Coven Raving is meeting. As always when we meet, we talk about our lives, about our needs, about our lovers or lack of lovers.
We are gathered under a high Victorian ceiling in a flat in the Mission district. The sashes are drawn as the time comes to work magic. We take off our clothes.
That is relevant, because our magic, our deliberate linking and focusing of minds, our raising and molding of subtle energies, our touching of each other, our intimacy, is not separate from our sexuality. Nor can our sexuality be separated from our magic. We are not lovers with each other, but we are five naked women in the small room, and as we breathe together, inhaling and exhaling in unison, becoming one—one breath, one organism—the air is heavy with odors that are earthy, spicy, fetid. We are exotic flowers; we are slowly-eroding-over-a-lifetime flesh.
We are Witches. We pursue together the Mysteries. And sexuality, not in its narrow but its broadest sense, is the essence of those Mysteries.
I am writing now beside a lake that is 7000 feet up in the Sierras. The still water is a perfect mirror, reflecting the rounded outcroppings of pink and gray granite, which have been molded into forms that undulate and are sexual. Cracks suggest vaginas and their stony, clitoral protrusions. The line where rock meets water becomes the body’s line of symmetry. The Goddess stretches out Her arms: a fallen log and its mirror image, to protect Her hidden clefts. Her pendulous breasts, looked at from the opposite side, become uprising penises. Up here, it seems clear that earth is truly Her flesh and was formed by a sexual process: Her shakes and shudders and moans of pleasure, the orgasmic release of molten rock spewing forth in fiery eruptions, the slow caress of glaciers, like white hands gently smoothing all that had been left jagged.
Up here it seems clear—not that everything is sexual, but that sexuality is an expression of the moving force that underlies everything and gives it life.
Light penetrates the water. A fat log, weathered to silver, thrusts into the lake’s green depths. We dive from it; our skin tingling with the sudden rush of cold, then slither on our bellies back along its surface, which is slippery underwater. Wrapping our legs around it, we lie on the warm, smooth wood; it is like lying upon a lover.
It seems that sexuality can be a process of mirroring. Self reflects self in the water; in the motions of hands, lips, tongue, genitals; in the thrust and arch of bodies; in attraction; in conversation; in growth and change. Mirroring, we take another into ourselves and become changed by that other. Being mirrored, we are acknowledged, our beings are recognized; we feel our own impact. Mirroring and being mirrored, we create a reverberation, the hum and throb of an energy that lifts us in waves of emotion and sensual pleasure. We create a dance.
No wonder, then, that the mirror was always an attribute of the Goddess of love. The word mirror is related (not etymologically, but in poetic resonances) to mira! (the Spanish “Look!”), myriad, and miracle; mer and mar (the “sea”), the seductive mermaid; merry, marry; and to the Goddess-names Miriam, Mariamne, Mari, Maria, Miria.
Mirroring begins with the self. It is our own reflection we see first and recognize as wonderful, as a miracle. All love begins as self-love. (This does not mean, however, that it stops there.) It is some reflection of oneself, some feeling of likeness or connection that first attracts us to a lover. (Here I could be dreary and quote Jung or Freud and theories of projection and transference, but I will not.) “Celebrate yourself, and you will see that Self is everywhere,” is a saying in the Faery tradition of the Craft.
Yet the mirror is easily distorted. The culture of estrangement, which teaches us to denigrate sexuality, makes it impossible to look in the mirror and see a clear reflection of our own instincts and deepest desires. Instead we see a fun-house distortion, a parody. We become diseased.
The root of that disease is power. Sex is an exchange of power in the form of energy that flows between two beings. But the culture of estrangement distorts all power into power-over, into domination. Sexual relations become a field on which questions of power and status are played out. The erotic becomes another arena of domination and submission. Our own sexuality becomes something alien.
This alienation is no accident. Our economic and political systems, our science and technology, are rooted in our alienation from our own bodies and from the realms of deep feeling. The imposition of the puritan ethic in the seventeenth century and the denigration of sexuality that accompanied the Witchburnings created conditions in which capitalism was fostered and peasant classes were forced into alienating wage labor.1 Today, as long as we remain cut off from the sources of deep feeling in our lives, we remain avid consumers of packaged substitutes for feeling that can be sold at a profit to a mass market. When we lose our feeling for beauty, we become willing to accept the ugliness our culture creates. We cut ourselves off from the horror and despair we might otherwise have to acknowledge.
