“Know the Mystery
that if that which thou seekest
thou findest not within thee,
thou will never find it without thee …”
WICCEAN (PAGAN) PRAYER
“The Lord of all,
The knower of all,
The beginning and end of all—
That Self dwells in every human heart.”
UPANISHADS
“The Kingdom of God is within you.”
THE NEW TESTAMENT
“Look within, and seek That.”
JALALUDDIN RUMI
“i found god in myself
& i loved her / i loved her fiercely”
NTOZAKE SHANGE
ONCE WHEN I WAS traveling in the South with Florynce Kennedy and other women in black/white feminist speaking teams—which Flo referred to with a smile as “Little Eva teams, something for everyone”—we spent a weekend with a woman I shall call Ella, the mother of one of the speakers traveling with us, in rural Georgia. Because we arrived on the once-a-month Sunday when the circuit-riding preacher opened the only church in the black area of this small town, we listened to a whole day’s singing, testifying, and sermonizing, followed by a big potluck church supper. In this community of houses built on stilts over fresh Georgia clay, there was not a general store or even a gas pump, but people came from miles around to hear this music sung in drawn-out meters with no instruments, in a remembered African style.
While talking over the day’s events that night at the kitchen table, my friend and I were both surprised to find that her mother, Ella, a woman who had raised such a strong family and even defied the Klan, still had one regret: she couldn’t be a deacon of her church. In addition to the usual duties of singing in the choir, cooking for the congregation, and saving money in a Mason jar to pay the minister’s salary, Ella had made cushions for the hard church benches, sewed slipcovers for the preacher’s armchair at the altar, and answered all the church correspondence. Indeed, she wrote such effective letters—a by-product of her skill at writing lyrics for her own songs—that she had been made assistant clerk, the highest post ever given to a woman.
But the rules were clear: only men could be deacons. And they were the ones who passed the collection basket, traveled as delegates to church conventions, and made decisions for the whole congregation. When she was young, Ella had accepted this order of things: the deacons had seemed old and wise to her then. But after thirty years, she was only too aware that most of them were less experienced than she was; that some also drank, fathered children “on the side,” and were cowardly with local racist employers; and that none had devoted as much time and energy to “the Lord’s work” as she had. Yet the church gave them its authority and withheld its trust from her. As she said to us, “It hurts me in my soul.”
Listening to my friend and her mother mourning this unfairness, I wondered: How many women have been wounded in their souls by religions that believe God is a man, and thus only men are godly? Her story suddenly seemed thousands of years old—with the difference that she was one of the few with enough independence to know it was unjust and say so. Having had the strength to reject the Bible stories that showed Jesus, a Middle Eastern Jew, as snub-nosed and blond, she had acquired the courage to question; yet in her black community, she had support for a rebellion based on race, but not on sex. Her beloved church and preacher, the strongest forces in her life, felt they had the Bible itself behind them when they devalued her as a woman. For every verse she found about women as equal believers, they could find ten preaching female obedience.
As the three of us talked late into the night, we went far beyond deacons. Why were there no black women preachers riding from church to church in cars paid for by Mason-jar savings? Why was God so consistently white and male that even Ella found herself picturing a white man when she prayed? She and a few of her women friends sometimes raised these questions among themselves, but they felt blasphemous. Besides, the church was all they had. They didn’t want to be thought crazy, divisive, or not “God-fearing women”—an interesting phrase in itself. But if God is white, then whiteness is godly. If God is a man, then man is a god. Any religion in which God looks suspiciously like the ruling class is very different from spirituality that honors the godliness in each of us. It makes us feel different. It makes us act different.
After we came back to New York, her daughter and I sent Ella a poster. It was Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, but with God as a black woman who was giving the gift of life through the touch of her fingertips to a white woman. When Ella called us, she was laughing with shocked delight. Later she showed this poster to her preacher—being careful to explain the poster was just making a point and didn’t mean to exclude men—but he only said with disdain that this was obviously a gift from her “Black Panther daughter” (an odd comment, we thought, from a man so separatist that he had refused to shake hands with me, perhaps the only white person ever to stay in this rural settlement). In the end, Ella’s rebellion was confined to framing the poster and hanging it on her living room wall as a silent protest for all church visitors to see.
Thanks to Ella, I also began to think about my experiences as the daughter of a Christian-Jewish marriage—two traditions so opposed that both families had objected to the wedding at first; yet to me as a child, they seemed very much alike. Both religions excluded me from their words and imagery, and made me feel a little suspect and unclean, as if I had to behave in a very special way in order to be accepted. Nonetheless, I did turn briefly to religion as an escape from the violence that suddenly seemed everywhere around me as I entered adolescence. Not only were there frightening “Saturday night fights” (the phrase for domestic violence when there was no such phrase) in the apartment downstairs, but the father of a boy in my school had shot his son—and then himself. For many months, I took two buses every Sunday morning to reach the safety of a fundamentalist church on the other side of town. I still remember the poignancy of seeing the Bible held in the big rough hands of a Sunday school teacher, an ex-convict who owned a chicken farm and said he had been saved from a violent life by Jesus. Like countless women before and after me, I looked to religion as the only force strong enough to tame violent men, or at least to protect me if I obeyed. But giving up freedom for safety is a child’s bargain, and soon, the safety turned out to be illusory anyway. “Saturday night fights” didn’t seem any less frequent among these families than anywhere else, and the congregation itself eventually split between two ministers along class lines over the issue of whether or not to have a neon sign on the church.
