From chapter 7 of Pure Lust, pp. 274–85.
From chapter 7 of Pure Lust, pp. 274–85.
Nemesis 1: Virtue beyond justice, acquired by Inspired Acts of Righteous Fury; Virtue enabling Seers to unblindfold captive Justice 2: participation in the powers of the Goddess Nemesis; Elemental disruption of the patriarchal balance of terror; Passionate Spinning/Spiraling of Archaic threads of Gynergy.
—Wickedary, p. 84
Mary Daly’s own fighting spirit surfaces here, both philosophically and in the tale of the Furious Fighting Cow. She drew an important distinction between justice and nemesis. Justice is seen as too small a goal, too accommodating, to be worthy of Amazons. By contrast, the goddess Nemesis does not negotiate with oppression, but pursues transformation instead. Daly even defined Nemesis as “a relevant mysticism which responds to the tormented cries of the oppressed, and to the hunger and thirst for creative be-ing.”
Perceptively, Daly understood justice as embedded in economic rather than transformative metaphors: “Even the expression ‘fighting (or working) for justice’ suggests a commodity to be gained through active struggle. It does not convey the object of this striving as something that women create.” Justice is revealed as a finite object, and thus another limitation that Daly is determined to break through.
The story of the Furious Fighting Cow held great significance for Daly because of the singularity of the cow’s rebellion; one must fight even when one is alone in that fight. She made clear that
Sin-full Courage does not of its essence rely upon sisterly support. To recognize this is not to fall into “blaming the (other) victim.” What embattled woman (or animal) has energy to squander on that? To recognize this is to cultivate the Self-reliance so prized by [Elizabeth Cady] Stanton and other sturdy souls—who of course have Given Heart beyond measure.
Perhaps this indicates that Daly saw herself, more and more, in a situation parallel to that of the Furious Fighting Cow: struggling with or without the sisterly support that had seemed so abundant in the mid-1970s.
—Editors
The first of the moral virtues, justice, has been defined as “the perpetual and constant will to render to each one his right.”1 Barring the masculine/pseudogeneric pronoun, the definition would appear to have some merit. It becomes more problematic, however, when a woman asks what rights the “just” person judges that “each one” has. It is hardly necessary to review here in detail the long struggle of women to obtain “equal rights” within patriarchy in order to know that the patriarchal devisers of this definition of justice had in mind something substantially less than “right” when they created the device of such a concept. Since, moreover, the moral virtue of justice was believed to be situated in the will and thus to require the intellectual virtue of (virile) prudence to direct its acts, it is clear that much, too much, is askew in phallic theories of justice. The “just” king, president, pope, physician, boss, husband, father knows with certainty the proper place and “rights” of the touchable caste.
Nor does the patriarchally defined “vice” of injustice throw much light upon the predicament of women. For the Droningly Dictated Dichotomy of justice-injustice is chiefly concerned with the making and breaking of Boys’ Club rules. The situation of women—both the oppression and the a-mazing authentic aspirations—is ineffably outside the sphere of petty paternal disputes that is reflected in this dreary semantic dichotomy. The pair, justice-injustice, is too pallid to Name the Righteous Virtue of Raging women.
More accurate to name the object and the process of Racy Righteousness is the term Nemesis. As Goddess of divine retribution, the Nemesis within Pyrosophical women wills to act/live the verb which is the root of her Name: nemein, meaning to deal out, to dispense retribution. Unlike “justice,” which is depicted as a woman blindfolded and holding a sword and scales, Nemesis has her eyes open and uncovered—especially her Third Eye. Moreover, she is concerned less with “retribution,” in the sense of external meting out of rewards and punishments, than with an internal judgment that sets in motion a kind of new psychic alignment of energy patterns. Nemesis, thus Named, is hardly irrelevant mysticism. Rather, this Names a relevant mysticism which responds to the tormented cries of the oppressed, and to the hunger and thirst for creative be-ing.
Certainly, women have always cried and struggled for “justice.” The thwarting of this longing and struggling gives rise to the birth pangs of radical feminist awareness. But only when the knowledge that something is not “right” evolves into uncovering the invisible context of gynocide and, beyond this, into active participation in the Elemental context of biophilic harmony and power can there be great and sustained creativity and action. To Name this active Elemental contextual participation, which transcends and overturns patriarchal “justice” and “injustice,” Other words are needed. Nemesis is a beginning in this direction.
