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"women's mysteries," trinary thought, gender in traditional paganism
I don't normally do this kind of thing on my lj (knowing, as I do, that y'all are mainly here for fandom and fic type stuff), but it also wouldn't have been on-topic to post to the forum that kicked off these thoughts, so you're stuck with it.
The original post here is from one of the most influential elders of the Celtic Reconstructionist community, and since I don't consider myself strictly CR, I didn't necessarily think my responses were useful in terms of the CR conversation she was looking to start. Still, I responded really strongly to her post, both positively and negatively, regarding binary and non-binary concepts of gender and how sex and spirituality intersect. So what the heck.
Rather than go chronologically through the post, I'm going to highlight the things I really felt good about up front. As Erynn suggests toward the end of her post, Celtic pagan cosmology puts a huge emphasis on third-states, liminal spaces, boundaries, and the idea that magical and spiritual power occurs at the intersection of apparent opposites, at the spots where one is neither this nor that (all of that is actually indigenous to all Indo-European paganism, although the idea manifests in different ways, and surviving lore indicates that it was much more pronounced and visible in Celtic religion -- either that or it reflects the close relationship between Celtic poet/lorekeepers and the Celtic theologians/priestly class, which diverged more strongly in other IE cultures so that secular folklore may carry more wisdom-tradition information in the Celtic lands that disappeared or was never present in other cultures that had booming entertainment industries not controlled by the priestly class).
In a nutshell, and with the caveat that there's A LOT we don't know about Celtic pagan thought (seriously, a *lot*), my understanding of the worldview is basically this: the world is organized in paired opposites, chiefly light and darkness, expansion and reduction, this world and the otherworld, above and below, safety and danger, and the-world-inside-the-people's-law and the-world-not-covered-thereby. The second half of each of these sets is not considered evil, but it is approached on two levels at different times, or both simultaneously: it is a) the first and oldest state and the one that gives rise to, nourishes, and sustains the other state and 2) terrifying. So at the same time, you have a privileging of "order" over "chaos" (terms commonly used to describe these dualities, and I use them myself with some reservation) but also a profound reverence for chaos. It is considered hugely powerful, sometimes beautiful, and necessary in order to have a functioning world. Where Christianity has its "problem of evil" and the deep theological challenge of how to reconcile God's power with God's benevolence, I think Celtic paganism has its deep theological challenge of how one offers due reverence for that which one also does not want coming by for dinner; it's our "problem of chaos."
Note my clever omission in those lists of paired opposites: I did not include male and female, and I didn't do that because they don't really map onto that distinction in Celtic tradition. There is perhaps a slight bias toward viewing order as masculine and chaos as feminine, but in general, it's a mixed bag. Celtic myth and symbolism is chock full of goddesses and female figures that represent light, human endeavor, culture, and order (Romans classed those figures together as the "Celtic Minerva" when they encountered them), and male figures that come across as giantish, dangerous, night-oriented, and uncivilized. Like most IE cultures, the Celts appear to have believed in tribes or families of superhuman powers; the ones who had a marked bias toward order and human well-being, male or female, were regarded as gods, and the ones who had a marked bias in the other direction were seen as the ancient non-gods. They survive in Irish mythology as the Fomorians, and elsewhere in the IE world as the Greek Titans and Germanic Jotnar, and they too are both male and female -- obviously, if they're conceptualized as families or nations, they require both males and females.
The other significant difference between our modern understanding of "dualism" and the Celic approach is that issue of the third state, often symbolized as twilight or mist. *Ordinary life* appears to be made up of all these oppositions: you go from night to day to night, from winter to summer to winter, from your own hearthfire to foreign territory, in regular, forseeable ways. That's how calendars are organized, that's how time and space are marked up in ways that make humans able to function. The idea that lies at the heart of a *mystical* or wisdom-tradition stance within a Celtic worldview is that the regularity of these divisions is debatable, even illusory. Celtic poets, prophets, magicians, etc. are specifically trained and tasked with the job of crossing boundaries and blurring distinctions between this and that, which is part of the reason that the inspired, mantic poetry we have preserved from Ireland (where the office of the mantic poet far outlasted paganism per se) is so freaking incomprehensible, all full of bizarre imagery and contradictions. The "juice," as it were, is exactly in the fact that it reconciles opposites and holds that liminal space, suggesting that what functions as a boundary is also, by necessity, a meeting point -- every time you keep two things separate, there has to be either a space between them or a point at which they touch. Those between-spaces and contact points are the ZPMs (gratuitous Stargate reference, OMG) of Celtic religion, and religious specialists are trained to approach and negotiate them.
