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(More customer reviews)Jone Salomonsen's study of 'Reclaiming Witchcraft' is a hybrid document. Trained originally in systematic theology, she also later undertook ethnographic training, and the result is a combined study as a participant observer, complete with thick description, but also intends to uncover implicit theories of practice and heritage. In particular, Salomonsen works to demonstrate that the theological focus on "immanence, interconnection, and community" resembles an older subcultural line of medieval and early modern Christian mysticism, particularly women's mysticism. This broad thesis is not very successful, but other parts of the book are spectacular.
Her most imporant contributions in the book are in the areas of sacred hermeneutics, Reclaiming Goddess thealogy, and Gender.
She contends that Witchcraft hermeutics are vertical--with unifiying of sacred and profane, natural and supernatural, language and action, with the result of creating, magical reality--or what in literary theory would be called Magical Realism--symbol and referent becoming indistinguishable from each other. What Salomonsen calls the embrace of experience as prelinguistic, I would call "phenomenological."
In terms of theology, Salomonsen contends that Witches do not divide holy experience into 'immanent' and 'transcendent.' Rather, they may make a distinction between a horizontal manifest pansacrality, and a vertical sacrality where Goddess is experienced as Power or Deity, even materializing in sacred possession (or what might be more directly called mysticism). Her discussion of multiple selves (or souls) within Reclaming (Deep Self, Younger Self, and Talking Self) are viewed as ways of integrating these pluralist realities concerning phenomenolgical and symbolic experience. In turn, these realms can be accessed through trance and journeywork to locate answers to questions, be overcome by sacred forces, or meet other-than-human persons an opportunities for "re-membering" Selves.
Thealogicaly, Salomonsen claims that we are not in the space of just a "pantheistic principle," nor a "psychological concept," but rather in a paradoxical space where "Goddess is both deity and other-than-deity simultaneously." Following the 1982 theological work of Robert P. Scharleman, Salomonsen differentiates The Goddess in Reclaiming in four levels worth delineating:
1) manifest other-than-deity (Goddess is immanent in creation--Cosmos as Goddess Body)
2) hidden other-than-deity (Goddess as incomprehensible ground of being- always hidden)
3) hidden deity (Goddess's many names and guises, created/decolonized in magical acts of language/power-from-within)
4) manifest deity (Goddess's incarnation as otherness in all beings)
In terms of gender, Salomonsen draws upon the work of feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray to point to the ethical dilemma of motherhood as both a seat of feminist power and prime subject of dominination--and consequently to see the mother-daughter relationship as the operative field for articulating multiple pluralist feminist ethical roles between women and between Goddess and devotees. The mother-daughter relationship--little mythologized in Western Culture, is approached in Reclaming through the myth of Demeter-Perspehone. Salomonsen's view, based on both introductory and advanced workshops in "women's mysteries" is that essentialized notions of gender are used and deployed strategically in Reclaming to establish power-from within for peoples and situations that require it for a specific time and purpose, and that while reified notions of gender have certainly influenced and spread through the Reclaming community, they are constantly challenged and interrogated in a continuing process of dialogue.
There are powerful strengths and contributions of Salomonsen's work, but the historical thesis is weak. She continually to fit Reclaiming thealogy into Protestant Christian theology, or claim that since Judaism and Christianity both contain some immanentist countercultural traditions, and formed the bulk of the cultural landscape many of today's adherents emerged from, that Reclaming Witches are somehow still embedded in Christianity (and to a lesser extent, Judaism). But with the exception of contemporary feminism, all of the elements Salomonsen ascribes to feminist mystics in early modern Europe are also present much earlier (and stronger) in the Perennialist, Gnostic and Hermetic traditions, which have been well-documented as influencing Bynum's Christian feminist mystics, as well as contemporary Pagans (R. Hutton, S. Magliocco, F. Yates, E. Pagels, A. Versluis, J. Godwin). Salomonsen's theological and anthropological contributions are strong--her historical judgments of religious lineage weak.
A much more likely and historically supported linkage is 19th century feminist Spiritualism, Transcendentalism, and Theosophy in the United States, which always had a personalist flavor to it, with the most tenous, if any, links to Christian theology.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Enchanted Feminism: Ritual, Gender and Divinity Among the Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco
This is the first major study of the most famous Reclaiming Witch community, founded in 1979 in San Francisco, written by an author who herself participated in a coven for ten years. Jone Salomonsen describes and examines the communal and ritual practices of Reclaiming, asking how these promote personal growth and cultural-religious change.
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