Yet our sexuality can bring us another sort of power, as Audre Lord describes it, “That power which arises from our deepest, non-rational knowledge . . . The erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation . . .”2
A true transformation of our culture would require reclaiming the erotic as power-from-within, as empowerment. The erotic can become the bridge that connects feeling with doing; it can infuse our sense of mastery and control with emotion so that it becomes life-serving instead of destructive. In the dialectic of merging and separating, the erotic can confirm our uniqueness while affirming our deep oneness with all being. It is the realm in which the spiritual, the political, and the personal come together.
Once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our lives’ pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy of which we know ourselves to be capable. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence . . . The demands of our released expectations lead us inevitably into actions which will help bring our lives into accordance with our own needs, our knowledge, our desires.3
The erotic is bound up with the push-pull conflict between union and separation—a conflict that does not disappear after childhood but remains throughout our lives, always present in our work and in our relationships. Eternally, Kore leaves Her mother, descends to the dark, and returns again. Eternally, the God dies and is reborn.
The Goddess who is the mother is the love Goddess, the Goddess of the erotic. This means that through our sexuality we can again connect to the realm of deep feeling we touched as children through our mothers. So the deep forces of life and death, which manifest in mothering and in our development of a sense of ourselves as separate, autonomous beings, also manifest in sexuality.
Sexuality is the way we, as adults, experience this particular dance, deep in the caves of the body. For in sex we merge, give way, become one with another, allow ourselves to be caressed, pleasured, enfolded, allow our sense of separation to dissolve. But in sex we also feel our impact on another, see our own faces reflected in another’s eyes, feel ourselves confirmed, and sense our power, as separate human beings, to make another feel.
In the culture of estrangement, the great dance of life and death, of merging and emerging, is reflected in the fun-house-mirror-distortions of authority. And what we see in the mirror is the gulf our culture creates between feeling and doing, the split that ties women and nature and all oppressed groups to feeling (to being the ground that adapts) and links selfhood to men, to the dominators, the masters, those who perform and control.
So women are taught by this culture to be passive mirrors that reflect the selves of men. “My mother told me,” a friend of mine recounts, “that I would be much more interesting to boys if I listened instead of talking.” Our own selves are made problematic—our own ability, competence, and mastery are a threat to our promised female birthright of secure dependency. No wonder some part of ourselves may respond to pornographic images that depict the troublesome female self being destroyed—reverting to helplessness, to the silence, the dependence of infancy. Women become deluded that if they take in and take in, reflect and reflect, something will finally get through. Something will shake us to the core and awaken the sleeping spark of our own movement.
And men are inculcated with the same disease in reverse: an obsession with impact, with making oneself felt, even if the only impact one can have is destruction, the only feeling one can arouse is pain. The core of men’s identity is their separateness. A separate self, cut off from the sources of its own feeling, must have its existence, its being, confirmed by the reaction it can cause in another. But when that other has been reduced to a non-being, then one’s impact is not felt because there seems to be no one else there to feel it. In reality, the rapist’s victim feels. She suffers, but the mind of the rapist cannot reflect that suffering, so the rapist’s self, his existence, is not confirmed by his act. He annihilates himself with his inability to feel, as he annihilates his victim physically. He strikes out harder and harder, with more and more violence, yet his fist seems to strike a void; nothing happens, there is no response. The real pain, the real death of his victims remains unknown to him, because they were never alive to him. And so culture strikes out against nature, attempting to control, to master, to feel its impact, even though nature herself has not been real to Western culture since the triumph of the mechanist world-view in the seventeenth century (see Appendix A). We cannot hear nature’s cries even when her distress threatens our own survival.
Estranged culture breeds sadists and masochists. We may reverse the roles: a man who wields great power in the hierarchy of the culture, who lives in a nonfeeling self that achieves mastery, may feel his self as a sexual burden, may play out its destruction in masochistic surrender. Women may fear dependency more than the problematic self (if they are smart women); some may search for their sense of mastery and control in the sexual arena, instead of or in addition to, seeking it in other areas of life.