I would never go so far as to call this idea a human universal, but it's pretty common. You can go a lot of places in the world and see the indigenous idea that the everyday, apparent reality of the world is only the surface-seeming of a rich and bizarre reality that most people are not prepared to see and understand, and the idea that if you *do* want to see and understand it, you're going to have to shift your perspective to encompass both insiderness and outsiderness, to disregard boundaries. That's the idea behind the gender-transgressive behavior of all kinds of religious/spiritual specialists all over the world, which leads me to my next point, which is that gender is easy to conceive of as one more apparently binary reality around which we organize our daily lives, but that a spiritual/inspired/wise perspective enables you to see through, into the richer, weirder reality underneath. In a secular society where the role of the wisdomkeeper is in the hands of scientists, they are currently the ones doing their job by disseminating this data: biologists know that not every child is born clearly either male or female, and social scientists of all stripes know that gender is constructed and performed on many levels for purposes of social organization. The real difference is that in our more democratic modern world, this "inspired wisdom" is freely disseminated, rather than relayed within the context of initiatory secrets handed down to future generations of specialists.
So in that sense, yes. Yes, absolutely and without a doubt, a Celtic pagan worldview is extremely conducive (especially if you view yourself as a "religious specialist" of one kind or another) to approaching and sacralizing a sense of gender that is continuum-based rather than polarized, to investigating the spaces between, the both-and and neither-nor of male and female, which may be why a lot of people who are CR or strongly drawn to CR are themselves queer or transgendered; the language is definitely in place to make sense of your own experience of not relating to any of the ordinary, everyday binaries. Whereas a strict form of dualism that disregards or is suspicious of those compromise- or meeting-points will always look askance at not picking a side (you're with us or against us! Why can't you just *pick one* and stick with it?), the more a worldview values the power contained in liminal spaces, the more you feel valued and supported while you occupy those spaces, obviously. It's a huge, huge benefit of trinary-centric spirituality.
Now, after all that, here's my concern. Erynn, who is herself a poet-seer, uses the language of imbas, which is essentially inspiration, the spirit of prophetic enlightenment that decends on the poet and makes his or her words True and magical. Her argument is that since imbas is nongendered (which seems to be the case; it is not a personified force, but sometimes symbolized by fire or light, both of which relate to male and female mythic figures, so there's no good way even to attach gender to it by proxy), the experience of the fili/poet/seer/mystic is ipso facto nongendered. In her words, "When you go out into the wilderness seeking poetry, risking madness and death, gender is irrelevant. What matters is your preparation, your knowledge, and your ability to transform yourself in accordance with the demands of the spirits you meet. What matters is your willingness to die and be reborn, allowing yourself to be filled with the brilliant light and force of imbas. What matters is bringing it back to the people so that it changes lives for the better."
Which is beautifully said -- Erynn's a poet-mystic, of course it's beautifully said, that's her job! *g* And she may even be completely right, what do I know? But on some level, it freaks me out, and I hope she's not right.
One other thing you may have noticed I didn't map out in terms of organizing binaries was spirit and matter, and that's because I don't see very much of that in the Celtic worldview, either. The Celts, who may not have even gone in much for personifying their deities until after contact with the Romans, seem to have been much closer to an archaic animist cosmology than their cousin-religions were by that point in history, where spirit is inherent and indwelling in matter, and the landscape is alive with spirits and consciousnesses. To say that gender is irrelevant for the mystic because she channels a genderless force implies that either a) before receiving imbas, the poet's body was an empty thing waiting to be filled up, or 2) imbas "burns out" or sweeps away whatever other spiritual forces are inherent within the body, leaving nothing but itself behind.
And in my experience, that simply isn't the case. Yes, wisdom and inspiration are beyond gender in lots of ways, and receiving those forces is an experience that probably feels a lot the same for both men and women. But I don't think the poet herself is somehow pre-empted, and I don't think she becomes nothing but a vessel for imbas. An Irish manual on poetry describes three "cauldrons" within the body -- the lowest of them is always upright and fuels the state of being-alive, the middle one becomes upright through the course of life in most people and fuels the state of being-an-actualized-contributing-adult, and the uppermost one becomes upright for a very few people and fuels the state of being-wise (this is all wildly simplified, btw). It's that third cauldron that "recieves" imbas, that is active in the poet, but the poet has *two other cauldrons* also active at the same time. The second one, which deals with "vocation" -- I'm not ready to go on record, but I think there might be some ground to be gained by seeing it in terms of "socialization," and those constructed, performed aspects of identity in general, including gender. But the first cauldron, the Cauldron of Warming, is explicitly the power that generates and is generated by being physically alive and in your body.
