“In this Realm, Shrews shrink the alientating archetypes drawn by drones and dangled by flashers to fix/frame women in amnesic oblivion. In courses of anamnesia, of unforgetting our Archaic origins, Lusters uncover the Archimage—the Original Witch—within our Selves. We re-member Isis, cosmic writer and librarian, and weave the way toward naming our own Real Presence. Weirds conjure the Courage to Sin—to Realize be-ing. Brewsters brew potions, primevally potent. Our Archaic active powers are unleashed. Angelic forces are awakened.” – Mary Daly, Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy, p. 31

note: All words followed by an asterisk(*) can be found in the Wickedary/Metadictionary* at the bottom of this text.

    “She’s a witch with a capital B,” the conservative Christian woman says to me, blushing, contorting her furious face in an attempt to suppress her rage. She’s as mad as she ever gets right now. Walked off the job. Quit. 
    “Is she?” I ask quizzically. My mind is too locked onto the irony, the obviousness of this, to care why this woman gets the label “bitch.” How did I miss that? The Original Witch is the modern day Bitch, buried, reversed, and degraded under a disguised term. It’s no accident that “witch” is the euphemism for bitch. The woman-hating word “bitch” has had the hate/fear for the Original Witch projected onto it in a deceptive reversal. Cloaked, but peaking through, in a further twist of irony when a woman finds herself too bound or too afraid of what that word means (the hate projected onto it and the horrifying Woman it describes) to utter it straight, she attempts to soften the blow by calling the woman a witch, holding in her mouth with impassioned force for the only time ever her own True Name. The Hag*, the monstrous, ugly-faced defiant Woman is a Witch*. So awful is this creature that to kill her off she must be burned in most cultures. The incineration of Women by fire is a favorite of men, from suttee to witch hunts to acid in our faces.

“Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft.” – I Sam. 15:23

But the truth is that bitch is a euphemism for the Original Witch. A bitch is a one-dimensional shadow of the witch—she’s fierce, indignant, independent, and flippant, sure. She’s also sexualized, fetishized, squished into heels and a corset, empowerfulized and full of self-loathing. The Witch is raw. She’s real, charged with force of spirit and mind, prude. She’s untouched by men, existing completely outside of parameters that register their existence in any meaningful way: they are white noise in a distance somewhere. The Witch says:

 “I am the lamp stand of a thousand flames; I am the illuminator and the Star Maiden of the celestial vaults. I clear the black clouds to allow the light of the sun…I am from the Mother of Midnight Blue, and I am from the red core of the Earth. I am the middle and the in-between of woman and Goddess and I am the mediator between illumination and ignorance. I am the Lady of knowing and un-knowing, I am the Wise Sophia wearing the flesh of the gods. I am She who walks between worlds, and I am she who speaks to you now….I am the seven fold star that unravels the mysteries of the universe. I am the seven petaled rose that reveals the true name of all that is sacred. I am the winged serpent that rises to kiss your third eye and I am the mother of blood that rises from the lava of the Earth. I know every one of your faces for I fashioned them with my own bare hands. And I know every one of your souls because I housed them within your flesh. Seek me within the darkest depths of your soul for I reside between the place of riches and glory…There is no thing that is beyond my vision, for eternity is entombed within my body, just as every child that is born into flesh has been hatched from the graveyard of my womb. For all that has come from me has come unto me, either to find rest or to find life…” (excerpt from The Charge of Inanna by Helen Demetriou)

In order to overthrow the death-cult that is patriarchy*, run by warlocks (evil male conjurers) corrupting every thread of biophilic* life with their necrophiliac obsession for suffering and oblivion, Women must rise as more than feminists of a political movement. We must dis-cover the Original Witch within us, be bitches with a capital W. Radical (elemental) feminism is Witchcraft. Every woman is a Witch. Consciousness raising is about awakening her Power, helping her Real Eyes* to see through the veil of patriarchy’s lies in order to create a new world with precise intent.

“Where Hags are, will be Spells.
Where Women are, will be Spells.”
             – Gaelic proverb

