It is quite common, I think, for Jewish feminists to gravitate to the first creation story of Genesis/Bereshit as an example of human equality but struggle to claim this same passage as an example of the goodness of embodiment. Genesis/Bereshit 1:27 reads, “So G-d created humankind in the divine image, in the image of G-d, the Holy One created them; male and female G-d created them.” In this passage, we have not only equality between men and women, in direct contrast to the second creation story, but also a description of human nature.
Our Creator made us in the divine image: b’tzelem Elohim. The most traditional explanations of b’tzelem Elohim describe our divine-likeness to mean: our intelligence, our capacity for goodness, our creativity as well as our inner divine spark. Most traditional teachings also understand this description as a prescription for action: since every single human being is made in the divine image, we must treat every single human being with respect, dignity, concern and so on. Continue reading “B’tzelem Elohim and Embodiment by Ivy Helman”
Several years ago, I was pastor of a welcoming and affirming church. As a queer clergywoman, I thought that such a place would be the perfect place to flourish and thrive as a pastor. And yet, because of heterosexist and sexist microaggressions, I found myself anxious, depressed, and in need of physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual care.
After a three-day retreat filled with self-care and soul-nourishment at a non-profit retreat center that catered to activists and artists , I felt as though a tremendous weight was lifted off my shoulders, that I could focus and find clarity in my vocation. Pausing to care for myself gave me the courage to leave my toxic job and live more fully into my calling. This experience taught me the vital importance of self-care.
Womanist Audre Lorde once proclaimed, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Because caring for the self violates the patriarchal norms that traditionally dictate that you should be the one caring for everyone else. Yes, everyone needs to pause to care for the self. But oppressed minorities have a particular need for self-care, not simply as a way of refreshing oneself in order to do the work of justice, but as a vital part of the work of social justice. Because caring for yourself in a society—and a church—that wishes for you to do otherwise is an act of political warfare. When feminists care for themselves, it is a radical act of soul redemption, spirit rejuvenation, and a political and spiritual act of acknowledging your holy and innate self-worth. In case anyone has told you that you are not worthy, let me reassure you. You are worthy. And you deserve to care for yourself.
You may have seen the viral video of Congressional Representative Maxine Waters’ demands for “Reclaiming my time!” Video was taken during a proceeding in which Representative Waters is questioning Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who responds with long-winded answers and indirect statements. Ms. Waters appears annoyed, and she is not interested in flattery. She wants a direct response to her question. When she does not get it, she appeals to protocol, which allows her to “reclaim” the time allotted to her (intentionally) wasted by a man who wants to dodge her questions.
The video was very popular on my social media feeds. I know of preachers who used “Reclaiming my Time” in their sermons the following Sunday. There were memes, of course. There was even another viral video of Mykal Kilgore singing his gospel composition of Waters’ words. He and Waters appeared on a TV show soon after.
It’s fairly obvious why this video–and the sentiment behind it–struck such a chord with so many people. We wish we could reclaim our time in situations where we are moving forward with a purpose, only to be met with delays and roadblocks from those who want to deter us. Sometimes, these delays are unintentional. But too often, they are strategic attempts to wear us down, distract us, and redirect our energy away from our goal. Ms. Waters wasn’t having it. She called out the delay tactics and held firm to what was rightfully hers. Her time.
“Drinking the water, I thought how earth and sky are generous with their gifts and how good it is to receive them. Most of us are taught, somehow, about giving and accepting human gifts, but not about opening ourselves and our bodies to welcome the sun, the land, the visions of sky and dreaming, not about standing in the rain ecstatic with what is offered.”
–Linda Hogan in Sisters of the Earth
The women have gathered in a large open living room, under high ceilings and banisters draped with goddess tapestries, their faces are turned towards me, waiting expectantly. We are here for our first overnight Red Tent Retreat, our women’s circle’s second only overnight ceremony in ten years. We are preparing to go on a pilgrimage. I tell them a synopsis version of Inanna’s descent into the underworld, her passage through seven gates and the requirement that at each gate she lie down something of herself, to give up or sacrifice something she holds dear, until she arrives naked and shaking in the depths of the underworld, with nothing left to offer, but her life.
