This is part of a Wednesday series on Goddess spirituality and political activism.
Apologies for my absence the last couple of weeks. I missed doing a diary for Litha, the Pagan celebration of the summer solstice. One of the common themes in mythology is the sun's departure and reappearance a the winter solstice, working up to a time of celebration at the summer solstice. Sun deities can be both benevolent and dangerous, as in the Cherokee story of Unelanuhi .
Unelanuhi (also called Nunta) watched the earth from her lofty perch in the sky, stopping every evening at her daughter's home to rest. Sometimes the humans looked up at her, and she saw their faces squint and contort. She couldn’t imagine that she had any connection with these creatures. She confided to her brother, the moon, that she thought they were ugly. The moon laughed and replied that he found them beautiful. In the dark of the night, they would bask in his silver light and smile.
Unelanuhi grew jealous. Why should they smile for the moon, and not for her? She decided that she would kill those ugly, ungrateful humans. She burned with such fire that the humans began to faint, and their crops withered and died. Her searing heat claimed one life after another.
In desperation, the humans turned for help to the spirit people. The spirit people advised that they would have to destroy Unelanuhi before she destroyed the earth. They turned some of the humans into poisonous snakes, who then went to ambush the Goddess at her daughter’s home. But they came too early, before Unelanuhi arrived. The daughter saw the snakes and screamed, and a rattlesnake panicked and bit her. The venom killed the girl instantly, and the snakes fled back to earth.
Unelanuhi came home to find her daughter lifeless on the floor. Her grief was so great that nothing else seemed significant to her, not even her anger at the snakes. Unelanuhi shut herself in the home and refused to come out.
Now the earth was no longer parched, but freezing and dark. Once again the spirit people intervened. They sent seven humans to the Land of the Dead, with a box to bring back the daughter’s soul. Each human was armed with a sourwood rod. When they reached the Land of the Dead, they found a gathering of ghosts, all dancing in a circle. Among them was Unelanuhi’s daughter.
Each time she passed by them, one of the humans struck the girl with a sourwood rod. The other ghosts continued their dance, oblivious. The seventh time she was struck, the girl fell down senseless, and the humans stuffed the unconscious ghost into the box.
The spirit people had given one other instruction to the humans: Do not open the box. Every character in a myth ought to be familiar with this instruction by now. If someone tells you not to open the box, there’s a reason. Do. Not. Open. The. Box.
But the girl kept crying out that the box was too small, she was being crushed, she was thirsty. Finally she cried that she couldn’t breathe. Then she went ominously silent.
The humans began to panic. They decided it couldn’t hurt if they opened it just a little, just enough to let her breathe.
A red bird slipped out through the opening in the box, and flew away. The box lay empty; her soul had escaped. And because of this, no one can now return from the Land of the Dead.
Unelanuhi was devastated. She wept so hard that her tears threatened to flood the earth. She wept herself into exhaustion, then collapsed in her dark home.
The humans were worried. If she started weeping again, they could all be washed away. And so, to distract her, they lit fires and began to dance. At first, she didn't notice. The dance went on for days, straining the dancers to the limits of their bodies' ability. Finally Unelanhi was roused by the sound of drumming, and she looked out of her house. She saw the humans dancing in all their passion and grace. And for the first time, she truly looked at them, and she saw they were beautiful.
The Goddess smiled.
Since that day, she has given humans her warmth and protection. She burns neither too hot nor too cold, but gives the warmth and light that we need. And the humans do the Sun Dance so that she will always remember.
This story has obvious parallels with Amaterasu and Demeter and Persephone . But in Unelanuhi's case, her troubles were all caused by her deciding that humans were so dfferent from her, so far below her, that their lives were worth nothing.
That's pretty much how it is with privilege. When you're up high, it's easy to see the people squinting up at you as ugly and small.
Since the Sotomayor nomination, suddenly "empathy" is a dirty word in some quarters. I ran across an article (mega-apologies for forgetting where) that suggested that women judges do reach decisions differently than men do, and questioned whether women judges should be concerned aobut this. Nowhere was it suggested that male judges should be concerned aobut it. The assumption was that male is normal, female is the exception. That, too, is privilege, and like most privilege it can make itself invisible.
It's been weird watching the fauxrage over her "wise Latina" remark. Her point was so obvious: someone who's experienced discrimination understands it better than someone who's only been at the other end. Does anyone really think that Plessy v. Ferguson , the SCOTUS decision that upheld "separate but equal," was miraculously free of any bias from the fact that it was decided by eight white males?
A footnote about the 1896 Plessy decision: fifty years later, a young law clerk named William Rehnquist wrote the following :
I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by "liberal" colleagues but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed.... To the argument ... that a majority may not deprive a minority of its constitutional right, the answer must be made that while this is sound in theory, in the long run it is the majority who will determine what the constitutional rights of the minority are.
Rehnquist, of course, went on to become a Supreme Court justice in 1971, and was chosen by Reagan as Chief Justice in 1986. I remember that in his confirmation hearing - and in Antonin Scalia's, which was around the same time - it came up that both had signed restrictive covenants agreeing not to sell their homes to African-Americans or Jews. This was shrugged off.
When you're a minority without privilege, it's a very big deal to have the majority deciding where you have the right to live. When you're in the majority, you may not even see it as privilege; it's simply "the way things are."
Most of us are in the majority in some respects, and the minority in others. This is how we learn empathy, if we have any sense. Unelanuhi was able to see her connection with the humans, and understand that their suffering mattered, only after she had suffered her own loss.
A belated happy Litha to all of you...and don't open the frakkin' box!