Enchanted Feminism

The Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco

Jone Salomonsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134593149
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This is the first major study of the most famous Reclaiming Witch community, founded in 1979 in San Francisco, written by an author who herself participated in a coven for ten years. Jone Salomonsen describes and examines the communal and ritual practices of Reclaiming, asking how these promote personal growth and cultural-religious change.

Part I
Guardians of the world

1 The Reclaiming community

A feminist, social construction

The public appearance of ritualizing women, men and children in urban areas in the western world is no longer unusual. For example, an occasional Sunday walker in Lincoln Park in San Francisco,California, may one day have observed the following: thirteen women of many ages, all dressed up in red party clothes, are gathered for the ritual celebration of a teenage girl’s menstruation. As it happens, these women belong to the Reclaiming Witchcraft community.The girl, Sonia, has just had her first period. She is excited and nervous and keeps her mother, grandmother and friend Nicole close at hand. Nicole, who is now eighteen years old, had a similar celebration when she started menstruating five years ago.

The ritual begins as the women form a circle by holding hands, declaring the space to be sacred and “between the worlds”. Starhawk holds a bottle of water in her left hand. She has gathered the water from different lakes, rivers and oceans around the world during her travels teaching the animist, egalitarian worldview of feminist Witchcraft: that divinity is a congenital (personal) power, birthing and animating all of life, and that the earth is “her” sacred “body”. Now she anoints Sonia by lightly touching her forehead, breasts, belly and genitals, while declaring, “Remember, nobody can give you power.You already have the power within.”¹

Then a cord is tied around Sonia’s right and her mother’s left wrist. Hera, Nicole’s mother, says to Sonia,

When you were born, you came to the world tied to your mother’s body. As the umbilical cord had to be cut at that time for you to live, so the cord between the two of you has to be cut now. But the bond between you shall never be cut, because that is a bond by heart.

Mother and daughter are instructed to run tied together in the park for as long as they can.We watch them. Anna, the mother, does her best, but after a while she cries out that she cannot keep up with her daughter’s speed. They are asked to come back to the circle. In the meantime, Hera has shown Sonia’s grandmother how to cut the cord with a black-handled ritual knife called athame. When mother and daughter return, the grandmother cuts the cord between them. Later that day the knife is given to Sonia as a gift.

* * *

This passage from a ritual celebration for a young pagan woman, about to enter the first phase of adult womanhood, marks the beginning of a long ritual process that was completed in the evening with a large gender-mixed community ritual and party (described in full in chapter 7). It also marks the beginning of this chapter, which is an introduction to the Reclaiming community and to the people who have dedicated themselves to the path and rituals of “the Goddess”.

The name, “Reclaiming”, presently refers to a tradition of Witchcraft, a community of people and a religious organization.The Reclaiming tradition is a specific feminist branch of contemporary American pagan Witchcraft, while the Reclaiming community refers both to the local Witchcraft community in the San Francisco Bay Area (SF) of California and to the people, primarily in North America and western Europe, who identify with the Reclaiming tradition of Witchcraft. In fact, the tradition arose from a working collective within the SF community, naming itself the Reclaiming Collective in 1980.Thus, for almost 20 years, “Reclaiming” was the name of a small, founding community of approximately 20 people (the Collective), of a larger community of at least 130 Witches and pagans (primarily in SF) and, finally, of a distinct spiritual tradition, practised by thousands of people far beyond SF. In 1997, however, came a major shift: the SF Reclaiming Collective of elders² dissolved itself to give way to a new generation and a new social structure that could meet the needs of an emergent Reclaiming movement – not only spreading rapidly in the US, but also in Canada and western Europe (Germany, England, France and Spain) through so-called Witchcamps.

