Sylvana SilverWitch: How did you get started in the Craft _ give me a little background information, please.
Fritz Muntean: I first got into the Craft because it seemed like a very sound religion. It was a religion that took into consideration the shadow side, as well as sweetness and light, and it valued the feminine as well as the masculine and the material world as well as the spiritual world. This seemed to make a lot of good psychological sense to me.
I attended my first circle in 1963, was initiated in 1969, helped found the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn (NROOGD) and have been doing just about everything under the sun since then. I received my elder's credentials from Covenant of the Goddess (COG) in 1985. A Georgian priestess and I founded the Circle of Amergin covens in Vancouver BC and Bellingham in 1988, and the two circles have been going great guns ever since.
SS: When did you go back to school?
FM: Three years ago, it got to the point that the circles could run themselves, pretty much, and I did something that I've been wanting to do for some time: I pulled elder status in my circle, handed my ring, my key and my staff to my summoner with a big fat kiss and said I am going into semi-retirement, you run the circle and I'm going back to school. That was in the fall of '92. I went to school part-time and then last year finished up going full-time. It has been an amazing experience. I just completed my degree in religious studies , with an emphasis on Jungian studies. I really learned an awful lot.
SS: Jung is a bit weird.
FM: Yes, the psychologists don't like Jung because he's too mystical, and the mystics don't like him because he's too psychological. He's mainly trying to prove that this mystical stuff is workable in the therapeutic realm, that it has some use in curing mental illness.
SS: Was school much different from when you were young?
FM: Oh yes, very different. Not only is university different: For one thing, all the kids have really short hair and dress very conservatively, whereas 30 years ago, everybody was a rip-roaring radical. Now they're all very conservative in one way or another. I mean, we were radical, but the school was very uptight. Now everybody is conservative, and the schools are looser. When you've been around for any length of time, you start to notice that things kinda go in cycles. The successful way is to approach it with a sense of humor: Oh yeah, there it goes again, I wonder when long hair will come around on the guitar again.
SS: How did you end up studying Wicca in the university?
FM: You can study paganism just a little bit in school, like the classics department had a course on classical myth and religion. Wow! It was something you could call Paganism 101. In my case, I took several courses in the classics. The courses in the religious studies department were of course in the ecumenical movement: the ecumenism and the interfaith movement, what their history is, what they've been up to, how they've been doing it and what will happen in the future. That was very interesting, and courses in theological methodology, like what are the different ways of coming up with a theology.
SS: I think that's very valuable. Personally, I think that one of the things that would be good to look at is native people; they've been trying to keep their religion and culture in the midst of our modern civilization. They have had some of the same struggles and problems that we have had.
FM: What you say is true, and there are a couple of important differences to keep in mind. One is: There is a world of difference between ours and a religion like Native American spirituality, which is undergoing a revival. They've retained a lot of their religion; every native village I ever lived in had an elder with a couple of anthropology grad students following him around with a tape recorder reconstructing the language, reconstructing the dances _ they can actually do that. We can't do that _ we're not a revival. Technically, we're a reconstruction, that is, we are reading about things that happened in the past and making up a new religion. Nobody ever did what were doing now, no one in history. But we are inspired by a lot of different things.
Anyhow, the other big difference is that they're tribal and we are not tribal; we are the opposite of tribal. One of my Native American friends said the difference between Wicca and Indian spiritualism is comparable to how an Indian and a white person relate to the vision quest. You take an Indian that's been hand-carried as a baby, has never been alone. Then he is told to go sit on the side of a hill and think his own thoughts, all alone, for a week, and you've a challenged person. Take a European person and do the same thing, it's easy, it's business as usual. That's our normal mode of operation, thinking our own thoughts. I've been on a couple vision quests; they were very fruitful. The Indians who took me on them said, Oooohhhh, you did so well, you're a hero! Well, whatever.
