04/12/2023
LYSISTRATA
There is an ancient play written by Aristophanes in 411 BC in which the women from the warring factions of Sparta and Athens come together to end the war under the leadership of Lysistrata, a powerful Athenian woman with a deep sense of individual and social responsibility. How do these women, the wives of sworn enemies, accomplish such a significant social outcome?
They band together - all sides of the warring factions - and all the wives and lovers of all the warring men of all the lands agree to stop having s*x with their husbands and lovers until the men lay down their weapons. For some time, the men stagger around the Acropolis, waging war with raging erections, whilst the women go about their daily activities, s*x-striking. But the women eventually "win" and the s*x-starved men create a truce, thus ending the squirrelly Peloponnesian war.
Today, the modern descendants of Lysistrata stand on the cultural fields of our scarred and wounded society rapt with their righteous Kali anger, calling for justice, pink p***y hats held high upon their staff, somehow attempting to end a war that is not being fought.
Let me be clear: the anger of women is *right*, the choice made by some women to close thigh and throat and heart to men is RATIONAL. These Lysistrata women, with their heroic intellect and highly educated vantage points, administer a meaningful inoculation into our clearly unwell culture, the inky veins of bleeding into our collective rivers of body and psyche.
"We must hold men accountable", they say - and in many ways, they are right.
This is one way that women can effect change: by closing our bodies and hearts to men, taking our sensual swag and expression of feminine eros and leaving the party. However, this leaves both men and women segregated from the well-spring of erotic connection and openness that HEALS US ALL.
The moment we sever ourselves from Eros….our erotic life-force…that which animates ALL life (regardless of gender or s*xual enactment), we all suffer.
We become brittle, bitter, a ghost at the feast.
There is a deep re-templatization of union occurring between the Masculine and the Feminine. Deep codes of healing and activation are encoded in the s*x and the erotic life-force constellated between the (personal *and* archetypal) Feminine and the Masculine.
If women do not open themselves to being *penetrated* by the Masculine….the sacred Wands of Light of both c**k and holy spirit, we wither…and when the women wither, so does our world.
If women do not open - and *literally* - create ourselves through our devotional heart to receive the life-creational seed (symbolic or actual) from the Masculine, then men and/or the cosmic principle of the masculine literally have no place to put their NEEDED GENIUS - the life-affirming masculine leadership which is *precisely* what our broken world requires.
The moment women deny the reality of our Beingness as the Golden Chalice, we enter into a Thanatos-driven collapse (Thanatos is our instinct towards Death - the opposite energetic of Eros) into an overly-regulated, overly-politicked intellectual separation from our wildness, from the throbbing heartbeat of LIFE itself.
The archetypal and mythic dimension illuminates there is another way . Its messier, perhaps not as quantifiable…yet it is a way that glistens with the wetness of our tears and our desire….opened, dripping, re-membering.
In the Baghavad Gita, the 108 lovers and consorts of Krishna sing and twirl and sweetly surrender into sensual play (which is so beautifully called "leela"). This is the sweet, devotional, alluring play of the "Gopis", the cowherd girls , their dance and joy being an expression of Bhakti - their sensual devotional nature opened by Krishna, the impersonal, archetypal masculine.
These are women who wake from their sleep at night to wander deeply into the moonlit forest in response to Krishna's enchanted flute playing. Here, in the presence of their shared Beloved, they dance and play in their sensual aliveness.
Some women do not - or choose not to - hear the invitation of the archetypal (or personal!) masculine to come play…to come heal one another within the Eros-drenched darkness. Some women choose the path of Lysistrata, its cold stones worn smooth by the generations of women who have come before: heart and s*x justifiably closed in response to "masculine wrong-doing" - its imprint upon the feminine pain body undeniably evidenced and projected onto the neon marquis of social media and mainstream news alike.
The Lysistrata women will tell you *accurately* that women have been oppressed, r***d, murdered and burnt at the stake by the bloodied hands of men - or at the least, "the patriarchy". This very well may be true…..AND…..if this is your only belief - or even at the core of your beliefs of and about men, it is deadening YOU (not just them, as is likely intended) because it divorces you from the TRUTH and the moonlit magic of who YOU are.
Other women choose the humbled, achingly messy way of Krishna's Gopis - his cow-herding dakinis. These women choose to lay down their own armor, to be ravished by their devotion, to make love from nothing at all, and let the innocence of their feminine nature be enchantingly dangled for ALL the world to behold. This quality of Feminine nature is immortal, ageless, physically irrelevant: the sweet innocence of the Feminine in the expression of her pleasure, her sensual play, her "leela".
I know the place in me that stands in the humble lineage of "Gopi", one of the eternal dakinis of the archetypal masculine. I know the place in me that feels deeply grateful to fall to my knees, drawing immortal devotion through tender, thinned skin of dirty and pine-needled knee into the deeper flesh of thigh, of root, of wetted swollen lips.
My throat opens, my mouth is hot and wet, choking on the fullness of my own longing and an ancient desire within the wilderness of me that is jaguar (my pleasure huntress), gazelle (the way I know myself as sacred prey), and temple serpent (that which weaves the two in the indigo darkness).
"Thank you….thank you" slipping from my lips, spilling upon his hallowed s*x.
I am well aware that we are living in a trauma-saturated cultural conversation. I also carry a deep knowing that there is a place beyond cement and scar, battle and bruise. This requires allowing ourselves to be ravished by our own hunger…the quintessential desire to be filled by a man, to be taken by the masculine.
After the zeitgeist of frenzied finger pointing and the trembling reclamation of "this is what happened to me" (deep bow to all the women who found the courage to lift the veils of their own grief-soaked secrets), there must be an invitation towards MORE. There must be a visceral re-membering that WE are the sisters, wives, daughters, lovers, and mothers of MEN...that the double-helix-ing of relationship and interdependence and dare I say LOVE for one another is in our very DNA.
The Feminine is not rising.
The Feminine does not rise. SHE DESCENDS and grows downward….into the earth, womb, darkness, blood, wetness, rapture - and it is from this fecund, moonlit realm of DEVOTION that the FEMININE CREATES KINGS.
To the Lysistrata women, the regal empresses and the mighty queens:
you can have your cold throne of sturdy opinion and empirical evidence. You may sit high above, formidable with intellect, attempting to end an ancient and false "war" - the life-creating cosmic seed of the Masculine having no place to burrow within these fortressed gray gardens of fact, anger, and archaic narrative.
There is nothing your reasoning can do for our torn-asunder world until you open your heart and your s*x, ecstatically shattering open like 1000 blades of grass blowing by cool and muddied waters, your knees stained with dirt, the sound of a distant flute calling you into the moonlit forest.
Your castle may be beautiful, right, and pristine - but until you have been anointed with the stain of your own longing, you are no queen.
-Gillian Pothier
