THE COURAGE OF TURTLES - Central Washington University

Hoagland 1
EDWARD HOAGLAND
THE COURAGE OF
TURTLES
Edward Hoagland (b. 1932– ), a native of New York City and a Harvard graduate,
has written for such publications as Commentary, Newsweek, and The Village Voice.
In the following selection from his first book of essays (The Courage of Turtles, 1971),
he writes about the one animal he "wanted to keep in touch with." His essay reveals
both his affection and his sympathy for this seemingly lowly animal.
Turtles are a kind of bird with the governor turned low. With the same attitude of
removal, they cock a glance at what is going on, as if they need only to fly away.
Until recently they were also a case of virtue rewarded, at least in the town where
I grew up, because, being humble creatures, there were plenty of them. Even when we
still had a few bobcats in the woods the local snapping turtles, growing up to forty
pounds, were the largest carnivores. You would see them through the amber water, as
big as greeny wash basins at the bottom of the pond, until they faded into the inscrutable
mud as if they hadn't existed at all.
When I was ten I went to Dr. Green's Pond, a two-acre pond across the road.
When I was twelve I walked a mile or so to Taggart's Pond, which was lusher, had big
water snakes and a waterfall; and shortly after that I was bicycling way up to the
adventuresome vastness of Mud Pond, a lake-sized body of water in the reservoir system
of a Connecticut city, possessed of cat-backed little islands and empty shacks and a
forest of pines and hardwoods along the shore. Otters, foxes and mink left their prints
on the bank; there were pike and perch. As I got older, the estates and forgotten back
lots in town were parceled out and sold for nice prices, yet, though the woods had
shrunk, it seemed that fewer people walked in the woods. The new residents didn't
know how to find them. Eventually, exploring, they did find them, and it required some
ingenuity and doubling around on my part to go for eight miles without meeting
someone. I was grown by now, I lived in New York, and that's what I wanted on the
occasional weekends when I came out.
Since Mud Pond contained drinking water I had felt confident nothing untoward
would happen there. For a long while the developers stayed away, until the drought of
the mid-1960s. This event, squeezing the edges in, convinced the local water company
that the pond really wasn't a necessity as a catch basin, however; so they bulldozed a
hole in the earthen dam, bulldozed the banks to fill in the bottom, and landscaped the
flow of water that remained to wind like an English brook and provide a domestic view
for the houses which were planned. Most of the painted turtles of Mud Pond, who had
been inaccessible as they sunned on their rocks, wound up in boxes in boys' closets

Hoagland 2
within a matter of days. Their footsteps in the dry leaves gave them away as they
wandered forlornly. The snappers and the little musk turtles, neither of whom leave the
water except once a year to lay their eggs, dug into the drying mud for another siege of
hot weather, which they were accustomed to doing whenever the pond got low. But this
time it was low for good; the mud baked over them and slowly entombed them. As for
the ducks, I couldn't stroll in the woods and not feel guilty, because they were crouched
beside every stagnant pothole, or were slinking between the bushes with their heads
tucked into their shoulders so that I wouldn't see them. If they decided I had, they beat
their way up through the screen of trees, striking their wings dangerously, and wheeled
about with that headlong, magnificent velocity to locate another poor puddle.
I used to catch possums and black snakes as well as turtles, and I kept dogs and
goats. Some summers I worked in a menagerie with the big personalities of the animal
kingdom, like elephants and rhinoceroses. I was twenty before these enthusiasms began
to wane, and it was then that I picked turtles as the particular animal I wanted to keep
in touch with. I was allergic to fur, for one thing, and turtles need minimal care and not
much in the way of quarters. They're personable beasts. They see the same colors we do
and they seem to see just as well, as one discovers in trying to sneak up on them. In the
laboratory they unravel the twists of a maze with the hot-blooded rapidity of a mammal.
Though they can't run as fast as a rat, they improve on their errors just as quickly,
pausing at each crossroads to look left and right. And they rock rhythmically in place, as
we often do, although they are hatched from eggs, not the womb. (A common
explanation psychologists give for our pleasure in rocking quietly is that it recapitulates
our mother's heartbeat in utero.)
Snakes, by contrast, are dryly silent and priapic. They are smooth movers,
legalistic, unblinking, and they afford the humor which the humorless do. But they
make challenging captives; sometimes they don't eat for months on a point of order—if
the light isn't right, for instance. Alligators are sticklers too. They're like warhorses, or
German shepherds, and with their bar-shaped, vertical pupils adding emphasis, they
have the idee fixe of eating, eating, even when they choose to refuse all food and
stubbornly die. They delight in tossing a salamander up towards the sky and grabbing
him in their long mouths as he comes down. They're so eager that they get the jitters,
and they're too much of a proposition for a casual aquarium like mine. Frogs are
depressingly defenseless: that moist, extensive back, with the bones almost sticking
through. Hold a frog and you're holding a skeleton. Frogs' tasty legs are the staff of life
to many animals—herons, raccoons, ribbon snakes—though they themselves are hard to
feed. It's not an enviable role to be the staff of life, and after frogs you descend down the
evolutionary ladder a big step to fish.

Hoagland 3
Turtles cough, burp, whistle, grunt and hiss, and produce social judgments. They
put their heads together amicably enough, but then one drives the other back with the
suddenness of two dogs who have been conversing in tones too low for an onlooker to
hear. They pee in fear when they're first caught, but exercise both pluck and optimism
in trying to escape, walking for hundreds of yards within the confines of their pen,
carrying the weight of that cumbersome box on legs which are cruelly positioned for
walking. They don't feel that the contest is unfair; they keep plugging, rolling like
sailorly souls—a bobbing, infirm gait, a brave, sea-legged momentum—stopping
occasionally to study the lay of the land. For me, anyway, they manage to contain the
rest of the animal world. They can stretch out their necks like a giraffe, or loom
underwater like an apocryphal hippo. They browse on lettuce thrown on the water like a
cow moose which is partly submerged. They have a penguin's alertness, combined with
a build like a Brontosaurus when they rise up on tiptoe. Then they hunch and
ponderously lunge like a grizzly going forward.
Baby turtles in a turtle bowl are a puzzle in geometries. They're as decorative as
pansy petals, but they are also self-directed building blocks, propping themselves on
one another in different arrangements, before upending the tower. The timid
individuals turn fearless, or vice versa. If one gets a bit arrogant he will push the others
off the rock and afterwards climb down into the water and cling to the back of one of
those he has bullied, tickling him with his hind feet until he bucks like a bronco. On the
other hand, when this same milder-mannered fellow isn't exerting himself, he will stare
right into the face of the sun for hours. What could be more lionlike? And he's at home
in or out of the water and does lots of metaphysical tilting. He sinks and rises, with an
infinity of levels to choose from; or, elongating himself, he climbs out on the land again
to perambulate, sits boxed in his box, and finally slides back in the water, submerging
into dreams.
I have five of these babies in a kidney-shaped bowl. The hatchling, who is a
painted turtle, is not as large as the top joint of my thumb. He eats chicken gladly. Other
foods he will attempt to eat but not with sufficient perseverance to succeed because he's
so little. The yellow-bellied terrapin is probably a yearling, and he eats salad voraciously,
but no meat, fish or fowl. The Cumberland terrapin won't touch salad or chicken but
eats fish and all of the meats except bacon. The little snapper, with a black crenelated
shell, feasts on any kind of meat, but rejects greens and fish. The fifth of the turtles is
African. I acquired him only recently and don't know him well. A mottled brown, he
unnerves the green turtles, dragging their food off to his lairs. He doesn't seem to want
to be green—he bites the algae off his shell, hanging meanwhile at daring, steep, headfirst
angles.
The snapper was a Ferdinand until I provided him with deeper water. Now he
snaps at my pencil with his downturned and fearsome mouth, his swollen face like a

