1

Irish Journal of Feminist Studies vol. 2 no. 1 (1997): 117-132.

ON FORGETTING OUR DIVINE ORIGINS: THE WARNING OF DERVOGILLA

Mary Condren

On women's part, after submitting to patriarchal churches for centuries, they have

become disgusted with religion and have forgotten to consider their own divine

origins. The patriarchy has separated the human from the divine but it has also

deprived women of their goddess or their divinity. In the history of women religion

is mixed up with the culture of the earth, the body, life, peace. Religion is the opiate

of the people only because it is imposed upon us as the religion of the race of men.

Luce Irigaray (1987:190)

Since its inception the feminist movement has been divided over the relative

priority of different approaches to the phenomenon of female oppression. Is the key to male

domination to be found in materialist (Marxist), psychoanalytical (Freudian), or genealogical-

-the struggle for power, (Nietzschean) analyses? Others have been concerned to discover the

pristine "origin" of women's subordination, as though this were a phenomenon amenable to

universal explanation. Contemporary feminist theory, however, is developing a multiplicity

of approaches in the recognition that perhaps the exclusive concentration on sex, money, or

power is misdirected. Post-modern feminist theorists have attempted to combine these

various approaches rather than develop a unitary (phallic?) all-encompassing explanation. By

bringing together the materialist, psychodynamic, and genealogical perspectives we try to

form a composite analysis that allows us to take seriously the role that cultural representations

play in the construction of relations of domination and subordination.

Ironically, whereas some secular feminists were critical or dismissive of those

feminists engaged in religious studies, the post-modernist critique of religion has now turned

the debate full-circle. The split between the body and spirit, developed by patriarchy and

swallowed wholesale by some secular feminists, is now being replaced by a sophisticated

2

analysis of how the body and its multiple drives are constructed in relation to symbol systems

with widespread repercussions for all . In particular, there is a new concern about the lack of

empowering images of women in the cultural system and about how this lack shapes the way

we think about ourselves, how our consciousness is formed, and how effective is our ability

to act. (Grosz 1994; de Lauretis 1994; Irigaray, 1987).

The inclusion of the factor of representation is a major advance in

contemporary feminist theory. By focusing, in particular, on the erasure of the female

symbol systems, i.e. the representation of deities as female, or other empowering female

images, we can begin to understand how hard it is for women generally to envisage the

possibility of change.

We now have enough evidence to suggest that have been radical

consequences for women when the dominant cultural symbol systems are exclusively male,

or feature women whose identity is entirely derivative or serving a patriarchal status quo, i.e.

many representations of the Virgin Mary. (Sanday, 1981). The absence of empowering

female images both reflects and effects the subordination of women. This very lack shapes

and deforms the way our drives are constructed so that both body and soul are put in the

service of the patriarchal social order. As Irigaray argued in our epigraph: "religion is the

opiate of the people only because it is imposed upon us as the religion of the race of men."

The work of contemporary feminist religious theorists has enabled us to correlate the

overthrow of the female symbol system with the development of such patriarchal attitudes,

philosophies and religions. (Eisler, 1987; Gimbutas, 1982, 1989, 1991; Marler, 1997;

3

Metzner, 1994; Sjoo and Mor, 1989). We are, thereby, enabled to envisage alternative

paradigms and political systems that might begin to serve the liberation of women and men.

Among the questions being asked are the following: what caused the shift from matri-

centred to patri-centred societies to take place? Why was birth traced exclusively through the

male lines of descent rather than through the mother or both lineal systems; in other words,

why were women's genealogies collapsed? (O'Brien, 1981, 1989). What has been the

effect of the unrelenting propaganda war against women in patriarchal mythology?

(Starhawk, 1987; Condren, 1989).

For instance, in the Irish Dindshenchas writings, (the stories of how places got their

names), one after the other, places were said to be named after the local goddess had been

gangraped, forced to race against the horses of the king while pregnant, or drowned when she

went in search of wisdom. 1 The unrelenting nature of the texts, (yet to receive much, if any,

scholarly attention beyond compilation) testified to widespread oral and written patriarchal

propaganda, the intensity of which must have arisen as a result of the failure of the goddess

images to disappear quietly.