That experience helped me understand the appeal of fundamentalism to women. As Andrea Dworkin has so well explained in Right-wing Women, the promise is safety in return for obedience, respectability in return for self-respect and freedom—a sad bargain. And the impact of that one poster on Ella made me realize the importance of feeling included in whatever form of worship and spirituality we choose. It gave me new respect for all those working to reform organized religion from within, whether they were tracing the Black Madonna of Eastern Europe back to the Great Cosmic Mother of Africa or bringing an ecclesiastical lawsuit in support of the ordination of women as Episcopalian priests. Though still small in comparison to the religious establishments, there were a growing variety of such actions: rewriting Jewish ceremonies, including that infamous prayer in which men thank God for not being born females or slaves; insisting on the right of gay men and lesbians to be both open and part of their faiths; invoking the spirit of Mohammed, a reformer in his day, against literalist and antiwoman interpretation of Islamic law; and supporting a breakaway church of black Catholics. All of them were helping both women and men of all races to see God in themselves. Even the resurgence of Moslem and other nationalist fundamentalisms—anachronisms that justified an internal war against women and an external one against people of other faiths and nations—was better understood as partly a reaction to a European colonial God that had hurt the people of Third World countries “in their souls.”
What spoke to me most, however, were the movements that went beyond reforming existing religions and straight to the heart of an immediately experienced, universal spirituality. They were reminding us that pagan, a word made to seem negative, really just means “of the country” and originally signified those who believed in the divinity of all living things. By rediscovering prepatriarchal myths and holy places, as well as the still-living pagan beliefs of many indigenous cultures and mystical traditions, spiritual movements were giving us back a universal spirituality—the meta-democracy of all living things.
Those were inspiring possibilities—but they were just ideas. It wasn’t until 1980, when I took a boat trip down the Nile from near Aswan and the older more Nubian parts of Egypt to Luxor and areas closer to Cairo, that I had any idea what a more universal spirituality might look like—and what emotions it could unearth in me.
We started out with several dozen tourists of varying nationalities in an old boat that looked like a larger version of the African Queen. Because of the way my friend, Egyptian feminist and author Laila Abou-Saif, had arranged the trip, we saw the oldest temple and excavations first, so that the millennia seemed to be unfolding as we floated down this river that has been a changeless center of agricultural settlements for at least 10,000 years. It was like watching a gradual shifting from the old pagan, pantheistic world in which all of nature was holy, to the rise of a monotheistic and royal one as if it were happening before our eyes.
In relief on a temple ceiling at Dendera, we saw the goddess Nut, a version of the Great Cosmic Mother worshiped in the rest of Africa. She is a metaphor for creation and the cycles of life; mind and womb inseparable; birth and death in one. Her body, full of stars, forms a living horizon over the earth as she swallows the sun, creates the darkness of night while it travels through her body, and then gives birth again to the sun and a new day. Under her overarching body and nourishing breasts, all living things are sacred and flourishing: male and female, plants and animals, insects and flowers, reptiles and birds, ibises and crocodiles, wild geese and antelope, the fig tree and the papyrus plant—everything in nature’s cycle.
For those of us who have been raised in religions that treat sexuality as suspect and women’s bodies as symbols of temptation and downfall, the feeling of standing in places that treat both as sacred is like sunlight flooding into a dark room. Looking at the paintings and carvings of goddesses, of wildflowers, of powerful and playful animals, flocks of birds like those still migrating over the Nile—all the scenes of the sanctity of the everyday—created a feeling of peace and empowerment that caught me unaware. It was such a different feeling from standing in huge cathedrals under images of crucifixions that created an awe at one’s own insignificance and sinfulness. In Jewish synagogues, where the Torah is locked away from ordinary eyes and images of nature are forbidden as idolatrous, I felt a sense of an intricate and isolated history; and at mosques where there is no imagery of females or nature, and women cannot pray in the same chambers as men, I felt an authority over every part of life.
I thought: How could we have let body and spirit, sexuality and spirituality, be split apart?
In later temples and tombs, I noticed divinities in human form that were both male and female; for instance, Hapy, god of the Nile itself, who has breasts but wears a male headdress. Some were both animal and human, like Taweret, the Great Feminine One, goddess of pregnancy, who stands upright and has the body and head of a hippopotamus, the feet of a lion, and often the image of a crocodile down her back. It seemed right that pregnancy in both human and animal form should be worshiped as the symbol of creation the moment when there is the first movement of a new life.
I thought: Why should we worship a male-only god who makes women feel ungodly, and men feel they must be godlike? Why have we traded the mystery of birth for life created from dust?
