What Was the Sexual Revolution for Women?

Having been someone who was part of this revolution, I still am not really sure I could call it a revolution when I think about pre-patriarchal times, about 5000 years ago when communities were based around the mother-child bond and the apprehension and experience of deity was of a great mother, the Goddess, or whatever you choose to call Her. Since humanity has lived longer in peace and woman-centered culture than we have lived in war, lies and male domination, I find it difficult to define what has been called a sexual revolution as a true revolution because I would need it to shatter the global confines of the patriarchal imprisonment women suffer daily, which it has not. As feminist writer and "thealogian", Mary Daly says, "There is a kind of seductiveness about a movement which is revolutionary, but not revolutionary enough." (Beyond God the Father)

So, what happened for women during this time of sexual revolution? Certainly, the 60's ushered in a new approach to the "Father Knows Best" mentality shoved down the throats of our mothers and grandmothers from previous eras. Because the 60's were a time of consciousness revolution and an opening into a collective spiritual awakening, sexual roles and conditions were examined and changed. Women burned our bras, refused to shave, threw off the shackles of oppression as well as our clothes and danced wildly at love-ins. However, we were still objectified, and continue to be. I know of one community in which the women decided to no longer "take care" of men. They got out of their marriages and refused to cook, launder, and tend to the "needs" (read "addictions") and sexual desires of men. I consider this community a true revolutionary outpost during its' time. I know a woman who was raised in the consciousness of these women. Because of her feminist upbringing, she was able to see the lies of patriarchal thinking from a very early age and was somewhat spared the oppressive weight of having to conform to being a good daughter of the of patriarchy, which groomed girls to become future Mrs. Cleavers-obedient, pathologically cheery and ever-presently perfect, while really enslaving them to care-take men on many levels. For centuries, women have been forced to become the bedmates of men to be used as a narcissistic extension of the male sexual organ. This condition is heinously consistent the world over.

When we talk about women and the sexual revolution, to whom are we referring? White women in white American? Our Sudanese sisters who are currently sold into slavery? Our African sisters who have been enduring clitorectomies for centuries (though this is changing)? Our Afghan sisters who have no voice? What is sexual revolution for women? Not only is it full equality, which should never be in question in the first place, but also a restoration of a deep and awe-inspiring global respect of women as the givers of life, recognized by our ancestors. Euro-Western women certainly enjoy a degree of freedom from the jail of sexual oppression more than our sisters in third-world countries, even though rape is rampant and goes unnoticed as the unspeakably horrific crime that it is. The brainwashing of women about marriage, however, remains a deeply-rooted problem. Until we understand that marriage, at least in Euro-Western society, was/is a patriarchal invention designed for men to own women and children, women who are seduced by the promise of the white picket fence and prince charming are, by entering into such a contract, only signing their death warrant. As harsh as this may sound, I have lived through this reality, married for twenty-six years, and it nearly killed me before I divorced. Our sisters around the world who do not have this illusive dream are simply treated as property and live in the reality that unless they marry, they have no value whatsoever as a human being, and therefore their very survival depends on being a married woman, whose husbands more often than not use them as objects on which to vent their privileged rage, sexually and otherwise. I recently saw a television program on Chinese women and marriage. Many women in the documentary were elder women-deprived of a lifetime of joy and used to the bone by their abusive husbands. All of the women spoke of their fear of their husbands as well as their feelings that there was no love at all-that love wasn't even an option. As long as those women suffer in such degradation, the sexual revolution we white women here in American allude to is really a privilege.

Of course, we desperately need sexual revolution-everywhere. We need a revolution that IS enough. It is true I am not enduring exactly the same conditions my mother and her mother endured, though my grandmother took her own life, but not before she told my mother "it was a man's world." It is still a man's world. And will be until women choose to become radical revolutionaries, amazing amazons. This revolution begins within. We must learn how we contribute to our own oppression by internalizing the very voices that hate us. We must do our own deep spiritual revolutionary work to be able to hold our sacred ground and create our own mythology. We must be willing to say no to collusion with the patriarchal mind set, which I call PMS. A sexual revolution that is enough will re-create the way we live on this planet. Until women are seen for who we are, and until men are willing to own their out-of-control compulsion to control, dominate and manipulate everything in their path, not much is going to change. We have been doing the same thing on this planet for 5000 years. All war is the same war. All hatred is the same hatred. All of this stems from one reality-the global hatred and subjugation of women.

Let us fuel the revolution from within, find our connection to the sacredness of the Goddess, Mother of All, and step into evolution with certainty and love.

Tend and Befriend

Every Friday afternoon from noon to one o' clock women in my community gather on the downtown street corners to stand in solidarity with Women in Black. Women in Black is a global movement of women who dress in black and stand in silent vigil to share the collective grief born of war, which is, of course, unspeakable.

Recently in our community, women dressed in white, and red, white and blue holding flags have shown up to demonstrate their support of war and our troops that they claim are protecting us far and wide. I once approached the first woman dressed in white who first began showing up. I recognized her as the dance teacher my daughters had when they were little. I wanted to know from her if she really thought war was the answer.

Through her contracted hostility, she sharply said, "Do you want bin Laden to come over here?" That was the end of our dialog. I felt a deep sadness in my heart and I couldn't help but feel her fear. She was really scared. No, I don't want bin Laden to come over here, I thought. But I don't think that killing people is the answer. I was not able to tell her that. The only thing I could manage to tell her was that I was sorry she had to be so hostile. Maybe that didn't help, but I really was sorry.

More women dressed in white have begun to appear. Now it feels like it's a black and white thing happening on the street corners. One of my friends stands with the women in white. I was shocked to see her there. I called her up and talked with her and said that I didn't want anything to come between us. She agreed and we told one another we loved each other and got off the phone. She had recently come to lend her support to my daughter and to me at the hospital when my oldest daughter was in a car accident. My kids were all friends with hers. We have all been friends for many years. But I don't understand her view. And I want to.

I said to her that if women can't talk, then there is no hope. She agreed. I asked her about her view. She said she was mainly walking with the woman in white because of how the men who stand with the women in black behave. Now I don't understand why there are men there anyway, but I thought her point of view was very interesting. She was commenting on the behavior of men. Once again I was hearing a woman speak about disrespectful male behavior. My friend said some men had cursed her.

I had to agree that any behavior like that was totally wrong, and yet, at the same time, I couldn't help but think about the contradiction of supporting men who were killing people in Afghanistan. Why isn't that totally wrong to her too? I haven't asked her about that yet. We have agreed to have lunch and discuss our views.

I have noticed that the honks from cars passing by supporting the women in white are usually men. I have felt very uncomfortable about this, as I have felt that these women in white are really supporting men to do their domination thing in the world, and in the face of that, I am not able to feel a sisterhood. I feel their alliance to the patriarchal male mind is a betrayal of their own female wisdom. And yet, my friend said to me that it will be women and children in the Middle East who will suffer if we don't help them . . . but isn't it always women and children who suffer the horrors of men's wars anywhere?

All of this has gotten me thinking about fierce compassion and wrathfulness. Patriarchy has "dicktated" that women should not be angry -- that we should be "lady-like" and behave ourselves according to the definitions of the controlling and dominating mind-set. So, do we know what women's anger looks like? My daughter and her friend shared with me what happened to them last night. They were in a bar and a very large male came up to them and began a lewd gyrating action of pelvic thrusting around them. My daughter and her friend told him to get out of their space. He called them terrible names and slimed them with his seething hatred of women, spouting things that my daughter said she had never heard before. At that point, my daughter's friend put her jacket down, very deliberately turned around and sent her fist flying into his chin, following that by another throw that caught his lip, which began to bleed. This was a very large man, mind you, and he towered over both women. He was indeed, taken aback. So much so, that after he calmed down, he apologized.

I thought long and hard about this. I am non-violent. However, I am reminded of a teaching that I read once in a book of Buddhist spirituality, written by a woman. Two women summoned a rickshaw after an event and just as the driver was letting them off, he began to grab after one of the women. They pulled away somehow, and ran. The next day they went back to their retreat and went to the Buddhist teacher and told her of the event. They both felt very bad, as they felt they had lost their compassion for this man. The teacher told them that should that happen again, they should gather all the mercy and compassion they could muster and beat that man with their umbrella. I feel this is a teaching about wrathful compassion -- creating a boundary that speaks loud and clear, which is not done out of malice.

Later that day, after hearing this story, I went for a walk with my friend and she told me a very interesting thing. She asked me if I had heard about the women who had written a book, the title of which I don't know, about oxytocin and their research that shows women, in times of facing danger or extreme stress, are inclined towards what the authors name "tend and befriend", instead of towards the well-known "fight or flight". I said that I hadn't heard, but that I was very interested. She said that in these times the authors have said that women will tend to gather the children and befriend one another, or tend towards that reality. I realized that the "fight or flight" notion we have all been taught is based on what men do. And then I thought about my daughter and her friend. I don't think they were in a fight or flight mode. They felt the need to speak the language of the invasive, entitled male who was harassing them. It wasn't about fight. It was about establishing a boundary in the only language he could hear.

Now, what kind of world would it be if that man could learn to speak the language of women, who would rather tend and befriend? My daughter and her friend tried that -- tending to themselves and clearly and calmly telling him what they needed. He didn't listen, so they spoke his language, which he understood.

As for the women in white on the street corner, I don't feel a "tend and befriend" response from them towards the women in black, but rather a kind of response that contributes to division and separation..While I understand what my friend has told me about her not liking what the men have said to her, that is, once again, about men, not about women.

It is my prayer that women will be able to come together and find our "tend and befriend" ways together, create a new (old) way of being and find the peace that is so desperately needed on this planet. One thing is for sure. Peace will not happen until women's voices are heard around the globe in a unifying singular voice for peace, which may entail stopping the continued cry for war from the patriarchal mind-set (PMS) in a way that that voice can hear -- not by violence, but by fierce and wrathful compassion.

Leslie McIntyre is a "shemama," a practicing mama shamanic healer who lives and works in Sebastopol. She is one of the founding members of Awakened Woman's Circle and is now at work on a new non-profit, Women of the Earth (WE). This page is her monthly offering. She can be reached by e-mail.

Soul Retrieval of the Sacred Feminine

For too long we have lived with a language that is inherently male biased which has shaped our collective human experience. Naming from an androcentric perspective has been disastrous for women in particular because in this language there is no word that women can claim as our own to describe ourselves. All words for women are in the shadow of the male, i.e., fe-male, wo-man, wo-men. We have been told that the name of our essential life force is "Eros"-the name of a phallic deity. We have lived with understanding the shadow as that which is split off from our conscious mind, named as such by a man, who no doubt has given the world valuable insights, but whose own sexism and racism have been nearly overlooked by the very field that embraces psychological healing.

We have also lived for too long with patriarchal religious and spiritual traditions that all share a commonality-the conspicuous absence of the presence of the Sacred Feminine. When we approach the investigation of exploring the thresholds of creativity through what we name as Eros, shadow and spirit, it is essential to look at what lies beneath the surface of the patriarchal overlay and delve deeper into the mysteries of our ancestors who were untouched by the patriarchal mind set, or what I term "pms". In this psychic archeological exploration we find ourselves tapping into the field that archeologist, linguist and historian, Marija Gimbutas, has termed the realm of archeomythology. Deeply buried in the layers of our cellular memory are the myths and stories of the Great Goddess; therein lies a connection to the very source of healing that we so desperately seek.

What, then, is our experience of the essential life force if we were to give to the quality of love and life a female name, such as Aphrodite-in which the primal female mothering energy is honored and respected for what it is? How would we be shaped by this naming? What does our experience of the shadow become when we name the profound split from which we all suffer as the Mother/Child split? I am not talking about necessary individuation. Sane individuation is quite different from a thanatos-driven separation from the very life force that births and sustains us. Unfortunately, in patriarchy, we encounter far too much of the latter. If we are lucky, however, and not too dissociated, we can feel our pain. Pain becomes a portal into deep awakening, and when we are truly blessed we can hear the faint and distant echo of the voice of the Mother calling to us through our pain, as she calls to us now. It is her blessing of love that fills our hearts and souls with the moisture of life, as we soak it up like land parched by drought, welcoming a long awaited rain.

We all share the same connection, as is revealed by the presence of our umbilicus. We cannot split from this source and expect to maintain a quality of life and love in the world. The Sanskrit word "Artha", meaning "mater-ial wealth" ("mater" means "mother) has given rise to other meanings that are familiar to us-such as Urth, Hertha, Eortha, and Erda-all names for our Mother, who sustains us with Her abun-dance. The Sacred Feminine, known by so many names the world over-Kali, Tara, Isis, Asherah, Yemaya, Guanyin, Coatlique, White Buffalo Woman, Hecate, Demeter, Persephone, to name a few, and whose presence inspired the naming of lands, such as Asia, Africa, Europe and Russia, is calling to us to re-member Her and to re-member ourselves.

The thresholds of creativity we behold when we retrieve the Sacred Feminine for ourselves exist in the internal landscapes of our deep inner being. There we uncover the sacred well of the Goddess, where we can drink freely of Her nurturing waters and feel cleansed of our suffering, shedding like the snake, the ancient symbol of the Goddess, our outworn skins of despair. She is the elixir of life, the fountain of youth. Her youth lies not in an eternally youthful appearance, but in Her powers of regeneration, well-known by our ancestors.

