Women's Voices in Magic

Magical cultures like all communities encode expectations about gender. Women are witches; men are magicians. Women use receptive energy, men use active energy. Intuitive women embody the moon, focus on dreaming and enjoy making things, while intellectual men embody the sun, focus on accomplishment, and enjoy doing ritual. The essays in this book explode gender stereotypes and survey the spectrum of women's experiences in magic. Women are witches, but also ceremonial magicians, Satanists and sex magicians. Women dream, use intuition and make magical tools but they also argue, create ritual, and fiercely contest their right to achievement. In these essays, pregnancy is an occasion for analysis, alchemy exists in the lab and in the kitchen, desire is a path to self-knowledge, and gender itself is a door to the deep contemplation of the meaning of magic. In this book women's voices whisper their secret experiences, narrate lives of women magicians in the past, speak of the usual and the unusual, roar their triumphal discoveries, and sing the joy of life.