He says that he is not part of this world, that he was set on this world as a stranger.1
Circle One—three miles across: winds of 500 miles an hour; destruction of all buildings, including steel-reinforced office structures; most people in the area killed outright.2
Circle of hands . . . circle of arms around each other’s bodies . . . circle of voices . . . circle of power.
Well my own daughter, Sherry, she’s eleven, has deterioration of the bones in the middle ear. She just got a hearing aid and she already needs a stronger one.3
In the circle we chant each other’s names. We place our hands on each other’s bodies for comfort, for healing. We share our pain. “When do you feel powerless?” we ask each other. “And when do you feel a sense of your own power?”
Circle Two—six miles across: winds of 300 miles an hour; stone and concrete buildings destroyed; exposed people, if not killed, critically burned.2
“Giving birth to my baby—I felt power then . . .”
“Planting my garden, or weaving . . .” “When I can speak out honestly, and say what I really feel . . .” “Organizing—putting out the flyers and seeing all the people come to the march . . .” “Joining with other people to work together, that’s when I feel power . . .” “When I do what I’m afraid to do . . .”
And she has a double row of bottom teeth and a sub-cleft palate. She was born with a hole in her heart and an enlarged liver. She has slight retardation too.3
On whose world is the sun going down, Sisters and brothers, dare we claim it, dare we lose it again?4
Diane Di Prima
Revolutionary Letter #70
As I write, the cats play on my desk, grooming themselves, batting my papers to the floor, or curling up to sleep, secure in the familiar. Their minds do not encompass 500-mile-an-hour winds, or the possibility that what is familiar can be transformed in a flash to charred bone and flesh.
We cannot feel as secure. The newspapers describe what would happen if the city were hit by a nuclear bomb; they tell of pesticides in well water, of a nuclear alert triggered by computer error, of children damaged by chemical wastes.
It seems the sun is going down on everybody’s world, that we are about to lose what can never be reclaimed. Our acts of power seem frail compared with the powers of destruction. There are too many enemies, too many burial sites for chemical wastes, too many weapons already in the stockpiles. There are too many jobless, too many hopeless, too many rapists at large. Too many of those who wield great powers are unconcerned. They do not feel that they are a part of this world.
Circle Three—eight miles across: winds of 160 miles an hour, destruction of brick and wood frame houses; exposed people seriously burned.
Even the small acts that ordinarily bring us pleasure or comfort become tinged at moments with horror. There are times when I walk down the street, and smile at the man who sits on his front stoop playing the radio, and the kids laying pennies on the streetcar tracks, and the woman whose dog plays with my dogs, but in between the blinks of my eyes they are gone. I see the flash, and then nothing is left—of these charmingly painted Victorian houses, of these ordinary people, or the features of the earth beneath these streets. Nothing—but ashes and a scorched, black void.
I know that I am not alone in being overwhelmed at times by hopelessness and despair. I hear the same fears from my friends, my family, from the clients who come to me for counseling. Everybody’s personal pain is touched by this greater uncertainty: we are no longer confident of leaving a better world—of leaving a living world, to our children.
Yet the children must be fed, the dogs must still be walked, the work must go on, so we raise the barriers that defend us from unbearable pain, and in a state of numbness and denial we go on. The work may seem flat, but we carefully avoid questioning its meaning and its usefulness, even though we sense that something deep and sweet is missing from our lives, our families, our friendships; some sense of purpose, of power, is gone. And still the children grow up around us, no less beautiful than any other generation of children, and still when we poke a seed into the earth it continues to push forth roots and unfurl stem, leaf, flower, fruit. There are still moments when we see the processes of life continue to unfold, when we cannot help believing that life is moved by a power deeper than the power of the gun and the bomb; a power that might still prevail if we knew how to call it forth.
This book is about the calling forth of power, a power based on a principle very different from power-over, from domination. For power-over is, ultimately, the power of the gun and the bomb, the power of annihilation that backs up all the institutions of domination.
Yet the power we sense in a seed, in the growth of a child, the power we feel writing, weaving, working, creating, making choices, has nothing to do with threats of annihilation. It has more to do with the root meaning of the word power, from the (late popular) Latin, podere (“to be able”). It is the power that comes from within.
There are many names for power-from-within, none of them entirely satisfying. It can be called spirit—but that name implies that it is separate from matter, and that false split, as we shall see, is the foundation of the institutions of domination. It could be called God—but the God of patriarchal religions has been the ultimate source and repository of power-over. I have called it immanence, a term that is truthful but somewhat cold and intellectual. And I have called it Goddess, because the ancient images, symbols, and myths of the Goddess as birth-giver, weaver, earth and growing plant, wind and ocean, flame, web, moon and milk, all speak to me of the powers of connectedness, sustenance, healing, creating.