The thirst for what has been perceived as attainable “justice,” as well as the longing to overcome “injustice,” has driven women into the arms of the male left and of the male right. Women of the left have sought Justice through male-approved methods of “revolution.” Women of the right have sought justice (though they often cannot articulate even this word) through tears, self-deprecation, insistence on their place in heaven, militant anti-feminism, vicarious living. Women swing to the left and to the right when captured within the confines of patriarchally controlled imagination—expressed in the words “justice” and “injustice.”
Understandably there is often a passivity in women’s hope for justice, as for a commodity long overdue. Even the expression “fighting (or working) for justice” suggests a commodity to be gained through active struggle. It does not convey the object of this striving as something that women create. This may in part be related to the passive condition of women as oppressed. I suggest, however, that the problem has to do also with the word justice, which is not sufficiently inspiring/Firing. It has the flavor, texture, and odor of a hand-out which women deserve, and which presumably could ultimately be bestowed by or wrenched from the prevailing order. But the prevailing order/ordure does not have the capacity to bestow or even to have wrenched away from it the sought-after treasure. It would be more fruitful to engage in the proverbial fruitless task of trying to obtain blood from a stone.
If a woman experiments with changing her discussion of justice from the nominal to verbal forms, she will quickly hit upon the verb rectify. For justice, after all, is said to be about “the right.” Consistent with this is the fact that rectify suggests that the task is to straighten out, correct, redress, remedy, reform a situation, that is, to re-turn it to a previous condition that is understood on the same level as the “problem.” The procedure sounds like correcting an error in arithmetic; it appears to be correcting an imbalance, restoring balance. There is nothing in this language that stirs the imagination beyond a patriarchal future and past, a regainable status quo.
Recognizing on some level the stagnation inherent in the dichotomy justice-injustice, theologians such as Paul Tillich have tried to write of “creative justice.” Yet this effort is so alien to Pyrosophical awareness and analysis, so reinforcing of submission and of what can be called the feminine imperative, that it will make a feminist’s flesh crawl. Tillich writes, for example:
Creative Justice demands . . . that he be accepted who is unacceptable in terms of proportional justice. In accepting him into the unity of forgiveness, love exposes both the acknowledged break with justice on his side with all its implicit consequences and the claim inherent in him to be declared just and to be made just by reunion [emphases mine].2
Certainly, acts of forgiveness are necessary in any deep relationship. But this is not all that Tillich is arguing for.
In order to savor the true flavor of this text, the reader could try the following exercise: Imagine a priest, rabbi, or minister reciting this text to a woman who has been repeatedly battered by her husband, or whose husband has sexually assaulted their daughter. Imagine the woman trying to find moral support for her decision to leave. Clearly, declaring the offender/criminal “just” and reuniting with him will not make him “just.” Rather, what happens in such a case is that the woman is “morally” bullied into forfeiting her right to judge. She is “morally” intimidated into Self-castration, into breaking her own Naming process. She is duped, guilt-tripped into separation from her own powers as Nemesis, blocked from re-claiming her life. Tillich’s moral verbiage in such a case, then, is worse than useless. It serves structures of oppression—notably those of the sexual caste system—which are not even taken into consideration.
I am suggesting, then, that justice is not an adequate name for that which Canny, Raging women create. The new psychic alignment of gynergy patterns associated with Nemesis is not merely rectifying of a situation which the term unjust could adequately describe. Nemesis is Passionate Spinning/Spiraling of new/ancient forms and connections of gynergy. It is an E-motional habit acquired/required in the Pyrospheres. It demands Shrewd as well as Fiery judgment and is therefore a Nag-Gnostic/Pyrognostic Virtue. Nemesis is a habit built up by inspired acts of Righteous Fury, which move the victims of gynocidal oppression into Pyrospheric changes unheard of in patriarchal lore.
