REVIEWS
Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women, by Sylvia
Brinton Perera, Toronto, Inner City Books, 1981, 112 p., $9.00
This is an exciting, difficult, engrossing book about women's
search for freedom and healing, and our desperate need to discover
an inner female authority in a predominantly male world. Combining
a third millenium Sumerian text, Ishtar's Descent, with dreams
from her own Jungian practice as a model for modern woman's
journey, Sylvia Perera presents a vivid image of female initiation.
We who are "father's daughters" in a psychological sense (cp.
"mama's boys"), defined by men as "docile daughters", "good
mothers", "bright, achieving partners", develop "animus-egos"
that goad us into living goal-oriented, compulsive, over-achieving
lives. These false centers drive us on to ever new accomplishments,
make insatiable demands upon our time and energies, and worse
yet, are always critical of the the results. It is that part of us that
"projects the power", that attempts to control by manipulation (a
real ugly!), that accommodates too willingly, that finds it difficult to
ask for help, that is unable to admit and value one's own needs. This
sentence struck home with me: "Too often there is no distinction
felt between the unmothered woman's need for the mother, and her
need for male partership. . . .(These women) continue to seek
strength and mothering from men and their own animus, even devaluating
feminine nurturance when it is available to them."
Somehow, someway, we must learn to dis-identify from compulsive
male judgments and find female values within for our own
salvation and wholeness. This is not, of course, a brand new
thought. Esther Harding began writing about it fifty years ago, and
it is an idea that has been coming to the surface more and more in
Jungian literature (for example, Marion Woodman's The Owl Is
The Baker's Daughter). Sylvia Perera describes this process with
such force and clarity that we are able to travel with Ishtar down
through the Underworld of our own lives to her dark sister Ereshkigal,
the Mother Goddess, source of the deepest instinctive female
energy, and return with new insight and awareness. The dread
initiation involves "suffering, disrobing, humiliation, flagellation,
and. . . crucifixion on the underworld peg." In the course of this the
great energy of the Goddess "turns back on itself, goes down into
self-preserving introversions, (and becomes) the energy that makes
a woman able to be separate unto herself and survive alone'—centered,
grounded and whole.
The Goddess is making herself known in many of us today. But
the great need is to experience her with awareness and not with
passive acceptance that leads to masochistic suffering. Some of us
perhaps take this journey voluntarily, and some of us get booted into
it. But if we miraculously survive to tell the tale and can experience
this archetypal ego-sacrifice to the self, we can begin to share in
the cycle of healing and transformation through which wholeness
comes.
I found it a heady experience to read and relate to the vivid
passages in this book, to recognize steps along the journey, and to
see them as parallel to my own. (Time to knock on wood and confront
inflation!) To realize with real elation and a sense of wonder, that
women like me can find in this tale a symbolic journey similar to the
Christian Hero's journey, but told this time in female terms. Here is
the story of the via dolorosa, the crucifixion of the ego to the Self for
the sake of salvation, the descent into Hell, and the resurrection,
told some 3,000 years before the birth of Christ. It gives me the
same exciting validation that Neumann's retelling of the story of
Amor and Psyche did when I recognized that story as an early
acknowledgement of woman's role in the achievement of consciousness.
Patricia C. Fleming
Wilmington, De.
Woman, Earth and Spirit: The Feminine in Symbol and Myth, by
Helen M. Luke. Crossroad Publishing Company, New York, 1981.
102pp., $8.95.
Helen Luke, has worked more than thirty years as a counselor
to men and women who sought to relate their daily lives to the
reality of myth and symbol. This book evolved from separate papers
written for study groups at her rural center, "Apple Farm." Its
opening chapter, "The Life of the Spirit in Women,'' appeared first
as a Pendle Hill Pamphlet. She forcefully addresses modern woman's
need to recover the awareness and expression of her authentic
femininity, which can take highly individual directions. One persist-
ent effect of the damage done by centuries of masculine dominance
is that much of the current feminist propaganda is poisoned by
actual contempt for the feminine. This is "the collective judgment
of centuries about the inferiority, the dullness, the uncreativeness
of a woman's passive feminine nature." Her aim becomes mere
equality with men, the achievement of comparable expressions of
masculine creative Spirit.
"There has to be fuel before the fire will burn; there has to be
earth as well as seed, before new life is created." Helen Luke deals
beautifully with the symbolism of Fire and Air vs. Earth and Water
in this connection, and quotes the I Ching on Yin the Receptive, the
"equal and opposite" of Yang the Creative. "The Earth's condition
is receptive d e v o t i o n . . . all beings owe their birth to it, because it
receives the heavenly with devotion."
