If you want to skip ahead to my interview with Daphna, jump to timestamp 50:00. Risa and I keep lists and lists of Witchcrafters we want to do episodes about, and then we kind of wait to see who calls to us to share their stories NOW. And sometimes it’s not the Witches calling, but the TIMES that cry out for reminders of what we’ve forgotten and what we need to know, or be reminded of. Now. SEVERAL of the people I know are dreaming of intentional communities, hippie communes with a feminist twist. So if that’s your dream, I hope you’re listening. Now. Because in 1970, Ruth met Jean at a quaker gathering for single parents. Together they would found WomanSpirit Magazine, and a commune they called Rootworks. In issue number 3 they wrote: OUR VISION OF WOMANSPIRIT "Our vision of WomanSpirit is of an experiment in using a magazine to share experiences of individual women in ways that are similar to a conscious-ness-raising group. Consciousness-raising is the feminist way of sharing problem-solving on personal and political levels at the same time. Inclusive, intimate, rational and emotional: the culture-making tool of transforming through acceptance, support and understanding--an experience of equals. [...THIS] may help us glimpse our part in the herstorical times we are a part of. They may show us what directions we can choose to move. To "raise" our "consciousness" here means to illumine our former confusion, to heal our wounds, to end our isolation - to bring acceptance and insight into all of our experiences: the crazy, wild, terror ones, the weird places and the hopeless ones, as well as the ecstatic and serene ones. [...] We feel this is a time for searching and sharing, for something is stirring the inner space of women. We do not know, cannot guess, what direction it will take." And one of the most beautiful things about their periodical is the number of voices that join together to weave this resource. Carol Gage wrote: “One of the things that struck me as most radical about WomanSpirit was how class-homogenous it was in terms of the contributors. Working-class and academic authors were published side-by-side, voices unedited, because the magazine had a commitment to egalitarianism.” So I decided to make this episode in the image of WomanSpirit Magazine. You’ll hear my voice, and voices from the coven reading from and talking about WSM, plus an interview with Daphna Romanoff, the creator of the Witchcraft and Pagan Periodicals Archive Project. www.missingwitches.com/ep-311-mw-wf-daphna-romanoff-and-the-mountaingroves/
www.missingwitches.com/ep-311-mw-wf-daphna-romanoff-and-the-mountaingroves/
Amy: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Missing Witches podcast. This one is special. Rissa and I keep lists and lists of witchcraft-ers we want to do episodes about, and then we kind of wait to see who calls to us to share their stories now. And sometimes it's not the witches calling, but the times that cry out for reminders of what we've forgotten or what we need to know or be reminded of now.
Several people I know are dreaming of intentional communities, hippie communes with a feminist twist. So if that's your dream, I hope you're listening now. Because in 1970, Ruth met Jean at a Quaker gathering for single parents. Together, they would found WomanSpirit Magazine and a commune they called Root Works.
In issue number three, they wrote, “Our Vision of WomanSpirit.” Quote, "Our vision of WomanSpirit is an experiment in using a magazine to share experiences of individual women in ways that are similar to a consciousness-raising group. Consciousness-raising is the feminist way of sharing problem-solving on personal and political levels at the same time.
Inclusive, intimate, rational, and emotional. The culture-making tool of transforming through acceptance, support, and understanding. An experience of equals." This may help us glimpse our part in the her-storical times we are a part of. They may show us what directions we can choose to move. To raise our consciousness here means to illuminate our former confusion, heal our wounds to end our isolation, to bring acceptance and insight into all of our experiences; the crazy, wild, terror ones, the weird places, and the hopeless ones, as well as the ecstatic and serene ones.
We feel this is a time for searching and sharing, for something is stirring the inner space of women. We do not know, cannot guess, what direction it will take." End quote. And one of the most beautiful things about their WomanSpirit periodical is the number of voices that join together to weave this resource.
Carol Gage wrote, quote, "One of the things that struck me as most radical about WomanSpirit was how class homogenous it was in terms of the contributors. Working class and academic authors were published side by side, voices unedited, because the magazine had a commitment to egalitarianism." End quote. So I decided to make this episode in the image of WomanSpirit Magazine.
You'll hear my voice, and voices from the coven, plus an interview with Daphna Romanov, the creator of the Witchcraft and Pagan Periodicals Archive Project. Lots to do, so let's get to it.
Intro: You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch.
Be a witch. Be a witch. Be a witch. Be a witch. Be a witch.
You must be a witch
Amy: I wrote a bit about WSM when we launched the Missing Witches web zine, so let's start there. I wrote, "The zining of life, WomanSpirit magazine, a 1970s self-published zine produced by a lesbian collective in a barn on a feminist commune." When Risa and I began this Missing Witches project, we awakened a hunger within ourselves to seek and find the witches that were missing from our educations, missing from our societies, missing from our lives.
Monica Showe led us to Great Cosmic Mother, which led us to Barbara Moore, which led us to discover a little-known self-published zine produced by a lesbian collective in a barn on a feminist commune near Wolf Creek, Oregon, WomanSpirit magazine. I began a near mad search for physical copies. Thankfully, nowadays the contents can be seen digitized online, and found myself in an email conversation with one A.O.
Black, who instructed me to print the order form and mail it with a check enclosed. And I kind of loved this. When something precious requires just a little more effort, when things get a little bit old school. I dutifully did as I was told, rooted around in the back of a drawer for my checkbook, covered in the dust of its own obsolescence.
Arriving at my community mailbox, I slipped my money magic into the slot and listened as the envelope rode the chute down into the dark unknown to mix with greeting cards and past due notices. I checked my bank balance daily, hoping to see that the check had been cashed. Time passed. Hope wavered. Then, a light in the mailbox, a perfect packet of WomanSpirit magazines, glorious, brimming with knowledge and imagination.
I sent an email. The check still hadn't been cashed, and I wanted to make sure there wasn't a problem. A.O. Black replied that she had just wanted to be certain they arrived before I paid. And that is the spirit of the universe of WomanSpirit magazine: to care, to be in community, to be in this together. An update to this zine post is that you can now purchase original copies online.
No checks required, but they are almost all sold out. So if you're a collector of physical objects of vintage feminist spirituality, I put the link in the show notes. But what made Ruth and Jean want to start a new world for women? The first issue opened with, quote, "Why Woman Spirit? This is a crucial time for women.
We have begun to understand and work through much of our oppression. We have made radical changes in our lives, and we are becoming aware of the immensity of these changes. We are also seeing the directions our new ways of living are taking us. When we realize the political implications of all our struggles, we know that patriarchy cannot withstand our changes.
Something is going to happen. We are feeling stirrings inside us that tell us what we are making is nothing less than a new culture. What women are doing by exploring the spiritual sides of their lives is essentially for the building of a new women's culture. We must decide what we will take with us on this creative journey.
What parts of our experiences are valuable and needed for our continued struggle? What behavior, thought patterns, values, images, illusions, and artifacts of the non-feminist culture will we choose to leave behind? As we continue to tear down the institutions and relationships that oppress us, we are also building, making, creating.
Because this process of taking and leaving, making, and new culture is so deep, profound, and all-inclusive, we are calling it spiritual. The sharing and comparing in that process is the reason for this magazine." End quote. During the 1960s, Ruth Mountaingrove became aware of her feminism and her lesbianism, and in 1970, she met her future partner, Jean.
