Drawing Down the Moon (18 page)

After the statement of principles was adopted, additional differences surfaced. The Council soon became moribund.

 

A more successful attempt to form an alliance of Wiccan groups took place in northern California on the Summer Solstice in 1975. Thirteen covens and several solitary Witches ratified the Covenant of the Goddess (COG) after a number of covens in California expressed the desire to build closer bonds, in part out of a concern over harassment and persecution.

When the meeting to form the Covenant was called in the spring of 1975, several months earlier, representatives of forty covens appeared. Many never joined. As the late Alison Harlow, an officer of COG at the time, told me, “Many came out of a desire to make sure that nothing was going to be pulled on any of their covens behind their backs.”

The Covenant, like the Council, came face to face with the decentralism of the Craft. As Alison said, “How could we build an organization that, in fact, did not dictate to anyone? How could we create a charter and bylaws we could file with the state as a legal religious organization without giving away the reality of what we're doing?”

The Covenant wisely accepted the basic anarchism of Wicca as not only inevitable, but desirable. They could not define the religion:

When the Covenant of the Goddess organized, Aidan Kelly suggested that it base its structure on the bylaws and charter of the Congregational Churches, so that it would be a religious body governed by autonomous congregations—in other words, covens—and not by ruling popes or bishops (or priests and priestesses, for that matter). This suggestion was adopted and Aidan wrote many of the bylaws. Originally, the “members” of the Covenant were covens and each coven got two votes on the Covenant's council. When there were enough covens (five) in a local area, a local council was formed to handle its own affairs.

Some of the items in COG's philosophy are instructive in understanding the eclectic nature of modern Wicca. For example, take the Preamble to the Covenant, as summarized by Alison Harlow in
The Witches' Trine:

In addition, the charter made clear that the Church or Covenant could not dictate policy, belief, or practice; that it could not, by itself, create a coven or initiate a Witch. Its board of directors had to consist—at all times—of members of more than one tradition.

Its code of ethics was also illuminating:

 

Today COG has more than one hundred member covens and fifteen local councils, and continues to be an important organization.

When you ask Witches for their personal definitions of Witchcraft, they are much richer than these more formal statements. In answering the questions, “What does it mean to be a Witch? What does it feel like?” almost everyone stressed that it was, more than anything, an attitude toward life—a way of living.

Z Budapest told me, “I relate to the Goddess every day, in one way or another. I have a little chitchat with Mommy. I love my freedom. I love my independence. I like to be silent. I can go for days by myself. I like to reach out to crowds. I see the presence of the Goddess everywhere, how she's given me this or that—even hamburgers. I've gotten a whole lot of nourishment from this religion; it has maintained me through difficult times.

“A Witch's approach to life is one that says, ‘When evil comes upon you, turn it around, make it work for you.' It means to bend; to be wise.

“Also, the past is a mirror. And the Craft presents women with their past. They look into this mirror and say, ‘Look at what we did back then! We are strong.' They look into this mirror and they like what they see and, eventually, they say, ‘Let's do something
more!
'

“And being a priestess of the Craft means responsibility for the collective experiences of the circles I am serving. It means being sensitive to those in the circle. I can touch on my divinity and, also, I can be a tool for others' growth.”

Alison Harlow told me that Wicca implies a “sense of connectedness, of cherishing all the forms in which life manifests.” Janine Renée said that being a Witch means “trying on the archetypes within you and
becoming them,
by taking on these archetypal powers, expanding the ego until it stands with the gods, and drawing strength from these roots, now, in a world where so much strength has been atrophied by depersonalization.”

Others did not stress such cosmic goals—some even found them objectionable. “I'd be happy if most Witches stopped trying to become like the gods,” said the late Leo Martello, “and simply developed as human beings.” Many stressed that the Craft was a lifestyle. Cybele told me, “It's a way of viewing yourself as a very natural being. You are at one with the stones and at one with the stars. It stresses practical knowledge, not blind belief. It's practical. It permeates absolutely everything I do. Craft people haven't lost touch with what's real. They haven't allowed themselves to be bombarded with stimuli, or, if they have at one point in their lives, they've found their way back.” Bran Tree, a Witch, said, “A Witch is someone who sees more than the mundane things of life, who can become excited over the feel of a pebble or the croak of a frog,” and Aidan Kelly told me, “What really defines a Witch is a type of
experience
people go through. These experiences depend on altered states of consciousness. The Craft is really the Yoga of the West.” Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart said that a Witch is a type of European shaman, and being a Witch involves being a priestess or priest, a psychopomp, a healer, a guide. “It is the sum of those things. You sense a community. The community may be the whole world or a handful of people.”

Most Witches stressed that the goal of the Craft was helping people to reclaim their lost spiritual heritage, their affinity with the earth, with “the gods,” with the infinite. Most said it was not a religion for everyone. Many felt the religion would always be small. Many felt the “fad of the occult” was ending; their response to that was relief. Some emphasized the pragmatic side of the religion—practical magic to get various jobs done. Others emphasized the experience of ecstasy and joy. Still others expressed larger goals: responding to the needs of the planet in crisis, or actualizing the divinity within oneself.

