Reclaiming the Spooky:
Matilda Joslyn Gage and Mary Daly as
Radical Pioneers of the Esoteric
Marguerite Rigoglioso
Matilda Joslyn Gage and Mary Daly: two of the most radical feminists the world has known to date. Most readers will at least have heard of Daly and her pioneering critique of patriarchy. Less familiar is Gage, who wrote some 100 years earlier and whose innovative analyses show her to have been an even more insightful and comprehensive thinker than her famous compatriots, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. While both Daly and Gage are recognized for their feminist contributions in the areas of social and religious politics, what tends to be overlooked in their writings is their keen interest in and attention to the esoteric.1
Who Was Gage?
Matilda Joslyn Gage was born March 24, 1826, in Cicero, NY (near Syracuse) to Hezekiah and Helen Joslyn. Her father was a noted abolitionist who educated his daughter to be a “freethinker”– someone whose ideas and beliefs were outside the dogmas of established religions. Her Scottish immigrant mother also instilled in her a love of justice, truth, and beauty (Patrick 1996, 20). Young Matilda was encouraged to participate in adult conversations with the freethinkers who were regular guests in her family’s household–explorations of progressive and esoteric ideas in religion, including mesmerism, phrenology, spiritualism, Swedenborgianism, and the creation of utopian spiritual communities were an ongoing part of her childhood. At age 15, Gage was already coming into public conflict with local Baptist church fathers over matters of doctrine.
When she was 18, Matilda married Henry H. Gage, a dry goods merchant. She eventually moved to Fayetteville, NY, where she had five children, four of whom lived to maturity and one of whom married Frank Baum, future author of The Wizard of Oz. The life of a housewife was not to be Gage’s entire destiny, however. She turned her own home into a stop on the underground railroad and, when she was 26, became galvanized by the women’s rights question. She presented her first speech on the topic at the national convention in Syracuse, in 1852, outlining themes she was to develop throughout the rest of her life: that, unbeknownst to most people, women were responsible for a number of significant achievements in art, science, religion, and government; that women were systematically denied an opportunity for self-development and financial independence; that the clergy and the state were responsible for this injustice; and that when people became aware of these realities, they would rise up to make change.
Over the next 40 years, Gage collaborated so closely with suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton that she is considered one of the “triumvirate” of the 19th-century U.S. women’s movement (Martin 1972, 83). She wrote articles, gave speeches at numerous events (including presidential conventions), and organized lectures, meetings, and petitions demanding equal rights for women and calling for an end to slavery. After the Civil War, she formed the National Woman’s Suffrage Association (NWSA) with Anthony and Stanton, advocating a strategy of civil disobedience in which women attempted to cast ballots even though they were told they could not.
In her writings and work, Gage held a more radical position than Anthony. To Gage as well as to Stanton, the vote was but one stepping-stone toward the overthrow of the two primary institutions of oppression: church and state. As creator and editor from 1878–81 of a newspaper called the National Citizen and Ballot Box, Gage wrote on feminist issues that were remarkably ahead of her time: the phenomenon of women living collectively and starting cooperative businesses, unfair and hypocritical laws governing the incarceration of women and prostitutes, leniency toward rapists in the courts, the oppression of Native Americans, women’s right to child custody, free love and legal recognition of cohabitation, and the problem of child molestation.
Gage was also a member of the revising committee that analyzed the Bible from a feminist perspective, work that resulted in the publication of The Woman’s Bible, edited by Stanton. Gage’s magnum opus, however, was Woman, Church and State, published in 1893, the culmination of twenty years of “rummaging around libraries” to bring startling facts to light (Stanton et al. 1969 [1881], 466). In it, Gage reveals herself to be the first American feminist to articulate the theory of prehistoric matriarchies, which she believed were egalitarian, woman-centered, and oriented around a female divinity–a position that would be validated in terms of Old European prehistory by 20th century archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. Inspiration for this theory came not only from Gage's library research, but also from her personal contact with matriarchal Native American communities, particularly those of the six-nation Iroquois Confederacy.
In Woman, Church and State, Gage is also the first scholar to provide in-depth documentation of the persecution of witches and to analyze this holocaust (her word) as an attempt by the patriarchal institution of the Christian church to destroy women’s culture through the disruption of their professions as healers, midwives, and practitioners of the esoteric arts. Gage formulates a bold, double-pronged analysis: that the foundation of women’s oppression is to be found in the church, and–even more radical–that the oppression of women served as the raison d’être for the church itself. Gage thus argues that no single concern is as paramount for the improvement of women’s lives as the dismantling of organized religion.
Yet, importantly, she approached the topic, not from the position of an atheist or agnostic, but as a deeply spiritual thinker. She recognized the value and universal validity of the mystical aspects of Christianity (Patrick 1996, 42); it was the current historical manifestation of the church she found oppressive. For Gage, the Church’s triple doctrine of obedience to authority, woman’s subordination to man, and woman as the cause of original sin was the problem. Her analysis reveals that she was not only a political feminist, but also what we would today call a spiritual feminist. And her embrace of what she called “the Divine Motherhood of God” (Wagner 1980, xxxi) was more than theoretical. In 1888, she opened a session of the Congress of the International Council of Women with a prayer to female divinity by Isabela Beecher Hooker. It was a bold move that shocked conservative Christian women in attendance.