Soul retrieval is a process in which power is restored to the individual who has experienced soul loss. Soul loss is a shamanic term used to describe the loss of vital life force experienced in trauma. I trained with the Foundation for Shamanic Studies where I learned techniques of soul retrieval. I came to study this shamanic work as a result of a very long journey of my own that informally began when I became a student of the path of psychoactive medicines. Not knowing I was entering the world of the.shaman/shamanka, I was held in grace as I spent many years navigating through the labyrinth and landscapes of my own mind. I believe it is a miracle that I am standing before you, for in those days, we just opened our mouths and swallowed. The substances themselves were my relentless, sometimes ruthless guides and teachers. I felt I was well prepared to use the techniques I learned from studying with the Shamanic Studies Foundation. I put the techniques to use, and worked with people for several years before my process with soul retrieval began to change. The more people I saw, the more I realized that most of the people coming to me were suffering from different manifestations of the same trauma. I had been working with family of origin trauma, which was important. I began to see a kind of inherited soul loss in the original families where abuse was passed down from generation to generation. I felt that helping to facilitate healing for the person before me was a good thing, but that a deeper healing was necessary. I was seeing that all forms of abuse could be traced back to a common psychic source-the soul loss of the Sacred Feminine.

What surfaced from this work for me was the realization that we are a people suffering from a collective trauma which impacts not only people, but all living things, including Earth herself. Because of this collective trauma, we are experiencing collective soul loss as well as a collective near-death experience. There are no words to describe this grievous condition. It will take each of us feeling this loss to restore our soul's connection to the Goddess/Mother and to the natural world. While we have many valuable sources of healing available to us, we still suffer and according to psychologist James Hilman, things are getting worse.

The further we remove ourselves from connection with the Sacred Feminine, the more we will suffer. Band-aids can only last so long. I believe our deepest healing will come when we lift the veils of denial, expose the androcentric viewpoint that currently rules the world, and make room for the Goddess/Mother to flood into our hears, minds and bodies. She is the wellspring of our existence. In our Western society we rarely hear of ancestor worship. We would benefit a great deal to remember our ancestors and what they knew, and bring that knowing forward into our daily lives. It is well known that Goddess sites in nature were often sacred wells where people could go to visit, to meditate and to find healing from her sacred waters. Without conscious connection to this source we experience a deep and severe cutting off from that which births and sustains us, becoming detached and dissociated. In the traumatic event of being cut off, our soul connection to the Sacred Feminine is diminished. When this kind of soul loss is experienced, when the well is covered over and hidden, when access to Her healing wisdom and sacred waters is blocked, sickness is a consequence. And sickness we have. You name it, we have it.

The Earth is sick. Her children are sick-the two-leggeds as well as her creatures of land, sea and air-trees, sea turtles, dolphins, whales, birds, and many more too numerous to mention. Because we are one with the Earth, we reflect in our bodies what is happening to her body. We are doing this to ourselves and to her, out our ignorance and denial of Her wisdom. The epidemic of breast cancer affecting the nourishing and loving charka of woman's body is no accident. When women are objectified, humiliated and sold into sexual slavery, specifically to satiate the sexual hunger of men who are really wanting something much deeper than this, who are longing for union with the Sacred Feminine but don't know they are being consumed by the demons living in their shadow, what do we expect is going to happen to us, and to the planet? Asthma is on the increase particularly in children whose bodies are telling us they are having trouble breathing. How can children breathe safely when adults, mostly men, hurt them at an alarming rate; when children living on the streets in South America are murdered by so-called policemen who consider them to be optional; when mothers in India are forced to abort their girl babies in utero or to kill them outright? And how can any of us breathe when the very lungs, the rainforests of the planet, of the living being of our Mother are being cut out of Her?

In looking at the metaphor of mother and child to illustrate the importance of soul retrieval of the Sacred Feminine, which is the metaphor the Dalai Lama touched upon in an article in Shambala Sun (1996) in which he described the need for a new spirituality in the world, we can say that the child feels protected, safe and psychically held when the mother is close. This metaphor assumes the natural loving state of motherhood. The child calls for mother above and beyond all things. When my mother was dying in her seventies, she called to her mother who had been dead for fifty years. When my children are sick, they come to me-to be in my bed, to be close to me, to feel my essence, which heals and comforts them. It is a preverbal connection with me they know in their bones they seek when they need healing. They seek the safety and healing of my womb-wisdom, my heart, my arms and my touch.

Mother is primary-she is the primal life-giving and life-sustaining energy experienced by the child as a deep knowing in her/his body. This knowing is perceived through feelings and touch. Mother and child are in telepathic communion/communication. The child internalizes the love, kindness and safety of the loving mother. The child develops a core sense of self and learns to love and trust her/himself. I have four children. I have experienced what I am talking about. When the mother is not there, the child cries and longs for her. And so, it is the same for us, who without the Mother, have no idea of who we are, and have no sense of who holds us.

What has happened to us that we haven't allowed women to be the strong, powerful people we are? What has happened to us that some of us who have become mothers have lost the knowledge of how to birth and mother, who have learned to put ourselves into the hands of a male medical model that tells us how to birth, how to mother, and who have become afraid of our own natural body wisdom? Of course we have a shadow-mother experience when women are not allowed to be ourselves. When we split off from our true knowing what can possibly be the outcome of this condition? It doesn't help women or the world to create elaborate belief systems explaining women's so-called dysfunction from an androcentric view, which often blames women.

Gloria Orenstein, professor of Comparative Literature at USC, in an anthology celebrating the life and work of Marija Gimbuts, recounts her review of Andre Breton's book, Nadja. Nadja was a real woman-a an authentic human being. Nadja supposedly went mad and was institutionalized. Orenstein says, "…as I began to decipher the symbols in the drawings left by Nadja, I saw, in her visual hieroglyphics, the disclosure by a female visionary of the memory of her lost matristic heritage with the Celtic mythological tradition. All patriarchal interpretations had concluded that Nadja was mad, so she was locked away in a sanitarium forever. Yet, from 'feminist matristic' interpretation, Nadja can be seen as presenting a plea for the return to a reverence for the Mother Goddess as the primary deity to explain the universe and women's place in it. Nadja's madness, therefore, was her last refuge, that inner world where she could dwell alone among the symbols of her own matristic truth, symbols that were real to her but that were neither accepted nor recognized by the dominating patriarchal order of her time."

Of course we are madwomen.Why is anyone surprised at this? A moving excerpt from French feminist writer, Jeanne Hyvrard's book Mother Death in the same anthology courageously illustsrates the truth about women's so-called madness. Tjhere again we find a woman who is institutionalized because of her memories of a time when "the Earth was sacred and reverence for the Goddess prevailed." The protagonist has experienced colonization and conquest by androcentric invaders-a true condition. "They perverted language…They said I had lost my mind. I can't find the forgotten language. The language from before the invaders…The language in which words also mean their opposites. The language that liberates…The language even older than the statue with naked breasts. The language of the souls of the dead in stones. The languages of your caverns' paintings, your soul's pottery, your ashes' silica. The language of the naked woman, her thighs like mountains…They pillaged your tombs and wonder why they don't know anything…They say I have a sickness. They give it a name. They say I'm unstable, precarious, lunatic. They say they want to cure me…They want to cure me of what, exactly? Of the world's creation and erosion? Of death and rebirth? They say they're going to cure me. Of what? Life itself?"

The shadow-mother is a natural consequence of denial of the Goddess-of not allowing women to be empowered. When women are disempowered, all of life suffers. What we need is an understanding of how this happened, so that we can heal. We are told in psychotherapy we need to name the wound to heal it. This wound I am talking about-the deep Mother wound from which we all suffer, from which all woundedness emerges in myriads of forms-- needs to be openly named. This is not about the patriarchal so-called devouring mother. This projection of men's fear of women onto women has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as women internalize this mirroring and become exactly what is feared. Then the fingers are pointed at women, with cries of "You see? It's her fault." This fear fueled the fathers of the inquisition in the women's holocaust-the slaughter and burnings at the stake of millions of wise women healers. Do you hear the cries of the ancestors in your ears? Can you hear them telling us to re-member before it is too late?

From a spiritual feminist perspective, definitions of such terms as Eros, shadow and spirit take on new meaning. This perspective sees the presence of the Sacred Feminine in all things. In this reality, language finds different expression. Why is it that we describe the energy of life in a male term and relegate the female maternal source that births the male to a secondary position? How does this make sense? And what are the effects of this kind of mythos on our psyches? For the erotic to be truly stirred, the aphroditic must be totally embraced by women and men alike. Author Patricia Reis tells us that female erotic energy is aphroditic and is a resource that lives deeply within all life. Aphroditic energy is Shakti-the activating creative life force that energizes Shiva in his universal dance. Without Shakti, Shiva is lifeless. This is why we see Kali dancing on Shiva in East Indian iconography. She is the creatix, sustainer and dissolver-all comes from Her and all returns to Her. Long before Kali, Paleolithic and Neolithic peoples knew this to be true.

In looking at the concept of shadow, I feel it is important to understand what created the shadow in the first place. We have elaborate descriptions, meanings and definitions of the concept of shadow. I have often wondered if our ancestors living prior to patriarchy had such a concept. Evidence certainly exists as to the notion of the Death Goddess, but she was always combined with Regeneration (see my book, Midwifing Death: Returning to the Arms of the Ancient Mother). Marija Gimbutas has shown us that early people had a deep respect for the cyclical nature of life. She tells us that early people understood death to be a part of life. In this wholistic view, death is not split off from life--there is no dualism, only continuity. In these early cultures of Old Europe, there is no evicdence of war-no weapons have been found, nor is there any depiction of war in the iconography. It would appear that these Paleolithic and Neolithic people did not experience a sense of splitting the way we post-Bronze Age, post-Descartes, post inquisition and post industrial revolution people do. These early matri-focaled cultures were marked by a profound connection the Goddess, excelled in creativity and existed peacefully for millennia. In archeological digs in Catal Huyuk in present day Turkey, three different skull types were found existing side-by-side in a peaceful matri-focaled community that lasted nearly 1,000 years. Ths informs us that three different "races" (I use quotations as there really is only one race of people-African) of people lived together in harmony. This does not seem to be fertile soil for a concept of shadow. It does appear to have been fertile soil for living in mystery and peace in close connection to the Earth, where the sharing of a profound and sacred shamanic reality was a way of life.

Patriarchy has succeeded in demonizing the Sacred Feminine. The rampant disrespect, crime and misogyny in our world today are killing us. The projection of fear onto women creates an extremely disturbing shadow. Without naming this shadow for what it is, and I am not talking about penis envy, which is some kind of strange projection from a man obviously suffering from a deep internal conflict, we will continue to be afflicted by the contents of that shadow, without understanding how to fully heal. We are suffering from a soul loss so staggering that I am not sure we can retrieve all of it. I pray for my children's sake and their children's sake that we can.

There is a definite connection between rape and the tearing open of the ozone layer. This is the nature of the shadow we have normalized and live with-like a village built on the side of a volcano that is about to erupt. Some Native Americans have a saying that says you can tell a lot about a people by how the women of the tribe are treated. So, what kind of people are we?

The Laws of Manu, though replete with patriarchal ideology, at its core embodies an important teaching. It says, "Women must be honored and adorned by their fathers, brothers, husbands and brothers-in-law, who desire their own welfare. Where women are honored, there the gods are pleased, but where they are not honored, no sacred rite yields rewards. Where the female relations live in grief, the family soon wholly perishes, but that family where they are not unhappy ever prospers. The houses on which female relations, not being duly honored, pronounce a curse, perish completely, as if destroyed by magic." Feminist writer, Barbara Walker, tells us that this advice came from the place northern Aryans referred to as Mutspellheim, or the House of the Mother's Curse, in the 'hot lands of the south'. She writes, "the Scandinavian prophecy of doomsday or the Mutspell would fall upon the violent patriarchal gods who ignored ancient tribal bonds and rules of morality, and instituted cruel warfare. The result of the Mother's Curse would be the death of all gods, their Gotterdammmerung or Going-Into-the-Shadow; thus it seemed the Mother's word of destruction meant the end of the world." This is not punishment from the Mother who sits in judgment of her children, wanting to burn them in brimstone and hellfire in eternal damnation, demanding that they live in fear and trembling of her. Rather, this curse is self-inflicted. The rules are simple. Disobey the naturals laws, and suffer the consequences. In Magic Dance, a book on dakini wisdom, Thinley Norbu reminds us, "from beginningless time until now, all ignorant sentient beings tried to find company, but we are always isolated meaninglessly because we disobeyed our Self-Awareness Noble Mother's advice." It is my belief that if we wake up and begin to honor the Sacred Feminine, the Noble Mother within ourselves, we can reverse this self-inflicted curse. I pray we have the time.

From a feminist shamanic perspective, spirit is the internal experience of the Goddess-not as a she replacing the he in the sky, but as the limitless primordial ground of being, the Prajnaparamita, or Mother of All the Buddhas and the Earth herself. Hers is a both/and universe. She is the immanent/transcendent All-Ramakrishna's Mother Kali, whose love, compassion, mercy and fiercenss know no bounds. To see Her is to be One with Her, to revel in her wildness, to experience ecstasy and to recognize that Her love is the antidote to our suffering. Connection with Her is connection with the essence of creativity itself. All of Her children have access to Her through direct communion and transmission, without the need of any mediator.

In the mother/child bond, if allowed to flourish the way it was meant to, without invasive, colonizing and controlling patriarchal thinking, this bond grows like a flower rooted in the life-giving, rich moist earth. No one needs to issue directives to the Earth how to grow a plant. She does it by herself. It is the mater-wealth that feeds and sustains the plant and child equally. This power is great-miraculous. It need not be feared, nor can it be possessed, though there are those who ceaselessly try. This creativity that births us is alive in every moment-there for us to suckle. When we have our fill, we go on about our way, feeling, exploring, playing, dancing, singing, loving, creating beauty and sharing ourselves with each other in life-affirming ways. When we need to return to the source for sustenance, the well is there, and all that is asked of us in return is humility, gratitude, acceptance, surrender and respect. Why is it so hard for us to live in this way, loving ourselves, loving each other, loving the earth? Do we really need to compete in order to measure our own self-worth? Do men need to dominate women, and do women need to be submissive?