Hierarchy itself is a sadomasochistic thought-form. If we examine the roles played in sadomasochism,4 we can see clearly that what is being played out, over and over again, in the masks of guard and prisoner, teacher and student, priest and supplicant, adult and child, master and servant, is the relationship of power-over. And the perpetuation of hierarchy requires our willingness to play “bottom” in real life, to accept humiliation and subjugation, to acquiesce in the cramping and corruption of our sexuality.
How, then, can we transform our distorted sexuality into empowering eroticism? How do we generate within ourselves the feeling self? If the erotic heals the split between flesh and spirit, can we use its power to heal our own splits, to bridge gaps between the spiritual and the political, to create a culture that serves not only life but joy?
First, we must reject spiritual systems that further the flesh/spirit split. We must reject asceticism, hierarchies, the confining of sex to marriage or reproduction. Spirituality can be voluptuous, sensuous. Religion can mean touching each other, allowing ourselves to feel moments of beauty, of energy, of joy fully. If the Goddess is immanent in flesh and nature, then our practice deepens our connection to flesh and nature. “All acts of love and pleasure are my rituals,” She says.
We must also demand that our politics serve our sexuality. Too often, we have asked sexuality to serve politics instead. Ironically, the same movements that have criticized sexual repression and bourgeois morality have themselves too often tried to mold their sexual feeling to serve the current political theory. This tradition includes nineteenth century revolutionary ascetism, the New Left’s demand that women practice free love (meaning sex without involvement), the fear of lesbianism in the early women’s movement, and the mandatory separatist line taken by some in the later women’s movement. Too many generations have asked: What do my politics tell me I should feel? The better question is: What do I, at my root, at my core, desire?
If we see that root of desire as the Goddess incarnate, as the source of power-from-within, if we honor it and explore it with eyes open, then we can ask: how do I create a society that furthers my sexuality? How can I live my politics erotically, so that they deepen my knowledge of the mysteries, so that they deepen my capacity for joy?
Such politics are dangerous. They are extremely threatening to patriarchal society, because they threaten the roots of hierarchical power relationships.
That is why the movements for lesbian and gay liberation are threatening—and why they are vitally important to any real movement for change. Sexual desire for a person of one’s own gender challenges the idea that the only valid purpose of sex is reproduction; it means that sexuality is valued for its own sake, for pleasure, not as a means to an end.
Lesbians, women loving women, are threatening because they are women refusing to serve as ground for the male self. They withdraw the flow of nurturing upon which the cut-off male self depends, affirming, instead, selfhood in each other, nurturing and strengthening each other.
The gay men’s movement has aspects that are threatening to patriarchy and potentially liberating, as well as aspects that may be oppressive and can reproduce the power relationships of patriarchy. Men who are cut off from feeling may substitute male bodies for female bodies as objects, and may treat each other as commodities. Yet men who truly love men, who are willing to be each other’s ground and support, are potential sources of far-reaching change. The Faeries, for example, deliberately attempt to re-link the feeling and doing selves by identifying with the Goddess. Thus they reconnect with the ground of life and death. To see men who deliberately embrace the characteristics associated with women (softness, silliness, wearing costumes, decorating themselves, nurturing, being vulnerable)—may be terrifying to other men because so much male identity in the estranged culture depends on a difference from women, that is, it is negatively defined. Yet beyond the fear may be the power to redefine the male self positively as a rooted whole, not a severed part.
However, we should not fall into the trap of saying one can only be a true feminist if one is a lesbian, or that one must be gay to be a liberated man. Desire does not follow the mind’s dictates. Women and men may have to struggle through more masks, more sets of expectations, as they attempt together to work out sexual relationships not based on power-over. But that struggle is vital. To honor sexuality is, ultimately, to stop defining ourselves in terms of our sexual partners, to realize that the richness of sexual attraction and expression lies in its hues, its infinite shadings, and only our cultural estrangement restricts us to the three primary colors.
I feel an obligation, at this point, to say a few words about committed, monogamous relationships, if only because that is what I practice. Commitment, even marriage, does not have to be based on the principle of power-over. It can be a deliberate choice to focus one’s energy on another human being with depth and passion. In marriage, whether it is legal or informal, heterosexual or lesbian or gay, we go through stages that take us around the magic circle, much as we do in groups. We fall in love with a vision—often an airy projection of some idealized part of ourselves. We pass through fiery phases during which we fight over power, and stages of flowing and merging together. When we live together with someone, we must also ground the relationship by caring for all the mundane things of earth. Through the struggle, we begin to see our partner as distinct from our images and fantasies, as a real and separate human being who values what is real in us (not our idealized image, nor our reduction to an object that serves another’s needs) as ourselves.
