Patterning Woman

'The real trouble about women is that they must always go on trying to adapt themselves to men's theories of women'. D.H Lawrence from Give Her A Pattern

I was a childhood Jehovah’s Witness from the age of seven until sixteen, when the suffocation of being in an evangelistic cult became undeniably unbearable. The growing mind’s bid for independence becomes a battlefield on its own, let alone with the spice of fundamental religion casting long shadows.

Fearful of the options for a continued life in ‘The Truth’ rapidly tunnelling into baptism, early marriage to a man from the congregation and then babies, I began a secret life of my own. Mainly in my own head, chronically aware that God could hear my thoughts, yet unable to resist them, but also with friends covering my arse when I was pretending to be somewhere I should be when I was definitely somewhere I shouldn’t. The tension between the life I had and the life I wanted, shimmering like an impossible distant oasis, was a terrible necessity my nervous system held like hot wire.

Higher education was actively discouraged by my religious community, not least as any questioning outside of Yahweh’s box with critical thinking meant the potential for a crisis of faith. Which could mean leaving the congregation and leaving the congregation was a life and death decision. As we were warned, our god was a jealous one and His consequences would be real.

As a woman, my place would be in the home, so going to college or university would be a waste of time. Sure, I could have job doing something, with my modest and god-fearing presence being an example to those around me, nothing too ambitious or clever though. Bible talks quoting the likes of Timothy and his convenient idea that ‘A Woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.’¹ Were given in a vein of compassion and piety by the brothers preaching. They were publicly kind and supportive of our subjugation. They were our friends. And because God said so, it was only men on that elevated stage talking, picking and choosing the biblical system by which we lived.

Once, when I was with only sisters having bible study at the house of an Elder, his wife had a small panic because there wasn’t a man present to lead the blessing of the proceedings. Another sister quoted something from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians about covering her head to make a blessing. A bible was produced, the passage found, a discussion ensued, a head covering worn, the prayer said and then we started. When the Elder returned home his council on the situation was sought and his validation that all was correct procured. Now I’m incredulous that it was so rare women were so alone to share spiritual study. This was not by accident.

One of the main Witness tenets was to ‘not be of the world.’ Being ‘wordly’ was a disobedience to our creed and being up for certain death once Armageddon kicked off. So you were required to hold yourself at a distance from non-Witnesses. It also meant any shady behaviour was instantly policed by anyone older than you. In order to qualify for the return to Paradise Forever, after the bloody battle of the apocalypse and the seven headed beast had had his moment, all human shadow work taken care of by Jehovah with Jesus by his side, so that we could live in perfect harmony in all eternity, there were rules. Amongst other things, no blood transfusions, which meant I couldn’t go on any school trips that needed a signed parental disclaimer agreeing to any emergency treatment, no Christmases, no birthdays, no voting, no divorce, careers were out, feminism out, sex before marriage was out, certain TV programmes were out, too much makeup was out, provocative dress was out, smoking was out, drugs were out and, most harrowing to my teenage self, discos were out. And so began the battle rounds between me and Jehovah as I applied the hotly desired azure blue mascara and frosted pink lipstick in the school toilets and faked my mum’s signature on school forms.

Hiding my religious background from the cool girls at school, I took to swigging Thunderbird ‘wine’ and pretending to know how to smoke menthol cigarettes - I thought the menthol cancelled out fag breath so I’d remain undetected - after which I’d spiral into a dark pit of guilt convinced I was going to shortly die for my transgression. Because one thing the Witnesses are good at, is managing the precipice of the world ending. It was always about to happen. So I could never relax.

This is what was in: bible study three times a week, going out 'on the work' meaning knocking on doors for a required amount of hours a week spreading the Good News (absolutely cringemaking if you happened to knock on the door of someone from school), three hours spent at the Kingdom Hall on a Sunday, reading aloud from the bible in study group, helping take care of the younger ones, being humble, not being with boys on your own, feeling terrible that the non-believers in your outer family were going to die and being shit scared of Armageddon.

Before reaching option taking age at school, R.E studies were mandatory. I liked Miss Banbury, the teacher, she was kind, wore nice perfume and never shouted at us but I disdained the subject for its false prophets. I didn’t want to excuse myself out of the class on religious grounds, I’d already done that for assembly in middle school and drawing attention to myself as a religious freak certainly wasn't on my dance card for high school. A couple of years above me there was another Witness kid but we’d glide past each other in a conspiracy or silence, mutually bonded in not wanting to draw unnecessary attention to ourselves. We saw the savagery the few muslim kids endured, and yeah, no thanks.

