Flash Silvermoon |
Around the early seventies it became apparent to me that my lesbian feminsim also needed a spiritual path that was congruent. I had been reading and studying about Witchcraft, and for everything that I read, this seeemd to fit my more anarchistic ways. Not a lot of rules there and they honor a Goddess ... hmmm, sounded good to me, and I was yet to have a real circle of women who believed as i did and I longed for that. I remember that I first heard of Z Budapest when she was arrested in LA for reading Tarot Cards, or so they said. At the time I was also making my living on the East Coast reading Tarot Cards and starting women's Kozmic Consciousness groups beacuse I didn't think they would buy Coven's just yet. Sept. 1975, NYC, in the loft of artist Carol Clemments, I actually met Z and we shared Tarot readings on the floor over boxes. By this time, Z had become my Hera for standing up against the establishment to try to actually have Church status like the other religions and not have to pay taxes. She was very savvy and that was of course why they came down so hard, and what led to her First US Tour to market The Feminist Book of Lights and Shadows ... hence my meeting her in NYC. The last time Z told the story of our first meeting it was much more colorful, and we could go with that version for pure flavor. This event occurred a few days later in Kay Gardner's Upper West Side Apartment, where a group of 30 or so very powerful NYC women had gathered for Fall Equinox to circle with Z and to have their Goddess Groove turned on, initiated, or enhanced. As Z said to us,"Once they smell a woman's circle, they never go back to the other way!" I was very hopeful that she was right. Kay and my then lover Pandora and I used to jam til dawn on many a steamy NYC summer night and this was no exception. Z claims that the first time we met, I was pounding the hell out of Kays piano, buck naked, and hair flying everywhere. [See it was more colorful] This was such an exciting moment for me, being in that circle, my first real witches circle and the women were all so ripe for this experience too. The group included the famous,the infamous, and the near famous as we sat skyclad on the floor waiting with baited breadth to hear the next incantation in Z's charming Hungarian accent, or the supporting words from Maiden and lover Helen Beardwoman who told us to enter the circle with perfect love and perfect trust. The magic was palpable as we took turns making thanks and wishes tossing sprinkles of wine on the floor as a libation. |
To this day, I still have the red cord that Z wrapped around my waist in the name of Habondia. Kay Gardner became the Priestess of the newly formed Amelia Earhardt Coven #1 and Pandora and I were handfasted the next day by Kay at a huge going away party/wedding and moved to Florida to start the Elizabeth Gould Davis [the author of The First Sex] Coven #1, which I still Priestess to this day. Shockingly to me, as I can be quite naive at times, the women of North Central Florida were not elated to hear of our wild and witchy ways and skyclad circles for Halloween on the lake. At that point, feminists and lesbians had rejected the damning father God, but were yet to pick up on Mama so we had quite a job on our hands. I am nothing if not persistent and I knew that I had come South to teach and was told as much by a very wise old crone. Gainesville had heretofore been the pit-stop for every Guru under the sun and had a very spiritual vibe, they just had not met the Goddess yet, and I was determined to bring Mama down south to meet the kind folks. Our circles were about 20 or so depending on time and purpose. A milestone for me and for the Women's Spirituality Movement was a gathering in Boston, April 23-25, 1976, called Through The Looking Glass: a gynergenetic experience. My band Medusa Muzic was invited to perform by the Pomegranate Grove who produced this outrageous event. I was absolutely elated. These were the women of my tribe, or at least the ones that I wanted in my tribe. Most of the women who were creating and writing about Women's Spirituality were here speaking, priestessing, performing and teaching and I was one of them, creating Herstory. Never before had such a group been assembled. It was like the Woodstock of the Women's Spirituality Movement. I was blessed to be at both of these events, and both had a life altering effect on me. Friday Night began in of all places, a huge church and one that I daresay will never be the same. As women of every size, color, and age began gathering, Kay Gardner, Pandora,Jerritree, Laurel Wise and myself began weaving wondrous webs of sound that transformed the church into a pagan wonderland. Kay and Pandora elevated the room with their flutes, Jerritree with her Marimba, and I alternated from drum to piano while Laurel kept a heartbeat on her hand made drum. The fact that we as a group had never so much as played a note together was immaterial. The room was fast filling up and the air was becoming thick with pungent incense and marijuana. Speakers such as Z Budapest, Sallie Gearhart, Mary Daly, Mello Rye, Elsa Gidlow and several others inspired the group and you could feel a fever pitch growing as Morgan McFarland began Prietessing the group assisted by the Pomegranate Grove. I must say even now what took place then was a blur of women ripping off their shirts and clothes, and more and more smoke and incense. I was drumming harder than I had ever in my life and women were making love to each other on the altar, dancing singing, chanting in wild abandon. Yep we were the witches your mama warned you about. I didn't believe that we could possibly get any higher than that ... until Saturday night. Kay Gardner began the evening with an enchantingly beautiful set of her songs from Mooncircles in a room only lit with candles. Her notes cradled and swept everyone into some mystical place of healing and magic. My band Medusa followed with our own brand of magical mystery tour, but this was music to really move your body and your spirit. Our sound was more rock 'n' blues, funk, world, jazz with lyrics that dove deep into the wild and witchy world of Goddesses and Amazons. I had just written a pre-punk Goddess anthem for Z called "Hands Off Our Religion Motherfucker" to show support for her fight with the LAPD. I was hoping to kick off our first set with that one, but didn't want Z to miss it. Sometimes witch time is perfect time and in she strolled with her lover Helen. They led a triple circle dance as we rocked the house chanting "Hands Off Our Religion Motherfucker, ya know you can't keep a good witch down" ... and so it went. Women dancing everywhere in circles, couples, triads as we performed Flaming Phoenix and Lunar Lullaby, at witch point Kay started jamming with us as we led into our final song Season of the Witch. These were such precious times and fertile times, and times that I will remember for the rest of my days. In 1980, Z visited, and we got a circle together to hex the "Gold toothed rapist" who had been attacking women outside a local Women's Health Clinic. 