The Goddess is not just for women and feminists. She is all-inclusive. Males are as much Her children as females, as are all our relations. However, it is Her children who must do the re-membering in order for Her to inform our lives. We are responsible for transforming our dualistic and delusional thinking. We are responsible for exorcising our own demons in order to heal. If we write mountains of books, and do not walk our talk, unfortunately, we will not have healed very much. The living Goddess finds expression in each one of us, as we open to love and let go of fear and destructive anger. We have all been abused because we live in an abusive paradigm. The healing we all seek from this abuse lives in the flowing waters of the Goddess' love, Her life-sustaining cosmic milk and the new life that comes from Her regenerative powers.

May we learn to drink deep from Her well, and find Her well deep within. We deserve to be loved. We deserve to be cherished. We can ask for what we need, and knowing we deserve to heal, then, may She bless us all with the sweet nectar of her blissful and ecstatic presence.

PUBLICATIONS CITED
Marler, Joan, ed. 1997, From the Realm of the Ancestors. Manchester, CT: Knowledge, Ideas & Trends, Inc.
Norbu, Thinley, 1981, Magic Dance: The Display of the Self-Nature of the Five Wisdom Dakinis. New York, NY: Jewel Publishing.House.
Reis, Patricia, 1996, Through the Goddess, New York, NY: Continuum.
Walker, Barbara, 1983, Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row

END NOTES
1. Marler, 1997, p. 458
2. Ibid. p. 459
3. Ibid. p. 460
4. Reis, 1996, p.119
5. Walker, 1983, p. 200
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Norbu, 1981, p.52

Societies In Balance

Gender Equality in Matrilineal, Matrifocal and Matriarchal Societies

Luxembourg was the site for the International World Congress on Matriarchal Studies, held in early September. Many people, most of them women, from the international global community gathered to explore the definition of matriarchy and to learn about matriarchies past and present, and to find inspiration for changing the current male-dominant ruling paradigm. The conference was held in a large circular room, with tiered seating allowing people to see the speakers and presentations from all angles. Microphones were available for the audience at their seats, giving easy access to group participation. The conference was presented in German, French and English. The front lobby was graced with nine life-sized paper and glue orange Matrones, the goddesses of the Rhine, sculpted by artist Marianne Pitzen. Placed in chairs in a semi-circle in council, they presided over the conference as representatives from the ancestral mother-realms.

Gracing a hallway in the lobby was a photo exhibit by Siegrun Claassen, an artist and photographer from Germany. Her artistic and sensitive display captured the beauty of the “Matriarchal Mystery Festivals”, created over the past twenty years by Academy HAGIA.

I must say now to be fair that I cannot report on this conference and leave out any of the presenters. The diversity of people, European, Asian, Middle Eastern, East Indian, North African, and American all had interesting views about matriarchy to share. Because I feel this event was a complete and total benefit for the world, especially at this time of need and collective global suffering, I feel it is in service of the Goddess to be complete and thorough in my recounting.

When I left my town of Sebastopol, California, to attend, I had no idea what to expect. I didn’t even know Luxembourg was its own country before attending this conference. Being a Goddess lover and devotee, a student and teacher of feminist spirituality for many years and a writer and author of radical feminist spiritual views, I felt I needed to be open and receptive and ready to learn. While I found the structure of the conference rather grueling–three days of presentation after presentation–and my posterior becoming quite numb and tired after all that time I spent sitting on it--I nevertheless felt hungry for the information. I, like many, long for the experience of woman-centered reality and community. Being together with women and a few men in an international setting sharing an interest in matriarchies gave me a sense that the tide is truly changing, and that patriarchy is on its last legs. While no one really knows how long it will take to crumble, it is crumbling, as evidenced by the increased insanity in the world.

The conference was two years in the making, organized by Heide Gottner- Abendroth, founder of the International Academy HAGIA for Modern Matriarchal Studies and Matriarchal Spirituality in Germany, where she teaches and continues as its director. In her own words, she explains the intention of the Congress, “The purpose of this World Congress is to initiate and encourage a multi-cultural scientific exchange, networking, and collaboration between scholars occupied with non-ideological research on what can be described as matrilineal, matrifocal, and matriarchal societies. A major intention of the Congress is to foster a world-wide awareness and appreciation of the many marginalized and threatened ethnic groups that have preserved matriarchal patterns to this present day. Women have always been creators of culture although this great history is often invisible. The Congress celebrates women’s multi-dimensional contributions to culture–past, present and future.” The motto of the conference was “a new millenium, a new science, and a new politics.”

Second presenter following Heide was Claudia von Werlhof, chairwoman for Women’s Studies at the Institute for Political Science at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Referring to herself as a matriarchal woman, she spoke on the insanity of patriarchy–“Patriarchy as the Negation of Matriarchy and Aspects of Cultural Madness.” She said, “The ‘genuine’ inventions of patriarchy consist mainly of different forms of violence. The antidote to this is the knowledge of the interrelationship of all beings that will once again become the bedrock of our feeling, thinking and acting in the face of the rampage and the predictable failure of this last phase of patriarchy: the introduction of world capitalism. This madness will fade away as matriarchal egalitarianism, subsistence, mutuality and love of life gain a foothold all over the world again as the true alternatives to globalization.” After hearing her present, I felt inspired to hear a professor at a university being passionate about the fall of patriarchy. I thought that her students were lucky to have such a teacher. We need more of her kind teaching in our colleges and universities.

Concluding the first part of the conference on theory and politics, Professor Annette Kuhn, Scientific Director of the Politeia-Project and Chairperson of the House of Women’s History Association, spoke about the origin and dynamics in history of “the matriarchal pattern.” She emphasized three points: 1) the innovative role of women in the history of humanity 2) the changing of the matriarchal pattern in the development of patriarchy and 3) the description of a general historical consciousness. While a scientific approach to discussing matriarchal reality is not my forte, I nevertheless appreciate all and any angles from which women (and those few men) come from in order to support a change in the current ruling paradigm. We need all the help we can get.

Part three through five of the conference focused on matriarchies, present and past. Peggy Reeves-Sanday, feminist anthropologist, author of the newly released Women at the Center and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, shared about her twenty years of field work with the matriarchal Sumatran Minangkabau. Her focus was on “Matriarchy and World Peace, Lessons from the Minangkabau.” She says, “Their culture is characterized by an ethic of gender balance and a dedication to negotiation and the peaceful resolution of conflict.” The cultural foundation of these amazing people is found in the deep respect of nurture as it is found in nature. Matriarchal customs include peaceful social values, and values are rooted in maternal meanings, as in those found in the mother-child bond. If these values ruled the world, as they did for millennia before the advent of patriarchy, how different things would be!

The conference was indeed fortunate to host presenters from China on the matriarchal cultures of the Mosuo in China. Ruxian Yan, Professor of Ethnology at the Institute of Nationality Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Bejing, spoke on the kinship system of these very interesting people from southern China, who she says reside “between the female mountain and the mother water.” Some of the highlights from Ruxian’s presentation included such things as “if you don’t have a daughter, water doesn’t flow”, which I interpreted to mean that the life force of the community flows through the female. She said the mother-daughter relationship is the most stable. The primary deity of the Mosuo is the goddess Gumo and the essential “glue” of the family is the mother.

Arriving late all the way from China was Professor Lamu Ga tusa, himself a Mosuo. As Associate Professor of the Social Sciences Research Institute of Yunnan Province, he has been dedicated to preserving “the unique social and spiritual heritage’ of his people. He spoke about the matriarchal marriage patterns of his people, and emphasized that lovers experience a “pronouncedly equal relationship”. In this matriarchal system, partners experience personal and emotional, as well as “benefits” independence. The mother is considered as the origin of life and society, expressed both in “ethnic concepts and in the concepts of love.” Children are raised in the home of mother, and there is no concept of fatherhood as we know it in western society. The mother’s brother tends to the children, and “fathering” is accomplished through the blood lines. I was very curious about this and had an opportunity to ask Lamu Ga tusa, through an interpreter, Aileen Walsh, (who also presented on the Mosuo), how men felt about knowing they had a biological part in creating a child and not be considered that child’s father. It was an amazing experience to feel his simply not having a concept of this kind of fatherhood. He had the utmost respect that a child is of the mother. I did not feel any kind of ownership, possession or need to dominate or be in control, as is so prevalent in the west around the issue of fathering. He indicated that monogamy was instituted at some point from powers outside of the Mosuo. Also worth noting is his statement that there is no rape in their culture. From my perspective, I see that when women are held in deep respect by unbroken matrilineal lineages, boys are raised by the values of the mother and do not develop out-of-control compulsions to dominate and possess. I was very intrigued by his questions to the audience such as “Why do you have to get married to turn lovers into enemies?”and “Why do you have to love one person your whole life?” While the Mosuo have their problems, and are not an ideal culture, they nevertheless experience a measure of enlightened quality of life when placed next to the patriarchal confines and oppressive limitations of Western culture. I also found myself feeling saddened watching Lamu Ga tusa smoking constantly and wondered what was propelling him to cause harm to himself in that manner. I felt this way about watching many of the women smoking as well–there was something peculiar about attending a conference on matriarchies where love and nurturing were being discussed as the predominant values while watching people hurting themselves through serious addiction.

Aileen Walsh, an anthropologist who has studied the Mosuo, presented spontaneously in the original space slated for Lamu Ga tusa. I do not have notes on her presentation, but Vicki Noble has related in her previous article that Aileen focused on their consensus decision making and gender equality. Aileen also talked about how the media has distorted the “visiting marriage” and that because of this distortion, more outside people have come looking for the Mosuo’s way of life as some kind of expression of a new tantalizing sexuality, without regard for the longtime practices of these matriarchal people. At different times, questions were put to several of these presenters about the presence of same-sex relationships within the Mosuo. I cannot say that I ever heard a definitive answer, but it was alluded to that people were free to choose as they wished.

Shanshan Du, Professor of Anthropology at Tulane University and author of Chopsticks Only Work in Pairs: Gender Unity and Gender Equality among the Lahu of Southwest China, shared about her work with the Lahu people. Her focus was on discussing “Frameworks for Society in Balance, Gender Equality From a Cross-cultural Perspective.” A salient point of her presentation was the information on these frameworks that she says “foster balance, harmony, and equality between the sexes and among individuals in some non-industrial societies.”

The first day ended with a film in the evening by Uschi Madeiskyi, “The Daughters of the Seven Huts, A Clan Story of the Khasi/North-eastern India.” A very interesting film about Aileen, a young woman helping to establish the business of her clan to ensure the family stability in the face of her mother’s illness. In her tradition, responsibilities for clan family and land are passed on to the youngest daughter, but in Aileen’s situation, her younger sister was too young, so she had to step in and help. We were honored to have Aileen attend the conference where she was introduced and answered questions from the audience.

Moving from Asia, the next presenter opening the second day of the conference, Helene Claudot-Hawad, anthropologist and scientific director of the National Centre for Scientific Research at the Research Institute of the Arabic World in France, discussed the Tuareg people of the Central Sahara from Africa. The Tuareg are a matrilineal people, though affected by patrilineal influences. She emphasized that the centrality of life of these people is constituted by the mother as protector and stabilizer of the community. Woman is considered the primary force, reflected as “the first mythical step of cosmogony.” A film, “The Daughters of the Tents, Among the Tuareg in Mali.” was shown later in the conference.

By this time deep into the conference, I was feeling the need to assimilate what I had heard so far in some way that would help me not be so much in my head. But that was hard to do, and so I just continued on, taking notes and listening, simultaneously feeling overwhelmed and not wanting to miss anything. The translators, at times, especially the male translator, were very hard to follow–sometimes not even making sense. After sharing glances and looks of disbelief and frustration with those around me who felt the same way, I dealt the best way I could and grew determined to hang in there and learn. The next speaker really helped me focus, as her talk was about the amazing Berber people of North Africa.

Dr. Malika Grasshoff is an historian, author and indigenous ethnologist of Kabylia (Berber) lineage. She was raised in a village in the Kabylia until she was seventeen. The Berber people of North Africa, known as the oldest people of that region, live in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. The mother is the “central post”–the spirit that guards the house, without whom the house breaks down. The spoken word is the carrier of their culture, and the Berbers speak an unwritten language, with the word for “woman” also meaning “language”. Pot-making by women is a holy activity, and a sacred magical script is inscribed on them. Pots are living–making pots during the time of the growth of the corn follows the order of nature and honors the fertility of the earth. Everything that women do from morning until night is done with magic ritual. So many of the things that Helene had to say about the Berbers were stunning. I feel the sacred and strong ties these people have with the earlier Goddess cultures appear to be quite intact, even with the influences of patriarchy. The entire birth process is seen as a totally female reality–it is completely linked to the moon. The mother “meets” the moon, prays to the moon and is washed in water that carries the sacred shimmering reflection of the moon. Men are not allowed to be a the birth, as it is a time for women only to experience the creation of life which “cannot be translated into a manly experience.” I thought, Wow! I gave birth in a community in Tennessse called The Farm where we prided ourselves on the fact that we had men there, participating. Helene reported that Berber women who had been in the U.S. were infuriated at Western birthing practices that included men. I am still pondering this complete and total difference from what I have known and experienced in my life, and how things would have been different for me had I had the Berber experience. Looking back, I think I would have much preferred it. Two other points by Helene, though there were many, stood out for me. The fact that there is no such thing as a single mother I found remarkable. The whole village is the family for any child. And, magically and beautifully, a child is adopted into the family by the act of being breastfed–milk is that which ensures life.

