Bridging the Divine Feminine & the Witch~

I’ve recently been enjoying the Gresham College talks featuring Ronald Hutton. In his talk about the Western Magical Tradition (which was excellent), something struck me in the Q & A (101 minutes), that pulled a few things into perspective for me. This comment sits right at the heart of my own work, explorations, and the ongoing, ever changing but alive Gnostic Woman website and its offerings.

Honestly, I’ve never felt particularly comfortable with the name Gnostic Woman. I chose it one day because I decided to serialise my dissertation on menstruation into a blog and it grew from there. Eight years down the line and despite my ambivalence, the journey keeps on unfolding new layers. I am finally owning this work. I always made it clear that the platform was not dedicated to a study of the religious sects of the first few centuries- though I do have an abiding interest in the role of women within these Gnostic groups. My leanings were far more weighted to the word “Gnostic” having to do with knowledge of the self and inner gnosis.

For two decades I have expanded my own explorations and reflections on what it is to be a modern woman, beyond myself and into my writing. I work through the lens of the symbolic and the mythic not because I am divorced from the literal material world but because I needed to find other ways into its meaning, its operations, systems and reflect on its impact on my feminine soul.

I attended goddess workshops, talks and training and always I felt that something was missing. In astrology I worked with the asteroid Goddesses, particularly Lilith, Medusa, Persephone and the dark goddess archetype. I ran moon circles and offered 1-1 sessions; I have worked with many women. I still offer workshops and courses. I still write, but less so these days because something deeper, something more personal, more political is taking root.

Listening to the Q & A at the end of Professor Hutton’s talk cemented something for me in what has otherwise been a fluid territory.

Here is the question:

Q. Why do you think that today witchcraft has a feminist section of practitioners?

A. Because the Witch is one of the very few independent images of female power. Most Europeans have thought that women are the more magical sex and therefore witches, i.e. using the term in the negative sense of those who are going to employ magic for their own ends are likely to be women- those who just have the power in them whereas men have to learn magic. And therefore, because of this I think the witches are naturally a feminist symbol.

Q. So it’s just another iteration if you like, or another manifestation of the divine feminine that we see in established religions of the ancient world but also survival of it a little bit in Christianity?

A. I don’t think it’s the divine feminine that’s in witches, I think it’s the empowered human.

And there it is. Women who are perceived to be witches and who are/have been persecuted accordingly, are not spectral, disembodied figures from ancient pantheons or religious hegemony, they are real life flesh and blood women navigating- and to some degree achieving- autonomy and power within structures and authorities that were never designed for them. They are women who are perceived as dangerous to the self-invested architects of those structures.

We can attend goddess workshops and retreats, we can dress up and dance and waft incense and sage, make rituals and invoke the goddess by her various names. And that is good and it has a place. But to truly honour the journey of women through a patriarchal system that has felt threatened by their sexuality, power, innate magic, cycles, creativity, and life-giving abilities, we must also recognise the struggle that they endured to become their own person, and “empowered humans”.

So often we show the wins, the slightly touched up version of our world as modern women with its successes to varying degrees. We like to present ourselves as healed women, strong women and empowered women but we don’t always say where we’ve been and how we got here. For many of us the journey home was long and hard won, and many of us are still on it.

The shadow is not easy to look at; the light, even if it is disembodied, is more comfortable, it is a promise that can never be entirely tested and dispelled. It remains an ideal.

It becomes clear to me now that Gnostic woman is the bridge between the divine feminine and the witch.

Words by Karen Mullen Smith. Image: Self Portrait- Karen Mullen Smith