The word Goddess makes many people who would define themselves as “political” uneasy. It implies religion, secularism, and can be mistaken for the worship of an external being. “Goddess” also makes many people who would define themselves as “spiritual” or “religious” uneasy; it smacks of Paganism, of blood, darkness, and sexuality, of lower powers.
Yet power-from-within is the power of the low, the dark, the earth; the power that arises from our blood, and our lives, and our passionate desire for each other’s living flesh. And the political issues of our time are also issues of spirit, conflicts between paradigms or underlying principles. If we are to survive the question becomes: how do we overthrow, not those presently in power, but the principle of power-over? How do we shape a society based on the principle of power-from-within?
A change in paradigms, in consciousness, always makes us uneasy. Whenever we feel the slightly fearful, slightly embarrassed sensation that words like Goddess produce, we can be sure that we are on the track of a deep change in the structure as well as the content of our thinking. To reshape the very principle of power upon which our culture is based, we must shake up all the old divisions. The comfortable separations no longer work. The questions are broader than the terms religious or political imply; they are questions of complex connections. For though we are told that such issues are separate: that rape is an issue separate from nuclear war, that a woman’s struggle for equal pay is not related to a black teenager’s struggle to find a job or to the struggle to prevent the export of a nuclear reactor to a site on a web of earthquake faults near active volcanoes in the Phillipines, all these realities are shaped by the consciousness that shapes our power relationships. Those relationships in turn shape our economic and social systems; our technology; our science; our religions; our views of women and men; our views of races and cultures that differ from our own; our sexuality; our Gods and our wars. They are presently shaping the destruction of the world.
I call this consciousness estrangement5 because its essence is that we do not see ourselves as part of the world. We are strangers to nature, to other human beings, to parts of ourselves. We see the world as made up of separate, isolated, nonliving parts that have no inherent value. (They are not even dead—because death implies life.) Among things inherently separate and lifeless, the only power relationships possible are those of manipulation and domination.
Estrangement is the culmination of a long historical process. Its roots lie in the Bronze-Age shift from matrifocal, earth-centered cultures whose religions centered on the Goddess and Gods embodied in nature, to patriarchal urban cultures of conquest, whose Gods inspired and supported war. Yahweh of the Old Testament is a prime example, promising His Chosen People dominion over plant and animal life, and over other peoples whom they were encouraged to invade and conquer. Christianity deepened the split, establishing a duality between spirit and matter that identified flesh, nature, woman, and sexuality with the Devil and the forces of evil. God was envisioned as male—uncontaminated by the processes of birth, nurturing, growth, menstruation, and decay of the flesh. He was removed from this world to a transcendent realm of spirit somewhere else. Goodness and true value were removed from nature and the world as well. As Engels saw it, “Religion is essentially the emptying of man and nature of all content, the transferring of this content to the phantom of a distant God who then in his turn graciously allows something from his abundance to come to human beings and to nature.”6
The removal of content, of value, serves as the basis for the exploitation of nature. Historian Lynn White states that when “the spirits in natural objects, which formerly had protected nature from man, evaporated” under the influence of Christianity, “man’s effective monopoly on spirit in this world was confirmed, and the old inhibitions to the exploitation of nature crumbled.”7 No longer were the groves and forests sacred. The concept of a sacred grove, of a spirit embodied in nature, was considered idolatrous. But when nature is empty of spirit, forest and trees become merely timber,8 something to be measured in board feet, valued only for its profitability, not for its being, its beauty, or even its part in the larger ecosystem.
The removal of content from human beings allows the formation of power relationships in which human beings are exploited. Inherent value, humanness, is reserved for certain classes, races, for the male sex; their power-over others is thus legitimized. Male imagery of God authenticates men as the carriers of humanness and legitimizes male rule. The whiteness of God, the identification of good with light and evil with dark, identifies whiteness as the carrier of humanness, and legitimizes the rule of whites over those with dark skin. Even when we no longer believe literally in a male, white God, the institutions of society embody his image in their structures. Women and people of color are not present in the top levels of the hierarchies that wield power-over. Our history, our experience, our presence can be erased, ignored, trivialized. The content of culture is assumed to be the history and the experience of white, upper-class males. The pain of all of us who are seen as the other—the poor and the working classes; lesbians and gay men; those who have physical disabilities; those who have been labeled mentally ill; the rainbow of different races, religions, and ethnic heritages; all women, but especially those who do not fit into culturally defined roles—is not just the pain of direct discrimination, it is the pain of being negated again and again. It is the pain of knowing that our concerns will not be addressed unless we bring them up ourselves, and that even then they will be seen as peripheral, not central, to culture, to art, to policy.
