Drawing Down the Moon (34 page)

Interestingly, it is non-Marxists such as Davis and Diner who are able to envision a dominance matriarchy with women in power, although that power is exercised in a very different fashion. Some feminist anthropologists have also noted contradictions in Davis's work; for example, she says that the rule of the matriarchies was totally benevolent, but that one reason for their downfall was the revolt of men who had been cast out. One feminist, knowledgeable in both Marxist theory and current feminist thought, told me that she was sympathetic to the argument that wars exist because of masculine aggression, but she noted, “I'm suspicious of it. I've read enough Marxist theory to feel that such a view may be a reactionary way of looking at things.”

Since theories of stages of evolution in history are hard to “prove,” most leading anthropologists and archeologists outside the Marxist tradition refuse to concern themselves with them. Many feminists, likewise, tend to drop the arguments for a universal stage of matriarchy and instead simply state that goddess worship was widespread in many ancient societies, and that archeological evidence continues to mount, with the unearthing of ancient societies such as Catal Huyuk and Mersin. Matriarchy may not have been
universal,
and present matrilineal societies may be oppressive to women, but there
is
plenty of evidence of ancient societies where women held greater power than in many societies today. For example, Jean Markale's studies of Celtic societies show that the power of women was reflected not only in myth and legend but in legal codes pertaining to marriage, divorce, property ownership, and the right to rule.
²⁰

Many women are also looking at the idea of matriarchy from points of view other than those of political theory, history, archeology, and ethnography. They are reexamining those writers, poets, and psychologists who have talked for years about
feminine symbols, feminine realms,
the
anima,
and so forth. The theories of C. G. Jung, Esther Harding, and Erich Neumann are being reexamined, as well as those of poets who have claimed to get all their inspiration from the Great Goddess—Robert Graves and Robert Bly, for example. Neumann, in
The Great Mother,
asserts that matriarchy was not a historical state but a psychological reality with a great power that is alive and generally repressed in human beings today. Writers like Neumann and Graves, in the words of Adrienne Rich, have seemingly rejected “masculinism itself” and have “begun to identify the denial of ‘the feminine' in civilization with the roots of inhumanity and self-destructiveness and to call for a renewal of ‘the feminine principle.'”

The recurrence of strong, powerful women in myth, legends, and dreams continues, and Rich observes:

Philip Zabriskie, a Jungian, has also noted the power and
presence
of the ancient archetypes of goddesses and ancient women, and has stated that they can be evoked in one's present psychic life.
²²
It is obvious that even the Greco-Roman classical goddesses who were known in a patriarchal context are much richer images of the feminine than we have today, although it is equally true that such images can be used to repress as well as to liberate women.

As we have seen, women are looking at the matriarchy from a complex point of view. They differ as to the existence of past matriarchies, and even as to what a matriarchy means in terms of power. Some, such as Davis, see childbearing as the source of women's ancient power, the innate difference that creates a kind of moral superiority stemming from closeness to nature and life. Other feminists, starting with Simone de Beauvoir and continuing through Shulamith Firestone, see in childbearing the root of women's oppression.

Feminists also differ on the question of matriarchy as a “Golden Age,” a view expressed forcefully in Davis's
The First Sex.
Some see matriarchy as, above all, an
idea
about women in freedom. They often picture the ancient matriarchies as societies governed by the kind of loose, supportive, anarchic, and truly unique principles that many of today's feminist groups are organized around, principles developed from the tradition of consciousness-raising. But others see the matriarchy rather as a place that
was
better for women, but had problems and difficulties of its own. Alison Harlow, for example, told me that she once had a vision, a small glimpse of the matriarchy.

“I was standing with my mother, father, and sister as a long procession passed by. A priestess was being carried along. She pointed at me with a long wand. I was chosen. Suddenly I was taken away from everything I knew. Now, maybe I loved it, but the lack of freedom scares me. A theocracy is only good if the priestess is always right. Now perhaps they were more intuitive than us, but . . .”

The matriarchy, according to Alison, was a period of thousands of years when women functioned strongly in the world.

“I do not consider there was ever a matriarchy that was a utopia. I do not consider it the ultimate answer to all our problems. I do think there were values from the ancient matriarchal cultures that we would do well to readopt into our present lives. I've spent a long time trying to come to grips with what it would mean to live in a goddess-centered theocracy, where people belonged to the Goddess, where cities belonged to the Goddess, where you are born to serve Her will. Concepts of human freedom as we understand them are not very compatible with any sort of theocracy and I am very committed to individual freedom.”

If feminists have diverse views on the matriarchies of the past, they also are of several minds on the goals for the future. A woman in the coven of Ursa Maior told me, “Right now I am pushing for women's power in any way I can, but I don't know whether my ultimate aim is a society where all human beings are equal, regardless of the bodies they were born into, or whether I would rather see a society where women had institutional authority.”

