Spiritual Values and "the Goddess"

Victoria Branden

The Green Party concept is attractive: a political party that makes the environment its major platform, instead of an afterthought to be given lip-service during

elections and largely ignored at other times. Recently I went to a local Green conference, and came

away discouraged. Those who attended never came to grips with the real issues of the environment, and most of the discussions were monopolized by a woman holding forth on "spiritual values." There was a great deal of talk about "the Goddess," "ecofeminism," the virtues of matriarchal societies, and a lot of fuzzy mysticism, much of it derived from the slipshod thinking of the New Age movement, which is about as new as Madame Blavatsky, or even the Delphic Oracle.

Matriarchal societies have existed, but they were distinguished as such by matrilineal practices, not by superior morals or ethics. The benign matriarchal society, with its reverence for nature, its kinship to all other life, is a romantic dream; it is about as realistic as the Garden of Eden, the Elysian Fields, or other myths produced by wishful thinking through the ages. I've heard Druid society cited as one such saintly and enlightened community; in fact Druidism was a horribly cruel religion whose ceremonies involved the burning of live animals (and sometimes people) in wicker cages. The corn gods of the Americas demanded sacrifice by fire of living babies, and some of their ceremonies involved the flaying of priestesses. (Their skins were made into aprons that the priests wore so that, by sympathetic magic, they became women and gave birth to corn gods.) The Goddess has the same kind of validity as Rousseau's Noble Savage.

What is the value of romanticizing and falsifying the role of women in the dim past? With rare and sensational exceptions, women have always been prevented from taking

dominant roles by the inescapable facts of biology. By the time they were through with child-bearing and -rearing, they were exhausted or dead. Average life expectancy for most of the history of the human race was less than thirty years; it wasn't until the nineteenth century, in the most favored Western countries, that it increased to forty. The liberation of women was effected by the birth control pill, without which feminism is a lost cause. All its passionate rhetoric is meaningless unless we can control our reproductive functions.

The spiritual values so strongly advocated at the Greens conference were never defined, and I suspect that anything so vague and amorphous would be impossible to define. However, I'm convinced that whatever they are, they are highly idiosyncratic and personal. I'm fairly certain that the spiritual values of the speaker, although they were never described except in foggy generalities, were unlikely to be my values, and I would resist furiously their being imposed upon me; such impositions result in religious wars.

The conference also produced a good deal of praise for hugging trees and carrying acorns and pine cones about with one (to assert kinship); I fail to see how this will benefit trees in any real way. I noticed that the proponent of this idea forgot her acorns and left them under a chair.

Finally, aspiration toward and achievement of what Freud called "the oceanic feeling" was recommended, and here an ignorance of the subject was only too plainly manifest. This "mystic experience" is a genuine one, and its biochemical causes are understood. Early in the century, William James discussed it in Varieties of Religious Experience, and Arthur Koestler investigated it extensively. Biofeedback researchers at the Menninger Foundation studied it, and showed that states of altered consciousness are clearly distinguished by different brain-wave patterns; the "oceanic feeling" coincides with the slow "theta" waves that occur between sleeping and waking. They may occur spontaneously, or can be induced by such disciplines as meditation; they can also be induced by drugs. They sometimes involve visions or inspirations that lead to problem solving (as in the often-noted case of Kekulé's discovery of the molecular structure of benzene) and the experience of blissful states; they sometimes are horrific, as in the drug-taker's "bad trip." In both cases, the experience involves chemical changes in the body. In spontaneous cases the drugs are naturally occurring ones like endorphins.

Religious/ oceanic/ cosmic experiences are frequently associated with diseases such as epilepsy, and with a variety

Victoria Branden is a jour-nalist and educator whose books include Mrs. Job, Flitterin' Judas, and Under-standing Ghosts.

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of mental illnesses that produce visions and voices. These are attributed by their victims to supernatural forces, often with deplorable results.

