On A Materialist Spirituality | by Esmée Streachailt

So, I want to encourage everyone to respond to these questions. They would make for some very lively discussion in the new server. I thought to offer a view on them because they indicate a stubborn either/or thinking that holds us back.

On A Materialist Spirituality | by Esmée Streachailt

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Like, let me take 2a first: Is a Wiccan path feminist? Well, depends on how you-alone or you and your community are doing your Wicca. Are the men running it? Are the men (even unconsciously) centering themselves? Is it all about sex and occult ritual? Or are the women in the lead, centered, and it’s also about healing the planet and her children? Or some blend of both? Does your group need to have a think about this? See, "Do as thou wilt, and harm none" can have a feminist vector, or just a libertine-libertarian one.

Wicca is a modern reimagining of an Earth religion we have indications of through Medieval monks' records, and there are more and less feminist kinds of it. I consulted with the members who've joined our Discord server some of whom are practicing Dianic Wiccans. They offered really great context and perspective:

After the Goddess revival peaked in the 90s, I've found the importance of "the god" has been overemphasized ad nauseum ... In winter we celebrate the Holly King and Oak King, in spring we celebrate pHaLiC mAyPoLe, in the fall we celebrate the sacrifice of the god, and... so where is this "perfectly balanced Wiccan Lord and Lady" stuff supposed to happen again? It seems "the Lord" can't be invited to the table without making himself the center of the celebration 😒

There is a male inclusive Wiccan group confused about whether it is Dianic or Fairy in Texas, McFarland Wicca, that claims coining the term "Dianic" which is of course not so. I met one and she was negative to Z's contributions of standing up to California anti-witch laws. Z was arrested for reading Tarot. Z went to jail in California as the last witch arrested for witchcraft in the United States. Her activism got witchcraft de-criminalized for all of us. McFarland Dianic makes fun of her for being a "fortune teller" which makes me wonder about their sincerity. They also advertise as being "the only Dianic organization that is gender inclusive" (they were founded by a man named "McFarland" who puts his own name on the group) which rubs me in so many wrong ways. Ruth Barrett and crew have a large thriving Dianic organization, and have been adamant about keeping groups women-only. Here's her book.

Dianic Wicca specifically includes feminist principles. (The only confusion is when a man claimed ownership and credit of a feminist branch of witchcraft). The original creators called it Wicca meaning "Dianic Witchcraft" and not the specific religion of Wicca. Words change, and that one surely did. Most Dianic groups exclude men and some don't. Starhawk went to the original Dianic Wicca coven initially before starting her own (which continues to this day as an active organization). I don't practice Wicca or any formula- set religion, but like all humans, am connected to the realms where "clocks don't tick and calendars don't tear." I found that book interesting because it shows how to develop your own rites rather than copying someone else's verbatim.

Now, whatever matriarchs are cooking up (Nergiz, Matriarchy Times, Matriarchy Now, a bit of MR here) will also be a modern reimagining of an Earth religion, a chthonic spirituality, and there is no finding total historical authenticity in that. We can center women, exclude men; we can follow rites like Goettner-Abendroth describes in the chapter "The Lunisolar Play" in Dancing Goddess (these follow the mythology of the Goddess and hero and heiros gamos). We really have to observe our patterns, check with our gut, honor what it says, and sometimes do some heavy sophialogical lifting. Because if Goddess has been pushed aside, and if men lead or bully, then you are very likely not in a feminist Wiccan community.

I don't imagine a matriarchy of charismatic cults and any dogma – that’s too hierarchical and too on-the-grid. But I do imagine a shared cosmology, a shared ethos, and lots of locally flavored stories, practices, festivals.

Questions 1, 2b, and 3 feel very related. There’s a tension expressed here between spirituality/faith and materiality/science-politics-rationality. Let me start here and paint in broad strokes: I don’t think our oldest known myths about the Goddess explain quantum mechanics, and I don’t think quantum mechanics can tell us much about the Goddess – but myth and physics are two schemata designed to address totally different parts of our reality. So it’s fine.

I don’t too much care if we think that the Goddess IS the music of the vibrational strings of the 11 dimensions of the quantum fields or if we think that the quantum music is just luck and humans are emergent phenomena of those fields and some of us believe in a Goddess-planet.

We have always been clever. We have always traded and built and invented. In the Americas many indigenous peoples tell the story of Sky Mother, who is also the earth in some versions. My European Paleo-Meso-and-Neolithic ancestors built large settlements, traded over 1000s of miles sometimes, and invented and invented because humans are problem solving animals. And we were animists, and that way of being related to – hell, Embedded In – our world is a misty memory for us. What I can tell you is that the split between faith and reason is very recent and only partly to the good.

Feminists are suspicous of religions for good reason – patriarchal religion uses faith to diminish and destroy women. I get it. We've had these traditions for so long, and the punishments for breaking with them have been so severe that venturing a new order of spirit – one that dimineshes no one, one that incorporates science because it does not split the spiritual from the material and does not govern the one with the other, BOTH/AND – yeah, that feels/is really risky. But, radical feminism has always demanded a change and growth to this depth. It will be very hard to give up and move out of either/or and othering in regard to sex if keep it everywhere else. As we have seen to date.

This both/and of Her is why I talk sometimes about a Hyperlithic era, about our embedment in the world and cosmos, a kind of return that is more a venture outward. In the old Irish stories that ultimate She is the cosmos, which is the whole of the Otherworld that completely surrounds our world.

Do we HAVE to have a Goddess? No. Does it feel less alienating to many women to engage with the world in those terms? Yes. Will that work for every woman? No. Will Medusa Rising make a problem out of that difference? Never. Being human is an art because a huge part of being us is knowing which frame or which process to bring to each experience or problem. And that’s not always totally clear at first. So we do a loose kind of scientific problem solving – we test and respond, iterate and develop – to see which we need.

I mean, which Goddess? Or which phase of the Goddess? As I have said elsewhere: She is the mother gazelle and the colt and the mother lion who kills the colt to feed her cubs. The grass and the meat. Death-Regeneration-Life, in that order. Biology and Ecology are two sciences we use to understand how that works down to a very fine grain.

The reason I like to call the era we all yearn for Hyperlithic is that it gets at how I think some kind of matriarchy will evolve next, hopefully out of our already democratic practices (hyper - beyond), and that while it will a futurist matriarchy (hyper - very cool), we are still very ground-dwelling animals who build with wood and rock (lithic). It expresses the ambition and humility we need. That carrying power lightly so that we may destroy power. For me, that is a project needing quite a lot of reason and science, and quite a lot of grounded faith. Humans have never done that before at this scale.

So the answer is yes-no. Do as thou wilt and harm none. But the individualism in that maxim is not enough for me, and I assert also not for a radical materialist feminism. But is it totally necessary that radmatfems be spiritual? No. I think a whole feminism that can move beyond critique to experiment and world building will need that element to be robust. I regard women deeply involved in feminist/goddess spirituality with admiration. And so do I regard with women committed to a materialist, economic, scientific worldview with deep admiration. We need both. We are always both in need and able to give, and we are at bottom obligated to each other and our supporting ecology, and She and we both have limits I would love us to use our reason and science to respect.

Esmée Streachailt is the founder/editor of Medusa Rising.

Reach out anytime for any reason: info@medusarising.org.
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