Some women have always known about active desire that reaches beyond the confines of “justice.” In 1852, in a political speech at the Woman’s Rights Convention, Elizabeth Oakes Smith asked:
My friends, do we realize for what purpose we are convened? Do we fully understand that we aim at nothing less than an entire subversion of the present order of society, a dissolution of the whole existing social compact?3
Assessing the twentieth-century American scene, Florynce Kennedy, commenting from her vantage point as Black feminist activist and attorney, wrote:
Every form of bigotry can be found in ample supply in the legal system of our country. It would seem that Justice (usually depicted as a woman) is indeed blind to racism, sexism, war, and poverty.4
The specific functioning of blindfolded “justice” in the legal mind (the patriarchal mind par excellence) has been expressed by Joyce Carol Oates in her description of a defense lawyer:
. . . he believed in the justice of his using any legal methods he could improvise to force the other side into compromise or into dismissals of charges, or to lead a jury into the verdict he wanted. Why not? He was a defense lawyer.5
As archetypally cast into the role of “the other side,” women know about the self-righteous sense of “justice” of professional defenders of the sadosystem, who use every method to force those who are pleading for justice “into compromise or into dismissal of charges,” and to lead the “jury” of patriarchally possessed peers to pronounce the destroyers of women “not guilty.” And women know that the nefarious methods of gynocide are legal.
E-motionally propelled beyond the inadequate naming expressed in the dichotomy “justice-injustice,” Pyrosophical women begin to live in dimensions of that which, transitionally at least, can be called Nemesis. The Virtue of Nemesis may be perceived as sinister, for it is creativity that is utterly Other than the righteousness of the sadorulers. It is sinister, not merely in the sense of choosing left as opposed to right, for this would be mere opposition of opposites on the same plane. Rather, Nemesis moves within a different context, and creates such a context as it moves. The Otherness of this context is not “complementary” to the prevailing order of sadosociety, for it is Other. Women participating in the powers of Nemesis, Spinning gynocentric ways of be-ing, are not caught in reactive rage, but are Actively Raging, Racing. [ . . . ]
[ . . . ] Nemesis is engendered by Rage. Pyrographers will note that Nemesis as divine vengeance often has been envisioned as a visitation in the form of Elemental phenomena. Inspired by the Muses of Rage, a woman coming into touch with Nemesis becomes awakened to Elemental powers of Geomancy, Aeromancy, Hydromancy, Pyromancy. Her “visitations,” or her influence upon situations, arises from Realizing her harmony with the elements. She becomes more at home in the world of dimensions uncaptured by the Phallic State.
Awareness of these dimensions gives the Canniness necessary to Spin new/ancient gynergy patterns that transform oppressive states. Sometimes this implies moving out of an old environment physically; always it implies transforming the conditions where/when one lives.
To imagine that women who choose Creative Nemesis are therefore insensitive to the reality of oppression is to miss the point. For it is Visionary Creation that carries Women’s Movement foreward (upward, downward, aroundward) and that sustains the woman warrior. Maxine Hong Kingston vividly illustrates the sustaining power of feminist vision, in relating how the stories of women warriors, told to her by her mother, aided her in the struggle of growing up female and Chinese in American society.6 Monique Wittig’s feminist classic, Les Guérillères, has inspired thousands of women with Amazonian Imagination.7 Indeed, numerous Crones have been engaged in the process of conjuring Nemesis through re-membering the lore of our fore-mothers and through Spinning Original tales.8 It is precisely such transcendent vision that makes possible acute sensitivity to the common facts of oppression, for in the light of what might be and perhaps once was, an A-mazed woman sees/feels the horror of each fact, each event of the Possessed State of her sex and of nature on this planet. This vision fires her to fight back.
Unlike blindfolded, static patriarchal “justice,” a woman inspired by Nemesis sharpens her senses, sharpens her Labrys. As her axe, this can cut back barriers. As her wings, it carries her on the wind. Better than a broom, it bears her beyond the foreground fortresses.
Nemesis is not about casuistry, nor about cautiously measured rewards and punishments. It is about flying through the badlands, badtimes. It is about creating new cacophony, new concord, countering destruction with creation. For such symphonic soaring, a woman needs Outrageous Courage.
I have attempted to show that Racy women Sin in the most colossal and cosmic way by be-ing Elemental. Ontological Courage, then, the Courage required for Pyrosophical be-ing, is a Sin-full Virtue. Derived from the Latin cor, meaning heart, Courage signifies a heartfelt, passionate strength. Sin-full Courage is the core/heart of all the Volcanic Virtues.
