Flashes of Insight

During the early seventies, it became apparent to me that my lesbian feminism also needed a spiritual path that was congruent. I had been reading and studying about Witchcraft and for everything that I read this seemed to fit my more anarchistic ways. Not a lot of rules there and they honor a Goddess hmmm sounded good to me and yet I was yet to have a real circle of women who believed as I did and I longed for that.

I remember that I first heard of Z when she was arrested in LA for reading Tarot Cards, or so they said. At the time I was also making my living on the East Coast reading Tarot Cards and starting Women’s Kozmic Consciousness groups because I didn’t think they would buy Covens just yet.

On Sept 1975 NYC in the loft of artist Carol Clements, I actually met Z and we shared Tarot readings on the floor over boxes. By this time, Z had become my Hera for standing up against the establishment to try to actually have Church status like the other religions and not have to pay taxes, she was very savvy and that was of course why they came down so hard and what led to her First US Tour to market The Feminist Book of Lights and Shadows..hence my meeting her in NYC. The last time Z told the story of our first meeting it was much more colorful and we could go with her version for pure flavor. This event occurred a few days later in Kay Gardner’s Upper West side Apt where a group of 30 or so very powerful NYC women had gathered for Fall Equinox to circle with Z and to have their Goddess Groove turned on,initiated,or enhanced. As Z said to us,”Once they smell a woman’s circle they never go back to the other way!” I was very hopeful that she was right.

Kay and my then lover Pandora and I used to jam til dawn on many a steamy NYC summer night and this was no exception. Z claims that the first time we met I was pounding the hell out of Kay’s piano, buck naked, hair flying everywhere.[see it was more colorful]
This was such an exciting moment for me, being in that circle, my first real witches circle and the women were all so ripe for this experience too. The group included the famous, the infamous, and the near famous as we sat skyclad on the floor waiting with baited breadth to hear the next incantation in Z’s charming Hungarian accent or the supporting words from Maiden and lover Helen Beardwoman who told us to enter the circle with perfect love and perfect trust. The magic was palpable as we took turns making thanks and wishes tossing sprinkles of wine on the floor as a libation. To this day, I still have the red cord that she wrapped around my waist in the name of Habondia. Kay Gardner became the Priestess of the newly formed Amelia Earhardt Coven #1 and Pandora and I were handfasted the next day by Kay at a huge going away party/wedding and moved to Florida to start the Elizabeth Gould Davis [the author of The First Sex] Coven #1 which I still Priestess to this day.

The women of North Central Florida were not elated to hear of our wild and witchy ways and skyclad circles for Halloween on the lake. At that point, feminists and lesbians had rejected the damning father God, but were yet to pick up on Mama so we had quite a job on our hands. I am nothing if not persistent and I knew that I had come south to teach and was told as much by a very wise old crone..Gainesville had heretofore been the pit-stop for every Guru under the sun and had a very spiritual vibe, they just had not met the Goddess yet and I was determined to bring Mama down south to meet the kind folks.

Our circles were about 20 or so depending on time and purpose.

A milestone for me and for the Women’s Spirituality Movement was a gathering in Boston, April 23-25 1976 called Through The Looking Glass:a gynergenetic experience. My band Medusa Muzic was invited to perform by the Pomegranate Grove who produced this outrageous event. I was absolutely elated. These were the women of my tribe, or at least the ones that I wanted in my tribe. Most of the women who were creating and writing about Women’s Spirituality were here speaking, Priestessing,performing and teaching and I was one of them, creating Herstory.Never before had such a group been assembled. It was like the Woodstock[where I also attended] of the Women’s Spirituality Movement. I was blessed to be at both of these events and both had a life altering effect on me.

