This essay is part 3 of an edited excerpt from the author’s Introduction to her book PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion. The book is based on her doctoral thesis 2002, which this essay is referring to.
My method of approach has been informed by my deep personal involvement in the topic, my need to “place” myself here; as feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray suggests that woman needs to do[i], given the patriarchal context that has mis-placed her, or not considered her a place at all.
Irigaray said that woman is not situated, “does not situate herself in her place”, that she serves as a thing and is thus nude[ii]. I have intuitively felt the need to “clothe” myself, to find the Place within me, to move from object to sentient subject. It has been a hunger which grew into a holy desire, a passion. The early intuitive sense of this need was fanned by feminist philosophers, primarily Mary Daly[iii], who awakened me particularly to the language that I and others spoke everyday – and how the world was thus shaped: how my very own sacred Land, my bodily presence in the world was alienated from my consciousness by everyday expression and imagery. An ostensibly small but profoundly ubiquitous example is the use of the female pronoun she to designate only females, while the male pronoun he designates all humans as well as males: that is, the scope of maleness includes humanity, while femaleness is restricted to “the Other”. That has generally been overwhelmingly so even in reference to the other-than-human: that is, the pronoun “he” is also used to designate all creatures unless it is known to be female or its femaleness specifically relevant. As Mary Daly states in Gyn/Ecology:
Any speaker internalizing such a language unconsciously internalizes the values underlying such a system, thus perpetuating the cultural and social assumptions … [iv]
I have not been satisfied to accept this state of affairs, and as Daly indicated, “… the emerging creativity in women is by no means a merely cerebral process”[v]. Thus my quest, and method of approach to this work has involved my whole being, my whole story. And the situation of the female pronoun turned out to become of central – essential – significance in the place-ment of myself, and the authoring of a gynocentric cosmology[vi].
I have been on a ‘quest for the Mother’ – She within me and within Whom I am: this is how I have understood the complete transformation that I sought, such a complete coming home to an indigenous Self, a Place which was as surely within me as it was my actual Earthly and Cosmic habitat – I could not separate these realms of myself. In approaching this search/research – this Search – then, I have been bold in my assumption of deep participation in the Matter of the world, the Matrix. I can identify this “Matter/Matrix” with Merleau-Ponty’s “Flesh”, which has been described as
an elemental power that has had no name in the entire history of Western philosophy … (and) the mysterious tissue … that underlies and gives rise to both the perceiver and the perceived …(and) the reciprocal presence of the sentient in the sensible and of the sensible in the sentient[vii].
Such a subjective quest would once have found no carriage in formal academic process, but fortunately for me, by time I came to engaging with the academic and scientific “pursuit of the Mother” things had changed sufficiently at the edges, for me to proceed boldly with “laying claim to the power of Naming”[viii] the sacred sites of my female land – my bodymind, and inhabiting my Place/Self, by means of acceptable academic methods as well.
Conventionally, scientifically acceptable discourse has disregarded all subjectivity: that is, reality was in the domain of hard quantifiable matter only; while many spiritual discourses – both conventional and “new age” – have only valued subjectivity, that is, they have said that matter is not of consequence and is to be transcended. So both genres of discourse have perpetuated a notion of this “Flesh”, this Matter, this Subject in Whom we are, as purely passive, without sentience, and available for exploitation. Neither of these viewpoints have challenged the notion that our Habitat – our materia – is inert dead stuff … “just a big dead ball of dirt” as Brian Swimme describes the modern human’s conception of Earth[ix]. Neither viewpoint challenges the notion that it is possible to separate the one who is sensing from what is being sensed: as ecological philosopher David Abram says, “… contemporary discourse easily avoids the possibility that both the perceiving being and the perceived being are of the same stuff, … [x]”. Neither the conventionally scientific nor the conventionally spiritual/religious viewpoint generally supports a sense of our context being essentially relational or a sacred whole – a mutual presence, that we are subjects within a Subject[xi], a sentient Universe. I therefore describe my engagement in my Search, my approach and the writing itself as a “con-course” instead of “dis-course”[xii]. I have been conscious of my relationship with my ‘topic’ – Her intimate involvement and reciprocal presence. The method, the work, has been a process of en-trance-ment and inter-action. It has been a process of changing of mind, not just talking about it or to it.
