Magic for the Resistance Read online

  The Dow Jones average dropped sharply the next day—for which the witches were more than happy to take credit.

  One of their leaflets stated, “If you are a woman and dare to look within yourself, you are a Witch. You make your own rules. You are free and beautiful. You can be invisible or evident in how you choose to make your witch-self known. You can form your own Coven of sister Witches (thirteen is a cozy number for a group) and do your own actions .… You are a Witch by saying aloud, ‘I am a Witch’ three times, and thinking about that. You are a Witch by being female, untamed, angry, joyous, and immortal.” 26

  Another memorable action (or zap, as they were called) took place in February 1969 at a bridal fair at Madison Square Garden (with a sister action in San Francisco). The witches of WITCH, this time wearing black bridal veils, infiltrated the event, chanting “Here come the slaves, off to their graves.” They then let loose white mice in an attempt to cause chaos.They changed their name to match each action: Women Interested in Toppling Consumer Holidays (Mother’s Day), Women Incensed at Telephone Company Harassment (at Bell Telephone Company), Women’s Independent Taxpayers, Consumers and Homemakers, and several others. Covens sprang up in cities across the United States but largely disappeared after 1970.

  In 2015 covens began to crop up again, and with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, WITCH activists, in their black cloaks and pointy hats, became an increasingly common sight at protests. A new anonymous WITCH PDX, established in 2016 in Portland, Oregon, is more broadly inclusive, embracing antiracism, antifascism, antipatriarchy, indigenous rights, gender self-determination, women’s liberation, trans liberation, anti–rape culture, reproductive rights, sex worker support, LGBTQ+ rights, environmental protection, religious freedom, immigrant rights, antiwar, anticapitalism, disability justice, privacy rights, and worker’s rights.

  Despite criticism of their tactics from some feminists, and the fact that the members used witch tropes humorously, the group is considered to be a progenitor of feminist witchcraft—which we will examine below

  But before we do, one other anecdote:

  On Lammas Day 1971, thirty-one years after Gerald Gardner and the New Forest coven cast their spell against the Nazis, several Californian covens gathered to raise a cone of power to end the Vietnam War.

  Which just goes to show: witches keep doing what witches gotta do.

  Modern Feminist Witch Activists

  The feminist collective WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), in its initial form in the late 1960s, was not explicitly religious or spiritual, but it played on pop culture tropes of the wicked witch, complete with pointy black hat. It did, however, create a culturally resonant and influential connection between feminism and the rapidly growing practice of Pagan witchcraft. As British Wicca began spreading in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s, it dovetailed with the countercultural revolution and gave birth to a uniquely American form of witchcraft: the cult of the Great Goddess.

  And the idea that witchcraft was inherently a feminist tradition, and the survival of a matriarchal folk religion extending into antiquity, was increasingly part of the zeitgeist.

  A number of books contributed to this: Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) found a new, receptive readership, as did Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, which was rereleased in an expanded version in 1961. Feminists Mary Daly, Andrea Dworkin, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Deirdre English all began to use the figure of the historical witch as an emblem of resistance to patriarchy. Merlin Stone’s 1976 book, When God Was a Woman, used archaeological data to explore the existence of prehistoric goddess worship and ancient nature-worshiping matriarchal cultures that she believed existed before the patriarchal Abrahamic faiths destroyed them.

  Feminists began embracing the (inaccurate) idea that nine million women had been murdered in the European witch hunts (the number is now believed by most scholars to be around forty thousand). According to many, the “Burning Times” was a holocaust that wiped out the remaining traces of the once-dominant matriarchal witch cult.

  It was only natural that many feminists would begin to advocate for a return to the lost religion of the Great Goddess and her priestess cult of herbalists, healers, and midwives. And the burgeoning Pagan community in the United States was there to accept them.

  Zsuzsanna (Z.) Budapest, a Hungarian refugee and daughter of a hereditary witch, started a women’s-only coven dubbed the Susan B. Anthony Coven #1 in California in 1971. Budapest came to call her brand of Wicca Dianic, and it was solely focused on goddesses and feminine concepts of deity—all male gods and male concepts from British Wicca were stripped from it. She initiated hundreds of women in the following decade, and the chant she wrote, “We All Come from the Goddess,” has become a classic in Pagan circles.

  In 1979 Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today was published. Adler was a popular reporter on National Public Radio and a Wiccan. Her book examined the rising numbers of Neopagans and Pagan religious and spiritual practices in the United States, and received praise and glowing reviews from mainstream critics and academics alike. Its impact on the spread of Paganism was enormous.

  Also in 1979, a largely unknown feminist writer, Miriam Simos, who took on the pen name Starhawk, published a best-selling book, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Religion of the Great Goddess, and a new form of feminist witchcraft exploded into the public consciousness. The book, and her several successors, linked Goddess spirituality not just with feminism but also with direct political action and a strong emphasis on social, political, antimilitarist, and environmental activism. Starhawk was a regular presence at direct actions, including the blockade of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, and says she stopped counting her arrests after two dozen.