SS: I thought they said that to everyone. I think that we have evolved from living in groups. We have gone from living in collective family groups, to becoming more and more compartmentalized and individualized, until now people mostly live singly and in twos. We've lost that sense of community and collective thinking.
FM: Individuation may be a necessary part of our growth process, but it's reached a level where it needs to be better integrated. It's one thing to say hmmm, isn't it interesting what the Indians are doing. But spirituality is a way of getting out of yourself, and if you're a communal-living Indian, the way to get out of yourself is to go off and do a solitary vision quest. In a solitary society like ours, the challenge is to do it collectively.
Another class that I took was New Religious Movements. Wicca is a new religious movement, and we are pretty heavily studied. Well, someone writes a book on the new religious movements, and the first thing they are going to say is, there are about 500 of them going on at one time. They are going to spend most of their time talking about the big ones, like the Moonies and est. Big organizations get most of the study, because you can study them anywhere; they are everywhere. What everyone has to say about neo-pagan Wicca is that's it a very small movement and that it's been around for an awfully long time as these things go, which is good. They tend to come and go; either they disappear, or they get really big.
I have a good one for you. You know the Wiccan rede? How about, "Do what thou wilt shall be the hole in the law!"
SS: What is your definition of a Wiccan?
FM: I'll take it from the top. Somebody from the university called me up a while back and said, "How many Wiccans are in Vancouver?" I said, "About 20." Then he said, "Ohhhhh, well, I talked to so and so and he said there were about a thousand." Here's the problem: When I say Wiccan, I mean someone who was trained personally by a qualified initiate, initiated into a lineage tradition and continues to do some sort of devotional activity on a regular basis in the company of other people who are equally trained, or thus trained and initiated.
SS: You don't count solitaries?
FM: If you count self-trained, self-initiated and solitary practitioners; there would be several hundred. I disagree when we start counting all the people who we would like to think we have something in common with, like the heavy-metal Enochians, and the OTO people, the Dianic separatists, then there's the Afro-Caribbeans, and native American spirituality, count all of them. Only by including all of these would you get anywhere near the thousands.
SS:. What would we be in your definition, since we are not Wiccan?
FM: Who's we?
SS: Our circle, the Sylvan tradition. We don't consider ourselves a Wiccan religion; we consider it a tradition, a way of life. And it has religious aspects, but it's a Craft. It's what you do, and what you are, rather than what you believe. Which is how I define religion, as a set of beliefs.
FM: There are two different kinds of religion. One is the religion of belief systems, like if you can get up and say "I believe in God the Father Almighty...," you've got what is called an orthodoxy, which is where everybody believes the same thing. Or you can have a religion of practice; it doesn't matter what a Zen person believes, but if you do certain things, then you're Zen. That's called an orthopraxis: Everybody has the same practice. Wicca is the latter category, a religion of orthopraxy, that is, everybody does the same thing.
What the same thing is, is: form a circle, cast a circle, invoke the elemental energies and deities of both genders. Raise energy through body movement, chant, sing, dance, heal, share cakes and wine, devoke, hug and smooch and go home. That's our practice. If you're doing that, you're practicing the Wiccan way.
What Wicca is, is Gerald Gardner's invention, a combination of folk magick and ceremonial magick. Both of those things existed; nobody ever tried to do them together. Gerald did them together, and since then we've had Wicca. We have some record that the very earliest circles that Gerald did were where a male ceremonial priest cast the circle, and a female priestess worked magick inside the circle, and it evolved from there.
SS: I guess what I am really interested in is what are people up to, what are they concerned about, thinking about or interested in? What is really important to them?
FM: The big concern, I guess, with people at my age and experience level is, what's next?
