Western epistemology is both hierarchical and pyramidal. This system gives some kinds of knowing more value than others, demeans some, and elevates one kind to a position of highest value and independence from the others. Science and philosophy strive to achieve and defend this ultimate, most desirable kind of cognition: objective, factual, Pure Knowledge.
This
system needs to be rethought and re-visioned, for in my experience knowledge,
or a healthy awareness of the world, comes from many kinds of knowing working
together or taking turns, with no one kind ultimately more valuable than any
other. Knowledge is, in a sense, like diet, for many food ingredients ÐÐ vitamins,
amino acids, minerals, proteins ÐÐ must also all work together to provide us
with proper nourishment. With knowledge, as with diet, each component or
ingredient is essential to goodness; no one manner of knowing ÐÐ not
disinterested cognition, intuition, inspiration, sensuous awareness, nor any
other ÐÐ is sufficient unto itself to satisfy our need to know ourselves and
the world.
The
following is a critique of our traditional western theory of Knowledge and a
format for revising this exclusive or Apollonic model into a field or matrix
model that welcomes and esteems all forms of human cognition, even the primal
ways of knowing of our Myth-making ancestors, ways that I feel are essential to
acquiring a full store of knowledge.
MYTH
AND KNOWLEDGE
Some current definitions and familiar assumptions:
myth: an ill-founded belief or story; legend; a false belief belonging to the
dark, distant, superstitious past; fabricated, invented, imaginary; an unverifiable
assumption (certainly not considered
Knowledge).
Knowledge:
what is known; publicly verifiable,
provable, objective structure of
reality (as in mathematics); facts, information; enlightenment; casts a light
on a subject; the result of coming up out of darkness and ignorance (low-down things) into the light of Truth.
This
model of Knowledge is at-least 2,500 years old. In classical Greece it was
epitomized by Apollo, sky deity, god of the sun and enlightenment, god of
Reason. From that ancient time to this, this system has held Reason to be of highest
value, for Reason is up, of the mind, ordered, cool, controlled, objective-all
positive things, all associated with ideas, with maleness and Apollo1
ÐÐ and all lead our eyes and hearts upward, "out there" as they whisper
of ultimate achievement. . . holiness. . . heaven. Notice that value judgments
frequently attend spatial assumptions.2
The
opposite of Truth and Knowledge is, of course, ignorance: unknowing; being unaware; an undesirable thing;
to be in darkness; a lowly (negative)
state, to be avoided at all costs for it feels "fallen" and pulls us
downward, whispering of superstition, the occult, of taboo, of the unholy. . .
perhaps of hell. 3
Aristotle
wrote that Reasoned Knowledge is the highest human achievement, therefore men (who he claims
are more "active" and capable of achieving in this strictly
mental area) are "superior" (Politics I, 2:1254b) and "more divine" (De
Generatione Animalium [G.A.] II,
1:732a), a higher species than
women whom he describes as "monsters. . . deviated from the generic human
type" (G.A.,I, 4:2, 767B5-15). He calls women "mutilated
males," (G.A. II, 3:737a) "emotional," "passive"
captives of their "body functions" and therefore a lower species, more like animals than like men. To him, a
woman is not parent to the child; female bodies are mere vessels for male (the
true parent) sperm. He sees nothing positive about women's life-giving wombs,
nothing valuable about the feeding-nurturing functions of our bodies.
Aristotle's
world is characterized by hierarchical dualisms ÐÐ that is, polar opposites within
which one side rules over the
other; for him Soul rules over body,
Reason over emotion, Male over female, and so on. For him, Pure Mind
("Nous," only possible for males) is connected with
"divine" Soul, which is supreme of all earthly things. The male Mind
is therefore higher and holier than all matter, even higher than the beloved
Apollonian (ideal, male) body; certainly the male Mind and Reason rule over and
are "more divine" than the female body because she (being ruled by
emotions and body functions) is not as capable of Mind or Reason, and so
on. Later these same hierarchies appear in Aquinas, his rankings and rulings
extending "out there" through nine angelic choirs, with Mind always
having dominion over matter and bodies, which he considers innately sinful. The
Great Chain of Being of the Renaissance was really a Chain of. Command, a
continuation of the ranking that put Pure Spirit "out there" on high,
supreme over bodies and pure matter, which were demeaned by being "down
below": God ruled over angels who ranked higher than men who ruled over
women who ruled over children. . . over animals. . . over earth . . . .
The
history of western civilization and philosophy is varied to the extent that
each era stresses its favored, characteristic aspect of knowledge and its
acquisition, but each era in this history has in common with every other era the
explicit devaluing of earth and body ÐÐ most especially the female body along with female-associated ways of knowing
and being-in-the-world. Even Christians like St. Paul and St. Augustine, who
despise pagan gods like Apollo, nevertheless continue to extol and keep central
to their theorizing the hierarchical Apollonian dualisms that demean the human
body, the female body being most
especially sinful, Eve (and all subsequent women) being blamed for the fall of
Man and for Original Sin, and everything else. Augustine's misogyny is
often blatant, as in: "man is the image and glory of God," and
therefore he "ought not to cover his head"; but the woman is
"not the image of God" and "she is instructed for this very
reason to cover her head" (On the Trinity, b. 12, chap. 7, p. 814), following Paul's lead from I
Corinthians (11:7, 5).
During
the scientific revolution Soul and Mind were still thought to be fulfillable
only in males, still experienced as striving to conquer the body. Descartes ushered in the Modem Age describing the
human Mind as Spirit that has nothing in it of matter or body. Like the
ancients he associated the male Mind with divinity and Soul, defining Soul
"by precisely and only those qualities which the human shares with
God" (Bordo 1987:94), that is, having no matter or body. He added to the
age-old list of powerful images aimed at disassociating the body from God by calling
it a machine. Determined to remove his Self as much as possible from the
lowliness of his body and its matter (matter from mater, the Greek word for mother), he labored in his Mind to
disassociate himself from his own infancy and mother, "to give birth to
himself" out of his own Reason-head (Bordo 1987:105) (just as Zeus had
bypassed Mother Goddess Metis and birthed Wisdom, Athena, from his own head).
