Everyday witches: identity and community among young Australian

women practising witchcraft

EMMA LACHMI QUILTY

B Arts (Hons)

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology and Anthropology, School of Humanities and Social Science The University of Newcastle, Australia

March 2019

This research was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship.

1 Statement of Originality

I hereby certify that the work embodied in the thesis is my own work, conducted under normal supervision.

The thesis contains no material which has been accepted, or is being examined, for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference has been made in the text. I give consent to the final version of my thesis being made available worldwide when deposited in the University’s Digital Repository, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968 and any approved embargo.

Signed: Emma Quilty

Date: 29 – 03 - 19

The research was conducted on the traditional lands of the Turrbal, Awabakal and Wonnarua peoples and the Boon Wurrung and Woiwurrung (Wurundjeri) peoples of the Kulin Nation, whose enduring connection with the land and water is acknowledged and respected.

2 Abstract

This thesis investigates witchcraft as a social phenomenon, by focusing on the everyday practices of young Australian witches. The thesis explores wider questions about how young witches construct meaning through cosmological systems and ritual participation. Everyday practices are deeply embodied and connect to broader ideas of belonging and identity. To explore these practices and patterns of belonging, the thesis draws on twelve months of fieldwork. This fieldwork was conducted among young Australian women practising witchcraft in, primarily, Reclaiming witchcraft, though also incorporating women practising in other traditions. The majority of the young women interviewed for this study are in their early-to- mid-twenties, some of whom grew up in conservative Christian families, which affected the development of their spiritual identities, leading them into the world of witchcraft. The thesis draws on insider participant observation methods where the researcher became immersed in the community that is the focus of this study. This thesis examines the social and cultural dimensions of spirituality, through a witchy lens, rather than a secular or rationalist perspective.

Through an analysis of witchy beliefs and practices, this thesis critically considers how witchcraft is lived in everyday contexts. It considers how women embrace witchcraft as a domain where they enact femininity in a way that is counter to patriarchal discourses. Through an analysis of cosmology and ritual, this thesis aims to illuminate how young women create a sense of belonging in their communities using the symbol of the witch. It aims to inform contemporary understandings of spiritual identity work. The thesis analyses witchcraft conceptual systems using metaphors to draw out the ways the young women intertwine witchyness into their everyday lives. One of the primary metaphors that came out of the analysis was weaving. Weaving emerges in the ways the young women intertwine themselves into a sense of sociality that encompasses the past, present and future, as well as human and non- human persons. From this web of witchyness, the thesis aims to inform current understandings of how young people understand themselves and their place in the world. Witchcraft represents an attempt to improvise on the historical threads they have inherited to create their own narratives. The young women in this study live these stories through seemingly mundane practices that become part of their everyday lives.

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This thesis is dedicated to all the people in the world who are persecuted and killed for being witches. It’s 2019 – how is this still a thing?

4 Acknowledgments

Firstly, I would like to begin my acknowledgements by extending my deep gratitude to the women and men who were a part of this study. Thank you for not only inviting me into your homes without hesitation, but for sharing your life stories with me. I am so honoured that I was able to listen to your experiences and share them.

Kath – it was your sociology of religion course that inspired me to pursue my quirky interests in paganism, witchcraft and shamanism. It was in your courses and reading your work I felt as though I had a place in the world, as a witchy academic. Hedda, thank you for being my confidante when I felt alone and for holding my hand at my first ‘grown up’ conference. I made so many wonderful friends at the AAS that year because you happily introduced me around.

To Daniela and Debbi, the first anthropologists who taught and inspired me. Thank you for everything you shared with me. Lena, thank you so much for taking me under your wing and encouraging me to pursue my passions. The experiences I have had as a result of my research in Voodoo and witchcraft will stay with me forever. The lessons you have passed onto me, about teaching, tarot, frogs, politics and life in general, have helped shape the person I am today.

I would also like to thank the wonderfully supportive mentors who I have worked for and beside during this journey. Ann, thank you so much for all of the countless opportunities you have given me; you have given me so much support and guidance. To my wonderful and inspiring friends in education, Daniela and Margot, thank you for taking me under your wings and introducing me to the wonderful world of pedagogy and Rosi Braidotti.

To my PhD roomies; Pearl, thank you for being a wonderful support through such a terrifying transition – your friendship is so precious to me. Eleonora and Justine, you two are absolute wonder-women and your research takes my breath away. I cannot wait to watch and see how you both take on the world. To my beautiful and hilarious psychology friends, Monica, Olivia, Stef; and Romany – thank you for always taking me on our walk and talks and kebab Fridays. I always knew I could knock on your door for a quick chat (or lengthy rant).

To my weird and wonderful family, thank you for being patient with me when I was away all the time, sometimes frazzled, and often hungry. Mum, thank you for being the strongest woman I know and the best role model for a young brown kid in an Anglo-suburban community. Dad,

5 you were the one who told me to choose a career I loved, so I would never feel like I was working, and that was the best career advice I have ever received. Thank you to my little sister, for being weird and always willing to watch American Horror Story with me, talk about Stevie Nicks, high school and being queer. A big thank you to my Aunty Elizabeth for sneaking me witchcraft magazines and letting me watch Buffy and Practical Magic.

Nicole Walters, when I told you my ambition to become an anthropologist you said something that has stayed with me – you said “I look forward to reading your first journal article and seeing your name printed in the journal”. What you said that day has affected my life. Jane Snell – as my society and culture teacher, you did more than just introduce me to anthropology, you supported my (somewhat leftfield) PIP on henna and you introduced me to Sidney Poitier. Thank you for inspiring and encouraging me.

I would like to thank the wonderful folks at Everymind; thank you to all of my friends and ghost supervisors who read chapters, made sure I took care of myself and generally cheered me on in the last push. I would like to especially thank Jasmina, Arsh, Renate and Elizabeth – your time and support is much appreciated.

Finally, I would like to thank my friends Holly, Kirsten, Caitlin, Emma and Danielle. I went through what has probably been one of the scariest times in my life while I completed my thesis. I may have been terrified, but I never felt alone. I felt more loved and supported than at any other time in my life, thanks to you.

6 Table of Figures

Figure (1) Witchcraft/Wicca Statistics sourced from the Australian Bureau of Statistics ...... 19 Figure (2) A selection of witchy social gatherings in New South Wales and Victoria ...... 64 Figure (3) Image from fieldwork diary ...... 77 Figure (4) Wheel of the Year based on the Northern Hemisphere. Image created by Rachel Hardwick and used with kind permission (see Appendix D)...... 88 Figure (5) Image of an altar from Tiff and Jenna’s home ...... 106 Figure (6) Image of an altar from CloudCatcher WitchCamp ...... 108 Figure (7) Morgan’s altar ...... 109 Figure (8) Image taken by Luke Brohman and used with kind permission, at the CloudCatcher WitchCamp held in 2015 (see Appendix C) ...... 140 Figure (9) Group of women at 2015 CloudCatcher WitchCamp (picture taken with permission) ...... 158

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Table of Contents Statement of Originality ...... 2 Abstract ...... 3 Acknowledgments ...... 5 Table of Figures ...... 7 Table of Contents ...... 8 Glossary ...... 10 About the Participants ...... 12 Cohort 1: Core Participants ...... 12 Cohort 2: Key Informants ...... 14 Chapter One: Witchy Ways in Everyday Life ...... 16 I. A Note on Terminology ...... 16 II. Witchcraft and Religious Participation in Australia ...... 18 III. The Australian Reclaiming Witchcraft Tradition ...... 21 IV. Positioning this Thesis ...... 22 Chapter Two: Literature Review...... 26 I. The Roots and Bones of (Neo)Paganism, Wicca and Witchcraft in Early-modern Britain ...... 26 II. Witchcraft in the North American Context ...... 34 III. Antipodean Witchcraft and Paganism...... 38 IV. The Reclaiming Witchcraft Tradition ...... 47 Chapter Three: Methodology ...... 59 I. Context of this Research ...... 59 II. Entering the Field ...... 68 III. Recording and Analysing Data ...... 76 Chapter Four: Everyday Witchy Practices ...... 85 I. The Dark Moon in Witchy Cosmologies ...... 86 II. The Sacred Cannot be Scripted ...... 94 III. Witchy Ancestors ...... 102 Chapter Five: Weaving the Witch ...... 113 I. Sorcery: Pulling the Threads of Fate ...... 114 II. Witchy Foremothers ...... 119 III. Weaving Existential Security ...... 126 Chapter 6: Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine ...... 136 I. Reclaiming Herstories ...... 136

8 II. Reclaiming the Body ...... 141 III. Reclaiming Community ...... 154 Chapter Seven: Conclusion ...... 164 Reference List ...... 170 Appendix A – Reclaiming Principles of Unity...... 182 Appendix B – Interview Schedule ...... 184 Appendix C – Copyright Permission from Luke Brohman ...... 189 Appendix D – Copyright Permission from Rachel Hardwick ...... 190

9 Glossary

Aspecting: Aspecting is a form of possession often referred to in the Reclaiming tradition and is used by witches to make contact with a particular deity. Aspecting is referred to as a ‘lighter’ or less intense form of possession (Field notes April 2015).

Circle: Most rituals involve casting a circle, which is often visualised as a boundary of energy and intent surrounding the ritual space. The circle is intended to contain the energy and focus, and is not for observers; it is participatory and experiential (CloudCatcher 2015).

Coven: A group of people who self-identify as witches that have bonded together, who share rituals, practices and social support, sometimes undergoing some kind of group initiation.

Craft: An abbreviated term to describe contemporary witchcraft or Wicca as practised in Europe, America and Australia.

Crone: Visually represented by an old woman or hag, who represents death in the cycle of life. The crone signifies death – which is a central aspect of the triple goddess. This face of the triple goddess embodies old age, sorrow and menopause (Luhrmann 2001, p. 121).

Otherworld: The otherworld is a spiritual domain that is said to co-exist with the ordinary everyday world; it is ‘primordial and also flowing through time, space and within the individual’ (Greenwood 2000, p. ix).

Reclaiming witchcraft: Reclaiming witchcraft is a branch of the contemporary neo-pagan movement. This tradition was originally founded in California in the 1970s. The Reclaiming witchcraft community has developed an overall radical position, often targeting their ritual practices towards changing the current unequal societal relations and the restoration of humanity’s relationship with nature.

Ritual: Rituals are both celebrations and actions, designed to influence the workings of the cosmos through intention and magic (Morgain 2013, p. 294).

Skyclad: This is the act of performing rituals naked and refers to the practice of ritual nudity popularised by the creator of the Wiccan tradition, Gerald Gardner.

10 Trance: ‘Trance’ is rooted in the Latin term ‘trans-ire, to go across, to pass over’, which signifies a range of ‘different phenomena all of which are characterized by embodiment and an experience of alterity’ (Behrend, Dreschke & Zillinger 2015, p. 2).

Triple Goddess: Commonly referred to in witchy groups as Maiden, Mother, Crone; however, many in the Reclaiming tradition prefer to play around with these categories so as to challenge conventional definitions that essentialise femininity and reproduction (Morgain 2010, p. 166).

Wheel of the Year: The Wheel provides an overarching spiritual framework by drawing on the cyclical progression of the seasons through time for recognising, understanding and responding to experiences and processes that may occur during one’s life.

WitchCamp: WitchCamps are annual retreats where participants learn about and how to use a range of spiritual tools, experience rituals and connect with one another. In Australia, these events are organised and run by witches in the Reclaiming tradition.

Witchy: This term refers to the discursive trend present in most Australian colloquialisms to create feelings of intimacy, familiarity and belonging in a witchcraft community. This term was used frequently by participants and captures the sense of belonging these young women create.

11 About the Participants

The following information is intended to provide a guide outlining details about the participants who were involved in this study. This study primarily focuses on Cohort 1, which is comprised of young women; the rationale for choosing this group as the core cohort for this study is explored further in Chapter Three. Since the witchcraft community in Australia is a relatively small group, compared to the more mainstream religions, I have decided to only provide the age cohort to which the participants belong, so that they are not directly identifiable. Cohort 2 is made up of the key informants involved in this study, who provided important contextual information regarding witchcraft in Australia and introduced me into the witchy community.

Cohort 1: Core Participants

Traditional and Eclectic Witches

Brigid is a 20-24-year-old witch who comes from a Christian background. She first began practising witchcraft when she was 15 years old and identifies as an eclectic neo-pagan. She lives in Newcastle and studies creative industries at university. Her witchy practices include working with tarot cards, ancestral worship and creating witchy art.

Erin is a 20-24-year-old witch who comes from a Christian background. She first began practising witchcraft when she was 16 years old and is an eclectic witch. She lives on the Central Coast and works in the creative industries. Her witchy practices include fantasy role play and using crystals.

Fae is a 20-24-year-old witch who comes from a Christian background. She first began practising witchcraft when she was 15 years old and belongs to a Cohranian coven. She lives in Brisbane and works in the creative industries. Her witchy practices include altar offerings, ancestral worship and creating witchy artwork.

Morgan is a 20-24-year-old witch who comes from a Russian-Christian family. She first began practising witchcraft when she was 16 years old and is an eclectic witch. She lives on the Central Coast and studies communication at university. Her witchy practices include ancestral worship, working with herbs and tarot readings.

12 Vanessa is a 20-24-year-old witch who comes from a Christian background. She first began practising witchcraft when she was 19 years old and belongs to an eclectic group of witches in Victoria. She lives in Melbourne and works in the field of complementary medicine. Her witchy practices include meditation and hypnotherapy.

Willow is a 20-24-year-old witch who comes from a non-religious background. She first began practising witchcraft when she was 17 years old and practices traditional witchcraft. She organises a monthly witchy gathering called The Red Tent. Her witchy practices include drumming and trances.

Witches Belonging to the Reclaiming Tradition

Clara is a 20-24-year-old witch who comes from a Christian background. She first began practising witchcraft when she was nine years old and belongs to the Reclaiming tradition. She lives in Brisbane and works in the field of natural health. Her witchy practices include ancestral worship, name-anagramming and working with crystals.

Clarissa is a 25-29-year-old witch who comes from a family with a Romani cultural background. She first began practising witchcraft when she was 15 years old and belongs to the Reclaiming tradition. She lives in Sydney and works in the field of transpersonal psychology. Her witchy practices include ancestral worship, tarot readings and working with herbs.

Karen is a 25-29-year-old witch who comes from a Christian background. She first began practising witchcraft when she was 16 years old and practises traditional witchcraft. She lives on the Central Coast and studies chemistry at university. Her witchy practices include ancestral worship, tarot readings and altar offerings.

Layla is a 25-29-year-old witch who comes from a Christian background. She first began practising witchcraft when she was 15 years old and belongs to the Reclaiming tradition. She lives in Melbourne and works as a scientist at a local university. Her witchy practices include ancestral worship, trances and reading tarot cards.

Lyra Rose is a 20-24-year-old witch who attended Christian schools in which she was taught that witchcraft was a form of devil-worship. She first began practising witchcraft when she was 16 years old and belongs to the Reclaiming tradition. She currently lives in Brisbane and studies psychology and nutrition at university. Her witchy practices include trances and drumming.

13 Temperance is a 20-24-year-old witch who comes from a Christian background. She first began practising witchcraft when she was 15 years old and belongs to the Reclaiming tradition. She lives in Brisbane and works in the field of natural health. Her witchy practices include crafting talismans and meditation.

Tiff is a 20-24-year-old witch who comes from a charismatic Christian background. She first began practicing witchcraft when she was 16 years old and belongs to the Reclaiming tradition. She lives in Brisbane and works in the field of natural health. Her witchy practices include tarot readings and trance work.

Cohort 2: Key Informants

Alex is a 20-24-year-old witch who comes from a Christian background. He first began practising witchcraft when he was 15 years old and belongs to the Reclaiming tradition. He lives on the Central Coast and studies psychology at university. His witchy practices include drumming and trances.

Caitlin is a 50-54-year-old witch who comes from a Celtic background. She first began practising witchcraft when she was 15 years old and practises traditional witchcraft. She lives in Melbourne and works in the field of creative industries. Her witchy practices include tarot readings, gardening and running witchcraft workshops.

Chris is a 20-24-year-old witch who comes from a Christian background. He first began practising witchcraft when he was 17 years old and belongs to the Reclaiming tradition. He lives in Melbourne and works in an “adult” store. His witchy practices include tarot and group ritual work.

Fleur is a 45-49-year-old witch who comes from a Christian background. She first began practising witchcraft when she was 19 years old and belongs to an eclectic group of witches in Victoria. She lives in Melbourne and works in the field of complementary medicine. Her witchy practices include hypnotherapy and camping.

Ishtar is a 45-49-year-old witch who comes from a Christian background. She first began practising witchcraft when she was 15 years old and runs a teaching circle in the Hunter Valley. She lives in the Hunter Valley while working in the area of natural health. Her witchy practices include ancestral worship, astrology and working with herbs.

14 Matt is a 20-24-year-old witch who comes from a non-religious background. He first began practising witchcraft when he was 16 years old and belongs to the Reclaiming tradition. He lives in Brisbane and has worked as an organiser at Reclaiming WitchCamps. His witchy practices include trance and ancestral worship.

Mitchell is a 20-24-year-old witch who comes from a Christian background. He first began practising witchcraft when he was 17 years old and practises traditional witchcraft. He lives in Melbourne and works in the field of natural health. His witchy practices include tarot and group rituals.

15 Chapter One: Witchy Ways in Everyday Life

Modern Western witchcraft can be understood as a non-institutional spirituality that venerates nature and sexuality, which has branched from the broader spiritual movement of neo-paganism (Hume 1997). Within the framework of witchcraft, the witch represents an identity that lies outside normative social and religious constraints generally applied to women. Keeping in line with feminist and queer research values, this study classifies ‘women’ as adults who identify as female (Heyes 2007; Johnson 2012). The decision to focus on young women in this study emerged from the dearth of literature currently available on the experiences of young women who become witches. While there are studies available on witches in Australia (Ezzy 2014; Hume 1997), and others that focus on young people (Aloi 2006; Berger & Ezzy 2007) – there are none available that focus on the path young women travel to find witchcraft or their experiences of becoming witches in the social context of Australia.

I. A Note on Terminology

Since this thesis focuses on young women’s experiences, to fill this current gap in the field of witchcraft studies, the term ‘young’ or ‘youth’ will be used to describe one of the groups, women aged between 18 and 25, who were interviewed for this study. Bourdieu (1993, p. 94) suggests that youth is a dynamic and ‘evolving concept’ and can therefore be understood as a social construction. The social construction of youth refers to the stage between childhood and adulthood, and the process of becoming independent. This study concerns questions about belief, so it is also important to differentiate between the terms ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’. Durkheim (1912, p. 129) defines religion as ‘a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden – beliefs and practices which unite into one single community, all those who adhere to them’. Religious rituals play an important role in this sense of unity or social cohesion, by inspiring a ‘transcendence of self, and the blending of the self into some larger reality’ (Friedmann 2012, p. 52), which for Durkheim, is community. While Durkheim’s definition is useful, it does have its limitations and has been previously critiqued (Goldenweiser 1917; Mol 1979). McGuire’s (2008, p. 12) definition of lived religion ‘distinguishes the actual experience of religious persons from the prescribed religion of institutionally defined beliefs and practices’. What McGuire’s (2008) definition of lived religion allows for is the messy, sometimes contradictory, definition where everyday

16 practices come to the fore for analysis. Drawing from this definition, spirituality, when used in this thesis, will refer to the search for meaning and belonging to a community who share the same belief in mysticism, in the idea that there is something else beyond the material realm.

Throughout this thesis, the terms religion and spirituality will be used interchangeably when referring to witchcraft. While Reclaiming witchcraft will be referred to as a lived religion in the sense that McGuire evokes, it is also important to note that it is a rejection of religion as a bureaucratised institutional form. Reclaiming witchcraft is an example of both a lived religion and a spiritual movement, one that engages with the search for meaning and attempts to develop human potential in its own characteristic ways. Reclaiming is a form of witchcraft that is ‘engaged in a radical project to transform modern Western society’ (Morgain 2012, p. 528). This engagement occurs in several ways, including feminist activities, community gatherings, public and private rituals, and celebrating the Wheel of the Year. The Wheel of the Year is the name used to describe the cyclical progression of the seasons, which provides an overarching spiritual framework for recognising, understanding and responding to experiences and processes that may occur during one’s life.

One of the key components of the Reclaiming witchcraft, and witchcraft more generally, is a tradition of conjuring new words. I draw on Alvizo’s (2012, p. 100) explanation of this process as the Dalyan tradition of creating new words in order to capture:

[T]he complexities and intersectionalities of our situations and our embodied realities’. This [tradition of conjuring new words] is how we learn and build and weave a new reality. So let’s partner with one another to build on each other’s work, and take it to new horizons, weaving new webs that make room for us all (Alvizo 2012, p. 100).

For example, Naomi Goldenberg (2004) describes how witchy words to create change was used to ‘breathe life into the left-wing politics of 1970’s feminism’. Ruether (2005, p. 151) echoed this sentiment, emphasising Goldenberg’s wish that ‘witches would continue to speak in ‘witchy’ ways that would be strange and spooky to the dominant culture’. Throughout this thesis I use the term ‘witchy’ when referring to the beliefs, rituals and practices of young witches, and I argue that they are weaving new embodied realities for themselves.

One of the new realities witches weave for themselves is one free the constraints of patriarchal religions. Griffin (1995, p. 39) theories that feminist witches believe that the major world religions encourage their adherents to forfeit their power and responsibility ‘upwards’ (to God

17 or likewise) through a hierarchical value system. This type of analysis focuses on the symbolic dimensions of religion, however, I focus on the embodied and material aspects of witchcraft and how they are tied to the broader cosmological system of symbols. Since there is some slippage here between the immaterial and material, when I refer to patriarchy or patriarchal throughout this thesis, I am referring to the imperative to weave together a religion that does not value the masculine over the feminine, or the rational over the emotional, or the immaterial over the material.

II. Witchcraft and Religious Participation in Australia

Religion as practised in Australia is defined by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS 1996) as:

[A] set of beliefs and practices, usually involving acknowledgment of a divine or higher being or power, by which people order the conduct of their lives both practically and in a moral sense.

Australia is a predominantly religious country, with 70% of people in Australia reporting that they have a religious affiliation (ABS 2016). Since the 2016 census, there has been a notable increase of 22% (2.2 million) in the number of those who reported having no religion (see definition above) from the previous census in 2011. Young adults, aged under 34 years, were more likely to report not having a religion (39%) and more likely to be affiliated with religions other than Christianity (12%) than other adults (ABS 2017). Research in Britain reveals that many young people are turning their backs on formal religion because they believe they do not treat women or LGBTQIA+ people fairly (Woodhead 2016, p. 245). In Australia, this rise may be attributed to the lower level of trust in religious institutions such as the Catholic and Anglican churches, particularly since the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (Wright & Swain 2018) and revelations about the forced adoption experienced by young unmarried women during their pregnancies (Fronek & Cuthbert 2013; Hone 2016).

This cohort of “no religion”, referred to by some (Fuller 2001; Harvey 2016) as the spiritual- but-not-religious (SBNR) phenomenon, requires further research to understand the ways young people are engaging with questions about who they are, what their place in the world is and what it is to live a meaningful life. Awareness of the social phenomenon of SBNRs emerged in the 2011 ABS census, and while this cohort may not be associated with existing organisations that does not mean that spiritual activities have become totally privatised. Young people who

18 identify as SBNR may simply be differently organised and networked. The census provides a snapshot of religious identity; it does not tell us about religious beliefs, practices, or anything else about a person’s religious life. Currently in Australia, data is being collected and analysed that aims to provide a cohesive evidence-based understanding of young Australian people’s perspectives on religion1.

In previous studies, witchcraft has been defined as a religion, a religious movement, as well as a form of spirituality (Ezzy 2014; Hume 1997; Rountree 2003). Witchcraft is not an institutional religion, but a lived religion that is comprised of a spiritual community. The young women in this study define what they practise in comparison to institutional arrangements of belief and spirituality; they form their community based on non-institutional, loosely organised forms of practice (Possamai 2000). They do not perceive witchcraft as an institutional religion comprised of formal worship and doctrine. Witchcraft provides a critical framework for young women to contest the Judeo-Christian religions within which they have been socialised and social norms concerning acceptable behaviour for women.

2016 2011 2006 Australia Total 6616 8415 8211 Total of Australia (Male) 1369 2006 1972

Total of Australia (Female) 5247 6409 6239

New South Wales 1666 2266 2171 Queensland 1536 1759 1616 Victoria 1593 2069 2033 Figure (1) Witchcraft/Wicca Statistics sourced from the Australian Bureau of Statistics

When it comes to determining the approximate witchcraft population in Australia, it is important to consider the organisational structure of this social group. Ezzy (2014, p. 14) describes Australian witchcraft as loose, ephemeral and voluntary in nature. Due to the diffuse nature of Australian witchcraft, it is difficult to obtain accurate demographic data on this cohort.

1 This is an ARC funded project titled Australian Young People's Perspectives on Religions and Non-religious Worldviews, the primary chief investigator on this project is Professor Mary Lou Rasmussen.

19 The first census to include Witchcraft/Wicca as an option under religious affiliation was in 1996 (Aloi & Johnston 2008, p. 17). The most recent ABS census, conducted in 2016, revealed that the cohort of Australians identifying their religion as witchcraft makes up 0.02% of the total population of Australia. There was a decrease in the witchcraft cohort between the 2011 and 2016 censuses. This may be explained, in part, by the increased number of people choosing to elect “no religion”. Another consideration for the decrease in witches in 2016 compared to the 2013 and 2011 censuses is that those who may have previously identified as witches are now choosing to identify as pagan in an arguably post-feminist era. The table above (Figure 1) indicates that witchcraft in Australia is practised, by both men and women, although the number of women identifying as witches is significantly higher. The research conducted for this thesis was carried out in the Australian states listed above (Figure 1).

Background on Witchcraft in Australia

Australian witches have much in common with witches elsewhere, especially as many of their ideas derive from European and American discourses. During the 1960s, the Australian intake of immigration from European and Asian countries increased, thus beginning the process of Australia transforming from a Christian-dominant religious landscape into a more multi- cultural and multi-faith society (Drury 2008, p. 8). This was one of the transformations that heralded the arrival of witchcraft in Australia. Another important factor in Australia that influenced the emergence of witchcraft is second wave feminism. This second wave of feminism also occurred alongside ecological awareness-raising social movements. These two (often intersecting) forms of social justice and activism influenced the development of witchcraft in Australia. In the early 1960s, interest in New Age and alternative spiritualities became more widespread in Australia (Hume 1997, p. 35). During this period, several small groups began forming throughout Australia, with participants pursuing alternative lifestyles on farming communes (Hume 1997, p. 35). Some of the early ritual practices and social structures set up during the 1960s influenced witchcraft in the 1990s. For example, due to the relatively flat structure of witchcraft groups and their loose organisation, finding witches in order to research them proves quite difficult (Hume 1997, p. 79). Larger gatherings provide witches with opportunities to exchange views, hold workshops and network (Hume 1997, p. 79).

Broader changes in the spiritual and religious participation in Australia are important to consider when studying a smaller (and marginal) religious group like witchcraft. Ezzy (2016, p. 267) writes that the shift towards individualistic religion is concurrent with a turn towards

20 more emotional and aesthetic forms of religious expression, such as witchcraft. The young women in this study search for and create meaning within the context of the associated social horizons of their communities. I will argue that witchcraft provides a framework for constructing both identity and community. Witchcraft provides young women with a language to articulate their processes of becoming and their values. Their worldview is both shaped and expressed through this framework. For example, views on social justice have been influential in shaping the rise and forms of Reclaiming witchcraft in Australia. Reclaiming witchcraft places emphasis on both social and personal transformation and the Australian Reclaiming tradition reflects this focus in its camps, rituals and political activism.

III. The Australian Reclaiming Witchcraft Tradition

The primary witchcraft community this study focuses on is the Australian Reclaiming witchcraft tradition. Reclaiming witchcraft began in northern California in the 1980s, and subsequently spread throughout North America, to Western Europe and Australia (Morgain 2010). The primary beliefs held in this community concern animism and social justice. This is reflected strongly in the group’s key social events and ritual practices. To give an example, the annual WitchCamps hosted by the Reclaiming community across North America, Western Europe and Australia reflect the values of social connectedness and social transformation. The intentions Reclaiming witches set for the individual rituals and for the camp itself will generally be linked to a social justice cause such as environmental activism. These intentions are informed by the Reclaiming Principles of Unity (Appendix A), which articulate how individual actions need to be linked to broader social transformations.

One of the key beliefs held by the Reclaiming community is the idea that witchcraft has the potential to create social transformation (Morgain 2015). The focus on this idea is based on cosmological foundations established in the 1980s by the founding members of the late modern tradition. One of the most famous of these founding members is Starhawk (1979), whose books and active role in the community heavily influenced the early creation and development of the Reclaiming tradition. Starhawk helped to instil the idea of social transformation and an ethical standpoint concerning social justice among Reclaiming witches, especially those who were engaging in activism during this period. One of the notions that underlies the belief about social transformation is the ‘Reclaiming theology of “immanence”, in which sacredness is seen as inhering in the entire material cosmos’ (Morgain 2015, p. 177). Put another way, rituals and practices are rooted in the notion of animism. Animistic beliefs about the sacredness of nature

21 are also visible in other forms of witchcraft, as well as paganism more broadly. Within the Reclaiming tradition, this idea is expressed politically through the belief that destructive and irreverent attitudes towards the earth are supported by Western and largely Christian cosmologies. In her work, Starhawk (1988, p. 216) argues that materialist ideas have culminated in a ‘mechanist view of the world as composed of dead, inert, isolated particles’, leading to ‘social estrangement and environmental degradation’ (Morgain 2015, p. 177).

Reclaiming witchcraft has an organisational structure that includes a small teaching team and organisers who rotate. Teachers and organisers who volunteer in these roles will generally have been involved in the community for a significant period of time and actively participate in the camps, public rituals and community events. Newer members or ‘camp virgins’ do not generally perform these roles. The organisational structure of Australian Reclaiming witchcraft will be explored in further detail in Chapter Seven. Reclaiming witchcraft in Australia connects itself to its international branches in several ways. International teachers attend the Australian camps in Queensland and Melbourne, facilitating workshops and passing on their knowledge and experience. The chants and songs used throughout the tradition in Australian Reclaiming are also used at other camps in North America and Western Europe. This inter-weaving of practices and knowledge is intentional, with the weaving theme emerging in the Reclaiming tradition, in its stories as well as its rituals. This metaphor of weaving functions on several different levels. The Reclaiming communities and camps use weaving in their ritual movements and language to symbolise the connections they experience at camp. On a social level, weaving evokes a sense of connectivity between the witches while they are attending the camp, which is continued through Facebook after the camp has finished. The sense of connectivity and belonging evoked through the symbol and practice of weaving creates the social cohesion that is important for designing and enacting forms of social transformation.

IV. Positioning this Thesis

This thesis sits within the field of witchcraft studies, which is an area of inquiry that has been taken up by anthropologists, sociologists and historians alike (Ezzy 2014; Hume 1997; Hutton 2000, 2017; Luhrmann 1989; Rountree 2003). Despite thousands of women and men engaging with and identifying as witches in Australia, Australian witchcraft is a relatively under- researched field. This thesis attempts to contribute to this gap. The sample size of this study (n=20) is small, and deliberately so. As a qualitative study of witchcraft, this research was

22 designed to capture the intricate and detailed processes of identity work and witchy ways of creating community and sense of belonging.

Research Aims and Questions

The broad purpose of this research is to explore and examine witches’ beliefs and practices and understand why young women find witchcraft appealing. I seek to uncover why and how young women identify as witches, and how they perceive the relationship between their spirituality and feminism. This study also aims to find out how their rituals are developed, how they are performed and what happens after a ritual concludes. To address these aims, this thesis will answer the following research questions:

• How do young women use witchy practices in their everyday lives? • How do witches create witchy communities and what practices do they use to create a sense of identity and belonging? • What kind of worldview do witches develop? How does this perception place them in the world around them?

By exploring these questions, I argue that young women use witchcraft in their everyday lives and communities to develop their identities and their sense of belonging in the world. By challenging the social scripting of gender, building through ritual and community, they develop a spiritual understanding of the world and themselves. Through this thesis, I will show how a sense of belonging and social cohesion is created at witchcraft gatherings, through formal and informal rituals, through shared meals, sleeping accommodation and casual conversations and interactions. Finally, I show how witchcraft gatherings, particularly WitchCamps, are used by witches to mobilise and share information regarding ethical standpoints. As a tradition founded on social justice, Reclaiming witchcraft WitchCamps are not only sites where witches gather to perform ritual, but also function as spaces for witches to mobilise collective responses to broader social changes.

Thesis Structure

The aim of this thesis is to provide a deeper understanding of the ways young witches living and practising in Australia experience spirituality and transition into adulthood. Chapter One will establish the phenomenological framework used to analyse the experiences of young witches. Chapter Two will contextualise the aims of the thesis by providing a comprehensive

23 review of the literature in this field, beginning with a brief evaluation of how witchcraft has been studied historically (Gibson 1999; Hutton 2000, 2017; Purkiss 1996). This will be followed by an analysis of the current literature available on studies of Australian witchcraft (Ezzy 2014; Hume 1997; Smith 2010). I will then explore literature examining young people practising witchcraft, and address the epistemological foundations, assumptions and limitations of these studies (Berger & Ezzy 2004, 2009; Johnston 2008; Lewis 2012; Merskin 2007). The final part of Chapter Two will examine contemporary studies of the Reclaiming tradition (Calley Jones 2010; Lepage 2017; Morgain 2012, 2013, 2015; Roberts 2011; Salomonsen 2002). There are currently no studies available that specifically examine the experiences of young Reclaiming witches living and practising in Australia, which is why this study has been developed and conducted.

In Chapter Three, the methodological framework of this research will be outlined. Specifically, the geographic location and demographics of the field sites chosen for this study. This will be followed by an exploration of the field site and the key community sites for the young women involved in this study. This chapter will also provide a description of the participants involved in this study. The key places of belonging for the Australian Reclaiming community identified in this study will be discussed. This will then be followed by an examination of the role my insider status played in this study, its epistemological underpinnings and its limitations. I will describe the primary methods used in this qualitative study: semi-structured interviews and participant observation. The final part of this chapter will also include which methods of recording and analysing data were chosen and how they were used in this study.

Chapter Four explores key elements of the witchy cosmological framework: reciprocity and cyclicity. This will be examined through the ways these cosmological beliefs manifest in everyday practices in witchcraft. The everyday practices and activities witches engage in are important not only for establishing their individual sense of identity, they are also necessary for the development of their social groups’ overall sense of identity. Creating a sense of connection as well as continuity between the two is what contributes to the overall sense of belonging the young witches experience. In Chapter Five, I will examine the everyday practices and rituals the young women involved in this study use to weave witchcraft into the fabric of their identities. The metaphor of weaving will be used to describe the integrative and tactile way witchy practices are embedded in their everyday lives. Weaving can be understood as both a bodily and a metaphorical practice that embodies the essence of witchyness for the young

24 women in this study. While Chapter Five focuses primarily on the individual witchy identities the young women develop, Chapter Six will explore the sense of identity the Reclaiming community creates for itself. Chapter Six will go into deeper detail about the Reclaiming WitchCamp, which I attended as a participant observer. It was at this event where several key acts of reclamation are lived out and observed. The three things this witchcraft tradition aim to reclaim are: ritual, the body and, ultimately, the symbolic power of the witch. Chapter Seven will provide a cohesive summary about the overarching arguments in this thesis. While the purpose of this study is not to provide a comprehensive analysis of witchcraft in Australia, what I seek to do is to illuminate experiences of young people practising witchcraft. To this end, the final chapter of the thesis will illustrate the complexity of the relationship between individual and collective witchcraft identities.

25 Chapter Two: Literature Review

The witchcraft community is often described as a branch of the paganism movement. This categorisation relies on the perception that the histories of witchcraft and paganism are similar, if not the same. While there are overlaps in formation and development of witchcraft and paganism, there are particular historical narratives that frame witchcraft. The sociocultural context surrounding its development influenced key elements of the Australian witchcraft community’s social structure. Accordingly, in this chapter, I begin by considering a selection of key historical events and figures, which have affected the expansion of witchcraft in early- modern Britain. These key events and figures include Gerald Gardner and Alex Sanders, and the publication of influential texts such as Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe and Charles Leland’s Aradia: Gospel of the Witches. This is followed by an analysis of how contemporary witchcraft can be understood as a revival of ancient paganism. Next this chapter will explore the impact of second wave feminism and the environmental movement had on the cosmological underpinnings of paganism and witchcraft in North America. It is important to map the rise of paganism and witchcraft in Britain and North America, in order to contextualise how key elements of this movement manifest in Australia and New Zealand. To contextualise the findings of this study and elaborate on the current gap in the literature concerning Australian witchcraft, this review of the literature focuses on one particular witchcraft tradition, Reclaiming witchcraft.

I. The Roots and Bones of (Neo)Paganism, Wicca and Witchcraft in Early- modern Britain

Paganism signifies the pre-Christian religions of Europe and the Near East, involving an active worship of (multiple) deities (Hutton 2017, p. xii). The broad scene of paganism and witchcraft in the 19th and 20th centuries was influenced by practices and writings from esoteric revivalist groups such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Freemasons and the Rosicrucians (Drury 2008). Greenwood (2000, p.7) argues that ‘modern witchcraft is not a form of ‘low magic’ associated with ordinary peasant folk and country lore, but rather is a development of the Renaissance high magic tradition’. The elements of early witchcraft in early-modern Britain may have emerged from and been shaped by the Renaissance high magic tradition, however, contemporary witchcraft draws more heavily on what Greenwood (2000, p. 7) terms ‘ordinary

26 village folk’ traditions. The ordinary folk traditions present in early-modern British paganism and witchcraft began with several key individuals. Gerald Gardner, Aleister Crowley and Alex Sanders are arguably the central figures who shaped the development of witchcraft and Wicca in the religio-cultural of early-modern Britain. In addition to creating and initiating people into their covens, Gerald Gardner (1954), like Aleister Crowley and Alex Sanders contributed to the rise and spread of witchcraft through notable publications.

The Alexandrian tradition of Wicca was founded by Alex Sanders (Alder 2006 [1986], loc. 1722). Robert Cochrane founded the Cochranian tradition of witchcraft, and called his coven the Clan of Tubal Cain, named after the biblical blacksmith (Valiente 1989). Aiden Kelly, one of the founders of the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn, was initially drawn to witchcraft through poetry (Alder 2006 [1986], loc. 2295). Dion Fortune’s influence on the early development of witchcraft is particularly important for this thesis since she ‘influenced [the influential Australian witch] Rosaleen Norton through her published work’ (Drury 2008, p. 86). Charles Leland’s published work, specifically the book Aradia: Gospel of the Witches, was influential in the rise of witchcraft and passages of which were used by Gardner in the development of key rites such as the ‘The Charge of the Goddess’ (Alder 2006 [1986]). In addition to his publications (1954), Gardner also founded the Bricket Wood coven through which he introduced a number of High Priestesses into the craft, including Doreen Valiente, Patricia Crowther and Eleanor Bone, through whom the Gardnerian community spread throughout Britain and subsequently into Australia and the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The Alexandrian tradition of witchcraft, according to Alex Sanders, began when he was seven and ‘he found his grandmother standing nude in a circle in the kitchen who then initiated him into the Craft’ (Alder 2006 [1986], loc. 1722). Gardner’s origin story for his tradition begins with the hereditary witches of New Forest whom he claimed ‘were a surviving remnant of an organised pagan religion that had existed and operated in England until the seventeenth century’ (Drury 2008, p. 95). These origin stories echo Margaret Murray’s (1921) hypothesis of a ‘pre- Christian religion that spanned all of Western Europe and survived in secret until at least the eighteenth century, this religion, was referred to as the Old Religion, the witch-cult, or the Dianic cult’ (Noble 2005, p. 6). One of the ideas this theory rests on is the premise that the early modern witch trials that occurred in Europe between 1580-1750 were a deliberate and

27 systematic attempt to destroy the old religion2. This hypothesis has been thoroughly debated (Eller 2000; Marler 2006; Rosaldo 1989) and interrogated in depth in Ronald Hutton’s (1999) study titled, The Triumph of the Moon. However, the effect of this myth is clearly present in British paganism and witchcraft concepts which Alder (2006 [1986], p. 1491) lists as:

[T]he pre-eminence of the Goddess; the idea of the woman as priestess; the idea that a woman can become the Goddess; and a new way of working magic that was particularly accessible to small groups., The last was a combination of the "low magic" common to folklore the world over (spells and recipes) and the "high magic" of the ceremonial grimoire.

Dion Fortune, founder of the Fraternity of the Inner Light society and influential author, suggested that women were outwardly passive in the ordinary world but dynamic on the inner planes of the otherworld this meant that in the Wiccan tradition men have to give up their social power and concede it to women. In her study of British witchcraft, Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld: An Anthropology, Susan Greenwood (2000, p. 177) observed the use circle casting to delineate ordinary and sacred space:

In this context magical ritual may be a cathartic space of transformation of the social realm; a negotiated space where feminine and masculine gender roles, or any other roles of domination and submission, are enacted as a theatrical play to work out deep-seated psychological issues, which in the process release magical power. In short, magical ritual may be a place where social relationships of power from the ordinary world are negotiated and transgressed.

