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Myths and Matriarchy: Research and In-search

by Patricia Monaghan

(Originally published in Druid's Progress 9)

What if you died right now, and some one who didn't know your beliefs was left to sort through your jewelry, books, journals, and artwork? To dismantle your altar? To decide what to give to whom, what to sell, what to throw away?

What would happen to that branch you carried from the sacred yew tree, to the block of chalk from a neolithic quarry, to the sand painting made at ritual? What would happen to the scribbled grimoire you always meant to recopy? What do you think would become of the uncut amethyst, the stack of tattered holy cards, the knotted red cord from your initiation?

Do you feel a tightness in your chest as you contemplate this? Now imagine that all these things fell to people who not only knew, but hated, your beliefs. How big a pile of rubble do you think they could make of your sacred objects?

Now you know what we're up against.

There are two parts to the process of re-forming Goddess Religion: search and research. By search, I mean creating sacred forms appropriate to our increasing understanding of the Goddess; by research, discovering and protecting what is left of former goddess cultures. There is an intermediary task, too, one that requires some of the skills of both. I call it in-search, and by it I mean an interplay between the study of real cultures and a creative self-awareness. It is in this in-searching process that we are likely to spontaneously recreate lost rituals, myths, objects, relationships. But it is also in this process that we're most likely to lapse into forgetful ethnocentrism.

I won't here discuss the creation of new forms, something best covered by ritualists and priestesses. Rather, I'll concentrate on the process of research and the dangerous pleasures of in-search.

The fantasy at the beginning of this chapter is, sadly, no exaggeration of what happened to women's cultures. Century after century, continent after continent, individuals were killed and their sacred objects destroyed. Hypatia was murdered, the Library at Alexandria burned, the Etruscans wiped out, the Miwok and the Maidu exterminated, the Cherokee forced starving across the land for generations, dying as they walked. What we have left is a tattered cloth, nothing like the glorious robes of the Goddess of old.

But even in the face of murder and destruction, there were survivals. Women hid their mysteries in fairy stories and whispered them to their children, thus keeping alive the names of Lamia, Medusa, Lilith. Goddesses were sneaked into the Christian pantheon in the guise of saints, carrying their sacred regalia. (This happened to gods, too; only recently has the Catholic church purged the lists of St. Priapus) Rituals were transformed into "folkways" and children's games like trick or treat. That we have even the Goddess' tattered cloth left meant that women risked-and often lost-their safety and their lives to save it.

And so the process of researching must be important to us; those were living women who sacrificed to convey our inheritance of goddess knowledge, and we owe it to them to uncover what's left. Research on the Goddess must be an ongoing part of our worship; we must be familiars of libraries and museums, for that's where our information is stored.

For the past several years, I've been researching sun goddesses. Because sun goddesses do not officially exist -you know the old canard about the earth and the moon always being female, the sky and the sun always being male - I've had to learn new ways of using libraries and museums, new ways of reading between lines to find what's hidden there. I'd like to share some of these techniques.

One of them is what I call "crawling on the floor," after an experience in the British Museum. I was looking for Medusas, led by the thought that her snake-surrounded head looked awfully solar and might hide an ancient sun goddess. It was one of those nice British Museum days when all the tourists were down in the Elgin Marbles room, and the rest of the place was vacant except for bored guards waiting to nab someone copping a feel of a pretty goddess' fanny. I found the Medusa room, all right, and started moving widershins around it, carefully examining each of the objects.

I was about halfway around when I realized I was only seeing half of the collection; the rest was below my waist, on little shelves along the door and at knee-level. The only way to see them was to creep along the floor in a sort of duckcrawl so that's what I did. And lo and behold! there were fabulous strange Medusas down there, not Romanized and prettified ones but grotesque and powerful ones in running swastika position with snakes for legs.

What were they doing down there? Was it just an accident that the most powerful of the female figures were out of sight? If so, this accident occurs with amazing regularity, as does mislabelling (why are sacred mirrors always "toilet objects"?). The strange old Medusas led me to a new depth in my thought about sexuality and power. Could that be what prompted museum designers to make them inaccessible? And what's hidden off in storage, too powerful even for the floor level shelves?

The lesson I gleaned from this experience is to look at everything. It's boring; I've looked at enough neolithic potshards to be karmically freed from that task for eternity, and I've never found one that meant anything to me. But what if there is one, and I miss it? We can't rely upon museums to label the interesting material for us (at least not correctly). We've got to crawl on the floor and find it ourselves.

