Fabulous female occultists

• Margot Adler (Wicca)
• Louisa May Alcott (Unitarian / Transcendentalist)
• Alice Bailey (Theosophy)
• Annie Besant (Theosophy)
• Elena Petrovna Blavatsky (Theosophy)
• Eleanor Bone (Wicca)
• Emma Hardinge Britten (Spiritualism, Theosophy, OTO)
• Zsuzsanna Budapest (Feminist Witchcraft)
• Mary Cardell (Witchcraft)
• Christina of Sweden (Alchemy)
• Sandra Tabatha Cicero (Golden Dawn)
• Bridget Cleary (Witchcraft)
• Ithell Colquhoun (Golden Dawn)
• Isabel Cooper-Oakley (Theosophy)
• Ida Craddock (OTO) - 1857-1902
• Vivianne Crowley (Wicca)
• Patricia Crowther (Wicca)
• Dafo (Wicca)
• Helen Duncan (Witchcraft)
• Biddy Early (Witchcraft)
• Florence Farr (Golden Dawn)
• Janet Farrar (Wicca)
• Morgan le Fay (Witchcraft)
• Dion Fortune (Golden Dawn)
• Maud Gonne (Golden Dawn)
• Alison Harlow (Feri Tradition)
• Fiona Horne (Wicca)
• Annie Horniman (Golden Dawn)
• Georgie Hyde-Lees (Golden Dawn)
• Anodea Judith (Feri Tradition)
• Anna Kingsford (Theosophy)
• Sybil Leek (Witchcraft)
• Moina Mathers (Golden Dawn)
• Dolores North, aka Madeline Montalban (Order of the Morning Star)
• Dorothy Morrison (Witchcraft)
• Rosaleen Norton (Witchcraft)
• Maxine Sanders (Wicca)
• Pamela Colman Smith (Golden Dawn)
• Anna Sprengel (legendary Golden Dawn founder)
• Starhawk (Reclaiming)
• P L Travers (author of Mary Poppins and many articles on spiritual life)
• Doreen Valiente (Wicca)
• Various Wiccan founders - Doreen Valiente, Patricia Crowther, Eleanor Bone, Lois Bourne, Dafo, Monique Wilson, Dayonis, Donna Gardner, Barbara Vickers
• and the many female members of the Golden Dawn

centenarian bluestockings

Happy birthday to a truly great bluestocking:

"ROME – Rita Levi Montalcini, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, said Saturday that even though she is about to turn 100, her mind is sharper than it was she when she was 20.

Levi Montalcini, who also serves as a senator for life in Italy, celebrates her 100th birthday on Wednesday, and she spoke at a ceremony held in her honor by the European Brain Research Institute.

She shared the 1986 Nobel Prize for Medicine with American Stanley Cohen for discovering mechanisms that regulate the growth of cells and organs.

"At 100, I have a mind that is superior — thanks to experience — than when I was 20," she told the party, complete with a large cake for her.

The Turin-born Levi Montalcini recounted how the anti-Jewish laws of the 1930s under Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime forced her to quit university and do research in an improvised laboratory in her bedroom at home.

"Above all, don't fear difficult moments," she said. "The best comes from them."

"I should thank Mussolini for having declared me to be of an inferior race. This led me to the joy of working, not any more unfortunately, in university institutes but in a bedroom," the scientist said."

Meanwhile, Margaret Caldwell, who is 102, has expressed interest in Wicca - there must be something about the wisdom of experience that makes one willing to explore new avenues...

An old crone, my dears, is a wise, old woman, one of the four aspects of Mother Earth, young and innocent in the Springs, full of seed and motherly in the Summer, ripe and bursting with produce in the Fall and wise and knowing in the fullness of Winter.

bluestockings and witchcraft

Intellectual women down the ages have frequently been suspected of witchcraft (muttering strange formulae, speaking foreign languages, and generally being cleverer than their peers).

Readers of a romantic disposition may recall the scene in Ivanhoe, when Rebecca, the beautiful and intellectual Jewess, is accused of witchcraft because she speaks Hebrew. Apparently the character may have been inspired by the real life bluestocking, Rebecca Gratz, a preeminent Jewish American educator and philanthropist who was the first Jewish female college student in the United States.

Then of course there are the fictional witches featured previously in this august publication, Mss Weatherwax and Mss Hawthorne.  Both highly intelligent and independent women.

More recently, the vitriol heaped on the highly intelligent, beautiful and charming Gail Trimble, always correctly attired in classic and timeless garb, has led to the suggestion that she should be burnt as a witch (this article is of course a spoof, but it's a spoof of the actual sexual innuendo and general opprobrium that was heaped on her merely for being an intellectual).

Indeed, nineteenth-century bluestockings were frequently branded "witches" according to the abstract of the article Bluestockings Beware: Cultural Backlash and the Reconfiguration of the Witch in Popular Nineteenth-Century Literature, by Linda J Holland-Toll.

Feminist witches have always looked to our foremothers for inspiration - one of the earliest feminist covens in America was called the Susan B. Anthony Coven No 1.  In fact, it's still going!  (Definitely a second-wave feminist type of organisation, though.)

The connection is probably because both intellectuals and witches transgress against the patriarchal dictum that women are not allowed to be powerful.  And of course, there is significant overlap between intellectuals, feminism and witchcraft.