An erotic politics cannot be based on hierarchical structures. Any authoritarian structure, regardless of its party line or position, reinforces the power relationships of oppression and alienation. The circles we spin can become erotic structures, based on personal contact and connection. In small groups we can share feelings, we can touch and stroke each other, cry together or laugh together, as well as do business. Circles remain small so we see each other, reflect each other, and our unique personalities have an impact on others to whom we feel connected. A movement of small groups is strengthened by an underlying network of human connections, a weaving of close relationships that bind it like warp and weft. Community is inherently erotic.
Sex is energy. What gives the physical exchange its excitement, its intensity, is the movement of vital energy, an energy not limited to human beings, but present in earth, air, water, fire, in plants and animals, in all living things. Understanding that the erotic is energy opens up the potential for an erotic relationship with the earth.5 We can love nature, not just aesthetically, but carnally, with our meat, our bones. That sort of love threatens all the proprieties of estranged culture. Love that mirrors the wildness of nature can move us into the struggle to protect her, and can give us the deep strength we need. That love is connection. When we feel it deeply, perhaps with an oak, when we feel the tree’s aura move into our bodies, feel our energy flow through the ground into its roots, let ourselves merge and feel at one with its tree-ness, we are sustained in the fight to keep the ax from its trunk, the radiation from its leaves.
To recognize that the erotic is energy is to restore eros to the whole body, to escape its limitations to a few narrow zones of pleasure. The whole body becomes an organ of delight. With it we can respond with pleasure to the vast beauty of the living world.
Eros as energy shapes many aspects of culture and appears in many forms: raw, instinctive lust; personal, bonded love; and the power to heal, to learn, to create. In a culture of immanence, sexuality would be honored in all its diverse appearances.
Instinctive sexuality, animal lust, was recognized in other cultures as a sacred force. Untamed eros was known to generate powerful energies connected with growth and with the fertility of plant and animal life. The so-called fertility rites in the ploughed fields, and the sacred orgies that so outraged the Biblical patriarchs, were religious celebrations that honored the sacredness of instinct, and the power of the life-force that pulses no less through our human bodies than through the bodies of other animals.
It is hard for us to imagine what such rites were like. In our culture, everything impersonal is exploited. If we experience impersonal, lusty sex, it is not in the context of connection—of knowing ourselves as nature or as animal—but in the context of the marketplace. So the young women who offered up their virginity at the gates of Babylonian temples are today termed prostitutes, yet in their own society they were acting as priestesses, learning to honor the Goddess instinct in themselves and the God Eros in whatever shape he chose to appear.
The erotic is also the personal. The interweaving of energies creates a bond—perhaps, indeed, that is the test of what is truly erotic—it creates a bond that is not based on exploitation.
The exchange of erotic energy creates patterns, forms, entities, an energy structure. Traditionally, it is the basis of the family (at least since the ideal of romantic love came to replace arranged marriages based on economics). Potentially, the erotic bond could be the model for all other associations, all connections in freedom. But in patriarchal culture, the family itself becomes another arena of authority, a hierarchical structure of dominance. The family mirrors the culture; the culture mirrors the family. And children, growing within a family, reflect its structure in the formation of their innermost selves. So our psyches grow in patterns of authority and domination. And the families we create, the relationships we establish, become corrupted by our struggles for power-over each other. Love is rarely as clear as the reflection of a log in the water.
Yet that same energy can be the source of a new bond. It can link our circles together—not because we rub genitals together but because we allow our meetings to be steeped in feeling, to contain acts of beauty and touching.
In a culture of immanence, the erotic infuses all the relationships that in our culture are based on power-over. Healing, in that context, becomes an act of shifting energies, not one of control. It is based on caring, not mechanics, whether it is a healing of the heart, the mind, or the body. It takes place in a context that is not sterile, but sensual, infused with beauty and emotion. In healing we can experience our profound terror of annihilation, of the betrayal and decay of our bodies, and our psyches. Through this experience we can know the depths of our desire for life, for health, for connection.