In our own lives, I explain, we face Innana’s descents of our own. They may be as difficult as the death of an adult child, the loss of a baby, the diagnosis of significant illness, or a destroyed relationship. They may be as beautiful and yet soul-wrenchingly difficult as journeying through childbirth and walking through the underworld of postpartum with our newborns. They may be as seemingly every day as returning to school after a long absence. There is value in seeing our lives through this mythopoetic lens. When we story our realities, we find a connection to the experiences and courage of others, we find a pattern of our own lives, and we find a strength of purpose to go on. Continue reading “Sacred Water by Molly Remer”
While the Republicans in Congress and in state legislatures across the country are working to repeal and restrict a woman’s right to control her own body, the Democratic Party has decided not to “insist” that the right to abortion is a basic human right.
Members of this community (and others) have been feeling that the world is out of balance since the 2016 election. There’s a feeling that people are becoming less kind and that some men (following the model that lives and tweets in the White House when he’s not at one of his golf resorts) are more misogynistic. I’ve heard that Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eight-Four is more popular than ever before. We seem to be living in a new, dystopic society. It’s very sad and very scary.
In my lifetime of researching women’s ritual dances in Greece and the Balkans, I have often come across related practices of divination or healing. One of these is the custom of coffee divination, the art of interpreting patterns in the fine grounds left in the cup after drinking Greek or Turkish coffee. The practice is found in Greece, the Balkans, Asia Minor, the Caucasus and the Middle East, and all over the world where people from these regions have emigrated. It is practiced mainly by women, particularly older women.[1]
Kafemanteía is related to much older techniques of divination and ritual, including the libations or liquid offerings which were an integral part of prayer in ancient Greece.[2] Sometimes, after the libation was poured, ‘the empty cup was examined for signs of oracle.’[3] The Old Testament mentions Joseph’s skill in divination by use of a cup,[4] while Istustaya and Papaya, the spinning and weaving pre-Hittite goddesses of destiny, divined using bowls of liquid akin to vessels used for scrying in many cultures.[5] The humble coffee cup can thus be seen as belonging to a long tradition of ceremonial vessels used in divination.[6]
Female figure in stance of invocation, with miniature votive shrines, pillars and cups or bowls for offerings. 5000 BCE, Netafim spring, Eilat, Israel.
In antiquity, Joan Breton Connelly makes clear, ‘religious office presented the one arena in which Greek women assumed roles equal and comparable to those of men,’ a fact which despite abundant evidence ‘has, until recently, been ignored by modern commentators or, worse yet, denied’.[7] In ancient Germanic, Celtic, Canaanite, Mesopotamian, and Anatolian cultures, ‘it was primarily women who were regarded as able to interpret signs and omens and to foretell the future’.[8]
Women who read cups today tend to view their ability either as a divine gift or as a talent learned or inherited from their mother, grandmother or aunt. The concept of inherited oracular or shamanic talent is an ancient one, according to Barbara Tedlock, who suggests that intuition as an ‘unconscious cognitive process’ may be ‘genetically determined in its structure and function.’[9]
In her 2005 book The Woman in the Shaman’s Body, Tedlock describes what she calls ‘the primacy of women in shamanism’, stating that ‘women’s bodies and minds are particularly suited to tap into the power of the transcendental.’[10] Her assertions have important implications for the discussion of kafemanteía as a women’s art, but also reignite feminist controversy about biological ‘essentialism’ and ways that theories about differences between the sexes have been used to justify oppression based on gender.
As an in-depth discussion of essentialism is not possible here, I highly recommend Carol P. Christ’s excellent posts on the topic for those who wish to think more deeply about these questions. As Christ shows, the assumption that ‘if there are sex differences they must inevitably determine behaviour’ is a flawed syllogism. Christ invites us to discuss these issues in a more open-minded way: ‘I think our feminist conversations would be richer if we could find ways to talk about sex differences without immediately jumping to the conclusion that it is regressive or anti-feminist to do so.’[11] In our discussion of kafemanteía, I suggest we remain open to the possibility that neurological and biological differences may have significance, though not in a deterministic way. Men can also be readers of coffee grounds and tea leaves, but the fact remains that most readers of cups are women. Why might this be?
The social component of kafemanteía is very important, offering comfort and company to both reader and querent. According to neurologist Louann Brizendine, women have both a greater need and greater capacity for the positive emotional interaction of this social relationship. Neurologically, the female brain contains more mirror neurons than the male brain, giving women an advantage in establishing emotional connection and triggering production of the anti-stress hormone oxytocin.[12] Rather than ‘fight or flight,’ female stress responses follow a behavioural pattern known as ‘tend and befriend,’ based on the maintenance of social networks that increase bonding and decrease stress.