Being physically alive and in your body. I'm all for imbas, wisdom, enlightentment, what have you. I really, really am. But not when it becomes the spiritual experience that supercedes and/or erases all other aspects of spiritual experience, like the one we're always having, every second of our lives, just by being alive and here. And that, I think, is not a nongendered experience. How could it possibly be? It's embedded in a gendered body -- and yes, we want to avoid dualism, and we want to be aware that there are people whose gendered bodies defy comfortable (for us) descriptions of what gender ought to be, but they are still bodies whose chromosomes are dictating gender in various ways.
There's this liberal Enlightenment view that your body is just stuff kind of hanging around, while the Real You is the you of ideas and actions and concepts. This view has been good for the world in many ways, because it's hard to justify oppressing people based on sex or race if you genuinely believe that their bodies are just so much inconsequential stuff. Feminism grew up and was nurtured on the idea that treating women differently from men was inherently wrong and foolish, because we were the same Inside, Where It Counts -- so much so that nearly all feminists now feel *some* degree of trepidation at the idea of fucking around with that formula.
From any kind of animistic perspective, however, it's a lunatic statement -- it's like saying that the lake in my backyard is pretty much the same as the Amazon River because they're both water -- freshwater, even! There's no duality required -- the lake in my backyard doesn't have to be the *opposite* of the Amazon River, but they are each their own thing with their own indwelling spirits that have everything to do with their physical differences.
I think that's how you have to approach the idea of "women's mysteries" and sex in spirituality. While there are sex-neutral mysteries and spiritual experiences, nobody has *only* a sex-neutral spiritual life. Unfortunately, saying things like this carries a huge amount of baggage, and I always end up offending some women, who are all like, "I am not defined by my vagina!" and "I don't exist to menstruate and procreate!"
Which first of all betrays a somewhat limited view of human biology. When I say you are (assuming you are a woman, that is) defined at least in part by having a woman's body, don't come at me like I'm only talking about your breasts or your vagina or your ovaries. The whole thing is a woman's body -- yours. The human body is a complex system, and you can't just pluck out a few parts and say, "Well, except for these." Gender is about chromosomes and hormones and the whole life cycle of your body (quick plug for the most beautifully, lyrically feminist science book ever written, Natalie Angier's Woman: An Intimate Geography -- if I had the power to make every person on earth read just one book, this would be the one); it's all part of an ecosystem, in all senses of the word. If you consider the body to have any relation to spirituality, it's not enough to think in terms of The Body as a generic.
Of course, the astute person will immediately see that there's not any such thing as The Female Body as a generic, either. Granted. But as medical researchers are belatedly realizing, male and female bodies are different enough in broad enough strokes that you can't, for example, do all your research on men and then prescribe the same things to women and assume it'll work out the same. It doesn't always. What's true of medicine is just as true of religion: the problem with a lot of religions is that they're field-tested on men and then thoughtlessly applied to people living in women's bodies with women's brains (I'm not sure there's any way now to argue that women and men have identical brains without being the equivalent of the Creationists, who la-la-la-can't-hear-you-science because the findings don't corroborate their preferred worldview) on the vague assumption that either it'll work the same way, no problem, or the deep-seated prejudice that we honestly don't care whether or not it works for girls because they're just girls.
Women, however, have never really taken that sort of thing lying down. In any living culture, simple observation will show that women "do" their religion identically to men in some ways, and in other ways in specifically female variations. The tragedy of the fall of indigenous European paganism is that the first thing to get lost was most knowledge of how women did religion, because the people who wrote down what survived had no interest in the topic. It's easy to say that all differences between male and female religious practices are cultural and learned -- but if you keep with the idea of the Three Cauldrons as repositories of different kinds of spiritual experience, why would the answer *always* take place within the Cauldron of (learned) Vocation, and *never* within the Cauldron of (inherent, embodied) Warming? What kind of sense does that make? To me, it seems like an idea that only the modern world could have come up with, following on this ingrained bias that tells us that naturally, obviously, of course, that which we know is more real and more influential than that which we sense or experience or are on a material level.
