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More Than Our Biology

The Threefold Goddess and Why We Need a Shift

The threefold system—that of the maiden, mother, and crone—is common in many traditions of contemporary witchcraft, Paganism, and goddess spirituality. It is arguably the most well-known system of divine female representation in contemporary Paganism. For many Pagans, witches, and goddess worshipers, this threefold model is the first format of personification of the feminal divine with whom they interface. Many of us have felt kinship with her, or have identified as her. The maiden, mother, crone system has felt perhaps natural to us.

However, many of us felt that this model was just a little bit—or a lot—off, that we couldn’t truly settle into it or that it didn’t reflect nor represent us. Feeling into my own discomfort with the model and asking others about their experience of the model, it became clear that the threefold system is embedded with damaging programming on many levels. First, the threefold model in much of its usage is rooted in female biology. The arc of this representation of the power of the goddess is defined by her procreative power and fertility. If we overlay our experience of feminality onto this divine representation, a woman’s life trajectory and her sense of self, and of her importance, is defined solely by her uterus.

When a woman’s worth is defined by her uterus, her valuation is in her procreative power. When her value is defined by her ability or inability—or willingness or unwillingness—to procreate, her basic worth is based in utility. Rooted in utility, or usefulness, her body is a commodity.

When a woman’s body is seen as a resource, she does not have the right to full self-determination; she does not have bodily sovereignty.

In the dominant culture, this lack of agency has led to countless instances and kinds of reproductive injustice. From lack of access to reproductive health care to the gross violation of forced sterilization, the common denominator is that women do not have bodily agency.

In adhering to a biology-based model for the feminal divine, we have carried the seed of inequality forward, disguised as worship of the feminine. At the core, the maiden, mother, and crone model for the feminine divine is a patriarchal system rooted in the ideology of ownership and utility. When our utility is our meaning, our bodies are community property.

On a more basic level; in the maiden, mother, and crone archetypal system, mother means woman. If a woman cannot or will not bear children, she may not easily see her face in this goddess.

In some branches of the American goddess traditions, the uterus is seen as the most holy and defining seat of a woman’s power and of women’s power collectively. In these groups, you are not a woman if you don’t have a uterus. Trans women are not welcomed into the circle of women in these communities.

Additionally, when menarche (the first menstrual cycle) is the rite of passage from maiden to mother, we are not only leaving girls and women who cannot bleed out of the equation, we’re also putting undue weight on our young children. What we’re saying when we couple a rite of passage into womanhood with menarche is basically “old enough to bleed, old enough to breed.”

This point of transitional recognition may have made sense at some point in our collective history; girls may have started bleeding later on average, and many bore children earlier than most do now. But the meaning of this rite is something that as women it is our responsibility to take into deeper account.

On another front, women who were not born with uteri, or who do not want to or are unable to bear children, haven’t historically been recognized as being fully woman—not in the dominant culture or within the model of the maiden/mother/crone.

Women who are childfree by circumstance or design are regularly harassed about their reproductive status. If a woman chooses not to have children she may be called selfish. She will certainly be second-guessed. She will be met with incredulity, if not outright hostility, and told that someday she will surely feel her biological clock ticking.

If a woman is physiologically unable to have children, she may be pitied. And while sterility that hasn’t been chosen may be a difficult experience for a woman, her fertility really isn’t anyone else’s business unless the woman in question has specifically invited questions or support. Yet we are culturally so entrenched in the mindset that a woman’s productivity is her purpose that it’s rare we even realize how intensely personal—and potentially painful—questions about reproductive capacity and choice are.

Without a thought any one of us might ask a woman, “So, are you going to have kids?” as if it were our right to know. Or even more likely and more potentially insensitively we might ask, “So, when are you going to have kids?” In a world that respected women to the point of recognizing that women’s bodies (and lives) are our own, these questions would fall away.

Also problematic is the external verification aspect of perceived readiness for feminal rites of passage. When a girl’s or woman’s transitions and rites of passage are based on externally verified phenomena—the presence or absence of her blood cycle, the appearance or lack thereof of sexual characteristics, pregnancy, or childbirth—her right to self-definition is once again degraded.

