The Angry Deva's Blog
Veneration of the Dark Godis is Veneration of the Whole Wombn. Our Power is in Darkness, but first wo-men have to leave our patriarchal conditioning behind - leave the father's house and his rules! Embrace the Way of the Womb!
A black Wombn's outrage, anger and disgust is her power. Oh i know that the love and light pages preach forgiveness and all that. But Black Wombn come from a place of Darkness. In Darkness we truly see what is, not what we wish it to be. Go outside into the sun. What is the first thing you do? Put your hand up. You shield your eyes. Because the light is blinding and it is obstructing your clear line vision. We have invented ways and means to protect our physical eyes from the blinding light. Yet we subject our Spiritual Eyes to this same blinding light. And we even endorse it as the way. Darkness is where you are from. The things we denounce? The things we are taught to reject and deject? These are our powers and strengths. This is the way we grow. Black Wombn, face your "Darkness:"
These "weaknesses" are your greatest strengths, once you accept them; and address their root causes. Meditation wont change it. Smoking wont change it. Crystals wont change it. This kind cometh by Dark Wisdom and Gnosis. Gno this, gnosis. The freedom of our Soul? Is not tied up in "love and light" but in Dark and Savvy energetic emanations.
0 Comments
I decided to delve DEEP into #controversy here. A***trigger warning*** to the racially sensitive, this is a piece that is meant to be a shocker and to provoke analytic thought. This is a call to the Black Womb to divest from that which is NOT in her best interest. This is a call to the Black Womb to realize her great power as a Woman and to NOT deny her greatness to appease the wounded hyper-masculines within our cohort. I wrote this in generalizations because it was easier, not because I am unaware or too stupid to understand what a generalization is and that they do not always apply to the all. It is NOT your average piece of writing on race by the black woman. It is designed to piss you off and get you to thinking. I anticipate your angry gossip, angry comments and complete denials. I know who you are and what your go to knee-jerk reactions are when it comes to black accountability for what is in our scope of power and access to control and change. I decided to view you as CAPABLE and SOVEREIGN and not as the slave-class we been encouraged to be.
With that said I firmly believe that the Black Womb is the God of the universe! Science has proven that the entire human species originates out of Africa and the Mitochondrial DNA Genome has been here on the planet for thousands of years before the Y-Chromosomal pattern was created by, you guessed it, the Black Womb. Via Channeling I was able to gather that we Dawta's (the galaxy) didn't always utilize sexual alchemy (or fuck) on our suns to create them. I am thankful to Spirit for that message... The GALAXY or the DAWTA gives birth to/creates the SUN or SON. Let those that have an ear hear! As such, and with all of this in mind: If black people are the ORIGINAL creators of life. and if there be NOTHING new under the sun... all we do has already been done... then MISOGYNY, RACISM, CLASSISM AND MORE are BLACK INVENTIONS gone rogue and wild (because we no longer control them en masse). If the Black man is the father of civilization, and many of you hold this to be the truth, and the black woman is its mother, WE CREATED THIS SHIT! ALLLLLLLL OF IT! even and especially that shit we HATE is in existence. I remember... being one of those race women who blame ALL black harms, horrors and issues on white folks. I thank Goddess for growing up. We can cite slavery, apartheid, global disenfranchisement ALL THE LIVE LONG DAY for all the ills of black society. and RIGHTEOUSLY SO! We can say that black men are abusive, black woman hating deadbeats on account of picking up the euro man all the live long day. But I ask you: what about those 56 women raped hourly in the congo, that they know of there's only 56 per hr, who are not black american with the black american slave legacy? and they will say that it is colonialism that did it. and I will ask: what about the FACT that africans SOLD THEIR OWN to the white man? as proof that WE CREATED THE SAME SYSTEM WE HATE and abhor, and they will say that slavery in africa was different than what white people did. you will hear about chattle slavery and other regurgitated soundbites on race relations. And I will ask them about the 3 black/brown men who RAPED and murdered Quiana Jenkins, the WIFE of Marine Jan Pawel Pietrzak eventually killing him after making him watch them rape his wife, for being married to a white man? The same of which, after raping that woman, killing her husband via one shot to the head and then killing her with a double shot to the back of the head, wrote "nigger lover" on their bedroom wall. And they will use denial, excuses, the media, statistical tampering and more to say that those violent rapist murder's of OUR sister and her husband were innocent. (A jury sentenced 2 of them to death and one to life in jail without parole in June.) We will say it was that the man did something to them.. not that this couple was PUNISHED for their choice to LOVE one another. and the blame will keep going BACK to white folks. This leaves no room for us to examine the ways in which we DO have the power to make choices that serve our highest good and best interest. which says, to me, that black people collectively when it is convenient for us, endorse the willful enslaving of our Divine Will, individual/collective Choice Power and Birth Rite to global white supremacy. How so? ANY SOVEREIGN PERSON OR GROUP will be seeking to HEAL and harmonize their cohort. not find JUSTIFICATION, based on historics, economics and virtual access, for their dysfunctional, self defeating behaviors, attitudes, practices, beliefs and cultural adaptations. ******************** When I was a child, my cohort and I were accused of "thinking we were white." For me, it was on account of my vernacular, diction and the articulation of my thoughts. Even though, then, I was the most RADICAL MILITANT PRO-BLACK SISTA EVER, rockin the fro and all lol, I was too white for them. I read books, I didn't fuck around and I was serious about my studies. (serious about my studies meaning, i liked to learn. school sucked majorly and taught us nothing so BOOKS and writing became my best friends). I was NOT the best student in grade school, i was bored out of my mind and didn't see an end of that until College. But that, reading and enjoying learning, is what "white" kids do. My own cousins would say "auntie's kids think they white" because of how we carried ourselves. When my sisters and I made it through our teen years without being "knocked up" by black men (focus on black men here because we are black women) we REALLY thought we were white and too good and better than everyone else who had fallen victim to the okey-doke. These are just a few of the ways that the dysfunctional black cohort attempts to police those trying to do better into acceptance of sub-par bullshit. I would enter debates and disputes all the time with people, attempting to help them see how they have taken every gross white supremacist ideal of blackness and applied it as the very embodiment of black. so black women can't read and be black... we gotta be tryina be white. black women cannot speak the "kings english," we tryina be white. black WOMEN cannot decide to reserve their sexual enjoyment for worthy partners... we tryina be white and what chu tryina say about the brothers? and it goes on and on this horrible denigration of Black Sovereignty and Black Will Power BY and AGAINST black women. Historically, and presently, black people are oppressed. Yep, "black dude" in the white house and all, our lives (as a collective) are NOT anything like those of the blacks over on Pennsylvania ave. Our oppression's as black women (and I am addressing black women primarily in my writings as I believe in the Sisterhood) are multi-faceted and intersecting. The legacy of slavery, the implications and IMPACT that has had on the collective black psyche will NEVER be explored, honored or even considered by the dominant narrative. We have wasted centuries of effort, energy and capital trying to get the dominant narrative to change. And in 2013 people, BLACK PEOPLE even, are STILL espousing horrifically racist views of African's in the Diaspora. I saw a black woman say that Alek Wek had GORILLA features and as such was NOT as beautiful as european featured Beyonce, just 2 days ago. It didn't shock me or surprise me. I expected to hear that from a black woman about her own reflection. THAT is whats disgusting... the EXPECTATION that black women espouse and embody the same racist sexism they LAMENT, is disgusting and a clear sign of someone who has been around too long and seen too much. In July 2013 an Italian Senate VP (a white male named Roberto Caldroni) came under fire for likening the nations FIRST Black Female Cabinet Minister to an orangutan. These anti black female attitudes have swept our planet and been fueled by and large by our own brothers. Our disconnect from our Black Origins and Black Godis power has borked our concept of community. We were NEVER a viral people the way that the dominant culture has become. On the contrary, we were always communal. We see the great issue with trying to be communal within a virus. Colonization itself was, I have seen, the result of our collective inability or disinterest at organization within a collective. We either saw no merit to a collective, or failed to successfully establish an hegemony that SERVES the interest of blacks throughout the diaspora. As it stands, our own brothers themselves see no value in the community or the Womb's who birth it. I identify their divorce from the yin/feminine/Godis as the endorsement of yang/hyper-masculine/patri-male-god usurpation of our position. They, as the fathers of civilization and creation, have created this anti-black female sentiment and have since endorsed it for their own financial gain and ends, black females be damned! and so my POINT here is... when is the excuse and blame going to be done with? when are we going to INTROSPECT and get to the ROOT of the problem, vs all this fraudulent cord cutting we have been doing around racialized sexism and sexualized racism? Because, as it stands, the blaming of the white man for all the ills of black people, the ills of black men against black women, has gotten us no where. It has gotten us into a dis-empowered state within collective global disenfranchisement. It has gotten us programs designed to keep us dependent on the dominant culture and narrative. It has NOT gotten us greater harmony nor community. Black males still run rampant in crime based activities in our communities with no regard to the mothers and children there. Black males are still shooting up our neighborhoods and sending our sons, and dawtas, to early graves with impunity. and Black women are permitting them to do so and enabling the maintenance of "thug" culture as the identity of black maleness at large with impunity. The consistent blaming of the white man has not done thing ONE to improve our lot, change our circumstances, improve the way our sons view our daughters and improve relations between our God's and her Suns. so again, when is the excuse and blame going to be enough to exact the necessary changes within our community and family? WHEN? Dear mothers, Before the mainstreaming of the Sun cult-u-re, we were a Lunar people. We went by the Lunation of the Moon. 13 months representing the sacred Holy number of Divine Femininity. I borrowed this from a sister Oracle: Learn your personal cycles- weekly - daily - monthly - and yearly I decided to write a little bit about our Sensual/Sexual/Spiritual lives. Real rap brown, sensual energy is great. Who doesn't enjoy a wonderful exchange of intimate innerg/energy with a desirable partner?
