(In response to, Grandmother of the Sun: The Power of Woman in Native America (and other readings))
“This spirit, this power of intelligence, has many names and many emblems. She appears on the plains, in the forests, in the great canyons, on the mesas, beneath the seas. To her we owe our very breath, and to her our prayers are sent…” (Paula Allen, p.1)
Since the beginning of time, humans have felt the presence of the divine watching over us (or not). Spiritual truth is a many sided diamond, with as many lenses as there are humans to perceive it in their lives. We look today at women through a humanitarian lens, and we seek to uncover some of that spiritual truth as it relates to the oppression of women in modern religion.
Gender stratification is evident in many religions of modern time, from Islamic cultures where women are generally not allowed to be seen with men non-related to them, are not allowed to drive a car, and generally do not go to school, to Christian cultures where the priesthood and church hierarchy is a selection of males, and women are thought to have brought “original sin” to humankind, and indeed, the devil will someday arrive on earth in the form of a woman riding a multi headed dragon.
Historically, we can look at the dark ages up to the sixteen hundreds, when the crusades were not only against the Muslims, whose culture survived the crusades in the arid regions more distant from central Europe, but against pagans and druids who made up the matriarchal culture of women-empowered witches. Those women were considered heretics by the Church because they could ease the pain of childbirth using herbs (which seemed like magic – a Christian taboo), so those witches were burned or subjugated. For some time, people of the countryside practiced both religions as a way of going half way with the authority of the church. But eventually the old ways died out into secrecy as the church became more and more authoritarian.
Speaking of the church subjugating locals, Europeans moved into Africa in the colonial period, where tribal worship began, where even today women practice the Shona culture. In their religion, different land wand water animals are archetypes and family emblems. Since a symbol can mean anything, we degrade that kind of culture in American perception as monkey worship. In fact these animals are such a deep part of African life that they come to represent human value that is subjugated in modern times by the church. The locals incorporate Christianity into their worship somewhat awkwardly, again attempting to go half way with the modern father-god-worship culture on Earth. The locals are battling deforestation and depletion and export of natural resources among other problems. A return to so called “ancestral values” is called for by the Kenyan Green Belt Movement. It sounds like they are listening to their erotic sense of what is right and taking action against globalization, by planting trees and encouraging sustainable farming of local foodstuff. Reclaiming their local sovereignty and recovering cultural meaning from dying religion is important to women whose culture and way of life has been uprooted and modified to suit the global agenda.
Even Native American tradition (of the Hopi people) acknowledges the creative and central godly powers of Spider Woman and Sand Alter or Childbirth-Water woman. However, the cultures belonging to pagans, Native Americans, and many other tribal peoples of the world have been marginalized in modern society. The Goddess of the pagans and the Sand-Altar Woman and other tribal goddesses have been turned into representations of mere fertility, indeed, sexuality, as if a woman god must be a sexual creature. Thought woman, creatrix of all things, whose thought allows all things to be and move in Hopi mythology, is marginalized this way:
“To assign to this great being (Thought Woman) the position of “fertility goddess” is exceedingly demeaning: it trivializes the tribes and it trivializes the power of woman.” (Paula Allen, p.1)
The stratification that has occurred, the suppression of the positive goddess images and beliefs, has been strategic. Women have their place in Islam, in Christianity, and maybe a better place in druidism. But how does this relate to women’s issues in today’s society?
Reproductive rights of women are affected. Who has the right to reproduce, in Jewish societies, in Islamic societies, in China
There is violence against women in religion. In Islam, a tradition masquerading as a religion, women who are suspected victims of rape by their brothers are killed by their own families to restore the honor of the men. Not only that, there is spiritual violence rampant in the religions of the world today. Religions and institutions don’t want people to doubt, or at worst, listen to their own sense of truth. The goal of institutional religion is to remove all doubt, to cut off a person completely from their own erotic sense of what is right and good. This is spiritual violence. Sometimes the oppression is internalized, and a person can be disconnected from their own sense of truth for a long time, and strongly support a system that marginalizes their own mental and emotional clarity about spiritual truth.
