"… things lost in the psyche are all
still there. So too, this well of
instinctual intuition has never been lost, and whatever is covered over can be
brought back out again." [1]
Requiem for the Fourteenth Grandmother. Part I
The
documentary film, “For the Next 7 Generations,” examines the work of thirteen wise
women or grandmothers who are using their collective folk wisdom to spread
peace and understanding throughout the world.[2]
The
cultures represented by the Thirteen Grandmothers are as disparate as the Maya,
Lakota, Inuit and Tibetan. The women
wear their traditional ethnic costumes as they travel, meeting and speaking
with international leaders and their representatives. Yet, neither European women, nor any North
American women of European heritage, are included.
An
American woman at a recent showing of the film commented on this absence and asked
why no women of Western European origin had been included in either the film or
the discussion panel which followed it.
Her question generated a lively discussion of what might be called
Euro-Woman and her place - or lack of it - in the global community of
women. In the end, there was an
uncomfortable consensus that she didn't quite fit in, but no one could explain exactly
why that was so, other than that she wasn't "indigenous."
This
begs the question of how useful it is to make longevity in place - the underlying
definition of indigenous - the critical characteristic when gathering the
wisdom of women from around the world.
Euro-Woman
shares the need expressed by the Thirteen Grandmothers to recover her ancestral
ways of prayer, peacemaking, and healing, not just for her own well-being, but
because the world needs them. Indeed,
she - and the world - hunger for it.
This
hunger is evident when Euro-Women in great numbers show up at medicine wheels,
pow-wows and other indigenous gatherings. Noting this, one Lakota woman asked a friend
why white people “always suck up to us Indians.” To which her friend answered,
"because all of our medicine women were killed.”
The
sobering fact is that the Wise Women of Western Europe and North America were indeed
killed and with them their wisdom and traditions, victims of the witch hunts
and the scientific revolution of the fifteenth and sixteen centuries. Not all of them, however, were eliminated. Those medicine women who survived the European
witch-hunts were – like Persephone - driven underground. As a result, their daughters have been
allowed – even forced – to forget their heritage, or to regard it as an amusing
remnant of the past, similar to witches' costumes on Hallowe’en, Mummers'
parades, Maypoles, or Easter bunnies. Disconnected
from their roots in traditional lore these things seem quaint, not to be taken
seriously. And yet, they persist.
***
In
the wake of increasing computerization, Euro-Woman's daughters are experiencing
a hunger, a yearning for a return to traditional ways that is evidenced by the
revival of such women's skills as needlework, herbalism, and food-ways. Their attendance at women’s healing circles
is further testimony to the need to return to a traditional, goddess-based, conception
of human society and behavior.
Yet,
for many women, the post-feminist revival of such wise-woman practices as
goddess worship and witchcraft has not fully satisfied the need. Euro-Women
no longer have their time-honored talismans, the costumes, beads, feathers, and
drums of their ancestors and have had to reinvent them. As a result, these retrospective gatherings
and ceremonies often feel flat, lacking the depth of ancestral beliefs that
only time can provide
The
rise of domestic goddesses like Martha Stewart or Rachel Ray offers further
evidence of this yearning, however much the media version of domesticity may
have distorted the essence of Goddesses like Hestia, Ceres, Demeter, or Bridget
that fuels their popularity. Similarly, their
herbal lore has not so much been handed down as recreated, and has been rapidly
co-opted by big business under the aegis of 'nutraceuticals.'
Euro-Women
have no traditional costumes that identify them among the community of
women. High heels, tweed blazers and
briefcases have displaced the kirtl, apron, and cauldron as Euro-Woman has
abandoned her place at the hearth and taken one in the market place. At first glance it would seem that all our
medicine women have indeed been killed.
However, if they have only been driven underground, there is hope for
their resurrection. Like Persephone,
they may return, if only for half of the year.
The
purpose of this essay is to examine the remnants of the ancient culture of Euro-Woman,
in the hopes of resurrecting it and restoring her to her rightful place among
the Grandmothers. To begin that
restoration, it is important to understand the process by which Euro-Woman lost
her identity in the first place.
