Dreamer Easy

PhD student works out exactly what it is insulin does.

The Tree of Life as a Tube Map

Introducing Thealogy by Melissa Raphael has been lying about in a plastic tub for about four years, waiting for me to pick it up and read it. Oh I am glad that I've finally started. It's one of those books that pulls that crazy quilt of understanding in your head into a pattern.

Just one of these stimulatin' insights is Raphael's discussion in chapter one of Goddess feminism's origins in the radical feminist movement of the seventies. Fed up with the sexism in the civil rights movements and the left generally, with "no desire for equality on what remained patriarchal terms", radical feminists left them behind to celebrate "female difference and traditionally female activities and relationships in post-patriarchal context".

Raphael contrasts this with the liberal or "reform" feminism of the sixties' Second Wave which "wanted to minimize the difference between women and men" and "to distance femaleness from biology", arguing that "female difference was of cultural rather than natural origin". Raphael is careful not to suggest that liberal feminism ignores the body and sex while radical feminism is solely interested in them. But these broad differences in approach characterise (for example) feminist reformist movements in traditional religions such as Christianity on the one hand and Goddess feminism, which has left those traditional churches behind, on the other. (And again, Raphael is careful to point out the "fluid" boundaries between these approaches.)

Intriguingly, Raphael also calls this radical feminism "cultural feminism", suggesting that it's the celebration of traditionally female culture that's the project of radical feminism: values such as non-violence, nurturing, and sharing of power, behaviours assigned to women and forbidden to men by patriarchy.

This made my brain explode, so I leapt up off the bed and ran in here to blog it. For one thing, I had an explanation of the indignation expressed by some when I said I was a boy because of the way I behave. (Like many other fangirls, it's just that I'm "gender non-conforming".) I'd said that men and women were different. This rang alarm bells.

For another, I could see the basis of criticisms of Goddess feminism both from within feminism (Katha Pollit) and from feminism's enemies (Rene Denfeld) as distracting from more important issues - but at the same time, it confirmed what I've always known: Goddess feminism, as a movement, is intensely, inherently political. It's not just a cutesy fantasy. It's informed every aspect of my feminism (I worship a dark-skinned androgynous teenage whore. If nothing else, that puts the centre of the universe somewhere else entirely from Yahweh.)and my politics generally (I never could get interested in the environment until I started seeing those rolling hills around the Hawkesbury as Her body).

I was also completely knocked over by a description in the book's introduction of a training program for priestesses which identified a number of different possible paths, including Creatrix (celebrating the Goddess through art, drama, etc) and Scholar/Teacher (sharing research). It was also affirming to read that very many Goddess feminists are solitary, like myself. As of this month's autumnal equinox, I'll have been a Wiccan for seventeen years. I've been berating myself for years now for sliding out of regular ritual, and just writing and reading about thealogy. Suddenly I realise I've been doing it right all along.

"This discussion may seem too abstract and 'reasonable' to say something useful about a society that had hundreds of gods and expended a great part of its resources on building temples, providing for the cult, and performing other religious actions (not that such actions are any more irrational than many features of modern society)... For the Westerner, problems in comprehending the alien and the rationality of religious practices may be posed most acutely by magic. Magic and rationality do not conflict: magic is rational, and its argumentation is often rationalistic. Magical spells and performances exploit many methods of inference and arguments from analogy that have strong logical coherence. These procedures and arguments differ from Western rationality less in their organization and formal properties than in their premises, which often assume different agents and modes of causation from those commonly accepted in the West."

Baines, John. "Society, Morality and Religious Practice". in Shafer, Byron E. (ed). Religion in Ancient Egypt: Gods, Myths, and Personal Practice. Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 1991.

Yet another podcast, this time about the personification of evil, in particular, evil spirits:

'...in eastern traditions the ambiguity and ambivalence of these figures is much more accepted. So that if your community were suffering from some type of terrible fever, disease, you would identify the demon of that disease and you would propitiate that demon. And this is why people in the western tradition are so amazed and awed by the religious art of Indonesia and Tibet because it seems to be so frightening and demonic. But this is because spirits of danger become spirits who can get rid of danger.

You don't have that in the western tradition. What happens in Christianity is that spirits of danger become uniformly evil, and they must be exorcised and chased away and bound and sent back to where they came from.'

I don't think that's an east vs west thing - it's a monotheism vs polytheism thing. I immediately thought of the ancient Greeks and the gorgoneions, Gorgon faces, they put on their buildings to ward off the evil eye - using a malign influence against itself, fighting fire with fire. But if you have only one all-powerful, all-good deity, then good can't flow from any other source.

Glorious Innana
Glorious Anat
Terrible chambers of my heart!

You drive me up
Easily as a cow driving away a fly -

Too high

I come down to find I've killed the tables and the chairs;
Instead of the enemy, I've overthrown my own house.

Terrible chambers of my heart,
Glorious Anat,
Glorious Inanna!

I broke and made magic_caravan, a comm for discussing Doctor Who and myth, magic, religion, and related subjects.

Over at demonbuster.com, you can find a handy list of occult paraphernalia strikingly entitled "Search Warrant Checklist". The items I have are bolded.

( Which arcane objects do you possess? )

That was a pretty poor effort. I'd have scored much higher if they'd included idols. Or if we had blood on the doorposts. (Well, it is Passover.) ETA: Jon pointed out my small, metal idol of Bast. But alas, the chalice long ago went to Vinnie's.

ETA: the Paisley pattern is also demonlicious and should be burnt rather than worn. (Under no circumstances try to combine these activities). Surprisingly, the reasons given have nothing to do with Christian Shaw.

Obviously the Gospel of Judas has a huge oo-er factor - history's greatest villain really a hero! Secret teachings of Jesus revealed! etc. Its actual significance is that it gives scholars insight into the early development of Christianity. "A long-buried side of Christianity is re-emerging," says the National Geographic.

( Thoughts on Gnosticism, Paganism, etc )

A response to that Guardian article decrying religious freedom for the UK navy's sole Satanist, but Julia Baird in the SMH: Evil really is out there, but not under pointy hats. The Guardian's piece worried this neglected the underlying power of symbols such as the Devil. Baird responded:

"...perhaps part of the reason we dismiss symbols is because we have learnt that popular representations of religion can be a distraction, and distort the idea of what good and evil is. Evil is not usually dressed in pointy hats but is often banal in presentation, if horrific in consequence. It is, for example, found in acts committed by people hunched over computers distributing child pornography, those who profit from the sex slave trade, or in corrupt institutions which fail to punish pedophiles."

She gives the example of newspapers in Wollongong so busy hunting non-existent Devil-worshippers that they failed to notice a paedophile ring right under their noses. Thought-provoking stuff.