St Augustine may have tried to control by will power every movement of his body but I had no wish to be a Canute trying to hold back a tide rising to reclaim her own. My body was her own domain and my mind conspired with her. To remain living as a male now seemed like attempting to build a tide-proof sand castle but to do otherwise was a leap into darkness. My difficulties were compounded because I knew no other like me and had only had instincts to guide me. They seemingly told me that to become free, to become myself, I had to desert what society told me of myself. This was one of the most important lessons of my life. The outcome of this leap made me realise our instincts are our natural divinely given guides.

My diary entry of early March 1974 recorded: "I started going again but this time as Jenny. It was like walking through a looking glass going out for the first time by myself as a woman...-. I was wolf whistled and chatted up - I certainly did pass as a woman." Life was immediately retextured, totally different, exciting, good, I quickly found I was accepted in everyday life for whom I said I was, whom I felt I was.

This easy public act was very different from the time when I secretly walked dressed as a girl in our garden when I was 14 but it felt as if it made legitimate that earlier experience. I was beginning to understand my childhood and why it was so plagued by painful asthma. Everything was starting to fall into place.

My first tentative experiments in 1974 began to open my eyes to the realities of female life. The first time I walked alone back home as a woman. I realised I had become vulnerable in a way I had never experienced before. Maybe my makeup was a little overdone that day? Maybe I moved wrong? But on Nicholson Street in Melbourne two car drivers stopped to ask me the way. They chatted me up and a truck driver gave me the wolf whistle. The end result was I quickly deserted the main street to walk via back streets and was not molested further. At first I had been pleased at being accepted as female. But I found it suddenly offensive to be treated as if a commodity on display.

It was important for me to find some counselling for I had no family or tribal elders with any knowledge of such matters. I was lucky the idea that such conditions are best treated by electric shock therapy had been abandoned. I have since come across many a horror story of people thus tortured to "cure" them of this natural if rare condition. There remains however still a presumption that a transsexual is in some way "ill". Doctors in the know nowadays call it "Gender Identity Disorder (GID)" - for it is a disorder resolved through helping the body match the gender of the brain - thus creating "order". Once this is resolved, once one has changed gender roles, then hopefully one is cured of GID and is no longer a "transsexual".

My psychiatrist, a Dr Bakewell, after many months of assessing me, told us both that we would be playing games not to accept that I had a female gender identity. She told Jackie that I was not a transvestite; that rather I was a person who had been landed somehow with a female gender identity. She told us both that I had to recognise that I was basically female at the deepest psychological level and that I had to re-order my life to accept this as my reality.

Jackie was also seeing an old and dear Jungian psychologist friend who saw me too. He actively encouraged us both to stay together for, he said, it was evident that we still loved each other. He told her that what I was going through was constitutional and couldn't be changed. My diary of June 1975 recorded that, after we had a rough few days, we "went away together. It took us just one and a half days to realise that we both just wanted to stay with each other - that we both just wanted each other to be free. We had a really free time together - a new getting to know each other." Jackie now put aside her doubts and had decided to tell me that I could jump the gender barrier without fear of breaking up our family, that we would continue to look after our children together no matter. This freed me. I loved her for this. For the fear she too was taking on. For us both it was a leap into the dark.

We knew our young children (then but 1 and 2 years old) would need above all else to experience our love for them as constant and honest. We thought this would best be done if we tried to stay together as they grew up - and answered their future questions honestly. We would explain to them that there are many kinds of people in our rich world including those with bodies that had both male and female aspects and who were brought up in the wrong gender. This would later lead to many an entertaining discussion that started: "Jani, when you were a girl inside but living as a boy, did you..." Our young children seemed to regard this as an undisturbing but very interesting fact of life.

Taking this pill was the most earth shattering decision of my life. Up to this point the turmoil in my life had caused both Jackie and I incredible difficulties and enormous pain and many a time I thought I just could not go through with it. But that was like the turmoil of my adolescence when I oscillated from wanting to be a girl to despising myself for even thinking of it.. Then as now I was bucking against my own nature - as I was to learn. Again and again Jackie assured me again we would stay together as a family and that she believed I had to be myself. She said this was my own personal decision and I had to make it without fear.

I took the first oestrogen pill fearfully and excitedly on the 1st August 1975. It was much later that I realised the significance of this day. August 1st is one of the four great festivals of the ancient Celtic year. It is the festival when was celebrated the death of the corn that we might live - part of the great wheel of life. This celebration was often mythically portrayed as the death of a Corn King. So I made the crucial act that would kill the male social me on the day when the King died to bring life. All this seems to have been utterly and somewhat weirdly appropriate.

As for the pill that I took, I had learnt about hormones from a self-help group in Birmingham in England called the Transsexual Action Organisation (TAO).. I am not sure how I found them, I may have seen their name in a magazine. It was run by two people travelling in opposite directions, male to female, female to male. Layla was its secretary. They answered my letters giving me practical advice about gender and transition. Their advice always seemed a step ahead of my needs. I thought it sometimes beyond my needs. But their instinct was right. They were able to predict what would be happening next for me because they and their friends had been there first. Among other things, they told me about the safest and best hormones.

As Doctor Backwell had no knowledge of what hormones were best, she decided to accept their advice, perhaps after checking independently. When I finally asked for a female hormone prescription, she ordered for me Premarin, a natural oestrogen. I was to take 1.25mg . 3 times a day, the same dosage as Layla was taking. It was a hormone extracted from the urine of pregnant mares. Nowadays I think of this as highly appropriate. The white mare was a symbol of the Goddess among my ancestors. Today she still runs the chalk hills of England with her image carved giant-sized into the turf.

In taking a mare's urine, I was not on a path unique to modern technology but taking a very ancient medicine seemingly once made by witches. In the first century BC the poet Ovid wrote from Tomis, a Black Sea Grecian colony near to the Scythians of the steppes who had a reputation for honouring gender-changers. "She's a witch, mutters magical cantrips, can make rivers run uphill, knows the best aphrodisiacs - when to use herbal brews or the whirring bull-roarer, how to extract that stuff from the mare on heat." Amores 1, verse 8. He also wrote in his poem "On Women's Facial Treatments": "Put no faith in herbals and potions, adjure the deadly stuff distilled by a mare in heat."

Thus I was midwifed by a wise craft (for what else is good psycho-therapy), using the urine of the fertile mare. The Goddess has not finished creating me. In a work of self transformation, I had to help create my own body, surely a divine work. Our bodies really do matter, are not to be despised. I was not content to be just a female soul or mind, I was born to share a body with my soul that could give me my full natural sexuality. There are those who believe that nature can be cropped and chopped but deplore as unnatural the desire of the transsexual to meddle with the shape of her or his body and call it a mutilation. But for me, when it is done in conformity with the soul, it is a wondrous act of alchemy. Through it the soul, a sleeping beauty, is transformed and awakened by a kiss of love. But at that time I still had to learn this. There were many times in the years before me when I thought otherwise.

The immediate effect of the hormones was that I became immediately vastly more relaxed. Inside I was exultant. At last I felt in my deepest instinctual self that the dichotomy between my body and my mind was resolved. For the very first time in my life I felt whole - and good. My soul was at home in my body. I was one. Both Jackie and I came off tranquillisers. Some weeks later she told me that it was obviously the best thing that had happened to me, that I was like a cat with a pail of cream and that she much preferred the new relaxed me. I truly felt less uptight. Only now did I fully realise what I had been forcing myself to do in "pretending" to be a male. Now I knew I had much less need to prove myself.

There was one jarring shock. Three weeks later Dr Bakewell had second thoughts. She wrote to say that she was going to stop prescribing the hormones for she was concerned about its impact on our family. Jackie went to see her to assure her that we were OK and after this the treatment was continued.

I later recorded in my diary the quick effects of oestrogen on me: "I have now been taking oestrogen for some 5 weeks. The effects have been remarkable. Jackie has said that I've become much more relaxed, not scared of emotion, human even. We are getting on far better with each other, freer together. I've become a far better person, easier to live together, less on the defensive. Judging on these factors , it seems I should keep on taking it. We are not going to worry about the future - just grow into it.."

"The physical effects so far are:

3 days after starting with hormones the right nipple itched all day;

4 days - the left nipple did the same - then about 6 days both breasts itched

By 3 weeks - a general softening of the skin became noticeable - on the back especially

By 4 weeks , dresses start to fit me better in front because of my changing contours (although the change is subtle)

By 5 weeks. .Although my figure change is so far not noticeable if I am wearing loose clothes. My face is noticeably fuller. In all the changes have been astonishingly rapid. I may well have to cut the dosage to a maintenance dose (for last 3 days took pills just twice daily)" I have since learnt that in my case this change was unusually fast and effective.' One of the doctors [well used to dealing with transsexuals} remarked with surprise on this and said he wished they had tested my chromosomes - they might explain my very unusually easy and dramatic change.

It seemed to me that somewhere in my brain, in a room controlling cell replacement and shaping, a controller had sat up with astonished surprise when the sensors in front of her recorded the arrival of much more oestrogen in my blood than she had been accustomed to see and had exclaimed: "About bloody time too! We've been waiting since she was 12 for this." She had then promptly dumped into the rubbish bin the tattered blueprints on her desk and pulled out from a shelf a set of fairly unused female blueprints, dusted them off enthusiastically, and set to work to change all the mechanism's within my body that were accessible to her. It also seemed to me that this path was easier because in subtle ways my body was already prepared for the oestrogen's arrival.

My diary recorded more of my thoughts and observations some months later: "In my early thirties I have begun to go through a second puberty, this time as a girl.., my light body hair vanished as my breasts became magically sensitive. Down deep at the base of the brain a key hormonal switching station has taken note of the female hormones now in my blood and pulled the mainline lever. Now every new cell in my body is a female cell My body now belongs with my mind. The changes although commencing immediately, still take time to complete. For months I could pass either way if I wore loose clothing. But I felt very much more at home in a dress - although I feel less need to 'dress up' in a skirt as I no have no longer a need to pretend I have a female body.. The element of conflict seemed to have gone. But I still feel it's all rather mysterious science-fiction. It's very good to be at home with my body!"

I also observed that "Karina and Katie both accept it very well. Sometimes I join my new name with my old. We think it is easier for them when young to accept transexuality. We hope we can protect them from too much confusion by teaching them about transexuality openly."

The most surprising elements for me were both the totality of the change and the utterly unexpected sexual awakening. Every part of my body became wonderfully erotically sensitive as, at long last, I began to become alive sexually. Suddenly I started to notice men as attractive! I presume it was much the same for me as it is for most girls at puberty. This was not a necessary development. Some of my later friends who transitioned, found afterwards that they were lesbian. My path was unfolding. I was not strong enough to see where I was going, but I was rejoicing in waking up, rejoicing in the wonderful sensual kiss of the Gods, of having skin that was at last alive all over .(I cannot speak for men - as I never was fully one, but my own experience is that men's skin is only sensitive erotically in limited areas - while a woman's skin is erotic everywhere.)

I also most unexpectedly found myself experiencing surfing the lunar cycles within my body, experiencing regular monthly very low times that were always followed by a magical lift. These were at first disconcerting. I had to adjust to being a lunar animal, to being much more part of the tides of the earth. I worried at first about these depressions that came and went. (However I did not bleed for my internal female organs had atrophied before birth.)

I found being a female with a male was an entirely different thing, as new to me as it would be to any pubescent girl. I must confess I enjoyed feeling protected and cared for. My whole body tingled, and still does I confess, when a man in a caring gesture puts his arm behind me. It meant more to me at first than it would to many woman for it also meant something I had long craved, acceptance as a woman.

I also found myself much more vulnerable to strangely predatory males - a beast that was as alien to me as to any woman. I thought I would have understood them better - but eventually concluded I had never been truly within their skin because of my always female brain. Trustworthy males were usually not around when I would have liked protection - and wanting protection was also a very new feeling. But I had absolutely no intention of welcoming vulnerability in order to have men protect me. No, I was determined to be a woman that could stand on her own feet - and enjoy male company.

I might have been born with a female brain, but I certainly had not been socialised to accept the female lot. I had no intention of taking a minor role to men but I had an awful lot to learn. Above all else I had to quickly learn to keep males at bay. I had found to my sudden alarm that the eye contact with males was now dangerous for it often was seen as a come-on signal. I had to learn eye control. My eyes had not to meet male eyes. I learnt that eye control was done by females, not by males. A man in our society is free to simply look.

I knew women that could look a male straight in the eye, laugh, flirt, enjoy life - and keep the males at a distance. The flamingo dancers of Spain embodied this for me. I saw them as expressing dignity and strength. I set them as my role model - but, until I was more sure of myself, I could not follow their example but had to learn how to avoid entanglements. My socialisation process was as hilarious as was XXX in Pygmalion? (the teaching of the 'rain in Spain" woman in the film XXX) . I had to quickly learn the survival skills that I had missed out on learning during my teens. Meanwhile I was delighting in the birth of my new body as it appeared with all the speed of a roller-coaster.

In 1975 it was not just my body that changed. I also had my passport changed and the name on my sociology degree . These were the easier things to achieve. All they required was a letter from my doctor. The letter she gave me said that in her opinion I was psychologically hermaphrodite - born with a female brain and male genitals. But the Lateran University in Rome refused to change the name on my Masters Theology degree certificate on the grounds that that had been my name at the time I took that degree. I think they did not want me to use this degree as the basis for a career. My driving license I retook so as to save hassles. This did not help. My male instructor failed me first time although I had safely driven for many years.

I wrote some weeks later in my diary, after we had moved from our rented communal home: "By now I had stopped being paranoid at home and most friends now knew me as a transsexual. This quieter house gave me the chance to work myself out that had been lacking at Alfred Crescent. Most people who have to go through this transsexual experience are advised by doctors to start up a new life somewhere else where no one knows them. I had no intention of doing this. My life was too full. The Mapoon project was in full stream. [This was our project on Australian racism and Aborigines] I had too many friends I valued. I had long personal talks to my friends and colleagues. The nearly inevitable result was that I became closer to them. Women friends reacted by lending me clothes, helping me be who I felt I was. Male friends were sometimes more awkward.

"The attitude of nearly all friends has been tremendous and free. For example, take Justin. He was a good mate. When I first told him at his house, , he found it easy. He said he had seen the female in me. We then decided to go down the pub together to talk about the meaning of life as we were accustomed. I saw no reason why we should not do this as a man and woman. Our first trip to the pub together after my transition went fine, but I could see his startled reactions in his eyes."

While it was all right when we were together in his house, it was a different matter at he pub. "For him being with a woman in a pub demanded a whole set of different reactions and behaviour that he was not used to associate with being with me. Like suddenly, awkwardly grabbing at doors to hold them open. Moving a chair out for me. It was more confusing for him than me. I was just being myself and laughing at him."

I found much fun in the sexual frission now at play in my relationships with men. But I soon found that some thought it OK to rub up against me in order to satisfy their sexuality. Their phallic drive was quite new to this naive new kid on the block. I had never realised quite how little that I understood them. I found myself perplexed at their behaviour, at their thinking, and this taught me how different they were to me. I did not like suddenly becoming very vulnerable, being patronised by males and finding that, when I protested, I was seen as unstable and emotional. It was disturbing to find myself suddenly so handicapped by gender. No matter how "feminist" a person is, experiencing at first hand the current male exploitation of women is definitely a major eye-opener.

I detested being put down. I could not stand being patronised. It made me angry - I was not socialised to accept this, not socialised into being a girlie. I had not been trained to be subservient. I had no great need to please men. I did not see my fulfilment was a relationship with one of them.

Nonetheless I now came under a great deal of socialisation pressure. I had to appear conventionally a female when I saw my doctors. This happens to most "male to female" transsexuals. If you want to get through the system, get hormones and perhaps an operation, you are put under great pressures to confirm to a male stereotype of femalehood because otherwise your doctors might not think you sufficiently "female". It is mostly male doctors that do this assessment. God help those who are judged too "masculine"! Transsexuals who are transitioning feel especially vulnerable when in the street. They are scared they will not to "pass" as women - and this pressure also lead to conformity. Recently I have noticed a relaxing of these criteria since the modern unisex ways of dressing do not allow doctors to judge femalehood by clothing..

I enjoyed using make-up in these early "pubescent" years. I discovered war-paint was fun and that it should be used more by men. I took pleasure in a new found freedom of clothes. In winter I relished the way my skin was now a much better protection from cold than it had been before. I no longer needed so many layers of clothing. I mostly wore skirts because it was the 1970s and skirts were still common female wear.

Above all, I loved the feeling I had of coming home, of being reborn, of finding that the suspension of my sexuality was over and it had now come alive. I had walked a lonely path on the borders of my femalehood for many years. It was as if for years I had been stumbling over a high moor amid rain and strong winds and now had discovered a hidden green valley populated by sisters who welcomed me. Once I had arrived in this home, looking back to that previous lonely existence seems like a very distant memory of a previous lifetime. I now find it very strange to imagine that it was me that once lived that so alien life.

Another unexpected development was that Jackie and I discovered we were happy living together in effectively a same sex marriage. (Another problem for the church!) Clearly it was a gigantic change in her life. I do not know how she adjusted - nor how much pain she went through in order to keep us together as a family. But at that time my gender role change was much less of a problem to us than we had previously imagined. We still loved each other. We expressed this love. We carried on sleeping together but as two women. My new attraction to men added a bisexual element that we shared - although for Jackie this was only with me. Outside our relationship she was as far as I knew strictly heterosexual. There were perhaps certain compromises here. Jackie and I had some high times sexually, many delightful times, but I was sure this was more due to our spiritual and emotional bond than to her innate desires. We just had to learn to listen closer to each other so we knew when the other wanted to be alone - or to seek male company.

So I had come to another step on my path downwards from a peak of prestigious status. I had left the clerical elite and now lost the privileges of malehood. At that time I thought that I was about to wreck my job prospects as well as to face ridicule, embarrassment and lost credibility - not just because I would be seen as a woman, but because of being seen as a freakish woman. I knew that I would also be embracing other risks. I would face legal discrimination and, if by chance arrested, being put in a male prison to face nearly certain sexual harassment and perhaps rape. This was not a distant threat . Within months I would be endangering myself by taking part in an armed occupation of a major mining camp on Aboriginal lands.

As for my vocation to the priesthood, in the eyes of the Catholic Church and in my own eyes I had dedicated myself to the priesthood of my Creator forever. For me this had not changed. I had accepted the call from the God within. I had been consecrated to the priesthood. Now I would be outwardly the priestess I had always been within - and thus become perforce in yet another way a small stumbling block for the Catholic Church's male dominated sacred realms. I was travelling far from the days when men called me Father.

As for ritual work, since Jackie was very concerned that we avoided publicity, this became limited to saying Mass in our family. Yet it remained important. It was for us the sacred meal that symbolised our bond to our Creator, to each other and to the earth. Celebrating this a woman gave it a new richness for me. I saw it increasingly as a very female act of nourishing. It symbolised how the sacred earth also nourished us by giving us plants, water and animals whose elements would become part of us. Through this rite we transformed the mundane into the sacred in a magical and symbolic way. When the Vatican decreed in 1994 on May 30th "there must be no more discussion of women priests", they presumed they had not ordained any. It seemed that the Goddess and I had ducked under their guard.

The Church of England permits today the ordination of women, but oddly calls these "female priests" rather than "priestesses". To me this suggests that their role is to be female men - or that they are to work in the priesthood in precisely the same way as men. I suspect that the title "priestess" is now so associated by default with the pre-Christian religions that the churches fear that the re-adopting of that title would in some way unloose a female pagan energy, a nature energy, into the Churches.

I was of course travelling in the reverse direction to that prescribed by Church Fathers such as St. Jerome who wrote: "as long as woman is for birth and children, she is different from man as body is from soul. But when she wishes to serve Christ more than the world then she will cease to be a woman and will be called a man (vir) " Commentary of the Epistle to the Ephesians III, 5 The very word "virtue" originally meant "male-like". St. Ambrose, another Father, shared similar views .. "she who believes progresses to perfect manhood, to the measure of the adulthood of Christ. She then dispenses with the name of her sex, the seductiveness of youth, the garrulousness of old age. -Exposition of the Gospel according to St Luke, lib X, n.161. This was not a view always logically adhered to Joan of Arc was arrested for wearing male garb! p134 of G acc to W.

