Magick and psychic ability were fairly normal to her, as both parents were psychic - but only with each other. She is the oldest of five kids, the rest of whom are not the least bit interested in the craft.
She met husband, Darrell, about nine years ago, at a party at Haragano's house. On their fifth anniversary they sent Haragano a thank-you card! Both Dana and Darrell have regular jobs, but neither think of that as "what they do." They have a small company called Tree House Productions, that wholesales athamés, chalices, and other pagan paraphernalia. This summer they had "Seattle's only Outdoor Occult Emporium" - a booth at the Fremont Sunday Market.
Dana operates Rantin' Raven Pamphleteers, her own pagan publishing company. It started with a tract about Halloween and has grown to three chapbook titles and a Rune-stone set. She is currently working on two books, one on the history of the Pagan Way movement and one on pagan child-rearing issues for written for Child Protective Service workers. In September, her rune-stone set was picked up by a metaphysical book distributor, and she's very excited!
To top it all off, she and Darrell just bought a house. She's lived in the same house for ten years and the landlord made them an absolutely irresistible deal on their very own house, but…it's in Tacoma.
So this interview is sort of a farewell to the Seattle Community.
Amanda: Dana, I know you've been in the Craft for a long time. Can you tell where and how you started? What tradition is it that you practice?
Dana: I came into the craft in my early 20's after having been vaguely Christian in my childhood, Mormon in high school, and into Zen and Spiritualism when I first started trying to find my Path. I started actively looking for a craft teacher in 1971, found one by '72, and was initiated in late '74.
My first teacher was Lady Sara Cunningham, one of the founders of the Church of the Eternal Source and a former student herself of Israel Regardie. But her heavily Qabbalistic Golden-Dawnish practice, while it was valuable, wasn't what I wanted or needed. Also a member of Lady Sara's group was Mara Shaeffer, later married to the semi-infamous Joe Wilson, and Morgan O'Celli. Morgan took over a failing pagan journal called The Crystal Well and transformed it into something beautiful but far too expensive to produce, and for about three years I was co-editor, which is how I got into pagan journalism.
Through Lady Sara, I also met the people who would eventually initiate me, Bran and Moria of Corax Covenstead. That relationship did not last long, partly due to personal conflicts and partly to the fact that their neighbors learned they were witches and started taking pot-shots at them; the FOR SALE sign went up real fast, and last I heard they were living on or near the CAW [Church of All Worlds] lands in the Bay area. They were AmTrad, (American Eclectic Tradition) though they always called it "Mohsian" after the trad's founders, Bill and Helen Mohs.
And actually, there are enough differences between the AmTrad BOS [Book of Shadows] and the one I inherited that Mohsian is now an independent, if tiny, trad in its own right. And due mainly to attrition, I'm (snicker) now the Senior Priestess of the Trad.
A: What was it like to be a witch back then? Did you call it witchcraft and yourselves witches?
D: Oh, absolutely! All this "Wicca" stuff was adopted in the early-to-mid 70's as camouflage or at least softening of the horrendous effect the "W-word" could have on people and sometimes still has.
What it was like is hard to pin down, because there was no such thing as a craft or pagan community, so what it was for one person was completely different from another's experience. Individual covens were secretive to the point that I was in my first coven - in Los Angeles - for nearly a year before I learned that there were actually many covens in the area.
One thing, though, was that there was much more magic and much less theology - and hardly any history or archeology or other scientific validation. It was also much less Celtic - we didn't start mangling old Irish for quite a while; we mangled Hebrew and Latin, with a smattering of Saxon, instead. And it was, on the whole, openly and utterly heterosexual. Gays were told that they could not advance beyond 1st degree because they didn't have the right kind of energy. Not that most gays were likely to be very comfortable in most covens, as traditional magic was (and often still is, as you may note in the Farrars' books) performed in male/female couples the better to create and tap a strong emotional energy flow.
There was little or no emphasis on "harm none" or the law of three-fold return. Power was a good thing; none of this tippy-toeing around it. If you had power, you used it, because you could and therefore obviously had a right to. Witches figured that they were special people, in many ways superior people, and therefore had a right to do bindings and love spells and all those "violations of free will" we now view as utterly reprehensible. I did a goodly number of them myself, and found that unless you were absolutely in the right, they backfired. Love spells in particular, though easy and fun to do, had a tendency to make the caster more enamored than the target.
I think a lot of the modern ethical standards were adopted because they gave us an excuse not to risk spell backlash. I agree that ethical standards are necessary, and that the ones we have are appropriate, but I miss the juice.
A: How hard was it back then to be a public witch? What were the hardest things about it?
D: It was damn hard! I mentioned that Bran and Moria got shot at by their neighbors; well, that was the culmination of a long harassment campaign that resulted from their going on a TV talk show to discuss the meaning of Halloween (I wish somebody would ask us about witches and Easter, just once!) and to perform a simple ritual.
