The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...
Webster's First New intergalactic WICKEDARY of the English Language
Conjured by Mary Daly in cahoots with Jane Caputi
With an Experimental Webbing by Alexiares
PRELIMINARY WEB FIVE
Guides to the Wickedary
The Muses/Demons attending all Wild women are Writers'/Readers' Guides to the Wickedary. Moreover, the Wickedary itself is a Guide Book for the Otherworld Journey, and it is filled with Guide Words that lead the reader ahead/around. As the Old Wives say: "One word/world leads to another." Thus the words themselves, together with Websters who Hear them into speech/song, work to Spin threads and webs, and ultimately to Weave tapestries that represent the terrain of Realms Re-membered in this book.
Wild women recognize our Guide Words as they cry out within our psyches, trying to break patriarchally embedded Sound barriers – those walls of elementary "definitions" that limit/dull their senses and dull our senses, keeping us all prisoners. The Hearing of Hags releases jailed words, who, like jailbirds freed at last from the masters' cages, sing and soar.
As the freed words speak/sing, we learn to follow the skeins of their flight. Guided by these sisters, these ungagged Holy Crones, we tour the Realms of words, learning New meanings and connections. We see/hear that words fly together, sounding each other to freedom. They free each other as well as our Selves, breaking the patriarchal prisonkeepers' patterns and soaring in Musing Metapatterns. Wise Women, who know that our Race is akin to the Race of Wild Words, find here clues to our own liberation. Words and women reclaim our own Nations, our tribes and formations. In this process, words and women aid each other. Our guiding is reciprocal, requited. United, we work to expel the bore-ocractic chairmen of the bored. We strive to make the world Weirder.
Elemental Mediums as Guides
The word guide, according to Webster's, is akin in its origins to the Old English witan, meaning "to look after, depart," and to witan, meaning "to know." Websters exercise our wits to know the words that will guide us in our departure from the State of Possession. In this process we experience Guidance from many Sources.
These Sources/Springs of Guidance are channels between the world of patriarchal possession/deception and the Realms of Metabeing, that is, the Background. As we have seen in Preliminary Web One, all Wicked women and words are Mediums, as are all Other participants in Elemental Be-ing. In this Web we are considering these Mediums as Guides to the Wickedary, helping us to Weave its tapestries and Weave our way into the Realms which they reflect.
Websters ponder the question: How do these Guides guide us? What are their Mediumistic ways of helping us? There are clues in the fact that one synonym for the verb guide is lead. Viragos considering this word readily dismiss the idea of "leading" that implies ordering someone about, as in the case of a military officer who leads. We find it more enlightening to consider such a phrase as "leading question," and then Hear this in a New way. Such Questions do not push, shove, or command, like drill sergeants. Rather, the Leading Questions that act as Guides invite, attract, beckon, prompt, inspire, teach, warn. Leading Questions are First Questions, inspiring us on the Quest of Be-ing.
One definition of the verb lead is "to guide by indicating the way: mark out of show the way to (led through the fog by the distant lights of the city)" (Webster's). Elemental Mediums lead/guide in this way, attracting attention in the right direction. Websters can understand this principle better by considering further the workings of the Final Cause, which causes by attraction, and which is the Cause of Causes, the Guide of Guides.
The Guide of Guides
The ultimate Guide of each Weaver/Journeyer is her Final Cause, her indwelling, unfolding Purpose. A woman is really "leading her own life" only when she is in harmony with her Final Cause. That is, she is on her true course, and it is by acting in accord with this Sense of Direction that she is enabled to Sense and understand the messages of the Mediums/Guides she encounters along the way.
Of course, there are obstacles and traps set by the rulers of snooldom, intended to distract and deafen each woman to the Call of her Final Cause, which is the Call of the Wild. Among the obstacles to clear Hearing is the continual white noise of the patriarchal Passive Voice – the noise/noose that keeps women passive. The Passive Voice – that ubiquitous patriarchal voice that subliminally spooks women, luring its victims into passivity, rendering them unable to recognize and Name the agents of oppression – calls from all sides. It is embedded in the voices of the secret agents, manipulators, possessors who attempt not only to disguise who are the agents of androcracy's atrocities but also to pacify/passivize their victims/patients. Yet the Call of the Wild within – the call of the Active/Activizing Voice of the Final Cause – can be Heard by women who choose to be attentive to our own Sense of Direction, refusing to be distracted.
