Showing posts with label Eco-feminism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eco-feminism. Show all posts

Sunday, June 16, 2024

Gloria's Call - A Wonderful Video about the Very Wonderful Gloria Orenstein

 

While my life has had its challenging moments and I have traversed many a dark woods in my quest for knowledge, I am fulfilled by the wondrous journeys I have made to the realms of the Marvelous, the Magical, the Great Goddess and the Shamanic Mysteries, and I will be forever grateful to the teachers who inspired me and to the feminist activists on whose strong shoulders we now stand as we welcome new generations of visionaries expanding our feminist legacy into the new millennium.  

 -Gloria Feman Orenstein

It was my pleasure to meet Gloria Feman Orenstein when I was pursuing a book on spiritual art and the Goddess in 1989.  She very generously agreed to meet with me, and I remember sitting in a cafe in Venice California, not far from the beach, utterly enthralled by the power of her personality, and the stories she told me about her journeys into Samiland, shamanism, and ecofeminism, as well as her scholarly  insights into surrealism, magic, and feminism in contemporary art.  Much later, she kindly let me post an important   article of hers about Shamanism on  this Blog.    

Gloria F. Orenstein is Professor Emerita in Comparative Literature and Gender Studies from the University of Southern California. Her areas of research have ranged from Surrealism, contemporary feminist literature and the arts to Ecofeminism and Shamanism.

Her first book The Theater Of The Marvelous: Surrealism And The Contemporary Stage paved the way for her pioneering work on The Women of Surrealism. Leonora Carrington had been a friend and remained a major source of her inspiration in research and scholarship since 1971. Her book The Reflowering Of The Goddess offers a feminist analysis of the movement in the contemporary arts that reclaimed the Goddess as the symbol of a paradigm shift toward a more gynocentric mythos and ethos as women artists forged a link to the pre-patriarchal civilization of the ancient Goddess cultures, referencing them as their source of spiritual inspiration.

Gloria's Call is an award winning  2019 film by Cheri Gaulke and Colleagues.  Director Cheri Gaulke was presented, among other awards, with the "Women Transforming Media" Award for her film.  

"Blending animation, interviews and a trippy soundscape, this is a fitting look at the life of radical academic and writer Gloria Feman Orenstein’s serendipitous life. She vividly conjures an alternative history of art, surrealism and eco-feminism in the 20th century, with lively anecdotes about Leonora Carrington, Meret Oppenheim and Jane Graverol, to name a few."

~Eileen Arandiga, Canadian International Documentary Festival

 

  https://youtu.be/mLhY9pGFjFQ?si=8AE7oiCTvxqhXlxD




In 1971, graduate student Gloria Orenstein received a call from Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington that sparked a lifelong journey into art, ecofeminism and shamanism. The short film, Gloria’s Call, uses art, animation and storytelling to celebrate this wild adventure. Now more than 40 years later, award-winning Dr. Gloria Feman Orenstein is a feminist art critic and pioneer scholar of women in Surrealism and ecofeminism in the arts. Her delightful tale brings alive an often unseen history of women in the arts.

Runtime: 17 minutes
Copyright 2018 ACCCA Productions

CREW
Directed, written and edited by Cheri Gaulke
Produced by Cheryl Bookout, Anne Gauldin, Cheri Gaulke, Sue Maberry and Christine Papalexis
Writer Anne Gauldin
Music by Miriam Cutler

FESTIVALS & AWARDS
Gloria's Call has screened in 40+ film festivals internationally and won awards including Best Documentary at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Audience Award at Nevada City Film Festival, Audience Award runner-up at HotDocs in Toronto, and the Women Transforming Media Award from MY HERO International Film Festival.




Wednesday, April 6, 2022

EARTHSPEAK - Video Presentation for ASWM

 My Presentation for the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology, made into a  video.........

https://youtu.be/cetufD32xfY


Friday, May 7, 2021

"If Women Rose Rooted": Women, Myth and a Conversant Land



"This is the core of our task:  to remake the world in the image of those ancient   stories.  To respect and revere ourselves, and so bring about a world in which women are respected and revered, recognized once again as holding the life-giving power of the Earth itself.  We can reclaim that image in each of us:  the creative, ecstatic, powerful feminine that each of us embodies in her own unique way.  Lacking it, it is no wonder that we are grieving, alienated, imbalanced - that we cannot find a way to belong to a world that teaches us to cover up not just our bodies but our feelings, our dreams, our intuition.  There comes a point in each of our lives when we face a choice.  Will we stay as we are, embracing the pale shadow of womanhood permitted us by the patriarchy?  Or will we sink deep into the heart of the boglands, and find in the depths what it is to reclaim our creative power as women? 

As always, the stories show us the way.  The old stories, the ones which tell us that women are the land, the Body of the Earth Mother.  The old stories, the ones in which the Earth is sacred, and so women are sacred too:  the force of creation, the givers of life.  The stories in which women are the bearers of the Grail, the keepers of the cauldron of inspiration and rebirth. "

Sharon Blackie, IF WOMEN ROSE ROOTED (2016)

In 2018 I went to the Gatekeeper's Conference in Pewsey, in the U.K.  It was also my delight to visit a number of prehistoric sacred sites, including Avebury, Silbury, the Chalice Well in Glastonbury, the  great (fallen) Stones and Henge of Arbor Lowe in Derbyshire, the Nine Maidens, also in Derbyshire,  and others.  Truly, as I sit here in my urban home, I reflect that it has often seemed,  among these ancient Mysteries, that I feel most at home.  