Descartes and his times continued the classical attempt to extricate Knowledge
and Reason from any bodily contamination, from Mother Earth and all things
female, to totally free Logos from Sophia, man and his Mind from Nature, and so
on (Merchant 1980).
Returning to the
current definitions with which I began this essay, one sees that the more
things change the more they stay the same, for the philosophical tradition
continues to extol things
culturally perceived as male (e.g., knowledge in the mind) and to demean and
suppress things culturally perceived as female (e.g., knowing in the
body). Note here, briefly but pointedly, that maleness and femaleness in
this context often have nothing to do with being a woman or a man.4
Hierarchical
dualisms-with their prejudice for Mind (i.e., maleness) and bias against body
and matter (i.e., femaleness)-lie at the foundations of western epistemology
and moral thought. These prejudices have become the core of our philosophical
and scientific traditions and cannot easily be weeded out for at least two
powerful reasons. First, the positive and negative images that go with our words and concepts, of male and
female, are strong and have accumulated over millennia of use. They are an
integral part of the sacred stories we have learned from childhood, the profane
stories, the fables; they are part and parcel of the standard jests; the
associated images have become a part of the way we think. Second, sexist value judgments are inherent in the
very words we use. The tradition must
finally be seen for what it is: intrinsically one-sided and partial. And
therefore its claims to Knowledge must be labeled a myth, meaning "an ill-founded belief or story."
Let me detail some of its presumptions and failings as I experience them.
The
following columns of basic words contain many of our thought system's core
dualisms. You will recognize key words from the definitions of myth and Knowledge I cited earlier. The columns reveal clusters of meanings, spatial
assumptions, and the misogyny of both the words and the system. They expose
value judgments that have unnecessarily brought about human alienation from
self, other, and planet and that have disastrously limited what we think is
desirable and worth knowing.
KNOWLEDGE (accepted
wisdom) / IGNORANCE (the occult and
taboo)
higher (up) / lower (down)
good, positive / negative, bad
mind (ideas), head, spirit / body (flesh), womb (blood),
Nature (Earth)
reason (the rational) / emotion and feelings (the irrational)
cool / hot
order / chaos
control / letting-be,
allowing, spontaneity
objective
(outside, "out there") / subjective
(inside, immanent)
literal truth, fact / poetic truth, metaphor, art
goals / process
light / darkness
written text, Logos / oral tradition, enactment, Myth
Apollo as sky-sun / Sophia as earth-cave-moons
public sphere / private sphere
seeing, detached / listening,6 attached
secular / holy and sacred
linear / cyclical
permanence,
ideal (fixed) forms, / change, fluctuations, evolution/
"changeless and immortal" / process, ephemeras (performance)
hard / soft
independent,
individual, isolated / dependent, social, interconnected, shared
dualistic / whole
MALE / FEMALE
The
discussion that follows seeks to redeem all words and concepts in the right
column of the above list, to reclaim as valuable the idea of the body as
knowing9, to reclaim female-associated things that were anciently, unfairly
relegated to lowly status. Much of what I am doing can be called
"valorizing the female," but I am actually seeking to make human experience whole by reclaiming the value and knowledge
in the human body, in human
emotion and sharing-the value in everything in the right column, the value in
things perceived as unmanly and therefore unworthy for three millennia. But
these things were so judged by ancient patriarchs, not by me. I will
demonstrate how such things as long-derided "ignorance,"
"taboo," "low-down," "subjective,"
"private and inside" things right down the list can enhance and
enrich the search for truth and knowledge.
A
feminist vision of knowledge must not continue the dualistic either/or PATTERN, so I will not eliminate or devalue any items
in the first column. I am suggesting a nondualistic both/and PATTERN of utilization, in which items in both columns
either cooperate or alternate just as one can alternate one's focus between the
field and the ground of a graphic or see both together easily and at will.
Rather than choosing or demeaning one column or the other, I suggest we mine
the warmth of women's experience
and ways of knowing (dark, interior, female wisdom) as well as the cool, bright enlightenment of public, male Apollo-Logos.10
As I go down the second-place column reclaiming its concepts, I will show that primal Myth, far from being synonymous with superstition and backwardness, is a vital, positive force and can open doors long-closed on the riches of the so-called "female" perspective (Lauter and Rupprecht 1985). Unlike the heroic myths that made an appearance after the politically-instigated Archetypal Reversals of the late Bronze Age11, primal Myth exposes a way of thinking and being in the world that dissolves dualisms, neutralizes coercive hierarchies, and puts some old taboos (especially about women's blood and bodies with their dark interiors) into new and positive frameworks, creating exciting possibilities for the future, for knowing about our human nature, and for revealing a more accurate (nondualistic) view (PATTERN) of the world we live in.
I
will argue that the method and subject matter of primal Myth correctly
understood, not as defined by the
western scientific tradition, is synonymous with and indispensable to the
feminist quest for knowledge that I wish to foster. This feminist quest
seeks to validate the social, bonding, community experiences, for therein lie
the highest human values and the solution to alienation for all of us on
this planet. Thus, individuality must be seen as properly manifested only
within a sharing community, the individual's quest being not to become top dog
or ruler over others but rather to acquire wholeness and an ecological balance,
an interconnectedness between the fully developed individual self and all
other forms of life.
We
can discover from Myths much about how such things were an integral part
of the lives and world views of our earliest human ancestors. Mircea Eliade
(1971), among other scholars in the field, shows how Myths reveal profound
universal truths12, describing what all humans share rather than what
individuates and isolates us from one another (Gebser 1985). An integral
part of the knowledge revealed when Myth is properly interpreted is that the meaning
of life for its tellers was in wholeness, in interconnectedness, and in a
cyclical experience of time not in dualisms and not in linearity. From Myths of
the distant past come examples of human attitudes toward the earth, nature,
rime, women, and women's bodies (all interconnected) matching those attitudes
that many feminists and ecologists, like myself, now struggle to create for our
present and future. The techniques of Myth making are available to us to help
us discover and describe how such things can function profitably in our
lives today.
Traditionally
it is claimed that only knowledge from a public place can be verified. But some of the knowledge in
primal, archaic Myth, created from private places like dreams and women's bodies, can be communicated
and understood across vast geographic distances and cultural differences with
the creators separated from their modem audience by thousands of years.