The Courage of Pyromantic Crones is necessarily Outrageous. One meaning of outrageous is “exceeding the limits of what is normal or tolerable.” It means “not conventional or matter‑of-fact: EXTRAVAGANT, FANTASTIC.” An Outrageously Courageous Crone, since she is Pyrogenetic and therefore not conventional or matter-of-fact, risks being perceived as outrageous in the sense of “extremely offensive: showing a disregard for decency or good taste.” Of course, as her taste becomes more and more discerning she is more and more subjected to foreground labeling as “tasteless.” Such deprecations should be treated as en-couraging/heartening signs that she has made progress in reversing the reigning reversals.
At the core/“heart” of the maze of reversals which Raging, Outrageous women must reverse, are the sado-ideology and sado-symbolism of the heart itself. The heart is said to symbolize “the centre of being, both physical and spiritual; the divine presence at the centre.”9 The symbol of the heart as center has been spoiled for countless women, however, by the sickening sado-sophism that “man is the head, and woman is the heart.” For the cliché is intended to legitimate women’s condition of subjection as entombed in the touchable caste.
The sadosages speak euphemistically of the heart as representing the “central wisdom of feeling” as opposed to the “head-wisdom” of reason.10 The clue to the ensuing deceptions is in the dichotomy/opposition itself. No matter how highly patriarchal propagandists extol what they call “the heart,” their ascribing of this to women says it all. The “central wisdom of feeling” is intended to signify mush-headed sentimentality requiring control by The Head.
By the symbolic dissociation of “the heart” from Intellectual Courage, from “head-wisdom,” the decapitators have attempted the symbolic castration of women (the “hearts”) cutting us off from our Active Potency. It is only by Taking Heart again, by Courage-ing the Sin of reuniting her passion and intellect, that a woman can Realize her powers. Pyrosophical Crones, wrenching the Heart back into our own semantic context, make Courage the core of Women’s Movement. Taking Heart, then, becomes a Metaphor of Metabeing, carrying a woman into the Pyrospheric Realm, where she transforms, transvalues virtues, desiring, acquiring Volcanic Virtue.
Taking Heart is an essential feminist task. In 1851, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote movingly of the need for Courage:
The manner in which all courage and self-reliance is educated out of the girl, her path portrayed with dangers and difficulties that never exist, is melancholy indeed. Better, far, suffer occasional insults or die outright, than live the life of a coward, or never move without a protector. The best protector any woman can have, one that will serve her at all times and in all places, is courage; this she must get by her own experience, and experience comes by exposure.11
Here Stanton Names the problem—the breeding out of courage from women under the guise of protection—the breeding out that breaks the hope of Breaking Out. Yet, some have never been thoroughly broken in, and these, less broken, hearten others. As Millicent Garrett Fawcett put it, in 1920:
Courage calls to courage everywhere, and its voice cannot be denied.12
This is a Naming of the Contagiousness of Outrageous Courage, of its Pyromagnetic propensity. It is a Naming of the basic calling of Nagsters, who by Taking Heart, Give Heart.
A woman who Takes Heart and Gives Heart moves to the heart of the matter, becoming Self-centering. Having known heartbreak over the dis-memberment of her kind, she now heartens her Self and her Sisters. Her Taking Heart is the magic Self-woven carpet that carries her to Metabeing, the place of her heart’s Desiring/Firing. Heartened, she engages in Pyromachy, fighting with Fire, with the fullness of luminous intelligence, the Radiance of Realizing reason. Her words/actions are Outrageous simply because they are beyond the proscribed limits of the familiar Flatland. She judges and acts according to Pyrometric standards.
Such Taking Heart is essentially that which can Give Heart to another woman, in the sense of en-couraging her to re-claim her own heart/head. I am not suggesting that an Outrageous woman acts Courageously chiefly in order to inspire others. Rather, her Taking Heart is essential to her own Elemental be-ing. It is contagious, but not always in an immediately perceivable way. Yet Crones know that Courage is the Elemental Lifeline.