I was also introduced to Sharon Blackie's book  IF WOMEN ROSE ROOTED   which I enthusiastically read throughout my visit, feeling that it resonated greatly with me.  The author lives in rural Ireland, close to the   beloved land she writes about, and speaks with passion,  and the bitter/sweet  story-teller lilt of an Irish Bard, about an instinctual need women women have to return to mythic (and actual) roots in the land. 

In some ways she reminds me of  Clarissa Pinkola Estes, as she urges women to regain, and celebrate the creative power of the life-giving  Divine Feminine in mythology. and speaks of  an essence deeply rooted in nature because we ARE nature. 

 She  returns again and again to the need to be ROOTED in the Earth as well as a mythic and conversant landscape that is also woman affirming;  the Heroine's journey, she writes, is not the same as the classical  Hero's journey proposed by Joseph Campbell -  because it is a journey of interconnection, relationships, co-creative and co-experienced cycles, and finally, the journey of belonging to the Great Mother, the great "conversation" of the planet.  The Heroine's journey, in a new and yet ancient sense, is perhaps now  the journey of the Eco-heroine.

Ms. Blackie speaks with passion because she believes it is urgent for all to "rise rooted",  as the death dealing forces of  patriarchy and sociopathic,  unlimited capitalism  are  quite literally destroying the future for not only humans, but all children of Mother Earth.

The title is a poem in itself, and as an artist who compulsively for decades has been putting roots on  faces and  hands and  bodies........well, it jumped off the shelf at me!  Yes, all my work has been "rooted" for a long time, even if I haven't always consciously been so............ but like many Americans with a life of bewildering change and movement, I have always  wanted to be rooted, attuned to the essence of place, without always  knowing how or why.  I look at 45 years of art, and always the Tree is there.  The Tree that is Asherah, the Tree of Life, the union of Above and Below.  For me, intuitively a quest to find identity within the those  vital roots, found in the  living, composting dirt, and  among the twining vines, flying webbed among the branches with the sparrows.  
 
Silbury Hill, Avebury, Wiltshire, UK - believed to 
represent the pregnant belly of the Great Mother

When did we lose our roots?  When did the separation between nature and human happen?  When did the Great Earth Mother, eternally birthing and growing and dying and returning again...........when did She disappear under the weight of myth and patriarchal cultures?  When did the processes of nature and the cycles of nature cease to be sacred and became profane?  A question I many have sought to answer as we move fully now into ecological crisis. 


The Nine Maidens,  Derbyshire (Henge and Processional in background)
"For it was no peasant, but calm and cunning wizards, ruling and pegging out in granite  the windings of the dragon track  that writhes unseen in  marsh and moss and meadowland,  that twines in stellar gravity among the eaves of the cubic sky.   So they, upon the veins of Anu,  print a spell of glory in our blinks of lives.   Rightness of the world Self seen:  the green, the garden.  
Older yet and wiser far, and I will not forget."
.....Robin Williamson, "Five Denials on Merlin's Grave"

Speaking With the Land

In so many  rural areas of the UK  the 21st Century seems like it is just another layer atop a continually emergent pentimento, the patterns of  a much older landscape.   Of course this is true everywhere, but it is so much in daily evidence in the UK and Europe.

That "pentimento" is like an ancient tattoo - circular, serpentine, full of  standing  stones, henges, magic wells, pregnant "harvest hills",  and geomantic ley lines.   For me,  when I was able to walk and explore this overlay my vision expanded  to a  broader vista, a panorama that  opened in my mind  as  I imagined the world of those who walked there so long ago.  And that very faint yet vibrant Pentimento gave me a vision as well of what,  as myth makers and "geologians" for the future, we might re-invent from the dreaming Earth. 

As far as these energized, ley crossed sites go, what poet and Bard Robin Williamson called the "veins of Anu and the windings of the Serpent Track",  I agree with those scholars who believe that once upon a time the  very lands the people walked on, the land they grew their food and marked the Solstices and Equinoxes and the movements of the moon and the stars  upon, was  the "temple"  itself,  The Deity was beneath their feet, and all around them. 

As   Marija Gimbutas, and later Michael Dames, have argued, these sites mark a sacred landscape that was once viewed  literally as  the Body of the the  Great Mother from which the blessings of abundance came, and ultimately to which, in the great cycles of the year , all return.    Here, and in ubiquitous similar sites in Southern and Central England, Ireland, Scotland, the Orkney Islands, the Hebrides, the Isle of Man, Brittany..........perhaps as well in the mysterious realms of the great Temples of Malta,  or the barely excavated, and truly ancient circles of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey as well, we see the remnants of a worship of the Earth as Great Mother that lasted for a very, very long time.    

According to  Michael Dames in his book the Silbury Treasure, Silbury,  which I visited in 2018 along with other similar "harvest hills" (there is one along the Processional to Arbor Lowe as well)  literally represented the pregnant belly of the Great Mother, and were associated with certain times of the agricultural cycles.  In the Neolithic and early Iron Age he makes a significant argument that there was a universal religion which regarded the LAND ITSELF AS THE DEITY.    Situated just south of Avebury, Silbury Hill in Wiltshire is Europe's tallest prehistoric structure.  When his  book was first published in 1976,  archaeological investigations sponsored by the BBC  had demonstrated that the hill was not, as had previously been believed, a burial mound, nor did it have any buriel remains connected with its antiquity. Dames surveys the history of earlier digs at the hill, then uses comparative archaeological evidence, astronomy, ethnography, folklore, mythology, mathematics and place-name research to argue that the shape of the site is designed to represent the pregnant Belly of the Goddess.  