Hoagland 4
napalm victim's. The Cumberland has an elliptical red mark on the side of his
green-and-yellow head. He is benign by nature and ought to be as elegant as his
scientific name (Pseudemys scripta elegans), except he has contracted a disease of the
air bladder which has permanently inflated it; he floats high in the water at an
undignified slant and can't go under. There may have been internal bleeding, too,
because his carapace is stained along its ridge. Unfortunately, like flowers, baby turtles
often die. Their mouths fill up with a white fungus and their lungs with pneumonia.
Their organs clog up from the rust in the water, or diet troubles, and, like a dying man's,
their eyes and heads become too prominent. Toward the end, the edge of the shell becomes
flabby as felt and folds around them like a shroud.
While they live they're like puppies. Although they're vivacious, they would be a
bore to be with all the time, so I also have an adult wood turtle about six inches long.
Her shell is the equal of any seashell for sculpturing, even a Cellini shell; it's like an old,
dusty, richly engraved medallion dug out of a hillside. Her legs are salmon-orange
bordered with black and protected by canted, heroic scales. Her plastron—the bottom
shell—is splotched like a margay cat's coat, with black ocelli on a yellow background. It
is convex to make room for the female organs inside, whereas a male's would be concave
to help him fit tightly on top of her. Altogether, she exhibits every camouflage color on
her limbs and shells. She has a turtleneck, a tail like an elephant's, wise old
pachydermous hind legs and the face of a turkey—except that when I carry her she gazes
at the passing ground with a hawk's eyes and mouth. Her feet fit to the fingers of my
hand, one to each one, and she rides looking down. She can walk on the floor in perfect
silence, but usually she lets her shell knock portentously, like a footstep, so that she
resembles some grand, concise, slow-moving id. But if an earthworm is presented, she
jerks swiftly ahead, poises above it and strikes like a mongoose, consuming it with wild
vigor. Yet she will climb on my lap to eat bread or boiled eggs.
If put into a creek, she swims like a cutter, nosing forward to intercept a strange
turtle and smell him. She drifts with the current to go downstream, maneuvering behind
a rock when she wants to take stock, or sinking to the nether levels, while bubbles float
up. Getting out, choosing her path, she will proceed a distance and dig into a pile of
humus, thrusting herself to the coolest layer at the bottom. The hole closes over her
until it's as small as a mouse's hole. She's not as aquatic as a musk turtle, not quite as
terrestrial as the box turtles in the same woods, but because of her versatility she's
marvelous, she's everywhere. And though she breathes the way we breathe, with
scarcely any perceptible movements of her chest, sometimes instead she pumps her
throat ruminatively, like a pipe smoker sucking and puffing. She waits and blinks,
pumping her throat, turning her head, then sets off like a loping tiger in slow motion,
hurdling the jungly lumber, the pea vine and twigs. She estimates angles so well that

Hoagland 5
when she rides over the rocks, sliding down a dropoff with her rugged front legs
extended, she has the grace of a rodeo mare.
But she's well off to be with me rather than at Mud Pond. The other turtles have
fled—those that aren't baked into the bottom. Creeping up the brooks to sad, constricted
marshes, burdened as they are with that box on their backs, they're walking into a setup
where all their enemies move thirty times faster than they. It's like the nightmare most
of us have whimpered through, where we are weighted down disastrously while trying
to flee; fleeing our home ground, we try to run.
I've seen turtles in still worse straits. On Broadway, in New York, there is a penny
arcade which used to sell baby terrapins that were scrawled with bon mots in enamel
paint, such as KISS ME BABY. The manager turned out to be a wholesaler as well, and
once I asked him whether he had any larger turtles to sell. He took me upstairs to a loft
room devoted to the turtle business. There were decks for the paper work and a series of
racks that held shallow tin bins atop one another, each with several hundred babies
crawling around in it. He was a smudgy-complexioned, serious fellow and he did have a
few adult terrapins, but I was going to school and wasn't actually planning to buy; I'd
only wanted to see them. They were aquatic turtles, but here they went without water,
presumably for weeks, lurching about in those dry bins like handicapped citizens, living
on gumption. An easel where the artist worked stood in the middle of the floor. She had
a palette and a clip attachment for fastening the babies in place. She wore a smock and a
beret, and was homely, short and eccentric-looking, with funny black hair, like some of
the ladies who show their paintings in Washington Square in May. She had a cold, she
was smoking, and her hand wasn't very steady, although she worked quickly enough.
The smile that she produced for me would have looked giddy if she had been happier or
drunk. Of course the turtle's doom was sealed when she painted them, because their
bodies inside would continue to grow but their shells would not. Gradually, invisibly,
they would be crushed. Around us their bellies—two thousand belly shells—rubbed on
the bins with a mournful, momentous hiss.
Somehow there were so many of them I didn't rescue one. Years later, however, I
was walking on First Avenue when I noticed a basket of living turtles in front of a fish
store. They were as dry as a heap of old bones in the sun; nevertheless, they were
creeping over one another gimpily, doing their best to escape. I looked and was touched
to discover that they appeared to be wood turtles, my favorites, so I bought one. In my
apartment I looked closer and realized that in fact this was a diamondback terrapin,
which was bad news. Diamondbacks are tidewater turtles from brackish estuaries, and I
had no sea water to keep him in. He spent his days thumping interminably against the
baseboards, pushing for an opening through the wall. He drank thirstily but would not
eat and had none of the hearty, accepting qualities of wood turtles. He was morose,
paler in color, sleeker and more Oriental in the carved ridges and rings that formed his

Hoagland 6
shell. Though I felt sorry for him, finally I found his unrelenting presence exasperating.
I carried him, struggling in a paper bag, across town to the Morton Street Pier on the
Hudson. It was August but gray and windy. He was very surprised when I tossed him in;
for the first time in our association, I think, he was afraid. He looked afraid as he
bobbed about on top of the water, looking up at me from ten feet below. Though we were
both accustomed to his resistance and rigidity, seeing him still pitiful, I recognized that
I must have done the wrong thing. At least the river was salty, but it was also
bottomless; the waves were too rough for him, and the tide was coming in, bumping
him against the pilings underneath the pier. Too late, I realized that he wouldn't be able
to swim to a peaceful inlet in New Jersey, even if he could figure out which way to swim.
But since, short of diving in after him, there was nothing I could do, I walked away.

Orwell 7
GEORGE ORWELL
POLITICS AND THE
ENGLISH LANGUAGE
Throughout his career as a journalist, essayist, and novelist, George Orwell (1903-
1950, born Eric Blair) was concerned with political injustice in both totalitarian and
democratic governments. Orwell saw the misuse of language as a tool for political
oppression. In the following selection, from Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays,
Orwell describes the reciprocal relationship between cloudy thought and awkward
writing and prescribes ways in which we can both think and write more clearly.
Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English
language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by
conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our
language—so the argument runs—must inevitably share in the general collapse. It
follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like
preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies
the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which
we shape for our own purposes.
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately 2 have political and
economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual
writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing
the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take a drink
because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he
drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes
ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our
language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is
reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread
by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If
one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary
first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not
frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this
presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have
become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now
habitually written.
These five passages have not been picked out because they are 3 especially bad—I
could have quoted far worse if I had chosen—but because they illustrate various of the
mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly
representative samples. I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:

Orwell 8
I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who
once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become,
out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the
founder of the Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.
Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression)
Above all, we could play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms
which prescribes such egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put
up with for tolerate or put at a loss for bewilder.
Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossa)
On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it
has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such natural growth and not an instrument
which we shape for our own purposes.
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately 2 have political and
economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual
writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing
the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take a drink
because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he
drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes
ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our
language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is
reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread
by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If
one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary
first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not
frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this
presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have
become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now
habitually written.
These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad—I
could have quoted far worse if I had chosen—but because they illustrate various of the
mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly
representative samples. I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:
I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once
seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an
experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of the
Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.
Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression)
Above all, we could play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which
prescribes such egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for
tolerate or put at a loss for bewilder.

Orwell 9
Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossa)
On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it
has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for
they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness;
another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is
little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other
side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure
integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small
academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or
fraternity?
Essay on psychology in Politics (New York)
All the "best people" from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic fascist
captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror of the rising
tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to
foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own
destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoisie
to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of
the crisis.
Communist pamphlet
If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and
contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and
galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the
soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the
British lion's roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare's Midsummer
Night's Dream—as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot
continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the
effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as "standard English."
When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less
ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated,
inhibited, schoolma'amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens!
Letter in Tribune
Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable
ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the
other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he
inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words
mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most
marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political
writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no

Orwell 10
one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less
and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases
tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. I list below, with notes
and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose-construction is
habitually dodged:
Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought 5 by evoking a
visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g., iron
resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used
without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of
worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because
they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the
changes on, take up the cudgels for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to
shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in
troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of
these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a "rift," for instance?), and
incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not
interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of
their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For
example, toe the line is sometimes written tow the line. Another example is the hammer
and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In
real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a
writer who stopped to think what he was saying would be aware of this, and would avoid
perverting the original phrase.
Operators or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate
verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give
it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are render inoperative, militate
against, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect
of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve
the purpose of, etc., etc. The keynote is the elmination of simple verbs. Instead of being
a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of
a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb such as prove, serve, form,
play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the
active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of
by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and deformations,
and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of
the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such
phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the
interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax by
such resounding common-places as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account,
a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration,