The Dindshenchas was not the only source of this information. Many of the heroic

myths, The Ulster Cycle, The Cycle of the Kings, and the Tales of the Fianna, testified to a

battle between the representatives of matri-centred Ireland and the emerging patriarchal

culture. (Cf. Cross and Slover, 1969). In their present form the myths are often blatant

patriarchal propaganda extolling the virtues of a warrior society. However, as in the

Dindshenchas, the sub-texts speak of powerful female deities and women such as seers,

prophets, and poets, who must have played an important role in pre-patriarchal Irish society.

1 Cf. bibliography.

4

Such sources have hardly begun to be excavated or seriously examined in this light.

In the light of this evidence, how come that the most influential psychoanalyst of all

time, Sigmund Freud, centred his work in Totem and Taboo on the killing of the father, while

ignoring the killing of the mother testified to throughout many mythological systems?

(Freud, 1918). Why in a myth such as the Eumenides in Aeschylus' famous Oresteian trilogy

did patriarchal culture come into being only when Athena announced triumphantly, "no

mother gave me birth, I came full-blown from the head of Zeus," thereby establishing her

credentials to adjudicate on the question of matricide, hitherto a most heinous crime avenged

by the old female deities, The Furies?

Allied to these questions are those often now asked by contemporary theorists: why

do the oppressed consent to their subordination, or how did it come about that the women,

and the matri-centred social system, were apparently so totally overcome? Related to this is

the central problematic for contemporary feminism:

Why is it that the very same analysis that is enabling to some women is oppressive to

others, for instance, white middle class women as opposed to black and working class

women, or white Western women as opposed to Third World women? (Cf. Spelman, 1988).

Is there any commonality now to be found between women or are we forever destined to be

divided and conquered?

The question of the erasure of female deities, female images of the divine,

female representations of wisdom-- in other words, a female symbol system--is now proving

to be crucial for feminist analysis. This erasure did not take place overnight but came as a

result of a long process of cultural change that can perhaps best be characterised as a process

of colonisation.

5

WOMEN AS A COLONIZED PEOPLE

All of the classical features of colonisation can be applied to the relationships between

women and men, or to the subordination of one culture to another. The invasion of territory;

the destruction of the gods; erasure of memory and language; divide and conquer, labelling

of inferiors as innately defective; and the control of freedom of expression. 2

For our purposes here, the most important colonial tactic is the control of systems of

representation and religions. All colonial powers immediately exercise this control, as it

deprives the colonised of the most potent source of their own empowerment, and symbols of

resistance.

In the long process of the colonisation of women by men, this tactic plays a crucial

role. Having made every effort to exclude women, patriarchal society must guarantee their

continued exclusion by carefully controlling their right to speak, to be educated, or to act as

models of liberation. For this reason, women will be excluded from the academies, barred

from the altar, and, where they have managed to break through to provide models of

liberation, they will be caricatured and dismissed.

Very often this process will result in a "self-fulfilling prophecy" whereby the woman

so treated, will eventually go mad, wild, or outrageous, thus justifying, and providing even

further evidence of the correctness of the patriarchal system in excluding her. As the

colonialist will say, "the natives are incapable of governing themselves," and self-satisfied

with such a diagnosis, they will take further refuge in the righteousness of their rule.

There are just some of the tactics and effects of colonisation as they are applied to

women. These could be developed and many others could be mentioned, but the end effect of

2 I have developed this at much greater length in Condren

1993.

6

colonisation classically is that the colonised must be made to be economically, educationally,

culturally, and spiritually dependent on the dominant class. There can be no autonomous

access to any of the institutions where the mechanisms of dominance are preserved, and every

effort will be made to label a colonised person who rebels against the status quo as a deviant.

DIVIDE AND CONQUER

However, not everyone accepts the new colonial culture. The witches, for instance,

held out on many aspects of patriarchy until the advent of Western medicine finally reduced

them to the status of folk-healers. (Heinsohn and Steiger, 1982, 1984; Barstow, 1986, 1988).

The feminist movement today could also be called an anti-colonial struggle. Such struggle on

the part of women, however, is severely hindered by one of the most potent tactics of

colonisation: divide and conquer.

