Ritual & the Body of the Goddess - An Interview with Rachel Pollack
Saturday, September 19th 2009 @ 7:11 PM (not yet rated)
How we remembered. How her memory brought me my memory. How I knew what she knew, how her breasts felt then, her body, how we were flooded with memory.
- Susan Griffin
A couple of weeks after returning home from Greece I came upon Rachel Pollack’s book, The Body of the Goddess in a local bookstore. Subtitled, “Sacred Wisdom in Myth, Landscape and Culture”, the book spoke to me about what I had been thinking and experiencing in Greece, especially Delphi, and here at home where I see “the body of the Goddess” every day in the mountains that surround me. The book takes the reader to many sacred places — Greek temples (including Delphi), stone circles, mounds, prehistoric caves — where the body of the Goddess is revealed, where in times past people worshipped the Goddess through ritual and celebration. The journey begins in the caves of the Old Stone Age in Europe and continues through the New Stone Age and the development of agriculture, through the construction of stone circles and giant passage mounds, to Minoan Crete and then the classical period that we are perhaps most familiar with, and finally to the Gaia Theory of today. This is an important book for anyone interested in gaining a greater understanding of Gaia, and of “the body of the Goddess” as manifested in the body of the Earth.
Rachel is a prolific and award-winning writer in many genres. She is also one of the foremost experts on the Tarot, having written the text for several individual decks, as well as creating her own. Her fiction works include A Secret Woman (2002); Burning Sky, a collection of short stories (1998); Godmother Night (1996), winner of the 1997 World Fantasy Award; and Unquenchable Fire (1998), winner of the 1989 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Nonfiction works include: The Kabbalah Tree (2004); The Forest of Souls: A Walk in the Tarot (2002); The Complete Illustrated Guide to the Tarot (1999); the Shining Tribe Tarot (2001), designed and drawn by Rachel; and The Power of Ritual (2000). For more information on these and other works, check out her website: www.rachelpollack.com.
Sometimes I feel so frustrated with the avenues of action and changing things that are open to me. One of the reasons I chose the theme of ritual for this issue is because it’s hard to feel that anything we do as an individual is going to make a difference. And yet at the same time we know that as individuals we can and do make a difference.
RP: I teach writing at Goddard College and one year Grace Paley, who’s a very committed, lifelong activist, was the guest speaker. She and I were talking about the dark times we’re experiencing in this country, and how disturbing it feels. I asked her how she keeps going. She said that you just have to do things. If you give in, despair overwhelms you and you feel helpless. But if you start taking action, even in small ways, then you become reenergized and you can have hope for the future.
I agree with that, certainly. One of the ideas that intrigues me is the idea of ritual as activism. I know that Starhawk, for example, incorporates ritual into activism, to hold focus and keep cohesion. And this is very important. But what I’m talking about is the power of ritual itself to change things on a vibratory level, on the level of consciousness. I sense that if enough people participated in various types of Earth/healing rituals, things would change, the energy created would be strong enough to impact folks even if they are unaware of it, you know?
RP: I think you’re right. I’m not sure I’ve actually witnessed it but intuitively it feels right. And isn’t that part of the essence of magic? To change realities through focused consciousness and ritual? And I would think that the more people do it the greater effect it would have.
Do you see a difference between ritual and celebration?
RP: Yes. There’s more magic in ritual. Ritual is marking things more and it has a sense of rhythm. Celebration can be of something, like the seasons, but ritual would have a sense of symbiosis, of connecting to the energy of the Earth in a very conscious way.
What basic elements are important in ritual?
RP: To me the most important element of ritual is consciousness. To be attentive, to be aware, to be a part of it. I especially like homemade rituals that are meaningful from the way people put them together. For example, a woman I know who’s in her 40s came out as a lesbian. She decided to change her name because she felt her given name signified all that she used to be not who she is now. But her family and friends had difficulties with the name change so I suggested a ritual, not for her, but to bring them with her and she liked the idea. We designed a ritual that took place in a big circle divided by a curtain. One side of the curtain was her old self, on the other side was her new self. A minister friend of mine and I held the energy while she used her ritual knife to tear the curtain and step through to the other side. She then invited the others to join her. This ritual wasn’t based on traditional forms, rather it was something we created ourselves that was meaningful to my friend.
Can ritual be spontaneous?
RP: I certainly have done things spontaneously.
But does that make it a ritual?
RP: There’s a quality of ritual that has a sense of ceremony about it so you feel it should be planned out. But I’ve been places where I feel called to simply pay tribute. If I come across particular landscape formations, like the Artemis hill formations in Greece, I would usually do something. I’m not sure if it’s ritual. The world ritual has in it the idea of repetition.