Reading the patterns
The intuitive response when reading the patterns in a cup often comes from what we call ‘gut feelings,’ which, as neuroscientific research reveals, ‘are not just free-floating emotional states but actual physical sensations that convey meaning to certain areas in the brain.’‘ [13] As Brizendine shows, areas of the brain that track gut feelings are larger, more sensitive, and more active in women’s brains; thus ‘the relationship between a woman’s gut feelings and her intuitive hunches is grounded in biology.’ [14] A further element to consider is the fact that neurological activity in most men is left-brain dominant, while women’s brain function tends towards a more even balance between left- and right-hemisphere activity.
Finally, Barbara Tedlock presents fascinating information on protein and collagen matrices embedded in connective tissues in the human body, ‘composed of liquid crystals and biopolymers that behave as electronic conductors, storing large amounts of cognitive information.’ [15] Given that these matrices can be seen as the biological structure in which ‘somatic consciousness’ resides, I would venture to ask whether the greater proportion of fat cells in women’s bodies may enable greater cellular conductivity for storing and transmitting intuitive and cognitive information. I would love to see further research in connection with the biological tendency of women to accumulate more fat cells post-menopause, and the image of the older wise woman or crone considered in many cultures to have oracular or divinatory powers.
I have had my cup read many times on my travels, and have often been astonished by the accuracy of information offered by the reader, including precise personal details which she could not have possibly known. This remains a mystery. Although I support further study into kafemanteía, I acknowledge that in essence it appears to defy conclusive rational explanation and therefore may remain permanently impenetrable to the scholarly mind. Perhaps all we can do is to simply increase our awareness of, and respect for, this living divinatory art, and the older women who keep it alive worldwide. I would be interested to hear from others about their experiences!
This post is drawn from a much longer article I have recently written, ‘Kafemanteía: coffee divination as women’s prophetic art in ancient and modern times.’ It appears in the current issue of Walking the Worlds 3:2 (2017): 52-68, available from www.walkingtheworlds.com
Laura Shannon has been researching and teaching traditional women’s ritual dances since 1987. She is considered one of the ‘grandmothers’ of the worldwide Sacred / Circle Dance movement and gives workshops regularly in over twenty countries worldwide. Laura holds an honours degree in Intercultural Studies (1986) and a diploma in Dance Movement Therapy (1990). She has also dedicated much time to primary research in Balkan and Greek villages, learning songs, dances, rituals and textile patterns which have been passed down for many generations, and which embody an age-old worldview of sustainability, community, and reverence for the earth. Laura’s essay ‘Women’s Ritual Dances: An Ancient Source of Healing in Our Times’, was published in Dancing on the Earth. Laura lives partly in Greece and partly in the Findhorn ecological community in Scotland
References:
Barber, Elizabeth Wayland. The Dancing Goddesses. New York: Norton, 2013.
Brizendine, Louann. The Female Brain. New York: Morgan Road Books, 2006.
Christ, Carol P. ‘What If There Are Sex Differences But Biology Is Not Destiny?’ FAR February 16, 2015.
Christ, Carol P. ‘Has the Vatican Discovered that Women Should Be Running the World?’ FAR February 9, 2015.
Connelly, Joan Breton. Portrait of a Priestess. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Green, Marian. “Wise Women Counsellors: Popular Methods of Divination.” In World Atlas of Divination, edited by John Matthews, 81-87. Boston: Little, Brown, 1992.
Karcher, Stephen. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Divination. Shaftesbury, Dorset: Element, 1997.
Miller, Guldjin. The Secret Art of Coffee Reading. Australia: Guldjin Miller, 2015.
Seremetakis, C. Nadia. The Last Word. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Shannon, L. ‘Kafemanteía: coffee divination as women’s prophetic art in ancient and modern times.’ Walking the Worlds 3:2 (2017): 52-68
Stone, Merlin. “Inner Voice: Intuition.” In Merlin Stone Remembered, edited by David B. Axelrod, Carol F. Thomas, and Lenny Schneir. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Books, 2014.
