Reclaiming Tradition Witchcraft
Author: M Macha Nightmare [a WitchVox Sponsor]
Posted: January 13th. 2001
Times Viewed: 44,352
TRADITION...
Reclaiming Tradition Witchcraft
by M. Macha NightMare, with input from Vibra Willow ©1999
(herself@machanightmare.com)
The Reclaiming Tradition of contemporary American Witchcraft arose from a working collective in the San Francisco Bay Area of California.
In the Summer of 1980, Diane Baker and Starhawk, who prior to that time had been working with individual guests to their coven, Raving, decided to plan and co-teach a basic class in Witchcraft. Starhawk's book, The Spiral Dance, was due to be published later that year. For this book, Starhawk drew upon her own personal training and experiences, her early exposure to the work of Z Budapest, and her later training in Faery Witchcraft with Victor and Cora Anderson. Diane and Starhawk called their first class "Elements of Magic" It was a six-week series. It was offered as a class in Goddess spirituality and directed towards women. Classes were done within sacred space and the emphasis was on the experiential rather than the didactic. Each class focused on one of the Elements, beginning with Air in the East, proceeding around the circle weekly to Fire in the South, Water in the West, Earth in the North, and Spirit in the Center. In addition, each class demonstrated a different aspect of magic (the intellectual, energy sensing and projecting, trance work, spell-working, etc.) and built upon the preceding class.
This class was so enthusiastically received by the women who took it that they pleaded for more. Starhawk and Diane enlisted the help of two other members of Coven Raving to teach a second series of Elements to more women who had expressed interest, and to create a more advanced class called "The Iron Pentacle." The Iron Pentacle is based upon a Faery Witchcraft concept. The class' "main focus was trance work and the discovery of the healing powers of the human body through meditations on the five-pointed star." (1) The points were sex, self, passion, pride and power. This construct is one of the distinguishing features of Reclaiming Craft because it is considered part of the basic approach to magic, although other lines of Faery also work with it. The same is true for its obverse, the Pentacle of Pearl, the points of which are love, law, wisdom, knowledge and power. Both pentacles have correspondences with the head, hands and feet, going round and transversing the human body touching the points of a five-pointed star.
Again, success spawned a further class called "The Rites of Passage." This third class ended with the students initiating themselves, and starting their own coven, the "Holy Terrors, " (2) followed soon thereafter by the Wind Hags. All classes were conducted within a ritual, in sacred space.
From there, more classes were formed, more people began teaching, more covens arose. By this time, the original teachers had joined with some of the "graduates" and others to continue the teaching and also to offer public rituals at the sabbats. They also put out a small newsletter containing mainly class and public ritual announcements. This core group became the Reclaiming Collective, so naming itself in 1980.
During this period, many Collective members and people from the larger Reclaiming community were prominently active in anti-nuclear civil disobedience in such places as Lawrence Livermore Lab and Diablo Canyon. Some people provided support for others who risked arrest doing direct action. In addition, some people in the Collective and the larger community lived in communal households. Some were anarchists. All of the Collective's activities, from designing classes to dealing with domestic concerns to public political protests were done using consensus process.
Because of the political experiences of most of the early organizers of Reclaiming, the Collective has always used consensus process, learned mainly from the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). This takes longer than traditional group decision-making and can be fraught with frustrations, especially for the more hierarchical and parliamentary-minded. Yet within Reclaiming it fostered close bonds among participants. Almost all of the early planning and activity took place "in sacred space, " ritualized, in the presence of the god/dess(es).
The Collective, after weeks and months of discussion and work, created a statement which appeared in each issue of the Reclaiming Newsletter:
Reclaiming is a community of San Francisco Bay Area women and men working to unify spirit and politics. Our vision is rooted in the religion and magic of the Goddess—the Immanent Life Force. We see our work as teaching and making magic—the art of empowering ourselves and each other. In our classes, workshops, and public rituals, we train our voices, bodies, energy, intuition, and minds. We use the skills we learn to deepen our strength, both as individuals and as community, to voice our concerns about the world in which we live, and bring to birth a vision of a new culture.(3)
Thus, unlike most other Craft traditions, including one of its foundations, Faery Tradition, Reclaiming has always espoused a connection between spirituality and political action.
