Poetry – Page 19 – Feminism and Religion

Facing the Moon Alone by Molly Remer

February 2016 030

“When all is said and done I think every Witch should, at some time, face the moon alone, feet planted on the ground, with only his or her voice chanting in the starry night.”

–Laurie Cabot, Power of the Witch

I will never forget the first time I heard someone recite the Charge of the Goddess from memory. Bare-breasted, she strode around the fire in sacred circle at a large goddess festival in Kansas, delivering the words with power, grace, and confident resonance. I thought: I will do that someday.

In February of this year, we took a family trip to Dauphin Island. While there, the afternoon of the full moon, I
decided that the time had come. I was going to memorize the Charge of the Goddess. First, I thought I would only memorize it a piece at a time. It seemed “too big” to do in a single sitting. I had it printed out on a piece of paper that rapidly became damp with the salty sea air. I drew a labyrinth in the sand with my toes, set one of my goddess sculptures at its entrance, and drew a Womanrunes card.

One stanza at a time, slowly I began to repeat the poem* aloud:

hear ye, the words of the star goddess
the dust of whose feet are the hosts of heaven...

Over and over, I said the words, letting them twine around my tongue and in the air, experimenting with cadence and rhythm. After I could reliably repeat one section, I’d move to the next, letting it build in my memory until I could put the two together confidently and then moving to the next.

I am the beauty of the green earth
the white moon amongst the stars..

I stared into the waves, listening to them rise and fall along with my words. My three older children dug in the sand. February 2016 073
My husband fished. My toddler toddled around and then came to sit on my lap and nursed to sleep for nap time:

before my face
beloved of all…

I whispered into his damp hair. I felt in an altered state of consciousness. The words began to wind their way through me, becoming a part of me, embedded in me. I danced with them as I have never danced with another piece of writing. I felt them merging with me. I sang them aloud. I stated them fast and slow and I built, adding the next line and then the next…

for behold, all acts of love and pleasure
all my rituals.

I turned over hard thealogical questions as the words spun their magic through the air. What does it really mean that “all your learning and seeking shall avail you not, lest your know the mystery.” Do I really feel the goddess within? Do I find her within myself or is she only outside and if she is only outside, does she really exist at all? Tears came to my eyes: do I even like myself?

Two hours passed. My baby awoke and returned to digging in the sand. My husband packed up his fishing gear. The sky began to darken and spit rain. I stood and danced the words into the sand with my feet.

let your divine innermost self
be enfolded
in the rapture
of the infinite

I felt rapturous. I felt triumphant. I had done it. Faster and faster my feet stamped the sand as I called the words into the waves. I spun in circles with my toddler chanting and laughing and offering my devotion before the sea, beneath the moon.

the mystery of the waters
the desire in human hearts…

February 2016 179

*I used Shekhinah Mountainwater’s adaptation of the Charge, originally by Doreen Valiente, as included in the book Ariadne’s Thread. Molly 180

Molly has been “gathering the women” to circle, sing, celebrate, and share since 2008. She plans and facilitates women’s circles, seasonal retreats and rituals, mother-daughter circles, family ceremonies, and red tent circles in rural Missouri and teaches online courses in Red Tent facilitation and Practical Priestessing. She is a priestess who holds MSW and M.Div degrees and recently finished her dissertation about contemporary priestessing in the U.S. Molly and her husband Mark co-create original goddess sculptures, ceremony kits, and jewelry at Brigid’s Grove. Molly is the author of Womanrunes, Earthprayer, and The Red Tent Resource Kit. She writes about thealogy, nature, practical priestessing, and the goddess at her Woodspriestess blog.

Wonder Bread by Natalie Weaver

Natalie Weaver edited It is a difficult thing to wake up and realize you are living a life you do not recognize. This happens for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes, it happens dramatically as in the case of death, job loss, personal trauma, or illness. Other times it is a slow and insidious transition from what you knew to what you have become, as you find yourself looking at your workplace and recognizing no one or wondering who these people are in your home. Sometimes it is as simple as getting a haircut or a pair of contact lenses, when suddenly you see some wrinkle or skin mark you didn’t know had been forming while you slept. I find this experience shockingly regular now, and while I am no longer surprised that it happens, I am consistently surprised at what I discover.