  To celebrate the book’s publication, Starhawk organized a Halloween ritual known as the Spiral Dance in San Francisco. Musicians, artists, and dancers collaborated to create poetry and music for the ritual liturgy, and each year it grew larger and more popular. In 1999, the twentieth anniversary of the ritual and the book’s publication, fifteen hundred people took part. The enormous success of the book, fueled by its practical and extraordinarily poetic rituals, also led to the establishment of hundreds of covens in the United States and Europe.

  From this ritual dance emerged the Reclaiming Collective, which now boasts several dozen regional communities in the United States, Europe, and Australia. According to the organization’s website, “Reclaiming is a community of people 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.” 27

  In 1982 Starhawk published Dreaming in the Dark, which was more explicitly political. She described magic as “the art of evoking power-from-within and using it to transform ourselves, our community, our culture, using it to resist the destruction that those who wield power-over are bringing upon the world.” 28

  As the political winds shifted to the right in the 1980s with the election of Ronald Reagan and the rise of the religious right, Starhawk further expanded her activism to include other marginalized groups: African Americans, indigenous peoples, and the LGBTQ+ community. And her deepening commitment to environmentalism led to her embracing and promoting permaculture, a system of sustainable environmental and cultural design.

  Another prominent Wiccan author and activist is Selena Fox, a trained counselor and psychotherapist. She helped organize the first Earth Day in 1970 and began leading public Pagan rituals in 1971 before
becoming an educator, lecturer, and activist. She founded Circle Sanctuary in Wisconsin in 1983 on a two-hundred-acre nature preserve. As executive director of the Lady Liberty League, a global Pagan civil rights network, she has been a leader in advocacy for Pagan religious freedom, and was instrumental in getting approval of the pentagram as a religious symbol on US military grave markers and memorials in 2007.

  Before Z. Budapest, Starhawk, Selena Fox, and other feminists embraced and remade it, witchcraft was largely a private, insular religion. Its magic was confined to small groups, and the politics of its practitioners as often skewed right as left. Now, thanks to these pioneering women and those who followed them, witchcraft and Paganism have been transformed into a progressive social force; even more progressive than they were, in some cases, embracing a more intersectional feminism than the one they knew. Indeed, few other religions or spiritual traditions (with the possible exception of Quakers or Unitarians) can claim to be as broadly inclusive, egalitarian, pluralistic, and politically engaged as modern feminist witchcraft.

  [contents]

  * * *

  3. George Sinclair, Satan’s Invisible World Discovered (Edinburgh: Thomas George Stevenson, 1871), 100–102; Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, A Historical Account of the Belief in Witchcraft in Scotland (London: Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1884), 21.

  4. Francis Young, Magic as a Political Crime in Medieval and Early Modern England: A History of Sorcery and Treason (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017), 87.

  5. Linda Root, “The Devil’s Halloween in the Kirkyard of North Berwick and Francis Stewart, Earl of Bothwell,” English Historical Fiction Authors (blog), October 30, 2013, https://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-devils-halloween-in-kirkyard-of.html.

  6. Emma Wilby, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Eastbourne, East Sussex, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2010).

  7. Mambo Chita Tann, Haitian Vodou: An Introduction to Haiti’s Indigenous Spiritual Tradition (Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 201), 21.

  8. Jason R. Young, Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 130.

  9. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Company, 1903), 196.

  10. Joseph Cephas Carroll, Slave Insurrections in the United States, 1800-1865 (Boston, MA: Chapman & Grimes, 1938; repr., Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004), 92. Citation refers to the Dover edition.

  11. Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998; repr., New York: HarperPerennial, 1999), 162. Citations refer to the HarperPerennial edition.

  12. Goldsmith, Other Powers, 162; Kate Havelin, Victoria Woodhull: Fearless Feminist (Minneapolis, MN: Twenty-First Century Books, 2007), 43.

  13. Mary L. Shearer, “Who Is Victoria Woodhull?” Victoria Woodhull & Company, 2016, http://www.victoria-woodhull.com/whoisvw.htm.

  14. Gerald B. Gardner, Witchcraft Today, with additional material by Judy Harrow, Ronald Hutton, Wren Walker, and Tara Nelson (New York: Citadel Press, 2004), 104.

  15. Gardner, Witchcraft Today, 104.

  16. Jack L. Bracelin, Gerald Gardner: Witch (Pentacle Enterprises, 1999), 52.

  17. Dion Fortune, The Magical Battle of Britain, ed. Gareth Knight (Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, UK: Skylight Press, 2012; repr. Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire, UK: Golden Gates Press, 1993), 15.

