Thoughts About Polarity (Part 2)

Tags

agender, asexual, book of shadows, diversity, identity, inclusivity, interesex, people of the book, trans, Wica, Wicca

Let’s go back to the early 1990s. The previous couple of decades had seen the rise of feminist groups and the Women’s Refuge movement. A growing awareness of women’s issues and the need for safe space represented by refuges, gave rise to many woman-centred or single-sex women’s groups, to create psychological safe spaces for women to share pain from inequalities or harms suffered in a patriarchal society. These groups might hold very different attitudes and it would be unwise and unmerited to view them as universally anti-male, even where the purpose of the group was to help women who had suffered from abuse by fathers or male partners. They often shared the intimate pains of womanhood – growing up as a girl, having children, experiencing sexism or prejudice at work, or perhaps just the experience of relationships from the female perspective.

As technology advanced and enabled more people to take on their preferred gender of identity, transfolk began to ask to join such cisfemale groups. Each group wrestled with the situation anew; depending on the activities they undertook, what their members felt, and what sort of person wished to enter the group; each carrying their own burden of fears, hopes and expectations. But often, it was difficult for both sides.

And I found it difficult. Like many feminists, I wasn’t certain what someone brought up as a boy could gain from discussions about all the commonalities of growing up as a girl – when you shed socks for tights; when you began to wear makeup and what you chose; what you did with your hair; how you coped with playground activities; what happened about menarche or menstruation; sex. all the usual stuff. But you know, I’d spent some years running a Bible Study group with a friend. by accident, everyone in the group was female. And they taught me so much about things I’d never experienced – about being pregnant and giving birth and motherhood. About what it was like to have to depend on someone else to earn the money. About coping with kids and schools, and coping with the system (often the NHS) as a mum.

They shared without telling me I shouldn’t be there because I hadn’t experienced it. And that taught me a whole lot of things, from motherhood to being inclusive. I learned to pass. And if, as a cisfemale I could have that privilege, what right do I have to deny it to a transfemale?

I can’t believe that no family is untouched by issues of gender-based identity. Yes, there’s the more straightforward question of sexual preference in terms of gay/lesbian/bi, but that shades into a whole range of attitudes that were hardly raised in the UK in the 90s – asexuality, agenderism and polyamory being at the less controversial end of that hidden range. I had a lesbian cousin and a bisexual aunt. My husband had a genetic malfunction on the sex chromosome that made him infertile. Shortly after being married we had to struggle with a whole range of problems arising that from that, from the nightmare of finding the right dosage of medication to societal attitudes about maleness and femaleness. You know the sort of stuff – the male disgrace about “firing blanks” or the assumption that, as a female, I’d be devastated not to have children. But the more interesting thing for me was coming to grips with the reality of how widespread genetic variations were. That not every child was born with a fixed gender; and that not every physical expression of gender married up with the genes.

This primitive education was expanded greatly for me in the 90s when I took a degree course in gender politics. I began to read the voices of different choices. Of protests about the way society forces gender on everyone, from birth. Of the babies forced through surgery so the families can tell the world they have a boy or a girl, because so many people rejected the idea that a child might be both; or neither. It made parents and aunts and grandparents and uncles and cousins and the whole family uncomfortable. And we’re still struggling with that whole thing. Society still wants people to adopt a stereotypical gender identity. Those who don’t are still left in the cold by the increasing awareness of trans. Even now; even when we talk blithely about how inclusive Wicca should be, we may confine our battles to the first three letters of LGBTI, because that’s as far as our comfort zone extends.

And so we come to Wicca. If it was difficult for relatively ordinary females leading relatively ordinary lives to accept trans and intersex and the whole Pandora’s Box of sexualities and identities they’d never thought about, how much more difficult must it be for people engaged in a major battle with society about another form of personal identity? Wicca was formed at a time when the only acceptable sexuality was straight. When everything was designed for couples. When being gay was a criminal offence; while being asexual or agender was right off the horizon and intersex was viewed with horror.

Let’s not forget that the first generation Wiccans were trailblazers. That takes a certain mindset, where you have great certainty about what you’re doing. Frequently, that is allied with certainty across the board about any part of your identity. As any of us who aren’t ‘normal’ straight white males will have encountered – fighting on too many fronts at the same time courts exclusion, even in these more enlightened times. That we are often constrained to chose one war; one ‘front’; one dimension of ourselves to defend. And let the others stay in the closet.

And there’s another problem, too. If your fellow Wiccans are taking on the world about their rights to express themselves as witches, then they may not appreciate anything perceived as an issue that makes that fight harder. They may not wish to take on the battles of someone else’s sexuality and identity. They may view it as something that can be used as a weapon to denigrate the Wica. But the longer that goes on, the more likely it is to reinforce attitudes that Wicca is this rather than that. And must stay this, in order to be authentic. And then this, as with any religion or practice, becomes frozen in a moment in time.

