Merlin Stone Remembered

by David B. Axelrod

  Yet, as a therapist who has spent so much of my time doing couples counseling, and despite the recent peculiarities at home, I truly enjoyed my relationship with my husband for nearly thirty years. I wondered what I might say to Andrea that would be honest and helpful.

  “Of course you’ll make your own decisions about relating to men. You’re certainly functioning well in managing your life, your new apartment, and new friendships. And I can see that since you left Roger, your sense of satisfaction with your life seems healthy and constructive. Your view of men may be just a state in your recovery from the divorce, or perhaps you’ll continue to feel this way. Time will tell. But I’ve been meaning to ask you since you haven’t mentioned your work for quite a while, how’s it going?”

  “It’s all right. I’m getting a little bored with my job at the magazine. And, of course, with all the changes I’ve had to make since I left Roger, I haven’t had much time to do any writing of my own. Actually, I haven’t written much of anything. It’s a little hard to concentrate. I’m sure I’ll start again soon. I have some ideas for a play.”

  “That sounds interesting. As I said before, the decision of whether or not to stop therapy is also completely up to you. It’s funny; I recently had lunch with a woman who helped me through much of my pain after my divorce when I was just about your age, and she wasn’t a therapist at all. In fact, she was a very poor seventeen-year-old Native American woman—a waitress at a place where I was staying for a few months, although now she’s become very active in the environmental movement in British Columbia.”

  “I didn’t realize you had been divorced. You always seem as though you know yourself so well, that you would go through life making all the right decisions.”

  “Andrea, I’m almost sixty years old. If I haven’t learned something about myself over all these years, I’d be a rather unobservant person. Everyone makes mistakes. The trick is to notice them as soon as possible. What’s that old saying, “That’s why they put erasers on pencils”?

  “Now we have computers. We get into the habit of changing and changing and changing and never being completely satisfied,” Andrea said. She thought for a moment and then added, “You know, I think I would like to continue our sessions for at least a little while longer if that’s all right with you.” (pp. 161–165)

  One could make a case that many details of Merlin’s own life are interwoven in her novel. Merlin’s own brave quest to research and document Goddess worship could easily relate to her hero Addie’s own meditation on what motivates people on a quest. Addie’s perceptions of what makes a successful male-female relationship are very likely tempered by Merlin’s own happy personal relationship with her lifemate, Lenny. Merlin had her ups and downs, her first divorce and a second brief marriage that was also connected to time she spent in British Columbia. Parallel after parallel may be drawn, and, indeed, there is an entire field in literature, biographical criticism, that builds interpretations of works of fiction around the facts of an author’s life. As authors often live private lives and, after their passing, are obviously not available to validate one theory or interpretation or another, it may be a safer task to simply read and discuss the passages themselves to glean whatever wisdom they may contain. Critics can’t claim fiction as fact any more than they can read an author’s mind.

  That said, Merlin may well have left us some fascinating glimpses into her own personal views in the perceptions she attributes to Addie, who observes:

  Time span. Looking backward, deep into the past. Looking forward, far into the future. Was it like a perspective point in a drawing, allowing us to see as far into the future as we could see into the past? Are all quests actually different efforts to understand this vast expanse of time and to try to make some sense of how yesterday links with tomorrow? It’s like a bridge being constructed from both banks with the hope that they’ll meet in the middle of the river, each of us trying to weld the two parts together in our own way and in our own lives. (p. 199)

  Looking back over her lectures in her class on cult behavior, Addie observes:

  I was increasingly aware that many people did seem to be on a quest for power and control, not unlike cult leaders. I felt I needed to present a more overall view of the quest for power and control, how it relates to a quest for status, and the impetus for the creation of hierarchy.

  It had recently been brought to my attention in so many different ways. There had been a breakthrough with women realizing that many males had set up a hierarchy that regarded females as inferior. There were people … who realized that a hierarchy had been set up by many Caucasians based upon portraying other races as inferior. There were the hierarchical attitudes of many Anglo-Saxons that depicted Italian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Polish-Americans, and so many other ethnic groups as inferior. Some Protestants regarded Catholics as inferior. There were even status hierarchies between the different denominations of Protestants, some viewing others as less socially acceptable, less well bred. People with a great deal of money often regarded the lives of poor people as less important, while some with college degrees made it clear that they looked upon those with less education as less intelligent.

  What else could all these attitudes be except a quest for a higher status, a means of fulfilling the quest to feel power and control? And who else could have created these hierarchical spectrums, these ladders of status in so many facets of life, other than those who had decided they were on top? Oddly enough, many of the methods used by cult leaders to diminish the value or worth of their members were all too similar to the methods used by those who claimed to be at the top of each hierarchy. It was to diminish the value or worth of the particular groups of people they had placed further down on the ladder. In one way or another they were all saying, “You should be more like me, but you can’t.” (pp. 16–17)

  It should be noted that Merlin expresses similar thoughts in her groundbreaking pamphlet Three Thousand Years of Racism (New Sibylline Books, 1981). Addie continues to question and observe:

  Why were people setting up these ladders on which to judge themselves and others in the first place? Why did people even think in terms of status and hierarchy? It was almost certainly a part of the quest for power and control, but then why the quest for power and control?