In R.E class I barely did the work required of me, stuffed to the gills with Jesus and bible stories already along with being conflicted that I was somehow blaspheming by hearing teachings about a false Christianity and their idolatry. Instead it was a two hour class in the week where I’d get stare out the window, paint my nails with Tipex and surreptitiously read a trafficked copy of Smash Hits.

Before the exam Miss Banbury had set our year, she called me to her desk and expressed her concern that I was going to fail. I shrugged and said I’d read the text book already. She looked doubtful and I felt bad. I did the exam and quite enjoyed showing off in it, then forgot about it. A few weeks later Miss Banbury again called me to her desk, a different look on her face. She told me I’d not only passed the exam but got the best mark of the whole school in as many years as she’d been teaching there. I shrugged again, my default setting, but she wouldn’t let it go and pressed me on how I’d done so well with so little work behind me. She also urged me to consider taking her class as one of my G.C.S.E options. I said ‘We’re Jehovah’s Witnesses Miss.’ The admission forced out of me. ‘Ah’ she said, ‘I see.’ Smiling at me with a mixture of sympathy and pity shrank I from her realisation, drenched in shame. She wished me well for my future.

All I did was think about that future. It was coming on fast. I was interested in boys but not as any kind of fixed entity. I knew having a boyfriend was an absolute no and I was expected to sit on my virginity like a prize cow until I was correctly courted under the watchful gaze of the Elders.

But the young men in my congregation were like over-watered plants, misshapen by wrought-out piety and struggles with Satan over barely won battles to refrain from masturbation. With their cardboard cut out suits, ugly shoes, black briefcases stuffed with Awake! and Watchtower magazines and earnest prayers, they were no match for the Terry Hall look-a-like boys at my comprehensive whose stay-pressed trousers, green Parkers and blond streaked hair I couldn’t see past. When it came down to it, there was no way I was going to end up married, knocked up and making the housekeeping money I’d be granted stretch to a buying a sanctioned nice thing for the home by some pimpled god botherer too indoctrinated to have an independent thought of his own - and who I knew I was definitely smarter than.

I had two things. English Literature and Drama Club. I lived for these in my last two years of school. Novel reading outside of homework was a hidden activity having been severely castigated when caught redheaded with Jane Eyre, instead of the bible. Although the Drama Club was grudgingly conceded. Not least because by then, the marriage between my mother and stepfather began to fragment in fairly spectacular fashion. The religious centre of our house shifted as fights about it took over. And I took full advantage of the space opening up. My brother and sister, who were still very young, were the focus of attention. The ensuing period of chaos proved my way out, as periods of chaos can, so I grabbed it.

An inspired Careers Advisor (who I am eternally grateful to) told me about a course I could take doing drama. I was amazed there was such a thing. Telling no one, I applied to the college she suggested in a town thirty miles away, auditioned in its achingly appealing black studio theatre with the other applicants, wrote an impromptu essay on the last book I’d read (The Far Pavilions by M.M Kaye) and got in. The summer before I left home to go, my mother initiated a divorce and we were finally free. On the outside. My interior compass, though, was manic. I was finally liberated from the concrete god cemented in me but I had no clue who the fuck I was without him in my head.

Aubrey Beardsley The Climax 1893

So I did what I always did and what I always do when strung out. I read books. Piles of them. Constantly. Now I didn't have to hide them. I stuffed myself full of plays, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Pinter, Miller, Sophocles, Lorca, Dario Fo and Franke Rame. I soaked myself in Erica Jong, Marilyn French, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer and Germaine Greer. I’d never, ever, heard such blood and truth pour out of women’s mouths. The grief, the rage, the sexiness, the humour, the dead-eyed appraisal of what men expected of them versus who they fought to be. The heroine battles of the 70’s and 80’s feminists carved a path within me and I started to read the world through their scars and wisdom.

A move to the London came. The hallowed place I’d daringly promised myself as a thirteen year old I would live and to an English Lit degree with the absolute thrill of being given a Reading List. Three years with nothing to do but read. I’d reached the Promised Land.