There had not been priestesses in Christianity since the Roman Church declared against gnostic Christians, in the Apostolic Constitutions of c. 380 AD, that "to take priestesses from among the women is an error of pagan godlessness" eu 132. The Synod of Laodicia of the same century went further when it declared "women are not allowed to approach the altar". In 1994 Pope John Paul II issued the following edict

"'I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly

ordination on women and that this judgement is to be definitively held by

all the Church's faithful". From the Vatican, on 22 May, the Solemnity of

Pentecost, in the year 1994, the sixteenth of my Pontificate.Joannes Paulus Pp. II"

We know there were priestesses among the early Christians not only from the need the Roman Church had in 380AD to banish this practice, but from its attacks on women taking on sacred ritual roles among the gnostic Christians. Bishop Irenaeus of Lyon in the 3rd Century attacked the local Christian gnostic Marcos in words that revealed Irenaeus' own prejudices against women. Irenaeus claimed that Marcus went up to "his deluded victim and he says to her, 'Open thy mouth, speak whatsoever occurs to thee, and thou shalt prophesy'. She then, vainly puffed up and elated by these words, and greatly excited in soul by the expectation that it is herself who is to prophesy, her heart beating violently, reaches the requisite pitch of audacity, and idly as well as impudently utters some nonsense as it happens. to occur to her, such as might be expected from one heated by an empty spirit." After this bitter, and no doubt bigoted attack, Irenaeus let slip that Marcos spoke in the ancient language of the mystics by instructing women: ". Adorn thyself as a bride who is expecting her bridegroom, that thou mayest be what I am, and I what thou art. Establish the germ of light in thy nuptial chamber." This classic language of the mystic marriage echoes that of the Wisdom literature of the Bible but Irenaeus suggested that Marcos only said this for his own sexual advantage.

In Irenaeus's view this was not the end of Marcos's wickedness for he alleged Marcos was 'deep in the black arts of magic' and had women preside at the Eucharist when 'he bids them consecrate these [chalices] in his presence.' He explained away Marcos's reputation for accurate prophecy by saying '. It appears that this man possesses a demon as his familiar spirit, by means of whom he seems able to prophesy ". This allegation of an alliance with Satan would be re-used thousands of times during the following centuries as a justification for killing those who seemed to have a sacred role or ability not sanctioned by the Church. His words also underlined an implicit transcendental dualism that would henceforth be strongly embodied in Catholic teaching. Although Catholics believed in one God who will be victorious, they also saw the world as dominated by a war between the Kingdom of Heaven and the Kingdom of Satan.

`But no matter how much the Fathers of the Catholic Church disliked the idea of women in the priesthood, they even more detested the transsexual priestess of pagan faiths. Augustine after calling the Goddess of Rome, Cybelle a 'demon' and a 'monster', concluded: "- her priesthood are 'castrated perverts' 'foully unmanned and corrupted' n121 bone 125. "These effeminates, no later than yesterday, were going through the streets and places of Carthage with anointed hair, whitened faces, relaxed bodies, and feminine gait... The Great Mother [the Goddess Cybele] has surpassed all her sons, not in greatness of deity, but of crime... This Great Mother of the gods has brought mutilated men into Roman temples" book 7 ch 28 of City of God. Tertullian went still further : "I do not call a cup poisoned which as received the last of a dying man; I give that name to one that has been infected by the breath of a fricix, a high priest of Cybele.. and I ask if you will not refuse it as you would such a person's kisses." N64 bone 113

It was not the castration but the taking on of a female identity that caused this revulsion. The eunuch who saw himself as a man was accepted and honoured. They quoted Isaiah: "Thus says YAHWEH: 'To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name which shall not be cut off.' Isaiah 56:3-5. They would be used in choirs in Catholic churches right up until the 20th Century and in this were more honoured than women who were for many centuries banned from singing in these churches

Jesus did not mention the transgenderd but he seemed to have little problem with eunuchs of any kind. "For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the reign of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it". Matt. 19:21

Josephus, a renowned 1st century AD Jewish historian who believed that every sperm ejaculated was a whole child, had a very different view. He wrote: "Shun eunuchs and flee all dealings with those who have deprived themselves of their virility ... expel them even as infanticides who withal have destroyed the means of procreation." He thus went beyond Deuteronomy's ruling against the physically imperfect male entering the Temple :"He whose testicles are crushed or whose male members is cut off shall not enter the assembly of the Lord". Deuteronomy 23:1.

Josephus' particular horror was of those who changed their bodies to conform them to their female instincts or soul. The eunuchs he knew seem to have been mostly transsexuals for he continued: "For plainly it is by reason of the femininity of their soul that they have changed the sex of their body"

The attitude of most of the Church Fathers towards the "males" who lived a females was a direct consequence of their fear of womankind. Augustine had explained his disobedient phallus by saying that women were given power over it through the Fall. But what when the woman who gave his an erection turned out to be transgendered? Such a person was thrice evil in his eyes - through refusing the divine gift of malehood, through deception, and through giving him an erection by utilising women's sexual magic.

This compounded fear is still present in our society and leaves the transgendered at great risk of assault. This was illustrated in 1998 by the case of a transsexual woman returned to Nicaragua by US Immigration. When she arrived at the Nicaraguan customs she appeared totally as the pretty woman that she was. But when the immigration authorities learnt of her background, they became very angry at what they saw as her deception, an anger increased by guilt at being attracted by her. They took her to a separate building, stripped her, multiple raped her and tortured her.. I feared I was in a similar danger when I was frisked by Indonesian Immigration officials when my body was totally hermaphrodite, female everywhere except between my legs.. I was terrified but managed to stare down the official who had frisked me. I was not always so lucky. Later on I would be nearly killed by an assault on me in London by a man who refused to accept me as a woman.

But at the beginning I simply had to accept this danger if I were to resolve my gender problems for I was confined to living in a prejudiced and sexist society. I also did not judge my path by referring to the above mentioned Biblical texts. I did not even note them at that time. I had utterly no wish to be a male eunuch. From the early 1970s I knew that the human brain is gender formed from birth - and that its gender may not correspond to that of the genitals. I knew that this discordance existed in others. I had found that trusting my instincts and changing my gendered presence in the world had resolved my terrible inner tensions.

There were many ways of effecting this gender transition in the old days. Some of these I mentioned in the first chapter "Monday". The elders of tribes with ancient cultures would interpret the dreams of a youth who seemed to walk between the gender worlds to see if he or she was called to the path of the other gender and, perhaps, gifted sufficiently in moving between worlds to be trained to be a shaman, teacher and healer of the people. The act of changing the external presence to the inner birth gender was seen as a powerful rite of self-empowerment, of self-shaping. Since shamans still practice in the remaining indigenous tribes of far northern Europe and Siberia (from whom comes the very word "shaman"), I think it can be presumed that my own ancestors once had had their shamans. I wondered, was I being called to an ancient path of my people? Was I born to have this role?

When I thought on the traditions that surrounded my sisters in tribal societies, I realised that , despite having abandoned a sacred male role, I was now proudly bonded with that Zulu youth who dreamt and changed, I was that Siberian youth dreaming, I was the American Indian who dreamt of being called to live as a woman - but above all, I was part of my own people's dreaming in the British Isle. It did not matter that I did not know what happened here before - for it was now happening now in my life, and thus in my people's life.

We have folk memories of witches, wise folk and guardians. The word "witch" comes from "wicce" meaning a woman who weaves reality - with knowledge of plants, drugs and medicines. (The word "wickerwork" has the same origin.) Some old books have also related witch to "wit", meaning a wise one. These wise ones, as do the shamans of other nations, knew much about the uses of plants, including sometimes how to use oestrogen rich plants such as the root of black cahosh, to transform bodies as well as the urine of pregnant mares. These herbs are today being increasingly used by transgendering people.

But when I began to consider this somewhat alchemic transition, these matters were not very well understood. The psychiatrist that most helped me had never before met a person like me. On my part, I had then only met one other male to female transsexual, an Aboriginal woman who was well accepted by her community. But that was 25 years ago. It is vastly easier today to find others in the same plight by using the internet and email based discussion groups.

My childhood experiences had now fallen into place and I had come to understand what had made me who I am. I did not however transition to an uncontroversial state. As a person moving between gender worlds, I came under attack from various schools of gender theorists who loved to practice on us.

I was shocked in the 1980s to find that a text book used for a course at a Melbourne university was "The Transsexual Empire" by Janice Raymond, a woman paranoid about transsexuals, who saw them as a male conspiracy to penetrate the lesbian-feminist movement (ignoring those who travelled in the opposite direction). She concluded by lecturing transsexuals, telling them not to try to find an escape by adopting female stereotypes, but instead, to stay in roles assigned at birth. She apologised for sounding cruel and unaccepting. She was being unaccepting. I found this insulting. I still find it insulting. I do not think anyone can see my life as unduly conforming to any kind of stereotype. She was also very ignorant of the biological basis of transsexuality and of gender. Her theories did not accommodate the thousands of "intersexed" assigned at birth to a gender according to surgical convenience.

I also found difficulty at one time with a group of women who worked on a printing press set up in one room of a communal Melbourne house that in 1979 was my home. They wore overalls almost as uniforms. They had rightly revolted against the insistence that women wear pretty clothes. They expressed sadness and disapproval when they observed that I still enjoyed wearing skirts and female gear. I must admit that it did take time before the novelty of wearing these clothes wore off. Nowadays this is unimportant to me and I mostly wear the unisex gear of today. If they now met me, I think they would approve - but I still claim the right to dress up!

A shock and a major disappointment for me was the attack of transsexuals launched by Germaine Greer over a decade ago with a full page article syndicated internationally. I had long admired her for her stance on women's rights but in this article she described with biting scorn how at one of her book launching parties in the US, a person she described as ugly and dressed in appalling taste came up to her to congratulate her on what she had done for "us" women. Greer cruelly said this was no woman but a parody and a fool who thought he could use chemicals to make himself a woman. I had thought Greer would have been more consistent in her stance that clothes do not make the person and much more enlightened on the biological reasons for transsexuality and intersexuality.

In 1999 she returned to her attack on transsexuals in a new book. This time she had dreamt up an even more fantastic argument. An ABC interviewer asked her:

"Can I quote what you said though on page 74? "when a man decides to spend his

life impersonating his mother like Norman Bates in 'Psycho' it's as if he

murders her and gets away with it." That's a pretty damming assessment of

what it is to be a transsexual?"

Greer responded:

"Well, if that's what happening. You see transsexuals typify their mothers as

the enemy. This is the family that wouldn't admit that inside this male body

was a female. I think it is very strange."

This is I felt a purely flippant and ignorant comment. I feared it seemed to her clever to typify and demonise transsexuals as if they are all Norman Bates. She had totally invented this argument. I have met many transsexuals and I have not met one who typified her mother as the enemy. Many receive much support with their transition from their mothers. She also ignored the many who change in the other direction, from living as women to men, perhaps because they would not fit into her theory. It is not as if she has not had the opportunity to learn more about transsexuals. In the mid-1890s she launched a cruel attack on a transsexual woman appointed to be bursar of the all-female Exeter College at Oxford University at which Greer was a Fellow. She said the Bursar was not a woman by her standards.

The applicant did more than obtain the Bursar's job despite Greer's opposition, she also organised at her new college an international conference on transsexuality and gender journeys in 1998 attended by many female to male and male to female transsexuals and by professionals working in this area. Much medical evidence was produced on how transsexuality was due to a false certification at birth. Greer has shown an incredible trust in the infallibility of (mostly male) doctors in the issuing of birth certificates. On March 16th 1999, I heard her on television again complaining about these "males" who had invaded her space.

Another but sadder mistake was by the author Randy Connor of "Blossom of Bone", a finely documented book that records much of great value about the sacred roles given to transsexuals in many ancient cultures. I have learnt much from his book - but boringly have had to mentally change pronouns throughout. I felt colonised by him, taken over, for he presumed that people like me are homosexual males like himself.. He thus claimed for gay males the many historical sacred roles that he goes on to document were given to transsexual women.

He said in his introduction that he would not document the sacred roles of lesbians but leave this to lesbians. I wish he had given the same courtesy to the transsexuals which he so badly misunderstands. I have no problem with acknowledging that gay males had sacred roles but when men have sex with them they do not think they are with women (and autopsies have shown they have male shaped brains).. A "straight" female transsexual 1s heterosexual if she fancies men and as lesbian if she fancies women. Her lovers will see her as female. Likewise a male transsexual (brought up as a girl) will be gay only if he is attracted to males. A partner's gender is a very different thing from one's own gender-identity.

His mistake was also that of the early Catholic faction of Christianity. He tells in his book how the Emperor Theodosiumon decreed on 6th August 390AD, shortly after the suppression of the cult of Cybelle and her transsexual priestesses: "all those who shamefully debase their bodies by submitting them like women to the desire of another man and in giving themselves to strange sexual relations shall be made to expiate such crimes in the avenging flames in view of all the people " (p 124 of bone n124 ) -. The crime deserving death in the Emperor's eyes was changing from a male sexual role to that of a female. He like Connor would have defined me as homosexual. But that was not how I saw life nor how I still experience it.

I presume that my transsexual priestess sisters of millennia ago would also have experienced sex with males as heterosexual - even if they had not yet had any operation. They too would have known of plants rich in female hormones that possessed the power of supplying the hormones that their bodies and minds craved as well as an extract from the urine of pregnant mares that witches extracted in the days of classical Greece.

Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor in their epic book: "The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the religion of the Earth" (Harper Collins 1987) claimed this primal gender balanced magic for the bisexual rather than hermaphrodite. Thus they wrote: "[in a previous age] the Mother was deprived of her ancient bisexual nature. As shamanism and bisexuality always go together this means the disappearance of the shamanic techniques." (p226) The records I have seen link shamanism more with hermaphrodites and people who change gender roles than with bisexuals. Again we have a confusion of a partner's gender preference with one's self identity. I myself am bisexual - but this has little to do with my gender identity. These authors knew of hermaphroditism but left hermaphrodites out of their world picture. They wrote of the hermaphrodite Goddess - but not the hermaphrodite nature of some who served her. (P67). Instead they talk of "eunuch priests" who lived "like women.".

I do not want to get too medical here - for I am dealing more with magic and self perceptions. But recently a woman challenged my own self perception, saying that I had to be a man, since I had no womb and had experienced male sexuality. After thus rejecting my self-identity and assigning me to a gender that my lovers, friends and colleagues, would not recognise as mine, she told me: "Get out of my space!" The gender of the brain was an irrelevant argument to her. She told me her brain was her womb. For her a woman simply could not have experienced what I had experienced.

Yes, it is hard for people in our society to see how this could be so. It was very hard for me to understand. I knew my earliest memories recorded an instinctual belief that I did belong in the female space. I had to eventually accept that gender identity could be different from genital sex purely because of instinctual knowledge and inner self-identity. It came out of my unusual experience of life. If Jackie had not chanced into my life, I probably would never have known what male sex could feel like - and, if I had then changed, it would have been easier for others to accept my hermaphroditism. But because it did happen the way it did, my life was enriched - and I learnt this strange lesson about gender identity. My physical explanation is still that it has to do with the physical shape of the brain and not the genitals. Nothing else makes much sense.

It is only if one is born without a womb, that one can know what it is to be a woman who has never had a womb. I know I have not shared the rich experience of having a functioning womb. All those born intersexed are born without a complete set of the gender organs that are normally supplied for those with their shaped brains and self identities, including the transsexual women such as myself, or the transsexual men which I am sadly neglecting here (hoping that these males will write their own books),. This of course greatly affects their experiences of life within the genders with which they identify. It must limit them (and me) in many ways, as does infertility and many another medical condition. But in other ways we are enriched by our unique experiences of life in both roles and especially in having to learn to totally trust instincts and dreams. It is this that we have to offer society.

The hormones may have made dramatic changes to my body - but it was still not female shaped in every aspect. My body was now like to that depicted in the oldest wooden carving so far found in the British Isle - the figure carved in ash wood found near Glastonbury with both female breasts and a penis - perhaps a figure of imagination, perhaps depicting the body of one who took oestrogen rich herbs or mare's urine extract. At that time, whenever I had sexual encounters with men, I told them that all below the waist was off limits while all above was definitely fine! In this fashion I had some of the most marvellously gentle and loving encounters with both Aboriginal and White males. Since before my transition I had no sexual interest in men, all this was entirely new to me in 1975. But more about these encounters later.

Some challenged me when I had just started to transition, saying that it would be preferable for me to seek an androgynous self-expression. They recommended that I should not seek any particular gender identity but instead seize the high ground of neutrality. This made me scream. It was a nice theory. But I was not a neutral person. I identified as female and fought to have this accepted. I saw nothing wrong with a bipolar gendered society for humans - for this is natural for us unlike for amoeba and some other creatures. The two genders are fun. They are how we are made and I relish the balance of energies and frisson between us - well, most of the time. The same goes for the "third gender" theorists - the academics who argue that there are more than two genders, that genders are purely a cultural construction. They ignore our biology. They are mostly people who have never walked between the genders.

But apart from the superficial ramblings of theorists who wanted me to fit into their plans, I was happy to be at last at home, mind and soul, brain and body, as part of a gender that never laid down... humm - that's not quite what I meant to say. Part of a gender that according to men used magic. More about this later in this chapter.

It may be a long time since St Thomas Aquinas taught that the female body was naturally inferior to the male but it is not so long since Charles Darwin taught that men had evolved to be more intelligent than women because of competition between men and the resulting need to care for women: "Thus man has ultimately become superior to woman. It is indeed fortunate that the law of equal transmission of characters to both sexes prevails with mammals, otherwise it is probable that man would have become as superior in mental endowment to women, as the peacock is in ornamental plumage to the peahen. "p 26

A recent evolutionary theory contrarily stated that the female human body has been shaped by evolutionary changes not shared by any other species that have fundamentally shaped human culture. It held that women have developed a menstrual circle giving her sexual capability at all times, not merely when she is fertile as with other female animals. Her sexual potential is further enhanced by the development of the clitoris, breasts and frontal sex. (Re p33 of Sjoo and Moo) Males underwent sexual evolutionary changes of much less consequence since they still made love the way of most male animals.

The teachings of the Catholic Church regarding human sexuality seem not to have noticed this dramatic change in female bodies! It prescribes that women should have sex only in order to conceive - much as if they were still governed by an oestrous cycle like that of other animals.But I note that other female animals also can have sex simply from pleasure - at least this is what I observe when neighbouring dogs visits my energetic border collie bitch. She seems ready at most times for this. I also have noted that she seems to be bisexual.

For long scientists have ignored the evident occurrence of variant gender sexual relations within a very wide range of species, declaring, almost with the fervour of the Catholic Church, that animal sex only should happen to pass on genes. They presumed that in the raw natural world of tooth, claw and beak, the sexuality of animals were regulated purely by procreation requirements. But the author of a recent work, "Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity", Bruce Bagemihl. (St. Martin's Press) has documented homosexual and transgender behaviour among at least 450 species of mammals and birds. "Biology must reconsider functional explanations based on evolution by natural selection," Bagemihl wrote, "and it must recognise the inherent multiplicity of all life forms. The existence of a natural phenomenon is its function -- regardless of how strange, complex, or 'unproductive' it may seem." part of a larger complex tapestry, a web of seemingly incongruous forces that interact to produce the flow of life."

He pointed out the concept of biodiversity stated that the vitality of a biological system is greater if it contains more diversity. As diversity expands, so do stability and resilience. Viewed this way, homosexuality and transgender behaviour are expressions of the natural exuberance of healthy biological system. Such exuberance of expression is also present among humans - but it has been severely limited by a functional view of the phallus that evolved with patriarchal societies.

By December 1975 I had passed through the initial stages of my transition to living as a woman but this only at home and among close friends. Outside this small arena, it was increasingly a dangerous time for me. It would not have been so dangerous if I had taken the usual advice of doctors, broken with old associates and gone to live in a strange town where I could establish a new identity. The danger was increased for me by the risky nature of the work I had taken on while living in the male role. I was deeply involved in working with Aborigines in Northern Queensland, both in documenting their oppression and in organising support for their organisations.

As I have always loved rocks, seeing these as my distant relatives, part of a living world, on whose faces I could trace whole rock family histories, and because I had studied geology, industrial sociology and white collar crime - I soon found myself a Mining Consultant to Aboriginal communities. My job was to provide them with research on the environmental consequences of different kinds of mines and on the track records of companies that approached them so that their elders could better decide what should be done to protect their land.

I also attended mining company Annual General Meetings in order to put the concerns of the unrepresented Aborigines and of some of the churches and aid agencies who funded us. All of this made me well known to these company directors. It was very unusual for anyone to be working so directly with Aborigines on mining issues and to be working under Aboriginal direction. All this was first achieved when I was living in the male role. Thus, when I changed over - and kept the same address, the same job, the same aims, the corporations soon got to know of my change and were in a position to try to use their knowledge to discredit me. To their credit, they did not attempt to do this for several years - but I and my family felt exposed to such an attack. Jackie and I were however one on this. The work had to come first. We trusted in divine providence to protect us - but with a degree of fear.

