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2 (2005) 173-193]

ISSN 1528-0268 (Print) ISSN 1743-1735 (Online)

The Goddess and/as the Cyborg: Nature and Technology in Feminist Witchcraft Chris Klassen
chrisklassen@sympatico.ca

Abstract
Feminist Witchcraft is a nature religion that posits a holism based on the immanence of the Goddess. This article outlines how these concepts nature and holismare understood by feminist Witches and then explores the implications of these concepts in the context of two novels. A holism based on the inclusion of humanity and the rest of the natural world in the body of the Goddess implies that humans, and their cultural and mechanical constructions, are also part of nature. Thus a dismissal of mechanistic technology as inherently unnatural does not fit with the declared holism. Yet both of these novels show suspicion, to varying degrees, of mechanistic technology. A conversation with Donna Haraway and her cyborg theory provides a way to rethink the divide between natural and technological sometimes found in these novels and in feminist Witchcraft in general.

Feminist Witchcraft, as a Pagan tradition, is a nature religion. Connected to the Pagan, particularly feminist Witchen,1 understanding of nature is a concept of holism that is based on the immanence of the Goddess. Good examples of what this holism looks like can be found in Barbara Walkers Amazon and Starhawks The Fifth Sacred Thing. Both of these novels present holism as a taken-for-granted worldview. This holism is generally directly opposed to an estranged, ecologically damaged patriarchal Western world. While both of these stories embrace holism, the success of this holism can be questioned. Are they maintaining the degree of interconnection and interdependence to which their immanence-based holism points? In some instances, no. A recognition of human mechanistic
1. Witchen is a created adjective that I first encountered in an online posting by M. Macha NightMare to the Nature Religion Scholars discussion list. NightMare uses it in print in her book Witchcraft and the Web: Weaving Pagan Traditions Online (Toronto: ECW Press, 2001). Just as Wiccan refers to the practices and beliefs of Wicca, Witchen refers to the practices and beliefs of Witchcraft.
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technology as part of nature is more in tune with the holism that feminist Witches propose than a disdain of this technology which is at times reflected in these novels. A discussion with Donna Haraway, who theorizes the integration of nature and culture, particularly technology, in her cyborg theory, could provide a possible way to avoid the pitfalls of essentialism and romanticism of the natural world. Though both of these novels suggest imaginative potential for a conception of nature which incorporates human, non-human nature and the divine in such a way as to give agency, to varying degrees, to each of these aspects, it is in The Fifth Sacred Thing that feminist Witches can glimpse a holism that follows the feminist Witchen declaration of human inclusion in nature without overly relying on a romantic return to an imagined ecologically pure past which sees human action and intervention as always suspect. Particularly, The Fifth Sacred Thing can be understood as moving towards a similar integration of nature and culture as does Haraways cyborg theory. Nature and Holism In her book Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (1990) Catherine Albanese argues for a uniquely American sense of nature religion beginning with the Algonkian Indians and the Puritans and continuing in various forms to the New Age movement. This nature religion is not a monolithic set of beliefs or way of being religious, but rather a number of distinct strands of religious ideology that draw on nature and the earth as paramount. By no means is Albanese arguing that the Indians and the Puritans understood nature, or its role in religious/ spiritual life, in the same way. She is simply showing how nature was spiritually important for both, albeit in different ways. A significant point she makes is that most strands of American nature religion seem to incorporate two important relationships with nature: harmony and mastery. The differences between the various groups Albanese explores often stem from the different emphases put on either of these relationships. Pagans emphasize harmony with nature instead of mastery. This harmony is constructed as a reflection of the holistic relationship amongst all natural life with an assumption that living naturally and with reverence for nature requires a recognition of interconnectedness. But what is nature and how do Pagans understand their holistic relationship within nature? As Raymond Williams points out in his essay Ideas of Nature, concepts of nature have shifted throughout human history to reflect human perceptions of themselves and their environment. Thus nature is never a given; it is contextual and constructed. However, the earliest meaning Williams has found is nature as the inherent and essential
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quality of any particular thing leading to a construction of nature as the essential constitution of the world.2 Though this idea of inherent and essential qualities has continued to be associated with the terms nature and natural, the meanings and interpretations of what this inherent and essential quality looks like have changed considerably from Nature as divine Mother to Nature as Gods minister to Nature as selective breeder. Humanitys relationship with nature has also conceptually shifted from being part of the order of nature through Gods design to being separate from a nature that could be shaped and controlled by human forces. Eventually, through the discourses of nineteenth-century Western industrialism and conservation, nature became understood as all that was not touched by man, spoilt by man [sic]: nature as the lonely places, the wilderness.3 Here nature acquired an aura of innocence matched with the suspicious activities of human development. Pagan concepts of nature are informed by and respond to this history of the ideas of nature outlined by Williams. For feminist Witches, the discussion of nature and holistic identity most often is articulated as the interconnection of all of the natural worldhuman and nonhumanas well as an inclusion of the spiritual, particularly deity, as part of the natural world. In this context holism is the concept that all the individual pieces of the world are, in fact, parts of one whole, interdependent upon one another. As Budapest writes, All is related in the universe, and none stands apart from nature. All is Nature.4 In feminist Witchcraft this construction is founded in the Goddess who is embodied in the earth and all earth life. Immanence here is fundamental to holism. The term immanence refers to the idea that the Goddess is right here, in the natural world. The imagery used is that the earth is the body of the Goddess. The Goddess is, as Budapest declares, life on this earth.5 This includes everything from rocks and trees to animals and human beings. Because all this natural world is the body of the Goddess, it is sacred and must be treated as such. Hilary Valentine emphasizes this sacredness when she asserts:
the worldview of Witches sees both corn and worm, both hiker and nettle, as holy. Corn, worms, nettles, bees, and roses are each living things, part of the immanent Goddess herself, part of the web of life. Each creature is on

2. Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London: NLB, 1980), 68. 3. Ibid., 77. 4. Zsuzsanna Budapest, The Holy Book of Womens Mysteries (Oakland: Wingbow Press, 1989 [1980]), xxv. 5. Ibid., xiii.
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its own path through life; each has the right and responsibility to defend itself, including the right to defend itself from us humans. By careful observation, by living with and loving both corn and worm, we try to find an artful balance that provides for our need, without tearing the web of life itself to shreds.6

Following from immanence is the idea of holism as interconnection. If we are all part of the Goddess, we are all connected. Barbara Walker, in her nonfictional text Womens Rituals, makes this clear when she insists we are all made of the same elements as Earths plants, soil, and even the very rocks: we are all products of Earth and part of the interrelationship of all living forms on this planet.7 Holism, then, is about the earth that is all living beings including humans, animals, plants, as well as the very rock and water that form the planetbeing one whole that is represented by the Goddess. Humans are part of this community of the earth; we are interconnected with, not isolated from, one another and the rest of the earth. For feminist Witches this means that, in order to maintain community health and well-being, humans must work towards the health and well-being of more than just themselves: they must care for the whole communitythe Goddess in all nature. Hence, feminist Witches concern with ecological responsibility is integrally connected to their religious identity. The ecological implications of holism based on the immanence of the Goddess are clear to Starhawk:
if we truly believe that the Goddess is every human being on the planet (and a lot of other things besides), then we owe the billions of Her who are hungry and hopeless and see no future some help, fast. We owe the sea turtles and the dolphins and the redwoods a shift in our values.8

Because of this understanding, many feminist Witches might be called ecofeminists. Karen J. Warren defines ecofeminism as an umbrella term that covers a variety of positions that are concerned with the interconnections, at least in western societies, between the unjustified domination of women and other human Others, on the one hand, and the unjustified domination of non-human nature, on the other hand.9 Many, though by

6. Starhawk and Hilary Valentine, The Twelve Wild Swans: A Journey to the Realm of Magic, Healing and Action (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2000), 192-93. 7. Barbara G. Walker, Womens Rituals: A Sourcebook (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990), 123. 8. Starhawk, Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2002), 24. 9. Karen J. Warren, Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What it is and Why it Matters (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), xiv.
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no means all, ecofeminists have ties to cultural feminism. Cultural feminists suggest patriarchy, as a sexual system of power, is global and women need to band together in a global sisterhood to fight this patriarchy. One way they conduct this fight is in the development of womens spaces, womens history (or herstory) and womens religion/spirituality. As Catriona Sandilands points out, many of these cultural feminists tend to transfer their understanding of femaleness and femininity onto nature. Because of this,
the emergence of nature as female (seen in terms such as Mother Earth, virgin forests, the rape of the wild) is understood to originate in the repudiation of woman; the construction of male separation from nature is justified in terms of natures apparently feminine attributes.10

Feminist Witches, as informed by cultural feminism, also tend to construct nature as female (the Goddess) and view the denigration of nature as resulting from a patriarchal devaluing of the female. That feminist Witches are concerned with these connections does not necessarily mean they are all politically active in ecological/environmental movements beyond the actual practice of feminist Witchcraft (which for some is sufficient to bring about a global change of consciousness), however they do hold to a belief in the relatedness of the degradation and oppression of women and of nature, each generally characterized by a lack of reverence for the Goddess who represents both women and the earth. While the holism found in feminist Witchcraft points to a laudable attitude of respect and potential responsibility for the environment, it can also lean towards a romanticizing of the natural world in a way that limits interrogation of the very construction of that natural world. Thus while feminist Witches maintain humans are part of the natural world because we are part of the Goddess who is the earth, nature is also often constructed as innocent or pure in contrast to human invention and intervention. In fact, the discourse of the immanent Goddess can emphasize a return to innocent nature when the embodiment of the Goddess and humans becomes abstract. Albanese suggests that the Goddess in feminist Witchcraft can operate on a metaphysical level similar to that of nineteenth-century transcendentalism. She writes:
Pushed one way, [the Goddess] celebrates the reality, the concreteness, of matter. Her teaching is harmony; and, if her teaching is woman, it is because in the collective Western consciousness woman has always stood closest to earth. Pushed another way, though, she tells us that matter is only a form of energy, that it can be shifted and changed by spirit. Her 10. Catriona Sandilands, The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 16.
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teaching is mastery; and, since her teaching is woman, she points to the strength of a rising feminist consciousness.11