To call radical feminism a political ideology or movement is both insufficient and contradictory, because politics are part of patriarchy. To uproot patriarchy at its source requires something much more holistic and involved than politics. We must go to the root, see the seed from which patriarchy manifests. For this, we must see beyond the foreground* of sexualized imagery, ritualized hetero-relations*, phallic architecture, male godheads and their religions, nations, the monetary system, reproduction practices, thought forms (for example: linear thinking, “objective” reasoning, “logical” obsession, literary communication, etc), statistics, education, health and body disconnection, and even time (the solar calendar, linear time). Most radical feminists do this already. Our analysis of the sex trade, for example, runs deeper than compassion and a sense of justice for the women who suffer at the hands of johns and pimps. Behind the foreground of bodily invasion, malnourishment from poverty, STDs, and potential beatings, radicals see, though don’t often speak about, the Background*. In the background of the sex trade, there is the belief that a woman is a thing to be bought by a man. Behind that is the belief that Woman is not fully human as man is fully human, and not just that woman, but all women, for if any of us can be bought, then all of us are reduced by that possibility. Further, we see that this thought pattern is not happening in a vacuum. That Woman is known as a subhuman thing to be bought and violated by man in the awareness of all human consciousness affects everything else associated with the concept of Woman, of us, and we are not a concept at all, but flesh and blood. For example, that Woman is reducible to fuck object for hire by man (or not even paid in the case of unpaid rape) is consistent with the notion that Woman is also an identity to be assumed by man, and that he is Woman if he feels himself so, and especially if he becomes a human being with a hole between his legs. For Woman is a human with a hole for men to penetrate. These two intertwining chords of belief/thought are a matter of consciousness. Consciousness is what this comes down to in the end, because, unless someone is a mindless robot with not thoughts at all, every action starts with an intent, and one cannot intend anything outside of consciousness. For example, no man rapes without first knowing about rape, unless we want to argue that men act in this way as reflexively as blinking or breathing (and that would be another story entirely).

“The superior learning of witches was recognized in the widely extended belief of their ability to work miracles. The witch was in reality the profoundest thinker, the most advanced scientist of those ages.” – Matilda Joslyn Gage

Radical feminism is not about politics at all. It’s about changing consciousness at will, consciousness being the utter root of the matter, and that is witchcraft. Witchcraft is about seeing the patterns, the background, the frame, the intertwining chords, the movement of energy along these chords, and then, with ever-increasing mastery of precision, reaching in like a surgeon to alter what we see. What could we do to reach in with our bare hands and rip out Rape from human consciousness so that no creature ever thinks of it again? Thoughts manifest materially. It is not enough to “outlaw” rape. It must cease to exist. It must be unconscionable. Spelling out words, we cast spells, and with music, we initiate trance, altering the deep recesses of human consciousness. If not, then what is the big deal about Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines? People dancing, singing along, enjoying the rhythm of a chant about rape. Yes, patriarchy is witchcraft, too. It is destructive magik, magik for harm and death, not creation. The magik of patriarchy is a celebrity magazine always cluttered with images of frail women and spells asking about her unacceptable weight gain. The spell here, the background thought pattern, is that Woman is a thing on display to be scrutinized, because woman is an object rather than subject, because she is subhuman and her body is the property of others, especially men (beauty standards are about male fuckability standards). The magazine is not just paper and photos, it is propaganda covered with symbols, implicitly forming a consciousness that every man carries inside him when he interacts with Woman and that every woman carries inside as she inhabits her Self.

image from Mitchfest

Radical feminists calling themselves witches are narrowly understood to be part of a Lunatic Fringe* (indeed, we are) that is not integral to radical feminism itself. There is a knee-jerk reaction at the word witch. This is deliberate, too (herstory at large that cannot be covered here). The rebukes I see from women when another woman says that feminism is about witchcraft reminds me of the Women Against Feminism campaign. Their signs are disturbing in large part because what they have to say reveals clearly to feminists that these women do not know feminism at all and are not open or receptive to dialogue about it. The responses I see about witchcraft stir a similar feeling. There is an article on the Left Side of Feminism about how neopaganism is not helpful for feminism, and this article was circulated right after feminist witches hexed Boko Haram. I can guess the article was meant to calm our silly fervor, but all the radical elemental feminists (witches) that I know fully agree with that piece. The defeating part of it is that whoever wrote it doesn’t know what witchcraft is if it was intended as a critique of witchcraft. Neopaganism is another male godhead religion. It’s utter bullshit and misses the plot in more ways than one. A Witch reads through that nonsense like she does an article about “feminist porn” and shakes her head in dismay at the wrongness of it.  

Witchcraft is changing consciousness at will.

Will is about power.

Power is what women have had beaten and even bred out of us.

Radical feminism is witchcraft, because radical feminism is about unearthing women’s power to manifest a new world at will through the changing of consciousness, ours and the world’s. Every woman is a Witch. It is not Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, casting a circle, and chanting to the Goddess (the Verb)* unless you want it to be. It is the art of giving birth to a new world when everything has been stolen from us and we are imprisoned by creatures that keep us and our sisters under a heavy spell of submission and amnesia. It is finding a way to alter reality by seeing the whole matrix of patriarchy (patrix) and studying its weaknesses, our strengths, plotting like devious, furious Hags who re-member our Archaic past. It is re-membering our past. It is the willpower to insist on a different future. It is shattering the spells of patriarchy and rewriting consciousness through spells of our own. This does not mean “don’t protest or petition.” It means first we must see, then set our intent, learn how, and manifest. That is witchcraft, whether it be the dissemination of new symbols and imagery (propaganda), the creation of music (chants/trance), the education of youth (thought forms), the undermining of the monetary system by creating alternatives to resource procurement, connecting women to their source/bodies to generate more power they can use in our efforts, healing our Self, everything we are doing—everything you are doing—is witchcraft. If you can shake the images of broomsticks and black hats from your head, and instead see the way our consciousness is formed by the casting of thoughts into manifest reality all around us, then you’ll know that you are a witch and you have been engaged in magik constantly all your life. To deny this will not make it cease to be, but will only give your power away, and that is what men want. They know power. They never give their power away. They will sooner kill or die than give their power away. Women start to change things when we refuse to give our power away or let them destroy it.  