Remembering Ann Ulanov's distinction between the "elementary
static" and the "transformative or dynamic" aspects of
the feminine principle, we may be tempted to wonder if Luke falls
back into seeing the dynamically spiritual as masculine by definition,
and only the static aspect as feminine. Such a judgment would
be unfair. It is easier to contemplate and admire the transformative
feminine in all its glory, both in others and in our own emerging
creative selves, than to render an equal tribute to Yin the Receptive!
For that very reason, we are sometimes driven to acknowledge that
Helen Luke's hammering on the Receptive may be just what we
need.
The essay on the ancient Aryan dawn goddess, Eostre, from
whom our word "Easter" is derived, may restore our lost meanings.
"This image of the goddess bringing to birth the resurrected
sun—or Son—out of the womb of darkness. . . carries a numinous
power." She ties it in with the mythic truth of the Pueblo Indians'
belief that if they were not present at every dawn to help the Sun
rise by their worship, it would fail to rise. As Jung says, "If anyone
lives his own hypothesis to the bitter e n d . . . he knows that Christ
is his brother." "A true love costs no less than everything. . . In
our individual lives it means we stand continually ready to accept
the death of an old attitude, the loss of an object of love or veneration,
the end of a projection that has lost its numinosity or its relevance
to the present."
"Goddess of the Hearth," is my favorite chapter, combining a
variety of symbols in a way quite new to me. Fire descends from
heaven to meet earth's fuel; whether it then burns creatively or
destructively depends on the nature of the fuel we supply and the
quality of attention we give it; as T.S. Eliot put it, we have a choice
between "fire and fire." The I Ching Hexagram #30, which also
means "fire and fire," carries the curious injunction to steady perseverance
and "care of the cow;" "an image of the slow, patient
chewing of the cud which turns the grass of the earth into human
food." "The cow is the passive, feminine heat of unremitting attention
without which there can be no transformation of fire"—
whether for the alchemist in his retort, the cook in her kitchen, or
anyone "who seeks to transform the raw material of his or her life
into the gold of consciousness." We must drink daily of the milk of
the cow; we must ruminate. Without this, says the I Chingy the fire
"flames up, dies down, is thrown away."
Helen Luke then turns to an interpretation of the hearth-goddess
Vesta's virginity: only as a woman finds herself to be completein-
herself, hence with no need for possessiveness, can she " bring
unity to the family around the hearth." This holds true, in different
ways, for the woman who has no literal hearth or family. According
to the ancient meaning of temple prostitution, it is only through
burning in the fires of instinct sufficiently to become "capable of a
total giving of herself, body as well as soul," that a woman becomes
truly virgin and able to 4 4 give the milk of her feminine warmth to all
who will draw it." But to bring this about, long years of tending her
essential feminine cowlikeness are required.
Another of my favorite essays deals with the "Mother and
Daughter Mysteries," which is interesting especially as compared
to Chris Downing's treatment.* Helen Luke is content to follow the
Homeric Hymn toDemeter as it stands; but she too was sufficiently
drawn to the thought of the mature Persephone's at-homeness in
Hades' realm, to opt for a cover design taken from a votive plaque
showing Hades and Persephone sitting together in state, companionable
and broadly smiling, perhaps pleased with their worshiper
who has offered them the emblems they like best. After all, Allseeing
Zeus did arrange this marriage, for good and sufficient
reasons!
♦Downing, Christine. The Goddess: Mythological Images of the Feminine,
N.Y., Crossroad Publishing Company, 1981.
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Attention is given to an episode in which Demeter, taking the
first step away from total abandonment to her grief, volunteers to
care for another child, the human son of the king and queen of
Eleusis. Her treatment of the child is described perceptively as both
right and wrong, and the mother's terrified interference as both
wrong and right. After a petulant temper tantrum and a demand
that a temple be built for her, Demeter enters a phase of introverted
growth. This culminates in her true and greatest contribution to
humankind, the founding of the Eleusinian Mysteries. No longer
playing at being a goddess, she demonstrates the reality by offering
one of the most profound ritualized inner journeys through which
humans have ever been enabled to win their immortality.
There are three brief essays: one on Straw and Gold (the story
of Rumpelstiltskin); one on "the Revenge of the Repressed Feminine"
(based on the Oresteia of Aeschylus); and one on "Money
and the Feminine Principle of Relatedness." The Latin Moneta was
originally the name of a goddess (of the mint in which money was
coined). Since she was forgotten and sank into the unconscious,
Money "has acquired an ever-increasing autonomous power and is
worshiped unashamedly as an end in itself." Helen Luke treats
money in the light of the profound human principle of Exchange
from which it was derived, and which, as celebrated in the poetry
and novels of Charles Williams, is indeed numinous; and this is, of
course, what money is for.
Woman, Earth and Spirit is a comparatively short book, but its
author's insights are as unusual as her style and give us much to
ponder.
ErminieH. Lantero
Spring Valley, N. Y.
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