Herstory – Page 20 – Feminism and Religion

REMEMBERING THE MAGIC OF MAMA DONNA HENES: 1945-2024 by Diane Saarinen

For those who don’t know who Donna Henes was, her official bio:

Donna Henes is an internationally renowned urban shaman, spiritual teacher, award-winning author, popular speaker and workshop leader whose joyful celebrations of celestial events have introduced ancient traditional rituals and contemporary ceremonies to millions since 1972. More at her Wikipedia page here.

Donna, known affectionately to many as Mama Donna, was so in tune with the seasons (even putting out a quarterly publication for a time called Always in Season), that when her time came to leave this sparkling, stunning incarnation of hers, she left on Autumn Equinox Eve 2024, just two days after her 79^th birthday.

Sad news to those she left behind and sad news to the planet. But as we approach Samhain, Halloween and Day of the Dead, what wonderful memories my friend Donna Henes left me with! And “what is remembered, lives.” So live on, Mama Donna!

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Ariadne and Me – The .5% by Arianne MacBean

When I travelled to Crete on a Goddess Pilgrimage last year, we were asked to introduce ourselves by our matrilineal lines. I am Arianne, daughter of Bernadette, granddaughter of Helen and a long line of women, known and unknown, stretching back to Africa. Many of the women in the group were able to intone long lists of names in their matrilineal lines. I was not able to go further than my Grandmother, Helen. No one in my mother’s large Polish family could remember my Great Grandmother’s name.

My journey toward Ariadne has been as circuitous as the labyrinth itself. In many ways, I have been searching for her since those first bedtime stories my father used to tell me as a child, when Theseus was the main character and Ariadne, merely a stop on his road. I longed for her, even then, to have her own heroine’s journey. I tried to imagine what that might look like but, without models, could not conjure anything beyond holding the red thread so others could triumph. Later, I began a more conscious search for Ariadne as I became curious about the connections between her choices, feelings, expressions and my own longings, betrayals, and outbursts. Since then, there have been moments when I let myself fantasize about being connected to her in some real way, beyond being named after her, or feeling and acting as she may have. In these fleeting moments when I imagine we are bonded, I am awash in an intense sense of belonging, something I never felt as an only child of divorced parents. But then in a flash, my mind takes a sharp turn, as in a labyrinth, and I negate those feelings with logic. You want to be connected to Her, so you are finding ways to make it true.

Women’s Bodies As Battlefield by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote in the introduction to her book The Women’s Bible:

The Bible teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the judgement seat of Heaven, tried, convicted and sentenced. Marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage, maternity, a period of suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent on man’s bounty for all her material wants . .

We are facing the long-term results of these biblical writings. This upcoming election is so unsettling because it is showing patriarchy in all its ugliness. We see how this is being played out, especially regarding abortion, but in all areas of the functioning of women’s bodies. The reason abortion is at the foundation of it all is that the drive to police women’s bodies is the crux which justifies all sorts of cruelties. It is the same with racism. These are issues that span the pantheon of rights; human, economic, healthcare, bodily autonomy. It takes a police state to quell all of these.

Mourning by Beth Bartlett

Grief is the experiencing . . . Mourning is the process,
when we take the grief we have on the inside and express it outside ourselves –
writing, planting, burying, burning, rising up
ceremony, ritual, community[i]

A glimpse of our cottage as I drove away.

“As long as I stayed there, I could keep you with me. . . .” Those words kept repeating in my mind throughout my long drive home from my sister, Jeannie’s, “Celebration of Life” service. I’d stopped midway on my thousand-mile journey at the cabin our family has shared for sixty years. There I could still feel her presence — on the hillside where we so often sat with our morning cups of tea, or watching the sunset, or chatting away the afternoon; on the dock where we’d lie in the sun or sit late at night and watch the stars come out, or cuddle up in blankets on windy, fall days; in the circle of couches and chairs where we played telephone Pictionary, charades, and CatchPhrase; in the kitchen where we’d cooked and eaten and played card games together; in the bedroom we often shared with a dog between our beds; the road where we’d go for family walks – eight, ten, twelve of us all together, and always two, three, or four dogs; even the driveway where we’d greet and hold each other with great gladness after months of separation, and where we’d hug and say goodbye, and then hug once more because in the back of our minds we’d be wondering if this was the last time. . . .

Censored Angel: Anthony Comstock’s Nemesis. A Novel by Joan Koster

“I would lay down my life for the cause of sex reform, but I don’t want to be swept away. A useless sacrifice.” Ida C. Craddock, Letter to Edward Bond Foote, June 6, 1898

In 1882, Ida C. Craddock applied to the all-male undergraduate school of University of Pennsylvania. With the highest results on the entrance tests, the faculty voted to admit her. But her admission was rejected by the Board of Trustees, who said the university was not suitably prepared for a female. (U of P only became co-ed in 1974)

With her aspirations blocked, Ida left home determined to leave her mark on women’s lives by studying and writing about Female Sex Worship in early cultures. At the time, little information was available to women about sexual relations. To do her research, Ida resorted to having male friends take books forbidden to females, such as the Karma Sutra, out of the library for her.

An unmarried woman, she turned to spirituality and the practice of yoga, a newly introduced practice to the American public at the time, as a way to learn about sex. In her journals, she describes her interaction with angels from the borderlands, and in particular, her sexual experiences with Soph, her angel husband through what was likely tantric sex.

