Recovering from Patriarchy

To Live in Growing Orbits, Vol. V: The Birth of the Titans

May 30, 2024

“The power of the arts to anticipate future social and technological developments, by a generation and more, has long been recognized. In this century Ezra Pound called the artist ‘the antennae of the race’. Art as radar acts as ‘an early alarm system,’ as it were, enabling us to discover social and psychic targets in lots of time to prepare to cope with them. This concept of the arts as prophetic, contrasts with the popular idea of them as mere self-expression…I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.” —Marshall McLuhan

For those wanting to listen, there is an audio recording of this post at the bottom of this email.

I continue to feel that I’m living out prophecies, that my life’s path has been guided by a future that’s called me to it so I could help create it, and have the experience of knowing that I did when my visions, expressed most often through words, come true.

Earlier this week, in ceremony with the Pōhala Hawaiian Botanicals lahui, this became so obvious I smiled throughout the Zoom, even though some of the things we talked about were heavy, like the birth of patriarchy as a system to recover from ancient cataclysms, and of all the suffering this system has created since we’ve refused to let it go after successfully rebuilding civilization and ensuring the continuation of human life. We spoke of how being an organic human requires decay. No matter how hard we try to bypass it, death is an unavoidable truth. This means we have to watch everyone we love die, and then die ourselves. In Western culture, we’ve pushed death so far away, it’s hard for me to process, even though I have already experienced the death of loved ones. There is a disconnect between what I know happened and my emotions. People I loved with all my heart are gone and I didn’t wail and tear my hair out, or wear black for a year. I went to a few somber funerals, made small talk at receptions, and moved on. What is wrong with me? What is wrong with us?

I don’t actually think there is anything wrong with me or us. I’m just using myself as an example of how so many of us navigate the inevitable truth of decay in patriarchy. Raised in a culture of control that values achievement over being, we perhaps fear the process of decay while still alive, more than death itself. Elders, who used to be valued for their wisdom, are dismissed as useless because they are no longer “productive”members of society. 104 years ago, Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote a poem called “The Second Coming,” that is just as prophetic now. Here is the first stanza:

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Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.

—from "The Second Coming," William Butler Yeats

The Earth is speaking—loudly—every hurricane, flood, fire, tornado, volcano, and earthquake, is an attempt to get us to wake up to the truth that we, in forgetting we are organic and subject to decay, have overstepped our bounds. Corrective actions must be taken, yet almost everyone I know is going on just the same, even when presented with statistics about climate change and another mass shooting. I have to assume most people believe anything we do won’t really make a difference. Posting “Ceasefire Now” on Instagram isn’t going to stop Israel from dropping bombs on Palestine. Calling our senators has not resulted in gun safety laws or a green revolution. Maybe these things will come in time. Despite everything, I am optimistic, because I believe in life, not as something to succeed at, but as an experience of great beauty that contributes to the evolution of the cosmos. Even though I can’t see these processes, I feel them, and am dedicated to doing my small part as a creator of beauty.

I don’t think the increasing extreme weather events we’re seeing are personal. The Earth is not out to get us. Why would she want to kill her own children? Wouldn't she prefer we wake up, recover from our traumas, and start living again in a beautiful way that keeps the balance between all creatures? We are not born sinners in need of redemption. Despite the wild rush of emotions that move through us that cause us to harm each other, we are part of a pattern much larger than the drama of human experience. We are not the center, and neither is Earth. Neither is the sun, or any of the other planets in our solar system, or the black hole in the center of our galaxy. There is no center, only spirals continually coiling and uncoiling. “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold,” Yeats wrote. My interpretation of this poem is that he’s saying this is not a good thing, but if we can let go of our fixation on a center, if we can view life as a process, the collapse of the center can be more like falling over the event horizon of a black hole where gravity pulls us into the singularity at the “center,” not a center at all, because the singularity is where spacetime itself breaks down and words like where or when can’t be used to describe anything.

This may seem terrifying, but for me it’s actually a relief. I believe I went through a singularity in an ayahuasca ceremony, and when I came out the other side, never having fainted in the material world, I was reborn. I did lose consciousness, not as in fainting or a seizure. I just did not exist anymore. It’s hard to write about, because I have no memory of it, but my body was different afterwards. I was sitting in the same position with my back against an adobe wall. People were singing around me. Nobody had any idea that I had just not been there except for me. I have no idea what happened in the singularity, but I do know my cells were altered and re-tuned. I was not I, anymore, like in the Jimenez poem, and the people in the circle with me were so beautiful I knew we were holy beings, and have not doubted humanity since.