Connection to the truth of our Sexual/Spiritual/Sensual origins and purpose is freedom and liberation. Actualization via acceptance of this concept within our Mind-frame template enables true Self Knowledge and Power. Embrace all of you! ♥ You can be a highly sensual person and still be on the path to enlightenment and gnosis. Enlightenment is not anything more than the falling away of untruth. It is so unfortunate that our ideal and connection to the process of enlightenment have been so thoroughly tainted by the "love and light" cult sweeping the planet... but the truth of the light is Love of Self, and the truth of enlightenment is the falling away of untruth, the crumbling away of all we once thought to be right and correct. That, to me, doesn't sound like a skip through the daises. In fact, it sounds to me more like a slow slip into madness. It is the release, the rejection, the refusal to embody all that we have been taught, indoctrinated and encouraged to believe in. About the author BlogMothers Comment: Jane Caputi
Cunctipotent – (rare – cunctus, all and potens, potent-em, powerful after the classical omnipotens): All-powerful, omnipotent. Oxford English Dictionary Cunctipotent – all powerful (i.e., having cunt-magic) Barbara Walker (1993, 197) I am. The light ripples through my fingers. I walk towards the sanctuary where the cunctipotent Dark One presides. Susan Hawthorne (2003, 267) Potency – meaning force, strength, power, capacity and authority – is supposedly a neutral term, yet it functions mostly to mean a man's ability to get and maintain an erection. At the same time, potency also carries some serious philosophical implications. As Aristotle so famously declared, woman "is as it were an impotent male, for it is through a certain incapacity that the female is female" (cited in Agonito, 1977, 4). Actually, Aristotle has it kind of backwards. In truth, it is through a certain imposed female incapacity that the male is "male" – by which I mean that he is able to be a "man" and not a "wimp," a "pussy" or even a "cunt." Centuries later, a would-be philosopher of the bedroom, Bob Guccione, editor of Penthouse, comes right out and says this when he whines about Viagra being so popular because "feminism has emasculated the American male, and that emasculation has led to physical problems" (cited in Roof, 1999, 5). In other words, male potency virtually requires female impotence. This attitude stems directly from the mainstream, though downright pornographic, worldview that tells us (1) that male and female are hierarchical opposites, with the woman being inferior, (2) that if there is anything womanly about a man he loses his maleness, and (3) potency itself is synonymous with both masculinity and male domination. Neither potency nor power, however, is inherently linked to either masculinity or domination. Both words are derived from the Latin posse which means "to be able, to have the power to." Back in about 1974, I went to one of my first feminist lectures, a talk by Robin Morgan at Wellesley College. It was the first time I had heard someone make a distinction between patriarchal power, that is, power as domination, and another kind of power encompassing empowerment as well as the generation and channeling of energy. 1 Here was a pregnant suggestion of another kind a power, a power that I am going to be calling cunctipotence, and one that can be adopted and wielded not only by women but also by men. Much knowledge, including awareness and understanding of female potency, has been appropriated and distorted, suppressed, discredited, erased and trivialized through patriarchal colonization. Nonetheless, if we know how to look for them, we can still find much of the underlying core wisdoms in oral traditions, myths, stories, symbols, words and common phrases, often by researching their etymological backgrounds and historical associations. I first encountered the word cunctipotence in Barbara Walker's Encyclopedia of Women's Myths and Secrets, under the entry for cunt. While many of us might assume that cunt has always been an obscene word, this is not so. In A Dictionary of Slang Eric Partridge notes that cunt was once part of Standard English but: "owing to its powerful sexuality the term has since the C15th been avoided in written and polite English . . . and been held to be obscene, i.e. a legal offence to print it in full" (cited in Mills, 1989, 60). Cunt, he details, isn't really slang at all, but an ancient word. Its etymological origins are in dispute, though Partridge links it to queen (which gives a new twist to the meaning of "Philosopher Queen"). Barbara Walker traces cunt to the Oriental Great Goddess as "Cunti, or Kundra, the Yoni [Sanskrit for cunt] of the Universe." Following Michael Dames' lead, Walker also links cunt with country, kin, kind, cunning, ken, and the archaic word cunctipotent, which she defines as "all powerful (i.e. having cunt-magic") (197). Most linguists dispute Dames' etymology, but I suggest we consider it as an alternative "folk" etymology that guides us to claim cunctipotence as a word meaning female and female-identified power, potency, possibility, and potential – a concept sorely needed in the English language. Patriarchal religious and cultural systems all are built upon dread of the cunt, that is, of explicit femaleness and female potency, which are associated variously with witchcraft, abomination, idolatry, obscenity, uncleanness, and madness. This dirty and disgraced cunt is defined in antithesis not so much to the penis, but to the phallus. The penis is not the opposite of the cunt, but the analogue. Indeed, the penis should be understood as not masculine but as itself female or feminine (as was the case in some ancient cultures 2 ), for the penis shares with the cunt properties of fertility and it, also like the cunt, is responsive, changeable (more often soft than hard), embodied, dark, wet, and "down there." The phallus is adamantly not the penis. Usually it takes the form of a detached, usually white and permanently erect penis. This phallus has long symbolized masculine omnipotence and patriarchal allegiance (Keuls, 1985; Bordo, 1999). In psychoanalytic theory, the phallus is also said to be the "ultimate signifier" and the symbolic agent that separates the child from the mother, initiating the child into the world of "the Father," the world of power, law, order, language, reason, and authority (Gamble, 1999, 294). Of course, this separation is not just from the physical mother, but also from the metaphysical "Mother," whom we can understand as the cosmic Matrix (from the Latin matrix, uterus), also known as Nature (from the Latin nasci, to be born). The earliest human traditions understood the forces that we generally think of as "Nature," the "life force," "origins," and "Fate" as analogous to female sexuality. These concepts were signified by representations of the vulva or images of the naked female form (Rawson, 1973). Throughout the world, the names of Goddesses of Sex, Love, Fate, Death and Transformation are drawn from symbols or words for womb or vulva (Grahn, 1982, 270-271). Hindu traditions still recognize the sacredness of the yoni – a Sanskrit word with meanings not only of cunt, but also abode, source, spring, home. Pre-Indo-European peoples understood the yoni as the "concrete manifestation" of Shakti, "the life-giving, animating power of the cosmos" (Margolin, 1986, 533). This knowledge has not been completely lost, but it has gone underground, for example, into the English language, where we can find intimations of cunt magic in evocative words and phrases naming or signifying the female sex organ, some obscure, some euphemistic, some clichéd, including principle, down there, the heart of darkness, possible, and trivia. Even as I write this, I feel the pressure of a multifaceted cultural taboo. One facet of this taboo restricts open discussion of sex organs to either pornography or medicine. Another makes the body, especially the sexual body, the antithesis of rationality, so anyone who identifies with the body, let alone the female sexual body, runs the risk of appearing unintelligent if not hysterical (from the Greek hustera, womb). And, of course, there remains the patriarchal demand for shame or pudency in women, particularly around our pudenda (from the Latin pudere, to be ashamed). In order to actualize female potency, we have to break though all of these taboos, to shed the imposed shame. We must be willing to acknowledge the potency – philosophical, spiritual, emotional and physical – of the cunt. 3 To do this, we will have to get down and dirty, wet even. We have to breathe deeply, burn with passion, and awaken all of our senses, both physical and ethereal. In other words, we have to get elemental. Starhawk ritually invokes