A poignant expression of what Albanese is talking about can be found in Starhawk and Hilary Valentines book The Twelve Wild Swans, where Valentine declares:
Witches (and modern physicists and mystics of all religious backgrounds) regard the physical world we know as a complex illusion, one that our minds create because we cannot directly perceive the incredible detail of the truth. Our human brains are organized to perceive the world as an assortment of separate and static objects, when it is actually more like a continuous web of energies in constant motion and harmony. We ourselves appear to be physical objects, bodies, but we are in fact a swirl or standing wave in an energy pattern that is connected to all creation.12

The metaphysical and transcendent elements of Goddess worship in feminist Witchcraft need not detract from the earth-based and immanent elements. As Barbara Jane Davy has argued, transcendence can be incorporated with immanence in an expansive understanding of this world rather than an insistence on the division between this world/nature and anotherworld/mind/spirit.13 However, when this metaphysical notion of Goddess is connected to a universalizing that denies localized connections to specific spaces and places on the earth, the transcendence of the Goddess overrides her immanence. Carol Christ, for example, writes that
Because the experience of nature is never abstract, but always shaped by the geography and climate of a particular place, an authentic American or Australian spirituality must be rooted in the lands where we live, just as an authentic Greek spirituality must be rooted in the Greek land.14

Yet in the same book she advises that

while we know the earth in particular places, the image of the whole earth as the body of the Goddess must keep us from identifying the Goddess primarily or exclusively with any particular part of the earth or with ethnic, cultural, racial, or national interests.15

11. Catherine Albanese, Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 179-80. 12. Starhawk and Valentine, The Twelve Wild Swans, 104-105. 13. Barbara Jane Davy, Definitions and Expressions of Nature Religion in Shamanic Traditions and Contemporary Paganism, paper read at the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion annual meeting at the Congress for Social Sciences and Humanities, 26 May 2001, Quebec City, Quebec. 14. Carol P. Christ, Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997), 44-45. 15. Ibid., 90.
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The Goddess is not abstract, but not particular either. Her immanence here is limited to a transcendent holisma form of energy that encompasses the earth/universe. With this understanding, rites located in natural placeswoods and groves, hills and riversideshonour the largeness of the earth rather than the smallness of a particular piece of ground. This largeness of the earth represents a changing consciousness a metaphysical realigning of the mind. As Susan Greenwood points out,
When contemporary witches celebrate in the woods, they celebrate the liberation of their inner selves from the domination of the everyday world. Nature represents the antithesis of urban society and its Christian values.16

Barbara Walkers Amazon and Starhawks The Fifth Sacred Thing allow for a more detailed exploration of how feminist Witchen holism operates. Amazon Amazon is a story that constructs and contrasts two worlds. Antiope, Walkers main protagonist, comes from an ancient Amazon society and is somehow transplanted into modern America where she meets modern Dianic Witches. The distinctions between pre- and (post)industrial societies in Walkers narrative are striking. The pre-industrial Amazons represent a utopian world that embraces the kind of holism to which feminist Witches aspire. The Goddess is the earth; society is structured around the care of the earth and integration of human and the rest of the natural world. The (post)industrial Americans represent a dystopian world that has lost its sense of connection to the natural world because of its rejection of the Goddess. The opposition is very clear, and in that opposition we find a technology of speculation that asks readers to consider possibilities outside of their known world. Walkers story speculates about a world in which holism as defined above was taken for granted. Walker asks what it might have looked like to assume the organic world, human and non-human, is significant and worthy of respect and honour because it is the embodiment of the Goddess. Walkers protagonist, the Amazon Antiope, describes the ancient Amazon religion in this way:
We worship the Mother, who created all that lives. She is to be found in every womb of earth, sea, and heaven. Women themselves embody the Mother. Men do too, though less so, because they are woman-born. The

16. Susan Greenwood, Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld: An Anthropology (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 111-12.
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Mother is the life force extending through all nature from generation to generation.17

In this holistic depiction the natural world is the Goddess; the Goddess is nature. The Amazon Antiope has trouble understanding the modern world because of its deviance from what she understands as the norm of reverence for the earth as the body of the Goddess. The Goddess is the world; she is mountain and moon, sea and tree. How could these strange Americans treat the natural world, hence the Goddess, so poorly? She complains that, unlike in her Amazonian society, modern children are not taught where their food comes from or how their bodies work:
They had not patience to watch spiders spinning their webs or birds building their nests, yet they would sit still for hours every day to watch cartoon characters kill each other over and over and to be trained by commercials to desire unwholesome foods and pointless toys.18

