This is part of a Wednesday series on goddess spirituality and political activism.
I had promised a review of Stolen Innocence , a memoir by Elissa Wall, a member of the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints (Warren Jeffs cult). Elissa was forced to marry her cousin at the age of fourteen. At eighteen she found the strength to leave behind her husband, her religion, and the only life she had ever known. I started the review, but it got mixed up with some thoughts on the Greek Goddess Rhea .
Rhea was a very ancient earth Goddess, often identified with the Anatolian Great Mother, Cybele . In Classical Greece, Rhea was known as a Titan, the wife of Kronos (Time). Kronos had defeated and castrated his tyrannical father, Uranus. Greek myth has it that the time under the rule of Kronos and Rhea was a golden age with no war.
But Kronos feared that one of his children would supplant him, as he had supplanted his father. And so when their daughter Hestia was born, Kronos swallowed the baby. Rhea continued to bear his children, and Kronos continued to swallow them (as indeed Time devours everything that Earth creates, except possibly styrofoam). Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon: he swallowed them all.
But when Zeus was born, Rhea wrapped a stone in swaddling clothes and gave it to her husband. In his haste, he failed to notice that it wasn’t a baby (and didn’t bother to take off the clothes). Kronos saw everything on earth, sea, or sky, so Rhea hid the baby in a cave, suspended by a branch above the earth. She sent a troop of warriors to dance in full armor outside the cave, their noise drowning out the baby’s cries. Ever afterward, Rhea was honored with armed dances.
When Zeus was grown, he came to his father and offered him a drink. Not recognizing the young man, Kronos drank the potion that made him vomit up the stone, followed by Zeus’s five siblings. The Gods and Goddesses overthrew the Titans, and Kronos’s rule gave way to the Olympians. (On the upside, having disgorged five full-grown deities, Kronos no longer needed Jenny Craig.)
Here’s what I want to know: what changed for Rhea in between the fifth and sixth baby? Why was Zeus one too many? Was it something about Kronos, something about this baby, or something inside herself that just said Enough? The kinder explanation is that she was plotting this all along, and was just looking for an opportunity when Kronos was distracted. But Greek deities had all the best and worst qualities of humans, so I’m not so sure.
In "Stolen Innocence," the character who haunts me is not Elissa or even Warren Jeffs, but Elissa’s mother Sharon. Like Rhea, Sharon allowed her children to be devoured, one after another, by a monster.
Sharon Wall was one of three wives to Elissa’s father. They had fourteen children together (plus ten from his other wives). It is impossible to overstate the importance of marriage in FLDS dogma. To achieve salvation, a woman must be married, and must be called by her husband to join him in heaven. Heaven has different levels, and to reach the highest one, a man must have at least three wives. The demographic problem is obvious: there aren’t enough women for each man to have three wives, and the imbalance is further skewed when leaders like Jeffs have far more. So, teenage boys and young men are frequently kicked out of the community over minor infractions, and given vague orders to "repent from afar."
Sharon’s oldest son Craig began displaying some normal teenage behavior, rebelling against authority. The parents were ordered to turn him out of the house. Elissa describes going with her mother to drop Craig off by the side of the highway, with a sign so that he could hitchhike to the city. Afterward, Sharon sat weeping for a long time, unable to start the car and drive away. But she did it.
After that, perhaps she had too much invested to quit. Having sacrificed her son, how could she say no when more sacrifices were demanded? She followed orders to leave her husband and marry another man, while her children begged to be returned to Daddy. She lost the rest of her sons, one by one, some being cast out and others running away. When fourteen-year-old Elissa was ordered to marry her nineteen-year-old cousin, Sharon tried to argue with the "Prophet" Warren Jeffs on her daughter’s behalf. But in the end she bought Elissa a wedding dress and tried to get her to smile for the cameras. Even after Elissa told her mother about being repeatedly raped by her husband, Sharon could not stand up for her. She would argue and plead with the men in power in the cult, but she couldn’t find the strength to walk away and say Enough.
Ironically, those very sacrifices by Sharon were what helped Elissa leave. Her exiled brothers, and a sister who had left the cult, provided her with the support she needed to get out when she was eighteen. Elissa went on to help put Warren Jeffs behind bars as an accessory to her rape. The hardest part for her was leaving behind two younger sisters, knowing that her mother couldn’t protect them.
Part of Sharon’s behavior can be explained by the cult’s extreme control. Elissa tries to explain how cult members believed that their Prophet was never going to die, and that when a woman was reassigned to a different husband, the children’s DNA actually changed to make him the biological father. FLDS members are isolated, given no education outside of church schools, and threatened with eternal damnation for any infraction. But there are plenty of people who don’t live in that isolated environment, and still believe absurd things. (Heard the latest about Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate? Or the "murders" of Vince Foster and Ron Brown?))
I know that some people on this site take the view that religion itself is the problem. I would say instead that ideology is the problem, religious or not, when it becomes more important than the real live person standing next to you. Enormous amounts of damage have been done in the name of communism, capitalism, and all kinds of nationalism, as well as the fundamentalist fringe of religion. We have people right now calling for revolution in our country, deliberately stirring up fear about "FEMA reeducation camps" and other nonsense. And I’m trying to understand what pulls a person out of the mindset where they’re willing to inflict all kinds of harm, even on their own families, for a cause that can never be questioned.
Part of the answer is that sometimes it hits home. Elissa left when the mistreatment became unbearable. I’ve seen some people change their view on (for instance) homophobia when a member of their own family came out. (There are others, of course – Pete Knight, Charles Socorides, Dick Cheney – who, Rhea-like, let their children be devoured.)
Those who are capable of empathy can be swayed when confronted by the consequences of ideologues out of control. A generation ago, people were shocked by images of civil rights protesters – including children – attacked with fire hoses and dogs. The murder of Matt Shepard had a similar effect. On a smaller level, former Republican attack dog David Brock (now of Media Matters ) left the fold after facing the harm he’d done with his smear book against Anita Hill. John Cole of Balloon Juice is probably a bad example; he was a Republican but not of the Kool-Aid-guzzling variety. Still, it’s interesting that the last straw for him was the Schiavo fiasco. After a disastrous war and the shocking image of Katrina, the party’s crass exploitation of one family’s tragedy was enough to say Enough.
For Elissa Wall, the other piece was contact with people outside the closed system of the FLDS. She’d been taught that outsiders were wicked, and apostates who’d left the FLDS were especially evil. But she knew her siblings, and she met an ex-FLDS man that she eventually married. My own stereotypes about Muslims fell apart in college when I met a Muslim feminist. It’s harder to fear a real person than a caricature. (Harder, but not impossible: Germany, Rwanda and Bosnia all saw genocides where people literally killed their own neighbors.) Of course, this presupposes that one is open to interaction with the outsider; had Elissa followed FLDS doctrine, she wouldn’t even have spoken with them.
Looking at her mother and the FLDS, Elissa is afraid for her younger sisters. Looking at the storm (or rather, Stormfront) brewing on the far right, I’m afraid for my country and for the violence that can so easily follow the escalating rhetoric. There are people who scream for revolution without seeing how it could swallow their own children. And I don’t know what’s enough to make them say Enough.