Morgana MacVicar

Morgana MacVicar, born Julie Eaton in 1947, grew up in Miami, Florida, and both sides of her family were involved in politics. Her father was a state senator, and he became a Federal Judge, enforcing integration in the school system. In college, at Florida State University (FSU), she was involved in civil rights and antiwar protests, and was president of Students for a Democratic Society. She completed her degree in social welfare in 1969, returning for her graduate degree in American studies and dance. During that time, she helped to start the Tallahassee Women’s Educational and Cultural Center on the FSU campus, along with Dorothy Allison, Nesta King, and Judith Jones.

Morgana MacVicar’s great passion of her life has been dance, especially belly dancing, which she teaches as sacred to women’s ancient, childbearing practices. Together with Rena Carney, she started a feminist dance theatre troupe in St. Augustine, Florida. Morgana and Rena cofounded with Suzanne Chance and Kathleen Clementson the Pagoda, a women’s residential community and cultural center in St. Augustine, active from 1977 to 1999. They leased and later bought a two-story building there. They produced feminist plays, concerts, and more, renting cottages as a resort destination. All events and rentals were for women only.

In 1979, Morgana and others became officers of an incorporated feminist church, the Mother Church, which NOW leader Toni Head had started in Florida in 1978. They changed the name to Pagoda-temple of Love and applied for federal tax-exempt status that year. They were the second, incorporated, tax-exempt Goddess church in the country, after the first one, which was Z Budapest’s Sisterhood of Wicca. In 1980, women who had bought the two-story building and started the cultural center decided to donate the building to Pagoda-temple of Love. The temple sustained its activities through tax-exempt donations until 1999.

In the 1990s, Morgana cofounded Alapine Village, a lesbian residential community in the mountains of northern Alabama, near where she had spent idyllic summers at a girls’ camp in her childhood, and it’s where she lives now. The owners of Pagoda-temple of Love sold the Florida property to another lesbian group. They bought land adjoining the Alapine property, changing the temple’s name to Temple of the Great Mother.

See also:

Audio Interview Pagoda Women at Alapine

“Pagoda, Florida 1982, Conversation between Morgana and Elethia,” in Lesbian Land, ed. Joyce Cheney (Minneapolis, MN: Word Weavers), 1985, pp. 111-115.

Merril Mushroom, “Pagoda Playhouse: The Glory Days,” Sinister Wisdom 104 (Spring 2017): 126-29.

Merril Mushroom, “Pagoda Temple of Love: Lesbian Paradise (1977-Present),” Sinister Wisdom 98 (Fall 2015): 53-61.

Rose Norman, “Alapine: Morgana’s Magical Mountain (1997-Present),” Sinister Wisdom 98 (Fall 2015): 146-49.

Rose Norman, “Pagoda-temple of Love,” Sinister Wisdom 124 (Spring 2022): 28-35.