Walkers is a story that encourages readers to rethink their relationships with the earth and to shape a religious identity that blends bodily, spiritual and environmental contexts. As such Amazon is a breath of fresh air in a world where the earth has been disenchanted and humans seek to control resources rather than live with and within their space/place. Walker, in places, depicts a balance between human and non-human in representing the Goddess. However, this depiction is complicated by a less holistic representation. The Goddess in Amazon is found in the natural world, in the caves, the woods, the moon and so forth. The Goddess, however, is not described by Walkers characters as mountainlike, tree-ish or reflecting the attributes of the moon. The Goddess is always portrayed as a woman whose body incorporates the mountains, the trees and the moon. She is reflected in these earth places rather than these earth places being reflected in Her. By extension then, the nonhuman natural world is generally described as Goddess-like, which means human/woman-like. The earth is the body of the Goddess; but in Amazon body always means human body. Thus the caves at the Temple in Themiskyra, where Antiope begins her vision-journey, are uterine, the springs of water in the caves are the Mothers pure amniotic waters, the moon is the all-seeing Goddess-eye.19 While it could be argued that humans are not the only creatures of the natural world to have uteri, amniotic fluid or eyes, the continued references to the Goddess as Mother,

17. Barbara G. Walker, Amazon: A Novel (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), 83. 18. Ibid., 124. 19. Ibid., 10-12.
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as particularly embodied in women and as anthropomorphically portrayed in iconography, emphasizes the human-likeness of the Goddess. It is possible that Walker maintains this human-centric focus as a way to make both the Goddess and the non-human organic world approachable and/or identifiable for her readers. The non-human organic world is just like us thus it deserves our respect and honour. Walkers protagonist certainly points out the lack of respect and honour for nature. As Antiope flies across the country with Diane, promoting Dianes book, she is given a broad view of the land.
Views of the land from high up began to seem more sad than thrilling. I began to notice vast spreads of potentially good farmland buried under sprawling roads, towns, shopping malls, parking lots, and factories; land poisoned and ruined by industrial waste; land black with soot or sterilized by machines. I now saw the ugly gray hue of filthy streams that had once run clear, the dim brown pall of foul air over every urban area, and the scars where the earth had been chewed open. Such sights filled me with cold dread. Surely, I thought, the Mother must be very angry at children who left canker sores all over Her body, turned Her breath and lifeblood into poison, and generally behaved like Her disease parasites. These people were making Mother Earth sick, draining Her health away to support their amazing civilization.20

This description prompts sympathy and care for a damaged and sick earth/Goddess. However, the anthropomorphizing of the earth-body of the Goddess is problematic in its reduction of differences between members of the earth community to sameness based on human norms. Environmental theorist Val Plumwood argues that the spiritualization of nature inevitably moves to anthropomorphizing nature. While I disagree that all spirit is necessarily human-like (unless you think only humans truly have spirit), her concerns about the anthropomorphism of nature are valid and important. Plumwood suggests:
We should aim to find cultural ways to recognise and celebrate the play of intentionality and agency in the world (and for regaining sensitivity to the particularity and agency of place especially), but preferably ways which do not show disrespect for the otherness of nature by inscribing that agency with the cast of the conscious human mind.21

Though Walkers portrayal of a human-like nature may bring empathy through familiarity, Plumwood notes:
20. Ibid., 123-24. 21. Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1993), 136.
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Respect for others involves acknowledging their distinctness and difference, and not trying to reduce or assimilate them to the human sphere The failure to affirm difference is characteristic of the colonising self which denies the other through the attempt to incorporate it into the empire of the self, and which is unable to experience sameness without erasing difference.22

By consistently and exclusively portraying the earth as like a human body in the form of Goddess, Walker denies the aspects of the earth and non-human nature that are different from humans. She denies herself a potentially powerful site of speculation for alternate understandings of deity and the relationship between human and non-human reflected in deity. That is, she denies a recognition and celebration of difference. Walker consistently utilizes a technology of opposition that contrasts modern Western patriarchal society and prehistoric matriarchal Goddessbased society. Her depictions of nature and human interaction with nonhuman nature continue this opposition. The Amazons respected and lived in harmony with the non-human organic natural world; the modern Americans do not. The modern Witches, as inspired by the Amazons, can be examples for feminist Witches to be people who love, respect and worship nature. For Walkers Antiope it is clear that the modern Americans do not respect the organic world precisely because they have forgotten the Mother and taken up the practices of an industrial and/or mechanistic world. Though Antiope has some appreciation for the benefits and wonders of the modern mechanistic technology, particularly when used to create a Goddess temple, she finds them ultimately alienating:
It was a peculiar society indeed: filled with miracles of comfort in the home, while everyone lived in anxiety and discomfort of the spirit, afraid to be close in the human way, afraid of their sexual nature, afraid of their own compatriots.23

