Author: Barbara Ardinger

Barbara Ardinger, Ph.D. (www.barbaraardinger.com), is a published author and freelance editor. Her newest book is Secret Lives, a novel about grandmothers who do magic. Her earlier nonfiction books include the daybook Pagan Every Day, Finding New Goddesses (a pun-filled parody of goddess encyclopedias), and Goddess Meditations. When she can get away from the computer, she goes to the theater as often as possible—she loves musical theater and movies in which people sing and dance. She is also an active CERT (Community Emergency Rescue Team) volunteer and a member (and occasional secretary pro-tem) of a neighborhood organization that focuses on code enforcement and safety for citizens. She has been an AIDS emotional support volunteer and a literacy volunteer. She is an active member of the neopagan community and is well known for the rituals she creates and leads.

No Man Can Spin Gold (Part 1) by Barbara Ardinger

Perdita In a land not too far away there once lived a widow who was so poor and who worked so hard day and night to make a bare living that she had almost no time to teach her daughter the things a girl needs to know to be a proper wife. The girl, whose name was Perdita, had learned how to do a few useful things around the house, but when she laid the fire she always mixed green wood with the dry, when she made the soup she always forgot the salt and pepper, and when she swept she inevitably forgot to sweep under the bed. When she sewed she always pricked her fingers and left little red spots on the fabric, and when she spun she always made huge knots and horrible tangles in the new thread. Although she wasn’t very good at these important homely tasks, she had somehow learned to read and study numbers and she had even learned about Panglossian optimism. Her parents had no idea how this learning had come to her, unless it had something to do with the scholars who regularly passed through the town and with whom Perdita spent a lot of time. In her own opinion, the girl more than made up for her lack of useful skills with her brilliant mind and quick tongue…not to mention her beauty.

One day, although her mother had ordered her to finish the washing and hang the clothes in the sun to dry, Perdita left them soaking in the tub and went out and about with her mother’s second husband. On the road they happened to meet the Queen’s eldest Nephew. Now since the Queen had borne no daughters and was now too old to do so, everyone knew that one of her Nephews would inherit the throne when she died. As soon as he spotted the young man, Perdita’s stepfather saw an opportunity.

“Here’s your opportunity,” he murmured to the girl. “Do what you can to attract this fellow. If you do, things will go well for you and your mother.”

Perdita saw an opportunity, too. An opportunity to raise herself socially and find a life that was not so filled with laundry and other mind-numbing hard work. So she tossed her curls and swung her hips, she gazed up at the Royal Nephew, and soon she had his attention, for this young nobleman was interested in the things that have always interested the upper-class men. During their ensuing conversation, Perdita said coyly, “I may have a poor mother, but I’m quite clever, you know. I can read and write. I can cook and clean. I can sew and spin.”

“I’m interested in girls who can do useful things,” said the Queen’s Nephew. “Are you good at all things you do?”

“Oh, yes, I am very, very good,” the girl replied demurely. “I have a great many talents.”

“And,” said her mother’s second husband, “some of this girl’s talents no one has uncovered yet.”

“I see,” said the young man with a wink. “And may I learn what your hidden talents are, my dear?”

“Why,” said Perdita with a pretty blush, “why I can…I can—”

“She can spin straw into gold,” said the stepfather. “Who do you know who can do that?”

“No one at all.” The Royal Nephew took Perdita’s hand. “It’s well known that no man can spin straw into gold.”

“And she works very fast,” said the stepfather. “See how soft her hands are! Her fingers are as nimble as my own. Even though we’re not even related by blood, I have taught her all she knows!”

“Indeed,” the Royal Nephew said, “nimble…” And after he thought for a moment, he added, “My dear, would you like to come to my Aunt’s palace with me and show me—show us your talents?”

So with an unnecessary push from her stepfather, Perdita, who was sure she would be moving into the best of all possible worlds, went to the palace with the Queen’s Nephew. But the Queen was not there, for she was visiting one of her Sister Queens in a nearby land. When the Royal Nephew asked Perdita to show him how she spun straw into gold, she batted her eyelashes at him and, remembering what she’d seen other girls do, shrugged her linen bodice just a little bit off one shoulder. A little while later, when the Royal Nephew asked again about spinning straw into gold, she shrugged her bodice a little bit off her other shoulder. When he asked a third time about spinning straw into gold, however, she finally understood that he expected a reply.

She had to think fast. “Oh,” she said disingenuously, “oh, I only do it at night, when the moon is full, and I can never do it if anyone is watching. I can spin straw into gold only when I am left absolutely alone with my work.” She was feeling quite sure that the Royal Nephew would never leave her alone, especially with her soft linen bodice falling off both shoulders.