Orwell 11
brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth.
Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun),
objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit,
exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up simple statements and give an
air of scientific impartiality to biased judgments. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic,
historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used
to dignify the sordid processes of international politics, while writing that aims at
glorifying war usually takes on an archaic colour, its characteristic words being: realm,
throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion.
Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina,
mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung, are used to give an air
of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g, and etc., there is no
real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in English. Bad writers,
and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by
the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary
words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine,
subaqueous and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon
opposite numbers.' The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal,
petty bourgeois, these gentry, lacquey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.) consists
largely of words and phrases translated from Russian, German or French; but the
normal way of coining a new word is to use a Latin or Greek root with the appropriate
affix and, where necessary, the -ize formation. It is often easier to make up words of this
kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary, and so forth) than
to think up the English words
'An interesting illustration of this is the way in which the English flower names which
were in use till very recently are being ousted by Greek ones, snapdragon becoming
antirrhinum, forget-me-not becoming myosotis, etc. It is hard to see any practical
reason for this change of fashion: it is probably due to an instinctive turning-away from
the more homely word and a vague feeling that the Greek word is scientific.
that will cover one's meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and
vagueness.
Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and
literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely
lacking in meaning? Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental,
natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they
not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by
the reader. When one critic writes, "The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living
quality," while another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its
peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion. If words

Orwell 12
like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he
would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political
words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it
signifies "something not desirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom,
patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot
be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there
no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost
universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently
the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they
might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of
this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses
them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something
quite different. Statements like Marshal Pêtain was a true patriot, The Soviet Press is
the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost
always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most
cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary,
bourgeois, equality.
Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give
another example of the kind of writing that they
'Example: "Comfort's catholicity of perception and image, strangely Whitmanesque in
range, almost the exact opposite in aesthetic compulsion, continues to evoke that
trembling atmospheric accumulative hinting at a cruel, an inexorably serene
timelessness. .. . Wrey Gardiner scores by aiming at simple bull's-eyes with precision.
Only they are not so simple, and through this contented sadness runs more than the
surface bitter-sweet of resignation." Poetry Quarterly.)
lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a
passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known
verse from Ecclesiastes:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle
to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of
understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to
them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion
that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be
commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the
unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Orwell 13
This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3), above, for instance,
contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not
made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original
meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations—race, battle,
bread—dissolve into the vague phrase "success or failure in competitive activities." This
had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing—no one capable of
using phrases like "objective consideration of contemporary phenomena"—would ever
tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern
prose is away from concreteness. Now analyse these two sentences a little more closely.
The first contains forty-nine words but only sixty syllables, and all its words are those of
everyday life. The second contains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of its
words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid
images, and only one phrase ("time and chance") that could be called vague. The second
contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives
only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is
the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to
exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will
occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still, if you or I were told to write a few
lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to
my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes.
As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not 12 consist in picking out
words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning
clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been
set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The
attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier—even quicker, once you
have the habit—to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to
say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for
words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences, since these
phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are
composing in a hurry—when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making
a public speech—it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a
consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of
us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By
using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of
leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the
significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image.
When these images clash—as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the
jackboot is thrown into the melting pot—it can be taken as certain that the writer is not
seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really
thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor

Orwell 14
Laski ( I) uses five negatives in fifty-three words. One of these is superfluous, making
nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip alien for akin, making
further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general
vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to
write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is
unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means; (3) if one takes
an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless: probably one could work out
its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4), the
writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases
chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink. In (5), words and meaning have almost
parted company. People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional
meaning—they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another—but they
are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every
sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying
to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this
image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could
I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not
obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and
letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for
you—even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent—and at need they will
perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.
It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of
language becomes clear.
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad is writing. Where it is not
true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his
private opinions and not a "party line." Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand
a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles,
manifestos, White Papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from
party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid,
homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform
mechanically repeating the familiar phrases—bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained
tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder—one often has a curious
feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling
which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's
spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them.
And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone
some distance towards turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are
coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing
his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make
over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when

Orwell 15
one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not
indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the
indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and
deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but
only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square
with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely
of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are
bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle
machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.
Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no
more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of
frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck
or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable
elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up
mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor
defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your
opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say
something like this:
While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the
humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain
curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of
transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been
called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete
achievement.
The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of 15 Latin words falls upon the
facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great
enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's
declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms,
like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of
politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly,
hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I
should expect to find—this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to
verify—that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last
ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt 16 thought. A bad
usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do
know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very
convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired,
would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in

Orwell 16
mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. Look back
through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed
the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning's post I have received a
pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany.
The author tells me that he "felt impelled" to write it. I open it at random, and
here is almost the first sentence that I see: "[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of
achieving a radical transformation of Germany's social and political structure in such a
way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying
the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe." You see, he "feels impelled" to
write—feels, presumably, that he has something new to say—and yet his words, like
cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar
dreary pattern. This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations,
achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard
against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.
I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who
deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects
existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct
tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language
goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often
disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of
a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone
unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of
flyblown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest
themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out
3
of existence, to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive
out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make
pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defence of the
English language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it
does not imply.
To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete
words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a "standard English" which must
never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of
every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct
grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning
clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a "good
prose style." On the other hand it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the
One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not
unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen

Orwell 17
attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring
the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply the fewest and shortest words that
will cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word,
and not the other way about. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to
surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if
you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about till you
find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more
inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it,
the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring
or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as
possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures or sensations.
Afterwards one can choose—not simply accept—the phrases that will best cover the
meaning, and then switch round and decide what impression one's words are likely to make
on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all
prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one
can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one
can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:
Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in
print.
1. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
2. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
3. Never use the passive when you can use the active.
4. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can
think of an everyday English equivalent.
5. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of
attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One
could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of
stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.
I have not here been considering the literary use of language, 19 but merely language as
an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase
and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have
used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know
what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such
absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is
connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some
improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed
from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and
when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political

Orwell 18
language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to
Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give
an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one
can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers
loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase—some jackboot, Achilles' heel,
hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse—into the
dustbin where it belongs.

Didion 19
JOAN DIDION
ON GOING HOME
Joan Didion (b. 1934– ), a native Californian, has written novels, screenplays, and
essays. Her collections of essays include Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The
White Album (1979). In her book, Salvador (1983), she recounts her visit to the
troubled Central American nation. In the following personal essay from Slouching
Towards Bethlehem, she describes the emotional problems that arise in a visit to her
childhood home, problems which are perhaps compounded by the presence of her
husband and daughter.
Iam home for my daughter's first birthday By “home” I do not mean the house in
Los Angeles where my husband and I and the baby live, but the place where my
family is, in the Central Valley of California. It is a vital although troublesome
distinction. My husband likes my family but is uneasy in their house, because once there
I fall into their ways, which are difficult oblique, deliberately inarticulate, not my
husband's ways. We live in dusty houses ( “D-U-S-T,” he once wrote with his finger on
surfaces all over the house, but no one noticed it) filled with mementos quite without
value to him (what could the Canton dessert plates mean to him? how could he have
known about the assay scales, why should he care if he did know?), and we appear to
talk exclusively about people we know who have been committed to mental hospitals,
about people we know who have been booked on drunk-driving charges, and about
property, particularly about property, land, price per acre and C-2 zoning and
assessments and freeway access. My brother does not understand my husband's
inability to perceive the advantage in the rather common real-estate transaction known
as “sale-leaseback” and my husband in turn does not understand why so many of the
people he hears about in my father's house have recently been committed to mental
hospitals or booked on drunk-driving charges. Nor does he understand that when we
talk about sale-leasebacks and right-of-way condemnations we are talking in code about
the things we like best, the yellow fields and the cottonwoods and the rivers rising and
falling and the mountain roads closing when the heavy snow comes in. We miss each
other's points, have another drink and regard the fire. My brother refers to my husband,
in his presence, as “Joan's husband.” Marriage is the classic betrayal.
Or perhaps it is not any more. Sometimes I think that those of us who are now in
our thirties were born into the last generation to carry the burden of “home,” to find in
family life the source of all tension and drama. I had by all objective accounts a
“normal” and a “happy” family situation, and yet I was almost thirty years old before I
could talk to my family on the telephone without crying after I had hung up. We did not
fight. Nothing was wrong. And yet some nameless anxiety colored the emotional charges

