Telling the World in a Dangerous Time: The Importance of Myth

"Goddess Speaks" by Earth Traditions Community at the Parliament of World Religions 2023

 

Recently I found myself joining conversations about possible futures in our very uncertain world, as we face both Climate Change and the possible end of the American experiment in democracy, which Trump and his very wealthy supporters, seem determined to do.  These are uncertain times indeed to be alive in.  I pulled up the following article, which I wrote in 2017, because it seemed to offer a reminder I needed, once again, unfortunately.

"Weaving" from "Restoring the Balance" (2004)

             TELLING THE WORLD IN A TIME OF DROUGHT: 

                                     Artists as Myth Makers

                                                           by Lauren Raine MFA (2017) 

“What might we see, how might we act, if we saw with a webbed vision? The world seen through a web of relationships…as delicate as spider’s silk, yet strong enough to hang a bridge on.”

 Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web

Recently I travelled cross country, joining conversations that always seemed to end with a question.  Since many of my friends are artists (I include writers, performers, ritualists, dancers, storytellers, and a number of shamans in the category as well) the question seems to come down to "what do we do now?"  

How do we, in a time that seems bent on eliminating education, free speech, environmental preservation, social ethics, and possibly even any kind of consensual truth…..as practitioners of the arts, increasingly marginalized by society, how do we find meaningful identity? 

"A Mask for Shattering Old Paradigms" (2024)

My own response is that I believe it's vital for artists to remember that we are myth makers.  Throughout history artists of all kinds have possessed the imaginal tools to invent and re-invent the myths that were the cultural underpinnings for their time.  

Phil Cousineau, author of  Once and Future Myths: The Power of Ancient Stories in Our Lives (2001) cautioned that if we don't become aware of both our personal and our cultural myths which "act like gravitational forces on us" we risk becoming overpowered, overshadowed, and controlled by them.  Myths are in many ways the templates of how we compose our societal and personal values, as well as how people organize their religions.  As Cousineau commented further, "the stories we tell of ourselves determine who we become, who we are, and what we believe."  

The human mind has a unique ability to abstract.  A stone is not always a stone - sometimes it becomes a symbol of something, a manifestation of a deity, or it can also become intentionally invisible, even when it stubs our toes.  An interpretation of "God" is something that whole nations have lived or died for.  And depending on the aesthetics of a particular culture, foot binding, skull extension, or bouffant hairdos can be experienced as erotic beauty.  If the worlds we know are, indeed, experienced through the lens of the stories we tell about them, then how are those stories serving or not serving the crucial time we live in?

A renunciate myth of the Earth as "not real" or a "place of sin and suffering" does not serve the environmental crisis facing a global humanity.   Stories that make women lesser beings do not release the creative brain power of half the human race.  A cultural mythos that celebrates violence and competition do not contribute to nurturance and sustainability.   Stories of "rugged individualism" may not be as useful in a time when science, sociology, ecology, theology, and even physics are demonstrating that all things are interdependent. 

I remember years ago participating in a week long intensive with the Earth Spirit Community of New England.  The event took place in October, in celebration of the closing of the year, the "going into the dark" time.  The closing ritual occurred at twilight.  Bearing candles, different groups wove through the woods toward a distant lodge from which the sound of heartbeat drums issued.  Slowly the lodge filled, illuminated with candles.  As we sat on the floor, lights gradually went out, we were blindfolded and the drums abruptly stopped. 

We felt bodies rush by us as hands turned us.  The sounds of wind, and half understood voices, someone calling, someone crying, or a bit of music came from all directions.  As we lost any sense of direction or time we became uncomfortable, frightened and disoriented.  I felt as if I was in a vast chamber, the very halls of Hades, listening to echoing voices of the lost.  And when it felt like the formless dark would never stop:  silence.  And the quiet sound of the heartbeat drum returned, re-connecting us to the heart of the Earth.

As blindfolds were removed I found myself in a room warmly illuminated with candles.  On a central platform sat a woman enthroned in brilliant white, illuminated with candles and flowers.  At her feet were baskets of bread.  Slowly we rose, took bread and fruit, and left the "Temple".  And as we left, on each side of the entrance, stood a figure in a black cape.  Each had a mirror over his or her face – mirror masks, reflecting our own faces.  