We seem to have done pretty well, we know how to organize circles, how to teach Wicca 101 and how to do festivals; we're at a sort of make or break stage in new religious movements. We have a lot of the things that make a religion work; what we need is a theology. You have to ask, just what is this supposed to be for, because if you don't, people will start using the religion as a change-of-life process. Most people who come to new religious movements come when they are in late adolescence or in mid-life. They need something to give them a boost, they want to change, and they can't do it in their families. They do something that's too weird for the family, so they have to go do it somewhere else. Or they get kicked out of the family for doing it, so they have to make all those changes in their life. There are a lot of religions around that say, "Oh, yeah, here they come." It's a fairly short process. We'll take care of them, whoops, there they go. People use new religious movements as an initiation, like a rite of passage.
Out of the hundred or so people I knew in the '60s, very few are still in Wicca. I am one of the very few. Most of the people that are still in it that were around in the '60s consider Wicca something they know about, they do and they go to the festivals. They formed a coven at one time, and it's running pretty well now, so they don't go to every meeting, they let the kids run it. And they are into something else interesting.
We haven't made the next move yet. The question is do we want to, do we need to or is it okay to just be a place where people stop off on their way to something else. There's nothing wrong with that.
SS: Don't you think if there's not some serious attempt at constructing a theology, that someone will come along and create a religion, an organized religion out of the Wiccan, or Craft, ideals, and they may or may not have anything to do with what we actually do?
FM: Are you thinking of anyone in particular?
SS: No! I'm not. I'm just thinking that if the people that are actually Craft don't make an attempt at becoming more organized, more educated and more responsible in creating a structured and acceptable form of the Craft, that someone else will. They will take it and what they know about it, which may or may not be anything, and they will create something out of it. It may look something like what we are doing, and maybe it won't. Someone might see some material value in creating a religion that's more mainstream.
FM: So you're worried about a charismatic demagogue coming along. Well, we are certainly ripe for that sort of thing. Wicca has been blessed because there hasn't been too much of that. One of the things that keeps that from happening is our rule against taking lots of money.
That's one of the things that a religion tries to be when it first becomes conscious of itself: big! So a new religious movement will try to be radically inclusive _ start including anyone who will allow themselves to be called whatever, everybody. We have some people in our religion who are eager to include people who would never allow themselves to be called pagan. But at some point, you have to stop doing that, you have to stop saying everybody is, and you have to start saying: All right, this is what it is, and that's not what it is. Just for no other reason except so that you don't have to please everybody.
SS: Yes, I agree, although I tend toward that myself. I also think that there's value in having some separate things for men and women, but I think that if you talk about doing magick, it's really essential to have a balance of energy, however you may manifest that.
FM: Here's a theological point, and this is Fritz's theology: I do want to say that. The misunderstanding here is the mistake of the identification of the masculine with men and the feminine with women. That is, the sacred characteristics of all the goddesses and the sacred characteristics of all the gods are something that exists in all of us, regardless of our plumbing.
So there are three things. Our sex: It's concrete like the grass is green, and I'm a boy. Next is, how do I feel about that, and this is mutable. That first category, the concrete, is not mutable _ short of staggeringly complex interventional surgery, which only makes superficial changes. How I feel about my sexuality changes from day to day. There have been times when I have felt only like having sex with men, and times when I only wanted to have sex with women; sometimes I feel polyamorous, sometimes monogamous. For some people, sexual preference is not a cut and dried affair. It changes throughout your life. It doesn't change overnight, and it doesn't change completely. Today, I may feel like doing one thing, tomorrow I may feel like doing another. It changes from moment to moment. Somebody you were really hot for yesterday, you couldn't possibly have it on with today.
The third category is the magickal, the mystical, the mythological, call it what you want, but that is where the masculine and feminine reside, that's the goddesses and gods. In theory, that's going on inside everyone. Most of the time, the masculine god-stuff is easier for men; closer to the surface. But obviously not for every man, because some men have the feminine more closely at hand. Some women have the masculine more closely at hand. People can learn; as you get older, it gets easier to pull up the masculine and feminine as circumstances demand.