  I had recently read an article about the serotonin levels in the brains of chimpanzees. It claimed that becoming the leader of a group had raised their levels of serotonin. Could the quest for power and control be fueled by an unconscious desire to have a higher level of some neurotransmitter rushing around in the brain? I felt the need to present these questions to the class, but it was frustrating to realize I didn’t have any specific answers.

  I could hear my mother saying, “Figuring out the right question is halfway to the correct answer.” (pp. 243–244)

  All this is in Dr. Addie Weaver’s voice. In his memoir of his life with Merlin, Lenny Schneir notes how Merlin loved her mother greatly, though he notes a moment along the way where she wished her mother better understood her writing and publications. It seems fitting that Addie can “hear my mother” giving good advice.

  For all the wisdom revealed in the nearly four-hundred-page manuscript of Merlin’s novel, some of the best advice seems to be on how we relate to children. The comments are imparted during a scene describing Addie’s class on cults and cult behavior:

  One of my deepest beliefs is that too many children are not encouraged to think for themselves, not only not encouraged but at times actively discouraged.

  “We know what’s best for you. You’re too young to understand. Just do as I say.” I believe these phrases find their way into children’s innermost belief systems and, without any attempt at explanation by the parent, weaken children in the long run. Encouraging a touch of skepticism in children may be as crucial to their safety as warning them to watch for cars when they cross the street.

  “Cult lead
ers use gullibility, naive innocence, to their advantage as they encourage people to trust them rather than themselves,” I explained to the class. Some of the students nodded in agreement. Others looked puzzled. The message that a child should not trust his or her own judgment is a subtle, almost subliminal process that can even further discourage the child’s trust in what he or she perceives. How is this form of undermining done to children? I’ll use the word ‘reflection’ for want of a better one. By reflection I mean a subtle impact that a parent or caretaker is having on a child. Reflection often determines a child’s sense of identity, their sense of the value or worth of their own perceptions and judgment. …

  The idea is to gradually teach them to use and trust their own perceptions and judgment so they can learn to think and reason for themselves, and for us as adults to understand that they are in the process of learning to do this. The pattern of a so-called spoiled child is a pattern of being unreasonable. Encouraging children to use their own perceptions and judgment to think and to reason helps them learn to negotiate differences and decisions in a reasonable way. It results in just the opposite of a spoiled child. (pp. 38–40)

  A biographical critic would have to delight in noting that Merlin’s theories seem to work, as her own two daughters have gone on to lead happy, successful professional lives with solid families of their own. What Addie, in the novel, perceived must have helped in Merlin’s life. A myth critic, finding the deeper, mythological roots for even the characters in contemporary novels, could delight in finding the archetypal Earth goddess in Addie’s nurturing and bringing forth wellness and growth in Andrea and at least three other patients.

  A psychological critic could, of course, psychoanalyze the author through her characters, asserting that, like dreams themselves, the fiction is a projection of the author’s own deepest aspirations and beliefs.

  However, here one need only operate as a simple literal reader, enjoying the words Addie herself uses to summarize the actions in the book:

  I suddenly found myself thinking that all quests might be a reaction to the infantile hunger of our insistent egos, an effort to satisfy their continual crying out for reassurance and a desperate clinging to a self-righteous security blanket of power and control. On the other hand, they could be a response to the call of our immortal souls that needs to feel the flow from where we began, our origins, and to where we might be going. This creates a deep desire to follow the gentle whispering voices as they try to help each of us build our own unique bridge between yesterday and tomorrow, inspiring us with a yearning to experience the exultant joy of sensing eternity in the here and now.

  The question was how to decide between the loud, driving passions of our egos and the gentle, tranquil guidance of our souls. As if in answer to my question, I could hear the voices … that someday all of us would naturally perceive our connections to everything and everyone, as well as a greater comprehension of time, as far backward and as far forward as each of us would be capable of envisioning. Perhaps it really was a matter of time, a matter of transforming ourselves, a matter of reaching a level of human development that would make it possible for us to quiet our egos enough to be able to hear the quieter messages from our immortal souls telling us how to change ourselves so we might change the planet into that perfect, or at least a much better, place. (pp. 367–368)

  Merlin, circa 1981.

