FELICITY ARTEMIS FLOWERS
Performance
Art:
A
Shape-shifting Tool for Consciousness-Raising
My dramatization of Medusa came out of many
years of personal healing, which included my teaching about
the Dark Mother. Since I began teaching Goddess spirituality
about seventeen years ago, much of my focus has been on honoring
women’s rage—rage as an expression of human sanity
and as a powerful tool for healing and propelling change in
the world:
. . . I am Medusa
the original snake monster mommy
you’ve all heard about
I am here to tell you my story
before it was rewritten by the fabricators of the fatherland.
I am the ancient Serpent Goddess of the Libyan
Amazons
I am Female Wisdom
The serpentine wisdom of cyclic regeneration,
the awesome power of the Bleeding Womb,
the transformative Mysteries of the female body.
My snake hair is my serpent-guarded wisdom
for it is within Female Spiritual Self-knowledge
that my Power lives
such as my Power to say NO!
and stop an assailant in his tracks.
I am the knowledge that when all women claim our
Power to say NO!
We will stop all assailants of women and the Earth
in their tracks.
So, of course, they had to chop my head off.
They got this guy Perseus to do it,
to prove his masculinity.
You see, it seems that my physical features kind of distort
when I’m called to defend myself or my principles
in such a way that can be kind of threatening
to those who expect me to be their victim.
In fact, my furious face alone can petrify an attacker
and turn him to stone.
My furious face is my tool of survival
and so he chopped my head off,
while I was sleeping,
to forbid Female Fury
And then, they say, Perseus used my severed head
to vanquish his enemies, because with it
he could turn men to stone!
He used my head to butcher millions
twisting my meaning completely around
MASS MURDER IS NOT WHAT I’M ABOUT!
This intentional distortion of my essential
truth
MAKES ME MAD!
And my sanity is contained within my madness
for if I succumb to their lies about me
if I become complacent and suppress my truth.
I will be theirs
and they will continue to use my head to butcher.
And I will not. . . .
I was drawn to women’s spirituality circles in my mid-twenties,
as emotionally safe places to experience both the celebration
and ecstasy of life and the pain of being a woman in patriarchy.
In these circles it was safe to be all that I was. Part of
what I was and am is the child of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust.
The pain of that inheritance led me into therapy and to my
spiritual path. It wouldn’t have been healing for me
to be involved with spirituality that didn’t also work
to dismantle oppressive systems of the patriarchy.
My parents were driven quite crazy by their experiences as
young children during the Holocaust. My dad was in concentration
camps, and my mother was in hiding with twelve other people
for two years—in a twelve-foot pit dug underneath a barn.
In raising me, they were completely obsessed with the past,
and forced their graphic horror stories on me from the time
I was very small. They were emotionally and physically abusive
as parents, and I felt they stole my childhood and my innocence
from me as theirs was stolen from them. At the same time,
they instilled in me an understanding of how people were “led
like sheep to their slaughter,” so that I would never
let that happen to me. Over time I gained the awareness that
emotional denial is a pathway to annihilation, and this has
become an essential medicine in my teaching and performance
art.
In order to heal ourselves and our world, women must feel
and express a full range of emotions. Our power is in the
potency of intense feeling—sorrow, rage, love, joy. All
are part of our aliveness and are pathways to ecstasy, creativity
and empowerment.
Through feminism I learned that the violence against women,
children and the Earth are all connected to the world’s
patriarchal, male God religions that teach religious disrepect
and hatred of life and of women. So I have focused my work
on the spiritual empowerment of women. I have experienced
women as powerful shapers of consciousness when our values
are informed by our connection to the Earth, and when our
sense of our own divinity is affirmed by one another in magical
circles through ritual.
In my personal journey, I have had to confront the realization
that claiming ecstasy feels like a betrayal of my parents’
limitations. Ecstasy is beyond their experience. The imprint
of my mother’s need to hide in order to survive and her
survival fixation still influences me sometimes. In the course
of my creative process, I sometimes get into surreal states
of immobilization where I literally can’t breathe and
feel gripped in the back. Why do I feel guilty? I am breaking
tradition. I am leaving behind my parents’ misery.
As I take my performance art into the greater world, I become
scared that I will draw animosity to myself. Everybody wants
to experience ecstasy while we’re here; it often sounds
as though we won’t if we’re fighting for our lives.