As with the ditch/henges that surround stone circles, Silbury would have been at certain times of the year surrounded by a human made body of water, which Dames believed not only was fundamental to the "temples" that these ceremonial sites represented, but in the case of Silbury, actually formed the shape of a squatting (birthing) woman.  He believes that Silbury was a sacred mound that was part of the Avebury ceremonial landscape.  He likens the "Goddess form" of the henge surrounding Silbury to similar pregnant Goddess sculptures and icons found throughout Europe during the Neolithic.  


As a child, I had great conversations with flowers and squirrels.  And, of course, my cats. Even earthworms were not immune to my words of concern for them.  Much later, I read avidly of the Findhorn Community, or Perelandra, or the Sirious Community,  the conversations members of these communities had  between the Devas of the plant kingdoms and those who came to learn and grow amazing vegetables, healing herbs, and magical gardens in conscious collaboration with them.  

 We need to learn to "speak with the Earth" again.   This impresses itself on me again, and again.  Not in some removed, abstract, distant way, but intimately, beneath our rooted feet, in our creative hands rooted in a great collaboration with the planet that stands aside, protects,  and at best shepards  the land.  That releases for good the outmoded concept of "domination" of nature.  Humanity must become friends again with the family of planetary life, the "Covenant" of the Garden.  I believe that our next  evolution as a planetary humanity is not out in space, but right here, on the Earth.   There will be many new innovations, but there will also be many, many re-discoveries of what was once known and understood.  This is indisputable  in the face of climate change,  and a technology that is advancing much more rapidly than we are evolving as a global humanity  to meet it. 

So where does religion come into this?  To be honest, I am not a religious person, although I have an abiding interest in  and experience of spirituality.  But I am a mythologist, and religions are founded upon myths, upon world and creation stories, which are ever revised and co-opted throughout history within  different cultures.  

The change that must occur within western religious systems is that we cannot continue with a  patriarchal, tribal  alpha male centered mythos.  Nor  can we continue to worship deities that are founded upon ancient warrior sky gods -  wifeless, daughterless, motherless, preoccupied with with dominance,  however they are packaged.  We can't continue with religions that are "Renunciate" either, not if we wish to make our way back to a "conversation" with the land that sustains us.  Dissociative religions that teach that divinity and sanctity lie somewhere other than here,  whether that be conceived of as Heaven, Paradise,  some elusive "Enlightenment" or Nirvana,  or, as various New Age groups teach, that life is "not real", and hence we must reject its "unreality". ..... will not serve our children, or all the many other forms of consciousness that are co-evolving on planet Earth with us. 

Enough.  It is time for the  Return of the Goddess.  For  Restoring the Balance in the divided human psyche.  We cannot understand Her perhaps as  neolithic peoples understood Her, but we must facilitate Her rising as people of the 21st Century urgently need to understand Her.     Not as some hierarchical deity that replaces a tyrannical, misogynist  sky god with an equally "dominating" and merciless  matriarch -  but as, scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis demonstrated in their Gaia Theory,  the Body of the Earth itself, which we are living IN.  Not ON, but IN.  And what we do to Her, we are doing to ourselves.  

 I respond deeply to Sharon Blackie's call to women to  "rise rooted" .  For those of us who have been rooting about in the shards and buried roots of prehistory and mythology........while we cannot really know what the ancients did or believed, we can sense it with our feet, divining rods,  instincts and imaginations, and (gnow)  that it is something that points toward a different way of being.  One we can invent, re-invent, and re-member ourselves into.


REFERENCES:

Blackie, Sharon,  If Women Rose Rooted:  The Journey to Authenticity and Belonging  2016, September Publishing 

The Gatekeepers Annual Conference, “Dreaming the Land” November 2018, Pewsey, Wiltshire, UK..   https://gatekeeper.org.uk/2018/05/dreaming-the-land-annual-conference-2018

3 Estes, Clarissa Pinkola,  Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype,  November 27th 1996,   Ballantine Books

4 Williamson, Robin, “Five Denials on Merlin’s  Grave” from A Glint At The Kindling & Selected Writings 1980-83    

https://youtu.be/iuRUVzqAfgk (to hear the performance)

http://www.songlyrics.com/robin-williamson/five-denials-on-merlin-s-grave-lyrics/  (lyrics)

 Gimbutas, Marija,  The Language of the Goddess,  (1989)  (and other writings), see also Old Europe Excavations and Kurgan Theory,   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marija_Gimbutas

6 Dames, Michael,  The Silbury Treasure: The Great Goddess Rediscovered November 20th 1978 by Thames & Hudson

7 Findhorn Community of Scotland: https://www.findhorn.org/

8 Sirius Community of Massachusetts:  http://siriuscommunity.org/ 

9 Perelandra Center & Michaela Wright:   https://www.perelandra-ltd.com/ 

10 Lovelock, James and Margulis, Lynn ,   The Gaia Hypothesis AKA  Gaia Theory, Earth Sciences, first published 1972  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis

Friday, July 25, 2014

The Talking Trees

 "Speak to the Earth and it shall teach you."

