Where I come from, God is a woman - goddess religion

Adam Phillips interviewed Wendy Doniger in WER #71 ("Public Myths, Private Dreams"), and has a continuing interest in Goddess spirituality. Phillips traveled around the US in 1988, conducting interviews for "Goddess in the USA," a National Public Radio documentary (reviewed on p. 61 of this issue). He interviewed Paula Gunn Allen in October, 1988; the following article is excerpted from the transcript of that conversation.

Paula Gunn Allen, the daughter of a Lebanese father and a Laguna/Sioux mother, grew up on a New Mexico land grant next to the Laguna reservation. A preeminent literary critic, editor and poet, she teaches English at UCLA.

Keep in mind that this is the edited transcript of an interview, not a prose composition; for a taste of Allen's writing, see the excerpts from Grandmothers of the Light, pp. 46-47. --Howard Rheingold

For the Laguna Pueblos, everything has male and female manifestations. Rocks and hard things, salt, crystals, cohesiveness, and thought are female. The soft gardener's rain that goes slowly into the earth and waters everything: that's female rain. Male is the rain that goes Wham! and runs down the arroyos. It's wonderful and terribly exciting, but then it's gone. Female lightning is sheet lightning that fills everything. Male lightning is the jagged arrow, the bolt. The female seems to be more inclusive, and it's always big. The female never dies; the male is born and dies. And both things are true. Things are always coming into being and passing away. That's male. But things are always staying right where they are in a sense, and that's female. Men are warriors because it's important to them to go out and keep testing their transitoriness. I don't think it's that men get to do all the exciting things and women have to do all the dull things. That's not how my grandma thought. In America, the ones who get on radio and TV and get to be president are the men, and they've convinced us that's really important. But at Laguna it was important, maybe more important, to grind the corn and feed everybody.

Where I come from, the earth is female; you look at the landscape and it's stone mesas, it's vast and huge and terrifying powerful. Unlike England, which is gentle and tiny and sweet and lovely. Now Mother Earth is going to mean a very different thing in England from what it's going to mean in New Mexico. You're looking at these enormous mountains and these vast plains, where in the old days before smog you could see 150 miles.

Where I come from, God is a woman. To understand native people you have to understand female force, female intelligence in native systems. It is tribal and female-focused or female-centered. It's not about all these tough women who beat up on men. It's about balance and mutual respect and reciprocal obligation. Our relationship to the Animal People and to the Spirit People is reciprocal. Where I come from, God who is the woman is not Mother Earth, but Grandmother Spider. We don't call her Mother Earth. We call her I-yati-kooh or Corn Woman. Before her, in the beginning, there was Thought Woman; she had two medicine bundles, and in each of these bundles was a woman, a spirit, a god. And each of these God women had sacred bundles. And the Spider sang them into life. She's not their mother. She's their sister! It's about sisters. Into their bundles, they sing the heavens, the firmament, the languages, the mountains, the rivers, and all that into being.

I think the white man's rage against the Indians is against this female force. I've never believed it was for land, because there's too much land still not being used. And I don't think it was about money because the Indians didn't want the gold. I think it was all the powerful women we had; their connection with the gods and the spirits just scared the bejeezis out of the whites.

But for us it's not just reducible to gender. Gender has to have a multiplicity of parts because the universe is multiple. There are never just two stars or two planets. There are probably millions of genders. I can only think of a few because I'm not as big as Grandmothers is, I'm just not as smart as she is. The people who have congress with spirits don't think that pregnancy comes about as a consequence of fucking, for example. They figure there has to be something else going on because a woman doesn't get pregnant every time she has sex: a very rational position in a way.

The magic I know is about medicine and ritual. Nothing goes on that's economic, political, or material because there's really no such thing. That's a white fantasy. It's about the power to sing, the power to make. Spider Woman is the only one who can make. We make what she lets us make. If we sing and if we walk in a balanced way, we can make sacred, which is to remember that it's all about the Spirit. I'm not making much sense in English, am I?

In the only depiction I've ever seen, she looks like a hawk with a woman's face. She created everything: architecture, social systems, religion, human relationships, language. You name it, she set it out. And there's a sense of affection and love.