It's easy enough to say, oh, well, the experience of being embodied in a woman's body means we have women's experiences and therefore need and deserve women's mysteries to sacralize those experiences, but then of course someone says, okay, smart girl, so what are these supposed women's mysteries that I'm supposed to need? The flip answer, obviously, is that hi, if I could just tell you, they wouldn't be mysteries. But honestly...yeah, that's kind of the answer. I can draw some broad outlines -- I can say that women's bodies, like most of nature, are designed to produce vastly more than it needs, and then to slough off and kill the excess, which is what your body is doing when it menstruates, and that maybe there's something there about abundance and the paradoxical relationship between death and life. I can say you have a hormonal cycle that affects how you think and feel, and that maybe there's something there about feelings and moods being *real,* not imaginary, and belonging to you as much as your body does, about it being all right to revel in having emotions, even uncomfortable ones. I can say that female brains seem to be wired to increase communication and empathy toward other people's moods, and that maybe there's something there about interdependence and insight into a world that's organized as a neverending matrix of connections and relationships. I can say that human childbirth is dangerous in the extreme due to the big, giant heads of our babies, and that even if you don't ever give birth, there's something there about how when you open yourself up to creating, you're always simultaneously open to the possibility of being destroyed, and that the reason women are generally a traditional community's midwives and its mourners for the dead is more than cultural. I can say that your mDNA is passed directly to you through thousands of generations of women, down from an actual, literal First Human Mother of Us All who was a real live person in Africa, and that maybe there's something there about continuity and history and not being so damn quick to think we're different from all those mothers of ours just because we have the pill and the vote, and something about not forgetting when you hear glib cliches like "we're all one human family" that there can be a grounded reality behind ideas, a reality that's literally alive in you right now -- not in your consciousness, to believe or not to believe, but in your bloodstream, in your cells.
But the point of mystery traditions is not to tell you what you should learn from being a woman, like your body is a text and you need the secret decoder ring. It's about having a basically simple experience (in this case, existing) in a specifically mindful way, from a certain perspective, that imbues it with more-than-simple wisdom and power that can't be easily articulated. I wouldn't tell anyone what to make of their experience of being a woman, but nor am I very ready to suggest that being a woman is or should be somehow beside the point of anyone's spiritual experience. It should be present, it should be *part* of the point, though not the be-all and end-all. I'm deeply unhappy with any spiritual perspective that tries to make it irrelevant, or only marginally relevant, in favor of a body that's only there to hold something better than what we've already got.
Anyway, as always happens when someone writes up a thing about what they believe and you write up a thing in response to it, I've probably misunderstood everything the original poster had to say. In my defense, though, as much as this was kicked off by Erynn's post, it was more in response to many years' worth of women I've met both inside and outside paganism who object to my "essentialism" and think I should just get over this vagina thing and get with the Judith Butler, already. Clearly, today is not the day I plan to be doing that. *g*
The original post here is from one of the most influential elders of the Celtic Reconstructionist community, and since I don't consider myself strictly CR, I didn't necessarily think my responses were useful in terms of the CR conversation she was looking to start. Still, I responded really strongly to her post, both positively and negatively, regarding binary and non-binary concepts of gender and how sex and spirituality intersect. So what the heck.
Rather than go chronologically through the post, I'm going to highlight the things I really felt good about up front. As Erynn suggests toward the end of her post, Celtic pagan cosmology puts a huge emphasis on third-states, liminal spaces, boundaries, and the idea that magical and spiritual power occurs at the intersection of apparent opposites, at the spots where one is neither this nor that (all of that is actually indigenous to all Indo-European paganism, although the idea manifests in different ways, and surviving lore indicates that it was much more pronounced and visible in Celtic religion -- either that or it reflects the close relationship between Celtic poet/lorekeepers and the Celtic theologians/priestly class, which diverged more strongly in other IE cultures so that secular folklore may carry more wisdom-tradition information in the Celtic lands that disappeared or was never present in other cultures that had booming entertainment industries not controlled by the priestly class).