What religions are for is getting in touch with what's beyond the material world. It doesn't mean the material is bad, as some religions would say, but getting in touch with the divine, having some methodology, either as a belief system or as a system of practice. Some people aren't drawn to religious experiences, which is why religions have a hard time being universal. Some modern people who are counting say that 10 percent of the population has no feeling for this at all, but 90 percent has some degree or another of feeling for the numinous, that voice of the divine. That feeling when you look up at the full moon and something goes "Ahhh" in your heart. Some way of reliably accessing that experience in groups would be what religion is.
This experience I'm speaking of can be frightening as well as pleasant and can be deeply moving. The point is, it's the transcendent, and the point of religion is to provide a reliable, authentic experience: I've seen it, I can describe it, and I can take you there. We can get there together.
Now, we have this idea in Wicca that this has something to do with the male and female, the masculine and the feminine coming together, because many of us have experienced that during sex and have gone "Wow!" For people who experienced it in sex with same-sex partners, it's still the same thing. It's a coming together of some kind of opposites. It doesn't necessarily have to be the masculine and feminine; it can be other kinds of opposites coming together. Most sex, hetero or homosexual, has some aspect of opposites in it, and therefore we identify this bringing together of opposites with sexuality. Wicca kind of works that way, but there are lots of other opposites that can get into this sex-like dance: winter and summer, maiden and mother, Demeter and Persephone. Strong friction is created by this interplay of opposites. The most important one is light and shadow, and that's scary, because the shadow is scary and the light is blinding. That's why we don't get along too well with New Age people, because they think the shadow is not there at all, it's all light. There are some Wiccans like that too.
SS: I tell them we're their shadow!
FM: The idea that we're witches: Witch is a shadow-trip; the witch is the shadow of the mother. The problem is that people who are bent in the direction of wanting pagans to be accepted by the larger population run around saying that the witch was never dark, was never shadow, was always good and only a healer. The idea that the witch was always shadow is attributed to patriarchal slander. To them, the witch was good, a midwife. But the witch really is dark, dangerous, and all the more valuable for being so.
SS: She wouldn't be able to heal someone if they didn't have some respect and fear for her power.
FM: People have a hard time wondering why doctors have so much power, why people hate, worry, fear and envy doctors. Because it works, it's dark, we're going to put you to sleep and slice, slice, slice!
SS: Yes, you think they're going to put you to sleep and you might not wake up.
FM: Anyhow, so what is the light side of Wicca? Well, singing and dancing, the flowers, the Maypole, the pleasant stuff and the balance between this witch and mother business, between the forces of darkness and the forces of light, it's not like in Tolkein. This darkness has a place in our practice. We're just about the only Western religion that looks at that. The Tibetans and Hindus look at it big time.
SS: Like Kali Ma.
FM: Whoa, yes. Kali is a really good example of the witch and the mother. She's giving birth from the waist down and cutting off heads from the waist up. That's it!! That's the stuff!
SS: I really like her, actually.
FM: Well, watch out. One of the problems with the people into the New Age is whenever anything goes wrong in their life, they can't believe that it has something to do with their spiritual practice. I had a woman come to me some years ago who said, "Things are going wrong in my life. I think someone has put a curse on me." I said, "Do you think it might have something to do with your practice, what you're doing? She said, "I'm manifesting Raven, and Raven is only good." I said "The Raven is the trickster." She said, "My Raven wouldn't trick me."
Another friend formed a coven based on the worship of Odin, as the master of runes and patron of shamanic arts. His life turned into a battlefield, and he couldn't understand why. I told him my magickal name, which at the time was Dionysus, and that I worked with that energy, and that as a result, I got into a fair amount of trouble with women. So imagine how dumb it would be if I was blaming the women for the trouble.
SS: Oh yes, I just had a dedicant choose Dionysus, and he's having a hard time right now. I'm actually still dedicated to Rhiannon. I was going to dedicate last Samhain to Hecate, because she's been calling me, and I've felt reluctant, like I'm not ready yet. Scared is more like it!
