Halloween is upon us! Now that my apartment is all decorated, it’s time to devote some posts to the spookiest holiday. Luckily, we have plenty of scary ladies to discuss! In this post, we’ll take a look at five classic female characters and their eerie stories.
Read more Five Classic Spooky Women to (Re)Watch This Halloween, at Her Story Arc
Halloween
Feminist Spirits and Saints by The Arctic Feminist
(Cross-posted from The Arctic Feminist)
As you probably already know, I am an occultist. I spend my free time pretty evenly spent in the intersections between feminism and trying to make weird stuff happen, which works! You should try it.
I’ve had “weird” experiences my entire life. Hearing voices at times. Seeing entities, especially when no one else could, things that look like ghosts, being touched by things I could not see, having things dropped in front of me, or tossed at me by that which was not visible to the naked eye. Some of this could be chalked up to an overactive imagination, which I encourage everyone to have but a lot of it, just isn’t. I believe in doubt. When something weird happens I like to question myself, especially my own sanity. I think usually: “okay, so I’m able to work a normal job, dress myself, feed myself, take care of my pets etc so I know I’m not crazy.” Its good to check in that one is taking care of the essentials.
So anyway all of this is a warm up to talk about how Halloween season, October especially, is my favorite time of year. I ache for it in all the seasons, I dream about it months ahead, my excitement is barely containable in the lead up to it.
The pagans believe/d that this time of year was when the veil between this realm and the realm of the spirits was at its thinnest. On Halloween they’d be able to walk the earth like you and I, which is why we dress up in costume, to hide ourselves from them.
So why am I writing about this? Well I’ve had such interesting flashes of creativity and connection to that realm lately that I wanted to share some things with all of you.
In traditional spiritualist thought there are different types of spirits of the dead. One of those types are known as “ancestor” spirits. These spirits however don’t necessarily attach themselves to families, they can attach themselves to movements and organizations, helping to assist the continuation the work from the other side. One great example of this is the number of NOI members who have had interactions with/seen Elijah Muhammed’s apparition.
But I’m here to tell you about our foremothers/sisters being with us. Mary Daly wrote about interacting with the spirit of Matilda Joslyn Gage so I’m not alone in calling upon our ancestors for assistance but I want to encourage other women to do it too. This is a simple feminist magick and its accessible to any feminist who wants it.
I recently tweeted a list of Feminist Saints that I had come up with whilst sitting in one of those inspired moments which I’ll share below. I hope this season the more skeptical of you attempts contacting one of these spirits for assistance in your liberatory aims. I even created a tarot spread in my etsy shop inspired by the spirit of Valerie Solanas, who is a very powerful spirit.
St Mary Daly – Patroness of reclamation, spinsters, cat ladies and elementally connected beings.
St Valerie Solanas – Patroness of lesbian writers, prostituted women and fucking shit up
St Andrea Dworkin – Patroness of scapegoats, the maligned and noble causes
St Shulamith Firestone – Patroness of female madness, betrayal and piercing the veil
St Audre Lorde – Patroness of poets, black lesbians and women with cancer
St Jill Johnston – Patroness of lesbian writers, free spirits and spectacle makers
St Julia Penelope – Patroness of lesbian separatists and womyn’s communities
St Matilda Joslyn Gage – Patroness of alliances, overcoming differences between women
St Sojourner Truth – Patroness of transformation, opening the third eye and black feminists
St Susan B Anthony – Patroness of independence, unwavering dedication to a cause
St Sylvia Pankhurst – Patroness of offending polite society and knowing when to fight
There’s obviously more sisters out there you can call upon, but you get the idea right? At this time of year when the veil between worlds is at its thinnest and we all want desperately to be frightened, try opening your eyes to how we’re never alone in this work, no matter how alone we may feel at times.
So this season, light a candle, burn some sandalwood and evoke these sisters to join you in your quest to slay the legion of patriarchal demons.
The Arctic Feminist: I lazily blog about whatever I want. Always from a radical feminist perspective
It’s Hard out here for a witch at The Arctic Feminist
(Cross-posted from The Arctic Feminist)
Witches are everywhere but like most non-conforming women they are invisible to the general public.
Much like being a lesbian, any woman can be a witch, its a choice one makes to stand against patriarchal spirituality, rules and expectations of woman as docile recipient of whatever men want from her. Witches bypass this expectation that women are to be passive in our experiences, and like men, choose to make their own realities. Choose to be creators, choose to use the laws of nature for their own purposes. Now just because any woman CAN be a witch, doesn’t mean that every woman will be a witch or is willing to do what is necessary to cut herself off from her conditioning. But we must remember that the choice is always available for those select women who desire it.
Witches choose to see that which we are supposedly not supposed to, that which isn’t there. They have a direct connection to the world around them, to nature, to the divine. It is easy then to see how radical feminism is a form of witchcraft. It requires unfixing the eyes, delving into the subconscious and extracting the patriarchal attachments that have wormed their ways into our spiritual and emotional bodies. I’m sure many women have experienced the feeling of being sucked into an alternate dimension when they read Griffin or Daly. Thats what the work is meant to do. Its meant to act as a portal to that dimension where we can replenish our damaged souls and find our strength and power to act in brave ways. Like we are meant to.
There is a reason why witches are persecuted. Magick works. It obtains results. Now we can debate why that is but the fact is that anyone who has spent any time in the practice will know this. They will also know that every human being practices magick, most are just unaware that is what they are doing.
I feel called to write about this today because it’s October, Halloween season and I want to write about “spooky” subjects because its my other passion, but also I want the women who read my blog, or come across it to understand just how deep men’s war against women goes. Its on every level. Men have not forgotten how to practice magick. Its partially why they obtain things so much easier than us. I don’t mean they’re out there every week casting a spell, although some do, it isn’t necessary to practice what I refer to as magick. They don’t go through the conditioning women do that puts us in an oppressed mindset. From an oppressed mindset it is very difficult to do much more than be a cog in the MANchine. From a powerful, elementally connected, infinite mindset its pretty easy to see yourself doing anything you want. Now we can’t have women standing in their own power, truth and actually enjoying their lives can we? They might decide they don’t want to be disposable rape objects, baby factories, cheap labor and domestic servants.
So men have waged spiritual war against us. Literally crippling our spirits before we are even born. They have created disturbing death cults that DICKtate how we are to obtain salvation for our inherent wickedness by being good servants to them and seeing their faces as the face of god. These BS (belief systems) tell women to accept our unhappiness, to swallow our own bitterness, literally making us physically ill. Its no wonder so many women can’t sleep at night for the physical pain and worry that eats them alive. They tell us not to practice magick, that they should not suffer those women who step outside and do it anyway amongst the community.
They have also waged physical war against witches. I don’t want to get too far into it here as its a topic that deserves far more attention than I can give now – but the European witch burnings were done on purpose, to put women in an even more subservient place than they were before. People don’t talk about the real history of Europe prior to the witch burnings. Women’s place was not in the home prior to that. Women owned businesses, properties, had jobs, were a vital part of the life of their communities. After this time period, men became the shop owners, it was considered unladylike to be out of the home engaging in business. Men took over traditional women’s roles like midwifery and healthcare. The burning times were a direct genocide on women as a caste, which men won and we are still dealing with the reverberations of today. Lets be clear – hardly any of the murdered women were witches. The witch is the scapegoat of womanity. Her spirit exists in all of us, waiting to be set free. Waiting like Lilith to seek her revenge on the sons of Adam who have knocked her down from her place in the garden of Eden.
The Arctic Feminist: I lazily blog about whatever I want. Always from a radical feminist perspective