Lughnasa is the first harvest festival of the year when the grain is ready to reap. The strength of the sun is now starting to wane as summer’s end is in sight, its energy now in the fields. Lugh is the Celtic sun god, and today is a fire sabbat honoring the sun’s power. In Irish Gaelic, Lughnasa is the word for the month of August.
This is an especially potent time for vegans, as the grain harvest is the first of the year’s harvest and it is decidedly plant-based (the final harvest of the year, Samhain, is a blood harvest). We can practice gratitude for the sun that continues to share its energy and provide food for us all to grow–humans, animals, and plants–without shedding blood. Instead, Lughnasa honors the sacrifice of the grain, the killing of plants as necessary to sustain life, part of the great ebbing and flowing of nature.
Lughnasa is also sunflower season, and, of course, the sunflower with its vibrant energy and promise of new growth with its ample seeds, has been a long time symbol of veganism. Now is a good time to practice some sunflower magic by eating some seeds at sunset and making a wish.
Sadly, in rural Ireland, Lugh has become personified in a wild-caught goat who is held captive on a tall platform over the Lughnasa celebrations for three days. This goat, known as “King Puck,” must endure terrifying heights, carnival commotion, bright lights, and the general stress of capture. The Puck Fair dates back to colonial times and likely the goat is used to symbolize Irish resistance, not being an authentic representation of Celtic Lughnasa at all. The practice persists despite many years of activist protest.
Practicing vegan celebrations of the sun’s passage is an important resistance to these modern appropriations. We can reclaim the life-affirming traditions of this season and celebrate by baking, eating some good bread, or taking action for those who have no bread, the children of Gaza being especially on my mind. 🌾
If you want to learn more about nature-based ritual work for vegan self-care, check out my new book, Vegan Witchcraft which is now available for preorder and releases this August on the new moon. This book is my Lughnasa harvest, finally reaped after three years in the works!
Dr. Wrenn is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology with Colorado State University in 2016. She was awarded Exemplary Diversity Scholar, 2016 by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. She served as council member with the American Sociological Association’s Animals & Society section (2013-2016) and was elected Chair in 2018. She is the co-founder of the International Association of Vegan Sociologists. She serves as Book Review Editor to Society & Animals and is a member of the Research Advisory Council of The Vegan Society. She has contributed to the Human-Animal Studies Images and Cinema blogs for the Animals and Society Institute and has been published in several peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Gender Studies, Environmental Values, Feminist Media Studies, Disability & Society, Food, Culture & Society, and Society & Animals. In July 2013, she founded the Vegan Feminist Network, an academic-activist project engaging intersectional social justice praxis.
For most contemporary ecofeminists, Wiccans and witches, animal sacrifice is rejected as masochistic, counter to feminist and ecological values, and unnecessary in an abundant natural world that already provides that which is necessary to thrive.
And yet nonhuman sacrifice remains extremely prevalent in neo-pagan mythology, creating an air of tolerance and even excitement. Starhawk, for one, seems to find charm in this lore. Despite her opposition to the practice in modern times, she suggests that Nonhuman Animals willingly sacrificed themselves in ancient times (1999). A romanticization of women’s spiritual practice in an imagined past too often maintains human dominance. Animal sacrifice is rarely critiqued when shielded within “the past,” while the institution of domestication–the corporeal and cognitive manipulation of other animals for the benefit of the dominant class–is itself naturalized as a human entitlement. There is no domestication without domination and sacrifice, and there is no feminism if the anthropocentric commitment to oppression remains unchecked. Thus, as feminist spirituality has attempted to discover and reclaim power in women’s history, goddess traditions have frequently merged with, rather than supplaced, patriarchal traditions.
Ironically, this animal oppression often required overlapping with the feminine to legitimize women’s shadowy pseudo-power, suggesting that, symbolically, the control over animal bodies and women’s bodies are entangled and mutually reinforcing. This relationship in bondage is rendered both credible and impervious to challenge through a lense of sacrality. Sjöö and Mor (1991) emphasize that the Goddess took the form of other animals in ancient depictions, offering sexualized mythologies of union between men and women, nature and humans. Warriors pierced and bloodied the bodies of nonhuman victims to create a “symbolic resolution,” as a penis entering a vulva (82). This sacred likeness between goddess and nonhuman, in their estimation, was culturally necessary to support the belief that nonhuman victims willingly sacrificed themselves for their human oppressors and relieve any associated guilt in the suffering it invariably caused. This suggests a false feminine empowerment. It is instead the fetishization of suffering under oppression.