The SF Reclaiming Collective/community was organized differently before and after 1997, when “the Collective” was replaced with a local “Wheel” and a transnational “Spokes Council”.Yet, the continuity in regard to basic ideology and structuring principles is obvious: no overall central authority, no implementation of dogmas or required beliefs, no formal hierarchy of priests and priestesses, no formal membership, no “church” that can be joined and no congregational building for worship and community gatherings. Reclaiming’s social structure was and is founded on working “cells”, which operate on a voluntary, nonhierarchical and independent basis, with a majority of active women. A small cell or circle may break down to an even smaller “circle within a circle” or expand to a large one when needed, for example, when performing rituals. People become involved in the organization known as Reclaiming by becoming involved in the work and activities of the various cells and circles.³ For that reason, Reclaiming is not a regular church, but rather a network of like-minded people cross-related – socially, ideologically and emotionally – through common activities for common goals in a still evolving and living religious tradition.

The social structure particular to Reclaiming takes its point of departure from a radical analysis of power, while attempting to create a just alternative by combining an “anarchist political agenda” of equality, diversity and local autonomy with a “feminist liberation agenda” of empowering women, both in public and domestic spheres. In fact, Reclaiming as a movement may be regarded as a conscious effort to break away from the hegemonic sociological worldview that sexual asymmetry is trans-historical and universal and that a sexed dichotomy between public and domestic domains is inevitable as long as women continue to give birth and raise children.⁴Women in Reclaiming are instead encouraged to reclaim their authority/power within both domains: to re-form the structures of domestic life (division of labour, parenting, the marriage contract) and celebrate their reproductive capacities as life affirming and sacred; and to value feminist Witchcraft as a new public and social institution with the potential to change American society and instigate a new, nonpatriarchal culture.

The people who constituted this visionary, networking community in the period covered in this book (1984–94) primarily lived in the Mission District in the southeast area of SF. Most of their activities, such as rituals, actions, classes and meetings, also took place in, or close to, this area. Mission is the oldest neighborhood in SF. The city was founded here in 1776 as a Catholic mission to convert and “civilize” the Costanoan Indians. In the 1980s and early 1990s this area was considered one of the poorest working-class neighbourhoods in the city,with a predominance of Mexican American and African American citizens.⁵ Street people, drug addicts, prostitutes and unemployed youths and older men marked the area. Crime rates were high, and the newspapers reported daily about robbery, assault, fighting and shooting. After dark it was unsafe for women to walk the streets alone.

But the Mission was also known to be picturesque, with old Victorian houses and a swarm of specialized shops, grocery stores, cafés, restaurants, bars, colourful murals and ethnic community centres. And because of low rents, the area also attracted a considerable number of white, middle-class “bohemians” such as artists, students and political activists. Street theatre, alternative bookstores, a Women’s Building and radical Christian parishes were therefore integrated into parts of this neighbourhood’s atmosphere, as were the possibilities for visiting a Catholic candle store (selling candles, incense, oils, crystal balls, amulets and figures of the Saints), a Voodoo supply store and the area’s first Goddess-shop on the very same block.

The experimental lifestyles of the Mission bohemians and of those living in the adjacent vicinities of Eureka and Noe Valley, Bernal Heights and Potrero Hill, had some similarities to the earlier counter-culture in what is now the more fashionable Haight-Ashbury neighborhood northwest in the city, where the hippie movement reached one of its heights in the summer of 1967. Yet, two striking differences were that the Mission alternative scene was predominantly anti-drug and that its intentional communities were often committed to idealistic projects addressing bilingual,multicultural and workingclass people. Also, while a majority of SF’s gay men preferred to live in the Castro neighborhood, not far from Haight-Ashbury, the less wealthy lesbian women had at the time a large community in the Mission.⁶ During the last decade, however, this typical Mission atmosphere is about to change. Increasing commercial interests and upper middle-class people who buy old houses for renovation and profit have created a commercial culture that slowly transforms Mission into a more trendy and white neighborhood, forcing poor people of colour to leave.