Even preceding concerns of fertility, a woman’s availability as a sexual commodity may become an issue. In contemporary goddess and Pagan traditions, a girl’s or woman’s sexuality is often seen as a gift of the gods—but as a gift to whom? In this case also she may be reduced to her utility: sexual utility, procreative utility, community utility. She is an object in this equation, not a subject. She is without agency. Whether sexual or procreative in nature, a woman being measured by her usefulness is a woman who has been stripped of her sovereignty. Put another way, her value is about doing, or more accurately in many cases being done to, instead of about being. She is seen as her service, not for her selfhood.

Some may argue that maidenhood doesn’t end when a girl starts bleeding—that it instead ends when a young woman becomes sexually active. In this case, an external element is required for the rite of passage; a woman does not become a woman under her own power but under the power of her lover or the person who “initiates” her.

If this is the argument, what about women who choose not to become sexually interactive, or those for whom sexual desire is not a feature of their internal terrain? And what about the women who were sexualized as girls, not of their own volition? What about the women whose sexual awakening was stolen?

Furthermore, does this idea assume or reinforce a heteronormative frame? If a sexual rite of passage marks the transition from maiden to mother or mother-in-waiting, the procreation-as-destiny model is again reified.

At the other end of the threefold model, we have the dimly defined territory of cronehood. Many women have complex feelings about aging, and there is little place to explore that complexity in a spiritual context when limited by the threefold model. We place much value on youth as a culture. Even in our countercultures cronehood is not given ultimate recognition; it is a vague designation, and what definition is offered is often seen—even by us, the ones doing the aging—through a lens of loss rather than gain. For those who are not mothers, the leap from maidenhood directly to cronehood without even a single intermediary step causes a lack of representation in ritual experience at the very least. And even for those who do mother children, the gap between the end of active mothering and assumed cronehood is an expanse that longs for recognition.

Additionally, cronehood is often defined by what it is not; it is not the fertile phase of motherhood nor the innocence and passion of youth. Culturally we are afraid of, alienated from, and even disgusted by aging. Again we return to the core issue: when the divine feminine is defined by biology, she is defined by the expectations, assumptions, and attributions wrapped up in the biological trajectory.

We live what we believe. When our concept of the female divine is rooted in utility, our cultural ideas of woman are also rooted in the same; a woman’s body, existence, and life are public property.

	JOURNAL: What are your thoughts about the utility of women?
	ACTION: Question your assumptions about biology-based transitions.
	Extra Credit: Talk with other women about ways in which they have felt the pressures of assumptions about their bodies, sexuality, or reproductive capacity.

Countering Dominant Culture

Contemporary Paganism and goddess spirituality are a counterculture. More precisely, Paganism and goddess spirituality are many countercultures and subcultures. By definition, all countercultures and subcultures exist within the fabric of the dominant culture. This being the case, all countercultures are built on the same foundational elements as the dominant culture.

Even once we have done a lot of work around deprogramming from the values and morals of the dominant culture, the effects still infiltrate in subtle (and not so subtle)ways. The patriarchal construct we all live within defines much of what we think of as the bedrock of our self-identity, our spiritual beliefs, and our assumptions about life in general.

The stealthy tendrils of patriarchy worm their way into the deepest recesses of our consciousness and thought processes. Patriarchal thoughts, values, and beliefs are so deep in us that we think they come from within. Patriarchal ideologies predict our actions and reactions, our assumptions of normalcy, and the measures by which we evaluate culture and identity.

Genderized language creates relationships between qualities (nurturing, robust, bitchy, weak, powerful) and the binary genders (male and female). When we say that strong is a male or masculine quality and soft is feminine or female quality, we are reinforcing gender-based norms and adherence to them.

What if strong was just strong, soft was just soft, and nurturing was just nurturing?

There are walls erected within the patriarchal system, and they are made of glass. Just like the glass ceiling, we can’t see them but they build us into stuck patterns that lead to exclusion, erasure, and subtly enforced adherence to norms of gender identity, sexual identity, cultural identity, and even spiritual identity.

We think we are choosing but the choices were made for us before we had the filters in place to evaluate sufficiently. We have been infected by xenophobia. It lives in us like a virus. We fear and fight against anything different from ourselves. As we awaken to this internal struggle, we ache. We writhe with discomfort.