Sjöö and Mor exalt the magical powers of blood harvested from the gaping wounds of dying sacrificial bulls, drunk by priestesses to increase their mystical power and spread across fields to improve the resourcefulness of the land. What they do not contend with, however, is how this willing victimhood would also be attributed to women and all manner of other vulnerable social groups to normalize and naturalize severe inequality and violence (Collard 1988). Neither do they contend with the anthroparchal implications of shifting to this warrior cultish “hunting”-based society; this was a violent political and economic revolution that transformed Nonhuman Animals from social equals to commodity objects.
The trope of the sacrificial goddess can also be found in non-Western cultures. Hinduism, most notably, overlaps the Goddess with the mother cow, and in doing so, helps to normalize the exploitation of feminized labor as something mystical and sacred. Researchers have expressed concern as to how these spiritual mythologies have been responsible for the entrenchment of speciesist practices that are highly resistant to critique (Narayanan 2018). Indeed, today India is one of the world’s top producers of dairy, “beef,” and “leather,” despite the supposed sacredness of cows.
The religious sacrifice of Nonhuman Animals, who symbolically represent the Goddess, is, by extension, also an attack on the sacred body and spirit of the Goddess. Killing to obtain the power found in victims’ blood, furthermore, is the ultimate patriarchal contract. The wholly unnecessary violence against female and nonhuman bodies for the benefit of the dominant class is behavior that is characteristically aligned with the active degradation of women and other animals and has nothing whatsoever to do with respecting them, worshiping them, or elevating their status. A truly feminist spirituality will need to sacrifice its allegiance to patriarchal myths to truly transform humanity’s relationship with nature and other animals.
Works Cited Collard, A. 1988. Rape of the Wild. The Women’s Press: London. Narayanan, Y. 2018. “Animal Ethics and Hinduism’s Milking, Mothering Legends.” SOPHIA 57: 133-149. Sjöö, M. and B. Mor. 1991. The Great Cosmic Mother. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. Starhawk. 1999. The Spiral Dance. Third Edition. New York: HarperOne.
Dr. Wrenn is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology with Colorado State University in 2016. She was awarded Exemplary Diversity Scholar, 2016 by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. She served as council member with the American Sociological Association’s Animals & Society section (2013-2016) and was elected Chair in 2018. She is the co-founder of the International Association of Vegan Sociologists. She serves as Book Review Editor to Society & Animals and is a member of the Research Advisory Council of The Vegan Society. She has contributed to the Human-Animal Studies Images and Cinema blogs for the Animals and Society Institute and has been published in several peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Gender Studies, Environmental Values, Feminist Media Studies, Disability & Society, Food, Culture & Society, and Society & Animals. In July 2013, she founded the Vegan Feminist Network, an academic-activist project engaging intersectional social justice praxis.
Ecofeminist spiritualities characteristically reject death as an ultimate end point. This is an intentional alignment with fluid natural cycles over linear, patriarchal timelines. Time is thought to be cyclical, organized around the rotation of the Earth, sun, moon, and other stars and planets of the universe. There is no end point, as energy and matter are reabsorbed and reworked into the flowing fabric of existence.
Comfort with the inevitability of death and the connection that humans have with the life cycles of Earth and the wider universe creates a worldview that is rather different from Judeo-Christian traditions that understand human (and nonhuman) life as finite on Earth. British witch Sybil Leek explains: “Once we become obsessed with thoughts of death as an ultimate end, we defeat our ability to become involved in life” (1973: 140).
For Nonhuman Animals, the patriarchal quest to defeat aging, illness, disability, and death itself has inspired all manner of heroic efforts in scientific exploration, efforts that have been used to rationalize grotesque, systematized brutality in vivisection laboratories (Collard 1988). It is an all too familiar pattern to vegan feminists: “In an earlier time, we burned witches in the name of religion,” muses Kheel, “Today we torture animals in the name of science” (1983a: no page).
An alternative worldview that emphasizes an infinity of existence could undermine this human supremacist approach. It animalizes humans, in some ways, reminding and celebrating that all sentient beings are part of an ongoing cycle of life. However, it also has the potential to depersonalize other-than-human animals. Leek adds: “As far as the spirit is concerned, the body is expendable; when we reach the point which we call death, the body is sloughed off like a coat we no longer need” (1973: 140). For Nonhuman Animals, whether or not this death is premature or violent (as is the case when they are killed for food) is not always considered relevant and their death be dismissed as “nature’s way.”