In a nutshell, and with the caveat that there's A LOT we don't know about Celtic pagan thought (seriously, a *lot*), my understanding of the worldview is basically this: the world is organized in paired opposites, chiefly light and darkness, expansion and reduction, this world and the otherworld, above and below, safety and danger, and the-world-inside-the-people's-law and the-world-not-covered-thereby. The second half of each of these sets is not considered evil, but it is approached on two levels at different times, or both simultaneously: it is a) the first and oldest state and the one that gives rise to, nourishes, and sustains the other state and 2) terrifying. So at the same time, you have a privileging of "order" over "chaos" (terms commonly used to describe these dualities, and I use them myself with some reservation) but also a profound reverence for chaos. It is considered hugely powerful, sometimes beautiful, and necessary in order to have a functioning world. Where Christianity has its "problem of evil" and the deep theological challenge of how to reconcile God's power with God's benevolence, I think Celtic paganism has its deep theological challenge of how one offers due reverence for that which one also does not want coming by for dinner; it's our "problem of chaos."
Note my clever omission in those lists of paired opposites: I did not include male and female, and I didn't do that because they don't really map onto that distinction in Celtic tradition. There is perhaps a slight bias toward viewing order as masculine and chaos as feminine, but in general, it's a mixed bag. Celtic myth and symbolism is chock full of goddesses and female figures that represent light, human endeavor, culture, and order (Romans classed those figures together as the "Celtic Minerva" when they encountered them), and male figures that come across as giantish, dangerous, night-oriented, and uncivilized. Like most IE cultures, the Celts appear to have believed in tribes or families of superhuman powers; the ones who had a marked bias toward order and human well-being, male or female, were regarded as gods, and the ones who had a marked bias in the other direction were seen as the ancient non-gods. They survive in Irish mythology as the Fomorians, and elsewhere in the IE world as the Greek Titans and Germanic Jotnar, and they too are both male and female -- obviously, if they're conceptualized as families or nations, they require both males and females.
The other significant difference between our modern understanding of "dualism" and the Celic approach is that issue of the third state, often symbolized as twilight or mist. *Ordinary life* appears to be made up of all these oppositions: you go from night to day to night, from winter to summer to winter, from your own hearthfire to foreign territory, in regular, forseeable ways. That's how calendars are organized, that's how time and space are marked up in ways that make humans able to function. The idea that lies at the heart of a *mystical* or wisdom-tradition stance within a Celtic worldview is that the regularity of these divisions is debatable, even illusory. Celtic poets, prophets, magicians, etc. are specifically trained and tasked with the job of crossing boundaries and blurring distinctions between this and that, which is part of the reason that the inspired, mantic poetry we have preserved from Ireland (where the office of the mantic poet far outlasted paganism per se) is so freaking incomprehensible, all full of bizarre imagery and contradictions. The "juice," as it were, is exactly in the fact that it reconciles opposites and holds that liminal space, suggesting that what functions as a boundary is also, by necessity, a meeting point -- every time you keep two things separate, there has to be either a space between them or a point at which they touch. Those between-spaces and contact points are the ZPMs (gratuitous Stargate reference, OMG) of Celtic religion, and religious specialists are trained to approach and negotiate them.
I would never go so far as to call this idea a human universal, but it's pretty common. You can go a lot of places in the world and see the indigenous idea that the everyday, apparent reality of the world is only the surface-seeming of a rich and bizarre reality that most people are not prepared to see and understand, and the idea that if you *do* want to see and understand it, you're going to have to shift your perspective to encompass both insiderness and outsiderness, to disregard boundaries. That's the idea behind the gender-transgressive behavior of all kinds of religious/spiritual specialists all over the world, which leads me to my next point, which is that gender is easy to conceive of as one more apparently binary reality around which we organize our daily lives, but that a spiritual/inspired/wise perspective enables you to see through, into the richer, weirder reality underneath. In a secular society where the role of the wisdomkeeper is in the hands of scientists, they are currently the ones doing their job by disseminating this data: biologists know that not every child is born clearly either male or female, and social scientists of all stripes know that gender is constructed and performed on many levels for purposes of social organization. The real difference is that in our more democratic modern world, this "inspired wisdom" is freely disseminated, rather than relayed within the context of initiatory secrets handed down to future generations of specialists.
So in that sense, yes. Yes, absolutely and without a doubt, a Celtic pagan worldview is extremely conducive (especially if you view yourself as a "religious specialist" of one kind or another) to approaching and sacralizing a sense of gender that is continuum-based rather than polarized, to investigating the spaces between, the both-and and neither-nor of male and female, which may be why a lot of people who are CR or strongly drawn to CR are themselves queer or transgendered; the language is definitely in place to make sense of your own experience of not relating to any of the ordinary, everyday binaries. Whereas a strict form of dualism that disregards or is suspicious of those compromise- or meeting-points will always look askance at not picking a side (you're with us or against us! Why can't you just *pick one* and stick with it?), the more a worldview values the power contained in liminal spaces, the more you feel valued and supported while you occupy those spaces, obviously. It's a huge, huge benefit of trinary-centric spirituality.