Strong women who do escape complete socialisation or indoctrination, and who try to

develop alternative visions or strategies of resistance will often be dragged down by the very

people for whose liberation they are working. The "divide and conquer" mechanisms of

colonisation are alive and well in the women's movement and are intimately tied up our

ambivalence toward powerful female figures which, in turn, is related to the erasure of

empowering female images in cultural symbol systems.

Feminist theorists are now discovering firm connections between the forcible removal

of a female symbol system, the collapse of female genealogies or representations of

mother/daughter, or other female to female relationships, and the phenomenon which has

plagued the women's movement since its inception: female horizontal violence. 3

3 The term is derived from the Italian feminist movement

which has been concerned to understand the continuing failure

of women's groups to achieve their objectives, and the levels

of hostility among group members that has hindered the

movement's effectiveness. See Sexual Difference, MWBC, 1990.

7

To understand this we should turn to a story that has not yet found its way into any of

the Celtic collections, containing, as it does, a key to the continuing subordination of women.

By looking at this story we can obtain valuable information about the real effects of the rise

of patriarchy and women's status as a colonised people, not only on the relationships between

women and men, but also and perhaps more importantly, between women themselves--

relationships that have helped keep women truly divided and conquered, and enabled

patriarchal social structures to remain intact to the present day: The "Deaths of Lugaid and

Derbforgaill." (Marstrander 1911:201-218).

THE DEATHS OF LUGAID AND DERBFORGAILL

The story begins when the king of Norway grants his daughter Derbforgaill

(Dervogilla is the anglicised version) to Cúchulainn. Cúchulainn, however, would have to

wait before getting married and so they had an appointed time when they would meet on the

strand of Loch Cúan, one year later.

To the day, Cúchulainn and his foster brother Lugaid were waiting on the strand of

Loch Cúan, when they saw two birds flying overhead.

`Have a cast at the birds,' says Lugaid. Cúchulainn threw a stone at them so

that it passed between her ribs and remained in her womb. Straightaway two

human forms were on the strand. `Cruel have you been to me, said the girl,

and it is to you I have come.' `It is true' said Cúchulainn. Thereupon he sucked

the stone from the maiden's side so that it came into his mouth with the clot of

blood that was around it. `It was in quest of you that I came,' said she. `Not

so, O maiden,' said he, `the side I have sucked, I shall not join with.'

Dervogilla found herself in a dilemma. She was an object of exchange between men,

between two competing powers, the king of Norway, and Cúchulainn. The proposed

8

marriage would have strengthened the power of both kingdoms and so she, without any

apparent consultation, had to leave her home and travel to a foreign land. She arrived in the

form of a bird. Fair game for any hunter, this left her vulnerable to the first passing slingshot.

When Cúchulainn sucked the stone from her side, he made a fatal mistake. In ancient

Ireland there was an institution known as the blood covenant, an early form of the state. Only

men could be part of this covenant; only men could suck the blood from one another, and in

return for this invasion of one another's boundaries they made three important promises: they

would avenge one another's death, they would never marry one another's sisters, nor would

they rape one another's wives. (see Hodges 1927:109-53).

By sucking the blood from her side, Cúchulainn had made of Dervogilla, not his wife,

but his blood brother. According to the terms of the covenant he could not marry her, but he

was bound to avenge her death. After many powerful mythological Irish females, the

image of Dervogilla on the mythological scene marks an ominous event. To my knowledge,

Dervogilla was the one and only woman to have been admitted to the inner circle of the

patriarchy. Her status rose in relation to the male hierarchy, but it was entirely derivative and

dependent on her relationship with a man. She was not a woman in her own right; indeed,

even before she arrived she was already an object of exchange between men. She was, in

other words, a colonised woman. At the start she had no say in the disposal of her own fate,

and now she acquiesced in her victimisation. In response she said to Cúchulainn:

`You shall give me then to whomsoever you please.' `I should like you to go,'

said he, `to the man who is noblest in Ireland--that is Lugaid of the red stripes.'

`Let it be so,' said she, `provided that I may always see you.' So she went to

Lugaid and bore children to him.

Now we come to the heart of the matter. Dervogilla was in a precarious position.

She was, you might say, in the position in which colonised women everywhere find

9

themselves: forced to make the best of her circumstances. In order to survive she had had to

mutate herself, change her identity, leave her homeland, and enter foreign soil. She might

have been able to manage all of that until Cúchulainn cast a sling at her: then the real danger

began. She became one of the men; a woman entitled to have her death avenged.