In December 1975 I was asked to speak at a major Aboriginal Land Rights Conference in Cairns. We would also launch at this our first book documenting the struggle of the Mapoon people. By now I had been on female hormones for four months and was androgynous in appearance. I was also now calling myself Jan, short for Janine. This had not been my first choice of female names. That had been Jenny but Jackie had wanted a more neutral name - and Jenny was the name of a sister

One night at this conference a dance was organised - and a man invited me to dance. I was very awkward. This was my first dance with a man and I did not know where to put my hands. He must have thought me dead ignorant. But I loved dancing and carried on. I was noticed by some of the Elder women, guardians of the female mysteries. Later that night one of the women came up to "sex" me while I was trying to sleep. She exclaimed at finding my pubescent breasts. She and her companions laughed at my confusion and wanted to know more. I explained that I was "half and half" and then fled from the house before they decided to investigate further. I spent much of the night sleeping under a car parked on the drive. I felt naive, ignorant and vulnerable. Barbara Miller my co-worker, who was now living full-time in the Aboriginal community, was later called on by our Aboriginal friends to do much explaining.

Later, when I had a meeting with the elders with whom I was directly working such as Mrs Jimmy from Mapoon. I explained what was happening to me. They were serious and courteous. They accepted what I had to say and then thanked me very much for telling them. At this stage the only other transsexual that I had met was living as a woman on an Aboriginal Reserve not far away from the conference. She was reportedly very well accepted..

The male Aboriginal organisers of the conference, men such as Mick Miller and Clarrie Grogan, also had little difficulty with my change. Mick simply accepted it. Clarrie, a former boxer, took me on a drive up the mountain so he could have the chance to ask me more about it. He was charming, intrigued and very accepting.

But I was up in Cairns on serious political work. Mick and the other organisers wanted me to be the first speaker at their conference. I had discussed this before I came to the conference with the Queensland radical Aboriginal organiser, Cheryl Buchanon, who was then living with us and also coming to the conference. On the 2,000 mile flight north from Melbourne to Cairns we agreed that a white person should not be the first speaker at an Aboriginal conference. On arrival I said this to Mick - and although he disagreed, he re-scheduled my talk.

I should not have tried to impose the more racially conscious ideas of the Aboriginal-White city world in which I was living on the more relaxed atmosphere up in the north where many more Aborigines still were on their land even if without legal title to it,. I later learnt that the conference organisers had wanted me to be first speaker so that I could put before the Elders the full scope of the plans of corporations for their tribal lands. They expected this would enable them during the rest of the conference to plan what actions were necessary.

What now happened was that when the Elders from Aurukun, 100 miles south of Mapoon and members of the Wik nation, discovered before my talk the extent of my knowledge of mining company plans for their tribal lands, they promptly organised their own meetings with me and absented themselves from conference events much to my embarrassment..

I spread out for them maps showing how Shell wanted to take over 1,905 sq. Kilometres (736 sq., miles) of their tribal lands directly south of the Comalco/RTZ mining lease. This it wanted to strip mine to remove a billion tonnes of bauxite. I told them where a port would have to go in, the roads and processing plant.

They were absolutely shocked. This was land they knew intimately, where they had their cemeteries, where they hunted, gathered and which they honoured with rituals. They asked me if I would fly back with them and tell the whole community what I knew. They had space for me in the hired plane (in the wet season planes are the main means of transport) since they would send one of their delegates south to raise support from trade unions. They knew that the situation was most urgent. The State Government was already preparing legislation to give their ancestral lands to Shell. Under this Shell would have the right to build and run a mining town with all its shops, to mine the coral reefs for calcium as well as to strip-mine the clays for bauxite, to build and run a harbour and to decide where Aborigines could hunt or run cattle.

At this conference the Aboriginal communities of the far north of Queensland decided to unite for the first time in a body to fight for their rights. This would be called the North Queensland Land Council. The Whitlam government had set up similar Councils in the Northern Territory - but most states had refused to permit such federal initiatives in their territories. But this Aboriginal initiative in Queensland set off a chain reaction right across Australia and eventually led to the setting up of a National Federation of Land Councils, vitally strengthening the Aboriginal fight to recover tribal lands. For many years I worked within this movement, helping it with research and fund raising.

Before I boarded the plane for Aurukun, I had my first serious disagreement with Cheryl Buchanon, the Aboriginal militant who had first involved me in this struggle and with Lionel Fogarty, her mate, a militant Aboriginal poet. They argued that the community did not really need to have help from a white person. They asked me not to go as invited to Aurukun but instead give up my seat on the plane to her or to some other Aboriginal militant. I answered that the elders had invited me because they believed their community needed my specialised knowledge. While I could see that my knowledge was partly due to the privileges of being born White, I did have this knowledge, and it was only right that I accepted their invitation to share it with their community. Yet I owed Cheryl much. She had not only involved me in her community of friends and first involved me in her people's struggle, she had welcomed me as a sister when I transitioned, saying that as I was now myself a member of a minority, I would better understand them. But despite this argument we did not split up right then. We remained friends.

I thus came to fly to Aurukun with the Elders and Delegates over ranges of forested hills until we reached the plains on the other side of Cape York. Aurukun looked tiny from the air, an airstrip, some dirt roads and corrugated tin roofs , a speck in a wilderness of forest about half way down the eastern side of the Gulf of Carpentaria in the far north-east of Australia.

Soon after my arrival I was given a set of maps that had fallen by chance into the community's hands. I could interpret them to give a full account of what the mining consortium planned. A community meeting was called and sitting in the dirt under the frangipani trees I told them of what I knew about the threat to their land. There was a stillness about my audience, an intensity, a pain - and a sense of defiance. When I explained that Shell was an Anglo-Dutch company, a man said: "My Grandfather and father-in-law defeated the Dutch. We will do it again!" [the relatives mentioned indicate lineage lines rather than individuals]

Later he and his family explained what had happened as if it had been just a few years ago. He told how a Dutch ship had first called at Mapoon, one hundred miles north of them. There the Mapoon people "had thrown spears hoping to hit the bullets!" The ship then arrived at Aurukun. "They asked us if they could put up a village. We said yes. They put up huts. We helped them put in a well, cut a path through the mangrove swamp. But then they started to take our women and to make us work and work and work for them. Then they got their guns. Maybe they were going to shoot ducks but we thought they were going to shoot us. One of us chopped one of them on the back of the neck, then we got in our canoes and came down to their boats and set fire to them with our firesticks. We can take you there, Jani, 8 Dutchmen buried there." When I later checked the records of the Dutch East Indies Company, I found that a Dutch vessel had mapped precisely that part of the coastline that lay between Mapoon and Aurukun. The Captain's log recorded trouble with natives had made him return North to Indonesia (then known as Batavia). He omitted to say that he had put up a village. The year was 1606. I had just been told about the first European settlement in Australia. I think I was the first person to write the account down.

At the Aurukun meeting men and women took an equal part. A young woman Gladys was particularly outspoken - she has since become a leading campaigner for her people. When I mapped with elders afterwards the tribal lands affected by the mining plans. I found that every part of their land had different elders to speak for it. It seemed that men and women worked equally as guardians of the land.

Frank Yungaporta, my "uncle" at the settlement, was adamant. "I say that there will be no mining here and that's that." (In Aboriginal communities a "skin" system can make the stranger a member of the family, giving her .(or him) people who are responsible for her welfare, people she can marry, people she cannot marry, people she has duties towards, thus integrating her into the community)

The elder Geraldine Kawangka stated: "Give the answer back that we are Aurukun people. Do not let the mining company in to destroy Aurukun for it is a beautiful place." Albert Chevalthun, an Elder responsible for the land wanted for the mining port (land already taken by Comalco but not yet used) said "Comalco never asked for this land. This is our forefather's land... we cannot give away our land. It is not well for the country to be destroyed and given away - we are trying to save this land for our children to help them stand firm and strong... No, we don't want the money, we don't want the jobs, we don't want the companies to take our land. All our children look very healthy here. They don't just live on store tucker. We have our own food out in the bush. If our country is destroyed, there will be no hunting places left just like Weipa. No, we don't want any mining. I speak on behalf of all my peoples land." Mabel Pamulkun, another Elder, added in almost Judaic terms: "From generation to generation it will be our land. God has given it to us." (Check Mapoon book 3 for other quotes and the mapping)

After the meeting I had time to look around the community. In the trees there were nests of bright green ants. These contain a high vitamin content and are ground up for medicine. I made a fool of myself when I saw a man painting a digeridoo. I asked him how he made the hole down the middle. Keeping his face absolutely straight he said: "You get a mob of termites then march them up and march them down again." We laughed and talked. Digeridoos he said were only used traditionally by certain tribes. Click sticks are much more common. I played a favourite game with the children. I walked into the bush with them and said; "Now that bush there. That is a useless one. We can throw that one away." "No, Jan, no, no" would come the chorus. Then they would tell me just how they used that plant for food or medicine. The mode of preparation might be quite complicated and might include leaching out toxins. But I never could find a plant that a 12 year old child did not know a use for it. This was their traditional literacy.

That afternoon, while I was playing with the children, a Queensland State government minister visited the settlement. The elders had not wanted me to show my face at this meeting as they knew my presence would raise questions. I was told afterwards that the minister said that there would be no mining if they said no. They said no and thought the crisis might be over, but that night while I was having supper with the Chairman we heard on the radio the news that the minister had reported that the Aurukun people had agreed to mining and so it would go ahead. This bare-faced lie shocked but did not surprise. That night the elders decided that they had to do something dramatic quickly to make their opposition well known before they lost all their legal rights to their ancestral land. They decided to drive to the mining camp next day to evict the miners. This was intended as a show of force so they would carry their weapons.

Next morning the male elders came together with their rifles, spears and shotguns. Even the Aboriginal State police came. They then drove up the track to Shell's prospecting camp some two hours away. I was the only white person present and it was a very slow drive. Whenever we came to a tree that had been marked with paint by the miners, we stopped to allow people the chance to purify the tree by removing the painted bark and burning it. When we drew near to the camp, they dropped me off promising to return for me after they had introduced themselves to the miners (they knew my white face would stand out). But just 5 minutes later they were back. They told me the miners had left, abandoning their vehicles on the air strip. They must have been warned by radio that armed Aborigines were coming.

The mining camp in the midst of the virgin forest was very large with many large yellow earth moving machines. We broke into the radio hut and announced to the press that we had captured Shell's mining camp. It was national front-page headlines. Nothing had happened like it before. With the elders, I tried also to sabotage the earth moving equipment that had been assembled to destroy the Aurukun lands. It was just as well that we did not know how to do it successfully - for if we had we would have destroyed over a quarter of a million pounds worth of machinery. It we had, I could well have been jailed in a man's prison with all the attendant risks for a person with a feminised body. I knew this risk. I just hoped that I would be protected by providence. As it turned out, I was protected by our inefficiency. It also turned out that we did not need to sabotage the machinery to make our point.

We used their radio to contact Aboriginal bodies in the south so they could organise help for us. . We thought we might need lawyers to protect us - and were told that by coincidence Aboriginal lawyers were already on the way up to us - and would arrive that same day. We were delighted. It was so timely for them to come.

When we returned to Aurukun, we found the lawyers Paul Coe and Kevin Smith had already arrived from the Sydney Aboriginal Legal Service and were involved in deep discussions with the community. I kept away but later that day, Eric Koo-oila and other elders came to me to ask what I thought of Coe's suggestion that they send a delegation to see the British Queen. They thought that as I was British I would be able to give them some advice on how effective such an action would be. I was astonished and appalled. I thought this based on an exaggerated idea of the Queen's importance and of amount of the media this would attract in England. I feared that they might waste their time on an abortive trip. I told them that the British people do not take much note of who attends court and suggested that a different kind of campaign was needed directed at marshalling public opinion against Shell.

The Elders now wanted me to put my views to the community. Their way of making decisions was based on full community discussions. I did not like doing this. I feared with some reason that this would alienate me from Aboriginal lawyers that I respected. But I did do as requested. The community listened - and decided that they would not go to see the Queen.

This put an obligation on me to do my best to organise effective pressure on Shell to respect the local community's wishes I felt that their story of how they defeated the Dutch before would be certain to gain public attention if only a delegation could be got to Holland. In the meantime I would make public what I knew by publishing with my friends at IDA an account of what had happened at Aurukun. We were editing the final version of The Mapoon Books, our study of oppression at Mapoon. We extended the third volume and put in a section about Aurukun. A leading historian, Humphrey MacQueen, reviewed them on publication as the finest study to be completed in the Whitlam era. We then organised a campaign around the publication.

These events did answer for me one question that had concerned me earlier. Female hormones had not made me docile nor affected my creativity. If anything I was much stronger and more the warrior.

Among Aborigines I do not think I was given any special status because of my gender change although I received from those that knew nothing but respect. I simply presented myself from now on as a woman and was accepted as such and was taken to the women's sacred places as a woman. I am not sure if Australian Aborigines ever gave any kind of shamanic status to people who gender-transition. I never investigated this although this is what happens in most similar cultures. I simply found I got on very well with Elders. I usually found we looked into each others eyes, laughed and that was that. We then had a working and good relationship. This happened to my delight and honour when I was with "Dreamers", the elders who were honoured as knowing the Dreamtime well and being able to reach it within themselves.

Perhaps some Aboriginal tribes had customs like to those of the Mohave Indians. I know Aborigines regarded American Indians as a sister people. Among the Mohave, in the tenth or eleventh year of life, a boy-child who wanted to change to live as a woman would be taken out of the tent by two women. The women would then dance. The youth would copy their dance. The women then gave the youth a dress and painted the youth's face as a token of acceptance. From then on that person took on a female name, lived totally as a female, was a female in the eyes of the people. People moved both ways, Girl-children would be equally solemnly made men. The re-assigned could pick a partner of either sex.

I knew that the next step in transition for me would be surgery. In our society surgery rather than the hormones is the definitive change that would protects from such risks as being put into a male jail. So I went to the only establishment that considered surgery for transsexuals in Melbourne, ironically to a psychiatrist attached to a Roman Catholic hospital. He was arrogant and detached. I wanted to better understand myself so asked him to recommend reading matter on transsexualism. He looked at me and calmly said: "No, I will not recommend any books to you. I prefer you do not read up the subject. It would make you harder to assess"

He then asked me about my relations with my children. When I told him that Jackie and I were jointly looking after them, he said: "I will not treat you while you are living at home and caring for your children. Your gender transition might well upset their own gender identity and confuse them."

I was astonished at this, made my goodbyes and left. I never went back to see him again. There was no way that I would "prove" to him I was a satisfactory candidate for womanhood by abandoning my children. It would take me another 7 years to find a hospital that will accept me without demanding I abandon my children. It meant that from 1975 until 1981 I lived with a very hermaprodite body. As I was also very politically active during this time and quite sexually active, it meant I had to run a great risk of exposure and perhaps of rape and male violence.

It made me question whether I would have wanted surgery if I had been born to such people as the Navaho who would have accepted me as a woman without the need for surgery. I was managing quite well as a hermaphrodite - or so I thought. The hormones not only had changed my appearance - they had also made my genitals almost child-like with a deep dark line where a cleavage would have developed if I had been born girl-formed. I knew I had in me both male and female aspects. Every human has these aspects - but in me these differences were now incarnate in my outward form. But as far as the medical profession went, my transition was incomplete and it was advised that I went for surgery. Socially this was the safer option. I was also told that my sexual life would be better afterwards!

I had no doubt that getting the hormone balance right was vastly more important to me than having the gender adjusting operation. The hormones made me feel right inside. They had changed very many of the aspects of me that had discomforted me. My body had now rebuilt itself with female bricks. I was now utterly at home as had never happened before with my moods, my rhythms, my way of moving, even my place in society. It was not that I enjoyed men discriminating against me - it was that I was comfortable with my sisters.

My gender crisis was at its root a crisis of maturity and of self acceptance in an unaccepting society. Ultimately self acceptance was even more important than hormones or surgery. My self acceptance meant that I was now claiming with pride my birth-right of living as a female person whose body had male aspects that could be amended if I so chose.

As Christmas 1975 drew near, the time came for our normal ritual visit to Jackie's parents. She was very fond of her parents and she hated anything that intruded to make them feel uncomfortable.. She thus wanted to keep me away from them - but at Christmas she felt was impossible. I hated the pretence and could hardly stomach it. Jackie said I must for the "truth could kill my Dad." She added that, if he knew, she felt nearly certain he would see her as a victim and put pressure on her to leave me

I thus reluctantly entered this charade, dressed as male for the last time - and for me it was a nightmare. My mind and body screamed at this albeit temporary reversal. Since my last visit to see them I had been five months on hormones. Male clothes could not hide the changes Jill's private explanation to them that it was the effect of the medicine I was on.

My diary recorded: "She is still worried about her parents discovering that I am living as a woman. Everyone else now knows about me being Jan - even her Dad's sister, Auntie Eve, who had been a wonderful surrogate grandmother for me. Jackie and her sister feared that telling their father might kill him. They also feared he might see Jackie as the victim, be enormously distressed and do all he can to rescue her."

When I came out to Australia we had intended to stay for some three years. We had stayed for five finding life much richer here than expected. I loved my life here although I was missing my own land and the friends I had left behind. Jackie told me she wanted to work and live back in Europe away from the more conventional influences of the Australian society. She also felt it would be easier for her parents if she told them by post the news about me. She felt they would be able to adjust without feeling they should rescue her. It would also protect us from the conventions that pulled on her and could hurt us as a family..

When we returned from this traumatic visit to Jackie's parents, we celebrated Christmas with our Aboriginal friends Cheryl and Lionel who had come down to stay with us some days earlier as they had many times before. Cheryl was now expecting a baby by Lionel. The difference of view over Aurukun fortunately seemed not to have created a barrier between us. It was also Lionel's 18th birthday and it turned out to be a good and tearful occasion. Lionel said he had never had such a good Christmas.

But in January, just before Jackie, the children and myself were to go to Tasmania on holiday, our relationship with Cheryl and Lionel collapsed. They told us a bark painting that I had brought from Aurukun was a sacred "life and death" painting and that, if I did not return it, they knew they would lose their baby. They also told me I must not tell the Aurukun people why I was sending it back but were simply to say that it belonged to Aurukun.

I had first seen this bark painting in the Aboriginal run store at Aurukun. It was not very expensive so I could afford it. When I first went to see the artist to ask him about it., he was delighted that I was interested in it. I was aware of controversy about sacred objects being purchased by Whites so I had asked him if it had any sacred meaning. He replied: "None at all. Do you like it?" He went over the painting in detail with me and it became as if a present from him to me. All the community knew I was buying it. They all treated it like a present from them to me.

I now feared that they could feel insulted if I returned it without telling them really why I was doing this. I phoned the Land Council and they confirmed my view. They said if I sent it back it could be taken as an insult. But Cheryl and Lionel were clearly very agitated by the painting. They came from communities that were far removed from Aurukun and of a different language group. Perhaps the images in the painting had a different meaning for their people? Since they were only staying a few days more I decided to put it away out of sight until they had left..

But they searched the house when we were out and found it. They were furious when we returned. Lionel hit me repeatedly with his fist while holding a meat cleaver over me with his other hand. It was very scary. But I understood that he thought the painting was endangering their unborn child. Cheryl was adamant that she would miscarry if the painting stayed in the house. And I believed her. Whether or not the painting was sacred to the people who created it, her beliefs would make it dangerous to her. I then decided to send it back to Aurukun but with a long letter explaining that I was returning a much loved painting to protect Cheryl's baby because of her belief that she would otherwise lose her baby.

There were many too many divisions between people who needed to fight united at this time. Paul Coe, the Aboriginal lawyer who came to Aurukun to recommend a visit to the Queen, savagely attacked me at a conference of the Australian Union of Students for opposing this idea. He joined Cheryl with me and attacked us both.

But then we found a senior white haired Aboriginal elder, Harry Penrith, who later changed his name to Birnum Birnum, sleeping on our couch when we woke up. He knew our backdoor was always open. This time he came down because he had heard of what had happened between Cheryl, Lionel and myself. He wanted to explain that this very regrettable event had happened because we were the safest and closest outlet for all their wrath and frustration. They knew we would not go to the police. It was not good what happened but please, he begged us, understand why it had happened. I did understand. I had seen Lionel cheer on non-white men when they attacked white women in television films. I knew something of his bitterness - but had not expected to be his target. Birnum Birnum emphasised Aboriginal people still wanted us to work with them. He had a particular task in mind for us. He said they wanted us to raise support for them in Europe. This would be very useful and important for them. We promised to do what we could. But we sadly never saw Cheryl and Lionel again although we tried to send them a present for their baby.

