I began developing Fencraft because I wanted to participate in a magical tradition where gender symbolism was absent. Not finding one, I started working on my own; and then it grew as I added more of my understandings of magic and the weird to it. As you might expect, I have an Awful Lot Of Feelings About Gender. The following page sketches out some of my ideas for understanding gender in Fencraft, a 'lil bit of politics, and some ideas for how to re-incorporate gender into your work if that's what you prefer. Fundamentally, Core Fencraft doesn't think about gender, focus on gender, or make it the centre of our rituals, magic, or understanding of the world and its weird.
Gender isn't emphasised in Fencraft:
(Some clarifications, explorations, digressions & ideas)
Everyone.
Fencraft is a decentralised religion; it's me in my bedroom writing down what I'm doing, and a small diaspora of internet strangers who see some value in it. I don't have any control over what strangers are doing with what I write, and I'd be wary of ever taking that role on. But to the extent I can dictate: all genders are welcome here. Fencraft welcomes straight and cisgender people - we hope our tradition gives you space to explore and reclaim your gender/sexuality on your own terms, rather than being fitted into a restrictive magical role. Fencraft is positive about the role non-binary people and intersex people have in magic, and hope you also have a bit more room in our tradition to participate in ways which makes sense for your life and experiences. We don't do gender-magic, but future members of our diasporic coven may choose to do so: Fencraft explicitly welcomes trans women to participate in women's traditions and female-centric magic, and trans men likewise in male traditions and male-centric magic.
If you're part of the diasporic coven, it would be swell if your working groups shared these values.
How does this interact with the Powers?Cosmologically, many of our Powers are not and were never human, and therefore don't necessarily have genders as we understand them - how can you have a gender if you have neither a body nor participate in social structures? I don't think Powers can have gender - at least, not in the same way humans understand it.
We are open to our Princes and Powers appearing in different-gendered guises to different practicioners. Perhaps this is to communicate something to US, to communicate using our personal symbolic language of gender (ie a power associated with "strength" might appear similar to Conan the Barbarian, Harvey Milk, or Beyonce - responding to the practioner's personal and cultural ideas of what "strength" looks like). The better known have a tradiational gender image that has accumulated over time - for example, Odin and Freya. But there's no reason they might not appear differently to you. Powers who were once human - Boudicca, Beowulf - generally appear in their original attribution.
Fencraft isn't gender-abolitionist witchcraft. We're not saying gender isn't real or women don't exist. Depicting Venus as a woman isn't a problem. But we stand in opposition to the idea that Venus represents an eternal/essential feminine essence, and tend to avoid working in such simplistic terms.
Fencraft does not use gender polarities in its magic; writing that out of the system was the start point of my design. But it's also designed to "play well with others" - my hope is people can borrow elements of my tradition, and easily mix it into what they're doing.
So if you're still working with a gender polarity, you're probably associating the sun as masculine and the moon as feminine. The Stellan current is most appropriately assigned to queerness. This is not merely because LGBTIQ+ people generally have an uneasy relationship with normative expectations of gender. Queerness is culturally unspeakable, hinted at and hidden, against the grain, between the cracks, narratives and stories never written or carefully coded which we must rediscover from the cultural artifacts of the mainstream. In other words, it's Landweirdy.
It's very hard to communicate online, and I apologise if I'm not expressing my ideas well.
Fencraft isn't anti gender or doesn't hate people with genders. But the system itself doesn't have ideas about gender built into it.
Each of us has a rich personal gender experience; we hope that in Fencraft, you have room to define what that means to you. If you want to explore men's spirituality, most religions give you a pre-defined path for doing so. Wicca has the God; Mage traditions have the idea of active, masculine energy; Christianity has men as head of the household, and so on. If you want to explore your gender in Fencraft, we won't give you a road map. You're on your own. You have to figure out what energies, memories, images, experiences, Powers, roles and emotions that gender expresses for you.
Nor is this tradition only for transgender people. Cisgender people are also trapped in a system with certain expectations and limitations put on them. Cisgender men and women, and much as anyone, benefit from space to explore and understand their gender on their own terms. You have space to work with something sincere, and genuine, and individual, something with nuance which is rooted in your actual life. You have to discover your own symbolic language, your own values for your gender, your own iconic and aspirational imagery.
Because that's what religion is - or ought to be. A ritualisation and celebration of the forces that are present for you. No more "women as mothers" imagery for infertile or child-free-by-choice women who have defined their womanhood in other ways. No more "ultimate sacred union of polar opposites, male and female" for gay and lesbian people. No more phallic imagery for men who don't have a phallus.
First off: I think gendered symbolism in older traditions is cool and powerful if that works for you. Please don't send me angry emails about this; I support every pathway to the divine, so long as it is authentic, and not hurting anybody. Generations of people marginalised wrt sexuality/gender have participated in them, either finding themselves in the canon of their faith or rewriting parts of the tradition to make room for themselves.