Several significant facts emerge from this history, the most important being that as a feminist theorist based in Goddess spirituality, Matilda Joslyn Gage should be considered the founder of the modern women’s spirituality movement. More so than any previous historian or religious thinker, she stressed “the feminine in the Divinity” (Gage 1888, 400), whom she referred to as “goddess/es” throughout her writings. Her interest was not merely scholarly; in numerous writings she evinced a mystical understanding and appreciation of the Divine Feminine from numerous traditions that suggests she may have been a devotee of one or more goddesses. She also provides the most comprehensive deconstruction of Christianity from a feminist spiritual perspective of anyone prior to Mary Daly. In short, she is the first and only woman of her century to lay out most of the major themes that have become the areas of analysis of the contemporary women’s spirituality movement.
Who Is Daly?
Born in 1928 in Schenectady, NY, only 130 miles from Gage’s Fayetteville, Mary Daly grew up as the only child of a homemaker mother who loved and encouraged her, and a traveling-salesman father with a gift for language and writing. 
Daly reports that although she was raised Catholic and attended Catholic schools, early in her childhood she had mystical experiences in which she felt the presence of divinity in nature (Karagianis 1999, 58)
Daly had a passion for academics, earning a Ph.D. in religion from St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame, and various advanced degrees from the University of Freiburg, including a doctorate in sacred theology and a Ph.D. in philosophy. Daly thrived on medieval philosophy and theology, and on the works of thinkers such as Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. She also read mystics such as Hildegard of Bingen and St. Teresa of Avila. When she discovered the Malleus Maleficarum, the misogynist treatise on witches, published in 1486, which church fathers used as a guide and rationale for the torturing and burning of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of women over the next three centuries, Daly became radicalized.
Inspired by Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and the winds of change blowing in the Catholic Church in the wake of Vatican II, Daly, by now a faculty member at the conservative and Catholic Boston College, published her first book, The Church and the Second Sex, in 1968. In it, she covers a small slice of the ground that Gage had traversed a century before (though without knowledge of the work of this foresister), revealing a history of prejudice against women in the church as demonstrated in writings from Paul to Pope Pius XII. She points to the trap that symbolism associated with Eve and Mary poses for women, and argues that for more woman-friendly change to occur in the church, attitudes toward God and images of God must change.
Daly’s next book, Beyond God the Father (1973), was even more revolutionary, for in it she states that any hope for fundamental change in the church’s attitude to women is futile. Having left the church, Daly develops a theme similar to that first proposed by Gage–that the primary function of the emergence of Christianity in Western culture was to legitimize sexism. She shows how Christian symbolic structures, such as the image of “God the father,” served as the foundation for patriarchal structures of society, and how identification of women with evil through the image of Eve has both legitimized the negative treatment of women and conditioned women to become self-denying and psychologically paralyzed. In this book, we have Daly’s famous observation: “If God in ‘his’ heaven is a father ruling ‘his’ people, then it is in the ‘nature’ of things and according to divine plan and the order of the universe that society be male-dominated” (Daly 1973, 13)
In Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978), Daly pulls out (nearly) all the stops, deconstructing and reconstructing terms through (sometimes humorous) wordplay designed to uncover hidden etymologies, reveal sexism inherent in language, and model for women new ways of thinking and being in the world. At the same time, she trenchantly analyzes the most depraved depths of patriarchal culture. She looks at atrocities such as Indian widow-burning, Chinese footbinding, African genital mutilation, and American gynecology with unflinching theoretical discipline combined with the creative rage of what she proudly terms the “Positively Revolting Hag.”
In her analysis of the European witchburnings, we find for the first time mention of Gage, along with Daly’s expression of her own amazement at only now having found the work of “this very perceptive and learned woman’s study.” She laments, “it is infuriating to discover that this foresister, and others like her, had already gathered and analyzed materials which feminist scholars are just beginning to unearth again” (Daly 1990 [1978], 216). Daly adds to the voluminous historical detail that Gage provides in Woman, Church and State a cognitive framework fully exposing the mind-bending psychological techniques and reversals with which patriarchy obscures what she calls its own “demonic” operations. In this work, she also uses the word Goddess for the first time. Again, she adds to Gage’s tour-de-force Woman, Church and State, with its illumination of the historical veneration of goddesses and the powerful role of priestesses, by exposing the patriarchal, and particularly Christian, appropriation of the Goddess and the priestesshood in both mythology and history. Her feminist analyses of ancient mythology and what she terms the “murder” and “dismemberment” of the Goddess helped give a theoretical voice to the emerging women’s spirituality movement of the late 1970s.
In her 1998 volume Quintessence, Daly uses a combination of fantasy story and theoretical analysis to continue exposing the manifold and ever-new/old ways in which patriarchy preys on women. Her writing embodies the spookiness and sparkiness of the esoteric realms that Gage was familiar with through her own spiritual explorations, but which Gage herself wrote about in more linear fashion in Woman, Church and State, The Woman’s Bible, and elsewhere.
Gage was very much ahead not only of her own times but even of our times in her engagement with occult matters.2 Her work in this area remains revolutionary for its boldness and depth, and her ideas serve as a rich source of wisdom and an inspirational jumping-off point for further research. It is helpful first to look briefly at the spiritual milieu in which she was immersed to understand what influenced her in this regard.
