From: cortese@skid.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese)
Subject: Re: New pagans and reading
Newsgroups: alt.pagan
Organization: University of California, Irvine
Date: 8 Sep 92 23:47:41 GMT

In article <1992Sep8.193403.4038@access.digex.com> corun@access.digex.com (Corun MacAnndra) writes:
>Dearest Janis,
>
>Greetings and brightest blessings to you. Thank you from the bottom of my
>heart for your kind and insightful words. I understand, and have agreed
>for some time with everything you said. I especially liked you analogy to
>tuning a guitar. I play guitar and Irish music, and if you've ever been to
>a seisun and tried to tune up while an Uilleann piper is tuning up...Yikes!
>I know that women have been usurped for longer than either of us care to 
>think about, and I didn't want my question to sound like I was against 
>anything women are doing to change that. I have a button that reads "Women
>hold up half the sky," and another that proclaims me as another man against
>rape. Believe me, if you knew how that subject churns my innards.
>
>However, I must not have made my question clear. It's not that women's
>mysteries frighten or worry me, it's that I can't find anyone who knows
>diddlybop about men's mysteries. 

Gotcha.  I think it was your saying "Aren't men as sacred as women?"
that made me think you were questioning.  However, ailsa caught on to
what you were saying so I suppose I can't use that excuse . . .

Basically, all I can echo here is ailsa's call to start making `em up!
Women's mysteries are present because we felt such a profound need for
them and crafted over years.  Because they haven't been openly stomped,
men may not have felt that urgency for a feeling of sacredness RIGHT
THIS VERY MINUTETOMORROW AT THE LATEST that a lot of women felt; after
all the established religions think men are better than women.

However, due to this crapping on us, men have lost a great deal and have
been psychically and psychologically crippled for years.  AND, you don't
have a convenient place to point the FFFoF (the Flying Fickle Finger of
Fate for those who remember Laugh-In).  Men's mysteries are sorely
needed, IMHO, and they'll pop up.  Men just have to want them at large,
after realizing that the psychological crippling that they've been
subjected to is no damned good.

>The session I went to at Ecumenicon was
>worthless. Nothing was said except that some of the men were afraid to open
>up because of the women in the room, and subsequently the whole thing turned
>into one big whine session. Nobody discussed men's mysteries at all, and 
>I'm curious. Is there such a thing? Does it go beyond the sweat lodge?
>What are it's roots? Things like that.

Dunno.  Overall, I'd say that men just have to do what women did -- look
in the past for good things, and steal from any source that doesn't run
away too fast.  I'm in the process of lifting stuff From Minoan Crete.
Hopefully when I'm done, there will be something of value at the end of
this path I'm hacking out for myself. 

>Personally, as a Taoist and a computer engineer, I believe in the creation
>and propogation of energy. All things in the universe give some kind of 
>energy, and the higher the degree of sentience, the more likely that the
>creature will be able to control it. Like a coin, there is male energy
>and female energy, and both are needed to make a congruent whole. I guess
>I'm seeking a method whereby I can recognize and utilize more fully, and
>for the greater good, the energy that I inherently create or propogate. I
>had thought that information about men's mysteries would help along that
>line. 

I'm in the process of finding all that junk out for myself now.  I am a
woman, but that doesn't mean that the women's spirituality movement fits
me like a glove.  There are a lot of things rthat don't suit me well in
it, so I'm trying to weave it together with the principles of science
and language and custom-tailor the end product to suit me.  You may be
forced to make your own method; this effort will be well-spent, though.
I'm not exactly at peace, but I've faced things about myself since
starting (the whole thing started when I realized I didn't want to be a
physicist; one watershed revelation can set off others) that I've spent
a long time burying continuously (these things don't stay buried once
and for all; you have to do constant upkeep to keep them down).  Start
blazing a new path.  It can only do good. 

>I apologize for not clarifying that in my first missive. Sometimes
>it takes me awhile to type what I really mean.

Fret not.  I have the same problem. 

>Anyway, I loved you message to me. 

You doll! 

>You remind me somewhat of a woman who
>is near to my heart. If you are familiar with Marion Zimmer Bradley's
>Darkover books, know that she and I have exchanged knives. She is my Breda,
>and I am her Bredu. We're not lovers, and probably never likely to be as
>we each have one of those, but the relationship is deep. She speaks to me
>much as you did. From the heart. And I am never afraid to tell her anything.
>Would that all people could know such love.

Thank YOU for these words!  Reading stiff like this makes the flamewars
worth every character I type. 

>Bb,
>
>Corun

Bb back atcha!
Janis