Mechanistic technology represents indulgences and luxuries that can take away from the sacred relationship with earth and Goddess.24 The implication is that it is only through worship of the Mother Goddess, whose body is the organic natural world not the humanly altered mechanistic world, that humans can truly have a non-oppressive relationship with the rest of the natural world. The more humans interfere with the rest of nature, the less in touch with the Goddess they are. In other words, human action does not reflect the Goddess, it takes humans away from the Goddess.
22. Ibid., 174. 23. Walker, Amazon, 39. 24. Ibid., 176.
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The ideal for interaction between human and non-human nature found in Walkers Amazon is that of holism, where all of the natural world comes together as one organismthe Mother Goddess. However, the anthropomorphic portrayal of the earth-body of the Goddess makes Walkers holism limited. In as much as non-human nature is like humans (particularly females) we are all one unity, reflecting the sacredness of the Goddess. Where human and non-human nature may drastically (or even minimally) differ is not addressed by Walker or her characters. Even though earth is generally portrayed in human-centric ways in this novel, human activity, particularly mechanistic technology, is still suspect; this activity is portrayed as moving humans away from the purity and sacredness of the earth as the Goddess. This is not to say all human activity is portrayed negatively. Where human intervention is minimal, Walkers Antiope can encounter the embodied Goddess. The Fifth Sacred Thing Amazon presents a past world where people lived closer to nature, which allowed them a clearer picture of their holistic identity as part of a whole embodied in the Goddess. The Fifth Sacred Thing is distinct from Amazon in that it is set in the future. What might the future look like if we continue on the religious, political and environmental trajectories that Starhawk critiques in her nonfictional work as negatively influencing current Western (and global) culture? Starhawks story revolves around a community living through an extreme of environmental degradation that exceeds even Walkers dystopian portrayal of modern American society. The utopian enclave of the North, in The Fifth Sacred Thing, is working hard to reverse the damage humans have done to the earth and themselves though they are sometimes thwarted by the activities of the leaders of the South who continue to see the earth as resource and commodity. Starhawks representation of nature is in many ways similar to that of Walker. Her story is a speculation that imagines a society that believes in the holistic interconnection of nature and deity. In The Fifth Sacred Thing, as in Amazon, the earth is the body of the Goddess. Starhawk begins her novel with a Declaration of the four sacred things, which is the ruling manifesto for her northern utopian community. This Declaration states:
The earth is a living, conscious being. In company with cultures of many different times and places, we name these things as sacred: air, fire, water, and earth To call these things sacred is to say that they have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves become the

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standards by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged.25

In order to facilitate this judging, the community has incorporated the four sacred things into their Council structure. Masked people channel the voices of the four sacred things to keep the community accountable:
Many people felt that nothing could truly be decided when the Four Sacred Things were not present. The animals, the plants, the waters had no voice in Council, and yet every decision should take them into account. After seemingly interminable argument, they had one of those unlookedfor bursts of collective creativity, or perhaps madness, and established this ritual, where masked representatives for each of the sacred elements sat in trance in Council, channeling the Voices of wind, fire, water, and earth.26

Giving the four sacred things voices in Council implies a certain understanding of sacredness. Not only do they have intrinsic value, as the Declaration claims, they have something to say; they have unique perspectives to which Starhawks Northern community is adamant about paying attention. Their voices point to consciousness. In fact, when Starhawks main character, Madrone, is in the South she attributes to all of nature a soul that is, it seems, synonymous with consciousness:
To us, Madrone said, everything has a soul. Or a spirit, at least. Consciousness. Animals, plants. Air and fire and water and earth. Like it says in the Declaration of the Four Sacred Things. We are part of the earth life, and so sacred. No one of us stands higher or lower than any other.27

This soul-ness of all of the earth life provides another dramatic opposition between North and South. In the North everyone and everything in the natural world is sacred and has a soul (or spirit). In the South souls are a privilege of the elite who follow Millenialist doctrine and support the Stewards. That all earth life has consciousness does not mean in The Fifth Sacred Thing, as it does in Amazon, that all earth life is human-like. Starhawk allows for the differences between human and non-human life, even when they are frightening. For example, Madrone is able to communicate with bees, but only in a limited fashion. If she were allowed full communication she would have to give up her humanity and become part of the hive. As the Melissa, the priestess of the bees (one who has entered the hive mind and thus can only communicate in a limited fashion with other humans), tells Madrone:
25. Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing (New York: Bantam Books, 1993), n.p. 26. Ibid., 46. 27. Ibid., 186.
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What I have taught you works with [the bees] nature. It is how they communicate. Even so, never make the mistake of thinking you control them. They are wild. They will aid you if they wish to, but they will not always understand you, and with all you have learned in these days, you still only barely begin to understand them.28

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The bees are not like humans, though they can communicate and work with humans in some situations. That all earth life has consciousness also does not mean that all life is always valued equally. Starhawk constructs a dialogue between Madrone and the Southerner, Isis, on the Northern position on meat-eating. Madrone outlines the debate, how some argue for strict vegetarianism and others for responsible animal farming, and how each household makes its own decisions. Isis pushes her, though: And what do you believe, personally? Madrones response: That theres a qualitative difference between your mind and that of a chicken.29 Madrone does not indicate whether there is a qualitative difference between a human mind and that of a deer, hawk, coyote or salmon (the representative masks of earth, air, fire and water included in the Council). A chicken, however, is not given voice in Council to contest Madrones opinion. In Amazon nature and the Goddess are specifically opposed to mechanistic technology. In The Fifth Sacred Thing Starhawk approaches this kind of technology in a more complex way. In some instances it is opposed to holistic living and magic. Mechanistic technology is a fake magic; it tries to manipulate the world through unnatural formations of energy whereas magic shapes natural energy for the sake of overall good. In other instances Starhawk allows for an appreciation of humanmade mechanicsmost notably in various characters love of the city and its constructs. The third approach is to speculate about an organismbased technology. The people of the North did not retreat to the forests; they remade the city to incorporate organic nature and human-made artefact. This incorporation is the beginning point of a place of contact between Starhawks portrayal of nature and mechanistic technology and Donna Haraways cyborg. Haraway argues that in our time we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short we are cyborgs.30 Her initial construction of cyborg theory found in her essay A Cyborg Manifesto attempts to confuse the boundaries between human
28. Ibid., 229. 29. Ibid., 186. 30. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 150.
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and animal, organism and machine, and physical and non-physical. These boundaries, Haraway argues, have all become blurry in the late twentieth century. She writes:
One of my premises is that most American socialists and feminists see deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine, idealism and materialism in the social practices, symbolic formulations, and physical artefacts associated with high technology and scientific culture Another of my premises is that the need for unity of people trying to resist worldwide intensification of domination has never been more acute. But a slightly perverse shift of perspective might better enable us to contest for meaning, as well as for other forms of power and pleasure in technological mediated societies.31