Now, after all that, here's my concern. Erynn, who is herself a poet-seer, uses the language of imbas, which is essentially inspiration, the spirit of prophetic enlightenment that decends on the poet and makes his or her words True and magical. Her argument is that since imbas is nongendered (which seems to be the case; it is not a personified force, but sometimes symbolized by fire or light, both of which relate to male and female mythic figures, so there's no good way even to attach gender to it by proxy), the experience of the fili/poet/seer/mystic is ipso facto nongendered. In her words, "When you go out into the wilderness seeking poetry, risking madness and death, gender is irrelevant. What matters is your preparation, your knowledge, and your ability to transform yourself in accordance with the demands of the spirits you meet. What matters is your willingness to die and be reborn, allowing yourself to be filled with the brilliant light and force of imbas. What matters is bringing it back to the people so that it changes lives for the better."
Which is beautifully said -- Erynn's a poet-mystic, of course it's beautifully said, that's her job! *g* And she may even be completely right, what do I know? But on some level, it freaks me out, and I hope she's not right.
One other thing you may have noticed I didn't map out in terms of organizing binaries was spirit and matter, and that's because I don't see very much of that in the Celtic worldview, either. The Celts, who may not have even gone in much for personifying their deities until after contact with the Romans, seem to have been much closer to an archaic animist cosmology than their cousin-religions were by that point in history, where spirit is inherent and indwelling in matter, and the landscape is alive with spirits and consciousnesses. To say that gender is irrelevant for the mystic because she channels a genderless force implies that either a) before receiving imbas, the poet's body was an empty thing waiting to be filled up, or 2) imbas "burns out" or sweeps away whatever other spiritual forces are inherent within the body, leaving nothing but itself behind.
And in my experience, that simply isn't the case. Yes, wisdom and inspiration are beyond gender in lots of ways, and receiving those forces is an experience that probably feels a lot the same for both men and women. But I don't think the poet herself is somehow pre-empted, and I don't think she becomes nothing but a vessel for imbas. An Irish manual on poetry describes three "cauldrons" within the body -- the lowest of them is always upright and fuels the state of being-alive, the middle one becomes upright through the course of life in most people and fuels the state of being-an-actualized-contributing-adult, and the uppermost one becomes upright for a very few people and fuels the state of being-wise (this is all wildly simplified, btw). It's that third cauldron that "recieves" imbas, that is active in the poet, but the poet has *two other cauldrons* also active at the same time. The second one, which deals with "vocation" -- I'm not ready to go on record, but I think there might be some ground to be gained by seeing it in terms of "socialization," and those constructed, performed aspects of identity in general, including gender. But the first cauldron, the Cauldron of Warming, is explicitly the power that generates and is generated by being physically alive and in your body.
Being physically alive and in your body. I'm all for imbas, wisdom, enlightentment, what have you. I really, really am. But not when it becomes the spiritual experience that supercedes and/or erases all other aspects of spiritual experience, like the one we're always having, every second of our lives, just by being alive and here. And that, I think, is not a nongendered experience. How could it possibly be? It's embedded in a gendered body -- and yes, we want to avoid dualism, and we want to be aware that there are people whose gendered bodies defy comfortable (for us) descriptions of what gender ought to be, but they are still bodies whose chromosomes are dictating gender in various ways.
There's this liberal Enlightenment view that your body is just stuff kind of hanging around, while the Real You is the you of ideas and actions and concepts. This view has been good for the world in many ways, because it's hard to justify oppressing people based on sex or race if you genuinely believe that their bodies are just so much inconsequential stuff. Feminism grew up and was nurtured on the idea that treating women differently from men was inherently wrong and foolish, because we were the same Inside, Where It Counts -- so much so that nearly all feminists now feel *some* degree of trepidation at the idea of fucking around with that formula.
From any kind of animistic perspective, however, it's a lunatic statement -- it's like saying that the lake in my backyard is pretty much the same as the Amazon River because they're both water -- freshwater, even! There's no duality required -- the lake in my backyard doesn't have to be the *opposite* of the Amazon River, but they are each their own thing with their own indwelling spirits that have everything to do with their physical differences.
