Editor’s Note: A reader's recent tip reminded us about a collection of articles from the October/November 1986 issue of Utne Reader about Halloween, contemporary witchcraft, and feminist spirituality. In celebration of the holiday, we’ll be posting a few of our favorites online through the 31^st. 

On every full moon, pagan rituals take place on hilltops, on beaches, in open fields and in ordinary houses. Writers, teachers, nurses, computer programmers, artists, lawyers, poets, plumbers, and auto mechanics—women and men from many backgrounds—come together to celebrate the mysteries of the Triple Goddess of birth, love, and death, and of her Consort, the Hunter, who is Lord of the Dance of Life. The religion they practice is called Witchcraft.

Witchcraft is a word that frightens many people and confuses many others. In the popular imagination, Witches are ugly old hags riding broomsticks, or evil Satanists performing obscene rites. Modern witches are thought to be members of a kooky cult, which lacks the depth, dignity, and seriousness of purpose of a true religion.

But Witchcraft is a religion, perhaps the oldest religion in the West. Its origins go back before Christianity, Judaism, Islam, before Buddhism and Hinduism. The Old Religion, as we call it, is closer in spirit to Native American traditions or to the shamanism of the Inuit people of the Arctic. It is not based on dogma or a set of beliefs, nor on scriptures or a sacred book revealed by a great man. Witchcraft takes its teachings from nature and reads inspiration in the movements of the sun, moon, and stars, in the flight of birds, in the slow growth of trees, and in the cycles of the seasons.

The worship of the Great Goddess, which is at the heart of Witchcraft, underlies the beginnings of all civilizations. Mother Goddess was carved on the walls of Paleolithic caves and sculpted in stone as early as 25,000 B.C. In 7000 B.C., cities arose in Asia Minor that developed a rich, Goddess-centered culture, combining agriculture, hunting, and early crafts, in which women were leaders. From excavations done in the 1960s, we get a picture of an egalitarian, decentralized, inventive, and peaceful society, without evidence of human or animal sacrifice or weapons of war.

Similar cultures flourished in the civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, India, Central America, South America, and China. For the Mother, giant stone circles, the henges of the British Isles, were raised. For Her the great passage graves of Iceland were dug. In Her honor sacred dancers leaped the bulls in Crete. Grandmother Earth sustained the soil of the North American prairies, and Great Mother Ocean washed the coasts of Africa. Her priestesses discovered and tested the healing herbs and learned the secrets of the human mind and body that allowed them to ease the pain of childbirth, to heal wounds and cure diseases and to practice magic, which I like to define as the “art of changing consciousness at will.”

In the great urban centers, as society became more centralized, a new type of power developed: the ability of one group of human beings to control another. War became common. And as warfare came to shape culture, women were driven from power, and the rule of men over women ensued. This rule brought with it the system of inheritance through the father. This made the sexual control of women necessary to ensure that a father’s children were truly his. In Europe, the Middle East, and India, this move toward patriarchy was intensified by invasions from the warlike Indo-Europeans, who venerated male sky-gods and glorified battle.

The change to patriarchy was not an instant process. The old cultures resisted, and the transition lasted thousands of years (from approximately 4000 to 1500 B.C.) in Europe and the Middle East. The written myths and legends of the Old Religion that have come down to us all date from the transitional era.

Yet the concept of Mother never completely died. In India, She survived (and still does to today) in village celebrations and in the goddesses of Hindu worship. In Greece, She became the goddesses of Olympus. Her worship lived in mystery cults and folk traditions as well as in the healing practices and rituals of the “pagans” (from the Latin, meaning “country dweller”). The Great Mother was also Christianized as the Virgin Mary, whose worship is especially strong to this day in Latin America.

Those who held to the Old Religion of the Goddess were called Witches, from the Anglo-Saxon root wic (wicca is another name some use for witchcraft)—meaning “to bend or shape.” They were shamans, healers, benders and shapers of reality, strongly tied to village and peasant culture, linked to the land and the round of seasonal celebrations.

