In
Cristina Biaggi's very wonderful little book,
In the Footsteps of the Goddess, in
which women write simply of their experience
of the Goddess, Mary R. Hopkins tells of her
quest. "I wondered what was a symbol for
woman. I began tearing pages out of
magazines, searched greeting card racks, and
dug into art history but I found nothing that
wasn't from a male point of view. That's how
I discovered how pervasive the male point of
view was. For ten years, I refused to read
anything by a man in an attempt to discover
how women think and respond to the
world."
I
remember when I was a girl, how much I
relished books with a female protagonist. I'm
sure that's why I read A Tree Grows In
Brooklyn five times one terrible hot and
boring summer when I was ten or eleven. It
was just so rare to read a book from a female
point of view, which meant that the intimacy
of reading novels (to say nothing of the
family drama) afforded me many opportunities
to identify with males.
But
as I reached puberty, the obvious difficulty
began to haunt me. I was not going to be
joining a ship's crew to discover my Treasure
Island, not likely to hitchhike across the
country with Kerouac, probably not even going
to write the Great American Novel with
tortured and poetic Thomas Wolfe. I was going
to be -- damnit! -- a girl.
Forever.
The
images of the feminine which were presented
to me did little to ameliorate the
difficulty. I just didn't fit the model, not
the right shape, it seemed, to start with,
for straight skirts and round-collar blouses,
and so adolescence was only the beginning of
years of depression which revolved around my
ambivalence about being a woman. I am a
little ashamed to remember it still!
It
was not until my own daughter reached puberty
-- when I began to delve deeply into the rich
material of women's writing much as Mary
Hopkins did - that I realized I was not
alone. Those of us "of a certain age" well
remember, as Eleanor Bowman so expertly
outlines in her essay in this issue, that we
came of age with a certain desperate sense of
loss. Approaching menopause, my reading
brought me to the arms of the goddess. I'm
sure I shall always remember the night I
attended my first ritual where the sound of
the drumming in a dark room full of women
reverberated with the echo of a distant
memory. I had been there before.
In
When the Drummers Were Women, Layne
Redmond writes, "Women today are on a
tremendous spiritual search. About 80 percent
of participants at transformational centers,
continuing education classes, therapy groups,
and New Age centers are women. Behind this
surging feminine energy is a yearning to
understand who they are and what their
purpose in life is. They long to live
meaningful lives in harmonious rhythm with
the sacred energies of the hearth and
heavens. Many have an underlying intuition
that women have been dispossessed of a
heritage, tradition, and sense of identity
that was once uniquely their own."
Eleanor
Bowman writes that women in her family sought
to deny their deep female nature by hiding it
in the artifice of femininity; Southern
"ladies," they disdained all the processes of
birthing and feeding their young from their
bodies. It was the black nanny who carried
all those labors for them (insofar as it was
possible!); she of course was closer to the
beasts of the field.
Another
course was chosen by the feminists of the 60s
and 70s, who preferred mind over body in a
brave demonstration of equality with men.
Thinking of those trenchant days, I like to
recall Ashley Montague's comment, that for
women, equality is a step down. Staunch
feminists fervently resist the idea that our
uniqueness as women resides in our capacity
for giving birth. To be valued as equals with
men, they have eschewed any generic
difference from males because it seemed to
confirm their lower status. In choosing
performance and achievement over the
trappings of femininity, they sought to
escape the role forced on them by male
privilege. But in the process, they, too,
have devalued their biological femaleness.
For
me, the most profound lesson of the goddess
is realizing that our spiritual power resides
in those very processes. In our monthly
cycles, our sexual ecstasy, our bleeding and
our birthing, we experience a oneness with
nature that is entirely unlike the experience
of males. Indeed it is the very experience
males have been trying to achieve with all
their austerities and meditations, though
unfortunately with the opposite result.
Seeking transcendence, they leave the body
out of the picture entirely -- a fatal
mistake.
Nature
is radiant, she is the best thing that we
could ever choose to rely on, she is the
foundation of our existence, and she, too, is
cyclical, stormy, juicy, all-embracing,
inclusive, and completely irrepressible. She
defies the mind's grasp. As women, we are
inextricably linked with her wildness as well
as her sweetness. The wisdom of the womb is
that all living beings are so connected.
By
being in relationship with us, men realize
their own roots in the ground of being; the
rituals of sacred marriage (hieros gamos)
once practiced in the temples of the goddess
were surely designed to remind men that they,
too, are of the earth. They experience that
connection through our bodies, both by coming
out of them and going into them, and that
repeated return to our shared humanity
through that sacred act is their best hope
for redemption.
Recognizing
the power that resides in our female
physicality does not mean that women are less
than men unless we accept the masculine
valuation on transcendence. I always remember
a line in a play by Loraine Hansberry that I
saw on Broadway during the '50s. It was
Sidney Poitier, I believe, who said, "A man
tells a woman his dreams and the woman says,
'Eat your eggs.'" There will always be a
tension between the male quest for
immortality and a woman's simple knowing that
life is here and now. But if men come to
value that grounding in reality, there will
be far fewer flights of fancy into the Great
Beyond, whether on the wings of poesy or via
the discharge of a nuclear missile. Men
appear to be generically (and genetically!)
less attached to life than we are; dreams of
personal power allow them to disregard what
the body needs, and that is part of the
reason why we are in this terrible mess the
planet is in today.
Women
are different, and the difference is
valuable. Amongst the Iroquois, chiefs could
not declare war without the support of the
women elders. Indeed, the Matrons were the
ones who appointed those chiefs. Indian women
know, and still remember, the power of their
essential being, and we have much to learn
from them. It is truly unfortunate that in
some cases they have been offended by the
late awakening of white women to the
deception of patriarchy. Certainly cheap
imitations of Native culture must be
abhorrent. But many of us are, after all,
sincere.
To
hold that power in society, we must first
nurture it in ourselves. But how do we come
to reside in that place? In modern society,
we are always tempted away from it, whether
by male disgust at our blood or our own
ambition to rise to a higher station in life
by proving that we can do anything a man can
do, better. We can enter the boardroom or
join the military; in the uniform we don,
breasts and thighs will be less visible. But
we will remain women, only proving by our
apparel our distrust of our own bodies. To
take on the male role is not the way to
equality. If we would be warriors, we would
be women warriors, spear in one hand, skull
dripping blood in the other, half naked if
you will. If we would be athletes, images
abound of the radiant Artemis, Diana of the
hunt, virginal, and purely wild.
The
rituals and the images of the goddess are a
boon to womankind. We need them desperately
in this age of media and celebrity images
broadcast on the flickering screen in all our
homogenized homes in subdivisions across
America. We need real grit.
Sharing
our stories with one another liberates us
from isolation, offers us confirmation of who
we truly are and the wisdom to see what we
are not. Unlearning the behaviors of
femininity (or feminism) takes time. We must
stop trying to conform to a man's idea of how
we ought to be. Therein lies our
subservience. If we are wild, and
irrepressible, as well as dignified -- if we
really hold that pure will of woman being --
we birth the possibility of a new culture,
one in which women are honored.
There
are many paths back to the primeval jungle,
but we go armed and fortified with the
experience of modern times. Embracing what
Susan Griffin has called "the Eros of
everyday life," we come back to the core of
our being. Life is a sensuous experience. We
are here to hold that truth, and share the
pleasure.
Blessed
be!
[NOTE:
In the Footsteps of the Goddess is a
wonderful book, just released summer
solstice. You can order it from KIT
Publishers, at www.booktrends.com]
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