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I Am Not I
by Juan Ramón Jiménez

I am not I.
                   I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget;
who remains calm and silent while I talk,
and forgives, gently, when I hate,
who walks where I am not,
who will remain standing when I die.

translated by Robert Bly

Consider it. What if there is no center? It seems like Yeats is almost going there in “The Second Coming.” He refers to the “widening gyre,” the spiral of life, but he doesn’t truly understand, or at least not in this poem, the nature of the spiral. Yes, a spiral collapses, but it always re-forms, and yes, it re-forms around a center, but that center is an illusion. There is no still point in creation. Everything is always moving. Our refusal to acknowledge this is the source of the war within ourselves that has led to all the wars that have ever been fought on our planet. If nothing is ever still, we can’t own it. Possession is also an illusion. What do we do with a spiral—we who live under patriarchy, that refuses to fall back into itself where it can be reborn?

In my time, 56 years, many anthropogenic extinctions have occurred. We, too, will go extinct eventually, and the reason will also most likely be anthropogenic, meaning we do it to ourselves, although it may look like we are victims of cataclysmic floods, but if Earth can rebalance, and I believe she will, life will go on. Will Earth miss us if we aren’t here? Does she miss all the other animals and plants that went extinct? Does she miss the dodo and the passenger pigeon? The Kauai akialoa and the Tasmanian tiger? The calamites and Cooksonia plants? The Caribbean monk seal and the Yangtze River dolphin? I don’t know. It depends on if Earth has emotions. Even if she doesn’t, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want us to play our part in the evolution of the cosmos.

In all creation myths that I know, including Ancient Greek, the foundation for Western culture, Earth is referred to as female. Embryology has discovered that all embryos begin as female; those that develop a Y chromosome become gendered males. This is not to say that gendered females or the feminine principle are superior to gendered males or the masculine. What I’m getting at by emphasizing the primacy of the female/feminine, is how the organic human being would not exist without going through the birth process, which occurs through the female body. (I am aware that some animals have been cloned and brought to life in labs, and I believe this may be in the works for humans, but as far as I know, it hasn’t yet occurred. )

Because decay is a law of organic life, and because we live in a culture that fears death so much, we have projected our fear of death onto the feminine, whether it resides in a female body or not. This has led to the ultimate war on life itself, a war on Earth that may result in our death before we complete the human event, which, according to Mū culture, is to learn all we can from the emotions until we have transcended them and consume ourselves in self-reflective love, aloha mā. So entangled in emotions, it’s difficult to expand into a vision of what this would look like, but really, we don’t need to get that cosmic. We can just consider the emotions we experience in daily life. Did you get road rage when someone cut in front of you today? Did you play and laugh like a kid? Did you feel sad when you saw the faces of refugee children, or a photo of an orphaned orangutan in Sumatra. Maybe you felt numb. You’ve had enough of emotions, or you just can’t process all the horrors we are so rapidly bombarded with by our media.

What are you feeling right now?

Emotions are beautiful and to be valued as great teachers, attempting to bypass them is a huge problem on Earth. Instead of allowing them to move through us like water, instead of realizing they are processes, not possessions, we inflict them on the physical world in petty disputes and horrifying wars. We remain lost in the mistaken belief we can pass our unwanted feelings onto someone or something else, without realizing they will keep circling back on us like a boa constrictor, a death-grip spiral that squeezes the life out of us. We are forced into death without ever learning our lessons, cycling back to repeat them as the same mistakes that keep us at war with ourselves and out of synch with life.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The flowers are still opening. The bees are still making honey. There is still sweetness to be found.

Before I knew we would be contemplating the origins of patriarchy in the Pōhala ceremony via the story of Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec war god, I planned to reflect this week on the third story from Piko: A Return to the Dreaming. For those who have been following along, I’m writing a series,“To Live in Growing Orbits,” where I’ve been sharing the stories I told in the ceremony that generated the book, Piko. (Links to the book and other articles in the series can be found at the bottom of this article.) This story is the Birth of the Titans, the Greek story of the creation of patriarchy, which is strikingly similar to the Aztec story.