The killing of other animals is thus liable to diminishment even in goddess spiritualities. Indeed, Weinstein (2020) notes that death should not be seen as “horrible or frightening,” as it is a natural and necessary aspect of life (105). “Both power and suffering can be hurtful,” she notes, and “both, as parts of life, should be respected” (1973: 181). Suffering, in other words, must be accepted, if not embraced. Ecofeminist and pagan practices that remain committed to anthropocentrism, specieism, and non-veganism invariably default to the “natural” way of animal death, especially if it can excuse human violence against other animals.
While it is true that suffering in life cannot be avoided, some witches, ecofeminists, and certainly vegan feminists differentiate between suffering that can be avoided and that which is unfortunately unavoidable. As these traditions are rooted in activism, they often advocate intervention where possible. Starhawk, by way of example, emphasizes that suffering may exist, but “it is not our task to reconcile ourselves to it, but to work for change” (1999: 37). Indeed, Starhawk is perhaps the strongest advocate for using magic in the service of change. For her, witchcraft is a form of direct action and civil disobedience that can resist despair.
For Nonhuman Animals, however, their suffering is more easily reconciled if they are categorized as human foodstuffs. Starhawk (2004), for instance, is tolerant of veganism, but not vegan herself and suggests that veganism and vegetarianism are diets that are impractical for the environment and not nutritious enough for women. Although some ecofeminists, some pagans, and some witches do adopt veganism or perhaps even vegetarianism, most of them do not. Thus, philosophies of cyclical living (and dying), while useful in ecologizing all life on earth–humans included–it can just as easily be used to reinforce existing social hierarchies than to deconstruct them.
Works Cited Collard, A. 1988. Rape of the Wild. The Women’s Press: London. Kheel, M. 1986. “From Healing Herbs to Deadlyl Drugs.” Feminists for Animal Rights Newsletter 2 (2): 1-14. Leek, S. 1973. The Complete Art of Witchcraft. New York: New American Library. Starhawk. 1999. The Spiral Dance. San Francisco: HarperOne. Starhawk. 2004. The Earth Path. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. Weinstein, M. 2020. Positive Magic. Newburyport: Weiser Books.
Dr. Wrenn is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology with Colorado State University in 2016. She was awarded Exemplary Diversity Scholar, 2016 by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. She served as council member with the American Sociological Association’s Animals & Society section (2013-2016) and was elected Chair in 2018. She is the co-founder of the International Association of Vegan Sociologists. She serves as Book Review Editor to Society & Animals and is a member of the Research Advisory Council of The Vegan Society. She has contributed to the Human-Animal Studies Images and Cinema blogs for the Animals and Society Institute and has been published in several peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Gender Studies, Environmental Values, Feminist Media Studies, Disability & Society, Food, Culture & Society, and Society & Animals. In July 2013, she founded the Vegan Feminist Network, an academic-activist project engaging intersectional social justice praxis.
Nation-states in many regions of the globe were founded and controlled by abled, white male powerholders on Indigenous peoples’ and animals’ lands. On Turtle Island (North America), for instance, the land was taken (treaties notwithstanding) and offered by the government to white settlers from Europe for homesteading. Because of this invasion and occupation, there was and is an unequal, intertwined relationship among Indigenous peoples, the state, white settler property holders, and animals.
The state, our capitalist economy and privatization of land could not exist without the appropriation of First Nations’ decision-making over their territory. The rationale used by this trinity to carry out colonization was based on the contrived belief that “uncultivated” and “unproductive” land is vacant and unused because it is not tilled for crops and/or grazing domesticated animals. Such land lacks the private property mode of production to fulfill the soil’s bountiful potential, liberating the land to its rightful destiny, a freedom that was racialized, gendered and human-centric.
Once the white state and settlers had validated, among themselves, their sense of ownership, the violent subjugation of the original inhabitants was easily justified. Law enforcement officers, soldiers and settlers killed or forced Indigenous peoples and free-living animals off their lands. The government settler pact replaced the refugees and natural terrain with privately run tracts for monoculture crops and animal imprisonment farming. As well, hunting the displaced, relatively free-roaming animals as “game” was promoted on private and public territories by these white men and their institutions.