As mentioned earlier, Gage’s parents were drawn to the work of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1722), a successful scientist who claimed to converse with angels on other planets and planes of existence. He attempted to reconcile science and ancient knowledge, especially from hermetic Egyptian sources, and believed that, like angels, humans once had a direct telepathic knowledge of God that was still accessible through a mystical understanding of the Bible. According to Swedenborg, the incarnation of Christ had rendered humans more god-like, and the “second coming” would be the resumption of direct communication between heaven and earth rather than the advent of any one savior figure.
The influence of Swedenborg can be seen in Gage’s fascination with ancient Egypt and its esoteric knowledge, which runs throughout numerous of her unpublished and published works, including Woman, Church and State. Gage’s published article on the philosophical meanings of colors as they relate to science and the spiritual world also recalls Swedenborgian themes (Patrick 1996, 56).
Gage (and her father) became intrigued by the religious movement known as spiritualism as well. This movement, which emerged in the late 1840s among Hicksite Quakers, sought a “return to the devotion to the inner light within the individual Christian that had characterized John Fox and other early Quakers” (Porterfield 1999, 26). A woman-dominated movement whose locus was Rochester, NY, not far from Gage’s home, it featured women who served as “mediums” for disincarnated spirits, particularly the dead, during special seances. Although Gage did not particularly subscribe to spiritualist beliefs (Patrick 1996, 63), she used ideas from the movement as a springboard to continue her own investigations of spiritual phenomena.
Gage eventually became attracted to the Theosophical Movement, founded in the late 1870s by the Russian immigrant Helena Blavatsky. Theosophy combined a belief in spiritual communication with Eastern and ancient philosophies. Blavatsky popularized some of the mystical aspects of Hinduism and Buddhism, such as reincarnation and karma, and related them to Gnosticism in the West.
Gage was not alone in her fascination with alternative religious movements. While many freethinkers were agnostic or atheist, numerous social reformers of both genders, as well as the general public, were interested in spiritualism and the occult (Patrick 1996, 6). Movements such as Theosophy were concerned with retrieving knowledge regarding the mystical nature of reality, knowledge that was believed to have been lost, but that could be rediscovered through psychic and intuitive powers or through the teachings of “Masters” to initiates. Theosophy, in particular, provided the links between scientific understanding, ancient wisdom, and the mystical, universal aspects of Christianity that Gage sought.
Gage gratefully called her association with Theosophy the “crown blessing” of her life (Patrick 1996, 67) and was admitted to the Rochester Theosophical Society, headed by Josephine W. Cables, on March 26, 1885. There are apparently no records to indicate what being a Theosophist involved for Gage personally, aside from reading and writing on esoteric topics. Did she herself receive some sort of initiation? The depth of understanding in her writings suggests so, but perhaps we will never know for sure. Her obituary in the Fayetteville Reporter indicates that she may have participated “with” Theosophy while not being “of” it, for it reads: “She never lost faith in the old fundamental truths of religion, and while not adopting in full theories of any of the new schools of thought, she claimed to be an investigator in those fields, especially of psychology and Theosophy” (Anonymous 1898).
Whatever her level of engagement, in her books, newsletters, and correspondence with her family, Gage drew on the work of Theosophists such as Blavatsky, A.P. Sinnet, and Anna Bonus Kingsford. In fact, it was Blavatsky who first argued that witches who were burned in Europe were practitioners of the form of magic derived from ancient Gnostic wisdom, a topic that Gage subsequently developed in full in Woman, Church and State. Blavatsky also was among the first to recognize Gnosticism for its belief that wisdom, personified by the goddess Sophia, was female (Blavatsky 1988 [1877], 2:1–53). Gage made the Divine Feminine a cornerstone of her own religious thinking.
Gage’s participation in Theosophy also spurred an interest in numerology and astrology. Among her personal papers archived at Radcliffe College are her own writings on such topics, including astrological charts she drew up for members of her family. Her letters make it clear that she relied on astrology and consultation with psychics for personal guidance in her own life, particularly regarding her continually challenged financial situation after the death of her husband in 1884 (Patrick 1996, 76).
It is interesting to note that when she was adopted into the wolf clan of the Mohawk nation in 1893, an honor that admitted her into the Mohawk’s Council of Matrons and allowed her to vote on the selection of the nation’s chief, Gage was given the name Ka-ron-ien-ha-wi, that is, “Sky Carrier” or “She Who Holds the Sky” (Wagner 1998, 34). Given Gage’s pioneering interest in reclaiming the lost practice of astrology–upholding the integrity of the sky and its messages–I read the selection of the name “Sky Carrier” as synchronistic. Moreover, the name can be seen as a reference to the ancient Egyptian goddesses Nut (often depicted in ancient Egyptian art as holding the sky in her arched body over the earth) and Isis (the latter of whom Gage wrote about in detail), as well as other celestial goddesses, who were Queens of Heaven associated with the stars. Thus “Sky Carrier,” as I see it, also affirms Gage’s karmic role as the first major figure in the West to attempt to restore the Goddess to Her proper place in the cosmos and in the spirituality of humanity.
