probably not where I'm going with this

While the neopagan divorce survey is not yet closed, I have been editing it so I can pull the data for this final draft of my book.  While I’ve made a concerted effort to ensure that each section was clear about the data requested, I’ve found some … interesting…interpretations of the requested data.

I have a whole new respect for survey writers. I’m often frustrated by leading questions and the  limited answers I find. In the case of Fox News Polls, where questions posed are along the lines of “How much does Obama suck?” for the most part, survey writers really mean to be objective. No matter how well you write it, or how thorough you try to be, you find you miss a question and you can never prepare for the subjective way people interpret your questions. Also, no survey writer in the world can prepare for Pagans, who, despite their own best intentions, behave like squirrels.

To prepare for this, I did draw on my college training on survey writing. I spent extra time trying to avoid leading questions, even though it’s technically impossible: as the author of the survey, I am part of a specific culture and part of a specific subculture. This colors my perspective no matter what I do. I can’t just not be an American-born white citizen with complicated cultural background.

…and my specific subculture doesn’t really restrict people on measuring time.

When asked for lengths of time on marriages on this survey, I’ve gotten some… interesting answers. Answers that force me to spend extra time editing to make sure the data tabulates right. Answers that make me pause and say, “Huh, this person is right. How do I go about counting that/measuring that time?”

For the sake of clearing confusion as much as it can be cleared, here’s what I’m laying down so we have the structure necessary to start a dialogue about Wicca/neopagans¹  and divorce:

1. A handfasting counts as a marriage. The presence or absence of paperwork does not determine the seriousness of a marriage.
2. Living together before marriage is one I’m on the fence about; right now I’m inclined to not count cohabitation because getting married/marriage ceremonies means there is a conscious, alchemical change to the relationship on a level that can only be determined after that change has been made. It has been indicated that the real alchemical change happens from 6 months to two years into the marriage: the “honeymoon is over” time is the time when “married” affects the persona and the interrelationships of those paired. Most survey respondents also indicated that they consider cohabitation different.
3. If someone was married “1.5 years” for the sake of consolidation, I’m counting it as “1 year.” If you don’t reach anniversary markers, I guess it falls back to the previous year, assuming those remaining months were taken up with the business of divorce.

I’m also taken aback by the vast majority of respondents who waited “no time” to start dating/start new relationships again. Even when I remove people who went through extended periods of separation and polyamory most people went straight from one serious relationship to another. For reasons I intend to explore further here and on the book, I strongly believe that this may also contribute to a high divorce rate. While I am not opposed to divorce, I do advocate making healthy relationship decisions, and those that have had successful second marriages (or third) have spent time alone between relationships.

neither advocating nor criticizing

I also realized I did not ask the following questions. Granted, few probably want to answer them, and I may even ask about this stuff on camera for the brave and willing.

• How did you ask for your divorce/how were you asked for your divorce?
• What magical actions did you take to deal with the grief moments?
• Did you consider the end of the relationship the actual divorce, or from the moment of agreeing to divorce?
• Were there any attempts at reconciliation?  Did you consider this beneficial?

Yes, these questions are grating, hard, jarring – and necessary. Even though the divorced themselves often display visible discomfort with the book, most comment to me with “Wow, that’s really needed!”

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1. I make this distinction because of course, my writing will be colored by the Wiccan perspective

When a thought form erupts/comes into being without guiding intent, it’s usually the result of collective belief. Most of the time, someone directs that belief somehow. The person or persons directing may or may not be what we would see as magicians, but since they direct the energy produced by attention and stimulated belief, they end up serving the same purpose.

My favorite example of this is the powerful collective belief in Jesus Christ, i.e. Jesus of Nazareth. While minimal evidence supports the existence of such a person (and what there is is circumstantial at best) from the perspective of a practicing occultist, it doesn’t matter a whit whether there was a Jesus of fact because there is a Jesus of fact. After centuries of collective belief, entire civilizations that have based their cultures around the idea of a man who died on a cross for sins and a litany of creative energy poured into expressions of and inspirations by the Christ story, it is, in the magical world, only natural for this Jesus Christ to show up whether on the road to Galilee or in a grilled cheese sandwich.¹

Other entities that have emerged from shared thought forms could include Santa Claus (though with muddled power thanks to cultural concept mixing), Lady Liberty or, less popularly, Squat².

