Claremont Pagan Studies Conference - I

Pomona

Twelfth Conference on Current Pagan Studies at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California.

Longtime pal Anna Korn and I shared the long drive to the Los Angeles area for this annual event that feeds my soul.  I’ve attended several times since I was invited to be a keynote speaker in 2009.  Last year was the first time Anna went now that she’s retired.

I find that this precious little conference (about 50 people) strikes a good balance between the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, which draws thousands of participants from all over the world and of which Pagan Studies and related sections (Religion & the Environment, Goddess Studies, New Religious Movements, Ritual Studies, et al.) are only a small part, and PantheaCon, which draws a general Pagan public, features a small number of scholarly presentations, and often tends to elicit fractiousness about one or another issue each year.

Each year presenters explore a theme.  This year's theme was Social Justice.

Saturday, January 24

Armando Marini, “Murtagh An Doile,” a co-founder of the Pagan History Project gave an appropriately historical talk on “Elitism and Identity Formation in American Craft and Paganism: A Historical Perspective” in which spoke knowledgeably about the underpinnings of contemporary American expressions of Pagan thought and practice found in Freemasonry, fraternal orders, early folkloric studies, as well as the spiritualist movement in 19^th century America and the “goddess movement” of the 1970s.  Always fascinating to me, and always too brief.

Kellen Smith followed with a presentation of her doctoral study on “Feminist Spirituality: From Counterculture Revolution to the Feminist Movement.” Listening to her talk was like hearing one’s personal political history.  Among her visuals were images of key, dare I say “ovarial,” books such as Merlin Stone’s When God Was a Woman (1976, when I received it as a birthday gift and it turned my thinking around), Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), and Elizabeth Gould Davis’ The First Sex (1971), along with photos of the actions of W.I.T.C.H. (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), among whose NY members was Robin Morgan, editor of another germinal anthology, Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970).

Kellen had difficulty locating feminist periodicals from those years.  I mentioned that I had sent lots of old issues of WomanSpirit, Women of Power, Calyx, Lady-Unique-Inclination-of-the-Night, Chrysalis, Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, and others whose names escape my senior mind at the moment, plus a few more contemporary ones like Bitch and off our backs, to the New Alexandrian Library in Delaware.

As it happens, after my early months meeting with a consciousness raising group – that’s what we called those intimate women-only weekly gatherings where we shared aspects of our lives not normally discussed, offered sympathy and support, and analyzed how we saw our experiences in society – I joined with others to form the San Francisco Women’s Studies Collective.  Out of that group, three of us (Sandra Butler, Carolyn Shaffer, and myself) created a resources list of feminist books and other publications and resources.  There wasn’t a very long list then, maybe six double-sided typewritten pages.  We sold photocopies of it for cost (something like 25 or 50 cents).

Marie Cartier, Preview of The Homofiles, a documentary co-produced with Kimberly Esslinger.  We viewed the trailer which had fascinating interviews of Lesbians both in and out of the closet.  Marie has presented papers at past Claremont gatherings I’ve attended and I’ve always enjoyed them, and more importantly, I’ve learned things I otherwise wouldn’t have.

Keynote: Gus DiZerega, “Rethinking Social Justice in Accordance with Pagan Values” Gus spoke enthusiastically about Aristotle, James Madison and the Federalist Papers, specifically Federalist Paper #10, and John Locke as forefathers who wrote about issues of justice.  I didn’t take notes because I haven’t yet regained the ability to write legible handwriting since my stroke in July.  However, I did manage to write down an African proverb he cited that I think is worth quoting here:  “I am because we are.”  As someone with a ‘relational’ personality and worldview, this proverb resonates strongly in me.