Vivianne Crowley, argued that this redefinition of femininity stems from ‘The Legend of the Goddess ritual, when a witch undertakes an initiation ceremony that makes her a high priestess. (Greenwood 2000, p. 163-4). According to Drury (2008, p. 91) Wiccan covens are led by a high priestess and perform ceremonies at particular times throughout the year:

The coven meetings held through the year at full moon are called esbats: there are usually thirteen of these meetings in a calendar year. The major gatherings in the

2 The number of people who were executed in the early modern European witchcraft trials varies between various historical sources, Monter estimates 35,000 deaths, Hutton (1999) 40, 000 deaths, Gaskill (2010) 40,000–50,000 deaths, 60,000 deaths (Levack 2006) and Barstow (1994) estimates in the upper range of 100,000 deaths. In the American context, an estimated eighty people throughout England's Massachusetts Bay Colony were accused of practicing witchcraft and between nineteen and twenty people were executed (Brandt 2014; Reed 2015 ).

28 witches’ calendar, the so-called Greater Sabbats, are related to the cycle of the seasons and the traditional times for sowing and harvesting crops.

Strongly related to the emphasis of cyclicity in witchcraft, like the Wiccan tradition, is the three- fold aspect of the Goddess as ‘Maid (youth, enchantment), Mother (maturity, fulfilment), and Crone (old age, wisdom)’ (Drury (2008, p. 91). The Crone aspect of the Goddess is often associated with a ‘connection to the ancestors, which in witchcraft is viewed as a rich resource of knowledge’ (Greenwood 2000, p. 31). The Sabbat most commonly connected to ancestors is Samhain (seasonal transition from autumn to winter), which is believed to be ‘a time when the spirits of the dead could return to earth once again to contact loved ones’ (Drury 2008, p. 91). The other festivals include: Yule (or winter solstice), Imbolc (or Candlemas), Eostar (or spring equinox), Beltane, Litha (or summer solstice), Lammas (or Lughnasad), Mabon (or fall equinox) and Samhain (or Halloween) (Salomonsen 2002, p. 48). For witches in both contemporary and early-modern Britain, the ‘Sabbats are a time for fellowship, ceremony, initiation, and ritual performances are followed by feasting’ (Drury 2008, p. 91). The Wheel of the Year is a ritual calendar used by witches (as well as other pagan and Wiccan groups) and draws on the ‘solar cycle, the annual seasonal and agricultural cycles, and the waxing and waning of the moon’ (Hume 1999, p. 290). Ritual became an important feature of witchcraft and Wicca in the 20th century.

The Elements of Witchcraft Rituals

The ritual elements Gardner sourced from Crowley’s Gnostic Mass were developed further by Alex Sanders and Vivianne Crowley (Pearson 2007). Vivianne Crowley suggests that the emphasis on ritual is what makes the tradition attractive to individuals with a Protestant background. One of the key elements of ritual is the delineation of sacred spaces from everyday spaces which Tanya M. Luhrmann (1989) observed in her study of Wiccan coven and ceremonial magic orders in London, as she outlined in her book titled, Persuasions of the Witches' Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England:

Chanting. Incense. Slow, rhythmic dancing. If the language describing magical ritual creates a suspension of disbelief, ritual itself involves a totality of word and action which magicians treat as, and seem to experience as, something wholly apart from everyday reality (Luhrmann 1989, p. 221).

29 Witch and author, Doreen Valiente (1989, p. 99) writes about the effect candles around a circle can have on creating sacred space within the everyday space of a home:

[A]s a room in an ordinary house becomes a different place by the light of the candles around the magic circle, so the naked witch dancing by the light of those candles is a different person from the usual inhabitant of that room.

Working within a circle (Hutton 1999) is often used as a means of creating sacred space for ritual work. Drury (2008), for example, describes how Wiccan ceremonies take place in circles that can be either inscribed on the floor in someone’s home or marked on the earth. In her study of contemporary British covens, Greenwood (2000, p. 83) observed that ‘witchcraft rituals tend to be conducted outside in woods or open spaces; the emphasis is on a connection with the land and its spirits’. This sense of connectiveness stems from the goal of living in harmony rather than separation from nature, in this way ritual is a means of closing this gap (Alder 2006 [1986], loc. 239). Once the circle is marked, the next stage of the circle casting process is to invite the four elements. Each of the elements are associated with a particular direction, which according to Drury (2008, p. 91-2), places earth in the north, air in the east, fire in the south and water in the west. If a ritual altar is being utilised, then it is commonly placed in the north quarter of the circle. Gods, goddesses or beings associated with the four quarters are then invited to be present in the circle. Casting a circle to demarcate sacred space from everyday space is important for achieving transformation, which is the primary goal of ritual performances, as Vivianne Crowley (1996, p. 200) put forward:

The true purpose of all magic is transformation. This can be transformation of the outer world but, more importantly, it is transformation of the inner world that is the aim.

This sentiment is echoed by Lynne Hume (1997, p. 143) who argues:

In spite of its seemingly theatrical mode, its tools and paraphernalia, ritual is only a means to an end. Ritual is the outer form whose purpose is to act as catalyst to the inner process... Neither ritual nor magic are intended to convert the sceptical or astound the novice, but are used as tools to transform the individual.

This idea of being able to transform oneself shares a similar philosophical foundation to the New Age movement and the human potential movement (Greenwood 2000). Other key characteristics they share include: ‘a reluctance to over-institutionalize; the recognition of the need for a spiritual idiom in feminine terms; a sense of animism; an emphasis on the non-

30 rational and a belief in reincarnation’ (Greenwood 2000, p. 9). The mechanism through which transformation is enacted, according to Greenwood (2000), is metaphor. She argues that ‘through metaphor and the linking of incongruous concepts, one can see things in new ways and create new knoweldges’ (Greenwood 2000, p. 43). For example, the ritual of ‘drawing down the moon’ is one of the more well-known rites developed during this period that is still practiced by contemporary witches in Britain and America (Alder2006 [1986]). This ritual inspired the name of one of the first extensive sociological studies of witchcraft and paganism in America which was conducted by Margot Alder (2006 [1986]), titled Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today. Alder (2006 [1986], loc. 461) claims she was sent a tape recording of this ritual by a coven based in Essex and upon listening she describes it as ‘one of the most serious and beautiful [rituals] in the modern craft’. In this ritual ‘the priest invokes into the priestess the Triple Goddess who is symbolised by the phases of the moon’ (Alder 2006 [1986], loc. 461). The process of invocation is one of ritual embodiment, whereby the priestess embodies the goddess.

The practice of ritual nudity is present in both Alexandrian and Gardnerian variants of witchcraft (Alder (2006 [1986]; Hutton 1999). Valiente (1989) describes ‘a naked witch dancing’ by candle-light, which Pearson (2007, p. 90) argues is an ‘inversion of social norms which proclaims a levelling of status, a denial of social distinctions, a uniformity – a process by which the coveners become equal’. Through this process, the body becomes a symbol of trust and intimacy (Pearson 2007, p. 90). Pearson (2007, p. 89) argues that ritual nudity is connected to Victor Turner’s concept of communitas, where ‘community is the being no longer side by side but with one another of a multitude of persons… a dynamic facing of, the others, a flowing from I to Thou’. In addition to being a catalyst for communitas and a symbol of trust and intimacy, Pearson (2007, p. 89) argues that ‘the practice of ritual nudity in Wicca can be regarded as a symbol of freedom’. For Gardner, ritual nudity represented freedom from institutional and Christian attitudes towards sexuality and the body.

Witchcraft, Greenwood (2000, p. 104) argues, ‘embraces a spirituality that rejects dominant social values concerning the body and sexuality. Further developing this point, she puts forward that the ‘body is the initial focal point of all Western magical work’, which is in direct contrast to Christianity that has a tendency to frame the body as sinful. This notion of the sacred body is present in Gardner’s practices which utilised the sexual energy of coven members (Greenwood 2000), which ties into the broader pagan movements’ hedonistic tendencies and open attitudes towards sexuality. For example, there are some contemporary Wiccan groups

31 who still use Gardner’s bondage and flagellation techniques into ritual (Pearson 2007, p. 85). Similar to Gardner, for Aleister Crowley employed sex as a weapon to use against the dominant Victorian social values regarding sexuality and the body. Pearson (2007, p. 78) argues that this was a ‘calculated act of transgression [that] violated and inverted the moral laws and sexual codes of both Christianity and the larger social order. For instance, nudity in witchcraft can be interpreted as a symbolic and material act of reclaiming of the female body. A sense of embodiment and sexual liberation was central to the early stages of development for both witchcraft and Wicca.

Understanding Witchcraft as a Revival of Ancient Paganism

Contemporary witchcraft has previously been described as a revival or reconstructionist religion. Purkiss (1996, p. 32) argues that modern witchcraft is a revived religion that draws syncretically on a variety of historiographically specific versions of ‘ancient Pagan religions’. Building on this definition, Pearson (2007, p. 104) defines witchcraft as ‘a magical religion that weaves nature and astral magic into a continuation of the hermetic doctrine of spiritual progress’. Hutton (2017, p. 169) supports this idea that witchcraft is a revival religion, arguing that modern witchcraft draws on ancient images and ideas for contemporary needs, as a part of a rejection of religions that have supposedly suppressed ancient ways of worship. Rountree (2015, pp. 1-2) describes the recent rise in paganism in Europe as revival groups that draw on images and ideas of ancient Europeans. Rountree (2015) and Hutton (2017) both argue that witchcraft is a revival religion that places focus on comparing how witchcraft is and is not similar to past religions. This study focuses on the ways witches weave together their personal narratives with this broader historical picture.

An important aspect of revivalism in witchcraft emerges through beliefs that draw on aspects of ancient paganism, such as the importance of ancestors (Lepage 2017; Morgain 2013). The emphasis on ancestors is closely connected to the formation of witchcraft as a personal identity (Salomonsen 2002). During the formative years of developing their sense of identity, witches honour the connections to their deceased family members by following the spiritual practices handed down to them (Salomonsen 2002, p. 114). Witchcraft rituals and practices are perceived as a way of healing the disconnection that exists between humans and nature (Magliocco 2012). The idea that showing reverence to one’s ancestors has the capacity to heal this rift stems from a belief in matriarchal prehistory – an imagined harmony and connectedness believed to be present in ancestral religions (Magliocco 2012, p. 154). Philip Carr-Gomm (1991, as cited in

32 Greenwood 2000, p. 31) writes about how ancestors are viewed as a source of knowledge and power:

In many Pagan practices ancestors are seen as a rich resource of knowledge. The druid Philip Carr-Gomm argues that when each generation stands on its own and ‘doesn’t feel connected to its lineage’ it experiences alienation and disconnection. But, conversely, when it is in touch with its ancestors, ‘when we sense them as living and supporting us, then we feel connected to the genetic life-stream, and we draw strength and nourishment from this’.

Witches who perform ancestor worship alongside more contemporary activities engage in what is termed eclecticism. Eclecticism is often referred to when describing the phenomenon of contemporary witchcraft, as part of a continuum developed by Strmiska (2005, p. 19), who describes how contemporary pagan groups fall on a spectrum; on one end is reconstructionism and on the other is eclecticism. Reconstructionists engage in a more scholarly pursuit of paganism, studying ancient folklore and languages (Strmiska 2005). Strmiska (2005, p. 20) argues that eclectic pagans are interested in the past; however, unlike reconstructionists, do not feel bound to the past religious traditions of a specific region:

[They are] more inclined to freely select religious ideas, practices, and even deities from a wide variety of sources, both European and non-European, and to combine them based on what they take to be their similarity or complementarity.

The process of ‘selecting and combining’ disparate elements needs further exploration – a deeper understanding of how people decide whether certain ideas are similar or complementary is needed. What do they draw on to make these decisions? How do they weave together ideas and practices and deities that may contradict one another?

A central term that has been woven into the cosmological tapestry of witchcraft is nature. The myth of contemporary witchcraft’s origins, which are re-told among witchcraft communities, ties their current practices and beliefs back to ancient pagan “nature” religions (Drury 2008; Hume 1999; Rountree 2003). Through classical anthropological approaches to studying sociality and identity through ritual, I explore the myriad of individual ways witches put their religious stories into practice through ritual.

33 The origin mythology of witchcraft fits within the revival/reconstructionist model (Hutton 2017; Strmiska 2005). First, as a revival mythology, the mythology tells the story of witchcraft as reviving a lineage of ancient witchcraft covens who were forcibly moved ‘underground’ during the rise of the Christian faith (Hutton 2017; Purkiss 1996). This mythology has strong literary ties to Murray’s (1921) proposal of a pre-Christian matriarchal religion surviving in secret, which was taken up later by early Reclaiming witches and authors (Starhawk 1979; Stone 1978; Valiente 1989). Sceptical witches embrace the power of this myth, without feeling the need to describe it as a truthful, historical recollection – instead believing that it is an invented or constructed history popularised by Gardner (1954) on the basis of European esoteric traditions (Salomonsen 2002, p. 67). The idea of participating in the ‘Old religion’, for both sceptical and non-sceptical witches, is an exercise in re-enchantment. The idea of participating in the ‘Old religion’, for both sceptical and non-sceptical witches, is an exercise in re- enchantment. McPhillips and Hume (2006, p. i.) define enchantment as ‘the sensation when one experiences events or circumstances that produce a sense of the mysterious, the weird and the uncanny (Schneider 1993)’.The stories of the old religion, the ancient roots of a modern phenomenon, are remembered and shared, enacted and woven into the fabric of their lives. As Hutton (2017) argues, nature has not always been associated with witchcraft; however, as I elaborate below, contemporary witches often weave nature into their own historical re-telling of the origins of witchcraft.

II. Witchcraft in the North American Context

The early stages of development in modern paganism and witchcraft were influenced by a number of key figures. In her study of witches in San Francisco, Jone Salomonsen (2002, p. 92) argues that Raymond Buckland was an influential figure, who was initiated into the Craft by one of Gerald Gardner’s high priestesses and subsequently introduced Gardnerian witchcraft to America. As Buckland later developed it, ‘Seax Wicca became an accessible tradition available to anyone, and published one the first books of public Craft rituals’ (Alder 2006 [1986], loc. 1693). Another figure who had impact on the emergence of paganism and witchcraft in the North American context was Mary Daly who, according to Griffin (1995, p. 35), in November of 1971 ‘led "hundreds" on an "Exodus from patriarchal religion" by walking out at the conclusion of a sermon she delivered in the Harvard Memorial Church’. A few months

34 following this event, in Los Angeles, the first coven witches who ‘practiced "the Craft" as a religion, began to meet under the guidance of Zsuzsanna Budapest’ (Griffin 2002, p. 255):

On the Winter Solstice of 1971, a year after she arrived in California, Budapest and six other women created the Susan B. Anthony Coven Number 1, a group of separatist feminist Witches.

In addition to these formative events there were a number of significant texts that were published in the 1970s that contributed to the spread and rise of paganism and witchcraft. In 1976 an art historian Merlin Stone published When God Was a Woman. Two years later feminist historian and foremother of the Goddess movement Carol P. Christ (1978) authored the influential essay Why Women Need the Goddess. Another influential text that was published in 1979 was Drawing Down the Moon, written by Margot Adler which took a comprehensive look at modern nature-based religions in America. Reclaiming witchcraft was one of the movements that emerged during this period, and was founded in 1979 by two Jewish women, Starhawk and Diane Baker. Starhawk published a number of important books that were significant in the development of the broader paganism and witchcraft movement as well as for Reclaiming witchcraft more specifically. She is a pivotal figure for both the development of witchcraft and the Reclaiming tradition and she is currently active in the Reclaiming community. Her contribution will be discussed later in this chapter.

In 1995 Loretta Orion (1995) published her anthropological study of the Wiccan and wider Pagan community in America, titled Never Again the Burning Times: Paganism Revisited. While it is important as one of the first studies of witchcraft and paganism in America, Orion (1995) has been criticised for being too invested in the pagan community. Luhrmann (1996, p. 225) described the book as an ‘insider’s book with a scholarly surface’. Helen Berger’s (1999) sociological study of American paganism and witchcraft, titled A Community of Witches: Contemporary Neo-Paganism and Witchcraft in the United States, provides a more detailed social analysis of the community. She describes Wiccan rituals as a ‘technology of the self’ (Berger 1999, p. xiii), and demonstrates how witches and pagans form communities by ‘defining the position as outside of the mainstream and a sharing a life world’ (Berger 1999, p. 66). Sabina Magliocco (2004) builds on Berger’s (1999) study by delving deeper into the formative importance of folklore in pagan communities, and how witches forge their identities. The fieldwork undertaken by Orion (1995), Berger (1999) and Magliocco (2004) form the picture of a movement that places emphasis on both individual expression and the importance

35 of community. The American pagan and witchcraft communities emerged against a backdrop of social change that was occurring, particularly in the form of social movements such as feminism. These movements contributed to the development of this dual focus on individual expression and new(ish) emergent forms of community.

Second-Wave Feminism and the Sacred Feminine

The figures and texts mentioned above were all published during the 1970s which were heavily influenced by the late-1960s psychedelic counterculture which ‘fuelled a fascination with diverse wisdom traditions and various forms of ‘alternative spirituality’ and esoteric teachings’ (Drury 2008, p. 105). During this era of psychedelic counterculture ‘religion progressively became more privatized and individualised’ (Berger 2009, p. 501). This emphasis on the individual emerged, in part, from the emphasis placed on personal growth found in ‘feminist consciousness raising groups’ (Lozano and Foltz 1990, p. 220). In her study, Wendy Griffin (1995, p. 37) points out that while ‘the Goddess movement and feminist witchcraft are routinely criticized as being white women's movements’ she found that this criticism was not entirely valid for the groups she studied. What Griffin’s (1995) study highlights is the need for a more nuanced conversation regarding the role of ethnicity which previous studies have attempted (see Eller 2000; Magliocco 2004; Morgain 2010). Later in this chapter I will discuss this topic within an Australian context. The influence of second-wave feminism on the American cultural milieu saw the emergence of feminist witchcraft, which has produced a particular cosmology.

Those who practice feminist witchcraft, according to Griffin (1995, p. 39), see ‘women's oppression and environmental abuse as intimately linked and firmly rooted in patriarchal religions’. Through this feminist perspective the primary critique of what major religions, or ‘patriarchal religions’, neglect to speak to is women’s experience. Mary Daly argued that ‘feminist witchcraft was an appropriate alternative to a model of the universe in which a male God ruled the cosmos and thereby controlled social institutions to the detriment of women’ (Drury 2008, p. 105). Following the exodus led by Mary Daly in 1971 ‘witches began gathering in the hundreds in the mountains to celebrate their visions of female divinity in religious rituals’ (Griffin 1995, p. 35). Since this thesis focuses on the subject of identity, it is important to address how second-wave feminism influenced new visions of female divinity and how the witch fits within this particular discourse.

36 For example, Salomonsen (2002, p. 3) describes how the idea of the ‘witch as a healer of the self and bender of the world’ was popularised by Starhawk, who envisioned the witch as a ‘modern magician whose work is to liberate patriarchal culture and heal its wounds, at both a social and an individual level, and initiate a new age’. Alder (2006 [1986], loc. 3459) demonstrates how witchcraft provides a variety of new faces for women to draw from:

After all, if for thousands of years the image of woman has been tainted, we must either go back to when untainted images exist or create new images from within ourselves. Women are doing both. Whether the images exist in a kind of atavistic memory thousands of years old (as many women believe) or are simply powerful models that can be internalized, women are beginning to create ritual situations in which these images become real. Priestess McFarland writes: We are each Virgin Huntresses, we are each Great Mothers, we are Death Dealers who hold out the promise of rebirth and regeneration. We are no longer afraid to see ourselves as her daughters, nor are we afraid to refuse to be victims of this subtle Burning Time. The Wicce is Revolutionary.

Griffin (1995) writes that those who gather in the mountains are celebrating visions of female divinity in their rituals. Rituals are an integral component of witchcraft for the embodiment of these new visions of sacred femininity. Peg Aloi and Hannah Johnston (2008) in their study, titled New Generation Witches: Teenage Witchcraft in Contemporary Culture, highlighted the centrality of ritual, particularly rituals of self-transformation, for young witches living in America. Similarly, During the mid-2000s Ezzy and Berger (2009) conducted 90 interviews with young people across Australia, America and Britain and produced similar findings. The development of rituals, such as rites of passage or celebration, requires ‘a social and symbolic field within which new models of agency and religious identity are formed, for both women and men’ (Salomonsen 2002, p.3). This new social and symbolic field is one that redefines that relationship between the spiritual and the material - through the medium of ritual. One of the defining features of this relationship is nature, Chas Clifton in her study titled, Her hidden children: the rise of Wicca and paganism in America, describes how witchcraft is articulated as a nature religion which emphasises the interconnectedness of all things, an idea derived from Western esotericism, but also from American understandings of nature. The next section of this chapter will focus on the ways this relationship manifests in the southern hemisphere especially when the cosmological orientation of witchcraft festivals and rituals are (generally) designed in accordance with the seasons and cycles of the north.

37 III. Antipodean Witchcraft and Paganism

Paganism and witchcraft in Australia began emerging in the late 1960s and 1970s, according to Hume (1997, p. 35) when ‘people who had been initiated into Gardnerian and Alexandrian covens in England and the US began filtering into, or returning to, Australia’. Covens that began forming during these initial stages were influenced by Gerald Gardner and Alex Sanders, as well as others including Starhawk (1979) and Doreen Valiente (1989). One of the earliest public figures in Australian witchcraft was Rosaleen Norton. Johnson (2002, as cited in Drury 2008, p. 8) describes Rosaleen ‘as society’s scapegoat, the witch on the outskirts of the community, a demon required to reinforce family values and Christian morality’. The broader socio-political context of Australia during this time saw an ‘increasing intake of migrants from many European and Asian countries, and began a process of becoming a multi-cultural, multi-faith society associated in turn with a range of new religions (Cusak 2003). Prior to this, Australia’s religious profile remained relatively stable with a primarily Christian population (made up of a combination of Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists and Roman Catholics). The 1970s saw the religious diversity of Australia increase, with ‘significant and growing minorities of Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus, a broader range of Christian denominations, new religious movements and ‘nature’ religions’ (Bouma 2012, p. 47). The social conditions for religiosity began to change as the religious and spiritual moved away from the control of religious organisations, and out from the domination of churches. For example, in the 1970s new religious movements/nature religions including witchcraft, paganism and Wicca, according to Hume (1997, p. 35) began to grow through organised classes and pagan newsletters.

Hume (1997, p. 37) argues one of the major contributions to the rise of witchcraft and paganism in Australia was the New Age movement:

In the 1980s there was a widespread increase of interest in New Age philosophies, alternative healing, quality of life literature, and specialty New Age bookstores selling books, magazines, newsletters and an enormous array of do-it-yourself occult paraphernalia from crystal balls to dream-catchers...The availability of literature added impetus to the upsurge of pagan activity in small localised groups. Pagan activities were on the rise in most Australian states and localised private rituals were attended upon invitation only. Book such as Starhawk's The Spiral Dance and Cunningham's Wicca for the Solitary Practitioner set out the principles of modern witchcraft.

38 Hume (1997) points out above that pagan activities and localised private rituals emerged in Australia in the 1980s. Like the development of witchcraft in America, these types of gatherings were an important factor in the emergence of paganism and witchcraft Australia. In her landmark study of paganism and witchcraft in Australia, Lynne Hume (1997, p. 37-38) notes some of the gatherings that were initiated during this period including, the first Mount Franklin festival (in 1981), the first Australian Wiccan Conference was held in South Australia (in 1984) and Pagan Yule gatherings were held in South Australia (in 1984 and 1985). These initial events led to ongoing gatherings in the 1990s, such as the annual Pagan Summer Gathering (PSG), organised by the Church of All Worlds and ‘held in the bush on the outskirts of Canberra, at a camping site amid forested pines and tall eucalyptus trees’ (Hume 1996, p. 3). In her study of Dianic covens in New Zealand, Kathryn Rountree participated in Sabbat rituals, social gatherings and meetings run by a coven based in Auckland that was active for 13 years. Similarly, Kathleen McPhillips (2000, p. 34) participated in a women's spirituality group based in New South Wales, Australia that also ran for 13 years – attending monthly rituals solstice celebrations, equinox rituals and Christmas and New Year celebrations:

These rituals include our families and friends in the wider community, and help to create continuity and normality around the idea of ritualising certain events and aspects of life (McPhillips 2000, p. 34).

Douglas Ezzy is an Australian sociologist who has been involved in the pagan and witchcraft community in Australia for many years. In addition to his academic work on witchcraft (Ezzy 2007 & 2014) he has also published a book targeted at practitioners that speaks specifically to Australian witchcraft praxis. In a chapter on witchcraft in the bush, two of his participants reflect on what rituals look like for them, living in rural Australia:

[W]hen the night is dark and the weather is right, we go up to our favourite ridge. There, defined by forest flowers and eucalypt sprigs, the sacred space is laid out on the ground. After settling down, we sit comfortably on the grass, put out the candle and, in complete silence, wait. Gradually, with the cessation of our own noise (for we humans are the most noisy and intrusive of all beings), the night sounds become audible. Because we remain still and silent within our circle, the forest community— the animals, the birds, the insects, the frogs— is untroubled by our being there. It carries on with its nocturnal business and treats us as part of the landscape. Sometimes, as a whisper of air passes through the trees, just for a fleeting moment when it is least expected, a great hush

39 descends upon the forest, and the presence of very special company can be detected (Ezzy 2003, p. 243).

The aspect of life that is echoed throughout this vignette is one of deep ecology, or animism (Harvey 2005; Harvey 2013). Previous studies have identified the presence of animistic patterns of thought and practices in witchcraft (Greenwood 2000; Magliocco 2012; Rountree 2012; Salomonsen 2002). Magliocco (2012, p. 154) argues that the reason contemporary pagans perceive nature as sentient and sacred, stems from a foundational belief that ‘ancient pagans lived in greater harmony with the earth than modern, post-industrial Westerners’. This belief is significant because it is reflected in the key beliefs held by witches; Rountree (2012, p. 306), for example, takes an in-depth look into the role of animistic thought in paganism and argues that within a pagan worldview, the ‘natural, supernatural, and human social worlds are not separate from, or models for/of, one another but constitute one indivisible sacred world’. On the other hand, the presence of animism in witchcraft has not been thoroughly explored. On animism, Salomonsen (2002, p. 33) writes about watching Starhawk teach using a bottle of water containing water she had gathered from different lakes, rivers and oceans around the world during her travels. Starhawk collects the water while she travels, which symbolises the interconnection of these bodies of water. The idea of interconnection is a key part of the overarching concept of animism in witchcraft. The significance of seasonal festivals in witchcraft and the underlying emphasis placed on the human and non-human community points to the animistic beliefs underpinning practices in witchcraft. This is not assuming there is a direct likeness between Indigenous and witchcraft perspectives, however it is important to highlight the cosmological similarities. Relationality, is at the heart of this concept and to further expand on this point I draw on Harvey’s (2006, as cited in Rose 2008, p. 110) definition of animism:

[The] recognition that the world is full of persons, only some human, and that life is always lived in relationship to others. Indigenous Australian thought seeks out pattern, difference, association and among persons. A person in this context is both autonomous and enmeshed in relations of interdependence, always bearing responsibilities for others, and always the beneficiary of the actions of others.

Cycles are a pattern that hold significance in witchcraft and the Wheel of the Year embodies this idea, relating the cycles of the seasons with the cycles of human life. Smith (2010) observed during her research among a witch community in Western Australia, how they ‘re-engineered

40 northern hemisphere doctrine and processes into rituals to meet their southern needs’ (Smith 2010, p. 13). Similarly, Hume (1999, p. 287) observed that witches attempted to transpose northern hemisphere processes and mythologies into the context of ‘Australia's vastness and its extremes of geography, climate, flora, and fauna’. The Wheel of the Year is intended to celebrate a ‘sense of living communion with the land’ (Drury 2008, p. 99) and functions as a ritual signifying what lies at the heart of witchcraft cosmology, which is an immanent connection with nature. The seasonal festivals in the Wheel of the Year provide a sense of structure for everyday witchcraft rituals where they order ‘experiences of time, and help[ing] to establish[ing] routines, schedules and creating a sense of shared temporal regularity’ (McGuire 2008, p. 3). The creation of a sense of shared temporal regularity or ‘ecological time’ comes through the patterns of the seasons (Rose 2008, p. 113). The meaning of these patterns is expressed through stories. For example, Samhain (anglicised as Halloween) is known as the witches’ New Year and the time ‘when the dead come to visit the living, is engendered by the memories of the living’ (Morgain 2010, p. 252). Beltane (anglicised as Easter) is the festival that celebrates ‘the burgeoning of the earth’s new growth and human sexuality’ (Rountree 2003, p. 139). The belief system that underlies these festivals and their stories are a ‘regard for the earth as sacred, a living entity with its own indwelling spirit' (Hume 1997, p. 44). The social gatherings and festivals in which witches participate draw on these stories to inform their rituals and overall sense of belonging.

Gathering the Witches

The embodied knowledge that is created by this connected way of being in the world, produces a shared ethics. Ethics takes into account the entangled materialisations people are a part of, including new configurations and new subjectivities (Barad 2007 cited in Haraway). Witchcraft gatherings that take place in secluded areas, such as the Australian bush, represent attempts to configure new forms of sociality. Ezzy (2014, p. 15) writes about one such gathering in his book Sex, Death and Witchcraft, called Faunalia:

Faunalia is a pseudonym for an Australian Pagan festival that has been a yearly event since it began in 2000 and ended in 2009. It takes place over a five-day extended long weekend in a secluded rural bush location approximately two hours drive from a large Australian city. There is bunkhouse accommodation, a shared dining room, a gymnasium and a large open area with a central bonfire…Information about Faunalia is disseminated in a variety of ways. Most people who attend know each other through

41 participation in smaller covens or through other festivals…Faunalia is a peak experience, and the rituals are intense and profoundly transformative.

Like the festival Ezy (2014) describes above, Hume (1997, p. 95) observed in her study that ‘one has to be in the networking system to find out about gatherings and rituals’. The theme of sociality and belonging in witchcraft has emerged in a variety of studies, such as Greenwood (2000, p. 175), who focuses on how communities create a ‘shared feeling of belonging and merging tends to a “shamanic” ecstatic sense of oneness’. Related to this sense of oneness, Klassen (2012) puts forward, is a sense of ontological security that stems from a feeling of belonging to the cosmos, which ‘provides a meaning to life for those who hold nature to be ultimate’. Since witches reject the nature/culture binary, Klassen (2012) also argues that people are ‘natural beings, imbedded within nature, rather than separate from it’. On the basis of this argument, Klassen (2012) proposes that from this sense of belonging emerges an ecological responsibility and a call to review people’s relations with one another (especially in terms of diversity). A nature religion and community, based on this proposal, ‘lends itself to an ecological and multicultural ethic’ (Klassen 2012, p. 94). Locating the gatherings and festivals in the bush symbolises the rejection of separating nature and culture. Rituals function as containers for a ‘shamanic, ecstatic sense of oneness’ (Greenwood 2000, p. 175) to be achieved. Hume (1997, p. 7) argues that rituals draw on a range of sensory and embodied techniques to create a liminal space in order to facilitate transformative experiences where:

[R]eality is momentarily suspended or abrogated. Communication is not limited to mere words. An entire sensory repertoire is used to convey dramatic messages: breathing, dance movements, body posture and decoration, masks and paint, olfactory stimulation, the use of light and shadow, the mystery of foreign words, tone inflection, and even silence, all of which are fully employed to heighten activity and emotional response. In play, there is a freedom from normative constraints; one steps out of one time into another and enters an enclave within which is seems anything may happen.

The enclave of timelessness Hume (1997) describes above, has been theorised in the field of ritual studies as the liminal period. Van Gennep’s (1960) tripartite schema of separation, liminality and re-incorporation first discerned the common form in all ceremonies of transition. Where the transfer from one social status to another is to be expressed, he noted how material symbols of transition were inevitably used during the rite itself. Individual life in society, Van Gennep (1960, p. 3) contends, can be understood through the framework of passages – each of

42 which has rites attached that are culturally dependent. Rites of passage, he observes, occur when individuals move from one stage of life to another, for example: ‘from kindergarten to primary school to secondary school to university; from maiden to wife to widow; from warrior to elder to ancestor’ (Van Gennep 1960, p. 3). At the heart of Van Gennep’s (1960) theory is ritual, which Turner (1969, p. 243) defines as, ‘formal behaviour prescribed for occasions not given over to technological routine that have reference to beliefs in mystical beings or powers’. Victor Turner’s (1964) work builds directly upon Van Gennep’s (1960) foundational work in the field of ritual studies. Notably, he draws on Van Gennep’s (1960) tripartite schema, further developing the sociocultural properties of liminality. In his chapter, Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period, Turner (1964, p. 46) refers to the liminal period as ‘the period of the margin’. He uses this conceptual framework for understanding the structural properties of initiation rituals where an individual moves from one ‘state’ to another.

Since the release of these foundational studies, anthropological approaches to ritual have undergone a transformation, shifting from a focus on rituals as a ‘what’ (Van Gennep 1908; Turner 1964, 1978), to focusing on the ‘how’ in rituals (Bell 1992; Grimes 2013; Kapferer 1997; Salomonsen 2002). Most important is the emergence of the primacy of the body in rituals. For example, the ‘symbolic language, objects, imagery and words’ (Salomonsen 2002, p. 163) used in rituals that foreground the body. Griffin (1995, p. 41) writes that each new vision of femininity, each image of the witch, ‘represents a physical manifestation of the connection between the material the spiritual as well as a liberation of female sexuality from concepts of sin’. These images contribute to a new cosmology, one that Griffin (1995, p. 41) argues offers the ‘possibility of an embodied way of knowing and being’. To capture the embodied dimensions of witchcraft I draw on phenomenology, which emphasises the lived experience of inhabiting a body or ‘the living body’ (Husserl 1970). Within the theoretical framework of phenomenology, the concept of embodiment aims to overcome the problem of separating the mind from the body (Descartes 1988 [1952]). Embodiment reflects the idea that it is through the body that all aspects of existence are lived (Csordas 1990). Embodiment implies that lived experiences cannot be understood in isolation from the historicised logics that orient spiritual practices. Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) approach to the body explains how these logics are oriented through embodiment to instill ontological existence with a sense of continuity. Related to embodiment is the concept of embodied practices, which refers to Mauss’ (1950[1935]) classic concept of ‘techniques of the body’, where the body is simultaneously tool, agent and object.

43 He uses the examples of swimming and running (Mauss 1950[1935], pp. 82-83) to exemplify how techniques of the body are culturally mediated processes.

For example, Rountree (2003, p. 89) observed how witches performed ‘ritual transformation of wine into menstrual blood – reclaiming a symbol of femininity that is normally erased’ (Rountree 2003, p. 89). The ‘performance’ quality of rituals comes from dramatological elements drawn on to create an affective atmosphere and increase the efficacy rituals (Hume 1997) to grasp social and political events in different ways (Kapferer 1997) and as a form of praxis (Salomonsen 2002, p. 16). The formalising qualities of rituals refers to how rituals are ‘traditionalising instruments’ (Rountree 2003, p. 164) and ‘organised, rather than spontaneous’ (Salomonsen 2002, p. 163). According to Salomonsen (2002, p. 163), the efficacy of rituals ‘traditionalising’ power lies in their pattern – ‘not happening once but repeated according to cycles’ following the same pattern. In her study, Morgain (2012, p. 534) observed ritual patterns among Reclaiming witches and the power of these patterns:

The ritual intention for that night, which was posted on the wooden wall of the central dining cabin, reinforced this overarching expectation: ‘To relentlessly unmask as we embrace the dark mystery and enter the Realm of Annwn’. Thus the expectation established by Reclaiming custom and by the teachers’ framing of this ritual is that it would conform to the following pattern [my emphasis]: a solemn occasion tapping into intense and difficult feelings, which have lain dormant, hidden or suppressed by people’s traumas and the alienating effects of social conditioning in modernity, and which are now ready to surface, to be acknowledged and transformed.

According to Mauss’ (1950) theory, each society has its own special habits that embody culture. A craft can be defined as being competent in one particular habit, knowing what to do, (skill, presence of mind and habit combined) (Mauss 1950[1935], p. 78). Habitual practices that occur in everyday life, for many people, make the sacred more ‘vividly real and present through the experiencing body’ (McGuire 2008, p. 13). To examine people’s bodily and emotional expressions of the sacred, I draw on McGuire’s (2008, p. 12) concept, lived religion, to ‘distinguish the actual experience of religious persons from the prescribed religion of institutionally defined beliefs and practices’. This is necessary because outside of institutionally defined religiosity, ‘religious practices are far more diverse and complex, eclectic, and malleable’ (McGuire 2008, p. 17). The primary reason I use McGuire’s (2008) concept is

44 because it represents an attempt to make sense of people’s everyday lives through a myriad of ways:

This focus on individual religion necessitates examining not only people's beliefs, religious ideas, and moral values (i.e., cognitive aspects of individual religion) but also, and more important, their everyday spiritual practices, involving their bodily and emotional, as well as religious, experiences and expressions. (McGuire 2008, p. 17)

McGuire’s (2008) emphasis on the need to consider people’s lived experiences is, in essence, a phenomenological approach to religion. A phenomenological approach to religion, McGuire’s (2008) approach, considers people’s religious practices and the practical coherence required to fit into an individual’s everyday life. The practices need to involve their bodies, otherwise they are impractical. This is why embodied practices are the focus of this study, since it is through such practices that the material aspects of people’s lives are connected with the spiritual. Two material aspects that effect people’s embodied experiences of witchcraft are – class and ethnicity.

Class and Ethnicity in Witchcraft

Studies of witchcraft show that the demographic profile of those who participate in witchcraft are predominantly white, middle class and well-educated (Berger & Ezzy 2007; Ezzy 2014; Lewis 2012; Morgain 2010; Rountree 2002; Salomonsen 2002). The combination of each of these factors contributes to the building of social beliefs and values as an overarching worldview. In this study, these factors are also present. Understanding the epistemological orientation of the young people involved in this study is necessary in order to trace the meaning making processes that are both invisible and visible in the witchy community. Rountree (2003, p. 15) observed in her study in New Zealand that witches are mostly middle class, well- educated, liberal-minded feminist women. Two perspectives are distinctive in her observation that are not addressed in the studies listed above – feminism and liberalism. Rountree (2003, p. 192) terms this ‘feminist witchcraft’, which she explains ‘emphasises holism, partnership, self- empowerment and self-determination and sees dualistic paradigms, mind/body splitting and social models based on dominance and oppression as damaging and immoral’. Liberalism, in the context of her study, refers to the protection and freedom of the individual. The presence of these two ideologies emerges from attaining a high level of education (Surridge 2016).

45 Higher levels of education are congruent with the second factor commonly associated with this demographic, which is whiteness. Berger and Ezzy (2007, p. 35) highlight this in their study of American witches indicating that ‘the statistics on young witches are consistent with demographic studies of older Witches, which indicate that most are white, well-educated and middle class’ (Berger & Ezzy 2007, p. 35). The attraction of paganism, witchcraft and New Age spiritualities for white individuals over traditional forms of religion has been previously documented (Rountree 2015). The attraction of witchcraft for young, well-educated and white Australians is a result of, in part, the emerging religion’s emphasis on individualism and individual choice (Berger & Ezzy 2014). The idea of spiritual seekership (Berger & Ezzy 2014) plays a role in the desire to exercise agency over one’s religious life and spiritual identity. In the Australian context, ethnicity is stratified with whiteness constructed as superior to Aboriginal people, Torres Strait Islanders and non-white immigrants (Hage 1998; Perera 2009). Reclaiming witchcraft (Salomonsen 2002) is a tradition that actively asserts itself as inclusive of all races; however, only a few studies in this field (Morgain 2012) have considered the role of ethnicity in the Australian Reclaiming witchcraft community.

Australian working-class and middle class values of giving everyone a “fair go” are reflected in the structure of Reclaiming witchcraft (Salomonsen 2002). This value is a re-articulation of Reclaiming witchcraft’s overarching principles and beliefs that pertain to destabilising capitalist-based inequality. Reclaiming WitchCamps host symbolic auctions where individuals are encouraged to bid on items with sentimental rather than monetary value. The money raised through these events are used to subsidise student scholarships for young people who do not have the means to attend the camps. Other instances where this value of equitable access can be observed is when costs for events are scaled. For students or people working casually, the costs are lower than those who are employed full-time. This is part of their aim to promote social equity and sustain an egalitarian community structure. Despite these efforts at addressing wealth inequality, inequity persists, which was observed in Morgain’s study (2015, p. 189) of Reclaiming witchcraft.

Previous research conducted in the field of New Age spirituality posits that New Age self-help rhetoric reproduces neoliberal individualism (Young and D’Arcy 2017). Morgain (2010, p. 331) argues that ‘the hegemony of commoditisation impacts upon the forms of the gift and, therefore, on how relational elements of individualism are expressed’. Others claim that New Age spiritualists are engaging in a form of ‘new age orientalisation’, whereby Western entrepreneurs capitalise on and market Eastern religious and medicinal wellbeing techniques to

46 middle class consumers (Islam 2012). The consumption of other cultures through commodities, resulting from processes of capitalist globalisation, creates a path of seeking spiritual significance based on the belief that the divine or God can be found within oneself (Heelas 2008). The self-help rhetoric echoes these beliefs. The significance for the witchcraft community, which is itself attached to the broader pagan and New Age spiritual movement, is that witchcraft attracts participants through self-help rhetoric with the opportunity to engage with cultures other than Western ones (Islam 2012; Possamai 2000; Young 2017). Reclaiming witchcraft is a prime example of a witchcraft tradition that engages with other cultures as well as activism.