I've known people personally who lost their jobs when the word got out, who lost their children; I personally have lost many friends over the years and once was evicted. My Mormon brother does not speak to me except in family emergencies. While I was living in Boise, Idaho, someone at the post office took it upon themselves to divert all my pagan mail and subscriptions. I was totally cut off, and at one point they discontinued my mail entirely and would not begin delivering again until I sicced my Congressman on them. But things are getting really hard again. Mainstream Christianity is much more paranoid than it used to be; it's no longer just the lunatic fringe who assume you're going to eat their kids if you say you're a witch.
A: I know you have been less "public" lately than you were when I first met you, about six or seven years ago. Why is that?
D: Oh, yeah. You couldn't get much more public than ERCA [Earth Religion Cultural Association] was. In many ways I'm still out there. But I speak now primarily in print. Besides my own little books, and articles here and there, I've recently been interviewed for a book on traditional craft that's scheduled to come out next year, and I write protest letters to the media at the drop of a hat.
At one point, I was getting fairly heavily into public speaking - would you believe the Woodinville Rotary? How about a call-in show on a fundamentalist radio station? But my coven was doing some intense dialog with our tutelary Deities about then, and They said to stop. They said it was too dangerous. I was angry and hurt and rebellious for about a year, and if it was totally up to me I'd still be doing it. But I'm a Priestess. My Gods speak, I shut up and do what They say. And really, as much as I've been ill in the last couple of years, I realize now that was over-extending myself, stressing myself out. I suppose it's for the best. But I do miss a good fight!
A: I know you publish the booklet on Samhain or Halloween traditions for non-pagans. What are your thoughts on the holidays being co-opted by the mainstream public?
D: On one level I enjoy it. I mean, Trick or Treat and all that is to Samhain what Santa is to Yule. It's a cultural thing rather than a religious one, and I don't see why we can't celebrate both aspects of it. We are children of our culture as much as of our craft.
But the ghoulish aspects of it offend me, because they're a perversion of the recognition of death's power which is central to an understanding of Samhain. That aspect of it seems to be getting worse in recent years. But then, I've never liked Stephen King and his ilk.
Charles de Lint (the fantasy writer) points out that we seem to find it easier to believe that the paranormal or other-world is horrific and dangerous than that it can be beautiful and kindly; therefore, it is becoming more and more horrific. I'm not sure that's true, but it's food for thought.
At any rate, I'm opposed to things which foster xenophobia. And I'm angry and upset by the Christian world's equation of death with Satan, and their assumption that because we don't flinch (much) from the concept of death we must be murderers.
A: Do you think you've contributed positively to the public's awareness and acceptance of the Craft, or not, and why?
D: Yes, I really do. But I recognize that I've actually had impact only on those who were not seriously paranoid about us anyway, and in small numbers. Still, that pamphlet (its title, by the by, is A Witch Speaks Out About Halloween) has been published on-line all over the world by now: last I heard was from Holland. What it can realistically hope to accomplish, what I can hope to accomplish, is to make someone who's read it, when next confronted by some frothing-at-the-mouth "fundie" going on about the soul-searing terrors of Trick-or-Treat, look at them and say, "You're out of your mind. Get a life."
A: This is the time of the year when we think of "shadow stuff." How do you define the "dark side" or the "shadow"?
D: Well, first of all, I don't equate the dark with evil and the good with light! That concept was imported into Christianity from Manicheanism, which had gotten it from Zoroastrianism, and it twisted Christianity - which had actually started out pretty cool - into the kind of sick institution that could torture people to death for nothing more than the need to enforce conformity. It's the root of such diverse social ills as racism and nutritionless bleached flour. We don't need it.
The Dark is the fertile ground from which the light - a force of life yet itself sterile - arises. The Dark is mystery, it's that which lures us from safety and security and the routine and into exploration. As one of my pamphlets says, "We know what the stars are, pretty much. It is the darkness of space which calls to the adventuring soul."
The Dark is dangerous, be sure of that, if only because you can't see where you're going. It's easy to lose oneself in it. It's as easy, though, to lose oneself in the light, and the light is more likely to consume you
If I equate the dark with anything, it's with the depths. The shadow, though, is of the borderlands between dark and light: shifty, amorphous, unstable. The shadow can be cruel. This is where people go crazy.
A: What do you see as useful about addressing our dark sides?
D: Witches, ideally, strive for balance. We must partake both of the light and the dark to be whole persons. I also feel, though, that the dark is where our real creativity comes from.
Did you ever read poetry written by a "White Lighter"? Greeting-card fodder!
A: Do you think that you've addressed the shadow in yourself?
D: By which I assume you mean that part of me that's a bitch? Oh, yeah, we're on very good terms.
Seriously, I'm going menopausal these days, and my shadow side is making itself much more evident. For a while there I never knew who the hell I was going to be from one minute to the next, but then I got off the damn hormone pills and went back to being a human being.
(Related but separate issue: I got a major revelation out of the experience with hormone "therapy" that I wish some historian would look into: the relationship between menopause and the Medieval executions of middle-aged women for witchcraft. If I hadn't understood what was happening to me I'd have assumed I was possessed! Why hasn't anyone noticed this before?)
A: How do you define "black magick?" What do you think about it?
D: I don't use that terminology because of my feelings on the light/dark dichotomy. But I certainly have opinions about what constitutes unethical applications of magic. The most unethical magic I know of, in my opinion, is the use of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP, heavily advertised in new age publications) outside the therapeutic setting.