So something spontaneous could become a ritual if after the first time, you repeat it, like the little ritual I do before I begin working in the garden each spring. The first year it was spontaneous. I did it because it felt right. And now I do it every year.
RP: Yes. But when you did it for the first time there were certain elements you brought to it that you knew about. You were repeating things that you had absorbed, learned, and done. So in that sense it had the quality of repetition. When I pay tribute spontaneously to landscape formations I come across I am doing it according to patterns I’ve developed over the years.
What about the little things?
RP: Not all rituals have to be gigantic. While Native Americans have some very complicated rituals they do at certain times of the year or on certain occasions, they also have small, daily rituals like offering tobacco as a tribute. The Jews have this too. There are daily blessings. For example when they wash their hands they say a blessing. Small things like these can be very valuable because they keep you connected.
And they become become a part of who you are. Because ritual has the power to shift consciousness, once you do a ritual and go back to your ordinary life, the ritual continues to live inside of you.
RP: Yes. And if you discover yourself not doing them it’s a sign that something is wrong. Maybe you’re depressed or losing touch.
Gaia Theory — the idea of the Earth being alive — is very hopeful. To me it plays into the healing, changing, shifting power of ritual. I sense the Earth loves ritual, that it has the potential to nourish Gaia in special ways. Indigenous peoples believed this, and still do. Rituals were done at specific times of the year to honor the seasons, to bring the salmon home, to ensure a successful hunt or a bountiful harvest. What’s interesting is that a lot of people seem to get Gaia Theory, but they don’t take it to it’s logical conclusion, which is that if the Earth is alive, then the Earth has consciousness, along with all the creatures of Earth. How something can be alive and not have consciousness is beyond me.
RP: Yes. (Laughs). I think if we were sensitive enough we’d realize everything has consciousness. There’s a Gabon Pygmy song that goes, “All lives, all dances, and all is loud.” Gaia Theory allows us to regain the power of myth as a story that is actually true, both physically and metaphorically. It restores myth to science and science to myth, and returns to us a literal image of a living Goddess. It also challenges us to extend that awareness outward to the solar system, the galaxies, and inward to our bodies and the organisms who live in and on them as well.
I’ve been talking with people about some of the old Hermetic, Occult ideas. For instance take gravity, which we think of as a very dry, mathematical empty kind of thing. The occult version says that gravity, which holds the planets and the sun and everything else together, is sexual attraction. That the sun and Earth have an erotic attraction for each other. Newton, who formulated these things, was an alchemist, an occultist, but that side was suppressed. People around him wanted to benefit from his ideas but were embarrassed by his underlying beliefs, so they just covered them over.
One of my favorite books is Brian Swimme’s The Universe is a Green Dragon. Brian Swimme is a cosmologist and the book is written as a conversation between a Youth (Swimme) and Thomas Berry. What is says is that love is the force that holds the universe together. Gravity, according to Thomas in the book, is “an attracting activity” the details of which we do not understand. The consequences we get, the attracting itself is a mystery. In the book, Thomas calls this allurement “love in its cosmic dimension”.
RP: What’s interesting is that in the Christian mystical tradition, love is everything, love pervades everything. It’s not separate from the universe. But this has gotten lost.
In the ancient past people saw the world and their role very differently than we do today. You wrote about this in your book The Body of the Goddess. The body was sacred, the Earth was sacred, there was no separation. And then something happened. Instead of evolving toward a more peaceful existence, like the ancient Minoan cultures, people became warlike until, here we are. What happened? Where did it start? There were invaders, we learn. Fine. But why was their mindset so different?
RP: And why in so many cultures is there an account within the culture of this change? People come up with simplistic answers. Some trace it to literacy, saying it led to belief in a detached patriarchal god. On the other side was illiteracy and a connected Earth-centered Goddess. But that isn’t right because there were many illiterate cultures that have the same account of males taking over, like Tierra del Fuego and places in Africa. Some say that it happened when men discovered their importance in reproduction. But it only makes sense that people who domesticated animals and raised herds of different species over thousands of years would understand the mechanics of sexual reproduction. And in the Old Stone Age, the mingling of phallic imagery with images of vulvas and the Goddess’s body definitely suggests that these people also understood reproduction. You couldn’t get a calf unless a bull mated with a cow, and virgins didn’t have babies. People aren’t that stupid. (laughs)
Yes. And it’s obviously not true. The more we discover about ancient cultures, the more complex they appear. But, as you point out in your book, even though we kept finding evidence of a peaceful goddess culture, we persisted in interpreting what we found through the lens of our patriarchal world view. It wasn’t like cave men pulling the women around by their hair.
