Post by jadedsage on Aug 10, 2004 13:45:39 GMT -5
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.
(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.