Job 12:8

I've so many times spoken about "the Great Conversation", and asked myself how we can learn once again to "speak with the land".  Here's a short video I was forwarded by a forester that talks about that in another way.

http://youtu.be/iSGPNm3bFmQ

Monday, September 30, 2013

Follow Up on International Conference on Women and Climate Change

‘The World Will Be Saved By The Western Woman’

....The Dalai Lama, 2010

INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S EARTH AND CLIMATE SUMMIT, September 24, 2013 www.iweci.org .

 Women Form an  Unprecedented Alliance,  Declaration and Action Agenda to Take on Climate Change and Promote Sustainability Solutions  in  New York— Unlikely partnerships, meaningful policy, reaching beyond the choir, gender equality and a commitment to bold action were all on the agenda as 100+ women from around the world gathered in New York for three days of dialogue and deliberation at the International Women’s Earth and Climate Summit.   Emerging from the gathering, a burgeoning collaborative of organizations with a combined reach of 33 million women and men is now poised to become a major force in the climate and sustainability movements.

From indigenous leaders to former heads of state, from scientists to pioneers in fields of renewable energy, business and policy, the Summit was a who’s who of women leaders from the Global South and the Global North. This diverse cohort of delegates found unity around a ‘Declaration Statement for Urgent Action on Climate Change and Sustainability Solutions’ and laid the foundation for a Women’s Climate Action Agenda to be finalized in the coming weeks. The Agenda builds upon the core concepts of the Rights of Women, the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the Rights of Nature, and the Rights of Future Generations, addressing issues ranging from the protection of oceans and fresh water to divestment from fossil fuels and putting a high price on carbon. See the full text of the Declaration here: http://www.iweci.org/uploads/cke_documents/IWECI_declaration_FA.pdf

“Women have the knowledge to create the change we know the world needs. We are framing our own powerful Women’s Climate Action Agenda, working beyond the United Nations and other policy structures to reach new constituencies committed to protecting the earth and future generations,” said Osprey Orielle Lake, Co-Founder. “Women are gathering in great numbers with an unstoppable resolve, because what’s happening at the international policy level on climate change is not equivalent to the urgency we are facing,” said Sally A. Ranney, Co-Founder of the IWECI.

 “We are putting the world on notice: no more delays.  Violence against the earth and future generations is no longer tolerable: It’s time to stop the chemical warfare against nature,” Ranney said. “We represent a constituency of 33 million women and men, already mobilized and ready to take action. We vote, we march, we petition, we have purchasing power. We will be heard and we will make change, so that future generations can have a livable planet,” Ranney added. “Our Summit delegates included accomplished leaders in their fields who, though lesser known outside of their home countries, are major figures who rarely have the opportunity to converse together at this level. The result is an unprecedented collaboration, representing 33 million women and men around the world that are fiercely dedicated to a just transition to a clean energy future and to transforming how we are living with the earth and each other,” Lake added. The IWECI Summit occurred at a critical juncture in the debate over addressing climate change, with Climate Week and the United Nations General Assembly sessions in New York, and as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) prepares to release its much anticipated 5th Assessment Report.

 Summit delegates committed to building momentum for substantive action on, increased funding for and the meaningful policy changes necessary to address the global climate crisis. Ranging from small regional groups to large organizations with constituencies of hundreds of thousands, the combined reach of Summit collaborators represents a substantial boost to civil society movements mobilizing around climate change with a commitment to gender equity. In addition to the Declaration, Summit delegates took their first collective action yesterday, committing to a Women’s Global Day of Action on Climate in 2014. Additionally delegates signed a letter to US President Barack Obama urging him to reject the Keystone XL Pipeline (http://tarsandssolutions.org/member-blogs/global-women-leaders-send-president-obama-a-clear-message), an appeal to United Nations and World Bank officials to reject REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) http://no-redd.com/oppose-redd/, and calling on Ecuadorian leaders to protect the Yasuni National Park and uphold its Rights of Nature provisions (see www.amazonwatch.org). Over the coming weeks Summit delegates will finalize the Women’s Climate Action Agenda and plan for collective actions in 2014.

 Our goal is to stop the escalation of climate change and environmental and community degradation, while accelerating the implementation of sustainability solutions through women’s empowerment, partnerships, hands-on trainings, advocacy campaigns, and political, economic, social and environmental action.

Saturday, September 14, 2013

International Women's Earth and Climate Initiative

International Women's Earth and Climate Initiative 

The International Women’s Earth and Climate Initiative is a solutions-based, multi-faceted effort established to engage women worldwide to take action as powerful stakeholders in climate change and sustainability solutions. For Our Earth and Future Generations A project of Women's Earth and Climate Caucus and its partner eraGlobal Alliance 

Global participation in the Women's Earth and Climate Summit:

Join us September 20th-23rd! Participate in the Summit from your home, office, university or community.

Learn more about the IWECI Summit Live Stream and Vision Hubs »







 http://www.iweci.org/

About IWECI

About IWECI

MISSION—A GLOBAL WOMEN’S EARTH AND CLIMATE ACTION MOVEMENT

IWECI engages women grassroots activists, Indigenous and business leaders, policy makers and culture-shapers in collaboration. Our goal is to stop the escalation of climate change and environmental and community degradation, while accelerating the implementation of sustainability solutions through women’s empowerment, partnerships, hands-on trainings, advocacy campaigns, and political, economic, social and environmental action.

