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Copyright 1996 R.L. Davis. Manuscript may be copied for personal use but any commercial use is expressly prohibited.
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun. Ecclesiastes 1:9
Today's particle physicists are revealing wonderful things about the universe in the words they use to describe the brave new world of quarks and muons and cosmic strings sound like the words of mystics who wrote many thousands of years ago.
And some of the latest therapies -- based on reality and the use of cognition - echo some of the oldest concepts known to humanity.
No new thing under the sun. What most creative thinkers bring to any subject is not so much new knowledge as a different, often strikingly different, perspective to old knowledge.
Even Will Shakespeare told tales borrowed from earlier writers and contemporaries, but he told the old tales from a perspective so unique, so wonderfully ingenious, that today -- 400 years later -- we still marvel at his use of our native language, and such terms as "a world too wide" and "creeping like snail" are so common that most people are unaware they were first uttered by the Bard of Avon.
The ideas in this volume are not original to me. I have borrowed them from others, from people with their own unique perspectives on reality. People like Riane Eisler, Merlin Stone, Lewis Thomas, Jorge Luis Borges, Starhawk, Martin Buber, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus -- to name a few -- brought stunning ways of looking at things to my attention, through their books. I have attempted to reflect those perspectives.
Although I use the thoughts of many writers in these essays, however, the conclusions and the perspective of each is uniquely my own. I arrived at these conclusions after many years exploring the scope and limitations of the phenomenon which is freedom/responsibility. I no longer believe that either freedom or responsibility can truly exist without the other.
Freedom without responsibility is destructiveness and responsibility without freedom is slavery.
Each essay to follow was originally a talk given before my congregation. (Among other things, I am minister of a small Unitarian Universalist congregation in South Florida, where I've been for nearly two decades).
There will be some duplication of ideas from essay to essay. In most cases, I've chosen to leave in the duplication because some ideas need to be repeated over and over again before they are recognized as worthy of consideration.
For many of the essays I will list one or more references for further study. As often as possible, I'll list popular works -- easily absorbed by the average reader. I do this because I do not want you to take anything I write as gospel: Read the originals and decide for yourself.
What I try to do in this work is to offer you a different perspective on the society into which you have been born and in which you live. It's a pagan look at the world, because I am a pagan. In fact, I am a practicing witch and member of an active coven of witches.
It's also an existential look at the world, because, in my rejection of traditional philosophy, I have always found comfort in the hard realism of the existentialist point of view.
Some people marvel that I could be at the same time a witch and a minister in a main-line denomination, but this need not seem strange at all.
I am a Unitarian Universalist because it is the only contemporary religious movement that has room in its structure for scientists and mystics, believers and non-believers, activists and dreamers. And I am, at times, all of those.
I am a witch because I believe a return to paganism -- the religion that honored and respected the earth as Mother of us all -- is the only way our species will survive the next century. I believe we humans must begin to rediscover the ancient secrets of healing and magic that would allow us to become less dependent on energy-based technology.
My goal in this book is to transfer part of my vision to you. It isn't always a pretty vision. The prospect of the extinction of the human species is not a pleasant one. But the vision is vital.
If, therefore, you love every word you read here, I will have failed miserably.
I want only that you learn to think. I want only that you learn to dream. I want only that you wake up from the sleep our species has been in for the past four thousand years.
What I say should make you uncomfortable. I hope you become uncomfortable enough to change the assumptions you make about society, about religion, about government, about whom you think you are.
Blessed Be!
Rel Davis
When I was young, my teachers, my professors, and the authors of my textbooks all had the same answer: progress.
We humans, they said, began as primitive souls, ignorantly worshipping rocks and trees. We progressed to shamanism, worshipping the unknown through the mediation of a male "witch doctor." Then we progressed upward to pantheism and the worship of a group of gods (even, [shudder] some female ones). Then we got to the highest pinnacle of humanity and began worshipping one god!
Wow!
All this took place at the same time civilization was progressing from "cave men" to tribes to city-states to feudalism to nationalism.
History was all neat and preset. Everything evolved upwards, ever upwards. One basic assumption of my youth was the gradual upward motion of progress.
It all seemed wrong to me, as a child. And it still feels wrong. And not just to me. Researchers today are constantly poking holes in the notion of progress, and our very assumptions about reality are now being challenged.
This essay looks at the assumptions of our age -- and their fallacies.
For further reading, see Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade and Merlin Stone's When God Was a Woman.
There is an old song, Pop Goes the Weasel, which goes back to Elizabethan times. It concerns the terrible things young men did in London in those days. It's quite shocking to realize what was considered shocking to the good people of old Londontown.