After a lengthy custody battle over her children, Ruth and several other women caravaned across the US to Southern Oregon. Ruth and Jean took the last name of Mountaingrove together after the intentional community, Mountain Grove, where they had lived for several years after moving to Oregon. After Jean guest edited a wildly successful special spirituality issue of the magazine Country Women, the experience inspired the couple to create a publication devoted entirely to women's spiritual lives.
Building on their experience with Country Women, Ruth and Jean envisioned a publication that would do more than document women's lives. It would help create new ones. Nothing less than a new culture. The Mountaingroves subsequently moved to Golden, a gay commune where they began publishing Woman Spirit, their magazine about feminism and spirituality.
In 1978, Ruth and Jean purchased their own land near Wolf Creek, Oregon, and called it Rootworks. But
Let's revisit the why now question, and fast-forward to 2026 with some major trigger warnings. Trigger Chi Phi actives. Skip ahead if you don't wanna hear this part. And I won't rehash the details, but it's important to underscore here that none of the 57 boys in that group chat did anything to try to stop or even report the assaults on Jane Doe.
Her 120-page statement to campus police was reduced to six pages before being given to the district attorney. The DA decided not to press charges for the gang rape, noting a loophole in New York state law that, when broken down, effectively states that if a person willingly consumes drugs or alcohol, that must mean that they consent to being sexually assaulted.
YouTuber Cody Dollar reminds us, quote, "It's almost as if having a convicted sexual abuser as president is empowering sexual abusers everywhere." End quote. But rape culture goes much deeper than the White House. Cody compiled some terrifying statistics. Only 7% of men attending US universities live in frats, yet a North American Interfraternity Conference claims that while less than 2% of America's population is involved in fraternities, 80% of Fortune 500 executives, 76% of US senators and congressmen, 85% of Supreme Court justices, and all but two presidents since 1825 have been fraternity men.
According to a 2007 study, men who join fraternities are more than three times more likely to commit sexual assault in their first year at university than those who don't join frats. So With the Senate, Congress, Supreme Court, and White House being filled with frat boys, is it any surprise that we find ourselves contending with laws steeped in misogyny, normalized in fraternity settings, and loopholes that make raping a woman who had a couple drinks legal?
Statistically, it seems these lawmakers are the rapists, the cultural engineers of our time, and what we need is a new culture. Y'all know I'm no gender essentialist. I believe that gender is a construct, one that must be deconstructed. But the Cornell 57 remind us that this culture, the one we live in now, was constructed piece by piece by architects of sexism, greed, and entitlement with bricks of power, mortar of capital, wired through with electric cruelty.
So when I look to Ruth and Jean Mountngrove, no part of me wonders what they were thinking. Ruth said, quote, we wanted a cultural revolution, end quote. And sometimes, dear coven, a cultural revolution requires that we build a whole new world from the ground up.
Melissa: Psychic self-defense, the power of free women, an incident at the festival.
The second day of the Womanspirit Festival, there was a workshop on spirituality and politics. We talked about many things, but we kept coming back to the necessity of developing our spiritual awareness together with our political awareness. We don't wanna fall into the old patriarchal polarization of our inner selves from our outer selves, of developing our individual power at the expense of our collective power, or of thinking that sensitivity and receptivity do not let effective action happen.
Spirituality is all-inclusive for us, and so is spiritual power. We were not at the gathering just to entertain ourselves, although we did do that, or to develop our own feelings of oneness with the universe. We want to find out more about our own individual power and learn from other women different ways of developing it.
We wanna use it in a spiritual context to learn how we unknowingly hurt each other with our power. We wanna learn how to control it. We wanna see what happens when we feel our power together and gradually work out ways to affect the rest of the world with it. We know, however, that we have to have a very solid base before we can challenge established power.
"Thank goodness we haven't taken on the patriarchy," one woman said. "We're not ready for it." We also know that we learn as we grow and feel and test our power in each new situation. As the days of the festival went by, we were continually creating a space in which we could trust and support one another. We found that when we feel secure, freely loved just for being there, that we could give and receive even more support and response.
We can only watch to see what grows out of such a situation because we have not experienced it before. What unfolds is our truest selves, individually and collectively, and the real power of free women.
So the 200 of us spent days singing, laughing, dancing, doing rituals, both spontaneous and planned, swimming, eating and sleeping in clans, hearing poetry, discussing and experiencing our psychic powers, healing powers, primal therapy, masturbation, co-counseling, dream work, psychic and physical self-defense, the tarot, and on and on.
In the process, we were learning about our powers and about our love and our anger and how best to use them. As we released long-pent-up energy and dreams, we discovered how much was there, and so our woman energy ebbed and flowed and constantly grew, each discovery and dance building upon the next. The structure was loose but integrated so that we were each part of one or more small groups and part of the festival as a whole.
We felt close to and learned from and grew with the women in our clans, women we met in workshops, and those we met swimming in the creek. We could hear what was going on in groups that we were not in, and we could sense the energy growing in each woman and in the whole group
On the last night, as the full moon was rising, women came to the campfire ring in the middle of the meadow. Wood was gathered, fire built, drumming began. The women of the dance workshop began to dance, their naked bodies gleaming in the moonlight, huddled together on the ground as in an egg in the womb.
Slowly, ever so slowly, life stirring, unfolding, raising up, being born. Layers of women standing around them, watching, chanting, experiencing birth. The dancers raised one woman in birth, and others reached to the watchers to draw them in. Two trucks driving on the road. Is this real? Ignore it. It will go away.
Headlights piercing the soft moonlight, engines roaring, drunken men shouts. Women's heads turn. It's a sudden blow in the stomach. Who are they? What do they want? What will they do? What will we do?
A month before the summer solstice celebration, men had harassed the women, and the women harassed back. The men later came back and fired guns. Some of the women had panicked and were afraid to stay on the land. Fear ripples through the crowd. A fifteen-year-old yells, "We don't have to be afraid of them."
The women move closer to the dancers. One truck drives down the bank into the meadow and almost turns over doing it. It stalled. It stopped. Let's walk quietly to the other meadow, a plan some had suggested beforehand in case of trouble. Why are we running away? Okay, we don't retreat. The other truck comes into the meadow, coming towards our circle.
A cone of white light. Women surrounded the circle, the campsites, with white light. Women chanted low and quiet, gradually building an energy. Women stayed in the circle. The drummers kept drumming. Don't give them any energy. Women softly chanting, "Go away, go away." Women visualizing the truck keeping going, not stopping, going out.
A giant hand pushing the truck down the road
And the truck drove on past us and out, never stopping. The other truck finally got started and roared away. One of the men fell out, ran after the truck shouting, "Don't leave me. Don't leave me." Frightened by the sight of the group of women banded together, the men were gone. A woman screamed out her anger, the anger of all of us, "I want to kill them.
I want to kill them," sobbed, raged, pounded on the ground. She was the channel for everyone's anger. Women surrounded her, touched her, embraced her. A circle of women formed around them, chanting, offering their healing energy. A circle of women around the fire chanting. The chant of one group rising as the other group's chant fell.
The chants of both groups rising together. And we continued under the full moon. We joined hands and felt the energy we generated pass around the circle. We breathed into our hands and passed our hands over the woman next to us to clear our energy and heal one another. We made affirmations to the full moon, stating how our lives would be from then on.
