Word: coven
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...idea originated as a reinterpretation of the Last Supper from a feminine perspective, with women as guests, not cooks, participants, not waiters. Where 13 men sat down for the Last Supper, 13 women formed, in legend, a witches coven--a symbol of female power, albeit evil power. But as Chicago's vision expanded, so did the size of her party. Before she was done inviting women from all of history, it had grown to a three-sided affair with 39 guests...
...boys across the ravine-Fonda and Gates-a mighty eyeful and a good scare. They climb back aboard their $36,000 motor home and hightail it out of there, accompanied by their anxious spouses (Loretta Swit and Lara Parker) and a nervous dog (Ginger) and pursued by the entire coven...
...scatological rereadings of history, Reed comes up with an idea called Neo-HooDooism, a pastiche of an imaginary, ancient African aesthetic and a rip-off from the HooDoo coven of black poets to which Reed belongs. What plot there is to Mumbo Jumbo deals with a search for the ancient, original HooDoo text...
Aidan Kelly's San Francisco Bay area coven seems more designed to celebrate life. Kelly, 31, a former Roman Catholic who is a manuscript editor of physics textbooks, generally follows a variety of witchcraft called Gardnerian, after a retired British customs official, Gerald Gardner, who formulated it in England in the 1940s. Gardnerian witchcraft is what Occult Debunker Owen Rachleff calls "library witchcraft": it seems to have been largely concocted from books, perhaps combined with some rudimentary witchcraft practices of existing covens in the Hampshire hills. Kelly himself is one of the founders of a Gardnerian spin-off called...
...degree, and a magic knife called an othame. So far, not even Kelly has felt prepared to go for the highest degree, the green garter. Among other things, it involves a milder version of what Gardner called the "Great Rite," an act of ritual sexual intercourse. "Nobody in our coven," says Kelly, "has felt ready to take...