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Mutual Attraction: Re-membering Connections
We have seen in Preliminary Web Three that the Good is that which attracts Wicked women to transcend the patriarchally defined/confined categories of "good" and "evil." Those who strive for participation in Be-ing experienced as Good and as the Source of true Originality are attracted to each other and to Other Elemental creatures. This attraction is not sentimental, nor does it imply monotonous, monodimensional sameness. Rather, since we are attracted precisely to the Source of each Other's Originality, this brings out the Diversity that is required for harmony and that is Gyn/Ecological. This Wicked Law of Attraction repels the forces of fragmentation.
Unblocking the flow of participation in the Good makes possible Wicked contemplation. Contemplation is derived from the Latin com-, meaning "with, together, jointly" plus templum, meaning "space for observation marked out by the augur." When Websters are united in purpose, we Act as augurs, observing and contemplating from Spaces marked out by ourSelves. Moreover, templum, is said probably to be akin to tempus, meaning "period of time" (Webster's). Websters/Augurs observe and contemplate in our own Time. In his Etymological Dictionary Skeat explains that the templum was "an open [emphasis mine] space for observation (by the augurs)." The Space/Time of contemplating Augurs is indeed open – to the Elements, to the possibility of Elemental Divination.
Insofar as our minds and imaginations are blunted by bore-ocracy, we may believe that such contemplation/communication is either impossible or "merely" metaphorical. Since phallocracy systematically works to seal off our consciousness of the Elemental world, our perfectly Natural abilities to communicate with Other Elemental beings seem unreliable, even unbelievable. Moreover, the Wonder-full communicative capacities of animals are hidden from us.
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As the foreground conditions become worse, as the snoolish destruction and poisoning of Earth and its inhabitants and surroundings escalates to a state that can appear irreversible, our Guides draw nearer and Call women with urgency. Particularly loud and pleading are the Voices of animals, whose victimization and suffering at the hands of the rakes and rippers of patriarchy are similar in many ways to the rape, battering, torture, and massacre of women. This brings us to the Strange subject of Familiars.
Familiars as Guides
According to Webster's, one definition of familiar is "a supernatural spirit often embodied in an animal and at the service of a person (the loathsome toad, the witches' familiar – Harvey Graham)" (Webster's). Be-Witching women can decode this to mean "a Super Natural Spirited Background animal, the Graceful friend of a Witch." The word familiar is derived from the Middle English familier, meaning "member of one's household, intimate associate." Weird women know that our animal familiars are intimate associates, although not all are members of our households in the narrow sense of this word. However, if we take the word house to Name our habitat, the Earth, which we share with the animals and all Elemental creatures, we can recognize as our familiars many animals who do not live under the same roof. Moreover, when we consider that the word house is akin in its origins to the Gothic gudhüs, meaning temple (Webster's), this brings our thinking full spiral to the idea that as Augurs we share our open Spaces and Times of contemplation with animals who are inhabitants of the Wild, the Background.
Websters are aware of the well-known distinction between Domestic Familiars and Divining Familiars. According to Margaret Murray, Domestic Familiars are often obtained by gift from a "fellow-witch" and by inheritance. Divining Familiars often appear "accidentally" after the performance of certain magical ceremonies. Witches have been said to foretell the future with the aid of such animals. Murray writes:
The method was probably such as obtained in other places where auguries by animals and birds were practised, i.e., by the direction and pace of the animal, by its actions, by its voice if it emitted any sound, and so on.
Wicked women perform many "ceremonies," including the Weaving of Wickedaries and Other Wonders. Lustily Weaving, we are graced by visitations of Elemental Spirits and Elementally Spirited Animals – Boon Companions who arrive to ensure that we are following the right threads and to guide us further.
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The Animals' Parade
Websters preparing to Weave into the Core/Heart of the Wickedary decide to prepare ourSelves for this adventure by conjuring a celebration of Life. The Pixies suggest a picnic and so, Pixie-led, we Prance down Pixie-paths that lead us to the edge of the sea. As we Prance, we notice that we are joined by many Fore-Crones. Sojourner Truth and Joan of Arc are there. So also are Matilda Joslyn Gage, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hatshepsut, Hildegarde of Bingen, Sappho, Jiu Jin, Amelia Bloomer, Tituba, the Brontë sisters, Rachel Carson. and many, many Others.
We are joined also by many Elemental creatures. The Gnomes, Undines, Salamanders, and Sylphs are with us, as we pass through meadows and across streams, feeling the warm sun and breathing the fragrant air. As we Prance through the woods we meet Dryads and at brooks and waterfalls we encounter Naiads and Nixes. All of these friendly folk decide to come along. Oreads skip down from the nearby mountains, and as the whole gathering approaches the sea we are greeted by Oceanids and Mermaids swimming near the shore.
