Why a blog of her own?

A blog of her own is like having a room of her own in cyberspace. Why is this important? Because if our species is to survive, women's voices need to be heard. Right now women are attempting once again to add the equal rights amendment to the constitution, here in 2011! According to Supreme Court "justice" Scalia, "person" in the the 14th amendment does not mean women, and therefore women are not equally protected by the constitution. My head spins at the complete insanity of this arrogant sexism. I wonder where Scalia thinks he came from.

Author Virginia Wolfe felt it was important for women to have a room of their own. What does this mean? Well, if we studied her writing in school to any degree, like we do men constantly from the time we can read and write, we would know that she meant women need our own space to be who we are, free from patriarchal conditioning. For Virginia, she valiantly tried, and felt she could not cope. Had she had sisterhood instead of crippling isolation in a male-dominated world, she would have been able to not only cope, but thrive.

This blog invites any and every woman to find a true reflection of herSelf that is wholy/holy femme, untainted by male conditioning, free from fear and open to the true ecstatic nature of the divine She that women are.

Who's Not Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

I'm not! (Sorry for misspelling your name, Virginia, in my last post.) Many of us have grown up with this phrase "who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Elizabether Taylor and Richard Burton made it a household presence, though the movie completely missed the point. This is an example of the erasure of one woman's generous genius as well as an example of the general erasure of women in patriarchy overall, as evidenced by our floundering fathers' constitution of, by and for men, which as noted previously, WOMEN ARE STILL POINTING OUT IS COMPLETELY WRONG, while men continue to think we are engaged in a debate!! I think women need our own constitution, which would be part of a room of our own, a country of our own, a planet of our own, because Earth has currently been usurped by the real pms, the patriarchal mind set. On the other hand, if women were really free, we wouldn't need a constitution because we know what is right, intuitively, telepathically, naturally. Afterall, Mother bears don't  have a constitution that was created by the male bears, who often kill and eat their babies. We all know what Mother bears do. They fiercely and ferociously protect their babies. 


So, if you are not afraid of Virginia Woolf, then you must be a deeply creative woman in your own right, and, even if you are afraid of Virginia, you are still a deeply creative woman longing for a safe place to flower.  It is time for women to claim our space, even if the insane male "justices" are completely afraid of Virginia, and believe me, they surely are! It is time for women to shed the introjects (internalized patriarchal projections) of "not enough", "too sensitive",  "too big", "too small", and just generally, too much of this and not enough of that, as defined by the pms. And even that is an introject! We think we have pms, which has been projected onto us for so long that we now hold it in our bodies! Enough!!

What is FemUnity?

FemUnity is women's community. FemUnity is Sisterhood--you know, the hood where sisters hang out. Where is that hood? Well, it has been oppressed, depressed, suppressed, repressed, compressed and just generally pressed down into the smallest corners of our souls--but it is there! Most of us have no idea how "pressed" we are, and hard-pressed at that! Sisters are resilient. We are like that tender green shoot that finds its way up through concretized patriarchy--we are an unstoppable force because we are the very embodiment of the cosmos HerSelf.  We are that. We hear spiritual teachings say "you are that". Yep, we are, only their "that" is usually male-defined, and male definitions do not fit Sisters in any way, shape, or form. That is why we are being called to create our FemUnities, like the village in Northern Kenya, called Umoja, meaning "unity" in Swhahili (see Where Women Rule-Kenya  YouTube.com). These courageous women, recently under attack by local jealous and very scared men, have created a thriving FemUnity for over ten years, helping each other and saving young girls from sexual slavery called "marriage". These women are peaceful, creative, and self-sustaining. Why are these men compelled to inflict violence on them while the local authorities turn a blind eye? This kind of violence is perpetuated worldwide by men, and it continues. Why? Because it can. The stronger women become, creating our own space, the stronger communities will become. This does not mean that women must live apart from their male partners if they choose. What it does mean is that we do what the late, great, genius, biophilic feminist philosopher and theologian, Mary Daly, said--to separate from the separation created by patriarchy.


Many of us are confused about separation. People call women "separatists" if they don't want to live in a male-defined world. So, ok. What's wrong with that? What Mary said is that being a separatist is really about reclaiming what is real and authentic, refusing to collude in the separation and dualism upon which patriarchy is founded. In other words, it’s about choosing an authentic, cosmically connected, female-centered, originally aboriginal life over domination, separation, and necrophilia.


Food for thought!

Pray The Devil Back To Hell

Have you seen this? If not, please see the trailer and find the movie! It is more than a movie. It is a  moment in time documented by women showing how women peacefully brought to its knees the forces, guns, and violence of patriarchy in Liberia that never caught the eye of mainstream media. It is a tribute to the power of FemUnity in action. If you don't know the story of these a-mazing* women, I encourage you to let yourself be inspired by their courage, wisdom, heart, resolution, and fearlessness. The power of women together in unity is something that the world has yet to fully behold, but these women--mothers, daughters, grandmothers, aunts, Christian and Muslim alike--with nearly nothing but a deeply shared sisterhood beyond any male religion to which they subscribed, brought peace to Liberia. They ousted the corrupt and violent government of Charles Taylor as well as worked with the rebels that conscripted boys to become equally violent soldiers on the side of the opposition. These boys were taught to rape and torture without conscience, including inflicting this horror on family members. These a-mazing women showed the boys another way, and they began to see that the women were their mothers. They gave up their guns and allowed themselves to be embraced by love.


Liberia is a small country on the coast of western Africa that has been besieged by war ever since it was founded by freed American slaves in the mid-1800s whose dominating government lorded over the indigenous people. Hard to imagine that freed slaves would do such a thing, but they did. Patriarchy does not know any cultural bounds. The small country had been war-torn for so many years that the women decided they had had enough. And that was that. It had been unheard of that people of different "faiths" would group together, but if anyone could do it, it would be women because the true essence of a woman does not belong to any patriarchal religion. They tapped into their true essence and found each other. And then they founded the real Liberia and brought to power the first elected female African president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who took office in January of 2006. This documentary makes it very clear that global patriarchy is an everyday cultural battlezone for women, and that there are serious gender differences in views about how humans need to conduct ourselves for the good of all that do exist no matter how much they are denied. Women are the givers and caretakers of life. Men are not. And they need to relearn, as did the conscripted boys, as aboriginal men do, to live by women's law.


*This spelling is Mary Daly's and refers to undoing the maze of patriarchy

The YoniVerse--Part 1

I wondered for a long time who it was that decided the beginning of creation came from something called the big bang.  When I learned that patriarchy finds its existence through male domination of everything,  it was no surprise to me that androcentric science came up with the notion of the big bang--an idea perhaps stemming from the same fascination two-year toddler boys have with their private parts. Toddler boys are genuinely curious, whereas a toddler presence in a grown male body is another matter entirely. The two-year-old fascination has grown into something far more peculiar and dangerous--a narcissistic, obsessive, entitled god complex assuming that everthing comes from the great ejaculating pillar of all consuming power, even though we all know that life comes into being in the sacred womb of the female and emerges into form through the sacred yonic gateway. The denial necessary to uphold the lie of the cosmic ejaculation has been ruinous for humanity. Had science adopted what our early Paleolithic and Neolithic ancestors knew--that the parthenogenetic Mother/Goddess was the eternal All and that everything came forth from Her and returned to Her, we would all be much better off. The usurpation of sacred female powers can be tracked from one culture to another, with many stories telling how men, out of jealousy, stole women's power to use as their own. The examples of this coup are woven into the fabric of every current belief system patriarchy has man-aged to put forth as truth, bought and sold intergenerationally until we have been so duped that we will defend our dupeness to the death. That is some strange, wierd twist beyond words. It's like the creation of a reverse DNA spiral--a serious mutation.

The word "uni" is a cognate of "yoni". I think YoniVerse much more accurately describes where we come from and where we live. According to Barbara Walker, author of many books including the Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets,  Uni was an Etruscan name for "the Great Mother's holy trinity, a 'three-in-one' Goddess who gave birth to the uni-verse. She was represented by the sign of female genitals." (Walker, Women's Encyclopedia, p. 1027). All throughout both the Paleolithic and Neolithic, the symbol of the vulva is found the world over inscribed in rock art, emphasized and exaggerated in iconography, and formed into clay, ivory and bone talismans that were carried and/or worn. This gateway symbol of life and regeneration, the pubic V,  represented a continuous sacred living energy for thousands of years, informing the lives of our ancestors with a deep understanding, reverence and connection to the female reality of the cosmos--hardly a big bang. The systematic erasure of the truth of the female cosmos by patriarchy has created a logos-heavy reality that worships male self-importance as the supreme creative cosmic force. This all-consuming denial of our ancestors' wisdom has resulted in a hatred of women so heinous that global destruction in myriads of forms and rampant selfishness can be the only outcomes.

It is time for us to change our mythologies and reclaim the wisdom, truth, beauty and peace our ancestors have wanted us to know for a very long time.

The YoniVerse--Part 2

So, if the big yang bang isn't what's really going on, then what is? I am sure many of us have asked the questions "who am I?", "where did I come from?" and "where did the universe come from?", as well as many others. It is very difficult to answer these questions from the androcentric files of information we have all been fed for eons because these files are skewed beyond belief, and, ironically, some skewed beliefs have become facts. I am not sure if anyone really knows for sure that there was one big bang. But many astrophysicists insist on it. Eastern religion speaks of unending cycles of creation and dissolution. If Westsern linear science focuses only on a part of a great cycle of creation it could look like that all of a sudden there was a big something that happened from nothing. However, nothing is not nothing. It is "no thing-ness", which is different than nothing, zip, zilch. From my perspective, this emergence of somethingness is more like a flowering or crystallization of potential. It is not violent and it is not menacing. It is the same process that brings a flower into bloom. Modern astrophysics would have us believe that we live in a violent universe filled with all things in constant cataclysmic crashing and burning as if the universe is at war with itself. The view of the patriarchal mind set (pms, by the way), based on fear, dualism and separation, projects these notions of violent creation onto science as if they are of course normal and correct. These are the same projections that create violence in the everyday experience of life the world over. If we think that the universe in which we live is a violent one, how can our outlook about life possibly be any different?

Thank Goddess, I don't subscribe to a violent universe theory. I feel the YoniVerse is actually a magical benevolent female beingness. Because we are alive, we must come from a source that is also alive, which is not separate from us. We are Source. I have recently discovered some other ideas about our origins, some of which have been around for a long time, that I was never taught, and I am sure most people have not been as well. One view I have found deep resonance with is aether theory, or Akashic theory. Some meanings of Akasha are "shining", "aether", "space." As an early hippie back in the day, I learned about the Akashic records from psychedelic excursions into the unknown, where doors of perception opened and my consciosness expanded in ways that I could have never imagined. I delved into studies in Eastern religion as well as shamanism, and I have learned that all roads lead home--and home is the abode of Love. Aether/Akashic theory has come to the same conclusion, and the brilliance of the science is that it intersects the spiritual and reveals that there is indeed no separation. All is Love. In aether theory, creation is seen as eternal, and non-violent where there is no big bang. Why is a "theory" such as this one not taught? In the West, it has been around for about 100 years, but for our ancestors, it was understood long before that. Aether is often referred to as the fifth element and is said to emerge from a fourth dimension according to Paul La Violette, author of Genesis of the Cosmos:

"La Violette believes that the cosmology of the ancients is a better alternative that does not suffer from the Big Bang’s singularity problems. According to many ancient cosmologies, the universe evolved over billions of years as a result of a continuous process of matter and energy creation from a supposedly fourth dimensional realm, the aether. This creation process has never ceased and still continues today according to La Violette. To sustain his claims, he explains that the universe at heart is not a closed but an open system and is able to receive energy and matter from a fourth dimension without contradicting the laws of thermodynamics. From these observations, Paul La Violette reasoned that the aether may likewise spawn wave patterns from two aether states, two different aetherons, which continuously mutate from one state into the other and visa versa. In normal cases, the aether maintains its equilibrium state due to the second law of thermodynamics, however under critical conditions these aether transmutations... may become self-organising and form stable wave patterns. These wave patterns will become observable in our physical universe as electromagnetic energy, light." (http://wemustknow.net/2010/09/introduction-to-modern-science/)

LaViolette is telling us that we live in an electromagnetic universe that is constantly creating and re-creating itself through restructuring, or de-structuring. I once had a mentor who told me that electricity is "God in action." I would say "Goddess" in action is a brilliant dance enacted by aether and matter in total oneness and harmony. There is no separation or duality to worry about and mistakenly believe in.

And, from the same website, "The A-field of torsion waves may be new to science but its existence has been known for thousands of years in the East. The only new thing about it is that it is being rediscovered by western science. Eastern spiritual tradition has named this field the Akasha field. Akasha is a Sanskrit word meaning radiating or shining, it’s a synonym for aether. Akasha is the womb of creation bringing forth every physical aspect that can be perceived with the senses according to eastern traditions. In ancient eastern spirituality the history written within the Akasha field are called the Askashic chronicles, the book of life that records everything that has ever happened or will happen in the universe. The Akashic chronicles or Akashic records contain the story of every soul that ever lived on this planet." (ibid)

When I read the reference here to Akasha as "womb", I was blown away. Where do we ever encounter science referring to anything that has to do with creation using this metaphor of pure primal femaleness? It is a far different vision than the one we have been exposed to for too long--that of the massive violent ejaculation whose particles don't result in elegant creation but rather massive collisions and fiery destruction. Womb creation just feels better. And it's smarter. Incredibly smarter.

Monica Sjoo Passes Into the Arms of Goddess

This is the story of the passing of Monica Sjoo, pioneer feminist artist, author, and one of the founding mothers of the awakening of Goddess spirituality. Monica's last project before her passing was the contribution of her artwork to Leslene's book.

Two years ago, I came to visit Monica from California, where I live, to spend time with her following my attendance at the First World Congress on Matriarchies in Luxembourg. Since Monica could not go to the conference, I felt I could bring it to her. It was a wonderful time sharing with her the news about women (and a few men) gathering from around the world to talk about the truth about matriarchal culture. I felt I was bringing news of revolution/shevolution to her-a shevolution she has been part of for a very long time. She was in hospital then, dealing with bone cancer. I showed her digital photos of the conference on my laptop, talked and laughed with her, and did hands-on-healing with her. She told me how much she loved "having my strong hands placed on her body." I felt glad she could receive the healing energy. During that visit, Monica was able to come out of hospital and attend a healing ritual for her at a friend's house. Many of us placed our hands on her and tended to her like mothers and grandmothers. I always feel the ancient sisterhood when I can participate in ritual in sacred space, and felt so thankful that we could spend quality time like this together. I felt we were continuous in that circle with the matriarchal consciousness I had just experienced prior to coming to see her.

I have only recently returned from being with Monica again. This time was different. Monica was making her transition back to the Mother/Goddess, and she was at home, tended to by her son and friends. I had a specific purpose in coming to see Monica this time. I wanted to say thank you and good-bye to her. And I wanted her to see the final cover and manuscript of the book we had been working on together for several years, which turned out to be her final project. Monica's art graces both covers and the text, and her words in her introduction provide a portal for the reader to enter into the sacred realm of the Goddess. She had been asking me over the last two years when the book would be done, so I had a mission in bringing it to her. I feel that Midwifing Death, Returning to the Arms of the Ancient Mother, is a final tribute to her. Amazingly, the first printed copy of the book arrived at Monica's from the publisher on the morning of the day she died. It was the first time I saw the book in print. While she was not conscious, and so did not see it with her physical eyes, I felt the Goddess brought it to her in the way She felt was best for Monica. Her timing was extraordinary.

I arrived from a long journey from California on the Monday night before Lammas. Many friends along with her son, Toivo, gathered by her bedside that night to share a Lammas ritual with her. Although we knew Monica had been full of surprises, like going to Sweden when the doctors said she would die soon, we all knew this would probably be her last ritual. Her women's group created a beautiful altar of flowers and harvest fruits in the center of the room on the floor next to her bed and Marie France played her magical harp. I was particularly captured by her rendition of Pachabel's canon as her gliding fingers effortlessly coaxed the strings to surrender their tones. The music was riveting and sacred. Monica's good friend, Nancy, who generously housed me and cared for me while I was in Bristol, gently asked me if I wanted to offer something for the ritual. Nancy shared with me earlier that Monica said at a previous circle "I want to die, I want to fly." I remembered this as we all stood in circle holding hands. I felt that to really honor the energy in the room, the ritual needed to be very simple and needed to meet Monica where she was. She had decided only a day or two earlier to stop drinking and eating. She had clearly made her choice about what she was doing.

I have realized from my own priestessing experience for many years that one needs to be present enough to be able to read the energy that might arise in the space, as well as be flexible in the moment, and not attached to doing or having agendas about how things should be if there is a calling for something different that can only be felt in the moment. I feel rituals are created from the heart. I did my best to offer what I felt was needed for Monica-the creating of a sacred space in which people could offer blessings to her if they wanted to. It was a kind of harvest and sharing of the heart. One by one, we went to her bedside and said words from our hearts as we handed her a flower. Those of us in the circle held the space with gentle toning as people went to her. Monica received the flowers until she held a bouquet in her hands. When she felt she "had enough", as she put it, we made a collective prayer with those who did not have a chance to sit with her and sent loving energy to her. I felt we gave permission to Monica to let go, and that we were all witness to her process in leaving this world. We passed a cup of elixir to share communion. Marie France played Pachabel's canon once again, closing the circle. Monica said in a loud strong voice, "I want to die, I want to fly." It was certainly not a usual Lammas circle in how people are used to celebrating harvest and honoring the cross-quarter time between the Summer Solstice and Fall Equinox, as it was certainly quite unusual to have a beloved sister in the circle who was actively dying. So, it seemed to me the definition of harvest was more about the meaning of Monica's life and death, our willingness to share, and her willingness to receive.

It was my experience in the ensuing time I spent with Monica that our circle provided her with sacred permission to die, which is very important to give, if possible, because it lets the dying person know that it is okay for them to leave. It seemed that Monica's anxiety settled down after the circle and that she entered a more peaceful state. I had the opportunity to spend one-on-one time with her in which she spoke her truth in moments of lucidity, sharing some of her feelings. This gave me an opportunity to offer her some midwifing/coaching, much like a midwife does at a birth. I reminded her of the need to surrender and that death and birth are really the same. She gently closed her eyes and seemed to retreat into a deep well of being.

I left for a few days during Lammas to go to Cornwall. I wanted to go out on the land and pray at sacred sites. I was fortunate enough to get to re-connect with Cheryl Straffon, who I met ten years ago at a Goddess Gathering in California, and in seeing her again I felt a kindling of an instant connection with a long-lost sister. Cheryl was kind enough to take me to several places where I could be with the ancient Grandmother stones and Goddess. It is such an amazing experience to feel held by the landscape the ancestors/ansisters revered as the very body of the Mother, Herself. The luscious nurturing one can experience from this, if one is open, is beyond description. I felt Monica's presence everywhere. I also went to sacred wells and made prayers for Monica for safe travel on her journey. At the sacred well at Sancreed, I saw a Lammas poetry tribute hanging in the tree to Asphodel Long, who returned to Goddess several months before Lammas. I felt Monica was in good company!

As I returned to Bristol by train from Cornwall, I had a sense that Monica had made her transition. I held the space for her and learned from Nancy, who picked me up at the train station, that Monica had just passed two hours before I arrived. We went directly to her, and sat with her. I felt I concluded my Lammas ritual with her by sitting by her side and doing a prayer practice that is said to help the spirit of the departed. Feeling full of ancestral love and wisdom, I visualized a Great Mother Goddess in front of Monica's heart, imagining a sweet, golden, nurturing Heart Light stream forth from Goddess towards Monica, meeting the same Heart Light emanating from Monica's heart. I visualized all of Monica's karma purifying as her light met with the Mother's, the two becoming one, and Monica merging with Goddess. I did this over and over for quite a while. It is said in this practice that when we die, we are the child luminosity jumping into the lap of the Mother luminosity. May it be so.

I feel Monica was held by the winds of timelessness that will grant her wish to fly, and that she has returned to the arms of the Mother.

Merry meet, and merry part, and merry meet again.

Blessed Be.

Sardinia: Land of Dea Madre

I have been back from my study trip to Sardinia and Italy for over a month now. As I re-settle into my familiar life, I feel different. Traveling to lands and sacred sites where evidence of the Goddess is irrefutable gives me a new spark and added hope. Since these times in which we live are indeed perilous, as the global wanton dis-ease of the hatred of women spreads, going unnamed and unnoticed, while simultaneously claiming victory as the number-one most inhumane, degrading, violent, deadly, destructive, disastrous and unspeakably painful force on our planet, I felt nurtured by the living presence of the Great Mother, Dea Madre, in Sardinia.

When one has an opportunity (and I am fully aware that this opportunity is not afforded most people in the world, therefore, I am deeply and profoundly grateful for it in my life) to stand on and touch the Motherland where her children lived in complete and total respect for her presence and abundant bounty, one can experience a profound change at a cellular level. While I believe this same consciousness existed here in the soil of my birth (USA), there is something tangible still existing in Sardinia, an island off the coast of Italy, thought by some to be Atlantis, whose rugged and serene shores are graced by the turquoise-sapphire waters of the Mediterranean. Sardinia herself is the Great Mother. Her immense beauty and great diversity--oak cork groves, stunning grottos sheltering millions of years-old stalagmites, mysteriously shaped granite rocks carved by the mistral winds of time, millennia-old olive trees, brilliant red poppies dancing among ancient ruins, stunning ancestral triangle wells of the Goddess, Neolithic sacred sites, beehive shaped rock-hewn structures, uterine shaped giant tombs, and ancient Goddess figurines-have given her the name "Dea Madre", or Goddess Mother.

Because Westerners, white ones in particular, have generally not been raised with the lineages and legacies of our ancient ancestors, many of us are bereft of a true deep connection to the wisdom of the mother-as if we are cast adrift floating on a turbulent sea waiting for rescue, not knowing our own plight. In Sardinia "Dea Madre" lives in the hearts of the people-she is a primal living legacy. Here in the USA, Goddess reality is usually marginalized into some sort of "esoteric feminism", suggesting that feminism itself is a non-viable world-view. Nothing could be more viable. In Sardinia, everyone seems to know Dea Madre. Even though Christianity made its arrogant presence known in Sardinia, it did not entirely usurp the pagan/goddess reality it encountered. To this day, in some parts of the interior, people practice earth-worship and paganism, maintain a form of matriarchal family structure, hold land in common and pass on healing ways through the oral lineages of women.