Teaching and learning, too, become erotic endeavors—not sterile exercises in mastery of facts, but journeys together. In Reclaiming (our feminist spirituality collective) when we teach the arts of magic, each class, each workshop is itself a ritual. We do not just explain the Goddess, we invoke Her; we create the bond, arouse the power so that each student knows it in her or his own body, in an individual way. Our purpose, as teachers, is not to demonstrate our knowledge or our power, but to create a context that evokes power-from-within each person in the circle.
Work, too, can become alive with erotic power. The purpose of the ancient fertility rites was not only to awaken the earth’s energy and draw it into the prepared ground to infuse the year’s seed. It was to charge even the labor of planting, of weeding, of picking the harvest with evocative memories, and to link each act of work with the deep forces of life and death.
Not all work, of course, is pleasurable or potentially sensual. Yet even in routine work, we can feel our impact on the world, see ourselves mirrored in a change we have brought about—as we fix something that is broken, clean something that is dirty, build something that didn’t exist before.
What makes work alienating is the hierarchical structure in which our efforts, our pace, our needs, our sense of timing, our connection with our own bodies’ rhythms and with our friends and coworkers, are all shaped to serve somebody else’s ends. When we are valued only as objects, for the most mechanical of our abilities, when our work serves the ends that seem meaningless or even harmful to us, we are alienated.
To change the nature of work would be to change the underlying basis of society. We are challenged to find or create jobs and ways to work that restore value to the work itself, instead of the profits extracted from it. For work that has inherent value becomes erotic in the sense of connecting, enabling us to bond to the world in meaningful ways, to use our power, our abilities, and to see their results.
Esoteric teachings about sex describe a quality called polarity. Polarity is a quality of energy, a flow, like the electric field that is generated between the positive and the negative poles of a magnet. The currents of polarity are very powerful forces, and magical training often focuses on learning to recognize and channel those currents.
The simplest aspect of polarity is the energy that flows between women and men. In many traditional Craft groups, tantric groups, and some Native American traditions, female/male polarity is the juice, so to speak, that makes the magic work. So, some covens insist on an equal number of males and females in the circle, and some male Shamans must have a close connection with a woman in order to raise power.
Polarity can also be created internally, however. If a woman creates an inner male, or a man creates an inner female, polarity can flow between the person and what we call the companion self. It is important, however, not to associate the companion self with qualities, such as aggression or passivity, that are traditionally considered male or female. The companion self is not the Jungian anima or animus, and it does not complete one’s personality. Instead, it is a source of energy. To resort to a mechanistic metaphor, creating a companion self is like building a generator in the basement instead of plugging into outside power lines.
And polarity does not have to be generated either between two partners according to the heterosexual model. There are female/female and male/male polarities, each of which can also be generated or within a person by the creation of a same-sex double. These currents may have a different flavor but be equal in power and sometimes stronger than heterosexual polarities. Which form of polarity one chooses to work with is a matter of personal taste and inclination. But within a healthy community, all forms are necessary if a balance is to be sustained.
But polarity cannot be described, only experienced. Readers who feel ready for the experience might try some of the following training exercises:
In a warm, private place, stand naked in front of a full-length mirror. Place a bowl of salt water at your feet. Ground and center. (See the description of the Tree of Life for one method of doing this. Others are described in The Spiral Dance.)6
Look at your body and like it. Let yourself take pleasure in looking at every part of it.
If you don’t like your body, you are not alone. Most of us in this culture are trained to hate our bodies—to wish they looked some other way.
Imagine that your feeling of dislike for your body is a murky stream that flows out of you on your breath into the salt water. Pick up the bowl and breathe into it. Let yourself make sounds that help to carry the bad feelings away.
When you feel ready, relax. Breathing deeply, from your belly, draw energy up from the earth, like a clear stream of water that flows into the salt water and clears away all the negativity. When the water is clear and begins to glow, take a sip—because you are not trying to get rid of your negative feelings; you are transforming them to free the energy they contain.
Repeat this ritual at regular intervals until you can love your body. It is also helpful to try some new activity, such as dance, massage, hiking, or some sport that allows you to feel strong and take pleasure in your body. Do not diet or attempt to change the way your body looks—work on learning to love it the way it is.
Again, stand before the mirror. Ground and center. Look at your body and like it.