IV. The Reclaiming Witchcraft Tradition

A recent study of Reclaiming witchcraft in San Francisco was conducted by Australian anthropologist Rachel Morgain (2015, p. 175), who defines Reclaiming as ‘an anarchist and ecofeminist-informed tradition, known among Pagans for its focus on activism and its radical, world-transforming outlook’. The Reclaiming witchcraft tradition was initially founded in 1979, by Starhawk and Diane Baker who formed a community of feminist witches with the intention of teaching them about the goddess and her rituals. According to Alder (2006 [1986], loc. 2323), ‘Reclaiming has never had a single leader however Starhawk is considered one of the prime theologians’. One of Starhawk’s primary contributions to the Reclaiming tradition has been the emphasis on political action and creating different notions of power. For example, in 1982 after a political protest—a blockade of the proposed nuclear plant at Diablo Canyon, and Reclaiming’s first Spiral Dance—the community came together as the Reclaiming Collective (Alder 2006 [1986], loc. 2330). The Reclaiming tradition is one that is ‘eclectic and based on personal empowerment and is structurally non-hierarchical’ (Alder 2006 [1986], loc. 2330) which is reflected in its use of consensus decision making methods. The use of the term ‘witch’ stems from the Reclaiming understanding of feminist spirituality:

[A] spirituality that includes men and women—is based on an analysis of power that sees all systems of oppression as interrelated and rooted in a structure of domination and control. “Power within” is contrasted with “Power over” (Alder 2006 [1986], loc. 2330).

As a tradition that stems from a feminist spirituality and casts a critical lens over forms of power – the name of this movement is fitting, as Roberts (2011, p. 241) argues, ‘ Reclaiming signifies

47 the reclaiming of personal power as creators and as healers, political and social power to fight against oppressive societal institutions’. The connection between spirituality and political action, can be attributed in large part, to one of its founders – Starhawk. Salomonsen (2002, p. 1) argues that an ‘important factor to Reclaiming’s success is the fame and distribution of Starhawk’s (1979) books to a wide public, in particular her first one The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the ancient Religion of the Great Goddess’. Since Starhawk and Diane Baker first formed the Reclaiming community in San Francisco, the tradition ‘has grown into a large movement, with sister communities all over the US, Canada and western Europe’. Reclaiming witchcraft also has ‘groups and communities in many parts of the United States, as well as in Germany, Spain, Canada, and the Netherlands’ (Alder 2006 [1986], loc. 2323-2344). According to the Reclaiming website (2019) there are communities also active in Australia. Reclaiming witches are well-known for running witchcamps, which Alder (2006 [1986], loc. 2323-2344) describes as ‘weeklong intensives where drumming, dancing, chanting, storytelling, guided visualization, trance, and energy work take place’. She claims that ‘at least five thousand people have experienced these camps’ and when the 2006 version of her book went to press there were approximately twenty annual Witchcamps in America and Europe.

This thread of political action that casts a critical eye over structures of power runs through the centre of Reclaiming and can be attributed, in large part, to Starhawk’s training in Victor and Cora Anderson’s Feri tradition. The Feri tradition, according to Alder (2006 [1986], loc. 2302), was created by the poet Victor Anderson who was inspired by a range of cultural sources including ‘Hawaiian Kahuna, African Voudoun and Southern Appalachia’. Victor Anderson interpreted elements of these cultures, through his lens as a poet which Starhawk later brought into Reclaiming. Alder (2006 [1986) describes raising a cone of power as common form of ritual work in Reclaiming witchcraft. Starhawk (1979, p. 89) describes this experience:

The light begins to spin, a shining wheel of breath, turning and turning. Voices rise higher. The light spirals upward, faster, faster, as it narrows toward the top. The sound is indescribable; the voices are the shrieking wind, the howling of wolves, the high cries of tropical birds, the swarming of bees, the sigh of receding waves. The cone builds and builds a pulsing spiral, a unicorn's horn, rare and marvellous. Its tip cannot be seen. It is flooded with color: red, blue, green, sunlight, moonlight.

Raising cone of power can be achieved through a number of means including chanting, dancing, or running around the circle. The cone of power Starhawk (1979, p. 89) describes above was

48 conjured using chanting, her rich description of the physical effects, explaining how ‘energy is ecstasy’ and ‘when we drop the barriers and let power pour through, it floods the body, pulsing through every nerve, arousing every artery, coursing like a river that cleanses as it moves’. As Starhawk explains her experience of raising a cone of power she intertwines her own body (arteries) with the land (river) through metaphorical language. Just like her teacher Victor Anderson, Starhawk is a poet. Metaphor and poetry are also used when aspecting, which is when ‘the Goddess, symbolized by the moon, is "drawn down" into a priestess of the coven who…goes into [a] trance and is "possessed by" or "incarnates" or "aspects" the Goddess’ (Alder 2006 [1986], loc. 2018). Australian Reclaiming witches and authors Jane Meredith and Gede Parma (2018) define aspecting as ‘akin to possessory rites and practices of other magical, Pagan or spirit-working cultures and traditions – in Reclaiming it refers to the broad range of inviting a deity to be present within one’s body’. Reclaiming rituals draw on these techniques – raising a cone of power and aspecting deities – which were both observed at the WitchCamp I attended as part of my fieldwork. Gatherings such as WitchCamps are key location for ritual performances and strengthening community bonds.

As noted above, gatherings such as coven meetings all the way through to events with larger attendances such as Reclaiming Witchcamps have been part of the fabric of witchcraft since its British beginnings. The Reclaiming tradition places emphasis on community (Alder 2006 [1986]), which Morgain (2015, p. 181) argues stems from the belief that ‘people are not in fact unified, bounded and separate, but are partial, relational beings whose lives and personal evolution are at every point interwoven with others’. This belief emerges from the Reclaiming reconfiguration of power, which has resulted in what Morgain (2015, p. 181) calls ‘a very different kind of sociality from “Western individualism”’. The imperative to interlink spirituality and political action, is embodied through the rituals Reclaiming witches perform at Witchcamps. The rituals Reclaiming witches perform are not prescribed, however they do draw on frameworks that originated in the formative stages of witchcraft, such as ancestor worship. For example, Morgain (2010, p. 252) observed how this manifests specifically in the Reclaiming community she researched:

Reclaiming members have adopted the phrase ‘What is remembered, lives’ to express their sense that what happens at Samhain, when the dead come to visit the living, is engendered by the memories of the living. Such an understanding is reflected in the claim above that the dead were “invoked by thought and memory.

49 The subject of ancestral worship has received extensive attention in anthropology, in terms of the cosmological significance of ancestors (Douglas 1970), rituals for hearing ancestors (Stoller 1989), to ancestors and the Dreaming (Rose 2008). The role of ancestors emerges in anthropological studies of witchcraft as well. Jenny Butler (2014), for example, writes about the significance of ancestors in Irish neopaganism. Greenwood (2000), Rountree (2003) and Morgain (2013) each discusses the role of ancestors in witchcraft, as a part of the cosmology of the Otherworld and as a part of their symbolic systems. One of the patterns that emerges in accounts of ancestor worship, is the interconnection between people, the land and ancestors.

Ancestors and Existential Continuity

Ancestors emerge as a feature of witchcraft that is woven into the fabric of witches’ rituals as well as their everyday lives. Greenwood (2000, p. 24) puts forward the notion that witchcraft, like most cultures, has a notion of the Otherworld or an alternative reality (removed from the everyday) where ancestors reside. In her analysis of the role of sleep among a Reclaiming witchcraft community in Oregon, Morgain (2013, p. 167) describes how ancestors are not removed from the everyday, but are in actuality an integral part of the everyday lives of witches:

North is the cardinal point connected with Winter Solstice and midnight. Thus north/earth is a place of silence and sleep, just as the winter is a time of stillness and rest. It is also the direction of the ancestors and of the moment of death in the cycle of death-rebirth-growth-decay that Reclaiming members see as central to the passage of all life.

An important element for the creation of existential continuity, in the context of pagan studies, is ‘the formation and mediation of historicised logics’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962 p. 53). Ancestors are a source of existential continuity for pagans. For example, Butler (2014, p. 95) argues that because ‘ancestors are associated with the past, the past also becomes important in how it relates to modern Pagans perception of their own identities, socio-cultural place and legitimacy’. A sense of connection with the ancestors, from a pagan perceptual lens, holds significance for an individual’s sense of belonging, as well as a ‘sense of authenticity when it comes to cultural traditions and specific ritual practices’ (Butler 2014, p. 95). It is for these reasons that ancestors are central to pagan discourse and ritual practices. Utilising a number of studies on ancestors across several cultural and religious contexts, I contend that ancestor worship is an important source of ontological continuity, based on the historicised logics of connecting one’s identity

50 to their ancestors. It is also significant as a part of cosmologies of ecology – owing to the interconnected and entangled relationship witches have with nature and their ancestors.

The subject of ancestral worship has received extensive attention in anthropology, in terms of the cosmological significance of ancestors (Douglas 1970), rituals for hearing ancestors (Stoller 1989), to ancestors and the Dreaming (Rose 2008). The role of ancestors emerges in anthropological studies of witchcraft as well. Jenny Butler (2014), for example, writes about the significance of ancestors in Irish neopaganism. Greenwood (2000), Rountree (2003) and Morgain (2013) each discusses the role of ancestors in witchcraft, as a part of the cosmology of the Otherworld and as a part of their symbolic systems. One of the patterns that emerges in accounts of ancestor worship, is the interconnection between people, the land and ancestors.

Ancestors emerge as a feature of witchcraft that is woven into the fabric of witches’ rituals as well as their everyday lives. Greenwood (2000, p. 24) puts forward the notion that witchcraft, like most cultures, has a notion of the Otherworld or an alternative reality (removed from the everyday) where ancestors reside. In her analysis of the role of sleep among a Reclaiming witchcraft community in Oregon, Morgain (2013, p. 167) describes how ancestors are not removed from the everyday, but are in actuality an integral part of the everyday lives of witches:

North is the cardinal point connected with Winter Solstice and midnight. Thus north/earth is a place of silence and sleep, just as the winter is a time of stillness and rest. It is also the direction of the ancestors and of the moment of death in the cycle of death-rebirth-growth-decay that Reclaiming members see as central to the passage of all life.

An important element for the creation of existential continuity, in the context of pagan studies, is ‘the formation and mediation of historicised logics’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962 p. 53). Ancestors are a source of ontological continuity for pagans. For example, Butler (2014, p. 95) argues that because ‘ancestors are associated with the past, the past also becomes important in how it relates to modern Pagans perception of their own identities, socio-cultural place and legitimacy’. A sense of connection with the ancestors, from a pagan perceptual lens, holds significance for an individual’s sense of belonging, as well as a ‘sense of authenticity when it comes to cultural traditions and specific ritual practices’ (Butler 2014, p. 95). It is for these reasons that ancestors are central to pagan discourse and ritual practices. Utilising a number of studies on ancestors across several cultural and religious contexts, I contend that ancestor worship is an important source of ontological continuity and creating a sense of identity. It is also significant as a part

51 of cosmologies of ecology – owing to the interconnected and entangled relationship witches have with nature and their ancestors.

Australian Reclaiming Witchcraft

The Australian branch of the Reclaiming tradition has a number of key figures associated with its emergence and spread. Jane Meredith and Gede Parma for instance are witches and authors who often teach at the two WitchCamps that run in Australia in Queensland and Victoria, respectively. One of the core paths that are run (both inside and outside of the context of WitchCamp) is called the Reclaiming's Elements of Magic. In their book Elements of Magic: Reclaiming Earth, Air, Fire, Water & Spirit, Meredith and Parma (2018, para. 2) define the elements as ‘the basic building blocks of skills, understandings and practice that underpin effective magic and ritual within our tradition’. These skills can include grounding, casting circles, trance work, breathwork and raising energy (for example through a cone of power). The elements also refer to the five elements witches draw on: air, earth, fire, water and spirit. Meredith and Parma (2018, para. 2) explain that when Reclaiming witches create a ritual, ‘they generally thread a number of things (understandings and practices) together or layer them one within another, weaving our magic in a careful – or sometimes spontaneous – tapestry’. Parma’s online blog reveals this weaving magic as it emerged at the first Australian Reclaiming WitchCamp:

O Holy Mother, in you we live, move and have our Being. From you all things emerge, and unto you all things return. As I take thee into my body, may I be woven into thee, may I be woven into me (Gede Parma 2019 – blog).

According to Parma, the first Australian Reclaiming WitchCamp occurred in 2011 in country Victoria, which is still running and currently known as Earthsong. The other Australian WitchCamp, named Cloudcatcher, is held in Queensland and has been running for seven years. Like Ezzy’s (2014) study of the Faunalia festival, both of the Reclaiming WitchCamps are held in secluded locations in the bush. The decision to hold the gatherings in rural locations is a symbolic gesture that is linked to one of the key Reclaiming Principles:

All are supported by the sacred elements of air, fire, water and earth. We work to create and sustain communities and cultures that embody our values, that can help to heal the

52 wounds of the earth and her peoples, and that can sustain us and nurture future generations. (Appendix A – Reclaiming Principles of Unity)

This Principle is consistent with Hume’s (1997) contention that witches express their relationship with the earth through reverence and stewardship. Greenwood (2000, p. 4) defines paganism as ‘a Nature-venerating religion which endeavours to set human life in harmony with the great cycles embodied in the rhythms of the seasons’. Similarly, Purkiss (1996, p. 41) defines witchcraft as a path that seeks to create ‘unity between people and nature, life and death’. According to Hutton (2017), witchcraft has only been associated with nature since the 1970s owing to the rise in environmentalism, where previously, it was primarily a fertility religion, which is not the same as a nature religion. The presence of an ecological and eco- activist vein in Reclaiming witchcraft is therefore consistent with Hutton’s premise, since Reclaiming was founded during the late 1960s and 1970s environmental movement. The thread of ecology emerges through the Reclaiming tendency to map the macro onto the micro, the earth to the human body. This sentiment is clearly expressed through Meredith and Parma’s (2018, para. 1) explanation of how the five elements are present in the body:

All five elements are always with us. Our bodies are made from this earth, literally from its molecules and chemicals. We cannot live a moment without breathing air. The fiery sun heats our planet enough for life to flourish…we are continually with water – in our blood and saliva as well as the water we drink and bathe in. Spirit we take to be that animating force within us that links us to Mysterious Ones, to each other, and to all the worlds. We can do magic wherever we are because we are because we always have these things with us and within us”.

The fifth element – spirit – according to Meredith and Parma (2018), is what connects everyone to the ‘to Mysterious Ones, to each other, and to all the worlds’. While rituals are important for individuals experience and self-expression, they also emphasise their capacity to create a sense of belonging. Rountree’s (2003) argues that ritual is ‘a very good way of building community’ and that it has ‘a much wider application which spills over into the community she met and worked with’ (Rountree 2003, p. 105). Her argument about the capacity of ritual to build community draws directly on Durkheim’s (1912, p. 317) theory of ritual, which states that ‘individuals engaged in emotionally charged rituals are frequently drawn out of egoistic self- absorption into a self-transcending and transformative experience of social solidarity’. This phenomenon, of reducing one’s self-awareness and absorbing into the consciousness of the

53 group, was termed by Durkheim (1912, p. 317) as ‘collective effervescence’. Witchcraft gatherings, practices and rituals facilitate social cohesion within communities by creating experiences of collective effervescence and contributing to the overarching cosmology of the community.

Douglas (1970) provides the foundational work in the area of cosmology, primarily through her classic text Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. Tambiah (1985, p. 3) refers to cosmology as the ‘frameworks of concepts and relations which treat the universe or cosmos as an order system, describing it in terms of space, time, matter, and motion, and peopling it with gods, humans, animals, spirits, demons, and the like’. One example of a cosmological system is esoteric cosmology. Antoine Faivre (1992, as cited in Salomonsen 2002, p.69) outlines the primary phenomenological characteristics of cosmology as follows:

(1) the Universe is alive and the natural world “bound together” through a network of elementals, of which the basic four are air, fire, water and earth; (2) because of elemental correspondences between all parts of the visible and invisible universe, microcosm can be said to mirror macrocosm; (3) the universal net of elemental correspondences can be mediated and manipulated by the human imagination, an activity often labelled “magic”.

Morgain’s (2012, p. 539) work on Reclaiming witchcraft rituals mirrors this idea of the universe being bound together. Such rituals, Morgain (2012, p. 539) observes, transforms how ‘they relate to both the social and the natural world around them’ and these rituals occur against the ‘backdrop of the Reclaiming cosmology of interconnection, which in Reclaiming has both theological and ethical content’. Reclaiming witchcraft uses rituals and practices that focus on personal healing and social transformation. Salomonsen (2002, p. 139) sees trance as an aid to healing and becoming ‘depossessed from oppressive culture and remembering through the body what has been lost’. What is being ‘remembered’ is the utopian matriarchal prehistory lost to the wave of patriarchal and Christian oppression. Since Reclaiming witchcraft places emphasis on healing this loss, Roberts (2011, p. 247) establishes the primary points of healing witches’ focus on, namely, healing individual trauma and healing community trauma. Roberts (2011, p. 247) emphasises the important role healing plays in the creation of communities, which is to:

[Learn] how to listen compassionately and support others in their diverse experiences, which is seen as a step toward learning how to create and maintain community, which

54 is in turn a step toward healing from cultural norms focused on individualism and competition.

Building on this idea that Reclaiming witchcraft is a tradition focused on healing, Morgain (2012, p. 530) suggests that without a focus on healing the self, ‘Reclaiming members believe people are certain to perpetuate the social ills they have internalised through the damage done by modernity’ (Morgain 2012, p. 530). Developing this idea further, Morgain (2012, p. 542) argues that liminality and a feeling of uncanniness in rituals ‘operates as a means of engendering in participants a sense of belonging to an interconnected sociality and to a world infused with religious power’. One of the ways this sense of interconnected sociality is created is through stories that are performed and told through the medium of ritual. Salomonsen (2002, p. 201) argues that this occurs through the weaving of different ‘stories about foremothers and forefathers that strengthen the bonds of community’. To strengthen the bonds of community and transform their perceptions of themselves, Reclaiming witches sometimes participate in gender-segregated rituals. Salomonsen (2002, pp. 241-242) argues that gender-segregated Reclaiming rituals take on a liminal quality, stating that the:

[quality] of liminal communitas in which it is fully accepted, again and again, to equate femaleness with the powers of ultimate reality, to mirror the Goddess’s cosmic movements in their own womanly bodies, and to confirm themselves as beautiful, powerful beings, worthy of love and respect.

McGuire (2008, p. 100) argues that ‘each culture imbues the body with a myriad of meanings that serve as both maps and repertoires for individual experience and expression’. In the case of Reclaiming rituals, such as those Salomonsen (2002) describes above, social meanings are not merely overlaid on the surface – they are physically embodied. In the formative years of witchcraft and paganism rituals were spaces for power negotiations, particularly when it came to hierarchical gender dynamics. In the field of symbolic anthropology, Ortner (1974, pp. 71- 72) argues that ‘female is to male, as nature is to culture…women are symbols of something that every culture devalues, something that every culture defines as being of a lower order of existence’. Melissa Raphael (1996, p. 52), a feminist thealogian, also writes about symbols and the sacred, arguing that ‘the sacred is power and therefore the sacralisation of female embodiment is a means to individual and collective religious feminist empowerment’. As a tradition that was formed within the second wave of the feminist movement and by two feminist witches, it is understandable that Reclaiming witchcraft would take a critical view of symbolic

55 gender hierarchies. The imperative of Reclaiming witchcraft to challenge structures of domination, or those that exercise power over others also manifests in the ways they contest capitalism.

The Gift and Alternative Economies

As Morgain (2015) demonstrates, contemporary witchcraft is a spiritual endeavour that requires certain resources including time, money, cultural capital and social mobility. These resources are generally accessible to upper and middle classes. Broadly speaking, within the Marxist school of thought, class refers to a structural position within a production system (Joyce 1995). Sheppard and Biddle (2017, p. 501) move away from this Marxist definition, describing social class as a ‘categorisation of society based on hierarchical strata, according to individuals’ social, economic, or demographic characteristics’. When it comes to defining social class in Australian society, they assert that ‘Australian society is not commonly characterised by obvious class cleavages’ (Sheppard & Biddle 2017, p. 500). They propose a six-class model for Australian society: precariat; ageing workers; new workers; mobile middle; emerging affluent; and established affluent (Sheppard & Biddle 2017, p. 500). In his study of an Australian witchy festival, Ezzy (2014, p. 3) found that ‘participants tended to work in middle-class or service- sector occupations’. What this indicates is that there is something about witchcraft that attracts middle class Australians.

Exploring material practices among witches reveals the ways they imbue objects with sacredness and participate in social relations. Marcel Mauss’ (1990)[1925] notion of the gift, the idea that things exchanged as gifts take a personalised social form, and that they partake of and mediate relational sociality, holds an important place in anthropology (Gregory 1982; Hyde 2007; Strathern 1988). The social contract of the gift and the obligation to return, through the medium of the counter-gift, signifies a different set of social relations in comparison to those seen in the capitalist marketplace (Mauss 1990[1925]). Mauss (1990[1925], p. 20) argues that gifts partake in social relations as they shift from one person and intermingle with another:

[s]ouls are mixed with things; things with souls. Lives are mingled together, and this is how, among persons and things so intermingled, each emerges from their own sphere and mixes together.

Since Mauss (1990[1925]), others have approached the study of gift exchanges, including Hyde (2007), who considers the role of gift exchange in artistic endeavours, arguing that the gift is

56 essential to artistic projects. Gregory (1982, p. 41) theorises that in the commodity economy, objectification dominates, while in a gift economy, personification prevails. In other words, in the gift economy people assume the social form of persons rather than objects. Taking a similar approach to the idea of the gift, Strathern (1988) argues that within a gift economy, the sociality is understood as relational, and personhood as intermingled through the dialectical exchange of things. Mauss (1990[1925], p. 14) writes that gifts ‘made to men in the sight of the gods and nature’, where through giving gifts participants ‘incite the spirits of the dead, the gods, things, animals and nature to be “generous towards them”’.

For the purposes of this study, I will be drawing on Morgain’s (2015) conceptualisation of the gift through her theory of sacred materialism in Reclaiming witchcraft. Drawing on Mauss (1990[1925]), Morgain (2015, p. 178) proposes that ‘Reclaiming spiritual ontologies of matter are driven by a sense of urgency to reenchant matter to restore a sense of connection to human relationships (including with the natural world)’. Social justice is important to Reclaiming witches, which is why they develop personal sets of ethical standpoints concerning contemporary society, which is critical of processes of consumerism, patriarchy and neoliberalism. Salomonsen (2002, p. 149) argues that while Reclaiming witches believe they are oppressed and people are socially conditioned, this conditioning is not all consuming. Many practitioners of earth-based spiritualities, including practitioners of Reclaiming witchcraft, according to Roberts (2011, p. 247), hold the belief that ‘many aspects of industrial capitalist society are damaging the earth, that it has been and is being deeply wounded, and that it needs healing’. This healing process incorporates practices that involve people’s ancestors, as representative of the interconnectedness of all life throughout time.

Conclusion

Studies in the field of ‘teenage witchcraft’ (Berger & Ezzy 2014; Johnson 2008) have not focused on a specific tradition of witchcraft, such as Wicca (Cush 2010) or Reclaiming witchcraft (Morgain 2012; Salomonsen 2002). As it stands, there are no studies currently available that concentrate on the phenomenon of young people practising and identifying as witches in the Reclaiming tradition. Nor have any studies specifically looked at the Reclaiming tradition in the context of Australia. This study addresses both these gaps in the literature. This thesis draws on anthropological studies to develop new and meaningful approaches to the study of contemporary witchcraft. The focus on young people is deliberate and aims to avoid

57 homogenising young people’s experiences with adult experiences of witchcraft. Hence, a central intention of this thesis is to allow young women participants to speak for themselves. This study investigates the processes of creating a sense of identity and belonging for young women involved in witchcraft. In the chapter that follows, I will outline the methodological processes I undertook in order to investigate the lived experiences of the witches I studied, as well as considering the ethical and epistemological underpinnings of this research.

58 Chapter Three: Methodology

This study grapples with questions of identity and belonging, as it attempts to understand the everyday practices enacted by young witches as they navigate the world around them. Witchcraft acts as a compass, pointing them towards the person they want to become and towards a community that will support them on this path. Since witchcraft is not a doctrinal religion, nor does it require its practitioners to attend regular services, researching this particular social group necessitates taking a methodological approach that follows the path of the witch. Following the path of the witch through this study has led me to face a number of challenges, including finding the places where witches gather and gaining access to these sites. Entering this field, as an insider (to witchcraft) and an outsider (to Reclaiming witchcraft), raises questions of positionality that have long been debated in anthropology. As a predominantly insider-based methodology, this study is consistent with the most recent research approaches being applied in the field of witchcraft studies. This study utilises a phenomenological theoretical lens to understand the everyday lives of young people, which will allow their experiences within both the material and immaterial dimensions of witchcraft to emerge. The primary aim of this chapter is to establish the methodological approach used for this study, so to begin with I will outline the contextual details of this research.

I. Context of this Research

Witchy Places of Community Engagement

The witchy community in Australia is a dispersed, moral and spiritual community where members feel a sense of belonging to one another. Durkheim (1912, p. 42) refers to a moral community as a collective that ‘congregates (rather than merely aggregates) around a common conception of what is sacred (in terms of both objects and conceptualisations of what is sacred)’. Witchy collectives can be seen as such moral communities, congregating around the ‘witch’ as a symbol for the group itself. Interpretations of the sacred, and collective actions inspired by the sacred, such as witchy rituals, have consistency because they fit within broader cosmological meaning systems and ‘collective representations that provide them with coherence’ (Durkheim 1912, pp. 38–39). Gold (2005, p. 2) contends that, broadly speaking, community can be defined as ‘a group of people who have something in common and who are

59 actively engaged with one another in a benign fashion’. The witchy community that is the focus of this study can be described in this way. It is also necessary to address the spiritual component of researching a lived religion. The spirituality of a lived religion is embodied in everyday practices, not by prescriptive religious doctrine demanded by religious officials. The everyday practices enacted by the members of a lived religion are fed through memories, rather than doctrine or prescribed actions.

The witchy community is not a bounded site; it is imagined (Anderson 1983). I approach the witchy community as a dispersed community that needs to be approached differently, as opposed to a community with clearly determined boundaries. Gold (2005, p. 3), drawing on Amit and Rapport’s (2002) work in this area, argues that:

[for] anthropologists in the twenty-first century who no longer have bounded fieldwork sites – whether remote tribes, islands or villages – ‘notions of community’ offer ‘a convenient conceptual haven, a location from which to safely circumscribe potentially infinite webs of connection’. (Amit & Rapport 2002, p. 17)

The broader witchy community is imagined as spiritually focused, interweaving nature and humans together rather than separating them. Symbols of the natural world are frequently centre stage in these remembered places3, and rituals that occur inside rather than outside in nature will often include vestiges of nature (Hume 1999). The beliefs that underlie this type of ritual behaviour can be understood if the witchy community is considered a ‘religious ecology’. A religious ecology is ‘founded on the belief that the natural world is part of, not apart from, the deities that created it’ (Hume 1999, p. 95). Remembered places serve as ‘symbolic anchors’ for dispersed communities (Gupta & Ferguson 1992, p.11). WitchCamps are events held in the same location, which attract participants from a range of locations in Australia. WitchCamps embody key Reclaiming principles concerning nature:

Our practice arises from a deep, spiritual commitment to the earth, to healing and to the linking of magic with political action. (Appendix A – Reclaiming Principles of Unity)

The rural settings of these gatherings are chosen specifically for participants to ‘cultivate relationships with the natural surrounds to create a unique experience’ (CloudCatcher WitchCamp 2019). WitchCamps are used to create relationships both with the land and with

3 Remembered places are socially significant spaces or sites to which individuals attach spiritual and symbolic meaning.

60 one another. For creating community connections, witches have a combination of physical, virtual and imagined places of engagement. The three primary places of engagement for the Australian Reclaiming community are social media, WitchCamps and social gatherings. Through social media, primarily Facebook and Instagram, witches engage with one another on a daily basis. Social media facilitates community engagement for witches who do not live near others in their community. For example, some witches only see their community members in person by travelling to gatherings such as WitchCamps. WitchCamps are larger community- wide events where approximately sixty witches engage as a community for four to six days. During WitchCamps, campers will stay on site, sleeping in tents or shared bungalows, which enhances their experience of connecting as a community. This sense of cohesion is encouraged through rituals designed for social bonding.

Community engagement at WitchCamps occurs in different ways depending on one’s level of involvement. Individuals who have attended a number of camps and fulfil certain requirements (this will be explored later in this chapter) can become involved as teachers at the camp. Similarly, individuals can also self-select to perform organisation level roles, who are referred to as “orgs”. Acting as an organiser includes answering emails, running Facebook groups and pages, responding to Facebook questions and private messages, organising catering, booking accommodation, participating in Visionings, which are events used to decide the theme of the camp, and setting up carpooling documents. Others who do not participate at this level can still engage with their community at the camp – by adding items to the Bower4, running optional offerings5 or volunteering to be teachers.

Social Media

Daily engagement through social media adds to the sense of everydayness of participating within their community. This is important for a community that is dispersed. Social media platforms are commonly used to organise regular gatherings they hold. Witches do not proselytise witchcraft; however, they do advertise their gatherings and camps on Facebook and their publicly accessible webpages. These gatherings occur at regular intervals – weekly,

4 The Bower is ‘a room dedicated to the Sacred Body [it is a] space set aside for sexual work’ (CloudCatcher Witchcamp: Registration Pack 2015). The space is [often] decorated lavishly with pillows, blankets, photos, flowers and candles. The idea behind decorating the Bower in this way is for it be ‘beautiful, lush and inviting’ for people (CloudCatcher Witchcamp: Registration Pack 2015). 5 Optional offerings are for anyone to share a skill or workshop (CloudCatcher Witchcamp: Registration Pack 2015).

61 fortnightly or monthly. These gatherings are important for social practices in the community and reaffirming connections to one another. Activities range from sharing meals, to discussing their everyday lives and problems, to conducting group rituals. These gatherings are generally smaller group meetings from two to a dozen people. For this study, the primary social media platform I used was Facebook. Since the launch of Facebook in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, the capabilities of Facebook have evolved; members of the Facebook collective can post public messages, post on each other’s personal pages and share content. The online platform also has more private options; people can create closed groups or message each other directly in a private manner like SMS messaging, through Facebook messenger.

For the community in this study, Facebook provides a platform for witches to interact with each other daily through posts and group chats on Facebook messenger. This platform also functions as an organisational tool for social gatherings and events. For example, Facebook is the primary platform used to organise WitchCamps (in addition to email). The CloudCatcher WitchCamp Facebook page allows members to see who else is attending, to organise carpools and attend to the everyday matters that arise at the camps. Public pages, closed groups and private group messages allow witches to connect with local groups, attend events and keep in touch with one another after WitchCamps. Facebook functions as a means of maintaining their sense of belonging even after they have attended witchy gatherings. Social media provides a platform for people to perform their identities and create social groups that are set apart from others, which creates an overall sense of sociality and belonging (Schroeder 2018; Sinanan 2017).

Some events are advertised publicly, and others are only visible to members of closed Facebook groups. After attending several public events, I was invited to join some of the closed groups. Facebook is also used by the witchy community to share their stories. The medium through which they do so is varied because the social media platform supports textual expression as well as photography and videos. What they are expressing are moments, captured by ‘their smartphones and shared almost instantaneously with networks of online friends and followers’ (Elliott & Culhane 2016, p. 53). Through closed witchy groups, witches can feature and share their stories with an audience who will be able to interpret the symbols and meanings embedded within them.

62 Social Gatherings and Witchy Events

Reclaiming and non-Reclaiming witches in Australia run a number of different witchy events. These events often centre on some kind of ritual work or workshopping specific skills, such as trance. A trance is an alternative state of consciousness, which is often evoked in witchy rituals to effect the emotional atmosphere of both the individual and the group. Trance techniques, including drumming and meditation, are employed to create an altered sense of space and time for the participants. I attended monthly witchy events, including red tent gatherings (for more detail, see Chapter Five) that utilised trance techniques. There are also other events that occur annually, such as the Roots and Bones festival hosted by the organisation Queer Pagan Men Australia and the Brisbane Beltane parade run by the WildWood Coven6. These events are organised and championed by a combination of the old guard and a younger generation of teachers and orgs. At public events, such as the Brisbane Beltane parade, the broader Australian public are given the opportunity to glimpse inside the Reclaiming community. Social gatherings offer opportunities to new members of the community to ask questions and find out more, as well as experience what it is like to attend Reclaiming events, without committing to overnight stays such as WitchCamps. For long-time members, social gatherings allow them to reconnect with friends, to make new friends and welcome new members, and offer opportunities for them to act as ritual facilitators. Below, the table outlines some of the witchy social gatherings currently running in Australia.

6 For more information, see the following websites: Roots and Bones – https://www.facebook.com/events/roots-bones/1879319638957360/ Queer Pagan Men Australia – https://www.queerpaganmenaustralia.com/ Brisbane Beltane parade – https://www.facebook.com/events/wildwood-brisbane-faery-parade-and-beltane- ritual/1489953831301516/ WildWood Coven – http://www.gedeparma.com/a-little-on-the-wildwood-tradition/

63 Australian Witchy Social Gatherings

Social Gathering Location Red Tent Newcastle, New South Wales Monthly Earthwise Hunter Valley, New South Monthly Wales Pagans in the Pub Melbourne, Victoria Monthly Western Sydney, New South Wales Roots and Bones Melbourne, Victoria Annual Eastern Suburbs of Melbourne Female Coven Melbourne, Victoria Monthly Creation (Group has now disbanded) WildWood Brisbane Faery Parade and Beltane Brisbane, Queensland Annual Ritual Pagans in the Park Central Coast, New South Monthly Wales Reclaiming path workshops (Elements of Magic, Various Bi-annually (more frequently for example) depending on demand) Mount Franklin Pagan Gathering Mount Franklin, Victoria Annual Figure (2) A selection of witchy social gatherings in New South Wales and Victoria

Social gatherings and events are generally advertised through two primary methods: word of mouth and social media. Other less common means of advertising include handing out flyers at WitchCamps and the websites Meetup and WordPress. Social gatherings generally do not require participants to stay overnight. Unlike the WitchCamps, which will have a theme and a story, the social gatherings do not follow a set theme. The timing of these events is also different to WitchCamps, with some, such as the WildWood Brisbane Faery Parade and Beltane Ritual, planned according to the Wheel of the Year. This is followed by an official welcome by the facilitator(s) and explanation of any expectations (for example, be respectful of one another, or no photography). Once the expectations have been established, the first group activity or ritual will commence. After the conclusion of the ritual, a debrief or check-in will occur where participants are free to share their experiences and perform any self-care they require7. The group will then gather to share a meal together, which is another opportunity for conversations and debriefs. The activities and conversations held at social gatherings provide a blueprint for

7 Self-care is described as health-protective behaviours practised not by medical practitioners, but by lay individuals on themselves. Complementary and alternative medicines are often taken up by individuals as an embodiment of distinction (Fries 2013, p. 40).

64 the everyday rituals and expressions of witchyness. The more intimate gatherings are also places where witches learn about other events, such as the WitchCamps run by the Reclaiming tradition.

Reclaiming WitchCamps in Australia

Two WitchCamps aligned with the Reclaiming tradition are currently actively running in Australia: one in Queensland and one in Victoria8. The Australian Reclaiming WitchCamps are where exercises are carried out under the guidance of teachers who have been initiated into the tradition and undergone training to teach particular paths (such as Elements of Magic and The Path of the Edge-Walker). The main website for the Queensland camp describes the CloudCatcher WitchCamp as ‘a four day magical intensive in the Reclaiming Tradition that offers an intensive experience in Reclaiming magic for all who seek to nurture deeper bonds with this land and community’ (CloudCatcher 2018). On the primary website for the Victoria camp, called Earthsong, the WitchCamp is described as:

A six-day WitchCamp in the Reclaiming Tradition, set amongst the river red gums and rolling green hills of country Victoria. Join us for a magical intensive that includes trance work, healing, drumming, dancing, chanting, storytelling, energy work and celebration. (Earthsong 2018)

Both CloudCatcher and Earthsong are run by groups of volunteers. Some witches volunteer at both camps; however, the groups of volunteers are generally different at the two camps. At each of the camps, one individual will take on the role of ‘registration witch’, another will create cleaning rosters for the camp. Some work to support the teaching group. While the Reclaiming community imagines itself as a non-hierarchical community, behind the scenes there are key figures, often longstanding members of the community who have participated as teachers and/or organisers who champion the continuation of the camps, run ongoing workshops, contribute to the design of the websites and manage Facebook groups. The themes of the camps centre on a key myth and nominated deities. The themes are chosen through Facebook-organised events called ‘Visionings’. This is where community members are invited to get together to connect with each other to choose a theme and story for the next camp. This occurs through a combination of ‘trance, discussions and divinations’ (CloudCatcher Community Visioning

8 For non-Reclaiming witches, there are other annual overnight gatherings, such as the Seven Sisters Festival and the Mount Franklin Pagan Gathering.

65 Day, Facebook 2018). Those invited to attend Visionings range from camp virgins to the old guard9. The result of one of these Visionings was the development of the Dionysus theme, which was the mythological story that informed the WitchCamp I attended for this project.

I attended the WitchCamp in Queensland because that was the camp one of my key informants was attending and offered to connect me to the witchy networking system. This means that comparisons cannot be drawn between the two camps. The insights I offer from the Queensland WitchCamp reflect the community members drawn to the camp, its location and the chosen theme (the myth of Dionysus). These insights are developed in later chapters and draw on camp activities I observed, such as face painting, tarot circles and rituals making tea, as well as mundane activities I actively participated in, such as the cleaning roster and sharing meals. A significant part of the WitchCamp experience are the paths, which I attended as part of my fieldwork. Some witches used a kinaesthetic approach using touch through clay-sculpting; others used therapy-style debriefings where teachers would go around the group and do a pre- ritual check-in to see how everyone was feeling. There were also specific skills taught in the paths, such as how to cast circles. In some cases, participants were directed to do independent tasks such as venturing outside to collect rain water to bring back inside for rituals. The teachers who run paths at WitchCamps also volunteer for the position, just like the organisers. A description of what is a path is provided on the CloudCatcher website:

[p]aths run for three hours each morning of Camp. At the beginning of WitchCamp each camper chooses a Path (or the Path chooses them...) and it is followed through four mornings of teacher-facilitated workings that tie-in with the theme and ritual story. Workings are a mix of individual and group working, often including discussions, trance, ritual, journaling[sic], craft and other activities and magical techniques. (CloudCatcher 2018)

The path that I attended at the 2015 CloudCatcher WitchCamp was called the Elements of Magic. Put simply, a path is a magical workshop designed to give participants experiences with a variety of techniques and approaches to ritual and trance work. The criteria used to determine who can teach at Reclaiming WitchCamps is available for review on their website (WitchCamp 2016). According to the criteria list, first-year applicants (people applying to be teachers for the first time) need to have attended a camp and already be teaching and priest/essing within their

9 A witchcamp virgin is the label given to someone who is attending witchcamp for the first time. The old guard refers to the members of the witchy community who have been deeply involved in the community for a long time and attended multiple gatherings over a long period of time.

66 own community. First-year applicants also need to be able to describe their recent teaching and priest/essing experiences. Individuals applying to be teachers also need to be able to demonstrate a commitment to Reclaiming within Australia. Second- and third-year applicants need to be able to address the above criteria and also demonstrate more intensive community work, such as contributing to core Reclaiming classes10. The types of experience expected of first-, second- and third-year teachers are indicative of the reasons why people choose to teach Reclaiming classes and paths at camps. Overall, the criteria for teachers in the Reclaiming traditions speaks to the value placed on contributing to the continuation and growth of the community through engagement, leadership and communicating their knowledge and experiences. Participating in a path at a Reclaiming WitchCamp raises several important questions: how were the paths created/written/decided upon; how are new paths created; why are paths important in Reclaiming witchcraft? These questions will be addressed in later chapters in this thesis.

The camps are a way for witches to connect with one another and spend time together. They also serve as a ritual space for deep personal and collective spiritual work. WitchCamps provide the Reclaiming community an opportunity to retreat from the ‘outside’ world, to meditate, self- reflect and convalesce. The focus of WitchCamps is two-fold. They are used, first, as a place for witches to reflect, to challenge and develop themselves, and, second, as an opportunity to engage with wider socio-political issues around social justice and connect with other like- minded individuals. In between these foci, camp attendees socialise with one another. Each day at the camp is structured, with set times for main meals and blocks of time (up to three hours) designated for pathwork. During meals and ritual work, there are opportunities for more casual conversations and interactions. From this, individuals forge connections and friendships. The friendships created in camps allow a sense of belonging—belonging to one another, to the land they meet on, and to the Reclaiming tradition. This sense of friendship and belonging also emerges in the social gatherings and key witchy events that run throughout the year.