National laws enacted by white patriarchal governments to guarantee state power and private property rights further enhanced the reach of the state and settler proprietary status. State lawmakers were seen as a necessary medium to keep settlerism from falling into a lawless, chaotic, self-destructive competition for land.
State-owned land was leased for private forestry, mining and fossil fuel extraction in keeping with the productive mindset. Even when state lands were not designated for production, they carry the potential for such use.
Not all land could be used for production. Some had to be set aside for Indigenous reserves, conservation zones, and parks (ecological islands often used for tourism, recreation, and preservation of animal and plant species habitats).
Land also had to be held for housing, education, healthcare, transportation, businesses, police, military and other state/settler services, for capitalist colonial economic production to function in an organized and sustainable manner. Without these structural supports, the economy and society couldn’t exist and thrive.
State power, the for-profit economic system and private land holdings were foreign to the Indigenous ethos; humans and animals belong to the land, it does not belong to humans as a commodity any more than the sky. Unplowed land wasn’t perceived as empty, but teeming with endless plant and animal life.
The colonial/private pretense illustrates that white maleness was a condition for becoming propertied and expanding its whiteness. To be a white man, then, is conflated with private property. White women had no property standing apart from their husbands. People of color didn’t have the right color or the means to own land. The superiority of whiteness and the inferiority of Indigenous, black, and brown peoples and animals were thereby fortified.
The fiction that normalized a fusion of male whiteness and private property evolved into a naturalized identity of indigeneity – whiteness becomes nativist entitlement to the land. This created the misperception of Indigenous peoples as invaders and thieves when they go out of their prescribed space to pass through their stolen territory. In an act of astounding reversal, the oppressed are revictimized as the real villains. Undomesticated carnivorous and burrowing animals face similar treatment.
As Dallas Jokic, the Indigenous scholar whose knowledge primarily shaped this script, asserts:
“The image of the white male farmer defending his family and property is based upon the masculine ideal of “the ability to build a home, provide for and protect one’s family, and – most importantly – to exercise control over one’s private domain.”… This masculine ideal is highly racialized, and implies that his domain belongs to him ontologically [the fixed nature of his existence]. In other words, the white male farmer recognizes his ontological deputization and commits the violence required by it.” **
Ultimately, this androcentric ableist philosophy and practice, with its accompanying emotional trappings, e.g., “it feels right”, laid the groundwork for ongoing white rule, missing and murdered Indigenous women, species extinction and countless killings of untamed and domesticated beings.
* The contents of this article are a cursory summary of Indigenous scholarship studied over decades.
** Dallas Jokic, Fascism and Settler Colonialism in Canada, A thesis submitted to the Department of Philosophy In conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada, September 2019.
There were many feminists of the Victorian era who tackled the horrors of vivisection, but perhaps none was so outspoken as Frances Power Cobbe. Born of landed gentry in Ireland, she was well educated, philosophically minded, motivated by morality, dedicated to reform, and a prolific speaker and writer. She was also unapologetically fat, more or less openly gay, and grappled with disability most of her life. Cobbe loved to eat, she loved a laugh, and she loved a good fight. Louisa May Alcott, upon meeting her, was taken aback by her presence, and pleased to find such a powerful advocate for justice who also happened to thwart the old maid stereotype that befell single women such as themselves.
Cobbe had been for some years heavily involved in anti-poverty efforts, religious and educational reform, and feminism, but the assault on Nonhuman Animals in vivisection laboratories and medical theaters would come to define her career. For her, there was a clear link observed between the ideological and material treatment of Nonhuman Animals and other marginalized groups. For instance, the heavy use of vivisection in medical training, she believed, was socializing a culture of cruelty in doctors. She and her colleagues saw the inhumane treatment of women (who were often made doubly vulnerable by poverty) as not dissimilar to that faced by other animals. Even the same disciplinary lexicon and utilitarian devices devised for vivisection would be reworked for medical treatments and experiments on women (Lansbury 1985). Cobbe was also aware that institutional prohibitions on women’s healing (midwives were outlawed by the 19th century and women were not allowed to attend medical school to become professional doctors) meant that patients were denied a kinder, more individualized approach to care. It was an intentional disarming of women to maintain their ignorance and dependence.