Didion 20
between me and the place that I came from. The question of whether or not you could
go home again was a very real part of the sentimental and largely literary baggage with
which we left home in the fifties; I suspect that it is irrelevant to the children born of the
fragmentation after World War II. A few weeks ago in a San Francisco bar I saw a pretty
young girl on crystal take off her clothes and dance for the cash prize in an "amateurtopless"
contest. There was no particular sense of moment about this, none of the effect
of romantic degradation, of "dark journey," for which my generation strived so
assiduously. What sense could that girl possibly make of, say, Long Day's Journey into
Night? Who is beside the point?
That I am trapped in this particular irrelevancy is never more apparent to me than
when I am home. Paralyzed by the neurotic lassitude engendered by meeting one's past
at every turn, around every corner, inside every cupboard, I go aimlessly from room to
room. I decide to meet it head-on and clean out a drawer, and I spread the contents on
the bed. A bathing suit I wore the summer I was seventeen. A letter of rejection from
The Nation, an aerial photograph of the site for a shopping center my father did not
build in 1954. Three teacups hand-painted with cabbage roses and signed “E.M.,” my
grandmother's initials. There is no final solution for letters of rejection from The Nation
and teacups hand-painted in 1900. Nor is there any answer to snapshots of one's
grandfather as a young man on skis, surveying around Donner Pass in the year 1910. I
smooth out the snapshot and look into his face, and do and do not see my own. I close
the drawer, and have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well,
veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.
Days pass. I see no one. I come to dread my husband's evening call, not only
because he is full of news of what by now seems to me our remote life in Los Angeles,
people he has seen, letters which require attention, but because he asks what I have
been doing, suggests uneasily that I get out, drive to San Francisco or Berkeley. Instead
I drive across the river to a family graveyard. It has been vandalized since my last visit
and the monuments are broken, overturned in the dry grass. Because I once saw a
rattlesnake in the grass I stay in the car and listen to a country-and-Western station.
Later I drive with my father to a ranch he has in the foothills. The man who runs his
cattle on it asks us to the roundup, a week from Sunday, and although I know that I will
be in Los Angeles I say, in the oblique way my family talks, that I will come. Once home
I mention the broken monuments in the graveyard. My mother shrugs.
I go to visit my great-aunts. A few of them think now that I am my cousin, or their
daughter who died young. We recall an anecdote about a relative last seen in 1948, and
they ask if I still like living in New York City. I have lived in Los Angeles for three years,
but I say that I do. The baby is offered a horehound drop, and I am slipped a dollar bill
“to buy a treat.” Questions trail off, answers are abandoned, the baby plays with the
dust motes in a shaft of afternoon sun.

Didion 21
It is time for the baby's birthday party: a white cake, strawberry-marshmallow ice
cream, a bottle of champagne saved from another party. In the evening, after she has
gone to sleep, I kneel beside the crib and touch her face, where it is pressed against the
slats, with mine. She is an open and trusting child, unprepared for and unaccustomed to
the ambushes of family life, and perhaps it is just as well that I can offer her little of that
life. I would like to give her more. I would like to promise her that she will grow up with
a sense of her cousins and of rivers and of her great-grandmother's teacups, would like
to pledge her a picnic on a river with fried chicken and her hair uncombed, would like to
give her home for her birthday, but we live differently now and I can promise her
nothing like that. I give her a xylophone and a sundress from Madeira, and promise to
tell her a funny story.

Eisler 22
RIANE EISLER
OUR LOST HERITAGE:
NEW FACTS ON HOW
GOD BECAME A MAN
RIANE EISLER (b. 1931-) is co-director for the Center for Partnership Studies and a
national and international lecturer. She is the author of Dissolutions: No Fault
Divorce, Marriage, and the Future of Women (1977), The Equal Rights Handbook: What
ERA Means to Your Life, Your Rights, and the Future (1978), and The Chalice and the
Blade: Our History, Our Future (1987), and, more recently (1996) Sacred Pleasure: Sex,
Myth , and the Politics of the Body. The following essay first appeared in the
May/June 1985 issue of The Humanist.
n the nineteenth century, archeological excavations began to confirm what
Ischolars of myth had long maintainedCthat goddess worship preceded the
worship of God. After reluctantly accepting what no longer could be ignored, religious
historians proposed a number of explanations for why there had been this strange
switch in divine gender. A long-standing favorite has been the so-called Big Discovery
theory. This is the idea that, when men finally became aware that women did not bring
forth children by themselvesCin other words, when they discovered that it involved their
sperm, their paternityCthis inflamed them with such a new-found sense of importance
that they not only enslaved women but also toppled the goddess.
Today, new archeological findingsCparticularly post-World War II
excavationsCare providing far more believable answers to this long-debated puzzle. For
largely due to more scientific archeological methods, including infinitely more accurate
1
archeological dating methods such as radiocarbon and dendrochronology, there has
been a veritable archeological revolution.
As James Mellaart of the London University Institute of Archeology writes, we
now know that there were in fact many cradles of civilization, all of them thousands of
years older than Sumer, where civilization was long said to have begun about five
2
thousand years ago. But the most fascinating discovery about these original cultural
1
Radiocarbon dating is a method of establishing the age of prehistoric artifacts by
measuring the radioactivity of carbon; dendrochronology is a dating procedure based on
counting the growth rings of trees.
2
[Au.]
J Mellaart, The Neolithic of the Near East (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1975).

Eisler 23
sites is that they were structured along very different lines from what we have been
taught is the divinely, or naturally, ordained human order.
One of these ancient cradles of civilization is Catal Huyuk, the largest Neolithic
site yet found. Located in the Anatolian plain of what is now Turkey, Catal Huyuk goes
back approximately eight thousand years to about 6500 B.C.E. C three thousand years
before Sumer. As Mellaart reports, this ancient civilization Ais remarkable for its
wall-paintings and plaster reliefs, its sculpture in stone and clay . . ., its advanced
technology in the crafts of weaving, woodwork, metallurgy . . ., its advanced religion . . .,
its advanced practices in agriculture and stock breeding, and . . . a flourishing trade. .
.@
But undoubtedly the most remarkable thing about Catal Huyuk and other
original sites for civilization is that they were not warlike, hierarchic, and
male-dominated societies like ours. As Mellaart writes, over the many centuries of its
existence, there were in Catal Huyuk no signs of violence or deliberate destruction, Ano
evidence for any sack or massacre.@ Moreover, while there was evidence of some social
inequality, Athis is never a glaring one.@ And most significantly C in the sharpest possible
contrast to our type of social organization C@ the position of women was obviously an
important one . . . with a fertility cult in which a goddess was the principal deity.@
Now it is hardly possible to believe that in this kind of society, where, besides all
their other advances, people clearly understood the principles of stock breeding, they
would not have also had to understand that procreation involves the male. So the Big
Discovery theory is not only founded on the fallacious assumption that men are
naturally brutes, who were only deterred from forcefully enslaving women by fear of the
female=s Amagical@ powers of procreation; the Big Discovery theory is also founded on
assumptions about what happened in prehistory that are no longer tenable in light of the
really big discoveries we are now making about our lost human heritageCabout societies
that, while not ideal, were clearly more harmonious than ours.
But if the replacement of a Divine Mother with a Divine Father was not due to
men=s discovery of paternity, how did it come to pass that all our present world religions
either have no female deity or generally present them as Aconsorts@ or subservient wives
of male gods?
To try to answer that question, let us look more carefully at the new archeological
findings.
3
4
J. Mellaart, Catal Huyuk (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), p. 11. [Au.]
Ibid., pp. 69, 225, 553. [Au.]

Eisler 24
Logic would lead one to expect what ancient myths have long indicated and
archeology has since confirmed: that since life issues from woman, not man, the first
anthropomorphic deity was female rather than male. But logical or not, this position
was hardly that of the first excavators of Paleolithic caves, some of whom were monks,
such as the well-known Abbe Henri Breuil. They consistently refused to see in the many
finds of twenty-five-thousand-year-old stylized female sculptures what they clearly
were: representations of a female divinity, a Great Mother. Instead, the large-breasted,
wide-hipped, bountiful, and often obviously pregnant women these men christened
AVenus figurines@ were described either as sex objects (products of men=s erotic
5
fantasies) or deformed, ugly women. Moreover, in order to conform to their model of
history as the story of Aman the hunter@ and Aman the warrior,@ they refused to see what
was actually in the famous cave paintings. As Alexander Marshack has now established,
not only did they insist that stylized painting of tree branches and plants were weapons,
they sometimes described these pictures as backward arrows or harpoons, chronically
6
missing their mark! They also, as Andre Leroi-Gourhan noted in his major study of the
Paleolithic, insisted on interpreting the already quite advanced art of the period as an
expression of hunting magic, a view borrowed from extremely primitive contemporary
7
societies like the Australian aborigines.
Although Leroi-Gourhan's interpretation of the objects and paintings found in
Paleolithic caves is in sexually stereotyped terms, he stresses that the art of the
Paleolithic was first and foremost religious art, concerned with the mysteries of life,
8
death, and regeneration. And it is again this concern that is expressed in the rich art of
the Neolithic, which, as Mellaart points out, not only shows a remarkable continuity
9
with the Paleolithic, but clearly foreshadows the great goddess of later Bronze Age
civilizations in her various forms of Isis, Nut, and Maat in Egypt, Ishtar, Lillith, or
Astarte in the Middle East, the sun-goddess Arinna of Anatolia, as well as such later
5
See, for example, E. O. James, The Cult of the Mother Goddess (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1959), and M. Gimbutas, AThe Image of Woman in Prehistoric Art,@ Quarterly
Review of Archeology, December 1981. [Au.]
6
7
A. Marshack, The Roots of Civilization (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972). [Au.]
A. Leroi-Gourhan, Prehistoire de l'Art Occidental (Paris: Edition D'Art Lucien Mazenod,
1971). [Au.]
8
Ibid. [Au.]
9
J. Mellaart, Catal Huyuk, p. 11. [Au.]