On Being Apolitical or Neutral by Karen Tate

I believe we are all One and part of the cosmic web. Chaos theory, the butterfly wings moving in Oregon can affect a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Or quantum entanglement, two or more objects can affect each other no matter how far apart they are. Yes, we are all inter-connected whether we believe or understand it. So the crazy neighbor or uncle we can’t stand and roll our eyes every time they spew sh*t out of their mouth, well they are part of us. As are rich and poor, black and white, male/female/trans, Left and Right, American and French, Christian and Pagan, educated and less educated, religious and atheist, etc. If we are more tolerant and inclusive, if we focus on love, joy and being in the grace of the Light we might evolve or ascend as so many are talking about these days. The “deplorables” like the uncle or neighbor would do better if they knew better.

Can you remember when you had the self awareness to know you just didn’t know what you didn’t know? They don’t yet. I think, we, as a part of them, we have to “hold space” and move forward in love until they educate themselves, self correct and rein in their hate or bad behavior or thoughts. As One, it’s as if one of our appendages is broken. We don’t cut it off. We tend it until it’s healed and healthy through all the pain and physical therapy. Eventually we’re whole.

Unless this “part of us” is threatening our way of life…

Poetry, Plays, Pens, Persistence, Underpin Voice: Both Jean & Eleanor Live by Margot Van Sluytman

Stepping into the autumn season offers time to think about summer. Time to think about what happened during those hazy, lazy, crazy days. Digesting. Re-wording. Steeping one’s self in recent memories and drawing forth, indeed permitting to re-surface, what touched us most deeply. For me, The Beatles song, Eleanor Rigby, was conjured. That imagined woman. That fictional woman. And her voice and her voicing. Buried she was, in a church, along with her name. Nobody came.

What is it that invites this negation of voice? Voices? Voice-ing? Particularly those of womyn? No matter class, culture, creed. This question continues to journey with me, as I myself, note the accumulation of years. As I breathe the beauty of my Grand-Children’s energies. And with-ness their lives unfold. Unfold in a world that is slowly, ever so slowly, yet determinately, and with unceasing tenacity, resurrecting the lost voices of womyn. Too long buried and silenced.

Even Now: Creativity, Possibility and the Renewal of the World by Rabbi Adina Allen

October 3, 2024 // 1 Tishre, 5785

“Rosh Hashanah is the anniversary of the creation of the world,” wrote the Eish Kodesh, Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto. Writing at a time of unimaginable suffering, even against the backdrop of impossible circumstances, he knew this moment, the day in which we inhabit right now, to be one of creativity, possibility and renewal.

This theme of creativity and Rosh Hashanah is perhaps expressed nowhere more poignantly than in the phrase Hayom Harat Olam. One of the many names by which Rosh Hashanah is known, these words come from one of the holiday’s most ancient piyyutim, recited in the sacred center of the Rosh Hashanah service, the haunting, evocative Musaf Amidah. To conclude each of the three special sections for Rosh Hashanah: Malchuyot (Sovereignty), Zichronot (Remembrances), and Shofarot (marking the appearances and meanings of shofar across Torah), the shofar is sounded in the proscribed pattern — wholeness, breakage, shattering, wholeness, followed by Hayom Harat Olam.

Incredibly! The Inquisitional Cultural Mechanism Rears its Hydra Head by by Elisabeth Sikie

As a young witch hungry for feminist sisterhood and spiritual wisdom in the 90s, before the blooming of the internet, I discovered a mag called The Beltane Papers. I remember devouring an article featuring channeled material of women killed during the European witch hunts. This transmission revealed past voices of everyday people living their lives until they were snagged by the slow creep of an increasingly oppressive cultural trajectory. What struck me was the normalcy of their voices, the deceased echoes of regular women trying to make sense of events beyond their control until they were taken by a system that destroyed them. What stayed with me is the author’s observation that even at their violent end these women’s voices remained “incredulous”.

Decades, and seemingly lifetimes later, I completed my dissertation for my PhD in Religion and Philosophy in which I excavated some of the subaltern history of my European Ancestors and their female shamanic practices. At one inevitable point in my research – kicking and screaming – I reluctantly faced the inquisitions and witch trials. After waving a sage wand and cracking a sacred beer, I cracked open the Malleus Maleficarum, the infamous “Hammer of the Witches”.[1] This notorious guidebook, a how-to for career Christian Inquisitors written by two Dominican Friars[2] during the Middle Ages, details moral arguments supporting the legalized suppression, interrogation, and eradication of women designated by the church-state as heretics.

Elderberrying with the Yei by Sara Wright

Every year at the end of August I celebrate the Wild Harvest by gathering elderberries to make a medicinal tincture that I use all year long and share with close friends.

This gathering is a process that begins in the spring as I search for new bushes and then later blossoming elderberry flowers in old and new places. As the summer progresses, I continue to monitor the bushes searching for those with berries. Beginning in early August I am on alert for ripening. I am especially mindful because our weather is changing rapidly. If the trend of bad air, fog, and too many deluges continues unabated it’s probable that the times for harvesting berries may shift. In addition, many of the wild places that once supported elderberry bushes have been manicured to get rid of the wild plants by mowing them down, bulldozing the soil to remove all greenery, etc. The rape of wild nature has escalated with time.

This year I have been especially fortunate because I found new clusters bursting out in places they weren’t before. I think the Elder – Berry Woman is helping me. Destroying these precious wild plants and their habitat means that a once common ancient Native plant remedy may be disappearing. Despite horticultural advertising our elderberry bushes do not do well in cultivation, if they survive at all.