But I think one of the ways that we fight for our lives is
through ecstasy! Where do we get our power from? We don’t
get it from constantly being depressed. I don’t. My rebellion
is ecstasy. Performance is ecstasy. Theater has the potency
of a wakeup call. When people are engaged in being entertained,
they also become mesmerized. The messages conveyed have a
transformative power because they go very deep—much deeper
than when one reads a book or hears a lecture. I see artists
as great activists—essential catalysts to change. I think
of my theatrical vignettes as short-attention-span theater,
where the spoken word is integrated with movement and expression
to communicate an alternative reality that reaches to the
cellular level.
Photo by
Sharon Mc Carthy
PRESENT TIME
I dedicate every nuance of my life and breath to the transformation
of human consciousness so we can restore balance with the
understanding that all life is sacred. I love the Earth, and
am acutely aware that we are in a dire emergency. I denounce
the attitude that “It will all work out somehow,”
or “If the planet and every living thing dies, that is
what’s meant to be. She will regenerate herself after
we are all gone.” That’s not okay with me. I can’t
forsake the present moment. It’s not all right with me
if the planet dies! I love this place. It’s my religion
to love and protect the Earth in all that I am, see, say and
do. The resignation and acquiescence of certain “new
age” ideas is intolerable to me, and through Medusa I
speak to this.
They lied to you when they told you
some of your feelings are good and some bad,
some positive and some negative.
Like being happy is being positive,
while being frightened, sad or angry is being negative.
The oceans can be used to test nuclear bombs,
while men rape their daughters,
but WE don’t want to be negative, now, do we . . .
They start telling it to you in childhood when they tell you,
“Don’t be mad, don’t be sad, don’t be
afraid,
don’t be, don’t be, DON’T BE!”
And so you turn to religious practices that teach you to
just let go of your anger,
or just transcend your ‘spiritually incorrect’ emotions
. . .
Welcome to the psychic numbing of the world.
REIMAGING MYTH
Since I made the decision to live my life as an artist, I
have withdrawn from some of my teaching in order to focus
on the performance art with a mythological focus. Authors
such as Charlene Spretnak and Barbara Walker have taught us
that in most cases we have inherited distorted versions of
older myths translated through the patriarchy. This leaves
it to the contemporary mythographers to re-imagine mythology
from the perspective that the feminine was once held sacred
as the life-giver. What were those original myths probably?
I have taken the liberty of creating fresh post-patriarchal
versions of certain myths on my own. In the beginning of the
Medusa piece, I wrote about Eve having a spiritual communion
with the snake and through their erotic and delicious dance
together, their genetics combined and Medusa was born. This
is my intuition about the genesis of Medusa with her snake
spirit. As others have done in the past, I am inventing this
version for our time to help us understand our plight.
I am currently working on an Aphrodite monologue. This completes
the triad—Artemis, Medusa and Aphrodite—whose vignettes
will combine into an hour-long performance in which I shape-shift
to embody each of these archetypes.
ARTEMIS
I understand Artemis as the spirit of nature. Through parthenogenesis
(female self-genesis), this Amazon Goddess of the moon is
born of the Mother Earth. She represents the sacredness of
female autonomy. She doesn’t have the Y chromosome, and
she doesn’t participate in the Y. Although she is clearly
a sister to the Y, she is about the X. She is friendly with
men, but doesn’t hang out too much with them. In our
times she is the protectress of women and of women’s
space. She fosters solitude as an individual woman wanting
to be by herself and left alone, to walk naked in the forest
or dance with abandon under the moon without being threatened
by violence, jail or judgment.
Artemis says:
I am the core of the female self—
before any other influence took hold.
I am the virgin forest of your soul, sisters,
never possessed, never colonized, where you belong to yourself.
She is the journey of finding the core self before the betrayals
of mind and heart by the patriarchy. She is the virgin forest,
the part of us that no one can take away. She is the intact
female psyche. The journey of feminism is the journey to reclaim
that part that is self-defining, self-creating—the self-genesis.
Artemis also represents that sanctuary of claiming women-only
space. That is our birthright. In one place, patriarchy speaks
to her saying, “It’s not very nice of you to leave
the men all alone while you go out doing things with your
women friends. . . . they feel so left out, so excluded.”
In response, Artemis takes out an arrow of truth and shoots
the voice of patriarchy with it. She says:
I, Artemis, am a true Sister to men.
By bringing strength to women,
I deepen the hearts of men!
For I know my brothers well,
and I know that they are strong and wise, and capable
of feeding their own sweet souls with Life
when I am not around
When I am out feeding my own soul
I know that we can have it all . . . .