As we continued our journey, I noticed that goddess figures were beginning to give birth only to sons. A little later in historical time, the sons became larger, then larger still as they turned into consorts, and then even larger as they became male rulers seated on the lap of a goddess who had become only a throne.
I thought: It’s beginning; half of humanity is becoming more sacred than the other. Did the mothers rage? Did the daughters mourn?
Soon, there were male gods and kings who were larger than their female consorts. They were still goddesses, but the Great Cosmic Mother had been shattered into her separate parts: Isis, the Goddess of Wisdom; Maat, the Goddess of Moral Judgment; Hathor, Goddess of Life; Mehet-weret, Goddess of Death, who welcomed the dead into the underworld. Meanwhile, as Upper and Lower Egypt became one kingdom through conquest, military scenes began to take on an importance once reserved for the harvesting of crops, the grinding of grain, and other scenes of ordinary life. As if this greater power demanded greater tribute, the first pyramids also began to appear, and pharaohs called themselves Son of Re or Amun-Re, the male god of the sun, as though feeling no need of any mother or goddess-given authority at all. Isis herself was now turned into a throne. There were exceptions among the rulers, the greatest being Hatshepsut, the most prominent of three female pharaohs, who sent trade missions to other countries, restored neglected temples, and ruled largely with diplomacy and in peace. But having ascended the throne as a widow, she also had to invent lineage from a male god, even wear a false beard as a symbol of authority; and before the death of her nephew and successor, her name and image had been chipped out of the stone of temples, and her name omitted from royal history. But there was no shortage of female figures in these temples and tombs. In addition to queens and royal daughters, paintings and carvings began to show royal harems filled with princesses and ladies-in-waiting of the new kingdom, some brought from as far away as Asia. I wondered: Did the women of the harem mourn for their native lands?
By the fourteenth century B.C.E., all religion had been placed in the hands of a male priesthood, and King Akhenaten, often called the “inventor” of monotheism, had declared the Sun God to be not just the most powerful god, but the only god. Other god and goddess images were defaced and their temples closed down, including Karnak, where Akhenaten’s father had worshiped. Paintings and statues commissioned by Akhenaten and his beautiful wife, Nefertiti, ensured that they and their six daughters would be viewed by posterity as a godlike royal family—improbably fair of skin, as the famous painted bust of Nefertiti shows—and the queen was depicted as a priestess. I wondered: Had the darker-skinned Nubians of Upper Egypt come to feel excluded by birth f Did women look at Nefertiti and see fair skin or beauty as woman’s only power?
In the centuries that followed, poverty and the increasing alienation of the people from royalty and its Sun God religion led to political unrest and even to the ultimate crime of robbing tombs of the riches with which royalty had hoped to enter eternity. Soon, the Egyptian appetite for dynasty and conquest as well as increasing numbers of invasions from the outside world had brought confrontations with Libyan, Nubian, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, and Roman forces, each group leaving behind them the images of gods who looked remarkably like them. The withdrawal of sacredness from all but a few males was now complete, and even for them religion meant worshiping an authority that was not in themselves.
This trip down the Nile was like living through the steps to patriarchy that Joseph Campbell described in The Masks of God, his study of Western mythology: a world created by a great goddess, a world created by both a goddess and her consort, a world created by a male from the body of the goddess, and finally, a world created by a male god alone.
But reading James Henry Breasted, the early-twentieth-century scholar of ancient Egypt, I found this process put more simply: “Monotheism is but imperialism in religion.”
Before I began that trip down the Nile, I hadn’t thought of myself as someone whose life had been limited by religion, and so the freedom I felt while visiting those earliest temples came as a complete surprise. It was the return of a self-esteem and spiritual connectedness I hadn’t known was missing—or possible.
In moments of sorrow or joy, too many of us are forced to turn to ceremonies that falsely elevate some and demean others, that separate us from nature, that make us feel ashamed of sacred parts of ourselves. It will take courage, creativity, and community to replace them with inclusive ceremonies that mark life passages; rituals that externalize universal myths and nature’s symbols of old and continuing mysteries—and exclude no one. But as the quotations that begin this section show, all religions still have within them some tradition of listening to an inner voice and therefore acknowledging the sacred worth of each individual and of nature. As new archeological discoveries and ways of carbon-dating them show, the last 5,000 to 7,000 years of patriarchy, monotheism, and racism are a brief moment in the vast progression of human history that now seems to have extended for at least three and a half million years. If more than 95 percent of human history existed before this period we are taught to think of as history, there can be an even longer after.
All we have to remember is this: Seeing holiness only in others—or only in our own group—is the problem. Seeing the sacred in ourselves and in all living things is the solution.
Years later, Ella died without ever becoming a deacon. To the end, no matter what her preacher or neighbors said, she displayed on her living room wall that poster of God as a black woman. She had dared to claim the Hand of God as a symbol of creation. Though the creative power being symbolized lay within her own female body, she was counted a rebel.
As heir to the Great Cosmic Mother, Ella deserved more.
We all do.