In reading Marriage Shock: the Transformation of Women into Wives, I found that Dalma Hayn sussed out a shadow entity. Taking the forms and expressions of Donna Read and Lucille Ball, this entity is known as the Wife, and she does indeed haunt most married women. Powered by Victorian ideals of a wife sacrificing her personhood wholly upon the altar of marriage and fed into by layers of ideas about women needing to be perfect at all times, she haunts married women, especially newly married women. She’s what prompts us to stop going dancing, to try to impress mother-in-laws we don’t give a flying fuck about and to, above all get serious.   She carries with her a serene, Stepford smile and a deafening inner scream that married women – and the newly engaged – can hear. She’s all about the “you’re a WIFE now,” and with that conferred social status a suppression of our sexuality, our personality and our sense of FUN. She’s what transformed my former friend Julia into a vapid moron who could only discuss chandeliers and floor plans. She’s the reason Beth became convinced that divorced women were ALL suspicious, especially me. She’s what prompts women who had great relationships with their boyfriends to hide their vibrators and suddenly use sex for negotiation with their husbands – even though their husbands were the boyfriends that enjoyed them as was.

WIFE is the Queen Bee of Queen Bees. She’s a nasty piece of work. She got her teeth into Hera, even before the Victorians began telling women to sell their souls for an undefined place in heaven (that Revelations states not a one will get anyway.)  She’s the core voice that makes us call women who enjoy themselves sluts, who makes us when we marry become moralist busybodies and is, from Hayn’s perspective, one of the very reasons the odds against marriage are so terrible. The women whose marriages last? They married for fun. Everybody else is do dominated by WIFE that their lives suck from the inside out, because they’re so determined to project the Happiness Lie to the rest of the world.

I seriously doubt Hayn would consider Wife from a literal perspective; Hayn writes her as an archetype that has lived in the minds of every woman in the west. Even Emily Dickinson (never married) and Virginia Woolf  knew her faux-angelic shadow and fake smile. She produces inauthenticity, limits creativity and makes marriage a terrible place for women.

It tempts me to create a ritual to banish the wife. She’s certainly gotten her teeth in my shoulder more than once.

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• The first draft is done!

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Marriage Shock : The Transformation Of Women Into Wives (Hardcover) By (author) Dalma Heyn List Price: $2.99 USD New From: $8.00 In Stock Used from: $5.92 In Stock Release date May 11, 1999.

1. I have had a long, loving and deeply personal relationship with this entity.  It is ultimately out of love and friendship for this particular Christ that I can not, under any circumstances, ever again identify as a Christian.  I am grateful for this unusual gift: freedom from the first thing in our culture that is used to make women and men miserable (in that order) by the very source/excuse for it.
2. the lady of parking

It’s covered, if not thoroughly, and there are even Christian-oriented spirituality books that include ceremonies to acknowledge divorce.  It’s been years since my own divorce – many years. The person I was no longer exists, and the person I am has a completely different set of marital challenges and fears to deal with, although that person retains a burning hatred for the identity of “wife.”¹

So why am I doing it?

Because it still needs to be done. I don’t think I can cure divorce. Really, the only way to reduce the divorce rate is to stop people from getting married. So far the U.S. is doing this by going to great pains to stop only same-sex couples from getting married, which is pretty much a red-herring issue. It also doesn’t work.

I also don’t think a high divorce rate is necessarily a bad thing. More people developing the sense to get away from each other because they’re bad for each other is a good thing. If they have the sense to do it before they have children, so much the better. If they have the sense to do it before they commit to each other for life, on paper,  in health insurance, bank account and mortgage, even better. Pre-marital sex has done us a boatload of favors in freeing us from commitments we should never make. If we can get romantic pairings on a cooperative instead of competitive page, both marriage and not getting married have much better chances of working out well.  The old Judeo-Christian model never did work for everyone, and while it’s fabulous when it does work, insisting everyone conform to it isn’t about what’s good for the world, it’s just about a small group with too much power winning.