I chose the Victorians, American Literature, the Modernists, the clever sounding Post-Modernists and Poetry. The piercing seership of Plath and Larkin’s ‘No God anymore, or sweating in the dark’ were beacons flashing in the dark. Milan Kundera’s exquisite Unbearable Lightness of Being folded me into the fragility of life as I realised precariousness wasn’t only in me. Kafka, that wizard of bending time and writing the sterile futility that paranoia and fear birth from unseen powers, channeling life into meaninglessness rotation added dimensions I barely knew I needed. Also, that intense dark stare of his was pretty hot.

Joyce and his Dubliners haunted me with lives unloved, un-lived and a Portrait of An Artist aligned in my religious soaked psyche with its cold sweat . Austen, and her ivory tools, was a profound and deep pleasure, a pristine world order that calmed. Lucy Snowe came for me in Villette, who, impossibly, I loved more than Jane. And then my beloved Virginal Woolf, changed my internal landscape in one afternoon, forever, delivering me a self who could hold the terrible beauty of an inner life. She made the summer I read her inside and out not only liveable, but a trembling joy as my sanity collapsed in and out. Woolf took me to Lytton Strachey, who could think in paragraphs and lord Jesus, it showed. Here was what a writers’s writer read. The magical realism of Allende and Marquez were the opposite of the hard God I was constantly shredding and I stayed within those novels long after I put them down.

Here was art, literature and music to live in, with, and through as I stayed in my room, smoking, staring at the ceiling, writing down incoherent notes. I formulated an intellectual understanding as to why people flock to a religion, which I thought was big and clever of me. But I still held a rabid rejection of anything overtly holy, churchy or preachy. I could whiff a Christian a country mile away.

Drunk in pubs I’d talk to anyone who’d listen about books. For a while I proclaimed myself an atheist and would produce fierce arguments at why God was an outmoded idea suited to intellectually weak hypocrites. I read Dawkins and loved to see Hitchens debate the stupid, narrow back room weak-hearted priestly men idiotic enough to take him on. As I went on I coined my own phrase of Man-Made God. Earnest dialogues would ensure about how the superconscious of man needs to project this father figure into the sky to give themselves a sense of the divine, a reason to not fear death and the savagery of life. I was as scathing as much as I was scathed. Classic undergraduate fare.

Once in a seminar, an older woman who’d come to university for her degree now that her six daughters were grown, was talking about how she was Catholic and even though she wasn’t a practicing Catholic, she would always be beholden to its teachings because a religion remained within a person. She said being hemmed in by the church and its expectations of her life was simply a fact that coloured everything.

Outraged, I challenged her. I could barely spit out the words which was some volatile gabble of how you can become who you want to be, how no religion should never dictate to you, how you are free to reinvent yourself, anytime, any way you chose.

She called me immature, which of course next to her I was, and that I didn’t grasp the complexities of the religious feeling, that I had no idea what I was talking about. Then she stood up for her Catholicism and the beauty she found in it. Horribly, horribly, I started to cry in that paralysing way where your throat closes and hot tears spring involuntary from the deep. The professor, slightly bewildered by this exchange suggested we move on to another point in the book. I didn’t speak for the rest of the seminar, I was a seething gabble of provoked emotions I hadn’t dared register. It shocked me.

Despite how far I’d dragged myself up the hill and stuffed myself with stories, I still held all of those undissolved feelings inside me. I was carefully holding them like a glass of full water in a dark hallway which would spill at the slightest knock. Because of course there was an echo of truth in what the Catholic woman said. But I was still too raw, too skinned to be able to countenance it. Too young to understand that the work of distance, integration and processing took time, I didn't know triggering required my own compassion, let alone what triggering actually was. I didn’t yet realise that spiritual exhaustion could not be outrun.

Ironically I avoided taking Yeats for a module because of his connection to the Golden Dawn and its occultists. My prejudice against foreign sounding mystics and devil dabblers still skimmed the surface of my subconscious self-protection. Instead I chose Sylvia Plath. Obviously. A dark corner of me was still superstitious about upsetting God by aligning with Spirits and hermetic muses, even though by now I’d committed far worse transgressions than thinking about magic.

