The Furious Spinner

I first encountered Patricia Monaghan over ten years ago when I bought her amazing book Goddesses and Heroines. I had no idea the world contained so many goddesses until I had her book in hand, and I was thrilled. Since then, I have probably opened one of her books nearly every single day! In 1994, I asked her to become a "grandmother," along with Marija Gimbutas and Gloria Feman Orenstein, to my fiction magazine Daughters of Nyx: a magazine of Goddess stories, mythmaking, and fairy tales. She consented, and we've been mail buddies since then.

Patricia Monaghan is one of the leaders of the contemporary Earth spirituality movement and has spent more than 20 years researching and writing about alternative visions of the Earth. She is an acclaimed lecturer, a member of the Resident Faculty at DePaul University's School for New Learning where she teaches science and literature, and the author of over a dozen books of nonfiction and poetry. Her latest book is the delightful and inspiring The Red-Haired Girl on the Bog: Celtic Spiritual Geography.


K.A.: How did you get started writing about goddesses?

P.M.: My first book, Goddesses and Heroines, came about because of a class in 20th century women’s poetry that I was teaching at the community college in Fairbanks, Alaska. My students kept bumping up against mythic references they didn’t understand, as in Carolyn Kizer's “Hera, Hung from the Sky” and Denise Levertov's wonderful poem to Ishtar. I told them I’d make them up a list of goddesses to help them interpret the poems. Then for the next few weeks I was typing up the list; there were so many goddesses I couldn’t get them all down. So I thought I’d just assign them a book on the subject—only to find there WAS no book on the subject. Thus I fell into writing that book, which remains the most definitive list of goddesses ever published.

I still consider myself primarily a poet. But as a woman, I need sustaining images. We are surrounded by degrading images of women-as-midriff, woman-as-boob (both meanings). Although to some extent men’s bodies have also been recently commodified, women in our culture represent body, flesh, mortality. Reading stories of eloquent and vigorous goddesses inoculates me against taking our society’s messages too seriously.

K.A.: You work for a university. Have you been criticized, ostracized, and/or praised for your goddess studies?

P.M.: My college is extremely supportive. I’m on the interdisciplinary faculty of a major Catholic university, which may not seem at first to be a friendly place to goddess scholars. But my colleagues are great, as is the university as a whole. In some ways it’s easier to be a goddess scholar/poet at a religious college than at a state school with its “church/state separation” mandate. When I taught for the state system in Alaska, I had to disguise my work under literature. Many of the great classics are pagan—Homer, Horace, the Celtic epics—so I had no trouble finding work to teach. But in the environment of a religious school, at least one as liberal as mine, I can bring spirituality out of the closet. In fact my colleagues have encouraged me to bring goddess spirituality into the classroom. Because the disciplines I straddle academically are arts and science, I bring spirituality in through myth. Most of my classes include some mythic material, almost always about goddesses. One of my favorite classes is “Gaia: The Earth in Myth,” in which we begin by acting out creation myths. I’m in the middle of designing a class called “Myth and Life,” in which students will consider what myths they are enacting in their lives. (By the way, our B.A. program is now available online, and I have several students starting with me as advisor in the spring, doing goddess studies.)

Because my academic work is not in Religious Studies, I’ve probably had an easier time than women in that discipline. I have heard many depressing stories from women encouraged, for instance, not to pursue a topic because it would mean they might not get a job. There seems to be a tendency among some narrow-minded academics to believe that women can’t be objective about goddesses (I’m sorry: so men CAN?). I’ve heard of women being steered away from goddess topics by advisors in graduate school. Some of this may be well-meaning; in fact it might be more difficult for a woman doing goddess work to get a job than if she, for instance, became an expert in Buddhism. But this also means a woman gets set in a certain path and may find it difficult to change later.

That said, I have been widely ignored by many people in academic publishing because my Ph.D. is not in religious studies. So although I saved myself some difficulty in choosing literature as my field, I have also been silenced in other ways. My work does not appear on most bibliographies in the field, I’m not invited to participate in conferences on the subject, and so forth. It’s a hard trade-off but I follow my golden rule: “if it makes you write more, it’s good; if it makes you write less, it’s bad.” Negative personal encounters more deeply effect me than being ignored by people I don’t know. I’m not sure how I’d advise anyone else interested in goddess studies, except to say that it’s important to find peers and professors who truly support your work.