the traditional four elements in her ecofeminist and Wiccan practice and writings: air, fire, water and earth as well as the mystical fifth element, ether, the "sacred transformative spirit of the center" (Starhawk 2004, 70). Mary Daly explicitly creates an "elemental philosophy," characterized by "reason rooted in instinct, intuition, passion," and informed by and in tune with the Earth and Nature (Daly 1984, 7). In Daly's philosophy, the unification of the five elements releases the force of Quintessence (1998), which she understands as "the unifying Living Presence that is at the core of the Integrity and Elemental connectedness of the Universe and that is the Source of our power to Realize a true Future – an Archaic Future" (Daly 1998, 11), that is one outside of patriarchal time/space. In seeking to both understand and activate cunctipotence, I too will take the elements as my frame, intuitively pairing each element with a philosophically suggestive term for the cunt (Air – Principle; Earth – Down There; Fire – Heart of Darkness; Water –Possible; Ether–Trivia). I hope also, by adopting this elemental and ritual framework, to participate in Quintessence and that movement toward an Archaic Future. The Feminine Principle: The Air of Mystery A common recollection of former slaves was the sight of a woman, often the reporter's mother, being beaten for defying her master's sexual advances.... Minnie Folkes remembered watching her mother being flogged by her overseer when she refused "to be wife to dis man." Decades after her emancipation, Minnie repeated with pride her mother's teaching: "Don't let nobody bother yo principle; 'cause dat wuz all yo' had." Dorothy Roberts (1997, 45) "The breath in the body goes way down from the genitals up through the center and finally bursts out. [Martha] Graham put it more bluntly. 'Move from your vagina,' she instructed." Appolinaire Sherr (2001) Webster's defines principle as "a general or fundamental truth . . . on which others are based and from which others are derived." In her initiation into Haitian Voodoo, Zora Neale Hurston (1938, 137) tells of a ritual in which the feminine principle, as manifesting in the female sex organ, is directly linked to the most fundamental truth. The Mambo or priestess is asked the ultimate question: "What is the truth?" The Mambo answers by ceremonially stripping and then exposing her vulva, for, as Hurston's teacher tells her,"there is no mystery beyond the mysterious source of life." Webster's also define principle as "something from which another thing takes its origin, a basic or primary source of material or energy: ultimate basis or cause." Encapsulating all of these meanings is the use of the word principle as an actual synonym for cunt in the words of Minnie Folkes' mother, quoted above. The feminine principle manifests most directly in the generative genitals, both female and male, and is indeed the original and ultimate source of being and truth, matter and energy, life, death, and regeneration. Martha Graham asked her female dancers to breathe, and move, from the vagina. Breath, wind, and the element of Air is associated round the world with the life force and with spirit (Abram, 1996). In Tibetan Buddhism the basic energy of the cosmos, pranja, is linked with air and is understood as a feminine principle (Mullin with Watt 2003, 57). Air is the element that guides us to a comprehension of the female principle through its related conceptions of breath, spirit, essence, scent, and volatility. A ubiquitous misogynist insult against the cunt concerns its scent, literally its "essence." The female principle is indeed an essence, not only in the most obvious sense of the word essence – "a basic underlying or constitutive entity," but also as "PERFUME, ODOR, SCENT . . . the volatile matter constituting perfume" (Webster's). Highly fragrant flowers and blossoms – the lotus, rose, and lily – commonly are understood as cunt symbols. The cunctipotent imaginary thus reconceptualizes essence by theorizing its nature not as fixed, but as grounded in an innate volatility, flexibility, sweetness, and changeableness. Volatile is from volare to fly. It means "Passing through the air on wings . . . airy, lighthearted, lively . . . changeable . . . difficult to capture or hold permanently." Comprehending the nature of the volatile essence invites recognition of paradox or Mystery. Essences, including what we think of as sexual essences, are volatile. They, like the imagination, like living words themselves as Virginia Woolf (1942) describes them, take flight, are impossible to pin down, fix or capture. Annie Sprinkle, the sexually explicit performance artist, once gave a show called the Public Cervix Announcement. Inserting a speculum, she invited her audience to view her cervix. One man reacted by exclaiming that it looked just like the head of a penis, which, indeed, it does. So too, a large clitoris and a small penis are uncannily twin-like. The male and female bodies are analogs, not opposites. Historically, sexists have interpreted this to mean that women are inferior, barely formed men. But, in truth, all fetuses begin from one, essentially female template. Some of the oldest religious/philosophical traditions recognize the complementary dualism of female and male, understanding that both are aspects of one original and "dynamic essence" (Leon-Portilla 1963, 83). Often, the female or feminine aspect is recognized as the "older" or more "preponderant" one, since it takes a greater amount of female energy to create life. 4 Thus, female, male, and intersexed persons are all variations on the preponderantly “female – potential and primary” nature of nature (Allen, 1986, 14). This "feminine principle" of creation is the intelligent, active, originating, fructifying and diverse life force, in which both women and men participate (Shiva, 1988, 38-42). Obviously, it is a mistake to consider sexual essence as something bifurcated and oppositional. At the same time it is profoundly limiting to understand "sex as sex" in the narrow, moralistic or pornographic ways that we are used to. Rather, Paula Gunn Allen suggests, we need to also consider the metaphysical or spiritual implications of sexuality, because"sexual connection with woman means connection with the womb, which is the container of power that women carry within their bodies" (Allen, 1986, 24). This divine power of the womb is reminiscent of Walker's idea of "cunt magic." And, Allen continues, it is important to remember that this power is "not really biological at base. It is the power of ritual magic, the power of Thought, of Mind, that gives rise to biological organisms as it gives rise to social organizations, material culture, and transformations of all kinds" (1986, 28). Understanding the connection of the cunt to thought, mind, and spirit allows still more false oppositions – the mind-body, spirit-flesh ones – to fall away. Consider this response of a six-year old girl when Eve Ensler asked her,"What's special about your vagina?" To this question, the girl replied: "Somewhere deep inside I know it has a really really smart brain" (1998, 88-89). Down There: Earthy Knowledge 5 I come from the "down there" generation. That is, those were the words – spoken rarely and in a hushed voice – that the women in my family used to refer to all female genitalia, internal or external. Gloria Steinem (in Ensler, 1998, ix) After all, we live on earth. We are created of the earth. The Ojibwe word for the human vagina is derived from the word for earth. A profound connection, don't you think? Louise Erdrich (2001, 134) On several occasions, verging on orgasm, I have found myself suddenly overwhelmed with a sensation of no longer inhabiting my body but of actually being one with the land – once a Hawaiian canyon, once an anonymous forest floor, and once the tundra on Hudson's Bay in Manitoba. I lost the sense of myself as a separate body/being and became one with the throbbing Earth – the dirt, the ground. I had always heard the phrase: "The Earth moved." On these occasions I knew that this was more than a figure of speech and that there truly is an intimate connection between sex and the dirt or earth. We are used to the word dirt being associated with sex, but usually only in a pejorative way – dirty jokes, words, and thoughts, with dirty suggesting moral "impurity" and obscenity. These are the constructions of what Susan Griffin calls our "split culture," a phallocentric world that splits masculine from feminine, mind from body, spirit from matter, and values the former over the latter. But the dirt, the earth or soil is the very ground of human being (the word human itself comes from the Latin humus, earth or dirt) and sexuality is one of the most direct ways we can experience the power of Earth, Nature