Now imagine that the image in the mirror is your twin. She/he is your dear friend, someone who loves you. Let a feeling of warmth and affection flow from you to your double. Breathe into it from your belly—make sounds that strengthen the energy and movements that help it flow. Let it build until it becomes a powerful current.
Notice the feel of that current. Find a name for your double, and an image or word you can use to evoke the feeling you are experiencing now.
You can talk with your double, or, if you like, make love with her/him.
When you are done, thank your double and ask how you can call her/him back again. Ground the energy by placing your hands on the earth (or on the floor, as the case may be) and visualizing the currents returning into the ground.
Stand before the mirror. Ground and center. Again, look in the mirror and like yourself. Let a feeling of warmth and affection flow from you to the image in the mirror.
Now imagine that the image in the mirror begins to change. If you are a woman, it becomes more male. If you are a man, it becomes more female. The change moves slowly downward, from your hair to your face, your eyes, nose, mouth, jaw, throat and neck, shoulders, chest, breasts, arms and hands, waist and belly, hips, genitals, thighs, calves, and feet. If you have trouble visualizing the change with your eyes open, close them. Feel affection and attraction for the person you have created in the mirror. Breathe that feeling into the image, let it build. Make sounds and movements that help it grow, until it becomes a strong current flowing between you.
Notice how it feels. Again, name your companion self, and find an image or word you can use to evoke the current you are feeling now.
Have a conversation. Play. Make love. When you are finished, thank your companion self, and ask how you can call her/him back again. Then ground the energy.
Go outside. Find a plant. (You can also do this with a tree, a stream or some other natural object.) Sit or stand comfortably. Ground and center.
Call up the current you felt with your double or companion-self. Use your word or image of power.
Let the current flow into the plant until you feel its energy radiating back. Enjoy it.
When you are done, ground and center.
This exercise is healing—both for you and for the plant. Try it regularly with your plants and see how your garden grows.
Both of you should be familiar with the workings of polarity. Retire to a warm and private place.
Sit opposite each other. Look into each other’s eyes. You and your lover should each hold your hands up in front of you, palms outward. Your hands and hers/his should be about a quarter of an inch apart. Ground and center. Let yourself feel warmth and affection for each other.
One of you should now call up the current you felt with your double or companion self, whichever you prefer. Let it flow through your hands into your lover’s hands. When you feel ready, trade. Let your lover send while you receive.
Lie down next to each other. Place your hands on each other’s bodies—in whatever places please both of you.
Call up the current of polarity (whichever type you like) using your word or image of power. (You may want to share this with your lover, or you may prefer to keep it secret.) Then you can both send and receive simultaneously.
As the currents build, make sounds or movements that help them. Let the process reach its natural conclusion.
Note: This practice builds a deeper-than-superficial bond between lovers. Choose your partners carefully.
It is especially good for reviving passion in a long-standing love affair or partnership, in which love is strong but the fire is dying out.
If you try this and nothing happens, at least one of you is probably angry. Talk about it. Fight. Try again.
It is important to work with the currents of polarity in this exercise, not the visualization of the double or the companion self. Love is already complicated by enough projections.
This exercise is also a healing one for both partners.
Use your imagination to expand on these exercises or to invent your own. The power you have now learned to know as your own can be called up whenever you need it. Let it inspire your creativity, strengthen you in your work, grow your garden, heal your sicknesses, awaken your heart. Call it into your hands when you touch another person, call it into your eyes and your breath, into your voices when you raise it to challenge domination. Call it into your circles.
And do not be afraid to let it go. Like all energy, the erotic power of polarity moves in cycles, it ebbs and flows. It is always available, yet after it comes to us it will always recede. The ebb is the time of quiet, of rest—the silence between pulses in the rhythm of the dance.
A fear runs like a thread through Western culture—from the Church Fathers through Freud—that sexuality, if unleashed from the control of the internalized authority, the self-hater, would run wild and destroy civilization. But sexuality has its own regulatory principle, its own rhythm of expression and containment, arousal and satiety. Knowing that rhythm, honoring it in our own flesh, in our hearts, we invoke the love Goddess, who beckons. The father God who commands fades away. The stories of estrangement lose their punch lines. In place of them we can create new myths with images that arise from another context. The work of myth-making; the work of creating new forms, new structures not based on hierarchy; the work of securing and defending our right to keep our bodies and sexuality free from restrictions and intrusions by the agents of authority; the work of encountering and transforming our inner structures; the work of love—connecting, knowing another intimately, equally, honestly—all these are linked. They are the same struggle. There can be no escape into a private world of love and romance; because no one can love freely in a society based on domination. Yet the public struggle against domination cannot be waged with joy and spirit unless we bring to it a sense of personal power, a strength based on the electric, erotic spark of the earth’s energy running freely through our bodies.