K.A.: In the past, some feminists have been uncomfortable having spirituality as part of feminist concerns. Do you link feminism and women's spirituality?

P.M.: At a recent national conference of NWSA, the National Women’s Studies Association, the first plenary session on women’s spirituality was held. About half of the organization’s board of directors boycotted the plenary, as they felt the subject was unacademic. I have never seen an opening in women’s studies that asks for a specialist in goddess religions (goddess knows, I’ve looked!). This is deeply regrettable. Arguments against women’s rights always ultimately base themselves on religion, and the religious right grows ever stronger in its opposition to women’s concerns. (I must add that the same group is virulent in its opposition to gay rights; I cannot help but think this is deeply connected to women’s issues, not only because some women are gay, but because the archetypal fear of men becoming somehow turned into women seems at play in this objection to what is, after all, private behavior.)

To me, this is a no-brainer: feminism should embrace women’s spirituality and vice versa. I have met as many women who claim to be witches but refuse to say they are feminists as I have feminists who are appalled by goddess worship. I would go further and say that ecology should be a requirement for women in both camps; the earth is defined as feminine (“Mother Earth”) and then treated as such. We’re all in danger from such behavior.

K.A.: You write a great deal about mythology. Do you think mythology influences our modern day lives?

P.M.: Absolutely. I just don’t think most people are aware of it. Our official mythology is Christian, which is partially based in the dying-resurrecting-god motifs of the eastern Mediterranean. We have many unexamined prejudices that arise from that mythos, including the image of the virgin that Britney Spears has so recently exploited. (The opposite, the Magalene, is what Madonna so brilliantly exploits.) We are never far from myth, which appears in our dreams and our movies and our music. I think it’s useful to study myth in order to understand the hidden motives and motifs in our lives.

K.A.: Are you interested in fairy tales as well as mythology? How do you define the difference?

P.M.: Academically, a distinction is made between fairy tales and mythology, with the first being typically discounted as less important. But fairy tales are often the oral remembrance of earlier mythologies. As long as mythology is defined only by what is written, codified, organized into hierarchies of power, much of women’s lived reality will be ignored and suppressed. I make no distinction between a fairy tale heroine and a goddess in my work. To me, it’s all about images of women, wherever I find them.

K.A.: Have your studies led you to believe that our ancestors once lived in peaceful egalitarian societies?

P.M.: This isn’t something I can directly address, as my work is more about image than archaeological reality. I do note the studies that have shown that revolutionary movements never claim to be inventing some new vision of human interaction, but claim to be restoring Eden, a golden age from the past. I’m an Aquarian, so I have no problem with envisioning a future that’s different from the past, but most people seem to find consolation in the idea that we’re moving “back” to some “natural” way of being. The idea that women’s spirituality is leading us back to a partnership model from the Neolithic is interesting and useful. For me personally, I don’t care if it existed in the Neolithic: such a movement towards equality should be part of our future.

K.A.: Were you an admirer of Marija Gimbutas? If so, what do you think about the current backlash against her since her death?

P.M.: I admired Marija almost inordinately. I found her work when I was living in Alaska and when she had published only Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, before the great last books. I was so inspired by her passion and her knowledge that, when I was once speaking in California, I asked if there was any way to meet her. The sponsors arranged a dinner party at which I got to literally sit at her feet. She was a powerful intellect and a gracious spirit. I have always been grateful to have had the chance to meet her.

The backlash against her work is interesting in that it is so emotional. Academic disputes are common; people differ on ways to interpret data. But something more than academic difference seems at work here. There is widespread trashing of her work, not serious consideration and disagreement. Most appalling is the work of Cynthia Eller, who consistently misreads both Gimbutas and those who base their work on hers. The idea of a “feminist matriarchy” (from the title of one of Eller’s books) is not upheld by Marija’s work, which promoted the idea of partnership rather than “matriarchy.” The outraged and outrageous tone of Eller’s work shows that there is something beyond intellectual discussion going on. What is there to fear from the idea of cooperative membership in society? It is a testimony to the importance of Gimbutas’s work that she has roused such anger.