Vivisection, for Cobbe, was the exemplar for human immorality in a modernizing society; it was the bedrock for many social ills. Many tried to convince her that she was making much of nothing, that vivisection was rarely practiced and, for that matter, mostly harmless. Cobbe would have none of it, barrelling forward and drawing heavily on her scholarly training, gift for debate, and vast social connections to launch a campaign that she would fight until the end of her life. Kramer (1992-1993) credits her for organizing the first protest against vivisection, in fact. In 1863, she collected the signatures of 800 persons who insisted that exiled German physiologist Moritz Schiff cease his torturous experiments, leading to the formation of the Florentine Society for the Protection of Animals. Campaigners were particularly disturbed by the prolongation of violence against other animals in wholly unnecessary experiments conducted by scientists who dissected and mangled Nonhuman Animals without pain relief for purposes of curiosity and career advancement.
Back in Britain, Cobbe appealed to the RSPCA to intervene on the growing industry, quite unsuccessfully as the RSPCA was not wholly against speciesist scientific practices given its own class bias. Cobbe pushed ahead, gathering support where she could. Illustrations she collected from her research in medical journals were reproduced in a variety of campaigning materials, including color posters mounted in cities and railway stations across London and wider Britain. She had even hoped to include morally shocking images in a magic lantern show intended for family audiences (though, after much debate with her colleagues on the efficacy of such a tactic, was likely persuaded against it) (Williamson 2005).
Bolstered by the sympathies of Queen Victoria, Cobbe began to push for legislative regulation of the practice. With the encouragement of her colleagues, she formed the Victoria Street Society, what would become the National Anti-Vivisection Society (NAVS). This effort culminated in the passing of a parliamentary bill in 1875, but the considerable compromises necessary to move it forward manifested the 1876 Cruelty to Animals Act which effectively legitimated the practice and encouraged its rapid growth. Cobbe, a pragmatist, had been committed to restricting, rather than abolishing abolition. Considerable persuasion from her fellow abolitionists eventually moved her to adopt abolition herself, necessitating that she form a new organization, the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV).
The fight continued for the rest of her life. Indeed, it continues to this day. Cobbe, at the time living with her longtime partner, Welsh artist Mary Lloyd, died at the age of 81, leaving quite the legacy. Both NAVS and BUAV are still in operation today, and vivisection, while still well entrenched in scientific and pharmaceutical research, is declining in other industries, such as cosmetics, largely due to consumer pressure like that initiated by Cobbe almost 200 years ago. Technological advancements have created a number of ethical, more scientifically accurate alternatives to vivisection, furthermore, suggesting the possibility of a future cessation.
Cobbe’s legacy, however, is a complicated one. She was against “hunting and rejected the popular millinery fashion of wearing birds’ plumage, but she was not a vegetarian. Being both an advocate for women and an epicure (she claimed to have attended more than 2,000 dinner parties), she thought “meat” a necessity for good living, a necessity that was wrongly discouraged of girls and women. She was also known to be quite the bully, harassing colleague (and vegetarian) Anna Kingsford to the point of causing Kingsford ill health and necessitating her husband intervene with threats of litigation.
Cobbe was a stereotypical upper class Victorian whose wealth and wellbeing were made possible from colonial exploitation (her own family owned land in rural Ireland where her father worked as Dublin’s High Sheriff). She had some rather disparaging attitudes toward the colonies as a result, as well as some rather conservative ideas about gender roles despite her own independent lifestyle. Although she certainly advocated a much less restrictive set of expectations for women (championing their access to education, medical training, martial separation, and child custody), she took issue with women in certain leadership positions. She stocked her Victoria Street Society with men, for instance, to improve its credibility, and viciously attacked Kingsford (a wife and mother) for not restricting her campaigning to the domestic sphere.
For all her complexities, Cobbe is part of a rich history of queer anti-speciesist advocacy that informs a robustly diverse vegan feminist movement today. She certainly was not perfect, but she was a true force of righteousness that championed all sorts of causes. She lived an intersectional life and she recognized the intersectionality that shaped social inequalities. Her fortitude in the face of considerable patriarchal institutional violence and intimidation is nothing short of awe-inspiring.
References
Kramer, M. 1992-1993. “Frances Power Cobbe: Anti-Vivisectionism in Victorian England.” Feminists for Animal Rights Newsletter 7 (1-2): 5-17.
Lansbury, C. 1985. The Old Brown Dog. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Williamson, L. 2005. Power and Protest. London: Rivers Oram Press.