  [contents]

  three thousand years

  of racism

  Editor’s Note

  While Merlin Stone may be best known for research into the thousands of years of lost goddess religions, she was also very keenly aware of the scourge of racism. In a 1979 article she wrote for Plexus: A Bay Area Women’s Newspaper, Merlin attests to the fact that “the issue of racism within the women’s movement is one that touches me deeply. … After years of concern, compassion and guilt about racism (long before my consciousness of sexism), it recently dawned on me that perhaps I was in a position to do something about it.” (“Racism,” Vol. 5, No. 10, p. 5) She was writing to encourage women’s groups to include more women from Third-World countries and to be sure they paid minority speakers an equal stipend. Acknowledging her own position of importance in the women’s movement, she raised her voice for racial equality.

  The parallels between gender discrimination and racial discrimination were obvious to Merlin as she wrote her books. In Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood, Merlin was thorough in establishing the importance of goddesses of numerous ethnicities. In her commentary on goddesses in India, for example, she notes how Kali was relegated to a lower, “darker” place as a further way for people of a lighter complexion to assert their supremacy (Stone, Ancient Mirrors, p. 222). When God Was a Woman was equally notable for the documentation of the worship of the Goddess among people of diverse cultures and races.

  In 1981, Merlin published Three Thousand Years of Racism: Recurring Patterns in Racism—an essay of approximately ten thousand words—as a twenty-eight-page pamphlet including two pages of annotated bibliography. She used her own imprint, New Sibylline Books, “in conjunction with Women Against Racism.”

  The actual facts about that organization and the historical events that precipitated the release of the essay seem to be lost. However, books and essays were appearing at that time that asserted a new identity among African-American women, including, in that same year, Gloria Watkins’s Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism (under the nom de plume Bell Hooks, South End Press, 1981) and Angela Davis’s Women, Race and Class (Random House, 1981). In her own promotional statement for Three Thousand Years, Merlin states: “Our western educational system leaves many people with the idea that white people have a proud cultural heritage. … Educators must … [stress] the proud cultural heritages that all races possess.” (New Sibylline flier, 1982)

  She achieved some success with educators. State University of Colorado adopted her pamphlet as a part of its freshman orientation. The University of Santa Clara, California, proposed that Merlin visit to hold “contact meetings” to better educate students on campus. Even years after the pamphlet’s publication, the County of Santa Clara got Merlin’s permission to give its social workers a copy as “an excellent tool to help workers … build bridges with one another.” (Letter requesting permission, June 1991) In addition to her concerns about racism within the women’s movement itself and the implicit racism of America’s educational system, Merlin was highly concerned about the broader struggle toward racial equality in the U.S. and abroad. Women worldwide were uniting to take a stand against apartheid and for racial as well as gender equality.

  It should also be noted that while Merlin Stone, born Marilyn Jacobson in 1931, was not a practitioner of a specific religion, she was born Jewish. Her childhood and most formative years would bear witness to the rise and fall of the Third Reich. She was fourteen when the concentration camps were liberated and the full consequence of the Holocaust emerged for the world. Her analysis of Hitler’s Aryan empire, as part of Three Thousand Years of Racism, together with her identifying the clear patterns of racism, were absolutely a natural consequence of Merlin Stone’s personal and scholarly life.

  —David B. Axelrod

  [contents]

  Three Thousand Years of Racism:

  Recurring Patterns in Racism

  by Merlin Stone

  After the last few decades of efforts to erase or lessen the many overt and covert forms of racism in the U.S., many of us are now watching in horror as the reports of various forms of racist attitudes and violence seem to be increasing rather than fading away. We may blame it on the rise in unemployment, inflation, or extreme neo-conservative trends. But beneath our consideration of each of these factors lies the nagging question of the efficacy of the strategies and tactics that we have been using to battle against racism. Is there something that we should do that we have not done? Is there something that we have done that we should not have done? And
perhaps most important have we ever arrived at a full and clear enough analysis of racism that provides a firm foundation for the formulation of effective anti-racist efforts?

  We have long believed that our comprehension of racist acts and attitudes had been too limited. It had been based primarily upon observations of racism in the U.S. over the past few centuries and, for the most part, focused upon the effects of racism upon the victims rather than on the methods and behavior of the perpetrators. It was for this reason that we began to examine some of the records of racist acts and racist statements that had been written in many areas of the world and throughout recorded history. Some of these records dated back to over 3,000 years ago. As a result of this examination we believe that the chronologically and geographically broader perspective provided by these records may be of use in our comprehension of racism and thus in our formulation of viable strategies and tactics to combat racism in all its manifestations.

  The written accounts of racism throughout world history are numerous and will require many years of work to fully present and discuss. But due to the urgency of the issue we feel that some of the basic insights gleaned from this examination should be presented now. In our effort to do this we will first describe and explain what appear to be rather consistent patterns in the many accounts of racism, following this with some specific historical examples of racism that we feel may be of particular significance in our understanding of racist behavior. The final focus of this paper will be on the records of racism among the ancient Aryan groups of about 1200–600 B.C., the accounts that we feel may offer especially useful insights into the methods and strategies of racist oppressors today.