The simplest polarity flow is between male and female principles and many Craft groups make this central to working magic. According to Starhawk, however, polarity can also be created internally within the individual via a process of magical masturbation. She writes: "If a woman creates an inner male, or a man creates an inner female, polarity can flow between the person and what we call the companion self".
Starhawk explains the procedure: Firstly, remove your clothes and stand naked before a full-length mirror. Secondly, study your reflection, taking pleasure in every part of your body; "do not diet or attempt to change the way your body looks", says Starhawk, "work on learning to love it the way it is" (for Starhawk the body is not only always beautiful, but also always innocent; a natural object outside of culture and history).
Finally, it's time to invoke the double by imagining one’s reflected image to be someone both to love and be loved by: "let a feeling of warmth and affection flow from you to your double", says Starhawk; "you can talk with your double, or, if you like, make love with him/her. When you are done, thank your double".
This process of amusingly courteous occult ritual and magical masturbation is taken a stage further when the double becomes a full companion self - no longer just a reflection, but a virtual other of the opposite sex. Again we are instructed to feel "affection and attraction for the person you have created in the mirror". Starhawk also suggests naming the companion self: "Have a conversation. Play. Make love."
She further advises that mutual masturbation between flesh-and-blood partners is also a valuable way of building a "deeper-than-superficial bond between lovers", before advocating a form of al fresco masturbation with plants that, apparently, enables us to get closer to the natural world. Let’s briefly examine each of these options in turn ...
Firstly, mutual masturbation between partners. Not only does Starhawk insist that a partner should be carefully chosen and preferably be someone with whom one has already established a close relationship built upon trust and affection (Starhawk doesn't approve of promiscuous, irresponsible, or anonymous sex), but she says that both parties involved should also "be familiar with the workings of polarity".
I have to say I find the latter point particularly curious. I can’t help wondering why it needs to be the case; either there’s a cosmic law of polarity that exists independently of man or there isn’t. How can knowledge or lack of knowledge of it make any difference to its working?
Anyway, let us return to our masturbating couple:
"Retire to a warm and private place. Sit opposite each other. Look into each other's eyes and call up the current you felt with your double or companion self … When you are ready, trade. Let your lover send while you receive. Lie down next to each other. Place your hands on each other’s bodies - in whatever places please both of you. Call up the current of polarity … Then you can both send and receive simultaneously. As the currents build, make sounds or movements that help them. Let the process reach its natural conclusion".
Although Starhawk doesn’t explicitly say what this natural conclusion is, we can only assume she means (in a rather banal and functional manner) orgasm. She also adds an amusing end note to the above in which she once again insists that magical masturbation works best “in a long-standing love affair or partnership”. Such curious moralizing is, alas, all too typical of many writers within the Wiccan world.
Having briefly discussed mutual masturbation in the context of sex-magick, it’s time now to examine outdoor auto-erotic activity or loving nature as Starhawk both euphemistically and all too literally puts it. Perhaps we find here elements of the invocation of Pan that archetypal psychologist James Hillman celebrates (click here). Writing in those short, often two-word non-sentences that she seems to favour, Starhawk instructs us to:
"Go outside. Find a plant (or you can do this with a tree … or some other natural object) … Call up the current you felt with your double or companion self … Let the current flow into the plant until you feel its energy radiating back. Enjoy it."
Again, rather coyly, she doesn’t actually use the word masturbate here - but what else can it be that one is encouraged to do but wank with the vegetation?
Now, let me say at this point that I have no problem with any of this; not the wanking, the floraphilia, or the elements of objectum sexuality. However, one does worry that what's being advocated here is no more than an intellectual game played with smoke and mirrors; a deliberate and wilful prostituting of the body to the mind or what Lawrence terms sex in the head. And for me, it's disappointing that pagan occultism should be complicit in exchanging the sheer intensity of libidinal pleasure for mere representation.
Disappointing, but not surprising. For as the great Gardnerian witch-queen Doreen Valiente readily admits: "Practitioners of magic have always emphasized that … in the last resort it is the mind that holds the power of magic".
See:
Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark, (Beacon Press, 1982)
Doreen Valiente, An ABC of Witchcraft, (Phoenix Publishing, 1988).
Note: this post is a revised and edited extract from an essay on masturbation in The Treadwell's Papers 1: Sex/Magic (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). Readers interested in two related posts, also extracted from the above essay, should click here and here.