My method has been organic and intuitive. I have allowed myself to be led by inner promptings, below my conscious rational understandings, which I then organised my conscious self around in various modalities; and the universe has come to meet me in these actions as well. Such methods of approach have been named in recent times as “transpersonal” research methods[xiii]. Such methods are defined as allowing identification with an expanded sense of self, a reciprocity, a participative relationship with the perceived. They
incorporate intuition, direct knowing, creative expression, alternative states of consciousness, dreamwork, storytelling, meditation, imagery, emotional and bodily cues and other internal events as possible strategies and procedures in all phases of research inquiry[xiv].
My methods may also be described as “sacred psychology” which is how Jean Houston has named the work of recovery and deepening of one’s personal story[xv]. Houston says that
a deeper story sustains and shapes our emotional attitudes, provides us with life purposes, and energizes our everyday acts. It offers us both meaning and momentum. Everything coheres when a deeper story is present[xvi].
Plants grow better with a depth of soil. So it is with humans: a perception of the organic depth of being, inclusive of Origins of the Universe, enables a being to flourish.
NOTES:
[i] Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference.
[ii] Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, p.10-11.
[iii] Other important early influences were poets and writers such as Adrienne Rich, Robin Morgan , Helene Cixous and Charlene Spretnak who awakened me to the stories we lived everyday.
[iv] Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology p.18, citing Julia P. Stanley and Susan W. Robbins “Going Through the Changes:The Pronoun She in Middle English”, Papers in Linguistics, Vol 9, Nos. 3-4 (fall 1977).
[v] Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father, p.8.
[vi] Glenys Livingstone, PaGaian Cosmology.
[vii] David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, p.66 citing Merleau-Ponty 1968.
[viii] Jane Caputi “On Psychic Activism: Feminist Mythmaking” in The Feminist Companion to Mythology. Carolyne Larrington (ed), p.438.
[ix] Brian Swimme, The Universe is a Green Dragon, p. 133.
[x] David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, p.67.
[xi] an expression used by Brian Swimme in Canticle to the Cosmos, video 4.
[xii] “Con-course” is a term used by Jurgen Kremer, in his paper“Post-modern Shamanism and the Evolution of Consciousness”.
[xiii] W. Braud and R. Anderson, Transpersonal Research Methods for the Social Sciences, wherein “Organic” and “Intuitive” are two methods that are named and described.
[xiv] W. Braud and R. Anderson, Transpersonal Research Methods for the Social Sciences, p.xxx.
[xv] Jean Houston, The Search for the Beloved.
[xvi] Jean Houston, The Search for the Beloved, p.91.
REFERENCES:
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.
Braud, W. and Anderson, R. Transpersonal Research Methods for the Social Sciences. London: Sage, 1998.
Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. London: The Women’s Press, 1979.
Houston, Jean. The Search for the Beloved. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1987.
Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. (trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill) NY: Cornell University Press, 1993.
Kremer, Jurgen W. “Post-modern Shamanism and the Evolution of Consciousness”, paper delivered at the International Transpersonal Association Conference, Prague, June 20-25, 1992.
Larrington, Carolyne (ed). The Feminist Companion to Mythology. London: Pandora, 1992.
Livingstone, Glenys. PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion. NE: iUniverse, 2005.
Livingstone, Glenys. The Female Metaphor – Virgin, Mother, Crone – of the Dynamic Cosmological Unfolding: Her Embodiment in Seasonal Ritual as Catalyst for Personal and Cultural Change. Ph.D. thesis, University of Western Sydney, 2002.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Invisible and the Invisible. (trans. Alphonso Lingis). Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1968.
Swimme, Brian. The Universe is a Green Dragon. Santa Fe: Bear & Co., 1984.
Swimme, Brian. Canticle to the Cosmos. DVD series, 1990.