or the life force. Righteous dirt busters are obsessed with "purity." They find "dirt" everywhere – from consensual sexual acts to whole classes of people who then are subjected to moral or ethnic cleansing. But this loathing for the dirt is not a universal emotion. In many ancient religions "the mere existence of the soil was seen as significant"; the earth is understood "as a religious form . . . repository of a wealth of sacred forces" (Eliade 1958: 242). The beloved dirt, soil or earth, sometimes eaten as an act of identification, has been understood as the very flesh of Goddess, the cosmic womb/cunt that begets us and to which we ultimately return at death. The elitist and phallic trajectory turns inevitably upward: god in his heaven, your Highness, skyscrapers, and so on. But in cunctipotent traditions a winding descent ("down there") is also recognized as a necessary path to wisdom. Chthonos is the Greek name for Earth, mother of the Titans; it signifies the realm that is "below" as opposed to "above." Although St. Paul adjured all to keep their minds only on"what is above," the cunctipotent perspective invites us to restore balance by focusing also on what is below. Barbara Christian powerfully reminds us that Black feminist traditions advise us to look not only "high," but also to "look low, lest we devalue women in the world. . . [and] our voices no longer sound like women's voices to anyone" (1997, 56). Looking low, we can remember that mythically the cunt is understood as a mouth, a vocal and oracular mouth. In misogynist characterization, that speaking mouth and biting tongue are abhorred as ugly, loud, castrating. Maureen Mullarkey (1987), giving Andrea Dworkin's Intercourse (1987) a vicious review in The Nation actually lambasted Dworkin as a purveyor of "cuntspeak." Similarly, male members of the French Parliament have made hate-filled jokes about "vaginal verbosity" when female colleagues speak (Otis, 2000, p. 9). These intended insults register an abiding dread of a woman speaking and being with full potency. Despite Mullarkey's intention, we might shamelessly claim cuntspeak as an aspect of cunctipotence. Knowledge of the speaking cunt refers back to the oracular vulva of the Earth. One of the most famous oracles of the ancient world was found at Delphi in Greece. The word Delphi means, as religious historian Mircea Eliade politely puts it, "the female generative organ" (Eliade, 1962, p. 21). At Delphi, petitioners could hear the very voice of the Earth. Female oracles in ancient Greece were known as "belly talkers," accessing chthonic truths from the Earthy matrix that were otherwise inaccessible. Cuntspeak, as I mean it, can be conceptualized as a form of concourse with the Source. It is the voice of Nature, pejoratively characterized as mere "instinct." It is a tradition, which both women and men can engage in, of speaking from the heart, listening to the belly or gut, 6 and attending to the messages issuing from the very bowels of the Earth. Cuntspeak as an integral part of cunctipotence is the infernal internal voice, a voice from what, from the patriarchal perspective, is Hell itself, but in fact is the headquarters of the "underground" resistance to phallocracy, the holy, not horrific, Heart of Darkness. A Fire/Desire in the Heart of Darkness Fire . . . according to certain primitive beliefs . . . is engendered magically in the genital organ of the sorceress. Mircea Eliade (1962, 40) Heart often means "womb," except when it means "vulva." Paula Gunn Allen (1986, 24) "I'm trying to find the blackest, bloodiest, female-est form of expression I can . . . I'm aiming to find the Heart of Darkness, the very thing they've tried to suppress . . . which they claim is ugly and valueless then spend half their time imitating and murdering." Sapphire (1991, 172-173) In her ritually potent novel, Praisesong for the Widow, Paule Marshall (1983, 127) includes an homage to the (necessarily) dark cunt/womb/heart as the abode of divinity. After a man makes love to his wife, and remains lying within her, he becomes able to perceive the invisible forms of the deities who reside there: "Erzulie with her jewels and gossamer veils, Yemoja to whom the rivers and seas are sacred; Oya, first wife of the thunder God and herself in charge of winds and rains . . . a pantheon of the most ancient deities who had made their temple that pummeled darkness of his wife's flesh. . . the other heart at the base of her body." This is not simply lyricism. It is theology. Marshall thus implicitly rebukes Freud's infamous description of female sexuality as the "dark continent." In her vision the cunt is the abode of the cunctipotent Goddesses of Africa. In religious imagery, the Sacred Heart is one that is on Fire, the element that signifies both energy and desire – both of which are associated with Sex/Love Goddesses everywhere. Diane Wolkstein (1983, 169), commenting on the Goddess Inanna, writes: "The Goddess of Love gives forth desire that generates the energy of the universe." In the cunctipotent view, divine power is not, as the phallic imaginary would have it, the absolute power to dominate all others; divine potency is attractive, igneous, energetic, communicative, connective, sexual, intelligent, warming, transforming and ecstatic. Fire has everything to do with potential. It is a "symbol of synergy as well as enlightenment: fire lets loose potential energies already contained in wood" (Balkin, 2002, 336). Cunctipotence and fire are featured together in one of the lesser-known Grimm tales, Frau Trude (Mannheim, 1997). In this story, a bad/bold little girl, someone with potential, defies her parents who warn her against her acting on her desire to visit a Witch, whom they describe as a "wicked woman . .. [who] does godless things" in the deepest, darkest heart of the forest (it's best to read the story aloud). But the child paid no attention to what her parents said and went to see Frau Trude all the same. When she came in, Frau Trude asked her: "Why are you so pale?" "Oh," she answered, shaking all over. "I saw something that gave me a scare." "What did you see?" "I saw a black man on your stairs." "That was a charcoal burner." "Then I saw a green man." "He was a hunter." "After that I saw a blood-red man." "He was a butcher." "Oh, Frau Trude, I was so afraid. I looked through the window and I didn't see you, but I saw the Devil with a fiery head." "Oho. . . You saw the witch in her true headdress. I've long been waiting for you and asking for you. You shall burn bright for me." Then she turned the girl into a block of wood and threw it into the fire. And when it blazed, she sat down beside it, warmed herself, and said: "It is indeed burning bright". (152) Convention would have us read this as a kind of moralistic tale, ending with the punishment of a disobedient girl by this wickedest of witches. But the story is actually a symbolic one of initiation. The Witch is the Cunctipotent One who will pass on her knowledge to the right seeker. The young girl is courageous, impudent, willful, curious, desirous and active, venturing on her own into the Dark in quest of knowledge. Perhaps another child would not have even noticed the strange men, all of whom point to sacrifice, release of energy, and transformation (Boundy, 2006). Maybe that same child would have looked in the window and spied only an ordinary old woman, and not a Witch wearing the fiery headdress bespeaking her magico-religious power. But when this particular girl enters, the Witch recognizes that her long wait – and our long wait too -- has finally come to an end: This girl and the Witch, acting together in synergy, like the wood and fire that they participate in, have the potential to re-energize the world. When the Witch turns her into a log, this is the climax of the girl's shamanistic ordeal, the point where the initiate must "die to the human condition and . . . resuscitate . .. to a new, a transhuman existence" (Eliade, 1958, 87). The girl, thus transformed into wood, now can join with the Witch and blaze with a very bright light. The energy she emits goes out into the world, warming and changing others. Significantly, the girl both acts and is acted upon. Aristotle argued that potency takes precisely these two forms – both active (originating) and passive (or receptive) potency, on the one hand the capacity to act, on the other to receive something and to be influenced. Webster's, in keeping with Aristotelian philosophy, defines potential as: "Having the capacity to act or be acted upon hence capable of undergoing change." But these forms of potency are deeply circumscribed in sexist systems. In Pure Lust, Mary Daly (1984, 167-169) critiques the ways that patriarchal paradigms confine "women to the area of passive potency," while reserving what