Tedlock, Barbara. The Woman in the Shaman’s Body. New York: Bantam Dell, 2005.
Tedlock, Barbara. “Toward a Theory of Divinatory Practice.” Anthropology of Consciousness 17:2 (2006): 62-77.
Walker, Charles. The Encyclopedia of the Occult. New York: Crescent Books, 1995.
Winkelman, Michael. Shamanism: A Neural Ecology of Consciousness and Healing. Westport, Conn.: Bergin and Garvey, 2000: 243-44. Quoted in Tedlock (2006):70.
What a pleasant surprise to become acquainted with Samar Habib when she appeared on my newsfeed the other day. According to her biography, she “is a writer, researcher and scholar” as well as “[a] tireless advocate of human rights.” She is also “an expert of international standing on Gender and Sexuality in the Arab world, with unparalleled publications on same-sex love and desire among women and the juncture of Islam and homosexuality.” The Ted Talk I stumbled upon, titled “Let the Scholar Speak, Even if it Scares You,” explores the modern university’s difficulty navigating that murky space between academic freedom (based on scholarship and inquiry) and giving offense (based on fear of decimating a student’s belief system).
Samar is Palestinian, raised in a secular, but nominally Christian, household. Initially, her research focused on the study of sex and gender in the Arab world and gradually incorporated the more specific topic of homosexuality in Islam. At 27 years old, she began teaching her research, showing how the emergence of homophobia in the Arab/Muslim world starkly contrasts with the acceptance of gender and sexual diversity enjoyed in 9th century Baghdad, a vibrant center of scholarship, commerce, and the arts.. Continue reading “No Offense by Esther Nelson”
This post explores issues I present in an essay which will be published in the Journal of Theology and Sexuality. In that piece, I consider the term “identity.” I claim that identity and the categories it delineates often present dilemmas when it comes to gender, sex, and sexuality. This is especially the case when considering biological and social data related to sexual fluidity in women. While in the paper I argue that “identity” serves in many ways to stultify, I recognize that we can also interpret the eschewing of identity as something reserved for the privileged – who can afford to discard identity. Marginalized groups, on the other hand, are often at the mercy of identity – it is hoisted as a marker, one that cannot be displaced or removed.
Where I complicate identity relates to its ability to typecast and congeal a self into a definitive configuration. Categorization follows, serving specific ends and bolstering very specific institutions.
It is quite common, I think, for Jewish feminists to gravitate to the first creation story of Genesis/Bereshit as an example of human equality but struggle to claim this same passage as an example of the goodness of embodiment. Genesis/Bereshit 1:27 reads, “So G-d created humankind in the divine image, in the image of G-d, the Holy One created them; male and female G-d created them.” In this passage, we have not only equality between men and women, in direct contrast to the second creation story, but also a description of human nature.
tapestries, their faces are turned towards me, waiting expectantly. We are here for our first overnight Red Tent Retreat, our women’s circle’s second only overnight ceremony in ten years. We are preparing to go on a pilgrimage. I tell them a synopsis version of Inanna’s descent into the underworld, her passage through seven gates and the requirement that at each gate she lie down something of herself, to give up or sacrifice something she holds dear, until she arrives naked and shaking in the depths of the underworld, with nothing left to offer, but her life.
While the Republicans in Congress and in state legislatures across the country are working to repeal and restrict a woman’s right to control her own body, the Democratic Party has decided not to “insist” that the right to abortion is a basic human right.
Members of this community (and others) have been feeling that the world is out of balance since the 2016 election. There’s a feeling that people are becoming less kind and that some men (following the model that lives and tweets in the White House when he’s not at one of his golf resorts) are more misogynistic. I’ve heard that Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eight-Four is more popular than ever before. We seem to be living in a new, dystopic society. It’s very sad and very scary.
This post explores issues I present in an essay which will be published in the Journal of Theology and Sexuality. In that piece, I consider the term “identity.” I claim that identity and the categories it delineates often present dilemmas when it comes to gender, sex, and sexuality. This is especially the case when considering biological and social data related to sexual fluidity in women. While in the paper I argue that “identity” serves in many ways to stultify, I recognize that we can also interpret the eschewing of identity as something reserved for the privileged – who can afford to discard identity. Marginalized groups, on the other hand, are often at the mercy of identity – it is hoisted as a marker, one that cannot be displaced or removed.
Feminism and Religion 