So far in this story we are on familiar ground. Many women can identify with

Dervogilla. We too have left our homeland, been objects of exchange among men, have had

to mutate ourselves, had our memories and our language erased, changed our names, had our

deities destroyed, and have functioned as tokens as a condition of our survival at all. We

know what it is to have had a stone entering our wombs, and to have had the blood sucked

from our sides.

As the story continues there is a darker side which we must hear if we are to begin to

reclaim the sources for our own empowerment. We must re-enter the dark caverns of our

psyches in search of wisdom and understanding. Let us go back to the text.

On a certain day at the end of winter there was deep snow. The men make

great pillars of the snow. The women went up on the pillars. This was their

device. `Let us make our water upon the pillars to see which will enter the

farthest. The woman from whom it will enter, she is the best of us to keep.'

However it did not reach through from them. Dervogilla is called by them.

She did not like it because she was not foolish. Nevertheless she goes on the

pillar and it poured from her to the ground.

`If the men knew of this, no woman would be loved in comparison with this

one. Let her eyes be taken from her head and her nose, and her two ears and

her locks. She will not be desirable then.'

And the women converged on Dervogilla, tortured her and left her for dead.

=======

If I were to cite the one greatest single obstacle for a woman today it would be that:

the internalised oppression, the oppression derived from women who have not become

conscious of their status as colonised people, and who are still arguing and squabbling,

10

scrambling over the mountains of snow set up by the patriarchy.

Significantly, only the woman who has been chosen by the patriarchy can succeed in

playing the game on the men's terms. Dervogilla melts the mountain of snow, but she will pay

for it with her life. Oblivious of the system that enslaves them all, her death has come, not at

the hands of men, but at the hands of women.

But what does all this have to do with the question of a female symbol system? Are

there resources within contemporary feminist theory that can throw light on this

phenomenon?

THE SPECTRE OF THE PRIMEVAL MOTHER

The findings of feminist theorists, especially those influenced by the various schools

of psychoanalysis, would suggest that the shift mentioned earlier, from a matri-centred to a

patri-centred form of social organisation took place as many humans, appalled by the

ignominy of death, strove to overcome human transience, and dependence, under the auspices

of the death drives. They often did this by inventing myths of immortality; often, however,

such myths implied that they had been cheated of immortality by the actions of women.

Many mythologies, for instance, speak of the Fall from grace that takes place almost

as soon as we are born. We grow into culture when we accept that we need to make

independent choices, "know good and evil," and provide for ourselves rather than having

infinite access to the Garden of Paradise. From the moment we leave our mother's wombs we

are all born "into dereliction." However, Western culture, in particular, is characterised by a

constant theme, summarised by Luce Irigaray, who argues that while we are all born into

dereliction, men symbolise their death drives at women's expense. 4

4 Whitford, 1991, 153.

11

To an infantile consciousness the pre-Oedipal mother is an ambivalent symbol of

plenitude and withdrawal over against whom the early psychic struggles are played out (she

gives and withholds the breast, apparently at will). (Klein, 1975). Infants both envy and

idealise the early mother, but men and women have developed two distinct ways of coping

with her power.

Men in the patriarchal system have asserted control over the primeval mother by

colonising the female race as a whole. Men simply abolish the female symbol system, take

full control of all religious rites, and women now only appear within it with derivative

identities as virgins, mothers (of sons) and wives. As the philosopher Luce Irigaray points

out, there are no mother/daughter representations in Western iconography. In other words,

the matricide attested to in patriarchal culture is a psychic as well as a cultural reality.

Women in mythology come to represent symbiosis, dependence, chaos--devouring

females who will prevent men from achieving transcendence. Western culture has found ways

of dealing with such chaotic females: the Furies were sent underground; the Serpent is under

Mary's heel, the Irish goddesses are raped, drowned, or sent under the earth.

In the Irish story of the Táin, the goddess Medb finally lost her power when she had to

menstruate in the middle of a battle. (Kinsella, 1969:250). The tutelary goddess, who

previously was involved in a sacred marriage of king and goddess, is now reduced to offering

her "friendly thighs" to passing strangers in return for favours.

