Dianic Witchcraft: The History and the Tradition
Starhawk’s New Moon Chant for Diana: “Waxing, waxing, growing, growing, Diana’s power is flowing, flowing.”
Growth of the pagan movement during the mid 20th Century was strongly supported by the rapidly escalating feminist movement of that time. The 1950s marked a 100 years of campaigning for women’s rights and the refusal to be treated by society as second rate citizens. Women were asserting their rights and finding their voices. Some went as far as to cut men out of their lives totally.
Commune-style, female only communities emerged. These communities were creative, non-hierarchical, spontaneous, non-violent, pro-earth, and pro-woman. Spiritually, there was no compatibility with the hierarchical patriarchal mainstream religions of the world. Gardner’s “Witchcraft Today” published in 1951 resulted in increasing the awareness of Witchcraft. The principle of a Goddess, whose consort is the God, appealed to most pagans as it offered respite from the patriarchy of the mainstream religions. Even so, some feminists were not willing to accept any form of masculinity in their spiritual path. For them “the Goddess grew in importance and the role of the God shrank into obscurity”.
This was however NOT the birth of the Dianic Tradition in its modern sense. Unbeknown to many, and unrecognized by most, Egyptologist, folklorist and anthropologist Margaret Murray (1863-1963) should be credited with the early formation of the Dianic Tradition. Murray published “The Witch-Cult in Western Europe” in 1921. In this work, she examined the Inquisition documents and argued that Witchcraft could be traced to pre-Christian times and appeared to be the ancient religion of Western Europe. She went on
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