is believed to be "active potency" for males. With further depth of insight, she argues that women are "castrated," not just by being kept from male-defined active potency, but just as grievously by having our capacity to receive knowledge "destroyed/persecuted" from the earliest stages of infancy. We are systematically blocked, Daly argues, from what she calls"Elemental female passive potency – our capacity to receive inspiration, truth from the elements of the natural world, the Wild, to which our Wild reason corresponds" (169). The young girl in the tale exhibits both active and passive potency. She ventures out boldly on her own, but she also must be receptive to being changed by the Wild, by the Witch and by the Fire. Feminist thinkers like Daly, Carol Christ (2003) and Octavia Butler (1994) re-imagine divinity away from phallic omnipotence and toward cunctipotent conceptualizations of dynamic Unfolding or Change. In much patriarchal theology, creation took place only once, in the past as ordained by the Father God. Cunctipotent theology instead speaks of the potential of all being for participation in, and influence on, an ongoing and continually unfolding creation, of a Divinity (like the Witch) who is, in Mary Daly's (1973, 43) words "form-destroying, form-creating, transforming power that makes all things new." Such Divinity is indeed much like Fire, but it is also much like a boundless ocean of potential, opening us to the possibility of, as they say, living happily ever after. The Ocean of Possibility "First wash up as far as possible, then wash down as far as possible. Then wash possible." Alice Walker, relating her mother's bathing instructions (1988, 58) The Great Goddess is not only all-loving, all-giving, all-creating. She also is all-destroying. . . . What the modern analytical mind categorizes as a distinct duality, the tribal mind commonly perceives as an undivided unity of opposites. That way of thinking likens the Great Goddess to a boundless ocean of formless energy which is always pregnant with the potential of becoming. Lanier Graham (1998, 31) The word possible, curiously enough, is a folk name for the vulva (Ensler, 2001, 6), particularly in African-American usage. The words possible and potential are both intrinsically linked to potency. They are derived from the same root: posse, to be able. And both, also, are profoundly philosophical terms. The Catholic Encyclopedia explains: "When the notion of potency, or capacity, is referred exclusively to the order of being, it becomes possibility, i.e., the absolute potentiality, or capacity, to be" (Carlo, 627-28). Walker's and other African American mothers' naming of the cunt as possible is a most potent refutation of Aristotle's slander regarding females as impotent males. It also reminds us that the powers of the cunt are reflections of the cosmic forces of life and death, and change. The world's great waters have long been understood as symbolically akin to the vagina or womb. For example, as the religious historian Mircea Eliade (1956, 41) explains,"the sacred rivers of Mesopotamia were supposed to have their source in the generative organ of the Great Goddess. The source of rivers was considered as the vagina of the earth. In Babylonian, the term pû signifies both 'source of a river' and 'vagina.' The Sumerian buru means both 'vagina' and 'river.'" The most powerful water for purification purposes was found where the "mouths" of the Tigris and Euphrates met (Johns, 1926, 467). The cunctipotent meeting of these sacred rivers at their source can be understood as a veritable Lesbian hieros gamos, or sacred marriage. Whatever exists pours out of these oceans and rivers of energy at the moment of creation and ultimately returns at the moment of death. "Creation," Graham (1998, 31) reminds us, "happens not once but continuously. So too, does death." When we realize in our depths that creation, which includes death and transformation, is ongoing, we are enormously energized. First of all, when we understand the continuous and necessary interplay of death and creation we cease to expect apocalypse and dread personal death. Powerfully, we also begin to understand the extent to which we have the capacity to influence the always-unfolding creation, to encourage certain possibilities, and even, on occasion, to "make things happen" – including seemingly "impossible" things. Many fairy tales feature protagonists who are respectful to nature, listening, giving, and helping where they can, and therefore encountering magical guides who grant wishes – cunctipotent Witches, Fairy Godmothers, Lucky Stones and Talking Animals. These protagonists realize potential, perform "impossible tasks," and find that dreams and wishes really do come true. In fairy tales "everybody and everything can be transformed." Moreover, these stories, Jack Zipes tells us, indicate ways that we can actualize "possibilities for overcoming the obstacles that prevent other characters or creatures from living in a peaceful and pleasurable way," (2000, xix). In short, fairy tales tell us that, under some conditions, it is possible to perform what seems at first to be impossible and to live "happily ever after." The words happy and happen both stem from hap, "something which befalls by chance or luck" (Webster's). The physicist Jacques Monod (1971, 112) writes: "chance alone is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere." A cosmic appreciation of happenstance is expressed not only through physics, but also through mythic conceptions of Goddesses of Fortune, Chance and Luck. Luck herself, always a Lady, is the cunctipotent force that allows us to "win." The word win is derived from the Latin vener-, venus, meaning love, sexual desire. This root also yields the words wish and venerate as well as the name of Venus, the Sex Goddess also known as the Evening Star and the Star of the Sea. Our word desire actually derives from a word that means "star" and essentially we are calling on the Sex Goddess every time we ardently wish upon a Star. Some years ago I had a dream where I was in a room illuminated only by a blazing fire. Showing up as a shadow on the wall was a symbolic emblem of ancient danger. Two of my female ancestors appeared and told me something to the effect that a long time ago a battle had been waged and we – which I took to mean those identified with biophilic values – had lost, but that a crucial time was coming around again. They told me that it was imperative that this time we "win." My initial reaction was that this was a kind of "war" and that we had to defeat or dominate an enemy. I now think that maybe what the dream ancestors were telling me was that to truly win means that the force of our love/desire is so strong that it becomes possible to change the world. Quantum physics helps us to more fully understand the cunctipotent significance of the possible. In the quantum realm, things are always more than what we understand as actuality or "what is" – that is, what can be seen and measured, the everyday world we experience. Any quantum entity or system has more than actuality– it has potentiality, the slumbering reality waiting to be born as the system evolves. In quantum physics what might be has ontological status, a kind of reality of its own that influences and interacts with "what is." In many folk tales there is a sleeping Goddess or Princess who will renew the world with her awakening. As we come into our cunctipotence, we realize that there really is a "Sleeping Beauty," an alternative reality ready to wake up, a Princess to be "won," a wish to be made and granted. As we work to actualize this, we might find that utopia, the state of happiness, is neither in the past nor in the future. Rather, Happiness/Utopia is found in becoming, actualizing potential and giving form to possibility. One of the definitions that Webster's gives for possibility is "one's utmost power." Actualizing cunctipotence means staying in tune and time with the flow of elemental energies, not solely taking from but also giving back to that Source, being alert to Chance, falling in with Fortune, listening to the voices of the elemental world, and acting with integrity, when opportunity presents itself for influence. In so being and doing, we can use this, our utmost power, to shape Change so that good things happen. We even can call other worlds or realities into being. And, it turns out, the elementally appropriate place to do this kind of conjuration is the crossroads – also known as trivia. Ethereal Energetics: Trivia (Crossroads), the "Crotch" of the Road The Fifth Element, Ether . .. is a unifying principle. Mary Daly (1998, 22) Where the roads cross and enter into one another, thereby symbolizing the union of opposites, there is the "mother," the object and epitome of