Reclaiming Yoni Shakti! ( A repost )

[Guest guest]

>From Eve Ensler's "The Vagina Monologues," here is some of the

amazing Foreword by Gloria Steinem:

 

[When] I was learning to take care of my own body;, I was told the

name of each of its amazing parts except in one unmentionable area.

This left me unprotected against the shaming words and dirty jokes of

the school yard and, later, against the popular belief that men,

whether as lovers or physicians, knew more about women's bodies than

women did.

 

I first glimpsed the spirit of self-knowledge and freedom ... when I

lived in India for a couple of years after college. In Hindu temples

and shrines I saw the lingam, an abstract male genital symbol, but I

also saw the yoni, a female genital symbol, for the first time: a

flowerlike shape, triangle, or double-pointed oval. I was told that

thousands of years ago, this symbol had been worshiped as more

powerful than its male counterpart, a belief that carried over into

Tantrism, whose central tenet is man's inability to reach spiritual

fulfillment except through sexual and emotional union with woman's

superior spiritual energy. It was a belief so deep and wide that even

some of the woman-excluding, monotheistic religions that came later

retained it in their traditions, although such beliefs were (and

still are) marginalized or denied as heresies by mainstream religious

leaders.

 

For example: Gnostic Christians worshiped Sophia as the female Holy

Spirit and considered Mary Magdalene the wisest of Christ's

disciples; Tantric Buddhism still teaches that Buddhahood resides in

the vulva; the Sufi mystics of Islam believe that fana, or rapture,

can be reached only through Fravahi, the female spirit; the Shekina

of Jewish mysticism is a version of Shakti, the female soul of God;

and even the Catholic church included forms of Mary worship that

focused more on the Mother than on the Son. In many countries of

Asia, Africa, and other parts of the world where gods are still

depicted in female as well as in male forms, altars feature the Jewel

in the Lotus and other representations of the Lingam-in-the-yoni. In

India, the Hindu goddesses Durga and Kali are embodiments of the

yoni powers of birth and death, creation and destruction.

 

Still, India and yoni worship seemed a long way from American

attitudes about women's bodies when I came home. ...

 

By the time feminists were putting CUNT POWER! on buttons and T-

shirts as a way of reclaiming that devalued word, I could recognize

the restoration of an ancient power. After all, the Indo-European

word cunt was derived from the goddess Kali's title of Kunda or

Cunti, and shares the same root as kin and country.

 

These last three decades of feminism were also marked by a deep anger

as the truth of violence against the female body was revealed,

whether it took the form of rape, childhood sexual abuse, physical

abuse of women, sexual harassment, terrorism against reproductive

freedom, or the international crime of female genital mutilation.

Women's sanity was saved by bringing these hidden experiences into

the open, naming them, and turning our rage into positive action to

reduce and heal violence. ...

 

In the 1970s, while researching in the Library of Congress, I found

an obscure history of religious architecture that assumed a fact as

if it were common knowledge: the traditional design of most

patriarchal buildings of worship imitates the female body. Thus,

there is an outer and inner entrance, labia majora and labia minora;

a central vaginal aisle toward the altar; two curved ovarian

structures on either side; and then in the sacred center, the altar

or womb, where the miracle takes place -- where males give birth.

 

Though this comparison was new to me, it struck home like a rock down

a well. Of course, I thought. The central ceremony of patriarchal

religions is one in which men take over the yoni-power of creation

by giving birth symbolically. No wonder male religious leaders so

often say that humans were born in sin -- because we were born to

female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of the patriarchy can we

be reborn through men. No wonder priests and ministers in skirts

sprinkle imitation birth-fluid over our heads, give us new names, and

promise rebirth into everlasting life. No wonder the male priesthood

tries to keep women away from the altar, just as women are kept away

from control of our own powers of reproduction. Symbolic or real,

it's all devoted to controlling the power that resides in the female

body. Since then, I've never felt the same estrangement when entering

a patriarchal religious structure. Instead, I walk down the vaginal

aisle, plotting to take back the altar with priests-female as well as

male -- who would not disparage female sexuality, to universalize the

male-only myths of Creation, to multiply spiritual words and symbols,

and to restore the spirit of God in all living things.

 

If overthrowing some five thousand years of patriarchy seems like a

big order, just focus on celebrating each self-respecting step along

the way. I thought of this while watching little girls drawing hearts

in their notebooks, even dotting their i's with hearts, and I

wondered: Were they magnetized by this primordial shape because it

was so like their own bodies? I thought of it again while listening

to a group of twenty or so diverse nine- to sixteen-year-old girls as

they decided to come up with a collective word that included

everything-vagina, labia, clitoris. After much discussion, "power

bundle" was their favorite. More important, the discussion was

carried on with shouts and laughter. I thought: What a long and

blessed way from a hushed "down there."

 

Contributed by smita_kumari