The song went like this:
Up and down the city streets, in and out the Eagle,
That's the way the money goes, Pop! Goes the weasel.
Half a pound of thrup'ny rice, half a pound of treacle,
Mix em up and make 'em nice, Pop! Goes the weasel.
The streets of London were full in those days of young men with money and nothing to do. A lot of them were what they called in those days, "Commission Men." These were the younger sons of noble families, who were given a commission (a yearly income) and sent to the big city or the Colonies to keep them out of the family's hair and to keep them from contesting the eldest son's inheritance.
Well, when this song was popular, commission men were often sent off to London. There they wandered about the city generally making trouble. That's what "up and down the city streets" meant.
"In and out the Eagle" referred to a notorious hangout for young ruffians. In this den of iniquity they served that newfangled beverage brought over from the colonies: coffee. It was a coffee house, and since coffee was still a novelty, it was also considered somehow evil.
Now, the food the young men of London consumed was also considered terribly wasteful. It was "a half a pound of three-penny rice" mixed up with half a pound of treacle, or molasses. It was a popular dessert of the day, expensive (what with imported rice and all that) but popular among the profligate youth.
Oh yes, "pop goes the weasel" was the youth's slang expression for pawning a piece of property: you know, now you see it, now you don't. That's the way the money goes: Pop! Goes the Weasel!
The song was about juvenile delinquents wasting money by drinking coffee and eating rice and molasses! Many a parent today would be delighted if their teenage children were only involved in something so innocuous.
My point, of course, is that assumptions lead us often astray. Every age assumes that their era is the worse and their youth is "going to the dogs." We assume that anything foreign is somehow evil, or at best, not too good. (Or, if we happen to be the youth that is "going to the dogs," we assume that anything foreign and expensive has to be good!)
We make assumptions about people and about how people dress. We usually assume the worst in unknown situations. I'd like you to think about assumptions as you read the following fable:
THE STRANGER AND THE CHILD
One day a stranger came to a village, wearing all-white clothing marked with the dust of the lonely way. Shod in sandals . . . with long hair that fell below the shoulders.
The first person the stranger met was a merchant from the village itself. The merchant was greeted with the words: "The you-inside is beautiful." The merchant sidled away -- as if to touch the stranger might soil himself, and continued on his way.
The stranger continued into the village. Another shopkeeper was greeted in exactly the same way: "The you-inside is beautiful." He too stepped aside -- with that look one gives the hopelessly insane -- and went on his way without speaking.
The next person the stranger greeted was a housewife -- cleaning a pot beside her garden. "The you-inside is beautiful," she was told. She stood at full length and looked at the stranger.
"Do you say this," she shouted, "because the me on the outside is so ugly? How dare you insult me!" And she threw the heavy pot at the stranger -- who stepped nimbly aside and continued walking.
Throughout the village it was always the same. Each person greeted by the words "The you-inside is beautiful," responded with either anger or fear or, at best, with polite disdain.
Finally the stranger came to the center of the village, where was the well and a young child drawing water.
"The you-inside is beautiful," the stranger said to the child.
"I know that," the child answered, "but thank you for reminding me."
"An exceedingly wise child," the stranger said, "in such a village. Where did you learn such wisdom?"
"I learned nothing," the child responded. "But I have not forgotten, like so many of my friends."
"Then blessed are you that you have not forgotten." "But I do have a question," the child said slowly. "Will I forget too -- when I become an adult? Will I become like all the grownups in the village?"
"Not unless you want to forget. If you choose, you will be able to remember your inner beauty as long as you wish."
"Then," the child said happily, "I choose not to forget." A pause. "But what will become of me?"
"You will become a stranger," the stranger said, "wandering forever, visiting strange villages, reminding the villagers of the inner beauty they possess in ignorance."
The child bowed slightly and, placing hands together prayer-fashion, said softly: "The you-inside is beautiful."
The stranger did the same. And slowly walked away. Never again to be seen in the village.
And the child? She became a stranger -- like her sister before her -- wandering from place to place, dressed all in white, carrying the message that the "you" inside each of us is beautiful.
Why? The language we speak is not at fault, for the words used can mean both male and female. No, the problem lies in the habits we have developed about how we think about males and females.
A similar story (a riddle) concerns a young man who was in an automobile accident and needed emergency surgery at the hospital. The attending physician took one look at the young man and said: "This is my son and I cannot perform the surgery." Told that the surgeon was not the young man's father, most people spend hours agonizing about how the story could be true. A rare individual understands that the surgeon could also be the young man's mother.
But what is it in most of us that we automatically assign certain roles to males and certain roles to females? Why do we assume certain roles should exist for men and others for women?