In any event, most women who have explored the question do see a return to some form of matriarchal values, however that may be expressed, as a prerequisite to the survival of the planet. We might note that Robert Graves wrote in 1948:

The idea of a matriarchy in the past, the possibility of matriarchy in the future, the matriarchal images in myths and in the psyche, perhaps in memories both collective and individual—these have led spiritual feminists to search for matriarchal lore. The road is not merely through study and research. It involves the creation of rituals, psychic experiments, elements of play, daydreams, and dreams. These experiences, women feel, will create the matriarchy, or re-create it.

In Chapter 7 we looked at the idea that ritual may be seen as a way human beings have found to end, at least for some few moments, their experience of alienation from nature and from one another.

To reiterate, theorists of politics, religion, and nature have often viewed the universe in a strangely similar way. Many have noted the interconnectedness of everything in the universe and also the fact that most people do not perceive these connections. Spiritual philosophers have often called this lack of perception “estrangement” or “lack of attunement”; materialists have often called it “alienation” or, in some cases, “false consciousness.” Perhaps theory, analysis, and the changing of society can end our experience of alienation on the conscious level. Ritual and magical practice aim to end it on the unconscious level of the deep mind.

By ritual, of course, we do not mean the continuation of those dry, formalized, repetitive experiences that most of us have suffered through; these may once have produced powerful experiences, but in most cases they have been taken over by some form of “the state” for purposes not conducive to human liberation. We are talking about the rituals that people create to get in touch with those powerful parts of themselves that cannot be experienced on a verbal level. These are parts of our being that have often been scorned and suppressed. Rituals are also created to acknowledge on this deeper level the movements of the seasons and the natural world, and to celebrate life and its processes.

Many strong priestesses in the Craft have talked about the primacy and importance of ritual.

 

Sharon Devlin:
“Ritual is a sacred drama in which you are both audience and participant. The purpose of it is to activate those parts of the mind that are not activated by everyday activity, the psychokinetic and telekinetic abilities, the connection between the eternal power and ourselves. . . .We need to re-create ecstatic states where generation of energy occurs.”

 

Z Budapest:
“The purpose of ritual is to wake up the old mind in us, to put it to work. The old ones inside us, the collective consciousness, the many lives, the divine eternal parts, the senses and parts of the brain that have been ignored. Those parts do not speak English. They do not care about television. But they do understand candlelight and colors. They do understand nature.”

 

Alison Harlow:
“It is a consciousness-altering technique, the best there is. Through ritual one can alter one's state of consciousness so that one can become perceptive to nonmaterial life forms, whatever you choose to call them, and through this perception one can practice subjective sciences.”

 

In what additional ways do feminists think about ritual? Jean Mountaingrove began by telling me that, since dreams seem to speak from our unconscious mind to our conscious mind, perhaps ritual is the way our conscious mind speaks to our unconscious mind. She and Ruth would occasionally share water from a stream, she said, to symbolize the sharing of the waters of life. She added, “If I want my unconscious mind to understand that I love Ruth and that she is my partner, then we engage in a ritual together and the connection is very deep. All the words we say to each other may not do that. Ritual makes the connection on another level.”

Jean observed that ritual has a particular and radical relevance for feminists. “Since our culture—the one we share with men—is so contaminated, often when a group of women get together we only have words to use, and these words are all conditioned. Often we can argue and use words to divide. But our actions have not been so limited by men's definitions. So we need to find actions that have clearness about them, that do not have hierarchical connotations . . . because some of our symbolic behavior has also been contaminated. If I pat someone on the head, it may mean that I am bigger and better than she is; it may be condescending . . . but if we can find ways, like washing each other's hands, actions that we do mutually and that have not been contaminated, we can use such actions as a kind of vocabulary that cuts underneath all the divisiveness and unites us.”

Women are creating this new language. They are developing psychic skills in workshops with names such as “Womancraft” and “Womanshare”; they are reinterpreting events related to women in a new light and using these insights to create new ritual forms. For example, a number of women are using “Moon Huts” for retreats during menstruation. In doing this, they are re-creating an experience common to women in ancient times and in many tribal societies today. These women are convinced that, contrary to popular scholarly assumption, such retreats were not forced on women because of “uncleanliness” but were introduced by women themselves to celebrate their mysteries and to have a time of collective interchange. It has also been theorized that before artificial light and modern forms of contraception all the women of a tribe often menstruated at the same time.

Some women have begun to work with their dreams. In one instance, twelve women spent a weekend in the wilderness together. They slept in a circle with their heads together, facing inward, their bodies like spokes of a wheel. They wove “dream nets” from wool and fibers and sewed “dream pillows” filled with mugwort and psyllium seeds. A woman who experienced this weekend told about her dream:

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