I’m sure I’m not the only person who sees the whole Western marriage situation this way, and who still ended up pressured into a partnership that went against instincts. As much as I like to think of myself as strong, independent, even exceptional, even I can’t stand up to a cultural siege alone, and at the time of my first marriage, I was very much alone in that respect. Also, I live in a part of the country where a strong woman is viewed as a bitch that must be suppressed immediately, and this decision to actively suppress has no bearing on her actual actions. So what I got was a lot of “That’s who you’re marrying? He’s so normal!” This also meant that I did not get the support I very much needed when the somatic cues triggered by a marriage ceremony changed the nature of our relationship and my ex-husband allowed the whole truth about himself to be revealed, leaving me with both the burden of an unsupportive family pressuring me to conform to/repeat their life patterns and an in-law family that was mostly focused on what a bitch they thought I was. When I divorced at age 26, I also dealt with a lot of people who wanted to treat what I went through as a mere breakup.

No matter how young you are or how short the marriage, a divorce is not just a breakup. I went through a ceremony for my marriage, those somatic cues got triggered, our relationship changed and there was no going back or just forgetting as one might with a boyfriend or longtime lover. Also, since I was young and Wiccan, my own religious community took a dismissive attitude toward me.²  While it’s changing, there’s a school of thought that you’re not a real person/your experience is not actually valid until you’re 40 – even though teenagers “need special attention.” So anyone between 18 and 39 can get treated somewhat dismissively, or worse, with suspicion, by the very elders that worry about the future of this religious group. It meant that I had no tools, when I went to local events with older people/people in my experience range I did face a risk of exploitation, and when I dealt with people my age and younger they just didn’t get it, not having gone through such drastic changes themselves yet.

I’d like to say the predictable “I’m writing this for people in my situation.” It’s altruistic. It’s virtuous. Hell, it borders on saintly.

Saints tend to start off as martyrs, and martyr looks like puke green on me.

I’m writing about divorce for myself. While I’ve cut almost all of my personal anecdotes from the book I intend to publish, I did need to write those passages to make sense of what happened to me and to understand that while I am responsible for all my decisions, I am human, and as surrounded by influences that shove women towards altars and on into closed-door relationships whether they belong there or not. I’m writing this because my most profound, life-changing, personality-improving relationships have been with men – as have all my most heartbreaking, finding the worst in myself relationships. I’m writing this because there are a lot of women at war with me, my non-participation not being relevant to them, and because there are women  who have been my friend and cheered for me for years despite my not giving even a third of that goodwill back.

I am writing this book as an act of self-expression. I am also writing it because somehow, it tends to fall to me to say what a lot of people are thinking but are afraid to say.  I’m writing it because it lends a symmetry to that part of my life: when I first started as a writer, how I got blocked as a witch, and how that chapter closed – by closing this book on it.  By calling on the experiences of others, as well, I hope to point out both the extreme diversity of experience and how, despite our best efforts, even us scattershot Pagans end up having a lot in common.

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See larger image Third Degree Burn (Paperback) By (author) Lorna Tedder List Price: $14.95 USD New From: $14.95 In Stock Used from: $86.42 In Stock

1. This is not something I will discuss further. Most questions about it fall into a “justify yourself to me” vein that I find distasteful.
2. Not everyone. There are ALWAYS people who also treated me as who I was, rather than what my age was or is.

Because you followed your heart and spirit.

Conversion and divorce are of course both far more complicated than the above sentence implies. There’s no way to generalize, really, ever – but you need at least a few top category labels just to have the conversation.

Why aren’t we talking about this divorce from society in the Pagan conversion experience? I don’t really care for the “there is no conversion.” This is true in sexual orientation. We may be born with certain religious proclivities, but these are not biological. This need to blend the de-politicization of gender and sexuality with religion within Paganism is understandable, but also is not applicable.  If you don’t want labels on your gender or spirituality, great, but at least in spirituality, I need them and others like me need them because it helps with the acculturation process that always happens when you convert from a dominant religion to a minority faith.