10 ‘Core Classes’ have been designed by the Reclaiming teachers based in California, which makeup the foundation of the curriculum (Reclaiming: Classes and Workshops 2018).

67 II. Entering the Field

Researcher Positionality in the Field

I am a solitary witch and the process of becoming immersed in the Australian witchcraft community has been quite a journey11. Throughout each stage of this study, witchcraft has become a part of my social world in ways I never could have anticipated. Since researchers are always, in subtle or more overt ways, emotionally connected to their research, considerations for reflexivity are important (Davies 1999). The insider-outsider debate is not new to anthropology (Agar 1980; Boon 1982; Merton 1972) but forms part of the disciplinary discussion about doing research ‘at home’ (Jackson 1987; Morton 1999). Doing research at home is, in essence, the ‘idea of anthropologists coming to study groups or sub-groups which are in some sense to be regarded as their own’ (Morton 1999, p. 243). The discussion about insider research in the field of witchcraft studies (Favret-Saada 1977; Greenwood 2000; Rountree 2003) forms part of this broader disciplinary debate. But to what degree can the Australian witchy community be called my community? Prior to embarking on this project, I had not met any of the witches in this study, and I had not heard of Reclaiming witchcraft, which is the tradition this thesis focuses on. For me, witchcraft feels like my home, in the sense that I identified as a practising, solitary novice witch. Australia is my home. So, in some ways studying witchcraft in Australia for me, is doing research at home. There are, however, important distinctions between myself and the subjects of this research that are explored below.

In the process of interrogating my own subjectivity and epistemological position in this research, I came across the work of Sara Ahmed (2017), a critical race and feminist theorist. While reading her work, one line reached through the pages and echoed loudly with my own past, coming close to my own experience in a way no author has ever before:

I was brought up in Australia in a very white neighbourhood. I went to a very white school. I was brown, visibly different but with no real account of that difference; no real sense of where it or I was coming from. (Ahmed 2017, p. 33)

Just like Ahmed (2017), I was born and raised in a white Australian community. My mother immigrated from Fiji and my father is a white Australian. While my friends at school had either Catholic or atheist parents, my childhood had a blend of Catholicism and Hinduism. Certain

11 Solitary witchcraft practitioners rarely, and sometimes never, participate in group rituals or gatherings, preferring to keep their identity a secret (Lepage 2017; Smith 2010).

68 experiences became embedded in my spiritual self: incense and candles in Church; the reverberation of the hymns; going to a temple in Fiji where my grandmother placed a bindi on my forehead; discovering after she died that she read palms and tea leaves. Through this blend of Christian and Hindi cosmologies, I became interested in learning more about the concepts of reincarnation, feminism and polytheism. Many of the researchers in this field have been Caucasian, which is not to say they do not consider the role of ethnicity in witchcraft (Hume 1997; Morgain 2013; Rountree 2003; Salomonsen 2002).

An important consideration for this thesis is that my decision to pursue this topic comes from a place of personal interest, since I have been interested in and practised witchcraft in a solitary manner. Taking my positionality into consideration is important because it influenced the questions and ideas I carried into the research from the beginning. Elliott and Culhane (2017) argue that these questions and ideas are influenced by researchers’ subjectivity:

[T]he questions and ideas researchers carry in the back of our minds are shaped by our own lived, embodied experiences and entanglements with cultural beliefs and practices, histories and social/political relations. (Elliott & Culhane 2017, p. 4)

When I started this research, one of the ideas I had in the back of my mind was the belief that witchcraft was a way for women to reclaim their personal, social and economic power. Since paganism is such a broad movement, incorporating a number of spiritual traditions, I decided to focus on witchcraft because it was the tradition of which I had prior knowledge. Instead of ‘bracketing’ this idea in an attempt to achieve total impartiality and objectivity (Davies 1999; Elliott & Culhane 2017), I decided to try and find a balance between being an insider and an outsider in this field of research; for anthropologists, it is the balance of the outsider/insider perspective that creates knowledge and understanding. This balance of perspectives is reflected in the recruitment methods I employed to find participants for this study.

Participants and Recruitment

Prior to commencing this study, I did not have community contacts, so when I began my fieldwork, I reached out to witches who had prominent social media profiles, and/or had published witchy literary work. One such witch not only agreed to meet with me and be interviewed, she passed on my information to witches who were, according to her, authentic practitioners. This was my first encounter with witchy group politics as I learned that these ‘traditional’ witches had mixed feelings about the Reclaiming witchcraft community. From my

69 meeting with three groups of witches (one Reclaiming, two non-Reclaiming) in Melbourne and attending regular social gatherings with a group in the Hunter Valley, I learned about the Reclaiming WitchCamps. Early on it became clear that interviews would not be sufficient modes of engaging with witches’ social worlds, and that in order to capture the everydayness of witchcraft I would need to employ fieldwork methods. For me to ‘listen to people telling stories about themselves, their families and other researchers’ (Elliott & Culhane 2017, p. 4), I realised I needed to take a methodological approach that mirrored the interactions I observed among the young people I was researching.

In line with qualitative research seeking a deep understanding of a phenomenon, I chose to closely investigate a small group instead of examining broadly across a large sample. I do not seek to provide generalisable results; rather, I aim to generate conceptual knowledge (Crouch & McKenzie 2006). The criteria for inclusion in the research were, accordingly, relatively narrow, limiting participation to individuals who, at the time of research: lived in Australia; practised a form of witchcraft; and/or identified as a witch. Ethics approval was sought from the University of Newcastle Human Research Ethics Committee12. For individuals to participate in the study, informed consent needed to be given. Potential participants were provided with a detailed information statement about the project to read, after which they were asked to sign a consent form. All participants have been de-identified and no real names are used in this thesis, as per the ethics clearance.

Women from other witchcraft groups and traditions were identified and contacted through online meetup groups. I used these regular gatherings to identify myself as a researcher to the group. The process I underwent to recruit through the Reclaiming WitchCamp, for example, mirrors the steps I underwent with the aforementioned groups. The Reclaiming WitchCamp organisers were contacted prior to attending events, such as the CloudCatcher WitchCamp. This allowed the WitchCamp attendants to get to know me, understand the aims of the research and that I would be inviting people to participate in interviews after the camp, and conducting participant observation. A number of the participants in the study came from the Reclaiming community because the Reclaiming community is publicly accessible, which means information about their tradition, rituals and events are available online. Prior to attending the CloudCatcher WitchCamp, where I recruited the majority of the participants, I was added to

12 This project was approved by the University of Newcastle’s Human Research Ethics Committee, approval no. H-2014-0375.

70 the CloudCatcher WitchCamp closed Facebook group. After the WitchCamp, I made initial contact with witches who had expressed interest in participating in an interview. Prior to the interviews, they were sent the Participant Information Statement and Consent forms to allow time for them to ask questions. If they were willing to proceed, an interview time and location was organised. I allowed the participants to choose the location of the interview to ensure they felt as comfortable as possible. At the time of the interview, I clearly and precisely explained what the research was about and how it would be used. As per the research protocol established in the ethics application, I emphasised that they have the right to not participate, to withdraw their consent at any time and to know exactly how their confidentiality would be maintained.

In total, (n=20) witches were recruited and interviewed for the project: (n=16) women and (n=4) men. During the initial stages of fieldwork, I engaged with older women (n=3) and men (n=4) through participant observation and interviews. These individuals were willing to give me their time and were very effective at relating cultural practices, and it was based on these reasons that this group became key informants for this study. During the early period of fieldwork, I had a number of interactions with young women describing their experiences of becoming witches and finding a witchy community. Based on these encounters and the gap I had identified in the literature regarding young women’s experiences (n=13), I decided that women between 20 and 25 years of age would be the focus of this study. In addition to my fieldwork diary, the data I collected through the key informants of this study formed the basis of what Geertz (1973) refers to as ‘thick description’. In this study, I focused my analysis on the cohort of young women as the primary group.

Previous studies in witchcraft have shown that young people interested in witchcraft are predominantly white, well-educated and from middle- to upper-class families, as noted in previous studies of witchcraft (Berger & Ezzy 2007; Ezzy 2014; Lewis 2012; Morgain 2010; Rountree 2002; Salomonsen 2002). My age is close to most of the young women in this study. During interviews and social gatherings, this provided a starting point or a ‘common ground’, through which participants (may possibly) have assumed I would implicitly understand their perspective as a fellow young person. This allowed my research to incorporate a range of perspectives on the phenomenon of young women being attracted to and practising witchcraft. This approach enabled me to integrate into the network of witches in Australia, to have people’s names passed onto me, to be invited to group events, to be added into private Facebook groups where I could see events, and to be approached by individuals who were interested in becoming

71 involved in the research. Becoming a part of the networking system allowed me to view the structure of the witchy community from the inside13.

Doing Witchcraft: Participant Observation

Participant observation is one of the earliest methodologies used in anthropology in order to gain insights into participants’ viewpoints, and how they relate to others and construct their own social worlds (Malinowski 1922). Traditionally, objectivity has been the aim of the researcher, which refers to the expectation that they will recognise their personal experiences and empathy and bracket them (Clifford 1986). This approach has been challenged in the field studies of witchcraft. For example, Favret-Saada (1977) argues that when researching witchcraft in France, the ethnographer is already participating in a relationship of power – as one strong enough (or not strong enough) to fend off witchcraft. Salomonsen (2002) and Rountree (2003) both use their own experiences in their studies of witchcraft, by placing themselves within their own academic texts as informants. For Greenwood (2000, p. 15), the importance of participant observation emerged in her field notes, ‘it is important to undergo the experience of opening oneself up to the esoteric practice, to be able to write about that experience from the inside’. Greenwood’s (2000) reflection is in line with Hume’s (1997) argument that participant observation needs to be at the heart of studying witchcraft, as one cannot begin to ‘know’ unless one is actively engaged in ‘doing’:

[i]t would be virtually impossible to research any of [the] social groups in this study without becoming totally involved, for although one can read about the ideology, the rituals and the magic, the important thing is the doing. (Hume 1997, p. 14)

In rituals, there is no space for one to ‘observe’ – you are either in or you are not (Salomonsen 2002). Hume (2007, p. 2) argues that anthropologists can come closer to understanding religious and spiritual experiences, through participant observation. She argues that an anthropology of the senses is necessary, one that goes beyond the verbal and the visual, one that utilises bodily ways of knowing. Hume (2007, p. 2) described how she learned to use her body and become attuned to the ways of picking up on sounds, of speaking and moving that was aligned with the community. As a result, she began to experience trance in a similar way to that of the gurus and

13 The witchy community has intricate webs of connection. Some of the networks are visible and easy to find; their structure is transparent to others. Other groups are more clandestine – preferring to stay hidden. For example, I was referred to a group that fits within the latter category in my hometown, Newcastle. I was unaware of this social group because it did not outwardly label itself as a solely “witchy” group.

72 monks who were teaching her. Similarly, as I began to participate in more and more rituals among the community of witches, I discovered that our experiences during rituals were beginning to align more closely. I began to feel as though I was living in ‘two worlds’, as Greenwood (2000) described it. I felt that while I was participating in rituals, I could never fully switch off the questions in the back of my mind. My non-witchy family and friends, colleagues and supervisors played a pivotal role in helping me keep a sense of analytical distance during my fieldwork. Being able to ‘retreat’ from this study, into non-witchy spaces and conversations, I was able to gain some physical and emotional distance from the participants in this study and reflect on my experiences in the field.

In the field notes, I kept a record of the transformative experiences I underwent during the rituals I participated in. Reflecting on these notes after the data collection period led to the development of what Grimes (2013) terms methodological knowledge. Methodological knowledge encompasses two types of knowledge: ‘practical on-the-ground know-how’, such as how to gain access to a ritual, and the second type refers to ‘higher order’ knowledge, which is developed after the fieldwork had concluded (Grimes 2013, p. 13). Participant observation is a method that encompasses both types of methodological knowledge. Practical, on-the-ground knowledge about how to gain access into a community is essential. It is also necessary to consider why it is important to gain access to a community – which is to build connections and rapport. These connections and rapport are built through trust.

According to Roudakova (2017, p. 5), ‘there is a lesser-known tradition in Western epistemology that views knowledge production as dependent as much on trust, as on scepticism and doubt’. In this study, producing knowledge about the everyday was led by the participants. The everyday, for the purposes of this research, refers to the mundane parts and pathways of life – routines, chores, tasks and interactions. According to Rosaldo (1989), culture encompasses the everyday and the esoteric, the mundane and the elevated. While I conducted my fieldwork, I participated in the everyday lives of my informants and participants – cooking and sharing meals, hanging out at their houses, watching movies and having post-ritual picnics in the park on a fortnightly basis. Once I had gained access to my participants’ social settings and made my research intentions clear, the next stage involved disturbing the setting as little as possible, so I could observe them naturally going about their everyday lives (O’Reilly 2004, p. 87).

73 Between March 2015 and December 2015, I conducted fieldwork through participant observation and interviews with a group of Australian witches. This included attending and participating in a variety of witchcraft rituals (n=13), most of which were run by members of the Reclaiming tradition. Other rituals were at Red Tent gatherings or based on traditional witchcraft. When I attended group rituals, I was in a position where I could ask questions to understand the dynamics of the group rituals while simultaneously having a solid knowledge base to work from, so I was not “pestering” people by asking basic questions. My interest in rituals, and in witchcraft in general, added to the feeling of trust I was building between individuals and the campers. Roudakova (2017, p. 5) puts forward that knowledge is a social institution, closely intertwined with cognitive and moral orders. Participating in witchy rituals allowed such knowledge to be drawn out. Insights gathered from participant observation were followed up in interviews with participants, where lengthier and more detailed explanations can be given.

Interviewing Witches

Semi-structured interviews are not simply a methodological tool for obtaining information from interview participants. This research approach requires reflexivity because it inserts the ethnographer’s biography into the equation and encourages engagement with epistemological practices. This method is thus critical of all practices that dichotomise roles of the ‘intellectual ethnographer’ and passive informants who are complicit objects of knowledge. Benjamin (1988, as cited in Ezzy 2010, p. 164) offers insights on this matter, suggesting that, instead of thinking of the interviewer and interviewee as locked in a power dynamic divided by domination and subordination, we move towards a state of communion. To create the ideal environment for this state of communion, certain factors need to be taken into consideration, including the location of the interview, the identity of the researcher and their position, as well as the identity and agency of the interviewees. Moving away from the idea of interviews as a conquest, to seeing interviews as a form of communion, this methodology encourages listening and witness (Irigaray 2001 and Charmaz 1991, as cited in Ezzy 2010, p. 164), and emphasises emotional communion and intersubjectivity (Ezzy 2010, p. 165). This approach is reflected even in the steps I took to arrange the interviews.

After participants consented to an interview, I arranged to meet with the interviewee, allowing them to choose the location of the interview to ensure they felt at ease. Attempting to create this feeling, I endeavoured to reduce the unequal power relations between researcher and

74 researched. Asking open-ended questions enabled me to approach the research topic from different angles and to allow ‘questions [to] arise from lots of places, our body-minds, the environment, society’ (Grimes 2013, p. 47). I used a semi-structured interview schedule to guide the interviews. This schedule (see Appendix B) included questions about the participants’ family life and religious (or non-religious) upbringing. After the interviews were completed and transcribed, participants who indicated on their consent forms they would like a copy, were sent copies of their transcript to review and offered the opportunity to withdraw any comments or sections they were uncomfortable sharing upon reflection. This decision reflects my attempt to reduce the unequal division of power between interviewers and interviewees. This was essential as some of the participants had not “come out of the broom closet14” to all of the members of their families at the time of the interview. During the interviews, topics that were emotionally charged emerged, especially since we were discussing a topic that is deeply personal.

During the interview, I always endeavoured to be both aware and reflexive, ready to stop the interview or change direction if the participant displayed signs of emotional distress (Ezzy 2010; O’Reilly 2004). I adjusted my interviewing style depending on the personality and openness of the participant. Some were happy to talk at length, so the interview was more of a narrative than a communion or conversation. Others preferred to engage with me and the interview took the shape of an exchange; the more open I was with myself and my journey with witchcraft, the more comfortable they felt sharing their own stories and experiences. Most of the participants seemed to enjoy having the opportunity to talk about their lives and were flattered that someone was interested in them, often thanking me for my time and wanting to hear updates on my research. Exercising reflexive thinking throughout this research allowed me to identify that trust was built between the participants and myself through honesty. If I was honest about my decision to pursue this topic, then they were more likely to trust me and open up about their own experiences. This exchange of emotions is important for the qualitative interview experience (Ezzy 2010). It is also important for my own research integrity. For qualitative research to have integrity, the participants need to get something out of the exchange (Ezzy 2010); it needs to be reciprocal in some way. Giving my story to the participants in this

14 This phrase draws on the colloquial notion of “coming out of the closet” that is normally used to refer to gay or queer identities, re-working it to refer to witches making their witchy identities known to their family and wider community.

75 study and by adding their voices to the broader conversation about youth and religion, this research has given something back to the participants in two ways.

III. Recording and Analysing Data

Fieldwork Diary

There are certain qualitative techniques that assist in the establishment of ‘thick description’, such as participation in daily activities, establishing rapport, sharing conversations, selecting informants, and keeping a diary (Geertz 1973, p. 6). However, these processes all contribute to the aim of the methodology, which is to not simply participate and observe, but to interpret and critically examine meanings and understandings as well. The taking and ordering of field notes provides the methodological descriptions of the process of research that is unique to each circumstance, each designated field, and each anthropologist, and which can only be determined through the process of research itself, not determined prior to its undertaking. Keeping a fieldwork diary throughout the research process allowed me to create thick descriptions of the field. During my fieldwork, I took a notebook with me, writing in it during spare moments, confiding my fears and anxieties, ideas about people to talk to, books to read and logging the research activities I undertook. In the diary, I tried to note things that seemed both unusual and ordinary, to avoid inserting my own beliefs about what I considered “important” during my fieldwork. The process of keeping detailed field notes allowed me to retrieve detail about events and interactions that occurred during my fieldwork. I kept three types of notes: jotting things down; a diary; and a log. Jotting things down when I had short moments allowed me to return later to my jottings and scribbled notes to elaborate them into more detailed notes in my diary.

My fieldwork diary was essential during the analysis of the data. To piece together thick descriptions, I moved in and out of the interview transcripts and the fieldwork diary. For example, during the witchy rituals I observed, certain gestures people shared that would seem uninteresting or unimportant to an outsider, were meaningful through notes I kept of the ritual planning, proceedings and discussions afterwards. The meaning behind these gestures cannot be captured in photographs or film (Geertz 1973, p. 6). When I identified behaviours that emerged in a pattern in my fieldwork diary, I was then able to go back to the field and follow these links, to ask people about what these gestures mean and why they have those meanings attached to them. Comparing these answers from both the field and interviews allowed concepts to emerge for later analysis. During WitchCamp, we were encouraged by the teachers leading

76 the paths to keep a diary with us at all times, which aligned perfectly with my need to keep detailed notes during my participation – in other settings this would make me seem like more of an outsider.

When I returned home from my trips to the field, I transcribed my fieldwork diary into an electronic format using Microsoft Word. This was to back up my notes in case my diary went astray and to make it easier to enter the data into NVIVO during the analysis and writing up stages. As I wrote up these notes, I also included photos I had taken on my phone during fieldwork. Phones and other digital devices have now become embedded in how we ‘experience places, events and more generally our everyday normal life’ (Culhane & Elliott 2016, p. 53). Like the use of a diary at WitchCamp, taking photos of the scenery at camp or altars was normal. I took photos when appropriate and followed the tendencies of the group; if they were taking photos, I would then ask if people were comfortable with me taking photos as well.

Figure (3) Image from fieldwork diary

77 This image (Figure 3) is of fieldwork notes I took during one of the paths I participated in at CloudCatcher WitchCamp. The two teachers leading this path took us through a trance using a number of symbols of nature, including trees and mountains. My fieldwork diary included drawings because text-based description could not adequately capture the type of knowing I was experiencing. For example, I drew the visualisations the teachers read out to us during trances. By sketching out what I had seen in my imagination, my fieldwork diary documented a blend of both inner and outer worlds (Taussig 2011). Taussig (2011, p. 2) argues that drawings in fieldwork diaries help anthropologists to bear witness:

[t]his must be where witnessing separates itself from seeing, where witnessing becomes holy writ: mysterious, complicated, powerful. And necessary.

After I returned from the field and began distancing myself from the research, I read the fieldwork diary and noticed not only how my methodological approach was evolving and changing, I discovered that the research had changed me. Before entering the field, I had been advised by my colleagues that what I expected would not happen and to expect the unexpected. On the whole, I did not expect this research to change me in the ways it did. My fieldwork diary thus became a chronicle of how I have grown as ‘an instrument of data collection’ (Bernard 2011, p. 315). The word instrument feels too mechanical, especially for a thesis concerned with questions of the body and embodiment. My body is an integral part of the research process. My fieldwork diary reflects this bodiliness. In it I described how I felt when a participant hugged me and touched my hair, how her embrace dispelled my homesickness with its warmth.

On another occasion, I felt tense, ill at ease, and the need to flee when we were partnered for energy work at camp, and my ritual partner held my hands, making circles around my thumb with his. The intimacy of this slight touch, the sensation of closeness from a stranger, a strange man, made me feel trapped. I felt guilty for not escaping. I did not want to break the “spell” of the workshop’s tranquil atmosphere. I did not want to disturb others’ energy work with my discomfort. These experiences, among others, are moments that have shaped me as a researcher, as a feminist, as a person. The feelings of discomfort that arose from this interaction were not resolved during the workshop itself, mostly because I did not feel as though I had a friend at the witchcamp I could confide in. After writing in my fieldnotes journal I texted my boyfriend saying I was feeling sad and homesick and that I needed to talk. When I returned from this period in the field, I did not tell him or anyone what happened. I was afraid of appearing weak or blamed for what happened. Later after returning to Queensland to interview some witches I

78 refused to hug a stranger at a full moon gathering. This was a distinct moment in my development as a young researcher and young woman, as I had not actively denied someone affection. After I finalised my fieldwork and began writing up, it still took additional time and processing to be able to write about my experience. The first time I revealed this incident was to my supervisors when I sent the draft for this chapter.

Recording and Transcribing Interviews

There is an interesting feeling of straightforwardness at the beginning of a project. All the unexpected twists and turns are not in view so you do not realise how flexible you will need to be. A qualitative contortionist. At the beginning of this research, I had in my possession an audio-recorder unlike any I had seen others use. Regular audio recorders are quite “boxy” and when they sit between an interviewer and interviewee, one’s attention always draws back to it. The awareness of being recorded lingers. What I used to record the interviews for this research is called an Echopen, which is essentially an audio recorder shaped like a pen. The interviews conducted, recorded and transcribed for this study were completed by myself. The Echopen has several features that were helpful for the collection and analysis of data in this study. During the interviews I allowed participants to hold, examine and play with the pen before we would begin so they would not feel as intimidated by it. After the interview, I would back up the audio data using the Echopen’s associated livescribe software. For the most part, the reason they were recorded was to avoid misrepresenting or unintentionally obscuring some parts of the interviewee’s story. However, as I alluded to previously, flexibility when interviewing is essential. For some of the interviews I conducted, recording the audio was impractical or inappropriate.

Once all the interviews were completed and I had returned home from the field, I began transcribing the interviews. While I had the option of sending the audio for transcription by an external service, I decided to transcribe the interviews myself as a way of immersing myself in the data and gaining an initial overview of what I had collected. Transcribing, therefore, became part of the initial analysis stage. The livescribe software mentioned above has an inbuilt transcribing function and this is what was used to transcribe the interviews. When I transcribed the interviews, I did not skip over everyday phrases and repetitions such as ‘um’ and ‘you know’, deciding to follow Davies’ (1999, p. 114) advice:

79 [if] in analysing interviews the ethnographer concentrates solely on the content – what is said – then they may miss important communications. Apparently meaningless phrases, repetitions, sublinguistic verbalizations, pauses and silences may all be significant in adding, sometimes even contradicting, the purely semantic content of what is said.

By recording the audio information from the interviews, all of these ‘apparently meaningless phrases’ could be captured. By recording the interviews for later transcription, I adopted a less intrusive approach than say, taking notes during the interview (Davies 1999). Some of the interview participants had stronger regional accents than others, which emerged in the interview transcripts through particular stylistics. I made the decision not to alter this textual ‘accent’. The process of analysis for this study requires all of this finer detail so as to ascertain the everydayness of witchy experiences – which is often expressed through tone and silences. While the interview transcripts were created in this way, with attention to detail for silences, phrases and accents – it was still necessary during the process of analysis to return to the audio recording of the interviews. Alongside the audio recordings and the transcripts, I also wrote about the interviews in my fieldwork diary.

For the interviews, I kept detailed notes in my fieldwork diary about the emotional and embodied aspects of the interviews. For example, I made notes about the environment where the interview was being conducted, the time of day, the weather and if there were other people around. I also described the emotional framing of the interview, how the participant seemed when the interview began, if (and how) they changed during the interview and what their emotional state was like at the end of the interview. Knowing that the recorder was capturing the auditory information of the interview freed me to concentrate on the emotional and embodied performance of the interview (Ezzy 2010). Some of the interviews required a more gentle and subtle emotional performance; I was in a sense holding space for the participant to speak and for their stories to take form. The intersubjective exchange of the interview was different for others, the energy was higher and more intense. Paying attention to the context and interaction of interviews is an important methodological consideration for this study, and directly supports the next stage of this study, which concerns the analysis of the data.

Analysing Data

After I had decided I had collected enough data, I returned home from the field and began the analysis process, which included: keeping a fieldwork diary and transcribing interviews and writing up the findings from this study. While this chapter discusses each of these steps as

80 distinct stages, they are each inextricably linked (O’Reilly 2004). O’Reilly (2004, p. 177) refers to this as an iterative-inductive approach, which takes the form of a spiral. Moving away from a linear perception of the research process, the spiral shows how ‘analyses and writing up can lead back to more data collection and writing down’ (O’Reilly 2004, p. 177). The spiral allowed me to look at the data I had collected, return to the field to ask people questions, or look for some more information then bring it back home again. This flexibility allowed me to follow links and talk to people, all the while holding the research questions in the back of my mind. The research questions acted as an axis for me to spiral back to. The flexibility of the methodological approach needed to be anchored to avoid losing sight of what I was trying to find out. The questions held the shape of the spiral, so it could spin in and out, from writing up to writing down, without losing its integrity.

Sitting down with all the data – fieldwork diary and the interview transcripts – I completed the initial layer of analysis by hand. After reading all the material, I began to identify prominent themes and develop some initial codes (Denzin & Lincoln 2017). This process is key to ‘making sense of it all’ (O’Reilly 2004, p. 184). Writing during this stage was key, which included writing summaries and organising the data into categories. For the second layer of analysis I utilised a qualitative research software program, NVIVO, to systematically organise and archive both the data and codes. Using computer software to sort the data certainly makes the process faster and allows one to explore complex pathways; however, there is ‘no mechanistic substitute for the complex processes of reading and interpretation’ (Hammersley & Atkinson 2007). I used NVIVO to mark text and assign codes to different segments of text; this way I could retrieve all the segments attached to a code. The advantage of this software is that it allows you to attach analytical notes to segments. This is where the initial conceptual work began. This software also allows different types of data to be sorted (not just text) such as images, video and audio. Centralising all the data types is helpful with large amounts of data. What this is helpful for is reading and interpreting the interview data, in context using the field notes and images. Contextualising the data allows for richer interpretations to be drawn out.

The interpretations I draw out of the data collected in this study are analysed using metaphors. As a way of understanding the world around us, Lakoff and Johnson (1980, p. 4) argue that metaphors function not only in a cognitive sense, they exist in everyday life:

Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of intellect.

81 They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor. But our conceptual system is not something we are normally aware of. In most of the little things we do every day, we simply think and act more or less automatically along certain lines.

The metaphors drawn out of the data in this study, such as weaving and reclaiming, are sourced from interviews and notes about participant observation, taken from the fieldwork diary and exemplified through examples from observing the everyday lives of witches. From the first and second layers of analysis, I identified key themes and thematic patterns that emerged from the data. From these major themes and thematic patterns, I applied metaphors from the data to represent how the young women interpret their worlds. Taking mundane utterances from interviews and observations that are often over-looked, I used these metaphors to illuminate the hidden meanings that lie within them. Metaphors are, according to Lakoff and Johnson (1980, p. 3), pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980), ideas are objects and linguistic expressions, such as metaphors, are containers for meanings. Everyday actions embody metaphors. Bodily actions and gestures contain sensory knowledge that inform the witchy conceptual system.

An important stage in analysing the data collected in this study, concerns the protection of participants’ identities. Since the social group this study focused on is relatively small, it is important to use techniques designed to hide participants’ identities. While writing up the data from this study, I was mindful that personal mannerisms, expressions and anecdotes may identify individuals, especially when using detailed personal narratives (Davies 1999). In addition to assigning pseudonyms, I engaged in mindful slippage and relational ethics by intentionally blurring and protecting the identities of others in the witchcraft community. Any parts of interviews that may identify participants have not been included and identifying features have been removed. While the witchcraft community in Australia is itself small, the Reclaiming tradition within this population is smaller still. It is important that the sensitive information interviewees trusted to divulge is protected.

82 Ethics in Insider Research

One of the challenges that emerged in this study occurred while I was conducting participant observation work in Melbourne. A key informant in Melbourne organised a “meet and greet” dinner for his witchy friends to meet me using a Facebook group message. On this group message, I observed an interesting interaction occur between the key informant and a member of the Melbourne witchcraft community, who took issue with my use of the term ‘anthropologist’ to describe myself. He denied the invitation to attend dinner, and the reason he provided was that as a witch he did not trust anthropologists “ever since Tanya Luhrmann”. When I attended the dinner, I asked my key informant and the friends he had brought along what was meant by the comment. He explained that there was a belief in the local witchcraft community that Luhrmann (1989), who worked with the community in London in the 1980s, took advantage of the community by using the research to boost her own career, and not to give the witches she spoke to a voice (Lohmann 1991). I had not come across this attitude in my research up until this point and was surprised at the way he dismissed my presence without even meeting me. While this encounter was unpleasant, it does demonstrate that researchers have had an impact on the witchcraft community, even though Australian Reclaiming witchcraft has not yet been extensively researched. As a result of this encounter, I have been committed to making the work I publish and present accessible to the community I researched. I have made summaries of what I have presented available online, and, on request, allowed images taken of myself at WitchCamp to be made available for publication in news articles. These challenges influenced this study and its progress, finding out about the somewhat negative reputation of anthropologists among some members of the witchcraft community made me conscious about people’s reactions in the future.

Conclusion

Salomonsen (2002, p. 17) argues that ‘it is not enough to conduct fieldwork from such a normatively chosen “outside” position’. Fieldwork in witchcraft studies involves more than participating actively in rituals. Through a range of techniques, including placing a critical and reflexive lens on my own epistemological assumptions, I have endeavoured to develop a methodological approach consistent with previous approaches in the field. The methodology applied in this study has also taken into consideration where the witchcraft community locates itself and the social relations of the participants. As this social group is not located in a single bounded site, it will be understood in this thesis as an imagined community. The techniques

83 employed by this study form part of my attempt to capture the voices and lived experiences of the participants and communicate their understandings and meanings through their own conceptual systems. The advantage to studying multiple groups across different locations allows me to map the connections and disconnections among groups; it also allows me to identify common practices and aspects that are unique to certain groups.

84 Chapter Four: Everyday Witchy Practices

This chapter considers the values of reciprocity and how a world view of cyclical cosmology shapes young women’s everyday witchy practices. To explore both of these in the context of the women’s religious experience, I focus on ritual practices that occur in the private, domestic, familial sphere, where the women’s roles are likely to be more active and expressive than rituals performed in patriarchal religious settings. To do so, I describe the actual lived religious experience of people in their everyday lives outside of prescriptive, mainstream religious beliefs and practices. From the subjective position of the young women who participated in this study, an unfolding sense of identity and belonging becomes embodied through practices that they themselves have control over. The capacity to practice witchcraft in the everyday is particularly important for their sense of belonging to a community. This chapter explores the broader aim of this thesis, which is to examine how young women attempt to understand who they are and their connection to the world. The existential questioning that this entails underlies the witchy cosmological framework the women draw on to craft their identities and communities and, therefore, orient their place in the world.

Interpreting people’s everyday lives, particularly the beliefs and practices that make up their spirituality, requires an approach that considers both the individuality of their witchy practices and the underlying beliefs that bring these social groups together. In this chapter, I use ontology and cosmology to draw out the everydayness of young witches’ experiences. As I have outlined in previous chapters, cosmology can be understood as a set of frameworks of concepts and relations that treat the universe as an order system (Tambiah 1985). Ontology refers to a sense of being and the ways in which experiencing subjects know and make sense of their worlds (Harris & Robb 2012). I explore the unofficial and, in some ways, invisible aspects of the women’s witchy worlds that anchor their everyday lives effectively and meaningfully. I bring these two concepts together in order to understand how the young women in this study experience and order meaning in their world. The combination of these concepts will be used to capture how the beliefs, values and practices that make up their own personal lived religion are multifaceted and malleable.

85 I. The Dark Moon in Witchy Cosmologies

[i]n every moon cycle there’s [the] microcosm of the Wheel of Year and that whole ecology. So the moon and the hallows mirror each other. The dark moon [is] the dark half of the year. [During the dark half there are] lots of the hungry dead [because] everyone’s forgotten how to die (Fae).

Witchy cosmology encompasses the beliefs and practices witches use to order their universe, including: cyclical temporality; animism; and holism. Witchy beliefs in a holistic, cyclic nature of life are embodied in the Wheel of the Year. Australian witches use both the southern and northern Wheel of the Year depending on their own feelings about the two versions and sometimes depending on the group the practice with (if they are not solitary). Fae describes the lunar cycle as a microcosm of the Wheel of the Year. This organisation of time, the pattern of aligning oneself within the witchy Wheel of the Year, reflects the choice witches make to position their lived religion in the roots and practices of paganism that pre-date Christianity (Butler 2014). The shared history witches ascribe to is one they perceive as connected to the ancient, pagan, pre-Christian religion of their ancestors. Witches, like Fae, order the world around them using ecological systems, such as the cycle of the moon and the Wheel of the Year to inform their relations. Both the moon cycle and the Wheel of the Year are cyclical and have light and dark halves; the light half of the moon cycle referring to the period from the new moon to the full moon, while the dark half wanes from the full moon to the dark moon. Fae describes the dark moon and the hallows as mirrors of one another. Often the dark half of the moon is analysed in terms of the connection witches draw between menstruation and the lunar cycle (Rountree 2003). Greenwood (2000, p. 129) argues that witchy myths and folklore naturalise the moon cycle as a sacred feminine symbol:

Dark moon rituals have become increasingly popular for women to celebrate and reclaim what is seen to be the most feminine part of themselves. The dark moon is seen to be the time in the lunar cycle when the old moon dies and is then reborn again. The moon is often viewed as feminine in the way that it waxes and wanes, and female witches identify with its rhythms.

Embedded in these stories is the theme of cyclicity, which orders witchy beliefs and practices about living and dying by connecting these concepts to the larger system of the Wheel of the Year. For example, the witchy myth of the triple goddess shows transitions through three life phases: the maiden; mother; and the crone (and back around again in a never-ending loop) (Greenwood 2000; Rountree 2003; Salomonsen 2002). In witchcraft, the bodily process of

86 ageing and dying are imagined through the figure of the crone and her associated symbols, including the dark moon (Rountree 2003). The necessity for a deity that embodies death arises from what Fae calls ‘the hungry dead’ (Kendall 2008). For Fae, the world is not just inhabited by the living, but also (lots) of dead folk who are hungry for ‘food’ and craving ‘warmth’ because ‘everyone’s forgotten how to die’. People have forgotten how to feed the dead. They have forgotten why it is important to feed the dead. Feeding the dead, proving them warmth, brings people into a relationship with the concept of death, the idea of their own mortality. Luhrmann (2001, p. 121) writes that ‘the Old woman, the hag, initiates the death that enables life to feed on death’. Death in cultures such as Australian society is something that is often kept at an intellectual and physical distance (Ezzy 2014). Mythology, Ezzy (2014, p. 65) argues, allows people to confront their discomfort with death. Witchy rituals bring people into intimacy with death by drawing on the mythic cycle of the triple goddess. The level of intimacy is created through the relationship with the dead witches, a relationship that connects the life cycles of the young women with the macro cycle of the moon.

The Wheel of Year

[so] that circle is cast, [the] quarters invoked. I have my symbols placed on the quarters. If you want to think of it as a medicine wheel and it’s also a cycle of life – of [a] journey. So I can stand, not just in the directions, but [in] birth, childhood, adolescence, initiation into adulthood and union, eldership, death and remembrance so the quarters can be divided in eighths (Clarissa). 15

15 Native American medicine wheels are a spiritual concept, the design of which is a circle with four spokes radiating from the centre of the circle out towards the cardinal directions (Liebmann 2002). This concept has been appropriated by non-Indigenous groups such as pagans and witches and added to the broad set of practices and ideas they draw on (Rountree 2003). This discussion of appropriation is important; however, it is beyond the scope of this project to address.

87

Figure (4) Wheel of the Year based on the Northern Hemisphere. Image created by Rachel Hardwick and used with kind permission (see Appendix D).

In Chapter Two, I defined the Wheel of the Year as the cyclical progression of the seasons, which provides an overarching spiritual framework for recognising, understanding and responding to experiences and processes that may occur during one’s life. The witchy practice of circle casting occurs in a pattern that follows the movements of the sun. Through this practice, witches live in harmony with the ‘seasons and cycles’ of nature. Casting a circle involves ‘invoking the quarters’, which refers to the four directions aligned with the elements: north with fire; south with earth; east with air; and west with water. Witches will often place symbols, such as incense and candles (for air and fire, respectively), at each of the quarters in the circle to symbolise the presence of these elements in the circle. Movement around the circle clockwise or ‘deosil’ mimics the movement of the sun as it moves east to west16. In this way, the practice of circle casting traces the sun. The body of the witch walking or dancing is the thing that traces this movement. Embodying the movements of the sun is how Clarissa ‘lives in harmony’ with the cycles of the sun. The solar cycle corresponds with the Wheel of the Year, the eight points of the wheel corresponding with seasonal shifts. Reclaiming witchcraft author Starhawk (1989, p. 181) writes about the Wheel of the Year as emblematic of both the seasons

16 This direction of movement around the circle is reversed in the northern hemisphere to counter-clockwise. Hume (1999, p. 293) has written previously about the problems with exporting a nature religion from the northern hemisphere to the southern context and climate of Australia.

88 ‘Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn’ and life transitions such as ‘birth, growth, fading, death’. The circles that witches cast and the circle that is the Wheel of the Year can be considered mirrors of one another. This is visible in the ways Fae works with moon and life cycles, such as attending full moon parties and avoiding night walks in the bush during the dark moon. The circles mirror one another because they both cycle through periods of growth and decay. Witches, such as Clarissa, use the casting of circles and celebrating the Wheel of the Year festivals to draw a link between their individual ‘cycle of life’, the cycle of the seasons and the celestial cycles of the sun and moon. By casting a circle, she stands in the directions and simultaneously in ‘birth, childhood, adolescence, initiation [into] adulthood and union, eldership, death and remembrance’. The four stages or ‘quarters’ of birth, life, death and rebirth are divided, according to Clarissa’s cosmology into the eight life transitions listed above. The idea that these life transitions are connected to broader cycles (seasonal, lunar and solar) reinforces a central theme of the cyclicity of life in witchcraft. This cosmological framework provides witches with a sense of ordering transitions and transformations in their lives in a way that mainstream religious traditions do not (since most subscribe to a linear view of time and life). The celebrations and circle casting (in a group setting) witches participate in often involve shared practices that ground their beliefs about the cyclicity of life and nature in a sense of sociality. This aspect of witchy beliefs and practices, specifically commensality, is important to consider in order to understand the role these beliefs play in their everyday lives.

Commensality

21 July, 2015 – Ishtar’s farm in the Hunter Valley (Fieldwork diary)

On a multiple-acre property, six witches come together to meet at Ishtar’s farm. We gather around her outdoor table setting on the grass and start setting up the potluck brunch. Multiple members of the group are in the process of trying to lose weight, so the assortment of finger- food reflects these intentions – fruit and meat. This time we have not brought as many “carby” foods (for example, chips and biscuits). We eat, seated in a circle sharing stories about our lives. I share with everyone I was moving into a new house, and that I was very excited.

I asked the group if there were any witchy practices they know of for moving to a new house, Ishtar advised, ‘you can offer milk to one of the trees on the land – to let the land and the house know you will be living there and want to live there in harmony with the land’.