Another version of this is to make sure you check oddball locations. That crucial clue to a goddess culture may be in one-room museum in the midlands, as likely (maybe more so) as in the capital city. Don't settle for what's offered up in patriarchal prepackaging. A goddess researcher must be a sleuth. Look for clues everywhere.

Another technique is the bold lie. A lot of museums and libraries - places where the really good stuff is stored -are open only to those with the proper credentials. Yes, yes, yes, librarians and museum workers out there, I know there are reasons for this, and I agree books shouldn't be defaced nor objects broken. But there are other reasons, reasons with less of a high tone to them: the underclasses must be kept from the knowledge of how this society works against them; the hierarchies of knowledge must be maintained; the divisions among the disciplines must be kept pristine. As long as you're not going to deface books or break (or steal) objects, the bold lie should be part of your repertoire; it will gain you entrance to places where the goodies lie in storage and from which you'd be barred if you just present yourself as yourself.

I know a woman who regularly assaults the bastions of culture and asks to see objects in storage. She doesn't exactly lie: she inflates her credentials. She's working for a publisher, when really she's corresponding with one; she's a professor at a university, when really she's a student (the museum staff doesn't know that a yellow card means student and red means faculty; they just see the school ID); she is a researcher from a think-tank where she spent a summer once. She carries herself like a publisher/professor/researcher, shows no nervousness, and gains admission to special collections.

Finally, there's the library equivalent of crawling on the floor: reading unpopular and out-of-print books, going beyond the most obvious sources to discover what's carefully edited out of them. This usually entails going back to the original stories and myths, rather than just reading summaries in mythological dictionaries or interpretive articles. Most books on Scandinavia, for instance, use the male pronoun when referring to the sun; every single reference in the Eddas is to a female sun divinity. Dictionaries of mythology assure us that Native Americans believed in a sky-sun father; they forget to mention the Cherokee, Chitimacha, Natchez, Tunica, Yucchi, Achomawi, Maidu, Miwok and others who worshipped the Sun Goddess. You won't find these myths in the New Larousse Encyclopedia; you will find them in tatty old copies of ethnographic reports from early this century. Read everything.

And read carefully. And take notes or make photocopies. Don't rely on your memory to keep the details in place. These were the living religions of real people, and we owe it to them not to replace one kind of ignorance with another. Real women died to keep these beliefs alive; it insults their sacrifice to be inaccurate.

And here we come to those dangerous pleasures. The process of in-search is often summed in Monique Wittig's famous phrase, "Remember. And what you cannot remember, invent." Whether or not you believe in a collective unconscious, something like that is at work in dream and ritual and poetry. Strangely suitable images dreamed just before ritual turn out to be exactly what another culture used in their worship; sacred places call us to move in certain ways within them; magic allows us access to information stored in places even more tightly guarded than museums and libraries.

There is nothing more thrilling than watching the process of in-search in action. Recently I watched the actors of Fanfire Theater in Chicago move through a ritual dance they'd designed to incorporate their growing reverence for the mirror (both metal and water) as a goddess image. As they danced and swayed and focussed light on each other and held mirrors up to tire, I was thrilled with the recognition that they were instinctively recreating rituals that would have been recognizable to a Japanese Shinto believer or a Pharoaic Egyptian princess. There were vestiges as well of water-mirror rituals from Ireland. But their ritual was their own - it was not Japanese, or Egyptian, or Irish.

Alas, though, it's all too easy to assume that, because a ritual you read about seems so strangely familiar to you that you feel compelled to reenact it, that you've actually recreated that ritual. Remember that the transcription may have been wrong; remember that secrets are often kept from outsiders, so that ritual knowledge as written may be only partial; remember that some of the transcribers deliberately distorted their information to fit philosophic or cultural biases. Let's all make a habit of speaking with precision of the results of our in-searching. "This is a ritual inspired by the Hopi" we can say rather than "This is a Hopi ritual." We can say,"This is a ritual I was inspired to enact while visiting a stone circle in Scotland" rather than "This is a ritual performed in Scottish Stone circles."

This may seem like academic fussiness, but remember where we began: in speaking of culture and ritual we're speaking of real people, individual women like yourselves with strong minds and the drive to convey their truths beyond their lifetimes. In honor of them and of their struggle, let us be joyous in our in-searching and acknowledge all contributions, but let's also claim our own part in the creation.

Patricia Monaghan is the author of The Book of Goddesses and Heroines (E.P. Dutton) and has recently completed a book on sun goddesses. A lifelong Alaskan, she moved in late 1987 to Chicago, where she teaches writing in an inner-city school. In Alaska, she was one of the founding members of Shelix, a coven established in 1976 and still active.

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