If we accuse the Abrahamic faiths of being too attached to the book, then surely Wicca can also suffer the accusation of being too attached to the Book of Shadows, and all the ritual ‘business’ that forms the oathbound material. That Wiccan identity is fixed in time and cannot adapt to new ideas.

But surely it’s time to move past that? To show we are not people “of the book”, like the monotheists. To demonstrate that Wicca is not Procrustean by nature, and it is some of the Wica, rather than Wicca, who are afraid to accept personal identities that go beyond a binary polarity view. To be willing to adjust the words and the concepts we use to bring in greater horizons than those brave trailblazers could foresee.

Or else we, like the monotheists, may end up imprisoning our mysteries instead of exploring them.

 

Thoughts About Polarity (Part 1)

Tags

Alexandrian, Gardnerian, gender, heterosexuality, homosexuality, polarity, sexuality, Wicca

A friend was reading some crazy stuff about polarity and asked “What is polarity in Wicca? Why should it create problems for gays and trans folk?”

OK, this is actually a big question. For one thing, it strikes at the difference between lineaged and non-lineaged Wicca, and some difference between the US and UK. And then there’s… well, let’s take it in small steps. Let’s start with the father of Wicca: Gerald.

Gerald was a child of his time. Back in the first half of the 20th century, there was almost rabid homophobia. Oh, it had existed long before then. Anal intercourse by anyone on anyone was made punishable by death in 1533. The Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 extended buggery laws to outlaw any kind of sexual activity between males. Remember that Oscar Wilde was given 2 year’s hard labour in Reading Gaol in 1897 for being an active homosexual. He was lucky – the death penalty for the offence had only been rescinded in 1861.

During the 1950s the government set up the Wolfenden Committee to review the law. In the teeth of widespread opposition, it recommended decriminalising homosexual acts for consenting adults (then those aged 21. At the time, consent for hetero relationships was 16. Although the recommendations of the report were adopted – but not until the late 1960s – progress by comparison with heterosexual freedoms was painfully slow:

• The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 lowered the age of consent for gay sexual relationships from 21 to 18 in the UK in November 1994.
• Equality of age of consent was finally achieved January 2001.
• The Civil Partnership Act 2004 permitted single sex couples to register their relationships legally.
• Same sex marriage was finally enabled in England and Wales from March 2014, and Scotland from December 2014.

I published that information as a credit to the work of Stonewall in my latest novel. As at today’s date, same-sex marriage is still not permitted in Northern Ireland.

So…back to Gerald. One of his published works was Witchcraft Today in which he wrote:

The witches tell me ‘The law always has been that power must be passed from man to woman or from woman to man, the only exception being when a mother initiates her daughter or a father his son, because they are part of themselves’ (the reason is that great love is apt to occur between people who go through the rites together.) They go on to say: ‘The Templars broke this age-old rule and passed the power from man to man: this led to sin and in doing so it brought about their downfall.’

Although he was being coy in attributing this to unnamed witches, there is enough published out there for me to able to state that Wicca was based on polarity. To quote from a Wikipedia article on the subject:

Most traditional Wiccans worship the god and goddess,^[7] and a central part of Wiccan liturgy involves the Great Rite;^[8] an act of actual or symbolic ritual sexual intercourse between the two deities. This is traditionally carried out by a priest and priestess who have had the deities invoked upon them, and the conventional practice appears to be exclusively heterosexual. When performed ‘in token’ this involves the athame (representing the masculine principle) descending into the chalice (representing the feminine).^[9]

Now, let’s talk about Wicca as it’s practised among lineaged covens. I’m going to concentrate on the UK. Practice in the US is often different, but there is sufficient similarity here that this should apply on both sides of the pond.

Yes, covens are led by a High Priest, representing the god (if you believe in a single god) or a god (if you don’t) and a High Priestess representing ‘the goddess’/a goddess. (I’m not sure how pantheist or atheist Wiccans interpret this, so I can’t speak for them.) Many of the rituals have these two, or other members of the coven, acting out parts deliberately assigned to men or women.

Not unnaturally, there have been reactions against this. An all-female form of Wicca was set up in the US, in the 1970s, as was an all-male form. However, The Minoan Brotherhood is entirely gay, unlike Dianic Wicca. The Feri Tradition welcomes many varieties of sexual expression.

A lot was going on, during the 1970s, in England as well as the US. Though there were no forms of single-sex covens created here (as far as I know), things were going on in that bastion of respectability, the Church of England. The Movement for the Ordination of Women (MOW) was created, to force the church to change its mind about accepting women as priests. That particular battle became complex, as many gay clergy and officiants joined the fight against the ordination of women, on the grounds of tradition.