IWECI was created to accelerate a holistic Global Women’s Earth & Climate Action Movement. Our five-point plan for the first two years’ of action in 2013 and 2014 includes:
  1. Online Action ; Networking Platform (launching on International Women’s Day, March 8, 2013) - to spark project collaborations, sustainability business opportunities, and campaigns designed to advance long-term cross-cultural, cross-sector, cross-generational and cross-socioeconomic networking and mobilization.
  2. International Day of Action - creating a global photo mosaic of women promoting the slogan “Women for Earth and Future Generations”.
  3. The International Women's Earth and Climate Summit (20-23 September 2013, New York) - an unprecedented gathering of women leaders dedicated to addressing solutions for climate change and environmental degradation.
  4. Solution Spotlight, Projects and Action Campaigns - promoting best-practice solutions, on the ground sustainable projects , business and trainings that deliver benefits to both women, communities and the environment, and engaging in action campaigns focused on the most pressing issues.
  5. North American Regional Gathering - To engage women in the United States to mobilize together in support of concerted climate change solutions for the US.

Commentary:

Our basic relationship with the natural world has been distorted. Humanity is systematically destroying our home and undermining the ecosystems of our Earth. We are in need of a paradigm shift.

Global climate change is no longer a distant warning but is rapidly approaching a tipping point of no return. Scientists warn that the opportunity to prevent the worst impacts of climate change will be “lost forever” unless the global community changes course by 2017. This means we have four years to cap global emissions in order to reverse the current trajectory and change the deadly course we are on presently.

It is internationally recognized that women are critical to implementing climate change and sustainability solutions, yet there is currently not enough prominent mechanisms to wield a united effort into a defined movement. IWECI is engaging women's organizations worldwide, inside and outside the environmental arena, to join together and create a groundbreaking movement.

Icon by Betsy Porter

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Gloria Orenstein: Toward an Eco-feminist Ethic of Shamanism and the Sacred .

(1993) ( This Illustration was inspired by the art of Catherine Nash)

For years I've been wanting to share this article by one of the most eloquent Eco-feminist writers I know, Gloria Femen Orenstein.  The article is  extracted from Toward an Ecofeminist Ethic of Shamanism and the Sacred .

I heard Dr. Orenstein speak in 1989 at the Symposium for Art and the Invisible Reality, produced by Dr. Rafael Montanez Ortiz, at Rutgers University.   She was accompanied by her teacher, and friend, Ellen Maret Gaup-Dungeld who was a traditional Sami shaman.  I remember well how powerfully Ellen Maret cleared and raised the energy of the auditorium she spoke in by 'singing the yoik'.  More information about Gloria Feman Orenstein is available at the bottom of this post.

Toward an Eco feminist Ethic of Shamanism and the Sacred .

The shamanic worldview considers all of creation to be both spiritual and sacred. This dimension is as sacred as the spirit world. Thus, what happens to us while alive and awake, although interconnected with what is taking place in the spirit world, is also of great importance shamanically, and, of course, is also sacred.

Through the spiritual journey Shamans pick up vital information from other realms, in much the same way that we get our news from abroad via satellite and TV. By the same token, one could not characterize the human experience by the "core" activity of tuning into the news from abroad, even though this is a necessary part of our daily lives. Naturally, when Shamans work in the here and now, they are calling upon forces that reconfigure our ordinary concepts of space an time. Whatever their powers for certain kinds of work, they are not necessarily journeying out of the body, but they are expanding our concept of what a body is and relating to the body as an energy field composed both of spirit and matter.

Once again, from my own experience in Samiland, I know that I was always waiting to meet my "power animal," and my Shaman teacher was always taking me to the real reindeer, the real birds, the real mosquitoes. It wasn't until she communicated with birds, brought them to us, talked with them, and sent them away, or until she "psyched out" the problem of a lost reindeer, that I began to understand how the neo-shamanic narrative from contemporary workshops had actually blinded me to the fact that real animals are also spirit and power, and, at least to my Shaman teacher, they were every bit as important, or even more so, than her owl spirit guide who had appeared to her in childhood.

Sometimes I used to feel that I had a more "shamanic" perspective than she did, because I was always coming up with sophisticated symbolic interpretations of dreams and I was always looking for "power animals," while she seemed to be more interested in the real animals and she understood the figures in dreams to represent the spirits of real people. The truth is that she made less of a distinction than we do between real and spirit people or animals. To her, all was real, all was spirit, and all was sacred, simultaneously. There was no contradiction in that.

IGNORANCE OF GEO-COSMIC REALITIES

Through our education in the scientific worldview of the Enlightenment, we have become alienated from the earth and have forgotten that the earth is also a heavenly body. We have ceased to take into consideration the powers of the forces and the knowledge of the cycles that govern our lives. We hardly ever give a second thought to gravity, for example, without which we would all be floating off into space, and we certainly never think about the real magnetic force of the North and South poles. We also take for granted the amount of light and dark we experience each day. But what if an that were to change? What if we were suddenly plunged into a world in which the sun never set or never rose? What if we were to go to live at the magnetic North Pole? 

Then we would begin to experience syndromes similar to jet lag, and we would take seriously the implications of the revolutions of the earth on its axis around the sun. In Samiland during most of the fall and winter, the sun sets very early in the morning. During the summer, the sun doesn't set until well after midnight. The rituals women have begun to perform in the feminist spirituality (Goddess) movement have begun to put us back in touch with an awareness of the solstices, the equinoxes, and the lunar cycles. But how does this all relate to ecofeminist ethics and to Shamanism? Because of our geo-cosmic ignorance and amnesia, we fail to take into consideration the fact that certain powers can only be obtained and put into practice in certain places on the earth and at certain times during the year or during the larger cosmic cycles.

