Call for Submissions

May 27-30, 2011, Ottawa, Ontario

The special focus of this year’s conference is the influence of Z Budapest’s work and thought on the development of contemporary women’s spirituality, feminist witchcraft, goddess worship, thealogy, and gynocentric art.

Submissions may include though are not limited to scholarly presentations, performances, rituals, poetry, visual and other art, and audio and multimedia presentations. Divina et Femina IV seeks to broaden common conceptions of women’s spirituality through the presentation and publication of material that honours multiple ways of knowing. In this spirit, we embrace diversity in both subject matter and methodology. We seek submissions that add to the rich and complex wisdom of women’s spirituality, providing a necessary forum for important discourse in this growing field.

Submissions may address a wide range of submissions related to women’s spirituality, including such such topics as:

• feminista / womanist / feminist interpretations of spiritual traditions, literature and / or art;
• personal experiences within spiritual traditions;
• the impact of women’s spirituality on one’s relationship to self / body / Earth;
• creative expression of one’s spirituality;
• spiritual activism;
• interdisciplinary work with a spiritual or woman-centered emphasis;
• philosophical explorations

Submissions may be made in either French or English.
Deadline for submissions: September 15, 2010
Submissions should be sent to:

Dr. Lucie Marie-Mai DuFresne
Canadian Centre for Research on Women and Religion
Dept. of Classics and Religious Studies
Arts 102
University of Ottawa
70 Laurier Avenue East
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
K1N 6N5

tel 613 562-5714 /613 562-5714
fax 613 562-5991

For more information, contact: Dr. Lucie Marie-Mai DuFresne

http://www.divinaetfemina.ca

Blessings Sisters in Goddess!

We are pleased to announce our Goddess Festival Special for the the month of August 2010.

In the month of August only!
We are offering women who register for the Goddess Festival a FREE one year membership into the Susan B. Anthony Coven #1 … the world’s most famous coven!

Membership into the Susan B. Anthony Coven #1 is $50. So you’re getting a savings of $50! Plus, once a member of the SBA, you will find savings on classes worth more than the cost of your membership!

It’s a WIN-WIN!!! You get to come to the Goddess Festival and become a Susan B. Anthony Coven #1 Sister in Goddess … and you help raise funds for the Women’s Spirituality Forum.

The Women’s Spirituality Forum is an IRS 501(c)3 non-profit. Your registration fees and your membership are tax deductible.

* SBA Special pricing ends Sept. 1, 2010

Some women say I have no money to treat myself and my soul for an uplifting spiritual experience. True. There is tighter money now. But you woke up this morning, and you are well and you have something to eat, you have roof over your head and have something to wear.

You are successful.

Somebody tells you they need your resources. You think to yourself, he needs me. He needs my money. He comes first. I have something; I’ll support him because I love him or because he is my husband, or son.

Your daughter needs you too, and you give to her as well. And all these resources you have given away so generously without thinking will never come back to you.

When is it your turn?

You are not too young anymore. You are mature. Your needs are mature. When is it your turn?

Who feeds your hunger? Do you support them? Do you give back to yourself at all?

Yet you are lonely and exhausted. You work so hard, and you give it all away. You are a good person. Is that really enough?

At the end what we take with us is experiences, the memories of the divine. Do you have enough? Did the Great Spirit fill up your hunger? Did you smell the redwoods? Did you hear the ocean?  Did you just love yourself?

If you died tomorrow, are you a rich soul on your journey? Or just a suffering deprived worker, who was never number one? Was your life a donation? Does this feel good enough to you? You have been given away everything keeping nothing, not even a biannual women’s gathering is not possible for you while you are alive?

I say stop!

Your life is NOT a donation. You deserve to have a weekend every two years when you are a Holy Woman, not somebody who is a resource for everybody else.

We have kept our path strong. WE endure poverty gladly, because our soul is promoting the future. Join us. Take your life seriously! Take your spiritual needs seriously!

Get yourself registered now. Ride your own passion. WE only live once.

Gather the pleasure of your company. Share your joy with sisters. Look deep into the mirror of womanhood.

We have 200 beds to offer.  One of those is yours.

Blessed be,
Z Budapest

www.Goddess-Festival.com

Some men shot the ocean through the heart
Didn’t think it through
Didn’t care enough
Drilled baby drilled
Down into the deep.
Now the red states are painted brown .

Whose fault was it?
It was ignorance.
Overconfidence.
There was no plan B.
Wrong tools in the box.

Women didn’t plan this.
Women didn’t even try.
The oil was men’s business.
Now the Gulf coast has to die.

Somebody shot the ocean through the heart
Its just a taste of the bitters
Just a taste of the next fall
Many  species wiped out
Now men want to use the bomb.

Most women still  to meek
Most women hardly speak
Most women still don’t lead
In the meantime
Some men shot our Ocean through the heart.

As I was looking at my 80⁺ diaries, I realized that I used my diaries to work out my emotional problems, record lovers quarrels, shyly describe love making. I also put there my media appearances, topics of my researches, parties and addresses I had to find.