Eisler 25
goddesses as Demeter, Artemis, and Kore in Greece, Atargatis, Ceres, and Cybele in
Rome, and even Sophia or Wisdom of the Christian Middle Ages, the Shekinah of
Hebrew Kabalistic tradition, and, of course, the Virgin Mary or Holy Mother of the
10
Catholic Church about whom we read in the Bible.
This same prehistoric and historic continuity is stressed by UCLA archeologist
Marija Gimbutas, whose monumental work, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe,
brings to life yet another Neolithic civilization: the indigenous civilization that sprang up
11
in the Balkans and Greece long, long before the rise of Indo-European Greece. Once
again, the archeological findings in what Gimbutas termed the civilizations of Old
Europe not only demolish the old Atruism@ of the Awarlike Neolithic@ but also illuminate
our true past, again showing that here, too, the original direction of human civilization
was in some ways far more civilized than ours, with pre Indo-Europeans living in far
greater harmony with one another and the natural environment.
Moreover, excavations in Old Europe, like those unearthed in other parts of the
ancient world, show that what brought about the onset of male dominance both in
heaven and on earth was not some sudden male discovery. What ushered it in was the
onslaught of barbarian hordes from the arid steppes and deserts on the fringe areas of
our globe. It was wave after wave of these pastoral invaders who destroyed the
civilizations of the first settled agrarian societies. And it was they who brought with
them the godsCand menCof war that made so much of later or recorded history the
bloodbath we are now taught was the totality of human history.
In Old Europe, as Gimbutas painstakingly documents, there were three major
invasionary waves, as the Indo-European peoples she calls the Kurgans wiped out or
AKurganized@ the European populations. AThe Old European and Kurgan cultures were
the antithesis of one another,@ writes Gimbutas. She continues:
The Old Europeans were sedentary horticulturalists prone to live in large
well-planned townships. The absence of fortifications and weapons attests the
peaceful coexistence of this egalitarian civilization that was probably matrilinear
and matrilocal.... The Old European belief system focused on the agricultural
10
See, for example, R. Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (New
York: Harper and Row, 1987); M. Stone, When God Was a Woman (New York: Harvest, 1976);
E. Neumann, The Great Mother (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955). [Au.]
11
M. Gimbutas, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1982). [Au.]

Eisler 26
cycle of birth, death, and regeneration, embodied in the feminine principle, a
Mother Creatrix. The Kurgan ideology, as known from comparative
Indo-European mythology, exalted virile, heroic warrior gods of the shining and
thunderous sky. Weapons are nonexistent in Old European imagery; whereas the
dagger and battle-axe are dominant symbols of the Kurgans, who, like all
historically known Indo-Europeans, glorified the lethal power of the sharp
blade. 12
So while we are still commonly taught that it was to Indo-European invadersCsuch as
the Achaean warriors, celebrated by Homer, who eventually sacked TroyCthat we owe
our Western heritage, we now know that they in fact did not bring us civilization.
Rather, they destroyed, degraded, and brutalized a civilization already highly advanced
along wholly different lines. And, just as the factuality of how these truly savage peoples
demoted both women and goddesses to the subservient status of consort or wife has
now been established, the fact [that] they brought in warfare with them is also
confirmed.
Once again, as when Heinrich Schliemann defied the archeological establishment
and proved that the city of Troy was not Homeric fantasy but prehistoric fact, new
archeological findings verify ancient legends and myths. For instance, the Greek poet
Hesiod, who wrote about the same time as Homer, tells us of a Agolden race,@ who lived
in Apeaceful ease@ in a time when Athe fruitful earth poured forth her fruits.@ And he
laments how they were eventually replaced by Aa race of bronze@ who Aate not grain@ (in
other words, were not farmers) and instead specialized in warfare (Athe all-lamented
13
sinful works of Ares were their chief care@).
Perhaps one of the most fascinating legends of ancient times is, of course, that of
the lost civilization of Atlantis. And here again, as with the once only legendary city of
Troy, archeological findings illuminate our true past. For what new findings suggest is
what the eminent Greek scholar Spyridon Martinatos already suspected in 1939: that the
legend of a great civilization which sank into the Atlantic is actually the garbled folk
memory of the Minoan civilization of Crete and surrounding Mediterranean islands,
12
M. Gimbutas, AThe First Wave of Eurasian Steppe Pastoralists in Copper Age Europe,@
Journal of lndo-European Studies, 1977, p. 281. [Au.]
13
13 Hesiod, quoted in J. M. Robinson, An Introduction to Early Greek Philosophy
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), pp. 12-14. [Au.]

Eisler 27
portions of which did indeed disappear into the sea after unprecedented volcanic
14
eruptions sometime after 1500 B.C.E.
First discovered at the turn of this century, the once unknown Bronze Age
civilization of ancient Crete has now been far more extensively excavated. As Nicolas
Platon, former superintendent of antiquities in Crete and director of the Acropolis
Museum, who excavated the island for over thirty years, writes, Minoan civilization was
Aan astonishing achievement.@ It reflected Aa highly sophisticated art and way of life,@
indeed producing some of the most beautiful art the world has ever seen. Also in this
remarkable societyCthe only place where the worship of the goddess and the influence
women in the public sphere survived into historic times, where Athe whole of life was
pervaded by an ardent faith in the goddess Nature, the source of all creation and
harmony@Cthere was still Aa love of peace, a horror of tyranny, and a respect for the
law.@
And once again, it was not men=s discovery of their biological role in paternity
that led to the toppling of the goddess. It was another, final Indo-European invasion: the
onslaught of the Dorians, who, with their weapons of iron, as Hesiod writes, brought
16
death and destruction in their wake.
So the revolution in norms that literally stood reality on its headCthat established
this seemingly fundamental and sacrosanct idea that we are the creations of a Divine
Father, who all by Himself brought forth all forms of lifeCwas in fact a relatively late
event in the history of human culture. Moreover, this drastic change in direction of
cultural evolution, which set us on the social course that in our nuclear age threatens to
destroy all life, was certainly not predetermined or, by any stretch of the imagination,
inevitable. Rather than being some mystical mystery, it was the substitution of a
force-based model of social organization for one in which both the female and male
halves of humanity viewed the supreme power in the universe not as the Amasculine@
power to destroy but rather as the Afeminine@ power to give and nurture life.
Another popular old idea about this change was that it was the replacement of
matriarchy with patriarchy. But my research of many years shows that matriarchy is
simply the flip side of the coin to the dominator model of society, based upon the
dominance of men over women that we call patriarchy. The real alternative to
patriarchy, already foreshadowed by the original direction of human civilization, is what
14
Au.]
15
16
S. Martinatos, AThe Volcanic Destruction of Minoan Crete,@ Antiquity, 939,13:425-439.
N. Platon, Crete (Geneva: Nagel, 1966), pp. 48, 148. [Au.]
Hesiod, see note 13. [Au.]

Eisler 28
17
I have called the partnership model cf social relations. Based upon the full and equal
partnership between the female and male halves of our species, this model was already
well-established a long time ago, before, as the Bible has it, a male god decreed that
woman be subservient to man.
The new knowledge about our true human heritage is still meeting enormous
resistance, with traditional Aexperts@ from both the religious and academic
establishments crying heresy. But it is a knowledge that, in the long run, cannot be
suppressed.
It is a knowledge that demolishes many old misconceptions about our past. It
also raises many fascinating new questions. Is the real meaning of the legend of our fall
from paradise that, rather than having transgressed in some horrible way, Eve should
have obeyed the advice of the serpent (long associated with the oracular or prophetic
powers of the goddess) and continued to eat from the tree of knowledge? Did the custom
of sacrificing the first-born child develop after the destruction of this earlier worldCas
the Bible has it, after our expulsion from the Garden of EdenCwhen women had been
turned into mere male-controlled technologies of reproduction, as insurance of a sort
that conception had not occurred before the bride was handed over to her husband?
We may never have complete answers to such questions, since archeology only
provides some of the data and ancient writings, such as the Old Testament, were
rewritten so many times, each time to more firmly establish, and sanctify, male
18
control. But what we do have is far more critical in this time when the old patriarchal
system is leading us ever closer to global holocaust. This is the knowledge that it was not
always this way: there are viable alternatives that may not only offer us survival but also
a far, far better world.
17
See, for example, R. Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade; R. Eisler AViolence and Male-
Dominance: The Ticking Time Bomb,@ Humanities in Society, Winter-Spring 1984, 7:1/2:3-18;
R. Eisler and D. Loye, AThe >Failure= of Liberalism: A Reassessment of Ideology from a New
Feminine-Masculine Perspective,@ Political Psychology, 1983, 4:2:375-391; R. Eisler, ABeyond
Feminism: The Gylan Future,@ Alternative Futures, Spring-Summer 1981, 4:2/3: 122-134. [Au.]
18
Ibid. [Au.]

