Phyllis Curott interview,

In person, Austin, Texas

10-99

by Bill Bruzy

The Good Witch, Interview with Wiccan Priestess (and attorney) Phyllis Curott

by Bill Bruzy

When I was about to meet Phyllis Curott I wasn't sure what to expect. She was a Wiccan priestess, a witch, and a lawyer. That's enough to make any man nervous. But when she entered the hotel lobby in Austin, Texas for our meeting, I relaxed. Charming, bright, and open, Phyllis was obviously a good witch, and from what I'd heard, a good lawyer too.

Author of "The Book of Shadows" and successful New York attorney she is a woman of power. But she was more like old money than new money with her power. She didn't rub it in your face. No power suit. No flowing robes, gaudy amulets, strange smells, or red eyed cats perched on her shoulder.

Jane Magazine called Phyllis Curott one of the "10 Gutsiest Women of 1998." She is a member of the United Nations NGO Committee on the Status of Women and addressed the Beijing Forum on the status of women in the world's religions. She has frequently been in the media as a gutsy spokeswoman for Wicca, worked on the Fort Hood case for freedom of religious expression on a military base, and was interviewed extensively in the media about her objections to the "Blair Witch Project."

I had a chance to talk with her when she came to Austin, Texas as a presenter for the Whole Life Expo.

Bill Bruzy You've dealt with power in ways that are the definition of opposite, as a lawyer, as a witch. So, from this unique perspective, as a lawyer, a woman, and a witch, what have you learned about how we can energetically inhabit ourselves? How do we wield the power to live our lives, and not be trapped in it, become a tyrant, or abusive?

PC That's a very challenging question, as to how you transform the hard-wiring we have towards power and still honor it's needs?

BB Yes. For example, you had power in your legal career.

PC Yes and no. The irony was that at the same time I was increasingly in touch with the wealth of my authentic power, as a woman, as a human being, I was completely disempowered in the workplace. The contradiction between the two was dreadful. I felt powerless in the workplace. I had no sense of my worth and I did not have a sense of my boundaries and I didn't have a sense of what I deserved. I had an instinct for survival. I wanted to make a career, so I was trying.

It's an utterly surreal environment and you keep pinching yourself because you can't believe this is actually happening to you. It's very disorienting and destructive and the only way that you can make it is by adapting to it and accept the rules of the game, reconcile yourself to it and become very skillful at it.

BB So when you developed another relationship to power, the magic, the career blows up in your face?

PC Right, so what do you do now? That's your journey to the underworld. You have shoved off from the safety of the shoreline, from the mooring defined by the culture: this is what will make you successful, make you happy, what the meaning of your life is supposed to be. Those things are falsehoods and they destroy us instead of create us. As a culture I think we have so far to go in discovering what an authentic life looks like.

But when you cut your moorings and head out to sea what you are in pursuit of is an authentic life. You're in pursuit of a true self. You have to trust a gyroscope that you're not used to, that the culture has not acknowledged. You're becoming self-defined. It's very frightening, very difficult, a tremendous struggle. I was very lucky. At each point I've been given safe haven within a cove but inevitably pushed back out to sea. Maybe that's the result of being a sailor's daughter.

BB The sea is the perfect image. It's big and powerful and unmediated. Nobody controls it. It's wild.

PC It's huge, vast. It's full of life and full of death. Since the beginning I've always felt there is this vastness of energy around us. It moves through us, engages us, leaves us, abandons us and leaves us to our own resources. We have to learn to navigate through it.

When I was a little girl I always wanted my father to teach me to shoot the stars. One of my great heartbreaks was when his sextant disappeared from the house. And I never learned, he never taught me. But in a way I determined to create my own sextant, chart my own course, speaking metaphorically.

The sacred comes to us, initially, through the unconscious, through that great sea, because the conscious mind is so colonized by the dominant culture. It is so much the tool, the slave, the pawn, to victim, the agent, the child, the imprint of the dominant culture.

BB Your upbringing was unique. Religious?