It delights and somewhat surprises me when a man comes up
to me after a mixed audience performance—his eyes wide
with tears, holding his heart and says, “Thank you so
much. I needed to feel that.” When a performance helps
men understand women’s realities, and changes how they
see themselves in relation to women, that is a triumph for
the goddess. This is also true when young girls and boys are
exposed to female-affirming messages.
APHRODITE
Artemis is about womankind and sisterhood. Medusa is the protectress
of life on Earth, and Aphrodite addresses the sacred urge
to merge. She is about reclaiming a much bigger experience
of the erotic than is allowed by the patriarchy. Her knowledge
originates in the ancient Tantric practices of sexuality,
as a means not merely to orgasm, but to wisdom and ecstasy.
Aphrodite says, “Making love is how we went to church.”
Fertility awareness is an essential part of reclaiming the
sacred erotic and self-knowing. In ancient times, birth control
was paying attention—knowing when you were fertile because
you would slip your fingers inside yourself and see the consistency
of the elixir therein. Through attunement to our own bodies
we needn’t give our power to birth control pills, devices
or surgery. Fertility awareness also includes men’s attunement
to women’s bodies. In heterosexual coupling, which energetically
is a manifestation of the will of life to create itself, the
awareness of women’s cycles can add a highly erotic charge
to lovemaking while preventing superfluous peopling of the
planet.
Mainstream heterosexuality has been commercialized—turned
into bizarre cartoons both pornographic and puritanical. The
sanitized, medical version is also a distortion, making sexuality
one-dimensional. Even our language has distorted our perception
of what we are, and placed the erotic into a cage that prevents
access to the realm of the sacred—the realm of the spiritual
and emotional dimensions of sexuality. The only language that
comes close is poetry.
These sacred theater pieces come out of my life experience,
my study of writing by other women, and from my being born
a spiritual warrior. It is a supreme act of courage for me
and for anyone to take on their life and the healing involved
in undoing 5,000 years of genetic imprints from the patriarchal
mindset. This can be a painful and grueling task.
It has sometimes been hard for others to relate to me as a
constantly self-actualizing, evolving, changing and feeling
person. I often cry when I see the news on television. I am
not always fun at a party, because what I know about the world
affects me. On the other hand, I have a reputation for throwing
the best, most fun parties around. This is because my gatherings
are not departures from the work, but rather very high celebrations
of life that constantly feed the work. As I become bigger
in my awareness, I feel that I hold all of humanity.
Even when we are unconscious of our oneness with all life,
we are reacting to it in some way or another. That understanding
was underscored years ago after seeing the movie, The Secret
Life of Plants, which showed the plants of the Earth responding
to each other’s distress. Vibrationally, they feel what
is happening to each other. A tree will freak out when you
chop down its neighbor. We probably do too. How sensitive
and open are we to feeling? Medusa goes on about the prevalence
of antidepressants in our society as a way of numbing ourselves
to authentic feeling. I feel it is my responsibility to sometimes
feel the unbearable feelings of the pain of humanity. The
only way I can bear this is to turn the pain into a kind of
medicine, which for me is sacred theater.
When I perform the three goddesses, Artemis is the first to
come on stage with her message of female autonomy. Then Medusa
uses her rage to transform patriarchy. Finally Aphrodite speaks
of how we get here. She is key to healing the human psyche.
If we cannot feel the ecstasy that goes beyond genital orgasm,
then we are alienated from our true nature and our connection
to the life force. Our motivation for being here is pleasure—the
pleasure of wisdom. This wisdom transcends the puritanical/pornographic
paradigm and the pleasure/pain imperative. We don’t have
to run from the pain that is a natural part of being alive,
from which we learn and evolve. There is always death and
pain and loss and change; but I don’t think we have to
continue to learn from the pain that comes from violent oppression
and from being exploited, perpetrated against and betrayed.
As humans, we can shift and transform without torturing each
other and ourselves. I’m sure we can do better than that!
Felicity Artemis Flowers is a feminist theorist, ritual
and performance artist, high priestess, educator, and founder/director
of Circle of Artemis (aka Artemis Institute), a northern California
based center for the spiritual empowerment of women. She travels
to perform and present related workshops and seminars. and
is currently also leading monthly healing and empowerment
retreats for women in Maui, Hawaii. Her performance of Medusa
is now available on video. To contact Felicity call (707)
795-8403 or write to P.O. Box 2260, Sebastopol, CA 95473.