The antibodies to this illness are acceptance, respect, and an awareness of intersectionality. These keys will lead us ultimately to our collective liberation.

	JOURNAL: If you identify as a woman, what is it about yourself that informs you that you are a woman? What identifies other people as women to you?
	ACTION: Examine ways in which you may reinforce the biases of dominant culture.

Colonized Minds, Colonized Bodies

Our bodies have also been colonized. In dominant culture, white, male, heterosexual, able-bodied, cis-gendered, and Christian are the central measures of normalcy. White male values are normative. White male social markers are normative. Even to ourselves we are the Other. Our bodies are not our own. We see ourselves from the outside.

In some schools of feminist thought, reclaiming the term “Other” is an act of defiance against patriarchal normativity. Sometimes referred to as difference feminism, this branch of feminist theory holds that women are different from men. Inherent in difference feminism is the belief that women’s ways, contributions, and qualities are devalued in the patriarchal paradigm.

Yet Otherness is difference, and not all difference is equal; some are more different than others. And when cultures value normativity often above all else—and many cultures do—Otherness is a liability.

Globally, the bodies of women have been colonized. And, the treatment and mistreatment of the bodies, minds, spirits, and beings of Women of Color necessitate that we take the conversation of Otherness and colonization and sovereignty deeper.

In the structure of domination, the less “normative” a person is the less acceptable they are. The less acceptable a person is, the less valuable they are. The less valuable they are, the more disposable they are. And at that, valuation is a dangerous concept. Valuation is a word with monetary meaning, and comes from a mindset of external ownership.

Black women in the United States carry the personal and transgenerational trauma of slavery. These are not merely echoes; these are memories from a time recent enough that there are women still alive to talk about it who were born to parents who were slaves. The effects of slavery live in the bodies and psyches of Black women. Memories of children torn from the breast in the slave shacks of a hundred and fifty years ago reverberate.

Not only that, these memories are replicated in contemporary life; from slave yards to jail yards, the cycle of suppression is repeated. According to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), one out of three Black boys born in the United States in 2014 will spend time in jail or prison if current trends in incarceration continue. Also according to the NAACP, 1 in 100 Black women in America is in prison, and that number is rising.

In the United States, Black people are still treated like property and Black women doubly so. Often exoticized and fetishized, bodies of Black women are marginalized, dehumanized, seen as something less-than. They are imagined as “too” sexual, but are not afforded agency within their own sexual or personal identity.

Slavery is not over. It is still happening around the world. From human trafficking to indentured servitude, slavery has not yet been eradicated.

The horror of the mostly ignored holocaust of Native Americans is a hidden part of American history. Nations, tribes, and peoples were eradicated. Children were stolen from their people and forced to assimilate. They were forbidden their languages, spirituality, and cultural traditions at risk of torture and death.

Native Americans were literally herded onto reservations, and were in almost all cases removed from the lands that hold their origin stories and the bones of their ancestors. What treaties were made with the US government were broken, and are still being broken today.

In Canada, Indigenous women are murdered at a rate of more than 4.5 times higher than all ethnicities combined, according to a 2014 report released by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). The Report of the Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, James Anaya, to the United Nations (UN), states that more than one in three Native women in the US and Canada will be raped in her lifetime. (For women as a whole in the United States the risk is less than one in five.) And six in ten will be physically assaulted.

On some reservations, the murder rate of Native women is 10 times the national average. According to the report made to the UN, 88 percent of these crimes are committed by non-Natives, over whom tribal police have no jurisdiction.

Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline: The Girls’ Story is a report created by the Human Rights Project for Girls, Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality and the Ms. Foundation for Women and was released July, 2015. It states that Native American girls are the most likely of any race or ethnicity to be arrested and incarcerated. And of the girls who are incarcerated, 31% have been sexually abused.

Again we see the real-time results of transgenerational wounding.

Xicana and Latina women, when not erased as a group, are portrayed by mass media as hypersexual, less smart than their white counterparts, and somehow simultaneously sexually promiscuous and conservative. And, in the United States they make an average of 0.53 on the white male dollar. Xicana and Latina women are literally treated as worth-less.