Now that was a ritual telling of the myth!  We had entered mythic space, we had participated together in the Great Round of death and return to the light - and none of us would ever forget it.

"Invocation of Bridgit" 

I am suggesting that artists, troubled as my friends and I have been, step away for a while from the complex questions of identity so beloved by the art world, cast aside as well the dismissal, even hostility of the current anti-intellectual environment.  Instead, let us view ourselves  as engaged in a sacred profession.   We are pollinators of the imagination,  holding  threads in  a great weaving of myth, threads that extend into a time  yet to come, and far back into a barely glimpsed past.  If "the Universe is made of stories, not atoms" as the poet  Muriel Rukeyser famously said, the only real question for us now is "what kinds of stories are we weaving"?     

"The new myth coming into being through the triple influence of quantum physics, depth psychology and ecology suggests that we are participants in a great cosmic web of life, each one of us indissolubly connected with all others through that invisible field. It is the most insidious of illusions to think that we can achieve a position of dominance in relation to nature, life or each other. In our essence, we are one."

Anne Baring 

References:

Keller, Catherine;  From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism and Self,

       Beacon Press  (1988)

Baring, Anne;  "A New Vision of Reality" from her website

       http://www.annebaring.com/

Cousineau, Phil; Once and Future Myths: The Power of Ancient Stories in

        Modern Times,  Conori Press (2001)

The Earthspirit Community, Twilight Covening (1993),   

         http://www.earthspirit.com/ 

Rukeyser, Muriel;  The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser,  McGraw (1978)

ERASURE OF THE FEMININE by Dr. Anne Baring

 

"As a Jungian analyst and a historian, I would like to offer an archetypal overview of why the current crisis may have come into being; showing when, where and how the masculine and feminine archetypes – reflected in the image of a God or Goddess – became separated, and why this separation has had such a deep impact on Western civilization. I am not speaking only of the pandemic but the far greater challenge of climate change."

                     Anne Baring from A Crucial Time of Choice

I take the liberty of posting this important article by psychologist and mythologist Anne Baring Ph.D because it so eloquently and succinctly describes how Western culture evolved patriarchy, how we forgot that God was ever also a woman, and why patriarchy's values must end and the Goddess must return to the world, if we, and our fellow Beings on this beautiful planet, are going to continue.  

A personal note:  I keep intending to make this Blog more "autobiographical".  But each time I sit down to write, I am struck with the increasing tempo of the great world crisis, and I remember the voices of such great thinkers, philosophers, herstorians, theologians, and activists as Dr. Baring;  and suddenly, my story just merges in my mind with the greater collective story.  

                                                                        "Asherah" 

                    ERASURE OF THE FEMININE 

                                            Ann Baring

Owing to the research that I and others have conducted over the last 40 years, we now know that in the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras, the principal deity worshiped was the Great Mother. In this forgotten cosmology, there was no Creator beyond creation. Creation emerged from the womb of the Great Mother. All species, including our own, were her children. Everything on Earth and in the Cosmos was connected through relationship with her. 

Then, around 1,500 BC, there was a change so great that its repercussions are keenly felt in all aspects of Western civilization. This change was the replacement of the Great Mother by the Great Father. As the monotheistic Father, God brought creation into being as something separate and distant from Himself, so nature became split off from spirit and was no longer sacred. Simultaneously, the rise of powerful city states in the Middle East led to the creation of a succession of vast empires, territorial conquest, and war. 

Although the architectural, artistic, and literary creations of these empires were extensive, the suffering created by them was also widespread. Millions of young men lost their lives to war and died in atrocious pain. Millions of women and children were killed, raped, or sold into slavery. Deep traumas were created in the collective psyche of humanity that are unhealed to this day. During millennia of war, we forgot about nature and our relationship with her. Gradually, we developed the idea that we were above nature, entitled to control and dominate her for the benefit of our species alone. 