For Gage, the occult was based, not just on spirituality, but on science. She relied on the latest works of prominent European and American writers and scientists such as William James, Herbert Spencer, John Tyndall, and Charles Darwin, as they appeared in Popular Science Monthly, to inform her ideas (Patrick 1996, 60–61). However, like Anna Bonus Kingsford, who left the Theosophists to form her own hermetic society in 1883, and who claimed that humans could have direct, unmediated knowledge of the “otherworld” and the past, Gage maintained that intuition must be used in conjunction with science in order for spiritual truths to be revealed. Without intuition, she believed, science would merely veer off into materialism, as it was already doing in her time (54). In this, she prefigured the philosophy of the contemporary women’s spirituality movement, which stresses that an acceptance of alternative ways of knowing such as intuition is critical if humanity is to receive the wisdom and understanding it needs in order to successfully navigate the environmental degradation and threats of mass destruction that plague our planet.
In addition to tracking the ideas of the Theosophical movement, Gage attended numerous occult and freethinker meetings to witness trance experiments, hear esoteric teachings, and participate in seances. In October 1897, five months before her death, Gage wrote in a letter to her son about a “button” of a South American plant that opens the occult senses. Reporting that a local professor would soon procure them in Chicago, where she traveled frequently, Gage commented that she hoped “to perhaps try them” (Patrick 1996, 79). Clearly, Gage was referring to the peyote button, a long-standing entheogen (sacred hallucinogen) in Native American shamanic cultures. Although there is apparently no evidence to indicate that Gage indeed tried peyote, her willingness to investigate it underscores her unconventional and pioneering spirit in confronting the hidden realms.
Esotericism influenced all of Gage’s political activism and scholarly writing. For example, she drew on an esoteric religious definition of the equality of women and men in order to critique the Christian Church. In her first speech to the women’s rights convention in Syracuse in 1852 (Gage 1980 [1893], 5), she calls attention to the more mystical chapter of Genesis 1 (26–28) in which God (as a plural being) created man in “their” own image as both male and female, rather than the more conventionally cited chapter in which God creates Eve from Adam as an afterthought. Although Gage (Stanton 2002 [1895–98], 209) harshly critiqued the Bible as having had a predominantly “evil” influence over humanity, it was not spirituality or even scripture itself she objected to, but rather the way in which such material had been used to oppress women. In fact, she held that the Bible was a deeply mystical text whose true meaning could only be understood by occult initiates (67). Gage delineated between what she called “true religion” and “theology”: Christianity was not true religion since it taught the superiority of the male over the female. “I am as much as ever, a believer in the invisible church – but not in this rotten thing known to the world as 'the Christian Church,'” she wrote to her son Thomas in 1890 (Wagner 1998, 58).
A full exploration of the numerous occult themes and references in Gage’s work would require more space than this article allows, so I will mention only a few highlights here. Among her unpublished manuscripts is one on the esoteric significance of the stars and stripes of the American flag and another on the esotericism of Isis. One particularly interesting occult discussion is found in her comments on “Kings” in The Woman’s Bible. In her discourse on the Queen of Sheba, Gage notes the relationship between the words Sheba, Saba, and Sab and points out that all three relate to wisdom, particularly wisdom derived from astrology. Gage thus asserts that as the head of her nation, a land located in Arabia that was entirely based on the occult, the Queen of Sheba was the wisest of the wise and chief astrologer of the nation–a historical possibility that is not considered in contemporary accounts of this legendary Queen.
Gage continues along these lines in her comments on “Revelation” in the same volume. The image of the “woman clothed with the sun” that appears in this apocalyptic account, she says, represents the Divinity of the feminine, its spirituality as opposed to the materiality of the masculine; for in Egypt the sun, as giver of life, was regarded as feminine, while the moon, shining by reflected light, was looked upon as masculine. With her feet upon the moon, woman, corresponding to and representing the soul, portrays the ultimate triumph of spiritual things over material things–over the body, which man, or the male principle, corresponds to and represents. (in Stanton 2002 [1895–98], 183)
It is interesting to note here Gage’s reversal of the usual Western dualistic equation, in which matter is regarded as feminine, and therefore inferior to spirit. For Gage, spirit is female, and will triumph over the oppression to which it has been subjected by the masculine principle for millennia. Female-affirming esotericism continues in Woman, Church and State. In her first chapter on the matriarchate, Gage (1980 [1893], 12) notes:
Anciently motherhood was represented by a sphere or circle. The circle, like the mundane egg, which is but an elongated circle, contains everything in itself and is the true microcosm. It is eternity, it is the feminine, the creative force, representing spirit. Through its union with matter in the form of the nine digits it is likewise capable of representing all natural things.