Trans women face a host of life-threatening factors, from lack of access to health care to increased chances of rape and murder. The National Transgender Discrimination Survey Report on Health and Healthcare, conducted in 2010 by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, showed that 28 percent of transgender and gender nonconforming people had experienced discrimination in healthcare settings. Fifty percent reported having to teach their medical providers about trans health care.

Trans and gender nonconforming people surveyed for “Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Study,” conducted by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality in 2011, were asked about assault at work, in educational settings, at homeless shelters, in interactions with family members and with police, accessing public accommodations, and in jails and prisons. Twenty-six percent of respondents reported having been physically assaulted due to bias regarding gender identity or presentation in one or more of those settings. Ten percent reported sexual assault in the same settings. And intersectionality of course comes into play here; race and ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation all intersect with increasing levels of risk.

Goddess spirituality communities on the whole have not been inclusive; in Pagan and goddess spirituality communities, trans women are often distinctly excluded from women’s circles.

Subaltern means of lower status. Feminist author and academic Gayatri Chokravorty Spivak used the term in her most well-known essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” The paper is a foundational work in postcolonialism and postcolonial feminism.

This is a known tactic of colonization: the colonizing force takes one of the subaltern groups and gives them marginally more power than the other oppressed groups. Then those who have been given slightly more power than the others—yet who are also being colonized—do the work of the colonizers for them. We are both colonized and colonizer.

We are fragmented. Divide and conquer; women are telling other women how they must or must not be in order to be goddesses, to be feminists, to be strong, to be women. It is time to recognize, learn about, and seek to understand the complexity of intersectional realities. It is time for recognition of the right of all women to our own bodies, stories, lives. Our rights to—and of—self-definition, sovereignty on all levels; and in our Pagan and goddess spirituality communities, our right to a system of feminine divine that embraces all of the faces—and all the bodies—of woman.

	JOURNAL: In what ways can you commit to claiming your own sovereignty, and safeguarding the sovereignty of other women?
	ACTION: Take action on one or more of those ideas.

The Body of Woman

All of this echoes the dominant culture; women’s bodies are not our own. Even when our counterculture teachers, parents, and friends teach us the best they can that we own our bodies, the dominant culture tells us without exception that we do not.

From legislation of reproductive rights to forced sterilization, our basic relationship with the concept of self-ownership is eroded. In our lack of authentic choice about our actual bodies, our personal sovereignty is destroyed again and again.

From lack of diverse representation in media to lack of basic safety on the streets, our insecurities are perpetually magnified. Rape culture reminds us daily that we need to fight for every inch of space, even in our own skin. Fashion requirements, cultural and social expectations, and institutionalized insecurities enforce and reinforce our adherence to “appropriate” gender performance.

This keeps us fighting—instead of relaxing into—our aging process; keeps us adhering to body weight and appearance expectations. And even the preoccupation with liberating ourselves from the petty tyranny of lookism, ageism, and matters of identity keeps us far from the core of the deeper self and the greater liberation of awareness.

The body of woman is an ancient artifact. We are remnants of dead stars and galactic explosions. We have the blood of our mothers’ mothers’ mothers running in our veins. We have memories and mysteries encoded in our DNA.

	JOURNAL: In what ways has your bodily sovereignty been challenged or eroded?
	ACTION: Volunteer for a rape or sexual assault hotline, or a group that protects trans and queer rights, or a sex workers’ rights group. All women, and all people, have a right to bodily sovereignty.

Binary Gender Is Colonization

Gender exists on a spectrum, or a grid, or a sphere, or perhaps in a morphic field. Physical and genetic sex exists on a continuum. And sexual expression and orientation exists beside gender, sometimes intersecting with it. In other words, there are vastly more than two genetic sexes, and possibilities of gender expression and identity are literally limitless.

The gender binary, and adherence to assigned gender norms, are colonialist attitudes, and tools of cohesion to colonial domination. Gender identity and gender role flexibility is diverse and complex in Indigenous and ancient cultures worldwide.

In many cultures there are—or were—more than two genders. In India in 2013 a third gender that has existed since well before colonization was finally legally recognized. Though this legal win for other-gendered people was felt worldwide, there are innumerable stories of cultures that have had their multiple gender designations stripped from them by colonizing forces.