I asked our guide about the rich Italian strega (witch) tradition. He replied that strega has a reputation like witch does in our culture-something bad and scary, quite similar to the demonizing of women healers in patriarchy, as in the inquisition. I was saddened to encounter this reality. It shows the presence of the ubiquitous layer of patriarchal domination that we must eradicate. Even though I was sad about yet another way in yet another place of the normalized disrespect of women, I was nonetheless happy to hear what he had to say about the Sardinian women living deep in the interior. He spoke of female healers in a very respectful way. He told us the Sardinian women healers, known as majarzas, keep paganism alive and do not accept money for their services. He was proud to report this-proud to be Sardinian where paganism/earth spirituality is still a way of life for some, and very clear about communicating that Christianity had not taken the earth out of his people.

Tracking the African roots of the Goddess was the focus of our study trip, organized by feminist cultural historian, Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, whose theory about African migrations and return Semitic migrations found validation as we uncovered crucial evidence she identifies as central to her theory. For instance, we visited ancient Neolithic burial sites, like the necropolis of Montessu, circa 3500 BCE--graves cut into the hillside with spirals and pubic V's etched in stone, flushed with red ochre and the Dea Madre carved into rock (excitedly pointed out to us by a tour guide who was just leaving the site who wanted to make sure we saw her. His words about her came off his lips as easily and as naturally as a simple greeting. Not only was I stunned by her carved image in the rock, I was also stunned by his "of course, there is Dea Madre, you must see her" passionate manner. A man, no less--a man not threatened nor in competition with the Goddess Mother. That, in and of itself, was also a remarkable experience). Lucia's "theory" (I personally don't view this as a theory at all, but rather irrefutable fact), explicitly explained in her book, dark mother, African origins and godmothers, posits that African migrants traversed every continent of the globe, taking with them the values of a dark woman deity-equality, nurturance and justice with compassion-some 50,000 years BCE. We visited other sacred sites confirming this-the likes of which I did not know before going to Sardinia. Some of the iconic Goddess Mother imagery bears a likeness to the Cycladic Goddess imagery, and some of it I had never seen before, though the corpulent round shape of her was very familiar to me from my travels to other sacred places in Europe, and through the work of the late eminent arecheomythologist, Marija Gimbutas, as well as through other feminist researchers and scholars like Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor.

A magnificent structure, said to be constructed circa 1500 BCE by the mysterious Nuraghi civilization (a Bronze age culture from 1500-500 BCE that built large stone bee-hive like structures. There are several thousand of these structures, called nuraghe, throughout Sardinia, and this culture is the subject of much debate.), a sacred well renamed by Christians as St. Cristina's, took our breath away. There in the countryside was this magnificent sacred 3500 year-old ritual well, its triangular/yonic opening carved into the earth with steps leading down to the sacred waters of the goddess. To us, it was unmistakably a well constructed in the shape of Tanit, the North African goddess of Carthage, widely known throughout the ancient Mediterranean. The stairs descend to a small pool of water, held by a large rounded stone-hewn structure resembling a uterus deep within the earth. Looking up through the uterus-shape one could see spirals of light winding to the top where a perfectly round opening emerges above ground. At the equinox, the sun's rays penetrate the triangle, touching each step as the light meets the sacred mirror waters within the body of the mother, reflecting directly up through the womb-opening at the top at ground level. Every 18 ½ years the moon, at the solstice, on her path of descent, is mirrored in the circular opening, her light bouncing off the sacred water within, traveling up the stairs, emerging from the yonic gateway at ground level. This sacred place is indeed an amazing feat of astronomical architecture. This year, 2004, the moon will work her magic at this most holy well at the time of the winter solstice. I could feel the presence of Dea Madre as I sat at the edge of the stairs, witnessing the dripping water from the uterine wall of stone, scooping the precious water in my hand and anointing myself with it. I could feel the deep veneration and peace of her wisdom and the very ancient, global, yoni-versal (meaning the "song of the yoni"-from my perspective, a truly wonderful way to perceive the "universe") presence of her being.

After such an experience, I was shocked to hear a male tourist view the well and exclaim "phallic" something. Though I don't know exactly what he was saying, as he was speaking Italian, I could feel his lack of understanding at what he was viewing. I felt deeply protective, and felt a call to educate. I went to the small information sign posted to the side of the well, and spoke to the woman who had been with him (the man had apparently gone off somewhere else) and told her that it was not a phallic site at all, that it was a sacred site of Dea Madre, whose likeness was shown on the sign, though with vague explanation. She listened to my English as best she could, and I felt that we had an understanding that women are sometimes able to share regardless of cultural and linguistic differences. It is common to find a strong male bias in archeological explanations, both in scholastic writing, in museums and at sacred sites, so why wouldn't the man have thought this to be another "god/he" place? However, I remain impressed by the general acknowledgment of Dea Madre in Sardinia. A recent publication about this sacred well, Il tempio a pozzo di Santa Cristina, by Franco Laner, which I bought at the small on-site gift shop, speaks to the goddess mother symbolism of Tanit. Thank Goddess.

As we wound our way through the pristine beauty of the countryside of Sardinia, we stopped at archeological sites and museums that further validated the evidence of Dea Madre as well as the presence of African influence. For me, this tour was more than academic interest. It was a deepening of my connection to the understanding of ancestral origins, sacred earth spirituality, reclaiming the true religion of our planet, restoring feminine power to its rightful place as well as uncovering the layers of truth smothered by the patriarchal lies of his-story. Entering a church in the capital of Sardinia, Cagliari, I was completely taken aback by the deep ebony statue of a nude African tribal woman resting in the corner to the left of the front entrance. Her presence was totally astonishing. The explanation was that St. Augustine, to whom the church is dedicated, was African, and I might add, a terrible misogynist. And yet, here in the house of "god" was this African woman divinity. I felt the church was really hers. There were also many symbols of female divinity and paganism, such as a carved snake coiled around the base of a pedestal, spiral and yonic motifs on altar boxes and remarkable black madonnas.

Black madonnas are plentiful in Sardinia. Lucia's observation is that black madonnas appear along African migration routes. Patriarchal explanations say they are black because they are reflecting the fact that they were carved from wood, or that they are covered with smoke from a fire. However, when I stand in the presence of a black Madonna, I can feel her ancient origins wearing the garb of Christian co-option. I have felt this before in a church in Malta. In one church we came across a Dutch artist whose particular area of interest was Ethopia. He had a display of his art depicting the black Madonna amidst her people-it was so inspiring to me that I bought one of his vibrant and brightly colored paintings: the black Madonna at Pentecost surrounded by shining, adoring African faces. To me, his rendition of the Madonna holds within it the memory of the very ancient dark mother of all (see my article Luminous Dark Mother at www.awakenedwoman.com under my previous name, Leslene McIntyre). The adoration in the eyes of the people he painted glows with the same deep love one can witness between mother and child.

Many places in Sardinia abound with tales of miracles of the Madonna. Even though my interest usually circles around more ancient cultures, I found myself completely amazed at the religious focus on Dea Madre in her contemporary form as Mother Mary within the more christianized places of Sardinia. The focus was not on Jesus-it was on the feminine-the mother, Dea Madre. In one small sanctuary we visited, we found a rosary in the gift shop in the shape of the biological symbol of the female! It was reminiscent of Tanit, as the ancient memory of the Goddess appeared before us in this form. We were all stunned, astonished, moved. And needless to say, many of us purchased the rosary. The picture on the little card tucked in the pocket of the carrying case is a black Madonna.

In many churches of the Black Madonna, and no doubt, churches in general, there are traces of early paganism, Goddess spirituality and earth-worship. We saw amazing black stone spiral pillars surrounding black Madonnas, yonic symbols, spiral motifs, snakes, rosettes, statues of nurturing women, and folk art. In Rome, I was deeply struck by a magnificent large stained-glass window of three honeybees, well known to be sacred to the Goddess, particularly in pre-patriarchal Crete and the Mediterranean. Honeybees are a cooperative matristic society, something we could all stand to learn from and remember from our ancestors. There they were, in great colored-glass beauty, emanating the radiance of the goddess as the light of the sun held them in her warm embrace. This church, as are so many, was built on a holy goddess site of the ancient Near-Eastern Goddess, Cybele.

In one church I visited, I had a very unusual experience. Some churches have a place where one can purchase religious art-postcards, iconography, posters, and rosaries. When I went to pay for some postcards, the elderly man behind the counter came around and spoke to me in excited Italian, which I didn't understand. He beckoned me to sit down, and kissed me on both cheeks. He gifted me a large poster of Mary and a card with a picture of St. Monica, the African-born mother of St. Augustine, with a poem titled "Prayer for Mothers." I couldn't help but feel that he knew on some level I was a Goddess Mother devotee, a mother myself, and that Dea Madre, Mary, St. Monica and myself were all the same Mother. I also felt he had a deep reverence for mothers in general, which is rare, and had absolutely no shame in expressing his true and deep veneration of the Goddess to me. Though he probably did not use the word "Goddess", his sharing about her was unmistakable.

Visiting the Villa Giula Etruscan Museum in Rome was a very interesting experience. After having seen the ancient tomb of the "Giants", Coddu Vecchu, a Nuraghi megalithic monument in Sardinia resembling a large uterus with a yonic entrance carved in stone in the front, I was deeply impressed by the people who built such a structure. I was then amazed to see hand-fashioned terra cotta uteri resting on the shelves of artifacts from the Etruscan culture in the museum in Rome. The mysterious Etruscans, inhabiting northern Italy somewhere between 900-800 BCE, were a pre-Indo European culture favoring egalitarianism far more than the Greek and Roman world. I felt I was seeing once again another thread of the ancient Mother Goddess as she wove her way through the chthonic, psycho-spiritual, biological flowing memory-field of her many children, first from Africa to the rest of the world.

The actual building of yonic/womb/tomb structures and the handcrafting of clay wombs by peoples from these two different cultures spanning hundreds of years reveal a definite message for anyone willing to see. Upon viewing the clay uteri, I remembered that my friend had previously pointed out to me a famous and unusual swaddled baby Jesus figure in a church we had visited. It struck me that the swaddling looked very much like the clay uteri I had viewed in the museum. Perhaps the swaddling was symbolic of the mother's womb. Viewing the clay forms also gave me pause for reflection on the great stone beehive type structures of the Nuragi. My mind swirled with pictures of honeybees, beehives, and the bee-body shape of the clay uteri. I could feel a kind of ancient intuitive connectedness with the ancestors across time.

Because I was on a spiritual pilgrimage paying homage to the Goddess Mother, which is my passion, I was deeply impacted by the patriarchal split I experienced as well. This split is everywhere-including deep within our own psyches. It is a split reflecting the usurpation of the ancient values of woman-centered life and female divinity by androcentrism and narcissistic, phallocentric, "religious" domination. At the same time I saw the black Madonna in the extravagant churches I saw the black Madonna begging on the steps of the church, outside the heavy doors. The dark-skinned women, old and young alike, sitting at church entrances, begging for money to eat, to feed their children, or for medicine, posed a stark contrast to the veneration of the black Madonna icons gracing the very ornate inner sanctuaries of these gilded structures, considered to be places of worship. My heart ached for the obvious and arrogant inequality, as the men inside the churches (priests, etc.) didn't seem to see their Madonna sitting on the steps outside, begging for mercy.

When I gave them money, their faces lit up with a kind of eternal/maternal love that held no anger or malice. I was particularly moved by one woman. She was very old, it seemed, bent over like a tree that had been constantly blown by a forceful shaping wind. She walked the sidewalk in front of a church, humbly holding her small cup in front of her. I could not see her face, as she was so bent over, though I could feel her timelessness. I stuck a bill under her fingers so that she had a grip on it. I said "Buon giorno" to her, and she replied, "Buon giorno" in a sweet, quiet voice. I felt she was Dea Madre, bowed by the pain of women's oppression, walking, walking, waiting to be seen. The gift of her sweet presence will be with me for the rest of my life. I feel to be that sweet in the midst of such burden is something that only an old woman can know.

Then there was the dark-skinned gypsy mother with her two children sitting on the sidewalk-Dea Madre of the streets. Her darkness wasn't because she was carved from wood or covered by smoke. Her two children fearlessly approached me, holding out their small hands, eager to receive anything my white privilege would give them. I gave them some loose coins, which felt like a pittance. I walked along on my way, the image of their mother staying with me, her presence asking me to open my heart. I went back to her and gave her some money and took some bag lunches we had been given that were packed with an abundance of food and gave them to her. I looked into her face, and saw myself. I experienced her open heart brimming with love and gratitude welling up in her deep brown eyes. There she was once more, the begging Dea Madre. These women meant more to me than I can say. I know that when the women and children are cared for the same way the stone churches are, Dea Madre will truly bless us with her grace. Until that time, we are destined to suffer in confusion, because if she who gives birth, and has done so since the dawn of time, beginning with the first dark mother of Africa, is not venerated, then so goes all life.

I have brought home with me the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of a little-known place that will live in me for a very long time, particularly the many faces and mysterious presence of Dea Madre. I am thrilled the archeological evidence in Sardinia provides Lucia with further affirmation of her passionate discourse on our African heritage and human beginnings, for the values of the dark woman deity must be restored in order that peace be remembered and sustained. It is equally important we remember the dark mother as the mother of all, for she is the living truth. Our ancestors knew what we must remember. This truth is finding its way into the scientific community as in astrophysics, for instance, in which the "Mother Universe" theory explaining what happened before the so-called big bang (which I call the big she-bang) posits our genesis from "a timeless dimension that has always existed and always will, bearing daughter universes down an endless corridor of time." (U.S. News and World Report, Mysteries of Outer Space, p.14, December 2003.) A theory, I might add, not unlike the very way the honeybee recreates itself.

To Dea Madre

I feel you sighing through the starry mists of ancient mistral time
Your great granite breasts nurture Earth and Sky
My daughter-self, fruit of your great sacred womb
Breathes your sweet essence.
Liquid turquoise and sapphire gently lick your sandy softness,
Red, blue, purple, yellow and pink
Ecstasy
Flowers across your expansive earth body.
Red magenta blood cork trees glisten in your
Musty forests.
Great, great grandmother olive tree,
Roots alive held deep in your dark body,
Branches catch the whisper of your voice on the wind….
Dea Madre
My heart weeps for you and for me and for us all
You, begging on the sidewalk, dark eyes shining
You, walking the cement sidewalk, pacing, waiting
You, dark mother, your children with hands open
Searching my face for coins
My heart opens
I can think of nothing else
I see you and my spirit cries
"What has happened?"

Birthing as Shamanic Experience

Giving birth naturally, according to Vicki Noble, is a "peak shamanic experience" for a woman (Shakti Woman). When women give birth in wide-awake consciousness, we are given the opportunity to know how we are in relationship with the mysterious creative life force.

Our body-wisdom knows how to birth a baby. What is required of the woman who births naturally is for her to surrender to this body-wisdom. You can't think your way through a birth, and you can't fake it.

In some spiritual practices, much attention is given to the process of the rising kundalini at the base of the spine when one enjoys various "openings" in the pursuit of enlightenment. Barbara Walker refers to kundalini as the "Tantric image of the female serpent coiled in the lowest chakra of the human body, in the pelvis."

Giving birth is one of the most profound human experiences of that "opening". It is kundalini moving through the birthing body, rising with every rush of energy that opens the cervix. Not only is the opening felt during these rushes, but also in-between. The opening experience has a deep resting place where the body and soul of the birthing woman gather strength to accept the coming waves of the awesome kundalini as it continues to move through her, culminating in the birth of a new life.

Giving birth is one of the most profound human experiences of that "opening". It is kundalini moving through the birthing body, rising with every rush of energy that opens the cervix. Not only is the opening felt during these rushes, but also in-between. The opening experience has a deep resting place where the body and soul of the birthing woman gather strength to accept the coming waves of the awesome kundalini as it continues to move through her, culminating in the birth of a new life.

When I gave birth, I had the experience of feeling that I was the All, and the All was me, and that we were in this ecstatic dance together. I was the created and the creator at the same time, the dreamer and the dreamed, the breather and the breathed. There was no question about "where" my spirituality was; it was not in the sky, it was in the body. It took every ounce of "great pure effort" -- a buddhist teaching of what it takes to achieve enlightenment -- to show up for the process that was moving through me.

If I chose to spend time complaining, the birthing energy reflected that. It was immediate cause and effect. It was not that I had to deny pain, but I was supremely challenged to frame it in a way that would allow safe passage for my baby. I was asked by the Goddess to surrender completely to the experience, and let it take over. When I felt the energy of birthing kundalini as painful, my midwives compassionately guided me to interpret it in a different way, where I could integrate it as something that would take great courage and strength, but that I had it in me to open to it and take it in.

My midwives were mothers too, and had been through the experience. They knew what they were talking about. This made a big difference in how I could create a safe passage for my child. To have compassionate mirrors telling me I could do this made it possible for me to do it. I trusted them. I had to learn to feel the energy of creation as intense rather than painful, and trust that my body was capable of handling this intensity.

In giving birth, I also learned about the nature of surrender.

Many spiritual teachings tell us that surrendering is essential to spiritual well-being. We need to learn that we are not the center of the universe, and to be open to outcome. When a woman gives conscious birth, she experiences this teaching directly. I did not know if I was going to live or die, nor did I know if my baby would live or die. Entering the unknown in full surrender, the mother is in a deeply spiritual relationship with the All.

For women in patriarchy, this sacred connection is not acknowledged. What women are told is that we must go to the hospital -- the place where people go when they are ill. And what happens to us there? We are told how to give birth by a male mind (whether it be mouthed by women or men). And in these directives, we are made to feel dependent on what the male mind knows.

The male mind says that women need to escape the experience, and take numbing drugs. When a woman is drugged, her baby is also. In that state, she does not get the opportunity to experience birth as a process of enlightenment -- as an awakening of her soul. Patriarchy does not want women to know this power of birth, because men will not be able to control women if women know this power inherent in our beings.

It is my prayer that women will be able to come together and find our "tend and befriend" ways togetFor some strange reason, or reasons, men fear this power. How very odd, since it is where they come from? Men wind up fearing where they come from, and spend lifetimes trying to be better than this power, trying to control this power, being jealous of this power, fabricating male birth myths to prove they have this power. In the process, they have developed amnesia about what this power is really about and how they are part of it. Until this changes, unless there is transformation at the core, there is little hope for a peaceful existence here on this planet. Changing the faces of the cast of characters in this drama does not create a new play.

The experience of my birthings also showed me the incredible power of sisterhood. My guiding sister-midwives became the embodiment of the priestesses of the Goddess. They completely cared for me and loved me through a most difficult passage. They watched over me like angels, and took care of all my needs. Apprentice midwives stayed with me after the births, and I could just stay with my babies and bond. I was tended to by people who came and cooked, and looked after things until I was ready to resume my regular life.

I was lucky to live in a place where women and children were loved. The sacredness of the time during and following the birth was honored by the entire community. Everyone had respect for a woman who had just given birth, and everyone knew that I was in an altered state. My male partner was able to witness the love of women, and the love of the mother and child. He was able to surrender to the process, and not be concerned about being the star. He was able to be of service. And, he was able to bond with our babies as well. He was not afraid to love them, and did not feel shame when showing tenderness. Witnessing this miracle changed him and opened his heart. He was grateful to be a part of it, and humbled by the magnitude of what women do in birth.

The Goddess was everywhere. It was Her face tending me, guiding me, and feeding me. It was Her face looking back at me through the eyes of my babies, and it was Her arms that held these new beings and it was Her breasts that nourished them.

The Birthing Woman as Original Shaman-Goddess

Women were the first shamans.

In Shakti Woman, Vicki Noble refers to Geoffrey Ashe, a noted British scholar of shamanism, who has written that shamans were originally women, and that the oldest form of the word "shaman" refers to "female shaman." Vicki writes, "Ashe is very clear about one thing that especially interests me: He says that ancient shamanism was not an individual phenomenon but something that was practiced by the female group. And the power of the female group is biologically rooted in menstruation and the blood mysteries of birth." (p 13)

A shaman is one who flies between the worlds, and who has a foot in both worlds -- that of the seen and unseen. When a woman bleeds, she enters the world of the unseen, the world of dreams, intuition and spirits. Because we, in the west, are not educated in these ancient ways of seeing, we do not know how to embrace them. But, with Goddess re-emerging, our memories are returning, and we are re-membering.

With the female group bleeding together, the collective vision is deep and profound, with far-reaching affects on the community. In matrifocal societies, it was probably true that tribal life was guided by the visions of women who bled together. Women accessing healing and wisdom in the unseen realms through their blood, in rhythm with the moon, together, was a primal shamanic art. And giving birth was also a primal shamanic art.

Monica Sjoo clearly gives her perspective on women's shamanic art in New Age and Armageddon: "The ancient Goddess was the birth and death Goddess and fertility wisdom and shamanism are about crossing between the worlds. The birthing woman is the archetypal shaman as she brings the soul from the other realms into this world, forming and incarnating it within her body. She is mediator between the worlds and magically converts bread and wine into flesh and blood in mysteries of transformation." (p 194)

Birth is certainly messy and bloody. It is intense, fierce, fiery and loud, but not violent. It is bloody from shamanic transformation. Birth-blood is the primordial ocean of life that has sustained the child in utero; the giving of this blood in birth is the mother's gift to her child. The flow of blood is the first sign, following the flow of waters, that signals that new life is on the way, just as it is the first sign of a young maiden's initiation into a new life at her menarche. The blood of transformation is miraculous. In Spanish, the phrase "dar a la luz", to give birth, literally means " to give to the light". Giving to the light -- mothers giving birth are giving light to new life through blood. The messiness and bloodiness of birth are the gift of the Earth--elemental chaos coming into form.

Honoring mothers as the first shamans honors all of us. Recognizing that without our mother's love, nurturance, and healing wisdom we would die, shows us how to be in cooperation with the web of life. Respecting our mothers teaches us respect for the Great Mother.