Wendy Griffin, ‘The New Telling”:  Last year Wendy gave a presentation on Paganism and the state of our home Earth that elicited tears from everyone listening.  This year she had reworked some of that data into a story.  She began with a framework of the Triple Goddess, saying that the Maiden asks, “What about me?”  The Mother asks, “What about the children?”  And the Crone asks, “What about the planet?”  She also cited The Journey of the Universe, by Thomas Berry, and works on eco-consciousness, specifically a film, by Yale professor Mary Evelyn Tucker.  Mary Evelyn and her husband, John Grim, founded the Emerging Earth Community.  (Small world: Way back in 1998, John and I were both participants in the Biodiversity Project Spirituality Working Group, a small gathering of religious and environmental leaders, in Madison, WI; our work informed the publication of Building Partnerships with the Faith Community: A Resource Guide for Environmental Groups.  Unfortunately, the Biodiversity Project is no longer, nor is the guide available.  The current webpage of The Biodiversity Project is a different entity.)

Flora

Annie Brigit Waters followed Wendy with “Sustainability Must Embrace the Sacred.” Annie is an active member of the Grange in Willits, California, way up in rural Mendocino County.  Mendocino County, center of Ecotopia, is a far cry from the cornfields of Iowa and the fields of the Midwest where the Grange (National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry (formed as a national organization with a local focus in 1867 right after the dreadful American Civil War) movement had its earliest chapters. 

Ceres

Annie explained that the notions of Unity, Liberty, and Charity are its underlying values.  Although women have been equal members since the inception of the Grange, the founders were seven men.  They chose three Latin goddesses to symbolize their values, or as I would see it, as the matrons of the organization: Flora, Ceres, and Pomona.

Pomona

Grange halls around the country contain art and decorative architectural embellishments featuring imagery of sheaves of grain, baskets of apples, cornucopia, and Romantic images of these goddesses.

I’m given to understand that the founders of the Grange wrote a series of rituals that in some way incorporated these goddesses.  I haven’t been able to find any online.  Regardless, however, what especially thrills me about Annie’s work with the Grange is her creation and performance of rituals devoted to these three goddesses.  These rituals can bring participants and viewers into new relationships, new understandings, new reverence for the gifts to humans that Flora, Ceres, Pomona embody. 

[To be continued.]

On Veils, from PantheaCon

This photo is from a commercial source selling hijabs for girls.

Picking up where I left off my previous blog about PantheaCon –

On Saturday evening I went to a workshop called “Taking Up the Veil,” with Xochiquetzal Duti Odinsdaughter.[1]  The description in the program intrigued me:

“A growing movement among pagan [sic] women is a turning towards modest apparel, veiling, or in some way shielding the corporal body as honor to the Divine.  In this exploratory class we’ll try some veiling techniques, discuss methodology of veiling form a Pagan perspective[,] and some of us might even develop a deeper meaning to our practices…”

I love veils in general.  I especially like to wear one over my head and face when meditating or doing other ‘still’ work such as “anchoring.”[2]  I also find veils very useful in ritual when one is embodying a divine entity; with the veil, others see no mortal face.  Not my face or your face or the face of anyone they know in the mundane world beyond the particular sacred circle space to which that divine entity has been called forth.  Similar to working with masks, the veil both distances and brings closer in strange ways.

This workshop, scheduled on prime time Friday night, appealed to plenty of people, all women, but for one brave man (presenting as a man in jeans, T-shirt, unshaven and makeup-free), who came because he’s a cross-dressed and clothing and adornment evidently appeal to him.  My friend Serena Toxicat always lights up a space when she’s present, although with her uniquely Goth approach she may be intending to darken it.

Xochiquetzal began by speaking of modesty and dressing in solidarity with Muslim women.  She mentioned how adolescent females are excessively sexually objectified in our society, and how comforting it is to wear loose-flowing clothing and a head covering.  I completely agree with this second point.  How many of us would have welcomed being able to hide our bodies when we were out in public as we adjusted to its changing into that of a woman.

On her first point, however, I have a different, and very strongly held, perspective.