Walter T. Rea says that Ellen G. White, founder of Seventh-Day Adventism,

not only was a plagiarist of Herculean proportions, but suffered from epilepsy as well, as a result of being hit on the head with a rock at the age of nine. While epilepsy per se is not a mental disorder, the auditory and visual hallucinations which sometimes accompany the "aura" preceding a seizure can often lead to a decline in reality testing and a blurring of the line between thought and reality.'

Characteristics of such conditions include extreme religiosity and logorrhea, an apparently uncontrollable outpouring of words. The visions and their accompanying sensations of exaltation frequently lead to prophecy and a conviction that their victims have been in direct commun-ication with a god. This frequently puts them in conflict with established religion, and they are inclined to launch sects and schisms. Frank Zindler comments,

When one studies the biographies of the founders and leaders of the various religions, one cannot help but be struck by the psychotic—or at least extremely abnormal—behavior that has characterized so many of them. Luther, Wesley, and Loyola had hallucinations ("visions"). St. Theresa almost certainly was a hysteric. The book The Psychotic Personality, by Leon J. Saul and Silas L. Warner, devotes considerable space to the psychotic personalities of Mary Baker Eddy (founder of Christian Science), Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Mohammed, and the Rev. Jim Jones.... It seems significant that the founder of Christianity itself, St. Paul, also suffered from epilepsy.2

To this list we might add the name of our contemporary, Shirley MacLaine, another great gusher of words.

The oceanic feeling, which is a form of trance, is not necessarily bad; it has produced some of the world's best poetry. It is the subject of Wordsworth's "Prelude" and "Ode to Intimations of Immortality," and of Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty." I've experienced it myself and it can affect one very powerfully. Wordsworth described "spots of time that with distinct pre-eminence retain a renovating virtue ... that nourishes and repairs our minds ... and lifts us up when fallen."

However, it can't be too strongly emphasized that these are "spots of time," temporary and fleeting, not a continuous state.

The Green Party members appeared to believe that one could live permanently in these altered states—a manifest impossibility, and a highly undesirable one. People in such mental states would be a public menace driving a car, and would be highly ineffective in any work situtation. It is a passive near-dream state, borderline between sleeping and waking.

This is just one example of the sloppy thinking and lack of information that characterized the conference.

The Green Conference made only passing reference to overpopulation, which is at the root of most of our environ-

mental problems. It is predicted that the world population will reach 6.2 billion by the end of the decade. It took the human race from the beginning of its existence until the 1850s to reach its first billion; in the 150 years since that, we'll have added 5.2 billion. Anyone who can't recognize that as a crisis must be feeble-minded.

To my considerable surprise, several Green Conference attendants still felt that war was a viable way of dealing with one's enemies, although nuclear war is the ultimate polluter: it means annihilation. Preparation for war is almost as bad; not only are we bankrupting ourselves by wasting trillions of dollars on weapons (money that could be better spent improving the environment), but the manufacture of weapons has produced frightful results. Fernald, Ohio, where there is a plant manufacturing uranium rods for nuclear warheads, is the leukemia capital of the world. In Hanford, Washington, where huge nuclear bomb-making installations are located, the incidence of cancer is epidemic, totally disproportionate to the population. The Windscale/ Sellafield plant in Britain dumps its wastes into the Irish Sea, which is now the most radioactive body of water in the world. The internal combustion engine in all its ramifications, in combination with the petroleum industry, is probably the world's worst polluter. None of these got a mention at the conference.

They were too busy with spiritual values, ecofeminism, and a kind of fuzzy-minded nature worship.

A political party genuinely concerned with the environment would get not only my vote but my whole-hearted support; I'd work like a dog in its cause. Perhaps the Greens in Europe are of this type. But a party that can waste a beautiful summer day blathering pretentious twaddle about "spiritual values," without ever getting down to cases on our environmental crisis, is never going to accomplish anything.

Notes

1. Frank Zindler, quoted in "Religiosity as a Mental Disorder," American Atheist, April 1988, p. 27f.

2. Ibid.

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