Men do not have to be jealous of not giving birth. Instead of focusing on what they don't do, they can focus on what they do. Men can rejoice that they emerge from such sacredness, and are tended to, nourished and loved by Her. They don't need to wage war against Her because they don't do what She does. She has provided them with other mysteries to unravel.

Men need to spend time figuring out what these mysteries are, instead of what they are not, and not blame women or the Mother for their own internalized perception of inadequacy they have developed as a result of fear and competition and the dreadful teaching of "separation."

It is essential for women to return to the wisdom of our bodies and to reclaim our power and our wisdom inherent in our femaleness in order for global transformation to occur. It is essential for all humans to surrender the fear of Her and allow Her to once again guide our lives. For without Her, we are clearly headed for extinction -- the only outcome of denial of our Mother.

Women and Water

As a student, teacher and independent scholar of pre-patriarchal women's culture and spirituality, I feel that to really understand our environment and what is happening in/with it, it is vitally important to understand and respect the connection women have with the environment.

Basically, woman is the environment. The curves of valleys, canyons gorges, caves and mountains of the earth and the wild and serene flows of her waters reflect the body of woman in our sacred form. The earth's ability to spring forth the magnificent diversity of life from her body, sprouting it from her holy dark that reflects the dark matter (from "mater", meaning "mother") in the universe, or yoniverse, nurturing the tender sprouts into fruition, directly mirrors woman's sacred ability to birth and nurture from our own bodies. Our ability to give birth is more than a biological function. It is the very assurance of the continuity of life itself. From our blessed breasts, milk, for which the word "galaxy" is named, as well as the "milky way", flows abundantly, sustaining the very life emerging from the body of the mother.

What happens to the environment when women are not allowed to breast feed? When companies like Nestle colonize women and teach them that a canned and/or boxed product, no doubt invented by men, is better than breast milk for babies? Wbat happens to the environment when breasts are considered to be "indecent"? When women internalize these lies?

Woman is the creatrix of life. Our ancestors/ansisters had no doubt about this fact, as evidenced by archeological, anthropological and cultural herstorical confirmation of the primal truth of women's existence. A black female deity from Africa, color of the dark energy and matter of space and the soil of earth, is the original deity of our planet. Women, when left alone and "allowed" to be the mothers of humanity in the ways in which we see fit, would ensure the quality of life for all living things, as did our ancestors/ansisters, and would know better than to destroy our environment.

Unfortunately, women have not been "allowed" to be ourselves for the last 5000 years, and have since been colonized, oppressed, repressed, suppressed and who wouldn't be depressed from such a savage/ravage-- basically flattened by male control and stupidity. What happens to the environment when women are not seen, respected, loved, revered, and honored? What do we expect will happen to our environment when the values of mothering, love and compassion are replaced with out of control male ego, domination, rape, control, violence and war? If women are not loved, how can a rainforest be?

How women are treated befalls the culture, environment, civilization as we know it and everything else. It is painfully clear that the worldwide oppression of women is obviously reflected in the degradation of the environment. It is also painfully clear to me that while we can make advances in helping the environment by being less consumption oriented, becoming more conscious of not taking more than we need, giving back in important ways, and where relevant, remembering our privilege as first world people, until women are restored to our rightful place of respect in the world, the environment will continue to reflect the hideous inequality, hatred and misogyny on this planet-- until it is transmuted.

One area of working with this trasmutation is in purifying water, the single most important resource begging for attention. I have recently come to an understanding that water is the reflection of our state of mind. It is interesting to note that early people who were in direct relationship with the Goddess, or Great Mother, or whatever you choose to call Her, had a profound respect for water, and its connection to the life fluids-blood and milk. The early symbols of spirals, meanders, zigzags and chevrons, first appearing on rock art and then in pottery, were representative of life-giving water. These symbols were precursors of the written language, so perhaps we could say not only do we come from water, so does language. Water, then and now, remains the life-giving Goddess/Mother.

Right now, our water is seriously disrespected and polluted, worldwide. I see a direct connection with the mistreatment and oppression of women and the wanton disrespect of water. Water, in its natural pristine state, forms absolutely beautiful crystals in response to its environment, as well as to the spoken and written word. When women are allowed to flourish, we create an environment full of beauty and joy, the truth of which can be seen in some of the earliest rock art from Africa. Water, exposed to caring and loving energy, mirrors that energy, and can heal itself. So, then, can we.

Our bodies are composed of 50% to 70% water during our lifetime. When water is exposed to the words "love and gratitude", it forms itself into exquisite crystals. Imagine what can happen to us and to our environment if we truly practice love and gratitude.

Japanese scientist and doctor of alternative medicine, Masaru Emoto, has shown water's ability to directly mirror what is happening around it. It is obvious that the messages from water can once again remind us of our true heritage and from whence we come. Because he has seen that the hexagonal crystal structure of water is the basis of life and nature, he says it is absolutely essential that we return to Mother Nature, which to me, is another way of saying we must remember the Goddess, and what follows from that is that women must be globally respected and honored.

My vision sees women as not only the birth-givers and caretakers of life, but also the stewards and protectors of pure water for our communities ("muni" means "gift"). I feel it is of vital importance to keep our precious water from becoming the commodity of greed, privatized as an object of privilege, and keeping it accessible to all as our birthright and inherited gift from the Great Mother.

To aid my vision I have co-founded a women-owned environmental business, Environmental Purification Systems, currently looking into removing MTBE from water in California as well as investigating other serious environmental concerns.

Leslene della-Madre (formerly Leslene McIntyre) is President of EPS. She also continues her lifelong work of healing and midwifng the spirit, teaching and writing. Her new book Midwifing Death: Returning to the Arms of the Ancient Mother is now available. (Contact www.midwifingdeath.com for further information.)

Midwifing Death and the Gift-Giving Paradigm

When I think of the sacred Earth Mother and the sacred Dark Mother of the great yoni-verse, or song of the sacred gateway of all life, death and regeneration, I feel a deep, expansive stillness, wrapping around me like a warm velvety blanket woven with the wisdom threads of the ancient wise grandmothers who have gone before me. The really ancient ones-the ones reaching out across the timeless expanse of this stillness, piercing my heart, beckoning me to wake up to my whole/holiness, as a woman, made in the image of the Mother Goddess herself. I see before me the dancing primal mothers of Africa-whose legacy of love, justice with compassion and equality remains encoded in our mitochondrial DNA.

Opened up by the love of the ancestral grandmothers, I feel the deepest sense of mystery and magic holding my being, and I feel the sacred truth that we are all born of the Great Mother. I feel this has always been true, and always will be, even though the current twisted male-dominant paradigm would have us deny our beginingless beginnings. This paradigm, the mind-set of which I have termed the patriarchal mind-set, or pms, has claimed all of women's sacred blood mysteries as its own, tricking itself into believing that men give birth to women from their ribs, and gods give birth from their thighs and foreheads. The patriarchal mind-set, or pms, has broken the sacred hoop of life and forced it into a straight line, with no connection between beginnings and endings.

This pms has also co-opted the mystery of death, disconnecting it from life and rendering it an enemy. The sacred regenerative cauldron-womb of the Norse goddess, Hel, was corrupted by patriarchal christianity into hell, a frightening place of eternal burning and damnation. Medusa, sacred snake-haired crone hag, meaning "holy", was beheaded, an act considered by the pms to be heroic, in order that men might conquer death and become immortal. Conditioned by such painful distortions, we of western civilization suffer from a deep-seated fear of death, the mother, women, menstrual blood, birth and life. We have all but lost women's ways of knowing; however, our truth cannot be destroyed and remains embedded in our cellular memory, now giving rise to a worldwide collective remembrance as women gather to share and support one another in our awakening, as we are doing here and now.

As one who has been working on reclaiming women's mysteries and magic for many years, I have felt called to find this hidden knowledge about every possible aspect of life I am capable of uncovering and understanding. Genevieve Vaughn has defined for us the basis of community-that of gift-giving and sharing, as she reminds us that "muni" is latin for "gift". In applying this creative wise-female vision to death and dying, I have come to see that death does not have to be the traumatic, life-denying event we are told it is. Death can be a peaceful passage into the next world-the swinging door back through the yoni-gate of mystery (show slides).

I have had the honor and privilege to midwife beings in their dying-animals and humans alike. What stands out for me the most is that when beings feel safe, the process of dying can unfold organically, peacefully and beautifully. My mother's death was such an event. Like so many women, she was a survivor, which was a hard road for her because of the legacy she inherited from her mother, who had been institutionalized at the beginning of the 20th century, like so many, many women, when it took only one signature to claim a woman insane, usually done so by a male family member or male physician. My mother's mother was a brilliant woman, enormously talented and creative who suicided at the age of 54. My mother had heard for many years from her mother that "it was a man's world." I am sorry for my grandmother's pain and for not having the opportunity to know her. I stand now as the lineage holder of my motherline, saying no to further oppression and violence towards women. I know both my mother and grandmother are proud of me, as I carry on with their vision.

My mother, an only child, was the daughter of her mother's pain. With that legacy, she grew up afraid and angry. Who wouldn't have? She was also creative, talented, brilliant and innovative. I decided a long time ago that I would help my parents die, and not place them in a home if I could help it. While they both did have to spend some time in a convalescent hospital, I was committed to being there for them, to aid their passages and to provide an alternative to an uncared for ending of their lives.

So, I brought my mother home to die. Her full story is in my book, so I will only briefly share it here. She spent three days with us before passing, and I watched her change from frightened and anxious-what they call "end stage anxiety"-- to open, peaceful and surrendered-without the aid of morphine. I treated her like an honored guest in my home, creating an environment of peacefulness, beauty and love for her. I transformed her room into what I call a beauty field with flowers and candles, low light, and soft music. I often sat quietly with her, holding her hand, gently coaching her to let go, and giving her permission to die, letting her know that we, her children, would be ok. As I cared for her in this loving way-the same way a mother would care for her child-I witnessed the armor she spent a lifetime acquiring simply fall away and her anger and rage melt into a deep peaceful surrender, without fear. During the last moments of her life, I spoke gently into her ear, as it is said that hearing is the last sense to leave, and guided her into the loving arms of the Great Mother. She had even called out to her mother during her dying process. I rarely heard her speak of her mother during her life, as I think it was too painful for her. But in her death, it was as if she saw and felt her, calling out to her, saying "mom." My mother reached a consciousness of openness in a very short time during her dying, really, when I think of the time she spent in rage in her life and how identified she had become with it. She was able to open to letting go in grace.. I was holding her hand, and guiding her, and then she simply did not take another breath-there was no struggle or resistance. Her face appeared smooth and young looking, with a peaceful expression that surprised me. It was truly a miraculous and beautiful death.

The time of her death was marked by a warm, golden, early morning sunlight filtering through the windows as the sounds of singing birds heralded a new day. Since she died on April 15, which, in America is tax day, I couldn't help but feel her wry sense of humor about the two sure things in life she would talk about-death and taxes. She remained in her bed for three days at home. I would periodically go to her bedside and visit with her throughout those three days.

My children were at home, and they were a part of their grandmother's passing. At first they were frightened, but when they saw that the face of death could be peaceful, they were able to be present with their sadness and grief and move through it. Nothing was hidden from them.

Since I have been a midwife assistant at many births, I was used to feeling that sacred precious energy of new life, and my mother's death, her birth into the next realm, felt exactly the same way as a birth into this life. I simultaneously felt sorrow and joy at her passing. My sorrow was not for her. She had passed quietly and gently. It was for me, feeling the absence of my mother. However, at the same time, I felt an indescribable joy, because I was witness to a process of such undeniable exquisiteness, and I thought who would ever believe me that death can be beautiful?

I maintained the beauty field for her for three days, bringing in fresh flowers and candles, keeping her room like a temple. I showered her body with flower petals. Family members came to be with her and felt moved by the simple presence of what death looks like-no makeup job from a morturary, no hiding her body from view-just death, simple, serene and very present.

In midwifing death in this way, I feel the gift I gave to my mother was the love of the mother. It is this love we are sorely lacking in our lives. In a gift-giving paradigm, I envision that everyone would be well versed in what motherly love is and how to give it. Children would be raised in it and would therefore internalize it, growing into adults who would know how to give and receive love. Death would not be equated with violence and war, and women would be respected as the givers of life-the most precious gift indeed.

In my work with the dying, I have been inspired to find a way to help mend the hoop of the circle of life, bringing death back into the circle as part of, rather than the cold, uncaring opposite of life as it is seen in patriarchal cosmology. This patriarchal opposition has created a dualistic split between life and death, good and evil, dark and light, female and male, right and wrong, etc., with a white male elite at the top of the dysfunctional dominating hierarchy, instilling the idea of the necessity to be "god-fearing". In a mother-love paradigm, god-fearing would be unheard of.

This oppressive conditioning has devastating effects on who we are as sentient beings as well as on our Mother Earth, as we all know too well. In order to find an understanding of how our ancestors dealt with death from an integrated life experience, my passion to find the truth about women-centered culture and our ways has brought me to a study of ancient pre-patriarchal cultures.

A major key to this understanding is to know that in our ancient heritage, death was always associated with regeneration and never stood alone, as archeologist and linguist, Marija Gimbutas, has so eloquently shown in her comprehensive volumes, Language of the Goddess and Civilization of the Goddess. The Death Goddess was always the Goddess of Death and Regeneration, from the Paleolithic through the Neolithic. Regeneration in the womb-cauldron of the Great Mother gives us the vision of the wholeness of life, affirming the passage of death as necessary in order that the flow of life continue, like a river cascading over a mysterious edge, turning into a wondrous waterfall. This forgotten regenerative aspect of life through death, so revered and respected by our earliest ancestors, and hidden from view in patriarchal religions, is indeed the mother's gift of life, of which we are all a part. It was women's sacred practice as priestess to serve as midwife to life and death, as the shemana, shamanka, or shemama, as I now call her. The remaining great temples of Malta and the great womb tombs of Neolithic Europe are the ancestors' gifts to us of this primal wisdom.

The elements of fear and denial currently existing in our supposed modern death practices can keep people bound to a morbid, life-denying, dissociated experience of both life and death. If we cannot see death for what it is-a passage from this life into the next realm of mystery that serves the spiral of life in completion of the great round of the Goddess, then how can we see life for the complete and total gift of exquisite magnitude that it is? If we live in fear, how can we begin to know how to gift one another?

Meeting death in the gift-giving paradigm means to wake up to our life and reclaim our healing ways. We are still feeling the effects of the women's holocaust of the inquisition, which mostly go unnoticed and unspoken except in places where we can all nod in agreement and dare to speak of our herstory about what happened to our foremothers. And in the unspoken realms, we are deeply affected by the collective grief and loss women experience cross-culturally, and have been for 5000 years. Women's healing magic understands that life and death are one, moving in a seamless ebb and flow of creation. This magic knows the greater whole, and that we are all connected through our breath and blood, gifts from the body of the Great Mother.

Women's sacred cultural view of life and death is a nurturing one. It is not that there is an absence of pain and suffering in this view. It is, however, a life-sustaining cosmology, as woman bleeds life into form, suckling it at her breast, and tending to it in death, guiding it on its way through endings to new beginnings, as if we are nurtured in life at one breast and nurtured in death at the other. In this view, economics would not determine how well one is tended to and cared for in their passage. Love would be gifted, and would be its own reward.

Our early ancestors/ansisters seemed to enjoy a kind of ecstatic oneness with the Mother-it is this ecstasy I believe to be the womb-essence of women's true religion. Like our primal African mothers, whose rock art shows their celebration of life, let us dance together, sing, create, love, and share all our unique gifts through life and death. And the primal grandmothers will dance with us in celebration of our re-membering.

And now, I want to ask you to share with me a vision of motherly love in death and dying. I want to take you to the Wildzone, described by author and artist Patricia Reis as "strictly female space, woman-centered, woman-defined, woman-loving space. It is where women find each other as support and resource. It is where women's culture is formed" (Reis, Daughters of Saturn p. 36).

MEDITATION: The Wild Zone

Close your eyes, if you wish, and take some deep cleansing breaths. Allow yourself to relax and open, letting go of hurry and worry. Let your mind calm, and allow a sense of peace to wash over you. Breathe in nurturance from all around you, from the endless supply of love in the yoni-verse.

Allow the grandmothers of timeless time to appear before you, beckoning you to open into trust, beauty and joy. Allow a sense and or image to come to you of a loved one who is dying. Perhaps is might even be yourself. See them surrounded by caring and loving women who are tending to them in grace. See the space filled with beauty協lowers, candles, soft music, draping cloths, soft light, sweet smells of flowers and incense. Hear the women as they begin to quietly sing, forming a circle around your loved one. Their sound is like a lullaby. You sense your loved one feeling safe and surrendered. There is a feeling of wonder, magic and peace. The presence of mystery fills the space, as the natural organic process of life recreating itself unfolds. You sense your loved one beginning to let go, listening to the gentle guiding voice of one of the women who whispers softly in their ear, guiding them to let go, into the arms of the Mother. The midwifing women are the priestesses of the Mother on the side of the veil of flesh, blood and bone, ushering this precious life into the waiting arms of the Great Mother on the other side, in seamless continuity.

It is said that our true nature is 10,000 times brighter than the sun. Allow the warmth of this truth to emerge, as your loved one surrenders to the limitless space opening before them. Your loved one easily passes from this life to the next, and you remain, feeling the awe of the eternal flame of life, as it changes form. You remain, holding the space for your loved one to journey forth in a showering of the blessings of your love. There is nothing to fear. There is only love. You feel the presence of regeneration, and marvel at the truth that endings are new beginnings.

Patriarchy in Our Contemporary World Situation

For the last 5000 years the global rule of men, or patriarchy, has wreaked havoc and destructive chaos on earth and all her children. This grievous fact is hardly noticed by anyone in our species other than those who are victimized by it-women and children. And even then, those who suffer at the hands of male rule are often blamed for that which is inflicted upon them. We very often hear about injustices of racism, oppression, and classism. While these are certainly cultural and social priority issues, we almost never hear of the injustices of sexism, from which all other "isms" spring, and the misogynist foundations of patriarchal structure and hierarchy that create the unspeakably abusive state of dominance, or power-over. The paradigm of power-over affects every aspect of our being-spiritual, mental, emotional, psychic, biological, psychological, environmental and cultural. This topic is immense, and it is beyond the scope of this article to explore all the effects of patriarchy on our contemporary world situation. I will therefore touch on a few salient points to hopefully inspire further inquiry.

From this writer's point of view, patriarchy is the root of the world's problems-i.e., war, colonization, rape, sexism, racism, destruction of the environment, so-called "domestic" violence, terrorism, pornography, sexual slavery, kids killing kids, fascism, religious fanaticism, and homophobia, to name a few. I am not afraid to say that while it may sound simplistic that I state patriarchy as the problem, it is simply the problem. According to pioneer authors in feminist spirituality and women's culture, Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor, patriarchy is disconnection from cosmic oneness. Male rule without the values of female wisdom is completely and unequivocally insane. It can't get much more simple than that.

Because women birth all life, it only follows that maternal values would maintain and nurture the community, which they did in matrifocaled cultures around the world for millennia, and still do in some existing matriarchates, as in the cultures of the Mosuo in China, the Minangkabau in Sumatra and the Berber in Tunisia. Without this very basic structure for life to thrive, destructive chaos and an ever-growing narcissism reign, which is what we experience in patriarchy in many forms. I have named the cold, isolated and desperate mind-set that has emerged from this condition, the patriarchal mind-set, or "pms."

Citing the amazing Devi-Mahatmya, the epic myth depicting awesome female power from 400 CE India, author Ajrit Mookerjee writes, " It is said that Kali sprang forth from the brow of the Great Goddess Durga to annihilate demonic male power." It is indeed time now for demonic male power to be subdued once again. In the myth, the gods alone could not tame the out-of-control asuras or demons, the embodiment of control and domination. The gods had to summon the Goddess, the Great Mother Herself, in the form of Durga, whose name means "Beyond Reach." The asuras were "man-beasts", mighty in their force, multiplying at an electrifying rate, quite like what we see happening in the world today. Our own current government grows more fascist everyday. Author and activist Arundhati Roy speaks of the Nazi-based fascist philosophy sweeping India. Our environment is under constant assault; the connection between the war against women and the war against the environment goes virtually unnoticed by those too entitled to pay attention. Any war currently being waged on the planet is a war against women. The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and Israel I have spent time with agree. These out-of-control demonic forces are first engendered in a white male elite whose hunger knows no bounds, giving permission for all men to follow. Pms has colonized wherever and whatever, including women's bodies (ever wonder how women got stuck with the label "pms"?), resulting in what I refer to in shamanic terms as the collective soul loss of the sacred female. This myth is medicine for our times. It is clear the Goddess was summoned because she alone had the power to subdue the demons. Mookerjit states, "We have suffered the consequences of unbalanced power for long enough. Our world cannot any longer tolerate the disruption and destruction brought about by demonic force. In the present Kali Age, Kali is the answer, and she will have to annihilate again in order to reveal the truth of things, which is her mission, and to restore to our natures the divine feminine spirituality which we have lost." In shamanic terms I call this restoration "soul retrieval" of the sacred feminine. (Refer to my presentation "Soul Loss of the Sacred Feminine," available on tape from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, under the name Leslene McIntyre). I feel this very book is a collective effort in summoning the Goddess, for if we do not, there is little hope for the survival of our species. Gaia herself will cleanse and heal in the way she needs to do so. She does not need humans to survive. I feel her patience is wearing thin.

It is profoundly significant that human beings on this planet have lived longer in peace than we have in war, with the veneration of a female divinity at the center of life. Corroborating the work of Sjoo and More, cultural historian Lucia Birnbaum shows in her research that the original deity of our species was a dark woman/mother at the center of life-originating in Africa-- whose values include justice with compassion, equality and transformation. It is her theory that the African diaspora seeded the world with the values of the dark mother, who is also the earth and cosmos (see my article The Luminous Dark Mother in AWe, www.awakenedwoman.com). Based on her research including that of geneticists Birnbaum tells us that there is indeed only one race-African.

