Queerness in the Contemporary Goddess Movement

56 T I K K U N W W W. T I K K U N . O R G J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 QUEER SPIRITUALITY AND POLITICS QueernessintheContemporary GoddessMovement by Starhawk B eltane, May Day, is one of the most important celebrations in the Pagan year. This year I danced around a traditional Maypole with my friends in Reclaiming, a Wiccan/Pagan tradition with a commitment to political engagement as one aspect of our spiritual path. We twined the colored ribbons, sang, danced, drummed, and raised ecstatic energy to celebrate sexuality, creativity , community, fertility, and sustainability—queer, straight, lesbian, gay, bisexual, women, men, transgender folks, children, flowers, birds, and a few dogs, all together. Our Maypole ritual reflects the evolution of our thinking about gender. When we began the revival of the Goddess movement in the seventies, many of us were drawn to Wicca as a surviving religious tradition that had strong female images of deity. The historical persecution of Witches, we realized, was a societal attack on sexuality and a mass silencing of women’s voices and truth. The Goddess religions honored sexuality, saw nature and the body as sacred—and that sounded good to us! At that time, our teachers and other Witches and Pagans oftensawtheworld asacosmicplay ofduality, withspiritualand material energies poised in dynamic tension between male and female poles. Heterosexual imagery was embedded in symbols and woven into ceremony. The Maypole was a giant phallus, impregnating a female earth. Feminists challenged those myths. Teachers such as Z. Budapest, who founded the feminist Susan B. Anthony Coven Number One, and scholars such as Marija Gimbutas brought backtheknowledgeofancientWomen’sMysteries.Women’scircles and spaces were places of deep healing and empowerment. Men’s circles taught our brothers to draw support from one another instead of always seeking it from women. But what happens when the lines between “woman” and “man” become fluid? In the seventies and eighties, the feminist community sometimes split in bitter arguments over whether transgenderwomenwere“realwomen.”Today,youngerfolksare more likely to question whether women really exist as such, or whether gender as a whole is a restrictive lens through which to view the world. InReclaiming,wehadmanylesbian,gay,bisexual,queer,and transgenderfolksfromthebeginning.Beltanewasoftenacenter of controversy. How could the cock/womb imagery of the Maypole speak to us when our own sexuality was much more fluid? Were we not deifying heterosexuality as the norm? Yet we all loved the Maypole and the wild, wacky, tangled ribbon dance. A true religious symbol can support many different interpretations . Over time—and after many, many arguments!—we shifted our ritual away from polarity to invoke five aspects of the burgeoning life force: creativity, sexuality, fertility, community, and sustainability. My story for children, “The Goddess Blesses All Forms of Love” (printed in Circle Round), reinterprets the Maypole ribbons to represent all the different forms of loving sexual expression and all the multiplicities of gender. Many people, in and out of Reclaiming, are delving deeply into Queer Mysteries, working with pantheons of queer gods, developing rituals, myths, and sanctuaries. The Radical Faeries have, for decades, practiced their own wild rites. In Britain, the Queer Pagan Camp welcomes hundreds each summer to celebrate ceremony together. In a world where women as a whole are still oppressed, we can’t just jettison the categories. But queer spirit invites us all to look at the world in a different way, to stretch our imaginations and push the edges of possibility. I Starhawk is the author of eleven books, including The Fifth Sacred Thing, The Earth Path, and her latest, The Last Wild Witch. She lectures worldwide and teaches courses in permaculture, activism, and spirituality. Her website is www.starhawk.org. CREATIVE COMMONS/MAGANDAFILLE Queer_spirituality_1.qxd:Politics 6/1/10 5:05 PM Page 56 ...