Reclaiming represents one of the intentional communities in the Mission resisting these tendencies and which can still be recognized by some of the social (and moral) features that applied to the bohemian culture in general at the turn of the century. One basic feature characteristic is the value attributed to “individual diversity”. Although Reclaiming is primarily a white, middleclass and well-educated community, it is composed of people from many different walks of life. It had room for women, men and children; gays, lesbians, bisexuals and heterosexuals; vegetarians, meat-lovers, drinkers and total abstainers; those of a Jewish heritage as well as former Catholics, Protestants and Buddhists. It includes people who are committed to being sexually monogamous and those who live with multiple relationships, people who shared income in a large collective household and those who choose to live as a traditional nuclear family. Some are deeply involved with politics, while others are primarily interested in Witchcraft as a spiritual practice. Some are mainly pagan feminists and perceive of the Witches’ Craft as a simple nature and/or goddess religion, while others regard Witchcraft as a magical and secretive initiatory path. Some identify clearly as belonging to the Reclaiming community; others are more reserved and say they are only “friends” of Reclaiming.A majority participates in other communities as well, such as in the anarchist or direct action communities, in the twelve-step or performing arts communities, in the gay or lesbian communities, or in other pagan or non pagan spiritual traditions (many Jewish Witches do, for example, celebrate the Jewish holidays with non-Reclaiming friends and family).

I shall give a detailed description of how this community was founded and how its social order could be experienced in the early 1990s. A major goal is to provide the reader with a general idea of the social context for Reclaiming Witchcraft and the themes discussed in this book (such as human growth, ritualizing, and a female symbolic order). In addition to presenting Reclaiming’s history, people and structuring principles, I will also discuss some of its struggles not to become esoteric, but to live up to its own social visions of practising freedom of thought and of welcoming all those differences of life situation, background and ability that increase human diversity.

The portrait given of work cells, classes, rituals, social dynamics and the Reclaiming way of thinking is still valid for today’s community. The account of the Reclaiming Collective, including its structure and work tasks, applies less today since the Collective was dissolved in 1997. The different organization of Reclaiming in the SF Bay Area, including the new foundational “Principles of Unity” and the local SF “Wheel”, must therefore be briefly presented as well.Yet the focus of this chapter is Reclaiming before this shift from local SF community to transnational movement took place.This is due to the fact that my data from the field cover the period prior to 1997 and were gathered with the intention of writing an in-depth study of one singular community, not of presenting a broad survey of a movement. Additionally, the historical period up to 1997, and the community it fostered, has been foundational to the development of Reclaiming Witchcraft and, therefore, essential to understanding both the ways in which it differs from other pagan and feminist spiritualities and why the unity of pagan spirituality and feminist, anarchist politics has become such a predominant feature of what is presently associated with the Reclaiming tradition.

The history of the Reclaiming Collective, 1979–1997

Reclaiming started in 1979 as a teaching collective for a “school” in Witchcraft. One evening in the early summer, Starhawk, at the time 29 years old, and her friend Diane Baker were sitting in the backyard of Starhawk’s house in the Haight-Ashbury district in SF, talking about Diane’s decision to move to New York. Diane was concerned that she did not know any Witches on the East Coast and wanted some tools with which to teach the Craft so that, eventually, she would be able to establish a coven, which is a small group of Witches celebrating lunar rituals and personal rites of passages together.They decided that to co-teach a class in SF in the fall would be the right thing to do and a way for Diane to acquire teaching skills. Also, Starhawk’s book, The Spiral Dance, was due to be published later that year by Harper & Row, and to establish a “school” was an additional way for Starhawk to spread the “good news” about the “rebirth of the ancient religion of the Great Goddess”.

Prior to that time, Starhawk had been teaching Witchcraft classes through the open universities and occult bookstores, and since 1976 had managed to mother three covens: Compost, Honeysuckle and Raving. Compost was a mixed coven, while the other two were women-only circles (Diane was Starhawk’s coven sister from Raving). But, according to her own story, which conforms to an average Witch’s conversion narrative, Starhawk (then Miriam Simos) “experienced” the Witches’ goddess already in the summer of 1968. That summer, when she was only seventeen, she apparently lived so closely attuned to nature that she “began to feel connected to the world in a new way, to see everything as alive, erotic, engaged in a constant dance of mutual pleasuring, and myself as a special part of it all” (1989a:2). But she did not yet have a language to name her experience or a notion of a female deity.