For example, my son is now an altar server in the Roman Catholic Church. This has occurred concurrently with my very unexpected involvement in an annulment case, which has revealed an outrageous lack of pastoral sensitivity on the part of the Church. Witnessing the hurt this process causes, I could run from the Church. But then there is my son in the choir and serving at Mass, trying to understand this world that I both introduce him to and also roundly critique. I was chatting with a colleague at lunch over such matters and noticed her quieting after a time, eyes cast off into the distance. After a long pause, she murmured, “How did I get here again?” Continue reading “Wonder Bread by Natalie Weaver”

Celebrating National Poetry Month by Elizabeth Cunningham

Elizabeth Cunningham headshot jpeg One of my morning practices is Lectio Divina, divine reading. Instead of reading scriptures, I read poems. The practice calls on me to be alert and contemplative. Recently, I have been reading The Shambhala Anthology of Women’s Spiritual Poetry, an extraordinarily diverse selection of poems from 2300 BCE to the late 20^th century. I won’t be quoting from the collection, but I do recommend it to FAR readers as a sample of our literary, religious and feminist legacy.

Writing has always been one of the more accessible forms of expression for women. You don’t need expensive paints or canvas, clay or stone. To complete your work, you don’t need access to a theatre or an orchestra. Just a scrap of paper, a writing implement, a stolen moment, and, yes, the opportunity to be literate, not easily come by in many times and places for women or men. If you are literate, the act of writing itself does not require even Virginia Woolf’s much-to-be-desired room of one’s own. Jane Austen is said to have written at the dining room table surrounded by the chaos of family life. Continue reading “Celebrating National Poetry Month by Elizabeth Cunningham”

Caroline Schelling on Birth & Death by Stuart Dean

Caroline Schelling

Of the many letters Caroline wrote to her lifelong friend Luise, one of the most intense (the 57th Letter) dates from seven years after the 4th Letter discussed in my last post. By then both were married; only a few months earlier Caroline had given birth to her first child (Auguste); though Luise already had children, Caroline knew that one of them was terminally ill. In the first paragraph Caroline describes how difficult Auguste’s birth was for her; in the second she consoles Luise over the impending death of her child. She thus subtly parallels birth with death and hence the labor for one with mourning over the other.

Fifteen years later, only a few months after the death of Auguste–the last of her four children to die–Caroline’s generally positive disposition evidenced in the 4th Letter and her experience in grappling with birth and death evidenced in the 57th Letter were being put to the test. Though she was holding up well, Friedrich Schelling (Friedrich), the man who was to be her third husband, seems to have been suicidal from feeling guilty (rightly or wrongly) for having failed to do enough to cure whatever illness killed Auguste. Caroline wrote frequently and urgently to him, offering advice and comfort. In one of those letters (274d) she characterizes the challenge of overcoming grief as a formula to be solved: “(death/pain) x (love/bliss) = (life/peace).” She terms this one of her ‘primal axioms’ (the “Ursatz”), although she seems playfully to concede to Friedrich that he or perhaps someone else shares responsibility for it. Continue reading “Caroline Schelling on Birth & Death by Stuart Dean”

Caroline Schelling’s 4th Letter by Stuart Dean

Caroline Schelling

Caroline Schelling (‘Caroline’) wrote the fourth letter of hers that survives (the ‘4th Letter’) on October 7, 1778, shortly after she had turned 15, to a girl she met at boarding school who was to become her lifelong friend (Luise). The intensity of her friendship with Luise is evident already in the 4th Letter, for she tells Luise that in writing to her she “portrays her entire soul.” What prompted such depth of feeling for this letter relates not just to a significant moment in Caroline’s life but in every person’s life. In the second paragraph she refers to what was most likely her first sexual relationship. Given that context, Caroline demonstrates remarkable emotional maturity and intellectual sophistication in how she expresses herself.