In the late 1960s, racial discrimination was recognised as a problem, following the influx of people invited here from the West Indies, to help Britain with reconstruction following the Second World War. This resulted in anti-discrimination legislation passed on the ground of race, then sex (1970s), then other forms of discrimination, culminating in the inclusion of religion, sexual orientation and transgender, in the 2000s. The world was now a very different place than it had been when Wicca was born.

Most of this washed past lineaged Garnerian/Alexandrian covens, who staunchly held to their polarity ideals. Oh, many – perhaps most – covens could not attain the ideal of being formed entirely of matching couples. That covens would include singleton witches was recognised early on. And, by the late 90s, there were certainly some covens run by gay couples, who shared the roles of High Priest or High Priestess. Some of these people may well have received Gardnerian or Alexandrian initiation, but their covens would not be recognised. Or, if they were, they would have to be very careful about who initiated whom. Why?

Because there is one very large show-stopper. Let’s go back to Wikipedia, this time about another Wiccan off-shoot, though one that is disavowed because it broke the cardinal rule:

As in Traditional Wicca, the standard initiation practice is cross-sex initiation (female to male; male to female) but Chthonioi Alexandrian Wicca also accepts as valid same-sex initiations… Because of the acceptance of same-sex initiations, some elders of Alexandrian Wicca do not recognize Chthonioi-Alexandrian tradition as “Alexandrian”

Or, to quote a blogger on Gardnerian matters:

Yet, even today, we have people online who claim that their lineage goes back to Gardner through Michael Reagan to Ray Buckland (possibly even through same-sex initiation, which is a big Gardnerian no-no) back up the line to Gardner.

This implies that it’s possibly OK to have a coven run by a same-sex couple, but they will be hampered by only being able to initiate trainees of the opposite sex. Bit of a bummer, there. And a major stumbling block for growing any coven run by a same-sex couple. Note, I’m not saying that gays or lesbians are unwelcome in Wiccan circles… but like so much else, that very much depends on the coven. But that also provides material for the individual to think about, in terms of what an initiation represents, and whether they wish to be initiated by someone of the opposite sex.

However, there are signs that the standard of polarity is becoming part of a discourse on inclusiveness, covering queerness in Wicca. Out of this discourse has come a book offering ideas for Wiccan covens to use. As the author says:

“the gender binary is the notion that cisgender heterosexual pairs are the norm and that everything in the universe resembles a cisgender heterosexual couple. We need to expand the model to include different genders and sexual orientations.” It is common, in my experience, for people to encourage practitioners to think of this as the union of “masculine” and “feminine” energies, but regardless of metaphysical semantics, it can still feel exclusive especially since “masculine” and “feminine” are so often used interchangeably with “male” and “female.”

The discourse seems to have taken a more urgent turn, either as a result of the book’s publication or (more probably) because the book is an expression and a focal point for pre-existing discontent with the status quo. However, it is not as simple to change lineaged Wicca as it is the Church of England. It can not be done on a vote. In any case, even in the CofE, changes in favour of ordaining women and, more lately, of trying to recognise gay priests, have led to hive-offs, or whole congregations turning away.

Within Wicca, the covens are independent. However, the one point of agreement is that what is passed down, remains identifiable as Wicca. Covens may differentiate between those things which are unchangeable and those things which can be added.

It remains to be seen whether, in time, the decision is that polarity dependent upon a strictly defined sexuality is fundamental to Wicca. I have the feeling that, if that is the decision, lineaged Wicca will become a dwindling religion/practice. I hope that doesn’t happen.

The Importance of the Right Coven

Tags

covens, Craft, finding a coven, first degree, initiation, oaths

By Sunblade1500 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
The Witches Cottage, a hut in Bricket Wood, England, used by Gerald Gardner and his Bricket Wood Coven to perform rituals during the mid-20th century.

Among Gardnerian/Alexandrian Wiccans, it is said that first degree is an initiation into the coven but second is an initiation into all covens.

A good coven should create a good first initiation. And that is important. Thought must go into it, for it is the entry into lineaged Wicca. Done well, it is a birth; and it feels like one. Done well, it is an entry into mysteries, which enables the initiand to experience understanding. Done badly, it offers nothing. Everything is left to the individual and the gods to rectify the situation. Lineaged Wiccans tend towards a fatalistic attitude that whether the initiate remains in Wicca, or returns to it if s/he walks, is a sign of whether the initiation worked. But this is not an excuse for a coven to mess up the initiation.

This is why it’s so important to find the right coven.