In Australia, some witchcraft groups will open their groups to the public by hosting lunches where anyone is welcome to join. This is how I found Ishtar and her witchcraft group, by

89 attending one of the lunches she hosted in the Hunter Valley. After contacting her and telling her about my research, she happily invited me along to lunch in a local pub to meet her and other members of the group. This strategy allows the group to come to consensus about new members, thereby increasing the size of the group. In a sense, Ishtar acted as both the teacher and the gatekeeper of the social group. Those, like myself, who made it through the gatekeeping exercise were then invited to go back to Ishtar’s farm to do the ‘deeper work’. The deeper work involved spellcasting, circle casting, meditating and astrology charts. The people in Ishtar’s inner circle who were invited to attend gatherings at her farm were predominantly women in their early fifties, as well as a few younger witches, such as myself and Brigid. The witches in their fifties tended to be married or newly divorced, who found Ishtar through the public lunches. The older witches were also new to witchcraft and treated Ishtar as their teacher and guide.

The group itself is semi-structured, with Ishtar leading the circle casting and performing a teacher role. The members of the group who have been with Ishtar for a while helped in the preparation of food and clean up. For example, in the vignette above, Ishtar and the group begin their gathering by sharing a ‘potluck’ brunch. A potluck is a meal to which each guest is expected to contribute a dish or meal component. This type of meal can be considered a commensal act, with guests bringing a meal or single dish to give to Ishtar in exchange for hosting the gathering. This theme of commensality is a common one, defined here as eating at the same table (mensa) or eating and drinking together in a common physical and/or social setting (Kerner & Chou 2015, p. 1).

In the vignette, the members of Ishtar’s group bring food to share, which reifies her position as the teacher and emphasises that she holds the knowledge they wish to learn. While we ate together, Ishtar would share her knowledge, thus reifying her position as the teacher in the group. Since Ishtar both hosts and passes on her knowledge to the group, bringing food in exchange for her hospitality and teachings can be considered an act of reciprocity. The way we shared the food in this setting, seated in a circle, reflects witchy cosmological beliefs about cycles as well as the democratic and relatively flat structure of the group. Sitting in a circle can also be understood as less intimidating for more introverted members of the group, compared to a classroom or congregational setting. In the vignette above, I told my story to the group about moving out; as I recounted my experiences and trepidations, everyone else in the group picked at and ate the food on the table. Compared to more formal religious gatherings, this type

90 of gathering is more intimate and relaxed because it mimics familial interactions. Salomonsen (2002, p. 236) also observed in her study of the Reclaiming community of San Francisco how potluck meals shared in a similar fashion, with the group seated in a circle, allowed intimate stories to ‘pour out’ of the women. Sharing stories is a way of emotionally connecting with one another, which came from the intimacy of our seating arrangement and commensality. As the other women shared their stories, I decided to share what was happening in my own life. As my own story poured out of me, Ishtar shared her knowledge with me (and by extension, the group) about offering milk to the land. This type of witchy practice, offering a source of nourishment to the land, reflects broader cosmological beliefs about the reciprocal nature of their relationship with the land.

By constructing women’s belonging to children through the bodily fluid of breast milk and the relational act of breast-feeding, milk can be described as a substance that is at the same time nourishing and restricted to the private sphere of the home. The act of gifting the land with milk is an extension of this metaphor. If milk is to be considered a substance tying women to the domestic sphere, then the act of pouring milk onto the land orients the young women’s perceptions of their relationship with the land (nature). Instead of being symbolically connected to motherhood, offering milk to the land represents a symbolic and spiritual connection between women and the world. This sense of relationality is further reinforced through the social act of sharing food together.

The act of gathering and eating and drinking together is a common social practice that has received attention in anthropological and sociological literature (Douglas 1970; Goody 1982; Smith 1957). Just like the example in the vignette above, I observed numerous commensal acts during my fieldwork that were important settings for understanding the beliefs that underpin witchy sociality. Creating a sense of sociality through commensal acts occurs through continual practice. For Ishtar’s group, the sense of sociality occurred through the regular monthly occurrence of these gatherings, creating and reinforcing social relations (Kerner & Chou 2015, p. 1). The key characteristic underpinning the social relations in Ishtar’s group is reciprocity. The role of reciprocity and commensal acts have been explored, separately, in previous witchcraft studies (Greenwood 2000; Morgain 2010, 2015; Rountree 2012); however, they have not been linked together as connected phenomena. Commensal acts have multiple dimensions: social; political; economic and religious, to name a few (Kerner & Chou 2015). For Ishtar’s group, commensal acts have both reciprocal and spiritual dimensions. The everyday act of

91 sharing food is a commensal act that connects the witches in Ishtar’s group not only to each other, but to the land upon which they share their meal.

Creating Commensality and Sociality Through Witchy Feasts

26 June, 2015 – Outer suburb in Brisbane (Interview with Fae)

‘So you were saying about cooking food on the hearth, is food a big thing?’ I ask.

‘Massive thing, there’s a lot of lore around food, there’s particular foods that you eat on particular sabbats – you know like – there’s a lot of sorcery you can do with food, a bit like love spells and it’s like […] “let me just put a little bit of me in that for you”. So, there’s like, consensual things [like] where everyone puts a little drop of blood into the sabbat cakes and everyone has a stir and puts in a thought. That’s consensual sorcery [which is] where we bind ourselves together and are nourished individually and as a whole, and those kind of things,’ she replies.

‘When would you eat those?’ I ask.

‘Whenever you feel, oh actually that’s not so true. Maybe more the light half of the year, celebrating. Because the darker half of the year your Hallowmas, we do a dumb supper where we eat in silence and you kind of become a vessel for your family. You know your beloved dead and they’re fucking hungry, like it gets kind of, and they’re hungry and thirsty and you eat and drink for them and the dead crave that warmth. A lot of them don’t get it. A lot of people forget about their dead, forget about them before they’re dead. Chuck ‘em in homes. Age. Death. We’re in denial about age and death. That’s why no one’s really living. Stuck in little boxes, looking into little boxes. Not even half alive. You know not in communities, isolated, not in the community. Even the community of non-human, your river and your land. Those things I’m really passionate about.’

As part of her nomadic travels, Fae describes her experience of travelling to Tasmania, where she joins her coven in the celebration of Hallowmas. To mark this festival in the Wheel of the Year, her coven gathers to host a dumb supper. A dumb supper refers to the old folk custom of laying an extra place at the table for departed spirits and providing offerings of food to the ancestral dead (Butler 2014; Howard 2011; Lepage 2013). Folklore about the origin of the dumb supper comes from a range of locales, including America (Frazier 1959) and Scotland, however as Hand (1970) points out, the majority of the texts available on this subject point towards England as the source. For Fae’s coven, the tradition of a dumb supper occurs on Samhain

92 (which they refer to as Hallowmas)17. During a dumb supper, one of the practices of Fae’s coven is the cooking and sharing of sabbat cakes. The sharing of cakes and wine, according to Bado-Fralick (2002, p. 51), is a common commensal act and part of the basic Wiccan ritual structure. The lore surrounding food and eating particular foods on sabbaths, Fae argues, stems from what she calls ‘food sorcery’. Sabbath cakes prepared with drops of blood from each member of the coven call on a specific type of sorcery that is often known as blood magic. Blood magic, in this context, is a commensal act of sociality because it is a practice that embodies the belief of the coven that ‘blood is binding’. Fae’s coven cooks together, eats together and bind themselves using blood and food.

Eating for one’s ancestors, as in a dumb supper, reifies the coven’s belief in their community’s shared tradition as well as their connection to their ancestral lineage. This kind of commensal act, eating together and eating on behalf of one’s ancestors, transforms a witch into what Fae calls a ‘vessel’ for the dead. In the context of a dumb supper, witches become vessels for the dead, taking on the responsibility for feeding their ancestors. This is necessary because, as Fae argues, they’re ‘fucking hungry’. What they are hungry for is warmth, for connection and belonging. By performing this role, as vessels, the members of Fae’s coven enter into a reciprocal relationship, an exchange of food for connection. Pike (2001, p. 59) observed similar ritualised acts of feeding ones’ ancestor, at the festival she participated in, she saw witches offer beer and spirits at ancestral shrines. Fae argues this role emerges from a broader need for community, because ‘people forget about their dead, forget about them before they’re dead, chuck ‘em in homes’. The neglect of one’s ancestors, in Fae’s point of view, starts with the neglect of one’s elders. This neglect and lack of care comes from isolation, which stems from problems with technology: ‘stuck in little boxes, looking into little boxes, not even half alive’ (Fae). The dumb supper is a deliberate effort to reverse this habit, to move away from ‘living in boxes’ to living in communities. Fae’s coven binds itself together through the practice of celebrating Hallowmas with a dumb supper using the symbolic power of blood through commensality.

The purpose of a dumb supper is threefold: nourishing the self; binding the collective coven; and feeding the dead. In this study of witchcraft, the intersection of these three themes points to the importance of commensality in the sociality of witchcraft groups. A sense of sociality

17 Samhain occurs on 31 October in the northern hemisphere (same time as Halloween); in the southern hemisphere witches celebrate Samhain in April (Hume 1999).

93 occurs through cooking food together (sabbath cakes) and eating together (for one’s ancestor) during a dumb supper. A dumb supper can be understood as a ritual feast that is important for the members of a community to feel connected to one another. Geertz (1957, p. 35) describes ritual feasts as ‘commensal mechanisms of social integration’. Geertz (1957) observed among a Javanese Slametan gathering ritual feasts that are organised in a similar way to the witchy festivals described by Fae. Like the Wheel of the Year, events of religious significance for the Javanese occur ‘at passage points in the life cycle, on calendrical holidays, at certain stages of the crop cycle, on changing one's residence’ (Geertz 1957, p. 35). Slametans are ritual feasts used to mark and celebrate these events that are in some (significant) ways similar to a dumb supper. Geertz (1957, p. 119) describes how Slametans are communal feasts that function as ‘commensal mechanisms of social integration for the living’. While a Slametan operates as a means of social integration for the living, a dumb supper, by comparison, is a ritual feast/commensal act that integrates the living with the dead and the land.

II. The Sacred Cannot be Scripted

It was scripted and they [the Wiccan group] had the “sacred bowl” [and] the “sacred paper”. Whereas [in] my experience, before that, […] you can make anything sacred. The world is sacred. Your body is sacred [and] there are sacred tools [like] […] the things you have on your kitchen table. You can do something there and then and that was what I loved about Jambalaya. It […] [said] “use salt from your kitchen pantry “and “thyme from your kitchen panty” and “cloves from your kitchen pantry”. [You] don’t have to import dragon’s blood. It [Wicca] just seemed a bit wanky to be honest […] I’m sure people had genuine experiences, but my experience was [they] almost desperate [to] call [themselves a] religion […] so like it was that traditional [way] of experiencing religion but with different language that was how I experienced it that really rubbed me up the wrong way because of my upbringing. (Temperance)

Temperance’s experience with a Wiccan ritual was not an overly positive encounter. Specifically, she found their ritual practices and beliefs to be prescriptive, especially when it came to ritual artefacts. In the context of the ritual she attended as part of a Wicca group, she disliked their tendency to assign sacred status to material items such as ‘sacred bowls’ and ‘sacred paper’. For Temperance, this way of prescribing sacredness to certain things and people (such as high priestesses) is irrational because she believes that ‘the world is sacred’. In comparison to the approach she encountered in Wicca, Temperance draws on the approach to things laid out in Luisah Teish’s (1988) book Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book, which

94 contains African American folk traditions, knowledge and recipes. The emphasis of this book is not on the status of the ingredients, but on their availability. What Temperance finds appealing about this approach to practising witchcraft is its accessibility, being able to sacralise things that could be considered mundane such as salt, thyme and cloves from the kitchen pantry. Instead of feeling as though she needs to ‘import dragon’s blood’, which is a type of incense, Temperance locates the sacred not in exotic items, but in the everyday.

The everyday, in this context, refers to the space where Temperance practises, which is on her ‘kitchen table’ and with the ‘things’ on said table. Northrup (1995) writes about patterns that emerge in women’s ritual groups, observing how certain themes, like that of the ordinary, emerge time and again. The ordinary here describes the rhythms and activities of everyday life (Northrup 1995, p. 118). Ritual beliefs and practices can be understood as a process of connecting the everyday experiences of women's lives. McGuire (2008, p. 14) argues that ‘embodied practices can effectively link the material aspects of people's lives with the spiritual’. Greenwood (2000, p. 1) examines witchcraft through the concept of the otherworld, which she defines as a spiritual domain that co-exists with the ordinary everyday world. Contacting this otherworld, Greenwood (2000) argues, occurs through rituals that seek to transform both the individual and the wider cosmos. She argues that ‘connection with the otherworld is thus central to the magical practice’ (Greenwood 2000, p. 1). Research into witchcraft communities also needs to flow in the opposite direction, towards the ordinary and how and why witchy practices are entangled with the everyday. Witches locate the sacred in the everyday, such as their homes, because this is where women’s activities are so often situated. Witchcraft is a lived religion that imbues the rhythms and activities of everyday lives with meaning. This is pertinent for women’s ordinary lived experiences because they are so often marginalised or completely erased from traditional religious rituals and spaces. For many women, witchcraft values women’s spiritual authority as a form of protest and resistance to patriarchal religion and culture.

Witchy rituals mimics in some ways cooking processes, in that they both require embodied knowledge and practice. This cooking metaphor allows the embodied nature of witchy rituals to emerge. Like cooking, performing witchy rituals requires gathering ingredients in an ideal setting. Temperance prefers to draw on ingredients that are immediately accessible – the things on her kitchen table. Using the example of written recipes and learning cooking skills, Ingold (1999) demonstrates how learning cultural knowledge is an embodied practice. For example, a person may read a recipe, but it is only upon practising cooking themselves that they gain

95 knowledge. Temperance cooks with the ritual ingredients available in her everyday life. This imperative emerges from her experience of Wiccan rituals, which felt to her more like following a recipe by the written instructions, rather than cooking from their embodied knowledge. McGuire (2008) argues that ritual practices that unfold in familial spheres, such as the kitchen, can be considered significant and embodied religious practices. For example, she observed one young woman’s significant religious experience, which occurred when she cooked alongside her mother. Similar to cooking, rituals bring together disparate elements to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts. Jambalaya is a Louisiana-origin dish of Spanish and French influence. The ingredients that make up this dish are not especially meaningful; however, this Creole dish itself tells a nuanced and complex cultural story (Teish 1988). As part of her witchy practice, Temperance brings together different ingredients to cook up gifts for her friends.

Crafting Gifts, Relationships and the Self

[So] I made out of the wing and foot I made one for Tiff and I made one for myself and it’s got this leather loop and a foot so it’s a bit of talisman. With the preservation I try to make it like that (ritual) but it’s been interesting. So, one I gave [to] Tiff. That talisman she carries it everywhere. It’s with her tarot cards and she uses it a lot. (Temperance)

Temperance enjoys crafting things because to her ‘making is creation’. For her crafting, she often collects objects such as beads, bones and feathers to create ritual artefacts. On her parents’ property in Western Australia, for instance, she collects the remnants from ‘foxes and sheep and there’s rabbits’. Temperance’s friends and family are aware of her desire to craft with animal remains, so she is often gifted with bodies. For example, once she was gifted a butcher bird carcass and from this ‘little tiny bird’ she took its wing and foot to make two talismans, one for herself and one for her friend. The process of crafting these talismans begins with preserving the bones from the animal carcass. First, the remains are left on a compost pile to allow the ‘beetles and their larvae’ to eat the flesh that is left on the bones. Once this stage is complete, Temperance explained that she would take the bones left behind and cover them in corn starch and salt for a few months. To create the talismans, she used items from her ‘craft collection’, which she described as an assortment of found (not bought) objects, such as ‘shells, sticks and skulls’. From her craft collection, Temperance selected crystal beads, ‘iridescent and flamboyant rooster feathers’, and a leather loop. In this way, Temperance transforms the

96 ordinary activity of making a home-crafted gift for her friend into something imbued with witchy meaning.

The act of crafting and gifting a talisman imbues the rhythms and activities of Temperance’s everyday life with meaning. The talisman is both important and not important; the thing itself is given significance through the act of giving and the expectation of the counter-gift. Mauss (1990[1925], p. 125) writes that things have a personality, and that in giving something to someone, such as a talisman, one gives oneself in giving. Morgain (2015) argues, through the act of exchange and expectation, gifts can transform from objects to subjects. These objects- turned-subjects are seen as ‘imbued with life, and capable of participating in and mediating relations’ (Morgain 2015, pp. 178-179). Morgain (2015, p. 178) argues that from this understanding, matter can be seen as ‘capable of participating in and mediating relations’. For example, Greenwood (2000) observed ritualised talisman crafting among a coven she was working with as they gathered to perform a ritual healing of a sick member of their group. The creation and utilisation of a talisman performed by the coven in this example can be understood as ‘an alternative way of relating rooted in an ethos of generosity’ (Morgain 2015, p. 175). Temperance’s talisman was crafted out of a love of creating and subsequently gifted to Tiff as a sign of their friendship. This witchy way of relating to one another is based on the everyday activity of crafting, the meaning of which is transformed through Temperance’s perception that the talisman is a subject capable of strengthening the relationship she shares with Tiff.

Crafting gifts imbues the rhythms and activities of witches’ everyday lives with meaning. One of the key ideas that underlies the practice of creating a talisman concerns what Morgain (2015) calls ‘enspirited matter’. The relational implications of thinking about matter as enspirited stems from an understanding of the sacred as something that is embedded in the ordinary. As Temperance demonstrates, the process of crafting is a means of transforming everyday objects. The bones of animals are everyday objects in the sense that the carcass of rooster is generally disposed of as waste. Temperance transforms the bones of animals from abject waste to sacred object by creating talismans out of them. The act of imbuing an item with meaning, with spirit, represents connection. A connection between the individual and the object, as well as a connection between the person giving the gift and the one receiving said gift. The connection between Temperance and Tiff, as mediated by the gift, is their friendship, which is also the counter-gift. Giving a gift to a friend as a way of solidifying and continuing one’s friendship

97 functions as an ongoing circle of exchange. Interacting with friends is an ordinary activity that takes on new meanings in a witchy context.

As an alternative way of relating, witchcraft encourages generosity and intimacy. For example, Morgain (2013) writes about the co-sleeping arrangements she observed among Reclaiming witches and how this practice reflects values concerning intimate community and sharing. Through the act (and art) of creating a talisman from her craft collection, Temperance doesn’t only bring Tiff into a simple gift exchange; what she shares with her friend through this practice is herself. The talisman is an object turned subject that embodies Temperance’s understandings and perceptions of herself as a collector, a creator and a friend. The talismans, such as the one Temperance makes, are not used for healing like Greenwood’s (2000) participants, rather, they are used as a means to remake social relations (friendship in this example) so that it is embedded in generosity rather than consumption.

Dreaming About Chickens

[that] talisman she [Tiff] carries it everywhere. It’s with her tarot cards and she uses it a lot […] she recently tried to do a ritual and bless it and she couldn’t. She could do everything else and couldn’t do that. With everything that I believe about the afterlife, I have to do some more work with that, to make peace with the animal. Which I haven’t really been doing. But I recently did do a ritual for that, which was terrifying because I was home alone. I had the one [talisman] I made recently … [using] a bird, the one I made for myself recently, I used sage and put it [the talisman] under my pillow and I dreamt of chickens, because he was a rooster. (Temperance)

The practice of keeping tarot cards (and a talisman in Tiff’s case) close to oneself, carrying and using them frequently, brings these objects into the rhythm and activities of everyday life. When it came to her own ritual practices involving her talisman, Temperance reflects on how she felt this was something she needed to do (but had not done so until recently) so as to ‘make peace with the animal’ she was using in her crafting. While talking to me, she reflected on how this desire to ritualise this process connected to her beliefs about the afterlife. As a self-identified agnostic, she explained how she does not ‘even believe in an afterlife’; however, she does ‘talk to ancestors’. The act of talking to her ancestors (through the medium of bones) symbolises her belief in ancestral spirits being a rich source of knowledge.

98 In an attempt to bless her talisman, Temperance placed the object with some sage under her pillow. Sage is a popular herb often used in witchy rituals to cleanse a space, person or object (Rountree 2003; Salomonsen 2002). When the sage is dried and burnt, this type of ritual cleansing is referred to as smudging (Greenwood 2000)18. Putting these objects under her pillow not only brings them into her everyday routine (of going to bed to sleep), it blesses them by placing them in an intimate setting.

The dynamics of gift exchange, and the added layer of performing rituals on and with said gifts, holds significant implications for sociality in the witchy community. Temperance and Tiff both performed rituals on their respective talisman to instil the object with further meaning and personhood. The ritual Temperance performed on her talisman draws on a broader set of cosmological beliefs regarding sleep. Among the Reclaiming witches of Oregon, Morgain (2013) observed how sleeping patterns and practices expressed both social and spiritual principles. For example, she describes how co-sleeping in everyday contexts (outside of WitchCamps) has symbolic meanings in Reclaiming mythos (Morgain 2013, p. 163). The ritual Temperance performed on her talisman draws on these cosmological threads of sleep and sociality, transforming this object into a sacred subject. Sleeping with her talisman under her pillow expresses this, continuing the close sense of connection. The connection between Temperance and the animal (rooster) is mediated through the subject (talisman). Crafting and sacralising the talisman is Temperance’s way of making ‘peace’ with the rooster. She interprets her dream about chickens as a sign of her ritual’s success. Her belief that using the rooster’s feathers signifies entering into a reciprocal relationship informs the ritual practice of placing the talisman under her pillow.

Temperance fulfils what she perceives to be an ethical responsibility to the animals she works with through her witchy practices. As I have argued elsewhere, animism maps the connections between human and nonhuman through material engagement (Rose 2017). Temperance’s crafting is a practice that engages with the animals on a material level. For example, when she left out the butcher bird carcass that would eventually form the foundation of the talismans, she wanted to keep the skull; however, ‘unfortunately where I put it an animal took it, I suppose [that] is a way of giving it back, it didn’t want to be there’. Since Tiff gifted her the skeleton, Temperance entered into a reciprocal relationship that set up an expectation for a counter-gift,

18 Previously, smudging has been identified as an area of potential cultural appropriation (from Native American culture and practices). It is important to point out that this critique is relevant here; however, it is beyond the scope of this thesis to get into this debate; see Donaldson (1999) for more information on this topic.

99 which ended up being the talisman. Layered on top of this relational exchange (between Temperance and Tiff) is the relationship between Temperance and nature. When Temperance described how an animal took the skull of the butcher bird, she explained how this was a ‘way of giving it back’; giving it back to nature. The idea that nature is sentient and sacred creates an ontology of continuity and connectivity. To have a relational connection between Temperance and the bird carcass, the remains need to be imbued with subjectivity. Temperance demonstrates the subjective status of the remains when she suggests that “it” did not want to be there; in order for the skull to desire something, it must feel, which moves it from the object to subject.

Friendship and Feathers

[The] ones [crafts] I’ve been making…were from roosters that I, unfortunately, had to kill. [I] didn’t enjoy the practice, but I had a lot of respect for their life. But I used all [of] them, so I took their skull and we ate the meat and I used a lot of the feathers in my practice, [I] don’t waste it. (Temperance)

Temperance created her talismans not from things she bought but from the remains of an animal she killed, cooked and ate. By taking the rooster’s skull, eating the meat and using the feathers in her practice, Temperance is engaging in what she determines is an ethical relationship with the animal, one that uses all of its constituent parts. This ethical relationship emerges from the sense of respect she holds for the animal’s life. Her description of eating the rooster’s meat and taking its skull speaks to a direct material engagement with the rooster she killed and cooked. Cosmological beliefs about nature being sentient in witchcraft underlie eco-activism in Reclaiming witchcraft as well as everyday practices such as vegetarianism (Morgain 2010). While Temperance does not participate in vegetarian practices, she engages in reflective thinking processes around the animal she killed in order to eat. Morgain (2010, p. 207) writes about how Reclaiming witches stratify food items they consume, ranking home-grown and cooked food as more valued, with food processed by multinational corporations being less valued. Temperance’s approach to butchering and consuming the rooster aligns with this hierarchy of values since it represents conscious consumption.

Through gift-giving and conscious consumption, the lives of Temperance, Tiff and the rooster emerge as an entangled relationship. The shared ethics of respect stems from an ontology of connectivity between human-persons and rooster-persons. The expectation of reciprocity is established through Temperance’s belief that not wasting any of the animal is the best way to show respect for the rooster’s life. Strathern and Strathern (1971, p. 176) made observations of

100 magical things, such as birds, in Papua New Guinea, where individuals did not make masks, carvings or paintings, but they would take parts of the birds such as their feathers. In this example, Strathern and Strathern (1971) highlight how magical things made from taking parts of animals, rather than making representations of them such as paintings, point to a relational ontology that is underpinned by animistic beliefs. The subjectivity of Temperance’s talisman mediates the relationship between the rooster and Temperance, which neither finished when she killed the animal nor when she ingested the bird. This animistic structure of witchy relationality stems from broader cosmological ideas about nature. These observations mirror previous studies of witchcraft communities and belief systems describing nature as the embodiment of the sacred (Klassen 2012; Purkiss 1996; Ruether 2005). Ishtar’s witchy group performed a ritual that uses horseshoes as an object/subject that connects people with animals and the land:

21 July, 2015 – Ishtar’s farm in the Hunter Valley (Field notes)

Ishtar revealed to us that the land we were creating the circle on held even greater significance because there were horses buried underneath. While we shared lunch she had told the group about the significance of horseshoes in witchcraft because of the connection between horses and folk magic. Horseshoes were the result of a combination of all the elements – earth (iron), fire (heat from the blacksmith), water (used to cool the shoe) and air (used to cool the shoe).

In witchcraft, as demonstrated in the vignette from my field notes, nature is expressed in circle casting rituals through the elements (earth, air, fire, water). Elemental symbolism, in the context of this ritual, fosters a sense of community that goes beyond human persons. Circle casting is intended to connect witches to the ‘deepfelt consciousness of cosmic interconnection’ (Salomonsen 2002, p. 181). The sense of interconnection between the group and the imagined horses symbolises witchy beliefs in nature. Nature, in the context of anthropology, has received considerable attention (Descola, Lloyd & Sahlins 2013; Haraway 2007). One particular point of focus in this field of study is the nature-culture divide (Latour 1993; Ortner 1974; Rose 2017). This “divide” refers to the separation of nature and culture as two distinct provinces, separating the pole of human beings and culture from the pole of non-humans and nature (Latour 1993, p. 13). In his lecture on anthropology and nature, Descola (2001, p. 7) cites Mauss as the first to bring attention to the ‘material and ecological foundations shaping collective existence’. Cosmologies that treat nature and culture as single ontological provinces can be understood as what Harrison (2015, p. 27) terms connectivity ontologies, which are

101 ‘[modalities] of becoming in which life and place combine to bind time and living beings into generations of continuities that work collaboratively to keep the past alive in the present and for the future’.

The relationship Temperance, Tiff and the rooster share is a connective ontology, the process of talisman making draws these three beings together. First, by ingesting the meat, Temperance took the body of the rooster into herself; in other words, she embodied the animal. Fiddes (1991, p. 38, as cited in Gressier 2015) proposes that the cultural meaning underlying ingestion is due not only to the act of incorporating food and drink into the body in a material sense, there is also a social-spiritual dimension. Second, by using the feathers in her practice and passing this on as a gift to her friend, she created a sense of continuity. This sense of continuity connects to witchy beliefs of interconnectivity, which is the notion that all things and life are connected. Within esoteric cosmologies, all things are connected. Practices that draw in symbols of nature, like feathers, reflect the cosmological foundations of witchcraft. Witchcraft cosmology rests upon the idea that in nature, all life is interconnected (Greenwood 2000; Purkiss 1996). The connective ontology that binds nature and culture is both expressed and embodied through cycles. The importance witches place on cycles are an example of how witchy cosmologies embody elements of esoteric cosmologies. The significance of these connections comes from the idea that all life is connected – non-human people (such as the land and animals) and human people (both the still-living and ancestors).

III. Witchy Ancestors

[With] a lot of what I’ve done, as I’ve grown, I’ve always just put it down to [my] ancestors watching down [on me]. [They tell me] what [to] do…if I’m ever at loss for what to do, they [my ancestors] tell me what I need to do … and you know [they have] never led me wrong… I’ve always figured with being part a family [witchy] tradition, it’s got to be someone from [my] family there, watching over, making sure I [am] getting through this life. (Karen)

The witchy practice of talking to and accessing one’s ancestors reflects a shared belief in spirits. This belief in spirits embodies the idea that a person’s deceased relatives are willing and able to guide and protect them. Understanding the universe as an esoteric cosmology (Faivre 1992) explains why the world would be populated with spirits. Karen described to me how the spirits she interacts with are familiar to her because they are her ancestors; ancestral spirits are bound to her through invisible, yet malleable, ties. The relationship Karen shares with her ancestors is one of reciprocity; she explained to me how practising her witchy family traditions is an act of

102 reverence, of ancestral worship, and in return for showing her ancestors respect, they provide her guidance. Karen’s experience of living in an enchanted world contrasts with her memories of attending church with her family. She reflected how despite belonging to a non-religious family, her family would regularly attend church. She reasoned that since her family was situated within a conservative Australian community, attending church allowed them to maintain the reputation of a normal family. The pressure to conform to normative social expectations, while also believing in things such as spirits that fall outside of these boundaries, was difficult for Karen. Ancestors not only provide guidance for Karen, since she is in a relationship with her ancestral spirits, but also function as a form of witchy sociality.

For Karen, her ancestors represent her connection to her own family – that of belonging to a witchy family tradition. Growing up she felt a sense of distance from her community owing to the conservative social and religious beliefs. Within her family, the emphasis placed on ancestors during these formative years reaffirms the perception that she is connected to her (deceased) family members by following the spiritual practices handed down to her (Salomonsen 2002). In this way, ancestors are significant sources of meaning-making in witchcraft, with multiple other witchcraft studies observing the effect of ancestors on an individual’s sense of identity and belonging within their communities (Butler 2014; Greenwood 2000; Rountree 2003; Salomonsen 2002). The witchy belief in spirits existing and interacting with the world of the living, with their descendants, speaks to a broader sense of existential continuity. Ancestor worship is an important source of ontological continuity, based on the historicised logics of connecting witchy identities with ancestors. An important element for the creation of existential continuity, is ‘the formation and mediation of historicised logics in preobjective bodily experience’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962 p. 53). Ancestors function as an anchor for witches’ ontological security because ancestors are often associated with the past (Butler 2014). Witchy ancestors embody the past, which is important for how witches perceive their own identities and socio-cultural sense of place.

Previous studies in this field demonstrate that witches place emphasis on ancestors as a source of strength (Lepage 2017; Morgain 2013; Salomonsen 2002), mirroring Karen’s sense of connection and support with her witchy foremothers. In Karen’s family, the pressure of being socially accepted was valued over individual identity and expression. She recalled feeling afraid of saying anything that could cause suspicion or cause her family to be ostracised. The familial relationships she shared with her mother did not nourish her witchy sense of self; rather, they

103 repressed it. Developing her witchy identity required strength that comes from familial support. For example, while her family performed their weekly ritual of attending the local Catholic service, she would often leave church and walk outside to join her father. Sitting under a tree in the church grounds, she explained to me how she would feel comforted talking to him about her witchy practices and beliefs. Her mother’s fearful attitude about concealing any type of witchyness emerged when she began university, as she felt withdrawn and hesitant about being open about her witchy identity with her new friends. During this period of uncertainty and self- questioning, she turned to her witchy ancestors for guidance and strength. As a symbol of her past, her ancestors function as an ontological anchor by providing her identity a sense of existential continuity. While for Karen, ancestors provide a sense of ontological security, this is tied directly to her own beliefs about death – this is not necessarily the case for all witches, as there is a wide and complex variety of beliefs concerning death.

Spirits in the Home

[Just] after my sister died, I started getting cold shivers in our house. There was one really vivid [encounter] when I was walking in my dad’s house [which is] an old brick house so it’s cold to start with, and our bathroom door is this massive, thick wooden sliding door, that’s sort of semi-ornately carved on each side but has a massive mirror on the inside bathroom side. I went to the bathroom to go to the toilet and I shut the door behind me and [I had] this very strong sensation of something human-shaped reaching out of the mirror and touching me at the base of my neck. I full on shuddered and turned around and there was nothing there and it was just very profound. (Brigid)

Brigid’s experience in her father’s home involved communicating with her late-sister’s spirit. This communication occurred in a bodily way, creating a harrowing and eerie atmosphere for her. The emotional impact of this spirit encounter for Brigid meant she felt unsafe in her home and continued to experience cold shivers. From a friend of hers whom she met online, she obtained the recipe to make a charm for warding off spirits. Using washers, which are thin metal plates with a hole that are used to distribute the load of a threaded fastener like a bolt, she created a wind chime. The purpose of this wind chime was to detect the presence of spirits; when there were spirits nearby, the wind chime would make noise, thus alerting her. The wind chime charm is based on principles of sympathetic magic (Frazer 1993[1921]; Tylor 1871), which for Brigid forms a connection between her own material field and immaterial plane of her sister’s spirit. The washers themselves were sourced from her father’s toolbox, everyday items she used to craft a spirit detecting device. This type of everyday activity reflects her

104 broader worldview that the natural, supernatural and human social worlds are not separate from one another, but constitute one indivisible sacred world (Rountree 2003). Brigid’s practice of crafting and keeping a wind chime in her home to detect spirit activity is indicative of an esoteric cosmology, one where the network that connects all life can be manipulated through the human imagination. In this example, Brigid attempts to manipulate the spirit world by placing a handmade charm in her home.

Morgain (2013, p. 167) describes how ancestors are not removed from the everyday, but are in actuality an integral part of the everyday lives of witches. The ritual of placing a wind chime creates a symbolic connection between Brigid and her older sister, creating the charm for her sister to affect. The expression of this relationship plays out in the context of the everyday. Rountree (2003, p. 166) writes about the cosmological significance of such symbols, arguing that these ‘symbols represent collective experiences of the feminine that go through time, and so connect us to our ancestors and the whole continuity of female experience throughout time’. This sense of existential continuity is necessary within a lived religion like witchcraft as it is a tradition that regularly ‘confronts’ death. In Brigid’s example above, the spiritual connection is not with an ancestor she is descended from, such as a grandparent, but her sister, who can be classified as her beloved dead. The phrase ‘beloved dead’ refers to all relatives who have died but maintain a presence in the lives of witches (Morgain 2015; Rountree 2003; Salomonsen 2002). This spiritual presence is maintained through everyday rituals.

Symbols of the dead represent witchy conceptions of time, as cyclical rather than linear. This notion is consistent with some aspects of traditional religious cosmologies that are also cyclical; time occurs in a straight line and human life has a beginning and end. Starhawk (1979, p. 66) writes about the important role death plays in the wheel of life, explaining that ‘death is seen as a point on an ever-turning wheel, not as a final end. We are continually renewed and reborn whenever we drink fully and fearlessly from “the cup of wine of life”’. This idea is echoed in traditional, mainstream Abrahamic religious traditions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam. For example, during the Catholic mass, members of the congregation drink the wine that has been transformed through the process of transubstantiation into the blood of Christ. Through his body and blood (transubstantiated from bread and wine), Christ is brought into the presence of the congregation. Brigid’s sister is present through Brigid’s bodily sensations – her shivers and shudders. Brigid’s interprets these sensations as spirit activity and evidence of her sister acting upon the world. This interpretation emerges from her own worldview regarding what

105 happens when people, even family members, die. Within witchy cosmologies, life does not end with death – it is just another turn of the wheel.

Altars in the Everyday

29 June, 2015 – Tiff and Jenna’s house in Brisbane, Australia (Fieldwork diary)

‘I really like your altar,’ I say, pointing to the altar set-up next to the dining table. This home altar contrasts with the WitchCamp altars in several ways. The altars at WitchCamp (see Image 5) were set up on the floor with many items added by different people – including a mixture of artificial [toys] and natural [flowers] items. On the home altar in Tiff and Jenna’s house (see Image 6), natural items were included such as dried herbs and fresh fruit and flowers, with the exception of a photo of Tiff’s grandmother. The age of the photograph and its frame added to the overall homely and witchy aesthetic of the altar.

Figure (5) Image of an altar from Tiff and Jenna’s home

To explore women’s lived religions, McGuire (2008, p. 108) argues that focus needs to be placed on ritual practices that occur in the ‘private, domestic, familial sphere, where their roles are likely to be more active and expressive’. In this study, I observed an altar in the context of Tiff and Jenna’s home, a site where her social group was also gathering. Based on fieldwork

106 observations and an interview with Tiff, I established that she draws on a range of cultural artefacts to create her altar. This includes the common practice of keeping images of the beloved dead on their home altars. This practice relates to the cosmology of ecology, which gives witches a cyclical lens through which they view birth, death and rebirth as part of a circle, rather than the usual linear fashion. The cultural meaning underlying witchy practices that involve the beloved dead ‘serve as both maps and repertoires for individual experience and expression’ (McGuire 2008, p. 100). This is the lens through which witches view and understand death. Altars represent a practice that helps these young women to embed witchyness into the everyday.

Every culture is engaged in the process of generating and sustaining a system of meaning (symbols and artefacts) (Ortner 1974, p. 72). An altar, taken as cultural artefact, exists within a symbolic system that provides people with ‘extrinsic sources of information’ (Geertz 1993, p. 91). In patriarchal religious spaces, altars are used to sustain a system of meaning that values the masculine over the feminine. Cultural artefacts play an important role in materially grounding ideologies – particularly those pertaining to women. Altars are both a symbolic device designed to reify women’s inferior status, and a ‘social-structural arrangement that excludes women from the realm of religious and spiritual power’ (Ortner 1974). What altars symbolise is the materiality of spatial boundaries and gendered social structures. For example, in Christian settings images of Jesus – statues, paintings and mosaics – are placed front and centre, commonly on or behind the altar. Altars generally sit within a broader masculine infrastructure of Christianity and are arguably an extension of this ideology. Witchy altars, in comparison, are an ‘observable on-the-ground detail of women’s activities often at variance with cultural ideology’ (Ortner 1974, p. 69). By shifting altars into the context of the everyday, the home, the women in this study are resisting the cultural ideology that constructs women as inferior to men. As I have established previously in this chapter, in order to explore women’s lived experiences, focus needs to be placed on ritual practices that occur in the ‘private, domestic, familial sphere’ (McGuire 2008, p. 108). In her study of Reclaiming witchcraft and sacred materialism observed altar practices, Morgain (2015, p. 180) contends that altar objects:

[o]ften mediate connections between people and with the wider ‘web of life’. Items on an altar are not generally objects isolated from their context; altars tie practitioners to the season, particular elements or deities, experiences in their past or hopes for their future, and to more concrete social relations.

107

Figure (6) Image of an altar from CloudCatcher WitchCamp

Altars that are created and maintained in the homes of young women provide an opportunity to understand the relational field of connectivity within which the self is entangled. Just like the women in McGuire’s (2008) study, personal practices reflect an ongoing process of finding one’s identity while living their religion. Altars are both a practice and a site for witchy practices – whereby the young women in this study cultivate a perceptual lens through which they orient their lived experiences.

108

Figure (7) Morgan’s altar

Lighting candles, for example, in the ‘private, domestic, familial sphere’ (McGuire 2008, p. 108) represents a small, but important, daily ritual practice that creates a sanctuary. Morgan keeps a witchy sanctuary (Figure 5) that can be understood as a space of religious and spiritual power and re-affirms this by lighting candles every day. The young women in this study create their home altars by utilising a complex mixture of material items such as food, candles, paintings and photos of ancestors (Greenwood 2000; Magliocco 2012; McGuire 2008; Morgain 2015). As material expressions of witchyness, altars connect the visible and invisible worlds. Romberg (2018, p. 156) writes about the ontological function of altars describing them:

[as] spaces that enable ritual action and ontological transformations, shrines and altar rooms are central to the provision of channels for connecting visible and invisible worlds and the ritual transmutation of people, things, and words.

I use the idea of altars being points of contact between visible and invisible worlds in a witchy context to examine the notion that altars are a ‘point of contact between the human realm and the spirits’ (Romberg 2018, p. 156). A relational ontology is created and sustained between the

109 contemporary witches and their ancestors. Altars provide a material connection between the visible material world and the invisible world of the dead. The cosmological logics of practices relating to the creation of altars serves as a repertoire for both individual and communal experiences and expressions (McGuire 2008). Although cosmologies arise in localised contexts and are based on ethnicity and class backgrounds, the principles of cosmology share collective aspects across witchy social groups. Altars are places where the living and the dead, the human and the divine, meet.

Feeding Ancestors: Altars and Offerings

[o]n my altar there’s always milk and bread and honey, and I always offer to him [fairy man] in the daylight hours, it’s always got to be between when I wake up and midday. And there’s one particular foremother of mine, this ancestress who I, you know, there’s the beloved dead and the mighty dead, you know the ones who are sorceressly powerful. She’s sort of like a patron of mine and I offer to her at night and she likes to have sweet herbs or incense burnt for her. (Fae)

Fae’s relationship with her familiars requires offerings in return for guidance. This reciprocal relationship mirrors a type of social contract similar to the one outlined by Wilby (2000)19. Mauss (1990[1925], p. 10) asserts that the obligation to give things carries the obligation to receive and return things. In an example he gives on Maori customs of gift-giving, he argues that to ‘receive something is to receive a part of someone's spiritual essence’. What someone gives, such as food, comes ‘morally, physically and spiritually from a person’ (Mauss 1990[1925], p. 10). The thing that is given then retains its spiritual essence: it is not inert but alive (Mauss 1990[1925]). The specific food that Fae offers to her familiar, milk and honey as discussed previously in this chapter, possess a spiritual essence. What this means is that Fae is not only ‘offering’ food to her familiar spirit, what she is doing is sacralising matter by imbuing the food with her own spiritual essence to feed her fairy man. Here, Fae makes a distinction between the beloved dead and the mighty dead. In comparison to the beloved dead, the mighty dead refers to witches who have died, although there may be no direct relation between the living witch and to this group of ‘wise ones’ (Salomonsen 2002). When Salomonsen (2002, p. 205) asked the group of women she was studying who they were referring to when they called on the mighty dead in rituals, Starhawk answered “The Mighty Dead are powerful Witches that

19 Wilby (2000, p. 290) writes about nineteenth-century folk beliefs, that ‘fairy men and women habitually form "alliances" with humans and negotiated to work with them for a prescribed length of time, for an agreed payment’.