The answer goes far beyond mere prejudice. It is so deeply ingrained in us that it will take generations to remove, this poison of sexist assumptions. And its roots go far back in time, back to the dawn of civilization.
And, by the way, a lot of our other assumptions: the fear of the unknown, fear of the foreign, and the fear of our own youth, can be explained as arising from the same general font.
Civilization, it is now believed, started about 10,000 years ago when women discovered that certain plants could be harvested for food and that the seeds planted in the ground would produce a new harvest the next year. Agriculture was the foundation of modern civilization, and a mutant wheat was probably the key to the entire process. Before that, Homo sapiens lived a mainly nomadic life, following the herds of animals that "he" hunted. I say "he" because many scientists believe the men did the hunting and women stayed behind to care for the children. But when agriculture was discovered, women became the food-providers.
The first major civilizations were women inspired and women organized. The guiding force in such civilizations was cooperation. Trust was taken for granted. The religions of such civilizations were based on nature and natural forces.
The Mother Goddess was a kind and benevolent deity, under whatever name, and worship was a practical process of realigning oneself with the earth, with the seasons, with other human beings. Groves and mountains were sacred places. The soil was good.
Throughout the first six to eight thousand years of "civilization," the only holdovers in male domination were the nomadic herdsmen, who had domesticated their prey and travelled with the animal without hunting it. The lives of these people were harsh and barren compared to the comfort and warmth of the city dwellers.
So the inevitable happened -- about four thousand years ago. All over the world, the agricultural civilizations were overthrown by the crude nomadic cultures. The kindly Mother Goddess was dethroned and the harsh male gods of the nomads were thrust in her place.
In China, the Yin dynasty was overthrown by the Yang. In Canaan, the Astarte-Baal worshipers were overrun by the worshipers of the cruel Yahweh. In Greece, the moon and earth goddess was replaced by the God of the Sky -- Hecate was displaced by Zeus.
Mythologies were rewritten . . . and histories were rewritten . . . to justify the male domination.
Abel the herdsman was made the good guy and Cain the farmer became the bad guy, exactly the opposite of what really happened! (Goebbels' ideas about the big lie weren't new. They'd been done millennia before!)
The serpent, symbol of eternal life (because it sheds its skin periodically), became the symbol of evil incarnate. And men suddenly became responsible for the birth of children! (Eve was born from Adam's rib, and Diana sprang full-grown from the body of Jupiter.)
For the first time in history, between three and four thousand years ago, it became more important who a person's father supposedly was than who a person's mother really was. When Shakespeare wrote "'Tis a wise father knows his own son," he was poking fun at the male myth of fatherhood.
The ancient Celts transferred the kingship from Uncle to Nephew (or Sister- son). This way you were certain to get the same lineage. (By the way, genetically, this system makes a lot more sense than the modern one.)
Habitual ways of thinking were forced on all humans, male and female alike. The language shifted so that if sex were not specified, the male became automatically assumed. We would say: "men," meaning all humans, for example. In this culture, males were good and honorable and strong and females were weak, and emotional, and evil. Women could not serve as religious leaders anymore -- only men could be priests. Women were denied education in most male cultures. And even the right to own property was taken from them. They became, instead, the property of the male.
Peacefulness as a way of life was replaced by militancy. Trust was replaced by hatred, prejudice and xenophobia. Warmth and touching and kindness were looked down on and thus became the sole province of women.
Many of today's assumptions are inherent in that false view of reality that says that women are somehow less than men.
But the situation is changing slowly. We are all of us becoming more aware of our language these days. The Mother Goddess is being worshipped again. Men are again allowed to cry and be tender (at least in part of our culture) and women are allowed to be strong and capable.
But we still have a long way to go. Assumptions are internal poisons that lie in wait to place barriers between us and others. They take away our humanity and the humanity of others by denying what is real, by denying the essential nature of other human beings.
For the assumption which leads me to deny your humanity also forces me to deny my own. My assumption about me limits me more than my assumption about you might limit you. If I believe that I cannot cry, or cannot be tender, or cannot show weakness, then I have imprisoned myself, cut myself off from half of what it's like to be a human being. Men have, for years, been plagued by such seemingly male illnesses as peptic ulcers, heart attacks, and strokes, because they could not express emotions as well as women.
The goal of each of us should not be to act like the other sex, however, but to remember that we are totally human, capable of expressing and feeling the entire range of human emotions --that no emotions are exclusive for either sex.
Assumptions place the ability to be fully human out of reach for the average person.
Assumptions place barriers around us that keep us from others.
Assumptions take away our power to be fully alive.
Assumptions make us forget that the you inside each of us is really beautiful.
Rel Davis