Tag: Karen Tate

Are Your Shackles Showing? Hyperbole, Metaphor or Shades of Reality? by Karen Tate

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You’ve been held in a windowless room for a long time.  So long, you can’t remember how long it’s been.  You have shackles on your ankles.  Sometimes you can see beyond your sleeping pad, sometimes not so much.  You’re instructed to perform tasks assigned to you according to the will of your captor.   Most days you work so long you feel as if you’ll drop.  Sometimes you have enough food to eat, other times not.  It’s cold and damp in this holding cell where you’ve lived most of your life.  You’ve been sick here, but you have no access to a doctor.  You’ve been beaten regularly, physically and verbally,  for infractions perceived by your captor.   You still have the bruises.  You’ve not been outside this place for so long you’ve stopped scraping the number of days you’ve been held captive onto the walls. 
But, sometimes, you can faintly hear a voice whispering to you from the outside.  It’s a voice that calls to you in quiet moments when the usual crushing noise more easily heard doesn’t drown it out.  It’s hard to understand the words the voice is speaking.  They sound so foreign to you.   The voice suggests there is something else outside this cell.  When you ask your captor about it, the reply is always the same…laughter, mocking, anger.  So you become afraid to listen.


Then one day your captor gets careless.  Or maybe you’re listening closer.  The incessant noise seems less.  Your captor forgot to lock the shackles on your ankles and bolt the door.  You hear the voice outside.  It offers you something else.  It sounds too good to be true.   You’ve heard your captor say as much.   You’d been told that the voice offers empty promises that will never become reality.   But you ask yourself how much longer you can go on here?  So, you stand up at your sleeping pad.  Your legs are shaking.  The hair is standing up on the back of your neck  and carefully, timidly, you walk toward the unbolted door.   You reach out.  Your hand is shaking as you place it on the knob.  You see the red marks from old bruises on your wrists.  Something inside you knows you no longer can tolerate this cell.  Only, it’s all you’ve ever known, or it’s all you remember.

It’s your moment of truth.  You might not get this chance again in your lifetime.  Do you turn the knob?  Do you step across the threshold and move toward the voice?  Or do you shrink back, fearfully choosing the familiar, the devil you know?  Do you choose the somewhat reliable crumbs  laced with indifference and resentment your abuser has been dishing out for years?  Can this really be all there is?  Or can you find it in yourself to take a leap of faith?  Are you going to continue a life of institutionalized abuse and exploitation or are you going to walk across the threshold into a different  life?

Continue reading “Are Your Shackles Showing? Hyperbole, Metaphor or Shades of Reality? by Karen Tate”

Happy Birthday Isis: Isis Isis…Ra! Ra! Ra! by Karen Tate

I wanted to pull myself away from the ugliness out there and take time to honor the Egyptian Goddess, Isis, as Her birthday is recognized to be in the latter part of July.  My husband, Roy, and I formed the Isis Ancient Cultures Society and the Iseum of Isis Navigatum, in Los Angeles, sometime ago and for more than a decade, in Her name, we sponsored Moon Circles to promote diversity, Salons to teach, and we put out a quarterly newsletter when you still had to fold and mail them – remember that?  But the premier events every  year were the Isis Birthday Tea and the Isis Navigatum or Festival of Isis, every March.    Our aim was to reconstruct Isis rituals in a modern context and make them relevant  for today.

We put on the Isis Tea in prestigious locations like aboard the Queen Mary and the Isis Navigatum in various public locations including The Japanese Gardens, in the San Fernando Valley, and on the beach on Point Dume, in Malibu, California.  So detailed were our events, sometimes the public joined us thinking we were a movie crew and our organization was written about by a anthropologist/folklorist citing the detail and depth of the material culture of contemporary Isian devotees.

Continue reading “Happy Birthday Isis: Isis Isis…Ra! Ra! Ra! by Karen Tate”

Recognizing Abuse by Karen Tate

I’ve been thinking a lot about abuse.  Of course, most of us know about the domination, exploitation and  need for control meted out by patriarchy, but I wonder if we have actually normalized many abuses?  Abuse in the home, in the workplace, in our culture.   Perhaps  we accepted it unconsciously because so many of us are conditioned by religions that tell us to make noble sacrifice and tolerate suffering silently. I wonder if we’re calling it out when we see it – often and loudly – or if we’ve become conditioned to quietly accept the abuse with little push back.

My intent is not to offend anyone with this.  I want to find common ground and defeat the polarization we find around us, but our President is the poster child for abusive behavior.  Do we recognize his lies and fear-mongering and so many of the ideas he gives credence and license to as abuse?  Not only is he eroding our democratic institutions but he poisons the political, social and cultural arena with negativity, fear and hate, rather than uplifting us and encouraging us to evolve and be the best version of ourselves.  I equate him to poison in a well from which we must all drink. Continue reading “Recognizing Abuse by Karen Tate”

Ethics of Goddess Religion: Healing the World by Carol P. Christ

Nurture life.

Walk in love and beauty.

Trust the knowledge that comes through the body.

Speak the truth about conflict, pain, and suffering.

Take only what you need.

Think about the consequences of your actions for seven generations.

Approach the taking of life with great restraint.

Practice great generosity.

Repair the web.

 

In a recent interview on Voices of the Sacred Feminine on “Gratitude and Sharing: Principles of Goddess Spirituality,” Karen Tate asked me to review the “Nine Touchstones” of Goddess religion I offered in Rebirth of the Goddess as an alternative to the Ten Commandments. Tate expressed concern about the lack of social and political ethics in New Age spirituality and in some parts of the Neo-pagan movement at a time when ethical discernment and action is more necessary than ever.

Before discussing the ethical principles of Goddess feminism, it is necessary to dispel a common assumption that there can be no ethics in Goddess religion because ethics stem from a transcendent principle of justice that stands outside the world. Christian liberation theologians usually identify this transcendent principle with the commanding “Word of God” in the prophetic traditions of the Bible. They often assume that this word comes from outside ourselves and outside nature and as such is the only firm basis for ethics. Continue reading “Ethics of Goddess Religion: Healing the World by Carol P. Christ”