Listening to women speak about active matriarchies fed something deep within me. I felt I was taking in the milk of my long-lost mothers.

From North Africa, we were taken to Mexico by Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, ethnologist, sociologist and co-founder of International Women’s Studies. Reporting on an indigenous culture “in the midst of the machismo Mexican culture”, she says this culture in the town of Juchitan, in Southern Mexico, a city of 100,000, has “strong matriarchal characteristics.” They have a “mother-centered” genealogy. There are no isolated housewives and they experience a strong rootedness with the earth. She explained that the “whole community belongs to women” because the “mother’s house” is at the center. There is no “father’s house.” “Mothers and motherhood play a vital role.” Even though heterosexuality is prevalent, four different social genders are distinguished, defined through work and sexual preference. A film, “The Women of Juchitan”, was shown about these people, showing daily community life and celebration. One aspect disturbed me–the ubiquitous presence of beer, with women and men drinking copious amounts, equally. I can’t help but think that the dysfunctional effects of alcohol consumption are not matriarchal, but actually a disturbing influence from patriarchy, which we can certainly witness in our own indigenous peoples in the U.S.. Alcoholism is alcoholism wherever it is. A part of the film highlighted a young man who dressed as a woman and said he felt like a woman. He was completely and totally accepted by the community.

Moving into a look at past matriarchal consciousness, Riane Eisler, author of “The Chalice and the Blade” and President for the Center for Partnership Studies, was slated to open this topic. However, because she could not attend, her paper on “The Battle over Human Possibilities: Women, Men and Cultural Transformaion” was read. The points of clarity I heard were basic outlines of the differences of the two models Riane is well-known for discussing–that of the dominator model and the partnership model. She also emphasized cultural transformation theory saying “a central theme of cultural transformation theory is the centrality of the social construction of the roles and relations of the female and male halves of humanity to the construction of every social institution.” Her paper emphasized the necessity of overcoming polarized classifications found in patriarchy, and moving towards a partnership reality in which polarization is transformed. She also pointed out that the “ongoing battle over human cultural origins” is seriously overlooked as essentially important in understanding “views on human possibilities.”

Carola Meier-Seethaler,therapist and author, spoke on “Alternative to the Dualistic Concept of Culture and the Patriarchal Ban on Thinking”–a provocative subject. It was refreshing to hear a therapist discuss the “alleged ontological split between the male intellectual principle and the supposedly natural principle of female chaos” as absurd. She said “What becomes apparent are the parallels between mythological world views and structures of societies in the course of the violent superimposition of a peaceful Afro-Eurasian basic culture by warlike, marauding peoples between the 4th and 2nd millennia BC.” I felt she made an important point about the present policy of the gender mainstreaming she encounters, saying that the patriarchal scientific community is not willing to hear criticism because it cannot see its own presuppositions due to an unwillingness to self-reflect.

Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, author, cultural historian and Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies program in Women’s Spirituality, spoke passionately about the origins of homo sapiens sapiens and our emergence from Africa. Lucia’s book, “dark mother” (non-caps are intentional) substantiates her theses that “the oldest deity worshipped by homo sapiens is that of a Dark M other from Central and Southern Africa. Prehistoric signs of this Dark Mother were carried by African migrants after 50,000 BCE to the caves and cliffs of all continents. Later, ca. 25,000 BCE, these signs were transmuted into venerated female images found all around the Mediterranean litoral, in West Asia, Outer Asia, and in North and South America. In the Christian epoch these became Black Madonnas, but the legacy of the African Dark Mother is evident in all dark women divinities on every continent.” Her work is deeply significant because she shows that there is only one race of human beings– African. With this understanding, the fiction/friction of racism is revealed for what it is–nothing more than a useless concept used to wage domination, subjugation and oppression of “other”.

Concluding the second day of presenters was Christa Mulack, writer, lecturer and ardent explorer of matriarchy for over twenty years. She lectured on the work of Gerda Weiler (1921-1994) who was “the first author who probed the Bible for its matriarchal implications.” Author of “Matriarchy in Old Israel”, Gerda discovered cultic passages in the Bible containing definite matriarchal contents. Gaerda’s work challenged the way people read the texts, saying she felt it was important to understand the texts the way they wanted to be read. For instance, she claims that “Lord” and “God” originally meant “Goddess” and “Lady”. Perhaps most importantly, especially for these times, Christa says, “the discovery of these textural treasures allowed her (Gerda) to identify a pre-Israel-ite Goddess culture in ancient Palestine which had a strong influence on the Israelite tribes immigrating into the area. As a consequence, the conviction that Israel began with a patriarchal culture and society possessing a primordial monotheism has to be abandoned.” In Gerda’s own visionary words, she said, “The freed consciousness of women is the power by which the leap into the meta-patriarchal future will be prepared and made easier.” I know Gerda must be thrilled wherever she is, that a conference on matriarchies is a step in the right direction of freeing women’s consciousness.

The final day of the conference was opened in the morning by Joan Marler talking on “The Iconography and Social Structure of Old Europe, The Archaeomythological Research of Marija Gimbutas. Joan, faculty member of the California Institute of Integral Studies and Director of the Institute of Archaeomythology, presented a beautiful and informative slide show of Goddess iconography. As someone who feels that the spiritual must inform the political, I was inspired by the Goddess imagery Joan presented because it allowed me to connect to the truth of the matriarchal reality in a non-intellectual manner, which I feel is of vital importance if we are to deeply understand the changes needed to shift the current dominator paradigm. Viewing ancient images stirs our cellular memory and helps us open to a remembrance we might not otherwise experience through words alone. Joan says of Marija’s work, “Dr. Gimbutas developed “archaeomythology” an interdisciplinary approach to scholarship that combines archaeology, mythology, ethnology, folklore, linguistic paleontology, and the study of historical documents. A vast body of Neolithic imagery rendered primarily in female forms indicates the centrality of women’s activities and their roles as creators of culture. Utilizing archaeomythological scholarship, she described these early Neolithic societies as non-Indo-European and ‘matristic’”.

The baton of Goddess-knowledge Joan introduced was then taken up by the next speaker, Michael Dames, author, artist and prehistorian, well-known for his books, “The Silbury Treasure”, “The Avebury Cycle” and “Mythic Ireland”. While I admittedly had some reservations about men presenting at a conference on matriarchies, I found Michael inspiring and very knowledgeable about pre-christian Goddess religion. Referring to himself as “a matriarchal man”, he revealed his deep reverence and love for the Goddess in his talk, “Footsteps of the Goddess in Britain and Ireland.” This talk was very timely for me, as I was journeying to Britain following the conference to visit with Monica Sjoo, and knowing about the sacred sites there beforehand enhanced my trip. I think it is rare for a man to see himself as a son of the Goddess and not have issues about control and power. Though I do not know Michael, I know many women who respect him, and I mused on how important and absolutely essential it is for men to really “get it”. In concert with Marija Gimbutas, Michael says, “if the original quality of the goddess mythology is sought, a poetic synthesis of all these strands (folklore, folk customs, place names and medieval writings) should be attempted. Instead of the modern cult of Objectivity, a pre-Socratic empathy is required. The archaic offers a new methodology, with which to mend a torn world.”

I was very pleasantly surprised by the next speaker, another man, Kurt Derungs, who also seems devoted to the Goddess. His forte is the mythology of landscape and has developed his field to include research on matriarchy. I found much of his information in his talk, “Landscapes of the Ancestress, Principles of the Matriarchal Philosophy of Nature and the Mythology of Landscape”, simply put, stunning. He says, “The ‘landscape of the ancestress’ is the primary key for the recognition of many cultic sites and sacred places which would otherwise be overlooked or destroyed by the isolating patriarchal viewpoint.” He pointed out that the “divine ancestress” of different cultures he has studied is the land herself, and that people had to be on the land to experience direct connection with the “landscape ancestress”. One of the examples he mentioned was the landscape ancestress of Viet Nam, Baden, the black woman, a holy mountain in the Mekong Delta, originally holy to the matriarchal Chan people. Upon hearing this I reflected on Lucia Birnbaum’s thesis of the dark mother and the diaspora out of Africa. Near Hanoi, there is a large delta split into three rivers–the white, red and black rivers, colors of the triple goddess. The red river leads to a cave with stalactites referred to as “milk breast of the mother”. Another example he spoke of was Langkawe Island in an island

group in Maylasia, called “island of the pregnant woman.” On the island is a holy vulva-like lake where women who want to conceive visit and drink from her waters. He also spoke of Lensburg, middle Europe’s Silbury Hill, dated about 6000 BCE a burial mound where the dead were placed inside the earth as embryos in the womb for rebirth.

The next presentation “The Origins of Patriarchy in Ancient Desertification: Saharasia” by James DeMeo, Director of the Orgone Biophysical Research Lab, was controversial. I felt his focus on looking at origins of violence and child abuse to be an important one. He mapped and correlated behavioral variables such as infant neglect, child abuse and obedience training, adolescent sexual repression, female subordination and tendencies towards social violence, hierarchical structures, high-god religioin and warfare using the data of George Murdock, an anthropologist and ethnographer who collected material from around the world.. Following his presentation, Peggy Reeves-Sanday, a colleague who had lectured on the matriarchal culture of the Minangkabau/Sumatra and their peaceful resolution to conflict, very sharply and angrily criticized James’ presentatioin, calling him “reductionist” and then walked out of the conference. She said Murdock’s data were flawed. Ok, I thought, she doesn’t agree with James deMeo. But does she have to be so shaming and angry? This incident brought up a lot of questions for me. For someone who had studied peaceful resolution to conflict, she didn’t appear to know how to implement this knowledge in a challenging situation. I don’t usually defend men, and I am more often than not outraged at their ignorance, privilege and entitlement, but I was taken aback by her anger towards him and wondered what would be a matriarchal way to disagree. I have not read James’ book, “Saharasia”, so I cannot comment on the validity of his data. Maybe he was assumptive and ignorant–I don’t know. He was, however, invited to the conference as a presenter, so there must have been some respect for his work. I have felt for a long time that we cannot divorce the intellectual from the spiritual. We must walk the talk. It is much easier to talk the talk, but that isn’t enough. I felt James on some level to be an ally. I wasn’t sure about Peggy Sanday after her display of anger and contempt. While I understand the need for fierce truth-telling, I am not supportive of a lack of compassion. To me, the much-needed mother-reality is about how to be truthful, compassionate, fierce, strong and just. Pulling rank or status is not acceptable. In the end, a conference organizer recognized this unfortunate polarization and asked James to present a bouquet of flowers to Heide (who had also questioned his presentation, but in a more respectful manner). She responded with a gentle hug of acceptance and he was able to offer his thankfulness to her and for being at the conference.

Part six of the conference was devoted to matriarchal politics, spirituality, aesthetics and medicine. Heide commented that the interrelationship among all the above-mentioned topics “is in contrast to the situation in patriarchal societies in which these areas have been torn apart and made into separate spheres of power.” Ingrid Olbricht, a specialist in neurology, psychiatry, psychotherapeutic medicine and psychotherapy, spoke on “Women’s Health in Male Biased Societies”. Her important contribution included a look at examples of “structural violence” in the entire system of medicine in regard to women and the deficiency of care for women, which she says negatively influences women’s self-esteem and self-awareness, contributing to illness and the reduction of a quality of life. She says, “women experience their health very subjectively. In a male-dominated health system, the seemingly objective view in definition, research and treatment is still not sensitive to the female gender; it is androcentric and in psychotherapy, even paternalistic.”. Such wisdom! I have a great deal of respect for women in “the system” who courageously speak the truth.

Cecile Keller, a medical doctor most recently practicing in the field of gynecology, and student of shamanism and matriarchal spirituality, spoke on “Medicine in Matriarchal Societies”. It was a pleasure to hear her speak about this subject, because as she did so, I could feel in my bones a longing to return to this kind of heart-caring that women create together. A system of healthcare based on love as opposed to greed and control would lessen the actual occurance of disease and illness because people would feel safe and nurtured. Cecile says, “In matriarchal societies medicine is holistic and is based on experiential knowledge. The methods include both the treatments of the body and the guidance of the soul and consciousness. Within the context of a healing ritual, medical substances and physiological techniques find application. On the other hand self-healing processes of psycho-somatic and spirit-soul based orders are being stimulated through the medium of the “soul-search.” In this process the whole mythology and cosmology of the prevailing matriarchal culture is being activated which will reconnect persons seeking healing positively to their own world view.”

Vibrant and enlivening Ceylan Orhun, passionate activist in national and international women’s human rights gave a talk with slides on ”Aesthetic and Politics from Neolithic Visions”. A profound sharing included slides showing the site of a so-called “honor murder” where a young woman, accused of adultery, was put to death in the streets of Southeastern Anatolia. I was outraged by this wanton act of violence. How is it that men’s reality is allowed to pervade the world with such violence and cruelty and uncontrolled, raging misogyny? Any religion allowing such an act is no religion at all. The very word means “return to law”. The only real law I know of is women’s law–“all things are born of woman and do nothing to harm the children.” I know such killings happen around the world on a daily basis, not to mention rape, Ceylan shared her inspiration from Neolithic symbols of women’s presence and power and feels that women today can re-connect with these symbols to find empowerment. She said that the ancient cultic site of Catal Huyuk is next to small villages where the women of those villages have never ventured out to see this sacred site “because the feminine spirit is denied the right to live there.” She related that the women are “under the strictest control of patriarchy” i.e., “honor murders” being one example. But, she created celebrations using artistic symbolic rituals, bringing the women out of their houses and “enticed them into a feminised public zone, which was a very political act in these regions.” Right on, Ceylan!