Three years ago when I wrote Piko, I had to create a ceremony to open up the communication between me and the non-human world. I did that by telling folk tales and myths to the two little ponds in the Pu’uhonua, the Place of Refuge, near my home. I still think the book is a valuable contribution, a demonstration of how a modern person can speak with spirit, a kind of how-to manual in some ways, and I still love stories, but I don’t need them to open those portals now. I don’t need portals. I am the portal. My life has become a continual ceremony, even when I’m doing things I don’t want to do, something I never thought would happen. I’ve spent a lot of time being frustrated and resentful, mostly in regards to the jobs I’ve had to do in order to just scrape by, feeling a victim of a system that didn’t value what I wanted to offer—my writing—but was happy to reward me financially for cleaning toilets, if you can call working for minimum wage a reward. I don’t consider this time wasted. Or any of the time I’ve spent angry or frustrated. For the first time ever, I don’t mind going to work doing a job I don’t really want to do. Granted, I make a bit more than minimum wage now, though it’s not enough to have security within our current system, and being a massage therapist is more rewarding to me than being a cleaning lady, but the fact that I am not resentful any more shows me I have let go, I have learned the lesson of resentment and moved onto the next emotional experience calling to be integrated. Aloha mā. It sure feels good.

Before I delve further into my thoughts on patriarchy, I want to speak of compassion. Patriarchy arose because we needed a system that would enable us to rebuild civilization after cataclysmic earth changes that almost wiped humanity out. Imagine how terrifying it must have been to be one of the few humans left. It was truly a time of survival of the fittest that required competition and incredible striving that enabled us to go on. That we are alive, proves patriarchy was successful, and I am grateful for that. Thank you, to all our ancestors who sacrificed so that we could live on. However, in not stepping down when our survival was ensured, in continuing to push until the boundaries between us and the rest of life have been violated to the point where the Earth is rising up in the form of weather to correct the balance, leading to more cataclysms we see happening almost every day now, and in keeping us locked into a model of life where achievement, accumulation, and possession, are our primary goals, patriarchy has become our death knell and robs us of truly enjoying life, as well as creating horrific suffering for those who don’t find themselves on the top of the financial pyramid, or the wrong side of the battle. Nobody is truly a winner in patriarchy. There will always be someone to defeat and someone will always defeat you. Nobody is truly a winner in war. Do you want war to be the legacy of the organic human?

But what can we do! I know. I cry, too.

But someone wants to help us—empathy, and her daughter, compassion.

How can we kill someone whose pain we feel? Currently, as a collective, our planet is choosing fear over love. Some of us are the soldiers doing the actual killing, others the ones who condemn them. But some of us are refusing the commands to drop the bombs and pick up the guns, some of us are refusing to condemn the killers, searching for the deeper layers of the fear that drives us. You don’t have to have memories of archaic cataclysms that wiped out humanity, causing modern humans to continue to fight for survival on the grand scale of war, and to engage in the myriad daily competitions patriarchy requires of us in order to support ourselves within a capitalist system that requires money as a form of exchange. I don’t, though I believe these stories when I hear them, which could be a kind of memory. Compassion is simple. All it requires is opening our hearts, which some may think is not simple—the defenses seem so real—but they are illusions, and they will fall like every empire before ours. Knowing the walls will fall—of empires and your heart—what will you choose when they do? You’re going to die anyway. Will you fight or will you love?

The only way out of this cycle is letting go, accepting everything you love will die, and that you, yourself, will decay, and could potentially become compost for new growth. We must keep our hearts open despite the atrocities on every side, hold space for the fears at the core of our civilization as they reveal themselves through individual acts, understand why a soldier could pick up a gun and kill because he was commanded to. If we can do this, one by one, the walls will fall until there are no sides to be on.

Grieve—all your personal losses, and all the losses that came before you. None of them are yours, and they are all ours. Pua’aehuehu, fern medicine, tell us to grieve is not to mourn, it is to complete. We must finish this spiral and allow the new one to be born.

The Birth of the Titans

In the beginning, Gaia, Mother Earth, married the sky, her son, named Uranus. Enraptured with each other, the stage was set to populate the Earth when Gaia became pregnant with twelve children, the Titans. It’s hard to imagine the Titans as babies, but they were once, just like you and me, only with bigger muscles, shinier hair, and brighter teeth. Gaia looked within her womb and was excited to bring forth the gods.

But there was a hitch—Uranus was not equally enthused. In fact, he wanted to remain the only god. He would not let Gaia give birth to their children. He wanted to keep the world for himself, to be king, always.

Gaia wanted to see her children grow and flourish. She wanted grandchildren. Something had to be done. She came up with a plan to overthrow Uranus.

The next time her husband came to lay with her, one of the unborn Titans would castrate him.

The next hitch—none of the unborn kids were keen to take the sickle and castrate Dad. It wasn’t so bad in Gaia’s womb; they were safe and warm. Finally Cronus, the youngest Titan, agreed to his mother’s plot. Space was getting tight. He would do it. He would castrate his father so he and his siblings could be free from Gaia’s cramped womb.

That night when Uranus slipped into bed with Gaia, Cronus leaped out with the sickle.