Another event contributed to the loss of the sacredness of nature—a forgotten event that also had a devastating effect on women and the planet.[1] 

The Jewish people once worshiped both a Goddess and a God—a Queen and a King of Heaven—who together created the world. But in 621 BC, under a king called Josiah, a powerful group of priests called Deuteronomists took control of the First Temple in Jerusalem. They removed every trace of the Goddess Asherah, the Queen of Heaven, who was worshiped as the Holy Spirit[2] and Divine Wisdom, and also as the Tree of Life—a Tree that connected the invisible and visible worlds, and whose fruit was the gift of immortality. The shamanic rituals of the High Priest which had honoured and communed with the Queen of Heaven were replaced by new rituals based on obedience to Yahweh’s Law.[3] 

But the Deuteronomists didn’t stop there. They also created the Myth of the Fall with its punishing God and its grim message of guilt, sin, suffering, and the banishment of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.[4] They demoted the Goddess—whose title was Mother of All Living—into the human figure of Eve. They blamed Eve for the sin of disobedience that brought about the Fall and for bringing sin, suffering, and death into the world. Henceforth, all women would be contaminated by Eve’s sin and would have to be under men’s control lest they create further disasters. From it there developed the idea that the whole human race was tainted by original sin, punished for a primordial act of disobedience. The created world was no longer a manifestation of the Tree of Life but was viewed as contaminated by the Fall, no longer sacred. Woman’s long oppression, even persecution, stems directly from this myth. Her voice was silenced for millennia. 

Yahweh was left as the sole transcendent Creator God; The Divine Feminine aspect of God was deleted from the image of deity. The only place where the concept of the sacred marriage survived was in the mystical Jewish tradition of Kabbalah, known as the Voice of the Dove.[5] The Divine Feminine was not only banished from Judaism, but also from Christianity which took its image of God from Judaism. Islam also had a sole male creator god. The end-result of this new polarizing cosmology was that life on earth was split off from the divine world; nature was split off from spirit. Men came to be identified with spirit and women with nature. Body was split off from mind and mind from soul. Sexuality was sinful. Woman’s only role was to obey and serve man and carry his seed. All this was a complete reversal of the earlier cosmology focused on the Great Mother. 

There is one further factor that needs to be included in this story: the deliberate decision by the Roman Church to wipe out all trace of Jesus’ marriage to Mary Magdalene. Think what it would have meant for the development of Western civilization if the union of Jesus and Mary Magdalene had been celebrated by the Church founded in his name. Had their marriage been recognized and Jesus not turned into the celibate Son of God, Christianity would have had a totally different history without a celibate male priesthood and without the terrifying persecution of women in the witch trials that scarred Europe for five centuries. We might have been spared the disastrous association of sexuality with sin and the misogyny and mistrust of women that affects our culture to this day. 

Because of this history, we have been on the wrong path for more than two thousand years, out of alignment with the Earth and the Cosmos. It has led us to this time of crisis and of awakening, and to the need for a new, yet very old story that tells us we are the life and breath of the Divine in human form and that all life is infused with Divinity.[6] 

Materialist or reductionist science is built on the flawed foundation bequeathed to it by patriarchal religion and has dispensed with both God and the soul. It tells us that the universe is without life, purpose, or meaning. When the physical brain dies, that is the end of us. The highest authority is the rational mind. We are separate from the world around us. The master story is technological progress and unlimited growth. 

I think this explains why, in a worldwide culture influenced by the secular philosophy of science, we have come to believe that it doesn’t matter what we do to matter—that nature and matter are not sacred, that we are not part of that sacredness. This is why there is no foundation for morality in our relationship with the Earth. What we think we need, we take. 

                                                       from "The Red Book"

Jung could see the dangers of this materialist philosophy and commented: 

"As scientific understanding has grown, so our world has become dehumanized. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional “unconscious identity” with natural phenomena… No voices now speak to man from stones, plants, and animals, nor does he speak to them believing they can hear. His contact with nature has gone.[7]" 

Once, long ago, the world was experienced as alive with spirit. Nature was part of a sacred cosmic whole. In spite of horrendous persecution, Indigenous peoples of the world have kept alive this awareness of the sacredness of nature and the idea of our kinship with all creation. 

