From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Tue Jul 23 2002 - 15:48:08 MDT
You might want to include the following essay on the BBS. Then again,
you might not.
Gender and Nature in Contemporary
NeoPaganism
by Joe Dees
In recent decades, several social and political movements have
had profound impacts upon the popular Western psyche.
Collectively, they pose a powerful challenge to religiously
grounded relational paradigms which until recently have been
accepted almost without question. These movements include the
human rights trio (ethnic/racial civil rights, lesbian/gay rights and
feminism) and environmentalism.
The last two of these, feminism and environmentalism, have been
converging to the degree that a common discipline, ecofeminism,
has been born. Although some affinities exist between these two
and the others, the only solid connection seems to be the choice
by some feminists of lesbianism on ideological grounds in spite of
their personal sexual preferences. What could the womenÌs rights
movement have in common with the attempt to preserve and
protect our planetary ecology which the homosexual and nonwhite
rights movements do not share? To answer this question, we must
take a look at the paradigm they are all opposing, and in what
ways each of them oppose it.
Our Present Paradigm
This paradigm is drawn from the moral laws set down in the holy
texts of the religions comprising mainstream Western
Monotheism. These religions mainly include Judaism,
Christianity, Islam and Zoroastrianism; their texts include the
Bible, the Koran and the Zend Avesta. For purposes of simplicity
and brevity, we shall call this the JCIZ paradigm.
JCIZ postulates a single omniscient, omnipotent and relatively
benevolent male deity (Jahweh, Jehovah, God or Lord, Allah or
Ahura Mazda), who created and populated the world but is
essentially transcendent with respect to it. This deity is opposed
by another somewhat less knowing and powerful, relatively
malevolent male deity (Lucifer, the Devil, Shaitan or Ahriman),
who is also essentially supernatural. These two opposed forces of
good and evil, light and darkness, contend with each other by
intervening in our affairs. Each of us shall spend eternity with
whichever one he or she allies with; in any case this earth is a
temporary inconvenience, unimportant in the greater order of
things. It is in our interest to ally ourselves with the Ïgood guyÓ,
and we know how to do this because HeÌs thoughtfully sent us a
male savior or prophet or avatar (Moses, Jesus, Mohammed or
Zarathustra) to so inform us.
We are now in a position to understand the special affinity
between feminism and environmentalism. Homosexuality is
condemned and slavery condoned in the JCIZ, but if these
tendencies were reversed, it would not compromise the
underpinnings of the theological structure; gay/lesbian rights
identical to those of straights and white/nonwhite equality are no
metaphysical threat to the integrity of the system. The religious
ramifications of feminism and environmentalism, however, strike
it to its very core. By criticizing the consequences of following the
JCIZ, they indict as immoral or unwise the premises upon which it
is based, and do so from the perspective of an alternative
paradigm which derives from many pagan sources past and
present, but which is crystallized in Wicca.
Feminism
In the JCIZ, all deities are male, the first human is male, and any
central prophets or saviors are male. In the cosmic play, women
are relegated to the roles of dupe, slave, rebellious whore,
broodmare and submissive saint. Mary DalyÌs dictum that if God
is male, the male is God has the existential corollary, within the
JCIZ, of reducing females to nothing. In order to follow GodÌs
plan, women must submit to their husbandsÌ rule in particular, and
to male authority in general. Men may have to attend the school of
hard knocks, but women are stuck with their homework. They are
to raise their many children but not their voices, for fear of getting
knocked about themselves. This excision of the feminine from
spiritual significance and their resulting societal subservience has
provoked, within many contemporary women, a soul alienation of
Marxian proportions. Revolt against the predominance of this
divine chain of being has followed, and the guerillas have not
been exclusively female. Some men have come to feel cramped
and pigeonholed in the role of overseer on the domination
plantation and degraded and ashamed of what is expected of them
there. They have therefore joined the rebellion against the JCIZ
gender hierarchy, agreeing with Martin Luther King that you canÌt
hold folks down in a ditch unless you climb down in there with
them. As women and men come to the practical conclusion that
only equality of rights, responsibilities and opportunities works,
however, they also tend to come to the spiritual conclusion that
this is true because the sexes equally approach divinity. This,
however, would require deity to be comprised of masculinity and
femininity in equal measure, which of course directly contradicts
the JCIZ.
