These words are important in the practice of Modern Witchcraft.  They appear not only in various rituals, in books on Wicca -- they even appear on a camisole and panty set sold by Wacky Jac. They are a marker of Witch identity, one of the examples of folk speech of our community, like “Blessed Be,” that reveals our membership to others in the community, displaying our knowledge of our community’s customs and traditions. This phrase is used by Witches both in ritual and out of ritual to talk about their relationship to other Witches. I want to talk about their meaning for me, and their meaning for our community.

Most of us in Dianic tradition encounter this phrase in an initiation ritual or in another type of formal ritual such as an ordination.  The phrase is the answer to the challenge posed at a boundary or gate or entrance to a circle, “How do you enter this circle?”  The challenge is posed to us by a Witch acting as guardian of the sacred space.  Usually, this challenge is treated almost facetiously before the ritual starts – a facilitator tells the women that this challenge will be posed to them, and gives them the answer, almost like a “cheat sheet,” and in a way this implies that the answer is a secret code word, and the challenge is nothing more than a test of memory, a test of whether we can use “insider lingo,” a playacting of a real challenge. The only challenge is to remember the correct words, and once you do you are allowed to enter the circle.

I want to ask us to go deeper in our understanding of and use of these words. I have heard women say, when talking about a disagreement or conflict with another woman, usually a circle sister or fellow member of an organization, “I can’t be in perfect love and perfect trust with her.” Women seem to use “in perfect love and perfect trust” to indicate the presence or lack of trust and love within a group.  What they seem to be saying is “I do [or do not] feel safe with this woman” or even “I can [or cannot] do ritual work with them.”  Intragroup conflict is nothing new, either in women’s groups or in magical and Neopagan groups.  Recent histories of  the Second Wave of the feminist movement chronicle the conflict, disagreements, anger, fear, envy, mistrust, and all the other difficult feelings those women had with each other.  Consciousness raising groups also had emotional conflicts, as women struggled to feel safe enough to be real and speak their truths with and to each other. Magical organizations have a long history of conflict; I am currently reading about the early Golden Dawn and the interpersonal problems that arose in that group, and all the branches of Neopaganism have examples of conflict and struggle between and within groups. Starhawk addresses this in her book Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics, and Z Budapest refers to it in The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries, when she advises a woman who is in conflict with her High Priestess to “hive off” and form her own group, although recommending that the “mother” and “daughter” groups all come together at Summer Solstice for a “gathering of the tribes.” 

I am concerned that we take “in perfect love and perfect trust” too literally, and use it to refer to our own emotional sense of affection and/or safety. In doing this, we can then use this phrase, this challenge of the Goddess, to bludgeon others, to insist others meet our emotional standards, or to cement factions, or to shun or ostracize another woman. I think this is the opposite of what this phrase is supposed to do. I suggest that we really take these words as a challenge, as an opportunity for growth and change, as a test set by the Goddess to deepen our practice.  I ask that we think upon these words and see them as the spiritual challenge they are, to try to understand why this is the test administered to us when we want to enter a sacred circle.  I am suggesting we stop giving lip service to this phrase, stop treating it as code words or a secret handshake that will gain us admission, and start opening up to the ongoing challenge the Goddess is setting us, as we walk on our spiral path to Her.  Each time we hear these words, I hope that we attempt to go one level deeper on the spiral of our Goddess practice, to go deeper into our Witch selves – which is where the Goddess resides.

When we say that we enter a circle “in perfect love and perfect trust” I do not think that the challenge means “Do you love and trust everyone here?”  or “Does everyone here love and trust you?”  I do not think it means “Do you feel safe and warm and is it easy to be open and accepting and affectionate, is it easy to rely on the other women here?”  What I think the Goddess is asking of us is whether we are willing to choose to love the other women present while in ritual space, no matter what our relationship is with them outside the ritual or in the mundane world.  I think She asks us whether we are willing to choose to trust the other women present while we are in ritual space, no matter if we trust them outside ritual.  The challenge is to us, and is about us, not about the other women. Whether or not the other women are loving or trustworthy is beside the point. Our challenge, as set by the Goddess, is about our ability to love and trust others, while we do Her work.  She does not ask us to love and trust everyone indiscriminately, nor to give our money, time, hearts, homes, etc., to those whom our inner Wild Woman, our inner Witch knows to be unworthy of it. She is not asking us to be doormats or dupes. What She is asking of us is whether we can, while in ritual space, choose to step into that place within us that sees other women as Goddess.  Can we choose to step into that place within us that is Goddess, which is what enables us to see others as Goddess? And when we are in that place in us, and seeing that part of another, isn’t there really only one of us at that moment?  Isn’t that Goddess?