Jackie and I with the children finally escaped for a much longed for holiday in the ancient forests of Tasmania. It was our first together as two women. We laughed when a seaman carried my bags up onto the boat for me, leaving the much smaller Jackie beside me struggling with hers. We then were allotted a luxury cabin for an economy price which all added to the fun of the voyage. We were very glad to get away. The forest was wonderful and rich in healing for us. It contained much wildlife that had become much less common on the Australian mainland. There were tiny Kangaroos known as Potteroos, Tasmanian Devils and much else - and the weirdest of plants living above the snowline that seemed to be transplants from a Jurassic world.

But this camping trip made me even more aware of how vulnerable women can feel all their adult lives. When carloads of males drove past and saw two women camping in the bush, they would wolf whistle, offer beers, approach us looking for sex. I simply did not know how to handle this. I hid whenever possible. My figure was rapidly developing. I was soon to be a D cup.

My body, under the influence of a tiny amount of oestrogen, not much more than in the birth-control pill, had easily adopted a set of female blue-prints of its own. This included breasts that women friends joked made them feel jealous and a remarkable change in hair distribution. One Monash University doctor in a later final assessment said he wished they had physically appraised me fully and looked at chromosomes for he had not seen such a striking change before.

I can remember how I turned too quickly to go through a doorway and hit my breasts painfully on the frame. I had to learn to move differently, to adjust to a different shape and balance of weight - all stuff that girls easily and naturally learn in their early teens. The tides that now ran through me meant that I was vastly more susceptible to emotion. I would go down, get depressed, regularly. Tears would spring easily. And I learnt that next day, or the day after, my mood would naturally lift if only I endured. I learnt to accept that tides had become just as much part of me as they of our earth.

I also knew that my gender path was a gift that could teach me much. I had learned, as I have said, very early in my transition that I shared something of the path of the shaman, a name given to those among the Siberian tribes who guided people in the spirit realms, healed, balanced, taught, divinated and prophesied. But they would have received years of training from elders and I had no such teachers. There were many lessons I had to learn. I speculated that in my home islands of Britain and Eire, the same role was fulfilled by those we now call the witches or druids for they too served the community as healers, diviners and spiritual guides.

But in Australia, feeling myself to be a guest in Aboriginal lands, far from my own lands, I gave little thought to the phenomena of witches and druids, I then knew of no one who identified as such. The closest I came to this was when I documented and protested against traditional Aboriginal spirituality being labelled as evil devil centred sorcery by Christian missionaries. In my writing I spoke of the beauty of Aboriginal culture and its wisdom. I knew too of the down side, of the destruction of Aboriginal culture in and around towns especially through white schooling, the taking of children and the demoralisation and drinking. I had met many Aborigines who were fighting against these evils and I believed they would succeed in strengthening their people's pride and regain some of their ancestral lands. I remembered that the English children at school labelled us Irish kids as the children of no-good drunkards. I identified with the Aborigines and put everything I had into helping them protect their heritage.

I was working spiritually mostly outside the Christian community and often felt alone. I missed not being part of an explicitly spiritual community with my own cultural background. When I visited churches I found myself an alien in a once familiar world. The inner relationship with the God remained. I still felt married to Him and to the Earth. When Aboriginal people spoke of the land and the need to protect her, my spirit seemed to sing with theirs. The priestly element that I missed most in my life was the public and ritual celebration of the relationship between the sacred and us. I celebrated this only in our immediate family or by myself.

One of the only Christian rituals we observed was the construction of the Christmas Crib. We would go deep into the bush, collecting moss, logs, bark, rocks and ferns, from which we would be an elaborate wild landscape with in its centre the stable with its mother and child. It was a great pleasure to make it as beautiful as we could. It was an island of nature and of hope within our home, part of a celebration of divinity present in nature. Another lesser rite of fun but not religion, was constructing the birthday cake. Every birthday I was challenged to produce a still more exotic landscape out of cake, colourings and icing. It could be anything from a volcano, pirate island or fairy grotto.

After we returned from Tasmania, we both worked hard to complete the Mapoon books on racism in northern Queensland. Jackie did much of the lay-out work with me. I did the editing and co-wrote them with a small team of friends. We also laid our plans to leave Australia immediately the books were published so Jill's Dad would be protected from inadvertently finding out about me. It meant that we could not do everything we would like with the books, I would have preferred a little more time. I would also much rather have been the proud woman who dealt with everything face to face (as I was to do with my own family) rather than having to leave the country so - but the primary factor was that Jackie was certain that leaving now would help us stay together as a family. It made me feel somewhat better that we had now been set another task - that of trying to set up Aboriginal support groups internationally.

The first of the three Mapoon volumes was edited from the words of the Aboriginal people concerned. It was called "The Mapoon Story by the Mapoon people." All revenues from this were to go to the Mapoon people to help them resettle their land. The second was drawn from anthropologists, historians and other sources. It was called "The Mapoon Story according to the Invaders." Mike Parsons contributed great anthropological background and Barbara Miller, our field researcher, innocent looking in her long blonde hair, contributed a vast amount of documentation when she persuaded the Presbyterians who ran the missions at Mapoon, Weipa and Aurukun, to allow us to copy their mission files.

In these files we found first name correspondence between missionaries, mining company executives and members of the Queensland Government. It provided material for a devastating indictment of company and government for breaking promises made to Aboriginal people and abandoning them.

The last of our trilogy was entitled: "The Cape York Aluminium Companies and the Native Peoples." We examined the operations of the aluminium companies operating in Northern Queensland inside Australia and internationally. We looked at their operations on the lands of indigenous peoples elsewhere in the world such as in the Amazon basin where there were also aluminium mines. Everywhere we found the same dispossession and impoverishment of indigenous peoples.

By July 1976 the Mapoon Books were published successfully with surprisingly good press reviews. Aboriginal people came south from Mapoon to help get their story known. There was much media coverage. A leading Australian historian, Humphrey McQueen, called our books "the finest study to appear during the Whitlam era" - referring to a Labour Prime Minister famed for his stimulus to the arts and to social change. But I was not able to promote these books myself despite editing and co-authoring them. I had to leave that work to others for I had to protect my partner Jackie and thus our family from coming under pressure. She was scared that if I did promote the books myself, her parents would discover from the press coverage that I was living as a woman.

Thus midway through 1976 we set out as Jackie and Jan, Karina, 4, and Katie, 3, for Europe. Since we had also decided to use this trip to explore our European spiritual heritage, we decided to get off the plane in Rome so we could go to visit places associated with St. Francis of Assisi . He was a saintly troubadour of nature, a very non-materialistic man of the 13th Century who had been though his verse and life an inspiration to us. We would first make our way to Gubbio, a small medieval town on a mountain side not far from Rome where Francis had, according to legend, made friends with a big bad wolf.

Here in the central Apennine mountains, we watched medieval crossbow tournaments, with the locals cheering on their teams as if at a football match. We were nearly the only foreigners present and felt very privileged. We purchased a locally made plate depicting Francis in rags with a wolf standing up against his arm in affection (much as my dog Storm now does for me). This would take pride of place on the wall above our dinning table for the rest of our time together.

We acquired a minibus in which we could all sleep and went on to Assisi, the home town of St Francis where we were appalled by gross church-led commercialism and profit taking. When Francis died, despite him teaching that we need only trees and skies to form our churches and should not construct rich buildings, the Church decided to rear exactly such a building over his tomb - an ornate basilica covered in frescos. By its entrance we found a fat Franciscan friar sitting collecting donations. Inside we found ourselves in a gloriously painted void. The church felt dead. I could feel no spirit - and when I descended into its lower church to see the shrine, I felt suddenly sick. It was as if a corpse lay there that was not Francis', I quickly left a building that was for me ominous and dark. I could feel how the church had sought to imprison his spirit. (I was not surprised later when the church was damaged by an earthquake.)

Jackie and I then sat with our children in the square, wondering where Francis' spirit had gone. We pulled out a small history of Francis - and found that in his lifetime he had sought refuge in a wood on top of the hills behind Assisi. We immediately set off up to find it. As we reached the summit we entered a pine forest with a rocky floor. Immediately our spirits lifted. We opened the car windows, drunk in the air - and said hello to Francis. We walked out into his forest, saw the small caves amid tree roots that he and his friends had lived in and visited a very modest little chapel with a custodian who radiated welcome. We danced through the forest with the children. We read his blessing of sun and moon and animals and birds, in which he sings of Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind and Sister Water For him all nature was his family and sacred - as was his body. He once stripped naked in a church pulpit so as to better speak of the glories of the human body.

We had found what we came to Italy to seek - a person we could learn from who combined love of nature with a kind of naive Christianity that seemed to bear little relationship to the institutional church. By now I was beginning to integrate Aboriginal concepts with what I had learnt from my own Christian and Pagan inheritance. From Aborigines I had learnt that we are not the owners but the guardians and protectors of the earth; that we speak for the earth and thus must be able to listen to her.

I knew we are not really that different from the rocks and trees and birds around us. We are intrinsically one with them. From a galactic viewpoint, we are indistinguishable from our planet. We are a sprinkling of dust on its surface with which it sends out radio messages to the universe. And, from a microbe's viewpoint, we are also walking planets. There are more creatures living on and in us than there are humans on this planet. We are thus a self conscious world just as Gaia, the earth, is a self conscious planet. The tiny multi coloured quark building block of atoms, would insist quite correctly that we are also walking talking dreaming galaxies. And, as we evolved from quarks, they could rightly claim to be our ancestors. Likewise the photon, darting about, not sure if it is energy or matter; that too is a relative of ours.

We are the living, moving, self-aware, spirits of the rocks - and atoms. We are one of their tongues. In us they are self-conscious. They are not our sisters but our very selves. In the path of evolution, we are perhaps the way they express their innate self-awareness. They change part of themselves into us. "Remember man that thou art dust" is not a humbling saying. It is a sign of our very triumph.

This does not mean that we cannot smash rocks and turn them into building blocks for our cities. It means that we must remember as we do this, that we are dealing with our own body. It behoves us to treat the beings for whom we sing and speak with enormous respect. This was an instinctive thing for me from the time that I was a child aware on the Downs of the marvels around me. I think many instinctively know this is so as children but unfortunately it gets suppressed.

When I was in the seminary studying to become a priest, I had been greatly influenced by Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit palaeontologist and theologian who discovered "the Peking Man" when he was sent to China by Jesuit authorities who were disturbed by his ideas and wanted to get him out of the way. He wrote a book called "The Phenomenon of Man" that integrated the theory of evolution into theology. He taught that evolution was part of the plan of our Creator. He saw humans as meant to become the self conscious parts of our earth and saw us as now fulfilling our destiny in weaving around the earth the "noosphere" or knowledge sphere. He wrote in the 1950s and 60s in the time of phones but before that of the Internet. He predicted that we would link ourselves together as independent cells making the whole world conscious. Our radio waves, television, electronic communications, were the nerve pathways of a conscious world. This was happening as a stage of evolution. The earth was realising its existence as an intelligent planet. And, as an intelligent planet, it would know its Creator in an even richer way.

Teilhard's theories seemed to grow out of the understanding of nature possessed by mystics such as St Frances. It was years later that I learnt of how truly revolutionary was the teaching of St Francis and others like him. The Papacy was threatened in the era into which Francis was born. by a torrent of people inspired by a air of romantic freedom represented by the troubadours, who believed that following Christ meant driving money changers from the temples, sharing property, celebrating life with simplicity.

There was no place in their vision for a corrupt rich Papacy. But a Pope, Innocent III, met in 1209 with the charismatic 26 years old Francis who spoke to animals, hoping to use him to help stem the tide of change, a hope based on the knowledge that Francis believed Papal authority came from God. The plan was to appear to adopt the non-materialistic vision of the people for the church while manipulating the populace to ensure the future of its powerful rich elite. This strategy was in great part successful. Many of Francis' mendicant followers within decades of his death deserted his simplicity - but others continued to follow his more radical ideas.

Early in the 14th Century the Inquisitor Bernardo Gui was sent to investigate the lay followers of Francis in his Third Order in France and Catatonia. In north France they were known as the Waldensians. Gui reported in his "Inquisitor's Manual': "Many of both sexes were judged heretical and burnt from the year 1317" - and that those that died did so "saying they defend the gospel truth, the life of Christ and evangelical and apostolic poverty". He was outraged by how they put their vows to God before their duty to obey the Church. He particularly noted that they said they would refuse an order from the Pope to relax their poverty by giving themselves a wine cellar! He reported their commitment was to an inner voice, called sometimes the Holy Spirit, rather than to the Pope. He said they deserved to die for this. He recommended testing if a suspect were obedient to the Pope by asking: "If there were only one woman left in the world and she did not wish to marry, should she, to preserve the human race, obey an order from the Pope to marry?"

I was proud that my parents belonged to the same Third Order. As a youth I had been found the example of Francis inspiring - and learnt that similar ideas had stimulated throughout the medieval period and into the Renaissance a spirit of radical social reform. These ideas excited me - thus my reading of Thomas More's 16th Century "Utopia" when I was sixteen. A statue of Francis has an honoured place in my parent's home as did a copy of his Canticle to all Creatures. My father was to be buried in the robe of this order. But my parents did not question Papal authority - - nor would my parents have been aware of this history.

Gui said the Waldensians were also members of the Beguine movement - which had started as an all woman movement -and of which I will write more later. A Pope had forbidden the Beguines to "beg" on pain of excommunication - and a Pope took exception to the poverty of the Waldensians, seeing this as an implicit (and sometimes explicit) challenge to the Church's possession of great riches.

Gui reported that both a Beguine or Waldensian could be recognised in the street .by their habit of greeting each other with the words: "Blessed be Jesus Christ". He instructed that anyone who greeted thus should be arrested. He noted they also could be found by their habit of not joining hands while praying. They were to be arrested because they dared to deny his authority over them came from God. Even more seriously, he claimed they said the church persecuting them was not the true church but the "Great Whore of Babylon". He noted darkly: "They say they are laity and simple folk, but in reality they are astute, cunning and crafty." He noted that they would not betray each other to him. Finally, most shockingly, he noted they even collected in the name of Christ the ashes of those that he burnt and venerated them as martyrs!

The Cathars of southern France (also known as Albignsians), a hundred years before Gui tackled the Waldensians, were crushed by a "Crusade" launched against them in 1209 by Pope Innocent III partly because they were strict pacifists and would not take part in the crusades against Islam. When the Cathar city of Beziers was sacked, the soldiers were told to kill everyone as "God will know his own." It still took some 20 years of horrific warfare to eliminate them. They were a rather puritanical version of Christianity that did not believe in the authority of the Pope, perhaps one that was also influenced by the mysticism of the Sufi Islamic teachers then influential in Spain and the Balkans. Some modern historian of religion, such as Norman Cohen have called the Cathars non-Christian pXii but this seems scarcely to have been so looking at their rituals.

Their adult baptism ritual is described in their "Lyons Ritual". "An Elder said to the Postulant,

""God bless you and make you a good Christian and bring you to the good end."

"Do you give yourself to God and the Gospel?" Postulant: "Yes"

Elder:

"Do you promise that henceforth you will eat neither meat nor eggs, nor cheese, nor fat, and that you live only from water and wood (i.e. vegetables and fish) ,that you will not lie, that you will not swear, that you will not kill, that you will not abandon your body to any form of luxury, that you will never go alone when it is possible to have a companion, that you will never sleep without breeches and shirt and that you will never abandon your faith for fear of water, fire or any other manner of death?"

The Church never completely succeeded in suppressing a similar challenge to its authority in Central Europe. Cosmas of Prague (c. 1045-1125), Bohemia's first historian wrote of the local religious customs that perhaps went back to pre-Christian days: "marriages were held in common. In the manner of beasts they mated for a single night. No one knew the meaning of saying "mine," but as those who live in the monastic life they referred to all goods as "ours" in word, heart and in deed. None of their quarters were bolted and the doors were not closed in the face of the poor. Among them exists none who are ... destitute."[w file 8]

In the 1400s the Taborites and Adamites of Bohemia continued the same tradition. They instituted their own form of communism, distributing goods according to needs but keeping the means of production in private hands. In 1420 they declared: "Henceforth, at Hradiste and Tabor there is nothing which is mine or thine. Rather, all things in the community shall be held in common for all time and no one is permitted to hold private property. The one who does commits sins mortally ... No longer shall there be a reigning king or a ruling lord; for there shall be servitude no longer. All taxes shall cease and no one shall compel another to subjection. All shall be equal as brothers and sisters."

The Adamites also believed in communal marriages and were lead by a man and a woman. The practice of communal marriage apparently died out - but their communal ownership of goods was continued by the Hussites and by the Unitas Fratum of the Czechs. Goods were said to be "neither mine nor thine" but for the common good. They based their practice on that of the very early Christians who also held their goods in common. Their communistic practices spread into the neighbouring states particularly into Poland and Switzerland in the 16th Century - when they too were labelled as "witches" It seems that any type of unauthorised Christianity was likely to have its adherents labelled witches.

The bloody suppression of the Waldensians, who were often accused of being witches, and the earlier equally bloody suppression of the Cathars, were the actions of a Church that had moved far from the non-materialism of Jesus. It was now trying to dissuade people by threats of torture and of death from sharing goods in common. The Waldensians, as the Cathars before them, and the Hussites after them, were in the spirit of the more ascetic and communal of the early Gnostic groups. This similarity was not too surprising as Gnosticism had been strong in Southern France. They resisted the Roman church's imposition of its rule as had the Gnostics. They were Christians who sought wisdom within themselves rather than in the rulings of authorities. Many among them believed in the equality of the sexes with women sometimes taking on the role of prophetesses or preachers.

The Inquisition was created to suppress them. Their suppression would lead directly into another still bloodier and more wide-spread persecution of men and women labelled as heretics and witches throughout the later Middle Ages which continues into modern times in Africa and in other continents.

On Women, Nature and Magic.

I will digress for this section from the story of my life - for there is another history that also needs to be explained - that of women, mystics, nature and magic. I knew from the time I started to change my gender role that I was part of a very proud ancient tradition well known to many a tribal society. I seemed to have fallen off a pedestal and landed on my feet within this tradition. But this meant I had to learn a different language, or rather re-learn a language that started to come with childhood's magic but which was overlain with Church.

Magic in the history of religion does not mean conjuring tricks. For modern members of the pagan community and for others in the past, it rather meant the art of effecting changes by the exercise of one's will. There are two major magical traditions in the West. One is commonly known as "High Magic" and the other as simply "Magic" or, tongue in cheek, as "low magic. The latter, natural magic, is seen as resting totally in the powers that are innate in us and in natural things rather than on the powers of "supernatural" spirits. The Gods, Ancestors, Spirits, are seen as part of the natural world. The natural world is seen as filled with sacred energy, not as a "realm of the devil" or a "fallen" world. Nevertheless, it acknowledged magic could be misused. The use of magic for evil purposes was feared and proscribed. This magic is based on a religious belief system that is still present among some of the oldest indigenous cultures in the world such as those of the American Indians and Australian Aborigines.

European "High Magic" on the other hand was much closer to official Christianity. It was practised in early days of the Church among Coptic Christians and had many followers among the medieval clergy. A pope was among the first to be put on trial for this! (ref ncohen and later in this chapter) It's medieval form believed in summoning demons and in forcing these demons to do one's will. It would often attempt this by invoking the power of the Holy Trinity. The "tamed" demons, were said to be imprisoned by this magic in rings or in glass jars, in order to force them to be available at all times to assist the magician. It's origin seems to have been in the dualism of Asia Minor, adopted into Judaism before the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and common in Gospel accounts that depict demons as infesting human lifes. If Jesus could cast out demons, then the Christian also could seek mastery over devils. High Magic was exorcism plus.

But this magic was quite unlike nature centred magic. It was based on entirely a different world-view and religion. Modern witches such as Starhawk defined their magic very differently. She defined it alchemically as "the art of turning negatives into positives, of spinning straw into gold". Dion Fortune, another influential writer on magic, called it "the art and science of changing consciousness according to the Will.". It was based on a belief that humans naturally have considerable spiritual and mental abilities and that when we are confident enough in our ability to use them, we can effect or help effect real changes in ourselves or in the world around us for good or ill.

Many 19th and 20th century historians have tried to impose their philosophical views on the medieval world. Thus magic was said to be opposed to religion - when it rather reflected different religious ways. Thus magic was said to be opposed to science since it was "irrational" - while more recent interpretations recognised "magic" as another way of seeing reality that is logical within its own parameters. (Ref. Dr Jolly) For many magic dealt with mental phenomena that was known through experience but which science had not as yet explained. (More on this Xref - near end of this chapter)

The work of modern historians of witchcraft is bedevilled by translations. For example, I read that Classical Rome portrayed the "witch" as a worker of evil magic. Yet the word "witch" is of Anglo-Saxon origin and was not known in Rome. What has happened is that the Classical reference to a worker of evil magic has been translated as "witch." It was common in that time for a rival religious teacher to label the work of another as "evil magic" to try to discredit them - and to use words that are today translated as "witch.." In this sense, Witch murders did not start in the Middle Ages.