The new story emerging in quantum physics tells us that the universe is a unified field. Our lives are part of a cosmic web of life which connects all life forms in the universe and on our planet. Every atom of life interacts with every other atom, no matter how distant. A new vision is struggling to be born—a vision of our relationship with an intelligent, living, and interconnected universe. 

We are called to a profound process of transformation that is manifesting as a new planetary consciousness: a consciousness which recognizes that we are part of a Sacred Web of Life. We need a science and a technology that does not seek to dominate nature but works with nature, humbly respecting its harmonious order. We need women who truly embody the Feminine to guide us,[8] working with enlightened men, to restore the values and the practices that can transform our relationship with the planet into one of love and care. 

This pandemic carries an urgent message for us to wake up to the small window of opportunity we have to change course before it’s too late. This means change in every sphere of life: change in the very concept of what it means to be human and living on this extraordinary planet—change above all, in our relationship with the Divine Feminine. We tread a path which is on the knife-edge between the conscious integration of a new vision on the one hand, and the virtual extinction of our species on the other. Which path will we choose? 

This essay is derived from a talk given for Humanity Rising, August 11, 2020

 

[1] See Betty Kovacs, Merchants of Light (Claremont: The Kamlak Center, 2019) 

[2] This loss of the Holy Spirit was repeated at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE when the Hebrew feminine noun for the Holy Spirit—ruach—was translated first into the Greek word pneuma which is genderless, and then into the Latin spiritus sanctus which is masculine. The Christian Trinity was rendered entirely masculine and the former feminine gender of the Holy Spirit was permanently lost to Christianity. 

[3] The books of the Old Testament Scholar, Margaret Barker, give the facts of this story in detail. 

[4] Genesis 2 & 3 

[5] See Anne Baring, The Dream of the Cosmos, rev. ed. (UK: Archive Publishing, 2020), chapter 3. 

[6] See my talks on Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Christianity  

[7] Carl G. Jung, Man and His Symbols (New York: Random House, 1986), p. 95 

[8] By this, I mean women who are not taken over by the will to power. 

ABOUT ANNE BARING

Anne Baring b. 1931. MA Oxon. PhD in Wisdom Studies, Ubiquity University 2018. Jungian Analyst, author and co-author of 7 books including, with Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image; with Andrew Harvey, The Mystic Vision and The Divine Feminine; with Dr. Scilla Elworthy, Soul Power: an Agenda for a Conscious Humanity. Her most recent book, The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul (2013, updated and reprinted 2020), was awarded the Scientific and Medical Network Book Prize for 2013. The ground of all her work is a deep interest in the spiritual, mythological, shamanic, and artistic traditions of different cultures. Her website is devoted to the affirmation of a new vision of reality and the issues facing us at this crucial time of choice. www.annebaring.com 

The Tragic Split in the Western Psyche

A "Webbed Vision" - Toward a New World Story

                   A "Webbed Vision" - Toward a New World Story

By Lauren Raine MFA 

 

"What might we see, how might we act, if we saw with a webbed vision? 

The world seen through a web of relationships…as delicate

 as spider’s silk,   yet strong enough to hang a bridge on.” 

 

Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self  1

 

The quote above, from theologian Catherine Keller, has been deeply important to me.   I first read her book "From a Broken Web" in 2008, when I was pursuing my "Hands of the Spider Woman" Community Arts Projects.  The first project  was at the Midland Center for the Arts (with the Alden B. Dow Creativity Center) in Michigan, then at the Creative Spirit Center, also  in Midland (with Kathy Space),  and last when I was a Resident Artist at the Henry Luce Center for the Arts and Religion in Washington D.C. 

 

Perhaps because I live in the Southwest, the "legends of the Spider Woman" have always fascinated me as I encountered Her in Native American art.  Spider Woman is a ubiquitous Creatrix found throughout the Americas, with her earliest known origins among the Maya of South America.  Spider Woman manifests among the Navajo and the Pueblo Peoples of the Southwest as the "great Weaver".    Among the people of the Keresan Pueblo she is also called Tse Che Nako, the "Thought Woman" who weaves the worlds into being with the stories She tells.  Within this metaphor of the "great weaver", Spider Woman waits at the center of the Web of life, within which we are all connected, interwoven and co-creating.

