- profoundly unusual experience of flat-out bragging and knowing that the other women in the room will applaud you for doing so. That's all. No incantations. No raising energy and directing it at a particular desired event. Simply, for once in each turning of the yearly wheel, a chance to feel gratitude for not only our own blessings, but for those of other women, as well. Given that this ritual took place mere blocks from the Capitol and White House in a time of horrific sadness concerning what's happening in our country -- indeed, concerning what's happening to women and to Mother Earth -- this felt very much like an act of defiance, of revolution.
Then, of course, we ate. Mabon is the witches' Thanksgiving, so we had quite a feast, and, if I do say so myself, witches are excellent and creative cooks. And, while we ate, we talked and talked and talked. About us. About our lives. About ourselves. As if we, women, mattered. As if what mattered to us, well, mattered. As a follow up, one of the women sent me an ad for pirate tampons that I'll try to blog about this week. And, yes, it was a logical progression in the conversation.
In The Politics of Women's Spirituality Carol Christ writes:
Religious symbol systems focused around exclusively male images of divinity create the impression that female power can never be fully legitimate or wholly beneficent. The message need never be explicitly stated (as, for example, it is in the story of Eve) for its effects to be felt. A woman completely ignorant of the myths of female evil in biblical religion nonetheless acknowledges the anomaly of female power when she prays exclusively to a male God. She may see herself as like God (created in the image of God) only by denying her own sexual identity and affirming God's transcendence of sexual identity. But she can never have the experience that is freely available to every man and boy in her culture of having her full sexual identity affirmed as being in the image and likeness of God.
I am blessed. May it be so for you.
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