Friday Night began in of all places, a huge church and one that I daresay will never be the same. As women of every size, color, and age began gathering, Kay Gardner, Pandora, Jerritree, Laurel Wise and myself began weaving wondrous webs of sound that transformed the church into a pagan wonderland. Kay and Pandora elevated the room with their flutes, Jerritree with her Marimba, and I alternated from drum to piano while Laurel kept a heartbeat on her hand made drum. The fact that we as a group had never so much as played a note together was immaterial. The room was fast filling up and the air was becoming thick with pungent incense and marijuana. Speakers such as Z. Budapest, Sallie Gearhart, Mary Daly,Mello Rye, Elsa Gidlow and several others inspired the group and you could feel a fever pitch growing as Morgan McFarland began Prietessing the group assisted by the Pomegranate Grove. I must say even now what took place then was a blur of women ripping off their shirts and clothes and more and more smoke and incense and I was drumming harder than I had ever in my life and women were making love to each other on the altar, dancing singing, chanting in wild abandon. Yep we were the witches your mama warned you about. I didn’t believe that we could possibly get any higher than that…..until Saturday night. Kay Gardner began the evening with an enchantingly beautiful set of her songs from Mooncircles in a room only lit with candles. Her notes cradled and swept everyone into some mystical place of healing and magic. My band Medusa followed with our own brand of magical mystery tour but this was music to really move your body and your spirit. Our sound was more rock n blues,funk,world,jazz with lyrics that dove deep into the wild and witchy world of Goddesses and Amazons. I had just written a pre punk Goddess anthem for Z called “Hands Off Our Religion Motherfucker” to show support for her fight with the LAPD.I was hoping to kick off our first set with that one but didn’t want Z to miss it. Sometimes witch time is perfect time and in she strolled with her lover Helen and they led a triple circle dance as we rocked the house chanting “Hands Off Our Religion Motherfucker, ya know you cant keep a good witch down” and so it went, women dancing everywhere in circles,couples,triads as we performed Flaming Phoenix and Lunar Lullaby, at witch point Kay started jamming with us as we led into our final song Season of the Witch. These were such precious times and fertile times and times that I will remember for the rest of my days.

Pandora and I hung in there with the Gainesville women becoming more and more involved with the community and soon I was teaching all of these solid feminists how to read the Tarot and look to the Stars while blending in a good dose of Women’s Mysteries and Goddess Worship. When the bookstore where I taught was robbed, I gave them a stained glass pentacle for the window and persuaded them to do a protection ritual with me so that it would never happen again followed by a prosperity ritual to make up for the loss.
Little by little this community evolved into a place where the Goddess was not only invoked but revered.

In April 1990 I got the call at 3 AM from the Goddess Herself that it was time to gather the women. Why She always calls at those Godforsaken hours……..oh right..no God. Anyway I began frantically writing the information that was coming to me, grabbed my Ephemeris[astro table of dates and times] and picked July 7 at 7pm for the first Multicultural Women’s Spirituality Circle in the South, WOMAN SPIRIT RISING.

This was a very grass roots operation, no adds in the paper just a simple black and white flier asking the women to gather and to pass this on to 10 other women and so on. I Co-Priestessed this event with 3 other powerful Priestesses from Bahira, the New Age Jewitch/Buddhist,Ayoka the most serene woman on the planet and a Priest of Yemonja[Yoruban/Nigerian] and Georg Suzuki who followed a Lakota path and whose blood lines connected her with the ancient Ainu Indian tribe of Japan.

Imagine our surprise when we returned to discover that we couldn’t even find parking when we arrived 1/2 HR early! Well, over 350 women of every shape and size had also heard the call and knew that they had to be there. Even the woman who is now our Chief of Police was there. These gatherings draw you from your gut and the changes are visceral and life altering because when you accept and honor the Mother of Us All, you are honoring yourself. What a heresy in the belly of the patriarchy..for a woman to honor herself, and this first heretical act will no doubt open the door for other such heresies such as valuing yourself, that you need not be walked on by another, that your needs can come first, that you have equality in partnering and pay! The cornerstones of the Patriarchy are 3 fold. Externalization of the Deity, a male Godhead, and the use of intermediaries instead of direct connection and experience of the Divine. If each of us knew from the time we were born that we were Goddess/God,then no one could put us on the back of any bus and the act of denying civil or other rights would be ridiculous for how could one deny a Goddess? Imagine that reality and live into it and you are taking a first step beyond the Patriarchal very straight jacket.
I birthed and Priestessed another 2 Womanspirit Risings that same year, if you can believe that and another the following year.