  18. Fortune, The Magical Battle of Britain, 34.

  19. Charles Cooke and Russell Maloney, “Hexing Hitler,” Talk of the Town, New Yorker, January 18, 1941, 17.

  20. Cooke and Maloney, “Hexing Hitler,” 17.

  21. “LIFE Goes to a Hex Party: Amateur Sorcerers in Washington Try Black Magic against Hitler,” LIFE, February 10, 1941, 86.

  22. “LIFE Goes to a Hex Party,” 87.

  23. Abbie Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It: The Book That Earned Abbie Hoffman a Five-Year Prison Term at the Chicago Conspiracy Trial (New York: Dial Press, 1968; repr., New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2005), 39.

  24. Ed Sanders, Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side (Boston, MA: De Capo Press, 2011), 281.

  25. David Armstrong, A Trumpet to Arms: Alternative Media in America (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1981), 120–21.

  26. Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 208.

  27. Reclaiming.org home page, last modified March 13, 2015, http://www.reclaiming.org.

  28. Starhawk, Dreaming in the Dark: Magic, Sex & Politics (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1982), xi.

  Chapter Three

  Binding Trump

  At midnight on February 24, 2017, about forty of my friends and I gathered around a bonfire in a backyard in Baltimore City to cast a binding spell on Donald Trump and all those who abet him. It was the culmination of an extraordinarily surreal week of intense international press coverage and nonstop phone and email interviews, all accompanied by my growing sense that I had not merely written a spell that had gone viral but had unknowingly assisted in the birth of something unimaginably bigger.

  It was, in fact, the largest mass magical ritual in history.

  When I first posted the text of the spell on the website Medium, I assumed it might generate minor interest in the progressive Pagan and magical communities, and maybe some appreciative chuckles from my network of artist and activist friends. Instead, with a viral rapidity that could not have existed before social networks, it exploded exponentially and became a novel, rapidly growing social movement under the umbrella hashtag #MagicResistance—a term I had cheekily appropriated from my adolescent years playing Dungeons & Dragons.

  Something had emerged from our shattered collective psyche as we comprehended the enormity of the unspooling Trumpian dystopia—a deep and widespread desire to employ our spiritual energy as an act of resistance.

  It all began an evening shortly after the 2016 election as a friend and I sat drinking beer and ruminating about the dismaying results. He had been surprised at Hillary Clinton’s loss, while I had felt a creeping unease that Donald Trump’s use of nationalism, xenophobia, racism, and misogyny during his campaign would lead him to victory. We exchanged ideas about what, exactly, we could do as a response to the increasingly bizarre and distressing events that were unfolding in the wake of Trump’s ascendancy.

  We considered hosting a resistance party, for which I would DJ, and donating the proceeds to the ACLU. We bandied about ideas for direct actions and targeted protests like those we saw taking place across the United States.

  “It has to be something unusual,” I said. “Something to match the surreality of what’s happening.” After a few minutes of silence, I asked, “What about a spell?”

  My friend seemed perplexed. “What?”

  “A spell,” I said. “A hex on Trump. A group ritual anyone could join.”

  My friend laughed. “That’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever come up with.”

  But I couldn’t shake the idea. I had been practicing magic most of my adult life, although I wasn’t very open about it. So the following day I started writing a binding spell, using bits and pieces from a number of diverse traditions. When I had a draft finished, I emailed it to some of my witch and occultist friends. Most of them liked it, a few didn’t, and I received some useful suggestions. I spent some time polishing the language and decided it was good enough to publish.

  I posted the spell on Medium the afternoon of February 16, 2017,
and shared it on Facebook and Twitter. I expected maybe a few dozen people would read and appreciate it.

  After an hour I checked the stats. Several hundred people had viewed it. I started getting feedback on Facebook—people were sharing it widely. And not just my Pagan and magician friends, but people of all ages and demographics.

  And then it really blew up.

  Two days later, the original Medium post had passed a hundred thousand views and showed no sign of slowing. My email started filling up with requests for interviews from major print, radio, and TV reporters. Friends were asking to join in the ritual. Where was it going to happen? Could they bring their friends along?

  And witches, in particular, were getting on board. I was contacted by dozens of witches and Pagans who wanted to know more or host their own binding rituals on the night I had chosen, February 24, at midnight under the waning crescent moon. Artists were creating images to promote the event. Even more fascinating were the nonwitches and people who had never considered doing a magical ritual. “Why not?” was a common refrain. “It can’t hurt.”

  As the days passed, the press interest only increased. Producers from a local Fox TV station caught wind that I was based in Baltimore and began hounding me for permission to show up and film the upcoming ritual. Hate-filled emails began arriving in droves, too, along with an occasional death threat. I did so many interviews I lost track, but the requests kept coming in. I told Fox News to fuck off and that I would never work with lapdog state media, but they kept persisting.