Unger 29
RUSTY UNGER
OH, GODDESS!
Rusty Unger (b. 1945-) has written articles for the Newsday Magazine, the New York
Times, Mirabella, Look, Harper=s Bazaar, and other publications. A graduate of the
University of Pennsylvania, Unger has worked in book publishing, magazine
publishing, and motion pictures. She is the co-editor and writer of Not the New York
Times (1978) and the humor book The 90's: A Look Back (1990). The following essay
appeared in the June 4, 1990 issue of New York.
In the Morristown, New Jersey, Unitarian Fellowship Center, in an attic room lit
by candlelight, thirteen women have assembled in a circle to celebrate the full moon.
That moon is particularly luminous tonight against the rich, deep winter sky, its
platinum glow visible from the dormer windows. Among those gathered are a sculptor,
a biologist, a professor, and a computer-systems analyst, ranging in age from seventeen
to sixty-eight. On the large round mirror on the floor in the center of the circle are a
mass of flickering candles and pieces of jade, coral, pumice, and lava. There is a huge
conch shell filled with water, a small bronze statue of a fertility goddess, and a long
plastic tropical flower. The shell is passed around, each woman anointing the forehead
of the person to her left: AI, Donna, bless thee, Tiffany. Thou art Goddess.@
The women begin to chant and tap tambourines and shake feathered rattles, their
voices occasionally breaking off from the song to trill and hum their own private arias to
the glory of the Goddess, the divine female principle that represents for them the
mysterious and sacred procreative powers of women inherent in the Earth and its cycles
of birth and rebirth. You can almost hear Helen Reddy: AI am womanChear me roar.@
Next, the plastic flower, a ceremonial Atalking stick,@ circulates. Whoever holds it
is free to speak. But at least one stunned womanCa visitor and a first-timerCis at a loss
for words.
The ceremony is being led by the computer analyst, a well-preserved
grandmother with a striking resemblance to Shirley Temple Black. She is wearing a
grass skirt and a cowrie necklace with the shells Aturned out, like vulvas.@ In keeping
with the Hawaiian motif she has chosen, her self-styled ritual involves a series of hula
dances and a taped selection of Hawaiian songs. After the recitation of an ode to the
Hawaiian goddess of the volcano, the women are urged to rise and dance the hula on
their own.
Donna Wilshire, a lithe, middle-aged writer and professional performer of
Goddess myths (Acollages of song, dance, and dramatized verse and history@), watches

Unger 30
the performance with her mouth half open. Since the mid-seventies, Wilshire has been
a devotee of feminist spirituality and an avid proselytizer for the movement. She fears
that tonight's pagan pastiche could be enough to convince a guest that Goddess worship
is, well, a little off the wall.
By some estimates, more than a hundred thousand people across the United
States worship the Goddess. Notices of their moon circles are pinned to bulletin boards
in suburban supermarkets and near the checkout counters of health-food stores.
Recently, fliers announcing Goddess meetings have been taped to the mirrors of the
women's rest rooms at Merrill Lynch and at a nurse's station in New York Hospital.
While adopting a religion based on the pagan worship of nature may seem
extreme, some of the practices have caught on. AYou wouldn=t believe the number of
cars and drivers sitting out on East Ninth Street while some lady in a Chanel suit was
inside buying tarot cards or a copy of Robert Graves's The White Goddess,@ says Dee
Kissinger, a fortuneteller who used to work at Enchantments, a Goddess store in the
East Village.
Many of those who dabble become disciples. Since the rebirth of feminism in the
seventies and amid growing disenchantment with organized religion, thousands of
Americans have moved C to borrow the title of a book by philosopher Mary Daly C
beyond God the father.
For some, like Donna Wilshire, goddess worship is the spiritual aspect of
feminism. Viewing themselves as an oppressed class, these women have rejected the
patriarchal, hierarchical tenets of the Judeo-Christian ethic. (Buddhism is also on their
hit list.) Their spiritual quest reaches all the way back to the Stone Age worship of
fertility goddesses, to shamanism and witchcraft, where they find strong, holy images of
women to revere. This Afeminist theology@ or Afeminist spirituality@ celebrates a
composite archetype: part Neolithic fertility symbol, part Hera, part woman warrior.
Along the same lines, many worshipers see the Goddess as Mother Nature, and
they follow a pantheistic principle that calls for living in harmony with the Earth and its
seasons. Many men as well as women who are involved in the antinuclear movement,
ecological concerns, or animal rights regard their activities as an outgrowth of this
reverence for the Earth Goddess.
But there is another branch of Goddess worship, which has evolved from an
older, occult tradition independent of the women=s movement. The men and women in
this group are followers of Athe Craft,@ or Wicca C which is the Old English word for
Awitch.@ The good witches and wizards of Wicca C who are in no way related to
satanism, Christianity's dark opposite C believe that theirs is Athe old religion@ of
goddesses like the Roman deity Diana, practiced throughout Europe before the arrival of
Christianity.

Unger 31
Despite these nuances, the two groups who worship the Goddess share a basic
world view. As expressed in the movement's extensive literature, prehistory is Aherstory,@
a matriarchal golden age dreamily similar to Woodstock C full of peace, love,
organic meals, be-ins, and the kind of communal ecstasy one might have experienced at
the feet of Janis Joplin (though the physical ideal here is more like Mama Cass).
Some give the Goddess political and social veils, but underneath them, she is the
Great Mother. Worshiping her-through dance and study, art and herbal medicine,
meditation and witchcraft-has resulted in a balanced, natural way of life for many
women and quite a few men as well.
In a videotape made at a summer-solstice camp in the Sierra Nevadas, Charlotte
Kelly, once married to a minister and now the director of the Women=s Alliance in
Oakland, California, tells how embracing a feminine deity validated her sense of self. AI
took assertiveness training,@ she says, Abut there was no way in which I was really
embodying the power of my own womanhood.@ Church rituals had no meaning for her:
AI didn=t have any place for the beauty of my own soul.@
In a documentary about the movement, dashiki-clad author and teacher Luisah
Teish recalls that as a child, Athe more I listened to what they had to say about the great
bearded white man in the sky, the more I realized he was nobody I could talk to. You
couldn=t say nothing to the dude. He didn=t answer prayers.@
Jean Shinoda Bolen, a psychiatrist and the author of Goddesses in Everywoman,
says she sees the Goddess not as a figurehead but as a Alife force, as affiliation, as that
which links us all at a deep level to be one with each other and one with nature, and in
that, we are all connected with Gaia, or Mother Earth.@
This grassroots religious movement is a subculture with its own politics, morality,
aesthetics, and language. Its inhabitants have redesigned the tarot deck, the calendar,
astrology, medicine, ancient history, and the dictionary. (AIt=s feminist thealogy, not
theo-,@ says Carol Buizone, the owner of Enchantments, correcting a customer.) Words
like Awimmin,@ Awomon,@ and Awomyn@ are ubiquitous. Such elements have trickled into
the mainstream, enough to provoke riotous laughter from audiences when satirized in
Off Broadway's Kathy and Mo Show. And to be sure, some of the activity associated
with Goddess worship is as wacky as anything patriarchal societies ever invented.
There is, for example, a book that invites its readers to find their Agoddess type.@
Are you Athena, Aphrodite, Hera, or Demeter? (This is even more fun than being a Leo.)
In the summer-solstice-camp video, a woman intones, AWe are the teachers of the
New Dawn. We are the Ones.@ Other participants, wearing horned headdresses,
feathered masks, and wispy gowns, dance through the forest, grunting and gesticulating,
keening and moaning.
If that doesn't seem extreme, then how about one of the most influential books on
Goddess spirituality, Starhawk's The Spiral Dance, which has instructions for casting a
ASpell to Be Friends With Your Womb@: ALight a RED CANDLE. Face South. With the