As we become separate, and are manipulated as objects, we lose our own sense of self-worth, our belief in our own content. and acquiesce in our own exploitation. When we women, for example, see men as embodying the content of the culture, and ourselves as not possessing inherent value, we submit to the rule of men and devote our energies and talents to furthering men’s desires instead of our own. Historically, Christianity has reconciled workers, slaves, women, and people of color to the position of inferiors by denying value to the conditions of this life and assigning it to some future existence in heaven, where the meek and submissive will be rewarded.
Because we doubt our own content, we doubt the evidence of our senses and the lessons of our own experience. We see our own drives and desires as inherently chaotic and destructive, in need of repression and control, just as we see nature as a wild chaotic force, in need of order imposed by human beings.
In The Death of Nature, Carolyn Merchant documents the way the rise of modern science and the economic needs of preindustrial capitalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shifted the “normative image” of that world from that of a living organism to that of a dead machine.9 That shift, accompanied and helped by the Witch persecutions, supported exploitation of nature on a scale previously unknown. (See Appendix A, “The Burning Times,” for further elaboration.) The “machine image”, the view of the world as composed of isolated, nonliving parts blindly moving on their own, grew out of a Christian context in which divinity and spirit had long been removed from matter. Modern science undermined belief in the last repository of spirit when it killed off God after he had sucked the life out of the world. Nothing is left now but the littered corpses, the hierarchical patterns of our institutions—the Church, the army, the government, the corporation—all embodying the principle of authoritarian power, all formed in the image of the patriarchal God with his subordinated troops of angels, engaged in perpetual war with the patriarchal Devil and his subordinate troops of demons.
No longer do we see ourselves as having even a dubious dignity as flawed images of God. Instead we imagine ourselves in the image of the machine as flawed computers with faulty childhood programming. We are left in the empty world described ad nauseam in twentieth-century art, literature, and music—from Sartre to the Sex Pistols.
In the empty world, we trust only what can be measured, counted, acquired. The organizing principle of society becomes what Marcuse termed the performance principle,10 the stratification of society according to the economic performance of its members. Content is removed from work itself, which is organized not according to its usefulness or true value, but according to its ability to create profits. Those who actually produce goods or offer services are less well rewarded than those engaged in managing and counting this output, or stimulating false need. We are told in the business section of the morning paper that oil company Vice Presidents, for example, deny that their corporations are in the business of providing Americans with fuel and energy—rather, they are in the business of providing their investors with profits.
Science and technology, based on principles of isolation and domination of nature, grow crops and lumber by using pesticides and herbicides that also cause birth defects, nerve damage, and cancer when they infiltrate our food and water supplies. Claiming a high order of rationality, technologists build nuclear reactors producing wastes that remain dangerous for a quarter of a million years—and consign these wastes to storage containers that last from thirty to fifty years.
Estrangement permeates our educational system, with its separate and isolated disciplines. Estrangement determines our understanding of the human mind and the capabilities of consciousness, our psychology. Freud viewed human drives and libido as essentially dangerous, chaotic forces at odds with the “reality principle” of the ego. The behaviorists assure us that we are only what can be measured—only behavior and patterns of stimulus and response. Jung replaced a transcendent God with a set of transcendent archetypes, a slight improvement, but one that still leaves us caught in rigid, sex-role stereotypes.11
Sexuality, under the rule of the Father-God, is identified with his Opposition—with nature, woman, life, death, and decay—the forces that threaten God’s pristine abstraction and so are considered evil.12 In the empty world of the machine, when religious strictures fall away, sex becomes another arena of performance, another commodity to be bought and sold. The erotic becomes the pornographic; women are seen as objects empty of value except when they can be used. The sexual arena becomes one of domination, charged with rage, fear, and violence.
And so we live our lives feeling powerless and inauthentic—feeling that the real people are somewhere else, that the characters on the daytime soap operas or the conversations on the late-night talk shows are more real than the people and the conversations in our lives; believing that the movie stars, the celebrities, the rock stars, the People Magazine-people live out the real truth and drama of our times, while we exist as shadows, and our unique lives, our losses, our passions, which cannot be counted out or measured, which were not approved, or graded, or sold to us at a discount, are not the true value of this world.
