Introduction to The New Story
by Carolyn Brigit Flynn
(excerpt)
A story was created two thousand years ago, and, we are told, it began in the Garden of Eden. It said: humans are given preponderance over the earth and all its animals. It said: man is given preponderance over woman. It said: there is a evil energy in the universe and the only answer is the one Father God. This is the story that has fueled our current epoch.
Yet there are other stories. Non-western, unrelated to the one-patriarch-God, they are found all over the planet. In them animals sing the world into being or sacred deities drop from the sky and create continents. There are older stories. In them, humans are not given preponderance over other animals. Men are not given preponderance over women.
I have always been moved by the groundbreaking work of the late, brilliant archeologist Marija Gimbutas. When archeologists uncovered the remnants of human cultures in Old Europe from five to twenty thousand years ago, she tells us, they were struck by the fact that the gravesites showed no evidence of hierarchal societies, no separate burial places for powerful figures. The art engravings had no indication of armaments such as the blade, spear and dagger. And the human remains showed that the bodies did not die of violent means. They did not die of war. Now, for a long time that made the archeologists shake their heads. Isn’t war inevitable? Isn’t violence, hierarchy and the rearing of power over others part of the human gene? Isn’t the devil bound to make some people restless and mean, and won’t that mean that some of these people make war or dominate and repress others? It took Marija Gimbutas to see the ancient human remains and artifacts with clear eyes. No, war is not inevitable. No, widespread violence and domination is not an inevitable part of being human. Here are the facts right before us: humans lived without war or rigid hierarchies for tens of thousands of years.
Gimbutas was also one of the first to tell us something new, or to see something ancient on its own terms for the first time. In those same studies, archeologists had found another puzzling thing: thousands upon thousands of female images carved in stone, ivory, bone and clay. Many, many more than the male images they found. Thus the first archeologists made a story: the female images were fertility fetishes. The few male images were the gods; the abundant female images were essentially their harems. But Marija Gimbutas liked to say that she looked at the carvings and human artifacts, and stopped reading what others had written about them. For twenty years or more, she looked. At hundreds of thousands of ancient archeological images. And what she told us after her looking was this: those images were of the Great Mother. The Great One who birthed the universe, who birthed the earth. Who birthed the animals, who birthed the trees. Who birthed the people. The earliest sacred images, from the Paleolithic era twenty-five thousand years ago are of a great birthing womb, and that image continues into the Neolithic era five thousand years ago. The great birthing womb: that was what they knew of creation. And that became their creation myth. A great womb that gave rise to them all.
To us all. Yet in our time we have lost the Great Mother. She is found no where in our creation myth of the garden…. But was She there, nonetheless? Perhaps in the Snake? Or perhaps in the Tree, or the Apple? Perhaps in the Woman, or in the Man? Perhaps She was everywhere; perhaps we need to do what Marija Gimbutas did: look at the images, but let the old texts about them go. Perhaps we simply haven’t been looking with clear eyes.
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I sat in my living room in September of 2001 and looked around at some of the more gifted and wise women I had ever known. What was such a circle of women writers to do at such a time? It was circles not unlike our own that had helped to birth other stories, other movements, other myths. We were here now, to witness. To give voice to the heartache and tragedy of the moment. And, equally important, we were here to begin to wonder and imagine; to listen carefully to the stories in quivering leaves and the spirits in grasses; to unbind ourselves from the creation story that was unbinding itself in any case, and to begin to learn or find or teach ourselves a new way.
Creation myths, we noticed, evolve by combining and re-combining elements of the old. We knew that in stories more ancient than Eden there could be found the tree of life, Axis Mundi, the snake, the seeds in the apple, a lush garden-like earth. Animals are always involved; even in the Bethlehem story certain camel and sheep are carefully noted to have been present as witness. Something new is not necessarily heaved out of whole cloth when a new story is born; more likely the old and the ancient are re-birthed in a new angle, re-emphasized, re-told. Overlooked parts take on key roles. What had been banished into shadow is brought into the light.
As we wrote during that unforgettable fall of 2001, we began to assuage ourselves that we would create a collection to hold and remember and honor the work as it unfolded. We knew we would need to reread certain pieces; we knew we would want to remember a time in which all of our lives and points of view were rapidly altering.
The writings in this collection are seeds planted in the dark. Yet isn’t that where all seeds are planted? As I re-read them one year later I am moved by their tenderness, their honesty, their sense of possibility. As Karen Sallovitz opens in “Step Out of the Dark”:
Step out of the dark
step into the stream
let the myth of separateness
fall away
Find the door…
This is our work. Finding the door. Stepping out of the dark. That is, hopefully, your work. To the reader of this volume, we call with great gentleness and caring: What do these stories seed in you? Write it down. Tell it or draw it or move it or pray it. Sing or sound or play the new notes of the new era. While others tear the world down, begin to express the possible new story toward which we are all heading. It could be beautiful. It is ours to listen for, to pray into being, to create.
Carolyn Flynn
Ben Lomond, California
August 2002