Personally, I wasn't able to do this. I felt like I was trying to tailor a wooly jumper into a ballgown - beyond a point, I just needed to use different materials. The more I tried to focus and study, the more I ended up butting into things that pissed me off and didn't reflect my reality. In particular:
I didn't like feeling like I was always fighting against something fundamental, things that didn't need to be there in the first place. I disliked getting the answer "symbolic gender has nothing to do with real gender", which quite clearly seemed to be bollocks. If your ritual magic states that men direct the power, but women channel it, you've basically made sacred "men have very, very important career goals and your role is to cook dinner and support his ambition". I also do not accept that "it's not sexist because everyone has both male and female energy". If this is true, then what is the point in using the terms "male" and "female" in the first place, if these energies have no relationship at all with gendered bodies or people? And if this is true, then why can't women have attributes like "making rational decisions, being in charge and directing power" and men have "being aware and in tune and supporting the power of those around them"?
I was uncomfortable with how many founder figures in Paganism and the occult seemed to have straight up disliked real women - even as they revered the sacred feminine. In that context their use of sex imagery was always a bit skeezy for me, and I think it's reflected in the limited and stereotypical roles present in their original works. Thinking about women in terms of virginity, penetration, capacity to reproduce, and her sexual availability to men, doesn't make me feel terribly comfortable. Paradigms in which a woman's body or sexual expression forms the source of her power remind me of the many ways that sex has been disempowering for women - that motherhood has been a trap, that "being sexual" has been used as an excuse to belittle someone's mind, that culture pressures everyone of all genders into certain "good" forms of sex and shuns "bad" ones. In this context, I understand why people wish to celebrate the sacred feminine, the body, and sacred sexuality. We desperately need to see these things as beautiful and powerful. But you can't celebrate authentic desire, authentic sex or bodies, by putting them into limited roles or limiting expression.
(It's important to me to think about these older traditions in their original contexts. For example, the focus on women's sexual behavior doesn't feel like a route to liberation for me. Yet the key founder traditions in modern magic (Wicca, Golden Dawn, Thelema) were developed between 1890-1960, pre-sexual-liberation, pre-feminism. Images of female divinity, and talking about sacred sex and pleasure were extremely radical; a faith which acknowledged female sexuality at all was groundbreaking. But when I look at them now, I see images of female sexuality as defined (predominantly) by men; and with the benefit of the decades, I think we can do better, while recognising how challenging the movements were in their day. Or at least, they no longer work for me.)
I think I speak for most humans on the planet - gay and straight, men and women, trans or cis, asexual or not - that discovering your authentic desires, and then expressing them to others, is the hardest thing in the world. Religion, cultural pressures, locker room talk, porn, patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality, sexism - it's very hard for individuals to discover what they actually want and how they want their bodies to be seen without this morass of pressure and expectation. When magic puts certain sexual metaphors or acts at the heart of its mystery, it forms part of this pressure. I think sex and gender can be incredibly magical, but that can only happens when individuals discover their authentic desire. That might be sex with people of any genders, sex in certain ways or for certain meanings, or even "no sex at all". When the Goddess says "all acts of love and pleasure are my rituals", that can't coexist with a Paganism that enshrines one particular form of sexual expression in its myths and rites.
As far as I can tell, the historic witchcraft Gardener et al were quoting did NOT have this gender-sex focus. These elder witch figures saw some sacred sexuality in history, but then attempted to find and draw together fertility imagery throughout history to form an overarching mythos. To make it universal, to make it the core of the magic. Whether it's the Great Rite in Wicca, or the alchemical marriage in hermetic traditions, or the sex magic in Thelema. It's a modern interpretation, and a valid religious practice - but not the one I choose to go with. Landcrafting uses the same raw materials, but takes witchcraft down a different route. I want to be a witch. I want my cauldron to be a cauldron and my wand to be a wand. I don't want to think about genitals. I want to reclaim an image of spinster witches, of unmarried women who didn't exist in relation to sex.
My goal here isn't to be critical for no reason. That's not the intent. I'll be disappointed af if anyone turns up in my inbox angry or telling me I don't understand. I've read all the works in their original texts, and my understanding is - I cannot be comfortable with these practices, I find them rather invasive and violating. The key word here is "I" - I don't like it. Clearly, these other paths work for other people - and thats OK. They do not work for me, so I've created something more to my taste. You do you. Celebrate what makes YOU feel powerful.
As an extension of this, you can reincorporate gender or sexual imagery into Fencraft. It's not part of the Core tradition, but you're welcome to explore it in your personal practice or even as part of a working group. The most important thing is to be organic and authentic about it. We've not pre-defined how gender works in our system, because the process of exploring it for yourself is the only way to write rites reflecting your life, your body, your sensuality, and so on. Doing gender/sex magic isn't "doing Fencraft wrong" - unless you're leading a diasporic coven, and impose your own ideas onto the other participants. In fact, I'd even say that doing exploratory work into your perceptions and hidden places, and picking your own way through the culture is as "doing Fencraft right" as it gets.