Estrangement permeates our society so strongly that to us it seems to be consciousness itself. Even the language for other possibilities has disappeared or been deliberately twisted. Yet another form of consciousness is possible. Indeed, it has existed from earliest times, underlies other cultures, and has survived even in the West in hidden streams. This is the consciousness I call immanence—the awareness of the world and everything in it as alive, dynamic, interdependent, interacting, and infused with moving energies: a living being, a weaving dance.
The Goddess can be seen as the symbol, the normative image of immanence. She represents the divine embodied in nature, in human beings, in the flesh. The Goddess is not one image but many—a constellation of forms and associations—earth, air, fire, water, moon and star, sun, flower and seed, willow and apple, black, red, white, Maiden, Mother, and Crone. She includes the male in her aspects: He becomes child and Consort, stag and bull, grain and reaper, light and dark. Yet the femaleness of the Goddess is primary not to denigrate the male, but because it represents bringing life into the world, valuing the world. The Goddess, The Mother as symbol of that value, tells us that the world itself is the content of the world, its true value, its heart, and its soul.
Historically, cultures centered on the Goddess and Gods embodied in nature underlie all the later patriarchal cultures. Images of the Goddess are the first known images of worship, and are found in paleolithic sites. The beginnings of agriculture, weaving, pottery, writing, building, and city-dwelling—all the arts and sciences upon which later civilizations developed—began in cultures of the Goddess.
When patriarchy became the ruling force in Western culture, remnants of the religions and culture based on immanence were preserved by pagans [from the Latin word, paganus “rustic or country dweller”] in folk customs, in esoteric tradition, and in covens of Witches.13 The cultures of Native Americans and tribal peoples in Africa, Asia, and Polynesia were also based on a world-view of immanence that saw spirit and transformative power embodied in the natural world.
Ironically, as estranged science and technology advance, they have begun to bring us back to a consciousness of immanence. Modern physics no longer speaks of separate, discrete atoms of dead matter, but of waves of energy, probabilities, patterns that change as they are observed; it recognizes what Shamans and Witches have always known: that matter and energy are not separate forces, but different forms of the same thing.
The image of the Goddess strikes at the roots of estrangement. True value is not found in some heaven, some abstract otherworld, but in female bodies and their offspring, female and male; in nature; and in the world. Nature is seen as having its own inherent order, of which human beings are a part. Human nature, needs, drives, and desires are not dangerous impulses in need of repression and control, but are themselves expressions of the order inherent in being. The evidence of our senses and our experience is evidence of the divine—the moving energy that unites all being.
For women, the symbol of the Goddess is profoundly liberating, restoring a sense of authority and power to the female body and all the life processes: birth, growth, lovemaking, aging, and death. In Western culture the association of women and nature has been used to devalue both. The imagery of the immanent Goddess imparts both to women and to nature the highest value. At the same time culture is no longer seen as something removed from and opposed to nature. Culture is an outgrowth of nature—a product of human beings who are part of the natural world. The Goddess of nature is also the muse, the inspiration of culture, and women are full participants in creating and furthering culture, art, literature, and science. The Goddess as mother embodies creativity as much as biological motherhood. She represents women’s authority over our own life processes, our right to choose consciously how and when and what we will create.
The female image of divinity does not, however, provide a justification for the oppression of men. The female, who gives birth to the male, includes the male in a way that male divinities cannot include the female. The Goddess gives birth to a pantheon that is inclusive rather than exclusive. She is not a jealous God. She is often seen with a male aspect—child or consort. In Witchcraft, the male aspect is seen as the Horned God of animal life, feeling, and vital energy. Manifesting within human beings and nature, the Goddess and God restore content and value to human nature, drives, desires, and emotions.
Many people will prefer the concept of immanence without the symbol attached. I hope they will feel free to translate what follows in this book into terms or images that seem right to them. I prefer the symbol to the abstraction because it evokes sensual and emotional, not just intellectual, responses. However, I recognize that there is a danger in the use of any symbol—that people will forget the principles it represents. The Goddess could be taken as an object of external worship in a context no less hierarchical and oppressive than that of any religion of patriarchy. Let us be clear that when I say Goddess I am not talking about a being somewhere outside of this world, nor am I proposing a new belief system. I am talking about choosing an attitude: choosing to take this living world, the people and creatures on it, as the ultimate meaning and purpose of life, to see the world, the earth, and our lives as sacred.