She begins by referring to the “sensations of my heart,” telling Luise how she struggles to find “adequate words” to express them. She is not, she proudly insists, an “enthusiast” who simply gives into feelings, insisting instead on the importance of “going over” (Überlegung) them herself. Though Caroline was not taught Latin, it seems as if she had been taught the relevance to German of a Latin treatise from the 4th century CE on the method for defining words. Caroline’s ‘going over’ her feelings before writing Luise is consistent with its methodology: first, to confront the question of whether something even exists (an sit, Existenz) and then determining, to the extent possible, what it is (quid sit, Wesen) and what its qualities are (quale sit, Eigenschaften)–i.e., its relationship to other words (grammar) and hence how it can be communicated.

This methodology, which is applicable to a wide range of disciplines (e.g., legal argumentation, psychiatric diagnosis), is also analogous to a language theory Charles Segal argued is implicit in what remains of the writings of the 5th century BCE Sicilian Gorgias, a theory Segal related to Sappho’s poetry. That is relevant, because given the failed sexual relationship about which Caroline writes to Luise, the 4th Letter bears comparison to two poems by Sappho (S. 31 and S. 1) that Caroline surely then knew in translation. Caroline’s “sensations of my heart” is directly comparable to the palpitations of the heart Sappho refers to in the second stanza of S. 31. The immediate effects are comparable; Sappho cannot speak and Caroline cannot find “adequate words.” Though S. 31 appears to break off, S. 1 can be read as a continuation of it. There Sappho prays for divine intervention (Aphrodite) to deal with a failed sexual relationship; the closing prayer of its final stanza is analogous to the last sentence of the 4th Letter’s first paragraph: “Lord, you who know my heart . . . fulfill no wishes that are not pleasing to you, I am depending on you!”

In each case it would seem the answer is anticipated to be one that is not heard or read but rather felt in the heart, intuitively understood as the center point of all bodily feelings. That would be not an abstraction from the senses but an inward intensification of them. Such intensification becomes the basis for its outward expression not just in words, but in all forms of art.

Caroline grew up during a time of renewed interest in ancient Greek art and particularly nude sculpture, which rightly can be taken to symbolize the belief in the sacredness of the entire human body (a belief that correlates with heart centeredness). It is notable that the floruit of such sculpture predates Plato by almost a century and quite literally embodies principles utterly antithetical to his philosophy. It is also analogous to another art form that predates him and that he disparaged: reciting poetry (whether or not incorporated into a theatrical production). Poetic recitation requires fully identifying with the poet and poem to such a degree that it can be thought of as internalized sculpting.

The principles underlying sculpture and recitation are thus similar and of general applicability. Caroline, who enjoyed (and was appreciated for) reciting poetry, makes the point in a review she wrote of a book of essays on artistic appreciation (the “Review”). To judge art, she says, it is necessary to penetrate “deeply into the meaning and sensibility of both it and its initiator . . . surrendering oneself in quiet reflection to a disposition of loving, receptive observation . . . [to be] transpose[d] . . . into the world of the poet or artist.” She defends the book’s use of a fictional friar to voice religious reverence for art, effectively equating artistic appreciation with religious devotion, since it is only from feeling the divine within (i.e., internalizing god as the artist) that the divine outside is to be understood.

This was not something new for Caroline, as is evident from the 4th Letter that was written nearly twenty years before the Review. Not only does she seem to have internalized Sappho, but the opening line of S. 31 (a man, “equal to the gods”) and the closing line of S. 1 (“my comrade,” the goddess) arguably encouraged her transition in the 4th Letter’s first paragraph from describing her feelings to Luise (psychology) to praying to God (theology). That transition anticipates the identification of psychology with theology Caroline articulates in the Review.

The remote antiquity of this identification and its association with goddess worship to which Sappho attests, as well as the recognition of it by Caroline at such a young age deserve attention, for it has quite a history, especially in German culture. Goethe quoted two lines of a 1st century CE Latin poem on astrology that essentially echo it in the guestbook atop Mount Brocken on September 4, 1784: who is able to know heaven except by a gift from heaven, who finds god unless a part of the gods is within them. It is not known when Caroline met Goethe; it has been speculated that he was the father of her first daughter, Auguste, born April 28, 1785. In August 1784 Caroline was living in a mining town not far from Brocken.