Like currents of water rippling out from the toss of a stone, the waves of patriarchal horror have spread out across the earth, only in tsunami proportions. Documenting what she refers to as the Kurgan invasions, the late eminent archeologist, linguist, archeomythologist and scientist, Marija Gimbutas informs us that some 5000 years ago, peoples from the steppes region of the Black Sea descended on the peaceful and apparent egalitarian and no doubt, matrifocaled cultures, of Old Europe, in three different waves of conquest, spreading out over several thousand years. These Kurgans were patriarchal in nature-why, no one seems to know exactly, as they were certainly part of the original African diaspora. Somewhere along the way, the focus of deity changed from mother to father, and the thundering sky god was born, lightening bolt in hand, who for some reason, had a penchant to conquer, dismember and destroy the mother, usurping her myths and co-opting her magic, thereby creating very strange myths of male birth, i.e., a man giving birth to a woman from his rib (Adam) and a man giving birth to a daughter from his forehead (Zeus). With these kinds of myths imprinting the minds of the conquered, a terrible and distorted reality emerged in which the male sky god became the almighty ruler over and his place of abode was somewhere else outside of his creation. This karmic snowball formed into a hierarchical paradigm with males at the top and all "others" on the bottom. In Europe the eventual formation of the church, whose "fathers" seethed in a deep-seated hatred of the Great Mother and Her powers to give life, created one of the most horrific holocausts of our time which goes virtually unnamed in history-that of the witch burnings and inquisition from 1300 to 1700, in which hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of women died at the hands of a male elite in the name of "god." All of the male-dominated religions created by pms, old and new, are based on the same deep-seated hatred at their twisted patriarchal core.

This is one of the most devastating effects of patriarchy on our world situation-male religious persecution and oppression, and male privilege and entitlement that accompany such grandiosity. Because there is a multitudinous number of examples of the patriarchal overthrow and usurpation of the Great Mother the world over, I will not go into detail, as the subject is too lengthy for the purposes of this article. In giving only a few examples, the reader will be able to gain a sense of the immensity of the vast sweep of this pms across the globe and the changes in human evolution (though some refer to it as "devolution") it effected.

In Christianity, the Mother Goddess was relegated to either virgin or whore, modeling for women the only choices for their existence sanctioned and defined by the god-fathers. (Virgin in this sense is associated with chastity. It has since been reclaimed by such writers as Esther Harding and Nor Hall to mean "she who is whole unto or herself" and "belonging to no man."). The Islamic name "Allah" was a late Islamic masculinization of the Arabian Goddess "Al-Lat" or "Al-llat", primal lunar deity of Arabia . Along with Al-Uzza and Menat, they formed together the great religious trinity of the ancient Arabians. It is said that Mohammed once revered the desert goddess of the morning star, Al-Uzza, whose name means "the mighty" or "the strongest", until he turned on her and destroyed her sanctuary of acacia trees south of Mecca. The Brahmans assigned the attributes of the great dark mother, Kali Ma of India, the Hindu Triple Goddess of creation, preservation and destruction, to the male deities Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Current accepted teachings of Buddhism are made up of deeper layers of wisdom from such goddesses as the Taoist Queen Mother of the West, whose present acceptable patriarchal form is probably the male buddha, Amitabha. There is also considerable evidence suggesting the well-known and highly venerated male deity of Tibet, Chenrezeg, was originally female. The Djanggawo creation myth of the Australian Aborigines tells how the men stole the sacred objects of the women. There are numerous stories and myths of diverse peoples from around the world, such as the Komo from Guinea, the Kalabari of Nigeria, the Pygmies from Africa and the Amazon tribes from South America, all telling the same story of men usurping the power of women by stealing their sacred objects such as ceremonial masks or their sacred musical instruments; in some places women are punished by death if they even attempt to play their instruments. In these few examples, it is obvious the subjugation of women, women's culture and wisdom in the name of religion is a world-wide patriarchal phenomenon. The effects of this degradation are unspeakable.

When women are hated and denigrated, all life is hated and denigrated. This simple truth seems to be a very difficult one for most to grasp. When woman is not allowed to soothe the soul of humanity with her songs and rhythms, the tribe and community break down. The denial of the mother by pms over time has eroded an authentic sense of the sacred, especially for inhabitants of Euro-Western culture. Unfortunately, patriarchal Euro-Western culture is spreading its lies around the world: for instance, the promise of freedom through consumerism and narcissistic consumption and capitalist globalization. According to Johanna Brenner, author of Women and the Politics of Class, global capitalism is undermining older forms of male dominance while at the same time making women's life conditions more difficult. She writes, "women and children, even more than men, are victimized by global capitalist restructuring. Economic insecurity and impoverishment, exposure to toxics, degradation of water, high infant and maternal mortality rates, forced migration, increased hours spent in paid and unpaid work are only some of the indicators of women's burdens worldwide."

Because of the inequities of an inherently flawed paradigm and because of the world-wide treatment of women as second-class citizens, any shifts in the social order moving in the direction to help women are often obstructed by male-dominated agendas. For example, advances made for women in Roe vs. Wade are now being reversed because men continue to assume it is their inherent right to govern women's bodies and sexuality. This constant struggle over who has the power to govern women's bodies, which is ludicrous to be a question at all, comes from the deep-seated fear, hatred and jealousy of women's power to give life-the very same thing for which women were persecuted and burned at the stake centuries ago, the embers of those fires still burning in our collective cellular memory. Brenner points out, "The major forces contesting feminism, for example, within development policy circles and the international conferences through which the United Nations attempts to regulate development policy are not those of the new world economic order, but organizations representing groups threatened by the loss of older forms of patriarchal political and economic power: Islamic governments, conservative Muslim non-governmental organizations, the Vatican and Catholic organizations, the Protestant evangelicals, and the International Right to Life Committee.

The disconnection from the sacred natural order and the changes in definitions of family from matriarchal to patriarchal ("Matriarchal" does not denote the opposite of patriarchy. It is not a system of power-over, but rather power-with) have been some of the most devastating effects of pms on humankind's ability to survive and thrive as a cooperative, harmonious species, living as part of nature. Instead, patriarchy sees and treats the living earth as a machine -something to be narcissistically used by pms and discarded without care. The change from the Mother-Goddess to the Father-God in our human journey upon this earth sounds a death knell that can be heard loud and clear. One way in which this sound reverberates is through the denial of our collective need for a mother. Patriarchy denies such a need, instead stuffing down our throats that "God" is good, male, and of the sky, while woman is evil "Eve", dark, bloody and of the earth. The Father-God is seen as the mothering presence we must all cater to in fear, or we will suffer the consequences of his wrath. No mother in her right mind would raise her children under that threat of fear and punishment. As a mother, I know. I have four children. The mother-child bond of love stands alone. There is nothing stronger. However, the divisive reality denotes women as the undesirable half of the dualistic equation. It is inherent in this view that women, then, are to be despised, as are our bodies, blood and milk-all the true necessities for life to sustain itself. This hatred attempts to break the mother-child bond, which, in the long run, it cannot do. However, in the short run, we are seeing dire consequences from the cold-hearted attempt at its disruption.

One of these consequences is that young males in patriarchy go uninitiated and grow into raging, lost men, acting out their learned disdain for life and women. Exposed to pornography at exceedingly early ages, boys internalize the socially sanctioned "boys will be boys" values of domination. They learn that to be a "man", they must objectify women and see them as sex objects to be used as soon as they are old enough to use one. The psychic, emotional and mental confusion a boy suffers from this is exacerbated by the fact that he lives with his mother, and perhaps a sister, both of whom he is learning to hate and disrespect on a daily basis, not only through the exposure to pornographic magazines, but also by exposure to the dehumanization of women through television, misogynist music, violent and "sexy" video games and movies, as well as the internet. There are no sacred rituals in this wasteland of a culture to support young males growing into manhood to give them a sense of the sacred, their relationship to it and how to nurture themselves in a loving way. They then turn on the mother, and isolate themselves in a terrible imprisonment of the father, whose steel bars tightly prevent the fierce softness of the mother to enter. Because the maternal values of love, justice, compassion and equality, to name a few, are not allowed, boys are encouraged to become hard and rigid, and to push down their sensitivity and tears. There is only one outcome from this-the rising of the out-of-control demonic male ego. And there is only one solution-the summoning of the Mother to subdue it. Imagine how our culture would change if boys were taught that their primary relationship in life is to the Mother Earth, as some Australian Aboriginal tribes teach their boys. Spiritual male traditions in Aboriginal culture center on men's initiation into the knowledge of the feminine principle. According to author Robert Lawlor who lived among the Aborigines for fourteen years, after a man has achieved his high degrees, he is then given an opportunity to enter what is referred to as "women's law," which is considered to be the "highest law." Lawlor observed that Aboriginal culture is based on the earth Mother, the Universal Feminine, and the ground on which men enact their sacred rituals is referred to as "Mother." Lawlor also reports that it is only recently that women have been recognized as being spiritually "higher" than men in Aboriginal society. I do not believe this is a reference to a hierarchical reality. I believe it to be a recognition that women are the older race and are therefore the elders of humanity.

Such an elder from a different part of the world is Canadian-born author Louise Goueffic. As an independent scholar she studied English and other Indo-European languages for over thirty years. In her groundbreaking and courageous book, thirty years in the making, Breaking the Patriarchal Code, for which she received personal threats, Goueffic looks at the gender biases in our language and has created new ways to change them. In studying Goueffic's work, I was stunned to experience, in my bones, the effects of patriarchy on language-English, indeed, is a patriarchal code of a subtle hidden agenda promoting "the idea of male dominance, violence, political gain and control" Goueffic examined over 10,000 words invented by men to describe the world. "She points out the absurdity of trying to describe the female experience using words coined by men." In concert with my earlier discussion of the rise of the father-god, Goueffic brilliantly explains that "the semantic ascent of man from natural father to supernatural father of All is achieved by creating the ultimate dichotomy: Father-Everything and Mother-Zero, showing the archiparadigm Father-Subject lord of Mother-Object. In it the masses of world-be rational men suffer from the deep guilt inherent in delusional male privilege. History is the story of war, the vir (wir); it is man most in conflict with himself." Barbara Walker has shown that the word for "man" is the Sanskrit "vir", and that "man" in Old Norse meant "woman."

While it is difficult and complex to address the effects of patriarchy on our contemporary world situation, one's heart can be warmed by a soothing ray of hope in the way in which women the world over are responding to the destructive wake of chaos we all experience. Even though pms is running amok, there are creative and nurturing actions rising up from the ashes. One very interesting response to the world situation is the creation of the science of biomimicry, a new way of viewing and valuing nature. According to author and devoted nature-lover, Janine Benyus, this science looks at what can be learned from observing the natural world rather than fixating on what can be extracted from it. Benyus simply points out the obvious: "Biomimicry is a new science that studies nature's models and then imitates and takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems, e.g., a solar cell inspired by a leaf." I feel her clarity of vision comes from a deep, female way of viewing and experiencing the world and cosmos. To me, her approach to knowledge is a mothering approach-one that is holistic, compassionate and inclusive, and is actually an ancient viewpoint, very much like the present-day matriarchal culture of the Minangkabau of Sumatra, whose social structure and understanding of nature to culture is based on their proverb "Growth in nature is our teacher." A Minangkabau elder says, "We study everything around us: human life, animals, plants, mountains, hills, and rivers. Nature surrounds us in all the events of our lives. We learn from the good in nature and throw away the bad."

With nature as their teacher, the Minangkabau also live in deep respect for women and the mothering principle: "Matrilineal adat (custom) is in accordance with the flora and fauna of nature in which it an be seen that it is the mother who bears the next generation and it is the mother who suckles the young and raises the child. In nature, all that is born into the world is born from the mother, not from the father." Minangkabau philosopher M. Nasroen suggests, "the primordial emphasis on the maternal and the development of matrilineal adat law were fused because of their fit with the animistic past, in which nature constituted the model for culture." I believe Benyus' work and research is an example of a remembering of the primordial, animistic reality in nature that beckons us to choose the path of creation rather than self-centered destruction.

Another positive spiraling effort swirling out of the dust of the patriarchal storm is what author Johanna Brenner, mentioned earlier, sees as a rising feminist power. She states, " based in part on women's incorporation into wage labor and their access to literacy and education, feminism has emerged as an organized political force. Women from the global South are not only mounting challenges in their own countries but are participating in a global feminist movement that is capable of affecting the policies of transnational organizations such as the UN and the European Union."

Spiritual feminism is also another way in which women are responding to the conditions of patriarchy. Many women are inspired by the Goddess-our original mother, and are waking up and questioning the patriarchal conditions and definitions to which we have been enslaved for 5000 years, and witnessing how we collude in our own oppression. For instance, women are reclaiming the power of menstruation and teaching daughters to love their blood through empowering rituals that celebrate women's bodies and the sacred power of creation uniquely embodied by the female form.

It is time for women to rise and unite our voices, hearts, wombs and minds to change and transform that which does not serve life. The patriarchal event in human history must come to an end. With our collective power, let us call on the Great Mother Durga to help us. The time is now. It is said in the Devi-Mahatmya that Durga's commitment is to "nourish the world in time of need with the vegetation from her own body, and that in her 'terrible' form she would deliver her worshippers form their enemies and bless them." Durga's mysterious appearance in time of need and disappearance when aggression is subdued is considered one of the most profound aspects of the myth, "for the feminine action in the cosmic drama is without retentive, ego-seeking ambition." As women undo the shackles of oppression from male rule and domination, and stand up to patriarchy, both inner and outer, life on our beloved Mother Earth will rejoice in beauty, love, compassion, joy and ecstatic celebration, for this is what the ancestors/ansisters knew, and we shall know again.

Narcissism and PMS

Yesterday I went to see my doctor, and when I put the book down I was reading, she noticed the title and asked me if it was good. The book is "Narcissism, Denial of the True Self" by Alexander Lowen. She said she thought denial of the true self is counterintuitive. I wholeheartedly agreed and said to her that it was a good book about narcissism, and she told me her mother was definitely a narcissist. I then told her that I felt that narcissism is an epidemic, to which she agreed with nervous laughter. I also told her I was doing research on narcissism because I am writing a book about it from a feminist perspective.

This column is not about the usual PMS we hear about. I am writing about PMS-the patriarchal mind-set-and the relationship between patriarchy and PMS. I see this mind-set as a 5000 year-old invasive virus-a dis-ease of the soul we have all been suffering from, including the planet, for a very long time. All the ills I see come from this virus. In shamanic terms, an invasive energy is causing a deep soul loss, resulting in horrendous physical, mental, emotional, environmental and spiritual sickness (when I went to type the previous word, I accidentally typed "dickness" instead. I couldn't help but notice this unconscious connection to what I am saying). PMS is a view founded on male domination and control, absent of love and full of hate. It is one we have all internalized, because we have all been living inside of it for 5000 years. And now it lives inside of us. Because energy follows thought, the deep gorge carved by this fear-based thinking exists inside our collective unconscious, our subconscious and our conscious mind. And, we are held in this deep abysmal gorge of the patriarchal mind, surrounded by steep slopes of isolation and fear. This grinding energy cuts and shapes our hearts and those of our children. We are dry, lost and covered over with the dust of ignorance, starving in a parched wasteland, desperate to be seen and heard as the loving beings we are and want to be. But because we are caught and bound in this painful reality, very often, our only survival is to become narcissistic-devoid of feelings and empathy, and desperate for the attention that we deserve but never got. We spend lifetimes searching for a way out, but creating karma instead because we don't know what we are running from and why we are so scared. In the process, we have managed to create an image of ourselves we hide behind-one that is only good. Therefore, all the rest of us, the not-so-good parts are projected outwardly, and we blame others for our pain-war is a good example of just this. We deny the true self in order to survive. This situation makes it nearly impossible to have truth and magic-the necessary threads weaving transformation. We are too busy defending ourselves and being sure we are right and that everything is "good", i.e., there is nothing wrong, everything is fine, you support me in my denial and I'll support you in yours. Meanwhile, our normalized addictions grow out of control, and no one notices because we are all in so much pain, and it feels not quite so lonely to suffer in company.

Narcissism is the result of an absence of love. Lowen writes it is the denial of the true self that creates narcissism. What is our true self? If our parents denied their true selves, how could we possibly learn about our own? As I see it, like the invasion of the body-snatchers, the PMS has taken over our true self-that which is rooted in love, compassion, justice, equality, cooperation, beauty, ecstasy, joy, presence, kindness, creativity, and celebration. These are the practices of the Goddess. We have lost the connection to the Goddess within. This is why narcissism exists at all. The Goddess is anathema to the PMS because Her energy threatens the constructs of domination and control. Our egos have become hard and rigid and we identify with our pain. We become our pain. The Goddess energy, like a loving and caring mother, seeks to heal the wounding of the reality of the PMS, but this love is not passive. It is fierce and active, and therefore scares the egoic structures of delusion. Challenging a narcissist on their behavior is like trying to interact with a bucket of tar. The more you try to get at it, the more stuck you become in it, because all they know is how to take. That is how devoid a narcissist is of love and feeling. In Euro-Western society, I feel we are all on this continuum. Some of us are more devoid and self-centered than others, but we all suffer from the same condition. I believe this condition is directly caused by a lack of respect for women and our power to bleed, birth and give milk. Without connection to this energy, this very sacred life-giving and life sustaining energy, narcissism grows, because there is no choice. The human being experiences this absence as a deep betrayal and from this betrayal comes a consuming rage-a healthy response. But because this rage is not identified early on as the reaction against a denial of love, it can only fester into a murderous rage when it really needs to be transformed. Hence violence, war, destruction, wanton hatred and general all-around non-caring and disrespect for life, which males perpetuate more than females. Why is that?

As I see it, all narcissism is not the same. Male narcissism has the component of entitlement and privilege that female narcissism does not have. While it is true that the undifferentiated ego claims privilege in its rage, the conditions of patriarchy and its effects on people and culture play a profound role in how narcissism develops. Because women are the oppressed in a male dominated society, the narcissism developing from this experience does not have the same sanctified position and acceptance as male narcissism. Women generally do not rape. Some, yes, but most certainly not like men do. Male narcissism is supported and encouraged by the use and abuse of women as objects and pornography. Female narcissism is not supported at all. If we are not the good servers of patriarchy, we are condemned and demonized. It is male narcissism that is the father of narcissism. Any woman caught in this trap-this "dickness"-loses her soul, becomes male identified and her self-centeredness becomes a struggle for survival in a male world. The male already has privilege in a male world. His narcissism is cute. Television commercials abound with such things as the husband waking up in the night with a cough while the pert and sweet wife jumps up out of bed, heads to the medicine cabinet to find just the right syrup, runs back, and pours it in a spoon and feeds it to him--to this grown man. He is just so cute sitting there in his bed, completely unable to do anything for himself, in total and complete expectation of being taken care of. She then comforts him so that he can go back to sleep. Women have to become more like men in order to be seen. It most certainly is not the other way around. Because of this, women lose connection to a deep sense of self-in patriarchy, our choices of who we are to become are limited to either being virginal or "whorific". Narcissism from either of these two realities is still defined by the PMS. Male narcissism and female narcissism both stem from the patriarchal male point of view, with females becoming so as a direct result of being oppressed, abused and dominated. Male narcissism rules. In a "kingdumb" where male narcissism rules, all are subjected to the influence of this out-of-control, disrespectful, insane perpetration/penetration. A male psychiatrist diagnosing a female as narcissistic would really need to know the depth of her pain and the depth of her colonization and assimilation and have empathy with the total and complete loss of her culture in order to understand her as a narcissist. A narcissistic male psychiatrist can sit in his privileged position and diagnose a woman-while his narcissism goes completely unnoticed--because he can. Freud could manipulate his findings of sexual abuse in women, blame them for it, call them hysterical, and come up with penis envy as a viable insight, all because he was too afraid to tell the truth and be criticized by the PMS of his day. His own narcissism went completely unchallenged, and yet, we have a whole system of "healing" based on his work.

If men were to become more like women who have re-membered our culture and dis-identified with the current ruling paradigm, things on this planet would be very different indeed. From my perspective, our only hope lies in the restoration of women to sacredness and respect, since life flows from our wombs, and all that is birthed by us is therefore sacred. When women reclaim this truth, the culture created from that wisdom will create beauty and peace. Women must exorcise any and all male identification in order to be free from this virus. Women's culture is vastly different from the current patriarchal paradigm we are agonizing in. Women's culture is based on love. Patriarchy is based on domination and hatred. Love is not a word. It is action. It is being. It is vital and alive. It soothes the parched hearts and souls of our narcissistic imprisonment and restores the wellness of our being.

How do we begin to become part of the solution? We begin by loving ourselves. How do we do that? By looking closely and directly at any and all of our addictions and freeing our energy to access our love. By giving space to our pain, and understanding it with compassion and self-forgiveness. By looking in the mirror and noticing all the negating self-talk and changing it to loving talk. By refusing to be a slave of the PMS and holding a space that can create something very different. This change that is so necessary is huge. It will not be possible to shift things overnight. But, we can begin with ourselves, and take to heart the changes we need to make in ourselves. I do not think it is of much value to be a political activist when one isn't an activist of the heart. Things will continue to spin around and around with very little movement until we understand the deep roots of the PMS and how all life everywhere on our planet is profoundly and grievously affected by it. Is it possible to heal narcissism? Some say it is not. I feel that it is, because where there is courage (meaning "to take heart") there is infinite possibility.

Everyday Cultural Battlezone

I had intended this column to be about Janet Jackson's bravery in baring her brown-skin African-American breast before Amerika during half time at the super-bowl, causing tremendous uproar and chaos. Good for her. Brava. A metaphor for our times-the return of the breast of the Dark Mother. And I was going to take a look at the schizophrenic reality of that and the paid-for-view half-time programming involving numerous women running around in their underwear playing tackle football, no doubt baring breasts, and the clamoring, gawking, oogling and beer-drooling of the viewers, all accepted as normal male behavior.

