The Return of the Goddess (To Me)

This video is called "Clementine Cannibal Talks About Being a Witch." A link to another one of her videos which is about the return of the Goddess is below.

The beginning of the following text is an email I wrote to Clementine about identifying as a witch. I know this post is a lot of Clementine Cannibal, but I'm still working to find my own voice as a witch, to figure out if I even am a witch by the perimeters I outline below, so I'll be using other people's words a lot until I'm better able to articulate this on my own.

I was raised, and to some extent still identify as, Catholic. But I have dabbled in Wicca [a form of witchcraft]. But it’s interesting, because the Catholic Mother Mary, to me, is a big manifestation of the Goddess. It’s no secret that the early Catholic church "recruited" the visage of Mother Mary to get pagan converts. But in my spiritual journey, Goddesses from other belief systems, like the Greek Hekate, the Hindu Kali, and the Buddhist Quan Yin have come to me. While I admit it’s a form of cultural appropriation, these faces of the Goddess have taught me things.

Also:
I believe that the Goddess has returned, because I've been waking up. I quit smoking cigarettes over 3 months ago, I made a firm decision to stop ruminating over the past, and I've stopped shaving my armpits without worrying that it's a contradiction that I still shave my legs and pluck my eyebrows. (My husband loves the pit hair!) For more about the return of the Goddess, please see Clementine's video The Return of the Goddess or Demetra George's book Mysteries of the Dark Moon: The Healing Power of the Dark Goddess.

I think the main reason I haven't been identifying as a witch is that I'm not into ritual magic. The best rituals I've ever done were more like exercises in art therapy, wherein the artistic process transforms psychologically and spiritually, than they were casting spells. Sometimes I think taking a walk on a balmy summer night is magical enough! (Note: partially since I am now identifying as a witch and not Wiccan, I don't think I need to perform formal ritual magic to be a witch.) Some other ways I am a witch are that I really connect with the world and nature on a spiritual level through my art, I feel a really strong connection to the cycles of the moon embodying the cycle of life, death, and rebirth (as we also see in the seasons, and in contradiction to the predominant thinking of time as linear instead of cyclical) and as far as Christianity goes I feel a very strong connection to Mother Mary as a face of the Goddess.

the moon is close to my heart

important q from the faq page

Do you hear voices? Do they tell you to kill people?
I do sometimes hear voices, and they certainly do not tell me to kill people! Even if they did, that doesn't mean I'd do it, because I know they aren't real. They're very disturbing when they happen, but they don't make me violent, towards myself or others. 

Nicotine-Stained

pillspillspillspills
pills to make you sleepy
pills to make you wired
pills to make you not hear voices..... yes

you sleep all the time
you suppress magical thinking
and wonder if it's wrong
if you're wrong
you wonder what the hell's wrong with you

are you possessed?
are the voices really faeries?
not modernly imagined, sweet, childlike faeries but old-school mischievous faeries?

When the people who are against psychiatry hear you talk this way, they say you should go off your medication
Well, fuck them
because the medication saved my life
even if it made me fat
it made me have a life

and now there's nothing left to say
I'm telling you my secret
because I'm a drama queen and attention whore at heart

even if I lock myself up in a nicotine-stained glass coffin

fb note entitled "becoming a feminist"

OK, so I was 7 when in 1986 I started questioning gender roles and challenging them, but I didn't realize that could be called feminism until I was 11 and got really into the activism of the late '60s/ early '70s, and then when I was 12 I (attempted to) read "The Feminine Mystique." I pretty much considered myself a full-blown feminist by the end of my freshman year of high school.


--the brevity of this is due to the fact that I originally wanted to put it under "changed beliefs" on my timeline, but "they" didn't "think" "a feminist" was a proper response to the field "became," so I'm posting it here instead


Maybe I considered myself a full-fledged feminist by the end of 8th grade, because the 8th grade yearbook said, in the part where they said what we'd be when we grew up, that I'd be a women's rights activist. Also, I remember this really really sad incident when I was 15 and my mom would let my brother walk around alone at night but she wouldn't let me do it, and when I asked her why, she said it was because I was a girl, and I said that was sexist and she said, "That's the way the world is." I knew she was right, and it made me realize for the first time that it wasn't my mom who was sexist or my school that was sexist; I thought to myself, "there will never be true equality until a girl can walk around alone at night without being afraid" and I knew that wouldn't happen for awhile, and, as you can imagine, it really bummed me out... it still bums me out! I didn't have the vocabulary for it then, but that's when I realized we live in a rape culture.

JIGSAW THIRTY--SOMETHINGS!!!

My therapist is a feminist, and today she expressed that I'm making a really important feminist statement by choosing not to have kids, when the supposed duty of women to pro-create is still so profound in our culture. I told her it was mainly because I didn't want to f*** up my medications that I take for schizo-affective disorder and didn't feel capable of taking care of another human being 24/7 who was completely dependent on me, not to mention the fact that one of the reasons Tommy and I got married was that we both didn't want kids. My therapist said it was still a feminist statement for a woman to even be able to think in terms of not wanting children. And then it hit me: if I met a woman with hairy armpits who kept her "maiden" name when she got married who said she didn't want kids, my "feminist radar," if you will, would go off.
So, put together like Kathleen Hanna's famous jigsaw, this is my brand of feminism. What's yours? For example,  a woman could choose to HAVE children as part of her personal feminist creed, etc....

self portraits