LIFESTYLES of the WITCH’S ANUS

by Lobelia

That’s what we called our progressive dinner party. “We” were the Witch’s Council; at least that’s what “we” thought. In fact, our friends referred to us as “The Four Disgraces” - Endora, Delilah, Alexandra and Lobelia. It was 1992 and the New York community had invited faeries far and wide to NYC for an urban gathering conceived as an update on the infamous 1989 “FAG” – Faerie Action Gathering. At that one the faeries had inadvertently sparked an actual gay riot by inviting thousands of queers to a “recreation” of the Stonewall riots with faux cops, foam rubber bricks, and real drag queens. The Radical Faerie’s magic had set loose thousands of angry homosexuals once again onto the streets of Greenwich Village. As a queer activist, I had shown up and marched for hours as “fags” left the astonished faeries behind, taking the streets, banging on bar windows while chanting “Come out! , Come out!”, and burning anything we could find in front of the local police station. That had been my first encounter with this group called the Radical Faeries.

Now, in homage, we called our new gathering “FAGtasia”. Our newest faerie, soon to be named “Keisha Lorraine”, arranged a photo shoot and we exhausted more than a few copy machines reprinting these drag photos as movie posters with tag lines like “In Space Nobody Can Here You Cream” and “This Time They’ve Gone to Far.” The opening event, a “progressive” dinner party was to progress from house to house, celebrating the new nexus of faerie community in Park Slope with cheap food and drink drawing on our ‘white trash’ roots. My apartment was to be appetizers and since we of course started late, everyone was hungry. Being the “novice witch” that I was, I served up a giant edible Pentacle made of Cheese Whiz, bottled olives and Ritz crackers. Possibly the first Pentacle I ever made, it was gone in the flash of an eye… devoured by starving faeries.

I was late on board the neopagan revival. In 1989 when I first encountered the faeries, I was an ardent activist prominently engaged in the organization of hospital care teams to nurture children with AIDS and busy representing ACTUP in the fight over AIDS Education and condom distribution in public schools. Knowing my interest in things sexual and spiritual as well as political, a feminist comrade gave me a book called “Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics” by someone with the unlikely name of Starhawk. This was my first encounter with pagan beliefs. The emphasis on natural cycles of birth, growth, death and renewal provided a much needed balm to my ongoing grief as friend after friend, and child after child, died of AIDS. Eager to begin the practice of “the Craft” and newly introduced to the Radical Faeries, I put out a call for a regularly meeting ritual circle. The faeries responded and out of that call thirteen NYC faeries met weekly for a year and a half, improvising rituals and exploring our understanding of the “fae” life. Identifying our alliance with feminist spirituality, we called ourself “CLITSY” which stood for “Concerned Lesbians in Training….See Ya!” - an admittedly opaque name for a group of gay men who would show up at the Blue Heron gathering with limitless piles of drag and wigs and move into a mostly male campsite called “LSD” which, of course, stood for the “Lesbian Separatist Development”. I hope that we someday write a history of these giddy times…. who would expect that they would pass so quickly? But as these things happen,

I had put out the call for a ritual group that “could become anything” and, as might be expected, it did….YUCK! A year or so down the road, identifying our need for more focus and ready for formal ritual training, four of us broke off and formed our own group...“The Witch’s Council.”

Two Scorpios and two Aries embarked on a year long training of new moon, full moon and pagan holiday rituals using Starhawk’s tome, “The Spiral Dance”, as our guide. The woman who had first handed me a copy of “Dreaming the Dark” gave me Starhawk’s phone number and on a whim I gave her a ring. I left her a message saying we were faeries and witches in training who were seeking her help. Much to my surprise she called back, kindly offered to make herself available for guidance, and invited us to come meet with her when she was doing a workshop soon in NYC. A few weeks later I walk in to a large circle not knowing what Starhawk might look like. She turned out to be, in my mind, the least likely person in the room to be the famous “Starhawk”. Largely due to this lack of pretension, I liked her immediately. True to her promise to guide us, she made herself available whenever we had questions. In reality, she mostly reminded us that we already knew the answers. Somewhere along the way we heard the following tale (which I now paraphrase), it became Delilah’s favorite. When Starhawk discovered her first teacher, he asked why she wanted to study the Craft. She responded with something along the lines of “I want to see the Goddess!” All well and good, but it was his response which stuck in our minds: “Silly girl! Don’t you know that in order to even glimpse the Goddess you must devote your entire life to her?” From that point on, “Silly Girl!” became our code words for the magic we unleashed. Whenever we felt overwhelmed by the ritual responsibility we had undertaken or the magic we had set loose, we would look at each other askance and say “Silly Girl!”