I think that's how you have to approach the idea of "women's mysteries" and sex in spirituality. While there are sex-neutral mysteries and spiritual experiences, nobody has *only* a sex-neutral spiritual life. Unfortunately, saying things like this carries a huge amount of baggage, and I always end up offending some women, who are all like, "I am not defined by my vagina!" and "I don't exist to menstruate and procreate!"
Which first of all betrays a somewhat limited view of human biology. When I say you are (assuming you are a woman, that is) defined at least in part by having a woman's body, don't come at me like I'm only talking about your breasts or your vagina or your ovaries. The whole thing is a woman's body -- yours. The human body is a complex system, and you can't just pluck out a few parts and say, "Well, except for these." Gender is about chromosomes and hormones and the whole life cycle of your body (quick plug for the most beautifully, lyrically feminist science book ever written, Natalie Angier's Woman: An Intimate Geography -- if I had the power to make every person on earth read just one book, this would be the one); it's all part of an ecosystem, in all senses of the word. If you consider the body to have any relation to spirituality, it's not enough to think in terms of The Body as a generic.
Of course, the astute person will immediately see that there's not any such thing as The Female Body as a generic, either. Granted. But as medical researchers are belatedly realizing, male and female bodies are different enough in broad enough strokes that you can't, for example, do all your research on men and then prescribe the same things to women and assume it'll work out the same. It doesn't always. What's true of medicine is just as true of religion: the problem with a lot of religions is that they're field-tested on men and then thoughtlessly applied to people living in women's bodies with women's brains (I'm not sure there's any way now to argue that women and men have identical brains without being the equivalent of the Creationists, who la-la-la-can't-hear-you-science because the findings don't corroborate their preferred worldview) on the vague assumption that either it'll work the same way, no problem, or the deep-seated prejudice that we honestly don't care whether or not it works for girls because they're just girls.
Women, however, have never really taken that sort of thing lying down. In any living culture, simple observation will show that women "do" their religion identically to men in some ways, and in other ways in specifically female variations. The tragedy of the fall of indigenous European paganism is that the first thing to get lost was most knowledge of how women did religion, because the people who wrote down what survived had no interest in the topic. It's easy to say that all differences between male and female religious practices are cultural and learned -- but if you keep with the idea of the Three Cauldrons as repositories of different kinds of spiritual experience, why would the answer *always* take place within the Cauldron of (learned) Vocation, and *never* within the Cauldron of (inherent, embodied) Warming? What kind of sense does that make? To me, it seems like an idea that only the modern world could have come up with, following on this ingrained bias that tells us that naturally, obviously, of course, that which we know is more real and more influential than that which we sense or experience or are on a material level.
It's easy enough to say, oh, well, the experience of being embodied in a woman's body means we have women's experiences and therefore need and deserve women's mysteries to sacralize those experiences, but then of course someone says, okay, smart girl, so what are these supposed women's mysteries that I'm supposed to need? The flip answer, obviously, is that hi, if I could just tell you, they wouldn't be mysteries. But honestly...yeah, that's kind of the answer. I can draw some broad outlines -- I can say that women's bodies, like most of nature, are designed to produce vastly more than it needs, and then to slough off and kill the excess, which is what your body is doing when it menstruates, and that maybe there's something there about abundance and the paradoxical relationship between death and life. I can say you have a hormonal cycle that affects how you think and feel, and that maybe there's something there about feelings and moods being *real,* not imaginary, and belonging to you as much as your body does, about it being all right to revel in having emotions, even uncomfortable ones. I can say that female brains seem to be wired to increase communication and empathy toward other people's moods, and that maybe there's something there about interdependence and insight into a world that's organized as a neverending matrix of connections and relationships. I can say that human childbirth is dangerous in the extreme due to the big, giant heads of our babies, and that even if you don't ever give birth, there's something there about how when you open yourself up to creating, you're always simultaneously open to the possibility of being destroyed, and that the reason women are generally a traditional community's midwives and its mourners for the dead is more than cultural. I can say that your mDNA is passed directly to you through thousands of generations of women, down from an actual, literal First Human Mother of Us All who was a real live person in Africa, and that maybe there's something there about continuity and history and not being so damn quick to think we're different from all those mothers of ours just because we have the pill and the vote, and something about not forgetting when you hear glib cliches like "we're all one human family" that there can be a grounded reality behind ideas, a reality that's literally alive in you right now -- not in your consciousness, to believe or not to believe, but in your bloodstream, in your cells.