The
ancient wisdom of Myth is, unfortunately, locked in code, hidden from most
modem readers. Although the words are recognizable and seemingly
intelligible, the value escapes us. Myth, like our dreaming, uses the symbolic
language of Image and Metaphor (from the debased column above) to reveal its truths,
rather than the language of Literalness, which is the only language we expect and respect in this age of
mathematical and scientific exactitude. A different consciousness, a change in
mental focus away from the literal, is required to unlock the meaning of Myth.
Only a nonliteral, dilated consciousness can read Myth's Images and
Metaphors.
One
kind of consciousness, one focus, is sharp; it narrows our attention to one
point in the way of traditional science and epistemology, indeed one of our
valuable human skills. Another kind of consciousness is our less appreciated
ability to unfocus to utilize our peripheral vision, to widen out to include
many ideas and images all at once the same way the eye's iris narrows its focus for certain feats of
seeing and widens for others. These two essential, valuable methods should not
fall into the either/or PATTERN of dualism. Both are good, acceptable,
usable behaviors. We must learn to treasure and utilize at appropriate times
the technique of widening and blurring the mental field of vision so that it
does not focus on anyone thing, not even on what is straight in front. Called
"splatter vision" by trackers, this is an essential skill in the
wilds where one must constantly be alert and guard one's safety by attending to
the entire surroundings, not focusing even on the place where one will step.13
Among many other uses for such a consciousness psychologists have devised
a technique for problem solving called the "Aha!" experience; it
utilizes being temporarily out-of-focus and in-ignorance to move one from
"controling" the status-quo to "allowing" change, the
"allowing" attitude enabling one to move from an insoluble difficulty
onto the edge of discovery. These untouted skills, from the list's right
column, are valuable for knowledge gathering and necessary for perceiving the
overall PATTERNS and knowledge lodged in Myth.
This
other kind of consciousness, the kind that does not focus on separate details
and always opens up to a wide spectrum of data all at once, belongs to art and
science (Heisenberg 1970) as well as to Myth, and mothering. It is very much
like the mental activity of a woman who is tending to sewing and hearth while
simultaneously listening to a friend, watching the clock, planning dinner,
and minding the children. This inclusive method of minding whether its
tasks be those of homekeeping or science does not deal with isolated data.
Instead it looks at the data all together in situ, in the surroundings in which they naturally
occur. Neither does the minder exert great control in assembling and
selecting the data. Rather, she sets up her field of minding deliberately as
broad as possible in order to receive to allow all that spontaneously presents itself (chosen and unchosen) to come into the
picture. And even then, rather than analyzing or focusing on any details
assembled in the clear light, the minder looks through them. The minding, the consciousness, is aimed beyond the
facts into the murky darkness and uncertainty; concentration is on the
misty, fuzzy, unfocused disorder of the collage, attending without
prejudice to the chaos it temporarily presents, letting the assemblage form
itself into its own PATTERN. When its own PATTERN emerges, the
seeker-of-knowledge will know then and only then the proper questions to ask in
order to produce an effective interpretation or answer. By contrast, in the
pursuit of the more conventional methods of scientific investigation it is
possible to focus on isolated data to such an extent that the
seeker-of-knowledge loses sight of which data are truly worth investigating.
Like the tracker who hopes someday to see a bear and therefore must wait in the wilds (in the chaos?) for a bear to present itself, the deliberately unfocused thinker positions herself within the assembling information, waiting unhurriedly for an unforced understanding of the large picture to present itself. She waits uninflated, without ego, without control content to be in ignorance for an unspecified time, willing to be not-knowing until the elusive essential PATTERNS appear in their own good time. Although ignorance and lack of control are not part of the "accepted wisdom" of our times, deeper wisdom recommends a place for them in a full human epistemology. Sensible, mindful, thinking people have always known that sometimes worthwhile knowledge is vague, unclear, subterranean. And because there are uses for such knowing, there must also be room, recognition, and respect for it.
The
knowledge in Myth is often expressed in an abundance of inexact, constantly
shifting, seemingly illogical metaphors. Myths, like dreams, follow a
meandering thread. But if one is willing to stick with the script until the
larger PATTERNS begin to fall in place, the images of Myth will begin to make
sense. Admittedly, it differs from the kind of sense we are used to because
Myth, like modern physics, has no unbending obligation to logic (Heisenberg
1970). It is PATTERN overall PATTERN and ever-recurring cycles that myth
seeks to reveal. In the PATTERNS lie Myth's special kind of truth and knowledge.
A
Myth's Image is most often that of a deity, but the divinity, the sacred Image,
always represents fundamental PATTERNS and Principles, not Personhoods. It
was the PATTERN and the Principle that was seen as divine and immanent in
Nature. But a deity was not a Person; a deity was the Image of a PATTERN
exhibited within the anima mundi that
governed the workings of the universe.14 Herein is a significant
difference between transcendent (Person) deities, like Yahweh, and
immanent (PATTERN) deities (Eliade 1971), like the Great Mother Goddess. This
difference results in totally different kinds of worship and holds one
important key to understanding Myth, thus, I suggest it for a feminist
epistemology.
The divinity within
the seed is a good example of this immanence. The earliest inventors of
agriculture, most likely women (Boulding 1976:97-114), were able to plant crops
because they discovered the dead seeds had the innate power to be Born
Again and therefore must be divine. So that people could celebrate and speak
intimately about the divinity in the seed, they gave it a humanlike form and a
name. Archaic Greeks called the Divinity-withinseeds "Kore, daughter
of Mother Earth . . . Kore, She who is born out of De-Meter's womb, the
Earth." Kore, called Persephone by later Greeks, was the personification
of the divine creative power within the seed and had no raison d'etre, no
importance, no Personhood or story or biography in earliest times other than as
that simple personification of the seed. But all who participated in the
religious rituals of Kore understood that the divinity was within the seed, and that Kore was not a Person existing in Her own right with any Her-story
separate from the seed.