 

Ts' its' tsi' nako, Thought-Woman, the Spider is sitting in her room

 thinking of a story now:   I'm telling you the story  She is thinking.

 

Keresan Pueblo Proverb from Carol Patterson-Rudolph 2 

 

My path on the trail of Spider Woman has been fraught with synchronicities, which I have come to think of as touchstones along the way.  Synchronicities, to me, are a mystical part of the overlay (and the foundational "under") of the metaphor Dr. Keller writes of.  As I write about   "A Webbed Vision", for example, I note that for the past weeks a spider has made its home on the ceiling directly above the keyboard where I write.  I have come to think of that spider as my muse - perhaps, fancifully, she is Spider Woman's envoy, weaving its patient web just above my head, reminding me each day of a vision I want to hold.

In her 1989 book Dr. Keller does not speak of the Native American Goddess Spider Woman, but she often references the Greek myth of "Penelope".  Penelope is a name with ancient origins that derive from an archaic Greek word meaning "with a web on her face".   It is likely that Penelope was originally a Fate or Oracular Goddess before she was later demoted in patriarchal Greek mythology to the faithful wife of Odysseus, weaving and un-weaving a shroud to avoid her suitors (it's always  interesting the way myths are transformed to suit the evolving mythos and power base of different cultures).   Yet within the earlier context of a more egalitarian society, "Penelope" would be one who could "see" and "weave" the beginnings and the ends of a life.  She might have been personified with a loom before her, or spinning a thread.  Taking the metaphor further, such a Goddess would "see" the inter-dependencies between all things, the Great Web spreading out across the landscapes of life.   

 

 

Pueblo mythology tells that when each of the previous worlds ended in catastrophe, it was Spider Woman who led the people through the sipapu, the kiva (or birth canal) into the next world.  As such Spider Woman is the divine midwife for the birth of each new age. According to Hopi cosmology, we have now entered the "Fifth World".  It is interesting that, in contemporary Neo-Pagan practices, there are 5 Elements that symbolize the "great Circle".   The Fifth Element is called "Center", and is represented with the color white, the union of all colors.  It is the last Element, and symbolizes the universal force or Aether that unites all the other Elements.  

I cannot resist imagining that the World Wide Web might just be is Spider Woman's latest appearance!   

 

"Spider Woman's Cross" motif in Navajo rug

 

“In Hopi cosmology Spider Woman was the first to weave. Her techniques and patterns have stood the test of time, or more properly, the test of timelessness.…..…..

Weaving is not an act in which one creates something oneself – 

it is an act in which one uncovers a pattern that was already there.”

 

John Loftin 3

 

As we confront the universal catastrophe of climate change, it seems to me that this is a significant and appropriate metaphor.  Indeed, a significant Prophecy:  for what we now confront concerns not just a tribe or nation, but all beings upon planet Earth.  We must evolve a new, global paradigm for this Fifth Age if we are to survive.   Spider Woman, bringing a vision of the Great Web of life, once again must be the midwife as She makes visible the connections, the strands of the Web,  whether we speak of  ecology,  economy, quantum physics, or integral psychology.   In our essence, as Jungian psychologist Ann Baring has said, "We are one".

Petroglyph,  Southern New Mexico

 

"The new myth manifests through the triple influence of quantum physics, depth psychology and the ecological movement suggests that we are participants in a great web of life, each one of us indissolubly connected with all others through that invisible field.  It is the most insidious of illusions to think that we can achieve a position of dominance in relation to nature, life or each other.   In our essence, we are one."

 

Anne Baring, Awakening to the New Story   4

 

How indeed, as an evolving global society, would we think and act, if we saw, like Penelope (or Grandmother Spider Woman) "with a webbed vision"? Would we be able to change the catastrophic course of ecological destruction if we had such a theology based upon Relationship instead of Domination?  If our reasoning, and our way of seeing, was inclusive rather than dissectionist?  If instead of valuing competition and the "alpha" winner, we valued consensus? If instead of "fight and flight" in the face of danger, we instead pulled out the defense tactic found among female monkeys of "tend and befriend"?   If instead of renunciate, hierarchical religions that turn us away from nature and Earthly existence toward an abstract "heaven" or "nirvana", we saw ourselves as profoundly embedded in the sacred body and evolving soul of our living planet?