***
There
clearly was an indigenous culture of wise women in Europe, as is evidenced by
the strength with which it was suppressed.
Two forces in the early modern period [c. 1500 to 1800 AD] were strong
factors in its demise. The first was the
religious upheaval of the Reformation along with its antithesis, the
Counter-Reformation, in which the Roman church struggled to retain its primacy
against the rise of Protestantism. The
second was the struggle of the scientific rationalists to gain equal standing
within a culture dominated by theologians.
The wise-woman healer was the victim of each.
In
the end, the combination of the imperial intentions of the Medieval Church and
the Scientific Revolution’s rationalization of thought and information united
to repress and even annihilate such women.
Hundreds of women were hung or burned as witches in the pivotal period
in which magic, science, and religion struggled for political and intellectual position
in the rapidly changing culture of Europe.[3]
Women's
use of natural herbs and roots threatened the rise of scientific medicines. Although the church attributed the success of
women’s herbal medicine to collaboration with the devil, a self-serving accusation,
it was not so much in support of the scientists, but because the very existence
of women threatened the newly formulated doctrine of celibacy.
In
order to impose that doctrine on its clergy, the church had to wage an
intellectual war of public relations against human sexuality. The task of convincing young males to adopt a
life of celibacy was a daunting one and the Church mounted a massive public
relations campaign against women that persists to this day. The most effective method of doing this was
to denigrate women and the attraction they naturally hold for most men.
Celibacy
became the higher path in life for men, at least for the clergy. The rise of the Virgin Mother as the ideal
woman was the ironic matrix against which this took place. Although marriage and motherhood were
sanctioned by the church, sexuality was not.
The
Cult of the Virgin, ostensibly an elevation of Mary, the mother of Jesus, to a
place above the Saints and Angels, intensified this marginalization by creating
the dichotomy of the virgin and the whore.[4] If virginity was the ideal, then – for real
women, at least – motherhood was tantamount to whoredom. By focusing so intently on Mary's virginity,
and by setting her up as a role model, the Church was able to deem women with
normal sexual lives sinful, and to exalt the celibate state for men.[5] It was in
this period that Mary Magdalene, about whom the Bible actually says very
little, was redefined as a prostitute. The
only hope for a woman lay in the convent where nuns lived apart from the rest
of the community in perpetual virginity.
Throughout the Middle Ages these views combined to marginalize women.
The
very language of Christendom reinforced this denigration of women. There is a legend, for example, that Jesuits
entering a church were trained to wipe the seats of the pews after a woman had
sat down, lest her evil qualities afflict them.
The creation of such myths as the succubae,
seductive female entities who visited men in their dreams, was a convenient way
to blame women for causing otherwise chaste men to have sexual dreams that were
beyond their control.[6]
The value of women’s ceremonies and
celebrations paled against the Rites and Rituals of a patriarchal Church. Home-based ceremonies based on the Passover Seder
were swept away as high church liturgies dominated the religious life of towns
and cities.
***
Learning
from the model provided by the Church, the secular rationalists waged a
methodological war on the women's gifts of intuition and tradition as they
attempted to raise Science to the status already held by Theology. Potions, nostrums, and tisanes, the healing
tools of the wise woman, were increasingly disdained as male scientists
isolated the active ingredients in common herbs and roots, thereby co-opting
them as ‘medicines’ which required that they be prescribed by a trained
physician. Healers who lacked such training
were redefined as quacks or frauds.
Women's
intuitive approach to healing, because it did not lend itself to scientific
investigation, was gradually degraded as unscientific or non-existent. Women, by virtue of their degraded status,
were then denied the scientific training and the new information it
provided. Science - like Theology
-became the domain of men, while women's skills were disdained as witchcraft or
demonology.[7]
These
twin processes of denigration and annihilation culminated in the witch trials
of the 17th century in both Europe and America.
Those women who were not killed as witches gave up their healing
practices or were driven underground.
It
is hard to recognize the remnants of our traditions in a world of cell phones,
chat rooms, and microwave cooking.
Nevertheless, there is evidence that remnants of that culture are still
with us. Industrial/commercial overlays
mask the folkish roots of our traditions.