Concluding this herstorical conference, Erika A. Lindauer, a woman who “wilfully terminated her secondary educational process at a boys’ school at sixteen” in Germany and identifying herself as a “self-determined person” seeking self-education, gave a talk on “The Topic of Fairy Melusina in the History of Luxemburg.” She recounted an amazing story of the “water fairy” Melusina, the ancestress of the people of Luxemburg. Connecting Melusina to her ancient roots, Erika says, “She was a woman of the ancient culture who was still venerated one thousand years ago. Melusina conceals a Goddess, and the first city was built on her ancient cultic site, the “Bockfelsen”. A church is situated at the foot of the Bockfelsen with a widely known black Madonna. Both these facts indicate that the history of Luxemburg has its roots in the matriarchal culture of Old Europe.” A very nice way, indeed, to finish the thought-provoking and inspiring gathering of wise women and a few men from around the globe, sharing in a deep spiritual, herstorical, political and scientific endeavor to change the world.

I know the ripples from this conference will reverberate for a long time to come. There was an idea discussed at my lunch table that perhaps we could bring a similar conference to America. We all toasted the idea, and the seed was planted. May it be so.

From Monica in the hospital

Monica had this to say:

"I feel very frustrated being stuck here in the hospital and the future looks very uncertain about what I will be able to do and not do. I’ve always been an activist, and I am frustrated in these dangerous times to not be able to be out there."

We sat around and listened to Monica tell stories. One of the most well-known was the time when she and 15 women crashed a mass at the Bristol Cathedral. For thirty years or so she had a vision of wanting to stand up in a cathedral or church during mass and confront the bishop or priest and say you are blaspheming against the mother but I never did it because I was too afraid of being put in prison or in the hospital. I had this vision before the women’s movement really began, so there was no support for it at the time. We were planning a conference in Bristol in 1992 which we called “Breaking the Taboos” and was very much a conference around anti-racism. Thre were a lot of African Caribbean women doing workshops. Thre were women there who were really keen on doing this acion in the cathedral and we met in the evening but I was feeling quite nervous because the cathedral was just up the road from where I live. The women who gathered were fearless-anarchist, anti-road, anti-motor-way activists. When the women started singing Buring Times, I realized this was the group ofwomen I had been waiting for all my life. So we decided to go ahead and meet at 10 Sunday morning which is mass and do an action. Much to her amazement, all the women turned up She put her God Giving Birth on a piece of cardboard and she held it in front of her. Some of the women painted their faces with butterflies. One woman had a baby on her back. We made a circle around a tree outside and then went inside the cathedral and walked in the dark until we were lined up right in front of the high altar. She was standing in the middle. The Dean of Bristol was leading the mass. We found out later that he was in support of women priests. The next year the first 30 women priests were ordained in that cathedral on Internaltional womens day. The dean saw Monica as the leader of the pack... if young women do this they are charming, if you are older you are not likely to ever change. He went for her. He said what are you doing here, we are having amass in here. She said well we want to do something in here. He said it is our cathedral. She said all churchs and cathedrals are built on ancient sacred sites of the goddess. He then gave up after a woman working in the church asked if he should call the police.... he said no. He asked us whatwe wanted to do. We were all scared... we thought the roof was going to cave in... we thought we were breaking one of the greatest taboos of all time... breaking a mass. We said we wanted to sing a song. WE saind all the verses of Burning Times. And then the women wanted to do a dance. For a minute it looked like the Dean was holding two women’s hands... but then he pulled back. She had given her word that they were just going to sing a song. They went out thru the center and as they walked out, she said “Glad tidings end of the Godfathers. When she looked back, she saw one of the women standing on the pulpit with her butterfly wings paintead on her eyes looking as if she was preaching to the congregation. When we were going out there was an old man standing at the door who said to Monica You are old enough to know better, and she it is precisely that I am old enough that I am doing this. We went back to the conference... there were 9women drumming, and we danced ecstatically for the next 3 hours... The energy was incredible. WE felt had done something for all women’s consciousness around the earth. AT the confrence we set the date for the end of patriarchy to be celebrated on Silbury Hill in August at the Lammas full moon.

Oh our mother earth
Bringer into birth
Sweet Creatrix of the night and day
Bring our spirits thru
Rest our thoughts in you
Guide our feet in a natural way....

Aspects of Women's Spirituality in Tending to the Dying

For many of us, death is something we would rather not think about. Why is this? Why do we not want to understand the deepest mystery of life? Why are we so afraid to die? These are some of the questions that beckoned me on a journey to learn about the true nature of death, resulting in a recently published book, Midwifing Death: Returning to the Arms of the Ancient Mother, weaving together knowledge about how our pre-patriarchal ancestors viewed life and death with modem stories telling how the sacred passage of death and dying can be midwifed in grace, love and beauty, which are all aspects of the sacred feminine in women's spirituality--the oldest spirituality on the planet. What I have discovered, or rather, uncovered, from the forgotten realms of our ancestors is a deep and profound wisdom of the nature of life, death and regeneration. In order to understand aspects of women's spirituality and their pertinence to death and dying, I feel it is important to have an overview and body-centered sense of what women's spirituality actually is.

Most of us in this fast-paced Euro-Western culture have no idea how our Neolithic and Paleolithic ancestors experienced the sacred, because we erroneously assume that history begins with Mesopotamia and Sumer. While we cannot say we can know exactly what the ancients knew, we can put the pieces and shards together of the puzzle of our past and see as well as feel a timeless reality that spans past, present and future. Most of the scholarship in archeology, cultural anthropology and cultural history has within it an insidious male bias which has not allowed for accurate vision and conclusion regarding our human evolution. Well-known figures and teachers, such as Joseph Campbell, have realized that without the necessary light of feminist scholarship, we have unfortunately been hoodwinked into believing things about ourselves as a species that simply are not true. Without the advent of recent pioneering scholarship by women such as the late Dr.Marija Gimbutas, archeomythologist, linguist, scientist, professor at UCLA for many years who created the new field of study of archeomythology, and author of the encyclopedic The Language of the Goddess and The Civilization of the Goddess, as well as numerous other books and articles, we would be doomed to create and recreate a fear based, violent and insane reality spawned from lies about who we are as beings on this planet, which we have already been doing quite long enough, successfully contributing to our own demise and that of many other species. My research for my book was deeply influenced by her work, as she has literally unearthed from her diggings and studies of Neolithic Old Europe, evidence of peaceful woman-centered cultures that not only lived in peace, but also flourished in creativity and beauty. She has inspired people from around the world to further study these cultures. It is my prayer that her work will become part of the general curriculum in our schools, for her work and research clearly show that humankind is fully capable of living peacefully, because this is our legacy for the millennia preceding patriarchy, the advent of which occurred some 5,000 years ago. Campbell informs us in the forward of Gimbutas' definitive work, The Language of the Goddess:As Jean-Francois Champollion, a century and a half ago, through his decipherment of the Rosetta Stone was able to establish a glossary of hieroglyphic signs to serve as keys to the whole great treasury of Egyptian religious thought from c.3200 B.C. to the period of the Ptolemies, so in her assemblage, classification and descriptive interpretation of some two thousand symbolic artifacts from the earliest Neolithic village sites of Europe, c. 7000 to 3500 B.C., Marija Gimbutas has been able, not only to prepare a fundamental glossary of pictorial motifs as keys to the mythology of that otherwise undocumented era, but also to establish on the basis of these interpreted signs the main lines and themes of a religion in veneration, both of the universe as the living body of a Goddess Mother Creator, and of all the living things within it as partaking of her divinity-a religion, one immediately perceives, which is in contrast to that of Genesis 3: 19 where Adam is told by his father creator: 'In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken, you are dust, and to dust you shall return.' In this earlier mythology, the earth out of which all these creatures have been born is not dust but alive, as the Goddess-Creator herself.1From the time we can read and write we are taught that humankind, often referred to as mankind, and I ask you to reflect on that referencing which is constantly used to describe all of humanity, as a symptom of what is not working for us as a species, has always been violent. We are taught and teach our children that history is equated with which great heroes conquered whom and how many wars have been raged throughout time. We have been forced and force our children to learn detailed accounts of violent atrocities perpetuated by these so-called heroes and of violent demises of civilizations, as if this is all good, important and necessary for us to do and to know, without any regard or consideration for the sensitive and beautiful open mind of a child; there is no questioning about how this kind of focus affects the tenderness of a soul and our capacity to be loving and kind human beings. I think it is safe to say that it is painfully and obviously clear that such indoctrination has one outcome--the sanctioning of violence against "other" to the point where we, as a species, are now teetering on the edge of a collective near-death experience. When our children murder other children in our schools, something is deeply and drastically wrong. When men use and abuse children as sexual objects for a temporary fix in an attempt to end their own pain and suffering, something is excruciatingly and drastically wrong. With such profound imbalance in our lives, how can we possibly live loving, kind and peaceful lives? And if we cannot live peaceful lives, how can we possibly expect to die in peace?

The global and cross-cultural wisdom of the ancients, prior to pre-patriarchal times, offers wonder, truth and beauty about life and death. At the core of many of these Paleolithic and Neolithic cultures is a wisdom nearly lost to us now, without which we grievously suffer, not understanding why. The central core of strength of early peoples from around the world was the experience of earth as Mother, of universe as Mother, of life emerging from the sacred womb of the Great Mother, also known as Goddess. At the core of these communities was the mother-child bond, which informed all aspects of daily life. When I attended the First International Congress on Matriarchies in Luxembourg two years ago, I heard Chinese professor, Dr. Lamu Gatusa whose work centers on the preservation of the social and spiritual heritage of his people, the matriarchal Mosuo of China, speak to the fact that the mother is considered the origin of life and society expressed in both "ethnic concepts and in the concepts of love."2

Archeological findings from the work of Gimbutas and many others as well as research by feminist cultural historians such as Dr. Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, show that our ancestors knew very well who gave them life and who sustained life. Birnbaum, professor in the women's spirituality department at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco and author of several books including her most recent, ground-breaking dark mother, african origins and godmothers, has researched the African diaspora of homo sapiens and has shown that within the psyche of all humans is a deep memory of the dark mother and her values of justice with compassion, equality and peacefulness.3 Her work is corroborated by eminent geneticists, such as L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza who agree that there is only one human race--Afiican. Birnbaum postulates that the core of the deep spiritual nature of our being is informed by the cellular memory of the dark mother who gives life, sustains life and receives life back unto herself in an eternal cyclical existence deemed as heresy by the later church so-called fathers. The implications of Birnbaum's work are far-reaching, for she shows us that the notion of race is really an illusion. In understanding this truth, racism is then eradicated. It is also my prayer that Birnbaum's work will find its way into our curriculum in what we teach our children. If we taught them the truth about who they are and that human beings are far more informed by peacefulness and beauty than insane violence and hatred, as all children really know before this natural wisdom is conditioned out of them, which is happening at increasingly earlier and earlier ages with the age of technology, we will be giving them the tools to live happy, productive, cooperative lives, with a deep respect for their mothers, Mother Earth and Mother Nature, and therefore the extraordinary gift of life and the magical cycle of life, death and regeneration.

The amazing discoveries of the birth, life, death and regeneration murals in the excavations by archeologist James Mellart in Turkey of the 8,000 year old Neolithic culture of Catal Huyuk in the 1960's beautifully depict the deep and profound reverence in which these early peoples lived. The Catal Huyuk settlement lasted approximately 1,000, years. The unearthed evidence of three different skull types found in various diggings showed that diverse peoples lived together in harmony. There is no evidence whatsoever of weaponry or warfare in any of the murals or iconography. And there is amazing substantiation of the reverence of a Mother Goddess. The majestic Neolithic double temples in Malta and Gozo, themselves symbols of the sacred female principle and predating the pyramids by 1,000 years, have yielded numerous female figurines suggesting the primaIness of woman--she who births life into form. One enters the temples through the sacred yonic gateway, which leads to round earthen womb-like spaces deep inside. And one leaves the temples through the same gateway, experiencing a sense of rebirth and regeneration. The ancients also knew to whom they returned at the end of life. Today there are existing remnants of this mother wisdom alive insuch cultures as the Minangkabau in Sumatra, the Berber in Tunisia, the Mosuo in China and the matriarchal >culture found in Juchitan, Mexico. Significantly, when people revere the Mother and the Sacred Feminine, peace abounds. So, it is true that his-story is about war. And it is also true that her-story is about something else entirely.

My journey with the questions about death began a long time ago. Most recently, I was called to care for my aging parents. When my father became ill, I made a decision that I would help him through his passage from this world into the next. It was a spiritual practice for me to show up in that way, because his wounding had gone unhealed in his life which made him difficult to be with at times. Often when people are dying, and they are afraid, their anger and fear can be released in ways that can be very confusing for caregivers, loved ones and family members. My father's death was twenty years ago, and since that time 1 have learned a great deal about midwifing death. I have seen the need for people to feel safe at the time of dying. And I have noticed that most people don't. I wondered why not. That question guided me on my own spiritual quest, as I realized that there was a great deal I did not know about myself, my conditioning, the ruling paradigm I had grown up in, the global wanton hatred of women, culminating in the burning and torture of thousands if not millions of women in the Inquisition, that is, simultaneously, referred to as the age of the Renaissance. This is the single most unspoken event in the recent herstory of our specie-s-the women's holocaust that lasted for about five hundred years, ending in Europe and in the U.S. only three hundred years ago, now finding current expressions in other parts of the world. It might not be easy to understand why anyone would talk about this in relation to death and dying. For me, it is painfully obvious why it is absolutely necessary. In the cells of every woman is this memory, unseen, untold and forced into exile within a woman's soul. Death and dying take on a new meaning from this perspective.