By
the time of Homer in Greece and Moses in the Near East deities had become
important as Persons, laying claims to individualistic feats and personalities;
but their descriptions and myths resembled heroes and legendary adventurers
more than the universal PATI'ERNS of primal, archaic Myth (Kerenyi 1975:42-43).
These deities' achievements in their own Persons as individuals made them
different from ordinary people and nature, whereas Myth tells of what all
people, nature, and deities share with each other. The areas of jurisdiction of
heroic deities were separate from their Persons and often only incidential
to their nature. For example, the three sons of Kronos, Zeus, Poseidon, and
Hades, acquired their various jurisdictions (sky, sea, and underworld) only
after winning a war with their father. But none of them had from conception an
essence innate to the realm he eventually acquired in the spoils of war, as
Kore (Persephone) had.
Kore was the Seed, Child of the Earth, born and reborn from
Earth Mother's womb. Period. From the beginning. She did not acquire seeds
as Her jurisdiction later on. Life, Kore, Seed each was identical with the
divine, eternal cycle.
Keeping
any distinction between past and future at a minimum (any dualism at a
minimum), our early ancestors perceived themselves and all things as divine and
as cycling eternally from birth, death, to rebirth. And they personified
that eternal PATI'ERN, that cycling Process, as "The Great Mother Goddess
who gives birth to all the universe and all life out of Her Cosmic Womb."
She gave birth to the earth itself; then, once the earth was in existence,
earth and its caves became an extension of Her cosmic womb out of which was
born the sun on Winter Solstice, as well as the animals, people. . . all of Her creation. The earth was the
Mother's body out of which we are born and to which we return at death (by
burial) for rebirth, just as the seeds when dead are returned to (buried in)
the earth whence they receive the gift of rebirth from Her body and are born
again in the eternal divine cycle of birth-death-and-rebirth. The Mother's
body, the earth, was perceived both as the womb out of which we are born and
the tomb into which we are buried-that automatically again is the womb out of
which we are reborn in the unending cycle. Both womb and tomb.
Not either/or.
Sometimes
our ancestors perceived the form of life as continuing unchanged through
the cycle of birth-death-and-rebirth-as with, say, a pomegranate that dies
(goes to seed) and is reborn again as a pomegranate. But earliest humankind
also witnessed forms of life in flux, one form constantly becoming another in
magical transformations forms flowing, interchanging, intermingling, one
into another. The vulture ate dead fish, transforming the fish into vulture
(rebirth in a different form), leaving the bones to be transformed by the
divine work of the Mother as Wind, Water, and Weather into soil (rebirth of
fish and beast into still another form), then soil into plant, and plant into
animal or human, and so on. Each transformation, each stage of the cycling from
death to rebirth-into-another-form was seen as equally important, equally
valuable in the overall scheme or cycle of life in the universe. Our
long-ago ancestors did not need to anticipate being reborn as human. To them there were no ideal forms, no fixed forms;
no one form was perceived as closer to deity or "more divine" than
any other. The deity was immanent in
all forms. Divine PATTERN was in the common cycling; the PATTERN itself
was the ultimate divinity. Such a vision of the holy working in nature has
within it an ecological respect for all nature that the earth would surely
appreciate at this moment in history in linear time.
The
PATTERN of birth-death-and-rebirth was itself divine and Female. Birth and
rebirth were seen as its primordial essence, the core of the PATTERN, and
recognized as the significant and distinguishing characteristics of "female."
The dictionary's minimal definition of "female" is that sex that
gives birth or lays eggs or divides parthenogenetically. The Goddess had within
Her nature the characteristics of all to which She gave birth; hence, because
she gave birth to sons and daughters, She Herself had to be Male as well as
Female, just as She was also Tree, Stone, Sea, Bird, and so forth. She was bisexual
but never It. She was always She thought of at base as the Primordial
Female, as Primordial Mother and Creatrix.
Care
must be taken not to think of the Great Mother Goddess literally: as a big
birth-giving Woman "out there" somewhere. The personification of a Mythic
or divine PATTERN comes out of immanence and metaphoric thought. Thinking of
these divine Images as "out there" to be taken literally reduces them
to masquerade; interpreted literally, the images become too individual or
specific too trivial, even if heroic to speak profoundly, universally, and with
impersonal truth about the nature of the world and all humanity, as the
Metaphor of Myth can.
Literalness/Metaphor.
In traditional epistemology one of these two languages is privileged; only
one is acceptable for determining knowledge. But both the literal and the
metaphoric are true and have value for knowledge. Both, not either/or. The
language of Literalness is good for logic and sometimes for mathematics,
and Apollo is a metaphor and Image for its values. The language of Metaphor, on
the other hand, does not translate into logic, but it is good for many tasks in
science as well as for translating Myth and its subject matter of wholeness,
universals, and what people share. I will now examine the Metaphor-Image of the
Great Mother deity to find the knowledge in it.
RE-VISIONING KNOWLEDGE THROUGH FEMALE IMAGERY
Archaic deities were imaged
Metaphors for the perceived essence
of timeless, sacred Principles and PATTERNS. It is, however, not appropriate to
say the Goddess was "merely a
metaphor." Mary Daly is emphatic: "When I say 'metaphor' I mean
something tremendous!"15 And James Hillman writes that the
importance of deity as Metaphor and PATTERN cannot be overstressed:
"An archetypal image operates like the original meaning of idea (from the
Greek eidos and eidolon): not only 'that which' one sees but also the 'means by
which' [the PATTERN through which] one sees" (1983:12). In other words,
the Images of archaic immanent deities ("What-is-seen") always
included the world view the worshipper brought to the seeing. The Image appeared
as a sacred "What" to the Neolithic worshipper who saw it as a manifest
Divinity; "what" the same image is to one of us viewing it today as
an unendowed, secular object is quite different. When the worshipper saw the
Image, it was seen to have "immanent" in it something of the Divinity
she or he believed it contained. The worshipper looked through the Image and saw on the other side certain
"truths" that typified the PATTERN they believed made the world go
round. . . cycle.