Seeking a mythology on which to base our training the Witch’s Council embraced the story of the ancient Sumerian goddess, Inanna. I recognized her name from the “Goddess Chant” that had been passed down to the faeries from the pagan community but, in fact, knew nothing about her. Browsing through the legendary dark and creepy NYC witch store “Magickal Childe”, one of us discovered Diane Wolkstein’s translation of the hymns to Inanna. Another found a Jungian analyst’s book, “The Descent of the Goddess”, and we were on our way. The story of Inanna’s descent into the Underworld to console the grief of her recently widowed sister, Ereshkigal, spoke powerfully to us at mid-twentieth century that Inanna could truly be reborn. But even more thrilling for these four aspiring faerie witches was our discovery of who we found to be her worshippers.

“I say “Hail !” to Inanna. First Daughter of the Moon !

The male prostitutes comb their hair before you.

They drape the nape of their neck with colored scarfs the height of the AIDS epidemic. The courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi gave voice to our erotic longings. Much to our delight, we discovered that Starhawk had written a call and response chant about Inanna with some West Coast faeries. It became for us a kind of theme song. All of this was great, but laying wait for us in these tales was something much, much more.

There it was in our very own Brooklyn sky–a Ritual Pentacle, long ago dedicated to the Goddess Inanna, which had been slowly rotating through the Zodiac and across the millenniums ebulliently greeting four Faerie Witches celebrating Her arrival. Now, Silly Girl, this was something more than Cheese Whiz.

You see, though the hymns to Inanna may be several thousand years old, they were basically lost for those intervening centuries. In the mid-twentieth century archeologists pieced together tablets…. some in London, some in Baghdad, some in Philadelphia and elsewhere… and only then did they discover that they actually fit together to tell a tale, to sing a hymn, to describe the rituals. In the resulting story we found little faerie like beings, the kugarra and galatur, described as “creatures neither male nor female” who played a vital and heroic role in the story. Formed from the most insignificant of materials (the dirt underneath a king’s fingernails), their androgyny allows them to slip unnoticed through the gates of the underworld and their capacity for empathy with Ereshkigal’s grief allows them to rescue Inanna from her imprisonment in the Underworld. Due to the dispersion, disappearance and obscurity of these texts, it was only in the

They drape the cloak of the gods about their shoulders

The people of Sumer parade before you…..

The women adorn their right side with men’s clothing.

The people of Sumer parade before you.

I say “Hail !” to Inanna, Great Lady of Heaven !

The men adorn their left side with women’s clothing.

The people of Sumer parade before you. I say “Hail !” to Inanna, Great Lady of Heaven !

The people compete with jump ropes and colored cords.

The people of Sumer parade before you.

I say “Hail !” to Inanna, First Daughter of the Moon. “

Lost for thousands of years, it felt to us as if these verses had manifested now at the tale end of the twentieth century to give these faerie witches some guidance. We were ecstatic in our discovery of these ancestors and enthusiastic in our embracing of their rites. We drummed and danced and paraded in our ritual rooms to the sounds of our chants matched to the quirky transcendence of a recording of Steve Reich’s “The Desert Music” played at the wrong speed. Our right sides we adorned with men’s clothing, our left with women’s. Colored scarfs and cords were draped around our necks. Yes, we were celebrating the Goddess, but even more so we were delighting in the discovery of the respected roles of our transgendered ancestors.

Over time the Witch’s Council developed rituals based on numerous sources: “The Mists of Avalon” revealed the role of Priestess and the erotic secrets of Beltane. Rites based on the film “The Witches of Eastwick” allowed us the opportunity to confront the terror of manifesting our worst fears and desires. We used long fingernails as athames, we wrote queer power based invocations, we organized rituals on the Brooklyn Bridge and at City Hall Park. Though we utilized many resources old and new in our training, it was our exploration of the myth and rituals of Inanna that accompanied us most frequently on our travels through the Spiral Dance and onto our Initiation as Witches.

I remember a Village Voice article of the time describing neo-paganism as “a sequel to a history that hasn’t happened yet”. While I rather liked and embraced that concept, I now think it may not be entirely accurate. Piecing together the his/herstory of Inanna’s worshipers, we discovered that the ancient Sumerians had celebrated the rites of Inanna’s descent during those times when the planet Venus dipped below the horizon. In “The Mountain Astrologer” we found that if you track those conjunctions of the Sun and Venus over time they repeatedly come to form the shape of a Pentacle slowly rotating through the Zodiac. Now, here was a discovery that couldn’t help but incite our imaginations. There it was in our very own Brooklyn sky - a Ritual Pentacle, long ago dedicated to the Goddess Inanna, which had been slowly rotating through the Zodiac and across the millenniums ebulliently greeting four Faerie Witches celebrating Her arrival. Now, Silly Girl, this was something more than Cheese Whiz.