In this way the power of the Primeval or pre-Oedipal Mother (who represents

transience and death) is apparently overcome and the patriarchal symbol system, promising

immortality to those who obey the dictates of its gods, is put into place. While this might

have psychic origins, and take place in the realm of mythology, it also has real and practical

effects.

12

MOTHER/DAUGHTER RELATIONSHIPS

While men's relationship to the Primeval Mother is graphically attested to in

mythologies, much more subtle is the effect on women, and on women's relationships with

each other. 5 Let us return to Dervogilla to see how this might be effected.

A crucial element in the story of Dervogilla is the extent to which the women agree to

be pawns in the social games played by men. They lack female images of empowerment, or

access routes to their own sources of power. As Dervogilla says, "Give me then to

whomsoever you will, provided that I may see you always." She settles for what she can get,

while still lusting after the hero, Cúchulainn.

The blood covenant is the basis of male bonding, but where is the bonding between

women? For instance, Dervogilla's mother was not on the scene when the original deal was

made between the men. Dervogilla was a mother but even her relationship to her future

offspring is defined in relation to the male: "she went to Lugaid and bore children to him." In

the terms of Luce Irigaray, her female genealogy has been collapsed and her desire is

complicit in the patriarchal social order. But the very absence of the mother or the failure to

take her own reality seriously may provide the clues to what is happening.

Dervogilla and her handmaiden came held together by a gold chain. But after they

landed the handmaiden is, like so many women-to-women relationships, silent, invisible, or

utterly taken for granted. The queens, however, are bonded in weakness--a bonding designed

to exclude, tear down, and deface the very woman whose strength might have enabled them

5 As the Milan Women's Collective argue: "Female

political thought has emphasised that the symbolic order has a

material effectiveness not inferior to that of the natural

order, an idea which is not new in itself, but which the

women's movement translated into political practice" (Sexual

Difference 120)

13

to confront the patriarchy that controls their lives. As many feminist commentators have

argued, whereas men kill off the weak, in women's groups women kill off the strong.

The queens' identities as Victim made them even more amenable to manipulation

within the colonial system. But where did the notion come from that they could only find

power at Dervogilla's expense? It is here that we need to understand the deep psychic

consequences of the absence of representations of women in the symbolic system, and the

implications for women and for men. In other words, we are dealing with the tragic

consequences of the erasure of women from enabling religious symbolism; the failure to

envisage transcendent horizons for women, leading to the fantasy that there is only so much

power to go around: "if one woman gets it, it will be at my expense."

In some feminist theory these dynamics have now led to a new assessment of envy

and idealisation in relation to our earliest experiences of mothering. Women also experience

envy of our early mothers, an envy that leaves us in double jeopardy: whatever way we treat

the mother we also treat ourselves. This has led to several schools of feminist thought, one

derived from gynocentric feminism, and the other from post-modern feminism especially that

developed in France and Italy.

Gynocentric feminism assumed that women's experience of mothering and, in

particular, the fact that women do not have to make a radical break or separation with their

same sex parent and primary love object, the mother, predisposes women to be affiliative,

relational, and co-operative. Often feminists have gone on to argue from these premises for

women's superior moral capacity. (Gilligan, 1982; Andolsen, Gudorf, Pellauer, 1985;

Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, Tarule, 1986).

However, the experience of the feminist movement, and especially that recounted in

the psychoanalytically oriented feminist consciousness raising groups in France and Italy,

14

shows the flip side of those characteristics: the inability to tolerate difference; the envy and

jealousy displayed toward women who distinguished themselves in some way. That is to say,

the very same dynamics that enable us to develop such seemingly positive characteristics,

given their common roots in the female experience of developing and maintaining a separate

identity from the mother, also result in the inability to tolerate difference to trust female

figures in authority, and in the need to disparage excellence for fear of breaking up the female

libidinal economy that often recreates or becomes the symbol of originary unity with the

mother. (Kemp and Bono, 1993).

