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Feminist Literature

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Parent Issue
Month
December
Year
1994
Copyright
Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)
Rights Held By
Agenda Publications
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In the beginning. ..was a very female sea. For two-and-a-half billion years on earth, all lifeforms floated in the womb-like environment of the planetary ocean - nourished and protected by its fluid chemicals, rocked by the lunar-tidal rhythms.... The penis first appearedi n the Age of Reptiles, about 200 million years ago...when it comes to the two sexes, one of us has been around a lot longer than the other.

This information can be found on page two of "The Great Cosmic Mother," by Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor. If I were to recommend one text for feminist research, this 500 pager would certainly be it. We desperately need a clarified view of history (or, as some say, herstory) and as far as this boy can see, nobody has done it up quite so thoroughly and intelligently. What the book develops into is a fascinating and brilliantly stated examination of how we live and what goes down.

Politics happen when people realize their daily survival problems are not caused by individual "sin" and "guilt" but by a collective malfunctioning. Within patriarchal Christianism, this is the tatoo vision.... The American split, in raw terms, is this: nominal "freedom" without real-life ecstasy, or nominal "epiphany" without real-life freedom. Such a split is always the result when life is fed into the patriarchal dualistic grinding machine. . ..

There's wisdom here, and a refreshing emphasis upon things as they really demonstrably are. Rarely does one encounter such pragmatism and clarity. It is as if these women are focusing a big lens and saying, look at this world, can't you see how things run, and wouldn't it be better if the people on the face of the earth behaved as if we were really blessed to be here?

Luisah Teish, author of "Jambalaya" and "Carnival of the Spirit" gives us insights based in the wisdom of African spirituality and Pan-African common sense. She gives us this from the Yoruba people: "Life on earth is not regarded as a curse or as the result of negative Karma Being bom human is regarded as a natural manifestation of the design of Creation. Each person who walks upon the face of the earth is thought to have an original contract with Creation.... Life on Earth is an experíence, a stage in the cycle of Continuous Creation. Death is also a natural part of that Existence."

Honoring the female principle of the universe is the bottom line for many of us, and as far back as human memory goes there have been metaphors for life and its cycles: Goddesses. Or many manifestations of one Goddess. The feminist archaeological record has been exhaustively documented by Marija Gimbutas, whose "Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe 6500-3500 B.C." should be used in archaeology courses at every university. The dominant view of that science is mired, like most sciences (even the brave new techno-sciences) in the vestiges of 19th century narrow-mindedness. The time for change is now, and has been for awhile.

Trendification has distorted the common perception of Feminist Cosmology, which has been co-opted and marketed with all the zeal of pop culture economics. Again, from "The Great Cosmic Mother":

Because "women's spirituality" in the Western world has been, or has often seemed to be, a cultural luxury of mostíy white middle-class women, it too has been accused, quite justly, of "lacking a political consciousness";or, at least, lacking a political reference. On another level, many Lesbian and even hetero feminists who are "into the Goddess" have opted for cultural-political separatism; they have "left politics" and politica! solutions, that is,by blaming the world's problems on men, and then refusing to have anything more to do with "the man's world"-i.e., "Let him clean up his own mess. " The glaring problem with this separatist solution is that "the man 's world" is still filled with a majority population of women and children - it is women and children doing most of the suffering "out there, " and to turn one's back on "the man's world" is to turn one's back on them.

A genuine understanding of "the Goddess" would not allow us to do this...for we are in and of that world now, and its suffering is an extension of us, as we are an extension of it. In a true reliving of the world's first religion, we can make no distinctions between "the life of the spirit" and "the life of the flesh, " for they are one. And so, we can make no separation between "spirituality" and "politics. "We are this world; we cannot Ieave it. We can only work to transform it as we transform ourselves, in acts of evolution and revolution.

At this point get ravenously curious and want to hear more about this way of thinking. "The Politics of Women's Spirituality" - essays on the rise of spiritual power within the feminist movement (edited by Charlene Spretnak) provides many insights. If we consider that the system which is in place today is essentially the same system which burned nine million witches.why then we're caught up in a machine which can not and will not ever truly stand for life, liberty, nor any sort of enduring happiness. Not this motherfucker. Look where it has been; what it has done. See what it's doing right now. Do not labor under the impression that the Inquisition ever ended. It didn't end in Dachau; it didn't end in Vietnam; it hasn't let up in Bosnia. We need to see this, name it for what it is, and work for change.

I am a man, which genetically means I am half woman. Women are 100% woman. (It's in the chromosomes.) And at this stage in my own feminist research, I can state that my loyalty is to the Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (W.I.T.C.H.), which means devoting one's energies to the struggle against oppression, especially oppression of women.

There's a woman named Starhawk whose teachings are widely cherished and studied. "Dreaming the Dark Magic, Sex and Politics" is her magnum opus, wherein she defines the system as being based upon estrangement and the practice of maintaining power over others. Starhawk suggests we evolve past the limitations of not only patriarchy but hierarchy as well (although the two are nearly synonymous). She compares the Communist Party to the Catholic Church and says that structurally there's not a lot of difference between the two.

Structure, not content, determines how energy will flow, where it will be directed, what new forms and structures it will create. Hierarchical structures, no matter what principles they espouse, will breed new hierarchical structures that embody power-over, not power-from within...the structure itself reinforces the idea that some people are inherently more worthy than others.

Looking back over many years of counter-cultural activities, how true these words ring, and then the realization comes that we have a mammoth task before us if we ever expect any of this to catch on. Because the ways of power and greed are deeply etched in our people. Fortunately, women's wisdom runs deeper. Women's wisdom is the oldest wisdom. And over the last 20 years, feminist research has brought us closer to a comprehension of the true way of things, than we've been for many centuries.

BOOKS IN THIS ARTICLE: "The Great Cosmic Mother" By Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor "Jambalaya" and "Carnival of the Spirit" By Luisah Teish "Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe 6500-3500 B.C." By Marija Gimbutas "The Politics of Women's Spirituality" Edited by Charlene Spretnak "Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics" By Starhawk

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