PC No, I grew up in a very intellectual household where religion was the opiate of the masses. When I was six years old half my friends were going off the Hebrew School and the other half were going off to Catechism. I asked my mother, "what are we?" She said, "You're half Viking (my father's side of the family) and your half Macabee (my mother's side of the family, Jewish) which makes you 100% warrior." It made a very big impression on me.

BB You're the first Jewish-Viking I've ever met.

PC (Laughing.) So I asked my mother, do we believe in God. And she said we believe in the goodness of the human heart. We don't believe there is some father-male figure sitting on the other side of the clouds sitting in judgement. We believe that we are responsible for the life that we create here and it is up to all of us to make it a good life. She said when I grow up I can go see for myself whether God exists. It's a more appropriate pursuit for an adult.

BB Do you feel that left you open?

PC Very. We had a minora and a Christmas tree.

BB You're a philosopher. Wicca is a cosmology and cosmologies define paths and goals. What is the goal of Wicca?

PC To be able to see, to hear, to taste, to touch, and to know, by the sixth sense, the presence of the sacred as it expresses itself in ourselves, each other and in the world around us. It is different from other cosmologies like Hinduism. It is a cosmology that says the material world is not an illusion, it is a work of art.

That's how I came to my appreciation of ritual. I began to appreciate ritual when I began to understand that it was a living mandala, an art form. That it was filled with music and poetry and dance, an entire aesthetic. It is an aesthetic vocabulary. There is a wisdom that can come to you through the realm of aesthetics. It was part of an early recognition I had as a child as to what artists knew, how they could open the door into the world.

The idea, the bias of western culture, sees the divine as transcendental and removed from the earthly plane and the only way you got to it is through the denial of the earthly plane.

That western patriarchal perspective interpreted Buddhism and Hinduism. I think I can say that a part of those cosmologies is that the world is Maya, illusion, and the goal of the spiritual path is to be transcendent, detached.

The western shamanic path, which is what Wicca is, has more in common with Taoism, Native American spirituality, or Australian aboriginal spirituality. It's a different idea. Everything that exists is the embodiment of divine energy. It's not an illusion. It's an expression. So it's all about beauty and joy and rejoicing and celebration and acknowledgment and appreciation and gratitude and reverence and care and aesthetic existence. It's an existence of constant awe and gratitude to be engaged in that dance for as long as were here. It's not about transcendence. It's about immersion.

There is a transcendence that comes when you see the forms change. Here there will probably be a resonance between the Hindu and Buddhist perspective and the Wiccan in that the energy is constant but the forms are always changing shape. The constancy of the forms is an illusion but the reality of the forms transmuting themselves is art, artistry, magic in a way. It's about accepting that for a while you are in a form and the best of all possible worlds, which is what were supposed to be creating. You are supposed to be exploring and creating, living beautiful lives, rich, full of love and laughter, music, sex, food, poetry and all that stuff.

BB But then we'd have to give up all our drudgery.

PC Yea. Or, dole it out in shorter pieces, share it better, so that nobody is immersed in a life that's nothing but drudgery.

BB So to approach this divinity in life we break away from the safety of the known, go out to sea to keep our metaphor going. But you're talking about setting out to sea, not on the QE 2, you've got this little..

PC Dingy. I've made tremendous economic sacrifices to follow this path, huge. But I always ate, had a home, traveled, had money for the things that were important to me, I never wanted for anything. The things that were most precious, I had. I don't know whether it's the way to go into old age in this culture but…

I've always had this faith that if you worked and go after the things you love and do with joy that which you do well, it will work. You have to be practical. It's not going to work if you love to sing and sound like my dog. But if you're graced with a measure of talent in the things you love to do, it can work. I think people are generally graced with a measure of talent in things they love, there's a harmony there.

What was the line Joseph Campbell used? He said he realized early on he couldn't do abstinence, or obedience. So he did bliss. He followed his bliss. I'm Wiccan. That's what I believe in. That's what I try to practice.

For more information on Phyllis Curott, or "The Book of Shadows" (Broadway Books) look at her website at www.bookofshadows.net.

Bill Bruzy is a writer and counselor in Austin, Texas and can be reached at (512) 477-9595