The Chukchi people, an Arctic Siberian tribe, recognized seven genders. Many Native American nations recognized “two spirited” people as having genders other than the binary; in Diné culture this variation resulted in the recognition of four genders.

The Bugis, an Indigenous Indonesian ethnic group, recognize three sexes, four genders, and a meta-gender. In parts of Africa women could marry women, and in some cultures a woman who sought a wife could be considered a “female husband.”

In many Indigenous tribes and ethnic groups around the world, gender norms were—and are—different from what we consider to be normative. Many cultures had egalitarian distribution of work, wealth, and political and social power and influence. Some were and some are matrilineal, some were matriarchal, some were both, some were neither.

	JOURNAL: What assumptions do you hold about gender? Do you think gender is a thing that just is?
	ACTION: Notice how you perform your gender. Notice how others perform theirs.

Language is a Virus

Language is colonized. Language colonizes. Language spreads ideas. Ideas spread culture.

Standardized language is a tool of colonization and an act of—often enforced—assimilation. Assimilation is a tool of colonization. Our languages have been taken from us. Native, Black, Brown, Indigenous languages have been stolen and systematically destroyed. The languages of the poor, of the country people and hill dwellers and hidden people. The stories that are told and not written are dying with the languages that held them.

Standardized language steals our voices, the meter of our songs, the fluid nature of our stories.

We women are praised when our writing and speaking and storytelling is seen to have relevance outside of being “women’s” writing, or queer writing, or feminist writing. We are expected to erase who we are in order to be taken seriously.

The markers of literature tell us our stories are not important artifacts or cultural indices; that the recipes and lullabies and little rituals passed down from one generation to the next are not as important as the battle hymns and litanies of victory and power.

But our languages are the containers of our cultures. They hold the center of our distinct cosmologies and cosmogonies. Our old wives’ tales are the whispered bedtime wardings and poetic incantations that carry the secrets of our lineages of flesh and spirit. Passed through generations, our secret spells and superstitions have held the evils of the world at bay.

As we decolonize language, we decolonize our minds. This is a challenging process. It will require rethinking, withholding judgment, and pulling up whole aggregations of thought by the roots.

Language is layered with racist meaning. I chose not to use the words “shadow” or “dark” in reference to negative, unconscious, or subverted aspects of consciousness in this book. On a linguistic level we equate dark with bad and light with good. It’s not just language; it’s ideology. In examining the impact of my own language, I made the choice to not reinforce the “dark equals bad” mindset.

As you will see in the next chapters, I have used the term “occult” in place of shadow. Occult is a rich word with complex meanings: hidden, occluded, secret, mysterious, and esoteric are a few.

Decolonization requires that we reclaim the ways of our own stories, our own ways of talking. It requires also that we think through and beyond concepts like inclusivity. When we say “inclusive,” the opposite is also a truth; exclusive. Inclusivity is a word offered like a fruitless olive branch. It does not mean what we want it to mean, but it does mean what too often is intended. Extended as an empty gift, when we say inclusivity we too often mean “if you will take on my cause, we can fight together.” Or “let me tell you what the cause is, and you can join the struggle.” When I say, “You are invited,” I mean the table is already set in my home and you can come if you like. This may be nice for a dinner party, but it is no way to create a coalition.

There is power in words. As workers of magick, we must believe this if we believe anything.

Occupation is a word inherently traumatizing for anyone who has lived in a region with active conflict. Whether the occupied territories are in Palestine, the territories of the United States or Canada, or Africa, occupation is colonization. Occupation is war. Occupation is one of the steps of genocide. And even knowing this and having spent time in occupied territories, I was part of the Occupy movement. I saw the hope that the movement brought forth for many, and I ignored the obvious: Wall Street already is occupied. It has been since 1524.

There has been substantial backlash toward the Occupy movement for the insensitive—at best—word choice. In response to awareness of the colonizer-mentality of the name, some groups have started using the term decolonize. This term is also used globally by anti-colonialist movements. Ideally, the name change in the groups who are post-Occupy will also mean that the political focus of the groups includes Indigenous land claims. This is the level of examination we must adhere to; think a word or phrase through before you use it. And when you get it wrong (and we all do get it wrong), change it.

