| 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. |