FM: I was 50 before I decided to take on Dionysus, and I only did it for five years.
SS: I think that's when I first met you. You had a great reputation.
FM: All bad, I hope. Anyhow, we must accept the need for that, to say "I want to work with something stronger." You can't say, "I only want the good parts of Raven or Wotan. I only want the socially acceptable, dry-cleanable parts of Dionysus." Like when somebody says "I'm Lady Tiammat." Tiammat! Whoa. Don't cross my threshold! These are heavy deities. If you're, say, at least 50 years old and have studied them for a long time and have a lot of support mechanisms, try it, but be careful, because it's not all goodness and light.
SS: In our coven, they get that warning, but most people just don't seem to take it seriously.
FM: The trick, I think, of the priest and priestess is to keep reminding them: Do you think what's happening, the fact that you just lost your job, or that someone is gunning for you, might possibly have something to do with the energy you are working with?
SS: The problem I have is getting people to understand that this God and Goddess stuff is really real. I want to get back to what people are thinking about.
FM: I think one of the theological ideas that is coming into consciousness right now is that we live in a material world, in which differentiation has gone as far as it can go. We're turning sour on it. On one hand, we have goodness and badness separated. In the conventional religions, goodness is associated with the masculine and with the spiritual world. This is something that happened about 2000 years ago. Christianity started with the idea that there was something beyond the material that is the spiritual, that it wasn't okay to just be grossly evil, that there was a such thing as ethical behavior. Then the masculine somehow got identified with the spiritual and good, and the feminine got identified with the material and the not-so-good, or evil. That concept seemed to have some use in its day, but it's gotten stuck there.
Now, you might look to an undifferentiated state that existed before everything flew apart like that, before everything divided itself into lists of opposites. You might call it the Ourobouros, you can call it the big turtle, you can call it the swamp, you can call it what you want: It is the maternal matrix of all is oneness that existed before there was anything. When people refer to the Goddess, especially the Goddess of prehistoric antiquity, that's what they are talking about. The only problem is that the only thing about it that's feminine is the fact that everything is born out of it. It's the Ur-mother, the Ourana. A good deity that represents that state is Tiammat, a chaotic state in which nothing can happen. Let's call that the maternal, a prehistoric, preconscious maternal. A lot of people will take a look at our civilization right now and say that's what we should be returning to. They have a lot of fantasies about a world without war and without poverty, without crime and where everyone is a vegetarian.
SS: Sounds like an ideal society.
FM: Yes, but the trouble with a descent into the maternal matrix is that in that state, no ethical system can evolve, because if everything is everything, what does it matter if my behavior is less than ideal? Ethics become very difficult; if you can't have an ethical system, then the only thing you can accuse a person of, if their behavior doesn't meet your standards, is of not doing what they said they were going to do.
There's another theory, and that is that we are in a state of differentiation and that seems to have been necessary to arrive where we are now. That's where the divine masculine comes in; the divine masculine is the differentiation. Now the divine feminine can introduce the reintegration, and there's a difference between the feminine as a reintegrating force, moving on into the future to a Goddess-oriented, earth-oriented dance of opposites, than moving back into an undifferentiated maternal oneness. I am hearing this more and more. The masculine has had its day; let's reintegrate the feminine.
The irony is that people will be very proud to have a Goddess-oriented religion but at the same time say there's no real difference between masculine and feminine. They say any attempt to distinguish between the masculine and feminine automatically denigrates the whole. Which is a very undifferentiated thing to say, very matriarchal, very back to the matrix. It doesn't allow for any progress at all.
SS: It sure doesn't make any sense to me.