Environmentalism
In the JCIZ, the Creator packed a hostile and bountiful world like
a reluctant lunchbox for fallen humanity (read man) to suffer,
endure, dominate, subdue and exploit for his own benefit. This
divine license for exploitation without regard to consequences in
the name of greed has borne bitter fruit. Because we have not held
our common home in reverence, or honored her as sacred to us,
we have felt free to pollute, pillage, rape and otherwise profane
her. Yet, after fouling our own nest, we seem surprised to find
ourselves surrounded by human filth, with the blood of
extinguished comrade species crying out inconsolably from the
bleak bare ground. We are coming painfully to the understanding
that the earth is our source and foundation, and that poisoning and
impoverishing her can only hasten our own hollow demise.
However, the grasping of the fact that we are only a part of
something much older, wiser, grander and more complex than
ourselves draws us inexorably to an experience of awe and
sublimity in the presence of the sheer marvel of it. We begin to
see ourselves as tiny threads, which, by some miracle, are able to
sense the weave of a gigantic dancing tapestry (and the reality is
much more wondrous than that). The earth becomes hallowed for
us. But this contradicts the JCIZ premise that it is transcendent
Deity which is holy, not a nature which, compared to the
supernatural, must remain substandard.
ForbiddenFruit
Ecological degradation may be divided into natural resource
depletion and biosphere pollution, but both have overpopulation
as a root cause. Overpopulation drives us like lemmings to mow
our global lungs for farmland, lumber and cattle pasture, sapping
species diversity in the process. It drives us to strip-mine our
eroding soil to build skyscrapers, cars and soda cans. It drives us
to burn our fossil fuels, overheating our atmosphere and
decimating our ozone sunscreen for the sake of light, mobility,
plastic containers and air-conditioned comfort for a small
percentage of our teeming billions. It drives us to turn our over-
fished oceans into toxic cesspools when our rivers bear our
pesticides, factory byproducts and sewage to the seas.
Furthermore, the resulting competition for room and resources on
a shrinking sphere has led our infant race to nurse the barrel of the
nuclear gun.
It is ecologically imperative that we control our rate of
reproduction generally, and the fundamental pillar of feminism
that women must have the right to control their own reproduction
individually. To this dovetailing of the calls of personal freedom
and global necessity, the JCIZ responds with an iron demand
frozen for thousands of years in the face of catastrophically
changing circumstances; you must be fruitful and multiply.
Ecofeminism
The realization that birth control is both a feminist and an
environmental issue is one of many pattern matches which
ecofeminists have found. They follow the clue given by the phrase
ÎMother NatureÌ to the conclusion that women and the earth have
both been victimized by the same attitudes of subjection,
rapaciousness, violation, penetration of virgin territory, stripping,
despoiling and defloration. They consider this an unfortunate
result of the separation of the sexes into godlike, transcendent
man and earthy, immanent woman, into man as mind and woman
as body, found in the JCIZ. This partition, for ecofeminists, is
based on the differing positions of the sexes with regard to
childbirth; men observe, women participate. Women also, like the
earth, produce food, and can be planted with seed when in season;
hence the ancient occurrence of the term ÎplowingÌ for
intercourse.
Sexist theological Cartesianism, however, is untenable; the JCIZÌs
gender-based spirit/flesh dichotomy has been an injurious illusion.
Self-aware parts of nature are still woven into the web they
perceive. Mind, whether abstract or concrete, and of either
gender, is a bodily based, earthly and evolutionarily emergent
phenomenon.
The main division within ecofeminism is between ÎgenderÌ and
ÎnatureÌ ecofeminists. The ÎgenderÌ ecofeminists believe that
male-female relationships are the source of a domination pattern
that is generalized to apply to culture-nature relationships, and
that if we replace it with an egalitarian sexual partnership pattern,
our environmental abuse will stop. ÎNatureÌ ecofeminists believe
just the opposite; that replacing the egocentric, exploitative and
uncaring attitudes underlying environmental abuse with valuing,
consequence based stewardship will repair male-female
relationships by osmosis. I think that the domination pattern is
imprinted during child-rearing, and that to end it, we have to
embrace noncoercive methods of socializing our young.