 

"The question is not so much "What do I learn from stories" as 

"What stories do I want to live?"

 

David R. Loy, "The World is Made of Stories" 5

                      

 If each of us could, like Penelope, "see" ourselves holding a thread that originates with all of those who came before us - and touches all of those who will come after us - how indeed might we see, and act?

 

"The New Story coming into being is that the whole universe is a unified field. The world we experience is like a minute excitation on the surface of an infinite 

cosmic sea which sustains not only our world, but the entire Cosmos. 

We live within a cosmic web of life which underlies and connects all life forms in the universe and on our planet. Through a vast network of electro-magnetic fields We are connected to the earth,  the sun and the hundred billion galaxies.  

 So we are not separate from any aspect of planetary or cosmic life. "

 

Anne Baring, Awakening to the New Story 6

As I watch the ongoing corporate greed that is eroding not only democracy, but the very life of our planet,  and the unreasoned ideology of capitalism (as opposed to local free enterprise) that makes it  possible for this new monarchy of the 1% to arise, I wonder sometimes if there is any hope for the future at all.  If I am not my brother's and sister's keeper, and they mine - who is?  Monsanto?  Walmart?  A civilization, indeed the raising of a single child, is a grand collaboration among many, and it might be said from that "webbed vision" of societies that the exploiters and warlords pounding their chests and sitting like dragons on their stolen gold....... are the parasites of a civilization, rather than any appropriate leaders.

We urgently need pragmatic ways to create and envision expanding community, which can be simplified to a fundamental sense of belonging.   Beyond that, we need an ethos and mythos that supports the fundamental, and foundational, understanding of inter-dependency.    If America was not a culture that idealizes "rugged individualism" where "good fences make good neighbors"  what other kinds of values might enhance the quality of life for us (and perhaps the very survival of our species) along with an extended community of many other species we share our world with?

 

"The Rugged Individualist" cheers when needy people are deprived of food, battered women are deprived of protection from brutal husbands, children are deprived of education, because this is "getting government off our backs.”

Philip Slater, the Chrysalis Effect: The Metamorphosis of Global Culture 6

 

"Alpha male" individualism fails in every way to communicate that we live within a web of human and environmental inter-dependency, a web that is unimaginably vast and also very intimate. This is the "Webbed Vision" that sees and recognizes the links that must be restored.   A successful adult is so because of parents, siblings, friends, teachers, community resources, the backdrop of nature and environment, global society.........and distant ancestors that enabled him or her to be born.  Without a sense of belonging and contributing to that continuum as it reaches into both the past and into future generations, human beings end up feeling alienated, disposable, and without a sense of purpose.   Which is what an unsustainable, insatiable consumer system, as a placebo for the pain of spiritual and communal isolation, feeds on.

 

In tribal societies, survival depended on cooperation, as well as the collective ability to adapt continually to new environmental challenges, be it drought, invaders, or the exhaustion of resources.  The mythic foundation of any tribe (or civilization) is ultimately the template upon which they stand; a culture with a rigid mythos that cannot adapt and change is doomed to collapse.   Without a significant mythos of co-dependency in the face of global ecological crisis, the coming collapse of our civilization is apparent.  

 

"The culture that is holistic is holistic because its reasoning structure is holistic.  The problem we have with holism is that our reasoning is fragmentary, dissectionist, it removes us from relating things, it structures things in separate compartments in order to "have control". 

 

 Rafael Montanez Ortiz 7

 

The Latin origin of the word "religion", religios, means to "link back".  To rejoin with the greater and divine whole in some way.  In my opinion, many of today's religions, at least in their institutionalized forms, fail in communicating  this ultimate "webbed vision" - in fact, as tribal social control mechanisms with millennia of often mutually contradictory doctrines behind them, they do exactly the opposite.  They separate, create discord and fear, and damn those who do not share their cultural or philosophical constructs.  Religions are essentially concretized mythologies - concretized communal stories.  