Specifically,
the Image of the Goddess is a "What-is-seen." But Her worshippers
saw not only the "What" of Her statue or Image, they also saw and
understood the cyclical PATTERN She embodied (whether a circle or spiral was a
part of the Image or not). For She personified a gestalt, a whole cyclical
world view, the PATTERN or "means-by-which" Her worshippers
experienced the entire world.16 Always immanent to the Image was a
perception of the whole eternal cycle of birth-death-and-rebirth in which all
forms of creation were "seen" to be eternally turning and evolving,
all equally divine and important. Part of the "What" of the
Image they saw was the idea of the Female Body as divine. Through the
ubiquitous Image of the Goddess they experienced the Female as Primordial
Creatrix. They "saw" in Her Image the idea of Wholeness and
Cooperation as the PATTERN shared throughout the universe-in both the macrocosm
and the microcosm. The Myth says: "Demeter gives birth to Kore." What
is the profound truth in that? Let's see. First, we know that this is a
Metaphoric way of speaking about something perceived to be universal (see note 12). We know the Image of Demeter is the
Mother Goddess whose womb is the Earth; and the Image of Kore is young girl,
Demeter's divine daughter, the Seed. The external present tense of the
Myth "Demeter gives birth .
. ." - means this event goes on now, always has, always will, now and
evermore, cycle without end; it relates an unending universal truth.
Knowing
that the Mother Goddess was conceived as a trinity helps us decipher the
Myth; her three divine Persons represent the phases of women's lives Kore,
the young Daughter; Demeter, Mother and Queen of Heaven; Persephone, the wise
old Crone and Ruler of the Underworld and Death. It also aids understanding if
we realize that Kore later came to be known as Persephone. Persephone, in
archaic times, was the Death Goddess of the Under-Earth, which was to Her
worshippers a womblike place of healing and rebirth, the vessel out of which
came Creation. As you can see, the
three seemingly distinct Persons in the trinity of the Mother are actually
inseparable, all connected, mixed up, and cannot be neady categorized or
cleanly distinguished from one another. The trinity is One a Whole. Kore,
the Seed, died and was buried (planted) under the Earth (in the womb of Death
Goddess Persephone) where the Seed came into contact with (became One
with) the deep, dark, magically transforming powers of Her Mother's Body the
Earth. And out of that sacred Womb place Kore the Seed came to life again, She
rose from the dead, She was reborn! When we seek enlightenment and shun the darkness, we might remember that most
forms of life even ideas require "close and holy Darkness" in
which to germinate and gestate before they receive the gift of life. It is
testimony of our ancestors' deep conviction that Death is but a transformation
into further life to learn that even Persephone (Death Herself) eventually
cycled and became "the newly reborn," the Daughter Herself.
Our
age sees the normal desirable human life span as linear. The Myth tells us that
archaic peoples saw the normal desirable human life span as cyclical. Kore
and Demeter and Persephone, the evercycling Trinity that represents the
eternal PATTERN of birth-death-and-rebirth, embody their believers' philosophy that in cyclicalness is
universality and therefore the meaningful eternal life, but that what falls
into linear or individual time will end when it dies, for it is profane and
insignificant and will therefore not be reborn (Eliade 1971:35). Kore and
Demeter and Persephone. The cyclical PATTERN or world view comes to us as
embodied in the Images themselves an immanent, integral part of those Images.
The Mythic Images contain both a "What" and a PATTERN, that is, the "means-by-which" or
the "way-inwhich-the-What-was-seen."
As
various writers have pointed out in
various ways, this is the way that all people make sense out of their
world-today's scientists and philosophers as well as our Myth-making ancestors.
All of the "whats", all descriptions of "that which is
seen"-whether in a scientific or a Mythic system all contain the
assumptions of the PATTERN through which they are seen. All the "whats" described by science and
philosophy, all of those supposedly objective truths, have been determined
by the point of view, the world view, the PATTERN through which the observer has been looking. Every human carries
within her or him the PATTERN through which she or he sees the world; the
PATTERN - the describer's (subjective) world view-will always be inseparable
from "what-is-seen." So there really cannot be such a thing as
"an objective reality" "out there" with one and only
one correct description made by a detached observer, as the accepted wisdom of
the West has claimed. Although objectivity has been the sacrosanct,
one-and-only valid stance from which to acquire knowledge, one branch of our
tradition from time immemorial has been impelled by the urge to "know
thyself," which is a subjective quest, surely. It becomes an impossible
quest, prima facie, when we limit epistemology and our notion of what is
good to the realm of objectivity.
There
are many already-existing models for the new science and epistemology I
propose. One is Barbara McClintockÕs work on the genetic structure of corn
seeds, research that beautifully exemplifies the way of Myth as the way of
Science. Interestingly, Persephone
was not just any seed; She was specifically the corn seed. I am reminded of our
early foremothers and their belief that divinity (Knowledge) is immanent in
nature and how that led them to discover that seeds can be reborn. When doing
her revolutionary experiments, McClintock abstained from the traditional scientific,
legalistic, pharisaical method: that determines objectively with one's
detached mind what the rules of science are and then superimposes them on one's
work. Instead McClintock became emotionally involved with her corn seed
kernels. She listened and watched patiently, without ego, letting the corn
reveal itself to her, "allowing" what was immanent within the seed
kernel to teach her about itself. She imposed no preconceived notions onto
the PATTERNS the corn exhibited. Rather, the corn told her what its Nature
was; she, having her ears open, heard (see note 6 regarding difference between
seeing and listening).
The
revolutionary work in physics that went on at the Max Planck institute in
the 1920s (Heisenberg 1970), resulted from the observation that the usual
understanding of "objective reality" and "detached
observer" as separate notions
was incorrect and that such an idea caused fundamental problems in doing
science.'7 The apparent contradiction dissolved when these notions were
conceived of as not separate; rather,
the physicists said, observation is an event, or process of change, in which "observed" and "observer"
are united~ and in which the PATTERN imposed by the "observer" plays
an essential role. To attain this quantum-physical way of understanding
events, physicists had to explore and accept radically new ways of knowing a
new epistemology. For "quantum" does not refer to isolated facts.