Later in the chapter, she sets the feminist record straight on the figurehead at the heart of Judaism and Christianity: Yahweh /Jehovah. Drawing on the Kabbala and the work of Anna Bonus Kingsford, Gage (22) comments: “Jehovah signifies not alone the masculine and feminine principles but also the spirit or vivifying intelligence. ... The double-sexed word, Jehovah, too sacred to be spoken by the Jews, signified the masculine-feminine God.” Even the story of the tower of Babel contains a hidden, gendered meaning, she notes. The word Babel, she explains, means “God the Father” as distinct and separate from the feminine principle. “The confusion which has come upon humanity because of this separation has been far more lamentable in its results than a mere confounding of tongues” (22), she observes, referring to the thousands of years of suppression of the feminine principle that resulted. Citing Blavatsky, she concludes her chapter by noting that the Holy Spirit, symbolized by a dove, is a distinctively feminine principle but has been mistakenly treated by the Christian church as masculine.3
Daly as Mystic
Unlike Gage, who in her manuscripts treats occult topics in a strictly linear and intellectual fashion, Daly, while maintaining a strong grip on her philosophical training and her ability to engage in social critique, experiments with concepts, structures, and literary devices that are themselves imbued with occult resonances. Given my own embrace of spooky as a synonym for esoteric and occult, it is worth exploring for a moment what Daly means by her neologism spooking, which she elaborates on in Gyn/Ecology. She uses spooking to denote the process whereby patriarchal males attempt to frighten, haunt, and control women through implicit messages in their institutions, through body language, through silences and deceptive devices in their media, their grammar, their education, their professions, their technology, their oppressive and confusing fashions, customs, etiquette, “humor,” through their subliminal advertising and their “sublime” music (such as christmas carols piped into supermarkets that seduce the listener into identifying with the tamed Goddess who abjectly adores her son). (1990 [1978], 317)
Here Daly is pointing to the functionings of patriarchy on the occult level, implying that such devices are diabolical activities engaged in with conscious, malevolent intent by male actors (and their female accomplices) who are in the esoteric “know.” Perpetuated on the occult plane, such manipulations are in fact bona fide forms of magic. Their effects penetrate women (whether we are conscious of it or not) on the spirit level, which means the perpetrators are able to grip and control us in a pernicious manner that is most difficult to shake.
Thus, says Daly, women must learn “to Spook/Speak back.” For women, “Spinster-Spooking” means “re-calling/re-membering/re-claiming our Witches’ power to cast spells, to charm, to overcome prestige with prestidigitation, to cast glamours, to employ occult grammar, to enthrall, to bewitch” (318). Here, as she does throughout Gyn/Ecology and subsequent works, Daly clearly emerges as a magician/witch herself, a knower and operator of the occult. While many of her readers have no doubt interpreted Daly on this level over the years, others have likely glossed over such exhortations as tongue-in-cheek metaphors. This may have served to keep Daly’s work on university syllabi, but perhaps it is time for more women to acknowledge what I believe Daly is really saying here: mojo/magic exists, and we’d better start using it to break those things that have broken our backs, and create what it is we really want.4
Daly’s embrace of both mysticism and intellectualism is perhaps no more dramatic than in her 1998 work, Quintessence. The book's subtitle, Realizing the Archaic Future, already puts the reader in a liminal place through its suggestion that the time-space continuum may not be as linear as we think. Archaic future? Exactly what place and time are we talking about?
The device of playing with time is immediately and clearly established in the book’s preface, which is dated 2048 and written by a woman named Annie, a member of the Anonyma Network, which has decided to reprint the book, originally published in 1998, on its 50th anniversary. Alternating between her own sociological critique of patriarchy in 1998 and Annie’s commentary on her chapters in 2048, Daly places the reader both in present time and in the future, suggesting that the two moments are, in fact, interchangeable.
Such time play reveals an understanding of the nature of reality itself that is profoundly esoteric. My own introduction to the idea that all time is simultaneous came through reading occult books by Jane Roberts, particularly The Nature of Personal Reality and Seth Speaks. Roberts, now deceased, claimed that her books were more or less transcripts of channelings she received from a disincarnate being named Seth. I learned more about the nature of time through the occult writings and tapes of Sanaya Roman, who claims to channel a being called Orin. In these works, such as Living with Joy, Spiritual Growth, and Personal Power Through Awareness, Sanaya/Orin suggests that time is in fact malleable and can be manipulated through the action of our own minds. That is, through focused intention, we may “visit” the future or the past and gain information for the present; we may speed up or slow down events; or we may “create” alternative futures altogether. This is so because, in fact, all of what we know as “time” is simultaneous. These ideas have recently been given a boost in the popular media through the films What the Bleep Do We Know? and The Secret, which draw upon the work of quantum physicists and other scientists to elucidate such concepts. As I worked with these ideas and techniques myself, I came to determine that they were valid and offered tremendous possibilities for creating a more positive personal and collective reality.
Daly plays with a number of these ideas in Quintessence. Although she explicitly states, “I am not a ‘channeler’” (11), she refers to “conjuring her foresisters” when she is writing, lecturing, teaching, or just simply “spinning” ideas (xii). Although she may not physically sit in trance and receive “voices” in the manner of Roberts and Roman, she hints at receiving what I would call “direct transmissions of information” from those foresisters she names as sources of inspiration, such as Virginia Woolf and Matilda Joslyn Gage.
Daly explores the idea not only of invoking others’ consciousness, but also being invoked by women of the future, in this case, her character Annie. Annie states, “I went home [and] decided to Invoke [Mary] in order to have a conversation about her work and what it was like to live in those times. ... Well! As soon as I had clearly formed the thought, she just popped up in front of me” (xii).