A notable example of this is the story of the death of the famous woman philosopher, mathematician and inventor known as Hypatia of Alexandria. She headed the Alexandrian Platonic School early in the 5th Century CE and invented a water distilling apparatus and one for measuring the density of liquids. Her charisma and eloquence was widely revered and many important people were her students. One of the few sayings of hers to have survived was that "all formal dogmatic religions are fallacious." It seems that the Catholic Bishop of that city, Cyril, saw her as a rival and organised against her. (He was also notorious for organising attacks on Alexandria's Jewish synagogues.) Around 415 CE stories started to circulate attacking her for working magic and for being a "witch". Shortly afterwards she was attacked by a Christian mob, dragged into a church and stripped naked. She was then murdered by having her flesh peeled from her with oyster shells or tiles. The mangled parts of her body were burnt. No one was ever punished for this crime.

When the Angle-Saxon and German peoples were converted in the second half of the first millennium, they retained so many of their traditional beliefs that effectively their "Christianity" was transformed. A very similar process happened among Aborigines in Australia where some have been so selective that they have created practically new religions unlike anything preached to them. Among Germanic peoples, this was partly because missionaries adapted their message to gain them more converts. Thus in Germany Saints replaced Gods - and performed much the same function. Relics of saints substituted for pagan sacred objects in the working of magic. Christ became the ultimate war-lord whose support magically guaranteed success. This militarisation of Christianity had started earlier when the Emperor Constantine invoked Christ to gain military victory. It would culminate in the Crusades.

The evidence from that time shows that we cannot separate out "magic" as something that was only done by people self-identified as Pagan - no matter if this is what the Church at various times taught, no matter if magic were relabelled. If magic is pagan, then many among these early "Christians" were also pagan - and indeed were seen as still pagan by some preachers. Despite conversion to Christianity, many retained a belief in various natural powers and used these in magical ways. The retained "pagan" cures or "spells" were holistic. They aimed at curing both the soul and the body and engaging the will of the patient in the work of healing. Thus they often combined chants and ritual with herbs and sound medical knowledge. They often simply added a Christian invocation to a pre-existing remedy.

Around the year 1000 CE, a field blessing ritual went like this: First four sods were taken at night and soaked in oil, honey, yeast, holy water and the milk of every animal to be kept in the field. A field fertiliy invocation half in Latin and half in Angle Saxon was then said after which the sods were kept in a church until after four masses have been said. The sods were then returned to the field and a prayer said to the East, the Christian direction.

The next prescribed step in this ritual spell was for the farmer to obtain unknown seed from beggers and pay them generously. He put on his plough incense, fennel, sacred soap and salt and finally these seeds. Over this he then said an old blessing including the words:

After the 12th Century, the concept of magic changed. According to Dr. Karen Jolly, an authority on Angle-Saxon religious or magical practices, among country folk it continued to be based on an underlying pagan animistic sense that all of nature was alive and filled with spirits. However the country use of armlets, medicinal charms and so forth, as a focus of these natural powers became increasingly known as "low magic" while the intellectual elite developed a "high magic" for which literacy was required for it utilised astrology, Alchemic, classical and hermetic texts. Books of ritual high magic were composed known as grimoires. The church tolerated mostly this high magic. The "low magic" remained the world of the countryside and its healers, witches and cunning folk.

In Australia I have come across many examples of influential Aboriginal female elders being labelled by Christian missionaries as "witches" or, if men, as "witchdoctors". For example, at Philip Creek in Central Australia, the missionaries in the 1970s labelled the traditional female practice of "love magic" or yilpinji as "witchcraft" and called its practitioners "witches". Some Aboriginal men had since used this missionary labelling against women, in order to diminish the power and influence of the women. (Bell p 162) Much the same may have happened in 18th Century England when the "Cunning Folk" who serviced many local communities with magic and were mostly male, disparaged the mostly female practitioners as "witches". (Ref Hutton latest 98)

The Aboriginal women's love magic employed songs and chants centred on the power of one's country or of nature. In these songs, they might use "country" as a metaphor for a loved one. They would sing of their longing for their country, their sorrow at its absence and their anticipation of seeing it again.

Bell wrote: "Yilpinji is achieved through a creative integration of myth, song, gesture and design against a background of country. The circle, the quintessential female symbol, finds expression in the body designs, the rolling hands gesture and patterns traced out by the dancing feet... Ownership of myth and the rights to perform certain rituals provide the power base for the women's claims. ... in yilpinji the women (describe their social world and ) attempt to shape their world." P 173-5 Bell. For example, a woman who wants rid of a husband because he is playing around, may ask her group to perform yilpinji to help make him leave her. Yilpinji, love magic, is invariably based in the empowering link with land possessed by everyone in Aboriginal culture.

Aboriginal women might also attempt to help restore a person to health by gifting them with something that carried their own energy. This could be a gift of blood or body secretions from under the arms or from the eyes. (P161). Some senior healers, known in Central Australia as ngankayi, worked in a different way. They were believed to have special abilities in the removing of foreign bodies from the sick person's body. (which Western medicine might partially agree with - calling these foreign bodies germs or bacteria) Blood from a person causing an injury in a fight might be kept by the victims and later used in a revenge magical attack. Aboriginal people believe that they live in a world full of Ancestral Dreamtime energy and, as part of this world, they have access to this energy.

At Mapoon the missionaries wrote of "Awari (Lizard) or better known as old William, the witch doctor and rainmaker. The other is Namatu (Crocodile) .. Namatu's bearing is dignified ... he takes a leading part in the midnight councils and is held in esteem by all. Under these circumstances it seems strange that although he has been greatly influenced by the preaching of the Gospel... he has never openly confessed Christ." (P51 M.book 2)

The anthropologist Professor Robert Tomkinson, in a marvellous study of the Jigalong Aboriginal community in Western Australia entitled: "The Jigalong Mob: Aboriginal victors of a desert campaign" (1974), told of how Aboriginal people kept their religion intact despite the missionaries trying to suppress it since "the missionaries view the Aborigines as the children of he devil and the antithesis of Christian virtues". Tomkinson's work is very different in kind from that of the first Professor of Anthropology in Australia, A. K. Radcliffe-Brown who was a student of Emile Durkheim. He wrongly reported that in Aboriginal culture the world of the sacred is reserved to men while women had no religion, only "magic."

Through my work with Aborigines I learnt to much respect the magical way both the women and men worked with nature, drawing on the strength of the earth that cared for them and which they in turn cared for and honoured. Without any drama I had felt I was becoming more and more immersed in this same magic - not by joining in Aboriginal rituals but by simply associating with them, taking part in their fight for land rights and learning to become more and more sensitive to the energies within this vast ancient landscape. It was not my continent by birth right but it was part of the earth that birthed me. I fell in love with her as I got to know her better. My conviction also grew that was that what I was learning from Aborigines was akin to the oldest traditions of my own people of the British Isles.

Aborigines had their own words for healers and magic work. Since they knew the word "witchcraft" from missionaries who translated it into their language as meaning "a worker of harmful and evil magic", those who held fast to the Old Ways might well deny their spiritual work was anything to do with this missionary defined word "witchcraft.". This is also true among other "missionised" indigenous peoples. Many of today's Sami in northern Scandinavia hold the work of their shamans to be sacred and will thus deny it has anything to do with "witchcraft". (The influence of bible translating societies on tribal societies has been documented and deplored by such human rights organisations as Survival International in its book: "Is God an American?")

The word "pagan" is also a word that has changed its meaning. The labels we give each other often are first given by opponents - and often grow out of fables. Thus as we have seen the Catholics were so named by Gnostics. Thus city sophisticates labelled people as "pagans" meaning "country yokels" (or for a while - those not enlisted in God's army), using the Latin word for "country district" (pagus). These country folk had a country, therefore "pagan", religion. They believed in "local" spirits, local healers and the sacredness at nature. After a while "pagan" simply became a word for anyone who did not belong to the patriarchal and Biblical religions of Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

I have mentioned earlier (Tues.) the persecution launched across the decaying Roman Empire against those who did "magic" in the 5th Century. During the so-called Dark Ages, from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century, perhaps because pagan kingdoms still survived in Western Europe, the official Western Church line was simply a straight out denial of the efficacy of pagan magic, pagan prayers or rituals. The Papacy ruled that it was a heresy to belief in the power of witches to do magic but there were in this period still occasional killings of "witches" in the Christianised countries. Others may well have died at the hands of invading Christian armies for simply refusing to become Christian. However in Egypt, where Christianity was more affected by that country's ancient culture, many Christians still carried out magical practices without being persecuted.(see p x below) Magical "recipe-books' from this part of the world later made their way into Europe.

Once all the rulers of Western Europe were officially "converted", all subjects of these kingdoms were presumed to have followed orders and become Christian. If evidence emerged that any were keeping up pagan practices including magic they could now be held to be relapsed Christians or heretics and thus to fall under Church authority. In the next few centuries, most of those thought to practice magic were to die condemned not as witches but as "heretics".

At varioius times between the 9th and 13th Century, Church documents stated that a "vast" number of European women were still involved in a pagan cult within the "Christianised" nations. These women were said to be engaging in magic and worshipping Diana, a pagan Goddess. One of these documents was entitled "Canon Episcopi" and dated from around 900AD. It seems that this practice may have lasted at least into the 14th Century for the Church incorporated this document into Church Law around 1140 and re-issued it in various forms until 1310. It stated:.

"'Bishops and their officials must labour with all their strength to uproot thoroughly from their parishes the pernicious art of sorcery and malefic invented by the Devil, and if they find a man or woman follower of this wickedness to eject them foully disgraced from the parishes. For the Apostle says, "A man that is a heretic after the first and second admonition avoid." Those are held captive by the Devil who, leaving their creator, seek the aid of the Devil. And so Holy Church must be cleansed of this pest.

"It is also not to be omitted that some wicked women, perverted by the Devil, seduced by illusions and phantasms of demons, believe and profess themselves, in the hours of the night, to ride upon certain beasts with Diana, the goddess of pagans, and an innumerable multitude of women, and in the silence of the dead of the night to traverse great spaces of earth, and to obey her commands as of their mistress, and to be summoned to her service on certain nights. But I wish it were they alone who perished in their faithlessness and did not draw many with them into the destruction of infidelity. For an innumerable multitude, deceived by this false opinion, believe this to be true, and so believing, wander from the right faith and are involved in the error of the pagans when they think that there is anything of divinity or power except the one God." REF. Taken from Witches and Witchcraft, Rosemary Ellen Guiley.

The Bishop of Verona had complained in the 9th century that a third of the world were worshipping the Goddess Herodias. (W18) John of Salisbury wrote around 1150 of the honouring of her in France: "they assert that a certain woman who shines by night, or Herodias, ... summons gatherings and assemblies which attend various banquets. The figure receives all kinds of homage from her servants ..." W30. This may be the Goddess later known as Arcadia.

There were very ancient and pervasive European folk legends about Goddesses who travelled the sky at night blessing the earth, accompanied often by wild creatures and by the spirits of the departed (and sometimes by living women who flew with them). In Germany this was lead by the mother Goddess Holda. Her winter travels brought fruitfulness to the land and to the families she visited. Babies come from her. Food and drink were left out at night as a ritual gift to these visiting spirits. The legend of "Father Christmas" today has taken over much of this old myth. It is now a man who travels the skies accompanied by reindeer, rewarding good families, gaining entry into their homes by coming down chimneys - and for whom cakes and drink are left out.

The women who flew with these Goddesses were only reported as doing good works. But as the Middle Ages drew to an end, it was another old folk legend that came dominate. This seemed to have started around the Mediterranean in Classical times with the story a flying hideous bird or Harpy like creature that ate human flesh known as a strix. Perhaps there were overtones originally in this story of a Dark Goddess, like the Indian Kali, the mother goddess that ruled over death. Pliny the Elder and Ovid said the Strix that flew at night and lived on humans.. Ovid said they ate babies. He said one could protect one's house by magic - with a wand of whitethorn at the window and offering the strix the entrails of a young pig. Petronius said the strix could take away a man's virility by eating him from inside.

Classical literature also spoke of flying women. Ovid said the witch hag Dipsas knew the magic of herbs, could destroy the chastity of the young and conjure up the dead - and fly in the form of a bird. Apuleius in The Golden Ass 207 - had a witch Pamphile who could turn herself into a bird with a magical drink of laurel and dill. She was always after young men. According to Festus women who practised sorcery and flew were called "strigae". p 207

Positive images of flying women survived into 13th Century France. Guillaume d'Auvergne, bishop of Paris, who died in 1249, p214 , "heard of spirits who on certain nights take on the likeness of girls and women in shining robes and frequent woods and groves - and visit homes lead by Lady Abudia or Satia - if food and drink is left out for them - they enrich the house." In Sicily such stories were still believed according to Norman Cohn. He reported that they tell of "ladies of the night" who enter enter well ordered houses through the keyhole or cracks in the door. These are "guardian spirits" and not destroyers. P 216

Cohn concluded: 'from all this there emerges a coherent picture of a traditional folk-belief. Its origins seem to lie in a pre-Christian, pagan world-view. It is certainly very ancient; and, despite certain variations of detail, it has remained constant in its main features over a period of at least a thousand years and over a great part of Western Europe. It is concerned with beneficent, protective spirits, who are thought of above all as female, and who are sometimes associated with the souls of the dead." "And this age-old folk belief can be brought into relation with equally ancient beliefs about witches. In both cases, we find that women are believed - and sometimes even believe themselves - to travel at night in a supernatural manner, endowed with supernatural powers by supernatural patrons."

But it seemed that the stories of strix and strigae merged in some folklore accounts to produce the image of a woman who flew on both amorous and cannibalistic missions. The earliest Germanic legal code that we possess, the 6th Century Lex Salico, stated: "if a stria shall devour a man and it shall be proved against her " then she should be fined. The code also set a fine for a false accusation. But the 634AD Lombard Law, the last of the Germanic codes, stated: "let no one presume to kill a foreign serving maid or female slave as a striga, for it is not possible, nor ought it to be at all believed by Christian minds that a woman can eat a living man up from within.". Gradually this creature came to be seen as a night flying woman of evil character, an eater of children and bringer of misfortune. Soon she was to become under contract to the devil - and the archetypal witch found in "confessions" extracted with torture and condemned by Church and State.

Behind such images of women, lay a male paranoia. The power of women over sexual relations was feared by frustrated men Four centuries after the Fathers taught that women can diabolically control the disobedient penis, Archbishop Hinemar of Rheims declared in the year 860 that women should not use magic to make men impotent. (227Eu) In the 13th Century, 400 years further on, church gatherings frequently condemned sorceresses "who put spells on married people so they cannot engage in conjugal relations." These included the synods of Salisbury in 1217, of Valencia in 1255 and of Besel in 1434. p 229 Eu

Women were persecuted for their power over sexuality for much of the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance thousands were being burnt while Shakespeare wrote and Michelangelo carved. A provincial synod held in Lombardy in 1579 under the authority of a man later 'sainted', Charles Borromeo, imposed penalties against sorcery that impeded conjugal intercourse. The Synod of Naumur in 1662 renewed laws against this "because we know that every day marriages are thrown into confusion by enchantment." P233 Eu

A much feared spell was said to done by tying a knot in lace while saying words designed to impede male sexual desires. This was practised throughout the Middle Ages from at least the 12th century. Montaigne wrote in the 16th Century that "people are no longer talking about anything else." Eu233 The Jesuit Professor of Physics in Palermo explained: "No other kind of magic is more widespread and feared nowadays. In some places married couples no longer dare to be married publicly in church before the pastor and witnesses but they do it at home the day before and then go to church on the following day." (Eu234) The Church officially allowed marriages to be dissolved because of magical spells that stopped consummation.. There may have been something behind this apart from the fear of women. I suspect that in some cases women may well have been using magic, or the fear of magic, to impede both forced weddings and male sexual power..

This "knot spell" was also part of Roma (Gypsy) magic. In the 14th-15th centuries many thousands of these pagan nomads arrived in Europe. They were of North Indian origin and were well known for practicing magic. Some had arrived in Europe via Egypt and thus came their popular name 'Gypsies' - although they preferred their own names for themselves such as Roma or Romani. They reportedly still have "love knot" spells. A version of this was to tie knots in a cloth while concentrating on the person one wants to bond with, then to wear it for a day before giving it to this person as a love present.(46) Young girls would make clay beads in which they would mix their first menstrual blood. This was a charm against pregnancy. They kept them safe until when they wanted to get pregnant. They would then take them to a stream, toss them in and wish for pregnancy as they slowly dissolved. All such charms were aides to human will. It is not hard to imagine versions of these same spells designed to protect a woman from marriage or pregnancy. Some Aborigines in Australia have today this kind of magic.

Women needed to find ways to control their own future so some may well have resulted to magic. The village witch or wise woman who used folk magic sometimes was tolerated in the early Middle Ages unless she seemed to challenge the influence of the church or state. As the Church grew in power in Europe at the end of the "Dark Ages", women were increasingly traded between noble families as commodities in order to cement alliances. Peasant women were also at the mercy of the noble families under the so-called "doit seigneur".

The Roma soon became the subject of persecution and of expulsion. In 1539 the French Parliament called on: "all those impostors known by the name of Bohemians or Egyptians to leave the kingdom under penalty of the galleys." Henry VIII expelled them from England in 1531 - although many escaped expulsion. Those that remained became the target of attempts to "assimilate" them by getting them to abandon their nomadic lifestyle.

But in the 13th Century something happened to make the trials of suspected witches much more common and more likely to result in a death sentence. Up until then most punishments for witchcraft were for isolated cases of "maleficium" or the working of harmful magic. It was not so much magic that was being punished in most cases, but the doing of harm through magic. What happened from around the 14th Century was that a pact with Satan became the dominant reason for the condemnation of alleged witches.

Norman Cohen, in his book "Europe's Inner Demons", argued that this change occurred because of the rise in the practice of "High Magic" among the literate elite in the 1200s. Many were fascinated by the possibility of forcing a demon to serve a Christian by invoking the name of the Holy Trinity. This demon taming was said to be a task only to be undertaken by pious literate men who had full confidence in the power of God. In 1267 Roger Bacon complained of the numbers of Grimoires being written on the techniques of demon raising and high magic. Some of these books purported to derive from the teachings of the biblical Solomon. These books taught that one had to prepare for demon raising by periods of chastity, fasting and prayer. There were special magical tools that had to be prepared, fumigated and consecrated while psalms were recited. According to Cohen these often included a sword, staff, white handled and black handled knives. Early in the 14th Century Michael Scot, tutor to the young emperor Frederic II wrote for him a personal grimoire known as the "Liber Introductorius." This gave the names by which demons could be summoned and stated that, if a demon was to be tamed by being imprisoned in a ring or bottle, a sacrifice should first be made to it - even by offering it some human flesh taken from a corpse!

But although many clergy tried their hands at High Magic, it also had powerful opponents within the Catholic Church. One of the most influential was St. Thomas Aquinas. He taught that it was foolish for the magician to pretend to gain control over demons - rather it was the demon that was gaining power over the magician. Furthermore Aquinas charged that this practice involved a form of apostasy in that the practitioner was making a pact with the demon in order to secure its aid.

In 1220 Emperor Frederick II made burning alive the penalty for heresy. In 1231 the Papacy assigned the same penalty and set up the Inquisition. In 1233 Pope Gregory 9 had ordered punishment for "Luciferians" accused of worshipping Lucifer. In 1258 Pope Alexander said the Inquisition was to punish sorcery that involved consulting demons - that is, High Magic. He also authorised the torturing of suspects.

In 1307 the French Emperor Philip the Fair utilised this controversy against the powerful Order of Knights Tempars. Early in the morning of the 13th October he had the unsuspecting Knights arrested throughout France. His motive seems to have been his desire for personal power and his wish to enrich himself from their wealth. He fancied himself as the grand chief of a new Order and the Emperor of the West. The previous year he had arrested Jews throughout his kingdom on 22 July 1306, seized their assets and expelled them from his kingdom. He proclaimed this as a great victory for the church - just as he was to do with the Knights Tempars.

He had to justify his act against the Knights as they were under the protection of the Holy See in Rome - so he accused them of worshipping the devil in the form of a statue and of a black cat - and of engaging in ritualistic sexual orgies. When the Pope refused to endorse the imprisonment and torture of the Knights, Philip threatened the papacy, then based in France, with charges of complicity with heretical devil worship.