We will not get anywhere by continuously centering the already central and dominant arguments. When we are reaching toward and moving into the question of collaboration and cocreation, we must purge the ideologies that say dominant thought (even feminist dominant thought, or radical dominant thought) is right, and marginal voices are wrong. We must believe other women when they say they are feminists or women or working for liberation. We must even move beyond the reliance on the term feminism as the glue for our collaborations. We must respect our sisters enough to move into the space of embracing difference and acknowledging and living into our shared struggles and our shared liberation.

We must stop offering assimilation and instead seek a respectful interchange of ideas. We must step out of our comfort zones and ideologies, and into honest communication about real life and the living of it.

When I say, “May we eat together?” I mean: can we create this thing, you and I, we, us? Can we collaborate, cooperate, cocreate?

We must move out of the process of colonization to find words that mean what we mean; we need to stop saying, “You are invited to participate in my process.” Instead we must ask, “What needs to be done? How should we go about it? And can we do it together?”

We must reach straight through good intention and reach toward wholeness, liberation, respect.

	JOURNAL: What do you want to help build, or make, with your community of women? Do you want to open yourself to a wider social justice or spiritual community? If so, how will you go about it?
	ACTION: Talk to other women about what their lives look like, what their day to day reality consists of, what their concerns are.

New Languages of Woman

The Yanyuwa are an Indigenous people who live on the northeast coast of the continent now known as Australia. The Yanyuwa language has one dialect for men’s spoken language and another for women’s. Children speak the women’s language until puberty, from which point forward the boys live with the men and learn the men’s language.

The Yanyuwa are far from alone having different dialects for men and women. There are several documented cases of cultures where women and men have or had radically different dialects, or even whole bodies of words that were only used by men or by women. Consider the case of China’s Nüshu script, a written language developed by and for women as a way to communicate. It was handed down generation to generation, mother to daughter. It was written on fans and sewn into wedding dresses and other pieces of clothing.

Spoken Japanese, from traditional dialects to contemporary, is considered a gendered language. Many written languages had, and some have, variations in character use for male and female versions.

In contemporary languages worldwide there are distinct differences in word choice and ways of speaking between women and men. In linguistic theory, there are four main approaches to evaluating communication variations:

• • Deficit: women’s speech is deficient compared to the normative male speech
• • Dominance: women are dominated by men, and language shows that men are dominant through male-centered language
• • Difference: a model based in equality that holds that women and men are different subcultures with differing communicative conventions
• • Dynamic: the intersectionality of language and communication theory! The dynamic approach is not gender-static and takes into account the dynamic elements that go into communicating

All four approaches agree that language conventions are gender-based, and that women have decidedly different ways of using speech than men do.

The language of women is a language with different pauses. It is the language that stops and leaves spaces for other voices. It is the bone-deep rhythm of call-and-response that offers the meter of work and play. It is the starry night chant around the fire circle interspersed with laughter, children’s demands, sharing of news, and tears for loved ones who are missing.

It is also the Stop now! of women calling for an end to rape and sexual violence. It is the rage and fury of a community mourning its children lost to genocide. It is the wail of grief as another virgin forest gets cleared for cattle ranching. It is the swift, primal snarl, and the pounce-and-tear of the mother lion protecting her young.

Our new languages are old languages revived. They are the reclaiming of feminal power in all its ghastly glory and reverential whispering. They are the coded languages that allow us safety in unknown places and privacy in crowds.

The new languages we choose and shape and share and discover are languages that pull in from the edges and work their way to the center. They are languages that recognize a shifting center or need, and adapt to that which is most pressing. Not so much like in a crisis, but in the way a caregiver is one step ahead of the needs of those in their care who are most vulnerable and how the stronger ones step in as needed. In the way a lull is followed by a rush, and a rush by a lull.

In these new languages we will will ourselves to listen to the parts that are hard to hear because the stories need to be told and heard in order to be healed.

	JOURNAL: What stories are ready to be told by you? Are they your stories? The stories of your culture? Woman stories? Stories in your mother tongue?
	ACTION: Pay attention to your language. Notice the words you use, the rhythms you fall into, whether you are exerting in a comfortable way or pressuring yourself or others. Allow your language to open up. Look for the words that truly fit. Give yourself time and space to say what you really mean.

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