The opening paragraph of an essay published by Caroline’s third husband in 1809, only months before her death, contains a reference to the principle of knowing the god outside from the god within, correctly noting that its connection with Empedocles proves it predates Plato. In 1936 Heidegger characterized that essay as “one of the most profound works” of Western philosophy. In my next post(s) I hope to show that its profundity relates to a critique of Plato (and other philosophers) that derives from Caroline and her appreciation of ancient Greek female spirituality, and not to glorifying supermen.

Stuart Dean has a B.A. (Tulane, 1976) and J.D. (Cornell, 1995) and is currently an independent researcher and writer living in New York City. He has studied, practiced and taught Tai Chi, Yoga and related disciplines for over forty years. Stuart has a blog on Sappho and the implications of her poetry for understanding the past, present and future: http://studysappho.blogspot.com/

so said black Jesus by Natalie Weaver

Natalie Weaver edited Last month, I went to a conference in San Antonio, Texas. Feeling overwhelmed by the combined elements of work, family, and creative writing, I did not have much of a desire to go. It was right before Valentine’s Day, which I try to celebrate with the kids, especially since my oldest is named Valentine. The house was not clean. I was not packed. I had not bought or helped fill out cards for the kids to distribute in the classrooms, nor did I remember whether I had signed up to bring in juice boxes or cupcakes. I just wasn’t ready to travel.

Beyond that, I developed some health issues last year that impact my daily life. I have found it hard to recognize the consequent shifts in my energy or output as legitimate bodily realities. I must be imagining it, right? I’m not this tired really… just lazy or something. Among the things impacted, my vision is sometimes dark and distorted. Plus, I broke a toe at the beginning of January, and I am still limping. As I imagined traveling alone, I felt myself wondering whether I was up to trekking through the airports with a broken gait, blurred vision, and the fatigue that sometimes quite rapidly descends when I least expect it. I didn’t want to go.

To top it off, I knew I wasn’t going to a regular hotel. I was going to the Oblate Renewal Center. I felt I could handle the Riverwalk and a couple nights at the Hilton, but I was really questioning whether I was in the right mental space for a retreat center. I was not feeling still, nor did I really want to be still. I had too much to do, of course. I compounded that feeling by stopping off on my way there for a short visit with my sister’s family at the point of my flight’s connection, where she and I drove around for hours picking up and dropping off her five school age children at their various extra-curricular activities. When I eventually made it to the retreat center, I was very much decentered in my own skin and underprepared mentally. I had neither gifts to bring nor expectations about what I would take home.

And this led to something remarkably beautiful… Continue reading “so said black Jesus by Natalie Weaver”

And No Religion Too by Elizabeth Cunningham

Elizabeth Cunningham headshot jpeg Religion. As a species we can’t seem to live with it or without it. There is dispute about the derivation of the word, but some scholars believe it has the same root as the word ligament, ligare, to bind or tie, to reinforce the bonds between human and divine, or perhaps the bonds between believers. The words bond and bind also have a variety of meanings and connotations. A bond can be used to tie someone up; it can be a bond of kinship, or bond given as surety.

Religion’s impulses and manifestations are just as ambiguous. Did religion arise because the world seemed so beyond human control (weather, health of crops, availability of game)? Perhaps there were gods or spirits to appeal to or propitiate? Or did it arise equally from a sense of gratitude for the earth and seas that feed us, for a sky that dazzles us, for the life that flows through us and surrounds us. Song, dance, storytelling, drama, art likely began as religious or ritual expression. No aspect of life was beyond the sacred. And so religion also went into the business of law, social control. Religion has a long, bloody, ongoing history of occasioning and/or justifying war, oppression, persecution, torture, genocide.

Was religious expression ever purely benign? Were humans? Perhaps when we were still small bands of hunter-gatherers or when we lived in matriarchal, matrilineal cultures where men did not feel obliged to control women (or each other) to ensure the perpetuation of their own DNA. There are benign tenets in most religions still—food as something to share, the stranger as someone to welcome. Birth and death and all the phases of life as a time to gather in community to celebrate or mourn. The call to respond to infirmity, grief and suffering with compassion and to injustice with bravery and truth.

lennon I titled this piece “And no religion, too” after a line from John Lennon’s song “Imagine.” Maybe I am struck by that line, because my life and work have been dominated by religion, literally since birth. My mother’s labor was induced to accommodate my curate father’s schedule. One of my earliest memories, age three, is of plotting to kill God and Jesus. Other childhood memories include being terrified that I would go to prison or hell for trespassing on the property next door. (From the Episcopal version of the Lord’s prayer, I knew trespass meant sin.) I also remember a skirmish with the Roman Catholic kids down the street who used to be my best friends until we went to different schools. A backyard holy war.