Thus it came about that a Pope was one of the first to be formally tried for practising ritual magic. A Roman family allied to Philip kidnapped Pope Boniface VIII to put him on trial. The Pope was rescued - but died shortly afterwards. Philip then pressed for him to be put on trial posthumously - and these proceedings began in 1310. 180 ch 10..

The charge against Boniface was that he had 3 demons, one of which he carried with him imprisoned in a ring through High Magic. A monk testified that "he saw how the lord Benedict went out into a garden adjoining the palace, drew a circle with a sword, placed himself in the middle of the circle, sat down and pulled out a rooster and also fire in an earthen jar. He saw the lord Benedict kill the cock and throw its blood on the fire" while reading from a book and conjuring up demons. p 184. It seemed to me that this high magic ritual bore interesting similarities to African Voodoo. I do not know if there was a cultural link.

"Philip the Fair" in 1308 also charged Guichard, Bishop of Troyes of using demonic witchcraft against Queen Joan by employing a Dominican Friar to summon a demon. The demon told him he could attack the Queen by making a wax doll, baptise it in the Queen's name, prick it with pins - and if needed, throw it in the fire. P188. Later 27 witnesses reported the bishop was the son of an incubus (a devil) who had slept with his mother. The bishop was also accused of keeping a demon trapped by High Magic in a glass flask and in the point of his cowl.

In 1317 Pope John XXII had the bishop of Cahors arrested for trying to kill him by poison and maleficium. The bishop was interrogated by the pope himself, tortured, scourged and burned at the stake with his ashes thrown into the Rhone. Other cases involved leading Italian and French families and clergy. P 176 - In 1320 the Pope was disturbed when he heard ritual magic was being practiced at his own court in Avignon. Thus in 1320 the Inquisition was empowered to charge practitioners of ritual magic as heretics.

In 1324 a leading Irish Anglo-Norman family were accused of high magic.P198 Lady Alice Kyteler, the banker William Outlaw, the cleric Robert of Bristol and other associates was put on trial in Kilkenny in 1324-5. The charges against them were of using sorcery to enrich themselves. The accusers were step children who had lost their fortunes to Kyteler. She was said to have organised a heretical sect that sacrified cocks to demons and to have slept with a demon called "Robin, Son of Art." The demons were said to have made her wealthy and given her the ability of making love potions. Much of the evidence against her was extracted from a maid servant who was then burnt. Lady Alice herself was rescued by relatives and taken to England. 203. Cohn commented that in calling him Robin, "Petonilla of Meath was no doubt uttering the name of the first local wood-spirit that occurred to her" 203

In South France in 1335 mass witchtrials commenced that were effectively continuing the earlier work of the Crusades against the Cathars in "purifying" the region - or subduing the religion of the people to the power of the Papacy. Na Prous Bonnet, a prophetess on trial in 1325 in Toulouse who claimed that the Holy Spirit inspired her words, declared the pope had forfeited his role as the head of the Church by corruptly killing and persecuting. But trials for High Magic were notably few compared to those against the Cathars and Waldensians. This did not mean that there were not many suspected high magicians. They simply were better connected. In 1374 the Inquisitor of France complained to Pope Gregory XI that many, including clerics, were invoking demons;but when he tried to proceed against them, his jurisdiction was contested.

Cohen believed that the campaign "against ritual magic helped to produce the fantastic stereotype of the witch." He noted how suspected witches were increasingly accused not simply of being workers of evil folk magic but of working in alliance with the devil. He gave examples of how in 1390-1 women of low social status had their "confessions" formulated in terms of ritual magic. In 1390 a Margot de la Barre admitted before torture that she could cure such illnesses as impotence by combining traditional herbal cures with high magic.p197 "They had operated by means of chaplets of herbs which the devil, at their request , had endowed with magical powers. Invoked 3 times in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, the devil appeared. " Margot and her woman partner were consequently burnt to death. Another case he gave was of a woman called Macete. She was accused of employing Jehanne de Brigue to use magic to induce a man to marry her. Then, when he proved a poor husband, they worked with toads and wax figures to make him ill. Jehanne confessed under torture that this had been done through the help of a demon she invoked in the name of the Holy Trinity. She said she learnt this technique from her godmother.

He also noted how folk history and legend had shaped the image of the witch. The flying witch of old legend had by the 14th Century become the subject of serious juridical investigation. In the witch-hunts unleashed against the Waldensians, the suspects were accused of flying - but now by the power of the devil who allegedly had given them a flying ointment to grease the flying sticks which they flew to their "synagogues" or "sabbats" (words borrowed from another religion Church authorities had demonised, Judaism) on various mountain tops in the French and Italian Alps.

But Cohn's theory did not explain why charges against High Magic magicians were relatively few and why charges of calling on demons came to be levelled mostly against women who had never seen or used a grimoire. Cohen like many male historians missed many of the gender dimensions of this persecution.

When the Roman Church sent Gui as an Inquisitor against the Waldensians, a religious movement in France that rejected war service, the death sentence, the need for church buildings and the doctrine of purgatory, he wrote that the Waldensians were a kind of Beguine. The Beguine were then a major and very influential movement involving thousands of women. From the 12th century, large numbers of secular women in the Low Countries, in Germany, France and Switzerland, organised themselves to live apart from men. They set up what had became known as Beguine communities - with those in the Low Countries having up to 2000 members each and those in Germany averaging around 70-80 women each.

These Beguine quarters were effectively cities or sections of cities and were sometimes fortified with walls. They were self governing communities of lay women.. practising skilled and manual labour, composing books, poems and songs in the vernacular languages - including the earliest such works in Dutch and Low German. They studied all the crafts and worked as blacksmiths, bricklayers, brewers, soldiers and surgeons. They engaged in communal rituals and developed a Beguine spirituality.

They wrote exultantly of the spirit of love and the ancient mystic marriage spirituality, perhaps rediscovering this from within themselves, perhaps because it had been passed down from in from earlier centuries. They were part of a movement that included the troubadours who at that time were celebrating human love and sexuality in song at many a noble woman's court.

This troubadour movement was influenced by a Sufi mysticism then sweeping the Islamic world including Spain - until Grenada was conquered in by a Catholic army a century later. The influential Ibn al-Arabia, 1165 - 1240 had a vision when on pilgrimage to Mecca and ritually walking around the Kabah. He saw the Goddess Sophia in a young woman. Her beauty for him was a reflection of divine beauty. He wrote of her 'as the object of his quest, the virgin most pure.' He said that "love was the faith I hold", and that love made one all including the pagans who worshipped idols: "his heart is capable of every form, a cloister for the monk, a fane for idols, pasture for gazelles, the votary's Kabah" ("The Mecca Revelations") One branch of the Sufis was known as the Mawlawiyyah, or in the West as the "Whirling Deverishes". This was a stately dignified dance used as a method of concentration in which in movement and ecstasy one sought to dissolve the boundaries of the self.

The revival at this time of the Jewish Qabbalah mystical school lead also to a renewed emphasis on the female principle in religion. Judaism and Islam were then peacefully co-existing in Grenada in South Spain and were influencing each other's development. A book known as "The Bahir" (c1200) identified the female Jewish figure of Shekinah in the Qabbalah with the Goddess Sophia of the Gnostics. It said she had become alienated and lost in our world and needed to be re-discovered for us to regain wholeness.

Another influence was Neoplatonic mysticism. This became known more widely in France in the 9th Century when the works of the 5th Century Pseudo-Dionysius (he wrote under an assumed name) were presented in 827 to King Louis the Pius by the Emperor of Constantinople, Michael the Stammerer. This was based not so much on nature but on holding the mind in suspension before the unknowable and on asceticism.

But the Beguine movement that commenced in the 12th Century was not at all abstract. It was an amazing piece of self-empowerment by women that lasted through the Middle Ages. Women needed an alternative to a male dominated society in which they were being sold into marriage, belittled in Church and denied access to higher education. The Beguine set up an alternative. Their all female walled towns were reminiscent of Greek stories about the Amazons. They saw women as needing space away from men in order to develop skills and spiritual work. They helped each other to acquire Guild qualifications. They supported themselves. They were not originally under the control of the Church although from the 14th Century on they were increasingly curtailed. They vowed to share communal goods and to minimalise consumption. They were free to decide to marry but if they did, they had to leave as their communities did not admit men They had their own rituals and were inspired by a mysticism in which women could be self-empowered, or directly empowered by God. They had brother communities made up by men living by the same principles and known as Beghards - but there were far fewer of them than of the women.

Some "Beguinages' still exist in Belgium. One is in the city of Bruge. When recently visited, an lace-making elderly women living there were asked about what the Beguinage was originally - and replied "Oh, I think they were hostels for reformed prostitutes"! This story reminded me of how Mary Magdelen, a leading figure among the Apostles who clearly had a very close relationship to Jesus, was later identified with the 'reformed prostitute" mentioned elsewhere in the Gospels. She was depicted as a repentant sinner rather than the strong woman who rallied the apostles after the Crucifixion.. It seems the Beguines had suffered the same fate.

The women of Italy gave the Church a shock in the 13th Century when a Princess Blazema of Milan became Guglielma the Prophetess and attracted other women to what was effectively a female lead alternative religion. She said that the Holy Ghost was female - in the old tradition of Sophia - and that in the coming era of "The Age of the Holy Spirit", all the cardinals and the Pope would be women. One of her supporters, the priestesss Maifreda, was designated as the coming Popess and at Easter 1300 celebrated secretly a solemn Mass in the company of a selected 6 men and 6 women. They also preached and forgave sins. In 1296 they were condemned by Pope Boniface and several were then "incinerated"..

One profession in which women still held much prestige in the early Middle Ages was that of the healer. The image we have today of the "witch" boiling ingredients in her cauldron, originated partially from that of the medieval woman healer - as well as of the cook. The cauldron of the healer was celebrated in many a chant and song of the bards and druids. It was called the "cauldron of regeneration" and "of inspiration".

The women healers possessed within their craft knowledge accumulated over many generations from the keen study of nature and from experiments to find useful ways to work with nature. Among many drugs they discovered, were ergot used to relieve pain, belladonna to regulate contractions and prevent miscarriages, and digitalis for heart complaints. Derivatives from these plants still play a very major role in modern medicine. Hildegard of Bingen 1098 -1179, who is not classed as a Beguine since she ran a convent, had the women in her convent wear crowns as symbols of their sovereignty. She wrote from what was effectively her convent-fortress authoritative books on medicine and nature that pre-dated the universities. She was also a mystic who honoured the earth as our Mother. One of her poems went as follows...

She was effectively rediscovering, or expressing, both the female and mystical sides of religion that had been suppressed by a male church. In the following example of her writing the Goddess seemed to live again.

"Thus I seemed to see a girl of unsurpassing radiant beauty, with such a dazzling brightness streaming from her face that I could not behold her fully. She wore a cloak whiter than snow, brighter than stars, her shoes were of pure gold. In her right hand she held the sun and moon and caressed them lovingly. On her breast she had an ivory tablet on which appeared in shades of sapphire the image of a man. And all creation called this girl Sovereign Lady. The girl began to speak to the image on her breast 'I was with you in the beginning, in the dawn of all that is holy. I bore you from the womb before the start of day' and I heard a voice saying to me: 'The girl whom you behold is Love, she has her dwelling in eternity." (P212Trev)

She has also been credited by historians such as Ronald Hutton as one of the first users of the Pentagram as a religious symbol - although others say it was used in ancient Middle Eastern faiths. She saw our 5 senses, 5 fingers and 5 limbs (including the head) as symbolised by this five pointed star. In modern times this symbol has become one used by pagans as their own symbol - but this begs the question of how we define such wise women as Hildergard and even define the nature of "paganism". She lived within a very Christian world and identified as a Christian, albeit as her own kind of Christian. She honoured the female in nature, saw nature as sacred - both key criteria in modern paganism (and she would thus meet most of the criteria set for membership by today's most representative UK pagan organisation, the Pagan Federation.), Beguine such as Porete would meet other criteria by rejecting an imposed moral code, seeing our guide simply as "love". For me, in such cases I forget these misleading labels and simply see both as inspiring ancestors and teachers. I prefer a world of mutually tolerant religious paths that seek to learn from each other while all acknowledge as a basis the sacredness of nature and all that this entails.

The authorities during Hildergard's lifetime suspected that she was not really a Christian. They often harassed her and even excommunicated her. When the Inquisition was soon afterwards founded, it had among its first targets the secular and semi-religious Beguine communities of women. Many churchmen especially distrusted the women's herbal knowledge. Some of them believed that the only cures that should be attempted were those that drew on the power of the Church's relics, chants, prayers and holy water - which many used in a magical way.

The Church and its allies in the 13th Century were in practice countering the all-female Beguine centres in setting up the all male Universities that, unlike the Beguine, did not use the language of the people but Latin, the language of the Church. These universities were a vital tool in the Church's efforts to remove healing work from women. Their medical courses focused on old texts including the rediscovered works of Aristotle with his concepts about the physical and mental inferiority of women.. The students were instructed that a priest should accompany them to see patients and sometimes that they might have to deny medicine to patients who refused to go to Confession.. Some preachers even condemned any attempt to heal the deaf and dumb arguing that such people were barred both from faith and healing by quoting St. Augustine who wrote of deafness: "this defect also hinders faith itself as the Apostle has taught "Faith comes from hearing" (Rom 10:170". Eu241

These universities taught a medicine for over 200 years that was inferior to that of the better women healers. Their cures were often based not on experimentation but superstition - thus they learnt to cure leprosy with the flesh of snakes caught in hot rocky places or to cure a toothache by writing a prayer on the sufferer's jaw. Blood letting became a cure-all remedy. Their main text-book became the thousand year old works of Galen who had specialised in the most elaborate of medical preparations with rare, costly imported ingredients. It was not witches but these doctors that prepared the portions of legends with such ingredients as unicorn horn, viper's flesh, powdered mummy, crabs' eyes, oil of earthworms and rhino horn. Such medicines were sold for very high prices making affluent both apothecaries and doctors.

Women healers with their cheap local herb based remedies were seen by some male doctors as commercial rivals whose skills were to be disparaged and, if possible, replaced by their own. In 1322 a woman healer Jacoba Felicie, famed throughout Paris for her healing skills, was put on trial for daring to practice medicine without authority. A Church Edict reportedly stated: "If a woman dares to cure without having studied, she is a witch and must die". Since women were not admitted to the university courses, this edict put all female healers at risk of death..

Women healers were in danger however effective their cures. If they were not authorised by the church, they could be suspected of curing by witchcraft. In England a witch-hunter wrote: "It was a thousand times better for the land if all witches, but especially the blessing witch, might suffer death." A "witch" who did good was seen as a greater danger to the Church than the cursing" witch" for the healer might lead people to less rely on the church. Later the new male medical profession petitioned the British Parliament against the "worthless and presumptuous women who usurped the profession" asking for "long imprisonment" of the women concerned. However we now know that the mistresses of some rich English households treasured an extensive list of up to 500 useful herbs passed onto them quietly by country healers. p18

When the Black Death struck in 1348, killing within months one third of Europe's population - the new schools of doctors blamed it on a conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars. In 1496 the doctors had not learnt much more when syphilis arrived. Mercury was then grabbed from alchemy as a toxic substance that could kill the infection - and often the patient.

University medicine did not start to be reformed until Paracelsus in the 15th Century angrily denounced the excessive profits made by selling to patients expensive preparations with many imported components. He said that Nature had provided cures near to the need; that local plants could do much better than imports and that nature looked after us by even making plants indicate their medical function by their appearance. He wrote of the herb St John's Wort: "it puts to shame all recipes and doctors. They may yell as much as they wish. They will only break their teeth." Where did he himself get his own knowledge?. One day he dramatically burnt his own text on pharmaceuticals rather than take credit unjustly saying he "had learnt from the Sorceress all he knew". He recommended to his students: "A physician ... should learn of old women, Egyptians (as Gypsies were then called) and such like people, for they have greater experience in such matters than all the Academians." P48 But despite all he said, women healers still were not brought into the schools as teachers.

The Gypsies, despite the persecution, were trading their herbal and medical knowledge. Although we have few records of their practice, an account of early 20th Century Gypsy lore told of how the shuvihani (or shuvihano for a male)., which meant "Wise One", administered remedies accompanied by words that involved the whole person in the healing. For example, if one had eye problems, she might use an infusion of the herb eyebright and say:

In the High Renaissance period, even the alleviating of birth pains brought midwives in them into conflict with a Church that preached that women had a duty to suffer pain in childbirth as a punishment for tempting Adam in the Garden of Eden, Thus, in Koln (Cologne) between 1627 and 1630 nearly all the city's midwives were killed as witches. This tragedy inspired the Jesuit Spee to write a denunciation of the witch trials which said in part:: "Thus I have to confess that in various places I accompanied a good many witches to their death, women whose innocence I have just as little doubt about even now as I expended every effort and enormous diligence to discover the truth ... but I could find nothing but blamelessness everywhere". eu231

Many women, and some men, suffered from demon worshipping accusations that had much more to do more to do with the elite's dabbling in high magic than with the practices of the common folk. It has been alleged by Ronald Hutton "that it is now obvious that the main force in driving the persecution was pressure from the common people who genuinely feared and hated witches" - but he did not explore why this fear was so strong and violent. In great part it had been whipped up and reinforced by the teachings of the Church and its doctrinaire male chauvinism. P379

St. Thomas Aquinas whose work was very influential in shaping the climate of opinion, and much quoted by witch hunters, taught in the 13th Century at the University of Paris at a time when the Beguine communities of women were at their strongest. Although he was later honoured as the "Angelic Doctor" by the Vatican, he was in fact a fanatic hater of sexuality and a belittler of women. A female Catholic theologian has recently listed some examples of his language finding that Aquinas called sex "filthiness", "staining", disgusting", "shamefulness", "disgrace", "degeneration", sickness", "corruption of integrity" and a reason for "aversion" and "loathing". Aquinas also said with great disgust that the lack of chastity resulted in the "feminisation of the human heart" (Summa Theo. Suppl q 53 a3 ad 1) . (Eu 194)

Aquinas and the other scholastics did not go unchallenged by the Beguine despite them being barred with other women from the universities. A leader in this was the Beguine Hadewijch of Antwerp, who was forced to leave her small Beguine community around 1260 for fear of the Inquisition. She was a scholar knowledgeable of the Fathers of the Church, of Ptolemaic astronomy and of Latin. She wrote the first prose to be published in the Dutch language - and for this she was the more suspect in the eyes of the Inquisition.. Her poems and letters all reflected a strong vibrant mysticism. Her love for God was interwoven in her verse with her love for nature. Her poems were written in the traditional troubadour style and were sometimes sung as love songs.

She challenged the exaltation of reason (perhaps a criticism of the dry debating style of Aquinas whose chains of logical deductions were sometimes based on very dubious premises.) She wrote: "Love despises reason and all that lies within. For whatever belongs to reason stands against the blessed state of love. For reason cannot take anything away from love or bring anything to love, for love's true reason is a flood that rises forever and knows no peace." She personified love as female and divine. " Love does not yield to saints or men or angels, heaven or earth, and she enfolds the divine in her nature. To love she calls the hearts who love, in a voice that is loud and untiring. The voice has great power and it tells of things more terrible than thunder."

But the Beguine who became best known as a spiritual teacher and mystic was Marguette Porete. She wrote "The Mirror of Simple Souls" between 1296 and 1306 in the high summer of Aquinas's Scholasticism. It was written in the spirit of the troubadours as a love poem but was also a direct challenge to the Church and its theologians. It spoke of the worldly hierarchical "little church" of Popes and Bishops that must give way before the "greater church" of the Spirit. She sung: 'Theologians and other clerks, You won't understand this book - however bright your wits - if you do not meet it humbly, and in this way Love and Faith will make you surmount reason, they are the mistresses of Reason's house ... Desire, Will and Fear take away from them the understanding, the outflowing and the union of the highest Light of the ardour of Divine Love."

She taught that in union with God, the soul does not need virtues, or pious works. They are replaced by what we do naturally when living in a state of love. "Virtues, I take leave of you for ever more. I'll have a freer heart for that - more joyful too. Your service is too unremitting - indeed I know . I have quits your tyrannies, now I am at peace" (Lerner trans. 80) Her teaching that we do not need the disciplines of the "little" Church if we love God, was a threat to the Church's hold over the spiritual life of the people. She too wrote in the vernacular while Thomas Aquinas wrote in Latin - making her, like other Beguines, seem all the more dangerous to the authorities.