Even in therapy, it is so powerful that its use should be explained in advance and permission gotten. It circumvents the mind's rational defenses in a way that violates free will. To use it as a sales tool, a technique people pay big bucks to learn, is the moral equivalent of rape. And that's kind of my nutshell definition of "black" magic, whether you use NLP or a poppet or whatever: if it leaves the victim feeling violated.
A: The English witch traditions have the reputation of being more conservative than other traditions. Would you agree? How so, and how not?
D: Oh, I certainly hope so! There needs to be some balance between the exploration and experimentation of this admittedly young "old religion" and the tried-and-true practices with which we began. We have to maintain a connection to our roots, a sense of continuity, or we're just off in la-la land. But I also hope not to get stodgy.
It's also essential that there be some consistent body of belief and practice for there also to be a shared sense of identity. Most importantly, though, is the power that is built up through repetition.
A: Earlier in the year, some rumors went around about your tradition being anti-gay, which you strongly refuted in an ad in Widdershins. Can you speak to the difference between gender polarity and bias?
D: Well, first of all, I'd like to mention that the rumors were the result of someone new to town asking questions of a member of my coven who (a) wasn't the world's best communicator and (b) didn't know as much as he thought he did.
But it's still a damn tough question, and one that we - traditionalists especially - need to ask ourselves on a regular basis. I'm not sure I'm bias-free. I try to be. But this is ultimately a traditional coven, and to change it too much in order to accommodate non-breeders would alter it more than I'm comfortable with. All we can do is muddle along, trying to be as honest with ourselves as we can.
A: What are your thoughts on the issue of gender polarity in ritual? When is it useful, when not?
D: Gender polarity is always useful. It's the bedrock of Wiccan practice. A more cogent question might be, "Is gender polarity always appropriate?", and then the answer would have to be "No, not always."
If you're drawing down the Goddess and God, as far as I'm concerned you need polarity. If you're raising energy for a healing or something, then polarity is only one of many ways to achieve your goal. In the long run, the important thing is to understand the principles behind your practice, so that you can tell the difference between polarity and genitalia.
A: Our culture in general doesn't deal with death very well. Do you think we as pagans are much better? Do you have any thoughts about death and dying?
D: I think we're, on average, slightly less terrified of death than most mainstream folk. But only slightly. And I think we're at least as seriously in denial about our true feelings, or we'd be doing more to ensure our right to die in a pagan manner, to be buried or cremated or grokked as we wish and with the rites that would comfort us rather than as our relatives think is seemly.
Darrell and I often talk about our ideas on death and how we'd like ourselves handled. There's a real comfort in knowing that one's death and disposal will be handled lovingly by those who loved us.
There are some wonderful books out now, notably Caring For Your Own Dead, which, though written by a devout Christian has a down-to-earth pagan feel to it that we really love. It puts the topic sort of on the same level as home-birth - which, come to think of it, is how it ought to be.
A: Assuming that you are still teaching and running a coven, how do you deal with problems that come up within your coven or in your community?
D: Geez, that's way too broad a question! Actually, the last of the coveners recently hived off and we're taking a break. We probably won't start another coven now until we get settled in Tacoma.
How problems have been handled in the past depended on the nature of the problem, the people involved, how far along they were in their training, and. frankly, how well I was feeling.
For really serious problems, bad enough to threaten the person's continued membership in the Coven, we'd call them into Temple and pull rank on them. For other things, we'd do the same kind of extended thrashing it out among us that any other group of intelligent adults tends to do. Mostly, as I said before, we muddle along. We're just mehums (mere humans), like everyone else.
As for problems in my community, well, you've seen my tendency, from ERCA activities to the COG [Covenant of the Goddess] Ethics trial of a number of years ago, to the accusation of homophobia you mentioned before, to take the bull by the horns. Sometimes disastrously, sometimes less so. I'm Taurus on the cusp with Aries: I don't do subtle real well.
A: What is the oddest thing you've ever had to deal with?
D: Probably the college radio station DJ in Boise who, shortly after I'd been interviewed on the air, had a psychotic break and appeared on my doorstep demanding the answer. I gave him chicken soup and a nap on my sofa, and when he woke up he was sure I'd saved his life - and I may have. But I didn't want his flippin' life, and it took me a couple more months to detach it from around my neck.
A: What has been your most rewarding experience from being a witch?
D: Sounds trite, but, just being a witch.
A: Do you think the craft has changed over the years you've been into it? If so, how?
D: I think this one's pretty much covered at the beginning, under "What was it like before?" But the single most important change in the craft since then has got to be the Internet.
This one technological marvel, living proof of Clarke's Axiom ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."), has made it impossible for arrogant postal employees to deprive a lone witch of contact with her kin; has made it unnecessary for a pagan parent to battle the legal system without help; has connected us in a web at once tenuous and indomitable, that, if we use it wisely and defend it from governmental meddling, will keep us free and make us strong as we have never been before.
A: Do you have any advice for people who are just starting in the Craft?
D: Illegitimi Non Tatum Carborundum!
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