Ironically, and tragically, these dynamics reach their apotheosis, not when women's

movements are beginning, but when there is a possibility of success. (Orbach and

Eichenbaum, 1988: 20) In the early stages of women's projects, women do not have to look at

their own differences but can unite in solidarity for a common task. As Athena argued: "Let

all our wars be fought abroad." In this way negativity is often externalised over against a

common enemy (The Patriarchy), for according to Aeschylus, "unanimous hatred is the best

medicine for a human community." (Aeschylus, 1977)

But these dynamics change radically once groups begin to consolidate and the

question of difference among women comes to the forefront. The libidinal satisfaction that

women might have received in the early stages of the group, (often replicating the holding

functions of the early mother) is now seriously threatened when women's differences come to

the fore and when individual talents are experienced, not a form of riches to be brought to the

group, but as a threat to group cohesion and implicitly, to individual identity.

This confusion around the identities of women in the colonial system compounds the

problem. In the story of Dervogilla, for instance, it is not clear how the queens of Ireland

evaluated her. Was she a servant of the colonial system, or a token woman, one who could

15

not be trusted? Or alternatively, and even more lethally, did she represent the Primeval

Mother, the woman who had it all and against whom "no one else would be loved in

comparison?"

The spectre of the Primeval Mother continues to haunt our consciousness and we

often deal with that by establishing the group as the "neutral mother." In other words, women

often manage our envy of the primeval mother, now collectively symbolised, by killing off

the very strengths that might enable us to challenge the patriarchal system as a whole.

Women may hold themselves back for fear of breaking the connection, or for fear of

retaliation by the group. In turn, we often hold back other women from distinguishing

themselves from the group in any way. This fear of difference leads to what Luce Irigaray

calls, "a night in which all cats are grey." 6 (Irigaray 1993) Devoid of authentic role models of

female empowerment, women are, as a result, crippled by internalised self-hatred.

These dynamics radically impede the possibilities of developing empowering forms of

female leadership. For instance, while we have unrealistically high expectations of feminist

leaders, we often participate in "thrashing" other women. Having been at the receiving end of

abusive power, women are reluctant to give power to anyone. If a female leader takes power,

the fantasy will be (within the economy of envy) that she got it at our expense, and so we will

expend our energies killing her off, while the system of domination itself is not confronted.

6 "Without realising it, or willing it, in most cases,

women constitute the most terrible instrument of their own

oppression; they destroy anything that emerges from their

undifferentiated condition and thus become agents of their own

annihilation, their reduction to a sameness that is not their

own. A kind of magma of "night in which all the cats are

gray," from which man, or humanity, extracts for free what he

needs for food, lodging, and survival." Irigaray, 1993:103-

104.

16

Given the prohibition against competition among women, exacerbated under the aegis

of "sisterhood." Competitive feelings are projected onto strong women, thus demonizing

them. In reality, we are killing off a part of ourselves.

Feminist groups often operate under a new kind of tyranny: the tyranny of the group

that bands together in weakness, to exclude or destroy any woman who threatens to erode the

precarious basis upon which such power rests.

In the story of Dervogilla the "queens of Ireland" display all the characteristics of rival

siblings. Rather than face the terror of their own difference, the "queens" resolve tensions

among themselves by banding together against a perceived common enemy (the Mother who

has everything). They make her into a scapegoat who, excluded from the community, receives

the weight of their envy and jealousy. Although politically powerless to challenge the

patriarchy, these women are content in the myth of their own innocence.

As Italian feminists argue, one of the reasons why women are afraid to face conflict

among themselves is the fear it would "keep the women from being nourished symbolically."

(Sexual Difference, MWBC 1990:98) In other words, women fear the consequences of

individuation from the group because of the threat of maternal retaliation.

Women desperately need to develop a separate identity if we are not to lapse into

psychosis, but the way we do that is determinative, not only of our psychic, but also of the

social structures as well. Here is where the absence of an empowering female symbol system

is most crucial.

FEMALE SYMBOL SYSTEM

Psychic structures are shaped, and shape, power relations between the sexes. A vital

way in which this is done is through the use and control of symbols, in particular, the

eradication of female imagery and its replacement with male heroic spiritual or other

17

warriors, representing strength, individuation, and the possibilities of psychic separation.

In the present patriarchal religious economy the only legitimate representations of

parent child relationships are those of father/son, and mother/son. The mother/daughter

relationship is either non-existent or fused (the overwhelming mother). This makes it very

difficult for women to legitimately provide or accept recognition of other women's

independent subjectivity.

The absence of empowering female images who might foster women's struggle for

individuation has meant that very often we turn to the men, symbols of power and separation.