K.A.: Many prominent women in the field are having problems with publishing and making a living from their work. Do you think this is a publishing problem (death of the midlist) or do you think there is a backlash against women in particular when they write about feminism or write seriously about women's spirituality?

P.M.: Dale Spender’s excellent book, The Writing or the Sex (which has the wonderful subtitle “How you don’t have to read women’s writing to know it’s no good”) explores discrimination against women in publishing. She has found a one-third/two-thirds rule regarding women. One-third of books published are by women. Then one-third of the books reviewed are by women. Then one-third of those reprinted, etc., etc. Obviously this means that a very very small number of women are reprinted, studied in college classes, known widely. Spender has also found a very strange phenomenon, the “women are taking over” paranoia. When a publisher’s list was half-women, it was perceived as being ALL women. Anything more than one-third women roused a perception that no men were appearing on that list.

This is depressing and seems very true. There is also the problem that a women writing about women suffers under something of a double curse. When my book of poetry, Dancing with Chaos, came out last year, I was surprised at the response. Surprised because people assumed I was somehow very smart, because the poems are about physics. The book of poetry that came out before that, Seasons of the Witch, received a warm response, but no one said I was smart. How come I’m smart because I can do science, but I’m not smart because I can do goddesses? I think it’s because when I engage with a “male” field (a “hard” science), I associate myself with the official power structure. When I, as a woman, write about goddesses, I’ve entered the double-whammy domain.

In this regard, it’s interesting to note that the two best-selling books about goddesses are both by men: Robert Graves and Leonard Shlain.

And now add the woes of the publishing industry, which are real indeed. I hope that new technologies like print-on-demand will make it possible for women to make their works available despite the biases of society.

K.A.: People still seem to believe that if you praise women, you're knocking down men. I think this is silly, but I'm wondering if you ever get this reaction to your work?

P.M.: I remember once arriving at a women’s spirituality conference and hearing another speaker greeting me with a loud, “What are you doing here? I didn’t know you were lesbian!” As I don’t talk much about my personal life (I like to say my sexual orientation is TOWARDS), she would not have known one way or other, but I found it interesting that she would assume that my presence at a women’s spirituality gathering was proof of a specific sexual orientation.

That was several years ago. But there still seems to be an idea, repeated ad nauseum by those who declaim against the hypothesized “matriarchy,” that being pro-woman means automatically being anti-male. I think we may have here the psychological tendency towards projection: if women did to men what men have done to women, men would be in deep doo-doo indeed.

I always begin my goddess lectures by talking about monotheism. There is no historical evidence for a single monotheistic goddess religion. Put another way, all monotheisms exclude the feminine while exalting the masculine. All known goddess religions have been polytheistic; they have admitted not only the god as well as the goddess, but many versions of both. Goddess religion is not the opposite of the god religions; it’s a completely different critter.

K.A.: Tell us about your latest book and how you came to write it.

P.M.: The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit started out as a gazetteer to goddess sites in Ireland. But within a short time it had morphed into a work of personal narrative scholarship, in which I not only describe Ireland’s sacred sites but also describe my adventures therein. It took seven years to write and is without question the most ambitious thing I’ve done. Every chapter was an adventure; I was led to reading Marx and Foucault as well as ancient Irish epics and folk tales. It’s also the most personal thing I’ve done, because it was impossible to describe locations without there being a body present. And that involved explaining how I came to be in that place, with whom, at what time, and so forth. The book came out in March, and the response has been enthusiastic. It’s been very encouraging given the intensity of the work that went into the book.

K.A.: What work are you seeing being done by other people in your field that you are excited by now?

P.M.: Unfortunately I’ve seen a strange warping of goddess spirituality into something like spiritual popcorn. I read an interview with a new goddess author recently who said she “liked everything about the goddess: makeup, clothes, boys.” Left me scratching my head about what had happened to feminism, women’s empowerment, and ecology. Publishers seem to be looking for books with the word “goddess” in the title that nonetheless are not at all challenging, either to reader or to society. And I think goddess literature should be both.