all union. Carl Jung (quoted in Cirlot, 71) The crossroads (otlamaxalli) is the "crotch of the road," with obvious sexual symbolism. . . . It was associated with an illicit and excessive female sexuality, the practice of sorcery, and the underworld. Louise Burkhart (1989, 63) Years ago, in the mid-1970s, I was working with Mary Daly while she was writing Gyn/Ecology. Reading a book on mythology, I discovered that the word trivia (which literally means "three roads") was Latin for crossroads and also a name for the Triple Goddess Hecate, who was closely associated with witchcraft. I told this to Daly who mentioned it in Gyn/Ecology, which led to the naming of the journal Trivia as "a place where women's ideas can assume their original power and significance." Recently, after working on this essay for the journal Trivia for some time, I casually picked up a book on colonial encounters in world history. There I read of the Aztec identification of "the crossroads" with the "crotch" of the road, with "illicit and excessive female sexuality" and with the Aztec Witch-Goddess Tlazoltéotl, also known, suggestively, as the "Dirty Lady" or "Earth's Heart" (Burkhardt 1989, 61). Tlazoltéotl explicitly protects prostitutes and appears with the red serpent of sex. In one depiction, she wears a man's loin cloth, signifying the underlying unity of the sexes, and projects a stream of "magic power" from her cunt (Burland, 1973, 147)! The Aztecs, like the Greeks, were patriarchs who downgraded and distorted the powerful female Goddesses of earlier times, splitting them into oppositional virgins and putas (whores) (Anzaldúa 1978, 27-28), and identifying the most autonomous and powerful as witches. Reading beyond the patriarchal bias, we can recognize Tlazoltéotl and Hecate's crossroads as the spatial analog of the cosmic cunt. What patriarchs fear as the "excessive female sexuality" and "sorcery" associated with crossroads is really the etheric elemental force of cunctipotence itself. The element of ether is, as Mary Daly points out, a "unifying principle," and this core theme of union also is implicit in both the literal and symbolic crossroads where diverse paths meet. Another word for crossroads is a junction – a word, curiously enough, from the same etymological root as yoni (Margolin 1987, 330). Yoni, along with join, juncture and junction, are all related to the ancient Sanskrit yu, to join and unite. Curiously, this essay has turned out to be as much about words as it is about female potency. Speaking of words, Virginia Woolf (1942, 127) tells us "that it is their nature not to express one simple statement but a thousand possibilities." Of the "thousand possibilities" that the word crossroads suggests to us, there is one more that is relevant here. A crossroads is also "a crucial or critical point or place esp. where a decision or choice must be made" (Webster's). Arguably, humanity is at just such a point as the disastrous effects of a world based in splitting take their toll in gynocide, genocide, war, and catastrophic environmental devastation.7 Vandana Shiva, the ecofeminist theorist and activist, openly calls for "female energy" as the force capable of restoring justice and ecological balance to the planet. The unifying force suggested by the cosmic yoni/cunt/crossroads is precisely what is needed to redress the destructions wrought by a phallocentric consciousness based in "splitting," which has produced an illusory sense of separation from the mother/matrix/nature.8 It is only in such a state of disconnection that it is possible to believe that one can use or abuse another without also hurting oneself, that one can pollute the Earth without also poisoning oneself. The force enabling the reunification of all that has been so grievously split is the primal force of connection – cunctipotence. A cunctipotent perspective enables us to recognize and experience the underlying unity of life, to perceive sexual correspondence, not difference, between females and males, cunts and cocks, to experience communion and not isolation from "others" (human, animal and elemental others). Cunctipotence reunites what has been disastrously sundered – humans from nature, high from low, body from mind, sex from intelligence, flesh from spirit, culture from nature, life from death, light from dark, essence from change. For the "all-powerful" of cunctipotence is not omnipotence, the ability to separate from and then dominate, control and crush anybody and everything. Rather, the "all powerful" in cunctipotence bespeaks participation or communion in the creative inter-connecting power of the commonplace, the whole, the All. Notes This intrinsically feminist redefinition of power has become the stuff of our popular culture. Consider the first episode of ABC's dramatic series Commander-in-Chief (Fall 2005), starring Geena Davis as the first female President of the United States. Davis plays "Mac", a former Congresswoman and university Chancellor, who is now the Vice President. A political Independent, "Mac" was chosen as a running mate by a Republican Presidential candidate so that he could secure the female vote. But after he suffers a stroke, the President asks her to resign so that the Republican Speaker of the House, a man after his own heart, will succeed to the office. At first, "Mac" is willing to step down. But in a riveting exchange with the Speaker, she changes her mind. The Speaker tells her the world is too dangerous a place to have a woman as president of "the free world." She is not a leader, he says, but a mere female teacher. When "Mac" reminds him that she was a University Chancellor, he condescendingly says, well ok, you are a "Philosopher Queen" and continues to openly insult women, with specific reference to "loose" sexual activity and menopause. For all intents and purposes, he is calling her a cunt. At this point, "Mac" changes her mind. Agitated, he asks her why she wants to be President and tells her that she should affirm to him that it is because she lusts for omnipotence, that she "wants the power to control the universe." She replies,"That's not me" and walks out to take the oath of office. (back to essay ) For example, in ancient Atiteco belief, "the penis is held to be female in that the urethra is a small vagina" (Tarn and Prechtel 1986, 173). Correspondingly, the clitoris is held to be male. These beliefs can function to support a patriarchal worldview and even become the basis for practices of genital mutilation (both female and male), where the feminine foreskin is cut away from the male and the clitoris excised from the female. But I also think such an understanding underlies a cunctipotent paradigm, recognizing the congruity and basic femaleness of both women and men. For more on this, see Caputi (1993, 274-290). (back to essay) Clearly, some feminists, visually and verbally, are working to do this (Ensler, 1998; Muscio, 1998). I elaborate more on this in Caputi (2004). (back to essay) For elaboration on these concepts see Teish (1985, 55), Tarn and Prechtel (1986), (Leon-Portilla, 1963). (back to essay) I first used some of the language and ideas in this section and elsewhere in this piece in Caputi (2004). (back to essay) Webster's tells us that the etymology of bowel is akin to IE cwith, belly womb, OHG quiti vulva, ON kvithr belly, womb and Goth quithus, stomach, womb. The archaic meaning of bowel is "the seat of pity or tenderness or of courage, GUTS, HEART." We are accustomed to hear men speaking of having "balls" but don't realize that when anyone, male or female, speaks of having "guts" or"heart" they are using these as euphemisms for the cunt and are invoking the cunctipotent tradition. (back to essay) According to the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a report compiled by 1,300 leading scientists from 95 countries, pollution and exploitative practices are damaging the planet at a rapid rate and to the point that the"ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted" (Connor, 2004). The planet, in response to this abuse, they say, will no longer be so readily providing such "services" as purification of air and water, protection from natural disasters, and the provision of foods and medicines. While practices of the richest nations, greedy for space, energy, food, water, and raw materials, are at the root of the problem, it is the poor who suffer and will continue to suffer the worst effects. The study urges drastic and immediate changes in consumption, an emphasis on local regulation of resources, better education, new technology and higher costs to be borne by those who exploit ecosystems. (back to essay) The crossroads are "places where people stop to think. They are also places where one passes from one world to another, from one life to another, and from life to death" (Chevalier and Gheerbrandt 1994, 257). Perhaps, as the elements converge, as thinking happens, and as Quintessence is released, we also will find that the crossroads are that mysterious space where we are most inspired to imagine, and realize, what Daly calls the "Archaic Future." (back to essay) References Abram, David. 