The Challenge of Neopaganism
Neopaganism Generally
The Neopagan alternatives to the JCIZ paradigm trace their roots
to prehistoric Eurasian and African tribal and shamanic nature
religions, and count the Amerindian and Australian aboriginal
traditions as siblings. From them, Pagans have taken their
reverence for the earth and their celebration of the more feminine
principles of divinity. They generally create sacred space by
casting a circle (which is the intersection between a sanctified
sphere and the ground), and calling the four directions, which
correspond to the four elements, and to the divisions of a day, a
moon cycle, a year and a lifetime, and much else. Their holy days
fall on the solstices and the equinoxes, on the midpoints between
them (the cross-quarters), and/or on full moons. In addition, they
honor personal rites of passage; such as birth, a naming of the
child (sometimes called wiccaning), puberty, marriage (known as
handfasting), menopause (croning), and death. Contemporary
neopagan groups include the Fellowship of Isis, Ar n Draiocht
Fein (Our Own Druidism), the Church of all Worlds, Asatru and
the Church of the Eternal Source.
Wicca Specifically
All the above is true of Wicca, but when casting their circles most
also call the Earth Mother, Sky Father, and Center, this last
representing both the individual selves of the participants and the
common center they create by joining together. They also thank
and dismiss them when they open their circles upon the
conclusion of their ritual workings.Wicca follows a gender-
complementary immanent duotheism comprised of a God and a
Goddess; for Wicca, deity is double and non-transcendent. The
distinctions between them entail neither mutual hostility nor the
subservience of either to the other, but instead require the co-
presence in dynamic symmetry of these differing yet equi-
primordial principles for circumstances to proceed. The
fundamentalist belief in the actual existence of these deities is not
a prerequisite for becoming Wiccan. In fact, many, if not most,
Wiccans view the Earth Mother and Sky Father as archetypes in
the Jungian sense, and as lenses through which to apprehend, and
grasp in concrete, human-friendly terms, a totality which is too
vast and ineffable to be circumscribed by finite minds. Wiccans
consider all Goddesses and Gods throughout history as cultural
manifestations of these principles, revel in the diversity of
expression that they find, and borrow whatever they find that
works for them. In this sense, Wicca does not enslave and use its
adherents; rather it is the case that Wicca is made use of by them,
as a spiritual tool with which to focus their passions and
intentions upon the realizations of their plans and desires. The
conceptions and attributes surrounding these deities are not
inscribed for all time in any holy text, but are flexible, for Wicca
is an evolving, pragmatic religion with little dogmatic baggage.
Wicca's central ritual, the Great Rite, consists of dipping a dagger
in a chalice of wine in symbolic intercourse. The Christian
Communion, in contrast, is symbolic cannibalism.Wicca has one
major law, the Law of Three (any action, whether well or ill
intentioned, is returned to its source threefold), and one
commandment, the Wiccan Rede (Îif it harms none, do what you
willÌ). While these admonishments do emphasize personal
freedom, they link it to personal responsibility, and the
consequences of following them are a strict self-discipline, since
one is expected to strive not to harm oneself, others, or the
biosphere we share. Their more magickal practices include a
Santeria-like invocation of the masculine principle by the priest
and of the feminine principle by the priestess (the Drawing Down
of the Sun or Moon), and Raising the Cone of Power. This
practice involves an entering of the group into a shamanic state of
consciousness, usually by means of some combination of dancing,
chanting and drumming, preparatory to attempts at divination or
spellcasting.
The Earth Mother represents the foundation or substrate of
change; the matter underlying form, the being beneath becoming.
She is omnipresent, although aspects of her may undergo periodic
change. She never dies. The feminine principle of divinity
encompasses the cyclical-intuitive, synthesizing, fecund-
formative, nourishing aspect, with its emphases on the personal
and collective dream worlds, and on relatedness.The Sky Father
represents the changes of form that must occur in the life cycle
and food chain. He withdraws and returns, and never lingers. He is
the God of the inseparability of hunter and prey, and of the cycle
of vegetation. He is born of the Mother, grows, flowers and dies,
to be reborn of his own seed the following year. The masculine
principle of divinity encompasses the linear-logical, analyzing,
fertilizing aspect, with its emphases on ego, task and
individuality.A combination of these traits is preferable to either
alone, and all people are considered to have their own particular
ratios of these attribute sets; their own yin-yang or anima-animus
blend.
