Yesterday I read Naomi Goldenberg's article in Embodying Feminist Liberation Theology, "Witches and Words" in which she argues for the relevance of witchcraft, particularly the goddess (thealogy) for contemporary feminist theology. Goldenberg (pictured - faculty profile here) begins by quoting Xaviere Gauthier:
Why witches? Because witches sing. Can I hear this singing? It is the sound of another voice. They tried to make us believe that women did not know how to speak or write; that they were stutterers or mutes. That is because they tried to make women speak straightforwardly, logically, geometrically, in strict conformity. In reality, they croon lullabies, they gasp, they babble, they shout, they sigh. They are silent and even their silence can be heard.
Goldenberg, who in the article identifies herself as an "inveterate atheist" and, as such, as one who cannot "be a witch in an orthodox sense since [she] can not entertain belief in any deity whatever qualities of gender or limitations are imputed to her, it or him" (204-205). Goldenberg played a part in bringing to the AAR witches Z Budapest and Starhawk and suggesting that feminist theologians would do well to listen to these voices in their own work (but more on that later in the post).
Witchcraft and Pentecostalism
What first interested me was Goldenberg's characterisation of the reason for witchcraft's growing appeal as (Goldenberg is citing Sian Lee Macdonald Raid) one that encourages "religious innovations that permit individuals to speak about an 'unmediated connection with the divine' (206). In greater depth Goldenberg explicates the attraction of the feminine of witchcraft and its (somewhat parasitic) relationship to institutional religion (I apologise for the length of this quote):
Discursive, institutionalized systems connected to organized religions, governments, universities, and armies are built around imagery that idealizes male adulthood such as lines of paternal descent, male ritual gatherings and processions, and phallic attributes of power. Witches embody other psychological and social forces. The word witch can conjure female carnality, deep imaginings that border on madness, the playfulness and vulnerability of infancy and old age, the perpetual birth and decay of the natural world. Witches thus are well-positioned to make institutions nervous by calling attention to that which a dominant patriarchal order must occlude. Mention of witches' wails and incantations, the mutterings of crones, their rhymes, their prophecies, their so-called gibberish summons up specters and visions of suppressed portions of minds, histories and desires. Ancient grievances and exclusions are referenced in these forms of language as are human lights and longings. Because witchy words can touch us deeply, they have the power to disrupt ordinary speech and thus disturb business as usual. They wield creative leverage and make space for something new to happen - something other than the routinized performance of patriarchal grandiosity (205, emphasis added).
While I am certain it was the last thing on Goldenberg's mind in writing the above what strikes me about Goldenberg's characterisation is its similarity with what Walter Hollenweger and Harvey Cox have observed concerning pentecostalism's reception. Like the witches in Gauthier's imagination Pentecostalism was birthed in subversion. In the quotation with which I started this post Gauthier decribes the witches voice as a different voice, silent by the dominant (patriarchal) conventions but revolutionary once one learns how to listen in a different key. This, of course, was the reaction of some of the first witnesses to Azusa Street at the turn of the twentieth century, and interestingly, the tongues speech reporters for the LA Times heard were women, or to put it into the language of Gauthier, descendants of the witches. This equation between witchcraft's and pentecostalism's empowering discourse is not, I think, purely speculative. In an article later in the same volume Ruth Mantin suggests that Goddess-talk (thealogy), of which I assume witchcraft is one instantiation, be understood as heteroglossia. Heteroglossia is a term first coined by the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin to refer to the "multiplicity of languages within the apparent unity of any national language" (source). This seems related to what James Smith has identified as glossolalia's "linguistic surrealism" when in speaking in tongues the speaker engages in "the multifaceted, embodied, communal, and performative elements of language" (101). Like Gauthier's characterisation of witchcraft as subversive act so tongues is a language of resistance. Where y, once tongues was an empowering discourse it has now, for Smith, become a hindrance. The decreased prominence of tongues demonstrates Pentecostalism's coming to terms with capitalism's hegemony:
I would venture a hypothesis which is admittedly anecdotal: as Pentecostal denominations (such as the Assemblies of God in the USA) climb the ladder of social class (John Ashcroft, former Attorney General in the USA is an A/G member), the practice of tongues-speech in congregational worship context decreases. This, I would suggest, is precisely because such a ’strange’ practice does not conform to the rationality (reality principle) of capitalist logic; and insofar as such upwardly mobile congregations are seeking to advance by capitalist logic, they eschew the language of resistance (p. 110 n. 76).
Like Smith's commentary on the decline of glossolalia Goldenberg opines that witchy words, words that were once liberative have become commodified and, in so doing, have lost their potency. Approvingly citing Howard Eilberg-Schwartz's observation Goldenberg affirms that today "the witch is no longer an 'other' ... on the contrary, witches are now recognizable and respectable members of our society with whom we share a great many common interests and values". The Craft, suggests Goldenberg, has accordingly resulted in a "domestication of the witch and the routinization of goddess talk" (206). The "so-called gibberish" that was once, sociologically speaking, efficacious in feminine empowerment and identity is no longer Other, and hence of limited use.
Notwithstanding the commodification and normalisation of witchy words the Craft remains, for Goldenberg, a potent resource for Feminist theology. Earlier I cited Goldenberg's observation concerning religion, and Christianity in particular that they are "built around imagery that idealizes male adulthood such as lines of paternal descent, male ritual gatherings and processions, and phallic attributes of power". Behind this discussion lies Feminist theology's rejection of traditional dualism, I may have a future post on this soon.
References
Naomi R Goldenberg, Witches and Words, in Beverley Vlack (Ed.), Embodying Feminist Liberation Theologies, T & T Clark, 2004, 203-211; Ruth Mantin, Theaological Reflections on Embodiment, in Beverley Vlack (Ed.), Embodying Feminist Liberation Theologies, T & T Clark, 2004, 212-227.
Mary C Grey, Sacred Longings: Ecofeminst Theology and Globalization, SCM, 2003.
James K A Smith, Tongues as Resistance Discourse, in Mark J Cartledge (Ed.), Speaking in Tongues: Multi-Disciplinary Perpsectives, Paternoster, 2006.
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