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AUTHOR'S IN-TEXT FOOTNOTES
[*] According to the Oxford English Dictionary, one definition of the noun guide is "one who leads or shows the way, esp. to a traveller in a strange country." According to the Wickedary, a Guide is "an Otherworldly Helper who shows a Traveler the way into the Country of the Strange, her Homeland" (World-Web Two).
[*] One example of such a question: "What does it mean, on a day to day level, to live with integrity on the boundary of patriarchal institutions?" The process of asking Leading Questions is described by science fiction writer Alice Sheldon (alias James Tiptree, Jr.) in her story "The Psychologist Who Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats." The deviant psychologist ponders: "The privilege of knowing how, painfully, to frame answerable questions, answers which will lead him to more insights and better questions as far as his mind can manage and his own life lasts. It is what he wants more than anything in the world to do, always has." See James Tiptree, Jr., Star Songs of an Old Primate (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), p. 236.
[*] For more on the Sense of Direction see Appendicular Web Three.
[*] The word intended applies here. The question of whether the intent is "conscious" or "unconscious" is irrelevant, since the intent is inherent in the institutions and behaviors dictated by the sadosociety.
[*] Among blatant examples of these are "tour guides," which predigest knowledge, making Original experience of women's history almost impossible. Similarly deceptive are "museum guides." Any well-traveled Crone knows that these erase the clues that would make possible the awakening of Deep Memory. An important archaeological museum in Heraklion, Crete, for instance, is replete with such studied deletions and misrepresentations (although the clues are there for those who can look with Real Eyes). Among elementary guides are also TV "guides," which lure readers into fixation on TV screens, so that they become inured to the horror of Boredom and lose the capacity for dreams and visions. Other pseudoguides include scientific "experts," politicians, and priests of all kinds, including all the medical and psycho-logical bad counselors who attempt to prevent women from Hearing our Wild Guides.
AUTHOR'S FOOTNOTES
[1]. For a philosophical discussion of Final Causality, see Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation, pp. 179-98. The idea of a woman "leading her own life" is horrifying to snools. A classic expression of this horror is the droning of pope Pius XII in his "Address to Women of Catholic Action," Oct. 21, 1945, in which he bemoans the fact that the daughter of a working mother "will want to emancipate herself as early as possible and, according to a truly sad expression, 'live her own life.'" Cited in Daly, The Church and the Second Sex: With the Feminist Postchristian Introduction and New Archaic Afterwards by the Author, p. 116.
[2]. See Passive Voice, Word-Web Three. For more on this concept, see Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, pp. 324-29.
[3]. Janice G. Raymond discusses the value of discernment in relation to female friendship in her book. A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), pp. 171-73.
[4]. For additional material about sources already cited on torture and exploitation of animals in the name of science, see Hans Ruesch, Slaughter of the Innocent (New York: Bantam Books, Inc. 1978).
[5]. Dunsany, Edward (Lord), The Curse of the Wise Woman (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1933), p. 242.
[6]. Ibid.
[7]. See Daly, Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy, pp. 260-88.
[8]. Ibid., pp. 200-207.
[9]. See Margaret A. Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921), p. 222.
[10]. Ibid., p. 206.
[11]. Oshun is Goddess of love and beauty in West Africa and in the African-Brazilian Macumba religion. Her earthly domains are inland waters, rivers, and streams. See Judy Grahn, The Queen of Wands (Trumansburg, N.Y.: The Crossing Press, 1982), p. 95.
[12]. Chih Nu is one of the most beloved Goddesses of China. See Patricia Monaghan, The Book of Goddesses and Heroines (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1981), p. 64.
[13]. Judy Grahn writes of the beliefs of Pueblo Indians concerning Spider Grandmother/Thought Woman: "Because She thinks, we are. Her thoughts are like a psychic net dropped over the universe, as if a golden apple were spun into the tiniest possible molecules of light, electrons of inspiration, and dropped over us as a universal mind, one we enter in psychic and dream states, and through which knowledge passes to us." See Grahn, The Queen of Wands, pp. 98-99. See also Merlin Stone, Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood (1979; Beacon: Boston Press, 1984), pp. 284-312.
[14]. See Monaghan, The Book of Goddesses and Heroines, p. 110.
[15]. See Barbara G. Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983), pp. 325-26.
[16]. See Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia, pp. 628-629.
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