The fantasy is that they will be the means through which we can separate from what appears

to be symbiotic dependence. Under the circumstances we will often turn to a male arbiter for

recognition or legitimation. As the queens say clearly: "no one would be loved in comparison

with this one." Seeking to find an objective arbiter of their affairs, we look to the very

agencies whose mentality and inner workings have up to now guaranteed, and provided a

legal framework for our continuing subordination.

We become daughters of the fathers crying, like Athena: "No mother gave me birth--I

came full blown from the head of Zeus." (Aeschylus, 1977, 288-292) We can refuse to

separate, and continue to play off the struggle, enlisting the mother on our side, seemingly

against the fathers, but in reality remaining within his orbit. This latter option is the one,

ironically, often taken both by fully colonised women and feminists.

In the case of fully colonised women they often establish the famous "heterosexual

triangles" of mother, daughter and husband. In the words of one psychoanalyst, a woman

may:

seek out the protection of an idealised, omnipotent husband in order to ward

off the intrusive, devouring mother. The intensity, quality and duration of the

18

woman's Oedipal romance with her idealised father is often directly

proportionate to the intensity of her need to escape the clutches of the

overpowering and destructive mother whom she feel "possessed" by.

(Schechter, 1979).

The killing of the mother is the secret story of western civilisation, and the killing of

women by other women is a way of perpetuating it. However, like most unconscious

processes, the most likely form this takes is the form of denial. This again has vital

implications for feminist theory, and might account for the traditional resistance to be found

in women's groups to discussing differences of class, ethnicity, and sexual preference.

DIFFERENCE IN FEMINISM

Some feminist theory has often assumed that "Woman" is a one-dimensional category,

thus erasing differences of class, race, ethnicity and access to cultural and financial resources.

Some strands of feminist theory assume that the category of "Woman" can override these

differences by dint of good intentions, but very often these assumptions are part of the very

dynamics that maintain patriarchy intact. The very strategies that support middle-class women

in their quest for liberation are often those that maintain working class or ethnic minority

women in subordinate positions.

The category of "Woman" is increasingly seen to be part of the universalising

tendency of patriarchy and the manipulation of this category one of the strategies of power on

the part of the dominant classes. In other words, it is often in the interests of women in

dominant classes or ethnic groups to deny difference rather than to explore what this

difference might mean and how unequal access to resources can be overcome.

The injunction: "let's not talk about our differences--let's talk about what we have in

common," can function to silence disadvantaged women from naming the structural

19

inequalities that exist in favour of a new feminist libidinal economy in which such differences

are magically erased. The seductive appeal of this economy serves ultimately to strangle

initiative on all sides-- on the part of the powerful as well as the powerless.

The impetus to deny difference results in what is often the only competition tolerable

among feminists: the competition to see who is the most oppressed, the hierarchy of victims.

Thus the route to an authentic commonality is often lost in this struggle. =====

What is being argued here is that the subordination of women has come about, partly

as a result of deep psychic processes, but superimposed onto those processes are power

relationships that begin to have a life and social effects of their own. In other words, while

most psychoanalysts agree that we are dealing with primordial psychic processes in separating

from dependence on our primary caretakers, our mothers, Irigaray goes further when she

argues that the outcome of these processes is not inevitable and various cultures symbolise

these outcomes differently in dialectical interaction with the social structures.

The killing of the mother may, therefore, be one of the primordial myths of Western

culture but now that we are becoming aware of its lethal political effects we can develop

strategies of intervention at a symbolic level that might lead to change. In the light of

contemporary feminist theory, we can see that these relationships can no longer be seen as

inevitable but are the result of decisions cultures have made and can now change.

The story of the torture of Dervogilla and what it represents is, therefore, one of the

most important myths that we must come to terms with. It is the shadow side of the feminist

movement. We all know what it is to have been tortured, and if we are honest, we will admit

to having, on occasions, played the role of torturer ourselves. We have, in the words of Mary

Daly, been the "token torturers" of our own sex (Daly, 1978).

=====

20

The needs of the colonial system have inscribed themselves in the bodies and psyches

of women and men in the patriarchal system. Thus the question of the necessity for female

symbol systems, returns to central importance in any analysis of female subordination, and

the ways in which female desire is complicit in the patriarchal social order.