                            

What stories are so many people and institutions telling about the world we live in, the 21st Century world of global civilization? How do these sacred stories - most of them with their origins in ancient tribal societies existing in a very different kind of world - serve, or fail, the world of today?

Returning to "religios", the "linking back" to what is sacred, patriarchal  Renunciate religions that teach us to renounce the world, the body, and the demands of relationships of every kind, either in service of some abstract "better place" (be it heaven, paradise, enlightenment or nirvana) or teachings that degrade earthly life as "impure" or "unreality"..............will not help us.  More importantly, they certainly will not help those who must come after us to live in a diminished world.   In the established and unquestioned   systems systems of patriarchal religions, divinity is placed "elsewhere", be it the literally conceived paradise that awaits the faithful, or a more elegant grand abstraction that teaches us "this is not real" but fails to describe what actually "is real".  This is a prime theme to be found in patriarchal religions, religions that have their origins in warrior ideology and warrior lifestyles.  It might be said, for an example, that the Old Testament God Yahweh, with all his punishments and rules, is a classic example of an authoritarian, warrior "sky god".  

And more subtly, the  New Age message that "this experience  is not real" which drives devotees to seek "the real world"  found in  some divine, other-worldly, perfected  abstraction once we are "purified" or "surrender" in order to have consciousness is raised sufficiently:  too often this "must happen"  through an authoritarian Guru or leader, with many of the attendant social abuses.  

To speak of "oneness",  to address creating a cohesive vision of holism that is appropriate to the world we live in today,  mythic systems that include  creative diversity within that "oneness" are needed.   Myths and symbols that can include many gods and goddesses, many voices and languages, and many ways to the truth instead of simply eliminating the competition.  Further, our world myth can no longer be simply a human world myth - it must include many evolutions, many other beings within the intimacy of ecosystems.  If we're to survive into sustainability.   

"We live in a world today in which the problems we face are all planetary" Philip Slater commented in his last book The Chrysalis Effect, “the polarization and chaos we see in the world are the effect of a global cultural metamorphosis".  Slater's view was ultimately hopeful - that we are witnessing the chaos of a new evolution.   That metamorphosis he spoke of, I personally believe, is based on the realization of inter-dependency with all life.  In his view, this is humanity's childhood's end.  We are called now to the world, each other, and the miracle of life, with a "Webbed Vision". 

As the New Year approaches, I personally would like to call on artists, writers, musicians, storytellers, and all other "cultural creatives" to help to make a new mythology for the global tribe.   The writer Ursula Leguin called them "realists of a larger reality".  Among the Navajo (Dine`) infant girls still have a bit of spider web rubbed into their hands so they will "become good weavers".   May we all now rub a bit of spider web into our hands for the work ahead of us ..........and, like Penelope, may we all now see "with a web on our faces".

 

“Hope now lies in moving beyond our past in order to build together a sustainable future for all the interwoven and interdependent life on our planet, including the human element.  We will have to evolve now into a truly compassionate and tolerant world – because for the first time since the little tribes of humanity’s infancy, everyone’s well being is once again linked with cooperation for survival.  Our circle will have to include the entire world. 

 

Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad, The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power 8

 

1)   Keller, Catherine, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self,

       1988, Beacon Press

2)    Patterson-Rudolph, Carol, On the Trail of Spider Woman, 1997, Ancient City Press.

3)    Loftin, John D., Religion and Hopi Life, 2003, Indiana University \

        Press (first published January 1st 1988)

4)   Baring, Anne, "Awakening to the New Story", 2013, from her website: 

       https://www.annebaring.com/anbar14_comment.htm

 

5)   Loy, David R., The World is Made of Stories, 2010, Wisdom Publications

6)   Baring, Anne, "Awakening to the New Story", 2013, from her website: 

       https://www.annebaring.com/anbar14_comment.htm

7)   Slater, Phillip, The Chrysalis Effect: The Metamorphosis of Global Culture, 2008, 

       Sussex Academic Press

8)   Ortiz, Rafael Montanez Ph.D., interview with Lauren Raine, unpublished manuscript 

     (1989)

9)  Alstead, Diana and Kramer, Joel, The Guru Papers:  Masks of Authoritarian Power, 

       1993, Frog Books