We drank the life force of the place, tea of all the herbs that grow there, brewed all day in the sun. We read poems, sang, chanted, drummed, and danced, raising power with our emotional energy on and on into the night. Women celebrating our moon power on our night
Throughout the festival, we had been exploring our psychic power, exploring our group power and unity. Then came this moment when it was on the line when we were challenged to use our power for our defense and to test our unity. A time of stress, a time of test, and we met the challenge. The men drove away without hassling us.
Our power comes from our spiritual unity. All of us felt fear, but we stayed together and kept our energy focused together. We have all witnessed and experienced random male violence so many times before. No one knew what to do, but together we did the best we could. We begin to recognize the situation and the phenomena.
As an independent woman becoming stronger, freer, and happier, the more threatening we become. The way men hold power over us is through making us afraid of them. If we do not fear them, they lose their power over us. Our biggest danger is our own fear of them. To have expressed our fear would have attracted similar thought forms and would have brought to us that which we feared.
To concentrate on the reality of our strength, to focus our energies through chanting and breathing together pushes away the fearful thoughts. One woman saw the dogs running wild, reflecting fear, so she gathered them together and chanted to them to calm them. To play their violent games is to support the violent patriarchy.
And so we continue to learn to develop ourselves and our power. Our awareness of our power is new. We believe in it, yet it is so new that while we know it can work, we have to find out exactly how. And we can trust ourselves in all situations. It is in our memory. We know what to do
Amy: Here's a piece from Rural Revolutions, a master's thesis written on the Mountain Groves. Quote, "Gene Mountain Grove said, 'We just tried to come across as kind of boring, nice people. I think it was a few years later that one of the neighbors down the road asked if Ruth and I were sisters because we have the same last name.
I said, "Yes."'" And thought, well, aren't we all sisters? Rather than wait for rumors or assumptions to develop around them, Jean and Ruth Mountain Grove intentionally set out to impress upon their neighbors the idea that they were boring, nice people to protect them from harassment and prevent any interest in developing relations beyond that of friendly neighbors.
By making it clear that they neither drank nor smoked, they set up a situation in which their neighbors would avoid inviting them to social occasions that would inevitably involve drinking and smoking. They also tried to connect with each of them using their commonalities, such as having and raising children, which may have also led their neighbors to assume them to be heterosexuals.
This memory also reveals the continuation of the maintenance of safe space through misleading information. After having lived there for a number of years, Jean points out that when asked a direct question about her and Ruth's relationship, she carefully avoided giving an answer that might lead to a potentially dangerous situation.
Simultaneous to this strategy of diversion and misinformation, Jean reconstructed the meaning of sister, taking the established definition of a blood relationship and transforming it into one of gender and choice. Given her Quaker background, it makes perfect sense that she would choose to obfuscate rather than lie outright, a strategy that has historically been referred to as passing."
And Jean was right to do so. A little rant here, I was always fed the line that communes of the 60s and 70s died out when the hippies all came to their senses, cut their hair, and moved to Wall Street. The true story is that many communes were bulldozed by the government because of new zoning laws that prevented them from existing.
In The Modern Utopian, Richard Fairfield wrote, quote, "To the best of my knowledge, the first open land commune was Gorda Mountain on the Big Sur coast of California. In 1962, Amelia Newell decided to make her land there available to anyone who wished to come and live on it. As the U.S. hippie movement grew, so also did the population of Gorda.
At the peak of 1967 summer, there were over 200 young hippies living on Amelia's land. Local residents became quite hostile about this influx of strange, long-haired, dirty, drug-crazed deviants, to use some of the phrases most favored by the press in describing hippies." One local gas station owner took to wearing a revolver and refusing to service cars and trucks from the Newell community.
Other local businessmen placed signs in their windows, Positively no service to hippies, except the use of the public telephone, on these premises. The health department was the willing tool of the county politicians who decided that Gorda Mountain was a menace to their political positions, given the opposition of older residents and businessmen.
The politicians therefore determined that Gorda Mountain should be closed down, an objective in which local vigilantes aided the county authorities. End quote. In the same book, Timothy Miller wrote, quote, "Once upon a time, zoning was unheard of in the United States, and by the time the 1960s era communes erupted, it was still unusual in many rural parts of the United States.
A lack of zoning laws meant that people could do pretty much anything with the land the owner wanted to and could let any number of people live there. Gradually, however, zoning has become stricter, in some cases because upstanding local citizens were horrified at the counterculture invasion they experienced.
Zoning laws not only limit land uses, but are often coupled with building codes ensuring that simple structures cannot legally be constructed and often specify occupancy limits, often as few as three or four unrelated persons in a given building or on a given piece of land. That kind of restriction inhibits communal living severely.
And more than a few of the continuing communes keep very low profiles, since publicity might disclose their noncompliance with zoning laws." End quote. So if you're one of those witches dreaming of a commune of your own, be sure to investigate the local laws that might prevent you from living in peace.
Woman Spirit was created with a vision for a magazine that was, quote, "International and radical feminist." Ruth said, "We wanted a cultural revolution, a total reordering of institutions and values. It was to be a modest magazine with grand goals." End quote. The magazine came out four times a year, on the spring and fall equinoxes, and summer and winter solstices.
Over its 40-issue, 10-year course from 1974 to 1984, Woman Spirit Magazine became a physical and spiritual home and platform for feminist magic, stories, songs, essays, poems, letters, drawing, justice and ideas, a new culture. And their work continues to inspire. Jenna Danchuk is the newest member of the MW staff, having taken on the role of coven steward.
She's working on her PhD, and it was in this research that Jenna first discovered the mountain groves.
Jenna: If you want to learn about how feminists and lesbians engaged with culture and spirituality across the '70s and '80s, Woman Spirit is a great place to start. Um, I think it's also just a cool model for making together.
Um, the writers come from all sorts of different backgrounds, all sorts of different levels of experience. They're identified by their names, their locations, and their age. There's a really intentional part of it about bringing s- people together and making and creating. I first encountered Woman Spirit Magazine when I was starting my PhD research.
Um, and I was reading books like Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler. Uh, it came out in 1979, and, um, she interviewed Jean and Ruth for that book, so there's little bits and pieces of them across it. Um, and in chapter eight of that book, she explores women, feminism, and the craft, and she talks about things like witch, Dianic Wicca, um, and the Zeput- Budapest lineage, and my favorite, the many print book zines and other periodicals that documented this movement and, uh, kept people connected, and is a record of what happened as it emerged.
Um, and in that book she talks about the New Woman's Survival Catalog by Susan Rennie and Kristin Grimstad, which is another cool, like, source book periodical from that time. She talks about Woman Spirit, and also a bunch of other really cool literary magazines like Dykes and Gorgons, Hera, um, Wicce and Sinister Wisdom, a lesbian journal that's still in publication.
Um, and then when I went to go access Woman's Spirit, I had to go to the library, which, you know, privilege and a pleasure. Um, and my university has a small women's studies library with a few copies, so I started there. And then, um, Toronto's The ArQuives with a Q, used to be called the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, they also have a few copies.
Um, but around 2015, 2016, I took a trip to visit a friend in Chicago, and I went to Northwestern University, and I accessed the full run there, and also the final index, uh, that was published for the series, which came out in, I think, uh, 1988. So there's like a midpoint index somewhere in the series run, but they also put up this more official thing at the end.
Um, and then in fall 2017, when I started my research officially, uh, in fall 2017, I did fieldwork in California and Oregon, and I got to go to a bunch of really cool archives that held witchy and lesbian and feminist materials. Um, and one of the places I went was to, uh, to- Gosh, I'm blanking on the name.