110 do not have to reincarnate, who live on the astral plane as sources of power and protection, almost like semi-gods”.

Feeding her fairy man ‘every day’ is also a part of Fae’s everyday life. Her fairy man’s appearance in her life occurred when she ‘started bleeding…since (she) was twelve’. Cosmological beliefs about menstruation have been explored elsewhere in this work and other studies. Salomonsen (2002) writes about witches gathering to discuss experiences of their first menses. Greenwood (2000, p. 129) also observed menstruation-focused rituals where red ochre was used to represent the blood of menstruation in a celebration of their synchronicity with the moon and their foremothers. The idea that menstrual blood is a sacred bodily fluid, not a polluting substance (Douglas 1970, p. 107), that can be offered to the spirits (be they ancestral or familiars) is indicative of cosmological logics of connectivity. Fae creates the connection between her first menses and the appearance of her fairy man in order to locate a sense of existential continuity in her life. This sense of continuity and connection, to her fairy man and her witchy identity, is a product of her historicised logics. This sense of historical consistency is located in her pre-objective bodily experience (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 53), specifically the experience of her first ‘bleeding’. Fae’s witchy practice of offering milk, honey and bread to her fairy man is an act that gives her identity a sense of historical continuity.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have argued that witches enact practices in their everyday lives that reflect a broader cosmology based on the cycles of nature. The everyday practices that involve reciprocity illuminate the witches’ beliefs about their bodies, their identities, and their relationships with others. By exploring the moon cycle and the Wheel of the Year, I have explored how these notions structure time and rituals in a cyclical pattern. The notion of cyclicity structures existential ideas in witchcraft regarding death and dying. Cosmological notions of life and death structured as a cycle inform and shape witches’ relationship with both one another and the land. This is reflected in everyday commensal acts that occur within the witchy community that reflect a sense of interconnection between human people (both alive and deceased) and non-human people (including the earth). This understanding of animistic connection is also embodied in the reciprocal acts of relationality enacted by the young women in this study. The practices performed by these young women, such as crafting gifts, are indicative of their perception of the sacred as immanent, as something located in the world, not separate from it. Locating sacredness in the everyday is indicative of how witchcraft is a lived

111 religion that imbues the rhythms and activities of everyday lives with meaning. These witchy practices and perceptions hold significance not just for the young women’s sense of sociality, but also for their sense of self. Witchy identities are complex and entangled with their relationships with other witches, as well as the land. The metaphor of weaving is useful for understanding this relationship and will be explored further in Chapter Five.

112 Chapter Five: Weaving the Witch

26 June, 2015 – Outer suburb in Brisbane (Interview with Fae)

Sitting on a patch of grass in the sun, I asked Fae what she would like me to weave into her braid.

Pausing for a moment, she pulled a section of her hair from near the nape of her neck forward, answered, ‘What would I like? Well there is a particular flavour of longing and lack that’s been dogging me lately and I reckon I’m ready to let that dissipate.’

Gently, I took the small section of hair Fae offered me and began to plait it.

‘Where do you feel it?’ I ask.

Patting her chest, she tells me, ‘It’s there. You know I think that’s going to block blessings that could be coming so I’m ready for blessings I welcome them and yeah, let it ease. [To] let that ease [so I] feel like there’s enough.’

While she spoke, my fingers pulled and looped her long red hair together into a simple plait. We did not have any hair bands with us, so we left the plaits to unravel.

As I came to the end of the plait I commented, ‘I think this is good because it will unravel, instead of being ripped out.’

During the course of my fieldwork, I noticed there was a tendency to describe the relationships between people, groups, the land and the past, as threads of connection. People imbued their relationships with a sense of meaning by calling on metaphors drawn from a variety of sources including traditional folk crafts – such as weaving. Weaving is both a practice and a symbol for witchyness. As a practice, weaving is both an embodied and a metaphorical practice. As a bodily practice, it manifests in acts such as hair plaiting. In the vignette, Fae and I practiced the act of weaving by plaiting each other’s hair. The strands of our hair functioned as symbolic threads holding both the power of our intentions and the intimacy of our new friendship. As the plaited hair unravelled, the power of the ritual was released. In this chapter, I examine how weaving is not just a symbolic image; as Northrup (1995) suggests, it is an embodied practice that is connected to social meanings in witchcraft communities. The symbolic use of the appropriation of women's crafts as ritual metaphors emerges from everyday acts. For women’s

113 spiritual groups, weaving represents the complex relationships and interconnections that pattern women's lives and spirituality. Rituals such as plaiting hair or a spiral dance, weave a sense of togetherness, a feeling of belonging. To examine the role weaving plays as an embodied and metaphorical practice, I identify and examine the relationship between people’s bodies, rituals and sacred objects. Fedele and Blanes (2011) argue that in new spiritualities, such as witchcraft, the body and the self (spirit) do not exist in opposition to one another. Weaving is a metaphor that captures the complexity of the relationship between the body and the self. Rituals that draw on this metaphor add another layer of complexity by bringing in other bodies – human and non- human – into relationship with one another.

I. Sorcery: Pulling the Threads of Fate

The way I believe, just stirring my coffee may or may not affect old mate across the town. But if I had his hair and I was stirring that into something, maybe it would, you know what I mean? With it all being about fate threads and working the fate threads [and] the web of fate that we find ourselves [in]. We are all connected, which is why sorcery works. You know? Having those links makes it more powerful. (Fae)

Fae belongs to a Tasmanian coven, one that aligns closely with the tradition of witchcraft established by Robert Cochrane. Cochrane was an enigmatic figure who emerged from the contemporary British witchcraft movement. As the founder of what Fae refers to as the Cochranian tradition, he was a core influence on the traditional witchcraft that has been practised in the West since it was founded in 1951. Fae’s beliefs in weaving the threads of fate emerge from the Cochranian tradition of witchcraft. According toMichael Howard (2011, p. 28), Cochrane named the goddess of witches, Fate. Fate, according to Cochrane, was a weaver and therefore the tools for weaving and spinning became symbols for the threads of fate that permeate, bind and, ultimately, order the universe (Howard 2011). Fae’s idea of constructing the world as a web emerges from this tradition of witchcraft. Fae’s cosmological construction of the world as web, made up of threads of fate, places her in a powerful position. From this vantage point, she perceives her ability to act upon the world not as a separate, single individual navigating an indifferent universe; rather, as a powerful witch situated within an interconnected web – the threads of which are at her fingertips.

Hair is both a cultural and ritual object in a variety of settings, accompanied by an array of social meanings and rituals (Giri 2006; Keen 2006; Malinowski 1932). The use of hair in ritual, as an object imbued with magical properties, is treated alongside nail clippings and bodily fluids

114 as symbolically equal to the person from whose body they came. Using hair and nail clippings in ritual work draws on a belief in contagious magic which ‘holds that people/objects that come in physical contact with other people/objects can become permanently influenced through the transfer of some or all of their properties or “essence” from one to the other’ (Fernandez and Lastovicka 2011, p. 281). Fernandez and Lastovicka’s (2011) definition of contagious magic is drawn directly from Frazer’s (1993 [1921]) ‘law of contagion’. Fae’s beliefs about sorcery implies there is a material and immaterial connection between a person and body parts that have been separated from an individual (in this case, hair).

The sorcery practice possesses a relational dimension because it embeds Fae within an interpersonal field of relations. Similarly, the social and spiritual meanings of hair in the context of witchcraft, embeds these young women within an interpersonal field of relations. The field of relations, within Fae’s cosmology, is conceptualised as a web consisting of countless threads of fate. The bodily practice, of attaining someone’s body parts to influence their actions, places witches within an agentic position within the web. This practice is similar to Voodoo – a religious practice founded in Haiti and New Orleans – that is renowned for its use of sympathetic magic in the form of Voodoo dolls. These dolls act as representations of people that the practitioner can act upon. As a cultural and ritual object, hair symbolises a powerful bodily link with the capacity to strengthen the level of metaphorical influence over another person.

As a metaphorical practice, here, weaving manifests through Fae’s sorcerous practice. The metaphor operating here concerns Fae weaving the threads of fate. The threads in this metaphor are hair, which is combined with the everyday action of stirring her coffee. The cosmological ideas underlying this metaphor concern interconnection; Fae believes that all life, including people, are connected. Witchy practices or sorcery is the recognition that these links exist and that they can be manipulated through human intervention. The esoteric cosmological paradigm outlined by Faivre (1992) proposes that the universe is alive and the natural world bound together through a network; this network can be mediated and manipulated by the human imagination. The cosmological logics of the web refers to the ‘space, time, matter, and motion’ of the universe (Tambiah 1985, p. 3). The gods, humans, animals and spirits who populate the cosmos are also ordered through cosmological logics of weaving. Sorcery represents methods of manipulating the threads that link people to each other and to the universe. Fae refers to these connections as threads of fate, which contrasts with other studies in this field that emphasise

115 the role of agency in witchcraft (Morgain 2010). Within the context of Fae’s witchy cosmology, this concept aligns more closely with the fates – Greek goddesses who, according to myth, preside over each person’s destiny (Mencej 2011). The notion of fate generally describes the development of events outside of a person’s control that are predetermined by an external power. Clarissa also conceptualises human life through the metaphor of a web:

You imagine it’s a sort of web and there’s all these paths you can walk along. There’s all your free will [and] if something is ultimately [meant] to be fated you will arrive at that point eventually in some way or other. Other things that are like, yeah “[it] could be”, or “[it] doesn’t matter”, if it doesn’t [happen]. They are the things you can change, so when it comes down to it you just [have to] live your life. (Clarissa)

Weaving is a social activity that places witches within systems of interconnectedness. The web is a visual representation of this idea of interconnection. Clarissa’s notion of fate and free will aligns with Ammerman’s (2003, p. 212) assertion that ‘agency is located…not in freedom from patterned constraint but in our ability to invoke those patterns in nonprescribed ways’. Clarissa and Fae evoke these patterns through the symbol of a web – which is intimately tied to other witchy weaving metaphors. Starhawk (1979, p. 21) defines witchcraft as a ‘religion of poetry, not theology’. Poetry in witchcraft takes the form of ritual chants, myths and stories. To find meaning in these symbols, it is necessary to explore the myths and stories where these metaphors live. The mythology of the three Greek goddesses who weave the strands of fate, is one such mythological story that echoes throughout both Reclaiming and Cochranian witchcraft:

In Greek folklore, the fates figure as three old women – at least one of which is always engaged in spinning, one of the remaining two sometimes bears a book wherein she records the decrees they jointly utter, while the other carries a pair of scissors wherewith to cut the thread of life at the appointed time. Sometimes, however, the last two spin, and in these cases one of them carries a basket of wool or a distaff and the other fashions the thread. Clotho spins the thread of life, Kalomoira apportions luck, and Kakomoira misfortune. (Mencej 2011, p. 72)

The metaphor of weaving in this mythology represents women as the creators of life. The tools for weaving, such as scissors, distaffs and spindles, represent feminine creativity (Christ 1997) and feminine knowledge (Northrup 1995). By participating in rituals, such as the spiral dance, witches evoke this history of women as weavers – as capable of changing their own fate.

116 The Spiral Dance

2 April, 2015 – CloudCatcher WitchCamp, Springbrook National Park, Australia (Fieldwork diary)

The group of witches leading the ritual stepped forward.

“There is a thread,” they announced, “That weaves through each camp, beyond Australia, through our camp to the camps all around the world.”

As they spoke to the group they walked slowly around the circle three times, encircling their hands in a weaving motion.

“Everyone join hands please, for our spiral dance,” the red priestess instructed.

With her hands, she began a slow drum beat that held the rhythm of the dance, as we circled around one another, making eye contact at least once with everyone in the room.

After the spiral dance had completed a full rotation we stood still, holding hands, and members of the group who were in the middle of the spiral (who had not danced with everyone) spoke solemnly to the wider group.

“Are you mad? If you go into the outside world and you try to talk to them, they’ll think you’re mad. Will you delve into the madness?”

The CloudCatcher WitchCamp runs once a year during the Easter long weekend for four days and is located in the lush tropical rainforest covering a mountainside in regional Queensland. The Reclaiming community has been running WitchCamps in Queensland for seven years. The vignette above is sourced from my field notes and describes my first Reclaiming WitchCamp experience (at CloudCatcher), my first group ritual experience and my first spiral dance (also known as the weavers dance). The popular Reclaiming text The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979), written by Starhawk, was named after the spiral dance which is Reclaiming-based ritual dance. The spiral dance involves a drumming group and sometimes a song. All members present hold hands and follow the ritual leader in a counter- clockwise motion using a grapevine step (Starhawk 1979). As the leader comes near closing the circle, they turn around quickly and move clockwise.

By continuing the dance in this formation, every dancer will eventually come face to face with every other member of the group (Starhawk 1979). The purpose of bringing everyone together,

117 through holding each other’s hands and the eye contact, stems from the Reclaiming imperative to create a sense of community and belonging through bodily touch. The vignette above shows how important dance and movement is to storytelling in ritual settings. Storytelling and ritual gestures are used in the vignette to create the idea of interconnection, through the symbol of the spiral. The story of the thread connecting each of the camps was told through the spiral dance, through loose and flowing movements where participants swayed and moved their bodies while weaving their hands through the air.

The feelings evoked through the spiral dance encapsulates the essence of witchy rituals, which is to achieve a feeling of connection. The circle it creates symbolises the cyclicity of time, which I explored in Chapter Four, the recurrence of the seasonal and lunar cycles for example (Northrup 1995). The symbols of connection, such as the circle, combine with the affective atmosphere created by the priestesses leading the ritual. In her study of a Reclaiming community, Morgain (2010, p. 140) also observed this moment during a ritual, when the self merges with the collective:

In Reclaiming praxis, there is one key moment where inner and outer, individual and collective can be seen to be fused together. This is the ecstatic pinnacle of ritual—the cone of power. Ritual planners build this into almost every ritual they plan, from the seasonal celebrations through to the nightly rituals at a WitchCamp. This involves having participants sing and ‘raise energy’ which is focused inward toward the middle of a ritual circle. Often, this is achieved with a spiral dance, in which members lock hands and spiral inward, then outward, then back around until everyone is facing towards the centre. At this point, as the song harmonies reach ecstatic heights, they morph into a resonant humming, focussing in towards the centre of the circle and upwards into the sky.

The atmosphere in witchy rituals is necessary for the merging of the self and the community and, eventually, a sense of social cohesion. An affective atmosphere is achieved through a confluence of sensory elements including drumming and chanting, holding hands, candles and dancing that tap into the senses. Evoking the senses in witchy rituals aims to elicit an emotional response from participants. The emotional response, in both my experience and Morgain’s (2010) example, was the feeling of connection. Creating and maintaining sociality occurs through the performance and repetition of rituals specifically designed to raise emotional energy. Geertz (1973, p. 90) defines religion as ‘(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men’. The mood that

118 the spiral dance evoked during this ritual was ecstatic and joyful. A sense of togetherness was created through the dance, our singing and holding each other’s hands.

II. Witchy Foremothers

I’ve always been really drawn to Germany, which is where [my family is from]. When I was really young, my mum and dad and one of her friends did a séance. I think it was my great- great-great [German] grandmother or something like that came through. She was a really strong witch. She came through [the séance] and she never left. (Karen)

Karen explained to me her attraction to Germanic culture and folklore as a result of a séance her parents performed when she was young. She believes that this ritual summoned one of her German foremothers – an ancestor of hers who she believes was a powerful witch. Karen also believes that once this ancestor was invoked, she did not leave her – remaining in her life as one of her ancestral guides. Calling on one’s ancestors is common in witchcraft. The act of calling on one’s foremothers is an act of ancestral reverence that anchors a young witch’s sense of self in the past. Grandmothers play an important role in formation of the young women’s self-identity. As foremothers, they act as vessels of wisdom and witchcraft knowledge (Rountree 2003; Salomonsen 2002). Witchcraft rituals represent a way of being that ‘keeps the past alive, people “become their ancestors”’ (Ingold 2000, p. 56). For Karen, becoming a really strong witch like her great-great-great grandmother honours her family’s legacy while providing a familial foundation for her own witchy identity. The need to call on one’s witchy foremothers through séances, rather than reading history books, arises from the belief that their witchy foremothers were systemically killed20.

Previous work in the field of witchcraft studies (Greenwood 2000; Rountree 2003; Salomonsen 2002) reveal the importance of rituals that call on one’s foremothers for creating a sense of belonging for a community. For instance, Salomonsen (2002, p. 201) writes about how witches weave stories about their foremothers in an effort to strengthen the bonds of community between themselves. An example of one such ritual occurred in Greenwood’s (2000, p. 129) study of witchcraft where the group she was observing stripped and ‘covered themselves with red ochre in celebration of the moon, menstruation and their foremothers’. Similarly, Rountree (2003, p. 188) discusses a Samhain ritual she participated in where the group was ‘invited to light black and white candles in memory of dead foremothers to remember those who had gone

20 For more detail, see Chapter Two.

119 before’. These practices of remembrance bring one’s foremothers into the present. Christ (1997, p. 132) observes among women who practice goddess spirituality use weaving to situate their rituals within a historical narrative.

They connect the image of weaving with the Goddess, she who weaves time and fate, she who is with women as they go about their traditional activities, she who is with us today as we attempt to transform images of the female body and women's power. Through the metaphor of weaving, contemporary women creating a new culture are linked to a heritage of female creativity going back to prehistory. (Christ 1997: 132)

For the young women in this study, witchy foremothers represent historical continuity and existential security. In this field of witchcraft studies, the role foremothers play in the identities of witches, particularly those who are in the early stages of forming their witchy sense of self, needs to be considered. The threads of this narrative are interwoven into the young women’s identities in a way that creates a sense of ontological security. The young women draw on the narrative thread of foremothers as women-healers, to weave together a tapestry. This thread emerges through embodied healing practices such as massage.

I didn’t know at the time that it was energy work that I was doing, but she [my grandmother] could feel it and she knew. [She] recognised [it] straight away. She would cup my face with her hands, I’ll never forget this and say [to me].

“You are a healer Clara, this is what you’re meant to do.”

She would make me do things, like when I would finish massaging her feet, she would make me shake my hands out. She would say,

“You’re shaking out the bad juju.”

I literally must have been pulling the pain out of her and pushing my love back into her. It’s a cycle and I realise with energy work it’s best to work from that cyclic way. (Clara)

The emotional exchange of pain and love between Clara and her grandmother occurs through bodily touch. Clara’s grandmother does not identify as a witch; however, Clara has taken this foremother of hers and woven her into her own self-narrative. I describe the energy work Clara performs as emotional work. Emotions are deeply tied to our bodies and as an embodied act, massage in this context represents more than just the manipulation of soft tissue and fascia. For Clara, this emotional work represents the beginning of her identity as a witch and a healer.

120 Northrup (1995) argues that contemporary witches have constructed an image of the witch as folk healers. The historical witches of the old religion straddle both the material (healing the body) and the immaterial (seeing past the veil). Tapping into this symbolic image is important for young witches such as Clara. The historicised logics of practising healing crafts established by their grandmothers, for the young women in this study, is based on an esoteric cosmology of cultural meanings and connections – with historical roots extending deep into the ground, connecting women in the present to women in the past. These roots provide a sense of ontological security through the perception that the rituals they perform are connected to what their foremothers practised before them. This is consistent with broader discourses of the matriarchal prehistory where the wisdom of women was oppressed by patriarchal, Christian groups (Rountree 2003; Salomonsen 2002; Starhawk 1979). The result of this oppression was a cultural re-shaping, a shift away from traditions of women-healers, women-shamans and women-leaders toward male dominance of these fields (Behar 2001). Weaving, both as a bodily practice and a metaphor, relates to the creative actualisation of folk practices that embody remembrance of one’s foremothers (Northrup 1995).

Celtic Goddesses: Vestiges of the Old Religion

…there’s the triple goddess that can really be…adjusted to any goddess because all the Celtic goddesses have three sides to them, when she’s the maiden, mother and the crone pretty much all of the Celtic goddesses have that aspect. (Morgan)

Starhawk (1979) ties contemporary witchcraft to the historical persecution and oppression of women. Tying witchcraft to this history provides further support to the idea that it is a reconstruction of a lost religion. By perceiving witchcraft as a revival of the old religion, Celtic history and culture is viewed as a ‘repository of a spirituality that has elsewhere been lost’ (Butler 2014). The triple goddess, for example, often emerges in cosmologies because it reflects three major life processes – youth, motherhood and eldership. Morgan’s interest in triple goddesses reflects the sense of connection she feels towards goddesses from Celtic backgrounds as well as her belief in a (historical) matriarchal utopia. One of the ways Morgan connects with this imagined past is through the film and songs written by Damh the Bard. While we watched one of these films together, called The Spirit of Albion (2012), Morgan explained to me how through the film and songs the bard tells the story of a utopian past, one that was destroyed by religions and societies focused on domination and control. In the film, the Celtic goddesses of this lost past, Morgaine and Ceridwen, for example, appear in contemporary times to lead three

121 young people who have lost their way back to the ways of the old religion. Watching this film weaves together Morgan’s historical perception of a lost utopia together with her own witchy identity. Weaving is a metaphorical practice Morgan enacts to provide her identity a sense of historical continuity and ontological security.

In the absence of a witchy great-great-grandmother like Karen’s, young witches such as Morgan draw on mythological and historical witches to function as their foremothers. As the daughter of Russian parents, Morgan spends time researching the mythologies and deities of her European predecessors. Like many young witches (Berger & Ezzy 2007) who are drawn to Celtic mythologies, she was attracted to the triple goddesses who have a maiden, mother and crone form. Authors, such as Gardner (1954) and Starhawk (1979), are partly responsible for popularising Celtic mythology among witches. Gardner (1954, p. 83), for example, writes about how in ‘Celtic times witches had great scope and used their powers wisely’. Authors such as Gardner and Crowley write their books in pre- and post-patriarchal language, which is indicative of effect Murray’s (1921) thesis had on their worldview. . Starhawk (1979, p. 19), for instance, tells the story of the Celts as the victims of a violent invasion from the new Judeo- Christian religions. According to this historical re-telling, Starhawk (1979, p. 20) argues that this invasion led to the destruction of the matriarchal utopia that existed in pre-Christian Celtic communities, which meant:

Communications between covens were severed; no longer could they meet on the Great Festivals to share knowledge and exchange the results of spells or rituals. Parts of the tradition became lost or forgotten. Yet somehow, in secret, in silence, over glowing coals, behind closed shutters, encoded as fairy tales and folk songs, or hidden in subconscious memories, the seed was passed on.

Witchy rituals that draw on this history attempt to create a connection between themselves and the old religion. Folk songs, such as the ones told by Damh the Bard, tell the stories of Morgaine (also known as Morgan le Fay), who is Morgan’s preferred Celtic goddess. Similar to other young witches (Berger & Ezzy 2007), Morgan became attracted to the goddess Morgaine who embodies this notion of the lost religion of the Celts. Morgaine is a main character and antagonist in Arthurian legends. She was rewritten by Marion Zimmer Bradley (1983) in The Mists of Avalon, a popular text among the young women in this study, as ‘a priestess of the ancient Goddess religion in the process of being supplanted by Christianity, whose temple is hidden behind the mists at the summit of Glastonbury Tor’ (Morgain 2012, p. 531). The

122 narrative of Morgaine, a priestess fighting to save the old religion from being swallowed by colonising Christian missionaries, is a feminist discourse that resonates with the young women who participated in this study. The folktale of the goddess Morgaine is a story witches weave into their own histories that connects them to the witchy past. To learn about witchy histories, they use other storytelling mediums such as rituals, folk songs and films. Witches, such as Morgan, draw on the mythological narrative threads of Celtic goddesses to connect their identities in a broader cosmological sense to both animagined past and to past communities.

Weaving Nature Through the Witches’ forest

[In the witches’ forest] there is a river. You know how in a rainforest it’s like cool and, I don’t want to use this word because it’s awful, but moist you know? When you’re in a really large forest in a rainforest there’s always dripping leaves, it’s not raining but it’s dewy. I know most of the people I live with [go there]. I remember I read out a poem [about] one of the spots [in the forest] that I go to and just through [hearing] my description we realised we all chill in the same forest but like come in through different ways. (Lyra Rose)

In Lyra Rose’s description, the witches’ forest is an imagined place that holds significance for the witchcraft community21. Similar to the otherworld described by Greenwood (2000), the witches’ forest exists both within the material world and within the practitioner. I use the phrase ‘the witches’ forest’, which is drawn from the beliefs the young women in this study communicated to me. Lyra Rose explained to me how there are different ways or methods people enter the witches’ forest. Lyra Rose enters the witches’ forest through trance. Her roommate and brother-in-law enter through dreams. In both examples, an altered state of consciousness is needed to enter the forest22. We got onto the topic of the witches’ forest as a result of both conversations I had had with other witches about their experiences, as well as my own experience in the witches’ forest. After I told Lyra Rose about my own lived experience entering the witches’ forest, through both trances and dreams, she shared her own stories about entering and exploring the forest. Greenwood (2000, p. ix) defines the otherworld as ‘a spiritual domain that co-exists with the ordinary everyday world’. The everydayness of the witches’ forest, for Lyra Rose, emerges through her poetry readings. In the context of her share-house (where she lives with two other young witches), reading out her poetry is a normal activity. The

21 I use the term imagined in the same way as Jenkins (2002, p. 6) when he explained that imagined communities are not fabrications or falsity, instead, linking them to imagining and creation. 22 Altered states of consciousness, achieved through techniques such as trance, are sometimes described as on ‘ontic shift’ where people experience their sense of reality change (Hume 2006, p. 15).

123 act of sharing her poem about the witches’ forest pulled together the threads of connection between herself and her housemates. For the young witches in this study, the wide spectrum of subjects are also interconnected; for example, Clarissa explained to me how all life is connected:

Forget about human, let’s say life – humans, animals, the earth, the environment, anything living at all. To me, it’s just a whole big, beautiful world of energy. We’re all interconnected. (Clarissa)

Weaving is not only a bodily act or metaphor that connects the witch to other witches, but also to places (environment, nature, forest) and times beyond their reach. The witches’ forest is a symbolic concept that embodies the young women’s beliefs about themselves and their relationship with the world23. Within witchy cosmologies, the witches’ forest represents a point where the landscape and their ancestors converge. Morgan, for example, explained to me how in Norse mythology trees are seen as sacred, as conduits to the gods. Nature is treated as sacred and sentient, and something humans are positioned within, not as separate from. Witchcraft can therefore be understood as a religious ecology, which is a concept ‘founded on the belief that the natural world is part of, not apart from, the deities that created it’ (Hume 1999, p. 95). As I have argued previously in this chapter, ancestors and goddesses play an essential role in the creation of both individual and group identities. These deities are perceived as imminent within the world, rather than transcendent. This type of thinking and being in the world is animistic, which Rose (2017) describes as seeing the world as populated by both human and non-human souls:

[The] bonds of mutual life-giving subtend relationships among individuals and groups, across species; they include a great range of beings, even some landforms. This is an ontology in the best possible sense: it is relational, and it articulates patterns and ethics connectivities, continuities, and responsibilities. (Rose 2017, p. 495)

Rose (2017, p. 495) defines it as ‘an ontology wherein non-humans are understood as persons, with their own ways of life and their own desires’. An animistic world is populated by both human and non-human souls, encompasses a wide spectrum of subjects such as ‘trees, rocks,

23 I use the plural possessive noun ‘witches’ to indicate that a) the forest is a social phenomenon and an experience shared by multiple witches, and b) it is not a material thing that can be possessed.

124 rivers, mountains, caves, insects, animals (including humans), fire, snow, particular tracts of land and indeed the whole earth’ (Rountree 2012, p. 308).

Meeting the Wise Woman in the Cave

I mean…glow worms are important to me [because at]…my nannas place in New Zealand had glow worms and my dad would take me walking through the rainforest and they [glow worms] were there. [At] Springbrook [the] glow worms look like a constellation. [At Springbrook there is] a cave with a hole at the top [where] water comes through. That place, every time I go there I get blown away. The first time [I went to Springbrook], I went for a bush walk with my partner and two friends of ours. It was storming and so [the water] was rising and we were drenched by the time we got [to the cave].

It was pretty quiet because it was raining and you could see [the] lightning through the hole. You’re not supposed to swim there and I probably wouldn’t do it again because it affects the quality of the water and the oils on your skin impacts the little glow worms. We sort of stripped off [our clothes] and went swimming [in] the water in the cave was so cold and…the lightning would light up the cave. Otherwise it was dark and all these worms [looked] like a constellation. [But] I’m glad I did …it was such a beautiful experience for me.

The [inner witches] cave is pretty lit, not brightly but it’s my cave, not [like] the Springbrook cave. It’s not a dark cave, there are dark areas, but my area is quite comfortable. (Temperance)

Witches weave their inner cosmology to their outer landscape; for example, as Temperance does when she undergoes trance work and visits a cave. She uses her memories, from visiting her grandmother’s house and swimming in the Springbrook cave, to create the material and emotional foundation for the cave. Temperance’s physical surroundings parallels with the landscape she describes in her inner landscape, her witches cave. One the features in her description of the cave (both material and immaterial) was the visual effect of the cave ceiling covered in glow worms that to her looked like a constellation. Temperance connects arrangement of glow worms (the micro), to the magnitude of a star constellation (the macro). Temperance explained to me that when she visits her cave it is different each time in terms of size because it is not static; like her, it changes. She also described how her cave would be different depending on how she feels. When she was an adolescent, she spoke to a therapist who asked her to think of a place that made her feel safe, which was the cave. Greenwood’s (2000) concept of the otherworld applies to this experience, which she describes as another dimension of consciousness that can be entered through ritual techniques. Trance, for example,

125 is the primary method of entry Temperance uses to enter the otherworld. The otherworld, according to Greenwood’s (2000) study, can be found both within the witch and in the land:

A land of everything out there and in here too [pointing to herself]. It is a whisper away, it is a shift in consciousness to see the bigger picture and the threads that weave through everything that has ever existed. It is multidimensional, a heartbeat away. There are people who exist in human form who have never lived in this world but have become ancestors. They live in their realm. (Greenwood 2000, p. 27)

Similar to Greenwood (2000), Morgain (2013, p. 304) describes witchcraft cosmologies as intersubjective, weaving together one’s ‘surroundings, in the woodlands or coastal foreshores or cities we inhabit, as well as those we visit in our imaginations and in our rituals’. Temperance’s impulse to create macro–microcosmic parallels emerges from a desire to locate her sense of self with other people, nature, and the universe as a whole. Weaving functions here, as a way of integrating one’s sense of self with the world around them. Temperance weaves her memories of the cave, in New Zealand and swimming in the cave at Springbrook, into her trance practice. Visiting her cave represents not only her animistic ontology, it signifies her belief that the sacred is immanent, as it is located both within (herself) and in the land. The nature of the relationship between Temperance and the land reflects a broader esoteric cosmology wherein microcosms mirror macrocosms (Faivre 1992). The inner and outer cosmologies of witches are bound together through witchy practices that reify the idea they are connected to the land. The young women in this study weave together a perceptual lens that allow them to unconsciously attach meaning to the unfolding of existence, thereby imbuing their existence with a sense of continuity.

III. Weaving Existential Security

I’ve had [experiences] that have been extremely significant, so they have formed an internal symbol, if that makes sense. I think it’s an internal reality that I was able to put an image to because I went there, and it was a very strong experience. So, one time I journeyed up a mountain spontaneously. No one was leading it, I wasn’t actually meaning to do a trance, it happened spontaneously.

I went up a mountain into a cave and met this older woman and she was telling me all this incredible stuff and as soon as she said I was like that’s true and I asked her all these burning questions and you know when it’s hard to ask the right question because they’re buried

126 [inside]? But they were these questions coming from my inner being and she gave me these answers and I was like, “Whoa, whoa. You know everything. Who are you?”

And she was like, “I am you.”

That to me was like a moment where it clicked for me. That wise women – is me. That’s my intuition and I got to have a visual experience of what it was like to dialogue with that aspect of myself and so that stuck with me.

I loved that because I had this tenderness and awe and respect for this woman. I was like you know everything, I just have to learn from you and I have to know what you’re about and towards the end of the conversation I asked,

“Who are you?” She said, “I’m you”. I was like, “What? How can it be?” (Tiff)

Tiff recounted to me that she will cast a tarot reading while she is menstruating to enter a trance state. She explained to me that when she is menstruating she feels as though she is already in a semi-trance state, which makes it easier for her to enter the altered state of consciousness necessary for trances. During Tiff’s trance, she had a significant experiential moment when she encountered the anthropomorphised symbol of her intuition as the wise woman. The witch has previously been defined as a wise woman; Rountree (2003, p. 42), for example, defines ‘witch’ as both a ‘sixteenth century village wise woman or a modern spiritual feminist – who challenges patriarchal control and claims independent knowledge and power’. Similarly, Salomonsen (2002, p. 241) discusses the wise woman as the third face of the moon goddess – ‘an elder, an experienced wise woman, the Crone’. Through her trance work, Tiff comes to the realisation that the wise woman in her cave is a symbol for her own intuition and knowledge. In her work on the emerging patterns of women’s spiritual groups and practices, Northrup (1995, p. 119) observes how women are guided by the ‘imaginative possibilities of inner wisdom, creative memory, and emotional responsiveness’. Tiff’s inner wisdom manifests as the figure of a wise woman who dwells within a cave. Ritual techniques such as ‘trance, chanting and wild behaviour’ are used to open up consciousness. Opening up one’s consciousness allows the self to dissolve into the larger reality, which is the culture of the witchcraft community. Identifying as a witch is not a straightforward linear process and the complex and relational dimensions of this process are captured through the metaphor of weaving.

The self-making practices these young women engage in, are ones where their experiences, emotions, knowledge and femininity are valued. One of the ways these young women weave

127 these values into their sense of self, is by drawing on threads that both re-enchant the world around them while providing visual representations of the sacred feminine. For example, Tiff’s wise woman not only symbolises her own inner knowledge, it represents a broader aim in witchcraft, which is to re-value feminine spiritual authority. The wise woman embodies the attitudes and aspirations that make up the witchcraft communities’ identity. In Tiff’s group, for instance, the principles come in part from the foundational ritual practices she learned in Starhawk and Valentine’s (2001) book The Twelve Wild Swans: A Journey to the Realm of Magic, Healing, and Action. This book begins with a fairy-tale, one that is encoded with wisdom and teachings. Starhawk and Valentine (2001) provide an analysis of this story, explaining the symbols and metaphors used throughout. According to the authors, the old woman character in the story represents ‘the Crone incarnate, guide and teacher who practices “tough love”’ (Starhawk & Valentine 2001, p. 6). Working through the elements chapter of this book with her group, Tiff found the activities to be practical. However, given that she worked in a women’s-only group, the identity of the group was tied to working on providing safe space for women to practice witchcraft. This had consequences when Tiff attended her first Reclaiming WitchCamp.

When Tiff and I both attended the same WitchCamp, we were both confronted by the same challenge, which was doing witchcraft with men. Since we were both familiar with performing rituals in women-only spaces, Tiff explained to me that attending the CloudCatcher WitchCamp was a challenging experience. For example, since we had both read the registration information pack, we knew to expect nudity. As we both found out, Reclaiming principles about freedom and the body are different in person than they are in a book or information pack. During my first ritual where I saw a naked man, I felt very uncomfortable, almost afraid. When this happened, I found one of my friends, Alex, and stood close to him. When I confessed my feelings to him, he smiled and jokingly whispered, ‘I don’t think you’re their type, Em.’ Laughing together, I felt more relaxed and was able to go back to participating in the ritual. Tiff recounted to me she experienced a similar encounter at WitchCamp when she was sitting down during a ritual and when she looked up she saw a naked man. Afterwards when she returned to her bunkhouse room, she shared her experience with Jenna and Temperance; they all agreed seeing naked men’s bodies felt confronting. However, it presented them with the opportunity to question why seeing naked men provoked such a negative initial reaction. Within Reclaiming witchcraft, nudity is both a bodily technique and a symbol. Nudity represents the re- conceptualisation of the body (as well as gender and sexuality) as sacred within the community.

128 While witchy rituals are designed to put people back into their bodies, the experience of seeing naked men had the effect for both myself and Tiff, of taking us out of the experience of the ritual. Ritual nudity symbolises the Reclaiming communities’ aim to create intimacy and equality (Salomonsen 2002). Like myself, Tiff had only participated in rituals that involved women and this was our first encounter with male nudity. Salomonsen (2002, p. 225) asserts that within western culture, ritual nudity is used to oppress women on a symbolic level, linking it with ‘poverty, weakness and femaleness’. She follows this assertion with the argument that argues ‘witchcraft contests this tradition by equating femaleness with strength and nudity with pride, making associative links to nudity that are experienced to be continuous with the “natural” and the “ordinary”’ (Salomonsen 2002, p. 225). For this reason, she states that Reclaiming rituals are not common in mixed covens. During WitchCamp this was not the case; as a mixed-gender event there were numerous occasions where people, both men and women, were naked. Layla explained to me that the Reclaiming community in Australia was less likely to have segregated rituals or ritual spaces at WitchCamps, since this would run counter to their principles of unity that directly emphasise inclusion. In the next section of this chapter, I explore the experiences of a young man who participated in a nude Reclaiming WitchCamp path.

Eating Apples and Pomegranates: Embodiment and Sexuality in the Bower

10 December, 2015 – Dinner with Chris, Melbourne (Fieldwork diary)

Sitting closely in a crowded and hot dumpling house with Chris, our conversation turned to the topic of past CloudCatcher WitchCamp themes. Chris recalled attending the CloudCatcher WitchCamp during 2014 with “Eve and the snake”, which was called Eve and the Serpent, the Garden and Aradia. During this WitchCamp, he explained, they worked through the Christian origin myth in reverse by starting outside the garden (of Eden) naked. At this WitchCamp he chose to follow one of the paths that took place in the Bower and involved complete nudity for the three hours. His expectations changed after completing the path.

“I went into this all ‘oh everyone’s bodies different, I love being naked’ but by the third day of being naked and crying with strangers you just want some pants.”

During this path he recounted to us how he remembered meeting Yahweh in the body of a camper who asked, “Kiss my feet.”

To which he replied, “No, no – I don’t do that”.

129 He described the feeling of Yahweh turning him away and feeling as though he is no longer a part of that flock as very real and present in that moment.

During this path fruits such as apples and pomegranates were used. They also took turns seducing people to eat the apple. Taking the fruit from the tree they had created with all types of fruit hanging from it, which to him looked like a “feast for the eyes”. He recalled how together with a woman he bit into a pomegranate and as the red juices ran down their chests onto their genitals they both felt a tingle. To each of them this was humorous since they were both gay, and looking into her eyes he thought to himself – “damn fertility!”

In the vignette above, Chris described to me how he worked with Christian stories and symbols, which was important to him as a young man who identified as both gay and a witch. Through his experience, Christian understandings of the body as taboo are countered through the ritual nudity and performances. For example, the idea of seducing each other to eat the apple echoes the Genesis story about the origin of the world and the role of the devil seducing humankind to commit sin. The Genesis origin of the word myth is important to Christian cosmology. For a community to attach the whole theme of the camp to a Christian myth is both provocative and transgressive. It is provocative to place a Christian myth in a witchy setting because the ‘witch’ in Christian cosmologies represents a threat to the broader social and moral order. By transgressing the expectation that something that is profane (the witch) will be kept separate from sacred (Christian mythology), those attending and participating in this camp are actively playing with the boundary between the sacred and the profane by ‘work[ing] through the Christian origin myth in reverse by starting outside the garden (of Eden) naked’. This is why the path Chris attended was conducted in full nudity. He found this path challenging since he started with a body-positive and accepting attitude, and by the end of this three-day path he wanted the option to cover himself. During this path, one of the witches participating aspected Yahweh, which is the Hebrew name of God, asked Chris to kiss his feet24. Kissing feet is a bodily act of submission. Chris’s refusal to kiss Yahweh’s feet embodies his rejection of Abrahamic cosmology and followers who use these beliefs and doctrines to inform social and cultural mores.

Reclaiming WitchCamps are structured around a selected myth and associated deities, such as Eve and the Serpent, the Garden and Aradia. Owing to the democratic nature of the Reclaiming

24 Morgain (2010, p. 256) describes aspecting as the act of drawing in ‘energy of a deity or other spirit to become a part of themselves which involves setting aside one’s own consciousness and inviting the spirit to speak and act through one’s body’.