In working with the esoteric concept of the simultaneity of time, and our consequent ability to “time jump,” Daly moves from being a theoretical philosopher to what I would call an embodied or practical philosopher, in the fullest Greek sense of the term philosopher, a lover of Sophia/Gnosis/wisdom. That is, she models for us the possibility of using esoteric concepts and the power of our minds in very real ways to effect change. It is my belief that pre-Aristotelian, particularly pre-Socratic, philosophers, understood the simultaneity of time, as well as other esoteric concepts, and both used them and taught them to others. Daly is thus one of a long lineage of “deep” philosophers.5
Daly elaborates on her time-bending concept when she defines the “Archaic Future” as “the real future, which transcends the stagnation/timelessness of archetypal deadtime. It is the direction of the movements of Original Creative Time (Archaic Time), beyond the stifling grasp of archetypal molds and measures. It is reality created through successions of Original Acts/Actions” (1998, xv). For women, traveling beyond archetypal deadtime is a reaching “deep into our Memories, our Deep Past, to Dis-cover the roots of an Archaic Future, beyond the limits of patriarchal linear time” (3). Daly explicitly states that in grasping this frequency, we enter the realm of the “Fifth Dimension.”
What we are seeking, in Daly’s words, is “participation in the Transtemporal/Trans-spatial Integrity and Harmony of all creation” (23), or timeless harmony. Wise women, Daly asserts, are already working in the Fifth Dimension when, for example, we experience, notice, and cultivate synchronicities, those magical coincidences that tell us there is more to the universe than the mechanical functioning of dead matter.
Daly presents a logical trajectory for our collective fifth dimensional work in her character Annie’s retelling/foretelling of the history that transpired/will transpire between 1998 and 2048. Annie describes how women fight patriarchy psychically, eventually causing an energy shift that coincides with geographic and climactic changes arising from abuses to the planet. The people who survive are those with the psychic skills to intuit where they physically need to move on the planet to escape floods and other catastrophes and to withstand the new intensified energy field. Annie explains, “much of our communicating is done by means of our Third Eye, whose powers we have enhanced by continual practice. ... And [Mary adds] we all receive messages through Deep Hearing” (59). Theirs is thus a full-fledged fifth-dimensional world, one that is also Gynocratic and Gynocentric, in which patriarchy is a dim memory. Although Annie hails from a continent that has deliberately been inhabited only by women, the new world is not exclusively an Amazonian Eden; men exist on the other continents but no longer engage in dominator, androcentric behavior.
In Quintessence, Daly offers the “gnowing” reader (my term) a veritable mental feast of time-jumping possibilities. In this, she is truly the witchy woman she has always claimed to be, a magician who I contend rivals the best of them from any epoch of humanity, past, present, or future. (And, importantly, she reveals herself to be a positive, constructive witch, not a negative one, for, as anyone realizes who dips into the occult waters even briefly, magic can be used freely either for good or for evil.)
First, by designing/affirming a probable future in which patriarchy has been overthrown, Daly is literally creating such a reality in some dimension. Further, by articulating this vision and sending it out through her books, which will be read by thousands of women, she is helping womankind focus its intention on such a vision, thereby making it more likely that we will draw this probable reality to us. She thus models for us how to conjure, how not to get stuck in the mire of despair but how to use our (psychic) energies to accomplish what we want through creative intention. Such visioning, along with other acts of courage, she says, creates “the vast morphogenetic field out of which true Metamorphosis can emerge” (63). This is the kind of magic what witches throughout time have practiced; Daly is merely reminding us of this. I would add that any good witch knows to be careful: conjuring is always done with the specific disclaimer “May this–or better–come to be according to the greatest good of all.”
Daly models for us how to use our will and mental effort to connect with all Wild Women across time to draw strength, guidance, and inspiration. She inspires hope by reminding feminists to keep in mind the long-term perspective, to remember that our work is not in vain, that women of the future will be affected by what we do and that they need us to keep doing what we’re doing, no matter how small our efforts. At this point, Daly’s esotericism converges with that of Gage, who is quoted passionately by Daly's character Annie (63): “The women of today are the thoughts of their mothers and grandmothers, embodied, and made alive. They are active, capable, determined, and bound to win. They have 1000 generations back of them. . . . Millions of women, dead and gone, are speaking through us today.”
Daly reminds us of the esoteric truth that it is not only our ancestors who may guide us, but our future sisters as well. She herself draws energy from the morphogenetic field of the human community of Anonyma Network women that she has created. According to one esoteric train of thought (one perhaps Daly embraces herself), on some dimension, Anonyma has come into actual existence in (future/present) time because Daly has conjured it so. She uses the force of the network’s existence as a magnetic energy to draw herself –and all of us–closer to this future probability. Her character Annie states in the last line of the book, “we send this joyful message and Memory of the Future to our Sisters of all kinds and all times so that they too can always remember it” (237).
This is powerful magic indeed; no wonder patriarchy, in the academy and elsewhere, has repressed knowledge of how to manifest and weave new present/future realities into creation.6 If women were, en masse, to begin conjuring new, non-patriarchal realities, that could put a lot of patriarchs out of business. It serves patriarchy for women not to know about magic, and the most effective veil the “gnowing” patriarchs and their ready female assistants can cast over it is the claim that occult realms do not exist. That veil is kept pulled tight through special tactics, such as threats that people who remain open to the ontological reality of such realms will be made to look ridiculous or will not get jobs in important places (a vague memory of more vicious and violent ways of controlling witches). We can begin to see in this how subtle and pernicious occult warfare really is, taking place through mind-bending, insanity-provoking reversals aimed at the points where we are most vulnerable. I maintain that whether or not patriarchal institutions admit that the front of “respectable agnosticism” they have put up amounts to a ban on the occult, it is up to women to refuse the deadness of the narrow ways of thinking that are part of our repressive institutions and to persist in exploring, in Daly’s terms, the Fifth Spiral Galaxy.