And then Michelle, a young 32-year-old mother of two, was kidnapped and brutally murdered in the county in which I live, a few days ago not far away from my home, her body casually thrown away into the local river like a piece of trash. Now I must write about her. The man who is the alleged perpetrator, an unemployed butcher, is being held in jail without bail. He was caught very soon after Michelle disappeared. It seems there was no provocation for her murder-not that there could be anything justifying his actions. He wasn't an ex seeking vengeance, or someone she wronged. Apparently, he is just a butcher of women. Friends and family say she didn't know him. She was walking home in the wee hours of a Sunday morning, and he somehow grabbed her and threw her into his truck. Witnesses say they saw a woman screaming in the back of a speeding pick-up truck, though they couldn't make out at the time what was really going on. Now they know she was screaming for her life. At the time they thought she might be a drunk person "playing around." Not that any drunk person can truly "play around." Real playing requires presence. A testimony, however, to what is accepted as normal-a screaming thought-to-be drunk woman in the back of a speeding pick-up truck straddling the tailgate doesn't need to be paid attention to.

She was not drunk, and she wasn't playing around. She was a woman, a mother, a daughter, a sister, a friend, living her life, and she was hunted down by a raging man, just like men hunt and kill animals for "sport." The police found evidence along the roadside-her bloody jacket, a lot of her blood and her tooth. Her nude body was found in two feet of water in the river, with obvious head wounds, and her long hair had been cut off. A man brutally and sadistically took the life of this vibrant young woman and robbed her children of their mother. What did he get from taking her life? What did he get from torturing her? What do any men get who commit these daily/deadly global crimes? What do men get from war?

This is war. This is war against women, anywhere, anytime, anyplace. Women live in a cultural battlezone day in and day out. Women are forced by the patriarchal mind set (PMS) to bear this burden, to accept it, to get used to it, which is impossible. Men don't have to live this way, because the patriarchal male mind dominates and controls any way it possibly can. When a woman fights back, a movie is made about her and she is called "monster." Academy awards are given to the actress portraying this "monster", this person who gave the rage back where it belonged. I don't condone violence. I am pointing out the severe gender inequities of being the hunted and preyed upon. Most men do not have to face living in a world where they are the hunted. Yes, some do-gay men and men of color have certainly experienced this, and other men in other places too. I am not talking about the exception. Several years ago, two gay men were murdered in the same town. Still, because it was men who were murdered, there was lots of publicity and coverage. Michelle was on the news for a short time…in the paper for a short time. Following her story on the television news was a much longer story with much more publicity about a man who was killed by a hit-and-run driver. I am sorry for his death and I feel sorrow for his family. Michelle's murder, however, is something that needs to be in every headline in every paper in the world, as do all the murders, rapes and beatings of women. This war is the root war we must end. No other war will end until this war against women ends. Why isn't Michelle's story publicized as much as the story of a white man who dies accidentally?

I am outraged at the cultural battlezone on this planet for the last 5000 years. People are afraid to say they hate something. I hate this battlezone I have grown up in and my daughters live in that Michelle was killed in. I think it is healthy to hate it. I am not condoning wanton hatred, like that of the man who butchered Michelle and like that hatred that compels men to create wars. What I am talking about is different-not known by the current ruling paradigm. It is a fierce hatred that must be used in a positive way…used for the good to create change, to speak the truth, to transform this battlezone. It is a kind of hatred that does not harm, because it is recognized, felt, contained and used for the better. To deny it is grievous.

I think the man who killed Michelle has a terrible hatred-for himself, for life, for everything. He has not learned that his hatred is not who he is. He has not embraced it and learned to understand it and use the energy in a positive way. He has allowed his hatred to hurt and harm-his hatred made him gynocidal. I am sure he was deeply wounded as a child-where hatred was directed at him. He in turn hated that hatred while at the same time internalizing it, receiving the message that he was not worth loving. All he knows is hatred, which he hates.

This denied, unfelt hatred men have is what creates the cultural battlezone for women. Women are targeted and projected upon-women are prey to men's hatred because we are the carriers of life, which men in their hatred, hate. We have all been taught that we shouldn't hate, that we shouldn't be angry. Women especially are taught that it is not proper or lady-like to be angry. Men get to be angry-their anger is sanctioned by patriarchy. However, they are taught not to feel, which creates a deep self-hatred, because they learn to hate their sensitivity. We all experience anger and hatred. They are powerful emotions and part of the human experience. What I think the teaching about anger and hatred is, is that it is okay to feel these strong emotions and that we must learn to be responsible in order to learn what to do with them. It is okay to feel them. It is not okay to hurt or cause harm to oneself or to anyone else. We can feel the emotion, transform it and not become it. We don't have to be our feelings. Feelings come and go, like the tide ebbs and flows. We are not our feelings. We are that which feels them-like a hollow bamboo. They come in and they go out, if we don't identify with them. If we identify with them, they control us and we are then out of control, which sparks a deep terror and panic. Satiating that terror is only temporary-i.e., an explosive reaction, a compulsivity to cause harm, mayhem and murder, creating a war.

In the case of Michelle's butcher, he is his hatred. Walking the street and area in which she was killed, I could feel a blanket of fear cloaking the town. An act like he committed sends out reverberations for a long distance. I could feel everyone being affected by his violence. Women especially.

Addressing this lack of safety for our well-being is the single most important issue in creating peace in the world. Every man who hates life must come to terms with his inner condition and transform it. Every man who is ashamed to feel his feelings must cut the shackles of his conditioning and find the courage to own his deep-seated rage. I think any time we hear of a woman hunted down and murdered by a raging man, true brothers need to rise to the fore and find ways to educate each other about their collective pain and take responsibility for it. Men need to go see their murderous brothers in jail and start talking about the truth of their pain. Men need to father their sons in loving ways and give boys the tools to meet their manhood in love and respect, instead of feeding them a diet of violent sexism, domination, stupid and violent videogames, movies and television, dysfunctional competition, one-upmanship, and violent, hard-ass sports.

Today I went with a friend to the spot where I believe they pulled Michelle's body from the river. Many footprints from boots, shoes and dogs were left behind in the mud from the police and search dogs that combed the area for her body a few days ago. I took dried rose petals with me and strewed them along the road down to the river as I walked, saying a prayer for her. I made an offering of the petals to the water, and watched as the currents carried them about, as if they knew exactly where to take them. Butterflies flew overhead and a large blue heron flew above and landed a short distance away. In all the horror, life expressed itself in great beauty as I made prayers for her. It was an amazing paradox. My friend and I built an altar out of stones along the bank of the river, marking a memorial for her. We put more rose petals on the altar and arranged colored rocks in a border, circling the altar. We lit sage and smudged the riverbank. We then drove to a place along the road where Michelle had screamed for her life, where she was bludgeoned by the butcher of women. I drew a heart in the dirt under the redwood trees and placed the rest of the rose petals inside it. We outlined the heart with fresh, green redwood leaves. I was reminded of the brutal slayings of four women in Yosemite by a crazed, raging mad-man several years ago. I went there with a group of women and we did the same thing there for those women. We did a healing on the land where the last young woman was murdered-stood on the very ground where he slashed her throat so severely that he beheaded her--and did ritual to cleanse the woods of the murderer's desperate violence that took the life of four women, including a mother and her daughter, and honored the women as our sisters, as casualties of men's undeclared war against women. Later, I contacted her mother, and invited her to meet with us at her daughter's grave and she shared stories of her beautiful vibrant daughter, bringing picture albums to share with women she didn't know. But we do know. We are sisters, and we can do things like this, because we are lovers, carriers and protectors. of life. We all listened to her stories and cried with her and shared her grief and pain. In those moments, we were women together, acknowledging the battlezone created by men's hatred, and we were peace.

As I stood back to look at the heart I drew for Michelle in the soft dirt along the busy roadside, the roadside of terror for her, I thought that maybe I should just go around the world and build shrines and altars on the places where women are hunted and murdered by raging, hateful, crazy men. I should just go and bring love and beauty to the places where women lose their lives to this heinous sport of hunting.

I left the river feeling not quite so helpless. I felt I had again done something to counteract the tyranny of the cultural battlezone. Tomorrow is another day. The battlezone women live in will still be there. And so will I to stare it down and dismantle it piece by piece, committed to bringing love and beauty to a parched, love-starved, Goddess-starved, female wisdom starved land.

And I thank Janet Jackson for showing us the black breast of the Earth Mother. Perhaps we may remember something deep and hidden. Perhaps we may remember.

Blessed Be.

Hotflash

As the world turns, I continue to be more and more intrigued by the plague of narcissism introduced to humanity by the white male elite and the advent of patriarchy, some 5000-6000 years ago. Like a cloud of locusts, this narcissism has descended on the psyche of humankind, and unlike locusts, it has not died out. Here in the West, this condition has become so normalized that we don't notice the sheer insanity of this state. This condition is very complex. In my last column, I discussed some differences between the genders and this narcissistic reality. In this column, I will explore a different face of narcissism.

I am currently looking at this new phenomenon of "reality t.v."-the latest of which is a rash (which is usually itchy and uncomfortable) of "let's televise the heterosexist relationship reality and encourage voyeurism of the projected male fantasy of relationship and broadcast it world-wide." These shows of suave Ken-doll bachelors, giggly and pert Barbie bachelorettes (the very word a derivation of dominant maleness, signifying female "less than" status) and bumbling "average joes", (and of course, there isn't one of "average janes" for a man to choose from, as women must at all times be above "average" to appease the appetite of hungry men) are steeped in the violent mind-set of objectification. Yes, violent-masked by the airbrushed appearances of beauty, glamour and romance. I have been studying some of these shows because they draw huge ratings, which mean that many minds, including the minds of the future, are absorbing this reality. Recently, a wedding was televised of one of these made for t.v. couples. The network spent almost four million dollars on the wedding. Four million dollars!!! It was billed as the biggest wedding event since Diana and Charles' wedding, and the biggest wedding of the decade. What is going on here?? What happened to women's liberation, the sixties, psychedelic revolution and consciousness-raising? How many starving children can eat for four million dollars? How much medicine can be sent to Africa for the uncountable AIDS victims for four million dollars? And this country spends that on televising a collective fantasy, promoting heterosexist god-the-father coupling and marriage! To me, this is an extreme form of narcissism. Why do the huge entertainment corporations need to promote this illusion? Could it be because the Bush regime fancies itself as the next world-order dicktator, and needs women to fawn and fuss over men, because their agendas are so important, and to produce babies for the ongoing war-machine? You too can have a storybook wedding, with the god-father presiding if you are white, privileged and willing to sell your soul to ABC, NBC or CBS.

As I see it, this kind of televised live soap opera is designed to brainwash women into thinking our fulfillment lies in our ability to attract a man. Scores and scores of young women line up to be picked as "the one" by the cool bachelor dude who determines the worth of these women because they don't know who they are unless a man wants them. This is the entitled male narcissism that currently governs this planet. The bachelor dude narrows his pick down to three women he concurrently "dates". The women drool over him like he is the most important thing in their lives-this guy they hardly know. The network offers him a date with each woman, separately, in which the master suite of some fancy hotel is included as part of the package for an overnight interlude-insinuating a promise of some kind of illusory, fantasized fulfillment. When each woman goes to the chosen overnight suite with romeo, she is beside herself with the seduction of the crackling fire, champagne on ice and the big master suite bed. They don't even know this guy! They know he's doing the same thing with three women, one after the other. And each woman is all over him-cameras zeroing in on kissing scenes and entwined bodies during each individual "date". I simply cannot believe how these women throw their power away and give themselves to this guy in the hopes he will pick them as his one and only. Who would ever see this as a condition of male narcissism, of male domination and superiority, and the ongoing, non-stop, incessant oppression of women? The insistent message of pleasing daddy is deeply ingrained throughout the show--these women hoping, waiting, wanting daddy to see them, nurture them and love them. Where is the real nurturing daddy? Well, he's too busy being narcissistic, being served by mommy, and taking, that he doesn't really know where he is, and neither do I, and neither do these women desperately searching for him.

And then there's the Barbie bachelorette. Even though she is in the position of choosing a guy, rather than being chosen by a guy, she is still brainwashed by the all-important "gotta have a man"mind-set. So, she finally settles on her fireman as the "be all end all of her life", can't wait to become his little mrs. and the next thing you know, the network is marrying her off. The poor woman is marched down the aisle by her father, handed over to her husband-to-be and sermonized by the male minister who basks in his self-conceived likeness to the all-male pantheon of god the father, the son and the holy ghost, righteously religiously ruling over this young woman whose total identity is in the fireman she doesn't really know, who stands before her waiting for "his" bride, like a good boy in a bad dream. When it's all said and done, the minister announces to the fireman that he may "kiss his bride for heavens sake." There, he has a bride-object he can finally call his own and everyone is happy that the male ego is once again fed. The woman--passed on from one male to another-- is the sacrificial object for the narcissistic male ego that knows no end to its hunger. This is current popular television viewing in america.

And now, I have just learned about the super bowl game expensive pay-per-view half-time "extravaganza." This event is none other than a tackle football game with models and actresses running around in their underwear so that drunken men can drool in front of their television sets over the culturally sanctioned sexualization and objectification of women, only to return to the violence of male-bashing (commonly known as "football") when half-time is over. All the while being served beer and popcorn by dutiful wives and girlfriends (Stepford wives?) who join in the whole mess in order to be loved. CBS has called this half-time event "truly must-see TV". "Must see" for whom? Is there anyone out there who can see that this male narcissistic reality is devouring the planet? That which promotes the teaming of sex and violence as a "must see" phenomenon is totally and completely narcissistic in a very dangerous way. It is dangerous because it is based on male privilege and the oppression and second-class citizenry of women, worldwide. This kind of narcissism is in a class all by itself. And there is absolutely no way any half-time event would be scheduled for men to run around in their jock-straps grabbing after each other, unless, of course, men wanted to watch one another, to entertain women. Women aren't interested in sexualizing men and watching their penises flailing around in the wind. We have far more important things to think about-like trying to help our sisters survive in war-torn, rape-torn places, to stop men's wars, feeding our children and constantly attending to innumerable never-ending priorities. What "pleases" men in this culture is what wins. And women lose.

This narcissistic psychosis invades our everyday lives-constantly creeping up on you when you aren't looking and attempting to suck you dry, if you are not careful. We must be careful-i.e., full of care. That is the antidote to this deadly narcissism-care. I care about those young women trying to please daddy by running around in their underwear. I want them to know that there is another way to live. I care about those young women lined up in a row waiting for mr. bachelor to choose them. I want them to know that their self-worth is not dependent on a man liking them-that who they are is magical and exquisite, whole/holy, complete unto themselves, needing no one, and certainly not a man in order to be complete. Any man who truly respects the creatrix-Goddess in a woman would never want to be disrespectful towards her in any way whatsoever. He would want to surrender to the grace and beauty of woman because he would know he is birthed by her, and he would know that the sheer grace and beauty of that miracle would sustain him for his entire life. He would not be the least bit interested in owning or dominating, nor threatened by her power.

In the early days of tantric practice in India, created by women from their deeply spiritual rituals, any man who wanted to be in the presence of the yoginis had to exhibit certain signs of attainment to even be allowed into the circle of women. He knew the yoginis would recognize him as a lover of the Goddess by the level of respect he demonstrated-because he wanted to be respectful, because he knew it was his salvation. There are many references in tantric literature to the dire consequences of any man disrespecting a woman, as it was seen as a terrible crime. My Goddess, how far we are from such a reality.

There is hope, however. The recent gathering of the Loya Jirga in Afghanistan to draft a constitution has seemingly come to some sense about the severe oppression, degradation and dehumanization of women that has been going on there in the name of "god" for a very long time. The chairman of the Loya Jirga, Sibghatullah Mujaddidi, stated "Afghanistan is like a garden that has many kinds of trees, flowers and thorns. The flowers are women." Indeed. I once heard that flowers are the laughter of the earth.

When the flowering of women's wisdom is restored, we will certainly, without a doubt, experience peace on this planet. The deadly rampant global narcissism that is obviously and violently devouring this planet will then transform as the deafening roar of self-centeredness, the core of narcissism, will find its resting place in compassionate, glistening spaciousness and true love.

What Was the Sexual Revolution for Women?

Having been someone who was part of this revolution, I still am not really sure I could call it a revolution when I think about pre-patriarchal times, about 5000 years ago when communities were based around the mother-child bond and the apprehension and experience of deity was of a great mother, the Goddess, or whatever you choose to call Her. Since humanity has lived longer in peace and woman-centered culture than we have lived in war, lies and male domination, I find it difficult to define what has been called a sexual revolution as a true revolution because I would need it to shatter the global confines of the patriarchal imprisonment women suffer daily, which it has not. As feminist writer and "thealogian", Mary Daly says, "There is a kind of seductiveness about a movement which is revolutionary, but not revolutionary enough." (Beyond God the Father)

So, what happened for women during this time of sexual revolution? Certainly, the 60's ushered in a new approach to the "Father Knows Best" mentality shoved down the throats of our mothers and grandmothers from previous eras. Because the 60's were a time of consciousness revolution and an opening into a collective spiritual awakening, sexual roles and conditions were examined and changed. Women burned our bras, refused to shave, threw off the shackles of oppression as well as our clothes and danced wildly at love-ins. However, we were still objectified, and continue to be. I know of one community in which the women decided to no longer "take care" of men. They got out of their marriages and refused to cook, launder, and tend to the "needs" (read "addictions") and sexual desires of men. I consider this community a true revolutionary outpost during its' time. I know a woman who was raised in the consciousness of these women. Because of her feminist upbringing, she was able to see the lies of patriarchal thinking from a very early age and was somewhat spared the oppressive weight of having to conform to being a good daughter of the of patriarchy, which groomed girls to become future Mrs. Cleavers-obedient, pathologically cheery and ever-presently perfect, while really enslaving them to care-take men on many levels. For centuries, women have been forced to become the bedmates of men to be used as a narcissistic extension of the male sexual organ. This condition is heinously consistent the world over.

When we talk about women and the sexual revolution, to whom are we referring? White women in white American? Our Sudanese sisters who are currently sold into slavery? Our African sisters who have been enduring clitorectomies for centuries (though this is changing)? Our Afghan sisters who have no voice? What is sexual revolution for women? Not only is it full equality, which should never be in question in the first place, but also a restoration of a deep and awe-inspiring global respect of women as the givers of life, recognized by our ancestors. Euro-Western women certainly enjoy a degree of freedom from the jail of sexual oppression more than our sisters in third-world countries, even though rape is rampant and goes unnoticed as the unspeakably horrific crime that it is. The brainwashing of women about marriage, however, remains a deeply-rooted problem. Until we understand that marriage, at least in Euro-Western society, was/is a patriarchal invention designed for men to own women and children, women who are seduced by the promise of the white picket fence and prince charming are, by entering into such a contract, only signing their death warrant. As harsh as this may sound, I have lived through this reality, married for twenty-six years, and it nearly killed me before I divorced. Our sisters around the world who do not have this illusive dream are simply treated as property and live in the reality that unless they marry, they have no value whatsoever as a human being, and therefore their very survival depends on being a married woman, whose husbands more often than not use them as objects on which to vent their privileged rage, sexually and otherwise. I recently saw a television program on Chinese women and marriage. Many women in the documentary were elder women-deprived of a lifetime of joy and used to the bone by their abusive husbands. All of the women spoke of their fear of their husbands as well as their feelings that there was no love at all-that love wasn't even an option. As long as those women suffer in such degradation, the sexual revolution we white women here in American allude to is really a privilege.

Of course, we desperately need sexual revolution-everywhere. We need a revolution that IS enough. It is true I am not enduring exactly the same conditions my mother and her mother endured, though my grandmother took her own life, but not before she told my mother "it was a man's world." It is still a man's world. And will be until women choose to become radical revolutionaries, amazing amazons. This revolution begins within. We must learn how we contribute to our own oppression by internalizing the very voices that hate us. We must do our own deep spiritual revolutionary work to be able to hold our sacred ground and create our own mythology. We must be willing to say no to collusion with the patriarchal mind set, which I call PMS. A sexual revolution that is enough will re-create the way we live on this planet. Until women are seen for who we are, and until men are willing to own their out-of-control compulsion to control, dominate and manipulate everything in their path, not much is going to change. We have been doing the same thing on this planet for 5000 years. All war is the same war. All hatred is the same hatred. All of this stems from one reality-the global hatred and subjugation of women.

Let us fuel the revolution from within, find our connection to the sacredness of the Goddess, Mother of All, and step into evolution with certainty and love.

Tend and Befriend

Every Friday afternoon from noon to one o' clock women in my community gather on the downtown street corners to stand in solidarity with Women in Black. Women in Black is a global movement of women who dress in black and stand in silent vigil to share the collective grief born of war, which is, of course, unspeakable.

Recently in our community, women dressed in white, and red, white and blue holding flags have shown up to demonstrate their support of war and our troops that they claim are protecting us far and wide. I once approached the first woman dressed in white who first began showing up. I recognized her as the dance teacher my daughters had when they were little. I wanted to know from her if she really thought war was the answer.

Through her contracted hostility, she sharply said, "Do you want bin Laden to come over here?" That was the end of our dialog. I felt a deep sadness in my heart and I couldn't help but feel her fear. She was really scared. No, I don't want bin Laden to come over here, I thought. But I don't think that killing people is the answer. I was not able to tell her that. The only thing I could manage to tell her was that I was sorry she had to be so hostile. Maybe that didn't help, but I really was sorry.

More women dressed in white have begun to appear. Now it feels like it's a black and white thing happening on the street corners. One of my friends stands with the women in white. I was shocked to see her there. I called her up and talked with her and said that I didn't want anything to come between us. She agreed and we told one another we loved each other and got off the phone. She had recently come to lend her support to my daughter and to me at the hospital when my oldest daughter was in a car accident. My kids were all friends with hers. We have all been friends for many years. But I don't understand her view. And I want to.

I said to her that if women can't talk, then there is no hope. She agreed. I asked her about her view. She said she was mainly walking with the woman in white because of how the men who stand with the women in black behave. Now I don't understand why there are men there anyway, but I thought her point of view was very interesting. She was commenting on the behavior of men. Once again I was hearing a woman speak about disrespectful male behavior. My friend said some men had cursed her.

I had to agree that any behavior like that was totally wrong, and yet, at the same time, I couldn't help but think about the contradiction of supporting men who were killing people in Afghanistan. Why isn't that totally wrong to her too? I haven't asked her about that yet. We have agreed to have lunch and discuss our views.

