After healing from the initial burnout from this subjective experience and getting my hands on as much knowledge, lore, women’s medicine and women’s power as I could access, and with a renewed sense of purpose, I returned to reading Nietzsche. I remembered that Jung says that when our own culture fails to remedy what ails one sometimes one has to go to another culture in order to find what it is that we need to heal us. I had a strong sense of the power of women’s dreaming and women’s unwritten and sometimes unspoken knowledge and power; I found that in cultures where people had lived close to the land and had not been industrialised or colonised by Anglo-Saxon society, women had maintained a healthy power relationship with men and had conducted women’s business which was older than white women’s reaction to social injustice and they had completely different perceptions of life than European types.
I found that of all the philosophers I had ever read, this man was outstandingly brilliant. This was perhaps not so much in his regard for women of his era – as social constructs and domesticated/tame animals – but specifically in his foresight and willingness to offer the tools for emancipation which the women of the future would require to emancipate themselves from the chains that bind and then to emancipate themselves from that emancipation – post feminist culture. I read Nietzsche for ten years and at that time refused to read anything ELSE. His language was at first difficult but became something sublime to read and he often made me belly laugh because he had both the intense rage at human stupidity and the lightheartedness to overcome this in himself. Eventually I admitted secondary sources who helped me to clarify Nietzsche’s position on women, the Ubermensch and his doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence.
Perhaps nobody and nothing (although I have to admit that Indigenous women have been absolutely significant in shaping my own dreaming and imagination) has had quite the degree of impact on my philosophical investigation and journey to explore power which Nietzche has had. I can only reckon that this is because he himself was an exceptional student and therefore makes an exceptional teacher. But it is no doubt just as likely that it is because he was an exceptionally creative thinker that gives rise to or allows the space for me to think creatively for myself. I can’t begin to give a clear picture of how he saw the world and with what foresight and vision he imagined the future. What I can say is that he makes it possible for me to revalue all of the values I was indoctrinated into and to promote my philosophical insight and social value as a thinker because he taught me the significance of turning my own theory on its head, practising reversals and attempting to prove myself wrong.
To begin with, he significantly granted that God was dead (that the illusion of the absolute power that authorised man to absolutely corrupt both women and the earth itself was finished with and had become obsolete in the face of scientific rationale). He demonstrated how UNTRUTH had been mistaken (and instituted) for centuries by man as The Truth. He showed how history has its uses but so many disadvantages for LIFE ITSELF. Through the concept of the Ubermensch (the Ubermensch is intentionally not a gender-specific construct and he specifically declared that he didn’t care if the Ubermensch was a woman, only that humanity might overcome MAN altogether – as a repeated piece of folly and error), he showed how mankind might create as anarcho-psychologist and artist a new meaning for humanity… and a return to the earth.
So, here I stand with scales in my hand, still weighing and measuring POWER. The profitability of gender specificity is concerned with revaluing the values that man has applied to the feminine bodymind and is concerned with creating a truly scientific and artistic future for humanity. The highest value in life is not mankind, the highest value in life is OVERCOMING. It is our duty and a necessity, if we are to survive the folly of man and man’s erroneous notion that life must serve man, to overcome the lie that has been imposed upon both men and women. It is not mankind’s right to profit himself from the earth; cultural people who live close to the earth will affirm that we are merely caretakers. not the owners of the earth. There is a power relationship between what is organic and mankind, and if man does not get the balance of power right between his need/wants/greed and what is essential to life (clean air, water, food, etc) then life becomes toxic and cannot sustain into the future.
It is my vision and intuition that says women MUST be at the forefront of ALL culture creation (no man has more inherent or organic authority to forbid or deny women this power) and precisely because women are different; we are NOT men’s bodyminds or the products thereof. Women’s power is NOT men’s power, and to create life the feminine bodymind is essential. We are NOT empty things needing to be filled by men’s beings and we are NOT valueless without the meaning men might apply to our being/becoming. We are necessary to life and to sustainable cultural development in and of our selves. We do not need to appear, or dress, or behave in any particular manner to be this necessity to life. It is about our capacity for change and becoming that gives us power, not the mere appearance of ourselves. It is our very difference that is needed most urgently after a long history of the suppression of our power.
We are dynamic power; the power that has been stolen from women through sexual interference by theists and priests of religion (which is the greatest crime against humanity that ever was) and by other men empowered by androcentric fallacious reasoning has to be returned/affirmed as our OWN. Absolute power as practised by a long history of instituting patriarchy (dominion OVER and AGAINST organic life forms by the assertion of the illusory laws of male creator deities, of priestly types and other oppressive father figures, profiteers, rapists, child abusers and other usurpers of women’s power through their will to power and control) has absolutely corrupted the earth. It is time (there is no other time given to save ourselves) to take our power back and to deconstruct the lies that have been taken for truth about life, simply because it has profited some man or another to fool all of the people all of the time. Women are reason unto themselves for being and nothing short of their own self-determination and self-actualisation is justifiable in life.
Gender-specific profitability is more about power and how this is exercised between beings (all beings are the will to power) than it is about economics. Yet we cannot avoid the fact that man has constructed for himself the notion of “rational economic man”; for modernity, power IS money. And as much as women constitute more than fifty percent of the world’s population, collectively women own less than a few percent of all accumulated wealth. When it comes to climate change and the scarcity of resources (land ownership, clean water and viable seed/food sovereignty) it places ALL women in a critical situation for survival. Because so little of the world’s wealth (and land) is in the hands of women who have to provide for their children and ensure generations to come, it is now women’s business to create the change that will allow for a possible future.
Since man/men are not going to cheerfully just hand over the power that they have assumed over women’s bodyminds, they are not going to police themselves in respect of eradicating crimes against women and children’s bodyminds (since the object of those crimes is to steal power and profit the men who perpetrate them). Women have to be empowered to step up to the task of demanding equal opportunity in all aspects of culture creation if we are to survive the errors of mankind. Mankind perceives and asserts gender-specific profitability as some kind of divine providence or right of man and systematically applies that belief OVER everyone and polices it with violence and intimidation and manipulation. We all have the collective task of returning to the earth, of being response-able caretakers of the land, of ethical child rearing and of dreaming and working towards the possibility of future becoming; that is, if we are any of us going to survive by any means. Competition has been the psychology of competitive apes and the politics of man, but what is required now is the spirit of CO-OPERATION. For that we need EVERYBODY to pull together equally and at the same time; without each other we are surely doomed.
Read part 1.
Read Meet Mago Contributor Stacey Hughes.
We, the co-editors, contributors, and advisers, have started the Mago Web (Cross-cultural Goddess Web) to rekindle old Gynocentric Unity in our time. Now YOU can help us raise this torch high to the Primordial Mountain Home (Our Mother Earth Herself) wherein everyone is embraced in WE. There are many ways to support Return to Mago. You may donate to us. No amount is too small for us. For your time and skill, please email Helen Hwang (magoism@gmail.com). Please take an action today and we need that! Thank YOU in Goddesshood of all beings!
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