So years down the line, the Unseen reaching out for me from behind the ‘Trembling Veil’, my natural instinct for Dream and the Seer, looking for a place to work the upsurge of spiritual essence piling into me, the words of the Bee Mistress stilled me: ‘… before they were told who they were meant to be by their parents, their schooling, their culture…No religion has in practice been good for women, all represent century upon century of oppression. The women within the Path of Pollen are fully empowered. Not empowered in the way that many women are in this day and age, where, in an attempt to gain power that was taken from them, they often become the imitation of men. The sun and Earth do not compete, they are opposites. Look at nature: We see that opposition created the greater whole, harmony. Competition destroys. The Melissae do not compete with men, rather they understand that their power as women means they can be sensual, sexual, lusty, passionate, even wanton, and that does not make them an object for you or any other man. In fact, it is their power that gives birth to all things: sexuality, emotion, mind, body and spirit.’²

It was everything, right there, that I wanted from a spiritual path. The female elder I’d never had, one who knew within her body how to be fully herself and one who understood what religious oppression meant. Bull’s Eye! The Bee Mistress was a heady collision of serious courage, wisdom and a ruthless freedom in which divine ecstasy was an intended cultivation. A way into knowledge. Even her moniker of Bee Mistress had me shivering with undiluted want. No male hierophant here dolling out the rules on a female body of which he was essentially ignorant and incompetent. No putting on a head scarf to conduct spiritual enquiry and then checking with a husband that you’d done the right thing.

With this, I was all in. A place where women would be met by men, not only as spiritual equals but also sexual equals. A tradition that was crucially and essentially about the female knowing and connection to the luminous. Women being wholly, holy, sensually and sacredly unto themselves is about as holy a grail as you can get. It merged with my instinctual feminism and spiritual hunger.

But the crucial line that hooked me in is plagiarised. And, of course, from a woman. It’s taken from an article in the Guardian from Karen Armstrong and her article from The Sacred Facts of Life dated November 2003. It’s about abortion and the religious right in the U.S controlling the bodies of women. Armstrong is a bestselling author writing on comparative religion and an ex-Roman Catholic nun. Her book A History of God, published in 1993 arrived through my door this morning. Still, even now, on the move to parse out God.

Buxton also plagiarises four passages more from Armstrong’s Guardian article, mainly for Bridge’s speech on why he must go through killing a red deer to further his initiation. But these are the lines he he took from her for the mouth of the Bee Mistress: ‘No religion has in practice been good for women, and in adopting a pro-choice position, some liberal Christians are beginning to redress centuries of oppression by taking women’s rights seriously.’ Carefully bent out of shape for the fullest effect.

It wasn’t a male version of the Path of Pollen Buxton was offering a curriculum for, which would have made more sense as he was a male initiate. It was for women only, and for which he gathered six women to create a cell of credible teachings. He was giving women spiritual catnip, made up from the hidden bodies of women who did come before us but not from the Tradition we were sold. These unacknowledged women are the real teachers.

The Melissae, those mythic priestesses Buxton dredged up from a small passage in Greek history, were bodily conceived and mapped out as templates for the women paying to learn subterfuge teachings. They are literally only named because of their archetype and connection to the honey bee. And because Buxton had to call the women in his book ‘something’. The title of Bee Mistress was taken from an early 20th Century book about beekeeping by Tickner Edwardes.

In chapter II of A Room of One’s Own, Woolf nails the process we women serve to men’s enchanted view of themselves. ‘Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size...That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism...The looking-glass vision is of supreme importance because it charges the vitality; it stimulates the nervous system.’ ³

We were the mirrors through which Buxton saw the fantasy reflection of himself.

And with a book he couldn't even be bothered, or had the talent, to write himself.

The occult book dealer Buxton used as the middle-man for selling the artefacts and papers he pillaged from a female artist, occultist and serious magician who is central to the women’s work of the Path of Pollen, warned me of the potentially devastating shame experienced by men when they lose their status. I read between the lines. I should be careful, be quiet. Something bad might happen. Here, as ever, is the expected obligation of a woman to compress herself for the sake of a man’s feelings.

And something bad has already happened.

My reply was unequivocally on the side of the hundreds of women duped and defrauded of their money, emptied of their spiritual confidence and wallpapered into a made up spiritual lineage. And for what? So some guy with his underdeveloped moral compass, grandiose spiritual supremacy and overblown need to puff himself up in the looking glass we provided can start his own religion.

Same old, same old.

1. 1 Timothy 2: 11-12

2. The Shamanic Way of the Bee, Inner Traditions 2006 Pg 110-111

3. A Room of One’s Own, Virgina Woolf, Penguin 1993 Pg 32