As I grew up, I repressed my deicidal tendencies and remained a creed-saying Christian until my mid-twenties when I began to participate in the silent worship of The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). Later an encounter with the goddess called me to join with others in creating earth-centered ritual at High Valley, a center I directed for eighteen years. During that time, I also became an ordained interfaith minister and counselor. All my life I have been writing novels that ponder religious questions, starting with The Wild Mother, a reimagining of the Garden of Eden story. For twenty years I worked on The Maeve Chronicles, novels from the point of view of a Celtic Magdalen who remains an unconverted pagan. My latest novel, Murder at the Rummage Sale, is set in the church of my childhood. Clearly I am still working with my primary material.

Yet I don’t know that I have a religion any more. I am still friends with my co-celebrants. We meet in a variety of contexts. But for the first time in my life I am not part of a religious community. No doubt I have beliefs, but I have no belief system. As I struggle to write this post, it dawns on me that it is my own life without religion that I am trying to imagine.

Continue reading “And No Religion Too by Elizabeth Cunningham”

Ghosts by Lauren Raine

Florence's Hands by Lauren Raine — Florence’s Hands by Lauren Raine

GHOSTS

Where do the dead go?

The dead that are not corpses, cosmetically renewed

and boxed, their faces familiar and serene.

Or brought to an essence, pale ashes in elegant canisters.

I ask for the other dead

those ghosts that wander unshriven among our sleep,

haunting the borderlands of our lives.

Continue reading “Ghosts by Lauren Raine”

E Pluribus Unum: The Woman From Africa by Stuart Dean

She’s his only savior. African in origin, her figure bears witness to her homeland: her hair twisted in dreads, her lips full, her color dark, her chest broad with pendulous breasts, her stomach flat and firm, her legs slender, her feet broad and ample.

The passage above translates the portrayal of Scybale, the black female slave of the farmer in the poem Moretum, that as discussed in an earlier post, is the source of the phrase ‘e pluribus unum.’ It is reasonable to infer it is a self portrait.

The case for Moretum being the work of a woman (and perhaps incorporating a self portrait) begins with the very fact that it portrays a woman so positively. Portrayals of women in such positive terms in ancient literature are rare. The details are impressive because they seem so real. The form of the description manifests a diagnostic technique (head to feet) well attested in ancient poetry. That includes Sappho’s self portrait (S. 58b), which reads as if composed while standing in front of a mirror, as does this portrait. Continue reading “E Pluribus Unum: The Woman From Africa by Stuart Dean”

Why Is Pizza Round? The Black Goddess of Rome by Stuart Dean

The remains of an ancient Roman bread pie from Pompeii, carbonized in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE — The remains of an ancient Roman bread pie from Pompeii,
carbonized in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE

The poem Moretum (discussed in my last post) narrates the preparation of a meal that can be characterized in modern English as ‘pizza.’ Round flatbread is baked; to go on it, a cheese spread is mixed. The details of the narration are such as to create a recipe of its ingredients and related cooking instructions.

The most important ingredient, however, is not an ‘ingredient’ as such, but a shape. The bread, the cheese, and the cheese spread are all round. That by itself might not seem remarkable, but the Latin terminology (words from which ‘orbit’ and ‘globe’ derive) is identical to then contemporary astrological terminology. The bread is even scored into quadrants, symbolizing, among other things, the four elements and the quadrants of an astrological observer’s circle.

The ancient audience of Moretum would have recognized in all this the world view of the Italian poet from southern Campania, Parmenides. Though the only poem he is known to have composed is in Greek, the combination of the fact that he likely wrote it while in Italy and that it had over the centuries since its composition become one of the most influential philosophical works of pre-Christian antiquity meant Parmenides had special importance to Romans. It is not surprising Moretum has the same meter and many of the poetic images as are found in the poem of Parmenides. Continue reading “Why Is Pizza Round? The Black Goddess of Rome by Stuart Dean”