Yet, they are woven into our folk and fairy tales, our holidays,
festivals, and food ways.
They
remain in those quirky habits of Italian and Jewish great- grandmothers, for
example, who tie a red ribbon on the crib of a newborn to keep the evil spirits
away, or knock on wood and say, “Gahfabid” [God forbid] or “Kunna Hurra”
[Yiddish: Kein ein hora]. Both of these traditions involve tying a red
ribbon on the baby’s crib to ward off evil spirits. The Yiddish words, meaning "no evil
eye," are used when someone compliments the baby. Similarly, the Italian "God forbid"
and knocking are designed to negate or drown out a compliment paid to the baby
lest the spirits become envious. Other
childbirth traditions include the Christian precept that mother and child do
not leave the house until the baby is baptized, again protecting the infant
from evil spirits before his soul has been protected.
***
Euro-Woman
as wise woman disappeared from European culture, so much so that today, even
other women do not recognize her as a kindred spirit. She has had her traditions ignored, not only
by those men who set the rules for church and science, but also by her sisters
among indigenous women like those who constitute the Grandmothers Council;
worst of all, she herself has accepted the belief that there is no indigenous women’s
culture in the west. And yet....
The
exclusion of Euro-Woman and her cultures from such an important undertaking as the
Thirteen Grandmothers’s crusade for global peace creates a ‘we/they’ situation
in which 'you white women' are seen as somehow usurping the culture of the indigenous
women of the Council. But if the Council
is truly in a quest for peace and understanding, such an exclusion is
counterproductive. It is also a
misreading of our mutual history.
Paraphrasing
a Jungian concept, Clarissa Pinkola Estes notes that, "things lost in the
psyche are all still there."[8] It is quite possible that for Euro-Woman the
culture of our grandmothers has never been totally lost, and - more importantly
- that whatever is covered over can indeed be brought back out again. It is here that we can begin to locate the
remnants of our traditional culture.
Like archeologists, we must uncover our culture, shard by shard, image
by image, and restore it, rather than adopting the culture of others.
[1] Carl Jung, paraphrased by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves, NY:
Ballantine/ Bertelsmann 1992, 1996, P. 83.
[2] Their first major gathering was in 2004. In attendance were Gloria Steinem, Alice
Walker and Helena Norberg-Hodge [see Shambhala
Catalog. Fall/Winter 2009, p. 31]
[3] For more
on the anomaly of tribes annihilating their own women, see Leonard Shlain,
The Alphabet vs the Goddess.
[4] The
Church distinguishes between virginity and celibacy. Although the highest ideal may be perpetual
virginity, that status is primarily reserved to women. The panoply of female saints is replete with
women who - like the virgin/martyr Saint Agnes - were canonized precisely
because they defended their virginity, defying parental or other pressures for
them to marry, and giving up their lives in the process. The male version of the
saintly tale begins with a dissolute life as a soldier or a knight in which
wine, women, and song predominate. This
tale culminates in a spiritual conversion, with the canonization of the
now-reformed man as a saint of the Church.
See for example the life of Saint Ignatius.
[5] A survey
of the language of the prayers of the Roman Church reveals that the word
'virgin' is used consistently in referring to the Mother of Jesus, as well as
to other holy women of the early Church.
Given the theological precept that Jesus never married, and is presumed
to have had no sexual relations with women, it is significant that the word
virgin is never used in conjunction with him, nor with any of the male
Disciples who followed him. Within the
Church there is a significant distinction between celibacy and virginity. The first is a choice, the second is a
physical state. Males could - and did -
lose their virginity in their profligate youth, only to recover [wc] later and
take a vow of celibacy. For females, the
preferred state was absolute virginity.
[6] The male
version of this 'demon' was the incubus/incubi.
Both of these were sexual dreams or nightmares that visited the sleeping
Christian, doing things that the waking person would never do.
[7] It is
interesting to note the origin of the word witch, which derived from the word
'wit' or wisdom. Estes p. 97.
[8] Estes,
Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run with the Wolves, NY: Ballantine/ Bertelsmann 1992,
1996 p 83.