 It is interesting that when it comes to sacred herbs, we recognize that they grow in certain places and that people who cannot obtain certain herbs cannot experience their effects. However, herbs are portable, and this suits our purposes, for we can transport the products of the Amazon jungle to California via plane. However, we can never transport the magnetism of the North Pole to California. Nor can we manifest the effects of the Arctic midnight sun in Los Angeles. 

When I travelled to Samiland, I became aware of the effect that the magnetic North Pole was having upon me. It was causing me to enter a deep trance state when I slept, and it was when I was in such a deep trance that I was able to hear the voices of the ancestral spirits. As I ate Sami food, I noticed that my hair and skin began to take on other characteristics. This might have been due to the purity of the air, the water, and the food, as well as to the intensity of the earth's magnetic field in which the food was grown. We have noted that people are sensitive to light deprivation and that they become depressed when they do not receive enough light. Have we thought about what an overabundance of light might do to a person or how light might affect one's consciousness? In Samiland in the summer, when the sun sets well after midnight, sometimes as late as 3:00 Am., one enters altered states, highs, and expansive states of consciousness.

Westerners always want to bring Shamans to the United States, put them on American TV talk shows, and have them perform miracles on our turf to prove their powers. When a Shaman from Samiland insists that you must travel to the North Pole in order to study Sami Shamanism, an American may tend to balk and dismiss the Shaman as a phoney. I brought my Shaman teacher to the United States to participate in a number of conferences (such as Ecofeminist Perspectives: Culture, Nature, Theory-held at U.S.C. in the Spring of 1987), but she always insisted that my real training would not take place in the United States, but in Samiland.

She was right, because my progress was intensified as soon as I came into the magnetic field of the North Pole. The results of culture shock and jet lag, when combined with the magnetism of the North Pole and the surplus of light in summer, catapulted me immediately into a shamanic state that was intensified by the presence of two powerful Shamans. It is important for us to honor the geo-cosmic realities of shamanic cultures and to realize that certain things cannot be transported elsewhere.

One of the main features of summer in Samiland is that suddenly the marshes become swamped with mosquitoes. The Sami love their mosquitos, because they realize that "the white man" cannot stand them, and so the mosquitoes have, in some sense, kept their land from being taken by outsiders. Most people cannot bear to live with those mosquitoes. As I mentioned before, Sami Shamans communicate with their mosquitoes, and they understand that they can be messengers, guides, and protectors.


 Ultimately, as we come to respect the geo-cosmic specificities of particular cultures and as we realize that there are things that cannot be bought, sold, commercialized, and commodified, such as magnetic fields and sunsets, (whereas people have already commercialized sacred waters and herbs), we must develop an ethics and a politics that will protect the earth and the cultures that reside not only in "places of power" or in places where we can obtain special products, but everywhere on our planet, for we must remember that the specificity of each location has its own potency. In this way, by raising our consciousness about the geo-cosmic specificities of gravity, light, magnetism, solstices, equinoxes, lunar cycles, indigenous plants, animals, climate, and so forth, we may come to value the variety of diverse cultures and regions whose multiple knowledges all serve to enhance life everywhere on our planet in an astonishing number of ways. Most of these geo-cosmic teachings can only be acquired in the particular region in which they originated.

Finally, if we are to awaken our own shamanic abilities, perhaps lost in the mist of time for some but founded in the traditions of the Early European Tribes for others, then we must attune ourselves to precisely those same forces as they manifest in our own bio-regions. In some cases this may require us to learn about our region from the indigenous tribes in our area; in other cases we must set about discovering the power of the places in which we live on our own. This is our challenge, if we want to save the earth. We must not run away to other "exotic' cultures, but we must begin by exploring our own backyards.

THE DE-POLITICIZATION OF THE SHAMANIC VISION

By universalizing and essentializing a "core" concept of Shamanism, we tend to ignore the practical and political use to which shamanic powers can also be put. When Ellen Maret Gaup-Dungeld led a contingent of women from the reindeer ranches of Samiland to stage a sit-in in the Norwegian parliament in order to protest the hydroelectric power plant that the Norwegians were planning to erect over the Alta-Kautokeino River on the day that Prime Minister Gro Bruntland stepped into office, she used visions to create her political itinerary. 

When the new prime minister did not return to hear the Sami women (after twenty-four hours, as she had promised), Ellen Maret asked the women present to relate their dreams. Some had dreamed of flying to Rome, so she requested an audience with the Pope at the Vatican (in order to obtain publicity for their cause); another dreamed of flying over large cities, so she planned a strategic visit to the United Nations in New York. Ellen Maret did not make the kind of separation that we, in the West, would make between those dream-inspired journeys to Rome and New York and other dream-inspired journeys to the spirit world. Nor did she consider the dream to be an inferior means of establishing a political itinerary. Being a political leader was being a spiritual leader, and vice versa.

Because Shamans from indigenous peoples do not separate spirit from matter and do not privilege a "core" shamanic experience over a this-worldly journey
, knowing that both are sacred, both are real, and both are spiritual, focusing exclusively on lower, middle, and upper world shamanic cosmology in our courses excludes the important political function that shamanic vision often serves. Furthermore, she took the visions of women to be as relevant as those of a Shaman. She did not establish a hierarchy among women as visionaries. These women from the reindeer ranches were considered to be the very people whose dreams (spirit-world contacts) would help the Sami to save their land and protect the earth. Here is ecofeminism in action.