Some of the most interesting work I know is being published online. The journal Matrifocus has great stuff regularly. The old print journal Of A Like Mind is about to go online in revived form. There is also the terrific Cornish goddess e-zine Goddess Alive! by pagan scholars Cheryl Straffon and Sheila Bright; a more general Cornish site, in which Cheryl is also involved, is Meyn Mamvro (“Stones of our Motherland”). In print, there is also Goddessing Regenerated, a lovely publication that includes a lot of European goddess news.

K.A.: What are you working on now? You are such a wonderful poet. (You recently had a poem in Poets Against the War, right next to Mario's poem, which I got a kick out of.) Are you working on a new collection of poems?

P.M.: I have two projects underway. One is the dramatic adaptation of a book of poems I finished this summer. It’s called Homefront and is based on two things: my experience as the child of a veteran who suffered from what is so prosaically called PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and what the Celts more poetically called “Soldier’s Heart”; and Celtic myths about war and its aftermath. Finding a publisher for poetry is always difficult, so while I undergo that delightful process I’m adapting the book for a staged reading this spring. Some of the mythic poems are available online. Obviously I have been moved by recent events to complete this work, which has been with me for more than two decades.

That we are asking young men and women to undergo horrific and mind-altering experiences of violence—as well as enforcing such experiences on the people of Iraq and Afghanistan—without acknowledging that they will live with the trauma for the rest of their lives, as will their children, disturbs me greatly. I hope Homefront offers some small voice against that madness.

The other poetic project will be many years in the making. It’s a collection of poems called Earth Oracle in which various living beings speak: wasps, birds, mushrooms, and so forth. I have about 20 poems for that book, which is some years from completion.

I’m also working on a book that represents a real change for me. It’s an historical novel about St. Augustine’s mistress. Yes, THAT St. Augustine, and yes, he had a mistress with whom he lived for 15-16 years and about whom almost nothing is known. Because of that absence of information, I’m free to invent a really interesting Carthaginian poet who becomes involved in the “happy heresy” of Pelagius and winds up in a sort of heretical penal colony on the Isles of Scilly off Cornwall. Where her daughter, Augustine’s unknown second child, is recording her mother’s final testimonial and writing her own more pagan life as well. After so many years of careful scholarship, writing a novel feels almost like omnipotence. I say she’s half-Cornish, voila! she’s half-Cornish. Beyond the enjoyment of the story, the message is about the way in which a holistic nature-affirming kind of Christianity was suppressed in order to affirm a patriarchal and dualistic version—one that afflicts us still.

K.A.: The world seems to be going to "hell in a handbasket" as of late. Sometimes it appears as if all the work done by civil rights workers, feminists, environmentalists, peace workers has gone nowhere. Our current administration seems bent on starting war after war, turning back all environmental progress, and taking away women's rights. Do you have any advice on what people can do to get through this period of time?

P.M. I can see you saved the hardest question for last. This seems to me one of the bleakest times in my life. I remember feeling frustrated during the Viet Nam conflict, but not hopeless. Now I struggle with hopelessness a lot. I cannot turn off my awareness of the suffering of people around the world, caused by our government’s decisions. Children in Afghanistan who are starving while we set up to build a pipeline there. Women in Iraq who hold the shattered bodies of their loved ones. I do not need the news to report these facts; this is what war does, this is what we are doing.

And meanwhile I hear reports that 69% of America believes Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks of 9/11. I feel like I’m living in a fun-world where nothing makes sense.

So I do what I can. I have been a Quaker for more than 30 years, so I center in that welcoming silence. I make afghans, at least one a month, as part of the afghans for Afghans project. I bring ideas of humanism into my classrooms.

And I write letters and send emails and make phone calls. I was horrified recently to talk to a friend in California who knew self-proclaimed witches who were planning to do ritual to keep Arnie out of the statehouse, but who did not plan to actually vote. HUH?? Magic is part of life, but so should voting be, in a democracy. As one commentator recently said, I would get to the polls to vote for a baloney sandwich in order to remove the current resident from the White House. I will be working on the campaign of anyone who runs against him. And I will urge all my friends to do so likewise.

K.A.: Thanks for doing this interview, Patricia, and thank you for all your great work over the years. Have a great Halloween! Best witches.
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