The object of consciousness-raising is to reconnect with the erotic. Religion, if it is to exist on earth, should exist in the service of the wellbeing of the human’s who practice it. Religious truths extracted from doctrine must be humanitarian, and when they’re not, (e.g. in Catholicism, women are advised against birth control as being sinful), we need to take religion into our own hands and adapt it. Once we are aware that stratification exists, we can take steps to change the entrenched values.
At a micro level, women encounter stratification right in their homes, indeed, in Islam, the family is thought to be a microcosm of the Arabic community at large, and it is, for as long as there is violence against women in an Islamic or American home, there will be violence in the community at large. At a micro level we face our friends and family and look at reshaping those bonds to be more permissive of women’s freedoms and rights. At the national and global level, consciousness raising leads to acts of activism that change a country, or otherwise, a small act can be catapulted to the spotlight and given major meaning to the national and global communities. Right now the “blu bra revolution” is occurring in Islamic culture, where some men who attacked a woman are being shamed and losing their honor instead of the woman who was assaulted and left half naked in the street losing her “sexual honor”.
The path of least resistance is an issue to women in religion. Often when we have raised our consciousness and feel some oppression in our own religion, it is easy to let it slide and be complacent, because to challenge the patriarchal status quo in the world’s major religions and your friends and family is a huge challenge. The key is to pick your battles and choose your battlegrounds. When we are persuading are close friends and family to be less gender stratified, a good tactic is to divide and conquer. We can't persuade a person or society to change unless we understand the issues at work in their minds.
Sexual Agency is an issue to women in religion. In Islam, all sex outside of marriage is considered adultery and is illegal. In Catholicism, women are allowed to have sex, within marriage, but not use birth control. Abstinence is promoted in America for religious reasons
Social Conditioning is an issue because we don’t always get to choose our own religion, it is given to us by society and family, and indeed we accept it and it becomes a framework for the meaning in our lives. The erotic is again important because sometimes we are socially conditioned to believe things that go against our wise inner nature, our erotic sense of truth.
Overall women’s place in religion is tenuous. We need women priests, we need Islamic women who are allowed to drive and leave their homes, we need native American kids taught that their gods are more than just sex and birthing objects. How do we get there?
Religion uses guilt to control women and men. Look at body image in religion. In Islam, women are objectified as such sexual objects that they must cover themselves lest they soil another man’s honor at a distance (or pants). In Christianity, women are given images of the virgin Mary or the virgin de Guadalupe to hold themselves to, unrealistic images that are impossible to achieve and end up causing self doubt and lack of self esteem.
My conclusion is that changing the attitudes of the world’s religions, institutions, and individuals will have to deal with addressing guilt. Guilt is normally what we experience when we know we have done something wrong. Religion uses guilt as a weapon, a threat of hell-fire, even in Wicca and Buddhism there is the idea of “karma” which will “come back and bite you in the ass.” for your bad actions and thoughts. The other option is humor. If we’re not feeling guilty about our failures, it’s because we know the God or Goddess looking over this universe has a knowing smile on its face. The purpose of religion ought not to be to threaten guilt or punishment to insure cultural norms, but to encourage wellbeing and healthy functioning of women and men and encourage cultural norms to develop out of our own erotic sense of rightness. Religion originally came from human insight, not the other way around, and we need to restore that attitude to the world’s dogmatic religions.
Finally, is it ok to be angry at God? If we feel undervalued by our religion, if it hurts, what then? It is only through the full expression of anger and the validation of the meaning and values behind the anger that can change the community or institution in question. Being angry is so important, being connected to our own feelings. I’m angry too. Anger can’t go into a box inside, that’s a way to dissolve a person’s sanity away, that’s the ultimate spiritual violence we can do to someone, is to take away the agency of their self-respect. Feel your feelings, they’re what the Goddess gave us to guide us in this crazy gender stratified world.
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