Feminist Spirituality

FeMiNiSt SpIrItUaLiTy....

ARE FEMINISM AND WITCHCRAFT (NEOPAGANISM)
A PERFECT MATCH??

Let me bring you the original WITCH manifesto.....

WITCH is an all-women Everything. It's theater, revolution, magic, terror, joy, garlic flowers, spells. It's an awareness that witches and gypsies were the original guerillas and resistance fighters against oppression-particularly the oppression of women-down through the ages. Witches have always been women who dared to be : groovy, courageous, aggressive, intelligent, nonconformist, explorative, curious, independent, sexually liberated, revolutionary. Witches were the first Friendly Heads and Dealers, the first birth-control practitionaers and abortionists, the first alchemists. They bowed to no man, being the living remnants of the oldest culture of all-one in which men and women were equal sharers in a truly cooperative society, before the death-dealing sexual, economic, and spiritual repression of the Imperialist Phallic Society took over and began to destroy nature and human society.

Witch lives and laughs in every woman. She is the free part of each of us, beneath the shy smiles, the acquiescence to absurd male domination, the make-up or flesh-suffocating clothing our sick society demands. There is no "joining" WITCH. If you are a woman and dare to look within yourself, you are a Witch. You make your own rules. You are both free and beautiful. You can be invisible or evident in how you choose to make your witch-self known.

Whatever is repressive, solely male-oriented, greedy, puritanical, authoritarian-those are your targets. Your weapons surround you : theater, satire, explosions, magic, herbs, music, costumes, candles, bells, Vodou dolls, incense...... Your power comes from your own self as a woman, and it is activated by working together with your sisters.
-Adapted from Robin Morgan's "WITCH : Spooking the Patriarchy"

WhErE dO mY BeLiEfS sTaNd??

Honestly, I have difficulty dealing with the traditional
stereotypes associated with WITCH,
and yet I agree with much of the philosophy.....

Many of my beliefs are forming as I learn
more of feminist spirituality and its roots.
In many ways, religion seems therapeutic to me.
All over the U.S., women are in "recovery."
We are seeing private therapists and joining groups
to talk about our pain and helplessness
around incest, rape, pregnancy, "loving too much,"
over-eatting, being abused by our lovers,
and all the addictions to various substances
our culture offers for the dulling of pain and awareness,
and the escape into denial that has characterized our lives.
It is time we name this "recovery movement"
and see it in the broadest sense possible,
so that we include all the women
who are choosing to get well.

Women are choosing to heal ourselves from the world illness of Patriarchy.

THIS IS WHAT ATTRACTS ME TO FEMINISM AND SPECIFICALLY FEMINIST SPIRITUALITY......

I am seeking that higher power that defies traditional stereotypes....
I imagine the universal divine spirit to be a strong woman-figure.

Links to some spirituality sites....... Sister Spirit
Mccannas