Aspects of women's spirituality in tending to the dying become more comprehensive and encompassing in regard to the current human condition, because if we do not understand the Mother Wisdom from which we are born, we will not know how to impart it to ourselves or to our children, in life and in death. Understanding women's spirituality is also about cultivating a deep understanding of what is happening on our planet and seeing that the death and destruction, violence, and war we wreak on ourselves is intimately connected with the denial of the Mother Wisdom lying dormant in our cells, though there is a new spark of awakening that is happening around the world as women are choosing to create something new rather than fight against the old.

Interestingly, midwifng my father in his death taught me a great deal about life. I saw that we need a completely new way to live, which is not new information, really, but it came to me in my process with him because I came face to face with my own anger and fear, and I needed to learn how to express myself in compassion and love without blame and judgment,-all the values of the original dark mother. As I continued in my journey helping people die, I felt I was awakening to that cellular memory within me of the Mother and began to create with and for people a new way to be together in one of, if not the most important, mysterious and awesome experiences of a lifetime.

Midwifing the dying means to bring into the experience the sacred values of mothering, which have been all but destroyed in global male-dominated hierarchical cultures around the world. Death for the ancients was always connected with regeneration. In our society, we associate death with the grim reaper-a scary image of a man with a sickle coming to get us. In pre-dynastic Egypt as well as dynastic Egypt, the Goddess Nut is found painted on the bottoms of coffins with open arms and the body of the dead is placed on top of her image, face down, indicating a face-to-face meeting of the mortal with the immortal Mother Goddess. The arms of the Mother Goddess welcomed the dead back into the numinous realm between life and death. The Norse Goddess Hel was the wise eternal grandmother whose womb cave of regeneration, the place where souls went in death to find nurturing in her safe haven of warmth and rebirth, was found deep in the heart of the mountain. Today the remnant of Hel's sacred domain has become split off from the cycle of life, death and regeneration and has deteriorated into the demonized place of hell where the hot and cold fires of fear and rage are fanned with violence. People are frightened into believing that to be god-fearing will save them from punishment in the afterlife. Fear, however, does not allow for love, openness, surrender and peace, which are all favorable states to be well acquainted with in life in order that one can be prepared for death, and once again, the values of the dark mother from which we all have come.

To bring the values of mothering to the dying requires skill, because we no longer naturally know these values in our bones, though the memory is there. One must cultivate presence and bring to the bedside of the dying a loving openness that is not encumbered with an agenda. And one must keep one's own fear, anger and need to control in check in order to be truly available to the dying. One must be able to see the needs of the moment and be able to give. This is not a co-dependent giving. This is a giving from the heart that sees and feels, grounded in compassion and authenticity. A loving and present mother knows what is needed. She just knows. It is the same in tending to the dying, which used to be women's practice prior to the advent of patriarchy. When people feel cared for and safe in their dying process, amazing things can happen. I have witnessed a person who has carried a lifetime of anger shed that deep-seated identity with anger in the moments before death, thereby changing the effects of what they carry with them into the realms beyond. Such was the case of my own mother. I midwifed her in her dying, bringing her home to die in peace. Many of us in this culture are the walking wounded. My parents' generation, and many before, did not know much of anything else--therapy was not considered as something people needed unless one was diagnosed as mentally ill and needing special confinement. From what I witness, that describes just about all of us. Valium was offered for women who were considered hysterical. Now we have Prozac. So, my mother suffered from a deep depression all of her life, at the same time raising five children and certainly doing the best she could. But she was angry most of her life, having suffered a difficult childhood. In her death, because she was surrounded by love and safety, she could let go of her pain and really surrender into dying. It was an amazing process to witness, because her personality fell away as the true nature of her being emerged. It is said that our true nature is 10,000 times brighter than the sun, and I could actually feel something of this truth as my mother let go of her anger in the hours before her death.

It is motherly love that births life, sustains and tends to it. Why wouldn't we want motherly love surrounding us in our dying? I am sure most of us would. But most of us do not know what that is, nor what it looks like, because we have been deprived of the ancestral grandmother wisdom that guided, for instance the indigenous peoples of this land, such as the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, as they were named by the French, whose wisdom was not only used in the formation of our constitution, but also was offered by the Haudenosaunee women to the suffering Euro-Western women who were their neighbors to help them realize their own oppression--such women as Matilda Joslyn Gage, Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott. We all know what those women did with what they learned from their Indian sisters.

Motherly love in death and dying offers sanctuary, authenticity and open-heartedness to all involved. Fear and anger melt away in the open arms of love, compassion, truth and beauty. However, in order to be able to give in this way, we must cultivate this reality in our lives. This is the ancient global truth of women's spirituality. It is an indigenous truth that when women are respected, then so is all life, which makes the opposite true as well.

If we are to have peaceful transitions from this world to the next, it is imperative that we change our ways and become more aligned with our true nature, which is love. Life is meant to be lived in peace, joy, harmony, abundance and celebration. With such a life, death is not the end, but rather an opening, a portal, into another realm of the Great Mystery.

Footnotes

1 Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess, HarperSanFrancisco, San Francisco, 1989, p.xiii.

2 Professor Lama Gatusa, personal experience/conversation. Also refer to Goddessing, An International Journa lof Goddess Expression, issue #19, 2004-5, article by Leslene della-Madre," Societies in Balance: Gender Equality in Matrilineal, Matrifocal and Matriarchal Societies, " p.41.

3 Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, dark mother, Authors Chioce Press, Lincoln, 2001, p.xxvi.

The Luminous Dark Mother

I am deeply interested in the true origins and beginnings of the spiritual life of humankind. This interest has, over time, become a passion as I have expanded my awareness and understanding about our human story — most of which is not told in history books. As a long-time student of Goddess thealogy and spirituality, I have woven into the fabric of my life the inspirations and insights that have come from teachers, elders, and sister travelers who also share this same passion. I have also made spiritual journeys in search of ancestral wisdom about how our ancestors revered the most ancient and primal deity — the Great Mother, also known by some as the Dark Mother. I have found myself propelled into finding answers to the questions: "Who is She?" and "What significance does She hold for all of humanity?" I realized that I have had a profound inquisitiveness about, and yearning for, the Dark Mother for a very long time while not really knowing it, because I had no language for this longing until the Goddess spirituality movement became a reality for many women. From vision quests on mountaintops, to using sacred hallucinogens, to studying numerous Goddess cultures from around the world and traveling to sacred sites, I have been on a long quest — one that has taken me to the heart of the Goddess.

In 1998, I went on pilgrimage to Malta, Egypt, and Crete on the trail of the African Dark Mother who was carried in the hearts and minds of very early peoples migrating from the African continent into other parts of the world. My longing for this communion with the Dark Mother was also further deepened when I attended a conference in San Francisco on the Goddess at the California Institute of Integral Studies, in the late 1990s, honoring the work of the late archaeomythologist and linguist Marija Gimbutas. There I met cultural historian Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, whose work has focused on the origins of Goddess culture and spirituality originating in Africa, and the subsequent diaspora. I was enthralled with her research and could deeply understand her passion for educating people about the Dark Mother. Her wisdom ignited something deep within me. Perhaps it was more of an awakening — a remembrance bubbling up from my very cells. When Lucia planned a pilgrimage to Sardegna in May/June of 2004 to explore African migration paths and the Dark Mother, I jumped at the chance to travel with, and learn, from her.

I had been fascinated by astronomer Vera Rubin's discovery of dark matter (the word "matter" comes from "mater" or "mother"). Dark matter comprises about ninety percent of the matter in the universe (which I like to refer to as the "yoni-verse," as "uni" is a cognate of "yoni") and yet, is invisible. It is thought by astronomers and physicists that the gravity of dark matter shapes galaxies and holds them together. I had begun to think of this as metaphor and to consider what sacred meaning this metaphor might hold for humanity as a reflection of macrocosm in the microcosm. In other words, what is the correspondence between the Dark Mother of space and the Dark Mother in our human experience?

Lucia's work sheds light on this mystery. Her work cites research by noted geneticists revealing that African DNA is found in all races of people, and that humans — our species homo sapiens sapiens — originated in Africa. Her research has revealed that the worship of the Dark Mother followed African migrations after 60,000 BCE, first moving west into Asia and then spreading out across the rest of the world. From this evidence, supported by archeologists and other cultural historians, she boldly asserts that we are one race of people, originally African, and that we are all people of color!

Evidence of early African migration can be seen at the site of the oldest religious sanctuary in the world, Har Karkom, created in 40,000 BCE in the Sinai Peninsula, later known as Mt. Sinai. In Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum's seminal work, dark mother: african origins and godmothers, she notes that this ancient site is known as the geographic origination of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.1 Yet long before the emergence of these recent religions, in Paleolithic times, the site served as "an open air museum of a sacred place with altars, megaliths in alignment, and a cliff art record of peoples who have lived there."2 Their religion was centered on a female divinity, which would have been African and black, millennia before the rise of patriarchy.

My interest in learning about the Dark Mother has grown like a glowing ember, fanned by the wisdom of people like Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, who has inspired me to think of the implications of being originally African, and to find sacred meaning in the microcosmic experience of the Dark Mother. The first homo sapiens sapiens mother passed her mitochondrial DNA to her children and her daughters passed it to their children, and their daughters to their children. The mitochondria in DNA is the "powerhouse" of the cell —the organelle at the center of enzyme activity producing the storehouse of chemical energy, the power molecule ATP, or the vital power the cell needs to live. This mitochondrial DNA, shaped in the form of a double helix, is only passed by the mother. There is no corresponding genetic material which is passed from father to child. Therefore, the vital cellular energy of all people on the planet came from the first African homo sapiens sapiens mother — the original Dark Mother of our current human species. In dark mother, Lucia cites geneticist L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza who refers to the double helix as "the symbol of the evolution of the universe...the unlimited possibilities of becoming."3

In the word mitochondria, "mitos" means "thread." My own view is that this thread relates to the "superstring" in modern astrophysics theory, which asserts that subatomic phenomena are actually manifestations of vibrations of fundamental, one-dimensional strings. As emanations of consciousness in form, humans are connected to a primary source through our cellular threads. Just as dark matter (mother) in space shapes galaxies, and holds them together, we are shaped and held by the African Dark Mother who has given us Her life force, and resides in the very depths of our being, where the macrocosm is literally reflected in the microcosm — creating an unbroken, ecstatic, (I prefer to think of the constant creation in the yoniverse to be of an ecstatic nature rather than a violent one, as is so often assumed in the patriarchal scientific rhetoric), luminous, cosmic weaving connecting mother and daughter, which is really more of a cosmic dance of continuous, whirling motion. This original "matriarche," as I am calling it, is completely inseparable from the greater body/yoniverse/source and beyond. In my view, and in this context, the term "matriarche" differs from the term "matriarchy," which most commonly defines a social system of culture (though is no doubt based on the macrocosmic reality). Some common definitions of matriarchy include: "a family, group, or state governed by a matriarch," and "a system of social organization in which descent and inheritance are traced through the female line."4 There are also feminist definitions, which I think are much more accurate, one of which is offered by philosopher, scholar, and director of the Matriarchal Studies School, Heide Gottner-Abendroth. Her comprehensive work on the subject, spanning some thirty years, redefines the term matriarchies more inclusively: "they are all gender-egalitarian societies, and many of them are fully egalitarian. This means they have no hierarchies, classes nor domination of one gender by the other."5 While Gottner-Abendroth does include the spiritual in her redefined view of matriarchy, which is too extensive to fully discuss here, my use of the term "matriarche" is closer to the core meaning of the truest essence of what I am presenting as an expression of yoniversal spiritual Presence. "Matri" means "mother" 6 and "arche" means "the underlying source of the being of all things," so, taken together, "matriarche," for me, conveys "mother as the underlying source of the being of all things."7 She is the yoniversal primal reality from which all is birthed. Thus, She is everywhere.

I am also profoundly intrigued by the recent discoveries in astrophysics of dark energy and dark flow. With the discoveries of these dark phenomena in space, I see a reflection of the sacred trinity of the Goddess/Dark Mother of our ancestors — creation, preservation, dissolution — which was co-opted and twisted by the church, resulting in the patriarchal reversal known as the christian trinity. Dark energy is said to be responsible for accelerating the expansion of the yoniverse. Dark flow, the most recent discovery, is believed to be a kind of unseen force, pulling on us from perhaps another yoniverse outside of our own, over 14 billion light years away, which can be detected in a clear patterned direction displayed by certain galaxy formations. Here is the dark trinity — right there in astrophysics! From my perspective, dark matter, dark energy, and dark flow seem to be a part of something so great and truly mystical — a vast energy that gives birth to Herself. The "Mother Universe" theory of Princeton cosmologist J. Richard Gott suggests that we live in a multiverse that has always been here — a Mother universe that gives birth to daughter universes, eternally. This theory, as I see it, reflects the early parthenogenetic Goddess of Paleolithic ancestors—The Great Mother/Dark Mother. Dr. Gott says "The mother universe, which is sustained by energy from the quantum world, creates itself and makes the first matter in some way we will never be able to know."8 Maybe our ancestors did know.

I am also equally intrigued by the recent acknowledgement by astrophysicists and cosmologists of the possible functions of black holes. Though little is known about these mysterious beings, some theorists now consider them to be centrally responsible for the creation of galaxies, since most galaxies have one at their core — the Dark Mother is at the core of every galaxy giving birth from Her great womb/cauldron of stellar creation! And some theorists go so far to say that because of their enormous energies black holes could be responsible for creating "baby universes."9

The darkness clearly holds all possibilities. It is not something to be feared; rather, it is a mystery to be lived. Understanding the meaning of being held and shaped by the invisible Dark Mother can give us insight into the true nature of our being, and can help us remember what we have lost when we have strayed too far from Her embrace. I believe women are the original and primal species of our kind, giving birth, just as the yoniverse gives birth. We are held in this deep mystery, which I believe is intrinsically, unequivocally female at its core. She simultaneously rocks us in the cradle of chaos and order.

