With all of the arguing about women's rights and feminism in heathenry, or just in general, I feel like we are missing something. #Havamalwitches has started a firestorm within heathenry. Many women and femmes have experiences assault, discrimination, abuse, and sexism within the religion and from the tribes and kindreds there in.
Many women are sharing stories. Many are getting rageful. And many men, even allies, are getting defensive and hostile toward the women trying to share, trying to break through the denial and status quo.
When it comes to rage, it is normal to be angry after a lifetime of abuses, neglect, and being treated like you do not matter or are not valuable. These things build up over time into anger and rage. They sometimes break out into violence, verbal and physical. What we are seeing is once again women having enough and snapping. It's happened periodically in history with the suffrage movement, the temperance movement, etc. It's building again.
The difference is this time no one is listening. Nothing is happening on a political or social level to give voice and validation to this rage. When you can find justice through the system as it is, you tend to be calmer, do the legislation you need to, and settle into the new norm. But when your search for justice, for human rights, is frustrated by a system that refuses to change, by people that refuse to listen and instead shout you down, the rage only builds with no outlet. Except for one, and that is war. We have had a civil war in this country when both sides refused to listen to each other and violence was the only way to settle it once and for all. It didn't really solve anything since slavery was just replaced with KKK terrorism and Jim Crow laws, but at least something shifted a little.
Believe me, I don't want war. I am a woman and I have a daughter, and we all know how women and children fair in war.
But there's another aspect of this that is getting lost in the political discussion. We have a faith. #Havamalwitches is about women in HEATHENRY. In this faith there are Goddesses, the feminine face of the divine.
Von List wrote about many spiritual themes and lessons. He is controversial because his writings were appropriated by the Nazis to justify their own political ends. He died in 1919 so he wasn't technically a Nazi although he was a German nationalist. That's a discussion for another time.
He wrote of a binary spiritual theme, the duality of spirit and matter and that matter was condensed spirit. If that is truly the case then women really are Goddess. Thou Art Goddess, is not a phrase just for Wiccans and Neo Pagans. It should be for heathens as well.
To worship the Goddess is to recognize the feminine face of divinity. It is to revere the spark of divinity within every woman. The Christian church literally tried to kill this spark with its witch hunts and doctrine stating women had no souls and were like animals. This toxin has infected western society for long enough.
It's time for men and other women to understand, when you attack women, when you treat them like property, abuse them for fun; you are in fact doing the same to the Goddess. What was it Jesus said? "Whatever you do to the least of yours, you do to me"
You cannot worship and love the Goddess while spitting on women, Her material representatives.
Even Jesus understood that.
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