Oregon. Eugene, Oregon. There we go. Not Portland, Eugene, Oregon. Small, little friendly, very lesbian, uh, populated town. Um, and I had the privilege of accessing Ruth's personal papers when I was there, um, and that was really cool, just to look through all the different, you know, things that she kept in her own papers, all the different journals.
Um, and if you're curious about that collection, a lot of her photos have been digitized and are online, um, and they capture, like, her life, life in the back to the land movement, lots of naked people. Um, and there's also some really cool video diaries that Ruth did. Um, and she's older in these, and they're also digitized.
Um, so very cool source. I haven't watched through all of them, but they're quite trippy. When I encountered Ruth's papers, you know, I thought I would find something specifically there that was for my project, but it's so much more than just a story of witchcraft in the women's movement. Um, too big for just my project.
Um, but, uh, one issue of Womanspirit did become really key in my research. So in 1976, um, Womanspirit collaborated with Pomegranate Productions, um, who were later known as Persephone Press, um, and they made a special edissue- special edition issue of Womanspirit, uh, that documents a conference that happened in Boston in 1976.
It's called, uh, Through the Looking Glass: A Gynogenetic Experience. And together, Jean and Ruth, with, um, Persephone, or Pomegranate at the time, put together this issue documenting the conference. I believe they all got together in Boston and produced it there. And that source has been just a story of that conference for me, and all the different ideas that came out of it, and also about their collaboration with other lesbian feminist organizations.
So they're their own publishing group. Ruth and Jean were - also had their publishing and print called New Woman Press, alongside Womanspirit. And they were collaborating with Pomegranate, other, uh, lesbian feminist cultural producers. If you look into Ruth's photos, you'll also see images of Diana Press, which were another lesbian feminist, uh, pr- pr- print press.
So yeah, just a really rich community of people working together. Um, so feminist spirituality was dismissed as kind of apolitical and cultural and escapist by some political feminists during the '70s and '80s. Um, you know, they're going back to the land, they're getting out of the city, they're running away from real politics.
Uh, but scholars such as Julie Enzer, who's the editor of lesbian periodical Sinister Wisdom, um, and also a historian of lesbian feminism, argues that by the late 1970s, quote, "The rage and outrage which sustained the US women's movement had begun to wane," as, quote, "This type of energy is difficult to sustain," and as shift in available energy was- available energy was addressed by new models of engagement beyond consciousness-raising and direct political action, including feminist spirituality and cultural production.
Um, I've seen Womyn's Spirit called a consciousness-raising exercise in a magazine, which I think is so interesting. There's this idea that, that back to the land or lesbian feminist or women's culture is really rooted in this idea of essentialism, and in some ways it was. Um, but it was also so much about redefining and remaking through culture, um, and building their own spaces.
Um, one of my favorite stories about, uh, I think it's called Rootworks was the name of the lesbian land that Ruth and Jean lived on in that community, um, was their barn, Natalie Barney, um, who's named after the lesbian poet Natalie Barney and Renee Vivien, famous lesbian couple. Um, and that barn was built by them, you know, has this kind of separatist idea of like, "No man's hands shall touch this, this wood and this project."
Um, but I think the really interesting thing beyond the gender is just like, "We can learn to do this. We can teach ourselves." Um, and then by the end they have this like mystical being that is Natalie Barney the barn. Um, so yeah, for me it's, it goes beyond the gender thing to within and beyond, I guess, um, to a bigger idea of redefining culture and making it in all sorts of different ways, whether it's building, putting out a magazine or a zine, um, creating new rituals and ways of being together.
Um, one of the other really cool projects that came out of Rootworks was the Ocular workshops, um, which were a photography workshop that happened every summer in that area. They were led by Jean and Ruth and T. Corrine, um, well-known feminist erotic photographer. Um- And yeah, that was, you know, ovular instead of seminar, um, is the idea there, and they were getting together to make new images of, of women, right?
And I think it goes beyond Beyond the body, beyond essentialism, about being together and what we can make of it. Woman Spirit was so much about this community of back to the land, but they also distributed it across North America, took contributions from around the world. Um, and so it was a mix of this, like, intentional utopic community and their connections to the wider world.
So a poem that stuck out to me, I think I have a picture of it somewhere in one of my files, um, is, like, an ode to Betty Crocker. Um, and that, I was like, "Oh, this is so interesting." Um, and it really kinda has a little bit of that, you know, uh, Betty Friedan, uh, feminine mystique housewife vibe. Um, but then also in the pages of Woman Spirit you find things like women doing peyote, um, and, like, learning those practices in the Southwest, and that being a big part of the circling culture that happened on the back to the land.
So just this kind of, like, stretch of all these different ways it touched people.
Amy: In Drawing Down the Moon, Jean Mountain Grove told Margot Adler, quote, "Feminism tells us to trust ourselves. So feminists began experiencing something. We began to believe that, yes indeed, we were discriminated against on the job.
We began to see that motherhood was not all it was advertised to be. We began to trust our own feelings. We began to believe in our orgasms. These were the first things. Now, we are beginning to have spiritual experiences, and for the first time in thousands of years, we trust it. We say, 'Oh, this is an experience of mine,' and feminism tells me there must be something to this because it's all right to trust myself.
So women began to trust what they were experiencing. For example, a woman has a dream about stones, and she goes to the library to see what there is about stones. Then she finds Stonehenge. Then she gets interested in the Druids and discovers that people do ceremonies, and that this is often called witchcraft.
Then this woman becomes interested in witches and goes to them to find out what's going on. I think that's how connections are made." End quote. And at the risk of making this about us, it feels like Jean Mountain Grove could have been writing about the Missing Witches coven. Here's Heather reading from volume one, number four, Summer Solstice 1975.
Heather: Transformation by Ruth Mountain Grove. A few months ago, when I blithely agreed to write an article on transformation, I didn't realize that I was into the beginning of one. The beginning when energy is turned inward, when there seems to be no energy for the outside, for writing, planning, organizing. So here I am, bogged down, introverted, and not able to do.
How am I gonna write this? Perhaps the best way is to be where I am. I certainly feel it. It's not abstract. My sisters in the collective have helped me by accepting where I am and making my state conscious to me. I didn't realize that that's what I was going through until they pointed it out to me. I just knew I had been putting a lot of effort into something that wasn't happening.
So the question was, what was to be born? Later in the evening, images of the I Ching began to come up in my mind, not just once, but three, and then four times. So I felt this time was the time I consult the oracle. I needed to learn something, and the I Ching was one of the tools I use. I threw the coins and got hexagram twenty with six in the third place as a changing line, the hexagram then changing to fifty-three.
Twenty is contemplation, view. Fifty-three, development, gradual progress. The image of twenty is a tower on a mountain with a broad view, but it also means being seen. Fifty-three contained the image of a tree on a mountain with its roots penetrating the soil, rooted and tranquil. As I wrote down the I Ching portions that held meaning for me, it occurred to me that this is the knowledge I need to be a wise woman.
Not that I am wise, but that this is how to become wise. That to be wise requires inner concentration, contemplation, and gentleness that is adaptable, but at the same time penetrating. The I Ching tells me that the process of becoming wise is gradual and requires perseverance, since without perseverance, gradual progress can dwindle to nothing.
Transformation is change into something totally new. Batter is changed into a cake through the application of heat. We understand this process from our experience in the kitchen where many transformations take place. In our psyche, the heat is the raising of consciousness to a level where we understand what is happening to us.