She was called before the Church Inquisitor of Lorraine but denied his authority over her for she said he only represented the worldly "little church". He condemned her as a heretic, particularly for saying that if one is united to God, one "could and should grant to nature all that it desires". The Inquisitor must have thought "Did she not know that nature is corrupt?" The Church's use of the new universities to reinforce its power is illustrated by how in 1310 twenty one of the masters of Paris University's Faculty of Theology sat in judgement on Porete at the request of the Inquisitor, William of Paris, and found her guilty of heresy. Later in 1429-31 the same Faculty would be consulted during the trial of Joan d'Arc.

Porete's book was burnt publicly in Valenciennes by the Church then some months later she too was burnt at the stake in Paris on June 1st 1310. Her reputation was such and her appearance so dignified and gracious, that the spectators were in tears. After her death her book did not vanish despite being uniquely condemned on three separate occasions by the Church. It was secretly copied, translated and smuggled throughout Europe. The men and women who handled her book knew that they could be killed as heretics if they were found with it in their possession. One complete copy was found enclosed within the personal writings of Blessed Julian of Norwich, a British mystic. This copy is now in the British Library.

The year after Marguette Porete's death, the Catholic Church attacked the Beguine movement at the Council of Vienna in 1311. It tried to limit the influence of the Beguines by forbidding its members from leaving the walls of their communities. They were put under the authority of Bishops and Church authorities tried with limited success to transform them into enclosed "religious communities" by decreeing that no Beguine could leave her community without the church's permission.. Civil authorities tried to destroy the Beguine communities by heavily taxing them. (The word "beg" may well come from them since many communities were plunged into poverty through Church opposition.)

The church had to deal with Beguines in Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium and Holland. Also in Southern France and Catalonia there were, as previously mentioned, communities called Beguine by the church but which were better known as the Waldensians. All these communities faced investigation and possible death at the hands of the Inquisition. Although many communities were suppressed or transformed, Beguine communities did survive. A few Beguine communities still exist today in Belgium but in a very different form.

Porete was not the only "mystic" targeted by the Inquisition. Mechtild of Magdeburg 1207 -1282, another Beguine, came under attack for her mystical work written in Low German. It has also been discovered that Dante probably borrowed from her writing for his rendition of Bernard's Prayer to the Virgin which Chaucer later translated to use in his Second Nun's Tale. She boldly attacked the corrupt members of the clergy as "goats" and "Pharisees" and was fiercely critical of the hatred of the body shown by the ascetics of the Church: "Do not disdain your body, for the soul is just as safe in its body as in the kingdom of heaven'. She had also a lesson for me for I was long afraid of being open about the gift I had been given at birth of walking between the genders. She wrote:

Another Beguine mystic, Hadeqich from Brabant, only escaped being tried as a heretic by leaving her community and living in isolation from where she advised people by post.. Her writings are also the first works published in Low German. She died around 1260 but her letters were for long lost and only rediscovered in 1983. She like Porete wrote in the style of the troubadours, called minnesingers in Germany. One of her letters tells of the loving union between God and human:

She wrote of deity in the female gender, calling the deity her "Love". For example: "I showed my pain to Love and begged her pity". She was also very happy with her nature. She "sinks deep in herself utterly satisfied with her nature, she fully rejoices in herself" - an attitude very different to that of Aquinas.. For her the ecstasy of divine love cannot be understood "save by those who have been thrown, into the abyss of love's mighty nature, and those who belong there, and they believe in love more than they understand her."

Aquinas' successor in the Chair of Theology at the University of Paris was Meister Ekhardt. 1260-1328 He was a very different man from Aquinas, more influenced by Plato than by Aristotle and very much in the mystical and gnostic tradition. He saw us all as "birthing" God within us as we grow spiritually. His love for nature was evident.: " Here all blades of grass, wood and stone, all things are One. This is the deepest depth." - Miscellanies. He declared, in very courageous opposition to the Inquisition's demonising of women; "Evil is opposed to being, therefore the devil does not exist." Some of his students quoted early gnostic works that were later lost and not rediscovered until the 20th century. He died while his works were under investigation by the Inquisition - the one mercy showed him was that he was allowed to die rather than be executed.

The women living in convents also embraced the mystic marriage tradition. They saw themselves as wedded to God and this became the basis of their own initiation rituals. In the 14th Century a major influence was exerted by Blessed Julian of Norwich, a hermit living in a room attached to church in Norwich, then the second largest city in England (who also possessed a secret copy of the Church-condemned Porete's work as I mentioned). . She did not write like Porete of a "little" church but said she was writing for the 'even-Christians", meaning those not influenced by rank. She wrote about the presence of God in nature and how Divine Love is present in and maintains Creation.

"And after this I saw God in a point. That is to say in my understanding. By which sight I saw that he is in all things... He showed me a little thing, the size of a hazel nut lying in my palm or so it seemed to me and it was as round as a ball.... it is all that is made ... it lasts and ever shall be for God loves it and so have all things being by the love of God..., the maker, the keeper, the lover."

She acknowledged both male and female aspects of the Divinity in much the same way as the Gnostics who saw Sophia as Divine Wisdom. "The almighty truth of the Trinity is our Father, for he makes us and keeps us in him. And the deep wisdom of the Trinity is our Mother in whom we are all enclosed" She also had no time for the anti-sensuality of the Fathers but taught: "Our sensuality is grounded in nature...In our sensuality, God is.' For her the spirit's search for God should lead it to the mystic marriage of human and divinity. Her conclusion was thus the same as the Greek and Egyptian pagan mystery cults - and, as we will see, as in some of the practices of the twentieth century "Wicca" or witchcraft.

For her we are "oned" with divinity and know ourselves as ultimately divine. "till I am substantially oned to him, I may never have full rest, nor full bliss...God is nearer to us than our own soul" for he is the ground in which our soul stands." "God does not love us any less than He loves Christ". She has God say: "I am the ground of your seeking. First it is my will that you have it and I make you will it" (Also see the poem quoted in the previous chapter) She was a great scholar. She translated the Bible texts from the early Greek and Hebrew versions unlike the contemporary translator John Wycliffe who translated the Bible from Jerome's later and less accurate Latin Vulgate version.

Julian's very female imagery was dangerous in the eyes of the Church. She opened her account of a vision by saying that she was pregnant with God's Word just as Mary was pregnant with Jesus. Her close advisor and protector Cardinal Adam Easton had her delete this, knowing that Marguette Porete had been burned at the stake partly for using that same image. Birgitta, a contemporary Swedish mystic and mother of 8, also used the same image, saying that her book was moving within her like a child in the womb. After Easton died, Julian reinserted in her manuscript her pregnant imagery.

There was a pan-European weaving of powerful mystics in the 14th Century. Catherine of Sienna, the namesake of our daughters and critic of the Pope, used words from the "1368" version of Julian's work as the opening of her 1378 book "Dialogo". Julian in her turn quoted from William Flete, Catherine of Siena's disciple and executor. Adam Easton was a friend not just to Julian but also to Catherine of Sienna and Birgitta of Sweden. Birgitta was influenced by the Beguine mystics, Mechtild of Magdebourg as well as by Marguerite Porete as was Julian. They also organised the secret Europe-wide "Friends of God" movement that included as members Meister Eckhart and two other mystics quoted by Julian, Henry Suso and Jan Van Fuusbroec. An unsuccessful "Friends of God" mission was sent to the Pope to plead for peace. This mission also accurately prophesied that the Pope would die the following year. It continued underground throughout the 17th Century and involved the descendants in exile of Thomas More, an executed English Chancellor who also reportedly had a copy of the condemned mystical book of the Maid of Kent.

But the participants in this movement knew their danger. Some of the Friends of God died at the hands of the authorities. Julian under pressure took some of her biblical translations out of the later versions of her work and protested that she never intended to teach theology. If she had been condemned for disobedience to the Church, she could have been hung, drawn and quartered. After Julian's death in 1373 the crack down intensified at the hands of churchmen who feared being challenged by women and by laymen. In 1407 Archbishop Arundel forbade women and laymen from teaching theology, seized vernacular bibles, burnt John Wycliffe's books before St Paul's Cathedral and, in the Arundel Constitution, decreed that a licence from a bishop was needed to quote the bible.

It was a highly dangerous time to write of spiritual experiences not sanctioned by authority. The Holy Maid of Kent, Elizabeth Barton, was executed at Tyburn because she was critical of the monarch in her mystical book, "Revelations". Several people died simply because they owned a copy of her book. St Birgitta of Sweden was also critical of her monarch. She had to go into exile to Italy. These were not inconsequential mystics but women of great influence feared by kings. Their manuscripts were hidden in Antwerp, in Lisbon and in Paris. In Spain the great mystical writer St John of the Cross was also imprisoned by the Inquisition.

Most of the women and some of the men that the Church wanted removed were in great danger of being labelled 'witches" as well as 'heretics". Under the heading of "witches" went the village wisewoman, healers, herbalists and spiritual guides and many others named in hysterical or malevolent accusations. The efficacy of their work was ascribed to the imagined supernatural opponent of the Church, the Devil, -as was said of the work of the condemned Beguines. It was rumoured that the witches were part of a pan-European heretical cult.

So the Papacy was in great trouble from the 13th to the 14th Centuries. It believed it had conspiring against it pagans, witches, Beguines, Waldensians, Cathars, male and female mystics and some major theologians - a great league of people who mostly saw nature as sacred rather than as the domain of the devil. These were by no means an alliance of illiterates or of people without political connections. Another mystic, St Teresa of Avila, who worked within the Church and did not think so highly of nature, complained about her own treatment by Church authorities: "it is not right to repel minds that are virtuous and brave even though they be the minds of women" 134

In 1484 Pope Innocent 8th, well known for giving his illegitimate children splendid Vatican weddings, had come to so fear the influence of witches over his sexual progress that he appointed as Inquisitors into witchcraft two German Dominicans, Jakov Sprenger, and Heinrich Kramer. The Pope said their appointment was because of reports that in the dioceses of Cologne, Mainz, Trier and Salzburg many women and some men were engaging in sorcery "to make the conjugal act impossible."

Witches and devils were supposed to have special power over human sexuality because Augustine and other Fathers had taught that this was the most corrupted part of human behaviour. A man sainted by the Catholic church, Bonaventure (d 1274), a famous Franciscan theologian, taught "because the sexual act has been corrupted (though original sin) and has become, so to speak, stinking and because human beings besides are for the most part too lustful, the devil has so much power and authority over them." He justified this by quoting the biblical book Tobit that Jerome had doctored to make it pro celibacy.

Sprenger was deeply devoted to a miraculously pure and powerful woman and mother who was said to have never known carnal pleasure, the Virgin Mother Mary. He founded the Confraternity of the Most Holy Rosary in her honour. He was also highly influenced by an earlier Dominican, St Thomas Aquinas, who had ruled that Satan had particular control over human sexuality because "of the loathsome nature of the act of generation, and because through it original sin is transmitted to all men." (Iq. 3: q. 10)

In the resulting book "Maleus Maleficorum" which meant "Hammer of Evil Doers" (mistranslated popularly as "Hammer of the Witches"), Sprenger and Kramer demanded the death sentence for all witches who caused impotence. Their views on contraception outdid the current anti-abortion extremists in the US who are shooting doctors who do abortions. They taught that wasting human seed by sex outside the vagina (which they called "the ordained vessel") was worthy of a death sentence - as were all acts of contraception. They justified this by quoting particularly St Thomas Aquinas. They also used mock science: 'there was a defect in the formation of the first woman, since she was formed from a bent rib, that is a rib of the breast, which is bent as it were in the contrary direction to a man. And since through this defect she is an imperfect animal, she always deceives.... All witchcraft comes from carnal lust which in women is insatiable" Their book went through 19 editions and was a principle text for the Inquisition.

They based many of their arguments on documents written by the Fathers of the Church in the first centuries of the Christian era.. These documents were so well used that it was as if these Fathers had lived only a few years earlier rather than a thousand years before. The theory that women were allied with Satan and thus could use magic to give cause involuntary erections was now put to use to explain why women had power over the medieval phallus. Yet despite the reliance of the persecutors on the Fathers of the early church, Ronald Hutton, who has written much of value on the pagan history of the British Isle, has surprisingly exonerated the early Church from blame for the witchtrials. He wrote: "Certainly the early Church cannot be held responsible for the mass burnings of heretics which commenced seven centuries after its installation in power or the great witch hunt that commenced eleven centuries later.") - P257 The pagan religions of the British Isles.

Women were said to be practising witchcraft when they "charmed" men " and inclined " the minds of men to inordinate passion" (MM) (Thus if a man raped a woman, she may be to blame because she must have "enchanted" him.) We still use the words the witch-hunters used when we speak of the power of a beautiful woman. A glamorous woman is casting an illusion. A "glamour" was an illusion created by a woman's spell. A beautiful woman is said to "enchant", "charm", "bewitch" us. These words were first used to deny that the beauty of women was naturally attractive to men. They said it was not her beauty that attracted men, but her use of diabolical pagan magic to attract men. Many men loved this theory because it meant they never needed to acknowledge any woman as more talented or spiritually powerful than they. If they did feel a woman was superior, she must be literally bewitching them. (P32)

The authors of Malleus Mallificorum were very grateful they were not women. They thankfully prayed: "Blessed be the Highest who has so far preserved the male sex from so great an evil." Despite this, these authors had no doubt that the magic of women entailed a female talent for using the powers of nature. They agreed that witches could do wondrous things without supernatural help for "the most extraordinary and miraculous events came to pass by the workings of the powers of nature." (P13) and witches cannot operate "except through the medium of the natural powers". (p40) (something I agree with utterly.) Of course they added that women did not naturally have great magical powers. Women, they said, were weak and thus could only do major acts of magic by putting themselves under the command of devils.

A pact with the devil was an essential part of witchcraft in the minds of these Inquisitors. This attitude has modified in more recent Catholic teachings. In 1999 the Catholic Encyclopaedia On-line defined the magic of witchcraft as "the production of effects beyond the natural power of man by agencies other than the Divine." This definition still relies on the existence of a supernatural world separate from nature - a distinction not accepted by most modern "witches' who see magic as entirely based on nature. (I exclude those who practice "high magic" as they normally call themselves magicians, not witches.)

The authors of "Hammer of the Witches" extraordinarily targeted midwives. Kramer and Sprenger declared that: "no one does more harm to the Catholic Church than midwives." A question that excited them was why "the witch-midwives exceed all other witches in deeds of shame" (III q 34) If a baby was still-born or aborted, they said the midwife present could have killed the child to steal its soul. This was based on Augustine's teaching that unbaptised babies belong to the devil. They also suspected midwives because of a ruling of St Thomas Aquinas that it would be a heresy to deny there were witches with power over human conception. They also accused midwives of dedicating children to the devil. These charges lead to the deaths of many midwives by "incineration" - the word used by these authors.

The Inquisition gave the "Medical Doctors" trained by the universities and sanctioned by the Church, the power of life or death over all female healers or midwives. If any woman was accused of 'healing' before a witchcraft tribunal, the presumption was that she had cured through witchcraft. But to be doubly sure, the authors of Malleus Mallificorum said that the question of how the woman had healed the patient should be put to a "Qualified Medical Doctor". If he said she had cured through witchcraft, then she would die. (P41) According to some recent scholarship, up to 20% of those killed as witches were healers.

Sprenger and Kramer had a blind faith in these new male doctors. They recommended them for cures for witch-induced impotency. (P157) "Although some of their remedies seem to be vain and superstitious cantrips and charms [for] everybody must be trusted in his profession." The operative word here is "his". No such trust was extended to female midwives and healers - unless one be a bishop. They noted that one bishop had received a dispensation to go to a witch to have removed from him an illness inflicted by another witch - and that witches offering to do such magic were so common at that time that they could be found "every German mile or two" along the highways. It is likely that other witches survived by offering services against those who did black magic.

Catholic authorities thought that the resistance shown to torture by the women accused of witchcraft was so extraordinary that it must be due to supernatural help from the Devil - or from other witches. (It has been suggested by some witchcraft authorities such as Dorleen Valiente that this help was more likely given by sister herbalists in the forms of painkilling preparations.) The current Catholic Encyclopaedia, in its entry on Witchcraft trials, stated that the most surprising element was that many women who were not tortured still maintained that they were witches even when on the scaffold. This suggested that they were proud of being witches.

The accounts given by suspects in witch trials of witch practices and beliefs are very similar in England and the continent - despite torture not being quite as hideously applied in England as on the continent. Although many were hapless victims, many were also young, strong, good looking and proud - not the hags of popular mythology and far from being the helpless old woman as often depicted Many of the accused apparently spoke in terms that would later become better understood when ethnographers recorded the work and words of shamans living in remote areas of Russia and the frozen north where the older forms of religion still survived. They spoke like these shamans of spirit journeys across lands and into underworlds, of flying, of dancing and of ecstasy. They often were not apologetic - despite their lives being in danger. They instead said they found their spiritual experiences in witchcraft rich and much to be valued.

So it seems that the witchtrials did not only reveal the misogynist hang-ups of men. Nor can all the many statements by those accused about their practice of witchcraft be discarded as the products of wishful thinking - as some historians have suggested who almost seemed to want to explain away this phenomenon. It is more likely that some testimonies reflected a form of spirituality that was perhaps more based on instinctive shamanism and animistic beliefs than on books. Among the Arctic tribes, shamanism was always understood as a talent discovered within oneself and not learnt from any book. Recent studies, such as "Between the Living and the Dead" by Professor Eva Pocs, based on the evidence of several thousand transcripts of witchtrials and accounts of folk traditions in central Europe, found between the 16th and 17th centuries a strong shamanic tradition of witchcraft survived in Europe in which people passed to and from the Otherworld in trance, dreams and visions, foretold the future, rode with the Wild Hunt and communed with the dead.

The influence of the Roma, as many of them call themselves (they often object to the misnomer of gypsy meaning Egyptians) should not be ignored. Despite Church sanctions the Roma talents in divination or spell craft were much in demand. The Romany word for "Wise Woman.". Shuvihani, had much the same meaning as "witch". She knew the rites and rituals for such occasions as weddings and baby blessings as well as of spells and herbs.

Despite this reputation for witchcraft, the killing and enslavement of these people has not generally been counted by historians in assessing the numbers of witch-hunt victims. Thus we have historians state that none there is no evidence that any of those accused were pagans. (ref Hutton) The Roma however were killed explicitly as pagans. "Heidenjachten" (pagan-hunts) were organised against them in Holland and cavalry hunts against them in Saxony. A 1646 Bern city ordinance gave anyone the right to hunt and kill "heiden" (pagans - taken as meaning mostly "Gypsies") and hunting them continued in Denmark until 1835. (Pp197-8 PE). They were also enslaved for over 300 years. In 1370 40 Roma families were given as slaves to the monastery of St Anthony in Voditza. In 1665 they were deported from Edinburgh to be slaves in the West Indies.( Some 250,000 - 300,000 gypsies died because of racial prejudice at Auschwitz during the Second World War. The New York Holocaust Centre estimated that some 500,000 to 1,500,000 Roma died at Nazi hands in what the Roma call "The Devouring".)

In the more northern states of Europe, where Christianity was only established in the Middle Ages, the witch-hunt persecution was often explicitly against paganism. Thus in Iceland the use of runes was condemned as witchcraft in 1639. The surviving Icelandic grimoires or magical books shared mix pagan and Christian names and metaphors. Witchtrials in Finland tended to be against the evil use of magic rather than all magic.

Were the victims of "witch-hunts" in the rest of Europe "pagan"? Ronald Hutton has baldly stated that none have been proved to be pagan - although we have seen that the Roma (gypsies) were condemned explicitly as pagans. If we tested Hutton's statement by examing trial records we run into a major difficulty. This is because we cannot assume that what the Courts then defined as Christian would be so defined today. The "subject" of a Christian monarch then had a duty to obey the established Church and thus be a "Christian". Thus people were accused of being heretics and disloyal to the Crown if they disobeyed the Church. Thus those accused of witchcraft were assumed to be Christian dissidents or heretics rather than pagans. Malleus Maleficorum defined its witches as heretics who were "forsaking the catholic faith". The same assumptions pervaded everyday life

But, when it came to personal practices, people were much more eclectic. From the records they mixed and matched a range of beliefs from both Christian and Pagan sources. Some who called themselves Christian, were perhaps more pagan than Christian by today's definitions. Giordano Bruno, burnt at the stake on February 17th, 1600, had tried to convert the Pope to a religious system based on that of pagan Egypt.. (He was a famed mathematician and astronomer who developed concepts of an infinite universe with many worlds well ahead of such as Galileo. (VC26))

The literate who rebelled against the Medieval Church and State assumption of control over their religious beliefs still expressed their beliefs in the Christian terms to which they were most accustomed. Some said they were part of a better "greater church" as did Porete; that they were honouring a Female Divine Holy Spirit as did the followers of Guglielma; that the inner voice within them was that of Holy Spirit, as did the Cathar women who were among the first targets of the Inquisition. The Church made little difference between them and the less well educated. They were all labelled as heretics, often also as "witches", and they were all sent to the stake, axe or noose. Those labelled as "witches" were often the ill educated but again this is a generalisation. Some "witches" studied their work and the techniques of ectasy as is shown by some of the surviving grimoires or personal magical "recipe-books".