In ritual we come together with women whom we may not choose to socialize with, who may bug us, annoy us, anger us, and let us down.  We come together with women who are not perfect, who are not always lovable, who are not always trustworthy – this includes us as well as others. “In perfect love and perfect trust” does not ask us not to have doubts about others, does not ask us to be “perfect” in our emotions or claim some New Age sort of denial of conflict or “negative” emotions. We do not have to lie. Nor do we have to feel love or trust for our sisters in the circle outside of ritual, though of course it would be nice if we could. Ritual space is “time out of time,” when we step into and create a space that is between the worlds, a space into which we invoke the Sacred and work with the Sacred to accomplish transformation, to give honor and thanks, to create change in ourselves and the outside world of “reality.” We are not our mundane selves when we do ritual. The challenge the Goddess sets us is to leave our mundane emotions outside the circle, bringing our Goddess selves to the sacred work we do together in ritual. I do not mean that we are to create an artificial division between “the sacred” and “the profane,” a duality we rightly wish to leave behind in Dianic Witchcraft. We of course use ourselves as the ground for our work in ritual, and use ritual to address our “mundane” concerns.  But when we say to ourselves and to each other “You are Goddess,” we are recognizing the Deeper Self that is the Sacred, and that is what I think this challenge is daring us to do – to choose to be that Deeper Self, that Goddess within, while in ritual.

On two occasions I was asked by my Dianic elders to make this choice.  In a class that I took from Letecia, there was a woman in the group with whom I had conflict in our daily lives. She felt hurt by me, and had attacked me verbally in public on many occasions. While I had tried not to engage overtly in this dance, I’m sure that I contributed to it somehow myself.  I told Letecia about it, the other woman told the class about her feelings about me, and I even called Ruth for advice. Both Ruth and Letecia asked me if I could put aside my fear and mistrust and upset, and participate in the class. Could I “work deep” at the level the Goddess was calling me to?  I took a breath and answered “Yes.”  It was not easy, but my choice to go to that deep place where I was Goddess, and where I could see the other woman as Goddess, made my work in the class much more meaningful than it might have been had I not had to concentrate so hard and choose over and over to be in that place.  The same woman was in my initiation group, and I had to again choose to work deep, to go to that place where I was Goddess, and she was Goddess, and where what mattered was the ritual work at hand.  It made my initiation a much deeper experience for me, since I had to consciously choose over and over to focus, to work deep, to be “in perfect love and perfect trust” with all the women in the ritual, including the one in question.

I think my elders were right to challenge me that way.  They were metaphorically standing at the border of a ritual circle, barring my way unless I could meet the challenge. I did not have to repeat a phrase I had memorized; I had to use my will to be in perfect love and perfect trust – I had to choose to enter the work or the ritual with love and trust, perfect because it was Goddess – the Goddess in me and the Goddess in the other woman and all the other women in the class and ritual.

M. Scott Peck says that love is not a feeling but an act of will – to choose to behave in a loving manner to another whether or not we feel the emotion at that particular moment. I think trust is the same. The words of the challenge are not “How do you feel about the circle? How do you feel about the others here?”  The words are “How do you enter the circle?”  They refer to an action, to an act of Will.  They refer to our choice. We can enter in our emotions (positive or negative), or we can enter through our will, our choice to be in perfect love in this ritual circle, in perfect trust in this ritual circle. Perhaps that is why the challenge is often delivered by a Witch holding a blade, not a cup – it is Will being challenged here, not emotions.

We do not have to be perfect, we do not have to love everyone, or trust everyone – that would be stupid, actually. We do not have to give up our minds which weigh and judge and want to make the ritual and its facilitators better next time. We do not have to give up our opinions about others and their behaviors. Nor do we have to meet this challenge in all we do in our community – we cannot necessarily love all the women we socialize with or sit on committees with, nor will we trust them all equally (of course it is good to respect all our Dianic sisters and treat them well). What we do have to do, as Dianic Witches, is meet that challenge at the gate – in ritual, can we find the Goddess in ourselves and in the other women?  Can we see the perfect Sacred in ourselves and in other women? For the space of the ritual, can we pass the Goddess’ test? Can we enter the sacred circle in perfect love and perfect trust, experiencing the Divine in ritual?

2008, Cerridwen. Do not cite without permision, please.