As the culture of Europe changed in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, Catholics and later Protestants persecuted Witches as a way of breaking down the peasants’ cultures in order to open the land to more profitable exploitation; to increase the power of the male medical profession by driving women out of healing; and to consolidate social control by attacking sensuality, the erotic, and the mysterious. Torture, terror, burning, and outright lies were their tools, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of victims (some estimate as many as nine million), primarily women, established the aura of fear that still surrounds the “Witch” and the Western view of suprarational powers and abilities.

After the persecutions ended in the 18^th century came the age of unbelief. Memory of the Craft had faded, and the hideous stereotypes that remained seemed ludicrous, laughable, or tragic. Only in this century have Witches been able to “come out of the broom closest,” so to speak, and counter the imagery of evil with truth.

Excerpted from Yoga Journal(May/June 1986) and reprinted in Utne Reader (Oct./Nov. 1986).

Image by Lapatia , licensed under Creative Commons .  

Starhawk, committed global justice activist and organizer, is the author or coauthor of twelve books, including The Spiral Dance, The Fifth Sacred Thing, and The Earth Path. Her latest is The Empowerment Manual: A Guide for Collaborative Groups. She is a veteran of progressive movements, from anti-war to anti-nukes, is a highly influential voice in the revival of earth-based spirituality and Goddess religion, and has brought many innovative techniques of spirituality and magic to her political work. Her web site is www.starhawk.org. Starhawk was recognized as an Utne Reader Visionary in 1995.     

Editor's note: This post originally appeared at Dirt Worship, Starhawk's blog on earth-based spirituality, permaculture, magic, politics, activism, and Paganism.    

Jason Pitzi-Waters, of the Pagan Newswire Collective, asked a few of us to respond to the Supreme Court’s decision that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional. Here’s mine:

A Pagan response—or rather, this Pagan’s response for there no universal agreement among Pagans on any issue–to the upholding of the Affordable Care Act has two aspects: is it good for us, individually and as a community, and is it in concert with our Pagan values.

While the Act is not as good for me, individually or many of us as a single-payer system would be, it is definitely an improvement over the callous and greed-ridden system we’ve got. Like many other Pagan writers and teachers, I’m self-employed and have been pretty much all my adult life. I’ve had health insurance since my mother brow-beat me into getting it in my twenties, with the same company. While I’m pretty healthy for my age, I’ve seen my premiums go up and up every year, to the point that they were costing me more than my mortgage, more than my food budget, more than anything else. Now, if I were being taxed for a single-payer system, when my income went down my payments would go down. But with private insurance, the price just keeps going up and up and up! When it finally reached over $1200 a month, I started looking for other options. I tried switching companies, but I’m now over sixty, overweight (not alone among Pagans in being so!) and with minor but irritating health problems that somehow drove my projected premiums up even higher! So I switched to a lower-cost plan that has a $6000 deductible. That would keep me from losing my house should I get a serious illness, and having lost five friends in the last five months, mostly to cancer, I can’t ignore that possibility. I’m still trying to save up the $6000 to have ready in the bank should I need it suddenly—because if I do get sick, I won’t be able to travel and teach which provides the bulk of my income.

Meanwhile, I encountered the dreaded Socialized Medicine when I was in England and needed a new asthma inhaler. I was able to get an appointment at the local clinic in Totnes—the same day I asked for one. I saw a doctor, who gave me a new prescription. He very apologetically informed me that I would have to pay for it, he was so sorry, because I’m not on National Health. I said that was okay, as an American, I was used to it. The clinic had a pharmacy on the premises, and the pharmacist filled the prescription, also expressing regret and embarrassment that I had to paid. He then charged me just over 5 English pounds—less than $10, for two inhalers, each of which costs me about $35 in the US!