RP: And they see weapons everywhere. Take the story of the scythe. It was assumed to be a weapon of war, but in actuality it was a harvest tool, a women’s tool. Which they should have realized because it’s shaped like the moon. It’s not phallic. Modern scythes look the same and we know they’re garden tools. So the example was right in front of them, but their mindset was so rigid that whatever they found had to be weapons.
In The Body of the Goddess you write about how the Goddess is embodied in the Earth and how ancient peoples associated certain landscapes and land formations with Her, how they constructed temples, mounds, stone circles to complete landscape forms, positioning observers in such a way that the sense of the female body is obvious. It really spoke to me because of my experience at Delphi last fall, and here in the White Mountains where I live. One day last summer I was looking at the mountains from the window of my chiropractor’s office and all of a sudden I saw the goddess. She was lying on her back looking skyward. I saw her breasts, her rounded belly, her knees were bent . . . It was very powerful — and so obvious that I wondered how I had missed it.
RP: Yes, it’s a powerful thing to see. And people have seen it for thousands of years all over the world. It really is a kind of distortion of consciousness that we don’t see it.
And after you see it once, you see it everywhere.
RP: Exactly. What’s interesting too is when you learn about the special meanings particular landscape formations have, you start seeing them as well. For example, in Greece triple hill formations are associated with Artemis who lived in the mountains with her nymphs and both hunted and protected the animals. She also watched over women in childbirth. Archaic pictures sometimes show her with outstretched wings, an image that may have arisen from that same triple peak, with the central hill as her body and the mountains on either side as her wings. Here at home, the train to New York City from where I live runs along the Hudson River and there’s an incredible spot where across the river you can see a large cone-shaped hill exactly like it’s described in the ancient traditions, and then the two hills on either side of it go out in layers exactly like unfurled wings. It’s the most amazing sight.
One of the things you say that I think is very interesting is that the Goddess’s body in the land emerges fully through the symbiotic actions of humans, which would include ritual.
RP: Yes. It’s the way we participate in this consciousness. It’s not something out there that we look at, it’s something we have to be a part of. The whole idea of the body of the Goddess is an idea of consciousness as well as physical form.
You noted that the bigger and more dramatic the temples became, the more they seemed to separate from the land and focus on the gods and not the Earth.
RP: And on human construction and abstraction which becomes the gods who are in the sky rather than on the Earth.
One of the things you say that I really resonate with is how our experience of sacred places help us give meaning to these places even though we may have lost their original intent, like visiting Stonehenge or the Oracle at Delphi. We may not know the original meaning or purpose but we still have experiences in these places and sometimes very strong emotional responses to being there that effect us deeply.
RP: In some ways I think the ancient stone age places that are forgotten are most interesting because of the freedom of reaction to them. We are in a sense recreating it. But it’s important that we recognize we are creating something new, not actually reproducing the original purpose. We really do not know what Stonehenge was for, and never will. We can make some intelligent guesses but should not pretend that the rituals we might construct today are a genuine restoration.
And if we’re all a part of the Earth and everything is alive and connected and evolving which I believe, then the sacred places are evolving as well.
RP: That’s right. I agree with that, too. And our consciousness, and actions, in sympathy with the place itself, are the vehicle of that evolution.
We can’t go back in time to do rituals they did 2000 years ago, but the energy is still there and we can feel it and maybe it’s appropriate for us to interpret it and do rituals even if they’re totally different. It’s like what you were saying about participating with the land so that the sacred places and the humans connect.
RP: I think we need to find our own ways to get into it. When I visited the Serpent Mound in Ohio, it was very impressive, very beautiful, a great work of art, but I didn’t really feel it. I was more admiring it from the outside. Then when I went to the cliff below and looked up I saw that the crest they put it on is like the head of a serpent. To make that kind of discovery myself made it much more meaningful. So I think that we do have to bring something of our own psychic energy and find some way into it.
In my hopeful moments it seems to me that we may be coming full circle. In ancient times there was an understanding of the Earth as alive and people as part of nature. Then the idea of separation came, and the industrial age and so on. Now in some ways we’re going back to those ancient understandings. Do you see this at all?
RP: I do see that happening. But at the same time there’s this huge reactionary energy in the world. But what’s interesting to me in the positive sense is that movement, the full circle thing, is not coming as a reaction. It’s not saying, “we don’t like the modern world, we’re going back to the stone age” although there are people doing that. The real movement is coming from science and that’s what’s exciting. It’s a movement forward into a return to consciousness not a movement away from what we’ve had. It’s interesting some people feel that if you want to feel there’s more than meets the eye that the eye should be partly closed. And I feel the eye should be wide open and see everything and then go beyond it, see what’s implied.
From Volume 3, No. 1 & 2