What Lucia and others are telling us is that, contrary to modern belief, human nature has not always been violent. No evidence of warfare or weaponry in the artifacts and iconography in these early civilizations has been found. The work of the late archaeomythologist Marija Gimbutas has shown the peaceful and creative nature of the early cultures of Neolithic Europe. In her monumental volumes, Language of the Goddess and Civilization of the Goddess, her discoveries about the peaceful and female-centered Goddess cultures are exquisitely detailed. Now, Lucia's work reveals the origins of European culture in a single source, the African Dark Mother, whose worship conveys peace, justice, and compassion. She inspired the creation of cultures of beauty and celebration on all continents. As the very early African rock carvings and paintings show, life was celebrated and enjoyed by our early ancestors.

Lucia's work demonstrates that at the heart of Goddess spirituality is the Dark Mother Herself — which is the living soil/soul of the Earth, the spinning matter/mother and mysterious unseen forces of the yoniverse, source of us all — peaceful and beautiful. It is my belief that, when we remember who we really are, and from whom we come, peace will once again reign as our birthright. When women are returned to our proper place of respect in the greater scheme of things, it will be very difficult to imagine a world full of violence, hatred, and war.

When women are loved, all life is loved, and from this organic flow, people will naturally revere life, as they did so many millennia ago. This lack of evidence of warfare and violence in the archeological evidence from many early cultures gives us new material to teach to our children. I think it is imperative that we teach them about the peaceful nature of early humans, as this will help change their entire orientation to life. In these very difficult times, we are witness to a collective desperate longing of our souls to come home. I see this desperation reflected in the violence our society perpetuates against women and children, and now, children against children — usually males against others. It is no wonder that our children, at this time, are experiencing a devastating despair and loneliness, fueled by an insatiable hunger for violence and destruction. The only culture they have known is founded on premises that promise equality for all — if you happen to be male and white.

This kind of arrogant exclusivity is taking a psychic toll on all of us, as well as the planet. Our so-called founding fathers modeled much of their constitution on the Iroquois Federation. However, I feel they left out the most important premise on which the Iroquois based their agreement — that the council of grandmothers and clan mothers was the governing body that determined who embodied the virtues of female wisdom enough to become chief — virtues of peace, compassion, and kindness! This council had the power to remove any chief who did not hold these values sacred. The Iroquois placed the highest authority into the hands of women — of wise grandmothers. To me, these grandmothers were the embodiment of the Dark Mother, and were respected as such. The Iroquois knew that human life comes through women, and so women must be revered in order for all life to thrive. We have forgotten this. And when people collectively forget this very basic truth, there is a high price to pay for their (our) amnesia. It is the wisdom of the grandmothers that needs to govern our lives once again. When the wisdom of the Dark Mother is denied, we spiral downward into a deep abyss of carelessness, confusion, violence, and a profound sense of separation from the living Earth as we witnessed with the 2010 oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. I feel it is imperative to bring to our children the truth about our real history —herstory — in order for them to find a positive life experience that allows them to look forward to growing into their wholeness.

In Malta and Gozo, I felt the presence of the African Mother in the fantastic megalithic temples — the first one constructed over 5000 years ago, and in the Hypogeum, a labrynthian-carved structure in the limestone earth some thirty feet deep, with curved and round, egg-shaped niches for burial. The Hypogeum felt to me like a large womb, once holding the remains of about 7000 people. There is evidence that a temple once stood on top of the ground, indicating that rituals of life and death, as well as perhaps healing, were all enacted in a sense of wholeness/holiness. The Maltese structures are the oldest free-standing structures in the world, pre-dating the pyramids by about 1000 years. The megalithic temples are built in the shape of a large-bodied woman, so that upon entrance, one enters the body of the Mother through her yoni/gate. They are "double temples," with two shapes of the female body, side-by-side, indicating perhaps, shared leadership, mother-daughter relationship, and/or lesbianism, and perhaps, even, the double helix.

The temple-builders were migrants out of Africa, apparently first arriving in Sicily. I was amazed at how some of the rock construction of these temples reminded me of the natural rock formations in Philae in southern Egypt surrounding the Temple of Isis, the black African Goddess. Was there a memory of these amazing rock formations in the minds and hearts of the Africans who migrated to Malta?

Philae in southern Egypt, home of the Temple of Isis, was, itself, a very popular pilgrimage site in the millennium preceding Jesus and continuing several centuries beyond his death. Isis was a female deity with origins in central Africa, or Nubia, and was known as a compassionate mother. In dark mother, Lucia cites the work of leading nubiologist and archeologist, William Y. Adams, who considers Isis worship to be "one of history's most important ideological transformations."10 Adams further writes that Isis worship became "the first truly international and supra-national religion" because pilgrims of all classes and nationalities, including Meriotes, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and desert nomads alike flocked to Her temple for healing and spiritual guidance.11 Isis veneration spread as far east as Afghanistan, to the Black Sea, as well as to what is now western Europe in Portugal and as far north as England. It is Her legacy that has been inherited by christianity as revealed in the icons of the Black Madonnas found all over Europe; Isis and Her son Horus suckling at Her breast are most likely the prototypes for Mary and Jesus.

The Dark Goddess of Africa is the same Dark Goddess of India and the Far East — all with different names, but with the same power. Kali is a well-known Goddess from India, though we often hear Her name associated with the aspect of destruction. She was actually the Dark Goddess of India in all Her aspects — creation, preservation and dissolution. Why is it that her destructive aspect seems to be more visible in literature and in many myths than the others? It seems to me that associating the Goddess or Dark Mother only with destruction instills fear in people, and yet this is common. We have learned to fear Her power, the dark and death, with men in particular fueling this fear because of their own separation from the Dark Mother.

This separation is a result of the fear of the power of the Goddess that, for some reason, grew in men over time. The vast creative power of the Goddess, the Sacred Female, began to be taken as a threat by the male mind some 5000 years ago, and because of this fear, the need to "conquer" became the chosen acceptable heroic behavior for men in order for them to become "real men." To me, however, these men suffer from "PMS," or the Patriarchal Mind Set, which has only served to cause further separation and alienation of men from their source — the vast watery womb of the Dark Mother, who cannot be controlled.

The obsession to control and dominate has created a deep psychic split between mother and son, which is the only reason why rape exists. At the core of rape is a monstrously distorted compulsion to control, which comes from deep-seated feelings of being out of control, alone, and isolated from life and beauty. The projection of this fear of the Sacred Female onto women has created devastating destruction of the Earth and all her living children. The Dark Mother's message to us is that we must address this destruction—face the huge shadow that humans have created by denying Her. The shadow is all that has been split off and denied in our psyche, all that longs for attention and is, often, rarely seen. People act out what is in their shadow; often it is our children who carry the heavy burden of the unhealed collective wounding, with no idea of what it is that pains them so deeply in their tender psyches. Every day in the news, we see violent acts carried out by younger and younger people — mostly despairing boys and young men (though not all are young) whose souls ache from separation from the Mother.

In 1999, in Littleton, Colorado two desperate boys opened fire on students and teachers at Columbine High School, killing twelve students and one teacher before ending their own lives. Prior to that, in the Montreal Massacre in 1989, a twenty-five year old man, who claimed to be "fighting feminism," killed fourteen women at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, Quebec before taking his own life. And more recently, in China, there have been several horrific attacks by middle-aged men using meat cleavers and knives on beautiful little school children, killing sixteen children and one teacher before killing themselves. These heinous, unspeakably brutal crimes, which have become a cross-cultural, global phenomenon, would never happen in a culture where the Mother is revered. Never.

When a society idealizes and romanticizes war and violence, how do we expect our children will behave? We don't need scientists, sociologists, and psychologists to hypothesize about whether or not violent media affects our kids. How could it not affect the open bright minds of our children? Imagery is a powerful force — the root of "magic" is contained within it. We must be responsible for the magic we give to our children. If we give them glitzy Hollywood movies like "Star Wars," then they will grow up thinking violence is a neat adventure — full of excitement and power. Most of these kinds of movies are imagined in the minds of men, from Walt Disney to George Lucas. The visions in the minds of women are very different indeed, as is evidenced by early woman-centered cultures, which were notably characterized by the organization of community around the mother-child bond, egalitarianism, peacefulness, and an absence of weaponry. As Lucia notes, "The harmony of ancient mother-centered civilization is shown in that in Paleolithic Africa there was no division between sacred and profane and no division of self and other — the mother and her nurture of all life were one." 12

We often refer to the negative experiences in our life as "dark." As a sweat-lodge facilitator for women, I have learned that the dark is not a fearful place. In a sweat lodge, it is so dark inside that one cannot see one's hand in front of one's face. What I have come to experience sitting in this dark womb space is the incredible light that emerges from the deep dark — at times so bright, so luminous, that I couldn't tell that I was even sitting in the dark. I would like to offer that the dark is actually a nurturing place — just like the dark earth surrounding the tender seed, encouraging it, in full darkness, to sprout. If the seed is exposed to the light too soon, it will die. If the seed is not rooted in the dark, damp, rich soil, it will die. The darkness is necessary for life to take root! In that context, I would like to reclaim the dark, and refer to our negative experiences as something else — perhaps just "negative" — and let the dark emerge for us as the Dark Mother who holds us together and shapes us, just as a potter shapes her clay. The dark place of growth, Her womb, holds us and keeps us safe while providing us with nourishment.

Women carry the dark womb space within our bodies. To be in touch with our womb-wisdom is to know the wisdom of the Dark Mother. In my previously-mentioned journey to Egypt, I was led off-the-beaten path to the temple of Sekhmet, the fierce lion-headed goddess considered to be an aspect of Isis or the Goddess Hathor. Though Sekhmet's temple is not easily found, nor seems to be considered that important for tourists, for me, She was an awesome treasure. I was not interested in the grandiose pharaonic temples. I found them imposing and suffocating. Carved in black granite, Sekhmet was a regal and daunting presence. She was truly a magnificent embodiment of the Dark Mother. A solar disc rested on top of Her head and She held in Her hands a staff topped by a lotus, which perhaps was symbolic of the sacred yoni and/or the psychotropic blue lotus. After quieting my mind, I sat quietly on the temple floor and simply allowed myself to feel Her energy. She felt strong, protective, fierce, and peaceful. I felt that if I embodied the energies She was representing, I would be in touch with my own deep female strength and power. The fact that She was black made me feel even more in touch with the dark womb of the Earth and cosmos.

Several weeks after I returned from my journey to Egypt, Malta, and Crete, I participated in a teaching-transmission of the Tibetan Black Dakini, who is seen as a black lion-headed goddess, Simhamukha. Although She is Tibetan, Her energy and Her attributes felt the same to me as those of Sekhmet — fierce and powerful. It was the same archetype. I was truly awestruck by the similarities between these two goddesses, and felt Lucia's work resonating in my heart. I could see the arms of the original African Dark Mother reaching out across the planet, embracing Her children and encouraging them to come close to Her — to come back home.

In these desperate times, we need the healing power of the Dark Mother who is not afraid to cut through the egoic structures/strictures of dualistic thinking with ruthless compassion. Women especially need Her image to help us shed the heavily imposed patriarchal layers of definition by a mind that does not really see us — a mind that is only interested in controlling us and making us "behave." This healing power is a primal transformative force emerging from the depths of women's wisdom, which is, as we now know, genetically passed on to all of us. Men need this image in order to face their fear of the feminine, which they have learned to hate and which they have internalized as the hatred of women and of themselves. With the Dark Mother by their side, men can allow themselves to go into their deep feelings and not be ashamed to bring forth those frozen tears that often turn to bullets or violent attack. They can once again reclaim their heritage of being the loving sons of the Mother who has shared Her womb and breast with them to give them life. No longer will they need to conquer and dominate. With the Dark Mother's embrace, all people will be able to once again live in Her bountiful peace, beauty and celebration. Without Her, we will perish.

With a deep and profound reverence for our ancestors, and to the foremothers that have literally given birth to all of us, I offer a prayer in closing:

In the spirit of peace, beauty, compassion, kindness and love, let Her wisdom once again guide us out of our own mind-made prisons of distortion so that we may once again feel Her exquisite embrace and gracefully move our feet in dance to the rhythm of Her beating heart and come to know within the blessing of Her ecstatic joy. BLESSED BE.1 Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, dark mother: african origins and godmothers (San Jose: Authors Choice Press, 2001), 45.

2 Ibid.

3 L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, History and Geography of Human Genes (Princeton University Press, 1994), quoted in Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum dark mother: african origins and godmothers, (San Jose: Authors Choice Press, 2001), xxxvii.

4 Merriam Webster, "Matriarchy," www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/matriarchy

5 International Academy HAGIA, "Matriarchal Studies," www.hagia.de/de/matriarchy/matriarchal-studies.html

6 The Free Dictionary, "Matri-," http://www.thefreedictionary.com/matri-

7 Simon Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1994, 1996), 23. www.amazon.com/Oxford-Dictionary-Philosophy-Paperback Reference/dp/0192831348#reader_0192831348

8 Roy Abraham Varghese, The Wonder of the World, www.thewonderoftheworld.com/Sections7-article83-page1.html

9 Ibid.

10 William Y. Adams, Nubia, 338, quoted in Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, dark mother: african origins and godmothers (San Jose: Authors Choice Press, 2001), 14.

11 Ibid.

12 Birnbaum, dark mother, 6.

New Dimensions Interview with Justine Toms

Leslene Della Madre is a midwife, not to birth but to the passage out of this life. Culturally we have learned to look the other way at the time of death, until we find ourselves afraid of the process and of handling the body that remains. But in recent years, more and more people are returning to ancient practices of caring for the body of a deceased loved one at home, rather than relinquishing it to the care of a funeral home.

