Customer Reviews

Enchanted Feminism: Ritual, Gender and Divinity Among the Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco

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Jone Salomonsen's study of 'Reclaiming Witchcraft' is a hybrid document. Trained originally in systematic theology, she also later undertook ethnographic training, and the result is a combined study as a participant observer, complete with thick description, but also intends to uncover implicit theories of practice and heritage. In particular, Salomonsen works to demonstrate that the theological focus on "immanence, interconnection, and community" resembles an older subcultural line of medieval and early modern Christian mysticism, particularly women's mysticism. This broad thesis is not very successful, but other parts of the book are spectacular.

Her most imporant contributions in the book are in the areas of sacred hermeneutics, Reclaiming Goddess thealogy, and Gender.
She contends that Witchcraft hermeutics are vertical--with unifiying of sacred and profane, natural and supernatural, language and action, with the result of creating, magical reality--or what in literary theory would be called Magical Realism--symbol and referent becoming indistinguishable from each other. What Salomonsen calls the embrace of experience as prelinguistic, I would call "phenomenological."

In terms of theology, Salomonsen contends that Witches do not divide holy experience into 'immanent' and 'transcendent.' Rather, they may make a distinction between a horizontal manifest pansacrality, and a vertical sacrality where Goddess is experienced as Power or Deity, even materializing in sacred possession (or what might be more directly called mysticism). Her discussion of multiple selves (or souls) within Reclaming (Deep Self, Younger Self, and Talking Self) are viewed as ways of integrating these pluralist realities concerning phenomenolgical and symbolic experience. In turn, these realms can be accessed through trance and journeywork to locate answers to questions, be overcome by sacred forces, or meet other-than-human persons an opportunities for "re-membering" Selves.

Thealogicaly, Salomonsen claims that we are not in the space of just a "pantheistic principle," nor a "psychological concept," but rather in a paradoxical space where "Goddess is both deity and other-than-deity simultaneously." Following the 1982 theological work of Robert P. Scharleman, Salomonsen differentiates The Goddess in Reclaiming in four levels worth delineating:

1) manifest other-than-deity (Goddess is immanent in creation--Cosmos as Goddess Body)
2) hidden other-than-deity (Goddess as incomprehensible ground of being- always hidden)
3) hidden deity (Goddess's many names and guises, created/decolonized in magical acts of language/power-from-within)
4) manifest deity (Goddess's incarnation as otherness in all beings)

In terms of gender, Salomonsen draws upon the work of feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray to point to the ethical dilemma of motherhood as both a seat of feminist power and prime subject of dominination--and consequently to see the mother-daughter relationship as the operative field for articulating multiple pluralist feminist ethical roles between women and between Goddess and devotees. The mother-daughter relationship--little mythologized in Western Culture, is approached in Reclaming through the myth of Demeter-Perspehone. Salomonsen's view, based on both introductory and advanced workshops in "women's mysteries" is that essentialized notions of gender are used and deployed strategically in Reclaming to establish power-from within for peoples and situations that require it for a specific time and purpose, and that while reified notions of gender have certainly influenced and spread through the Reclaming community, they are constantly challenged and interrogated in a continuing process of dialogue.

There are powerful strengths and contributions of Salomonsen's work, but the historical thesis is weak. She continually to fit Reclaiming thealogy into Protestant Christian theology, or claim that since Judaism and Christianity both contain some immanentist countercultural traditions, and formed the bulk of the cultural landscape many of today's adherents emerged from, that Reclaming Witches are somehow still embedded in Christianity (and to a lesser extent, Judaism). But with the exception of contemporary feminism, all of the elements Salomonsen ascribes to feminist mystics in early modern Europe are also present much earlier (and stronger) in the Perennialist, Gnostic and Hermetic traditions, which have been well-documented as influencing Bynum's Christian feminist mystics, as well as contemporary Pagans (R. Hutton, S. Magliocco, F. Yates, E. Pagels, A. Versluis, J. Godwin). Salomonsen's theological and anthropological contributions are strong--her historical judgments of religious lineage weak.

A much more likely and historically supported linkage is 19th century feminist Spiritualism, Transcendentalism, and Theosophy in the United States, which always had a personalist flavor to it, with the most tenous, if any, links to Christian theology.