A vital part of our work, therefore, must be the theorisation and re-invention of

mother/daughter relationships, not only at an individual, but also at the level of female

groups, and culture as a whole. In particular, we need to work actively to critique and develop

symbol systems as they shape consciousness.

Italian feminists have argued for the need to develop a system of "female

entrustment," in which women can empower other women in whatever way they might be

disadvantaged. In this system women can grow gracefully from dependence to independence

and eventually to provide such entrustment for other women. (see Miner and Longino 1987).

We can also realise how vitally necessary it is to continue excavating, and celebrating

the existence of such systems. Our focus will be as much on the future as on the past. In

other words, we must actively work once more with ritualists, artists, poets, and others in the

creation of such empowering images, related to their cultural context.

In a colonial system the dominant powers, in this case patriarchy, will ensure that the

symbol system supports the ideas, values, ethics, and gender of the dominant sex so that the

outcome of our early psychic processes will be shaped to suit the patriarchal status quo.

These dynamics may have their basis in psychic structures which are now being

recognised as socially constructed. In other words, the claim that everyone experiences the

pre-oedipal or Oedipal conflict in the classical Freudian or neo-Freudian way is an

ethnocentric, not to say a gendered assumption that cannot any longer be sustained.

A new symbolic economy might enable us to surmount the lethal non-choice open to

21

women in relation to mothering dynamics: to kill and be killed.

=====

Let us finish the story of Dervogilla:

She is tortured in this way and afterwards brought to her house.

The men were assembled on a hillock above Emain.

`I think it strange, O Lugaid, said Cúchulainn, `that there should be snow on

Dervogillas's house.'

`She is at the point of death then,' said Lugaid.

They rush at the same speed towards the house. When she heard them she

locked the house on herself.

`Open,' said Cúchulainn.

`Lovely the bloom in which we parted,' said she.

This is what they say, that her soul was no longer in her when they came into

the house. Cúchulainn, however, went into the house to the women and

overturned it upon them so that neither man nor woman came alive out of that

house--that is of the thrice fifty queens, but he killed them all.

The clear message coming from this story to me is this: that the mountain of snow is a

trap, and we climb upon it at our peril. We may succeed, like Dervogilla, in melting it, but if

we do so we will pay the price. Even as Dervogilla's torturers we will ultimately end up

being killed ourselves. For truly if women are to "hear ourselves think" rather than tearing

one another apart, we must find ways, in the words of theologian Nelle Morton, to "hear each

other into speech." (Morton 1985:82)

In the light of what we now know about the tendency of women's groups to destroy

their own internal sources of empowerment, I want to affirm, as Luce Irigaray, the necessity

22

for women who "have forgotten their divine origins" to develop a transcendent horizon--a

space carved out of history, symbols, and imagination--in which our humanity might be

affirmed rather than sacrificed to the needs of the patriarchal order.

There are no easy solutions to the broader questions of inequality among women, in

particular, the unequal access to resources that leave many women utterly impoverished:

Mere knowledge never leads automatically to virtue. But a systematic analysis of the

dynamics of oppression and especially women's internalised oppression, cannot but help

women develop spiritual , ethical, and imaginative resources that will enable us to act

differently for the benefit of all.

At the end of the story, only the mighty hero Cúchulainn is left alive, and he alone is

left to set up the artefacts of death all around him. Seldom have the inner workings of

colonisation been laid bare in such excruciating detail, or in such a way as to challenge us as

women. For if patriarchy continues, and if women remain powerless to challenge its

downward slide to destruction, the earth will indeed be destroyed and nothing will be left but

monuments to death and despair.

23

Mary Condren is Director of the Institute for Feminism and Religion in Ireland and

teaches feminist theory, gender and religion at Trinity College Dublin, and University College

Dublin. She is the author of The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion, and Power in

Celtic Ireland (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1989). She is a former Research

Resource Associate in Women's Studies, at Harvard Divinity School, where she also

completed her doctorate in theology in the area: Religion, Gender, and Culture. Her latest

work is on the role of sacrifice in the construction of a gendered system of representation and

a violent social order.

A version of this article originally appeared in From the Realm of the Ancestors: An

Anthology in Honor of Marija Gimbutas (Marler, 1997).

24

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