Sometimes very important things get just a single line as it was with my Tarot arrest. I simply wrote “busted.” Behind that of course was a storm of activity, meetings that followed, friends came forward, money was raised, and given to attorneys, plans were hatched.

Along the way my personal life was changing. My short three weeks vacation had turned into a lifelong residence in California. And every so often I went back to Budapest to refuel.

Even back then I was already writing my AB, in little snippets. I wrote about my parents to purge them, to understand them better and me in relationship with them. The distance has helped me a lot. I was not an abused child, but I was an ignored child. Since I was also the only child for the first 13 years of my life, you would have thought that would afford me more attention from my parents. Not so. I felt that I was always a burden.

During the war when I was a toddler, during the bombings, I caught every childhood disease there was. I remember the whooping cough as the worst. I used to say between fits of coughing, “Oh my god, this sickness is going to kill me.”  It didn’t.

After the war, my parents just farmed me out to peasant families in the countryside where there was food. Here my life got better. I had for the first time seen a goat and her kid, drank warm goat milk, and picked chamomile flowers for teas all day. I felt productive.

These are pictures that do come independently, imprinted deep in my soul.

A lot of important things just fall away if not asked about it.

But now as I am sitting at my computer, Lady Mac, I wonder how can I recall all of it?

I have already decided that the first five years included everything already that was important for the rest of my life.

And feminism that gave birth and gave me my wings, was really churning between ‘65 and ‘75.  Afterwards it was all backlash, which lasted 40 years now. My 1975 included most of my sowing the seeds of my victories. Not harvesting, no, but 1972/73/74/75 are my essential story; if I want to track my life on feminism.

But is that all that gave meaning to my life? How about the magical evenings on top of the Big Rock Mountain in Malibu?

I am excited about writing my AB when I flash on another episode.

But I am alone. No body is stimulating my mind to recall.

I need you to become my muse. This writing is very much harder than the normal magic books I have written. This is all personal. This I have lived. This I like to tell.

Think… ask me questions you would like to read about in my autobiography. Please. I will take those questions and contemplate them and write them.

Otherwise I don’t know how I’ll get through this highly personal job.

Help!

What’s in a Name? Sometimes Everything
February 24, 2010 — narajane84

While our coven, Daughters of the Sacred Torch, was still in its planning phase, one of the other coven council members and I were discussing what kind of coven we would be, what—if any—tradition we would follow. I suggested that we just go ahead and call ourselves a Dianic coven. After all, we are following all of the basic tenants of Dianism, and the major works of Dianic tradition founder Z. Budapest figure prominently not only on our reading list but also on our practices. The other coven council member present for this discussion agreed. But her husband—who, by the way, is a nice guy and by no means hostile to Dianism—thought we should reconsider using such a “loaded word” as “Dianic.” read more….

Z Budapest’s response…
Blessed be the women with brave hearts! The brave hearts with skills of language, insights and leadership!.

The Dianic Tradition had been maligned because its for and by WOMEN. Who loves women? Why is that a bad baggage? Don’t you love your mothers and sisters? Shame on you if you hate us.

Women in the Dianic Tradition are hetero, bi and lesbians. We don’t ask if they are or not, in spirituality its besides the point. When women gather to worship the Goddess they worship their own ancestors, their own mothers and sisters. Why can’t males do the same?

And as to why males insist to be in the circle with females and malign the female only circles, is because males don’t really bother to develop Men’s Mysteries. And why not Men’s Mysteries? Because its WORK. It’s study, it’s reading, digging deep, and spending the time like I have. The it’s creativity, it’s taking a lot of flack, it’s being called names.

We have pointed the way in the Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries, under Sacred Sons, but in 35 years NONE have gone there to develop a male specific non-sexist spiritual tradition based on ancient heritage. All the old fraternities still lay dormant, the Salii, the Bacchos, Dionysus, Iacchos ,Bassareus, Euios, Zagreus, Theyoneus, Braites, Lenaios, Eleutherus, Bromios, Pan, The Horned One. Where is the studious male mind who wants to reclaim the true magic of males?

Stop harping on your fear induced “baggage” (all yours). The women are WAY ahead of you. Care enough to have your own. You will not know the true meaning of being a fully male human until you get together with your brothers and fathers, and practice.

Mixed groups twice a year (Midsummer and Halloween) is also part of the Traditions. But, the men have NOTHING to bring to the table. Men … women are no longer doing your jobs! Do your own research and develop the male mysteries. Wake up and create yourselves.

To the women, wear your womanhood proudly, we paid for it in blood during the Burning Times. Be well and bless your loved ones as you bless each other.

The Goddess IS alive, and magic IS afoot!
Blessed be,
Z Budapest

I know it can be. A woman body is a full time job. Just to be healthy, we need to mind our natural cycles, bleeding every month is not fun. Two weeks tied down with the menstruation, one week pre-tension, then the bloods, and then the waning of the bloods.