Daly and Gage as Prophets and Sibyls
Daly’s attention to and hope in the future parallels that of Gage, who saw to it that her Declaration of the Rights of Women was presented to the organizers of the nation’s Centennial celebration in Philadelphia, in order to, she said, “place on record for the daughters of 1976, the fact that their mothers of 1876 had thus asserted their equality of rights, and thus impeached the government of today for its injustice towards women” (in Wagner 1998, 18).
I see both Gage and Daly as prophets, in the tradition of the sibyls of old who channeled otherworldly wisdom and provided guidance for a multitude of seekers. Like Daly, Gage saw far into the future and made predictions about it. In making such predictions, she literally created in some dimension the reality she sought, and perhaps she, like Daly, knew her responsibility and occult power in this regard. Such envisionings are peppered throughout her writings, including her 1888 report to the International Council of Women (in Patrick 1996, 101), where she declares
The night of ignorance, credulity, and despair is nearly at an end; the hour is at hand; the feminine will soon be fully restored to its rightful place in creation and in religion as well as in law, in divinity as well as in humanity, we shall find recognition of the sexual duality of all life, of the motherhood as well as the fatherhood of God.
More than one hundred years later, her words are bearing fruit. The women’s spirituality movement is but one testament to her prophetic power.
Daly has been a major figure in carrying out Gage’s vision, and, in Quintessence, a volume produced in the autumn of her own life, she enjoins other women to continue that work. She witchily reminds us that in our task of dismantling patriarchy and restoring the Goddess, women may call upon, not only their sisters from across time, but also “the animals, trees, stars, and Elemental Spirits (commonly known as angels) who are our traveling companions across Time/Space” (25). Despite the negative picture of the present she reveals with all of its atrocities against the “Elemental” feminine, she, like Gage, believes that women–and Goddess–will prevail.
I propose it is critical, then, that more women follow the lead of Gage and Daly in exploring and reclaiming the spooky. It is our birthright to understand about other worlds, other realms, to journey into the Fifth Spiral Galaxy, to know its wonders (and its terrors), to come into our true powers. We must “spook” if we are not to “be spooked” by ever new and heinous violations of the Feminine–biotechnology, cloning, the creation of mutant species through genetic manipulation, the persistence of fascistically misogynist groups around the world. We need to get busy spinning and manifesting the realities we want for ourselves, our loved ones, humanity, the planet, and beyond in the next ten, hundred, thousand, ten-thousand years. The (eternally present) time has come.
References
Anonymous. 1898. “Mrs. Matilda Joslyn Gage,” Fayetteville Recorder, March 24, 1898.
Blavatsky, Helena P. 1988 [1877]. Isis Unveiled. 2 vols. Pasadena, CA: Theosophical University Press.
Cranston, Sylvia. H.P.B.: The Extraordinary Life & Influence of Helena Blavatsky, Founder of the Modern Theosophical Movement. New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1993.
Daly, Mary. 1998. Quintessence... Realizing the Archiac Future: A Radical Elemental Feminist Manifesto. Boston: Beacon Press.
_____. 1990 [1978]. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon.
_____. 1985 [1973]. Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation. Boston: Beacon.
_____. 1985 [1968]. The Church and the Second Sex. Boston: Beacon.
Gage, Matilda Joslyn. 1980 [1893]. Woman, Church and State. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press.
_____. 1888. “Woman in the Early Christian Church.” In Report of the International Council of Women, assembled by the National Women Suffrage Association, Washington, D.C., March 25 to April 1, 1888. Washington, D.C.: National Woman Suffrage Association.
_____. 1852. Speech of Mrs. M.E.J. Gage at the Women’s Rights Convention, Held at Syracuse, Sept. 1852. Women’s Rights Tracts no. 7. Syracuse, NY: Masters Print.
Karagianis, Maria. 1999. “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary.” Ms. 9(4) (June/July): 56–59.
Kingsley, Peter. 2003. Reality. Inverness, CA: The Golden Sufi Center.
Martin, Wendy, ed. 1972. The American Sisterhood. New York: Harper and Row.
Patrick, Lucia. 1996. Religion and Revolution in the Thought of Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1898). Doctoral dissertation, Florida State University. Ann Arbor, MI.: UMI.
Porterfield, Amanda. 1999. “Recurring Tendencies in the History of American Christian Women.” Sunstone 22 (March–April): 24–33.
Roberts, Jane. 1974. The Nature of Personal Reality. New York: Bantam.
_____. 1972. Seth Speaks. New York: Bantam.
Roman, Sanaya. 1989. Spiritual Growth. Tiburon, CA: HJ Kramer.
_____. 1986a. Personal Power Through Awareness. Tiburon, CA: HJ Kramer.
_____. 1986b. Living with Joy. Tiburon, CA: HJ Kramer.
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, ed. 2002 [1895–98]. The Woman’s Bible. Mineola, NY: Dover.
