This essay is part 2 of an edited excerpt from the author’s Introduction to her book PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion.
Being “Other”
Image: Vierge Ouvrante, Erich Neumann, The Great Mother, Pl 176.
The sense of being “other”: that is, out of the main play and text of things, and perhaps irrelevant, was exacerbated by being female. Perhaps this was actually central to the sense of alienation, since the religion, the main cosmology, paid her very little positive attention. It has been common for millennia that women have not been able to name themselves or their experience as sacred, because the metaphor of the Divine did not extend to their experience, their presence in the world. The historical, scientific and religious texts of my cultural context did not include the perspectives of a female-friendly cosmology. Woman as philosopher, shaman, priestess, spiritual authority, wise woman, healer, and also as mother in these roles, was barely identified, let alone her perspective taken seriously. Scholarly texts which purported to be whole and truthful objective accounts, have used terms like “us” and “we” – presuming to speak for her, even as they burnt her, silenced her, kept her out of institutions, politics and texts. If the story had been told from within her perspective, that is, the perspective of a female-friendly cosmos … as wise woman, healer, priestess, mother, would she speak of herself for instance, as “just a mother” – if her mind was imbued with the integrity of life happening in her? Would she allow a church to tell her she could not speak for the Divine, if her bodymind had not been locked up?
The female body – and hence her presence – has not been included in most of humanity’s thinking for some time. French philosopher Merleau-Ponty speaks about the body and its importance in human experience. For him,
The body is first of all a way of viewing the world; it is at one and the same time the way a subjective attitude both comes to know itself and express itself. The lived phenomenal body must therefore not be thought of as an object in itself, but as a bodily presence in the world, a bodily awareness of the world.[i]
The denial of the body in general has certainly influenced Western thought[ii]; so then it may be asked, how has the denial of the female body in particular affected thinking – by women themselves as well as by the men who wrote the texts? It is now a largely accepted fact that half the human race has rarely been allowed, or found access to the development of the mainly adhered-to texts of philosophies and sciences. Her body, for the last few millennia, was not supposed to do what it did; if her body was more like his, then it would have been better, and normal. St. Augustine for example, regarded it as an achievement when a nun’s menstrual cycle ceased due to fasting: he regarded that she was getting holier. The body, at its best and peak of integrity, was not supposed to menstruate; what did this kind of thinking signify? What kind of worldview was being denied? Woman’s fertility was thus frequently a source of shame, and certainly in the cultural context, it was at the base of her loss of power[iii]. It is the worldview of the female body, this subjective presence in the world, that has been absent from our collective minds, even her own mind. She must now be written into the histories, the philosophies, the sciences, the cosmologies. This book[iv]participates in that movement along with many others at this time in the human story; wherein the female as an embodied human, is moving out of being “other” into the “norm”, into the foreground of consciousness.
(Meet Mago Contributor) Glenys Livingstone, Ph.D.
REFERENCES:
Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. NY: Basic Books, 1999.
Livingstone, Glenys. PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion. NE: iUniverse, 2005.
Madison, Gary Brent. The Phenomenology of Merleau -Ponty. Ohio University Press, 1981.
Neumann, Erich. The Great Mother. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974.
Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born. NY: Bantam, 1977.
NOTES:
[i]Madison, Gary Brent. The Phenomenology of Merleau –Ponty. p.23.
[ii]See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought.
[iii]See Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born.
[iv]PaGaian Cosmologyby Glenys Livingstone, of which this essay is an edited excerpt.