wildfire/14_chap8.html

<h1>CHAPTER 8</h1>
<h2>The Past Age Movement</h2>
<p>New age ideas, though saturated with a masculinism that would be expected to deter even the least politically conscious feminists, are nevertheless seducing thousands of women of all degrees of feminist consciousness.</p>
<p>I believe this is because these ideas bear faint echoes from the 200,000 years of women's world that preceded patriarchy. The "new age" movement is the repository of pseudofemale Eastern thought in this country. Patriarchy has always lured women back into our prisons by dangling our own disguised precepts before us, teasing us with their familiarity. Even dimly hearing ideas that resemble the shape of women's mind causes some of us to succumb to the old subterfuge. We think we have found something wholly good and different and as if hypnotized fall back into our age-old position of listening to external male voices, either channeling them (and almost all women I know who channel entities, channel male entities<a href="#fn1">[1]</a>) or following male leaders. We have seen all this before. It is the bynow familiar pattern. Christianity when it began "empowered" women in just this way. But once it had captured our hearts and minds, it made no more pretense.</p>
<p>There is very little or no feminist consciousness among leaders of the "new age" movement. All is based upon the premise that women experience the world as men do, that there is no important or appreciable difference that merits attention. So women are invisible again, colluding again by pretending that we are really included with the men, denying our very different experience in the world, denying what male/female relationships mean at this time of the world, denying patriarchal enslavement.</p>
<p>The "new age" movement is the same old exploitation of women, the same old lipservice paid to the importance of our contribution in order to bring our wonderful energy, our invaluable resources of mind and spirit, under the command of men again. It is patriarchy indulging its habit of siphoning off strong women and usurping their power by taking upon itself a veneer of female values - the same old Bygone Age Movement.</p>
<p>Though more and more women are becoming aware of these tactics, our consciousness as a group is not rising in an unbroken column. We have occasional relapses, proof that our conditioned derogation of women's value is difficult for even enlightened women to overcome. A case in point was the response to the Past Age's so-called "harmonic convergence" - or "harmonica virgin," as my irreverent daughter Kari and others dubbed it.</p>
<p>A couple of years ago, the men who lead the past age movement, as usual pirating women's ideas and power and battening on our energy, oracularly proclaimed that the time was near when celestial bodies would be so configured that for several hours on a certain day female energy would pour forth upon the earth. Their message was so affecting that on that day all over the country people betook themselves to the most naturally powerful spot they knew of to celebrate this great event with rituals and prayers and meditation. Ironically, thousands of people who would no more listen to women than to toads celebrated women's energy when directed to do so by men.</p>
<p>The truth is that women's energy has been pouring forth upon this planet in the most extraordinary fullness, not for two hours, but nonstop for at least 200 years, rolling forth from all its sources in the universe - including us - like a mighty river of goodness and life. Some of us have been saying so for a long time. But because we are <i>women</i>, few men or women have seriously considered our message. It takes <i>men's</i> saying it, it takes male appropriation and management, to persuade even some feminists. We are too often still deaf to women's voices, blind to our own effect, unbelieving of our own achievements until men steal them, diminish them, and reintroduce them as their own - a major male strategy for keeping us from a knowledge of our power and stealing it from us at the same time.</p>
<p>When men so generously bestowed upon us a few hours of women's energy, when they purred, "Oh, celebrate the glorious feminine!" many women were deeply moved. They felt so important and powerful and proud for that short time that they handed over their power without a murmur. I heard too few women question this male perversion of the truth.</p>
<p>I want women to consider that nothing of value that is being said by the past age movement could even be <i>thought</i> if it weren't that women's mind has been waking for a couple of centuries, regaining its power, breaking its chains, and rising to transcendence on this planet - a phenomenon that is occurring <i>despite</i> men.</p>
<p>Now everywhere we hear women's values, infiltrating, saturating every movement, nearly all of which are headed by men. Women's mode of being, and our Movement - the rising of half the human race out of bondage - is what is igniting the freedom fires ablaze now around the globe. Human consciousness is expanding and finally exploding from the heat of women's liberation. All present-day insurrections take their cue and their fire from women's energy and mind.</p>
<p>I want women to own all this and to stop bowing at men's feet - men in this dimension or any other, to stop looking to men on any plane for leadership. I want women to recognize our own magnificent female powers of mind and spirit and to trust them without verification from the men, to start channeling our own living selves. <i>Nobody</i> outside us is wiser than we, regardless of their location in space and time. I want women, by listening to ourselves, to end this co-optation and perversion of women's material, the age-old phenomenon of men's vampiring our power, naming it their own, and using it to destroy life and joy.</p>
<p>Women's gratitude for the few hours of female energy men "granted" them, when they could <i>wallow</i> if they would in the illimitable quantities of it, reminded me then of some women's equally blind and humble gratitude for the UN Decade of Women that ended in 1985. We were overwhelmed that men so generously gave us permission to use ten of their 5,000-or-so years to take a little peek at ourselves - only on condition that we do it their way, of course, which effectively foiled any possibility of a global slave revolt.</p>
<p>Who are men that we think they can donate years to us? Do we really believe that men own time? What would happen if we believed the truth - that we could have all the decades we wanted, that we already do legitimately own them and could name them ours at any moment we took ourselves seriously enough to do it? The bestowal of the Decade upon us proves that <i>men</i> believe we could do this.</p>
<p>Remembering that men never do anything that will actually benefit women but only appear to, so that everything they ostensibly do for us they are really doing for themselves, we recognize the Decade as a clever stratagem to divert our rebellion into controllable channels before we realized our power and took <i>everything</i>. Men know our power far better than we do. They fear us as the masters always fear the slaves, fear our waking up in the middle of the parade and seeing that they have no clothes on, no real power. And so they must constantly develop ruses to prevent us from recognizing that their control is maintained by legerdemain. They must keep us from discovering that they are powerful and we are powerless only <i>because they have succeeded in making us believe it</i>.</p>
<p>Every day, however, more of us wake up to our magnificence and to the knowledge that our personal power is intensifying the fire of hope and change in which the world is being reborn. Soon men won't be able to fool any of us with such flimflam as harmonic convergences or women's decades.</p>

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<p><a id="fn1">[1]</a> Though these voices disingenuously proclaim that they are genderless, they use male names. Even clearer evidence that they are perceived as male is that their followers refer to them as "he" and "him," never as "it." When these followers were once feminists, they - also disingenously it seems to me - vow that <i>they</i> do not think of their entity as male at all, just as christian feminists often assure me that they do not think of god or Jesus as male. There is a powerful lot of self-deception going on here.</p>