Hans Kung, one of the most authoritative Catholic theologians of the 20th Century, the Director of a major German University faculty at Tubingen, concluded: "it is beyond dispute that there would have been no trials of witches without a popular superstition which had a pagan stamp."; P611, that was "an underground, uncontrollable popular culture" .. and "the background to this is the archaic anxiety about magical knowledge and practice which was so widespread among the people .[plus].. a patriarchal anxiety about solitary women and their often real knowledge of contraception and medicine." (P612-3). Trevor-Roper, an important Catholic historian, concluded "some of the coarser elements were directly derived from German Paganism p146 n7 .The result were, Kung stated, "the greatest mass killings in Europe outside of wartime." 614.

It is possible that some of those accused would have ceased to believe in the God of the Church who condemned them. Some, influenced by the popular dualism of that time, may have named their rival to the Church's God as "the devil". Court officials in any case would have presumed that it was the devil the accused worshipped - especially if they denied Church authority. Some of the accused may have named a different God. Joan d'Arc spoke of the Christian God and the voices that spoke to her under a tree. Her final adherence was to her inner voice.

The Catholic historian Trevor-Roper called the massacres of witches a holocaust - and so it was. The Reformation made it worse. Calvin preached that "the Bible says there are witches and they must be slain" tr130. After the Reformation the Catholics concentrated witchhunts on Protestant areas, the Protestants on Catholic areas. In Denmark saying Catholic prayers was declared an act of witchcraft. The persecution in Germany greatly accelerated after the publication of Malleus Maleficarum. By 1630, according to the Jesuit Friedrich von Spee who bravely met many of the accused: "in Germany especially the smoke from the stake is everywhere." (F von Spee Cautio Criminalis - Legal Objections to the Witchtrials 1631.) Trevor-Roper wrote that after 1630 "lawyers, judges, clergy themselves, join old women at the stake. Terror haunted the countryside and towns in France, Germany, Switzerland, England, Scotland. Calm periods in any locality could suddenly be broken by a spate of killings as the persecution died down or flared up with all the frightening irregularities of a bush fire.

It is now nearly impossible to total just how many were arrested, terrorised, tortured and killed, nor to total the seared memories of relatives and friends nor to number those who were terrified and traumatised, or those who had to live with the fear imbrued over generations of executions that they too would be accused and killed. In some villages practically every woman was killed. Enormous numbers must have been traumatised. As for the numbers killed, recent estimates from conservative academic sources give tentative figures ranging from near to 100,000 up to 160,000 to 240,000 - the 160,00 figure is from Cornell University's witchcraft studies centre. Vivienne Crowley estimated 130,000 to 200,000. Reliance on these figures alone to assess the damage done would be to ignore the trauma suffered by the many more that were accused, exiled, jailed and tortured. These experiences must be deeply seared on the collective memory of this continent - and especially on that of Europe's women.

I have not verified these figures but the following are from figures given in some of the many papers on the witch-trials. Numerous individuals were killed from the 1100s in England and other countries. In 1430 over 200 were burnt in the Valais and some 167 in l'Isere- as well as Joan d'Arc in 1431. In 1437 150 were killed in Briancon. (CE) Ten years later Margery Jordemaine was burnt in London at Smithfield - one of the few burnt in England where the noose was the preferred way. She burnt because she was accused of using witchcraft against the King. In 1524 over one thousand were reported in an old account as burnt in Como alone. In Germany in 1589, 133 were burnt on one day in Quedlinburg and in that same year 48 were also burnt in Wurttenburg. Between 1590 and 1600 ten were burnt every day in Brunswick. In 1598 24 were burnt in Aberdeen. In 1603 205 were burnt at the Abbey of Fulda in Germany. In 1645 20 died in Norfolk. In 1647 witch killings started in what is now the United States. In 1658 18 were burnt on Castle Hill in Edinburgh . In 1659 the Bishop of Galloway allowed a women from Irongrey to be put into a tarred barrel which was set on fire and then thrown into a Scottish river. One of the last of the mass burnings of witches occurred in Bradenburg in 1786 (Hans Kung). Isolated killings in Europe continued after this at the hands of mobs. Thus died Alice Russell in Great Paxton in 1808.

Women comprised about 75 - 80% of those who died in this holocaust of people accused of using pagan magic. Reportedly some villages lost most of their female inhabitants. Thousands of killings may not have been reported. Some were killed for "heresy" rather than for witchcraft. Very inadequate or no records were kept of the numbers subjected to horrific torture yet not killed, of those imprisoned - and of the great numbers of their traumatised families and friends. We have only to think of the trauma that would be suffered in any village today if just one of its inhabitants were tortured, burnt or hung, to gain an idea what it must have been like for hundreds of years. No one has assembled all accounts. Few historians have seriously considered the impact on European culture and on the psyche of women of this half a millennia long persecution.

Some recent historians have tried to minimalise the impact of these centuries - by not giving any real weight to the traumas inflicted, portraying those women affected as passive victims, ignoring non-judicial accounts, blindly accepting church or state distinctions over who was killed as a witch or as a heretic and only counting the former, and by merely arguing about the number killed - and even by indignantly asking why the fuss when so many more men were killed in wars. (Ref RH) Nor have the churches ever apologised for their role in inciting and managing these massacres. The writings of the "Angelic Doctor, St Thomas Aquinas, whose work helped create the "intellectual" justification for these massacres is still being used in the training of Catholic priests.

Behind all these persecutions were the effort of the Churches to monopolise spiritual authority as well as male sexual anxieties and insecurities. It was aggravated when and where the Churches felt most insecure during the period of the Reformation. Although more died by sentences passed by state or community courts than by ecclesiastical courts, it was the church's acquisition of an official "established" status that lay behind the civil terror and it was the preaching of the Churches that incited the civil slaughter and lynching. (With the exception of the Basque region of Spain - where one Inquisitor stood out against the persecution of witches). Politics shaped the witchtrials - thus under Elizabeth 1st, the more Catholic regions of Essex and Lancashire became prime targets. But in general men had created a myth to explain away their neurosis or lack of sexual power and, rather than sort out their own hang-ups, had blamed, tortured and killed women in the name of religion and of all that is holy.

Did the women and men susceptible to accusation of witchcraft in the Middle Ages try to prevent this fate by organising themselves? It was alleged at the time that some witches did do so. Some killed as witches in England were accused of plotting to overthrow the monarch. Montague Summers in his 1928 Foreword to his English translation of Malleus Mallificorum stated that Bodin , an infamous Protestant Lawyer and French Assembly member , claimed that the witches "were, in fact, the active members of a vast revolutionary body, a conspiracy against civilisation."

This is no doubt a paranoid overstatement - but it is hard to imagine that women and men who knew they were likely to be targeted by witch hunts did not have taken steps to protect themselves. The suspects included independently minded women and men engaged in healing or midwifery, in magic or experimenting, who must have been very aware of their danger. Those accused were by no means all illiterate. Many were upper class with connections and political influence. Some indeed were condemned for challenging the men who held authority. Many would have escaped and needed sheltering. Since the persecution was Europe wide, so could have been their self-support and resistance network.

The Beguine movement of independent women showed that many women had a considerable degree of international organisational ability - a fact that did not escape the Churchmen's attention. It may not have been entirely a co-incidence that it was at this time the Church began to persecute numbers of women as heretics or witches. During the Renaissance period, while many female witches were being burnt or hung, many men organised themselves into secret societies to minimalise their danger while still working magic, casting circles and invoking spirits. There is evidence that women were also members of some of these societies - but their names are rarely found. Perhaps they were perceived as being in more danger than the men so in more need of protection by having their names concealed? But their lack of prominence could simply have been a product of the chauvinism of the times.

The male members of these societies wrote books on magic and few were killed. They organised themselves protection by securing powerful friends in the palaces and among the nobility. Their societies were evidently inspired by the early pagan gnostic literature, including the Corpus Hermeticum, or Works of Hermes, which were purchased in 1450 and then translated by the powerful nobleman Cosimo de'Medici. Some tried to contact angels or aspects of deity in order to work magic. This became known as High Ceremonial Magic. Elements from the Jewish Qabbalah also were introduced by such as Pico della Mirandola.

The well connected German Cornellius Agrippa in 1531 published his De Occulta Philosophia which taught that magic was based on natural psychic gifts and not on demons. His drawings showed a magical circle protected by pentagrams at the quarters. His book "On the Nobility and Superiority of Women" argued for gender equality and for the ordination of women. He said women should be venerated by men for reflecting for them the beauty of God and that menstrual blood had a unique ability to rejuvenate and bestow wisdom. For his pains he was eventually banned from Germany - but he escaped the stake that was the fate of others with vastly less magical knowledge.

The society known as the Family of Love had over a thousand members in 1580. Many influential people joined these societies. Some groups mixed magic with aspects of Christianity and of ancient paganism. This movement had great influence in the Knights Tempars, as well as on the new societies of the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons and the Illuminati. A member of this movement, John Dee, a famous mathemtician said to have completed the first translation of Euclid, alchemist and for a period imprisoned as a magician, was an advisor to Queen Elizabeth, adviser her on the most auspicious date for her coronation and her secret envoy to European courts. The French Court was experimenting with the Eleusinian Mysteries. Some groups created Grimores, or magical reference works, or treasured much older similar books such as the two Keys of Solomon which later were to inspire Gerald Gardner, a founder with Dorleen Valiente of modern Wicca

There was never a time when it was not more obvious that magic and science were not opposed than the Renaissence. Such men as Isaac Newton were noted scientists, members of magical societies and deeply interested in alchemy. Today, in our post-Rationalist world, we still suffer from a presumption that came with the rationalist ideology. This is the ultimately unscientific belief that because we do not yet know how something works, it cannot exist. Yet there are many that will testify to phenomena that are yet not understood by science. For example, one day, when I was walking along a wild part of the Welsh coastline, the thought suddenly came to me that a certain friend was about to phone me. I switched on my mobile phone and then thought "It will ring within 20 seconds". I laughed at my own presumption - and it rang. In Bristol my friend had just come home, thought he must phone me, and phoned me. It was the first time he had tried to phone me that day and my phone had been switched off until that time. Such events are now a frequent part of my life - the more so since I started to listen more to instincts. I see magic not as irrational but as seeking to utilise and discover the limits of the human powers to detect and influence events around us. This includes by using mental means as well as by working with our links to the natural world around us - including to the creating Force or Persons. For me there should be no conflict between magic and science. Both work experimentally. Both are techniques for working with and understanding the same natural world

The alchemists were also of great influence in this period and drew on an ancient tradition common to Egypt, India and China. The poem called the "Hermaphrodite Child of Sun and Moon" spoke of alchemy as a process whereby opposites were joined together, including male and female, in order to achieve "gold" or spiritual perfection. They believed that spiritual processes were reflected in nature - and thus they thought it legitimate to mix chemistry and mysticism. The following is an extract from this poem.

The Jewish mystical practice of the Qabbalah was reinterpreted in the light of alchemism. The spheres through which divine energy descended to the earth and returned were supported on two sides by the pillars of Severity and Mercy. Between them was the column that balanced these energies - that of Harmony or Beauty crowned with the highest of all spheres, that of Kether, the first emanation from the godhead. These two pillars became emblems of Freemasonry under the names of Jachin and Boaz. They were said to be the two pillars in front of Solomon's Temple. These two signified in their union in the temple, the unity required for contemplation.

Lord Admiral Charles Howard was among the many influential Grand Masters of Freemasonry at the time when Francis Thynne, 1543-1608, the Lancaster Herald and a student of Druidry and Egyptian magic, wrote of the Quabalah as "the most profound knowledge" and John Dee as "the learned Quabalist". The Society of the Rosie Cross (the Rosicrucians) may have influenced Shakespeare's work. His play "Midsummer's Nights Dream" started where a Rosicrucian play "The two Kinsmen" finished.

A French historian, President de Thon, recorded in 1598 a confession about the secret societies reportedly given without torture by Beumont, a man already sentenced for magical practices: "He held commerce with aerial and heavenly spirits" and confessed that "schools and professions of this noble art had been frequent in all parts of the world and still were in Spain, Toledo, Cardona, Grenada and other places; that they had also been very celebrated in Germany but here for the most part failed since Luther had sowed the seeds of his heresy.... that in France and England it was still secretly preserved as it were by tradition in the families of certain gentlemen so only the initiated were admitted into the sacred rites." He also mentioned that John Dee and others in England had at Hallow E'en 1590; "entered the circle for necromantic spells". (Ref. Ron Heiser. The Impact of Freemasonry on Elizabethan literature.)

Women were discriminated against in some of these orders. Freemasonry at first admitted a few women, but from early in the 18th century excluded them. The Rosicrucians were more balanced but when I read the documents produced by the men of the Renaissance revival, it was evident that many were dominated by male interests and approaches. I found them mostly heavy, full of hierarchical ranks and to excessively exalt reason over emotion. Much of their work had nothing of the sparkle and taunts of the Beguine women mystics although sometimes there were lovely gems. It would not be until the late 19th century that women started to take their place in new magical orders that catered for both genders such as the OTO, Golden Dawn and Wicca in the 20th Century.

But this exclusion of women did not apply to witchcraft or its equivalent. A scattering of a few traditionalist family groups are said in pagan circles to have survived that preferred other descriptions than witchcraft for their spiritual work such as "just doing what comes natural" or the "Old Religion' or the 'Old Way'". They might have the local vicar at their occasional gatherings. Some traditional witches, such as Pickingill in Essex, were said to have contacts with Master Masons. (Rh292) During the 18th and 19th centuries in England, there is evidence that there were many thousand Cunning Men and some Women working magically as healers and diviners. (Ref RH) As I have mentioned, some of these accused others, mostly women, of working evil magic, calling them "witches". P102 This reminded me of what has recently happened in Australia where Christian missionaries called women who do magic "witches", defining a "witch" as a person who does evil magic. Some Aboriginal men took advantage of this to disparage the magic of the women - while men were also secretly engaged in magical practices.

Many of these people simply saw themselves as the 'guardians" of the sacred places of the countryside. Many could have been illiterate - such as the gypsies - but the few of whom there are records seemed to be constantly seeking out the few books that recorded magical or herbal knowledge.

The mystic marriage tradition continued within the Christian Churches - particularly in the religious orders and in certain Protestant groups such as the Quakers. Catholic women who wished to pursue a "marriage with Divinity" continued to be encouraged to become Nuns or "Brides of Christ" and to enclose themselves in institutions under Church supervision. St. Therese of Liseaux was one such mystic ( my parents had a statue of her in our family home).. In the 20th Century it would again surface in a strong and vigorous form in the writings of such as Thomas Merton, Teilhard de Chardin and Mathew Fox. Merton was to discover the Taoist wisdom, Fox the Gnostic. However such mystics had little impact on the institutions of the larger Churches. Some instead formed small mystical groups or organisations outside mainstream church structures in which the ancient gnostic forms of Christianity were revived.

When legal discrimination ended and feminist understandings became more acceptable, it became possible for Gerald Gardner, Dorleen Valiente and others to weave together more openly aspects of the knowledge passed on through the male dominated secret orders, as well as through Golden Dawn and OTO, Rosicrucianism or Freemasonry (by then a secular body in the UK with generally no ostensible Christian belief apart from a basic avowal of God) . When they joined to this their knowledge of the Middle Eastern initiatory mystery religions, and whatever aspects of the traditional craft they could discover, we had the birth in the second half of the twentieth century of what now is known as Wicca or as the modern witchcraft.

It was only then that women really started once to come into their own again in magical circles as scores of new groups took on these same ideas, all inspired by a new fusion of energy that came from joining what had been separate and secretive traditions but which all ultimately derived from the ancient European inheritance. The women who joined tended to be well educated, often self educated, and independent minded. The prominent role in women in this movement was reinforced by the woman's movement and strengthened by classical studies of the role played by priestesses in Greece and Egypt, Charles Leyland's late nineteenth century reports, such as "Aradia", reported on the prominent role of Goddesses and women in the surviving Italian strega or witchcraft.

The "ritual craft" of what was effectively a revived religion of magic drew heavily from what they knew from the Renaissance's grimoires, from the Gnostics, classical studies, the Rosicrucians, alchemists and Co-masonry while it's "spell craft" grew with inputs from grimoires, traditional and gypsy sources. Much was owed to the work of Dorleen Valiente, the part-Romany Raymond Buckland and others of a similar ilk. The 'reclaiming" nature of this movement, was symbolised by the adherents taking on the titles of priest or priestess as well as that of witch.

Although in recent decades, the situation of "witches" has been transformed in Western Countries, they are still being killed in Africa and other parts of the world. Thus a Syrian died in 1998 in Saudi Arabia, condemned as a witch. Many black women still die every year in South Africa accused of being witches... The list below shows the killings have not stopped. It documents the killings of African witches for about 14 months of 1997 and 1998 using reports from news agency and newspapers. The list was put together by (name to come).

March 20, 1997 - Meningitis kills 542 in Ghana, witch hunts launched. A

mob killed three middle-aged women in the village of Yoggu, accusing

them of spreading the disease through witchcraft. Reuters

April 1997 - Swami pastor and wife hacked to death by members of rival

church. The victims were accused of killing the rival church's choir

master with witchcraft. Independent Newspapers

May 13, 1997 - A cat was beaten and kicked to death at FNB stadium

during a competition because the cat's presence was considered a bad

omen and a symbol of witchcraft. Independent Newspapers

September 1, 1997 - A family of four was killed while sleeping with

AK-47 assault rifles, south of Durban. The victims were killed because

the wife had been accused of using witchcraft. Independent Newspapers

October 27, 1997 - Ghana's human rights Organisation called for a halt

to the dehumanising treatment of women accused of witchcraft. Women in

the Northern, Upper East and Upper West regions accused of witchcraft

are being lynched or banished to "witch camps". There are four such

camps located at Gambaga, Kukuo, Kpatinga and Nagani. There are 123

women at the Gambaga camp, 450 at Kukuo, 42 at Kpatinga and 193 at

Nagani plus 13 men accused of being wizards. The ages of the "inmates"

are between 35 - 90 years old. Africa News Service

January 8, 1998 - In Durban, Northern Zululand, five people were burned

to death accused of witchcraft. Two women and three men were the victims

and evidence suggests that a considerable amount of people carried-out

the attack. Independent Newspapers

January 13, 1998 - A 79-year old farmer in the Volta region of Ghana is

asking for compensation (equal to $23,000) from the chief and elders of

his village for banishing him on accusations of witchcraft. The human

rights commission is pursuing the matter, they have sent a letter of

inquiry to the chief, and have received no response as of yet. Africa

News Service

January 27, 1998 - In Northern Ghana, masked vigilantes clubbed and

stoned two women aged 55 & 60 to death for allegedly practising

witchcraft. Reuters

January 28, 1998 - Police shelter "witch" and her two children after her

village accused her of witchcraft in Hlogotlou in the Northern Province.

Independent Newspapers

February 16, 1998 - In Tanzania's Mwanza and Shinyanga regions, an

alarming number of elderly women are being killed for witchcraft. Major

General James Lubanga, the Mwanza regional commissioner said that the

problem of witchcraft is common and behind every misfortune they believe

somebody is involved. Africa News Service

March 6, 1998 - A human skull and a puffadder (snake) was found on a

principal's desk in the Dete district. A witch doctor claimed that these

were acts of witchcraft designed to kill the school headmaster.

Independent Newspapers

April 3, 1998 - A security guard was shot by a 50-year old man outside

an office block on Pritchard Street, central Johannesburg. The killer

believed that the guard used witchcraft on his daughter. Independent

Newspapers

May 7, 1998 - A man who murdered his aunt is jailed for 11 years in

Umtata. Hloniphile Mdludlu, 52, told Eastern Cape Judge Cecil Somyalo

that after his uncle died he consulted a sangoma (witch finder) in

Gauteng who told him that his aunt, Nodimile Mdludlu, 70 was bewitching

members of his family. Independent Newspapers

May 16, 1998 - Last year, police in the Northern Province investigated

over 150 murders of suspected witches. The problem has become so serious

that a village has been set aside by the police as a "witch sanctuary".

The village is named Helena and is about 60 kilometres from Pietersburg.

Independent Newspapers

END