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage. 1969 [1881]. History of Woman Suffrage. Vol. 1. New York: Arno & The New York Times.
Wagner, Sally Roesch. 1998. She Who Holds the Sky. Aberdeen, SD: Sky Carrier Press.
_____. 1980. Introduction. In Gage, Woman, Church and State, xv–xxxix. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press.
Endnotes
- Webster’s 10th edition defines esoteric as “designed for or understood by the specially initiated alone”; “of or relating to knowledge that is restricted to a small group.” A synonym is occult, which Webster’s defines as “matters regarded as involving the action or influence of supernatural or supernormal powers or some secret knowledge of them”; “not revealed: secret”; “not easily apprehended or understood: abstruse, mysterious”; “hidden from view: concealed.” In what follows, I use the terms esoteric and occult interchangeably, and I consider both of these terms to include all of the above. In other words, by esoteric or occult, I mean anything that relates to the unseen “otherworld,” the astral and infinitely inner realms; realms that are apprehended through the opening of certain forms of perception, generally accomplished through a series of formal and informal initiations. In short, I use these words to denote all that we might call the “spooky.”
Obviously, such a definition is predicated on my own acceptance of the reality of unseen realms, a view informed by my encounters with the occult through the works of spiritual teachers such as Helena Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner, Dhyanni Ywhahoo, Jane Roberts (e.g., 1972, 1974), Sanaya Roman (e.g., 1986a, 1986b, 1989), and Vicki Noble; by the teachings of Ammachi, Barbara Marciniak, and various individuals in the San Francisco Bay Area, among them Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Josephine (Jodi) MacMillan, Kalli Rose Halvorson, Elisabeth Sikie, Laura Amazzone, Oloya Tyehimba, and Robert Owings; and by formal and informal initiations I have experienced through pilgrimages to sacred places, visionary journeys into non-ordinary states of reality, and synchronistic events. (back to article) - Lucia Patrick’s doctoral dissertation for Florida State University, Religion and Revolution in the Thought of Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1898), is the only major work I have found on Gage that discusses the esoteric aspect of Gage’s writing and thinking. Even Gage’s primary biographer Sally Roesch Wagner, who freely addresses the theme of Gage’s critique of Christianity, largely skirts the issue of her esotericism. Much of Gage’s thinking on occult matters is presented in her letters and unpublished manuscripts, which are archived at Radcliffe College’s Schlesinger Library. (back to article)
- While Gage’s esoteric analyses are fascinating, they do raise the question of validity regarding truth claims. Often she relies on the works of Blavatsky and Kingsford, women who were fairly forthcoming about the sources of their information. Blavatsky claimed that all her occult knowledge was given to her by her “Master” –a mysterious figure from India who may have been a guru in the phenomenal world, or who may have been a spirit being only (she was never explicit about the subject; see Cranston 1993). Kingsford indicated that she received her information directly from the spirit realms, and that such knowledge at least in part was delivered during altered states of consciousness induced by her inhaling of ether (Patrick 1996, 70).
At times Gage clearly cites Blavatsky, Kingsford, and others, but at other times her citations are spotty. It’s possible that Gage was privy to her own direct gnosis, whether through meditation, psychoactive substances, direct intuition or psychic ability, or the like. Her writings lack clarity in this regard. However, whether Gage was writing about her own esoteric perceptions or merely discussing those of others, the question remains as to how esoteric truth claims may be evaluated. This will no doubt be an important and expanding area of inquiry for those of us who wish to see esoteric epistemologies taken more seriously in the academy. (back to article) - I wish to acknowledge that many women already embrace the more esoteric realms in their life and work. This may be particularly true of women who are a part of long-standing ancestral traditions. (back to article)
- I am supported in the idea that the pre-Socratics were profound esoteric practitioners by the highly respected classicist Peter Kingsley in his book Reality (2003), even though he does not directly address esoteric notions of time in antiquity. (back to article)
- The idea that all time is simultaneous and that humans have the power to conjure reality/ies implies that we may be conjuring the past as well as the future. Currently, many in the academy dispute the historical/material facticity of matriarchal and goddess-venerating cultures, criticizing feminists for assigning historical validity to something we have merely desired and imagined. While this is not the place for an extended discussion of the topic, I would suggest that we at least consider the possibility that the power of thought may indeed be radical enough to allow us to create realities back into the past, and that creating past realities is something patriarchal historians, archaeologists, and the like have done and continue to do, to the benefit of the patriarchal powers. (back to article)
about the author
Marguerite Rigoglioso is graduating this fall with her Ph.D. in humanities from the California Institute of Integral Studies, where she also earned her M.A. in philosophy and religion, with a concentration in women's spirituality. She is a faculty member at Dominican University of California, where she is assisting the development of a new program in women and gender studies and helping to establish women's spirituality as an undergraduate discipline. Ms. Rigoglioso has traveled in Europe and North Africa, researching ancient female divinities and priestesshoods. Her work has appeared in numerous academic journals and anthologies, including the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, where in 2005 she received honorable mention for the journal’s New Scholar Award for her pioneering paper on the Graeco-Roman cult center devoted to Persephone at Lake Pergusa in Sicily.