CONCLUSION: NEW DIRECTIONS

In conclusion, I would Like to suggest that we begin to take the shamanic means of obtaining knowledge seriously in our culture. First we must begin to return the various shamanic practices to their specific cultures. We must not be reductive, but must see the complexities posed by the diversity of shamanic practices around the world. This will be enriching to our understanding of what Shamanism is, in the long run. Then we must set about creating a shamanic practice that is indigenous to our part of the world and our culture. However, we must revise many of our own cultural assumptions from an ecofeminist perspective. 

White Westerners must cease to project their white Western fantasies of the exotic, the glamorous, and the romantic onto other cultures. We must always assume diversity, and not make assumptions about being the same all over the world just because some aspects of them may appear similar to us. We must also resist thinking in a dualistic manner. We must remember that in Shamanism, spirit resides in matter, and all that exists is sacred. We must also resist thinking in hierarchies, privileging the spirit world and its entities over the material world and its inhabitants. Nor must we engage in elitist assumptions about whose visions have the most wisdom. We must respect the folk of every culture, remembering that their experience contains wisdom, and we must seek out women teachers whenever possible, for they have generally been the guardians of earth wisdom (because of women's socially constructed roles, and not because of any inherent or "essential" characteristics).

We must also learn the folklore of the cultures we visit and remember that what we consider to be "lore" and "legend" may have actually taken place in that culture and that these stories often contain real lessons for us that we would do well to heed. We must remember to seek spiritual protection, and we must become aware of the risks involved in shamanic practices, as well as the dangers incurred when working with people of power. They are also very human, and like non-Shamans, they may be tempted to abuse their power. 

Above all, we must cease to trivialize the spirit world. We must begin to take seriously the reality of spirit-especially those of us who engage in spirituality rituals. We should practice these rituals believing that the rituals we engage in are real events that do communicate with the spirit world. As we are taught in anthropology and folklore courses, we must not exploit the sacred ways or appropriate the sacred objects of other people-especially not for commercial purposes. 

One of the first things I was taught was that you must replace everything you take. Rather than stripping a foreign culture of its material and spiritual possessions, we should begin to contribute to its survival. We must begin to set standards for the practice of Shamanism, in order to protect the population from charlatans and new age dilettantes who know nothing about the spirit world and less about human consciousness and psychology. A new age neo-Shaman might easily jettison an ardent Shaman student into a state of severe mental or physical injury, simply due to the kind of ignorance, arrogance, and lack of responsibility that typifies much of the dabbling that takes place in this movement. We must remember that Shamanism is just as serious as surgery. Would we like to have our brains operated on by someone who had not been trained in medical school?

From the eco-feminist perspective on ethics, we must never lose sight of the fact that it is the misogyny and dualism at the root of white Western civilization that have caused the exploitation of both women and nature. On the other hand, we must not guilt-trip ourselves to the point of endangering our lives. Somehow we must come up with a balance in which we honor both non-Western cultures and ourselves for all that is beneficent, while constantly maintaining a critical position toward all forms of abuse of power.

If we take the lessons of Shamanism seriously, and  revise our cosmology in time, if we practice eco-feminist ethics while honoring both the material and the spiritual realms, then, I believe, there is real hope for us to heal the earth, our homeland.



Gloria Feman Orenstein is Professor Emeritus in Comparative literature and the Program for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Southern California. She is the author of The Theater of the Marvellous. Surrealism and the Contemporary Stage, The Reflowering of the Goddess and co-editor of Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism.   I  highly recommend her book The Reflowering of the Goddess, (1990), published by Pergamon Press, New York. (ISBN 0-08-035178-6).  
For more information:   Gloria Feman Orenstein



Wednesday, May 18, 2011

The Planetary Movement for Mother Earth

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The article below comes from my friend  Janie Rezner , who has a radio program called Women's Voices with KXCI in Northern California. On April 18th, her guest was Dr. Claudia von Werlhoof, from Germany.* I feel that Dr. von Werlhoof's call, and the work of Dr. Rosalie Bertell, is very important. I am no conspiracy theorist - but I must add that it's interesting how much dis-information has been devoted to these women. I take the liberty of publishing Dr. Claudia von Werlhof's call for the creation of the “Planetary Movement for Mother Earth”, which was presented May 29th, 2010 at the International Goddess-Congress on  “Spirituality and Politics” at the Castle Hambach, Germany.

“We have discovered that the military in the east and west has developed technologies which could attack the planet and transform it into a weapon itself! This technological process is by no means controlled by the public. Moreover, these technologies can be used everywhere on the planet as “plasma weapons, weather war and geo-engineering“ (See, Dr. Rosalie Bertell, "Planet Earth:  The Latest Weapon of War"). Not only do they multiply already existing atomic and other technological and climatic dangers to an unimaginable extent, but they also can endanger the existence of Mother Earth as a whole!  We rise up against these idea of making war!

We must act now, if we and our children are to have a future worthy of the name. We demand that these technologies finally be discussed in public, examined by independent scientists and their use or the experimentation with them be forbidden as long as they are threatening life on Earth and the Earth itself (or are against the ENMOD Convention adopted by the UN General Assembly 1976 – which prohibits modifications of the environment). Until now a public discussion of these dangers has not occurred. On the contrary, any attempts of this kind have been actively impeded. If the activities of installations like HAARP (High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program) in Alaska, in Siberian Nishni Novgorod, in Norwegian Tromsö and in Puerto Rico are only harmless, why is no one allowed to know what they are really doing?