Whoever says otherwise is lying. While we balance on high heels, secretly we hope our bloody pad wont move up to our back, or aspire to become shoulder pads. Bleeding is hard work. And it’s expensive. The cost of tampons, pads, the teas, the pills, the loss of joy in life, comes out of our own pockets. We finance a nation’s fertility. Not fair.

The government doesn’t pay women for being fertile, but it pays men to have erections. Viagra is covered in health plans. Birth control for women is not.  Where is the outrage?

The other day I managed to get my hands on a precious old book called, “Handbook of Women’s Liberation” written by Joan Robins. This was the very first book I read when I arrived in Los Angeles written by a contemporary feminist sister. Back then it costs $2.95, today I got it for twenty dollars. But I was so happy it was avaible at all.

In order to hold on to your Goddess consciousness you have to build in your mind a place for her with feminism. This is how she sticks with you through thick and thin.

What’s in the book?

Ms. Robins gives us a quick background on the early feminists, the suffragists from the last century. It’s good to know whose shoulders we are standing on. It’s good to know what they have done right. They organized themselves, set reasonable goals, and were relentless in pursuit of their goals. Unfortunately the narrow goal of the vote was all they could get us in order to change the female social status from chattel to citizen with a vote. This took them 75 years. Only the youngest daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriot Stanton Blatch, lived to see the vote won. Young Alice Paul drafted the Equal Rights Amendment, the very night the women celebrated their right to vote. That law has still not passed.

The short history of where the Second Wave comes from the Civil Rights Movement, and the Peace Movement where women have participated, only to be ordered back to make coffee for the male peaceniks and the black male revolutionaries.

There was a point when the women came to consciousness about how inconsistent that was with the goals they have supported. This is when the women left the movements of the males and created their own. There are wonderful pictures in the back of the book showing us these young faces, just like yours today, marching down on Fifth.

This is the Second Wave that invented the ingenious and effective C.R. Groups, consciousness raising groups, which I think we should reframe and reinvent for this huge wave of generation Z.

How is C.R. Groups different from study groups or discussion groups?

In the C.R. Group, the emphasis is on the personal experiences of each woman. We use what we learn first-hand from each other to politically analyze the status of women. “We wanted to build our own analysis of the conditions of women and from that derive a theory of action,” Robins writes.

I think our oppression certainly changed since 1970 when this book was written, but not so much in essence.

For example in the seventies, two-thirds of women were not employed. Instead we all labored privately; the unpaid labor of housewives’ and genital work (marriages).

Today the workforce is majority female workers, but the country is still run by old white males, who live in the fifties mentally.

Back then, women were not admitted to universities, or just not as many as men, today since admittance finally changed into merit based decisions, 75 percent of women comprise the student body in all collages and universities. Wahoo!

So we can pat ourselves on the shoulders, good work! Education is the key to liberation. Education is the key to independence. The key to human-hood for women. And we got it!

But here is a list what we have not dealt with yet, and these are huge problems.

Male supremacy:
This is the active behavior of men to hurt women. It starts in elementary school, and lasts a lifetime of anti-female propaganda. In our times, it’s very sophisticated, but hidden or not, its worse then ever before.

First we thought that only a few men, not capitalism was the culprit, who benefit from women’s unpaid labor. But male chauvinism is a cultural belief that males are superior to women. Most male god religions endorse this. Southern Baptists for example, President Carter just has written a letter of why he quit the church over their ingrained sexims.The Taliban teach the same thing, different male god … same oppression for us. Taliban kills us if we talk to a boy who’s not our relative; not long ago in Europe the church killed for six hundred years long women for witchcraft. Once accused, the women never came home again.

It’s a self-entitlement to feel superior to women, to make women serve and benefit males. Financially, in sex trades, children are the next target; born to poor mothers, men sell children to each other for sex and free labor. All men derive benefits from this enslavement of women, not just the pimps and johns, but the good men who do nothing culturally to control their brothers.

Back when Robins wrote her book, women could not foresee how to get out from under. But as herstory shows us, the collective female energies converged quite naturally and choose to go through the cracks of the doors that the Second Wave has opened for us.

What has become the norm are the personal solutions. We used to scuff at personal solutions versus the collective solutions, but in retrospect I think the female principle was right to fix our status with education first.

We are just not ready to attack the rest of the problems.

We tasted little of the return of the collective solution when we have voted for Hillary Clinton. She did get 180 million votes. That’s a good chunk of approval from women with jobs. Now if we just contemplate the Pro-Woman line, the bearers of the new society.

Blame. If we just stopped blaming each other and victims of violence, and see all women … the talented and the slow, the beautiful and the homely, the fat and the skinny, the PhD and the high school drop outs, the pregnant and the barren. We are all connected in the web of life. When you walk down the street, men don’t look at you and say, there goes a PhD. educated women. They still just see a female, any female, vulnerable.

Wake up and stay awake! Speak up wherever you are. Form the new C.R. Groups. So much work still needs to be done.