Some years ago in an online group called Our Freedom: A Pagan Civil Rights Coalition a younger woman suggested the very same thing, wearing head coverings in solidarity with Muslim women (at least those who were forced to wear hijab).  Again, I am all for solidarity with oppressed sisters, but I think the situation is more nuanced than a simple black-and-white “Let’s cover our heads in solidarity.”  After all, Roman Catholic nuns, along with royalty throughout Europe, were compelled to cover their heads in various ways, in the former denoting a pledge of celibacy (or life-long virginity if it’s not too late), and in the latter, relative social status.

To that suggestion on that list, both Phyllis Curott and I, who are just under a decade apart in age, objected.  We felt we’d struggled too hard to free ourselves from so many, many, many restrictions placed upon women in the society in which we’d grown up.  I grew up wearing girdles, hose with a seam up the back, garter belts (talk about uncomfortable[3]), shaved legs and underarms, sleeping in metal, brush, plastic, or bobby-pinned curlers.

Girl children in my day seldom wore pants, and never were allowed to wear them to school.  Never!  Dresses and skirts only.  As any active person knows, dresses and skirts can cramp you style if you’re climbing trees or playing on a play structure.  In Winter we wore two-piece woolen snowsuits, with our skirts either tucked into the pants when we went outdoors, thereby wrinkling, or flounced out over the bottoms like a peplum.

Modesty, a quality Xochiquetzal rightly extolled, was something that was forced upon girls of my generation (during and just after WW-II).  Our quite necessary response was to go for uppity (rebelliously self-assertive; not inclined to be tractable or deferential).

There was even a time in my lifetime when there were ‘public’ places, such as restaurants, pubs, and clubs, where women were not permitted to enter, or, if it was a really progressive place, a woman could come in if she were accompanied by a male patron, and even then, she had to remain seated at a table and could not approach the bar to place an order.  This was in San Francisco, folks!  And it wasn’t all that long ago.

But back to the workshop -- Xochiquetzal demonstrated various ways to wrap veils and headscarves, and most of us tried those techniques. I find many ways of dressing the head (not hair) very beautiful.  She spoke of different purposes, such as shielding the most emphatic among us from jarring and/or toxic.  These are all good reasons.  I, however, feel confined and restricted when my head is bound.  I seldom even wear hats, except for protection from sun and sometimes rain.  But sometimes I do wear veils, as I mentioned above.

She also spoke a bit about the sexuality implied in hair, especially thick, long tresses.  For much of my adult life I wore my hair long, and I felt it to be very sexual, though I liked it for other aesthetic reasons as well.  I made do with tying it back on the nape of my neck when I was doing things it interfered with.  I loved all this talk.

There was one woman there who seemed to bring with her something of a party attitude, as she frequently interrupted Xochiquetzal’s talking, and others who tried to speak.  She may have been ‘three sheets to the wind,’ I’m not sure.  In any case, the presenter handled these interruptions gracefully.

This workshop discussion underscores the value of, and need for, increased and more frequent inter-generational conversation about our worlds and our Paganisms.

Highlight

Which brings me to the real highlight, for me, of my having attended this workshop.

Understand that I’d come to PCon after a drastic disaffiliation from my ‘home community’ and another set of misunderstandings/disapprovals over the past year-plus, so I’ve been processing those changes and contemplating what my place might be, if any, in the Pagan world I love so much.

At one point Xochiquetzal recognized my raised hand, so I began to speak and was interrupted.  She then stated to the group something complimentary about me.  I was amazed!  I didn’t even know she’d any idea of who I am.  But she did, and she said it loud and clear.  It sure felt good to hear her speak.  Not only was this incident a highlight of Xochiquetzal’s workshop; for me it was a blazing highlight of the whole Con.

I’m thinking of a possibility we’d both articulated at the time, that we might have a mutually enlightening conversation about the matter of veils, along generational lines.  I could even see a colloquy between us that could be formatted into a more formal article.

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[1]   Gods, what a splendid name!