"The word 'quantum' refers to a whole amount of something. Thus, the body
quantum refers to a whole amount of something important governing the whole
human body. That something is consciousness . . . [which] acts in a quantum
manner inside our bodies" (Wolf 1986). Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr
have written that what happened in the discovery of quantum physics united the
methods of science and art, an important statement about their perception of
the goals and methods of science. According to Bohr, sometimes before one can
see or know the "what" that science is investigating, the scientist,
like the artist, must examine the process and try to discern a PATTERN. And
very importantly, he says, the scientific method at certain points in the work
must proceed by image, parable, and metaphor as in poetry and art. Science,
literature, art must value one another and incorporate and share one another's
methods and forms. In this theory emotion, passion, and wild speculation become
essential to science. I anticipate the day when all discussions of ideas and
science will include poetry, oral history, literary and emotional allusions. I
am eager to read the astronomer-mathematician who gives as much attention to
the rhythms, music, and dance she experiences in her body while she is observing
as she gives to the observed: the cosmic dance, flow, and energy she is
reducing to formula or speculating about.
Wolfgang
Pauli's discovery of "wavicles" contradicts the laws and basic
assumptions of Newtonian physics and traditional philosophy of science. In the
1930s Pauli urged a new description of science as a "wildly
illogical" field that deals with both mathematical precision and paradox
and contradiction. Bohr stated, unequivocally, that although in Logic the
opposite of a truth is a falsehood (a dualism), "in physics the opposite
of a profound truth is often another profound truth" (not a dualism).
Thus, if the first-placed word in each dualism is profoundly true (e.g.,
literalness, mind, reason, cool, etc.) their opposites are also profoundly true
(metaphor, body, emotion, hot, etc.) a good tenet for physics, a good tenet
for feminist epistemology.
Levi-Strauss looks at certain archaic peoples and
declares that the basic PATTERN of their lives and world is competition; other
scholars look at the same peoples and see them exhibiting cooperation and
interdependence (Pratt 1985:122). Traditional epistemology sees the world as a
place beset by unsolvable dualistic problems; many feminist scholars, like
people in gatherer-hunter cultures, do not experience the world dualistically.
Clearly, "what-is-seen" comes in large part from an a priori PATTERN
of seeing carried within the beholder. The Goddess's Image contains within Her
an assumption (PATTERN) of wholeness, of the oneness of mind-body and earth,
of a nondualistic, cooperative, caring way of being in the world.
RECLAIMING
THE POWER INHERENT IN THE IMAGE OF THE GODDESS
The
western philosophical, scientific tradition, symbolized by Apollo, perceives
the world through a dualistic
PATTERN, the dualisms having a valued (male-associated) side and a debased
(female-associated) side. In my opinion the feminist effort to revise,
re-vision, this system of PATTERNING has a dual task: (1) showing the prized
column to be inadequate by itself for
gathering knowledge; and (2) redeeming the other column that has for so long
been shunned or "second-best." But as Carol Christ warns,
"Symbol systems cannot simply be rejected, they must be replaced.
When there is no replacement, the mind will revert to familiar structures at
times of crisis, bafflement or defeat" (1979:275) and grab for the
old gods, images, PATTERNS.
So
the list's second column must not just be rethought; it must be revisioned.
A new Image must replace the beloved
Image of Apollo as the symbol of knowledge, for this Image glorifies male
superiority and all dualistic heirarchies, unacceptable as both an
Image/metaphor for knowledge and as a means by which knowledge is obtained. The
new Image must be a deity that embodies the male-associated items in the left
column and the essence of those female-associated ideas in the right column;
this Image, a "What," will include an acceptable means-by-which, that
is, the PATTERNS through which we
might wish ourselves and others to perceive the world.
No
one needs to invent or concoct such an Image. A powerful Image already exists the
Great Mother Goddess. Much of the religion of ZeusApollo (father-son sky
gods) and the sacrosanctness of traditional epistemology came into being
specifically to counter the authority and inherent wisdom in this Goddess. Zeus
was invented by the conquerors of Her people (lonians, Archaeans, Dorians)
around 1580 (Kerenyi 1975:38). The conquerors knew the image
well; through the processess of defamation and "masculine overlay"
they put Her down (as with Hel who went from "Underearth Source of
Knowledge" to "Accursed") while stealing much of Her essence and
power for their male deities (e.g., Zeus giving birth out of his body! recall
note 11).
All
other Goddesses are later derivations or forms of the Great Mother Goddess
(Gimbutas 1982:236-237). The later, classical goddesses have little of the
divine power the Great Mother enjoyedl18 in heaven, earth, and below,
although it must be remembered that any power She had was immanent in Nature,
intrinsic to Her being, not derived from acquired authority over others. Once
perceived as Wholeness itself once praised as the Creatrix whose Oneness
manifested in Manyness Her nature by classical times had been divided (the
best way to conquer) into different aspects of Her Manyness, into
separate Images, such as Goddess of Love, Goddess of Wisdom, Goddess of Music,
and so on. But it is not difficult to image Her as whole and holy again.
The
Goddess's divine Image represented a way of seeing that acknowledged women
as beings with innate powers of knowing to be reckoned with. Women's blood and
women's bodies were witnessed as knowing, as actually being connected to the
most mysterious, cycling, life-giving powers of the cosmos. The first
human calendars were lunar, and they unambiguously related women's menstrual
periods to the moon's periods, each having a dark period of withdrawal. Biology
can now explain the phenomenon of women having their periods at the same time;
it is due to the ecto-hormones called pheromones that transmit between
bodies (McClintock 1971:244-245). Thus, archaic peoples saw women and the
moon actually cycling together. And as long as they saw women's bodies rhythmically synchronized with the heavens,
women were considered beings with wisdom and authority, in both the earthly community
and the sacred realm.
Archaeologist
Marija Gimbutas in one of many researchers who finds strong evidence that
women's authority equaled men's in Goddess-worshipping cultures. She
reports that in Neolithic cultures" A division of labor between the
sexes is indicated, but not a superiority of either" (1980:32). "The
role of a woman was not subject to that of a man" (1982:237), for both
women and men had responsible, if different, work in governance and maintenance;
and each was respected and valued.19 Women were esteemed leaders and
priestesses who took charge of religious rituals in this "generally
unstratified and basically equalitarian society with no marked distinctions
based on either class or sex" (Eisler 1987:14). Myth and society were both
dominated by the Mlmother, but this was not domination in the sense of tyrannical
power-over others; "this
dominance [had] the character of centrality and experience" (French
1985:35), for all life was seen as created and empowered from within by H/her.