But the point of mystery traditions is not to tell you what you should learn from being a woman, like your body is a text and you need the secret decoder ring. It's about having a basically simple experience (in this case, existing) in a specifically mindful way, from a certain perspective, that imbues it with more-than-simple wisdom and power that can't be easily articulated. I wouldn't tell anyone what to make of their experience of being a woman, but nor am I very ready to suggest that being a woman is or should be somehow beside the point of anyone's spiritual experience. It should be present, it should be *part* of the point, though not the be-all and end-all. I'm deeply unhappy with any spiritual perspective that tries to make it irrelevant, or only marginally relevant, in favor of a body that's only there to hold something better than what we've already got.
Anyway, as always happens when someone writes up a thing about what they believe and you write up a thing in response to it, I've probably misunderstood everything the original poster had to say. In my defense, though, as much as this was kicked off by Erynn's post, it was more in response to many years' worth of women I've met both inside and outside paganism who object to my "essentialism" and think I should just get over this vagina thing and get with the Judith Butler, already. Clearly, today is not the day I plan to be doing that. *g*
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This was very interesting. Thanks!
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After reading and thinking about it for a bit, I have to agree with you. Humans may be spiritual beings but that's not all we are, any more than our bodies are the sum total of our experience.
Being equal does not mean being identical which, I believe, is a fallacy that many people get tangled up in. Woman can be equal to men, homosexuals can be equal to heterosexuals, etc., etc. without the former being identical to the latter. Embracing our differences while appreciating our commonalities seems a better way of learning to respect each other than using a fear of those differences to force conformance.
...*coughs*
*gets off soapbox*
Soo... yes. Loved your post. Thank you. :)
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First off, I don't think that the poet is "empty" of everything in a pre-imbas state. Open, yes. Empty, no. Essentially, if the poet were "empty" there would be nothing there to transform when the fili and the Otherworlds meet. The three internal cauldrons aren't necessarily always empty either -- otherwise the imagery of brewing and boiling, of filling and emptying, would be meaningless.
I tend to think of spirit as immanent in body, that in many ways they're inseparable, but I'm also speaking as someone who at root identifies as androgynous and has felt a certain gender dysphoria throughout my life that expressed when I was maybe seven as "mom, I really think I was supposed to be a boy." My experience as an androgyne is not going to match exactly with the experience of someone who feels strongly gendered one way or the other, regardless of the sex of the body they were born in.
My point in posting was not so much to say that there are no men's or women's mysteries. It was really to point out that there are mysteries that are other than male or female, mysteries of between-ness and other-ness. It is particularly gender rather than physical sex that I refer to in my post and in my discussion of Celtic spirituality, and in a strict sense, gender has nothing to do with the physical body at all, but rather with the spirit of who we are, if you will.
Certainly my female hormones and female body effect my experience, but it is the non-gendered, androgynous part of me that interprets that experience, that travels within the mists. When I'm in the Otherworlds, my body may or may not be human, may or may not be male, may or may not be female. The spirits I interact with there may be sexed or gendered or not. The mist and imbas are ungendered, and in so many ways it seems that the Celtic worldview is that the center and the edge, both being liminal places, are also ungendered in that sense.
Filidecht isn't the same as ordinary poetry that's rooted in physical experience. It reaches into something magical and Otherworldly and tries to bring it back here into the physical. My mundane poetry is as much rooted in my female body and my bisexual experience as anything else. But when I'm working with poetry that arises from aisling, from the state of dream and vision, it transcends that bodily limitation and moves into other realities. This isn't about modern western feminism, nor is it about transcendentalist spirituality that postulates the body and the material world as bad and the spirit and heaven as good. It's about dealing with something that's within the world but seen from an entirely different angle. It's about what walks in the mists. It's about being in that place that every mystic may inhabit regardless of their physical station in life and the condition of their physical body.
It's about paradox.
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There's this liberal Enlightenment view that your body is just stuff kind of hanging around, while the Real You is the you of ideas and actions and concepts.
That idea is a heck of a lot older than the Enlightenment, and it's not necessarily liberal, either. Platonists were perfectly able to combine "only the spirit is real" with "women aren't as good" by positing that women's bodies attracted or were animated by second-rate spirits. *eyeroll*