Some of that heat is transformed into light, the light of new knowing. One of the characteristics of transformation is that we do not know where we are going or how it's gonna happen, and we have to look for clues. One of the places I look for clues is in my dreams. Looking back in my journal, I see that on February thirteenth, I had a dream I recorded because I thought it was relevant to my future psychic development.
This is a portion of that dream. I find myself in a store with a modern skyscraper shell, but inside it's an old store with the same layout as before. It is night, dim illumination. I want to buy a long battery, gold-colored, for a penlight flashlight. I am not sure if I have enough money. They are sixty cents apiece.
I look in my gold and red change purse and find I have enough silver, quarters, nickels, dimes to buy two batteries. A woman says that these are selenium batteries worth nine hundred dollars. I say, "Thanks a lot," in a sarcastic way.
She didn't need to say that. I feel she has put me in jeopardy in some way. The man selling the batteries is concerned for me. It is night, and I want to go outside. I say, "Look, I'm twenty-four." He seems to think I'm seventeen. I'm responsible and old enough, but that woman hasn't helped with her comment. I have written down in my journal what happened the day before.
I walked out of a woman spirit layout meeting because I was angry, and I felt a few hours later that my walking out was irresponsible. I walked up to the cabin, built a fire, cooked some rice, and just enjoyed being alone Although I noticed I kept looking out the window from time to time for my partner.
A new development has been happening between us. She is much less dependent on me, which has temporarily disoriented me, but freed my energy at the same time. Associations. The gold batteries have a silhouette of the fiber pens I use. Dim illumination is not very conscious. Old layout may have to do with old pattern or reaction.
Old store may be work I've done with Jungian analysis or Gurdjieff work, or it could be wisdom, old knowledge. Selenium, I found to my surprise when I looked it up in the dictionary, is for Selene, goddess of the moon, from selas, meaning brightness. It is a non-metallic element with shifting and changing forms.
It is used in photoconductive devices, e.g., doors that open as you approach. Nine hundred dollars is approximately the amount one woman gave to each eleven women in our community to, quote, love themselves, unquote. The purse is woman spirit's change purse. The silver, which I usually carry in my jeans pocket, is a symbol of the feminine and the moon because it is silver, too.
Penlight is a source of illumination for me and for others for my writing. Gold is the highest value. Sixty cents is the wholesale price of Country Women magazine. I am a country woman, so I have the energy, enough money for the illumination. An old store in a modern shell is Gurdjieff's teachings adapted from Eastern teachings for the West, and Jung's work extracted from alchemical treatises.
So what this says to me is that I have valuable information to share out of my past, the old store experiences. These are to be shared with women through writing. My woman spirit contains the energy change to accomplish this. The batteries are made of the silver moon goddess illumination, our knowledge as women, even though they appear to be of gold, man's highest value.
Man's information, G. and Jung, perhaps they are both. I don't understand all of this yet. That's why I wrote the dream down and read it over from time to time, looking for further ideas and clues, living with the dream. Another way I have approached transformation is through dance. Nothing fancy, just moving from feelings inside, a dancing out of the old hurt or new ideas.
I have used colored pens, letting my hands move on their own as much as I can. This is good for me since I have no skill as an artist, and this allows unconscious material to surface. Also, I am writing what I call nonsense verse, which when analyzed in the manner of a dream, can make a good deal of sense.
What I have to do is keep my censor from shutting the door on certain ideas or words, and I can do it on this automatic level. The path of our growth is not very apparent either to us or to those around us. That is why it is usually termed a search. It follows inner psychic laws still not too well understood after centuries of experience.
It is hard work trying to understand what our psyche wants for us, but through dreams, daydreams, persistent images, we can find our way. We need to keep journals, write stories, write down our dreams. We need to see, watch what images reoccur for us. It is as though there were two people in us, one conscious and one unconscious.
We need to befriend the unconscious one, nourish her, encourage her, so we can become our own one person, one whole. Hold me in your birth until I am whole. Woman and man, and more and more. A meditation I wrote that I don't understand, but that will be revealed to me when I'm ready to know. Meanwhile, I work in ink, fiber pens, crayon pots, sketchbooks.
I keep my journal. I walk in the woods. I listen
Amy: And now we're moving on to part two of this episode. I mean, I was working on my script that you just heard, um, talking about Women Spirit Ma- Women Spirit Magazine, and the founders, and the lesbian coven that ran Women Spirit Magazine. And then I discovered the work of Daphna Romanoff, who is currently working on a witchcraft and pagan periodicals archive.
And so I knew that I had to get Daphna into this conversation. So welcome, Daphna Romanoff. Hi.
Daphna: Hey. Thank you so much. Thanks for inviting me.
Amy: So before I get into the project, what do you want our listeners to know about you personally?
Daphna: I am someone who is just always looking for cool things. And so I guess that would be the thread of everything in my life.
Like, I'm a librarian. Um, I used to do a lot of astrology, and I taught that, and I'm a hedge witch, and I do a lot of different things, but they all relate in that I'm always kind of seeking the hidden and, like, the things that are harder to find, and sharing that.
Amy: Yes.
Daphna: So that's kind of like just what I've really come to understand about myself.
Amy: And you also started an accompanying podcast. I listened to the first episode, so, um- Yeah ... I was kind of like taking it in, like, okay, okay, okay, because so many of the things you said are exactly the thrust of The Missing Witches project, also the thrust of my life. You describe yourself as a counterculture enthusiast- Mm-hmm
which is literally in my, like, about the author, you know, bios for the books that we've published. I have always been a counterculture enthusiast, and when we started The Missing Witches project, we were saying, you know, we just started looking. Mm-hmm. And you said the same thing. You got this inspiration, and then you just started looking.
Mm-hmm. And the popularity of this project has exploded. I mean, I operate almost entirely within witch circles, and I had, I think, three different people-
Melissa: Wow ...
Amy: send me this project that you're working on. So let's talk about Witchcraft and Pagan Periodicals Archive. We can say WAPA for short now that we've said all-
of those words. Tell our listeners who haven't yet listened to your podcast, don't worry listeners, I will link it in the show notes so you can get the other version of this, but tell me about the genesis of this WAPA project.
Daphna: Thank you. Uh, thanks for letting me know that too, 'cause that's like the most exciting thing for me, is when people just share because they genuinely love it.
Like, that's so cool to hear. So, um, really it's very much just a tale, I guess, of someone who was reading and, you know, I came across these publications over time. Um, you know, if you've read books like Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler, um, you know, and certain other ones, the older ones from like the '70s or '80s or...
Yeah, probably those time periods. Um, you'll come to find that they were talked about. You know, they were mentioned, these newsletters. They weren't really zines. I- that's a term that I just kind of used, um, very loosely, but they're more like newsletters and bulletins, and often they were, um- Just covens, like, communicating with each other in little groups.
Um, their one way of communicating at the time. Um, so I came across them, and they just sounded so cool, you know, especially, like, the unicorn. That was one that, like, really, I was like, "I wanna read that." Like, and I was just like, at a certain per- I don't know what it was, but I was just like, "Well, why don't I just see if I can find them," you know?
Um, and I wasn't finding them so quickly, you know. I actually was very surprised, uh, that there wasn't something like this already in existence, and that it needed more digging than I expected. Uh, I found a couple of avenues, but nothing, like, all in one place, really easy to find, and where you can actually read them.
