Excerpt from Don’t Take It lying Down: Life According to the Goddess
The stories from our past have profound implications for us today; they explain how our current beliefs and attitudes have formed over time. There are many clues that have been overlooked in our education. The story of the loss of women’s mysteries is the first step in reclaiming our true heritage as daughters of the Goddess. This is not just another passing fad. This is the story of your past, of the events and attitudes that have led us to the brink of losing our connection to the life-giving power of the Goddess. It is also the basic information that can support you in reconsidering the whole experience of being a woman in today’s world.
Before we look to the past, it is important to understand that mythology is not just about stories from ancient Greece or tales of Celtic heroes. Our current time is also made up of particular myths. However, we call the current myths “reality” or ‘truth”. Mythology is a collection of stories that includes both fantasy and fact and that provides meaning collectively and personally.[i] When we can recognise that any view of reality is actually the product of a mythology, or a collection of mythologies, we can begin to move beyond some of the unconscious assumptions that determine our lives.
Our strongest myths today come from science and technology. Medical science, for example, teaches us about biological reproduction and the use of the contraceptive Pill. As you will see, this is only one story about fertility and reproduction, and it is a story that denies women true reproductive autonomy.
Do you know why that is the case?
Modern methods of birth control do not offer reproductive autonomy but rather a kind of reproductive dependence that a study of mythology and history places in a disturbing and provocative perspective.
Science is one story we use to make sense of our experience and give it meaning. Science is, however, the dominant myth of our times and, as people in all times have done, we tend to believe in the absolute truth of our own myths. The myths of other times and places explain fertility quite differently from biological science and, as you will see, also offer women different ways to manage their reproductive choices.
A study of mythology, ancient and contemporary, invites us to look at human experience in a broader historical and cultural context than usual. While this sounds like a good idea, it is actually quite difficult to look beyond our own understandings to other ways of experiencing the world. We tend to believe our own stories and be suspicious of others. This is, after all, how cultures have survived for millennia. We are, however, at a time of the world when it could be catastrophic not to listen to other stories. Unless we can learn to interact and exchange as a world-wide community, the destructive potential in human beings will remain a constant threat. This has, of course, been the case through most of recorded history, but now we have the means to perpetrate disaster on a world-wide scale.
History and myth seem to be inextricably intertwined in our thinking. I can remember one of my daughters coming home from primary school with a story of how she had questioned her history teacher about locating an historical event “at the time of Christ”. She wanted to know if he was saying that Christ was an historical figure. The question was shocking to some of her fellow students, simply incomprehensible to others, and even the teacher had trouble answering. This question is, however, one of many that can begin to unravel history as we know it, opening up possibilities by sorting fact from fantasy, without losing the value of either. The Christ energy, for example, is profoundly meaningful to those it touches whether or not there was a proven historical figure called Jesus (the significance lies in the symbolic power to stir meaning and reverence, not necessarily in historical reality). It is, however, vitally important to sort through the underlying assumptions of our belief systems.
Questions like the one my daughter asked may seem irrelevant today when formal religion is not as important to the community as a whole as it once was. Yet just because we have stopped going to church or even consciously believing in a father God, it does not take away the deep influence of a major religion on a culture over time. In a predominantly Christian culture, many of the teaching stories of the Bible still affect us in some way, even if we have not learned them directly.
All people throughout time have had myths of the creation of the world, stories that explained the mystery of life and existence, and each community believed that their story was the true story. Every religious story is a myth that explains the mysteries of life and death according to the people who dreamed it into existence. Even if it we believe that these people received the teachings from a higher power of some sort, they are still formed into stories that reflect the cultural conditions and historical era in which they come present. One of the first steps in claiming autonomy is exploring how the stories of our culture affect us now.
Adam and Eve and Kiss Me went down to the river to bathe; Adam and Eve were drowned, and who do you think was saved? Children’s rhyme
Even those of us who are not actively practising the religion have been influenced by the basic assumptions of the Judeo-Christian myth. Almost everyone knows that the first man was Adam. Most people also think that the first woman was Eve, the one foolish enough (or evil enough) to take the apple from the serpent. What does this story teach as it is absorbed directly or indirectly?
Take a moment to consider the story of Adam and Eve. You may know it in some detail or only vaguely, but it is almost certain that you do know it. What effect does this story have? What does it teach about men and women? If you write what you know of the story from your childhood, how would it go?
Actually stop reading and take some time to write the story as an exercise:
Once upon a time there was a man and a woman called Adam and Eve . . .
Continue the story as you remember it.
Now reread what you have just written, bearing in mind that this story has been told for centuries as a teaching story about good and evil, men and women. What does your version of the story suggest about life?
The generally accepted version of the story would have us believe that woman, through Eve, brought suffering and sin into our lives by eating the forbidden fruit. But, what exactly was it that Eve ate and tempted Adam to taste as well? Could it have been not only knowledge of good and evil but also wisdom and choice? What do you think?
This, and other stories like it, have the power to shape our lives. Can you think of other cultural myths that contain underlying messages that form your view of the world? Make a list of these and examine what they tell you.
One of the most insidious cultural myths that affect women today is the well-known “beauty myth”[ii]. The constant bombardment of slim, athletic, youthful images of women has a profound effect on our ability to be comfortable in our own bodies. When we are not able to be comfortably and fully embodied, we have no real internal ground on which to stand to make informed, empowering choices. Do you believe the story told by the beauty myth? Or do you spend life energy holding it at bay?
The beauty myth has the power to affect your ability to trust yourself and claim your deep feminine wisdom. Our instinctual knowings are often not particularly fashionable or attractive according to contemporary ideas of beauty. Women today are caught in a paradox: even while we are struggling to develop our full potential in the work place, in relationship and family, or in areas of creativity, at the same time many of us are concerned about being too big. The contradiction is terrible: I want to be as big as I can be, but I also want to be smaller. This struggle undermines us as effectively as the old injunctions of the Dark Ages, limiting our capacity to develop a full experience of feminine power and autonomy.
The origins of the beauty myth predate the feminist movement by thousands of years; they are inextricably linked to changing mythological conditioning regarding the value of the life-giving power of the feminine. When fertility is highly valued in a culture, women have reproductive power, but once the value of fertility is displaced by economic, political, or military values, there is a shift in sexual emphasis from fertility to erotic power. When the life-giving power of the feminine is devalued, the value of women’s bodies changes. In the words of cultural historian, William Irwin Thompson, “Gone is the obese Great Goddess; come is the sleek young maid…” [iii]
(Meet Mago Contributor) Kaalii Cargill
[i] A Watts, 1968, Myth and Ritual in Christianity, Boston, Beacon Press, pp. 7-8.
[ii] N Wolf, 2002, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are used against Women. New York: Perennial. p.10.\
[iii] W I Thompson, 1981, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture. New York, St Martin’s Press, p. 165.