I have noticed that the honks from cars passing by supporting the women in white are usually men. I have felt very uncomfortable about this, as I have felt that these women in white are really supporting men to do their domination thing in the world, and in the face of that, I am not able to feel a sisterhood. I feel their alliance to the patriarchal male mind is a betrayal of their own female wisdom. And yet, my friend said to me that it will be women and children in the Middle East who will suffer if we don't help them . . . but isn't it always women and children who suffer the horrors of men's wars anywhere?

All of this has gotten me thinking about fierce compassion and wrathfulness. Patriarchy has "dicktated" that women should not be angry -- that we should be "lady-like" and behave ourselves according to the definitions of the controlling and dominating mind-set. So, do we know what women's anger looks like? My daughter and her friend shared with me what happened to them last night. They were in a bar and a very large male came up to them and began a lewd gyrating action of pelvic thrusting around them. My daughter and her friend told him to get out of their space. He called them terrible names and slimed them with his seething hatred of women, spouting things that my daughter said she had never heard before. At that point, my daughter's friend put her jacket down, very deliberately turned around and sent her fist flying into his chin, following that by another throw that caught his lip, which began to bleed. This was a very large man, mind you, and he towered over both women. He was indeed, taken aback. So much so, that after he calmed down, he apologized.

I thought long and hard about this. I am non-violent. However, I am reminded of a teaching that I read once in a book of Buddhist spirituality, written by a woman. Two women summoned a rickshaw after an event and just as the driver was letting them off, he began to grab after one of the women. They pulled away somehow, and ran. The next day they went back to their retreat and went to the Buddhist teacher and told her of the event. They both felt very bad, as they felt they had lost their compassion for this man. The teacher told them that should that happen again, they should gather all the mercy and compassion they could muster and beat that man with their umbrella. I feel this is a teaching about wrathful compassion -- creating a boundary that speaks loud and clear, which is not done out of malice.

Later that day, after hearing this story, I went for a walk with my friend and she told me a very interesting thing. She asked me if I had heard about the women who had written a book, the title of which I don't know, about oxytocin and their research that shows women, in times of facing danger or extreme stress, are inclined towards what the authors name "tend and befriend", instead of towards the well-known "fight or flight". I said that I hadn't heard, but that I was very interested. She said that in these times the authors have said that women will tend to gather the children and befriend one another, or tend towards that reality. I realized that the "fight or flight" notion we have all been taught is based on what men do. And then I thought about my daughter and her friend. I don't think they were in a fight or flight mode. They felt the need to speak the language of the invasive, entitled male who was harassing them. It wasn't about fight. It was about establishing a boundary in the only language he could hear.

Now, what kind of world would it be if that man could learn to speak the language of women, who would rather tend and befriend? My daughter and her friend tried that -- tending to themselves and clearly and calmly telling him what they needed. He didn't listen, so they spoke his language, which he understood.

As for the women in white on the street corner, I don't feel a "tend and befriend" response from them towards the women in black, but rather a kind of response that contributes to division and separation..While I understand what my friend has told me about her not liking what the men have said to her, that is, once again, about men, not about women.

It is my prayer that women will be able to come together and find our "tend and befriend" ways together, create a new (old) way of being and find the peace that is so desperately needed on this planet. One thing is for sure. Peace will not happen until women's voices are heard around the globe in a unifying singular voice for peace, which may entail stopping the continued cry for war from the patriarchal mind-set (PMS) in a way that that voice can hear -- not by violence, but by fierce and wrathful compassion.

Leslie McIntyre is a "shemama," a practicing mama shamanic healer who lives and works in Sebastopol. She is one of the founding members of Awakened Woman's Circle and is now at work on a new non-profit, Women of the Earth (WE). This page is her monthly offering. She can be reached by e-mail.

Soul Retrieval of the Sacred Feminine

For too long we have lived with a language that is inherently male biased which has shaped our collective human experience. Naming from an androcentric perspective has been disastrous for women in particular because in this language there is no word that women can claim as our own to describe ourselves. All words for women are in the shadow of the male, i.e., fe-male, wo-man, wo-men. We have been told that the name of our essential life force is "Eros"-the name of a phallic deity. We have lived with understanding the shadow as that which is split off from our conscious mind, named as such by a man, who no doubt has given the world valuable insights, but whose own sexism and racism have been nearly overlooked by the very field that embraces psychological healing.

We have also lived for too long with patriarchal religious and spiritual traditions that all share a commonality-the conspicuous absence of the presence of the Sacred Feminine. When we approach the investigation of exploring the thresholds of creativity through what we name as Eros, shadow and spirit, it is essential to look at what lies beneath the surface of the patriarchal overlay and delve deeper into the mysteries of our ancestors who were untouched by the patriarchal mind set, or what I term "pms". In this psychic archeological exploration we find ourselves tapping into the field that archeologist, linguist and historian, Marija Gimbutas, has termed the realm of archeomythology. Deeply buried in the layers of our cellular memory are the myths and stories of the Great Goddess; therein lies a connection to the very source of healing that we so desperately seek.

What, then, is our experience of the essential life force if we were to give to the quality of love and life a female name, such as Aphrodite-in which the primal female mothering energy is honored and respected for what it is? How would we be shaped by this naming? What does our experience of the shadow become when we name the profound split from which we all suffer as the Mother/Child split? I am not talking about necessary individuation. Sane individuation is quite different from a thanatos-driven separation from the very life force that births and sustains us. Unfortunately, in patriarchy, we encounter far too much of the latter. If we are lucky, however, and not too dissociated, we can feel our pain. Pain becomes a portal into deep awakening, and when we are truly blessed we can hear the faint and distant echo of the voice of the Mother calling to us through our pain, as she calls to us now. It is her blessing of love that fills our hearts and souls with the moisture of life, as we soak it up like land parched by drought, welcoming a long awaited rain.

We all share the same connection, as is revealed by the presence of our umbilicus. We cannot split from this source and expect to maintain a quality of life and love in the world. The Sanskrit word "Artha", meaning "mater-ial wealth" ("mater" means "mother) has given rise to other meanings that are familiar to us-such as Urth, Hertha, Eortha, and Erda-all names for our Mother, who sustains us with Her abun-dance. The Sacred Feminine, known by so many names the world over-Kali, Tara, Isis, Asherah, Yemaya, Guanyin, Coatlique, White Buffalo Woman, Hecate, Demeter, Persephone, to name a few, and whose presence inspired the naming of lands, such as Asia, Africa, Europe and Russia, is calling to us to re-member Her and to re-member ourselves.

The thresholds of creativity we behold when we retrieve the Sacred Feminine for ourselves exist in the internal landscapes of our deep inner being. There we uncover the sacred well of the Goddess, where we can drink freely of Her nurturing waters and feel cleansed of our suffering, shedding like the snake, the ancient symbol of the Goddess, our outworn skins of despair. She is the elixir of life, the fountain of youth. Her youth lies not in an eternally youthful appearance, but in Her powers of regeneration, well-known by our ancestors.

Soul retrieval is a process in which power is restored to the individual who has experienced soul loss. Soul loss is a shamanic term used to describe the loss of vital life force experienced in trauma. I trained with the Foundation for Shamanic Studies where I learned techniques of soul retrieval. I came to study this shamanic work as a result of a very long journey of my own that informally began when I became a student of the path of psychoactive medicines. Not knowing I was entering the world of the.shaman/shamanka, I was held in grace as I spent many years navigating through the labyrinth and landscapes of my own mind. I believe it is a miracle that I am standing before you, for in those days, we just opened our mouths and swallowed. The substances themselves were my relentless, sometimes ruthless guides and teachers. I felt I was well prepared to use the techniques I learned from studying with the Shamanic Studies Foundation. I put the techniques to use, and worked with people for several years before my process with soul retrieval began to change. The more people I saw, the more I realized that most of the people coming to me were suffering from different manifestations of the same trauma. I had been working with family of origin trauma, which was important. I began to see a kind of inherited soul loss in the original families where abuse was passed down from generation to generation. I felt that helping to facilitate healing for the person before me was a good thing, but that a deeper healing was necessary. I was seeing that all forms of abuse could be traced back to a common psychic source-the soul loss of the Sacred Feminine.

What surfaced from this work for me was the realization that we are a people suffering from a collective trauma which impacts not only people, but all living things, including Earth herself. Because of this collective trauma, we are experiencing collective soul loss as well as a collective near-death experience. There are no words to describe this grievous condition. It will take each of us feeling this loss to restore our soul's connection to the Goddess/Mother and to the natural world. While we have many valuable sources of healing available to us, we still suffer and according to psychologist James Hilman, things are getting worse.

The further we remove ourselves from connection with the Sacred Feminine, the more we will suffer. Band-aids can only last so long. I believe our deepest healing will come when we lift the veils of denial, expose the androcentric viewpoint that currently rules the world, and make room for the Goddess/Mother to flood into our hears, minds and bodies. She is the wellspring of our existence. In our Western society we rarely hear of ancestor worship. We would benefit a great deal to remember our ancestors and what they knew, and bring that knowing forward into our daily lives. It is well known that Goddess sites in nature were often sacred wells where people could go to visit, to meditate and to find healing from her sacred waters. Without conscious connection to this source we experience a deep and severe cutting off from that which births and sustains us, becoming detached and dissociated. In the traumatic event of being cut off, our soul connection to the Sacred Feminine is diminished. When this kind of soul loss is experienced, when the well is covered over and hidden, when access to Her healing wisdom and sacred waters is blocked, sickness is a consequence. And sickness we have. You name it, we have it.

The Earth is sick. Her children are sick-the two-leggeds as well as her creatures of land, sea and air-trees, sea turtles, dolphins, whales, birds, and many more too numerous to mention. Because we are one with the Earth, we reflect in our bodies what is happening to her body. We are doing this to ourselves and to her, out our ignorance and denial of Her wisdom. The epidemic of breast cancer affecting the nourishing and loving charka of woman's body is no accident. When women are objectified, humiliated and sold into sexual slavery, specifically to satiate the sexual hunger of men who are really wanting something much deeper than this, who are longing for union with the Sacred Feminine but don't know they are being consumed by the demons living in their shadow, what do we expect is going to happen to us, and to the planet? Asthma is on the increase particularly in children whose bodies are telling us they are having trouble breathing. How can children breathe safely when adults, mostly men, hurt them at an alarming rate; when children living on the streets in South America are murdered by so-called policemen who consider them to be optional; when mothers in India are forced to abort their girl babies in utero or to kill them outright? And how can any of us breathe when the very lungs, the rainforests of the planet, of the living being of our Mother are being cut out of Her?

In looking at the metaphor of mother and child to illustrate the importance of soul retrieval of the Sacred Feminine, which is the metaphor the Dalai Lama touched upon in an article in Shambala Sun (1996) in which he described the need for a new spirituality in the world, we can say that the child feels protected, safe and psychically held when the mother is close. This metaphor assumes the natural loving state of motherhood. The child calls for mother above and beyond all things. When my mother was dying in her seventies, she called to her mother who had been dead for fifty years. When my children are sick, they come to me-to be in my bed, to be close to me, to feel my essence, which heals and comforts them. It is a preverbal connection with me they know in their bones they seek when they need healing. They seek the safety and healing of my womb-wisdom, my heart, my arms and my touch.

Mother is primary-she is the primal life-giving and life-sustaining energy experienced by the child as a deep knowing in her/his body. This knowing is perceived through feelings and touch. Mother and child are in telepathic communion/communication. The child internalizes the love, kindness and safety of the loving mother. The child develops a core sense of self and learns to love and trust her/himself. I have four children. I have experienced what I am talking about. When the mother is not there, the child cries and longs for her. And so, it is the same for us, who without the Mother, have no idea of who we are, and have no sense of who holds us.

What has happened to us that we haven't allowed women to be the strong, powerful people we are? What has happened to us that some of us who have become mothers have lost the knowledge of how to birth and mother, who have learned to put ourselves into the hands of a male medical model that tells us how to birth, how to mother, and who have become afraid of our own natural body wisdom? Of course we have a shadow-mother experience when women are not allowed to be ourselves. When we split off from our true knowing what can possibly be the outcome of this condition? It doesn't help women or the world to create elaborate belief systems explaining women's so-called dysfunction from an androcentric view, which often blames women.

Gloria Orenstein, professor of Comparative Literature at USC, in an anthology celebrating the life and work of Marija Gimbuts, recounts her review of Andre Breton's book, Nadja. Nadja was a real woman-a an authentic human being. Nadja supposedly went mad and was institutionalized. Orenstein says, "…as I began to decipher the symbols in the drawings left by Nadja, I saw, in her visual hieroglyphics, the disclosure by a female visionary of the memory of her lost matristic heritage with the Celtic mythological tradition. All patriarchal interpretations had concluded that Nadja was mad, so she was locked away in a sanitarium forever. Yet, from 'feminist matristic' interpretation, Nadja can be seen as presenting a plea for the return to a reverence for the Mother Goddess as the primary deity to explain the universe and women's place in it. Nadja's madness, therefore, was her last refuge, that inner world where she could dwell alone among the symbols of her own matristic truth, symbols that were real to her but that were neither accepted nor recognized by the dominating patriarchal order of her time."

Of course we are madwomen.Why is anyone surprised at this? A moving excerpt from French feminist writer, Jeanne Hyvrard's book Mother Death in the same anthology courageously illustsrates the truth about women's so-called madness. Tjhere again we find a woman who is institutionalized because of her memories of a time when "the Earth was sacred and reverence for the Goddess prevailed." The protagonist has experienced colonization and conquest by androcentric invaders-a true condition. "They perverted language…They said I had lost my mind. I can't find the forgotten language. The language from before the invaders…The language in which words also mean their opposites. The language that liberates…The language even older than the statue with naked breasts. The language of the souls of the dead in stones. The languages of your caverns' paintings, your soul's pottery, your ashes' silica. The language of the naked woman, her thighs like mountains…They pillaged your tombs and wonder why they don't know anything…They say I have a sickness. They give it a name. They say I'm unstable, precarious, lunatic. They say they want to cure me…They want to cure me of what, exactly? Of the world's creation and erosion? Of death and rebirth? They say they're going to cure me. Of what? Life itself?"

The shadow-mother is a natural consequence of denial of the Goddess-of not allowing women to be empowered. When women are disempowered, all of life suffers. What we need is an understanding of how this happened, so that we can heal. We are told in psychotherapy we need to name the wound to heal it. This wound I am talking about-the deep Mother wound from which we all suffer, from which all woundedness emerges in myriads of forms-- needs to be openly named. This is not about the patriarchal so-called devouring mother. This projection of men's fear of women onto women has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as women internalize this mirroring and become exactly what is feared. Then the fingers are pointed at women, with cries of "You see? It's her fault." This fear fueled the fathers of the inquisition in the women's holocaust-the slaughter and burnings at the stake of millions of wise women healers. Do you hear the cries of the ancestors in your ears? Can you hear them telling us to re-member before it is too late?

From a spiritual feminist perspective, definitions of such terms as Eros, shadow and spirit take on new meaning. This perspective sees the presence of the Sacred Feminine in all things. In this reality, language finds different expression. Why is it that we describe the energy of life in a male term and relegate the female maternal source that births the male to a secondary position? How does this make sense? And what are the effects of this kind of mythos on our psyches? For the erotic to be truly stirred, the aphroditic must be totally embraced by women and men alike. Author Patricia Reis tells us that female erotic energy is aphroditic and is a resource that lives deeply within all life. Aphroditic energy is Shakti-the activating creative life force that energizes Shiva in his universal dance. Without Shakti, Shiva is lifeless. This is why we see Kali dancing on Shiva in East Indian iconography. She is the creatix, sustainer and dissolver-all comes from Her and all returns to Her. Long before Kali, Paleolithic and Neolithic peoples knew this to be true.

In looking at the concept of shadow, I feel it is important to understand what created the shadow in the first place. We have elaborate descriptions, meanings and definitions of the concept of shadow. I have often wondered if our ancestors living prior to patriarchy had such a concept. Evidence certainly exists as to the notion of the Death Goddess, but she was always combined with Regeneration (see my book, Midwifing Death: Returning to the Arms of the Ancient Mother). Marija Gimbutas has shown us that early people had a deep respect for the cyclical nature of life. She tells us that early people understood death to be a part of life. In this wholistic view, death is not split off from life--there is no dualism, only continuity. In these early cultures of Old Europe, there is no evicdence of war-no weapons have been found, nor is there any depiction of war in the iconography. It would appear that these Paleolithic and Neolithic people did not experience a sense of splitting the way we post-Bronze Age, post-Descartes, post inquisition and post industrial revolution people do. These early matri-focaled cultures were marked by a profound connection the Goddess, excelled in creativity and existed peacefully for millennia. In archeological digs in Catal Huyuk in present day Turkey, three different skull types were found existing side-by-side in a peaceful matri-focaled community that lasted nearly 1,000 years. Ths informs us that three different "races" (I use quotations as there really is only one race of people-African) of people lived together in harmony. This does not seem to be fertile soil for a concept of shadow. It does appear to have been fertile soil for living in mystery and peace in close connection to the Earth, where the sharing of a profound and sacred shamanic reality was a way of life.

Patriarchy has succeeded in demonizing the Sacred Feminine. The rampant disrespect, crime and misogyny in our world today are killing us. The projection of fear onto women creates an extremely disturbing shadow. Without naming this shadow for what it is, and I am not talking about penis envy, which is some kind of strange projection from a man obviously suffering from a deep internal conflict, we will continue to be afflicted by the contents of that shadow, without understanding how to fully heal. We are suffering from a soul loss so staggering that I am not sure we can retrieve all of it. I pray for my children's sake and their children's sake that we can.

There is a definite connection between rape and the tearing open of the ozone layer. This is the nature of the shadow we have normalized and live with-like a village built on the side of a volcano that is about to erupt. Some Native Americans have a saying that says you can tell a lot about a people by how the women of the tribe are treated. So, what kind of people are we?

The Laws of Manu, though replete with patriarchal ideology, at its core embodies an important teaching. It says, "Women must be honored and adorned by their fathers, brothers, husbands and brothers-in-law, who desire their own welfare. Where women are honored, there the gods are pleased, but where they are not honored, no sacred rite yields rewards. Where the female relations live in grief, the family soon wholly perishes, but that family where they are not unhappy ever prospers. The houses on which female relations, not being duly honored, pronounce a curse, perish completely, as if destroyed by magic." Feminist writer, Barbara Walker, tells us that this advice came from the place northern Aryans referred to as Mutspellheim, or the House of the Mother's Curse, in the 'hot lands of the south'. She writes, "the Scandinavian prophecy of doomsday or the Mutspell would fall upon the violent patriarchal gods who ignored ancient tribal bonds and rules of morality, and instituted cruel warfare. The result of the Mother's Curse would be the death of all gods, their Gotterdammmerung or Going-Into-the-Shadow; thus it seemed the Mother's word of destruction meant the end of the world." This is not punishment from the Mother who sits in judgment of her children, wanting to burn them in brimstone and hellfire in eternal damnation, demanding that they live in fear and trembling of her. Rather, this curse is self-inflicted. The rules are simple. Disobey the naturals laws, and suffer the consequences. In Magic Dance, a book on dakini wisdom, Thinley Norbu reminds us, "from beginningless time until now, all ignorant sentient beings tried to find company, but we are always isolated meaninglessly because we disobeyed our Self-Awareness Noble Mother's advice." It is my belief that if we wake up and begin to honor the Sacred Feminine, the Noble Mother within ourselves, we can reverse this self-inflicted curse. I pray we have the time.

From a feminist shamanic perspective, spirit is the internal experience of the Goddess-not as a she replacing the he in the sky, but as the limitless primordial ground of being, the Prajnaparamita, or Mother of All the Buddhas and the Earth herself. Hers is a both/and universe. She is the immanent/transcendent All-Ramakrishna's Mother Kali, whose love, compassion, mercy and fiercenss know no bounds. To see Her is to be One with Her, to revel in her wildness, to experience ecstasy and to recognize that Her love is the antidote to our suffering. Connection with Her is connection with the essence of creativity itself. All of Her children have access to Her through direct communion and transmission, without the need of any mediator.

In the mother/child bond, if allowed to flourish the way it was meant to, without invasive, colonizing and controlling patriarchal thinking, this bond grows like a flower rooted in the life-giving, rich moist earth. No one needs to issue directives to the Earth how to grow a plant. She does it by herself. It is the mater-wealth that feeds and sustains the plant and child equally. This power is great-miraculous. It need not be feared, nor can it be possessed, though there are those who ceaselessly try. This creativity that births us is alive in every moment-there for us to suckle. When we have our fill, we go on about our way, feeling, exploring, playing, dancing, singing, loving, creating beauty and sharing ourselves with each other in life-affirming ways. When we need to return to the source for sustenance, the well is there, and all that is asked of us in return is humility, gratitude, acceptance, surrender and respect. Why is it so hard for us to live in this way, loving ourselves, loving each other, loving the earth? Do we really need to compete in order to measure our own self-worth? Do men need to dominate women, and do women need to be submissive?

The Goddess is not just for women and feminists. She is all-inclusive. Males are as much Her children as females, as are all our relations. However, it is Her children who must do the re-membering in order for Her to inform our lives. We are responsible for transforming our dualistic and delusional thinking. We are responsible for exorcising our own demons in order to heal. If we write mountains of books, and do not walk our talk, unfortunately, we will not have healed very much. The living Goddess finds expression in each one of us, as we open to love and let go of fear and destructive anger. We have all been abused because we live in an abusive paradigm. The healing we all seek from this abuse lives in the flowing waters of the Goddess' love, Her life-sustaining cosmic milk and the new life that comes from Her regenerative powers.

May we learn to drink deep from Her well, and find Her well deep within. We deserve to be loved. We deserve to be cherished. We can ask for what we need, and knowing we deserve to heal, then, may She bless us all with the sweet nectar of her blissful and ecstatic presence.