I left, infuriated—not at the National Health, but at our own rip-off system. Why should we pay two, four, seven times as much if not to enrich somebody at our expense? Since I shifted my insurance, and since my own trusted doctor retired, I haven’t been to see a doctor since, except for a couple of weeks ago when I had a serious bout with asthma after camping out in the desert. I went to the clinic at the University of California. I had to fill out a form before I saw anyone, stating my financial qualifications to be seen. The form informed me that the visit would like cost something in the neighborhood of $450 dollars! But they couldn’t tell me how much, ahead of time. No one tells you what any specific treatment costs, before you have it—yet you are expected to pay. I know there are many preventive things I should be doing, at my age—like keeping a watch on my blood sugar levels, but when money is short, as it often is, I hesitate to make an appointment or sign up for tests that might break the budget. And I think many others, Pagans and not-Pagans, are in the same situation.

So for me personally, the ACA will help. The insurance exchanges may allow me to get a better policy at lower cost. Some of the provisions of the act assure more justice and fairness for everyone. And while it’s not the National Health or Canada’s public insurance, I believe we are in a better position to push for more when we build on success than we would be if we had to recover from failure.

I didn’t mean to write quite this much. Do I have feelings about this? Evidently I do!

Now, as for the ethics. Our traditions tell us that we Witches were the village healers, the wise women and cunning men who offered herbs and treatment and magic to the sick, especially to the poor. As such we have a special interest in assuring access to health care for all.

I believe the core value in Pagan ethics is the understanding that we are interconnected and interdependent. On that basis, health care is an important right and everyone should have access to it. My personal health is not separate from your well-being. Health is partly a matter of personal responsibility, but all of us are subject to forces beyond our control. If we suffer illness or injury or sheer bad luck, we shouldn’t be left alone to suffer the consequences unaided. We live in a more and more toxic environment, and the constant assaults on our health from pollutants and radiation and the degradation of our food supply are our collective responsibility. No one should be left alone to bear the consequences of our collective failure to protect the life-support systems around us. Rather, it is to all of our benefit to share a public responsibility for our mutual well being, because every single one of us, at some point in life, will need that help. No one gets through life unscathed, and in the end we die. If we truly accept death as part of life, with its attendant break-downs of the body and the many sorts of mischance that befall us along the way, then we do well to offer one another solidarity and succor.

To sum up, universal access to health care is consonant with our core Pagan values of interconnection and interdependence. The Affordable Care Act is a small step toward that end, flawed but better than no change at all. As Michael Moore has said, it should spur us to keep working for a better, more equitable system. But I believe we’ll do better building on a small success than we would have trying to recover from an abject failure. I hope as Pagans we can help to lead the way.

Image by Andy Potter, licensed under Creative Commons.  

The tradition of burning witches has developed a bad reputation. In Alberta, burning witches sounds like a rather pleasant experience. In an article for Maisonneuve (not available online), Tadzio Richards writes about his family’s Danish tradition called the Heks, where trash from spring cleaning is fashioned into a witch effigy and set on fire. His grandmother calls it “an awful heathen thing we do here,” but the view of the burning waste could be quite beautiful. I just hope his family takes the environment into consideration before burning their trash.

Image of the Heks by EPO, licensed under Creative Commons.

In the almost 30 years that Margot Adler has worked with National Public Radio, she has covered social, health, and political issues for All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and many other shows. During that time, she has also been a practicing Pagan, a fact not often addressed in her professional life. Adler sat down with the radio show Interfaith Voices to talk about both paganism and public radio.

Adler, author of the book Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today, says she was drawn to Paganism partly due to the inspiration she drew as a woman from ancient goddesses, but also because of her connection to the environmental movement. In the interview Adler talks about the unthinking, “anti-ecological” tendencies displayed by many people, and how Paganism can help people connect with the earth.

Never use magic to get a date. Don’t even try. It will only get you into trouble. The latest issue of New Witch (article not available online), a pagan magazine from northern California, details why lonely, witchcraft-curious neophytes shouldn’t dabble in magic for superficial reasons, like finding a date. “Magic isn’t safe,” writes the “therioshaman” named Lupa. Some people try to delve into the spirit world to escape their personal problems, but according to Lupa, advanced magic will force people to “face the scariest adversary of all—him or herself.” The single and lonely should try the interpersonal charm, and leave the magical charms to the experts.

—Bennett Gordon