We want these technological developments exposed and examined everywhere, by climate and environmental conferences, by environmental organizations and in general by all social movements, by the scientific community and by politicians. Even the “World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth“ in Cochabamba, Bolivia in April 2010 with 40.000 participants from all over the world did not have any discussion of these new military technologies on their agenda! It seems that up to now no one can or wants to make an estimate of the  contribution of these experiments to global warming, the climate crisis and other already existing ecological damages.

As an eco-feminist and a researcher I came across the existence of these new technologies only through an international discussion of the thesis regarding some possible artificial triggers of the earthquake in Haiti in January 2010. When I mentioned this outrageous suspicion in an interview about “the crisis“ in the Austrian daily “Der Standard“ in February, a personal campaign against me was started by my own department at the university and practically all Austrian print media. The aggressors claimed I supported an unscientific and absurd “conspiracy theory”, and that I therefore was mentally disturbed.  The topic was obviously not supposed to be discussed or even to be researched.

During the following turbulent weeks I continued my own research on the question of what had really happened in Haiti. I examined the research of the internationally highly praised American natural scientist, Dr. Rosalie Bertell (Laureate of the Right Livelihood Award, 1986) (see, Bertell, "Background on the HAARP Project (1996), and her practically unknown book. Upon reading her book I started to understand the whole dimension of the technological “innovations” mentioned above. Bertell has extensively traced the history of the development of new military technologies since the Second World War.

Using Nikolas Tesla’s ideas the military experimented with electromagnetic waves and their artificial creation. Furthermore the military used these waves in unnaturally high intensities. By an installation of huge antennas or transmission towers these waves are focused in different frequencies and “shot” into the layers of the ionosphere where they may cause “cuts” or “holes” in the atmosphere (which is not just “air”, but a form of “matter” that holds together protecting the Earth) in order to make the transport of rockets and space travel possible. Another function of the “ionospheric heater” consists of producing a “plasma“ by heating the layers of the atmosphere and make them compress and curve into “lenses” in order to use them like a mirror for projecting the waves back anywhere on the Earth and beneath its surface. In addition to the already dangerously huge ozone hole, thunder-storms, droughts, abnormal hurricanes, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes can be the destructive consequences of the application of these technologies, as Dr. Bertell has commented. Furthermore there are related dangers because of the repercussions of intentional and unintentional interferences of waves, reactions of the magnetic field of the earth and turbulences in the atmospheric belts around the planet. What has been happening with regard to the new technologies within the last 10 years and what is planned for the future, we do not know, since Bertell’s book ends with the year 2000.


Bertell’s book is needed as a source of information for the “Planetary Movement for Mother Earth” and the public in general. This book contains the most serious possible research on this topic worldwide.  The “Military Alchemists” –as I call them– in east and west, in Russia, America and Europe must be stopped from going forward with their plans, doing whatever they want and consciously putting at risk life on, below and above the surface of the planet and even the planet itself, without assuming any responsibility for ourselves as civilians, the animal and the plant world, the climate and our Mother Earth.

We do not know enough about the delicate blue heaven above and the corresponding hidden worlds below the surface of the Earth.  Military powers seem to believe that the whole planet and all its “parts” - as they perceive them - are under their control.  Thus, we call for an alternative science, one which works with and for nature, the planet, Mother Earth and not against.  The military represents just the tip of the iceberg as it attempts to transform the planet itself into a giant weapon, or has already succeeded in doing  so! These experiments are not carried out during wartime or in the laboratory only, no, we - literally the whole human, animal and plant race – have been in a very real everyday state of war for a long period of time already.

Worldwide we – women and men - are calling for action against this obvious threat. Our Planetary Movement for Mother Earth is an answer to this form of globalization of militarism.

A new planetary civilization has to arise that respects and celebrates the variety of life on this wonderful, beautiful and friendly planet. There must be no appropriation, transformation and destruction of life. Instead, we call for a deep interconnectedness with our Mother Earth – which was our original relationship with Her and should be our normal attitude towards Her again. A loving relationship with Mother Earth is our only choice. 

To sign: If you want to join the Planetary Movement, write to: Prof. Dr. Claudia von Werlhof,
(mail: Claudia.Von-Werlhof@uibk.ac.at)  The MatriaVal-review will continuously report about the Movement.

*Janie Rezner's interview can be downloaded at:
http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/51153

**Below is the first of 3 lectures by Dr. Bertell, in (I believe) 2000.  In the first, she describes the "layers of our sky", the Earth's skin, and how military interests since the 1950's, without the global public's consent or even knowledge, have experimented with, for example, exploding nuclear bombs in the Van Allen belts. 

(Note:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKVAnPRV99s&NR=1 is an audio video of Dr. Bertell's lecture.)
 





(2) Bertell, Rosalie. Planet Earth. The Latest Weapon of War. London: 2000.
(3) Projektgruppe “Zivilisationskritik”. Aufbruch aus dem Patriarchat-Wege in eine neue Zivilisation? Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2009;
Von Werlhof,Claudia: West-End. Köln: PapyRossa, 2010
---.Vom Diesseits der Utopie zum Jenseits der Gewalt, Freiburg: Centaurus, 2010
---.Über die Liebe zum Gras an der Autobahn. Rüsselsheim: Christel Göttert, 2010