But Perdita hadn’t noticed that the moon was full that very night, and when the Royal Nephew offered to let her stay in the palace, she was loath to refuse the invitation. I’ll think of a way out of this predicament, she said to herself. I always do, for I’m very clever.

The young nobleman was keenly interested in gold, as nobles always are, and so he ordered a room at the far, far end of the farthest corridor to be filled one third full with straw. Then he got his aunt’s best spinning wheel and put that in the room, too.

Spinning wheel “Here is a fine and private room,” he said to Perdita, “and I guarantee that no one will disturb you. Just spend the night here and show me how you can spin straw into gold, and I’ll give you a lovely reward in the morning.” And he winked at her.

What could the girl do? She watched the Royal Nephew close the door. She heard the key turn in the lock. She began to walk about the room. At last she sat down beside the wheel. But she didn’t have the least idea about how to spin straw into gold, for she couldn’t even spin flax into decent linen thread without getting huge knots and horrible tangles in it. She began to cry. “I’m lost!” she wailed. “No one is here to advise me. No scholar I’ve ever met has considered this situation. No man can spin straw into gold, but I can’t, either. Oh, woe is me.”

“Well now.”

Suddenly she heard a voice, and when she peeked between her fingers, she saw a little man wearing a peaked green hat and a long brown jacket and wide brown trousers. He had a long white beard and big strong hands.

“Good evening,” he said. “Why are you crying?”

“I’m supposed to spin straw into gold, but I don’t know how.”

Continue reading “No Man Can Spin Gold (Part 1) by Barbara Ardinger”

All Saints Day and All Souls Day by Barbara Ardinger

In the Roman Catholic calendar, today is All Saints Day, tomorrow, All Souls Day. The following slightly edited paragraphs are from my book Pagan Every Day (RedWheel/Weiser, 2006), which is obviously not just about Pagan topics. (I couldn’t find goddesses for every day of the year, so I widened my view.)

November 1: All Saints Day

All Saints Day

During the persecutions of Diocletian (245–313), the number of martyrs became so great that separate days could not be assigned to honor them. They were given common memorial days. All Saints’ Day, the Catholic Encyclopedia informs us, was instituted in the fourth century when dioceses began to divide up and exchange the relics of martyr-saints. At first, only martyrs and St. John the Baptist were recognized, but in 609 Pope Boniface IV consecrated the Pantheon to the Blessed Virgin and all martyr-saints. The vigil for All Saints’ is Hallows Eve, which was also first celebrated in the fourth century. By the 13th century, All Saints’ Day was solemnly celebrated to honor “all saints known and unknown” and to remedy any deficiencies by the faithful in remembering the saints on their proper days. In other words, it became a sacerdotal catch-up day. If a saint was neglected on his assigned day, he could be honored today.

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From Her Lips by Barbara Ardinger

Barbara Ardinger

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe,
She had so many children she didn’t know what to do.
She gave them some broth without any bread;
She whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.

Look! Here she comes. Like most old women, she has a lot to say. Let’s listen in:

“Well, that’s what an old nursery rhyme says. But I’m that old woman, and I can tell you for sure that the only thing ‘true’ about that rhyme is that I’m old. I’m older than anyone I know. Oh, I see you there, eavesdropping. That’s okay. You’re welcome here.

Old woman...shoe You know what? I’ve been called many names by the (mostly) men who make up those rhymes and stories. I’ve been the old witch in the candy house who serves pie to children and then serves the children in the pie. (But did that German guy who wrote that opera about me ever say who eats those pies?) I’ve been the thirteenth old woman at the christening who wasn’t invited and brings a curse that’s as big as the blessings from the first twelve. I’ve been the evil, wicked, mean stepmother.

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Knossos: The Truly True Story by Barbara Ardinger

Barbara Ardinger (Note: this story was inspired by a blog written by Carol P. Christ. But she’s not responsible for the nonsense I write.)

Once upon a time there was a woman named Carol who lived in the largest house on the Island of Crete and had the largest flower garden and the largest herd of cattle. Because of her riches, not to mention her common sense, she had been elected chief of the Council of Mothers, the government of the island. The Council had searched and searched for a proper title for their leader and finally, reluctantly, decided that Queen was as good as anything else…as long as everyone remained politically correct and understood that Queen was merely a handy title. Queen Carol had a husband named Minos who tried and tried to assume the title of King, but no one ever paid any attention to his pretensions. Because he had nothing else to do, he spent most of his time lounging in the front parlor and reading the Knossos Times-Myth-Dispatch.

“Look here,” he said one day, waving the newspaper at his wife. “The Greeks are ramping up for a war over in Troy. They’re calling for kings and armies to join them.”

Carol laid her feather duster aside for a minute. “Well, if you really want to,” she said, “you can go. It’ll be better for you than sitting around here all the time and complaining that you’re bored. But you’d better not come back here and set yourself up as a warrior king! None of those huge statues like they’ve built in Egypt. None of those huge temples with carvings of conquering armies on them, either. We mothers won’t stand for it!”