In 1985 the Collective offered its first Summer Intensive Apprenticeship, held over the course of a week in homes of members in San Francisco and in parks and other outdoor spaces. Students traveled from other states to train; they stayed on futons, beds, couches and floors in the homes of collective members. The first Summer Intensive was so successful that the following year the collective rented a retreat camping facility at Jughandle Farm on the Mendocino Coast for a series of training sessions away from everyday life for both teachers and students. At this point, teachers were drawn from the pool of collective teachers.
The "intensives" soon came to be known as "Witch Camps" and expanded with SF Bay Area teachers being invited to other states, Canada, England, Germany and Norway. The people trained in those camps in turn trained others in their communities. Today, Reclaiming Tradition Witch Camps throughout the U.S., Canada and Europe are run autonomously. They are now connected to Reclaiming's representative body called the Wheel through their Witch Camp spokescouncil called the Web.
In the meantime back in California, the "core classes"(4) were expanded upon and modified, and new ones such as herbal magic, incense making, chants and enchantment, abortion healing, "Bringing the Steps into the Circle" (working with Twelve Steps), and others were added. The leading of public rituals taught us new ways of doing magic in large groups with participants of all degrees of magical expertise. We devised methods and roles to meet these changing circumstances.
Among the roles we created were "Crows, " those who oversee the big picture—of an individual ritual, of teaching plans, or of overall Collective activities. "Snakes" view things from the ground, the little, down-to-Earth things. "Dragons" guard the perimeters of circles in public outdoor spaces such as beaches so that participants can work undistracted by curious passersby; they do not directly participate in the work of a ritual because they are providing a buffer between the public and the inner circle. "Graces" act as assistant priest/esses; they welcome people, guide them, keep aisles clear, get people standing, sitting, chanting, dancing, assembled for a spiral dance, all in different and appropriate parts of the ritual.
In recent years Reclaiming has begun employing "Anchors" in large public rituals, to help focus and contain the energy of the circle in settings where it might be prone to fragmentation and dissolution. They act something like tent pegs to keep the energy contained until such time as it may be appropriate to release and direct it.
Currently, some Reclaiming Witches are being trained in aspecting, a technique which closely corresponds to what in traditional British Craft traditions more commonly known as Drawing Down the Moon.
Not all Reclaiming Witches practice all these techniques. Many full-fledged and respected Reclaiming Witches were trained and proceeded in their personal and coven practices before some of these techniques were commonly used, and Reclaiming continues to be an evolving, living tradition.
In The Pagan Book of Living and Dying, Starhawk describes Reclaiming's style of ritual as EIEIO—Ecstatic, Improvisational, Ensemble, Inspired, and Organic. Our practices are constantly growing, being "extended, refined, renewed and changed as the spirit moves us and need arises, rather than . . . learned and repeated in a formulaic manner."(5) The spread of teachings from the Bay Area combined with the growth of teaching groups in the vicinities where Witch Camps were held (Vancouver, B.C., Missouri, Michigan, Texas, Vermont, West Virginia, Florida, Pennsylvania). Lessons learned from collective work have informed teaching at the Witch Camps and lessons learned from putting on Witch Camps have found their way into local Bay Area practices.
Distinguishing features of Reclaiming Tradition Witchcraft are:
- non-hierarchial covens and group priest/esshoods;
- no specific pantheon;
- no requirement of initiation, and when initiations are undertaken, customized ones;
- strong emphasis on political involvement and social and ecological responsibility/consciousness;
- no set liturgy (except in certain large, rehearsed or semi-rehearsed public sabbat rituals) but rather training in principles of magic and the structure of ritual, and how to "speak as the spirit moves you" within that structure;
- cultivation of ecstatic states (customarily without the use of entheogens or psychotropics) and divine colloquy—more shamanic than ceremonial;
- cultivation of self-empowerment, self-discovery, and creativity;
- extensive use of chanting and breathwork in magical rites;
- intense "energy-raising, " often using our trademark spiral dance (or even double helix/DNA molecule dance);
- magical use of the Pentacle of Iron construct and its obverse, the Pentacle of Pearl;
- concept of Three Souls;
- encouragement of the creation of new ritual forms by anyone. I have heard us described as "the pentecostal Witches, " which I take to be an allusion to the loose structure, high energy and ecstatic nature of most Reclaiming rituals, particularly the large public ones.