After years of supporting families through this process, Ms. della Madre has gained deep insight and wisdom about what it means to heal through death. Her words will invite you to explore the ancient rituals for honoring a deceased loved one in a way that ultimately brings you closer to yourself.

Topics explored in this dialogue:

• How a home funeral can make the grieving process easier

• How your mothering instincts and skills can ease a loved one's passage into death

• What we lose when we lack a direct understanding of the death process

• How children can be willing and insightful participants in a home funeral

• Why witnessing death is similar to witnessing birth

The Surviving and Thriving in Patriarchy

I am writing this on what our society calls Memorial Day. I watched a few minutes of a segment on a pbs station commemorating all the dead from all the wars. The segment I saw focused on an injured young man who survived a terrible head injury and his mother and sister who are his constant caretakers, their lives wrapped in grief, pain and self-sacrifice. This show seemed very, very weird indeed. Here were people performing, singing, speaking and doing dramatic readings to honor the dead who lost their lives in patriarchal wars. Most of the people who have died are young people. So here were all these people glorifying the death of children who were sent off to war by a white male elite as if it is the highest, most noble thing a young person can do with her or his life. (I am not saying that the dead shouldn't be honored. Of course they should be honored and remembered. I am emphasizing that this was an event glorifying death.) It was very difficult to watch how all of the death, destruction, loss, pain, grief and suffering of all those injured and killed and their families could be considered a good and noble way to spend one's life. To me, it was horrible, confusing, twisted and insane. And the country is off the hook with shows, newscasts and reports about glorifying the war dead today. It was like one long advertisement about the valor of war to entice our children into early death and that if they die in combat and/or are good at killing, and maybe even getting wounded in the process, then they, too, can become heroes. I felt it was a serious propagation of a seriously insane patriarchal death wish. I felt such deep compassion for the mother of the young man with the head injury who was confined to a wheel chair and not able to respond to his surroundings, and her daughter. I couldn't help but feel that their lives were also owned by the white male elite who sent that young man to war, because they were left with the aftermath-a son and brother who was missing nearly a quarter of his skull and brain. And for what?

Will we ever see a Memorial Day for all the women who have been raped, murdered and abused by patriarchy? Both in men's declared and undeclared wars? The greatest war on the planet, is, of course, the war against women, and all wars stem from this one. It has been the same war for 5,000 years. We end the hatred of women and war will end because you cannot have rampant normalized abuse when women are loved and respected. It's that simple, period.

Given this, I would like to respond to the question "How do you survive the times?". Because women live in a cultural battle zone, I have had to find a way to have a quality of life in spite of this horrific reality. I must first say that my survival depends on a deep spiritual practice that continuously fosters a connection to Nature. This practice at its' core is presence. Being present allows me to be in tune with the moment and the moment always teaches me about eternity. In the experience of eternity, all conflict fades away, and the glorious bliss of the earliest known deity, the Mother, rises from within, and is reflected without, simultaneously. Noticing the deeply aphroditic (rather than using "erotic", which is taken from the masculine "eros", I prefer to use a womanist term to describe what I am saying) qualities of Nature allows me to feel within my own body that same energy and life force and affirms my own beauty as part of Her creation. Having a strong spiritual foundation is my saving grace. This grace allows me to navigate the terrain of this; question with an abiding, uncompromising and grounded approach to a precious life that cannot be stolen, no matter what happens. If I appreciate the life I am, and I live that life with respect, love and awareness of my true nature, then patriarchy withers. It is much the same way of being that we hear some prisoners describe when they say that the institution of prison cannot take away their hearts and minds, even though their bodies are held behind bars. Freedom lives inside.

My own journey in patriarchy has been rather amazing. I am a mother of four-two girls and one foster son and one stepson. I was a Haight-Ashbury hippie back in the 60's and was indeed blowing my mind with psychedelics. I was one of those who took that path seriously, and instead of blasting my eardrums out at the Fillmore and Avalon, which I did do on occasion, mine was a more inwardly directed journey. These medicines were my allies and teachers, showing me things I could never have learned in school, though being a student at UC Berkeley at the time did provide me with unique opportunities. I joined with others in the psychedelic revolution and went back to the land, helping to form the Farm community in Tennessee in the early 70's. There I got married and had my daughters. We then left the Farm in the early 80's and began a new life in "normal" society, though I could never be "normal". I subsequently got divorced as I began to understand that the life I was living was really not my life. All during those hippie days, I never once saw the bigger picture of women's oppression. My own demons came to me. I delved deep into my unconscious and saw my own terrors and fears. But I never once saw anything about patriarchy. I never saw that the Farm was a patriarchal hierarchy and that all the colluding we women did with getting married and having babies as if that was the be all/end all of life was really about being good daughters of the patriarchy. Please don't get me wrong. I totally love my children. Nevertheless, the reality was what it was, and I didn't see it until later in my life when I was studying shamanism and the Goddess came to me, as if rising right out of the earth, and the ancestral Grandmothers reached for me and never let me go. From that time, I became a radical feminist-meaning one who goes to the root of fem reality, culture and wisdom, seeking the wildzone of true women's reality untouched by anything patriarchal. Not an easy task.

As I see it, the underlying foundation of any woman's survival in a woman-hating pornographic culture is learning the art of not identifying with the oppressor. As Sonia Johnson has said in her book, Wildfire, many women suffer from what she refers to as "terror bonding" or "trauma bonding" which is also the oppressive reality of The Stockholm Syndrome.1

I am aware that it is easy to say that freedom is an internal state and that living it is a profound challenge. When women and girls are continually abused, battered, murdered, tortured, raped and sold into bondage and slavery in patriarchy, which depends on the degradation of woman, achieving this internal state may seem very, very far away. However, if we believe the hundreth monkey syndrome, which started with a female primate, then I believe the wisdom of the moorphogenic field will organically spread and women will rise up from the ashes of patriarchy and give birth to a life-affirming paradigm. The Rain and Thunder journal is an example of this rebirth. Women everywhere are gathering and dismantling the old male guard by creating our own rituals and celebrations, and by writing our own herstory. Of course, it is a process. One thing I know for sure. Primal fem consciousness can never be destroyed because it is the very stuff of the great mystery-just like dark matter, dark energy, black holes and super massive black holes. And just like these astrophysical phenomena are not well understood, neither is the primordial fem understood, except by those who know Her in their bones. It wasn't a big bang. It was a super magnificent, stellar orgasm. And what is the only organ in existence capable of such creative power? Yep-you guessed it. The clitoris. It's no wonder that men want to deny women this truth. They think that by cutting it out, or by making up androcentric specu/ejaculation theories about the beginning of the universe, which I call "yoniverse", as "uni" is a cognate of "yoni", it will go away. Not a chance.

As I age, I see that it takes a while for things to take root. Longer than I could have known. In the Tsalagi (Cherokee) tradition, one does not become a grown-up until the age of fifty-two. Now that I will be turning sixty-two, I understand this! Since I found myself at home with radical feminism, my life, of course, turned upside down. I wanted things to change rapidly. I wanted the world to know that no one thrives until women can walk safely down the street at any time of day or night or play fearlessly in the wilderness (that is, with no fear of the predatory male), that until women are restored to our true place of power there will be no peace until women have equality, no matter how many marches and speeches we do, all of which is completely absurd to even have to address, and yet without addressing the insanity of the lack of these things, nothing changes. I wanted to shout from the tallest buildings that I finally figured out what's wrong-it's patriarchy, plain and simple. I came to understand that pms is not what we have been told, though women's bodies respond in protest to patriarchal enslavement. Pms really stands for patriarchal mind set.

The first way I help myself and others to survive and thrive is by loving myself. This practice of self-love has been stripped of women and replaced with commands and demands of a woman-hating culture that tells us to hate our bodies, hate who we are and to hate each other. And, on top of that we are told we must find our self-worth in taking care of others at our own expense. Since this has been going on for over 5,000 years, recognizing the insidious patterns of co-dependency and self-erasure/effacement is sometimes not very easy to do, because of the depth of our internalization of patriarchy. Since I had children, I felt it was imperative that I model for daughters (my sons are a different story-one is a stepson and one is a foster son. Since they were with me off and on, I was not able to raise them consistently with fem values, which scared them as they got older since they threatened their inherent domination "rights". It is a whole story unto itself having sons in patriarchy, so I am focusing on my daughters in this writing.) a strong female/womanist presence. Well, being married made that difficult, but I did it as best I could. They have grown into fine young women, carrying the mother/daughter transmission into their lives and have formed an all-female music collective dedicated to fem values and consciousness, challenging the good ole misogynist boys' club of hip-hop. (see www.goddessalchemyproject.com)

I went to a garage sale the other day. It was run by women, of course. Most of the women were perhaps my age and slightly younger. I was deeply saddened at the quality of life most of these women had written on their faces. It was early in the day, and all of them had either a glass of wine or a bottle of beer in their hands. They were hardened, which is what happens to women in a world run by arrogant and dominating men. They were lost to their own culture. My heart ached. And even so, there was a tenderness inside these fem hearts that I could still feel-the heart of brave survivors who didn't even know what they had been surviving all their lives. I so wanted to reach out to them, to touch them and hold them and tell them that there is something else-that they don't have to compete with men to stay alive, nor do they have to take care of them. I wanted them to love themselves.

If I love myself first, then I have love to give. We hear all the new-age stuff about loving ourselves. This is beyond that. This is about reclaiming our truly fem hearts, bodies, minds, spirits, ancestry/ansistery and space. So, this is what I now do to help women liberate themselves. I teach about these things. If women don't understand our own oppression and how we collude with it, then we only serve our own demise. And extricating oneself from the pms is no easy task. One woman I work with is eighty years old. She has just come to realize in the last year that she has been a dutiful daughter of the patriarchy and she is now finding light at the end of her tunnel, as she makes her escape. However, she has shared that she is addicted to patriarchy. After all, we have learned to survive in it, and when we awaken to the mess it has created, of which we have been a part, the question arises "what is next for me?" It can be pretty frightening. Imagine doing that at eighty! And I encourage her and tell her how fortunate she is to be waking up! I love her for it! She is a-mazing (spelling borrowed from Mary Daly)-that is, undoing the maze of patriarchy. This work is guided by the wisdom and intelligence of the spirit of Harriet Tubman, because helping women to escape the chains and enslavement of patriarchy is truly about women becoming free.

Something else I am currently engaged in is appearing on elder councils at large music festivals. The addition of elder councils has been a recent thing at these events. My most recent endeavor was in Maui at a festival called The Mystic Garden Party. These councils are not easy for a radical feminist. Not at all. The truth about women's reality is hidden behind all the same old stuff that fills the space-male domination everywhere you can see, only younger. Then there was the husband and wife duo of high patriarchal artistic acclaim on the council who seem to see themselves as the high priestess and priest of elitist heterosexism. They were encouraging young people to get out there and get into relationship-het of course-and find themselves. This male artist is extremely well known for his "trippy" psychedelic art of the human body. They influence a lot of young people. So, I consider this front lines work I am engaged in because I feel I am the lone voice for radical fem truth on these councils. Very few people seem to know anything about this reality and many seem to shake in their boots when this voice speaks. However, I received feedback from some young women who told me they felt that I transmitted the truest activation they felt from the council. Now that was music to my ears! And I have appeared on councils with Grandmother Agnes Baker Pilgrim, chairwoman of The Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers, who has told me that she feels I have an important message that many people need to hear. That was also music to my ears and warmed my heart, even though she, bless her, has been programmed to pray to grandfather all the time. Someone at one point at a council I was on with her asked her to call out to Grandmother, and she did. Yay Agnes! I plan to continue to present on these councils whenever I can. If I am the lone voice, then so be it. That is my path and I am at peace walking the talk. It's the only walk and the only talk I can do.

Another project I am working on, in addition to writing, is gathering women together in retreat space to explore women's culture and doing soul retrieval of the sacred feminine work. My focus is on intergenerational circles where we can feel the expanse of sisterhood and begin to reclaim the depth of the fem mind and heart. This work is challenging because many young women are in that mode of protecting the abuser, without knowing it. Even Lesbian women sometimes reflect the male/female dynamics so prevalent in patriarchy. I think that we need women in all communities (community means sharing gifts, as "muni" is Latin for "gift") to keep putting it out there about the truth of patriarchy and the global oppression of women and how this directly affects our environment and how all the ills we see in the world stem directly from this original wounding. Helping women connect the dots through any means possible is essential because women are the culture creators, and the well being of ourselves and our planet is in our hands. Patriarchal men have messed it all up, with their seemingly never-ending blood lust and heinous need for war against life itself. We need to develop a deep and rich connection to the original deity of our planet-the Great Cosmic Mother. This is not about religion. This is about spirituality, which many feminists have not embraced. I am saying that a true awakening of empowered fem consciousness cannot happen without the conscious embodiment of what our ancestral Grandmothers knew. The expanse of lineage holders of women's wisdom stretches far back into antiquity, landing right in the lap of the oldest known human figurine carving, dating from 232,000-800,000 years ago, the Acheulian Mother, from the border of what is now Syria and Israel. The beings that made this statue were not even homo sapiens. In an indigenous culture, the teaching of ancestral respect is foundational to the survival of community. We have all but lost this ancestral respect in our Euro-Western culture, and I can say the ancestors are not happy about it. It is time to reclaim, reconnect and respect our woman lines, our mother lines, that we may heal from the terrible plague of patriarchy. With our foremothers standing behind us, we can move together as one, knowing the ground on which we stand, rooted, like the trees that make up the beauty of the forest. ______________________________
1Johnson, Sonia, Wildfire, Igniting the She/Volution, Wildfire Books, Albuquerque 1989