13 days later, he was dragged off to jail! We hung in there becoming more and more involved with the community and soon I was teaching all of these solid feminists how to read the Tarot and look to the Stars while blending in a good dose of Women's Mysteries and Goddess Worship. When the bookstore where I taught was robbed, I gave them a stained glass pentacle for the window and persuaded them to do a protection ritual with me so that it would never happen again followed by a prosperity ritual to make up for the loss. Little by little this community evolved into a place where the Goddess was not only invoked but revered. In April 1990, I got the call at 3 a.m. from the Goddess Herself that it was time to gather the women. Why She always calls at those Godforsaken hours ... oh right. No God. Anyway I began frantically writing the information that was coming to me, grabbed my Ephemeris [astro table of dates and times] and picked July 7 at 7pm for the first Multicultural Woman's Spirituality Circle in the South, WOMAN SPIRIT RISING. This was a very grass roots operation, no adds in the paper just a simple black and white flier asking the women to gather and to pass this on to 10 other women and so on. I Co-Priestessed this event with three other powerful Priestesses from Bahira, the New Age Jewitch/Buddhist, Ayoka the most serene woman on the planet and a Priest of Yemonja [Yoruban/Nigerian], and Georg Suzuki who followed a Lakota path and whose blood lines connected her with the ancient Ainu Indian tribe of Japan. Imagine our surprise when we returned to discover that we couldn't even find parking when we arrived half an hour early! Well, over 350 women of every shape and size had also heard the call, and knew that they had to be there. Even the woman who is now our Chief of Police was there. |
The cornerstones of the Patriarchy are three-fold. Externalization of the Deity, a male Godhead, and the use of intermediaries instead of direct connection and experience of the Divine. If each of us knew from the time we were born that we were Goddess/God, then no one could put us on the back of any bus and the act of denying civil or other rights would be ridiculous for how could one deny a Goddess? Imagine that reality, and live into it and you are taking a first step beyond the Patriarchal very straight jacket. I birthed and Priestessed another two Womanspirit Risings that same year, if you can believe that and another the following year. In the spring of 1991, I performed and Priestessed at Spiritfest in New Orleans, and that was the first Women's Spirituality Gathering in the South. That was also the last time that I worked with Z and she gave me a new title, the Minister of Music. At this point, I needed to withdraw a bit to complete my personal projects which were screaming from the back burner. During those years, I wrote Planetary Playbook: Astrological Visualizations, Meditations and Rituals, The Temple of Isis, Flashbacks of the Sixities [still in progress] and finally The Wise Woman's Tarot. On Halloween of 2002, I finally gave birth to The Wise Woman's Tarot, a life's work and project that was 25 years in utero. Sometimes I thought that it would never emerge, but it did and was self-published, because tarot decks are expensive to produce and most publishers were not fond of this Matriarchal, MultiCultural, MultiDimensional deck of potent Goddesses [and a few Gods] from around the world. It was important to me to include all the races, not just white people, and to show the universal reach of the Goddess in her many aspects. My personal circles during these times waxed and waned. While working on line to promote The Wise Woman's Tarot, "I encountered Shekhinah Moutainwater whose words had stared at me from across the page for some 13 years as we both had written for the now defunct "Of A Like Mind." I had always admired her writing and there we both were on the Hot Goddess list. I figured hers was the only name that I recognized so I introduced myself and we became fast friends and then lovers. We were supposed to perform and priestess together in Italy that fall, but the festival fell apart. I decided to make our own festival here in Florida and on September of 2003, the First Annual Wise Woman's Festival was born. Anyone who has ever produced a festival knows that this is no easy task, but with the Goddesses Blessings, we are fast approaching the Fifth Annual Wise Woman's Festival, April 4-6, 2008. I wish that I could say that most mixed pagans behave better regarding women only circles, but for the most part they do not and I like most prominent Dianics have taken a load of flack for it. I will always be a witch, and I also draw other Earth based paths to me and love them as well. Much of my current work is with the beloved four-leggeds and they surround me sleeping as I write these words. My literary "work in progress is called 'Lifetime Companions: Love Never Dies" which is all about my vibrational healing work as an Animal Communicator and also a way to help animal lovers understand the process of reincarnation with our animals so they will come to understand that Love Never Dies. As Little Richard said about himself and Rock n Roll, "I am the Originator." Z is to my thinking, is the undisputed originator of Feminist Dianic Wicca and the entire Woman's Spirituality Movement. There were many of us who picked up that torch and began to light fires and create groves all around the country, but .... Z Budapest created the spark that lit the fire, that began the rising tide of Womenspirit. As for me, I have shared some of the golden moments of my experience during those good old days, full of passion and fire, and a kind of innocence too as we broke open the world of the Goddess in all its juicy glory. I am not inclined to rest on my laurels and whine about the old days wistfully. My desire is to rejuvenate some of that early fire for learning/celebration and of course ... ecstasy. As long as a woman's heart beats, there will be a drum to call us to circle and for now, my drum and heart are beating calling the women back to our Sacred Circles. Blessed Be, |
These gatherings draw you from your gut and the changes are visceral and life altering because when you accept and honor the Mother of Us All, you are honoring yourself. What a heresy in the belly of the patriarchy. For a woman to honor herself, and this first heretical act will no doubt open the door for other such heresies such as valuing yourself, that you need not be walked on by another, that your needs can come first, that you have equality in partnering and pay!