This book invites the reader into the world of Feminist Witchcraft and Goddess Spirituality.  It examines how women today are subverting  traditional ideas about gender, using their own bodies as sacred text, and practicing one of the fastest growing religions and spiritual belief systems.   The book, the first of its kind,  is an edited collection of  chapters from different scholars in Britain and the United States.  It takes an  interdisciplinary  perspective through the use of participant observation, textual analysis, and in-depth interviews with women who celebrate the Female Divine. A special feature includes three chapters by non-academic practitioner/teachers.
 
 

by Tanice Foltz and Wendy Griffin
in Composing Ethnography:
Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing
Edited by Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner.
Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1996, pp. 301-330

This paper is a reflexive account of our fieldwork experiences with a coven of Dianic witches, a feminist religious group that professes to be an agent of empowerment and change. We examine ourselves as legitimate subjects of study, revealing how we were influenced through feminist ritual and magic and how those changes affected who we have become.  We believe this to be the first academic article to address the transformative process of doing fieldwork in the context of feminist ritual.  We inject our voices into the experimental movement in ethnography that seeks to heal the artificial separation of subject and object, modulate the "authorial voice," and acknowledge our subjective involvement in the creation of social knowledge.
 
 

The Embodied Goddess
Feminist Witchcraft and Female Divinity
by Wendy Griffin
Sociology of Religion, Vol. 56, No. 1, 1995, pp. 35-49

A phenomenological approach and descriptive analysis are used in this article to examine the religion of feminist Witches and women in the American Goddess Movement.  By drawing on interviews with participants in the field and focusing on three specific mythopoeic images used in religious rituals, I explore how these women use consciously created myths and symbols both to shape a framework of meaning that reinterprets the relationship between the spiritual and the material, and attempts to redefine power, authority, sexuality, and social relations.  Ethnographic data were collected during a period of four years through participant observation and in-depth interviews with feminist Witches and priestesses of the Goddess.

By Wendy Griffin Lozano and Tanice G. Foltz
Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 13, No. 3, 1990, pps. 211-234

This paper explores the religion of radical feminist witches and how it provides both the dying and the living with a meaningful framework for interpreting death.  Analytical description is used to focus on significant elements of the Dianic tradition of Wicca or Witchcraft, which interprets death as an integral part of the life cycle.  An analysis of a Wiccan funeral demonstrates how the religion gives meaning to life and death, links individuals to the community, helps to reestablish group solidarity, and provides a shared subjective reality for those who acknowledge only a divine female principle called "The Goddess."  The data for this paper were collected through participant observation in the coven’s rituals and selected social events over a period of one year.  In-depth interviews were conducted with all coven members as well.
 

For more scholarly work on Goddess Spirituality, click here.
 

This is not an academic article, but my reaction to a Neolithic stone circle on an island in the North Sea , north of the Scottish Highlands.
 

She Who Was King


A romanticized  biography of Hatshepsut, female pharaoh of Egypt during the 18th dynasty.  A powerful ruler who commanded armies, forged twenty years of peace, and built one of the most beautiful temples in the world, Hatshepsut  died almost as many years before Cleopatra was born as Cleopatra did before we were born.  The book is long out of print, but click on the cover to read loose translations of poetry from that period. Some day they will appear there.
 
 
 

 Sweet Abandon

This historical romance is also out of print. It is set in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the late 17th century, during the time just before "King Phillips War." There is absolutely no intellectual  justification for this bodice-ripper.   I wrote it to see if I could, and discovered writing it was fun.

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