To say something is sacred is to say that we respect, cherish, and value it for its own being. When the world is seen as being made up of living, dynamic, interconnected, inherently valuable beings, power can no longer be “seen as something people have—kings, czars, generals hold power as one holds a knife.”14 Immanent power, power-from-within, is not something we have but something we can do. We can choose to cooperate or to withdraw cooperation from any system. The power relationships and institutions of immanence must support and further the ability of individuals to shape the choices and decisions that affect them. And those choices must also recognize the interconnectedness of individuals in a community of beings and resources that all have inherent value.
It is challenging to try to envision a society based on that principle. The implications are radical and far-reaching, because all of our present society’s institutions, from the most oppressive to the most benign, are based on the authority some individuals hold that allows them to control others.
A change this broad may at first appear threatening, Utopian, or impossible. A society based on the principle of immanence would certainly not be Utopian. It would be dynamic, alive with the drama of conflicting needs and choices, with a constant demand for new and creative solutions. Conflict, when it is not resolved with violence, spurs growth and keeps life interesting. Nor would the creation of such a society be impossible, although it would undoubtedly be difficult. It would mean choosing different priorities, envisioning new forms and new structures, and grappling with new problems.
All of us have vested interests in some aspects of our present society. The way we live provides many comforts and pleasures, along with the hurts, and even the hurts are familiar hurts that may seem preferable to the unknown. Change in society may mean some of us have to forgo the privileges of our status in hierarchical structures. But a society based on immanence would be one that values comfort and pleasure. Perhaps we would learn deeper pleasures, richer joys. Perhaps the comfort of knowing that the continuance of life is no longer threatened would be worth forgoing many things.
Much of this book is devoted to the work of envisioning immanence manifest in the structures of our individual selves and our communities. Much of it also tackles the question: how do we bring this about?
The answers I propose involve magic, which I define as the art of changing consciousness at will. According to that definition, magic encompasses political action, which is aimed at changing consciousness and thereby causing change.
Magic is another word that makes people uneasy, so I use it deliberately, because the words we are comfortable with, the words that sound acceptable, rational, scientific, and intellectually sound, are comfortable precisely because they are the language of estrangement.
Magic can be very prosaic. A leaflet, a lawsuit, a demonstration, or a strike can change consciousness. Magic can also be very esoteric, encompassing all the ancient techniques of deepening awareness, of psychic development, and of heightened intuition.
Those techniques, like any techniques, can be taught in hierarchical structures or misused in attempts to gain power-over. But their essence is inherently antihierarchical. As a means of gaining power-over, magic is not very effective—hence its association with self-deception, illusion, and charlatanry in our society. Magical techniques are effective for and based upon the calling forth of power-from-within, because magic is the psychology/technology of immanence, of the understanding that everything is connected.
When we practice magic we are always making connections, moving energy, identifying with other forms of being. Magic could be called the applied science that is based on an understanding of how energy makes patterns and patterns direct energy. To put it another way, at its heart is a paradox:
Consciousness shapes reality;
Reality shapes consciousness.
At this moment, my consciousness is shaped by many realities, from my class background to the caffeine in my bloodstream. I would be writing differently if I couldn’t pay the rent this month, or if I were drinking peppermint tea instead of dark French roast.
Your consciousness is being shaped by the reality of these words that have the authority of the printed page. You would hear them differently if we were jogging in the park together—I in a torn sweatshirt, yelling at my dogs.
Yet the way our consciousnesses, yours—and mine too, as I write—are shaped by these words may cause us to act in new ways, to make different choices, to use our power-from-within in ways that are different from those we would use if we thought differently. And our actions, our choices, will shape the world around us in different ways.
Magic is art—that is, it has to do with forms, with structures, with images that can shift us out of the limitations imposed by our culture in a way that words alone cannot, with visions that hint at possibilities of fulfillment not offered by the empty world.
And magic is will—action, directed energy, choices made not once but many times, as this writing is an act of will as well as art, made up of hundreds of thousands of small decisions, of the choice, made over and over again to sit down at the typewriter and do it instead of the infinity of other things life offers. Those choices have led me to other choices, out of despair into action, risk, and hope.
And we have reason to hope. The forces of destruction seem great, but against them we have our power to choose, our human will and imagination, our courage, our passion, our willingness to act and to love. And we are not, in truth, strangers to this world.
We are part of the circle.
When we plant, when we weave, when we write, when we give birth, when we organize, when we heal, when we run through the park while the redwoods sweat mist, when we do what we’re afraid to do, we are not separate. We are of the world and of each other, and the power within us is a great, if not an invincible power. Though we can be hurt, we can heal; though each one of us can be destroyed, within us is the power of renewal.
And there is still time to choose that power.