First degree brings someone into lineaged Wicca. It gives them access to the rituals, to the coven’s Book of Shadows (which should record rituals going back to those who began the Craft), and to all those things which do not get published online because they are not written down. Of course, they should never be divulged, because Wiccans are bound by oaths to keep them secret. And what is done for the first degree initiate would never be written down, because it will be tailored for that person.

But so many new pagans think that Wicca is “it”, and rush towards it without exploring the vast variety of pagan religions and beliefs. Part of that rush is an eagerness to find a Wiccan coven. Various sites and fora are littered with “where can I find a coven?” posts. Wiccans on forums or at moots may find they are pestered by requests. That eagerness means that many new pagans searching to be Wiccans will join any coven willing to give them a place.

Leaving to one side (that’s another blog!) the confidence tricksters who lie in order to take advantage of such people, any real coven worth its salt will spend time assessing those who seek initiation, long before eiether admitting someone to the coven, or to first degree. Many Wiccan covens will meet a seeker once or more times, and perhaps invite them to a meeting with some other coven members, before letting them attend any rituals. Even then, many (most) covens will hold separate outer court rituals for those seeking first degree initiation, in which the seeker is given teaching and practice, without being exposed to oath-bound material or rituals. The HP and HPs will determine how long this goes on gor, and it may involve a lot of reading and homework by the initiand. That, itself, will put many off.

But there is more than that. As I said, the first initiation is into the coven. So the coven will want to feel certain they wish to circle with this seeker. That they wish to share their craft names and their personal information. After all, the first hurdle is high: “perfect love and perfect trust”.

And what of the seeker? It’s tough to be given the advice “if it feels wrong; if it doesn’t fit well – walk away. Find another coven.” Many might have spent a long time finding the present coven. But that’s what happens. It can take years. Or you might be initiated into a coven that doesn’t fit well. If that happens, it’s a bad sign, as it probably means that the HP and HPs are not tuned in to the seeker and his/her needs. And that means the initiation won’t be tuned in, either. And that takes us back to the earlier point about some initiations having to be redone by the individual or the gods. Where that happens, the seeker may not stay with that coven, anyway. And may not stay with Wicca.

So it isn’t enough to find a coven. Any coven. To feel good in the circle; to feel good about spending time with your fellow covenees, it has to be a good fit for everyone. And if that means spending a lot of time searching… believe me, it is worth it.

Making a Commitment

Tags

BTW, commitment, initiation, oaths, Wicca

“King Harald of England swearing fealty to William, Duke of Normandy, 1066”
by Myrabella. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

My longish silence here has been down to concentrating on preparing to take a commitment. As with any major spiritual task, this involves much thought and whatever your version of prayer is. Talking to my gods, in my case. Considering what I am taking on; what I have to live up to.

One of the things involved in that commitment was an oath. Now, oaths are dicey things for Heathens. They are regarded as extremely binding. If I explain that one’s word, once given, is regarded as binding by most Heathens, then an oath becomes more so. In many ways, an oath becomes unnecessary, as it is only necessary to give one’s word. Despite this, there is an elaborate ritual surrounding the giving of oaths. For example, using oath-rings. In the early medieval period, these were part of the swearing of loyalty to one’s lord. These days, some Asatru clans like to own modern oath rings. For my part, I tend to regard my word as binding, if it is given in formal circumstances. So I rarely give it that way. Even when not given in formal circumstances, I still try to abide by it. Once, when I wished to be free of a commitment, I went to the “lord” I had given my word to, to ask him to release me. He refused and asked me to carry through what I had agreed to do for him. Though he was Wiccan and not Heathen, he well understood what one’s word means to a Heathen.

I guess I’ve never really got the oath thing. In the sense of: why are they necessary? What is their purpose? Back in the medieval periods, they served the same purpose as a legal contract. But what purpose do they serve now? The only examples that come to mind are ritual circumstances, or to persuade someone of sincerity and commitment, when that person is doubtful. Those ritual circumstances may be a marriage or a religious ceremony; or a secular equivalent of a religious ceremony, such as Freemasonry; or a purely secular environment, such as a court of law. Which really places oaths neatly either within the legal system or within ceremonies of commitment.

Rituals are always a pain in the arse, because they involve someone’s else’s concepts and words. Heathens take as much notice of what the words mean, and treat the commitment of speaking them, as do Quakers. Maybe that’s why both the Society of Friends and, later, Heathenry, appealed to me.

Anyway, the person taking the main role to help me make this new commitment asked me whether there was anything in the oath he would ask me to swear that I found difficult. I studied the oath and told him, in all honesty, most of its words were meaningless to me, like asking a Christian to swear on a copy of the Quran. I referred him to the Havamal especially the bit about cattle dying and kin dying, but one’s renown lives on forever. And so, the oath I swore echoed what such things mean to a Heathen. Which makes the ceremony I took part in especially meaningful for me.