[2]    A sort of dropping-and-centering awareness technique used in some larger rituals to help maintain the focus of everyone present on the larger working of the group; something like a tent pole (holding the space up) and/or pegs (keeping the space anchored and contained).

[3]   None of this even begins to address the advances made in menstrual care products.  Some methods used before the advent of sanitary pads that adhere to one’s underwear were downright tortuous!

Why I’m Conflicted about Syria

Let me begin by stating that my philosophy is generally one of nonviolence.  Along with millions of others around the world, I protested the invasion of Iraq by Bush, Rumsfeld, et al.

Secondly, I’m excited to see signs of desire for democratic secular governments in several North African and Near Eastern countries, as evidenced by the Arab Spring uprisings.  I believe that all these matters need to find their ultimate resolution from within the populations of those countries.  It is not the business of the United States to police the world.

Further, I am of a generation that never knew the term “domestic violence.”  Some were aware of homes where violent behavior ruled, of battered women and children.  But we had no term for it and we tried to ignore it.  I know I was told by adult authorities at the time, including two Philadelphia Police patrolmen friends of my dad, that a whatever went on within a family was private, their business alone.  Besides, the man ruled the roost in those days.  Few women held title to any property in their own names, nor was credit extended to women, in particular not to married women.

When I was 11 years old, I was staying with my older brother, his wife and their new daughter, ostensibly to help with baby care.  While I was there, a horrendous uproar occurred in the bedroom.  I heard things being thrown around.  I heard my brother in a rage.  I heard my sister-in-law screaming with each blow she got.  I was a child.  I had never experienced anything like this.  I was afraid.  I felt I should do something, at the very least tell my parents when I got back home.  But as soon as she recovered enough, my sister-in-law gave me a lecture in the strongest terms that I should never ever tell anyone about what I’d witnessed.  She made me promise. As I said, I was young, unfamiliar with such conduct, and afraid.  So I never told anyone.  This was in 1954.

Not surprisingly, my sister-in-law, by this time pregnant with her second daughter, divorced my battering brother and cut all ties with his family (but for my one maiden Aunt Mary).  I don’t blame her a bit, although I regret having had no relationship with my two nieces.

My brother,[1] who was also alcoholic, went on to pair, and even sire children, with a number of women, all of whom he beat and all of whom left him.  Years later in another state on the opposite coast I stayed with his then-family for some months while I was pregnant with my first child (out of wedlock, as they say).  This was a full house with three adults and four children, one of whom was my nephew.  I witnessed similar drunken tirades, also behind a closed bedroom door and falling upon my then-sister-in-law.

He had never directed his violence towards me.  My younger sister tells me that she witnessed at least one attack on our mother, but I’m sure it couldn’t have gotten too extended or I’m sure my sister would have called someone for help.  This incident occurred after I no longer lived in my parents’ home.

In the late 1960s and early ‘70s I found Second Wave Feminism.[2]  With that came a more nuanced political awareness and analysis of domestic/spousal abuse.

Fast forward to the ‘70s, another incident that illustrates my, and society’s, changing consciousness about domestic abuse took place when I was driving down Sansome Street in San Francisco late one night.  This is in the financial district, an area with little foot traffic or street activity at night.  I saw a man punching a woman.  The woman was attempting to defend herself by dodging his fists.  I didn’t know what to do.  I wanted to interfere.  I slowed down and yelled out the car window for him to leave her alone.  His response:  “It’s okay; she’s my girlfriend.”  Huh?  So that makes it okay to beat her?  Then I offered her a ride, just to get her somewhere away from him, but she declined my offer.  Maybe she was one of those women who try to rationalize that she either had it coming or that her man was entitled to dominate her. 

Also in the ‘70s a newspaper reports about a man who splashed acid on his wife’s face so her disfigurement would prevent her from straying, so other men presumably would not find her attractive.

Helpguide.org states: “Domestic violence and abuse can happen to anyone, yet the problem is often overlooked, excused, or denied.”  Now I hold the position that domestic violence is everybody’s business.