Unger 32
third finger of your left hand, rub a few drops of your menstrual blood on the candle. . .
.@
But the Morristown Full-moon Circle is considerably more moderate. This lunar
luau is a warm support group, effusive in its praise for the swivelhipped computer
analyst. Still, a nervous Donna Wilshire whispers loudly to her guest, AThis isn=t
typical!@
Actually, there doesn=t seem to be a typical feminist spiritual group in the New
York area. Moonfire, perhaps the most famous Manhattan group, is not meeting now
because its leader, Amethyst, is Afeeling burned-out.@ Goddess worship in the city is a
diverse, do-it-yourself proposition that borrows freely from a variety of pagan traditions.
Margot Adler, a Central Park West witch who is a correspondent for National
Public Radio and author of Drawing Down the Moon, the definitive work on paganism
in the United States, identifies two streams of the Goddess movement: AThere=s the
feminist stream and a slightly different one, the neo-pagan Wiccan movement. They
have different histories, really, which doesn=t mean some people don=t move back and
forth between them.@
Adler, forty-four, the granddaughter of the psychiatrist Alfred Adler, lives with
her nonpagan husband in a comfortable, rambling apartment filled with books and
plants. With her dark good looks, earthy warmth, and sophisticated intelligence, she
makes being a witch seem as reasonable as joining Channel 13.
Adler says she knows of about twenty good-witch covens in Manhattan (with
more than 200 members altogether). AAs far as Goddess-spirituality groups, there are
fewer in New York than in a lot of other places.@
Within the two streams of Goddess worship C the feminist and the Wiccan C are
further distinctions. Some Wiccan covens are open to visitors, some closed. Some are
heterosexual, some are feminist, others are lesbian separatist. Some followers worship
in the nude.
Feminist Goddess groups, or circles, vary, too C with those in the Dianic tradition
emphasizing the Greek-goddess archetypes in their rituals and others focusing on herbal
healing. The latter call themselves Green Witches or Wise Women. Still others
concentrate on Native American teachings and deities.
Naturally, there is some friction among the groups. Certain feminist witches
claim that the Craft is Awimmin's religion@ and should exclude men, a prospect that
upsets traditional witches, who cherish the Wiccan ideal of a male-female balance.
AI do get upset and unhappy when people say Wicca should be exclusively
female,@ says a male witch known in the Manhattan Wiccan community as Black Lotus.
AThere was a three-day Goddess festival at the New York Open Center [in SoHo] last
year that allowed men in only at night. Assuming the Goddess is for women only is
silly.@

Unger 33
Christopher Hatton, another male witch, says, AMy attitude toward the very small
group that wants to exclude men is the same as it would be toward men who want to
exclude women from religion. I have a very low opinion of them.@
Beyond the sexist strife, some East Coast worshipers have problems with the
magical Native American branch of the movement. AThe shamanistic tradition isn=t the
Goddess movement,@ says one New Jersey woman. ASome women are very adamant
about not participating in Native American rituals, and now the Native American
followers are pissed off. But the medicine wheel is not our symbol. Herbal healing is
our tradition as North American witches.@ (She admits, however, that she and her
friends Ahave done sweat lodges.@)
Part of the feminist stream, the New Jersey group was formed around Barbara G.
Walker, author of The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets and seven other
scholarly works on the Goddess published by Harper & Row. Women who first met at
one of Walker=s book signings at a local store six years ago make up the core of the halfmoon
circle and another Aintellectual support group,@ explains Donna Wilshire, one of
the most enthusiastic members.
Wilshire is an intense, talkative mother of two grown children, with a dancer=s
body and a mass of curly brown hair framing her heart-shaped face. Her husband of
thirty years, Bruce Wilshire, is a professor of philosophy at Rutgers who, she says, Ais
into shaman journeys.@ He says that in his marriage to Donna he has had three wives.
AThe first cooked for me. The second cried a lot. The third is a goddess.@
Donna Wilshire grew up in a Catholic boarding home, struggled to become an
actress, then spent a decade being Athe perfect wife, garnishing every dish with a palette
of colors.@ When she realized in the late sixties that her husband Adidn=t care about any
of that,@ Wilshire became depressed. Eventually, Ahe knew something was wrong and
brought home books by Betty Friedan and Merlin Stone.@ Stone=s When God Was a
Woman is a seminal volume for many. Published in 1976, it attempts to document the
Goddess cults of Stone Age matriarchal societies in the Near and Middle East and their
destruction by patriarchal, Indo-European bad guys.
AThis is the best time of my life,@ Wilshire says. AI=m confident. I=m performing
sacred work that combines all the things the world keeps separate. I can use my whole
self because that's what the Goddess is: whole.@ The lives of Donna Wilshire=s friends
Nancy Blair and Lynn Peters C slender, attractive sculptors in their thirties C also
revolve around the Goddess. The two run Star River Productions, a New Brunswick,
New Jersey, company that makes Amuseum-quality@ Goddess statues and jewelry.
Blair, a petite brunette, is passionate about her beliefs. AWe used to do full-moon
rituals with women we knew from the local co-op and through our business, gathering
together to raise energy,@ she says. ABut we've taken it more private. Groups can drain

Unger 34
you. In the morning, we arrive at our studio, light candles, maybe write affirmations
about our growth, and pray to the Great Goddess to allow divine energy.@
As an art student in 1984, Blair saw the Venus of Willendorf, a famous
archeological relic and one of the oldest sculptures of a human form yet uncovered, for
the first time. AAll art-history courses begin with her, but they describe her as just
another fertility goddess,@ Blair says. AConnecting with the Goddess, I got the most
incredible feeling right up my spine. It really felt like coming home.@
Peters, who is fair-skinned, with dark hair piled atop her head, says, AI feel like
Ceres [the Roman goddess of agriculture] some days, or else more like Lilith [a
Talmudic demon], or this day I can feel like the Willendorf, an Earth Mother. They=re
all aspects of the One, so I can really flow with who I am that day.@
Four years ago, with two hundred dollars seed money, the artists decided to start
a business that would Amake images of the divine female available to other women,@ says
Blair. ALast year, we grossed more than one hundred thousand dollars. Now we even
have an 800 number.@ (Feminist spiritual hunger is apparently almost insatiable: a
Saugerties, New York, company ships bite-size chocolate Willendorf goddesses around
the world for nine dollars a dozen, plus postage.)
Blair and Peters consider themselves part of the Wise Woman, herbal healing
tradition in which female intuition is the guiding force. Manhattan=s leading Green
Witch is Robin Bennett. Pale, wiry, and articulate, Bennett, thirty-two, teaches an
herbal-healing course and holds monthly open gatherings of women in her home to
celebrate the new moon. The tiny kitchen in her small high-rise apartment near Union
Square is stocked with jars of every imaginable herb. Bennett began studying them at
nineteen to find relief from periodontal disease. (AI have perfect trust that my mouth
needed to do this for me,@ she says.)
AI was working with healing already, on an intangible level,@ Bennett says,
Aemotional, spiritual, psychological kinds of healing with one of the human potential
groups: Let Go & Live. My picture of what spirituality was was totally tied up with what
organized religion was, and it didn=t speak to me.
AWhen I met Susun Weed in 1985, the person most behind the reclaiming of the
Wise Woman tradition around the world, it changed my whole relationship with
spirituality and healing, bringing it more onto the earth. Susun helped me to put a
name to all the things I was doing and to learn there was this whole history of traditional
women working this way. To me, the wise woman behind it all is the Earth Goddess.@
Susun Weed, the author of Healing Wise, runs the Wise Woman Center C a Asafe
space for deep female healing . . . nourished by woman-only space/ time,@ according to
its pamphlet-in Woodstock, New York. In her forties, Weed looks like a rock superstartall
and willowy with long, flowing auburn hair, fair, unlined skin, and a dazzling smile.
At a workshop called AThe Spirit and Practice of the Wise Woman Tradition,@ held at the
New York Open Center last October, she wore an elegant turquoise silk outfit with

