I feel awake... alive. The cup of tea in my hand is warm, as warm as the metal of my worn necklace... as warm as the coming air. Everything is a feast for my senses as I take in the storm and thank Goddess for this.

Here I am mixing an incense to cleanse rooms/ tools/ itmes containing herbs and resin. I used this to cleanse everything used in the rose oil above.  I might make a small amount to put in the shop as well, but if not this one certainly others.

This is the start of a new BOS or at least a cover for it. In the moment I am stitching the pentagram to the cover and it is very ssslllooowwwlllyyy taking shape. No rush.  

So, a lot is going on and I really enjoy all the work. I also noticed that crafting for others makes me more focused because I want to make sure that everything coming together is just right.

A friend sent me this; not sure where it's from.

Let me share with you a portions of a paper in which I put forth a new theory about the female hero (not heroine) and the implications for women reading such myths in canonical and popular fictions. (all rights reserved) (ftn=footnote)

In the Western world, the word “myth’ literally means “utterance’ or ‘something one says’” (Harris and Platzner 8). Following ancient Greek and Roman oral traditions, written narratives featured gods and goddesses representing various aspects of the human world who, in their anthropomorphic form, interacted directly in human affairs. Men like Hesiod and Ovid wrote about and were the heroes of their own stories of the gods. Traditional “Heroism,” writes Meredith Powers, is “that noble conception which is itself an outgrowth of the semina (ftn 1) conception of divinity” and which “appears in myth to be an entirely masculine affair” (3). Since women did not fully author such myth, what resulted was what “feminists frequently term patriarchy . . . a culture that embodies masculist ideals and practices” (Ruth 53). Because of continued male oppression of women in myth, religion, and culture, women’s heroic everyday lives largely became demythologized and marginalized and fell into obscurity. Out of fear of women’s sexual and procreative power, many men frequently mythologized women “as ogresses; Gorgons, Harpies, Sirens, Graiae, Erinyes” (Powers 54). In order to control the strength of women “one of the first and most emphatic innovations of intruding patriarchal cultures,” Powers writes, “was to circumscribe women’s ability to participate in the cultural conception called heroism” (52). If there were stories of female heroism in the West, men of invading cultures often met them with distaste and immediately began co-opting them for their own purposes (52). Female goddesses largely became the creatures of nightmare and supernatural harassment. The father/king figure was posited as the purveyor of cultural control and became enshrined as a god.

According to Eisler, Lerner, and Powers, not all cultures began with a hierarchical model of the family and god/father/ hero. According to matriarchal myth, the cultural rape and subordination of earth-based, mother-honoring religions of earlier societies by invading patriarchal armies had forced women to take a subservient and debased role in culture and therefore in religious myth. The loss and devaluation of Divine Feminine symbols is the precursor of the lack of female heroes in religion, myth, and literature. This lack has generated the development of the heroine archetype instead, in which the passive female, when present at all, typically awaits salvation through a male hero. The sky-god/father/hero became the foremost ideal for patriarchal society. Therefore, the idea of a goddess/mother/hero is “theoretically impossible for the heroin (ftn 2) because of Western culture’s vitiation and eventual denial of the feminine divine” (Powers 3). The divine feminine in Western culture becomes an oxymoron and is therefore lost to future generations as primary myth. Meredith Powers argues in The Heroine in Western Literature that “the absence of a discernibly autonomous heroine" (ftn 3) in prevailing myths “is disturbing” and that scholars must do more to remedy the problem by pointing out heroes in the works of canonical authors. Powers maintains that myth arises as an “outgrowth of ritual and religion, particularly as a means by which ancient peoples explained matters of natural phenomena, but also as a means by which they validated the status quo” (29). The status quo in the Western world evolved into patriarchal myths and religions that have created the exemplar of the savior/hero. This model stresses a binary view of the universe that places men and women into concrete categories of material and supernatural order: higher/spirit/male versus lower/matter/women. The heroic models emerging from this binary view perpetuated an historical and religious cult/ure that relegated women to domestic servant status, presented them with religions that no longer speak to many women’s lives, and forced them to serve a ritualized male cult without representation.