Her perverse shift of perspective calls people to recognize the integrations, in partial and contradictory ways, of those things deemed opposites. In the context of Starhawks novel, the remaking of the North to incorporate organic nature and mechanistic technology, often perceived as opposites in feminist Witchcraft, recognizes the partial and contradictory integration of organism and machine that cannot be ignored in our society which is made up of an inextricable weave oforganic, technical, textual, mythic, economic, and political threads.32 This is a cyborg relationship. A more specific place of contact between The Fifth Sacred Thing and Haraways cyborg theory, however, is in the creation of new technologies in the North that are based on interaction between humans and intelligent crystals. All the computer technology in the North is based on this relationship. When the South invades the North and the invaders try to access the data bases, they cannot make the computers work. They question the Northerner, Bird, who has become a prisoner:
The data bases? Theyre all based on crystals, he said, barely audibly, and the crystals have a consciousness of their own. They cooperate with us, as long as they want to. We dont command them. You cooperate with rocks? Thats how it works. The tecchies spend a long time in meditation before they try to work out a program. Its tough, believe me. I had to do it in school. You lie. Its the truth. I swear to you!33

31. Ibid, 154. 32. Donna Haraway, Cyborgs and Symbionts: Living Together in the New World Order, in The Cyborg Handbook, ed. C. H. Gray (New York: Routledge, 1995), xii. 33. Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing, 344.
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Here is a poignant example of organism and technology not just working together, but fully enmeshed. The relationship between crystals and tecchies, those who work with the crystals, is a cyborg relationship that recognizes the integration of nature and technological. Cyborg Nature The concept of a holistic identity based on the immanence of the Goddessthat is, the earth, including humanity, as the body of the Goddess and thus sacredwhich is found in Walkers and Starhawks novels, can be appealing for those who care about the earth and creating sustainable environmental conditions. However, too often the holism constructed by feminist Witches is a limited holismone where interdependence and interconnection between all of the natural world is solely a reference to the organic world; what is artificial and artefactual is automatically suspect. This leads to two problematic constructions. First is a romanticizing of historical periods in which humans are perceived to have had less impact on the non-human world than we do today. Thus, feminist Witches are prone to an ideology not uncommon amongst environmental activists whereby pre-industrial society is seen as ideal while modern society necessarily separates humans from the rest of the organic natural world. In conjunction with this romanticizing is an equally problematic construction of nature as pristine and divorced from human invention and intervention. Where humans have intervened with the non-human organic natural world, nature has been sullied. This, interestingly enough, creates a hole in the theory of holism: if humans are part of the natural world, as argued in feminist Witchen holistic theory, then what humans create must be part of the natural world as much as a beaver dam or a birds nest. However, if nature is understood as pristine and innocent then human invention (particularly that deemed destructive) must be understood as unnatural. A holism that denies the inclusion of human invention and artefact can only be seen as limited. The first concern with the limited holism that is found in some feminist Witchcraft is what Kay Milton calls the myth of primitive ecological wisdom. The belief in this myth is not unique to feminist Witches but can be found advocated by a variety of participants in environmental discourse. For Milton, the myth of primitive ecological wisdom is the bedrock of an environmentalist romanticism that vilifies industrial society and suggests hope for the future in returning to the virtues of the past. However, Milton points out that the view that non-industrial peoples are/were more environmentally respectful is simply false. What look like environmentally sustainable lifestyles may be due to other factors,
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such as small populations, rather than cultural understandings of the earth as sacred or humanity as interdependent with the rest of the earth life. Milton argues:
Clearly, there are some non-industrial societies that hold themselves responsible for protecting their environment But there are also non-industrial societies which do not recognize a human responsibility to protect the environment, and which probably could not do so without changing some of their basic assumptions about the nature of the environment and their relationship with it. Whatever the differences between cultural perspectives that encompass environmentalist principles and those that do not, they apparently have little to do with the dividing line between non-industrial and industrial societies.34