This is one of the most theologically sophisticated ethnographic studies of a religious community that I've come across. The book is Salomonsen's account of her experiences as a participant-observer (though she problematizes this concept) in the feminist Reclaiming witchcraft community of San Francisco from 1984-1994.

Salomonsen examines the community's ritual, anarchist-feminist politics, immanentist theology, and historical origins in loving detail. She argues that the origins of the groups' immanentism, communalism, and search for ecstatic experience can be found in radical Protestant groups existing from the thirteenth century to the seventeenth century -- for example, the Brethren of the Free Spirit. Ultimately, she argues, Reclaiming witches are continuing the work of the Reformation by finding new sources of spiritual authority and restoring a cosmology in which human beings have a meaningful place, and may be more properly understood as subcultures of the Judeo-Christian tradition, rather than as members of the new religion of Wicca, with its specifically British occult origins.

Although the connections Salomonsen makes between Reclaiming witchcraft and radical Protestant traditions are intriguing and sometimes insightful, her thesis is badly overstated. In particular, she seems to ignore the fact that the historical groups she compares Reclaiming to were marginalized or branded as heretics by the more orthodox Protestant churches. To draw some connections between Reclaiming witches and marginalized Protestant heretics, especially while demonstrating how utterly different Reclaiming practice is from any existing Protestantism, doesn't do a good job of showing that Reclaiming is really part of the Protestant lineage.

Still, Salomonsen does have a point, in that many witches and neopagans are reluctant to acknowledge the Judeo-Christian basis of many of the magickal models that are central to their practice (most of which can be traced to the Golden Dawn of the late 19th and early 20th centuries). There's a difference between being influenced by another group and being part of it, however. Salomonsen would have done better to take the Reclaiming witches' claims to being a new religious movement at face value.

"in order to heal estrangement from Biblical religion"
Well, No. Biblical religion has naught to do with our practice of Witchcraft, it is certainly not the goal of our religion as the above seesm to imply. This editorial review above does betray the author's bias; she is not a Pagan despite recieving initiation in Reclaiming tradition of Witchcraft. Ours is an ecstatic religious tradition of the immanent Goddess, fundamentally different from the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic religions, but also more ecstatic, activist, transfomational and less into polarity than Wicca. Her style is scholarly, yet her biases shape her research.

At the time this book was published in 2002, Jone Salomonsen was "Senior Research Fellow in Theology and Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo."

She writes in the Introduction to this 2002 book, "This book represents an in-depth study of how contemporary Witches in the Reclaiming community of San Francisco attempt to construct new cultural visions and new religious agency and identity by means of nature-oriented goddess worship and magical, ritual performance... This community of feminist Witches was formed in 1979 by two Jewish women, Starhawk and Diane Baker, who intended to teach others about their newly found goddess and her emancipatory rituals. Twenty years later, Reclaiming has grown into a large movement... The name 'Reclaiming' refers to a spirituality these feminists feel they have reclaimed from ancient paganism and goddess worship in order to heal experiences of estrangement occasioned by patriarchal biblical religions."

Here are some additional quotations from the book:

"Thus, from an academic standpoint, (Gerald) Gardner (with [Aleister] Crowley and [Doreen] Valiente) must be regarded as the sole inventor of modern Witchcraft, including its practices." (Pg. 5)
"It should be noted, however, that most feminist Witches---also in Reclaiming---choose to refer to their religion as Wicca as soon as they enter public space." (Pg. 8)
"...many historians believed that the people persecuted as witches in the European witch hunts were members of a surviving pagan religion ... When the thesis of an Old Religion collapsed ... there was no social heritage to a living religion, only folklore, folk customs, literature and ceremonial frtaernities. The collapse of the theory of a surviving Old Religion has caused great distress to the Witches' identity, and during the last 20 years they have developed different strategies to cope with this fact." (Pg. 89-90)
"Aradia also differs from Susan by not being willing to dismiss her Catholic Christian roots. In fact, she has become famous in the community for calling herself both a Witch and a Catholic. This explicitly dual religious identity is not very common among Witches who were raised as Christians." (Pg. 111)
"Even though Starhawk never loses sight of the fact that our experiences of gender are culturally determined, she hesitates to say that 'sexual difference' is a social construction." (Pg. 215)
"Interesting, so far, is the fact that change of sexual IDENTITY from bisexual to heterosexual or lesbian has not been celebrated or ritualized... although it usually involves a major change in a woman's life, not least if she has children." (Pg. 231)