1996. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Vintage. Agonito, Rosemary. 1977. History of Ideas on Woman: A Source Book. New York: Berkeley Publishing Group. Allen, Paula Gunn. 1986. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press. Allen, Paula Gunn. 1991. Grandmothers of the Light: A Medicine Woman's Sourcebook. Boston: Beacon Press. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/la frontera: The new mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute. Balkin, Jack M. 2002. The Laws of Change: I Ching and the Philosophy of Life. New York: Schocken Books. Bordo, Susan. 1999. The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. Boundy, Ceti. 2006. Telephone conversation. Burkhart, Louise M. 1989. The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico. Tucscon: University of Arizona Press. Burland, Cottie. 1973. Middle America, pp. 142-162. In Primitive Erotic Art, edited by P. Rawson. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Butler, Octavia E. 1994. Parable of the Sower. New York: Seven Stories Press. Caputi, Jane. 1993. Gossips, Gorgons, and Crones: The Fates of the Earth. Santa Fe: Bear and Company. Caputi, Jane. 2004. "Cuntspeak: Words from the Heart of Darkness." In Not for Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography, edited by C. Stark and R. Whisnant. North Melbourne, Australia: Spinifex, 362-385. Carlo, W. E. 1967. "Potency." In New Catholic Encyclopedia, edited by C. U. of America. New York: McGraw Hill. Chevalier, Jean, and Alain Gheerbrant. 1994. The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols. Translated by John Buchanan-Brown. New York: Penguin Books. Christ, Carol P. 2003. She Who Changes: Re-Imagining the Divine in the World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Christian, Barbara. 1997. "The highs and low of black feminist criticism." In Feminisms: An anthology of literary theory and criticism, ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 51-56. Connor, Steve. 2005. "The State of the World? It is on the Brink of Disaster." The Independent UK, March 30. Daly, Mary. 1973. Beyond God the Father. Boston: Beacon Press. ______. 1978. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon Press. ______. 1984. Pure Lust: Elemental feminist philosophy. Boston: Beacon Press. ______. 1998. Quintessence… realizing the archaic future: A radical elemental feminist manifesto. Boston: Beacon Press. Dworkin, Andrea. 1987. Intercourse. New York: The Free Press. Eliade, Mircea. 1962. The Forge and the Crucible. 2nd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ensler, Eve. 1998. The Vagina Monologues. New York: Villard. Erdrich, Louise. 2001. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. New York: HarperCollins. Gamble, Sarah. 1999. The Routledge Critical Dictionary of Feminism and Postfeminism. New York: Routledge, 1999. Graham, Lanier. 1998. Goddesses in Art. New York, Abbeville. Grahn, Judy. 1982. "From Sacred Blood to the Curse and Beyond." In The Politics of Women's Spirituality, edited by Charlene Spretnak, 265-79. New York: Anchor Books, 265-279. Griffin, Susan. 1989. "Split Culture." Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism. Ed. Judith Plant. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 7-17. Hawthorne, Susan. 2003. The Falling Woman. North Melbourne, Australia: Spinifex. Hurston, Zora Neale. 1938, 1983. Tell My Horse. Berkeley: Turtle Island. Irigaray, Luce. 1985. This sex which is not one, trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. ______. 1993. Divine women. In Sexes and genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill. New York: Columbia University Press, 57-72. Keuls, Eva C. 1985. The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens. Berkeley: University of California Press. King-Pedroso, Natalie. 2000. "I-Tie-All My People-Together': New World Appropriations of the Yoruba Deity Oshun in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby and Derek Walcott's Omeros. 2000." Journal of Caribbean Studies 15:61-93. Leon-Portilla, Miguel. 1963. Aztec Thought and Culture. Translated by Jack Emory Davis. Norman, Ok.: University of Oklahoma Press. Mannheim, Ralph, Translator. 1977. "Frau Trude," In Grimm's Tales for Young and Old: The Complete Stories. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 151-152. Marshall, Paule. 1983. Praisesong for the Widow. New York: Penguin Books. Monod, Jacques. 1971. Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Mullarkey, Maureen. 1987. Hard Cop, Soft Cop. The Nation, May 30, 721-72 Mullin, Glenn H., with Jeff J. Watt. 2003. Female Buddhas: Women of Enlightenment in Tibetan Mystical Art. Santa Fe: Clear Light Publishers. Muscio, Inga. 1998. Cunt: A Declaration of Independence. Seattle, Washington: Seal Press. Otis, Ginger Adams. 2000. "Chienne de Farge: French Feminists Vigilant against Sexist Language," Sojourner: The Women's Forum, January, p. 9. Partridge, Eric. 1961. A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Rawson, Philip. 1973. "Early History of Sexual Art." In Primitive Erotic Art, edited by Philip Rawson, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1-76. Roberts, Dorothy. 1997. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York: Pantheon Books. Roof, Judith. 1999. "We Want Viagra." Post Identity 2.1: 5-23. Sapphire. 1991. Interview. In Angry Women, ed. Andrea Juno and V. Vale: San Francisco: Re/Search Publications, 163-176. Scherr, Appolinaire. 2001."Making a Career with One Eye on a Gender Gap."; The New York Times November 4, sec. Arts and Leisure: E8. Shiva, Vandana. 1988. Staying alive: Women, ecology, and survival in India. London: Zed Books. Starhawk. 2004. The Earth Path. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. Tarn, Nathaniel, and Martin Prechtel. 1986. "Constant Inconstancy: The Feminine Principle in Atiteco Mythology." In Symbol and Meaning Beyond the Closed Community: Essays in Mesoamerican Ideas, edited by Gary H. Gossen. Albany: SUNY Press, 173-84. Teish, Luisah. 1985. Jambalaya: The Natural Woman's Book. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. Walker, Alice. 1988. Living by the Word: Selected Writings 1973-1987. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Walker, Barbara G. 1983. Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged. 1986. Edited by Philip Babcock Grove. Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster. Wolkstein, Diane, and Samuel Noah Kramer. 1983. Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth. New York: Harper & Row. Woolf, Virginia. 1942. Craftmanship. In The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. London: Hogarth Press. Zipes, Jack. 1999. When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition. New York: Routledge. working notes I remember the first time I saw the word cunctipotent in Walker's Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. It jumped off the page, glowed, and compelled my attention. Mythic figures spoke the word to me in dreams. Subsequently, I uttered the word in talks and in classes. Students would later say to me, "Have you written that article yet?? "I love that word and never have forgotten it." In time other words started to come to me, the elementally philosophical words for cunt like possible, down there and heart of darkness. When trivia jumped off the page as a companion word for cunt I knew the article was on its way. Several other things made this piece possible. One is the re-appearance of Trivia and the dedication of Lise Weil and Harriet Ellenberger; another is the exceptionally generous and intelligent editing provided to me by Lise Weil. And finally, in this past year Carol Prusa gifted me with her artwork "Athene," whose daily presence helped to guide me into the dark mystery, speech and power of cunctipotence. About the author Jane Caputi teaches Women's Studies at Florida Atlantic University. She has written several books, The Age of Sex Crime, Gossips, Gorgons and Crones, and Goddesses and Monsters, and just finished making an educational documentary, The Pornography of Everyday Life (for information e-mail jcaputi @ fau.edu). She hopes to get the opportunity to write a book on Cunctipotence. I believe I can sound the alarm for the younger generation of black women. So they don't end up like our mothers... Forgiving others does NOT bring you peace. I get that this is the popular doctrine, but I am here, as an Indigo, to challenge the status quo and what we have accepted as normative.