The myth of primitive ecological wisdom is appealing for some of the same reasons Cynthia Eller argues the myth of matriarchy is appealing.35 Both provide a precedent for future activity that is based on something humans have already done and supposedly succeeded in. If nonindustrial societies lived in harmony with nature, then to solve the environmental problems of industrial and post-industrial societies we need only return to a better timebecome more natural as we were intended to live, and as we originally lived. Milton argues:
One of the clearest messages that anthropologists can give to environmentalists is that human beings have no natural propensity for living sustainably with their environment. Primitive ecological wisdom is a myth, not only in the anthropological sense, as something whose truth is treated as a dogma, but also in the popular sense, as something that is untrue, a fantasy.36

Going back can never be the answer because there is no ideal back to go to. Catriona Sandilands has similar concerns about the romanticizing of non-industrial peoples by ecofeminists. She suggests that not only is this myth of primitive ecological wisdom based on fantasy, but it characterizes indigenous knowledge as somehow pure, somehow dissociable from what colonization has actually done to those different cultures and social practices.37 This purity of the indigenous or the non-industrial society denies the complexities of these peoples and their interactions with others.

34. Kay Milton, Environmentalism and Cultural Theory: Exploring the Role of Anthropology in Environmental Discourse (London: Routledge, 1996), 133-34. 35. See Cynthia Eller, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Wont Give Women a Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). 36. Milton, Environmentalism, 222. 37. Sandilands, The Good-Natured Feminist, 55.
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It names them pristine, innocent and uncontaminated by technology, industry and, dare we say, culture. A good example of how the myth of primitive ecological wisdom works in feminist Witchcraft is found in one of Starhawks recent publications, Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising. In this text, while she warns against the romanticizing of other cultures and recognizes that not all indigenous cultures have lived in ecological balance, Starhawk does equate indigenous identity with being
deeply rooted in one place, living in a culture in which sustenance, spirit, and culture arose from the plants, animals, climate, and resources of that particular land. If we are going to create a new political/economic/social system, one that truly cares for the environment and for human beings, we may need to become indigenous again, to find at least one spot on the earth we can know intimately.38

Again, the argument is that we need to go back to have a better future. This is clearly the approach taken by Walker. The Amazons had an ecologically healthy lifestyle based on Goddess worship; if we reintroduce that Goddess into modern society, say Walkers Witches, we will again be ecologically healthy. Milton suggests an alternative. She proposes not a looking back to some pristine past which did not exist and only serves to further stereotype indigenous peoples, but rather a rethinking of nature to include human activity including technology, industry and culture. Milton advocates that we
see nature as the all-encompassing scheme of things to which all human cultures and practices, as well as non-human species and physical processes, belong. In this view, a dam built by people is as natural as one built by beavers, computer technology is as natural as collecting fruit from the rainforest. There is no other nature to get back to. This is itwe are already there. This frees us to examine all human practices and cultural phenomena without prejudice. It enables us to consider their ecological value without assuming from the outset that some are naturally better than others.39

With this mindset at work it is possible then to look to our own industrial and post-industrial societies, as well as non-industrial societies, for solutions to our environmental problems without labelling one group as more pure than the other and allowing all peoples the complexity of failures, contradictions, successes and ambiguities. Though feminist Witches loudly proclaim humans to be part of the natural world, they are less likely to conceive of human cultures and
38. Starhawk, Webs of Power, 163. 39. Milton, Environmentalism, 223.
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practices as natural. Both of these novels voice suspicion about mechanistic technology in and of itself. This limit to holism privileges the organic (the less processed the better) over the machinic. They are caught, as Ruth Lester suggests of ecofeminists in general, in a false binary offering only two choices: emancipation through identification with misogynist male rationality and technoscience or identification with nature, femininity and the irrational.40 However, as Donna Haraway argues, we no longer live in a world in which organic and machinic are separable. Starhawk would agree. She notes in her essay Feminist, Earth-based Spirituality and Ecofeminism, todays Witches are mostly urban people living in the mobile, fragmented, technological modern world.41 Furthermore, in The Spiral Dance Starhawk envisions a Goddess religion of the futurefirmly grounded in science, in what we can observe in the physical worlds. She continues:
In future or contemporary Goddess religion, a photograph of the earth as seen from space might be our mandala. We might meditate on the structure of the atom as well as icons of ancient Goddesses; and see the years Jane Goodall spent observing chimpanzees in the light of a spiritual discipline. Physics, mathematics, ecology, and biochemistry more and more approach the mystical. New myths can take their concepts and make them numinous, so that they infuse our attitudes and actions with wonder at the richness of life.42

It may be beneficial for feminist Witches to consider Haraways conception of the cyborg as a potential metaphor for understanding a more extensive and fuller, though more fragmented, natural world which fully includes the human. To this end, Starhawks novel, with its more complex understanding of mechanistic technology, provides a more appealing speculative picture of the natural world, which recognizes the activities of humans as also natural. Ann Kull suggests a conceptual and a practical problem to the project of defining and locating nature:
What is nature, and where is it to be found, then? Because virtually no nature untouched by human activity exists, we face a conceptual problem: On what grounds can one define nature as really nature and not artificial? And we face a practical problem: Either we have no nature at all, or nature is all around us but we cannot see it because we want nature to be out 40. Rita Lester, Ecofeminism and the Cyborg, Feminist Theology 19 (1998): 11. 41. Starhawk, Feminist, Earth-based Spirituality and Ecofeminsim, in Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism, ed. J. Plant (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1989), 176. 42. Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1999 [1979]), 220.
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there, separate and distinct from our actual interactions with nature.43