Or, as it was put to me during an intercultural communication class my senior year of college: “Culture is oxygen. No one can live without that context.” Even forming an opposition to dominant culture is allowing ourselves to be informed by it. Taking a rebel stance to dominant culture means that dominant culture is what dominates us.

In Wicca, it seems my continuous practice is a combination of loosening the holds of dominant culture – “Jesus is real” while picking and choosing what parts of dominant culture I continue to participate in – mostly, capitalism. There’s also an element of picking and choosing within Wicca, an abhorrent idea to those who believe that a faith is only sincerely practiced when taken wholesale. “I might not like the commands of Kemet,” one practitioner once said to me, “But devout faith isn’t supposed to be easy.”

No, perhaps not. My faith isn’t easy, ever.  But I think it should come from a natural place within me, where my values do not conflict with some outward religious standard of what is “right.”

This conflict of self with religion does resemble the conflict of self with an unsuitable partner. I lived with a lot of disappointment – marriage is not supposed to be easy is the message received. Yet marriage is important. Marriage makes you an adult. Marriage helps you grow up.

This is bullshit.

There is no single path to adulthood, self-acceptance or the divine.

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1. it’s included in the language of the survey itself
2. and it’s more important that those who go in front of a camera sign a release.

While it’s all implied I realized that neopagans especially get kind of fuzzy and weird about anything involving publishing. It’s a combination of a widespread misunderstanding of an already incomprehensible business with a unique cultural blip – we are among the last groups to place importance/fame on book authors over television and movie entertainers.

Any data released from the survey will not be accompanied by identifying data unless the survey participant explicitly allows it. I also intend to release a portion of the data in strictly numeric forms in order to add to demographic data – ages of divorce, number of marriages, etc. Since we have little in the way of demographic data as to exact numbers of neopagans in the world (or just in the USA) the information likely won’t reveal much in terms of the overall population. It might, however, show some commonalities in experience among neopagans that go through a divorce.

So to self-styled curmudgeons “nit picking” a process that they have no intention of contributing to: knock it off. You’re not contributing anything useful by blocking something that might be useful. If it turns out that what I write isn’t, that failure is on me, not you. Preventing people who might be helped through an act of participation from participating by drumming up fear is on you – and it’s a sign you suck.

I realize that credibility is a requirement among neopagans; unfortunately, there’s often a failure to distinguish between establishing that I’m trustworthy and overcoming a chip on someone else’s shoulder. Ultimately, I’ve got nothing to prove but something to share. If you want to partake, great, but perhaps instead of blocking my project you might use your protective energy in  a situation that perhaps obviously needs protection.

If that doesn’t work for you, then at least go fear change somewhere away from my yard.

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I’m also starting the Right to Write for my artist’s way blog. We’ll see how I feel after I’m done with that. Right now my plan is to do that, and then actually re-do the Artist’s Way so it’s actually on THAT blog.  Once I’ve finished all of Cameron’s works, I may just cede the blog to my cofounder Xiane, or start in on the creativity books. Undecided.

So, first: my essay on Wiccan divorce and handparting is up on The Witch’s Voice. Please give it a read, add it to your Facebook or LJ pages, share it on forums or wherever you like. The survey date on the page is wrong (Witches Voice is understaffed and overloaded, so it’s unlikely I can get a correction in, but I’ll check.) The survey for Wiccans and fellow neopagans who experienced divorce at any point in there lives will run until December 31st, or indefinitely.

I also got word that a poem I submitted for a Pan anthology was accepted. While not likely the stuff of big sales, it’s nice that I’m in, and encourages me to participate in any other anthologies that might cross my path. Right now it’s been a matter of getting multiple projects up and running on their own.

I do have a book proposal ready to read for Divorcing a Real Witch, although I’m concerned that the initial three chapters fall a bit short of the 50 page requirement. Now I just need to start getting out there.

If you want to ask me questions about this book, or any other aspect of my career, I do have a Facebook group page and I invite you to come and respectfully engage there or here.