Back then nobody wanted a eunuch King. (Or now, as a matter of fact—machismo still reigns.) Uranus was easily deposed and his sickle-wielding son Cronus took the throne.

Cronus wasn’t looking to reinvent the wheel with anything like ethical non-monogamy or socialism. He took a wife, Rhea, and began to procreate, but his patriarchal impulses were even more draconian than his father’s. He was an outright murderous dictator. As soon as Rhea pushed a child out, he ate it. Finally, Rhea couldn’t stand the pain of carrying life only to see it devoured as soon as it breathed outside of her. Like her mother-in-law, she resolved to do something.

Just as Cronus was about to eat their latest son, she swapped the tiny babe’s body for a stone. Bloodthirsty Cronos didn’t notice and the boy was able to grow inside her. After she gave birth, she hid the boy, Zeus, on Crete, and when he was a grown man he deposed his father, forcing him to disgorge Rhea’s other children, the goddesses Hestia, Demeter, and Hera, and the gods Hades and Poseidon. Olympus had a court. Zeus carried right on in his father’s footsteps, raping, pillaging, and begetting children with goddesses and mortals all across Greece. I’m sure you’ve heard the stories. We’re still living them.

But there’s another stream to this story, almost forgotten. Cronus, not the most loyal husband, had cheated on Rhea with the enticing sea nymph Philyra. He had to change himself into a horse to hide from his wife’s notice, which is why Philyra gave birth to a centaur, the famed healer Chiron, who was half man/half horse. Chiron became a great teacher and healer who educated many young heroes: Achilles, Asclepius, and Jason all walked the mountain paths with him on Mt. Olympus. Being born of a god and a nymph, he was immortal, which never bothered him until Heracles mistakenly shot him with a poison arrow.

The pain was so unbearable Chiron offered to trade his immortality for Prometheus’s freedom. Prometheus was being punished by control-freak Zeus for gifting fire to humans. The punishment was gruesome: chained to a mountain, eagles pecked and ate his liver, which continually regenerated. Zeus accepted Chiron’s offer. Prometheus was freed and Chiron became the constellation Sagittarius.

Some say after being deposed by his son Zeus, Cronus, being immortal, retired to Elysium, the blessed land, and founded a new Golden Age that’s still going on today. Some say he’s still there ruling over it. Kind. Benevolent. White-bearded. Twinkly-eyed with wisdom and mischief. A good king and father.

Some others say he faced his shadow and integrated his darkness. And some say when he looks over at us across the gap that separates our world from his, he weeps tears of true repentance, tears of remorse. But he can’t do anything for us from there. It’s up to us now. We are the ones who must wake up and realize the blessed land could be right here, right now.

Uranus and Cronus tried to hold their spirals in perpetual stasis. They were unsuccessful. Life cannot be held back. Control is an illusion. Patriarchy, a cult of control, is an illusion. The only real thing is love, which I keep saying, but the word won’t let me go, it’s spinning me round and round until I am dancing so fast my hands can’t keep up with the words. Now I am levitating and the Holy Spirit is carrying me both over the edge, and through the tight passage of birth where I will be crushed. Where I was crushed. This is the poem of how I received on the other side of the singularity:

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In Ceremony
by Jennifer Lighty

When the guitar penetrated the dark
the girl next to me began to weep.
I wanted to crawl across the earth floor,
take her to my heart,
coax her back against the clay wall
until she felt the mountain
beating beneath us,
but I was too afraid of my own shame
to touch hers. I knew she needed to cry

without comfort,
until there were no tears left for herself.
Then she could walk out in the morning
to see the hummingbird
                                      drop from the sun

on wing sound

seed syllables
whirling down the mountain
to gild the open flowers with stardust.

the flowers are open
the flowers are open
the flowers are open

Grounded in my open heart and womb, I now know I am part of unseen rivers that have been carrying me on their sound for years without asking for acknowledgment. All I had to do was float, and that wasn’t even a requirement. The choice was always there to drown. I didn’t take it. I floated, allowed myself to be carried through years of crippling depression and physical illness, and now I am here on a stone in the middle of the river writing to you. Currents part all around me, not even this rock can stop them, but they are smoothed, they are grounded, they are reminded of what a gift it is to be on Earth, part of a story so much larger than most of us acknowledge, a story that goes back to the ultra-violet light of a star. Now that you’ve heard it, what are you going to do with it?

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I Live My Life In Growing Orbits
by Rainer Maria Rilke

I live my life in growing orbits
which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
but that will be my attempt.

I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years,
and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm,
or a great song.

(Translated by Robert Bly)