Continue reading “Knossos: The Truly True Story by Barbara Ardinger”

What Would Durga Do? by Barbara Ardinger

durga1_4in It’s one of my favorite T-shirts. Every time I wear it, people who know who Durga is comment. So do some people who don’t know who the Hindu goddess is.

“What would Durga do?” is of course an echo of the question What would Jesus Do?

I’ve just done a bit of research and learned that this phrase may come from the Middle Ages, that it was famously used in a sermon in about 1891, and that it became very popular among evangelical Christians during the 1990s. What would Jesus do? I think he’d remind us to pay closer attention to the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5, 6, 7), especially the Beatitudes and the Golden Rule: “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them” (Matt.: 7:12). The Golden Rule is of course given in the other major religions, too. WWJD has also been turned into WWBD—“What would Buddha do?” I think the Buddha would tell us to live more mindfully.

But who, you may be asking, is Durga? Why does she have all those arms? Why is she carrying all those weapons? Why is she riding on a tiger? I’ll answer with reference to Patricia Monaghan’s New Book of Goddesses and Heroines (Llewellyn, 1997). While all the Hindu goddesses are ultimately one goddess with the collective name Devi (“goddess”), Monaghan writes, the goddess appears in different forms. “One of the fiercest of Devi’s forms is Durga … [who is] also the eldest.” She appeared during the “primordial war between gods and antigods” and is the “first manifestation of goddess energy” (p. 106). Continue reading “What Would Durga Do? by Barbara Ardinger”

A Fairy Tale Starring Real Fairies (with apologies to W.S. Gilbert) by Barbara Ardinger

Iolanthe Once upon a time very close to right now and in a realm way too much like our world there lived the Sisterhood of Faeries. We remember their names. There’s the Faerie Queen, Belphoebe, who spent much of her time composing epic poetry, which her sister Gloriana wrote down for her. Other fairies were Titania (who ran the orphan asylum for abandoned children), Carabosse (whose job it was occasionally to Speak Firmly to children, both fey and human, who were behaving badly), Fata (an astrologist), Morgan le Fay (no one was ever quite sure what she did), and Tinkerbell (who especially loved to play with well-behaved children). Most of the fairies worked as fairy goodmothers and guided their special human charges through their complicated human lives. A few of the younger fairies collected teeth. It was a rule in the Realm of Faerie that fairies were forbidden to marry human men, though they could (and did) of course flirt and dally with them.

One of Belphoebe’s favorite daughters was the adventurous Iolanthe, who traveled much in the consensual reality where the humans lived. Iolanthe had, in fact, gone among men so often that she had married the Chief Justice of the human realm. For her crime passionel, she was banished from the Faerieland. She took up residence in a stream, where she cast dreams and the occasional nightmare upon the Chief Justice, who had no idea where she’d gone. She also took up good works. Among other things, she pushed drowning children out of the water (though she occasionally arrived too late, as we know from young Ophelia’s sad demise). She spent most of her time reading great books, especially history and law. What no one had known when Iolanthe was banished was that she was pregnant. Her son, Strephon, was born and raised in an underwater castle. Because his mother was so busy with her books and works, the lad was nursed by a kindly female wolf and educated by scholars and sorcerers, and he finally found minimum-wage work as a shepherd. But the lad had ambitions! He abandoned his flock, found suitable clothing, and managed to enroll himself in a large university, where, inspired by his mother, he studied political science, law, history, music, and literature. When he confessed all this to his mother, she immediately blessed him and gave him more great books to study. Continue reading “A Fairy Tale Starring Real Fairies (with apologies to W.S. Gilbert) by Barbara Ardinger”

Book review: Merlin Stone Remembered: Her Life and Works by Barbara Ardinger

Barbara Ardinger When Merlin Stone’s book, When God Was a Woman, was published in 1976, it was a lightning bolt of feminist scholarship that told the world that before there was a Judeo-Christian god there were goddesses, and before there were goddesses, there was the Goddess. If you’re reading this review and you have not read When God Was a Woman, buy the book. Right now. As you sink into Stone’s book, try to imagine what it was like before we knew about Isis or Inanna or Astarte, before we knew that the tree in the Garden of Eden was probably a sacred fig and that the serpent was a symbol or aspect of the Goddess and that people (mostly women) who ate figs or worked with serpents were honored priestesses and prophets. Just imagine! The work of the second wave feminists added to the work of scholars like Merlin Stone and Marija Gimbutas, but it didn’t begin until the second half of the 20^th century. Before that? All there was, was God the Father, maker of heaven and earth. Yes, Merlin Stone hurled lightning bolts into our hearts and minds and bookshelves.