Dr. Wrenn is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology with Colorado State University in 2016. She was awarded Exemplary Diversity Scholar, 2016 by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. She served as council member with the American Sociological Association’s Animals & Society section (2013-2016) and was elected Chair in 2018. She is the co-founder of the International Association of Vegan Sociologists. She serves as Book Review Editor to Society & Animals and is a member of the Research Advisory Council of The Vegan Society. She has contributed to the Human-Animal Studies Images and Cinema blogs for the Animals and Society Institute and has been published in several peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Gender Studies, Environmental Values, Feminist Media Studies, Disability & Society, Food, Culture & Society, and Society & Animals. In July 2013, she founded the Vegan Feminist Network, an academic-activist project engaging intersectional social justice praxis.
Marking high spring and the beginning of summer in the northern hemisphere, Bealtaine (Irish for “May” and anglicized as Beltane) is a major sabbat that observes the returning sun, the greening of the land, and a heightening growth period. In Irish, Bealtaine refers to the fire (tine) of the Celtic sun god Bel. The May season is a time of agricultural birth and growth, with considerable wealth to be gleaned from the exploitation of other animals. Complex rituals sprung up across the British Isles in an effort to regulate the system and ensure prosperity.
Bonfires have traditionally been held on the eve of May 1st for the protecting of “livestock.” Cows might be jumped over the May Day fires or they and their living quarters might be decorated with protective plants and herbs to maximize fertility and keep the evil eye or dangerous fae away. Witches were often accused of interfering with “livestock” as well. Indeed, fears of evil interference with animal-based agriculture was a major reason for the persecution of witches and the overall devaluation of women. Cows and other animals that failed to produce or took ill were sometimes diagnosed as being “elf-shot,” that is, they were literally thought to have been targeted by witches, fairies, or other interlopers.
In modern witchcraft and pagan practices, killing and eating animals has become a contemporary opportunity for the average, non-farming practitioner to interact with this agrarian tradition (West 2002). “Meat” may not feature as heavily, but Wiccan author Scott Cunningham (2007) advises incorporating dairy into May Day festivities. Bees, too, are often included in Bealtaine celebrations as mead (a fermented honey beverage) is regularly encouraged (Greenleaf 2016). Bealtaine may not incorporate speciesism as deeply as Imbolc or Ostara, but it nonetheless exhibits the characteristic romanticization of speciesism in “livestock” exploitation through the ritualized consumption of animal-based foods and drink.
A time of union, handfasting, and the start of the fertile season, Bealtaine also marks a time in which the “masculine” and “feminine” energies of the earth are thought to merge as the feminine darker months wane with the return of the sun. There are certainly many ways to reclaim this cross-quarter point in early May for a vegan witchcraft. For instance, it might become a time to reflect on the fruits of female labour as well as a time to celebrate the destabilization of gender polarities. Indeed, this is the season of the Green Man (also known as the Wild Man and the Jack in the Green). This figure, representing environmental renewal and the fluid boundary between humans and nature, could be a useful symbol to explore.
Bealtaine should also be a time to reconsider the dual oppression of women and other animals, particularly in light of the historical persecution of women accused of interfering with animal-based agriculture. Today’s vegan witches aim to spoil farming yields through liberating–rather than hexing–cows, sheeps, and other imprisoned animals. Thus, the first of May might be an appropriate time to reclaim this feminist power of resistance by elf-shooting the anthroparchy and raising the Bealtaine fires for the protection and liberation of its victims.
Works Cited
Cunningham, S. 2007. Cunningham’s Encyclopaedia of Wicca in the Kitchen. Woodbury: Llewellyn Publications.Greenleaf, C. 2016. The Book of Kitchen Witchery. London: CICO Books.
Greenleaf, C. 2016. The Book of Kitchen Witchery. London: CICO Books.
West, K. 2002. The Real Witches’ Kitchen. London: Thorsons.
Dr. Wrenn is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology with Colorado State University in 2016. She was awarded Exemplary Diversity Scholar, 2016 by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. She served as council member with the American Sociological Association’s Animals & Society section (2013-2016) and was elected Chair in 2018. She is the co-founder of the International Association of Vegan Sociologists. She serves as Book Review Editor to Society & Animals and is a member of the Research Advisory Council of The Vegan Society. She has contributed to the Human-Animal Studies Images and Cinema blogs for the Animals and Society Institute and has been published in several peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Gender Studies, Environmental Values, Feminist Media Studies, Disability & Society, Food, Culture & Society, and Society & Animals. In July 2013, she founded the Vegan Feminist Network, an academic-activist project engaging intersectional social justice praxis.