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The cyborg, or in Kulls terminology technonature, can help in moving past these problems to dismantle the nature/culture or nature/technology divide. As Haraway points out:
Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.44

Cyborgs resist, or perhaps make illogical and unnecessary, the looking backward to a pristine, innocent, natural world. Haraway suggests:
Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upona-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.45

She disagrees with the radical feminist and feminist Pagan reification of the organic and the demonization of mechanistic technology. Haraways insistence on the lack of innocence of the cyborg does admit to its uses by patriarchal, militaristic forces. In fact, Stacy Alaimo suggests this is the very problem with Haraways theory:
In this culture the predominant ideology connected to the blurring of machines and humans is one of masculinist force and domination, an erotics of power particularly terrifying in a nuclear age. This seems like an insurmountable difficulty for the feminist cyborg.46

However, the cyborg is slippery. As an incorporation of both organism and machine, it is faithful to neither and thus pushes away from the dualisms that limit human understandings of ourselves and the rest of the natural world. In its disruptions of the nature/culture dividethe assumption that what is human-made is essentially and morally different from what is natural/wild/untaintedthe cyborg highlights both the construction, not necessarily by humans, of the natural world and the embeddedness of human culture and technology in the earth. In the context of feminist Witchcraft, Haraways cyborg could suggest
43. Anne Kull, The Cyborg as an Interpretation of Culture-Nature, Zygon 36.1 (2001): 52. 44. Haraway, Simians, 152. 45. Ibid., 175. 46. Stacy Alaimo, Cyborg and Ecofeminist Interventions: Challenges for an Environmental Feminism, Feminist Studies 20.1 (1994): 148.
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frightening, but exciting, new ways of talking about human, nature and, above all, deity. Haraway insists,
We cannot go back ideologically or materially. Its not just that god is dead; so is the goddess. Or both are revivified in the worlds charged with microelectronic and biotechnological politics.47

Reviving or (re)creating the Amazon Goddess does not make sense in a world that has such a different shape than that of prehistory. The earth has changed; if the earth is the body of the Goddess, the Goddess must change as well. Perhaps there is room for a cyborg Goddessa Goddess, or Goddesses, whose body is the earth in all its organic and machinic components. This is not to suggest that all mechanistic technology is necessarily good or useful for creating a just and sustainable world. It does suggest, however, that nature is never innocent or pure or untouched either by human hand or by the activities of other non-human agents. This cyborg Goddess would be a much more complex image than the Mother Earth Goddess who is either being destroyed by, or impervious to, human technology. Cyborg Earth Goddess imagery would be fragmented and thus more properly a collection of Goddesses networked together, though perhaps incompletely so, to reflect and act with all of the natural world in its diversity and dissonances. Haraway concludes her famous Cyborg Manifesto with the statement I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.48 I suggest that for feminist Witches who are invested in a sacred and spiritual construction of the natural world, it is possible to be both cyborg and Goddess. Bibliography
Alaimo, Stacy. Cyborg and Ecofeminist Interventions: Challenges for an Environmental Feminism. Feminist Studies 20.1 (1994): 133-52. Albanese, Catherine. Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990. Budapest, Zsuzsanna. The Holy Book of Womens Mysteries. Oakland: Wingbow Press, 1989 [1980]. Christ, Carol P. Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997. Davy, Barbara Jane. Definitions and Expressions of Nature Religion in Shamanic Traditions and Contemporary Paganism. Paper read at the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion annual meeting at the Congress for Social Sciences and Humantities, Quebec City, 26 May 2001.

47. Haraway, Simians, 162. 48. Ibid., 181.

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Eller, Cynthia. The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Wont Give Women a Future. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. Greenwood, Susan. Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld: An Anthropology. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Haraway, Donna. Cyborgs and Symbionts: Living Together in the New World Order. In The Cyborg Handbook, edited by C. H. Gray, xi-xx. New York: Routledge, 1995. . Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Kull, Anne. The Cyborg as an Interpretation of Culture-Nature. Zygon 36.1 (2001): 49-56. Lester, Rita. Ecofeminism and the Cyborg. Feminist Theology 19 (1998): 1-33. Milton, Kay. Environmentalism and Cultural Theory: Exploring the Role of Anthropology in Environmental Discourse. London: Routledge, 1996. NightMare, M. Macha. Witchcraft and the Web: Weaving Pagan Traditions Online. Toronto: ECW Press, 2001 Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1993. Sandilands, Catriona. The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Starhawk. Feminist, Earth-based Spirituality and Ecofeminism. In Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism, edited by J. Plant, 174-85. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1989. . The Fifth Sacred Thing. New York: Bantam Books, 1993. . The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1999 [1979]. . Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2002. Starhawk and Hilary Valentine. The Twelve Wild Swans: A Journey to the Realm of Magic, Healing and Action. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2000. Walker, Barbara G. Amazon: A Novel. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992. . Womens Rituals: A Sourcebook. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990. Warren, Karen J. Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What it is and Why it Matters. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. Williams, Raymond. Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays. London, NLB, 1980.

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