And I was also looking to see, okay, maybe I can buy some or, you know, acquire them, and that was n- not easy either. You know, they're very rare. So that was it. I just was like, "Okay," like, you know, librarian mode activated. And I realized that this was a s- a real gap What I didn't realize was how many people would be, like, super excited about it.
I just didn't... I don't know why. Like, now I'm like, of course, because they're so cool. But, like, I didn't expect that. Um, and it was just very, um, it was very exciting to see the reaction. Um, but it was really just me simply going out there and mostly finding things on Internet Archive, thankfully. You know, thankfully, th- um, they are present there, for the most part, but also other places, other repositories or even websites.
Um, and that's just how it started. It was just finding things that were really sadly and surprisingly not being accessed due to probably, you know, just, um, w- just a lack of, um, awareness of their existence, I think, part of it. Like, some people just didn't even know that these, these publications were such a thing and that there were so many of them.
Um, but also I think, you know, when it comes to things like Internet Archive, um, they're not well organized, and if you don't know exactly what you're looking for and the title, um, it's not as easy as you might expect it to be to find them. Um, so it just did, it did require a bit more digging and a bit more, um, investigating, which is what I love to do.
So, you know, once I started finding them, I was like, "Oh my God, people need to know that these exist." So...
Amy: It, it was a task that required a librarian, I think.
Daphna: Yeah. Yes.
Amy: Right? '
Daphna: Cause I didn't give up. That was the thing, was like, I kept hitting dead ends. But I think the thing about librarians is that we just won't take no for an a- Like, I, I was like, "No, I am finding these."
And, um- Yeah, that, that's the thing. It's...
Amy: You remind me of, um, I, I interviewed Star Goody. I don't know if you've ever come across her work. She did, um, like a cable access show about- Ooh ... the goddess. And so, and this was, you know, back in the '80s. Um, I, I, I mean, same as you, like w- the Missing Witches project is all about digging and finding these witches that did not appear in our educations.
You know, Risa and I both have post, post-secondary educations, and we found that witches were missing from that.
Daphna: Yeah.
Amy: And so when I spoke to Star Goody, I mean, she was I think 80 by the time we had our conversation. But she told me that she and her friends started, like, a feminist newspaper because one of them had an old printing press.
Right. And it just so happened that one person had the tool, and then all of the other people gathered around this tool to make this thing. And so that reminds me so much of your project. I know that you're currently seeking volunteers, people to help you out with this massive undertaking. Do you wanna make a plea to the, to the- Yeah
Missing Witches coven?
Daphna: 100%. And, um, we, uh, so it's been, the, the other really cool part of this whole experience has been meeting other librarians and other enthusiasts and people who are, like, into all of this. Um, and definitely still looking because, like you said, it's a huge undertaking. There's a lot of material.
And you can go so deep with it, so you know, like we could catalog every single issue if we wanted to. Because right now the way it is is, like, you can find them, let's say, on Internet Archive, right? But there is no way of s- like, searching within, right? So let's say you are looking for a particular- festival or a particular event or person or topic, you would have to read through every single one of those documents to try to find what you're looking for.
So ultimately, the goal is to be able to say, "Okay, well, you'll find that in, in, you know, this issue of The Cat's Meow," the one I'm working on right now, or whatever it may be. So that's a little bit. That just would be, like, a full-time job, right? And I have a full-time job. Um, so- And, and two
Amy: kids- And two kids
and a life.
Daphna: Yes. And like all this other stuff and, um, you know, the kids are just at that age now of, like, their activities, and so most of my time is doing that, and it's like I wish I could spend more time in WAPA. But there are some volunteers who've stepped forward, and we would love to have more. Um, so yeah, if anybody has, like, cataloging experience or even, like, project management I'm realizing.
Um, so anything like that, um, would be l- like, welcome and so appreciated, so definitely feel free to reach out.
Amy: Yeah. And if this is ringing bells for some of our listeners, which I know we have so many librarians, so many witch librarians, project managers, everything that you're looking for, what's the best way to get in touch with you if people wanna volunteer?
Daphna: Um, an email is probably best at marymeade@wi- witchcraftandpaganarchives.org. Which I could also send to you. Um-
Amy: Oh, I've seen it ... it's kind of a
Daphna: long one. It's a long one. Yes, you have it.
Amy: I've been digging and digging. I wanna know, um, you made me think of something from Woman Spirit Magazine, but I'm gonna save that for a second note to self.
But, uh, what's, like, the craziest or most wonderful or most inspiring or most surprising, any word you like, what's, what's, what's something that jumps out at you as especially special that you've found in this curation?
Daphna: I mean, there are specific things, and I would wanna, like, s- be able to say the exact issue and all of that.
But, like, so for example, I mean, to me, the ones, the things that I love the most are, like, these ads for, like, witch businesses that, like, o- one of them was a witch travel agency. And I was just like ... So I, I'll have to find, I always try to, like, keep records as I'm doing the cataloging of, like, okay, here's, I don't know it off the top of my head, but I'll get it to you.
But, um, I just saw that, and I was like, "That was, like, a real thing," you know? Like, what? You know? And it was just an ad, so it, it said something along the lines of, "Book your next vacation with the Witches' Travel Agency." Um, things like that. The personal ads are amazing. Um, but mostly I happen to... 'Cause I'm in marketing myself, and that's what I studied, and so I just appreciate it so much.
And it's just so homemade and, like, just so, like, my co-host, Spike Gayfeather, said it, there was just this, like, innocence that, uh, is just so lovely and endearing and, like, cool because, uh, it was not polished, you know? The wh- on a whole, I would say most of these publications were just doing what they could with what they had, and I love seeing that.
Like, it, it, it really inspires me, and it just also reminds me that, like, we don't have to be perfectly polished, and, like, I don't like that. So it's like, why ... You know, I, I really actually do not like anything in life to be so, um, just kind of, like, neat and polished. I keep saying that word. But, um, yeah, so it, it just, it, it feels, like, so great to be able to explore those and just have fun with it, and they're very quirky.
They're, they're funny, too, you know? And it's, they just had such personality, and it was just so real. Like, they, they would write things just that you could tell were not edited um, for better or for worse, you know? And so it's just, it's, it's really fun
Amy: I agree, and I think that part of the popularity of your project specifically is that people are looking for things.
I'm a woman of a certain age, so I actually remember the days before the internet, but not everyone does. Yeah. Um, you know, if you're- It's- ... if you're 30, you don't really have a frame of reference, you know? And 30 is not a child. Mm-hmm. But I say this because I think that, um, in this day and age, people are looking for that unpolished, unslick, the total absence of AI.
Um, in art history- Mm-hmm ... we would call it naive, which- Yeah ... sounds like an insult, but to me is a compliment. You know, naive art is one of my favorite genres. Mm-hmm. And, and this comes up so much in these because they weren't, they weren't thinking, "I'm gonna get YouTube famous." They weren't thinking, "This is gonna get so many likes on Instagram if I change the color from this to that."
They were just, you know, like Star Goody, like, "We have a printing press. Okay, let's do this."
Daphna: That is- And s- ... such a great point. Yeah.
Amy: Yeah. Yeah. I think that, I think that that really goes a lot to the popularity, like I say, of the project that you're doing, is people wanting to see things that people did without- And this is not to say that people didn't have ulterior motives before the internet.
They surely did. But these zines that you're finding, these newsletters that you're finding, WomanSpirit Magazine very specifically has that homemade, hand-drawn, publishing letters from people who, uh, were just sitting at home literally on their typewriters typing these out. But I wanna return to this thought that I had of, there is one...