In the spring of ‘91, I performed and Priestessed at Spiritfest in New Orleans and that was the first Women’s Spirituality Gathering in the South. That was also the last time that I worked with Z and she gave me a new title, the Minister of Music.
At this point, I needed to withdraw a bit to complete my personal projects which were screaming from the back burner..During those years, I wrote Planetary Playbook: Astrological Visualizations, Meditations and Rituals, The Temple of Isis, Flashbacks of the Sixities[still in progress] and finally The Wise Woman’s Tarot.

On Halloween of 2002, I finally gave birth to The Wise Woman’s Tarot, a life work and project that was 25 years in utero. Barbara Vogel followed my text and designs to illustrate this Goddesswork bringing brilliantly colored images whose power matched the potency of the text. Sometimes I thought that TWWT would never emerge but it did thanks to the determination, love, time energy, and resources of Tara Allen Silverfox.

Because tarot decks are expensive to produce and most publishers were not in the market for a Matriarchal,MultiCultural,MultiDimensional deck of potent Goddesses [and a few Gods] from around the world, we self-published. It was important to me to include all the races, not just white people, and to show the universal reach of the Goddess in her many aspects. The Wise Woman’s Tarot emerged in all its r/evolutionary glory in vivid living color and has continued to enlighten and inspire women and some men around the world.

My personal circles during these times waxed and waned. While working on line to promote The Wise Woman’s Tarot,” I encountered Shekhinah Moutainwater whose words had stared at me from across the page for some 13 years as we both had written for “Of A. Like Mind.” I had admired her writing and introduced myself to her when I saw her on the Hot Goddess list.

We became fast friends and then lovers for a time. We were supposed to perform and priestess together in Italy that fall but the festival fell apart.

I decided to make our own festival here in Florida and on Sept of 2003, The First Annual Wise Woman’s Festival was born. Anyone who has ever produced a festival knows that this is no easy task but with the Goddesses Blessings, we are fast approaching the Fifth Annual Wise Woman’s Festival, April 4-6 2008.

THE WISE WOMAN’S FESTIVAL in a sense is the culmination of all my various projects for the last 38 years.

I was told by another psychic that I would do something that brought all of my parts together and I kept puzzling over what that could be but there was no need to wonder as I had been doing it already for 4 or 5 years at the time. Two of the very important paths that I embrace are Music and Magic, not necessarily in that order and both can be mixed together to create a mighty Alchemy that infuses both with even more sparkle and elevation. Some of the performances that I have presented at this festival have been the most memorable of my life especially when playing with Sister Priestess and bandmate Omi Aladora Ajamu and Kat Whitestar who also performs at this fest.When the jams start to swirl and catch fire, the whole room seems to become one whirling Temple to Oshun and Aphrodite with Isis stepping in to dance with White Buffalo Woman on occasion.

As the dancers wind down to a slow boil the fires of the Sweat Lodge begin to cook and Aurora Whitebird guides the women to release their woes and dreams. Aurora has been with the WWFest for the full 5 years and has been a great sister and a totally wise woman herself being a Priestess of Isis and Lakota Shaman. The last Fest was one of the most fun and we had so many new faces and presenters almost all of which will return this year. The Native American presence was very strong and I was the only main Priestess with no Indian blood in this life.

I never expected to be able to pull this festival off for all these years and yet, it is gaining momentum and attention and cant help but be even more exhilarating and uplifting this year.
I wish that I could say that most mixed pagan groups behave better regarding women only circles, but for the most part they do not and I like most prominent Dianics have taken a load of flack for it.

In my opinion and experience, Z. Budapest was the awakener of the entire Woman’s Spirituality Movement. There were many of us, myself included, who picked up that torch in the early 70’s and began to light fires and create groves all around the country.but Z was indeed the spark that lit the flame that created the fire of the Women’s Spirituality Movement.

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