Modern Wicca publicly began in 1949 when Gerald Gardner
published ÏHigh MagicÌs AidÓ, a book of Wiccan ritual disguised
as historical fiction. He then, in collaboration with Doreen
Valiente, published ÏWitchcraft TodayÓ in 1954 and ÏThe
Meaning of WitchcraftÓ in 1959. Although other Wiccan forms
exist, Gardnerian Wicca and an offshoot (Alexandrian Wicca,
after its founder Alex Sanders) remain the core Wiccan traditions.
Other important Wiccan theorists include Janet and Stewart
Farrar, Starhawk and Z Budapest.
WiccanTheo/alogy and the Foundations of
Feminism and Environmentalism
In a religion in which the God and the Goddess are equi-potential
(possess complementary and equal status), gender equality is
mandated rather than forbidden. Freedom of societally and
planetarily responsible choice belongs to all. In a religion that
urges its adherents to love the earth as a mother, rather than
resenting and coveting her as a rich, conquerable hostile kingdom,
children would be raised from birth to treat her with restraint and
respect, and to pass her on to their children in as pristine a
condition as possible. There is, in fact, a kind of Wiccan Eden
myth; a vision of a prehistoric peaceful eco-friendly agrarian
matriarchy which was overthrown by males banished for violence,
who banded together to conquer and enslave their former society
and pillage its lands. This Edenic vision is more admired than
believed. Most Wiccans desire a ÎreturnÌ to this Eden, even if
humanity has never in reality been there.
Feminists and environmentalists, particularly ecofeminists and
deep ecologists, share this vision for the future; it is what they
strive for. It is therefore to be expected that many of them would
appropriate a belief system possessing sensibilities so in harmony
with their hopes, goals, desires and dreams. If the Wiccan Utopia
is theirs also, adoption seems eminently reasonable. In fact, these
movements receive both support and guidance from Wicca, and
give both in return.
Wicca and ScienceWiccaÌs attitude toward science is one
of intense interest and positive regard, for WiccaÌs perspective of
pragmatic self-conscious evolution and its anti-dogmatic character
resemble scientific ideals. Science, for Wicca, is attempting to
reveal the underlying nature of immanent divinity, and as such is
performing a sacred service. In addition, LovelockÌs Gaia
hypothesis, that the entire biosphere is an evolving, self-regulating
totality, appears to be to Wiccans the beginning of the
confirmation of their ecological suspicions, and the recent
comparisons of gender, brain structure and cognitive style bolster
the validity of their chosen deity attributes. They for the most part
accept that humanity creates divinity in its own image, and feel
flattered that science is indicating that they in particular are doing
it rather well.
Difficulties
WiccaÌs deities form a heterosexual couple, and sex with oneÌs
significant other is regarded as a sacrament. This has caused gays
and lesbians to sometimes feel uneasy with the energy in the
circle. For this reason, some gay men have formed Faerie circles
and some lesbians have embraced Dianic Wicca. Straight women
will also meet in full moon circles, or esbats, and straight men in
wild man groups. Although there are some differences, for
instance in the deity or deities invoked, the thaumaturgy, or ritual
structure, remains similar throughout. General meetings are held
on the sabbats eight times a year, and networking is constant.
Wicca and Neopaganism remain far more gay-friendly than JCIZ.
Although racial diversity endures as an ideal in Wicca, it is sadly
lacking in reality. This failure to rainbow the Craft is deeply
disturbing to its members. It is almost certain that the reason for
the phenomenon of whitebread Wicca is that, for racial minorities,
the intensity and immediacy of their oppressed condition drives
gender and ecological concerns to the periphery if their
awareness. Also, it only stands to reason that they would feel
uncomfortable participating in ritual as the token minority, or at
best as one of the few. It is very likely that, despite the best
intentions of the other participants, such an experience serves to
reinforce, rather than relieve, the awkwardness and sense of
difference for which racial minorities would seek religious
comfort. Wiccans, having experienced discrimination themselves
on the religious front, understand these impediments, and
continue to remain open and hopeful.
Lastly, the Wiccan division of deity has inadvertently had the
corollary of evolving lists of masculine and feminine gender
attributes that seem disturbingly similar to those of the JCIZ, only
wrapped in positive-regard packaging. Also, in some cases, the
Wiccan backlash against patriarchy has swung the pendulum too
far in the opposite direction, subjecting men to the same ridicule
and discrimination that the phallocentrists previously reserved for
women. Wiccans must be on guard that they do not pigeonhole
individuals into these archetypes, and thus descend the slippery
slope into the very bigotry and gender expectations that many
have joined Wicca to escape.
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