I almost said episode. There's one issue of WomanSpirit Magazine where the, the group, um, took on the task of creating an index.
Jenna: Mm-hmm.
Amy: So it was like several years into the project, and then this one issue is, like, half what you would normally find in WomanSpirit Magazine, you know, poetry and essays and photographs and so on.
But f- fully half of it is an index of everything that had been published in WomanSpirit Magazine up to that point, curated and cataloged in the same way that you're dreaming of. Wow.
Daphna: That's awesome.
Amy: So again, like I, I wanna know, where is this project going? Yeah, and I- What is the dream? What's the fantasy for- Uh-huh
WAPA? So,
Daphna: yes. So I wanna just share one cool thing. It's like a synchronicity, because when I first started, um, looking into all of this, my, my dear friend Chelsea Donahoe, um, she sent me a bunch of WomanSpirit Magazines. So I have them, and I'm, I'm happy to send you... I know you're missing a few, so I'm... I'd like to pay it forward.
So if I have any that you are lacking, I will gladly send those to you. We
Amy: would have to take a look. Yeah. Sorry. I think, yeah. Uh, 'cause you know it kills me that I don't have all 40, but I think- Mm-hmm ... I only have 17 maybe. Okay. But it's a fairly, it's a fairly good collection, but- That's awesome. Yes ... I'm a completionist, so it kills me not
Daphna: to have them.
Right. You're like, "I want them all." Well, so I thought that was really interesting when you, um, emailed me and said that. I was like, "Oh, that's so funny," 'cause those were... That was like, that opened the door and I was kinda like, "Oh my gosh." So, um, what the vision and the fantasy. I mean, if I could just snap my fingers and have, you know, the dream it would be to do this full time, to have like a whole team where we're all paid, you know, well.
Um, I would love to get like a grant or more than one and to really, um- Make this something that is a sustainable long-term, you know, research project that works with, um, libraries and, uh, other organizations. So I came across this concept of post-custodial archiving. So basically, um, it's like where y- where an archive exists to build relationships between people or organizations or libraries, um, in order to basically take all of this information that's all kind of dispersed and kind of disjointed as it is right now, and bring it together through like a lens of like a community.
Like that's what I wanna do. So, um, you know, like I said, having the resources to be able to really go into every single issue and catalog them and make them searchable, but also to like curate like, um, collections and, and just be able to like talk about this and dig in there and give it all of my energy and attention and then like travel and go find the zines.
'Cause I mean, right now, um, mostly they're on Internet Archive, that's like the bulk of it. Um, and I want to be able to have like backup copies and to acquire more physical copies that we can then digitize and protect. 'Cause I don't know, you know, it's a little scary just that these are out there. Um, but I do know that certain institutions and libraries have copies, um, or at least maybe not the physical, but they have it on like, um, microfilm or things like that where we- The classic
Amy: microfiche
Daphna: that
Amy: Yeah ...
Daphna: that microfiche. So we can maybe work with them to just like secure that these will never be erased and that they're protected. Uh, so that's that. And I, I mean, I just wanna travel. I, I would love to be able to go to, you know, the Museum of Witchcraft and, or just different places and maybe talk and anything like that, I would just love to do that.
Amy: Have you found that most of what you're finding is American, North American, or-
Daphna: Uh, so I have kind of set the scope to be that just-
Amy: Yes ...
Daphna: for the purpose of, you know, not overwhelming. So we, we kinda just are focusing on American, um, pre-internet- era, right? So there are many more, and we often get people asking for, like, Canadian or, um, UK, you know, things like that, and I'm just kind of like, "Ah."
Like, I would love to, but I just need to kind of limit it for right now. But I know that there's tons. There's-
Amy: Yeah ...
Daphna: much.
Amy: It would be, it would be psychotic to try to- Yeah. There's this great documentary about record collecting- Yeah ... and this one, one collector whose goal was to collect every single record ever made.
Oh my gosh. And the, the sort of host, the, the maker of the documentary, also a record collector, is like, "You know that that's literally impossible, right? Like, do you maybe wanna try collecting, like- Yeah ... every jazz record ever made or..." And the guy, he was clearly, no shade, mentally ill because he was just like, "No, no, no"- No
"no, no." But we can understand that, like- Yeah ... it would be an impossible task to collect- Yes ... everything that's ever made.
Daphna: Right, and I mean, just the sheer fact that, like, these publications are, you know, so rare, so rare, so even to be able to fill in gaps of what we have found, um, I'm kinda... I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm no pessimist.
I'm actually, like- Just a crazy optimist in terms of my naivete. Like, I'm like- Yeah ... "It's out there." But like, I realize, like, I don't know if it is, you know? And so a big part of it is, like, hoping that this project will g- the reason I'm trying to get so much attention on it is I want people to know that it exists so that if somebody does have them and they're sitting in a box or whatever, they know, "Oh, my, my mom had these," or whatever, um, that they'll trust us to digitize them and store them, you know?
And then there, there are copyright issues too. And then what's interesting is, like, I think a lot of older occult texts are now, um, you know... What's the term? It's slipping my mind. But it's like they are free usa- like common-
Amy: Public domain? Uh,
Daphna: yes, public domain. So, um, with these, because they're not as old, they are still under copyright.
And so again, just resource-wise, we would have to have like a whole team of people getting permission from owners. And, you know, that just adds this interesting element, I think, to WAPA that is maybe not so obvious when you're first looking at it. Um, so it's just another thing that we have to take into consideration.
And same with like even posting. Like I don't, I don't want to post content from inside of them because they're still under copyright. Um, so it's just, it's just an interesting side of things, um, that we have to take into consideration. And so it does limit I think in a certain sense, like what we can do.
But I do still hope that people who have them, um, would find this and- You know, e- even if they just decide for their own to back them up, because I'd just would hate for those to be lost. Like, ugh.
Amy: No,
Daphna: like you get-
Amy: Nightmare.
Daphna: Yeah You, you- That's like my worst nightmare.
Amy: You mentioned another kind of fear maybe, um, in the podcast episode that I listened to, that there was a time when it was illegal to send these publications by post, and I know a lot of contemporary witches in 2026 also have this fear of, um, like they stay in the broom closet, as it were, because they fear fascism.
Daphna: Yes. So- And it's legitimate. It's unfortunately legitimate, so yes. Mm-hmm. We need to, you know, make sure that this never happens again. And part of archiving and part of doing this work is to ensure that, and to protect us, but also protect these artifacts. I'm having major deja vu as I'm speaking. That's why I'm like kind of freaking out.
Um, but yeah, so, uh, you know, it wasn't so long ago that it was literally illegal, and the mail, the USPS would like confiscate these, uh, newsletters and stop them from being delivered to people. So, thank you for bringing that because it's, it's, you know, not so, it's not such a far-fetched concept unfortunately.
Um, and so I think that preservation is so important right now, and sharing them. That's why I just felt that having access to them right now is very, very, very important because there's a lot in there, and if you really, really, really read them, you'll find information that to me is just extremely empowering, extremely important, historical, um, facts and events and things that I just think we need to hold onto and we need to really keep close.
And so, yeah.
Amy: And you've created a, a website separate from the Internet Archive to curate- Oh, yes ... these. Yes. And so listeners, if you wanna go into the deepest of rabbit holes, I highly recommend going to witchcraftandpaganarchive.org. Correct. Yeah. I got it right.
Daphna: You got it.