Unger 35
matching bandanna and exotic jewelry. Twenty women of all ages sat in the familiar
circle around candles, baskets overflowing with leafy branches, a black caldron, and a
rubber snake in the spiral shape that symbolizes the Goddess.
The day began with Anourishing@ chants to the Sacred Corn Mother. Weed=s
morning lecture on the failings of both scientific and alternative medicine displayed her
encyclopedic knowledge of herbs. Participants then used Weed's beaded witch-hazelwood
talking stick to explain why they were there.
Several in the Ahealing professions@ felt disaffected with the medical
establishment. A few had cured themselves of painful physical Afemale@ problems. One
had come because she was interested in Aowning myself since my marriage ended.@ A
fortyish woman C in tears Abecause [here] I=m allowed to speak@C was attending
because AI really love trees.@ A video producer said, AIf we respect ourselves, then we can
respect the environment, the rain forest. I know plants have tremendous power.@ Two
young nannies on their day off seemed to be there by accident.
AA lot of women who come into the women's spirituality movement,@ says Margot
Adler, Acome into it for reasons that are very personal. They feel like sC t, they hate
their bodies, they hate themselves. They come into these groups which basically say to
you, >You=re the Goddess, you=re wonderful.= And that=s really a personally important
experience for a certain period of time. But then comes the question of where do you go
from there? Because then they become very political.@
Attunement to nature and one's own inner wisdom, the idea that Aevery woman is
an extension of the Earth Mother,@ as Weed proclaims, is an attractive idea to harried,
fragmented urbanites, especially at a time when the death of nature is being prophesied.
Some of the events at Weed's Woodstock center are earthy, indeed. At last year=s
ABlood of the Ancients@ retreat, held over Labor Day weekend, Awe recreated the sacred
moon lodge, or menstrual hut,@ recalls Weed, Aand reawakened the old blood mysteries
of woman's creativity C pregnancy, birth, lactation, menstruation, and menopause. We
reclaimed the blood of peace, thereby bringing an end to war.@ Living conditions at the
center are said to be less than idyllic. It Ais really just a shack on a former stone quarry,@
says one participant, Abut there=s a beautiful stream and waterfall C you should have
seen us, about twenty women all nude at the waterfall.@
The plumbing is problematical. AYou can=t flush the indoor toilet often because it
will overflow and there's just one portable toilet outside, so women have to squat on the
ground,@ she says. AAfter a few days, they stop wearing underpants. There are lots of
goats, so you=re walking in human and goat sC all the time. For dinner, it=s great C
Susun just goes out and picks all sorts of greens and flowers for a big salad.@
Such mellow weekend flashbacks to Woodstock >69 are hardly typical of the
classic Wiccan covens. AWe=re more oriented to the balance than to just the Goddess,@
explains Judy Harrow. A plump brunette who is a health worker and sometime radio

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producer, Harrow is the high priestess of a Gardnerian coven based in her narrow,
homey apartment in Washington Heights. (The Gardnerians are descended from a
coven founded in Britain by Gerald Gardner in the early fifties.)
Harrow has lived with the large, bearded man in the photographs on her livingroom
wall for seventeen years. He and the others in the photographs are all middleaged,
jolly C and nude. Gardnerians almost always worship Asky clad.@
In her soft voice, Harrow says she Aresents the term >feminist theology= because
>feminist= is often equated with the term separatist. There are plenty of us feminists who
aren=t separatists. You don't have to disrespect men in order to respect women.
Separatists are part of the picture, though. Certainly, a lot of the art and writing comes
out of those groups.@
Harrow traces her involvement with witchcraft to being Aa forest-oriented,
nature-oriented sort of person, more than you'd expect from someone who grew up in
the city. And when our consciousness began to raise about ecology, that also became
important to me. I heard from friends that there were people who made a religion out of
this.@
Wicca has given Harrow Aa framework. It's become the focus of my life, which
was pretty scattered and unfocused.@ As a high priestess, Harrow says, AI got much
more confident and assertive from the experience of being a model for other people,
teaching and mentoring.@ She notes that a support group of coven leaders meets once a
month. AIt's a very little pond, okay?@ she says. ABut I'm a decent-sized fish.@
There are seven men and women in Harrow's coven: an X-ray technician, a
housewife, a student, a secretary, a copy editor, a computer technician, and a computer
consultant. During a typical meeting, Harrow says, they will Acast the circle C creating a
focus and sense of differentness C and then work on a particular theme. The second
half of the meeting will be whatever anybody wants to work on C magic or personal
issues.@
To work magic, Harrow explains, Awe focus our will, our attitude, our personal
energy, on our goals-through visualization, through chanting, affirmations, lots of
different techniques. If someone is ill and wants to get better or wants to make some
other change in their life, wants to change jobs or have a new relationship, whatever.
It=s a way of making a transference of consciousness. I=ve seen results again and again:
people getting jobs, getting better from illnesses, against the odds. For me, a lot of the
magic is completely explainable in terms of psychology, okay? That=s big heresy, but it=s
the truth.@
As for black magic, AI=m sure it goes on,@ Harrow concedes, Abut it=s a whole other
world.@
Harrow=s group belongs to the Covenant of the Goddess, a federation of covens
incorporated as a legally recognized church. AIn every way, [Wicca] is deepening and

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growing as a religion and as a culture,@ she says. AThere=s more interaction because of
the development of weekend gatherings that allow groups to share techniques more
than before.@
Harrow would like to see Amore communication between the academic-feministtheology
community and us. Some of the academic stuff is pretty disconnected with
what=s going on, and some of what=s really going on is pretty shortsighted because
there=s a philosophical and historical perspective lacking.@
Margot Adler agrees that the split between Wicca and the Goddess-spirituality
movement is a problem. AMost of the Goddess-oriented groups, particularly the lesbianfeminist
ones, [are] much more open [than covens] on one level, but they also don=t care
about the society at large, or certainly the male society.@ Yet Adler believes that Athe
whole separatist movement is lessening. Even lesbians are working with men more.@
Men are drawn to Goddess worship for many of the same reasons women are.
Black Lotus says that as a child, he was Ainterested in the idea of polytheism, relating to
Godhead as not just exclusively male or one particular image. In Wicca, we=re used to
relating to God the Father and also God the Mother, God the Child and God the Lover,
God the Servant and God the Master. This very much enriches one=s view, to see
divinity in all things.@ Christopher Hatton=s Apagan awareness@ began, he says, Awhen I
was reading the old myths and I encountered the concept of Mother Earth. By that, I
mean the biosphere C it felt right that this should be treated as a goddess.@
Since becoming involved with Wicca in 1971, Margot Adler has seen Athe odd
acceptance of it. It=s permeated mass culture to a certain extent.@ She points to a new
forty-five-dollar coffee-table tome on witchcraft and five different related volumes she=s
been sent in just the past month. "Hundreds of pagan magazines are flourishing,@ she
notes. ASome of these newsletters that have been going for years have five hundred
[subscribers]. Some of them also have ten thousand.@
Adler sees further evidence of her religion=s growth: AThere are all these straight
museums having Goddess exhibitions. There was a Goddess festival at the New York
Open Center in March of 1989 with two hundred people. That was where Olympia
Dukakis >came out.=@ (When she announced her affiliation, Dukakis says, AI felt very
vulnerable and tentative sharing with people my own yearnings.@ Dukakis became
involved with Goddess worship when she acted in The Trojan Women in 1982. Her
character, she says, Arejects the god of Troy and goes back to a more ancient time.@ Now
Dukakis develops improvisational theater pieces based on Goddess myths. Her most
recent is called Voices of Earth.)
Despite its growth, the future of Goddess spirituality is uncertain. AIs it going to
take directions that are really going to be exciting and interesting?@ asks Adler. AI think
that=s still really up for grabs.@ At a festival held in the Berkshires last fall, she says, Athey
wanted to create a new women's synthesis, [and] very few people showed up. Clearly,

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they did not know how to create some kind of new alliance calling on the pagans, the
Goddess people, the environmental people. I don't know if that meant it wasn=t time yet
of whether they just fC ed up.@
Serenity Young, an adjunct professor of religion at Hunter College, says that there
is a great deal of Across-fertilization going on between orthodox religions and the
Goddess movement. Reformists within the church and the synagogue visit Goddess
groups and take the rituals back with them.@ Young believes that Aif the movement can
keep its political focus, it will last. If it just becomes about sitting around in the woods
and feeling good, it won=t.@
In New York today, the Goddess movement lacks cohesion C and that may be its
most appealing attribute. There is room for the most individualized styles of worship,
whether enacting or sculpting powerful feminine images, communing with herbs, or
casting spells for success. What can be bad about a belief system that includes women
and joy? Celebrating nature=s mysteries and women=s connection to them clearly feels
right to many.
Perhaps only those who are particularly wounded or angry will respond to the
more strident and excessive elements of the movement. And sophisticates would
probably wince when Robin Bennett tells her New Moon circle to Ago with the flow.@ But
the low, modern coffee table in the young Green Witch=s simple downtown apartment
makes a fairly decent altar. And to the assembled faithful, the guided meditation she
leads is as much of a religious rite as Sunday mornings at St. Pat=s are to others.
The ages of the ten women C early twenties to early forties C are as diverse as
their vocations, which include nurse, photographer, young mother, and writer. They are
asked to picture a spiral staircase with a cave at the bottom. The cave is inhabited by
their Wise Woman, who has a message for them. The women focus on what they want
to get rid of as the moon=s cycle ends and what new seeds they want to plant in the
coming one.
With a feather, each woman wafts the smoke from the smudge pot-a rich blend of
cedar, sage, and mugwort over the body of the person next to her, sending Asupportive
wishes.@ Then everyone drinks herbal tea and, holding the talking stick, says what's on
her mind.
Rituals like these C part Seder and part consciousness-raising group C may strike
some outsiders as silly or strange. But the fact is that these disparate women C who
want to connect with something more eternal than L.A. Law C are all immensely likable
and intelligent. And it's just possible that with the tea, the chants, the good wishes, and
the Goddess statue, they'll have a pretty good month.