* * * * *

Having given the reader those positions, I now explain the reasons for my conflicted feelings around any potential involvement in Syria.

Like most who view videos of horrendous chemical attacks on innocent civilians in Syria, I am appalled.  Disgusted.  Outraged.  I weep.  What I keep seeing – and I do believe that as difficult as they are to watch, we should be seeing what’s being done – is what I saw in those early days of my growing awareness of the pervasiveness and malevolence of domestic abuse.

I am convinced that chemical attacks in Syria originated with the Assad regime and that the victims have all been in rebel, or at least unstable, uncommitted, neighborhoods.  But regardless of who attacked whom, it is innocents, many women and children, who suffer.

I see this as being domestic abuse on a national scale.  We never interfered in cases of family dysfunction and battering until we recognized and understood the phenomena of spousal and child abuse.  Expanding that to a nation with discrete national borders, the family of Syria is suffering battery by their “fathers,” the ruling regime.[3]  These attacks do not seem all that different to me from that of the man who threw acid on his wife’s face.

What I learned about domestic abuse in the ‘70s was that it is everyone’s business.  How that extends on an international scale I don’t know.  I don’t have a resolution.  I’ve expressed my serious reservations about the U.S. making any kind of strike within the borders of a sovereign nation.  And on a personal, familial scale, I now do not hesitate to intervene when I witness battery.  We have police and courts and social workers who have been trained to recognize and act in such cases.  We have battered women’s shelters.

But where is the shelter for the battered Syrians?  There’s a growing refugee population with no place to call home, but who have managed to escape the immediate rain of blows, the bio-chemical attacks.

Where are the trained police to bring calm and restore equanimity to a nation?  Should there even be such agency?  Is Syria a signatory to the United Nations’ 1993 Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women?  Did the United States sign?  I suspect so, though I can find no list of signatories.  Here’s Unicef’s 2000 report on Domestic Violence against Women and Girls.

The United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, General Assembly Resolution, December 1993, reads:

“Violence against women is a manifestation of historically unequal power relations between men and women, which have led to domination over and discrimination against women by men and to the prevention of the full advancement of women...”

If one can see a nation as a large family grouping, then Syria is a nation in the throes of horrendous domestic violence.  Where is the U.N. when we need it?  Surely the United States isn’t the only country that views recent violence against an innocent civilian populace as being unacceptable conduct in a civilized society.

I wish I could proffer a solution, but sadly I cannot.  I write this with the hope that others may see this parallel and perhaps be able to draw upon that understanding in crafting a solution.

* * * * *

© Stéphane Beaulieu, used by permission

Now I speak as a Pagan who worships many of the old gods of our many peoples.  My inclination in times of crisis is to look around to see what divine entities protect the peoples of a given region.  The goddess called Atargatis is known as “the Syrian goddess.”  Goddess scholar Johanna Stuckey writes in MatriFocus,“[a] life-giving divinity associated with rivers and springs, motherly protector of humans and animals. Atargatis often served as tutelary or protector deity of urban centers — the providence or luck of the place.”

If she has receded from the minds of the peoples of her place, then perhaps it is time for us to reawaken her.  We can call her, give prayers and offerings, and elicit her maternal rage at the way her children are being treated.  Of course, most if not all of the victims in Syria are Muslims, but regardless, mothers do not usually allow their children to be mistreated and killed.

“Holy Atargatis, motherly protector of humans and animals, protector of Damascus, Aleppo and all of Syria, protect your children in their hour of great need!

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[1]   Technically, half-brother by our father.

[2]   Frequent readers of my writings may tire of hearing of SWF all the time, but I can tell you that it turned my life around.  Not that I was an abused spouse; I was not.  But in so many ways, including a greater sensitivity to class and ethnic disparities – not race discrimination since there is only one race, the human race – and learning to work by consensus process.

[3]   Yes, I know that not all abusers are men.