I want to challenge us to think about forgiveness in a new light. What if, instead of forgiving the aggressor/abuser/asshole in our lives we forgive OURSELVES for granting ACCESS to the people who disrespect/harm/deny your Beingness? When you CEASE to permit them access to repeat their offensive behavior, you remove yourself from active participation in their lack of respect for you. You prioritize your integrity and needs above the appearance of a union or relationship or circumstance. Appearances and illusions rule our world and way of connection, so I get that it is a powerful illusion to bust up and be freed from. But challenge yourself. See how it helps you to grow!
We do not, presently, treat a virus by feeding it and giving it greater access. We begin a course of ANTI-BODIES to kill the source of the illness. We also build different levels of tolerance/immunity to infections already encountered/experienced. It takes a complete detoxification of the system to accomplish this.
Self-Centered Being and Loving in 5D. Going from Victim to Victor by being God in Motion, all ways, always, alway. hmmmm.... I am thinking about the Politics of Image and Illusion this morning. In the "who is the most womanly" game for black women? we have to contend with: The Cage of Black Wombn's Oppressioncolorism: light to dark, we are all heaux in this system shapeism: body proportions, women injecting themselves with botulism and other poisons to comply with the male ideal of Feminine Beauty. slutisms: which is the pro and anti arguments regarding Female Sexual Servicing of Male sexuality. this applies only when women are engaging men sexually. and keep in mind, it is the Official Position of the Deva that ALL WOMEN WHO FUCK MEN are sluts. this is a title that is assigned to we who are of heterosexual identity. sizeism: thick, fat, obese, overweight, morbidly overweight all classifications aimed at making black women feel small regardless of their health or vitality. this conversation is rarely about the health of the women being discussed. it is always about what we think looks best. hairism: natural vs weave vs creamy crack bullcaca Black Heterosexism: which in this case would apply to the expectation that women be sexually available for men. in our case, that Black women, regardless to their own lived horrors or the truth about black men, must have a sexuality that is exclusively available to black maledom. it is also the assumption that any woman who chooses a non black man is less than, dirty, or crazy. I have heard women say: "no matter what a black man does you still shouldn't discount him as a mating choice" which i vehemently disagree with. But I hold different views from most other folk about relating, mating and dating, anyway. Heterosexuality is not natural. Heterosexuality has roots in rape, and is a sexual identity that has been assigned to women to ensure patriarchal rulership over us all. motherism: the valuation of a woman based on her choices to breed. conversely the valuation of a woman based on her choices NOT TO BE BRED by some man. it is also the ascription of MOTHER to female Sexual identity as a CONSEQUENCE of female sexual expression. which is valid, because babies are a CONSEQUENCE of man fucking. it is a sexually transmitted disease we decided to privilege along the way. note again: all man fuckers are sluts and judged as such due to their choice to relate to males sexually. whoreism: the shaming of black womens Relationship choices when they fall outside of fuckin black men. the shaming of black womens SEXUAL AUTONOMY and RIGHT to self define that autonomy without a bunch of man fucking women coming in to "denounce" her right to reject the hetero identity. the shaming of black women's children out of wedlock is the shaming of her sexuality as well. So, as I reviewed these isms, these political prisons of black womanhood, and not only review them but review the "conversations" black women are engaging in regarding these issues; i'm just underwhelmed at the level of analysis being offered on the topics. None of you are saying anything cutting edge or anything we don't already know about these topics. Most women? they are merely ripping off what other women do and say. they are parroting back the shyt we already done heard. Yes, we know that most people judge you based on what you look like outside. Gabby Sidibe, I am sure, is aware of how deeply black women hate her for daring to be a fabulous fat woman. She continues to shine and love herself. And fat black women are also thankful for her. I mean, even though the "skinny divas" all celebrate Lupita and her "black beauty" she is the type of black beauty we love to celebrate. Her near european physic and stature is something black women can look at and celebrate as their own, because she is wearing the right colored costume. Gabby? She never had a chance to be hailed as the it girl for dark skinned glamour because she doesn't fit the fuckability requirement that black heterosexist women demand. Let's just be honest, none of you give a fuck about a woman's size or shape. you ONLY CARE that she looks good. (See Pam Oliver's Hair Hat fiasco) Over on Angry Devas? Over here? With me, the Triple DARK GOD-is? Who don't give a flying FUCK about convention, tradition, alleged codes of conduct and "normal" ways of communicating and engaging issues? We do none of that bullshit. Don't believe me? Check my track record. Check out the Website: www.angrydevas.com check out our Blogtalk Radio Show: www.blogtalk.com/angrydevas And the WONDERFUL THING about it all? is it CHALLENGES WOMEN to face the shyt they been hiding from. I know it does because it challenges ME to examine, speak on, address all the shyt that I haven't been addressing and checking into. It has aided me in standing back up again after a terribly devastating set of blows in my life. and accordingly? Many MANY MANY women write me, call in, send notes to our site saying: THANK YOU FOR SAYING WHAT NO ONE ELSE IS SAYING. Because of your show I left that no account mf who hated me. Because of your show I decided my life was worth living. Your show gave me life! Your show really helped me deal with something I am processing in my own life, thank you. THIS MAKES IT WORTH IT! additionally: I AM A BETTER, MORE HAPPY, MORE SURE AND SECURE WOMAN. A WOMAN OF STRONG CONVICTIONS WHO REFUSES to back down, yet has learned the WISDOM in shutting the fuck up when necessary. When it is necessary to STFU? when the shyt don't apply to you. when it isn't YOUR TRUTH when there is NOTHING you can do about it. But for my life? I am standing on what I got and who i am! I am simply teaching ME. anyone along the way who should so happen to be encouraged and empowered? GREAT! GRAND! but this is a VERY SELFISH endeavor. This is a VANITY IS SALVATION endeavor: Angry Devas. this is about Self-Centered Focus. Building and sharing and healing too. Living outloud and on purpose according to my way. Submitting to no truth but my own. Living according to no CREED but my own. Not the mule of the black community.... but the GOD OF MY OWN LIFE. I want to encourage MORE WOMEN to be trail blazers. to be WONDERFUL to be honest when themselves. Speak your truth, stand on your Square and don't listen to these blackistani haters. Nothing will ever really make them happy as a group, to be honest I don't think black folks WANT HAPPINESS as a collective. I think, black folks en masse, are addicted to scandal, drama, traumatizing others, and being abusive in our relating to one another. In order to survive the-blackistani -think-tank, you HAVE to have the Backbone of a Sycamore and the Skin of an Alligator. You will have to be prepared for the massive amounts of ignorance, arrogance, judgment, hatred and down right disgusting animalistic assault of those who, quite simply: hate you cuz they aint you! Be encouraged, inner-powered and FLY =FIRST LOVE YOURSELF
Inspired by Nina Simone's "Four Women" Ase Mama... |
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Angry Deva'sWriting is my Joy and Pleasure. I've been writing creative pieces, analytic pieces and empirical pieces since I learned how! I use my pen and prose to expose people to things they either don't know or never thought of. I am political, analytic, critical all things that Virgo/Gemini is. The Logos is the Eros to me. <3 Archives
March 2022
Categories
All
|