We have been taught in Western religious history that the patriarchal savior hero is necessary for the completion of humanity’s symbolic journey and also necessary to remove the original stain of sin; sin that is believed to remain/be contained within the female body. For those adhering to patriarchal religions, the female embodied what they vehemently denied in themselves--emotions and sensations that were perceived by them as irrational but are typically human. Patriarchal religion considered Nature fallen through the sin of Eve, and unredeemable without a male savior to reverse the sin. (ftn 4) Tertullian, an early Christian bishop, promptly told the women in his care, “The devil is in you. You broke the seal of the Tree. You were the first to abandon God’s law. You were the one who deceived man” (Quoted in Alexandre 407). Women came to embody chaos, which men considered antithetical to order. (ftn 5)Through the Divine Word, and through the Word’s male representatives on earth, chaos could be tamed.

The divine feminine principle gradually lost ascendancy until feminist theorists, theologians and literary scholars ascertained from their deep mythological studies that re-establishment of the Goddess archetype in religion and myth is necessary to correct a cultural imbalance. This imbalance had elevated and enshrined the patriarchal binary opposites of rational knowledge (male) over irrational knowledge (female). (ftn 6) Through this awareness, Logos could finally begin to embrace and celebrate Eros. However, there is a danger in engaging in feminist mythological romanticism in which we envision an antidote to patriarchy by positing an opposing mythical world in which women are higher or more enlightened humans beings than men. Like Radford Reuther, my vision is to meld the best of progressive, romantic, and Marxist ideologies into a composite that enlightens all human beings and promotes an egalitarian, non-hierarchical culture. Women would be the turning point in transforming cultural myth through active embodiment of all aspects of human experience.

Rosemary Radford Reuther argues repeatedly in Sexism and God-Talk that “the critical principle of feminist theology is the promotion of the full humanity of women” (18) and asserts that until both men and women recognize this, our concepts of women acting heroically will not filter into society through religious myth. We must go beyond the religious and philosophical dualities that, while promoting life in the spirit, “devalue life in the body” (240). We need to create new symbolic models that yield an androgynous female heroic trope, one that embodies both Logos and Eros and all of its combinations in human experience, and to find appropriate non-marginalizing images. Those authors, considered popular authors by literary scholars, have been the first to offer such models and the first to break new ground through the romance. (END OF PART ONE)

Footnotes:

1. “Seminal conception” is the truest language to use here since the savior hero myth issues from male thought like seminal fluid and effects the creation or birth of male domination in society.

2.  Some writers use the term ‘heroine” in place of “hero” in their arguments for female heroes, but as I will explain later in the chapter, hero is the proper term for a female protagonist.

3.  Powers uses the word heroine instead of hero in her book, but I prefer hero, since I will distinguish the differences between the hero and the heroine later in this study.

4. “From a woman sin had its beginning, and because of her we all die” (Sirach 25:24).

5. See Rosemary Radford Reuther’s Sexism and God-talk, pages 72-79, for a full explanation of the denigration of female principle in patriarchal religions.

6.  Gerda Lerner disagrees with this approach. In The Creation of Patriarchy, she argues that balancing a patriarchy with a matriarchy produces the same set of symptoms: a power over mentality in reverse. She advocates historicizing patriarchy, thereby making it subject to change (37). This may work for historians and theorists, but using this approach will not be able to change religion, which I believe is the strongest impulse in human existence, next to sex. We must challenge religious myth first. I also believe that using the word “matriarchy” creates the same set of problems that using the word “patriarchy” has. I prefer Gimbutas’ word “matri-focal” or matrilineal to avoid the suggestion of dominance or “power over.”

Works Cited