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As for the book – you know, that book – I’m on the third round of revising the book proposal and into the second draft of the book itself. After I enter changes, I plan to send a copy of the proposal and sample chapters to Lisa and get her feedback. I’m a little concerned, since according to AbsoluteWrite forums agents typically ask for the first fifty pages, and at this point my first two chapters come to roughly 30 pages, give or take some citations. I’m not really sure what I want to do here; wait until I polish chapter 3, or take the risk of getting bounced but know I turned in polished material? I guess I can see what any agent I approach says, and do my best to study up.

In the meantime, I did purchase a copy of Elements of Style. I can hope two or three readings brings up my grammar score at the content mill. Copyeditors’ distaste for my grammar wounds me, especially since I read a lot of grammatically correct writing that still sucks.

I realize I still have miles to go, and I only work on this book in small chunks – four or five pages a day. I plan to intensify that, and to really amp up some blog writing for Fat Chic, too, since these are the big items on my plate right now. Also, if you’re interested, I’m blowing off steam making incense paper bats. The little guys are kind of cool.

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1. If you are neopagan/Wiccan or any other type of non-traditional spiritual type who has experienced divorce, you get a safe place to talk about your experience. I’m not sharing the information that makes you identifiable, and using the explicit identifying material such as your name only if you give me explicit permission to do so. Incidents shared will be given pseudonyms. Also, I’m surprised at the popularity of throwing angry cats.

2. If you are neopagan/Wiccan who has NOT experienced divorce, you get two benefits long-term from helping this book come about:
1)If you go through a divorce, it will help to know what other people have done. It reminds you you are NOT alone. It also gives you a place to work from if the stress shuts off the creative part of your brain that designs ritual. 2)If you are a clergyperson, it’s a specific guidebook on the topic. It won’t make you accredited as a counselor or anything, but it gives you a platform to work from, especially if you do get that counseling accreditation from someplace like Cherry Hill Seminary.

So, how can you help? In a way that takes very little effort, where you need not leave the computer. You just need to direct people to http://survey.dianarajchel.com. If you have the ShareThis plug-in you can send it to multiple spaces at once. Or you can click thumbs up on StumbleUpon. Otherwise, you can just cut and paste that link – drop it in your Facebook and Twitter, send out a message to your pals still on Myspace, comment on the Reddit Link to it, add it to your delicious.com bookmarks, digg it – just the clickity you’d do without really moving anyway.
Just a little bit of help from all of you goes a long, long way.

Great, so how’s the book coming?
Along.

After evaluating where I’m at with the rough draft of the entire book (sitting at around 65K right now) and with the book proposal (in the third draft on the opening chapters right now) I’ve decided it’s OK to slow down, as long as I keep working at it daily.¹

I’m finding I’m excising all the stuff about my personal history. I’ll work it back in later, or maybe use that stuff to write a memoir down the road. With Mercury Retrograde starting August 20, and with planetary conjunctions making waves right now, I’m thinking this is a good time to lean back and really analyze my work, get feedback, do yet more revision. (Remember: Mercury Retrograde is a RE opportunity. Revise, reconsider, remember, relax.)

I’m also trying to work up a little something for Witch’s Voice that will hopefully bring the survey to the attention of people who want to participate, and I did exchange emails with the Minnesota Pagan Newswire Collective. At some point we plan to do a special interest story – and at some point, I plan on bringing all those journalism skills I developed in college to them.

That’s where I’m at – still working on that book!

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1. Well, more or less daily. I’m also engaging in a gym exercise schedule because I have to face the fact that I need to look a bit more conventionally attractive if I want any of my creative work to get the chance it deserves. For me this in itself is a long, long road and is not actually about weight, though it is about health. But not because I believe overweight is unhealthy, counter to “common knowledge” thought that is. Read Fat Chic, you’ll get it.

I am looking for

• Neopagans who have experienced divorce
• Those who have been divorced for one year or more (it takes about that long for all the consequences to come to bear)

• You need not identify yourself fully – pseudonyms are allowed
• You can skip questions that are not relevant to you or are too upsetting for you to answer, or complete a survey page and simply leave it

You can go to the survey at survey.dianarajchel.com.

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