Courage is a bond between Outrageous women and other Wild creatures, especially those who in some dimensions, at least, escape the sadorule. In a remarkable travel book, The Sea and the Jungle (a favorite book of Rachel Carson), H. M. Tomlinson describes the brutal taking aboard ship of sixty head of cattle—each being hauled on board by a rope around her horns, the rope being attached to a crane, so that all of each cow’s weight was on her horns. Each was hoisted up, bumping against the ship’s side, and then dumped on the deck. All were subdued by this treatment but one, a small black heifer. Tomlinson describes the resistance of this “implacable rebel”:
The cattlemen, as punishment for the trouble she had given them ashore, kept her dangling over the deck, and one got level with her face and mocked her, slapping her nose. She actually defied him. . . . She was no cow. She was insurrection, she was the hate for tyrants incarnated. They dropped her. She was up and away like a cat. . . . She put everybody on that deck in the shrouds or in the forecastle head as she trotted round with her tail up, looking for brutes to put them to death. None of the cows (of course) helped her. By a trick she was caught. . . . Then she tried to kick all who passed. If the rest of the cattle had been like her none would have suffered. Alas! They were probably all scientific evolutionists, content to wait for men to become kindly apple-lovers by slow and natural uplift; and gravely deprecated the action of the heifer from which, as peaceful cows, they disassociated themselves.13
During the voyage, though her head was fixed unmovably, unlike the others, the black heifer kept her unabated Fury. Recalling this, Tomlinson wrote, “What a heart!” But the story does not end here. After the journey the men had to unload the cattle:
We waited for the turn of the black heifer. . . . She made a furious lunge at the men when her nose was free, but the winch rattled, and she was brought up on her hind legs, blaring at us all. In that ugly manner she was walked on two legs across the deck, a heroine in shameful guise, while the men laughed. She was hoisted, and lowered into the river. She fought at the waiting canoe with her feet, but at last the men released her horns from the tackle. With only her face above water she heaved herself, open-mouthed, at the canoe trying to bite it, and then made some almost successful efforts to climb into it. The canoe men were so panic-stricken that they did nothing but muddle one another’s efforts. The canoe rocked dangerously. This wicked animal had no care for its own safety like other cattle. It surprised its tormentors because it showed its only wish was to kill them. Just in time, the men paddled off for their lives, the cow after them. Seeing she could not catch them, she swam ashore, climbed the bank, looking around then for sight of the enemy—but they were all in hiding—and then began browsing in the scrub.14
This story, which could be called “The Furious Cow and How She Escaped,” depicting the triumphant escape of the heifer who did not have the support of her subdued sisters, might be taken from its context and read as a poignant parable for weary and dis-couraged feminists—the moral being: Take Heart. If the brave heifer had been able (or willing) to read, she certainly would have agreed with Stanton’s words: “Better, far, suffer occasional insults or die outright, than live the life of a coward.” In any case, she demonstrated her knowledge of the fact that Sin-full Courage does not of its essence rely upon sisterly support. To recognize this is not to fall into “blaming the (other) victim.” What embattled woman (or animal) has energy to squander on that? To recognize this is to cultivate the Self-reliance so prized by Stanton and other sturdy souls—who of course have Given Heart beyond measure.
Tomlinson’s account can be read by feminists as a parable also on another level—critically, looking at it within the context of his telling it. For this story of the brave heifer and the fifty-nine who were subdued leaves something to be desired. His playful description of the “peaceful cows,” as “gravely deprecating” the action of the heifer, erases the fact that it was the torture endured by the animals that had subdued them. Tomlinson did acknowledge this, of course, but seems immediately to have forgotten the significance of his own information in his delighted admiration of the solitary rebel. For, as he writes, the cows had all been “wild things, which had been collected in the campo with great difficulty.”15 He writes, as we have seen, “None of the cows (of course) helped her. . . . If the rest of the cattle had been like her, none would have suffered.” The Outraged reader might ask: Did Tomlinson even protest? As an honored passenger he could have tried to intervene in the face of extraordinary cruelty. The context of his account does not suggest that this was his reaction.
Tomlinson does record the “great joy” which he and his companion, the ship’s doctor, experienced at watching the tortured heifer’s efforts to free her horns. But “great joy” at seeing the struggle of one “implacable rebel” does not strike the critical reader as an adequate response to this spectacle of suffering and bravery.
In short, the self-description of Tomlinson portrays/betrays the attitude of the liberal who by his passivity legitimates the Lecherous State. He legitimates this State also by his propensity for singling out the singularly courageous victim/escapee for his admiration, while sustaining contempt for the other Others. The subliminal association with women and other oppressed people is not hard to detect, nor are the applications. In contrast to this “sympathetic liberal observer” stance, the position of the Self-reliant, Outrageous Courageous Crone implies refusal to erase the history of oppression of those Sisters who were subdued and conquered. The Furiously Focused re-calling of the history of oppression of all women is essential to the identity of a feminist and for sustaining the Pyrosophical Vision, even under conditions of seeming desertion and isolation.