130 tradition, the themes are chosen by community members through events called ‘Visionings’. Visionings are events where community members are invited to get together to connect with each other before the camp in order to choose a theme and story for the next camp. These stories draw on symbols and mythic themes from a variety of traditions, such as Hinduism and pre- Christian European religions, with Celtic and Greek pantheons being popular (Morgain 2012). This eclectic pattern of behaviour is visible in studies of other witchcraft traditions, which have a demographic profile of predominantly white, middle class and well-educated that is mirrored in the Reclaiming tradition (Berger & Ezzy 2007; Ezzy 2014; Lewis 2012). The combination of these factors creates a set of particular social beliefs, values and worldviews. Understanding the epistemological orientation of the young people involved in this study is necessary to trace their transition to seeing the world (and themselves) through a witchy perspective/lens. This lens is often counter-cultural and inclusive, which is how witchcraft can serve as a haven for folk who sit on the margins of society. As a witchy space, WitchCamps allow for the critique of dominant discourses and the development of counter-mythologies. Weaving these myths into an individual’s and a community’s identity is important for witches who have been socialised into Christian families and communities, as many of the myths are exclusionary or damaging for young queer folk (Schroeder 2015).

Nature and Communal Sharing: Alternative Community Structures

…my very first kind of practices were shamanic, in the hills in northern NSW, with rainbow people in this community in this little shack that had like solar and bats living in the bathroom. I’ve lived in a lot of shacks, shack life (laughing) and I met this lady called Grandmother Windhawk…she did sweat lodges and stuff. And then I met these other people in another shack in another bunch of hills in and they had people who would come over from Arizona every year. And there was this woman who was a pipe holder and a shaman, and I spent a lot of time talking to her, so yeah. A lot of my early experiences were shamanic. (Fae)

Fae describes her experience of communal living, based on the ‘principle of sharing what one has with others’ (Morgain 2013, p. 158). The type of community life Fae describes above indicates that she not only shared accommodation with others, the material aspects of the camp also indicate a relationship with the land. The reciprocal relationship the rainbow people had with the land is embodied in Fae’s description of the living space as having solar and bats living in the bathroom. Through the intimacy of community, the rainbow people live together on the land. Fae also describes the community practices she encountered living with the rainbow people, including sweat lodges and connecting with shamans from Arizona – like the

131 Reclaiming community, their ties are woven between Australia and other countries. Such practices can be understood as interweaving the value of intimacy among the rainbow community. Living in shacks up ‘in the hills’ is a thread of connection between the rainbow people and the land – they live out their ontology of connectivity (Harrison 2015). This type of social activity aims to create a de-centralised and expressive community, one that does not adhere to patriarchal power structures (hence Fae’s veneration of Grandmother Windhawk). The idea and image of a witchy community is a powerful one for women. Northrup (1995) writes about the complexity of creating and belonging to a spiritual, feminist community:

Feminist ritual thealogy is collective. It is created in communities committed to the well-being of women. For many women's groups, ritualizing springs forth from the life of an existing community; in others, it is the creative and sustaining force that calls the community into being. The stress on community, however, must be balanced against a recognition of diversity, difference, and individual experience—an awkward tension that can at times be divisive. (Northrup 1995, p. 118)

In an effort to balance this tension, Morgain (2010) observes how Reclaiming witchcraft communities interweave communitarian and individualist ideals:

On the one hand, many of these movements have emphasised an ideal of creating ‘community’ through the methods of organising adopted, such as participatory democracy or consensus decision-making (Breines 1982:46-52, Epstein 1991:116-7). On the other hand, many participants of these movements have focused on decentralisation, self-expression and personal autonomy against what they have seen as more traditional centralised, bureaucratic political structures (Breines 1982:52-65, Epstein 1991:58-124). Overall, these movements represent an attempt to pre-figure the idealised social worlds they seek to usher in. (Morgain 2010, p. 85)

Drawing on similar ideals, the community Fae was living with attempted to live out the principles they believed in. For example, the use of solar power represents their desire to use ecologically sustainable forms of energy. Grandmother Windhawk’s introduction of sweat lodges echoes elements of Native American culture that are often introduced in witchcraft rituals (Salomonsen 2002). The purpose of introducing aspects of an indigenous culture are tied to a desire to be closer to the land. Creating a community identity that is tied to the land requires weaving together the subjects involved in this relationship. The sum of these relationships creates the living tapestry of witchcraft – the imagined community of witchcraft. As I discussed in Chapter Three, imagined communities can be understood as ‘locations from which to safely

132 circumscribe potentially infinite webs of connection’ (Amit & Rapport 2002, p. 17, as cited in Gold 2005, p. 3). A sense of security emerges through the sense of being within the community and by weaving their sense of self with the land. For example, the practice Fae describes of living in a shack-based community embodies the commitment of the group she was living with to the principle of sharing what one has with others. The identity of the rainbow group was partly tied to the concept of shamanism, which is a concept contemporary witches often draw on (Hume 1999). Rose’s (2017) definition of animism mirrors Rountree’s (2003) description of shamanism:

Central to their holistic worldview and their theories about magic’s efficacy is the shamanistic belief that all things—plants, animals, people, rocks, the elements, and so on—are connected in dynamic relationship. (Rountree 2003, p. 44)

Rountree’s (2003) definition of shamanism and Rose’s (2017) definition of animism both point to a relational ontology. Fae’s description of her earliest witchy practices as shamanic run concurrently alongside her first experience living away from home. Living in a community of rainbow people (and bats) in the hills instilled in Fae a sense of connection with the land – a relationship that informs the witchy identity she has (and continues) to develop. The development of the identity also occurred among the Reclaiming tradition, who I was able to observe during the events I attended. The ontology of connectivity between witches, in a human person to person sense, is visible in the vignette provided earlier in this chapter about the first evening ritual. Specifically, before the spiral dance, we were directed to participate in activity that required us to stare into the eyes of someone else. Lyra Rose, another young witch who was also in attendance, describes her experience to me:

I always really remember the first ritual. Mainly because I haven’t been able to get through one yet. You kind of segregate yourself [from other people]. You know how you usually don’t stare [into] people’s eyes? You don’t do shit like in real life, you don’t stare into someone’s soul. That’s not what normal people do. So you even though you do believe in the connection, you block those usual impulses, because you’re protecting yourself. So the first ritual when you’re staring into people’s eyes, it’s a drastic shift and it really shakes me in [my] boots. It’s really confronting, that first ritual always gets me. (Lyra Rose)

Lyra Rose indicates that there are those who believe in this soul connection that can be evoked through the bodily practice of prolonged and purposeful eye contact. However, she states that often these ‘impulses’ to connect with other people are blocked. The ritual action of staring into

133 the eyes of another person is a way of ‘expressing and continuing the close sense of connection…that can develop through highly charged ritual environments’ (Morgain 2013, p. 158). Lyra Rose describes the bodily changes and responses she experienced as a result of this highly-charged affective ritual atmosphere as a ‘drastic shift’ that shakes her in the boots. The practice of making eye contact elicits a strong and confronting reaction for her. Through this practice, Lyra Rose feels the presence of the thread. The thread that connects her to other people, the ones she normally ‘blocks’ or ‘segregates’ herself from. In this ritual moment, she feels un- ‘protected’ and ‘open’ to the ‘infinite webs of connection’ (Amit & Rapport 2002, p. 17, as cited in Gold 2005, p. 3). Paradoxically, it is through the structure of the ritual she is able to feel safe enough to feel unsafe. There is a sense of protection and segregation she employs in her ‘normal’ life that stops her from feeling vulnerable. From her perspective, to be connected is to be vulnerable. The threads that connect her to her Reclaiming community require a shift, from being unconnected, to being threaded. Temperance explained to me how she was longing for community, searching for a group of spiritually like-minded people.

I wanted something deeper and wanted a community…because that’s the only thing about the church I missed was community, and having somewhere you can go to talk to someone about spiritual practices. You know? Exploring that and having like network of people, who may not be on the same path as you, but understand that you’re on a path. And I was really longing for that, so we decided to make it. (Temperance)

Temperance discusses her experience with the Reclaiming community in comparison to her past involvement in the Church. The aspect she argues she was longing for once she left the Church was community – being part of a ‘network of people’ and feeling a sense of belonging. The notion of belonging in Reclaiming witchcraft, comes from the sense that they are part of a broader network. The cosmological logics of the ritual Lyra Rose discusses above, for instance, is based on the cosmological logics of existing within a universe that is connected through a network of elementals (Faivre 1992, pp. xv–xx, as cited in Salomonsen 2002). Temperance’s decision to interweave herself into the threads of Reclaiming was based primarily on a feeling – her longing for community. The sense of belonging is important to Temperance’s sense of ontological security. The ‘path’ she is on is her own; however, she needs a community of people around her who she can intimately share this path with. By sharing her path with others, Temperance locates herself within the webs of fate through the thread of Reclaiming witchcraft, a community where she feels she belongs.

134 Conclusion

In this chapter, I have argued that weaving is both a metaphorical and a bodily practice witches use to create their identities and to understand their place in the world. Witchy narratives reveal the ontological dimensions of witchy identities, namely the processes witches engage in to weave together cohesive identities. Becoming or identifying as a witch is not a linear process. The metaphor of weaving embodies the complex and relational dimensions of this process. The historicised logics the young women draw on, like pulling on threads from past narratives, weaving them into their present, creates a sense of ontological security. The weaving of these threads is an ongoing and dynamic process, with threads falling away to be replaced by new ones, the tapestry of their lives continually changing texture and form and the need for historical threads to maintain a sense of existential continuity. Weaving, for the young women in this study, captures the connectedness of all things – between themselves, the witchy community, the land and the cosmos. Weaving beliefs and practices tie into a broader cosmology of witchcraft, which orders the universe in an animistic fashion. Understanding the ontological foundation for their witchy identities is necessary in order to explore acts of reclamation and, ultimately, how witchcraft is itself a project of reclamation. The symbolic and metaphorical forms of reclamation will be explored further in Chapter Six.

135 Chapter 6: Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine

Gerald Gardner he brought it [witchcraft] back to a safe [space], I guess [that was] after World War Two. [During] that time people were kind of crawling [out] from beneath their rocks from the world persecution. But I do kind of feel, he saw that [time] as a safe point to kind of pop his head up and go:

“Look [witchcraft exists and] has been underground for [a] long [time].”

It had been [underground] that’s how traditions lived on. A family tradition…that’s where the whole occult thing [comes from]: [Witches are] dark and [live] in [the] shadows.

It’s how people had to survive, so that they wouldn’t be persecuted. (Karen)

Witchcraft has a certain shadowy and hidden quality that lives in the stories witches tell about the origin of their spiritual tradition. According to McGuire (2008, p. 98), religion, understood broadly, consists of how people make sense of their world – the stories out of which they live their lives. The stories witches tell to make sense of their world are sometimes referred to as ‘herstories’. Herstories (Messick 1987; Rountree 2003) are a subversion of the ‘his’ in history – a feminist critique that sees world history being told by men through a masculinist lens. There is a popular belief in witchcraft that women’s voices and stories – herstories – have been lost (Morgain 2010; Rountree 2003; Starhawk 1979). Witchcraft represents an attempt to take the historical threads the young women have inherited and to improvise upon what they have found (McGuire 2008, p. 185) to create their own lived religion where the body is taken back from patriarchal discourses and re-positioned as sacred. For this chapter, I draw on both interviews with the young witches as well as field notes in order to bring together the way witches articulate their experiences with their sensuous bodies. Rituals that involve sensual embodiment create a sense of belonging and cohesion for the wider community.

I. Reclaiming Herstories

In the vignette at the beginning of this chapter, Karen explained to me the story of the old religion through a prominent figure in witchcraft - Gardner. According to her, Gardner brought witchcraft out from shadows into the light, from the private into the public. The myth of the matriarchal prehistory, described in more detail in Chapter Two, is interpreted differently

136 depending on the witch and what tradition they belong to. Fae, for example, believes her witchy practices and observances are a part of this ancient lineage that was forced to go ‘underground’:

We use the almost Christianised names [for the Wheel of the Year festivals] such as Hallowmas, Roodmas, Candlemas. [We use] those names because we recognise dual-faith observance as something that was adopted by a lot of, I guess peasantry [folk]. The folk traditions got masked there [when it went underground]. Just like in say conjure or voodoo…it’s sort of [a] closed [group] thing that’s the other thing I don’t [attend] WitchCamps I don’t necessarily jump into public circles. I like the hidden nature of witchcraft, you know? [Practising in] black hoods at midnight. I don’t know there’s something sorceress [about hiddenness] that I find really powerful. (Fae)

Unlike Karen, Fae believes witchcraft is a tradition that survived by hiding within the dominant religion – Christianity. She compares this survival tactic as akin to Voodoo, because she believes in both witchcraft and Voodoo, Christians forced their spiritual practices ‘underground’. Hence the need for ‘masking traditions’. In witchcraft, the festivals in the Wheel of the Year, Samhain, Beltane and Imbolc – are practiced under the ‘mask’ of their Christian equivalents, Hallowmas, Roodmas, Candlemas. Fae embraces the ‘hidden nature of witchcraft’, which is illuminated through her coven’s continued use of the ‘Christianised names’ for the solstices. During the Christianisation of Europe in the Early Middle Ages, a number of pagan ceremonies were brought in and the festivals became part of the Christian calendar as pagans joined the early churches (Harpur 2004). By weaving these discursive threads into her tradition and into her own practices, Fae demonstrates how she subscribes to the mythos of witchcraft – of belonging to a tradition once persecuted and driven underground, of being part of the ancient lineage of witches, reclaiming the lost histories of the old religion. Karen, on the other hand, takes a more sceptical approach to the history of witchcraft and its origin:

[A]nyone who lays claim to being a witch and having that family connection you’re a charlatan because that can’t be it can’t be right. They’re all dead. They’re all dead. They killed them off. (Karen)

While Karen romanticises the origins of modern witchcraft, of being underground and Gerald Gardner bringing it ‘back to a safe light’, she criticises the claim made by non-sceptical lovers of the myth. This is the claim that Gardnerian witchcraft is part of an ancient lineage of witches who were persecuted during the witch trials. In her view, all the witches during this period are dead. Karen believes that witches were persecuted during the witch trials and killed, which is

137 why witches no longer have familial ties to the old religion. The ‘they’ she is referring to is members of the Christian faith. They play an important role, as the antagonists, in the story of the old religion. According to the beginning of the witchy origin story, Christianity is responsible for constructing the primary social discourses of witchcraft as evil and associated with the devil. As such, witchcraft and witches by extension, represent a threat to the moral order of society (Douglas 1966). Witchy rituals, therefore, represent an attempt to come to terms with as well as resist these moralistic discourses to reclaim what has been taken, herstories – meaning, sexuality and personal power – from mainstream religions such as Christianity.

Witchcraft beliefs can be thought of as creative collages (Rountree 2003) that draw together threads to create an imagined history of a matriarchal prehistory (Magliocco 2012), a social utopia. Witchcraft rituals rest on the meaning system made up of symbols, organised through historicised logics, such as those that support this imagined history like the Venus of Willendorf (Arcana 1992) or the triquetra (Brewer 2017). The symbols act as anchors, tying an imagined past (of an ancient matriarchal religion) to the present. Within rituals, symbols communicate ‘important cosmological concepts and values with persuasive emotive force; when enacted communally they unify participants and strengthen beliefs’ (Hume 1997, p. 112). A sense of unification or belonging, coupled with ‘persuasive emotive force’ are important elements witches draw on as part of the wider project of reclamation. A reclaiming of ritual, power and value from the dominant social and cultural order that oppressed them, according to the myth of the matriarchal prehistory. The foundation’s patriarchal power rests upon is both binary and hierarchal (Ortner 1974).

Reclaiming Sensual Rituals

5 April, 2015 - CloudCatcher WitchCamp, Springbrook National Park, Australia

On the grassy hill the whole camp stood around the fire.

The small group who were opening and closing the circle for the camp stepped forward to call the elements into the circle.

Forming a small circle within the wider circle of people around us, we welcomed each of the elements (earth, air, fire, water) into the circle.

As each person invited one of the elements into the circle they made sounds which were echoed by people in the wider circle.

138 For fire, fingers clicked together.

For water, hisses poured out to mimic the sound of a waterfall.

For air, a loud ‘haaaaaaaaa’ sound was emitted.

And finally, for earth one of the men fell to the ground slammed his fists loudly into the ground and growled into the earth.

Once the elements were invited into the circle it was time to move onto inviting the gods.

To invite Dionysus into the circle, together we sang:

“Io Zagarus”

“Io Bromios”

“Io Iakos”

“Io Dionysus”

“Io Evohe”

To invite the ancient Greek god Cybele, the smaller group dropped dramatically to the ground and slid their bodies slowly and sensually onto the ground, writhing around.25

Whispering her name we ‘seduced’ Cybele out of the earth and into the circle.

Together we stood up and re-joined the wider circle.

25 Cybele is an Anatolian mother goddess who was later assimilated into ancient Greek mythology. She reflects aspects of the mother goddess Gaia; she was associated with mountains, fertile nature, and wild animals (Lane 1996; Vermaseren 1977).

139

Figure (8) Image taken by Luke Brohman and used with kind permission, at the CloudCatcher WitchCamp held in 2015 (see Appendix C)

The design and performance of the ritual described in the vignette above included a number of sensual elements. During my fieldwork, I observed multiple circle castings that are used to begin a ritual. The one described in the above is one where I was actively involved in the planning and performance. As I discussed previously in Chapter Three, the planning phase of this ritual involved the members of the Elements of Magic path at the WitchCamp I attended. The two teachers who ran the path said that we were advanced and competent enough, even as the unofficial ‘beginners’ path, to cast the circle for the (final) evening ritual and welcome the gods. We were supplied with the list of gods we needed to invoke and farewell and given the freedom to design the circle casting and welcome however we wished. The planning phase took place in the Bower, which I discuss later in this chapter. Among those who were part of the Elements of Magic group, there were several members who were camp virgins, like myself. There were two witches – queer men folk – who had both attended camps before and were familiar with the structure of circle casting and welcoming the gods. They held the space for the group discussion, in that they responded gently to suggestions that were not logistically suitable. By gently I mean they did not dismiss anyone’s ideas, instead suggesting alternatives they had seen before that were applicable. One of the suggestions that came up was the idea of seducing Cybele out of the earth. To welcome this particular god into the ritual circle, as a group

140 we decided that as a mother goddess we would not invite her down by gesturing to the sky like the star goddess26. Instead, we would drop to our hands and knees and draw her out of the earth. Temperance told me her most significant memory from WitchCamp was this moment:

I think probably the [most significant] moment [for me] was when we did the Cybele bit [in the ritual] and we dropped to the ground and said “Cybele” and [began] writhing on the ground. Doing that in front of a big group of people was [something that], if I thought in advance that I would be doing that, I would never have thought that was something I would do. But it happened and it did feel good and it was very sensuous. (Temperance)

This ritual, for Temperance, was the ‘climax’ of her experience at the WitchCamp. This term, climax, was used frequently throughout the camp in a ritual context. It was often used to describe the apex of the ritual, the point when the energy raised by the group had reached its peak. The Star Goddess chant, for instance, has a line that specifically pertains to this idea: ‘All acts of love and pleasure are My rituals’ (CloudCatcher Registration Pack 2015). Witchy rituals, considered as acts of love and pleasure, are as Temperance describes, ‘very sensuous’. Through active participation, I observed how sensual embodied rituals in witchcraft (Ezzy 2014; Rountree 2012) foster ‘intense personal relationships’ (Greenwood 2000, p. 17). Reclaiming sensuality and the senses is embodied through ritual, which is explored in more detail in the following section of this chapter.

II. Reclaiming the Body

Reclaiming the body, through ritual, is embedded in Reclaiming witchcraft. There are a myriad of ways witches use ritual to reclaim their bodies. As I have argued previously in this chapter, the rituals performed by the young women represent their attempts to reclaim ritual from the broader patriarchal social order that devalues the feminine by marking the body as profane, and by constructing a ‘binary gender situation’ where women are categorised as inferior to men (Ortner 1974). Building on this argument, I propose that these actions of reclamation, are also attempts to reclaim the body. By taking a phenomenological approach to try to understand how the young women in this study reclaim the body, this form of knowledge is ‘embedded in embodied practices and cannot necessarily be expressed in spoken words’ (Pink 2011, p. 345). Witchy rituals represent a set of embodied practices where the ‘sensuous experiencing body

26 The ‘Star Goddess’ whose expansion and differentiation is thought to have given birth to the universe through an erotic interaction, a ‘foundational myth which sets the stage for a theology of diversification underpinned by an underlying thread of sacred interconnection’ (Morgain 2010, pp. 124-125).

141 and the rational mind’ (Pink 2011, p. 345) cannot be distinguished. Previous ethnographic studies have also provided discussions about the role of embodiment and feminine sexuality (Griffin 1999).

Embodying the Dirty, Fleshy, Bloody Parts of the Body

I find witchcraft and paganism is about getting into your body, to the dirty, fleshy, bloody parts of your body and being present, and grounded and rich in it all and I find that having that marriage of reclaiming sensuality of all our bodies. (Matt)

As a Reclaiming witch and regular WitchCamp attendee, Matt’s statement locates witchcraft as a way of ‘getting into your body’. To reclaim ‘sensuality’, he argues, one needs to ‘get into’ the ‘dirty, fleshy, bloody parts’ of the body. This definition of witchcraft emphasises embodiment, the body is active in the making of the social world. The social world Reclaiming witchcraft aims to create, is one where the body is not something to transcend; rather, it is the locus of the sacred because it is through the body that the world is experienced. From this perspective, ‘the world is sacred, your body is sacred’ (Temperance). Everyday experiences that marry together dirt, flesh and blood aim to get into the body. Rolling around in the dirt, metaphorical and material dirt, is one way that witches ‘get into’ their bodies.

[Rituals exist within] the physical things you do. It’s not just a stationary thing. [While] there are still moments of stillness, there are [also] things that involve a full body experience. I think in a culture where little girls are told to be still and be quiet. Being able to sit in a patch of dirt, and sing and yell. [To be able to] scream like a maniac and dance like a maniac. [Witchcraft is about] having [that] freedom and to actually have that encouraged and celebrated. (Temperance)

As I have discussed previously in Chapter Four, for some of the young women in this study, experiences of Christian rituals were hollow and denied the body. Rituals were disconnected from emotions, social ties and spiritual experiences (McGuire 2008, p. 102). Through ritual, Temperance embraces her body and is integral to reclaiming her sense of self – one outside of the restrictions her culture places on her due to her gender. When she feels silenced, witchcraft helps her to scream. By embracing a full body experience in their rituals, witches celebrate the body. Reclaiming witchcraft provides a framework for constructing and interpreting these experiences – which Temperance experiences as freedom from patriarchal discourses that socialise women to be docile. For example, skyclad practices, such as those I observed at a CloudCatcher WitchCamp ritual, are designed to encourage bodily freedom:

142 [T]he three priestesses’ aspecting Dionysus were situated in the centre of the room. Together they raised their heads and slowly began walking towards the circle of witches lining the large room. Looking over I saw one of the maenads, a young woman with long red hair, who had knelt down onto the ground. Resting on her hands and knees, she swayed back and forth, her hair moving back to reveal her pale breasts. Glancing around the rest of the circle, I noticed that the other two of the maenads were also topless. One woman had a length of leopard print material wrapped around her waist.

As the maenads jumped up and began running around the circle the solemn atmosphere of the ritual changed and became ecstatic and frenzied. Rushing up to each of us in the circle the maenads pulled us into the centre of the room as we began to all join in on this wild dance. As the frenzied dance spilled outside, I saw people begin to undress and run down the grassy hill. The rain from the day before had created pools of muddy grass and I saw two naked people rolling in the mud and howling at the full moon. (Field notes 3 April, 2015)

The vignette above is drawn from my own field notes, which describes a full body experience I had while participating at an evening ritual at the CloudCatcher WitchCamp. During this ritual we were all invited to run outside onto the grassy hill. Under the light of a full moon, naked bodies jumped, skipped and danced – some people ran towards the forest. Others towards a patch of mud that had collected from the near constant rain. Those who reached the patch of mud began sliding and rolling around in a frenzied state of ecstasy. The act of rolling in mud mirrors Morgain’s (2010, p. 230) observation during her fieldwork among the Reclaiming community in California:

California WitchCamp is the emergence of the ‘mud people’, in which, on one morning part way through the week, one path group strips naked, covers themselves in mud, and becomes speechless. The symbolic removal of clothes strips the mud-people of their distinctiveness as humans, while the mud ties them to the earth.

Just as Temperance says above, there are moments of stillness and things that involve full body experiences such as being able to ‘sit in a patch of dirt and sing and yell’. In my vignette above, both of these bodily motions are visible – while there were people rolling around naked in the dirt, there was also an older woman with white hair standing still singing at the moon – singing the moon to come out from behind the clouds. Singing in stillness, rolling in the mud, sitting in a patch of dirt and screaming – are all ways of ‘getting into your body, to the dirty, fleshy, bloody parts of your body’. As noted in Chapter Two, Douglas (1966, p. 2) describes dirt as ‘disorder’:

143 As we know it, dirt is essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder. If we shun dirt, it is not because of craven fear, still less dread of holy terror.

Reclaiming witches take dirty things from the regular world as it exists in the (cultural) eye of the beholder – such as nudity and mud, and use them to sacralise the body. Recalling Durkheim’s (1912) argument that religion is identifiable through what a social group classifies as sacred and profane, getting dirty matters to witches because it runs counter to binary constructions of superiority/inferiority, including: male/female, clean/dirty and good/evil . For example, as I have discussed above, one of the key components of the evening ritual I describe, was inviting everyone to run out onto the hill – to dance, to writhe in the mud and to release themselves from forms of cultural madness that deny the body27.

Reclaiming the Flesh

29 June, 2015 – Tiff and Jenna’s house in Brisbane, Australia

While talking to Tiff about our experiences at CloudCatcher WitchCamp, our conversation turned to the Optional Offering we both attended which involved a group discussion about how we learned about sexual norms. Tiff explained to me how she learned about the act of sex by watching porn,

“That’s how I learnt [porn]. You know my sex education [was] very clinical ‘this is how babies are made’ [and] ‘these are your bits and their anatomical names’.”

“Nothing on how to have an orgasm?” I asked.

“Yeah nothing practical [about sex],” she replied, “and then also like the spiritual side of it which [came] from a Christian perspective is…don’t do it well I mean it was like, ‘sex is the most sacred thing ever…it’s so sacred, don’t do it. But do it with someone you really love’. So that was my sex education.”

Laughing, Tiff said incredulously, “It’s sacred, so don’t do it?”

27 Cultural madness describes the types of behaviours Reclaiming witches perceive are results of living in a society where ‘power-over’ (domination) rather than ‘power-from-within’ (potential) (Morgain 2010).

144 “But, how sex works,” she explained to me, “I learnt [that] from porn. I found that the first couple of years [of] having sex, I [acted like a] show pony [because that’s] what I [knew]. I actually thought that was how to get someone [to have] sex. (Tiff)

The need for witches to get back into the fleshy parts of the body, comes from societal expectations that women are meant to serve men in the home and the bedroom. To get (back) into the fleshy parts of their bodies, they need to ‘unlearn these attributes’ and through witchcraft, ‘learn self-acceptance’. The main sources of this expectation, according to the young women, is their families and peers, the media and, last, pornography. Tiff expressed how she felt as though the education system had let her down, and described how her sex education was too clinical and did not adequately prepare her with real life situations. When I spoke to Tiff about her experience at WitchCamp, something that stood out to her was the conversations about sex. She expressed how her sex education had been lacking any practical knowledge. Instead, porn became her primary source of sexual knowledge. Knowledge of one’s sense of self, one’s sexual self, is an important part of one’s identity. Clinical information, for Tiff, does not translate into emotional and spiritual knowledge when it comes to sex. Tiff also learned about sex through a Christian lens, which has a tendency to deny the body. In the Christian community she grew up in, the social order established that her role as a woman is to remain a virgin before entering into a marriage contract. The attitudes produced by this requirement left Tiff without any knowledge surrounding sex. Which is why she went to porn.

At WitchCamp, we shared stories where being critical of external social influences, such as the media and the education system, reveals a level of reflexivity. Those involved in the conversation expressed how witchcraft is their way of unlearning the social beliefs and attitudes they have ingested throughout their lives. Morgain (2010, p. 17) describes how in Reclaiming witchcraft, themes of connection sit alongside themes such as ecstatic sexuality – she argues that within pagan cosmologies, sexual connections emerges as foci for practitioners. Sexual connection, Morgain (2010) posits, functions on both a material and an immaterial level. On a material level, sexual connections pertain to the physical relationships of overlapping and intersecting corporality that exist between humans in an everyday sense. In the sense of the immaterial, Morgain (2010, p. 37) argues that pagans often describe the ‘sacred energy of the cosmos as an erotic energy’. For example, Matt, a Reclaiming witch and org, recounted to me the erotic energy of the chocolate rituals he witnessed at the California WitchCamps.

145 For some [Reclaiming witch] camps, [like the] California [WitchCamp they have a] chocolate night ritual which has an open play space. As the night progresses it ends up with people making-out on the floor and stuff. But I suppose they [outsiders] view orgies as this depraved sexual experience. Where [the ritual] is more [of an] old sensual…and sexual celebration. It’s [about] consenting adults engaging in consensual acts of love and pleasure. It’s not like you rock [up] and you’re going to have to do things against your will or [without] consent.

Everyone that attends [the chocolate ritual] and is actively involved has consented. At any time you can take your consent away if you aren’t comfortable. I suppose a lot of what I [learnt] through Reclaiming [witchcraft] was the responsibility of someone saying no and having the responsibility of [listening when] someone says no. Like, if I was to say, “Emma can I hug you?” and you say no, I don’t need to be offended. You might be going through a situation where you have [a] history of father issues, where being hugged makes you think of that and makes you uncomfortable. Where for me [I need to] respect if you’ve said no.

The chocolate ritual at the California Reclaiming WitchCamps represent an open play space for sensual and sexual celebration. The chocolate ritual performed at the California WitchCamps embody Starhawk’s (1979, p. 66) adaptation of the Charge of the Goddess, that ‘All acts of love and pleasure are my rituals’. A celebration of the fleshy parts of the self. Through this ritual, the consenting adults get into their bodies through consensual acts of love and pleasure where sex is being reclaimed from a patriarchal dichotomy that constructs the masculine as powerful and dominant and the feminine as weak and submissive. The logic underlying this inversion stems from what Salomonsen (2002, p. 216) terms the sexual polarity school of feminism, whose adherents aim ‘at retrieving original complementarity through a strategy of reaffirmation of the feminine side, unmaking hierarchical notions of sexual polarity created by patriarchal culture’. The idea that the sensual celebration they are engaging in is old stems from the witchy origin mythology – of an ancient matriarchal religion where sex is sacred and enjoyed by both men and women. Salomonsen (2002, p. 214), for instance, argues that within the framework of witchcraft ‘sexual intimacy can be understood as path to the sacred – not something that should be denied or denigrated’ (Salomonsen 2002, p. 214). Sexuality and sensuality are celebrated during the chocolate ritual – an erotic and sensuous event that Morgain (2013, p. 158) also observed during her fieldwork:

Sometimes such events have erotic overtones: during and after the eroticized “chocolate ritual” at the California WitchCamps I attended, groups of people could be found sleeping together that night and into the next morning in the nearby “living room,” lying over cushions

146 tossed over the floor of the large open tent designed as a rest area. This is a ritual in which people eat chocolate-dipped fruit from another’s skin and engage in increasingly risqué and explicit sexual behaviour as the night develops.

Taking a more liberated approach to sexuality presents challenges for the Reclaiming community, especially since the sexual acts they engage in cannot be removed from the broader social context. In an effort to counter social constructions of docile femininity, Clarissa told me about her first tattoo, which she had done as a symbol of feminine empowerment:

The very first tattoo I got was right here (pointing to her stomach) it is was a butterfly. Reading that book [Women Who Run with the Wolves] as soon as I was of legal age [to get a tattoo]. This [Butterfly] woman came out stomping, everyone was excited expecting [to see] some pretty delicate little dance. Instead, it was this old woman with sagging breasts [and] she was stomping and shaking and rattling and making all kinds of noise like thunder and lightning. The butterfly [woman represents] woman[hood], [she embodies] metamorphosis and change. I never forgot that [story]. That was tribal that for me and I put it on my body all that time ago. I read the book when I was maybe fourteen or fifteen, I read it when I was ridiculously young to comprehend it.

Tattoos are a fleshy practice of reclamation – one that Clarissa told me she engaged in as a way of reclaiming her body – reclaiming a body that ages. The story Clarissa refers to above is called ‘La Mariposa, the Butterfly Woman’ and is from Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ book Women Who Run with the Wolves. This was a popular book among the young women in this study. Estes’ (1992, p. 211) perspective on women and their bodies:

This is the power of the body, our power, the power of the wildish woman. In mythos and fairy tales, deities and other great spirits test the hearts of humans by showing up in various forms that disguise their divinity. They show up in robes, rags, silver sashes, or with muddy feet. They show up with skin dark as old wood, or in scales made of rose petal, as a frail child, as a lime-yellow old woman, as a man who cannot speak, or as an animal who can.

La Mariposa or the Butterfly Woman, is referred to by Estes’ (1992, p. 207) as ‘the wildest of the wild, a living numen’. This notion of a ‘stomping butterfly’ in the story above reflects the idea that the female body, in whatever size or age, is powerful. A butterfly is typically associated with metamorphosis and the process of transforming into something that is beautiful and delicate, very unlike the caterpillar it began as. The story uses this imagery to set up and subvert the expectation of the reader. The dance of the butterfly is expected to be delicate and

147 beautiful, much like the social expectations established for femininity. Clarissa loves the butterfly in Estes’ (1992) story because she is not delicate or traditionally beautiful. The butterfly woman embodies a type of femininity that is loud and takes up space, she represents a broader horizon of femininity than what contemporary society currently offers women.

Dube (1988, p. 16) observed among the socialisation of femininity in India, the physical gestures women embody in public spaces such as ‘downcast eyes, silent and un-obtrusive shrinking movements’. This notion of the shrinking body-self ties into Temperance’s notion that little girls learn quiet stillness and the image of a delicate butterfly in the tale of La Mariposa. As Temperance describes above, she resides in a ‘culture where little girls are told to be still and be quiet’. Harden (2012, p. 85) describes how within ‘everyday routines, expectations and interactions, which form children’s days, that emotions are regulated and controlled by the restrictions placed on their bodily movement’. Normalising emotional behaviour in this way leads children to learn how to manage their emotions and to regulate each other’s behaviour. Harden (2012, p. 91) argues that bodies have become increasingly socialised, with closer regulation and control over bodily functions and behaviour. For example, Brigid explained to me why she hates that menstruation is subject to regulation and control.

I hate the shame associated with menstruation so much. My partner and his dad straight up cannot handle anything to do with periods or menstruation, [and if you bring it up] they will say “Oh my god what are you doing? What are you saying? Keep that to yourself!”

Anytime I have to demonstrate how against talking about menstruation my partner is I tell this same story where when I lived with him and his mum and I woke up one morning and his dad was ranting and raving and carrying on [saying], “I’m going to find out who did this!”

And I was like, “What happened?”

And he said “There…there is a, a thing! On the sink! [It’s] a pad or a tampon or something!”

I was like that’s kind of gross and assumed it was used [based on his reaction]. It was a half of a tampon wrapper the little plastic and he was full on distressed. It was hilarious and his wife, my partner’s mother, came out and said, “Why are you carrying on? It was probably bloody mine.” (Brigid)

Brigid recalled her experience of an object associated with menstruation being treated as profane. From her perspective, the tampon wrapper was clean. However, from the reaction her partner’s father had, the wrapper is dirty because menstrual blood represents disorder (Douglas

148 1966). His distress and accusations were attempts to shun what he believes to be a dirty thing connected with a dirty bodily process (Douglas 1966). Menstruation is essentialised as socially constructed, a bodily process that is peripheral and denied – something to be concealed or kept to oneself. Brigid describes how her boyfriend and his father silence her when she tries to talk about it. Rountree (2003, p. 66) argues that witches ‘embrace the corporeal, which means that they reclaim their bodies from patriarchal concepts’, perceiving their bodies as divine – their bodily processes (such as menstrual cycles) are no longer dirty. Menstruation, therefore, is reclaimed from patriarchal discourses. Instead of symbolising disorder, the young women in this study unlearn these gendered norms. Starhawk (1979, p. 20) traces the origin of these social attitudes to the witch trials, to the discourses these activities constructed about women:

Misogyny, the hatred of women, had become a strong element in medieval Christianity. Women, who menstruate and give birth, were identified with sexuality and therefore with evil. "All witchcraft stems from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable," stated the Malleus Maleficarum.

Menstruation has the potential to be used as a metaphorical point of difference tied to a bio- physical process (McPhillips 2000). The regulation and constriction of the ways in which the body, such as the menstruating body, can be spoken of, contributes to the broader regulation and constriction of the individuals with said bodies. Witchcraft represents an attempt to forge a new relationship between the self and the body. Starhawk (1979, p. 76) goes into specific detail about how witchcraft reveres and celebrates the body and women’s bodily processes:

The Craft also demands a new relationship to the female body. No longer can it be seen as an object or vilified as something dirty. A woman's body, its odors, secretions, and menstrual blood, are sacred, are worthy of reverence and celebration. Women's bodies belong to themselves alone; no spiritual authority will back a man's attempt to possess or control her.

There is a powerful connection here between witchy stories that lay the foundation for women to stand on to reclaim their spiritual authority and embodiment. The cosmology of Reclaiming witchcraft recognises the primacy of the bodily, material roots of subjectivity and of the enveloped, embodied character of the spiritual self. What these stories establish is the historical logics the young women in this study draw on as they attempt to reclaim the ‘matriarchal rituals that had been wiped out by Christianity’s menstruation taboo’ (Fedele and Blanes 2014, p. 24). Stories of medieval Christians vilifying women on the basis of their bodily processes and femininity ‘encourage witches to see their bodies as sacred’ (Salomonsen 2002, p. 214). These

149 stories establish the symbolism of menstruation28 as a source of disorder (Douglas 1966) and, therefore, a source of sacred knowledge (Greenwood 2000; Starhawk 1979). This construction replaces the dichotomy of male/female with a new lens through which they understand the world – patriarchal/feminist. Greenwood (2000, p. 104) argues that in witchcraft, ‘menstruation is often associated with a route to esoteric knowledge’ (Greenwood 2000, p. 104). Tiff told me about how she uses menstruation in her everyday witchy practice:

My main tools are tarot and menstruation. So with tarot I’ll just use that and sort of go within and see where it takes me, and that’s usually around menstruation. I’ll pull a card that comes out to me and I will sit with it and breathe. I’ll just focus my energy and go into it and go in a little journey. So I use the card as a jumping off point, but I also like utilise the menstrual state, cause I find it much easier to shift into an altered state of awareness on day one, because I’m all trancey and all over the place when I’m like that. (Tiff)

Tiff describes her menstruation and tarot as a tool she uses in her everyday witchy rituals29. Tiff describes how on the first day of her menstrual cycle she will draw a card that ‘comes out’ to her and will ‘sit with it and breathe’. What this allows her to do is to ‘go into it’. I posit that the ‘it’ she is referring to here is her body. As Matt defined earlier in this chapter, witchcraft is about getting into the body. Here, Tiff is using her tools to shift into an altered state of awareness that brings her into her body. As mentioned previously, menstruation is often constructed as ‘a route to esoteric knowledge’ (Greenwood 2000, p. 104). Menstruation is socially constructed as profane (Douglas 1966), and the use of this bodily process places the tools of sacredness and spirituality in Tiff’s control. Tarot cards and menstruation are ritual tools or symbols that can be accessed within her own home, within a familial space. The stigma surrounding menstruation transforms menstrual rituals into acts of vulnerability, which is why it is important for Tiff to perform such practices in her home, where expressions of her identity and belief can be made manifest.

Dark Moon Rising: Witchy Practices in the Red Tent

15 July, 2015 – Red Tent Gathering, Newcastle, Australia (Field notes diary)

28 Greenwood (2000, p. 129) argues that in witchcraft ‘symbolism of femaleness par excellence is menstrual blood’. 29 Tarot are a set of cards used by witches (and other pagan denominations) as a form of divination practice (Salomonsen 2002).

150 The sun had well and truly gone down when I arrived at Willow’s house. I had only visited her home once before, for a drumming ritual, and I did not quite remember the way there– all I could remember was that her home was close to the beach. After knocking on the front door, Willow and her dog greeted me and she showed me through into the living room. Willow returned to greeting her other guests and I knelt down to attend to her Doberman who was enjoying the attention and acting in a sooky manner. As I scratched behind her ears I took in my surroundings – Willow’s home had a witchy vibe especially considered since her house was decorated with bundles of dried herbs and painted drums.

I had entered Willow’s home with another young woman with bright pink hair, and together we followed Willow downstairs, through her kitchen and into her backyard. Willow lived in a slender townhouse with a similarly narrow backyard. In her backyard there was a bathtub full of delicate, colourful flowers. In a raised and compact garden bed there were groups of herbs growing alongside vegetables. Walking outside we said hello to Willow’s daughter and to the women already seated around a small fire pit. Before we were seated Willow picked up a small bundle of sage leaves that she had lit, slowly passing the smoking herb over our bodies wafting the smoke with a fan of feathers. Willow’s daughter jumped up while we were being smudged and Willow handed her daughter the sage stick and fan so she could smudge her mother30.

