WITCHCRAFT

What is a witch? The very power of the word, according to Paganism scholar Margot Adler, lies in its “imprecision.” The term resonates in our collective imagination and conjures personal as well as historical images. The places witch takes us can be whimsical or mythological; dark or mysterious. Our personal manifestation may traverse forested scenes and fairy-tales as a conductor of magic and a friend of animals, or exist as an aged spinster, alone and unworthy of love. Historically, witch also simply implied other, a grim distinction for individuals attached to the association. To practitioners, though, “the craft” of Witchcraft holds religious and spiritual significance stemming from “Old Religions” or matriarchal societies, rife with ritual practice and sacred wisdom—practices and beliefs deemed blasphemous by traditionalist religious institutions.

Witchcraft and related forms of Christian deviancy were reclaimed by lesbian feminists and members of the Queer community who popularized its symbolism in radical activist activity as a means of fighting persecution and criminalization. Some organized themselves into covens, drew strength from ritual, or incorporated Witchcraft into political work. Others explored Wicca and emerging forms of Paganism that they felt provided women and Queer individuals with authenticity and Spirituality denied to them within the Catholic Church or western religions more broadly. In symbol and practice, witches and Witchcraft held layered meanings.

The entrapment of a self-identified lesbian witch by an undercover LAPD officer sparked outrage amongst lesbian and feminist circles in 1975. Zsuzsanna Bartha, popularly known as Z. Budapest, was arrested by undercover cop Rosalie Kinderlin under the order of California law LAMC 43.30. Kinderlin posed as a customer seeking a Tarot reading at Budapest’s shop The Feminist Wicca. LAMC 43.30 forbade fortune telling in exchange for payment.

Editors such as Jeanne Cordova of The Lesbian Tide kept their audiences informed of Budapest’s trial for three years in publications across the country. Headlines such as “Witchcraft Trial Set” and “New Evidence in Witch Trial” helped rally readers around the case. To lesbians especially, her arrest represented ongoing campaigns of harassment and criminalization, both historically and throughout their own lives.

In 2012, Budapest’s practice once again drew attention after she held a women-exclusive ritual circle at a yearly gathering of Pagan practitioners called Pantheacon. The circle was marked “genetic-women” only, drawing condemnation from members of the Pagan community who felt a transphobic ritual had no place within the Pagan practice they valued for its gender inclusivity.

The Women’s Takeover Anniversary edition of RAT in 1971 was released one year after women took control of the publication from its male-dominated editorial board in 1970. Despite its radical intent in serving as a critical underground communication tool for various liberation movements, the paper’s leadership “had very little consciousness about sexism, especially its own.” What was originally supposed to be a one-time women’s issue turned into a permanent takeover after male editors considered incorporating pornographic imagery into the next month’s layout. A women’s collective—many members of which identified as lesbian—then stepped in permanently. The transition was peaceful, though rumors circulated about shotgun-wielding feminists who drove the men out of their offices.

In addition to commemorating the RAT takeover, much of the issue covered the takeover of the “Fifth-street building,” an abandoned women’s shelter and welfare building that women activists occupied and turned into a community center. Among the many projects and services offered in the building— including a Feminist School, Welfare Mothers group, and Food Co-Op project— was an Astrological Study Group.

The “Devil's Page” on pg. 24 advertised women-run services from free pap tests and pelvic examinations to information on the Committee to Free Angela Davis (Davis was then imprisoned at California’s Marin County Jail).

J.R. Roberts wrote Black Lesbians: An Annotated Bibliography in 1981, and founded the New Alexandria Lesbian Library in Chicago in 1974. Alwin took on its curatorship in 1977 after the original lesbian collective discontinued organization (see more under the “MOON” section).

This issue of The Ladder from the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) claimed 1969 as “the year of the chapter,” citing nine established or emerging DOB chapters throughout the United States—steady growth for the first lesbian rights group that formed in 1955 against the backdrop of The Lavender Scare and McCarthyism.

This cover plays off of a passage in The New Testament: After casting a demon from a possessed man, Jesus asks its name. The demon replies, “My name is Legion; for we are many.”

In “Out Now!” Charlotte Bunch outlined the ways lesbian feminists were organizing to protest actions undertaken by the Nixon Administration. Of the many methods, Bunch refers to WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), founded by Robin Morgan. The original WITCH Manifesto called upon women to fight whatever was “repressive, solely male-oriented, greedy, puritanical, authoritarian” with a variety of “weapons,” including but not exclusive to: magic, covens, herbs, and brooms. WITCH’s actions ranged from disrupting the Miss America Beauty Pageant on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, to hexing Wall Street on Halloween (both in 1968).

Though they adopted witch iconography and practices to ground their activism, WITCH was not formally religiously or spiritually-based. The strategy of organizing a political or feminist coven rather than practicing “the craft” represented what Margot Adler, author of Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America, calls “feminist witchcraft” rather than “traditional witchcraft.”

“There is no joining WITCH. If you are a woman, and you dare to look within yourself, you are a witch.” –WITCH Manifesto, 1968

Kaymarion Raymond’s woodcut was placed between Audre Lorde’s “The Same Death Over and Over, or, Lullabies are for Children'' and “The Sender of Dreams” by Karen Feinberg in Amazon Quarterly, 1974. Later, it was republished in Z. Budapest’s Feminist Book of Light and Shadows in 1978.

In the Winter 1978 issue of Sinister Wisdom, Susan Leigh Star offered “A Model For Lesbian Psychology of Consciousness” – a pentacle that she described as a “five-way energy channel.” Each portion of the pentacle represented a particular “structure of awareness” that allowed individuals to understand lesbian feminism “consciousness.” Star identified Witchcraft—along with others such as humor, passion, and sex/desire—as content critical to understanding this model.

“Of course we were all aware that historically women who were different were accused of being witches, which wasn’t necessarily the same as believing in alternative forms of spirituality… but there were so many ways in which we were trying to embrace these women who were spurned, and to turn the tables to revere those outcasts who paid the price for their difference.” - Karla Jay, from an interview with the curator, February 6, 2021