From the beginning, Reclaiming has had no specific pantheon. We always invoked Goddess into our circles and often, but not always, God as well. Collective classes, covens, and community have had significantly more women than men. Eventually, two particular deities seemed to have adopted the Bay Area Reclaiming community—Brigit and Lugh.
Concurrent with all these developments, Starhawk was working on a counseling degree at Antioch University West. Her work and life informed her master's thesis, which was published as Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics in 1982. Her 1987 book Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority and Mystery expanded on what we were learning to do and on what she and others were doing in political direct action.
There is no doubt that Starhawk is the primary thealogian of Reclaiming Tradition Witchcraft, as well as being its most prolific liturgist. Other prominent liturgists include Rose May Dance, Pandora Minerva O'Mallory, Anne Hill, T. Thorn Coyle, and the many collaborative chants and songs that arise from classes and in the various Witch Camps.
Starhawk has always acknowledged that much of her own thinking grows out of the community and is informed by others. Reclaiming is a far more collaborative and egalitarian Collective and community than it may appear to outsiders because of the fame of one member, i.e., Starhawk. People assume she is "the leader" and that has never been true, although she has always been, and remains, a powerful and influential voice.
Initiation—which is not required in order to perform any ritual role—has come to be performed by "committees" of teachers selected by the candidate for initiation who must ask for initiation; it is not offered, or even suggested. She may or may not have her request granted; one or more teachers may refuse. It may take some years before all on the "committee" agree that she's ready. If the candidate works in a coven, she usually is also initiated into that coven, and any initiates within the coven are invited to be part of the initiation whether they were the candidate's teachers or not.
Reclaiming initiations are customized to the individual seeker. The candidate must be willing to accept challenges from each of her initiators, and must fulfill them to everyone's satisfaction before the actual ceremony can take place. These challenges are created by each individual initiator in accordance with what that priest/ess feels the candidate needs to be challenged on, and the rule of thumb is that an initiator only gives a challenge which she has already done, or would and could do. No one is challenged to be a trapeze artist, for instance. She may, however, be challenged to such an undertaking as undergoing a white-water rafting experience if that is something the initiator determines would foster the candidate's growth—and that the person is ultimately capable of. For instance, a diabetic wouldn't be given a challenge involving prolonged fasting, nor would a physically frail person be expected to stay out all night unclothed.
Reclaiming Collective incorporated as a non-profit religious corporation in the State of California in 1990, wrote Bylaws based on a consensus process model of decision-making, and eventually gained 501(c)(3) tax status with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.
Over the years, Reclaiming Collective expanded from teaching Craft and providing public sabbat rituals to providing a recorded Events Line listing classes, rituals and other activities, recording chants, publishing a book, and maintaining an internet presence with website and listserves. The Reclaiming Newsletter grew into a slick, rich magazine now called the Reclaiming Quarterly.
After years of discussion and seeking input from those not members of the Collective itself, the Collective (which varied in size from about 10 to 20 or more at its largest) dissolved itself as a collective and turned over authority to the Wheel, a representative body comprised of spokespersons from all the many cells. At that point, about 52 people had, over the years, been members of Reclaiming Collective, for greater or lesser periods of time. In order to open up the perceived central authority of Reclaiming to the many Witches who, by the '90s, identified with Reclaiming and who practiced in the somewhat anarchic style of Reclaiming Witchcraft, the Collective created a statement called our Principles of Unity.
In addition to the Principles of Unity, the collective revised the former Mission Statement by deleting only four words: "San Francisco Bay Area." Today there are several "daughter" collectives spread over a widespread geographic area—ReWeaving in Los Angeles, Strand by Strand in Portland, Oregon, Diana's Grove in Missouri, Tejas Web in Texas, SpiralHeart in the Mid-Atlantic region, and even Dreamroads Collective in cyberspace.
Realizing that we have no way, need or desire to dictate to others how they should perform their rituals, and abhorring dogma and stagnation, we believe that any Witch may honestly and sincerely claim to be a Reclaiming Tradition Witch if he or she practices Reclaiming-style magic and agrees to our Principles of Unity.
Reclaiming Principles of Unity
"My law is love unto all beings . . ." The Charge of the Goddess
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. Honoring both Goddess and God, we work with female and male images of divinity, always remembering that their essence is a mystery which 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 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 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.
The article can be found here.
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