Seated around the fire Willow spoke to the group about how she would like the evening to proceed,

“As we move around the circle and each of us has a turn to speak, please ensure you do not talk over others which is what I call cross-talking. Instead I encourage you all to actively listen – this is, try to listen to what the other person is saying without also thinking about what you are going to say after.”

As each woman took her turn speaking to the group – checking in with each other about how we were feeling – Willow passed a bowl around full of ‘potions’. The potions in the bowl were herbal sprays we were invited to use – some were made to be ‘women-specific’.

30 Smudging is a symbolic cleansing practice that uses smoke and the scent from burning small bundles of sage leaves. While this is used in witchy practices (Greenwood 2000; Rountree 2003; Salomonsen 2002), it is primarily a Native American technique (Rountree 2003). The topic of practising earth-based or nature-based spiritualities such as witchcraft on colonised land is an issue that is beyond the scope of this thesis; however, it is important to note that conversations about cultural appropriation and Aboriginal Australian land and spirituality are occurring in the Australian witchcraft community.

151 Once we had completed a round of de-briefing we began to chat and talk more informally while Willow prepared for the next activity of the evening.

Once she was ready Willow passed around small pieces of paper and an eclectic assortment of different coloured pens, she then invited us to write down the things we wanted to burn on the dark moon. She then invited us to write down our new moon wishes. Since the talking had died down, as we each reflected and wrote on our pieces of paper, Willow spoke to us about needing to listen to our bodies when they are bleeding [menstruating],

“What are the nuances of each flow are trying to tell us – the colours, the texture of your [menstrual] flow, the type of pain you are feeling – is there something we need to let go of.”

As she finished speaking the woman who arrived at the same time as me pointed at a tree in Willow’s backyard where a tawny frog-mouth owl had landed.

Diamant’s (2009) The Red Tent re-tells the biblical story of Dinah from a feminist, matriarchal utopic lens (Welser 2007, p. 41). Red Tents are spaces created for re-valuing the feminine body with a specific focus on re-sacralising menstruation (Greenwood 2000). The monthly Red Tent gatherings organised by Willow are important sites where witches engage in embodied practices through ritual. First, the Red Tent gatherings take place in the intimate and private setting of her home. By inviting us into her home to perform this witchy ritual, Willow moves the setting of religiosity from the public and masculine domain of traditional religious spaces to the everyday. Willow’s home – full of material artefacts such as herbs and drums – creates a witchy atmosphere in the everyday setting of her living room. Willow guided us through her front door, to her living room, kitchen and, finally, backyard –taking us on a journey through the intimacy of the everyday setting of her life and her family’s life. The atmosphere of the Red Tent space was created in Willow’s backyard using smell: the scent of the sage smoke; the smokiness of the crackling fire; the smell of the plants in the backyard; and the scent of the potions we sprayed on ourselves. The act of gathering together for the purpose of ritual work specifically dedicated to honouring the menstrual cycle and sacralising the feminine body increased the sense of connectedness and belonging in the group.

The sense of sociality between the women was created through the embodiment of the belief that menstruation is a collective experience, one that is empowering rather than a symbol of disorder and something to be concealed. While this is not a public ritual, what this gathering does is transform menstruation from an isolating experience by bringing it into a shared setting

152 inspired by The Red Tent. This fictional text transforms the menstrual taboo by creating a mythology of menstrual tents as a gift – of knowledge, of hope and strength:

[b]ut the other reason women wanted daughters was to keep their memories alive…My mother and my mother-aunties told me endless stories about themselves. No matter what their hands were doing – holding babies, cooking, spinning, weaving – they filled my ears. In the ruddy shade of the red tent, the menstrual tent, they ran their fingers through my curls, repeating the escapades of their youths, the sagas of their childbirths. Their stories were like offerings of hope and strength poured out before the Queen of Heaven, only these gifts were not for any god or goddess – but for me. (Diamant 2009, p. 5)

A mythic re-scripting of menstruation sits alongside other mythological stories witches draw on to subvert patriarchal discourses about women’s bodies as sources of social disorder. Ancient mythological goddesses with lunar associations, such as Athena and Diana, are drawn on by witches to reify the connection between their embodied practices and the myth of the old religion.31 Willow connected the ritual practice of writing wishes and burning them as an offering to the phases of the moon – the dark and the new moon – she was grounding her witchy practices with broader historical logics. In addition, the elemental correspondences in witchcraft attribute characteristics to the phases of the moon. Greenwood (2000, p. 129) has observed dark moon rituals in witchcraft settings, noting the symbolic significance the witches attribute to the phases of the moon:

Dark moon rituals have become increasingly popular for women to celebrate and reclaim what is seen to be the most feminine part of themselves. The dark moon is seen to be the time in the lunar cycle when the old moon dies and is then reborn again.

Greenwood (2000, p. 129) argues that witches draw an ontological connection between the moon and women’s bodies. The idea of moon magic and menstruation connects their bodily processes with celestial movements. Witchy stories provide the women in Willow’s group with the historicised logics they need to transform dominant cultural beliefs about menstruation. The kind of witchcraft Willow’s group performs can be considered a form of feminist witchcraft (Greenwood 2000) on the basis that the group was restricted to women only and that the premise of the gatherings – Red Tents – are based on the reclamation of feminine bodily process from

31 Diana is an ancient Roman goddess of the moon and the hunt, popular among contemporary pagans and witches and there are some groups who are women-only covens, who are dedicated to this particular goddess (Rountree 2003). The connection to Diana also traces back to Murray’s (1921, p. 12) theory that there once existed a pre- Christian fertility religion that venerated the sacred feminine.

153 being labelled as taboo to that of the sacred (Ortner 1974, p. 71). One of the rituals I attended at Willow’s home used a mixture of red liquids to signify menstrual blood, which we used to mark each other’s bodies. The sacralisation of this bodily fluid, that is normally constructed as profane, is sacralised through the ritual in a tactile way – the way we delicately drew lines and patterns on each other’s arms and faces – expressing key beliefs regarding both sacredness and sociality.

Importantly, Willow’s daughter was present at the Red Tent gatherings. Her daughter was not simply an observer, sitting on her mother’s lap listening to what was happening around her. She was actively involved from smudging her mother, to writing down on her piece of paper to burn with the rest of us to get rid of her ‘grumps’ using the power of the dark moon. She also listened to all of our stories and like the protagonist in The Red Tent she listened to everyone’s ‘stories about themselves’. Her role at this gathering, as Willow’s daughter, was not just learning the embodied practices of her foremothers. She was there to keep their memories alive and to carry them in her body. For Willow’s daughter, just like the young woman in the story, her mother would run her fingers through her curls as she sat on her mother’s knee, breathing in the smoke as she listened to the stories about menstruation and the moon. Gatherings like the Red Tent are about reinventing ways women know their bodies and share this with one another, and importantly for Willow, sharing this with her daughter.

III. Reclaiming Community

As I have discussed above, in an effort to re-sacralise and revalue the feminine body, witches set up sacred spaces specifically for ritual work dedicated to these aims. Like the Red Tent, the Bower is ‘a Temple space dedicated to the Sacred Body where all are welcome’ (CloudCatcher Registration Pack 2015). The Bower is a phenomenon originating in Reclaiming witchcraft. These spaces are used for providing each other with support, performing rituals and organising activist action. Witchy sacred spaces, such as the Bower and Red Tents, enhance the idea that the feminine is sacred. These spaces create a sense of connectedness and belonging that is fostered through ritual work that aims to heal feelings of shame surrounding sexuality. As part of my fieldwork, I only attended one optional offering called Consensual Violence held in the Bower, which I cannot report on as part of the agreement in participating in this optional offering was confidentiality32. However, I interviewed Temperance who did discuss some path

32 The title of this optional offering was chosen by the two young witches who ran this activity in a deliberate attempt to provoke people’s reactions. When I asked about the title they explained that what they wanted to explain

154 work she did in this space as well as Matt who has priestessed the Bower and who defines the Bower as ‘sacred sexuality space’33:

The Bower [is] this sacred, sexuality space [that] was brought into camp. So the Bower is a space for reclaimed sensuality and sexuality. Having been [a] priestess for [the Bower] for two years, we really focused on just connecting back to our physical body. We do so much spiritual practice that [it is important to be] physically present in our bodies. You’ll look at some traditions [and] it’s very much about reaching [a state of] higher consciousness and being able to expand beyond [the] physical form. (Matt)

As I have discussed previously in this chapter, witchcraft can be thought of as a way of reclaiming sensuality. The Bower represents the Australian Reclaiming community’s attempt to carve out a space specifically for this purpose. The need to reclaim sensuality has emerged from the perception that social ‘conditioning’ encourages people to feel disempowered via sexual shaming. Fae explained to me that being ‘un-mothered’ – living in communes or what she calls ‘shack-life’ – protected her from this ‘conditioning’:

I was a bit of wild hill person, kind of un-mothered but I missed out on this conditioning, I never felt disempowered or sexually shamed. (Fae)

The Bower is a space dedicated to reversing this sense of shame surrounding sexuality. As soon as I entered the Bower, it was obvious to me that this area was different from the other spaces set up around the camp. Unlike the main meeting/ritual area, it was smaller and more densely decorated. The floor was lined with blankets and pillows. As we sat in a circle, my eyes were drawn to the paintings and drawings of Cybele and Dionysus around the room. The Bower is a space that was created with the intention of connecting to one’s body in a way that is not connected to shame. McPhillips (2000, p. 28) argues that ‘shame is a powerful emotion for self- assessment and regulation’. Shame is one of the emotions used to delineate a male/female dichotomy. One of the ways Reclaiming witches unsettle this dichotomy is by allowing both men and women to use labels that are feminine, such as priestess. Priestessing the Bower is important for social connectedness in Reclaiming. During the WitchCamp, I conducted my

to people was the role of BDSM in their lives – hence the use of the title that draws on prominent themes in the BDSM community (Weiss 2011). 33 In the Reclaiming tradition, the term priestess is used for men and women interchangeably. Morgain (2010, p. 124) defines priestess as a gender-neutral term in Reclaiming, she explains that ‘while some male practitioners refer to themselves as priests, priestess is considered the generic term, and the action of leading a ritual part is referred to with the verb ‘to priestess’.

155 fieldwork at the path group I was part of and decided to complete our ritual planning in the Bower. Temperance described to me the positive group dynamic she experienced while working together in the Bower.

For me, like [with] our path group [when] we had to do the ritual and we were in the Bower, I felt that just really worked really well. I know there were moments and there were a few strong personalities in that group, but it seemed really balanced and [when] we made that ritual, it just worked. (Temperance)

I mentioned this planning session briefly in Chapter Three, describing how my fieldwork diary was used by the group to note down the chant we would use together in the evening ritual (described earlier in this chapter). After path in the morning, the two teachers leading the path asked our group if we would feel comfortable casting the circle and closing the circle for an evening ritual. Nervously, everyone looked around at one another, unsure whether our group was able to take on this additional task. Especially since it would be performed in front of the entire camp and not just the intimate space of the path group we had grown comfortable practising within. A few of the members of the group were not camp ‘virgins’ and after some encouragement from them, together as a group we agreed to close the circle for the evening ritual. The feelings of anticipation and nervousness were palpable as the teachers left the room and the group was left to consider what lay ahead. Someone suggested we move the discussion to the Bower. There was an intimacy in the Bower that was missing in the larger room where the evening rituals were held. The Bower was a smaller space that felt cosy from the candles, pillows and blankets, and it was this sense of cosiness and comfort that allowed our group to come together and take on the challenge of casting the circle for whole camp.

Using Effigies to Destroy

3 April, 2015 - CloudCatcher WitchCamp, Springbrook National Park, Australia

Sitting in my room – one that I was sharing with two other women – I was writing in my fieldwork journal thinking about my own bed (one that did not remain damp) and my little grey cat. Feeling homesick for me seemed to worsen depending on the accommodation. Since the door was open to air the room, voices floated in. Hopping off my bed I followed the conversation until I found its source. Four women were walking to and from the garden bed, gathering leaves, flowers and twigs.

Approaching I asked, “What are you making?”

156 One of the women replied, “It’s an effigy. For the ritual tonight.”

“Let’s give the doll a penis and boobs – make it androgynous,” said another woman with curly hair.

“The boys will love that,” laughed another.

“So why do we need an effigy?” I asked.

“We’re going to tear it apart – after we pour all the cultural madness into it,” she explained.

“What are you going to pour into it?” I asked.

“Perfectionism – look at the breasts,” she answered, pointing at the agapanthus buds, “they’re lopsided.”

As the women created the effigy – pulling the leaves over the top of the twine they shared stories of other forms of cultural madness they wanted to get rid of. The expectations that men be circumcised and have a large penis. Men aggressively hitting on women. Puppy farms. Companies testing on animals.

157

Figure (9) Group of women at 2015 CloudCatcher WitchCamp (picture taken with permission)

In the vignette above, the women gathered around the effigy shared together stories as they created the effigy. The stories in this instance described the forms of cultural madness they had identified in contemporary society needed to be torn out and destroyed. There was a sense of togetherness in the way they wove the effigy together – working creatively to create the figure from the material things they found around them. The storytellers during this group activity were older members of the camp including women in their fifties and sixties, who had all attended Reclaiming camps before, some of whom had been part of the community when camps

158 were run not by Reclaiming, but by the Church of All Worlds34. Listening to the stories told by the women who belong to the old guard allowed me to tap into the types of witchy practices they were passing onto the new generation of teachers. While the women created the effigy, they shared jokes alongside the stories, for example, they joked that ‘boys will love it’ because they included a penis on the effigy. By combining both male and female primary sex characteristics to make the effigy, the women symbolically challenge the patriarchal dichotomy of male/female.

The process itself, of telling stories while creating the effigy together, speaks to their desire to move away from relations with one another that are based on domination and exploitation (Starhawk 1979). Through this process, a sense of belonging was established. This occurred through the shared sense of ‘madness’ they encountered in the ‘outside world’. From the sense of being ‘inside’ in the camp, the women were able to conceptualise the outside world as being full of ‘cultural madness’. The sense of otherworldliness is established through several different ways. The ritual practice of weaving, which I have covered in detail in Chapter Five, is an important way witches create and change the world around them. Morgain (2010, p. 128) observes Reclaiming witches perceive the world around them and their role as weavers of change:

Reclaiming practitioners place a premium on attempting to change the structure of sociality in wider Western society. Many view modernity and its vast social malaise as radically out of step with their sacred principles, and with what is demanded for human beings and for everything else to survive.

The Reclaiming worldview Morgain (2010) illustrates above is mirrored in the vignette of the women weaving together the effigy. The principles of justice in Reclaiming witchcraft are reflected in their actions and stories:

We work for all forms of justice: environmental, social, political, racial, gender and economic. Our feminism includes a radical analysis of power, seeing all systems of oppression as interrelated, rooted in structures of domination and control. (Reclaiming Principles of Unity)

I discussed above the ways in which Reclaiming witchcraft was a project dedicated to the reclamation of the body from patriarchal discourses. This is again reflected here in the stories

34 The Church of All Worlds is a religious group that aims to create a network of information, mythology and experience that provides a context and stimulus for reawakening Gaia (Alder 1986; Hume 1997).

159 the women wove as they created the effigy. The story they told about the expectation that women’s breasts be aesthetically ‘perfect’ and men needing to ‘be circumcised and have a large penis’. These stories speak to broader social and gendered discourses. The power structures that disseminate, reproduce and profit from these discourses use techniques of power that Reclaiming practitioners refer to as ‘power-over’. The concept of power-over was developed by Starhawk (1982) to describe structures and institutions that utilised domination and violence – such as ‘puppy farms and companies that test on animals’. The effigy is the container for these forms of ‘power-over’, created with the intention that it will be ritually and symbolically destroyed. The remains of which, the women explained to me, will be used to feed new forms of sociality – one based on power-within. By contrast, power-within describes ‘a living power that infuses the cosmos and every being within it, the power of being able, of potency and potential’ (Morgain 2010, p. 113). By identifying and planning to ritually destroy the forms of cultural madness they themselves have internalised, the Reclaiming witches engage in activity that aims to achieve both personal and social transformation. The efficacy of destroying these forms of power-over depend on how effectively they are able to ‘break their bonds with the outside world’ (Lyra Rose).

Breaking the Bonds of the Outside World

3 April, 2015 - CloudCatcher WitchCamp, Springbrook National Park, Australia

Sitting in the main room used for ritual I participated in one of the ritual conspiracies where we discussed the ritual intention for the evening ritual:

Caught between the cracks we dismember cultural madness and awaken our desire.

These ritual conspiracy discussions served as settings for members to ask any questions or raise concerns about the evening ritual ahead. This also helped to make the rituals run smoother. Since the phrase ‘cultural madness’ had been used in the previous ritual, it became obvious that this language had caused some distress among some of the campers. As such, one of the witches holding the space for the ritual conspiracy clarified for everyone that when they used the word ‘madness’ they were not referring to nor were they denigrating anyone with mental ill health.

This evening ritual was different from the night before. Rather than a group of witches priestessing the ritual invoking and welcoming the elements and deities to the circle, for this ritual only two witches sat in the centre of the large room, with the rest of the campers forming

160 a circle around them. Both of the witches had musical voices and as they called on each element and deity, the effect of their voices resonating off of one another in such a large room was very powerful. They also used periods of silence more so than the night before.

Three priestesses moved to the centre of the circle ready for the aspecting to commence. They were each painted with white and black paint and some had black paint across their eyes in a thick band. Once they had begun aspecting Dionysus, they arose and began slowly walking around the wider circle. Each made eye contact with members of the circle, holding their gaze before slowly and dramatically stepping away to repeat with the person next to them. The effect was unsettling. Once they had walked around once, they stepped back to re-join the circle.

Then, two maenads stepped into the inside of the circle, holding up the effigy I had watched the women weaving earlier in the day. The witches priestessing the ritual invited everyone to shout into the effigy the forms of cultural madness we wanted to get rid of. People shouted a variety of ‘cultural madness’ into the effigy as it made its way around the circle:

“Fracking!”

“Sexism!”

“Rape culture!”

“Slut shaming!”

“Nuclear power!”

“Child abuse!”

“Expectations!”

“Patriarchy!”

The effigy had made its way around the circle once, and I had stood back – too timid to step forward to yell into the effigy or to tear a piece off. During the second round I steeled myself, ripping off some of the leaves onto the ground. For the first time in an evening ritual I felt like I was participating fully, rather than holding back for fear of what the other camp virgins thought of me. Instead of swaying awkwardly on the spot I started dancing ecstatically and screaming with everyone else. The feeling was extremely cathartic. I surrendered to the ritual.

161 At the beginning of this vignette, I describe participating in what is called in Reclaiming a ritual conspiracy. This was listed on the camp schedule handed out on the first day and this word jumped off the page, much in the same way the optional offering called Consensual Violence had. Ritual conspiracies are pre-ritual planning sessions which are run in order to make the rituals more participatory and democratic. These sessions are run for people to learn any relevant chants or songs that will be used during the ritual. They are also opportunities for people to raise any concerns they may have about the upcoming ritual. For example, during this ritual conspiracy one of the orgs raised an issue. She informed us that a number of people had spoken to her about the use of the term madness, which they felt was a pejorative term for mental illness. She clarified that this term was not intended to upset anyone living with a mental illness; rather, it was specifically targeted at addressing forms of cultural and social madness in the in-between space of a WitchCamp.

WitchCamps are not events that take place in the public eye; rather, the settings are chosen for their privacy and for the sense of removal from the everyday. Within this liminal space witches are able to play with modes of transformation. The ritual itself involved both aspecting and the tearing of the effigy, both of which could be described as transgressive actions. The tearing of the effigy was described by Lyra Rose as a Maenady experience, which by association with Maenads, would make this potentially socially transgressive:

The tearing of the effigy, [I thought] that was super Maenady. So I was very impressed, I was super chuffed and I thought that went well. It was the first-time people let go, as a group like that was really cool. The bonds of the outside world were broken.

This ritual aligns closely with the Reclaiming Principles of Unity (Appendix A) that pertain to rituals being ecstatic and participatory:

Our community rituals are participatory and ecstatic, celebrating the cycles of the seasons and our lives, and raising energy for personal, collective and earth healing.

The ritual action of tearing apart the effigy directly dealt with issues pertaining to collective and earth healing as specific forms of cultural madness, including rape culture and fracking. The social dimensions of this ritual are important as well, where the cohesive effect of this ritual came from everyone breaking the bonds of the outside world. This Maenady act and tearing of the effigy had the effect of bringing the group together as they worked to break the bonds tying them to forms of cultural madness in the outside world. The culture created at the WitchCamp

162 I attended was fed in large part by the participatory and ecstatic rituals performed, such as the one that Lyra Rose described. It also comes from informal encounters such as the one I observed when the effigy was created. The sense of social cohesion was achieved, when their social bonds to the world outside of the camp was broken. Unsettling the connection to the outside world was necessary for the camp participants to feel a sense of togetherness. Community rituals such as the effigy ritual draw on this feeling of belonging to empower witches to go back to the outside world and engage in personal, collective and earth healing.

Conclusion

A major component of this study involved my attendance at a WitchCamp called CloudCatcher. This event is run by the Reclaiming witchcraft tradition, which inspired the metaphor that is the primary focus of this chapter. In this chapter, I have argued that witchy spaces are where key acts of reclamation are lived out. Through this chapter I have identified that there are three primary things that the witches aim to reclaim: ritual; the body; and, ultimately, the symbolic power of the witch. To reclaim something, to take it back, requires a clear delineation of who or what possesses that which needs reclaiming. Witchy stories, or herstories, establish patriarchy as the ideology that creates the overarching social order. Through the framework of witchcraft, this ideology orders gender in a way that is not only restrictive, it is destructive. Witches seek to disrupt the forms of cultural madness through which this ideology manifests itself. This disruption emerges in witchy practices and beliefs, particularly ones that subvert normative constructions of what is sacred and profane. Durkheim (1912) argues that what society constructs as sacred and profane embodies that which is socially valued (and de-valued). Through stories and rituals that sacralise the feminine, witches engage in communal reclamation. Rituals create a sense of belonging and social cohesion, which is what gives these reclaiming actions social meaning and power.

163 Chapter Seven: Conclusion

When I arrived at my first WitchCamp, I had no way of knowing the impact that the next three days would have, not just on my thesis, but on myself as both a researcher and a witch. Attending this gathering gave me the opportunity to see how a community can create a sense of belonging and connection over a relatively short space of time. The interactions I had at WitchCamp not only inspired the primary themes of this thesis – belonging, identity and embodiment – it was also where I first met the witches whose voices form the foundation of this study.

This thesis raises questions about identity and community, as well as about the role of women in religious settings, the patriarchal mechanisms that maintain their inferior status and society’s long history of persecuting women. While these questions represent overarching themes framing the thesis, it has not been possible to address each of them within the scope of this dissertation. Rather, what this study represents is an attempt to gain a deeper understanding and appreciation for a spiritual tradition that deliberately engages with and counters these mechanisms of power. Through this thesis, I have used witchy metaphors, such as weaving, to demonstrate how witchcraft is a conceptual framework the young women use to understand themselves and their place in the world.

In this thesis, I have explored the everyday experiences and practices among members of the witchcraft community in regional towns and urban settings in Australia. By paying attention to their rituals, beliefs and everyday practices, I have mapped the cultural and social foundations of their sense of belonging. Through this study, I examine how young Australian women create and participate in communities. Since witchcraft is a spiritual tradition that does not have sacred sites with physical infrastructures, such as churches, I have approached this social group as an imagined community (Anderson 1983). Through the thesis, I have argued that witchcraft serves as the symbolic anchor for this community to create and experience belonging. To elicit the ways young women create a sense of community, I examined their ritual practices. This approach to belonging echoes Durkheim’s (1912) argument, about the significant role religious rituals play in creating a sense of social cohesion, whereby the self blends with the identity of the community. Belonging to a community has been previously explored through a variety of epistemological perspectives: through a feminist lens (Rountree 2003); a framework of

164 individualism (Morgain 2010); and an ontological perspective (Greenwood 2000), to name a few. While this thesis does consider elements of these studies including feminism, individuality and ontology, what this study does differently is consider how embodying the witch and identifying with a community is experienced by young women.

By focusing on the experiences of young women in the Australian witchcraft community, I examine the role witchcraft plays in the development of young witches’ sense of self. I have demonstrated how belonging to a community provides a sense of support. Ritual is one of the key socially constituted practices young women use to develop a cultural imaginary that supports their new identities. Finding a community provides a supportive foundation for them to explore and identify as witches. Rountree (2003) argues that identifying as a witch breaks social conventions for women, which requires time and support for the women to re-orient their perceptions of themselves because:

[C]laiming to be a ‘witch’ and a ‘goddess’ not only breaches the boundaries of what is permissible for women in this society, it also challenges women’s own self-perceptions. It goes beyond being a protest about patriarchal prescriptions for womanhood; it causes women to change the way they think about themselves. ‘Witch’ and ‘goddess’ are identities which can take some getting used to. (Rountree 2003, p. 187)

Rountree’s (2003) assertion resonates with the arguments I have made in this thesis. I have examined women’s domestic rituals and larger public and private group-based rituals as a means of crafting their witchy selves. Through the research, I have observed how crafting witchy identities is particularly problematic for women who were socialised into a Christian and/or conservative social setting; however, as I argue, feeling a sense of belonging to a community provides an anchor for these young women to re-orient their sense of self. By examining both private and public rituals, I have drawn out the broader patterns of witchy cosmologies and illustrated how they manifest and are expressed through practices. A key point that emerges from witchy cosmologies, is power. Power in witchcraft comes from what Starhawk (1982) calls power-from-within, critiquing systems that rely on power-over. What the young women in this study value, is participating in practices and rituals they themselves control. Witchcraft communities are positioned on the edges of Australian society, which means they are ideally located for applying a critical gaze towards mainstream social and cultural conventions. One such cultural convention they openly critique and subvert is the construction of the sacred. Witches locate the sacred in the everyday, which is often in their homes, because

165 this is where women’s activities are so often situated. This is counter to traditional Judeo- Christian religions who demarcate clear boundaries around sacred spaces and assign sacred status to certain members of the group – thus granting them power. Within the witchy framework I studied, the sacred is not transcendent, nor is it bound up in hierarchal and patriarchal social structures. Therefore, belonging to the witchy community requires a perceptual shift away from understanding the sacred as transcendent, to identifying the sacred as something that is immanent and animistic.

Expressions of the sacred are made manifest through witchy practices, which are founded on the understanding that it is through the body that all aspects of existence are lived. As illustrated in Chapter Two, embodiment is an important perceptual framework in the field of witchcraft studies. Greenwood (2000, p. 28) has, for example, argued that embodiment can be constructed in witchcraft as a form of shape-shifting and, ultimately, an expansion of the self. Morgain (2010, p. 6) takes a slightly different approach by foregrounding embodiment as a means of ‘structuring social reality that calls into question the disembodied “rational” subject of liberalism’. The findings in this thesis do not contradict these assertions; rather, this study builds on these studies by paying specific attention to the embodied basis of lived experience. Taking an embodied approach to the experiences of young women brings the fleshy and somewhat messy parts of their lives into focus. Viewing the world and everything in it (including people’s bodies) as sacred challenges the normative religio-social order. Witches disturb this disembodied and transcendent social order by locating the sacred in the world and, most significantly, in their bodies.

The everyday material expression of their internal perceptual shift emerges through their beliefs and the practices that embody these beliefs. The arrival of witchcraft beliefs and practices in Australia in the 1950s laid the foundation for later Consciousness-raising movements which emerged in the very late 1960s and 1970s also coincided with other counter-cultural global movements such as second wave feminism (Hume 1997). These broader global movements, the arrival of spiritual groups and the folk traditions of immigrant families, combined to create the cosmological framework young witches today draw on for their own purposes. From the subjective position of the young women, their sense of identity and belonging is embodied through practices that draw on this broader cosmological framework. These practices include cooking, sharing meals and creating altars in their homes. Witchy practices are performed with ordinary tools in everyday settings and express broader witchy beliefs. Two significant beliefs

166 that emerged from this study, are cyclicity and reciprocity. Cyclicity orders witchy beliefs and practices about living and dying, by connecting these concepts to macro seasonal, lunar and solar cycles. Witchy practices of reciprocity examined in this study imbues the rhythms and activities of the young women’s everyday lives with meaning. These witchy ideas reflect wider cosmological understandings about the relational nature of existence and the interconnection of all living things.

One of the metaphors that is examined in this study that captures this sense of interconnectivity, is weaving. Weaving is an embodied practice the young women use to enhance their self- understandings. Identities are complex and fluid concepts, and it is through examining witchy identities through the prism of embodiment that the bodily nature of this metaphor emerges. In this thesis, I have drawn on the concept of socialisation (Giddens 1991; Mead 1934) to demonstrate how becoming a witch is complex journey, beginning with learning historical and family narratives, religious rituals, as well as societal values and norms. As their individual (and spiritual) identities became shaped by these processes, many of the young women in this study were drawn away from following normative life patterns. Since a sense of connection is important for an individual’s sense of ontological security, identifying as a witch requires a re- orientation of their relationships (Harrison 2015; Morgain 2013). Their explorations in witchcraft led them to identify as witches and to seek out others with similar interests and desires. From speaking with these women it is evident that they were not born witches or raised in witchy families; rather, the witch is a narrative thread that they weave into their identities that provides their overarching sense of self, a level of cohesion. Weaving also speaks to witchy ontologies as it is also through metaphorical and bodily practices that the witches develop a deep sense of belonging to a community of witches.

For the young women who participated in this study, it is within witchcraft that they find a sense of spirituality and sociality, which they have not found in the realms of traditional religion. Weaving is a social activity that places witches within webs of interconnectedness. Witchcraft is not something that fits within the social setting they were initially socialised within, which is what prompts these young women to seek out a witchy community to belong to. Weaving represents, for these women, the complex relationships and interconnections that pattern women's lives and spirituality (Northrup 1995). This sense of weaving also emerges in the ways they intertwine themselves into a sense of sociality that encompasses the past, present and future, as well as human and non-human persons. Sociality in witchcraft can be understood

167 through this metaphor in a structural sense. Webs of connection emerge from the emphasis witches place on agency and flat organisational structures that move away from other more pyramid-style hierarchies (Morgain 2010; Rountree 2003). A sense of security emerges through the sense of being within and with others; by weaving self into the story of past and present, they create a web that establishes the foundation of their identity and sense of community. This sense of belonging provides the stable position for communities such as the Australian Reclaiming community, to work on exactly what their name suggests – reclaiming spiritual life.

To reclaim something is to take it back, to repossess it from someone else. For the young women in this study, witchcraft is a metaphorical project of reclamation – aimed towards reclaiming historical discourses, the body and community structures from patriarchal power structures. Witchcraft represents an attempt to take the historical threads they have inherited and to improvise to create their own lived religion where the feminine is reclaimed from patriarchal discourses. Witches live these stories through mundane practices that enact these creative interpretations. Religion, understood broadly, consists of how people make sense of their world – the stories out of which they live their lives (McGuire 2008, p. 98). The stories witches tell to make sense of their world, or herstories (Messick 1987; Rountree 2003), are performed through rituals. For witches, rituals are living stories that draw on symbols and narrative motifs to both re-create an imagined past and simultaneously critiquing modern society. Embedded in both Reclaiming and other witchy traditions, are rituals and stories designed for individuals to reclaim their individuality from a society that would prefer to see them conform (Morgain 2010). These personal projects of self-transformation are also intended to be applied on a macro level – to change the structures and elements of contemporary society.

It would be useful to compare how different age groups in this community perceive witchcraft and its role in society. The age group this study targeted restricts the findings and conclusions made in this thesis because it investigates witchcraft from the perspective of young people’s experiences, and, therefore, the nuances of being involved in the community over a long period of time cannot be determined. Nor can I discuss the specific issues facing older members of the witchy community and their insights about young people joining the community, which would have been valuable to this study. Future research in this field could also consider witchcraft through the lens of both men and women’s experiences. It would also be useful to attend both of the Reclaiming WitchCamps that are run in Australia for a comparative analysis. A longitudinal study would also be advantageous in order to understand broader patterns of

168 attendance and participation in the community. On the one hand, a longitudinal approach would provide coverage in this field that has not been addressed since Hume’s (1997) study of witchcraft and paganism in Australia.

Since this study only considers a snapshot of the young women’s lives, it would be advantageous to conduct a longitudinal study of this group to explore how witchy identities and practices change through transition into adulthood. This line of inquiry could consider how the witch does (and does not) help them to respond to the challenges attached to this type of transition. Within the available literature on witchcraft social groups, there is a tendency to focus on the community as a complete entity. Further inquiry is needed into understanding how young people find and become socialised into these communities and the over-arching role identity plays. Since the witchcraft community is diffuse, it is difficult to homogenise witches into a single group; therefore, it would also be useful to explore the difference between witches who belong to the Reclaiming tradition and those who do not.

The role of ethnicity and class within the witchy communities could, for example, be explored, as could the experience of the male witch and other gendered dimensions. Another approach may compare the difference between members of the Reclaiming tradition and other witchcraft traditions. This thesis illustrates the importance of understanding young people’s engagement with society through counter-cultural activities. One of the central contributions of this thesis has been to raise questions about the place and role of witchcraft in modern spiritual life. The study contributes to the overall field of witchcraft studies, joining the likes of Hume (1997) and Ezzy (2014), in an attempt to broaden our knowledge about the cultural and social dimensions of this community, shedding light on why young women choose to call on the legacy of the witch, not only to construct their sense of self and belonging, but to grapple with broader existential questions.

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181 Appendix A – Reclaiming Principles of Unity

“My law is love unto all beings…”

– from The Charge of the Goddess by Doreen Valiente

The values of the Reclaiming tradition stem from our understanding that the earth is alive and all of life is sacred and interconnected. We see the Goddess as immanent in the earth’s cycles of birth, growth, death, decay and regeneration. Our practice arises from a deep, spiritual commitment to the earth, to healing and to the linking of magic with political action.

Each of us embodies the divine. Our ultimate spiritual authority is within, and we need no other person to interpret the sacred to us. We foster the questioning attitude, and honor intellectual, spiritual and creative freedom.

We are an evolving, dynamic tradition and proudly call ourselves Witches. Our diverse practices and experiences of the divine weave a tapestry of many different threads. We include those who honor Mysterious Ones, Goddesses, and Gods of myriad expressions, genders, and states of being, remembering that mystery goes beyond form. Our community rituals are participatory and ecstatic, celebrating the cycles of the seasons and our lives, and raising energy for personal, collective and earth healing.

We know that everyone can do the life-changing, world-renewing work of magic, the art of changing consciousness at will. We strive to teach and practice in ways that foster personal and collective empowerment, to model shared power and to open leadership roles to all. We make decisions by consensus, and balance individual autonomy with social responsibility.

Our tradition honors the wild, and calls for service to the earth and the community. We value peace and practice non-violence, in keeping with the Rede, “Harm none, and do what you will.” We work for all forms of justice: environmental, social, political, racial, gender and economic. Our feminism includes a radical analysis of power, seeing all systems of oppression as interrelated, rooted in structures of domination and control.

We welcome all genders, all gender histories, all races, all ages and sexual orientations and all those differences of life situation, background, and ability that increase our diversity. We strive to make our public rituals and events accessible and safe. We try to balance the need to be justly

182 compensated for our labor with our commitment to make our work available to people of all economic levels.

All living beings are worthy of respect. All are supported by the sacred elements of air, fire, water and earth. We work to create and sustain communities and cultures that embody our values, that can help to heal the wounds of the earth and her peoples, and that can sustain us and nurture future generations.

Reclaiming Principles of Unity – consensed by the Reclaiming Collective in 1997. Updated at the BIRCH council meeting of Dandelion Gathering 5 in 2012.

183 Appendix B – Interview Schedule

Sample Interview Questions

These sample questions address individual participants or practitioners.

The interviews with each and all of them will work with a set of general themes and topics that aim to shed light upon the witchcraft practices of the participants and/or the practitioners.

Three groups of participants form part of the proposed research: website conveners/event organisers, established practitioners and youth practitioners. The following sample questions may reflect differences in terms of the depth of each of their involvement. However, sometimes and depending on the situation and the interviewees’ circumstances, there might be minor to major overlaps between the participants and the range of each of their questions.

The themes and topics to be addressed in the interviews may include:

Addressing Website Conveners/Event Organisers

Introductory Questions

. What is your age? . Do you work? – If yes, what type of employment are you involved in? . What hobbies do you pursue? Do you enjoy them, if yes: why? If no: why not? And: Why do you engage in them? . Have you been brought up in a traditional Christian household? If not, how/where else? . What is your level of education? What is your family background (emphasis: socio-economic status, and ethnicity)? . Do you have particular career ambitions?

Initial questions regarding witchcraft

. When did you become interested in witchcraft? . What prompted this interest?

184 . At that age did you get involved? What was your understanding of the practice at the time of initial involvement?

Initial Event Organisation

. What motivated you to organise these events? Or: What motivated you to create this website? . What form, if any, did this take? — In reference to “no” - response: For example, have you organised any workshops, Pub Meet-ups or Witch Camps?

Ritual Participation

. Does the organiser / you /yourself participate? . Do you participate in groups? Or: Do you participate in solitary rituals?

End of Interview

. At the conclusion of each interview, the student researcher will thank the participant for the interview and their contribution to the research. Emma will invite the participants to review the transcript of the recording and/or the written notes from the session. Further, Emma will ensure that if the interviewees wish to receive a summary of the research findings sent to them, that they have either provided an email or a postal address for this. Emma will ensure that the interviewees have retained a copy of the Participant Information Statement (PIS) which include the supervisors’ and student researcher’s contact details as well.

Addressing Established Practitioners

Introductory Questions

. What is your age? . Do you work? — If yes, what type of employment are you involved in? . What hobbies do you pursue? Do you enjoy them, if yes: why; if no: why not/why do you engage in them? . Have you been brought up in a traditional Christian household? If not, how/where else? . What is your level of education? What is your family background (emphasis: socio-economic status, and ethnicity)? . Do you have particular career ambitions?

185 Initial questions regarding witchcraft:

. When did you become interested in witchcraft? . What prompted this interest? . At that age did you get involved? What was your understanding of the practice at the time of initial involvement? . What form did this take? Social media – Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Personal Blogs, Event Websites, Books, Organised events?

Ritual Participation

. How long have you been practicing witchcraft? . Do you participate? How do you do this? . Do you participate in groups? For example have you attended any workshops, Pub Meet-ups or Witch Camps? . Or, do you participate in solitary rituals? . Or do you do both?

Expression of Identity

. Do you publically identity as a witch? If not, is it a private matter that you seek to keep confidential? . If so, do you divulge their involvement to family, friends or potential partners? . What is your perspective on relationship between Christianity and witchcraft? . What, do you feel, are the most persistent misconceptions about the practice? . How would you describe the practice to ‘outsiders’?

End of Interview

. At the conclusion of each interview the student researcher will thank the participant for the interview and their contribution to the research. Emma will invite the participants to review the transcript of the recording and/or the written notes from the session. Further, Emma will ensure that if the interviewees wish to receive a summary of the research findings being sent to them, that they have either provided an email, or a postal address for this. Emma will ensure that the interviewees have retained a copy of the Participant Information Statement (PIS) which also include the supervisors’ and student researcher’s contact details.

186 Addressing Youth Practitioners

Introductory Questions

. What is your age? . Do you work? – If yes, what type of employment are you involved in? . What hobbies do you pursue? Do you enjoy them, if yes: why; if no: why not/why do you engage in them? . Have you been brought up in a traditional Christian household? If not, what else? . What is your level of education? What is your family background (emphasis: socio-economic status, and ethnicity)? . Do you have particular career ambitions?

Initial questions regarding witchcraft

. When did you become interested in witchcraft? . What prompted this interest? . At that age did you get involved? What was your understanding of the practice at the time of initial involvement?

Ritual Participation

. How long have you been practicing witchcraft? . Do you participate? How do you do so? . What are the types of ritual participation you engage in? Do you participate in groups? For example have you attended any workshops, Pub Meet-ups or Witch Camps? . Or, do you participate in solitary rituals? . Or do you do both? . Types of ritual participation – group or solitary . How long have you been practicing witchcraft?

Expression of Identity

. Do you publically identity as a witch? — If the response is “No”, is it a private matter for you that you keep confidential? . If so, do you divulge their involvement to family, friends or potential partners? . What is your perspective on relationship between Christianity and witchcraft? . What, do you feel, are the most persistent misconceptions about the practice (of witchcraft)? . How would you describe the practice (of witchcraft) to ‘outsiders’?

187 End of Interview

. At the conclusion of each interview the student researcher will thank the participant for the interview and their contribution to the research. Emma will invite the participants to review the transcript of the recording and/or the written notes from the session. Further, Emma will ensure that if the interviewees wish a summary of the research findings to be sent to them, that they have either provided an email, or a postal address for this. Emma will ensure that the interviewees have retained a copy of their Participant Information Statement (PIS) which include the supervisors’ and student researcher’s contact details as well.

188 Appendix C – Copyright Permission from Luke Brohman

189 Appendix D – Copyright Permission from Rachel Hardwick

190