Amy: Go there and just fall into naiveté as a compliment, but also the very highly political work that not only is Daphna doing, but that these witches were also doing.
You know, it's a sort of old, um, feminist slogan that the personal is political, and for witches I think that that's even more true. What you are doing, Daphna, is to me a highly political project, an, a super important project. And for young witches especially, to have this glimpse into how things worked before the number of followers that you had determined your self-worth, to go into these, um- digitized, but into these paper spaces and see what the witches have been up to.
So what's, what's next for you, Daphna? What's next for WAPA? What's next?
Daphna: So the immediate goal right now is to get everything cataloged, at least so that, again, you know, it's not just, like, my lists on Internet Archive and stuff, but to say, "Okay, here's what this publication was about. Here's who created it.
Here's, you know, the whole picture of it and what you'll find inside," in terms of the general, right? Um, so once that is... Well, that's what one thing that's going on. And then also, um, the podcast, the focus and the goal of the podcast is to bring them to life. So to have conversations, hopefully with people who were, uh, either creating them or circulating them or were there at the time.
Um, so some interviews, exciting interviews lined up. Um, and just to kind of, again, bring l- bring it all back to life as much as we can so that, um, the stories are not lost and that they're preserved. So oral, oral history is also a huge focus. Um, but like you said, you know, reading these zines and newsletters are, to me, they're like portals, and they take us into another time.
They d- literally transport you. Um, and Spike said it best. He said, you know, it's when, when we read books, right, we're kind of reading about the thing, but the zines and the newsletters are the thing itself. So to me, it's like this really cool immersive, like, direct experience of a time and place that was not perfect, right?
There is a lot of things in there that you'll say and be like, "What the hell?" But there's also some really progressive things that are very, um, you know, uh, inspiring, and, and it kind of ahead of their time, too, which is cool to see. So just going in there and looking and seeing what were they talking about, and then with the gift of retrospect, you know?
It's, like, so cool. So- I just tell people, just go read them. You know, go read the zines and, and see what speaks to you. And, you know, s- and just talk about it is what I hope happens. I hope ... And we have a zine club as well. Um, so that is just a place for us to get together and talk, because everything about the zines was community.
And it, to me, it's wild, because, like, we have social media, but, like, how social are we really? You know? Mm-hmm. And, and this project has shifted that for me. Like, I have met really cool people, and I have actually been feeling more of a sense of community. Um, and so to me, if that happens, then I'll feel fulfilled.
I'll feel like, okay, I'm doing something, you know, positive in dark times. So, um, that's, that's the future, hopefully. Yeah.
Amy: And if, if a young witch came to you and said, "I'm thinking about starting a zine, a witch zine." Ah. "But should I bother? I'm nobody." Mm. "Is ... Would it even make any difference?" What, what would you say to them?
Daphna: I would say do it, because your, your creation and, and what you care about and what you're feeling and thinking is your magic. And so- Like, that's the part that I really hope to impart is that w- our... It doesn't, it doesn't matter if you, if it's good, if it's not good, if it's getting likes, like whatever.
None of that matters at all. All that it matters is that it's expressed, because the fact that you are a witch and the fact that you feel these things and you crave and, you know, care about these things and that you seek magic in the world, like that's it. That's what it's all about, and it never was any more or less than that.
You know? Like, we just are, and you can, you can change the whole world, right? Just by expressing that and caring enough about it, whatever it may be. It doesn't have to be anything you know, huge. It's j- and that's what the zines show. It's like sometimes these, these, um, entire publications, like they're, they're simple, yet so huge because again, they, they put into expression, they put into existence magic.
So that's what I would say to them. Just do it, and don't worry, and don't do it for likes, like at all.
Amy: Because we don't know, you know, 40 years from now, someone like Daphna or, or maybe even Daphna herself could be curating your work that nobody noticed-
Daphna: Yeah ...
Amy: when you made it.
Daphna: Yeah. And, and our whole, you know, um, as witches, as people who like seek magic and, and value that, like if we didn't, then it wouldn't exist, and that would be horrible, right?
So that's how I think about it is like It doesn't matter if one person sees it, if no people see it, or if just you, just again creating it is what matters. So that's like- And
Intro: it's magic ...
Daphna: yeah, it is. Yeah.
Intro: It's magic.
Daphna: And then it's out there in the world, and it's doing stuff. So that's, that's like what has really been coming through, like the more I work on these and like sit with them and stuff and process them and everything.
It's like that message has just been really, really strong. So thanks for letting me say that.
Amy: And thank you, like thank you for coming and taking time out of your busy, busy, busy, busy, busy to chat with me. But also, like on behalf of the entire English-speaking, I'll say, global witch community, like thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for this work that you're doing.
I can speak to the fact that in our coven, people were freaking out, like in the best way possible- Mm-hmm ... when, when you launched this project, um, because it's, it's exactly what we're, we're doing. You know, you said your greatest love is finding something cool and sharing it. And we have that too. Thanks.
Daphna: Yeah. Well, thank you, and it's truly an honor, and it's like, it's just the best feeling, and it's the best community, and it... You know, the people who've been, um, finding it and stuff, I'm like, "These are the coolest people in the world, and the people who I want to serve." So it's just an honor. And I, it, it, it's just really amazing because I feel like everything in my life has like led to this, and now I can like use everything to, you know, give to the people who I most- cherish and admire and, like, truly do respect.
So thank you so much.
Amy: Tell me, tell m- tell our listeners your Instagram handle.
Daphna: Yes. It's DaphnaoftheStars, D-A-P-H-N-A of the Stars. Mm-hmm. I'm so happy to connect. You know, I, I really do appreciate every single interaction and, and, like, meeting people. And so if you wanna just say hi, like, uh, if you have something you wanna share or questions, I love it.
So please feel free to reach out.
Amy: And again, the website is witchcraftandpaganarchive.org. Correct. Yeah,
Daphna: there's so many different ways because it's so long, but, um, you'll... E- even if you Google, I think that it would pop up. Um, but yeah, thank you so much for sharing
Amy: that.
Daphna: Yeah.
Amy: And of course, listeners, all of this will be in the, uh, show notes webpage.
Um, so don't worry if you didn't have your pen and paper, if you're not currently creating a zine with pen and paper and have the ability to write this stuff down. We'll, Daphna and I will both put it on the internet for you. Yes. Thank you again so much, Daphna.
Daphna: You. Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.
Amy: And blessed fucking be. The Mountain Groves lived together at Rootworks until 1985, when they separated. The official story is that Jean and Ruth separated amicably due to having grown apart and differences in parenting philosophies. But though their partnership ended, the legacy of their work continues.
At a Montreal housing collective, lesbians and allies live intentionally and age joyously in their own urban version of Rootworks, building a new world of safety and comfort, building a new culture. On Tuesday, February 16th, 2027, you can join an event I discovered called Making Music to Make Music: Crafting Community Through the Folk Songs of Ruth Mountain Grove.
And I'll put the registration link for that in the show notes, too. The final page of the final issue of WomanSpirit magazine reads, "WomanSpirit lives in the lives of all women." So today, let Daphne and the mountain groves and the missing witches coven remind you that your work matters. Your magic matters, and your dreams matter.
Start a commune. Start a zine. Start a lesbian love affair. Start a new culture. Shape your future and watch how the world bends around you. Start a cultural revolution, one piece at a time.
Intro: You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch.
Be a witch. Be a witch. Be a witch. Be a witch. Be a witch.
You must be a witch