On A Materialist Spirituality | by Esmée Streachailt

So, I want to encourage everyone to respond to these questions. They would make for some very lively discussion in the new server. I thought to offer a view on them because they indicate a stubborn either/or thinking that holds us back.

Like, let me take 2a first: Is a Wiccan path feminist? Well, depends on how you-alone or you and your community are doing your Wicca. Are the men running it? Are the men (even unconsciously) centering themselves? Is it all about sex and occult ritual? Or are the women in the lead, centered, and it’s also about healing the planet and her children? Or some blend of both? Does your group need to have a think about this? See, "Do as thou wilt, and harm none" can have a feminist vector, or just a libertine-libertarian one.

Wicca is a modern reimagining of an Earth religion we have indications of through Medieval monks' records, and there are more and less feminist kinds of it.

Now, whatever matriarchs are cooking up (Nergiz, Matriarchy Times, Matriarchy Now, a bit of MR here) will also be a modern reimagining of an Earth religion, a chthonic spirituality, and there is no finding total historical authenticity in that. We really have to observe our patterns, check with our gut, honor what it says, and sometimes do some heavy sophialogical lifting.

I don't imagine a matriarchy of charismatic cults and any dogma – that’s too hierarchical and too on-the-grid. But I do imagine a shared cosmology, a shared ethos, and lots of locally flavored stories, practices, festivals.

Questions 1, 2b, and 3 feel very related. There’s a tension expressed here between spirituality/faith and materiality/science-politics-rationality. Let me start here and paint in broad strokes: I don’t think our oldest known myths about the Goddess explain quantum mechanics, and I don’t think quantum mechanics can tell us much about the Goddess – but myth and physics are two schemata designed to address totally different parts of our reality. So it’s fine.

I don’t too much care if we think that the Goddess IS the music of the vibrational strings of the 11 dimensions of the quantum fields or if we think that the quantum music is just luck and humans are emergent phenomena of those fields and some of us believe in a Goddess-planet.

We have always been clever. We have always traded and built and invented. In the Americas many indigenous peoples tell the story of Sky Mother, who is also the earth in some versions. My European Paleo-Meso-and-Neolithic ancestors built large settlements, traded over 1000s of miles sometimes, and invented and invented because humans are problem solving animals. And we were animists, and that way of being related to – hell, Embedded In – our world is a misty memory for us. What I can tell you is that the split between faith and reason is very recent and only partly to the good.

Feminists are suspicous of religions for good reason – patriarchal religion uses faith to diminish and destroy women. I get it. We've had these traditions for so long, and the punishments for breaking with them have been so severe that venturing a new order of spirit – one that dimineshes no one, one that incorporates science because it does not split the spiritual from the material and does not govern the one with the other, BOTH/AND – yeah, that feels/is really risky. But, radical feminism has always demanded a change and growth to this depth. It will be very hard to give up and move out of either/or and othering in regard to sex if keep it everywhere else. As we have seen to date.

This both/and of Her is why I talk sometimes about a Hyperlithic era, about our embedment in the world and cosmos, a kind of return that is more a venture outward. In the old Irish stories that ultimate She is the cosmos, which is the whole of the Otherworld that completely surrounds our world.

Do we HAVE to have a Goddess? No. Does it feel less alienating to many women to engage with the world in those terms? Yes. Will that work for every woman? No. Will Medusa Rising make a problem out of that difference? Never. Being human is an art because a huge part of being us is knowing which frame or which process to bring to each experience or problem. And that’s not always totally clear at first. So we do a loose kind of scientific problem solving – we test and respond, iterate and develop – to see which we need.

I mean, which Goddess? Or which phase of the Goddess? As I have said elsewhere: She is the mother gazelle and the colt and the mother lion who kills the colt to feed her cubs. The grass and the meat. Death-Regeneration-Life, in that order. Biology and Ecology are two sciences we use to understand how that works down to a very fine grain.

The reason I like to call the era we all yearn for Hyperlithic is that it gets at how I think some kind of matriarchy will evolve next, hopefully out of our already democratic practices (hyper - beyond), and that while it will a futurist matriarchy (hyper - very cool), we are still very ground-dwelling animals who build with wood and rock (lithic). It expresses the ambition and humility we need. That carrying power lightly so that we may destroy power. For me, that is a project needing quite a lot of reason and science, and quite a lot of grounded faith. Humans have never done that before at this scale.

So the answer is yes-no. Do as thou wilt and harm none. But the individualism in that maxim is not enough for me. We are always both in need and able to give, and we are at bottom obligated to each other and our supporting ecology, and She and we both have limits I would love us to use our reason and science to respect.

Esmée Streachailt is the founder/editor of Medusa Rising.