The
task of redeeming women's bodies in the service of knowing means redeeming
women's blood. One must leave behind the notion of menstrual blood as curse or
something to be ignored and go back to the Neolithic's perception of it as
something to be celebrated, regarded as the Sacred Source of Life containing
the Wisdom of the Ages in it, passed from Mother to Daughter. Women's womb
blood has been considered sacred and related to Wisdom from earliest
times for example, red ochre is often found on places where rebirth was
devoutly wished, at entrances to caves and on dead bodies. Hot, red, blood,
womb, dark these "down inside" menses words all stand for vigor,
life, excitement, passion. They come from the tabooed right column but belong
in any epistemology, for they are essential to knowing about human life
and existence.
When
a woman grew old and no longer bled, she was called Crone, a "wise old
Crone," for the "Blood of Wisdom" (as menstrual blood was
called) was being kept inside (Walker 1985:49). Athena, a Goddess of Wisdom,
wears the Gorgon's severed, bleeding head on Her chest because the bleeding
woman was related to Wisdom even into classical times. Athena bears other
remnants too that identify Her as a derivative of the earliest Goddess of Wisdom:
Gaia, She of deep Earth Wisdom. From the crevice in the Earth (Gaia's body) at
Her temple at Delphi came the voices and snakes of Prophecy, Python being
Gaia's Truth-speaking Daughter. The oracular snake wraps around Athena's legs
and the wise old oracular owl perches on Her shoulder.
The
Myths tell an interesting story: before a certain time in the Myths female
blood sanctified the soil, symbolized cosmic fertility and kinship. Then
suddenly the stories no longer speak of sacred female womb-blood; suddenly the
sacred genital blood of castrated males like Dionysos is spilled to renew the
soil, or Adonis's sacred genital blood is spilled to save humankind, and so
forth. And the spill of woman's wise sacred womb blood? It and the Gorgon
became the Curse.
I
believe that women's blood is not a peripheral issue in devising a feminist
epistemology. It is central to the issue of women's esteem-the way we are
perceived in the culture-at-large, as well as how our attributes are valued and
what importance our special knowing and ways have. Woman's blood also concerns
an information-gathering method that is the opposite of conscious control, that
is, with allowing, with letting-be something women experience in the
"periods" that come on them and that has little or no parallel in the
lives of men. "Allowing" is the "means-by-which" a
different kind of knowledge comes. Respecting the "private" and
"down inside" (not just "out there") as places where
knowledge is, respecting the minding body, respecting the way a woman
"is-in-the-world," respecting being female as a method and technique
for gathering and defining what can be or ought to be known, and respecting
being female and the female body as a way of knowing cooperativeness and
community (the opposite of competitiveness) all these respects are essential
ways in which humans know; they should be accounted for in an epistemology.
Women's
blood and women's periodicity direct our attention to a different consciousness
and to an acceptance of fluctuating, changing forms as paradigms. Listen to how
the Navajo Goddess, Changing Woman, creates. She is the opposite of all that
our Judeo-Greek tradition reveres and expects from a creating deity. We are
used to Zeus and Yahweh who do their divine things with the speed of lightning
and the suddenness of thunderbolts. "Let it be!" and
"Kahzam!" there it is like magic, instantly and it's perfect
too! complete, and never needs modification! Yahweh changeless, the Unmoved,
Mover creates not only quickly but in so final a form that he needs never
create anything again. Is this a proper model-form for human knowledge?
Not
so with Changing Woman. She does not take Herself that seriously. She is
sometimes in cahoots with Coyote, the trickster. She tinkers. She plays. She
tries it this way, that way. She may like it fine one way but just for variety
might change it anyway. She is so good at creating that She never stops, but
She goes on and on, continually bringing new PATTERNS and new ideas into
existencezo (maddening for anyone who thinks he has to keep everything all
categorized and systematized). It is interesting to look back at the dualism
columns with these two creating models in mind. Which is more human?
By
suggesting we use "Myth, Image, and the Female Body in Re-Visioning
Knowledge," I am not only proposing that we enlarge our data base
considerably to include the experience of half of humanity. But I am also
suggesting several other things: that we employ different methods of looking at
data; that we analyze it differently and from a new perspective our own
(Gilligan 1982); that we seek a different PATTERN in it, utilize different
kinds of consciousness, and learn to go from one to the other at will; that we
learn to listen with empathy when we have been taught only to look with
detachment; and that we employ ways of thinking and seeing that for the most
part have been excluded from western science and epistemology.
If
we are to know in new and better ways, we must also acquaint ourselves with
the so-far bypassed knowledge in our bodies, not just in our minds. Actually I
wish to suggest that we let our bodies take the lead in the new learning.
"Accepted wisdom" has said that Myth, metaphor, art, and one's bodily
being-in-the-world are not fully respectable in the context of knowledge
because they belong culturally to a realm of unesteemed, disdained, dark,
unacceptable stuff a realm associated with world and matter, lowly forms of
being associated with sin and femaleness. Understandably, even women may wish
to disassociate themselves from it.
James
Hillman understands the extraordinary damage the exclusions of such
"psychologically female things" have caused:
ÒEven
the determination of what constitutes appropriate data, the very questions
asked. . . are determined by the specific consciousness we call scientific,
Western, modem, and which is the long-sharpened tool of the masculine mind that
has discarded part of its own substance, calling it "Eve,"
"female," and "inferior." This kind of consciousness
[Apollonic] . . . is driven to repeat the same misogynist views century after
century, because of its archetypal base. . . . Until another archetypal
structure or cosmos informs our view of things and our vision of what it is
"to be conscious" with another, we shall remain endlessly repeating
and helplessly confirming with ever more subtle scientific observation our
misogynist [world view]. (1972: 250-251; emphasis mine)
The
Great Goddess is what Carol Christ and James Hillman are asking for: an
archetypal female image that can inform and reform our view of the world. Bohr
and Heisenberg, as I have indicated, had to discount formal "objectivity"
(the view from "out there," Apollo's realm) in order to achieve a
coherent view of physics. If this is true of the "hardest" of sciences,
then philosophy and the social sciences can also benefit by dethroning
Apollo as the exclusive model and symbol for knowledge. The Mother Goddess,
better than Apollo, captures our actual situation, which is in the world rather than "out there" like Apollo. She,
with Her earth-body wisdom, is an Image, Parable, and Metaphor that
incorporates ("has in the body") our "what" and at the same
time the "means-by-which" we must proceed to acquire knowledge.