Language came when she started college at UCLA in southern California and a group of Witches came to her sorority house to read them the so-called “Charge of the Goddess”, written in the 1950s by Doreen Valiente. Starhawk’s feeling was not that of hearing something new, but of finally being given names and interpretive frameworks for experiences she had already had. In addition she felt empowered by the concept of a religion that worshipped a goddess. By that time, Starhawk was already an active feminist and she instantly felt “a natural connection between a movement to empower women and a spiritual tradition based on the Goddess” (1989a:3).

She searched out Zuzanna Budapest in Los Angeles and started participating in the public rituals she offered. Budapest was at the time a lesbian separatist who taught Witchcraft to feminist-lesbian-separatists as a pure women’s religion. She called herself a hereditaryWitch because she claimed to have inherited secret knowledge, magical spells and rituals from her mother and grandmother in Hungary, practices which presumably go back to pre- Christian pagan Europe. She identified herself as a priestess of the Roman goddess Diana, and her Witchcraft was therefore called Dianic. ⁷

Even though Starhawk was a feminist, she was neither a lesbian nor a separatist. She therefore did not really fit in with Budapest’s Dianic Witches. The summer she turned 23, she decided to take off with her bicycle and travel in the US for a year.This year turned out to be a sort of a “vision quest”: she was challenged by people and the natural world and learned to trust her intuition and let it be her guide. As part of her “initiation” she claims to have had a series of powerful dreams in which she met the Goddess, and was given the names “Star” and “Hawk”.To mark this point of “no return” and to name her new being, she decided to change her Jewish birth-name, Miriam Simos, to Starhawk – mainly for the purpose of teaching Witchcraft. Teaching and writing now became her vocation. It also became her method to deepen her knowledge of the “path of the Goddess” and meet with soul mates.

In 1975, Starhawk decided to move to Berkeley (near SF). At the time, Berkeley and the Bay Area already had a small networking community of nonfeminist Witches and pagans, consisting of groups such as Corytalia (Faery), Church of All Worlds, The Fellowship of the Spiral Path and the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn (NROOGD), as well as traditions imported from Britain, like the Gardnerians and Alexandrians. Although magical communities are characterized by their overlapping membership structure, a majority of the Berkeley Witches did at the time belong to the NROOGD. This group did not claim to have inherited any tradition but openly admitted to having made it all up from reading (amongst others, Gerald Gardner) and from experimenting with ritual.⁸ In 1976, this networking community joined together with some solitary Witches to form an umbrella organization, the Covenant of the Goddess (COG), which soon incorporated as a legally recognized church.⁹

After Starhawk had taught Witchcraft her own style in Berkeley and SF for a year, she finally decided to approach a well-known hereditary male Witch in the area:Victor Anderson. Since the late 1960s he had offered initiations into Faery Witchcraft, a tradition that claims heritage from African Shamanism, Celtic paganism and Hawaiian Kahuna Magic. He claimed that this mix was not his own brew but partly passed on to him by his grandmother in Virginia as an oral, secret tradition, partly revealed when he was initiated into the Harper coven in Ashland, Oregon, in 1932 (cf. Kelly 1991:21). According to Starhawk, she wanted to be trained by him and initiated into this supposedly hereditary, fixed tradition to acquire a deeper understanding of Witchcraft, to develop her own curriculum when teaching, and to be acknowledged as a priestess of the Craft within the larger pagan community. She was indeed accepted and in 1976 elected first officer and public spokesperson for COG.

But Starhawk’s feminist, nonseparatist interpretation of Witchcraft, which became more and more important to her, needed a different audience from COG people to prosper and take form. In 1977, she even broke with her first coven Compost, of which she was a high priestess and founder, because it included women and men who did not share her growing political concerns. She moved to SF and decided to concentrate her work exclusively on women, at least for a period. The first result of this priority was Raving, a coven for women only. It had no position for a high priestess and put greater emphasis upon personal and inner experience (in contrast to inherited tradition) as religious norm and authority than was comm...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of plates
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Guardians of the world
• Part II Priestesses of the craft
• Conclusion
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Bibliography