How many Wiccans are there in the United States? Again, the decentralism of the Craft makes all estimates suspect. The Witch Sybil Leek estimated that there were “several thousand covens in the United States” in 1971.
¹²
Sociologist Marcello Truzzi put the figure at three hundred.
¹³

Susan Roberts wrote in
Witches U.S.A.:
“Witches don't know how many of them there are—much less where they are. There is no census, no master mailing list. Anyone who claims to have such a list is either lying or deluded.”
¹⁴
At most, one can make an estimate from the number of people who subscribe to Neo-Pagan and Craft publications, or attend Pagan festivals, but both would be a fraction of the total number. Most of the people I have met who are in covens don't subscribe to
any
Neo-Pagan journals, and most don't attend festivals. And I am continually surprised to find new covens who have created themselves after reading a few introductory books or hearing a few lectures. Since most covens are autonomous, there is no way to compile accurate statistics. While such and such a tradition with a line of apostolic succession may have a record of thirty or forty covens, and another tradition a record of fifty, there is no way to estimate the frequency of the spontaneous creation of new covens and new traditions through the reading of books. It is impossible to know how many people have, let us say, heard a radio interview, gone to their local library and emerged two years later with a “tradition” or started a coven. There may be many groups that have no links with what we have been calling the Neo-Pagan movement. Many may not even have heard the term. Since some of the most vital Craft traditions—NROOGD, for one—started this way, it is a valid route.

In 1985, I estimated that there were fifty thousand to one hundred thousand self-identified Pagans and Wiccans in the United States. By the year 2000, I had doubled the larger number and was saying that I thought the figure was closer to 200,000. I now think that there are double that number, although no one really knows.

There have been numerous attempts to figure how many Pagans there are, most of them are flawed, including my own. More than twenty-five years ago, J. Gordon Melton, who heads the Institute for the Study of American Religion, posed an odd question in a survey of Pagans: Do you own a copy of
The Golden Dawn?
Since only fifteen thousand copies of this book had been published, Melton used the percentage that said yes as a base to then extrapolate the number of Neo-Pagans in the United States. He came up with the number, forty thousand, and doubled it within five years. Today, you can find a number of academics and other writers who have attempted to give better figures for Wicca and for Paganism, both in the United States and worldwide. You can find many of their attempts on a Web site called
Adherents.com
. There you can find various figures for more than four thousand religious groups. As they say on the Web site, it's the kind of place you go to if you want to know how many Lutherans there are in Florida. On one page they list the top twenty-two religions by number of adherents. Christianity tops the list at 2.1 billion. Islam is 1.3 billion. Neo-Paganism is a surprising number nineteen at one million adherents. That's a lot bigger than I would have guessed. If you look further on the site, you get all kinds of estimates by writers and scholars. And although there are some that are clearly questionable—estimates of ten thousand and five million—most estimates of the number of Wiccans in the United States range between two hundred thousand and seven hundred thousand. Some of the estimates are for Neo-Pagans, others are for Witches, and in some cases it's not clear. Many scholars give estimates somewhere in the middle of that range (Helen Berger, Aidan Kelly), between one hundred and fifty thousand and three hundred thousand. The American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), a telephone poll taken in 2001, estimated, after factoring in a large number who refused to disclose their religion, and then adding children, that there were about 750,000 Wiccans in the United States (
www.religioustolerance.org/wic_nbr3.htm
). I will talk more about numbers in Chapter 13, but that's a very large increase since the last edition of
Drawing Down the Moon.

A coven simply means a group of people who convene for religious or magical or psychic purposes. Not all Witches form covens. Certainly the “Classical Witches” of Bonewits's description were most often solitary, and many scholars would argue that the idea of covens was an invention of those who persecuted Witches that was later adopted by the revival. Among the Gardnerian and Alexandrian Craft laws is one that states, “Ye May Not Be a Witch Alone.” So, one would think that at least there are no solitary Gardnerian or Alexandrian Witches, but even that isn't true—many Gardnerians and Alexandrians have decided to function without covens. (In this religion there is an exception to
everything.
)

Whether the word and concept of
coven
was invented by Witches or by Witch hunters, it works. A traditional coven in Wicca is twelve or thirteen, but in practice it is any number from three to twenty, depending on the group's philosophy, the size of the working circle (if it's nine feet in diameter, twelve is a crowd!), and the available members. Again, the coven works, not because of its mysterious nature, but because small groups, working together, are effective.

Some covens work in couples, emphasizing male/female polarity. These will be even-numbered. Other covens do not emphasize polarity and may be more flexible in number and size.

Most Wiccan covens work within a circle, “a portable temple,” as one Witch wrote to me. Certain groups in England have been known to set up a psychic “castle,” and many Witches will tell you that their circle is really a sphere. The circle is the declaration of sacred ground. It is a place set apart, although its material location may be a living room or a backyard. But in the mind the circle, reinforced by the actions of casting it and purifying it, becomes sacred space, a place “between the worlds” where contact with archetypal reality, with the deep places of the mind—with “gods,” if you will—becomes possible. It is a place where time disappears, where history is obliterated. It is the contact point between two realities. It is common for Witches to contrast their circle with the circle of the ceremonial magician. The Wiccan circle is not a “protection from demons” but a container of the energy raised.