FM: That's a way of looking at what's a new Wiccan theology, how that would look. Another important thing is, I specially recommend a book called The Long Way Home, by Christine Downing. Christine Downing is probably one of the best feminist religious scholars working today. The Long Way Home is about Demeter and Persephone, and one of the points she makes in it is that the qualities we like are not represented exclusively by goddesses. When we actually look at Greek mythology, don't fantasize about it but look at what the Greeks believed, the earth deities like Demeter, Persephone, Dionysus and even Hades have a lot of qualities that we like. By way of contrast, the qualities we don't like, that we're trying to change, are things like the deities rewarding people with riches and wealth, being arbitrary. The Greek gods, a lot of them, thought that work was the highest measure of human achievement, whereas deities we like are the ones that thought that initiation was the highest achiev ement. That's the difference between earth deities and sky deities. It is very important to realize that half of the sky deities were goddesses. Diana, Artemis, Athena were really good examples of goddesses of the patriarchy, whereas half of the earth deities were gods, and the real dance that should be going on is between sky and earth, rather than between masculine and feminine.
I'd say there are four major sources of information about our religion. One is the prehistoric Goddess religions up to, say, the late Minoan; another is the classic religions of Greece and Rome; the third is the Druidic religions of the Celtic people; the fourth are the folk practices engendered by those early religions that continued to exist alongside Christianity up until early modernity; and then a little smattering of postmodern psychology, American Indian lore and little touches of Afro-Caribbean here and there. Oh yeah, and then there's remnants of pagan elements that are still existing embedded in Christianity, like Christmas trees and bunny rabbits. Of all those main ones, the only one that's knowable is Greco-Roman. A scholar friend of mine says everything we actually know about the Druids could fit on one page.
SS: Wow, that's not very much!
FM: Not very much. We know a lot about what their enemies said they did, but everyone says their enemies burn their victims alive, whatever, dance in circles, scream and shout. It's traditional; it's also what the Druids said the Romans did. We know enough about psychology to know that's what the Romans really wanted to do, and what they actually did.
SS: I thought the Druids did human sacrifice?
FM: Well, or maybe they executed criminals.
SS: I suppose it may have been criminals that they sacrificed.
FM: The concept of the sacrifice of the sacred king was absolutely, positively invented by George Frazier, no other evidence at all. Projecting our hopes and dreams and desires onto prehistoric matriarchates or onto the Druids or Celts or onto magickal practitioners of the medieval era is a valuable exercise; it's like a Rorschach test, telling us what we want. It's not important whether Bridey Murphy actually lived, or whether I was a galley slave, the important thing is that it came out of my unconscious. When people project a peaceful civilization, that's what they want. You can look at it in that way.
SS: I guess my feeling about the male/female thing is this: We define energies by calling them masculine and feminine, and there are some characteristics that we assign to masculine and feminine that those energies might also have. I guess it really is a play of opposites, and you must have both, a balance of energy to create something, whether it's magick or a material creation. At least in this area, the attitude seems to be that a lot of the people in this local community don't really do magick... talk about not doing sex, but it seems that they don't really do magick either. That's a very intertwined thing, to me. Sex and magick are really close; it's raising energy, just manifested in different ways. I think it's really sad that some witches, Wiccans, whatever you want to call us, have lost that.
FM: I think it's coming back, I think it's coming back in the form of the SM community and other sex and spirituality organizations. Are you involved in that in any way at all? I mean in the organizations.
SS: Yes, I am involved in several organizations that promote sex and spirituality, and spiritual sexuality. I also do magick, not every day, but very often.
FM: Yes, I think it helps to show the direction in which we might be able to take this. I think that's the route in which all of us are being brought back together. I am very pleased to see that. But part of the problem is that we have reached the point where we say okay, sex.... Sex and magick are very important, but we have reached the point where people are aging, and they are getting involved in exclusive relationships, and you can't fuck anymore.
SS: And there is AIDS.
FM: Yes, and there is AIDS.
*NROOGD is the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn, a tradition that has nothing whatsoever to do with the Golden Dawn.
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