Excerpt from If Women Rose Rooted: A Life-changing Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

by Sharon Blackie

[Before there was the Word, there was the land, and it was made and watched over by women. Stories from almost every culture around the world tell us that once upon a time it was so. For many native tribes throughout America, Grandmother Spider continual­ly spins the world into being. For the Andean peoples of South America, Pachamama is the World Mother; she sustains all life on Earth. In Scotland and Ireland, the Cailleach - the Old Woman -made, shaped and protects the land and the wild things on it. In these and other Celtic nations, Danus gave birth to all the other gods and was mother to the people who followed. Women: the cre­ators of life, the bearers of the Cup of knowledge and wisdom, personifying the moral and spiritual authority of this fertile green and blue Earth.

Do you remember those days?

Me neither. Other indigenous cultures around the world may still respect and revere the feminine, but we Western women lost control of our stories a long time ago. The story which I was given to carry as a very young child, the story which both defined me and instructed me about the place I occupied in this world, ac­corded no such significance to women. In this story, the woman was an afterthought, created from a man's body for the sole purpose of pleasing him. In this story, the first woman was the cause of all hu­manity's sufferings: she brought death to the world, not life. She had the audacity to talk to a serpent. Wanting the knowledge and wisdom which had been denied her by a jealous father-god, she dared to eat the fruit of a tree. Even worse, she shared the fruit of knowledge and wisdom with her man. So that angry and implaca­ble god cast her and her male companion out of paradise, and de­creed that women should be subordinate to men for ever after­wards.]

[The stories we tell about the creation of the Earth and the ori­gins of humankind show us how our culture views the world, our place in it, and our relationships with the other living things which inhabit it. And the key consequence of this particular creation myth is a belief, prevalent now for centuries in the West, that women are naturally disobedient, temptresses who must be kept firmly in their place. We are weak-willed, easily persuaded to think or do evil, faithless, untrustworthy, mendacious, and moti­vated purely by self-interest. The story of Eve in the Book of Gene­sis is the underpinning for countless measures which have limited the actions, rights and status of women. No matter what women might achieve in the world, the fundamental message of the sacred texts of the world's largest religious grouping, which for 2,000 years have supplied the foundational beliefs of our Western cul­ture, is that men should not trust women, and that women should trust neither themselves nor each other.]...[The world which men have made isn't working. Something needs to change. To change the world, we women need first to change ourselves - and then we need to change the stories we tell about who we are. The stories we've been living by for the past few centuries - the stories of male superiority, of progress and growth and domination - don't serve women and they certainly don't serve the planet. Stories matter, you see. They're not just entertain­ment - stories matter because humans are narrative creatures. It's not simply that we like to tell stories, and to listen to them: it's that narrative is hard-wired into us. It's a function of our biology, and the way our brains have evolved over time. We make sense of the world and fashion our identities through the sharing and passing on of stories. And so the stories that we tell ourselves about the world and our place in it, and the stories that are told to us by oth­ers about the world and our place in it, shape not just our own lives, but the world around us. The cultural narrative is the cul­ture.

If the foundation stories of our culture show women as weak and inferior, then however much we may rail against it, we will be treated as if we are weak and inferior. Our voices will have no trac­tion. But if the mythology and history of our culture includes women who are wise, women who are powerful and strong, it opens up a space for women to live up to those stories: to become wise, and powerful and strong. To be taken seriously, and to have our voices heard.]

Author Sharon Blackie writes, “In this book, I'll share with you the story of how I reclaimed my native myths and traditions, for the stories of women today need to be told.”