PUBLICATIONS CITED
Marler, Joan, ed. 1997, From the Realm of the Ancestors. Manchester, CT: Knowledge, Ideas & Trends, Inc.
Norbu, Thinley, 1981, Magic Dance: The Display of the Self-Nature of the Five Wisdom Dakinis. New York, NY: Jewel Publishing.House.
Reis, Patricia, 1996, Through the Goddess, New York, NY: Continuum.
Walker, Barbara, 1983, Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row

END NOTES
1. Marler, 1997, p. 458
2. Ibid. p. 459
3. Ibid. p. 460
4. Reis, 1996, p.119
5. Walker, 1983, p. 200
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Norbu, 1981, p.52

Societies In Balance

Gender Equality in Matrilineal, Matrifocal and Matriarchal Societies

Luxembourg was the site for the International World Congress on Matriarchal Studies, held in early September. Many people, most of them women, from the international global community gathered to explore the definition of matriarchy and to learn about matriarchies past and present, and to find inspiration for changing the current male-dominant ruling paradigm. The conference was held in a large circular room, with tiered seating allowing people to see the speakers and presentations from all angles. Microphones were available for the audience at their seats, giving easy access to group participation. The conference was presented in German, French and English. The front lobby was graced with nine life-sized paper and glue orange Matrones, the goddesses of the Rhine, sculpted by artist Marianne Pitzen. Placed in chairs in a semi-circle in council, they presided over the conference as representatives from the ancestral mother-realms.

Gracing a hallway in the lobby was a photo exhibit by Siegrun Claassen, an artist and photographer from Germany. Her artistic and sensitive display captured the beauty of the “Matriarchal Mystery Festivals”, created over the past twenty years by Academy HAGIA.

I must say now to be fair that I cannot report on this conference and leave out any of the presenters. The diversity of people, European, Asian, Middle Eastern, East Indian, North African, and American all had interesting views about matriarchy to share. Because I feel this event was a complete and total benefit for the world, especially at this time of need and collective global suffering, I feel it is in service of the Goddess to be complete and thorough in my recounting.

When I left my town of Sebastopol, California, to attend, I had no idea what to expect. I didn’t even know Luxembourg was its own country before attending this conference. Being a Goddess lover and devotee, a student and teacher of feminist spirituality for many years and a writer and author of radical feminist spiritual views, I felt I needed to be open and receptive and ready to learn. While I found the structure of the conference rather grueling–three days of presentation after presentation–and my posterior becoming quite numb and tired after all that time I spent sitting on it--I nevertheless felt hungry for the information. I, like many, long for the experience of woman-centered reality and community. Being together with women and a few men in an international setting sharing an interest in matriarchies gave me a sense that the tide is truly changing, and that patriarchy is on its last legs. While no one really knows how long it will take to crumble, it is crumbling, as evidenced by the increased insanity in the world.

The conference was two years in the making, organized by Heide Gottner- Abendroth, founder of the International Academy HAGIA for Modern Matriarchal Studies and Matriarchal Spirituality in Germany, where she teaches and continues as its director. In her own words, she explains the intention of the Congress, “The purpose of this World Congress is to initiate and encourage a multi-cultural scientific exchange, networking, and collaboration between scholars occupied with non-ideological research on what can be described as matrilineal, matrifocal, and matriarchal societies. A major intention of the Congress is to foster a world-wide awareness and appreciation of the many marginalized and threatened ethnic groups that have preserved matriarchal patterns to this present day. Women have always been creators of culture although this great history is often invisible. The Congress celebrates women’s multi-dimensional contributions to culture–past, present and future.” The motto of the conference was “a new millenium, a new science, and a new politics.”

Second presenter following Heide was Claudia von Werlhof, chairwoman for Women’s Studies at the Institute for Political Science at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Referring to herself as a matriarchal woman, she spoke on the insanity of patriarchy–“Patriarchy as the Negation of Matriarchy and Aspects of Cultural Madness.” She said, “The ‘genuine’ inventions of patriarchy consist mainly of different forms of violence. The antidote to this is the knowledge of the interrelationship of all beings that will once again become the bedrock of our feeling, thinking and acting in the face of the rampage and the predictable failure of this last phase of patriarchy: the introduction of world capitalism. This madness will fade away as matriarchal egalitarianism, subsistence, mutuality and love of life gain a foothold all over the world again as the true alternatives to globalization.” After hearing her present, I felt inspired to hear a professor at a university being passionate about the fall of patriarchy. I thought that her students were lucky to have such a teacher. We need more of her kind teaching in our colleges and universities.

Concluding the first part of the conference on theory and politics, Professor Annette Kuhn, Scientific Director of the Politeia-Project and Chairperson of the House of Women’s History Association, spoke about the origin and dynamics in history of “the matriarchal pattern.” She emphasized three points: 1) the innovative role of women in the history of humanity 2) the changing of the matriarchal pattern in the development of patriarchy and 3) the description of a general historical consciousness. While a scientific approach to discussing matriarchal reality is not my forte, I nevertheless appreciate all and any angles from which women (and those few men) come from in order to support a change in the current ruling paradigm. We need all the help we can get.

Part three through five of the conference focused on matriarchies, present and past. Peggy Reeves-Sanday, feminist anthropologist, author of the newly released Women at the Center and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, shared about her twenty years of field work with the matriarchal Sumatran Minangkabau. Her focus was on “Matriarchy and World Peace, Lessons from the Minangkabau.” She says, “Their culture is characterized by an ethic of gender balance and a dedication to negotiation and the peaceful resolution of conflict.” The cultural foundation of these amazing people is found in the deep respect of nurture as it is found in nature. Matriarchal customs include peaceful social values, and values are rooted in maternal meanings, as in those found in the mother-child bond. If these values ruled the world, as they did for millennia before the advent of patriarchy, how different things would be!

The conference was indeed fortunate to host presenters from China on the matriarchal cultures of the Mosuo in China. Ruxian Yan, Professor of Ethnology at the Institute of Nationality Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Bejing, spoke on the kinship system of these very interesting people from southern China, who she says reside “between the female mountain and the mother water.” Some of the highlights from Ruxian’s presentation included such things as “if you don’t have a daughter, water doesn’t flow”, which I interpreted to mean that the life force of the community flows through the female. She said the mother-daughter relationship is the most stable. The primary deity of the Mosuo is the goddess Gumo and the essential “glue” of the family is the mother.

Arriving late all the way from China was Professor Lamu Ga tusa, himself a Mosuo. As Associate Professor of the Social Sciences Research Institute of Yunnan Province, he has been dedicated to preserving “the unique social and spiritual heritage’ of his people. He spoke about the matriarchal marriage patterns of his people, and emphasized that lovers experience a “pronouncedly equal relationship”. In this matriarchal system, partners experience personal and emotional, as well as “benefits” independence. The mother is considered as the origin of life and society, expressed both in “ethnic concepts and in the concepts of love.” Children are raised in the home of mother, and there is no concept of fatherhood as we know it in western society. The mother’s brother tends to the children, and “fathering” is accomplished through the blood lines. I was very curious about this and had an opportunity to ask Lamu Ga tusa, through an interpreter, Aileen Walsh, (who also presented on the Mosuo), how men felt about knowing they had a biological part in creating a child and not be considered that child’s father. It was an amazing experience to feel his simply not having a concept of this kind of fatherhood. He had the utmost respect that a child is of the mother. I did not feel any kind of ownership, possession or need to dominate or be in control, as is so prevalent in the west around the issue of fathering. He indicated that monogamy was instituted at some point from powers outside of the Mosuo. Also worth noting is his statement that there is no rape in their culture. From my perspective, I see that when women are held in deep respect by unbroken matrilineal lineages, boys are raised by the values of the mother and do not develop out-of-control compulsions to dominate and possess. I was very intrigued by his questions to the audience such as “Why do you have to get married to turn lovers into enemies?”and “Why do you have to love one person your whole life?” While the Mosuo have their problems, and are not an ideal culture, they nevertheless experience a measure of enlightened quality of life when placed next to the patriarchal confines and oppressive limitations of Western culture. I also found myself feeling saddened watching Lamu Ga tusa smoking constantly and wondered what was propelling him to cause harm to himself in that manner. I felt this way about watching many of the women smoking as well–there was something peculiar about attending a conference on matriarchies where love and nurturing were being discussed as the predominant values while watching people hurting themselves through serious addiction.

Aileen Walsh, an anthropologist who has studied the Mosuo, presented spontaneously in the original space slated for Lamu Ga tusa. I do not have notes on her presentation, but Vicki Noble has related in her previous article that Aileen focused on their consensus decision making and gender equality. Aileen also talked about how the media has distorted the “visiting marriage” and that because of this distortion, more outside people have come looking for the Mosuo’s way of life as some kind of expression of a new tantalizing sexuality, without regard for the longtime practices of these matriarchal people. At different times, questions were put to several of these presenters about the presence of same-sex relationships within the Mosuo. I cannot say that I ever heard a definitive answer, but it was alluded to that people were free to choose as they wished.

Shanshan Du, Professor of Anthropology at Tulane University and author of Chopsticks Only Work in Pairs: Gender Unity and Gender Equality among the Lahu of Southwest China, shared about her work with the Lahu people. Her focus was on discussing “Frameworks for Society in Balance, Gender Equality From a Cross-cultural Perspective.” A salient point of her presentation was the information on these frameworks that she says “foster balance, harmony, and equality between the sexes and among individuals in some non-industrial societies.”

The first day ended with a film in the evening by Uschi Madeiskyi, “The Daughters of the Seven Huts, A Clan Story of the Khasi/North-eastern India.” A very interesting film about Aileen, a young woman helping to establish the business of her clan to ensure the family stability in the face of her mother’s illness. In her tradition, responsibilities for clan family and land are passed on to the youngest daughter, but in Aileen’s situation, her younger sister was too young, so she had to step in and help. We were honored to have Aileen attend the conference where she was introduced and answered questions from the audience.

Moving from Asia, the next presenter opening the second day of the conference, Helene Claudot-Hawad, anthropologist and scientific director of the National Centre for Scientific Research at the Research Institute of the Arabic World in France, discussed the Tuareg people of the Central Sahara from Africa. The Tuareg are a matrilineal people, though affected by patrilineal influences. She emphasized that the centrality of life of these people is constituted by the mother as protector and stabilizer of the community. Woman is considered the primary force, reflected as “the first mythical step of cosmogony.” A film, “The Daughters of the Tents, Among the Tuareg in Mali.” was shown later in the conference.

By this time deep into the conference, I was feeling the need to assimilate what I had heard so far in some way that would help me not be so much in my head. But that was hard to do, and so I just continued on, taking notes and listening, simultaneously feeling overwhelmed and not wanting to miss anything. The translators, at times, especially the male translator, were very hard to follow–sometimes not even making sense. After sharing glances and looks of disbelief and frustration with those around me who felt the same way, I dealt the best way I could and grew determined to hang in there and learn. The next speaker really helped me focus, as her talk was about the amazing Berber people of North Africa.

Dr. Malika Grasshoff is an historian, author and indigenous ethnologist of Kabylia (Berber) lineage. She was raised in a village in the Kabylia until she was seventeen. The Berber people of North Africa, known as the oldest people of that region, live in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. The mother is the “central post”–the spirit that guards the house, without whom the house breaks down. The spoken word is the carrier of their culture, and the Berbers speak an unwritten language, with the word for “woman” also meaning “language”. Pot-making by women is a holy activity, and a sacred magical script is inscribed on them. Pots are living–making pots during the time of the growth of the corn follows the order of nature and honors the fertility of the earth. Everything that women do from morning until night is done with magic ritual. So many of the things that Helene had to say about the Berbers were stunning. I feel the sacred and strong ties these people have with the earlier Goddess cultures appear to be quite intact, even with the influences of patriarchy. The entire birth process is seen as a totally female reality–it is completely linked to the moon. The mother “meets” the moon, prays to the moon and is washed in water that carries the sacred shimmering reflection of the moon. Men are not allowed to be a the birth, as it is a time for women only to experience the creation of life which “cannot be translated into a manly experience.” I thought, Wow! I gave birth in a community in Tennessse called The Farm where we prided ourselves on the fact that we had men there, participating. Helene reported that Berber women who had been in the U.S. were infuriated at Western birthing practices that included men. I am still pondering this complete and total difference from what I have known and experienced in my life, and how things would have been different for me had I had the Berber experience. Looking back, I think I would have much preferred it. Two other points by Helene, though there were many, stood out for me. The fact that there is no such thing as a single mother I found remarkable. The whole village is the family for any child. And, magically and beautifully, a child is adopted into the family by the act of being breastfed–milk is that which ensures life.

Listening to women speak about active matriarchies fed something deep within me. I felt I was taking in the milk of my long-lost mothers.

From North Africa, we were taken to Mexico by Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, ethnologist, sociologist and co-founder of International Women’s Studies. Reporting on an indigenous culture “in the midst of the machismo Mexican culture”, she says this culture in the town of Juchitan, in Southern Mexico, a city of 100,000, has “strong matriarchal characteristics.” They have a “mother-centered” genealogy. There are no isolated housewives and they experience a strong rootedness with the earth. She explained that the “whole community belongs to women” because the “mother’s house” is at the center. There is no “father’s house.” “Mothers and motherhood play a vital role.” Even though heterosexuality is prevalent, four different social genders are distinguished, defined through work and sexual preference. A film, “The Women of Juchitan”, was shown about these people, showing daily community life and celebration. One aspect disturbed me–the ubiquitous presence of beer, with women and men drinking copious amounts, equally. I can’t help but think that the dysfunctional effects of alcohol consumption are not matriarchal, but actually a disturbing influence from patriarchy, which we can certainly witness in our own indigenous peoples in the U.S.. Alcoholism is alcoholism wherever it is. A part of the film highlighted a young man who dressed as a woman and said he felt like a woman. He was completely and totally accepted by the community.

Moving into a look at past matriarchal consciousness, Riane Eisler, author of “The Chalice and the Blade” and President for the Center for Partnership Studies, was slated to open this topic. However, because she could not attend, her paper on “The Battle over Human Possibilities: Women, Men and Cultural Transformaion” was read. The points of clarity I heard were basic outlines of the differences of the two models Riane is well-known for discussing–that of the dominator model and the partnership model. She also emphasized cultural transformation theory saying “a central theme of cultural transformation theory is the centrality of the social construction of the roles and relations of the female and male halves of humanity to the construction of every social institution.” Her paper emphasized the necessity of overcoming polarized classifications found in patriarchy, and moving towards a partnership reality in which polarization is transformed. She also pointed out that the “ongoing battle over human cultural origins” is seriously overlooked as essentially important in understanding “views on human possibilities.”

Carola Meier-Seethaler,therapist and author, spoke on “Alternative to the Dualistic Concept of Culture and the Patriarchal Ban on Thinking”–a provocative subject. It was refreshing to hear a therapist discuss the “alleged ontological split between the male intellectual principle and the supposedly natural principle of female chaos” as absurd. She said “What becomes apparent are the parallels between mythological world views and structures of societies in the course of the violent superimposition of a peaceful Afro-Eurasian basic culture by warlike, marauding peoples between the 4th and 2nd millennia BC.” I felt she made an important point about the present policy of the gender mainstreaming she encounters, saying that the patriarchal scientific community is not willing to hear criticism because it cannot see its own presuppositions due to an unwillingness to self-reflect.

Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, author, cultural historian and Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies program in Women’s Spirituality, spoke passionately about the origins of homo sapiens sapiens and our emergence from Africa. Lucia’s book, “dark mother” (non-caps are intentional) substantiates her theses that “the oldest deity worshipped by homo sapiens is that of a Dark M other from Central and Southern Africa. Prehistoric signs of this Dark Mother were carried by African migrants after 50,000 BCE to the caves and cliffs of all continents. Later, ca. 25,000 BCE, these signs were transmuted into venerated female images found all around the Mediterranean litoral, in West Asia, Outer Asia, and in North and South America. In the Christian epoch these became Black Madonnas, but the legacy of the African Dark Mother is evident in all dark women divinities on every continent.” Her work is deeply significant because she shows that there is only one race of human beings– African. With this understanding, the fiction/friction of racism is revealed for what it is–nothing more than a useless concept used to wage domination, subjugation and oppression of “other”.

Concluding the second day of presenters was Christa Mulack, writer, lecturer and ardent explorer of matriarchy for over twenty years. She lectured on the work of Gerda Weiler (1921-1994) who was “the first author who probed the Bible for its matriarchal implications.” Author of “Matriarchy in Old Israel”, Gerda discovered cultic passages in the Bible containing definite matriarchal contents. Gaerda’s work challenged the way people read the texts, saying she felt it was important to understand the texts the way they wanted to be read. For instance, she claims that “Lord” and “God” originally meant “Goddess” and “Lady”. Perhaps most importantly, especially for these times, Christa says, “the discovery of these textural treasures allowed her (Gerda) to identify a pre-Israel-ite Goddess culture in ancient Palestine which had a strong influence on the Israelite tribes immigrating into the area. As a consequence, the conviction that Israel began with a patriarchal culture and society possessing a primordial monotheism has to be abandoned.” In Gerda’s own visionary words, she said, “The freed consciousness of women is the power by which the leap into the meta-patriarchal future will be prepared and made easier.” I know Gerda must be thrilled wherever she is, that a conference on matriarchies is a step in the right direction of freeing women’s consciousness.

The final day of the conference was opened in the morning by Joan Marler talking on “The Iconography and Social Structure of Old Europe, The Archaeomythological Research of Marija Gimbutas. Joan, faculty member of the California Institute of Integral Studies and Director of the Institute of Archaeomythology, presented a beautiful and informative slide show of Goddess iconography. As someone who feels that the spiritual must inform the political, I was inspired by the Goddess imagery Joan presented because it allowed me to connect to the truth of the matriarchal reality in a non-intellectual manner, which I feel is of vital importance if we are to deeply understand the changes needed to shift the current dominator paradigm. Viewing ancient images stirs our cellular memory and helps us open to a remembrance we might not otherwise experience through words alone. Joan says of Marija’s work, “Dr. Gimbutas developed “archaeomythology” an interdisciplinary approach to scholarship that combines archaeology, mythology, ethnology, folklore, linguistic paleontology, and the study of historical documents. A vast body of Neolithic imagery rendered primarily in female forms indicates the centrality of women’s activities and their roles as creators of culture. Utilizing archaeomythological scholarship, she described these early Neolithic societies as non-Indo-European and ‘matristic’”.

The baton of Goddess-knowledge Joan introduced was then taken up by the next speaker, Michael Dames, author, artist and prehistorian, well-known for his books, “The Silbury Treasure”, “The Avebury Cycle” and “Mythic Ireland”. While I admittedly had some reservations about men presenting at a conference on matriarchies, I found Michael inspiring and very knowledgeable about pre-christian Goddess religion. Referring to himself as “a matriarchal man”, he revealed his deep reverence and love for the Goddess in his talk, “Footsteps of the Goddess in Britain and Ireland.” This talk was very timely for me, as I was journeying to Britain following the conference to visit with Monica Sjoo, and knowing about the sacred sites there beforehand enhanced my trip. I think it is rare for a man to see himself as a son of the Goddess and not have issues about control and power. Though I do not know Michael, I know many women who respect him, and I mused on how important and absolutely essential it is for men to really “get it”. In concert with Marija Gimbutas, Michael says, “if the original quality of the goddess mythology is sought, a poetic synthesis of all these strands (folklore, folk customs, place names and medieval writings) should be attempted. Instead of the modern cult of Objectivity, a pre-Socratic empathy is required. The archaic offers a new methodology, with which to mend a torn world.”

I was very pleasantly surprised by the next speaker, another man, Kurt Derungs, who also seems devoted to the Goddess. His forte is the mythology of landscape and has developed his field to include research on matriarchy. I found much of his information in his talk, “Landscapes of the Ancestress, Principles of the Matriarchal Philosophy of Nature and the Mythology of Landscape”, simply put, stunning. He says, “The ‘landscape of the ancestress’ is the primary key for the recognition of many cultic sites and sacred places which would otherwise be overlooked or destroyed by the isolating patriarchal viewpoint.” He pointed out that the “divine ancestress” of different cultures he has studied is the land herself, and that people had to be on the land to experience direct connection with the “landscape ancestress”. One of the examples he mentioned was the landscape ancestress of Viet Nam, Baden, the black woman, a holy mountain in the Mekong Delta, originally holy to the matriarchal Chan people. Upon hearing this I reflected on Lucia Birnbaum’s thesis of the dark mother and the diaspora out of Africa. Near Hanoi, there is a large delta split into three rivers–the white, red and black rivers, colors of the triple goddess. The red river leads to a cave with stalactites referred to as “milk breast of the mother”. Another example he spoke of was Langkawe Island in an island

group in Maylasia, called “island of the pregnant woman.” On the island is a holy vulva-like lake where women who want to conceive visit and drink from her waters. He also spoke of Lensburg, middle Europe’s Silbury Hill, dated about 6000 BCE a burial mound where the dead were placed inside the earth as embryos in the womb for rebirth.

The next presentation “The Origins of Patriarchy in Ancient Desertification: Saharasia” by James DeMeo, Director of the Orgone Biophysical Research Lab, was controversial. I felt his focus on looking at origins of violence and child abuse to be an important one. He mapped and correlated behavioral variables such as infant neglect, child abuse and obedience training, adolescent sexual repression, female subordination and tendencies towards social violence, hierarchical structures, high-god religioin and warfare using the data of George Murdock, an anthropologist and ethnographer who collected material from around the world.. Following his presentation, Peggy Reeves-Sanday, a colleague who had lectured on the matriarchal culture of the Minangkabau/Sumatra and their peaceful resolution to conflict, very sharply and angrily criticized James’ presentatioin, calling him “reductionist” and then walked out of the conference. She said Murdock’s data were flawed. Ok, I thought, she doesn’t agree with James deMeo. But does she have to be so shaming and angry? This incident brought up a lot of questions for me. For someone who had studied peaceful resolution to conflict, she didn’t appear to know how to implement this knowledge in a challenging situation. I don’t usually defend men, and I am more often than not outraged at their ignorance, privilege and entitlement, but I was taken aback by her anger towards him and wondered what would be a matriarchal way to disagree. I have not read James’ book, “Saharasia”, so I cannot comment on the validity of his data. Maybe he was assumptive and ignorant–I don’t know. He was, however, invited to the conference as a presenter, so there must have been some respect for his work. I have felt for a long time that we cannot divorce the intellectual from the spiritual. We must walk the talk. It is much easier to talk the talk, but that isn’t enough. I felt James on some level to be an ally. I wasn’t sure about Peggy Sanday after her display of anger and contempt. While I understand the need for fierce truth-telling, I am not supportive of a lack of compassion. To me, the much-needed mother-reality is about how to be truthful, compassionate, fierce, strong and just. Pulling rank or status is not acceptable. In the end, a conference organizer recognized this unfortunate polarization and asked James to present a bouquet of flowers to Heide (who had also questioned his presentation, but in a more respectful manner). She responded with a gentle hug of acceptance and he was able to offer his thankfulness to her and for being at the conference.

