Nuns at the Winter Solstice
Notes on Wicca, women's spirituality groups, and religion reimagined for a woman's world.
I knew that Wicce was the name of a Philly-based publication started in 1973, but I had very little knowledge about the actual feminist spiritual practices that emerged in the ‘70s until it came up in an interview. Here is a lightly edited transcription of a few minutes from that interview with four women: Z, Sharon, Kathleen, and Susan.
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Susan: There were Wiccan ceremonies, particularly like at the solstices and… those times of the year.
Z: And all those endless women’s spirituality groups… oh god!
Meerabelle: What were those?
Z: People sort of exploring, trying to create a feminist… spirituality, practice.
Kathleen: In lots of different faiths, and outside of churches.
Susan: Yeah that’s what the Wiccan circles were. We’d be in the woods, we’d do the blessing…
Z: For some reason the women’s spirituality groups were, I think, the most contentious groups that I’d ever been in. There was more conflict and struggle in the women’s spirituality groups than any other group I was ever…
Kathleen: And sort of more ‘who was in and who was out,’ it was very unpleasant.
Meerabelle: And so were the spirituality groups different from, like, the Wiccan groups?
Z: Yeah.
Meerabelle: So what were the spirituality groups?
Z: Well they were just in general more like an exploration, like a consciousness-raising group for feminist spirituality as opposed to specifically Wiccan things.
Sharon: Well there was the whole Neo-pagan revival thing happening, which was certainly gay… gay-friendly, LGBTQ friendly, but not just a gay thing.
Meerabelle: What was Neo-paganism?
Sharon: Oh, well that depends who you ask! [laughs] Some people will say it’s a revival of an ancient, earth-centered religion, and some people say—revisionist historians say it’s a new religion invented in England in the last 100 years. [laughs]
Susan: And what do you say, Sharon?
Sharon: I don’t know. I think that a lot of people are seeking to revive or to go back to… I think there’s this historical writer called writer called Ronald Hutton, who’s English, and who talks about the sort of roots of Neo-paganism as a sort of reaction against modernity and against industrialization that is seeking to basically reforge bonds with the earth that have been broken.
Z: I think that people were sort of trying to invent an entire women’s world that covered pretty much everything and religion was one of those things.
Sharon: It’s part of creating a woman’s world, you know, and… all this sort of Dianic Wicca is… you know, well, we’ve worshipped male gods for thousands of years so it’s time to focus on the feminine divine. And what’s really funny—I mean funny, strange, to me—is the Catholic women getting into Women-Church. There’s a group—and I don’t know if they’re still active—there used to be a group of nuns in West Philly who’d have what they call Women-Church and sort of talked about feminine aspects of the divine and…
Kathleen: Mariology is a long tradition.
Sharon: Yes. And I can just remember going to one of the towers, you know, at Penn, one year at winter solstice. We had this sort of ritual gathering. A friend of mine, who was also a grad student at Penn, took me—and it was mostly nuns and this one priest from the Women’s Center, celebrating the winter solstice!
Z: Oh my goodness!
Sharon: They went off to the vestry afterwards for hot cocoa and Christmas cookies!