Impressions on Penczak's "Gay Witchcraft"

After at least twenty years, I've finally managed to get my hands on a 2003 copy of “Gay Witchcraft: Empowering the Tribe,” by Christopher Penczak. It’s a Wicca 101 book, highlighted with gay overtones. It’s the sort of book I would have loved in the 1980s; it appears to be grounded in sources like Margot Adler, Janet and Stewart Farrar, Marija Gimbutas, Charles Leland, Starhawk, and Native American practices. Early chapters are a survey of world pantheons with a focus on gay, lesbian, and transgender deities where applicable. Later chapters are quick sketches of astrology, reiki, crystal healing, and herbal remedies.

It’s more same-sex centered than “The Gay Wicca Book,” by Bruce K Wilborn. It does have some ritual and practices for same-sex lovers, but it’s not really a gay essentialist tome in the way Storm Faerywolf’s more earthy “Satyr’s Kiss” is. Specifically, the Great Rite—placing an athame (ritual blade) into a chalice—is presented as a symbol for the heteronormative union of the Horned God and the Great Mother, i.e. Heiros Gamos, which in itself is a symbol for the union of cosmic principles. While I appreciated the handful of paragraphs exploring the Oak and Holly Kings recast as lovers, I did wish for more exploration of cis gay male eros, agape, and amore as a source of gay gnosis and as a lens for queer praxis within the framework of American Wicca.

To work beyond the book, it could be fruitful to one’s personal practice to explore decoupling elemental tools and directions from a male or female view. I’m not sure if that would make, say, a wand both masculine and feminine, neither male nor female, or some other intersection of the gender continuum. Perhaps it could be useful to move linguistically from statements like “fire is male” to “fire has male” (in the same way that one might say “he has hunger” instead of “he’s hungry.”) At the very least a reexamination of how gender and desire are woven into symbolic correspondences would result in more mindful symbolic acts, i.e. rituals.

I suppose to continue the decoupling, one could explore silent, mimed ritual. (Pause to imagine Wiccans trapped in a glass box.) Hmm. Maybe not. I’m sure there’s a metaphor in there, somewhere.