That spark can sustain our struggle until we can learn to meet as equals, free in our bodies and in our imaginations, until we learn to love, not reflections of ourselves that obscure each other, but one another’s true faces as we mirror each other’s passion and delight. Until we can become, in our lovemaking, oak trees whose branches intertwine, sequoias whose trunks slowly grow together, cats on the back fence, jaguars, tigers, jungle birds—until our teeth are wolves’ teeth and our tongues, like bear’s tongues, taste the honey of each other’s bodies—until our blood and our semen again become sacred substances of power that we use to consecrate our tools, our holy places, each other.
The rising of the erotic force is the rising of a great transforming power. When the erotic is strong, domination falls away, the pornographic must retreat, and authority can no longer maintain its hold. The story that follows is true. I present it as a parable:
The women arrested at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant blockade are detained in an old gym at the California Men’s Colony, a prison. We are watched, day and night, by male as well as female guards. The guards sit in the corners, looking over the floor of wall-to-wall mats. The women must undress in front of male eyes. There are no screens, no doors to shut. Late at night guards walk up and down the rows, shining flashlights onto the faces and bodies of the women, who lie cold under the one blanket which has been provided. It is a situation of deliberate humiliation, a small, calculated harassment, part of the punishment inflicted by the state for challenging its authority with our women’s bodies.
Outside is a small exercise yard. The central California sun is hot. And we begin to take off our shirts to lie in the sun bare-breasted. Some of the women decide to wash their clothes; they wrap themselves in towels, or wear nothing. We feel good about our bodies; we enjoy looking at each other. In that setting of corrugated iron and concrete, we are soft and alive and beautiful.
“I never knew how many shapes and sizes women come in,” says a friend, whose life has not previously allowed her to hang out in the company of two hundred naked women. “And we’re all beautiful. Look at that woman there. She’s like a sculpture—like a Venus of Willendorf, a Goddess.”
We are all the Goddess in her multitude of forms: an Aphrodite, an Artemis, a Maiden, a Mother, a Crone. We are all Persephone, dragged into the underworld by the authorities of patriarchy. But our living bodies transform hell. The situation is pornography brought to life, a constant humiliation that enacts a classic sadomasochistic guard/prisoner fantasy. Yet it is transformed by the presence of the erotic. We are connected with each other, and in our love for each other there is no footing for shame.
It is the guards who must adjust to us. Some are embarrassed; some delighted. Some deliberately feed us false information; some are genuinely friendly. They have no vested interest in the nuclear power plant. They have been transferred from San Quentin and Soledad prisons; for them, this is a paid holiday. No one has asked them whether men should guard women, whether we should be given extra blankets, hot food, or toothbrushes. Most of the women are white and middle-class; the guards are working-class, black, Latino. They have come to this particular job because it was the best of the choices their lives presented to them; as we have come to the blockade for the same reason. In that sense, none of us is free. None of us has the power, except as we demand it and take it, to determine what choices we are offered.
The women discuss the issue of bare breasts. Some feel it undermines the seriousness of our action, that it will look bad to the media. But we choose not to impose a restriction on each other.
At night we dance naked in jail. One woman plays the single guitar they have allowed in. We beat on tin cans; the corrugated iron walls become a drum. We clap our hands; we sing “Jailhouse Rock.” We paint tuxedos on our bodies and make corsages out of waste paper. We pretend we are having a prom. The music rises and the rhythm rises; we sweat together, the room is filled with the odor of two hundred women. And we dance, knowing that we are allowed this as a privilege, as so much of what has been good in our lives is a privilege; knowing that women who are in jail alone, who are not white, who do not have a movement and a legal team behind them, whose stories are not of interest to the newspapers, cannot dance, cannot go naked, may be raped and brutalized—not smiled at—by the guards.
Yet we dance, because this is, after all, what we are fighting for: this life, these bodies, breasts, wombs, this smell of flesh; this joy; this freedom—that it continue, that it prevail.