NOTES
1. Apollo is "the main symbol bearer of classical
civilization. . . . Whether it be the body of a god or a man, [this Ideal Male]
is changeless and immortal" (Redner
1986:350; my emphasis).
2. Developed more fully in
Donna Wilshire and Bruce Wilshire's "Spatial Archetypes and the
Gender Stereotypes Inherent in Them," Anima-An Experiential Journal (Spring 1989).
3. Hell is named for Hel,
once-beloved Goddess of the
Underworld.
4. For clarification of this
idea, read "On Psychological Femininity" in Hillman (1972:215-298).
For a discussion of how the Divine .female (e.g., Wisdom as Sophia) was
demeaned and suppressed in Greek, Hebrew, and Christian philosophy, read
Joan C. Engelsman's The Feminine Dimension of the Divine (1987). See also Catherine Keller's From a Broken
Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self (1987).
5. For an analysis of
texts showing Sophia rooted in Gaia, Goddess of Earth Wisdom, see
Engelsman 1987.
6. As in: "Sight
and hearing use our intelligence in two completely different ways. . . . Our
optic intelligence forms an image in our mind. Hearing, on the other hand . . .
evoking a response from the emotive centres" (Lawlor 1982:14).
7. The presence of
"evolution" in this column opposite "permanence" and
"ideal [fixed] forms", may account for both the difficulty that
evolution still meets in some quarters and the reluctance of mainstream
philosophers of science to embrace other theories of unfixedness, such as Nobel
physicist llya Prigogine's Chaos Theory (1984) and his work on emerging
patterns (1980), or the illogic of quantum theories.
8. Carol Gilligan would
likely add "justice and rights" to the left column, as part of
"the typical male voice." And she would add "caring
relationships" to the right column as "the typical female
voice." Her research shows that although the care perspective and deep
regard for relationships most typically describe female experience, they
are not solely women's province; they belong to all humans. "The different
voice I describe is characterized not by gender but theme" (1982:2).
9.
Much has recently been written on body knowledge. See Feldenkrais 1972,
Rosenfeld 1981, Wilshire 1982, Steinman 1986, and their bibliographies.
10. Although the entire spectrum of human experience is available to all humans, one cannot rule out the possibility that there may be a genetic predisposition of one sex to certain aspects. Such differences are irrelevant to the need to redeem the right-hand column, however.
11. This observation is
made frequently by mythographers and other scholars in pre-Iron Age Studies.
Some have called the Archetypal Reversal phenomenon "masculine
overlay," with the Freudian overtones intended. Samuel Noah Kramer, the
distinguished linguist who first deciphered the cuneiform tablets of Sumer,
calls the third millennium B.C.E. a time of "priestly piracy" when
"male theologians manipulated the order of the deities in accordance
with their chauvinistic predilections" and stole the goddesses'
perogatives to give to their sons (Kramer 1979: 27, 29).
12. Truth imposed from
"on high" rarely tUrns out to be universal. It becomes possible to
talk about universal truths, however, when the seeker goes to and through immanence,
as all preheroic Myths do. For those
who wish to explore how Myth reveals these truths more fully than I am doing in
this piece, read James Hillman's Archetypal Psychology (1983), Mircea Eliade's The Eternal Return (1971), and Jean Gebser's Ever-Present Origin
(1985).
13. This means teaching
the bottom of the foot, bare or in moccasins, to feel and test before accepting weight. In this kind of tracking the whole
body contributes to the minding, to the thinking and the knowing.
14. Anima mundi ,literally means the soul of the world with "world" being a good translation of mundi, .for the anima is definitely of the world it "permeates all things of the
world" (Hillman 1983:18); anima can
mean "soul" only in a special sense because it is not
"spirit"; it cannot mean spirit because it is totally
"worldly," of the "world," "squarely in the midst of
the world" (26); it means "soul" as in "soul food,"
food that gives evidence of the eater's perspective on life so anima as "soul" means "a perspective," a
PATTERN through which life is viewed, a means by which and not a "what," not a "substance"
-a subjective outlook, not an object (16). Seeing ourselves as being within and
interconnected with the great workings of Nature-understanding the anima
mundi, the Soul of Nature itself not
as a something, but as a Way-of-Being-and-Seeing-certainly does away with the
dualistic dilemma of human ,alienation and isolation from the world
15. From Merlin Stone's
interview of Mary Daly for Canadian Broadcasting Company's 1986 four-hour
radio series, "Return of the Goddess." (Audio Tape Cassettes,
CBC Audio Products, Box 5OD-Station A, Toronto, Ontario MSW 1£6)
16. I think of my
performance work-enacting stories and history of "The Goddess and Her
Myths"-as doing this, as "embodying ideas," combining a live
"what" with the nondualistic "way-in-which" I see the world
17. I am indebted to
physicist Bruce Bush, Ph.D., for his careful readings of this paper and
for his generous, instructive notes on the parts pertaining to physics and
scientific method. The ideas and statements are, however, my own.
18. The same demotion of the
Goddess went on in Europe (Berger 1985).
19. Many
anthropologists, especially Marla Powers (1986) and Eleanor Leacock (1981),
have made findings similar to those of Gimbucis (1982). "The empirical
status of women" in cultures studied by Powers "is frequently
clouded" by the false claim of Euramericans "that reproductive roles
cause women to be subordinate; [and] that males are somehow intrinsically and
universally dominant." Actually "women are neither inferior nor
superior to men, merely different" in the Oglala culture. "Both sexes
are valued for the contribution they make to the society" (Powers 1986:6).
20. Prigogine's work
reveals that new patterns and structures, the physical bases of life, emerge
constantly and randomly (1984).
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