“And what, then, is to be thought of those witches who in this way sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird’s nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report?” – Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum (Witches’ Hammer)

“I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant, almost to the point of being invisible—except as Creator: hand and eye. She is involved in work her soul must have. Ordering the universe in the image of her personal conception of Beauty.” – Alice Walker

Selections all from

Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language

Conjured by Mary Daly in cahoots with Jane Caputi

Background n: the Realm of Wild Reality; the Homeland of Women’s Selves and of all other Others; the Time/Space where auras of plants, planets, stars, animals and all other animate beings connect.

Biophilia n: the Original Lust for Life that is at the core of all Elemental E-motion; Pure Lust, which is the Nemesis of patriarchy, the Necrophilic State. Biophilia is not in ordinary dictionaries, although the word necrophilia is. Several years after the publication of Gyn/Ecology, Biophilia was used as an elementary book title by Edward O. Wilson to promote his views on the new/old field of sociobiology.

foreground n: elementary, plastic, contrived, possessed.

Goddess the Verb: Metaphor for Ultimate/Intimate Reality, the constantly Unfolding Verb of Verbs in which all be-ing participates; Metaphor of Metabeing.

Hag n [derived fr. ME hagge, hegge…akin to MD haghetisse witch, OHG hagzissa, hagazussa harpy, witch; all fr. Prehistoric Wgmc compound whose components are akind respectively to OE haga hedge and to G dialect (Westphalia) dus devil): “archaic: a female demon: FURY, HARPY…an evil or frightening spirit…NIGHTMARE…an ugly or evil-looking woman”—Webster’s]: Archaic: a Witch, Fury, Harpy who haunts the Hedges/Boundaries of patriarchy, frightening fools and summoning Weird Wandering Women into the Wild.

Hetero-relations n: “the wide range of affective, social, political, and economic relations that are ordained between men and women by men.” – Janice G. Raymond

Lunatic Fringe: {“the members of a group (as a political or social movement) espousing extreme, eccentric, or fanatical views: an extreme or wild group on the periphery of a larger group or of a movement”-Websters} 1: Crackpot Crones in tune with the moon, propelled by Pure Lust, who dare to Spin Wildly, always 2: the truly moving center of the women’s movement, comprising those who choose always to Survive/Thrive on the Boundaries, refusing compromise.

Metadictionary n: Metapatriarchal dictionary, written by and for Wicked/Wiccen Websters; dictionary that Gossips out the Elemental webs of words hidden in patriarchal dictionaries and other re-sources. WICKEDARY.

patriarchy n: 1. society manufactured and controlled by males: FATHERLAND; society in which every legitimated institution is entirely in the hands of males and a few selected henchwomen; society characterized by oppression, repression, deression, nacissism, crueltly, racism, classism, ageism, objectification, madomasochism, ecrophilia; joyless society, ruled by Godfather, Son, and Company; soceity fixated on proliferation, propagation, procreation, and bent on the destruction of all Life. 2: the prevailing religion of the entire planet, whose essential message is necrophilia.

Real Eyes: the Authentic, Elemental, wild capacity to Realize. Example:

“I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person now I was free. There was such a glory over everything. The sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in heaven.” – Harriet Tubman

Re-membering: 1: Re-calling the Original intuition of integrity; healing the sidemembered Self—the Goddess within women; Re-calling the Primordial connections/conversations among women, animals, and Other Elemental beings. 2: Realizing the power to See and to Spell out connections among apparently disparate phenomena: Spinning; Creating

Witch n [derived fr. A.S. wicce. Allied to M.Du. Wicker, ‘a soothsayer.’…Cf. Norw vikja, (i) to turn aside, (ii) to conjure away….Thus witch perhaps = ‘averter.’—Skeat’s]: an Elemental Soothsayer; one who is in harmony with the rhythms of the universe: Wise Woman; Healer; one who exercises transformative powers: Shape-shifter; one who wields Labrys-like powers of aversion and attraction—averting disaster, warding off attacks of demons and Magnetizing Elemental Spiritual Forces.