Merline Stone Merlin Stone Remembered is a new book edited by Dr. Carol F. Thomas, Dr. David B. Axelrod, and Stone’s life partner Leonard Schneir, with an introduction by Gloria Orenstein, professor emerita, USC. Orenstein opens the book by putting Stone’s work in context. Before the 60s and 70s, she writes, no one was ever taught anything about the matristic cultures. Yes, a few books had been written. She cites G. Rachel Levy’s The Gate of Horn (published in England in 1948, republished in the U.S. in 1963), Helen Diner’s Mothers and Amazons (1973), and Elizabeth Gould Davis’ The First Sex (1971). These books gave us some of our foundational myths, but, Orenstein writes, “we can see that although there was some writing that had already attempted to reconstruct a history of women …, much more expertise and authority were needed” (p. 8). “Once Merlin Stone provided us with her careful scholarship and a truly feminist (not biased, patriarchal) accounting of ancient Goddess cultures, I and all who found Merlin’s work were finally able to understand our herstory…” (p. 9).

Continue reading “Book review: Merlin Stone Remembered: Her Life and Works by Barbara Ardinger”

Howl: A Mashup Story by Barbara Ardinger

Howl!

For centuries, the wolves were the lords of the forests, ruling wisely and carefully culling the herds of the dumber animals, which actually helped to preserve many species. The wolf packs, led by their alpha females, worked to maintain the balance established by Great Mother Earth. But now a new predator was coming into the forests. Men were cutting down trees and making farms and towns and cities. They were forgetting the stewardship assigned to them by Great Mother Earth, upsetting the natural balance, making enemies of the wild creatures.

wolf

Something had to be done to save the wild places and the wild creatures. The great wolf packs called a World Parliament of Lupine Peoples, which met in a secret location in Mitteleuropa. The werewolves who attended had their own breakout session later in the week, but the men who cast wolf whistles at young women were chased away, as were all wolves in sheeps’ clothing and all wolves of Wall Street. Although there was some discussion about admitting the medieval English queens called she-wolves after a queen in one of Shakespeare’s plays (if you’re curious, it’s in Henry VI, Pt. 3), they were admitted because they were intelligent, brave, and cunning women. The Princess Lupa, stepmother of Romulus and Remus, was a special guest.

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Popeye as Deity by Barbara Ardinger

Barbara Ardinger

If you’ve read any of my posts here (or my books), you know that I’m not a friend of the fellow I call the standard-brand god. This is the “man upstairs” who goes by such names (in alphabetical order) as Allah, El Shaddai, Jehovah, and Yahweh. He’s the guy who’s snoopier than Santa Claus—he knows when we’re sleeping, when we’re awake, when we’ve been bad or good, and what we’re doing in any state of consciousness. At least that’s what his priests and preachers tell us. His holy books were written by men and his stories are told from the male point of view. (But how did Ruth and Esther get in the canon?) He has priests, but no priestesses that I know of, and even the named angels are male. I mean no disrespect to people who honor this god, but he’s just not my kind of deity.

But hark! There is a charming fellow. We all know him. Continue reading “Popeye as Deity by Barbara Ardinger”

Today is International Women’s Day—Let’s celebrate! by Barbara Ardinger

Barbara Ardinger According to their website, International Women’s Day (March 8) is a “global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future. In some places like China, Russia, Vietnam and Bulgaria, International Women’s Day is a national holiday.” The day was established to honor the work of the suffragettes who campaigned for women’s right to vote. (Note that the word “suffragette” is derived from “suffrage,” the right to vote. Today some women prefer to lose the “-ette” syllable, which diminishes any word it’s added to, and say “suffragist.”) “Great unrest and critical debate,” the website continues, “was occurring amongst women [at the beginning of the 20^th century]. Women’s oppression and inequality was [sic.] spurring women to become more vocal and active in campaigning for change. Then in 1908, 15,000 women marched through New York City demanding shorter hours, better pay and voting rights.”

On March 19, 1911, the site continues, “more than one million women and men attended IWD rallies campaigning for women’s rights to work, vote, be trained, to hold public office and end discrimination. However less than a week later on 25 March, the tragic Triangle Fire in New York City took the lives of more than 140 working women, most of them Italian and Jewish immigrants. This disastrous event drew significant attention to working conditions and labour legislation in the United States that became a focus of subsequent International Women’s Day events.”

Two thousand years earlier in Rome, the month of March began with the Matronalia, or Festival of Women, when the Vestal Virgins entered a sacred grove and hung offerings of their hair on the oldest tree. Some historians say that Roman matrons served their female slaves at this feast. For every baby born in Rome, a coin was deposited in the temple of Juno Lucina, “Light,” to give thanks to the goddess for a safe birth. Continue reading “Today is International Women’s Day—Let’s celebrate! by Barbara Ardinger”