Part six of the conference was devoted to matriarchal politics, spirituality, aesthetics and medicine. Heide commented that the interrelationship among all the above-mentioned topics “is in contrast to the situation in patriarchal societies in which these areas have been torn apart and made into separate spheres of power.” Ingrid Olbricht, a specialist in neurology, psychiatry, psychotherapeutic medicine and psychotherapy, spoke on “Women’s Health in Male Biased Societies”. Her important contribution included a look at examples of “structural violence” in the entire system of medicine in regard to women and the deficiency of care for women, which she says negatively influences women’s self-esteem and self-awareness, contributing to illness and the reduction of a quality of life. She says, “women experience their health very subjectively. In a male-dominated health system, the seemingly objective view in definition, research and treatment is still not sensitive to the female gender; it is androcentric and in psychotherapy, even paternalistic.”. Such wisdom! I have a great deal of respect for women in “the system” who courageously speak the truth.

Cecile Keller, a medical doctor most recently practicing in the field of gynecology, and student of shamanism and matriarchal spirituality, spoke on “Medicine in Matriarchal Societies”. It was a pleasure to hear her speak about this subject, because as she did so, I could feel in my bones a longing to return to this kind of heart-caring that women create together. A system of healthcare based on love as opposed to greed and control would lessen the actual occurance of disease and illness because people would feel safe and nurtured. Cecile says, “In matriarchal societies medicine is holistic and is based on experiential knowledge. The methods include both the treatments of the body and the guidance of the soul and consciousness. Within the context of a healing ritual, medical substances and physiological techniques find application. On the other hand self-healing processes of psycho-somatic and spirit-soul based orders are being stimulated through the medium of the “soul-search.” In this process the whole mythology and cosmology of the prevailing matriarchal culture is being activated which will reconnect persons seeking healing positively to their own world view.”

Vibrant and enlivening Ceylan Orhun, passionate activist in national and international women’s human rights gave a talk with slides on ”Aesthetic and Politics from Neolithic Visions”. A profound sharing included slides showing the site of a so-called “honor murder” where a young woman, accused of adultery, was put to death in the streets of Southeastern Anatolia. I was outraged by this wanton act of violence. How is it that men’s reality is allowed to pervade the world with such violence and cruelty and uncontrolled, raging misogyny? Any religion allowing such an act is no religion at all. The very word means “return to law”. The only real law I know of is women’s law–“all things are born of woman and do nothing to harm the children.” I know such killings happen around the world on a daily basis, not to mention rape, Ceylan shared her inspiration from Neolithic symbols of women’s presence and power and feels that women today can re-connect with these symbols to find empowerment. She said that the ancient cultic site of Catal Huyuk is next to small villages where the women of those villages have never ventured out to see this sacred site “because the feminine spirit is denied the right to live there.” She related that the women are “under the strictest control of patriarchy” i.e., “honor murders” being one example. But, she created celebrations using artistic symbolic rituals, bringing the women out of their houses and “enticed them into a feminised public zone, which was a very political act in these regions.” Right on, Ceylan!

Concluding this herstorical conference, Erika A. Lindauer, a woman who “wilfully terminated her secondary educational process at a boys’ school at sixteen” in Germany and identifying herself as a “self-determined person” seeking self-education, gave a talk on “The Topic of Fairy Melusina in the History of Luxemburg.” She recounted an amazing story of the “water fairy” Melusina, the ancestress of the people of Luxemburg. Connecting Melusina to her ancient roots, Erika says, “She was a woman of the ancient culture who was still venerated one thousand years ago. Melusina conceals a Goddess, and the first city was built on her ancient cultic site, the “Bockfelsen”. A church is situated at the foot of the Bockfelsen with a widely known black Madonna. Both these facts indicate that the history of Luxemburg has its roots in the matriarchal culture of Old Europe.” A very nice way, indeed, to finish the thought-provoking and inspiring gathering of wise women and a few men from around the globe, sharing in a deep spiritual, herstorical, political and scientific endeavor to change the world.

I know the ripples from this conference will reverberate for a long time to come. There was an idea discussed at my lunch table that perhaps we could bring a similar conference to America. We all toasted the idea, and the seed was planted. May it be so.

From Monica in the hospital

Monica had this to say:

"I feel very frustrated being stuck here in the hospital and the future looks very uncertain about what I will be able to do and not do. I’ve always been an activist, and I am frustrated in these dangerous times to not be able to be out there."

We sat around and listened to Monica tell stories. One of the most well-known was the time when she and 15 women crashed a mass at the Bristol Cathedral. For thirty years or so she had a vision of wanting to stand up in a cathedral or church during mass and confront the bishop or priest and say you are blaspheming against the mother but I never did it because I was too afraid of being put in prison or in the hospital. I had this vision before the women’s movement really began, so there was no support for it at the time. We were planning a conference in Bristol in 1992 which we called “Breaking the Taboos” and was very much a conference around anti-racism. Thre were a lot of African Caribbean women doing workshops. Thre were women there who were really keen on doing this acion in the cathedral and we met in the evening but I was feeling quite nervous because the cathedral was just up the road from where I live. The women who gathered were fearless-anarchist, anti-road, anti-motor-way activists. When the women started singing Buring Times, I realized this was the group ofwomen I had been waiting for all my life. So we decided to go ahead and meet at 10 Sunday morning which is mass and do an action. Much to her amazement, all the women turned up She put her God Giving Birth on a piece of cardboard and she held it in front of her. Some of the women painted their faces with butterflies. One woman had a baby on her back. We made a circle around a tree outside and then went inside the cathedral and walked in the dark until we were lined up right in front of the high altar. She was standing in the middle. The Dean of Bristol was leading the mass. We found out later that he was in support of women priests. The next year the first 30 women priests were ordained in that cathedral on Internaltional womens day. The dean saw Monica as the leader of the pack... if young women do this they are charming, if you are older you are not likely to ever change. He went for her. He said what are you doing here, we are having amass in here. She said well we want to do something in here. He said it is our cathedral. She said all churchs and cathedrals are built on ancient sacred sites of the goddess. He then gave up after a woman working in the church asked if he should call the police.... he said no. He asked us whatwe wanted to do. We were all scared... we thought the roof was going to cave in... we thought we were breaking one of the greatest taboos of all time... breaking a mass. We said we wanted to sing a song. WE saind all the verses of Burning Times. And then the women wanted to do a dance. For a minute it looked like the Dean was holding two women’s hands... but then he pulled back. She had given her word that they were just going to sing a song. They went out thru the center and as they walked out, she said “Glad tidings end of the Godfathers. When she looked back, she saw one of the women standing on the pulpit with her butterfly wings paintead on her eyes looking as if she was preaching to the congregation. When we were going out there was an old man standing at the door who said to Monica You are old enough to know better, and she it is precisely that I am old enough that I am doing this. We went back to the conference... there were 9women drumming, and we danced ecstatically for the next 3 hours... The energy was incredible. WE felt had done something for all women’s consciousness around the earth. AT the confrence we set the date for the end of patriarchy to be celebrated on Silbury Hill in August at the Lammas full moon.

Oh our mother earth
Bringer into birth
Sweet Creatrix of the night and day
Bring our spirits thru
Rest our thoughts in you
Guide our feet in a natural way....

Aspects of Women's Spirituality in Tending to the Dying

For many of us, death is something we would rather not think about. Why is this? Why do we not want to understand the deepest mystery of life? Why are we so afraid to die? These are some of the questions that beckoned me on a journey to learn about the true nature of death, resulting in a recently published book, Midwifing Death: Returning to the Arms of the Ancient Mother, weaving together knowledge about how our pre-patriarchal ancestors viewed life and death with modem stories telling how the sacred passage of death and dying can be midwifed in grace, love and beauty, which are all aspects of the sacred feminine in women's spirituality--the oldest spirituality on the planet. What I have discovered, or rather, uncovered, from the forgotten realms of our ancestors is a deep and profound wisdom of the nature of life, death and regeneration. In order to understand aspects of women's spirituality and their pertinence to death and dying, I feel it is important to have an overview and body-centered sense of what women's spirituality actually is.

Most of us in this fast-paced Euro-Western culture have no idea how our Neolithic and Paleolithic ancestors experienced the sacred, because we erroneously assume that history begins with Mesopotamia and Sumer. While we cannot say we can know exactly what the ancients knew, we can put the pieces and shards together of the puzzle of our past and see as well as feel a timeless reality that spans past, present and future. Most of the scholarship in archeology, cultural anthropology and cultural history has within it an insidious male bias which has not allowed for accurate vision and conclusion regarding our human evolution. Well-known figures and teachers, such as Joseph Campbell, have realized that without the necessary light of feminist scholarship, we have unfortunately been hoodwinked into believing things about ourselves as a species that simply are not true. Without the advent of recent pioneering scholarship by women such as the late Dr.Marija Gimbutas, archeomythologist, linguist, scientist, professor at UCLA for many years who created the new field of study of archeomythology, and author of the encyclopedic The Language of the Goddess and The Civilization of the Goddess, as well as numerous other books and articles, we would be doomed to create and recreate a fear based, violent and insane reality spawned from lies about who we are as beings on this planet, which we have already been doing quite long enough, successfully contributing to our own demise and that of many other species. My research for my book was deeply influenced by her work, as she has literally unearthed from her diggings and studies of Neolithic Old Europe, evidence of peaceful woman-centered cultures that not only lived in peace, but also flourished in creativity and beauty. She has inspired people from around the world to further study these cultures. It is my prayer that her work will become part of the general curriculum in our schools, for her work and research clearly show that humankind is fully capable of living peacefully, because this is our legacy for the millennia preceding patriarchy, the advent of which occurred some 5,000 years ago. Campbell informs us in the forward of Gimbutas' definitive work, The Language of the Goddess:As Jean-Francois Champollion, a century and a half ago, through his decipherment of the Rosetta Stone was able to establish a glossary of hieroglyphic signs to serve as keys to the whole great treasury of Egyptian religious thought from c.3200 B.C. to the period of the Ptolemies, so in her assemblage, classification and descriptive interpretation of some two thousand symbolic artifacts from the earliest Neolithic village sites of Europe, c. 7000 to 3500 B.C., Marija Gimbutas has been able, not only to prepare a fundamental glossary of pictorial motifs as keys to the mythology of that otherwise undocumented era, but also to establish on the basis of these interpreted signs the main lines and themes of a religion in veneration, both of the universe as the living body of a Goddess Mother Creator, and of all the living things within it as partaking of her divinity-a religion, one immediately perceives, which is in contrast to that of Genesis 3: 19 where Adam is told by his father creator: 'In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken, you are dust, and to dust you shall return.' In this earlier mythology, the earth out of which all these creatures have been born is not dust but alive, as the Goddess-Creator herself.1From the time we can read and write we are taught that humankind, often referred to as mankind, and I ask you to reflect on that referencing which is constantly used to describe all of humanity, as a symptom of what is not working for us as a species, has always been violent. We are taught and teach our children that history is equated with which great heroes conquered whom and how many wars have been raged throughout time. We have been forced and force our children to learn detailed accounts of violent atrocities perpetuated by these so-called heroes and of violent demises of civilizations, as if this is all good, important and necessary for us to do and to know, without any regard or consideration for the sensitive and beautiful open mind of a child; there is no questioning about how this kind of focus affects the tenderness of a soul and our capacity to be loving and kind human beings. I think it is safe to say that it is painfully and obviously clear that such indoctrination has one outcome--the sanctioning of violence against "other" to the point where we, as a species, are now teetering on the edge of a collective near-death experience. When our children murder other children in our schools, something is deeply and drastically wrong. When men use and abuse children as sexual objects for a temporary fix in an attempt to end their own pain and suffering, something is excruciatingly and drastically wrong. With such profound imbalance in our lives, how can we possibly live loving, kind and peaceful lives? And if we cannot live peaceful lives, how can we possibly expect to die in peace?

The global and cross-cultural wisdom of the ancients, prior to pre-patriarchal times, offers wonder, truth and beauty about life and death. At the core of many of these Paleolithic and Neolithic cultures is a wisdom nearly lost to us now, without which we grievously suffer, not understanding why. The central core of strength of early peoples from around the world was the experience of earth as Mother, of universe as Mother, of life emerging from the sacred womb of the Great Mother, also known as Goddess. At the core of these communities was the mother-child bond, which informed all aspects of daily life. When I attended the First International Congress on Matriarchies in Luxembourg two years ago, I heard Chinese professor, Dr. Lamu Gatusa whose work centers on the preservation of the social and spiritual heritage of his people, the matriarchal Mosuo of China, speak to the fact that the mother is considered the origin of life and society expressed in both "ethnic concepts and in the concepts of love."2

Archeological findings from the work of Gimbutas and many others as well as research by feminist cultural historians such as Dr. Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, show that our ancestors knew very well who gave them life and who sustained life. Birnbaum, professor in the women's spirituality department at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco and author of several books including her most recent, ground-breaking dark mother, african origins and godmothers, has researched the African diaspora of homo sapiens and has shown that within the psyche of all humans is a deep memory of the dark mother and her values of justice with compassion, equality and peacefulness.3 Her work is corroborated by eminent geneticists, such as L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza who agree that there is only one human race--Afiican. Birnbaum postulates that the core of the deep spiritual nature of our being is informed by the cellular memory of the dark mother who gives life, sustains life and receives life back unto herself in an eternal cyclical existence deemed as heresy by the later church so-called fathers. The implications of Birnbaum's work are far-reaching, for she shows us that the notion of race is really an illusion. In understanding this truth, racism is then eradicated. It is also my prayer that Birnbaum's work will find its way into our curriculum in what we teach our children. If we taught them the truth about who they are and that human beings are far more informed by peacefulness and beauty than insane violence and hatred, as all children really know before this natural wisdom is conditioned out of them, which is happening at increasingly earlier and earlier ages with the age of technology, we will be giving them the tools to live happy, productive, cooperative lives, with a deep respect for their mothers, Mother Earth and Mother Nature, and therefore the extraordinary gift of life and the magical cycle of life, death and regeneration.

The amazing discoveries of the birth, life, death and regeneration murals in the excavations by archeologist James Mellart in Turkey of the 8,000 year old Neolithic culture of Catal Huyuk in the 1960's beautifully depict the deep and profound reverence in which these early peoples lived. The Catal Huyuk settlement lasted approximately 1,000, years. The unearthed evidence of three different skull types found in various diggings showed that diverse peoples lived together in harmony. There is no evidence whatsoever of weaponry or warfare in any of the murals or iconography. And there is amazing substantiation of the reverence of a Mother Goddess. The majestic Neolithic double temples in Malta and Gozo, themselves symbols of the sacred female principle and predating the pyramids by 1,000 years, have yielded numerous female figurines suggesting the primaIness of woman--she who births life into form. One enters the temples through the sacred yonic gateway, which leads to round earthen womb-like spaces deep inside. And one leaves the temples through the same gateway, experiencing a sense of rebirth and regeneration. The ancients also knew to whom they returned at the end of life. Today there are existing remnants of this mother wisdom alive insuch cultures as the Minangkabau in Sumatra, the Berber in Tunisia, the Mosuo in China and the matriarchal >culture found in Juchitan, Mexico. Significantly, when people revere the Mother and the Sacred Feminine, peace abounds. So, it is true that his-story is about war. And it is also true that her-story is about something else entirely.

My journey with the questions about death began a long time ago. Most recently, I was called to care for my aging parents. When my father became ill, I made a decision that I would help him through his passage from this world into the next. It was a spiritual practice for me to show up in that way, because his wounding had gone unhealed in his life which made him difficult to be with at times. Often when people are dying, and they are afraid, their anger and fear can be released in ways that can be very confusing for caregivers, loved ones and family members. My father's death was twenty years ago, and since that time 1 have learned a great deal about midwifing death. I have seen the need for people to feel safe at the time of dying. And I have noticed that most people don't. I wondered why not. That question guided me on my own spiritual quest, as I realized that there was a great deal I did not know about myself, my conditioning, the ruling paradigm I had grown up in, the global wanton hatred of women, culminating in the burning and torture of thousands if not millions of women in the Inquisition, that is, simultaneously, referred to as the age of the Renaissance. This is the single most unspoken event in the recent herstory of our specie-s-the women's holocaust that lasted for about five hundred years, ending in Europe and in the U.S. only three hundred years ago, now finding current expressions in other parts of the world. It might not be easy to understand why anyone would talk about this in relation to death and dying. For me, it is painfully obvious why it is absolutely necessary. In the cells of every woman is this memory, unseen, untold and forced into exile within a woman's soul. Death and dying take on a new meaning from this perspective.

Aspects of women's spirituality in tending to the dying become more comprehensive and encompassing in regard to the current human condition, because if we do not understand the Mother Wisdom from which we are born, we will not know how to impart it to ourselves or to our children, in life and in death. Understanding women's spirituality is also about cultivating a deep understanding of what is happening on our planet and seeing that the death and destruction, violence, and war we wreak on ourselves is intimately connected with the denial of the Mother Wisdom lying dormant in our cells, though there is a new spark of awakening that is happening around the world as women are choosing to create something new rather than fight against the old.

Interestingly, midwifng my father in his death taught me a great deal about life. I saw that we need a completely new way to live, which is not new information, really, but it came to me in my process with him because I came face to face with my own anger and fear, and I needed to learn how to express myself in compassion and love without blame and judgment,-all the values of the original dark mother. As I continued in my journey helping people die, I felt I was awakening to that cellular memory within me of the Mother and began to create with and for people a new way to be together in one of, if not the most important, mysterious and awesome experiences of a lifetime.

Midwifing the dying means to bring into the experience the sacred values of mothering, which have been all but destroyed in global male-dominated hierarchical cultures around the world. Death for the ancients was always connected with regeneration. In our society, we associate death with the grim reaper-a scary image of a man with a sickle coming to get us. In pre-dynastic Egypt as well as dynastic Egypt, the Goddess Nut is found painted on the bottoms of coffins with open arms and the body of the dead is placed on top of her image, face down, indicating a face-to-face meeting of the mortal with the immortal Mother Goddess. The arms of the Mother Goddess welcomed the dead back into the numinous realm between life and death. The Norse Goddess Hel was the wise eternal grandmother whose womb cave of regeneration, the place where souls went in death to find nurturing in her safe haven of warmth and rebirth, was found deep in the heart of the mountain. Today the remnant of Hel's sacred domain has become split off from the cycle of life, death and regeneration and has deteriorated into the demonized place of hell where the hot and cold fires of fear and rage are fanned with violence. People are frightened into believing that to be god-fearing will save them from punishment in the afterlife. Fear, however, does not allow for love, openness, surrender and peace, which are all favorable states to be well acquainted with in life in order that one can be prepared for death, and once again, the values of the dark mother from which we all have come.

To bring the values of mothering to the dying requires skill, because we no longer naturally know these values in our bones, though the memory is there. One must cultivate presence and bring to the bedside of the dying a loving openness that is not encumbered with an agenda. And one must keep one's own fear, anger and need to control in check in order to be truly available to the dying. One must be able to see the needs of the moment and be able to give. This is not a co-dependent giving. This is a giving from the heart that sees and feels, grounded in compassion and authenticity. A loving and present mother knows what is needed. She just knows. It is the same in tending to the dying, which used to be women's practice prior to the advent of patriarchy. When people feel cared for and safe in their dying process, amazing things can happen. I have witnessed a person who has carried a lifetime of anger shed that deep-seated identity with anger in the moments before death, thereby changing the effects of what they carry with them into the realms beyond. Such was the case of my own mother. I midwifed her in her dying, bringing her home to die in peace. Many of us in this culture are the walking wounded. My parents' generation, and many before, did not know much of anything else--therapy was not considered as something people needed unless one was diagnosed as mentally ill and needing special confinement. From what I witness, that describes just about all of us. Valium was offered for women who were considered hysterical. Now we have Prozac. So, my mother suffered from a deep depression all of her life, at the same time raising five children and certainly doing the best she could. But she was angry most of her life, having suffered a difficult childhood. In her death, because she was surrounded by love and safety, she could let go of her pain and really surrender into dying. It was an amazing process to witness, because her personality fell away as the true nature of her being emerged. It is said that our true nature is 10,000 times brighter than the sun, and I could actually feel something of this truth as my mother let go of her anger in the hours before her death.

It is motherly love that births life, sustains and tends to it. Why wouldn't we want motherly love surrounding us in our dying? I am sure most of us would. But most of us do not know what that is, nor what it looks like, because we have been deprived of the ancestral grandmother wisdom that guided, for instance the indigenous peoples of this land, such as the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, as they were named by the French, whose wisdom was not only used in the formation of our constitution, but also was offered by the Haudenosaunee women to the suffering Euro-Western women who were their neighbors to help them realize their own oppression--such women as Matilda Joslyn Gage, Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott. We all know what those women did with what they learned from their Indian sisters.

Motherly love in death and dying offers sanctuary, authenticity and open-heartedness to all involved. Fear and anger melt away in the open arms of love, compassion, truth and beauty. However, in order to be able to give in this way, we must cultivate this reality in our lives. This is the ancient global truth of women's spirituality. It is an indigenous truth that when women are respected, then so is all life, which makes the opposite true as well.

If we are to have peaceful transitions from this world to the next, it is imperative that we change our ways and become more aligned with our true nature, which is love. Life is meant to be lived in peace, joy, harmony, abundance and celebration. With such a life, death is not the end, but rather an opening, a portal, into another realm of the Great Mystery.

Footnotes

1 Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess, HarperSanFrancisco, San Francisco, 1989, p.xiii.

2 Professor Lama Gatusa, personal experience/conversation. Also refer to Goddessing, An International Journa lof Goddess Expression, issue #19, 2004-5, article by Leslene della-Madre," Societies in Balance: Gender Equality in Matrilineal, Matrifocal and Matriarchal Societies, " p.41.

3 Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, dark mother, Authors Chioce Press, Lincoln, 2001, p.xxvi.