Wicca Women
SANDERS, CATHERINE
Wicca Women Religion as narcissism. BY CATHERINE SANDERS Browse in any bookstore's "spirituality" section and you'll find dozens of books about Wicca and the world of modern-day witchcraft. Pink...
...she cheerily adds...
...Now, with Witchcrafting, she's written a how-to guide devoted to showing practitioners the techniques whereby they can master the craft...
...Curott says the Wiccan god, by contrast, dances...
...History suggests that beliefs rooted in narcissism and hedonism tend to issue in nasty consequences...
...Pink and purple covers promising "girl power" fill the teenagers' shelves, and the women's section is crammed with volumes advising women on how to look better, feel great, and have more self-esteem by finding the "goddess within...
...But the problem here is finally not that this is all silly and incoherent...
...The real impossibility of Wicca as a religion is that it asks nothing lofty of its believers...
...What's worse, however, is that she ends up pro-moting—in the name of empowering women—something that is far more likely to injure women, both individually and in the culture...
...Don't go dancing naked around the maypole with these women...
...But Christ fails to gain her ultimate acceptance, because he was not sexually active and was "without humor...
...The numbers do not admit confirmation, but the majority involved are women who, the author insists, have finally found a religion that honors and empowers them—because Wiccans worship a female deity, the goddess...
...The absence of scholarly and analytical skills is probably a prerequisite for calling this jumble an "authentic religion," but Curott is singularly lacking in anything approaching critical power...
...This is the second try for Curott, a self-styled "Wiccan high priestess" and activist...
...It's rather that those who practice it do so because they like toying with an evil they don't actually believe exists, which gives them the frisson of doing something wicked while promising they'll be safe doing it...
...Curott instructs readers to not only dance "skyclad," but to "make love with someone you love" after returning from the maypole celebration celebrated the first day of May...
...In the traditional revealed religions "you need rules—a Bible, and the Ten Commandments, a Torah and a Koran—that come down from some transcendent, supernatural (masculine) source," she writes...
...Of course, that leaves the question of whether the rest of us are safe from them...
...The theodicy by which there can be a male god in the female universe is not what one would call theologically coherent, but in his male mode, the Wiccan god is erotic and can be found in nature or worshipped as Dionysius, Hermes, Zeus, Mars, or any of innumerable other pagan gods...
...You need a church or a temple or a mosque...
...After most Wiccan rituals, women are encouraged to turn to one another and inculcate self-worship by saying, "Thou Art Goddess...
...As it turns out, she has a sneaking admiration for Jesus Christ, because he possessed the "feminine qualities" of tolerance, compassion, and gentleness...
...One of the latest of these is Phyllis Cur-ott's Witchcrafting: A Spiritual Guide to Making Magic...
...Gardner wrote several books about witchcraft and even adopted the Anglo-Saxon word for wizard, wicca, which he mistranslated to mean "wise one...
...Throughout her book, Curott roundly condemns Judaism and Christianity as "patriarchal" and "oppressive...
...It starts silly, and it ends cruel...
...Chapters cover such topics as divination, spell casting, magic, the goddess, the god, potions, and tools...
...There is no mention of obeying the law or loving your neighbor...
...Her first book, The Book of Shadows: A Modern Woman's Journey into the Wisdom of Witchcraft and the Magic of the Goddess, was an attempt to explain why she, a Brown University graduate and attorney in New York, would bother with it all...
...A writer in Washington, D.C., Catherine Sanders is a Phillips Foundation journalism fellow...
...It derives mostly from an Englishman, Gerald Gardner, who in the late 1930s appropriated various rituals and customs, including nudity, from a local coven of witches, Indian folklore, the Masons, and the bizarre British sex practitioner Aleister Crowley...
...You'd think that the "spirituality" of Wicca would be vitiated by the fact that even its practitioners admit that they've made it all up...
...Wicca, by contrast, provides a real spiritual home for women...
...This vibrant and authentic religion," Curott explains, is an amalgamation of Freemasonry, mythology, folk practices, nineteenth-century American pantheism, transcendentalism, feminism, Spiritualism, Buddhism, the ancient pantheon, and shamanism...
...Unlike some of her peers, Curott at least acknowledges that what passes for modern witchcraft, which arrived in the United States during the 1960s, bears only the remotest resemblance to ancient paganism...
...The sexual theme appears in her chapter on Sabbats, the Wiccan holidays...
...And don't forget to practice safe sex...
...You need saints to intercede on your behalf and because God is not present to consult with you...
...Curott claims Wicca is the fastest growing religion in America, with fifty thousand followers...
Vol. 7 • November 2001 • No. 11
