Lady of the Earth and Moon: Goddess Imagery and the Ya-Yas

· Feminine sacred symbols—reference to the goddess and other female supernatural beings (fairies, mermaids, amazons, valkyries);

· Intuitive knowledge—location of the divine within the inner self, rather than external sources of authority, like law codes and rigid hierarchies;

· All-female community—membership in an all-female circle or congregation based on loyalty, emotional intimacy, and a powerful bond, sometimes referred to as sisterhood;

· Foremothers—reverence for mothers, grandmothers, and other ancestresses, real or imagined;⁵

· Sacred history⁶—a myth of origins, often involving a female creator deity and a way of connecting the female community of the present day to her;

· Homeopathic healing connection to the earth and nature, such as use of herbs, aromatherapy, and massage.⁷

All these elements are interwoven in the novel. The healing methods employed at the boarding school by Sister Solange, which she cautions Vivi to keep secret, are intimately bound up in a web of symbolism regarding care of the body and rejection of the classic dualism represented by St. Augustine. Vivi’s displacement from the community of Ya-Yas at St. Augustine’s School is also a displacement from her connection to certain sacred sites in nature, like Spring Creek where the Ya-Yas revitalize themselves by swimming and the bayou where the young Ya-Yas perform their clandestine ceremony of cohesion. An origin myth about Amazonian ancestresses forms part of the ritual establishing the Ya-Yas as an all-female circle of friends described as a tribe, combining three of the elements above: female community, female ancestry (imaginary, in this case), and female images of the supernatural. Goddess imagery is found throughout the novel, but it is especially prominent in the scene in which Vivi expresses her inner knowledge (intuition) that the Moon Lady, the divine mother-goddess, is her “real” mother. The same scene makes use of goddess imagery borrowed from Afro-Caribbean tradition, which fits the pattern of clandestine spirituality and ties it directly to the feminist emphasis on female images of the sacred.

Afro-Caribbean religions like Voodoo⁸and Santeria came into existence as clandestine religions. According to Milo Rigaud, when West African people were captured and taken as slaves to the Caribbean, they were forced to adopt the Christianity of their masters, at least on the surface. Meanwhile, they had no desire to give up their own beliefs or practices. Contrary to the stereotype of Voodoo as evil, it is actually a mixture of Yoruba (West African) polytheism with Catholicism, in which African deities (called loa or orishas) are concealed behind the iconography of saint veneration. When the slaves (and later their descendants) ostensibly paid homage to the Virgin Mary, they were secretly worshipping Yoruba goddesses. Voodoo has been an important part of Louisiana’s culture since the French brought slaves from Haiti through the port of New Orleans. Santeria is Voodoo’s sister religion from Cuba. As Migene Gonza1es-Wippler, herself a practitioner of Santeria, explains, it shares the same history and is essentially the same in most of its practices.

Paganism in Europe had a similar history. The word pagan derives from the Latin word pagane, meaning rural people. It did not originally have negative connotations, according to Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor (27-28, 322). When Christianity, a new, urban religion, swept upward from the Mediterranean region where it originated, the people of the European countryside had an earth-centered set of religious and folk practices pertaining to seasonal agricultural cycles. There were many deities associated with forces of nature, some of which were goddesses who represented the fertility of the earth and the life force in general. Rivers, seas, and springs were often sacred sites associated with particular goddesses because of water’s ability to refresh both the earth and the people. Many were also moon goddesses, whose triple identities as maiden, mother, and crone represented the phases of a woman’s life and her twenty-eight day monthly cycle, as well as the stages of the growing season. The pre-Christian goddesses had many names: Moon Lady, Earth Mother, Mother Nature, and Queen of Heaven, among others. Sometimes a goddess was linked specifically with flowers, sometimes with grain. Sometimes she was associated with the stars, especially the morning and evening star, which was actually the planet Venus.

When the rural people balked at the new religion, Christianity, with its masculine imagery, their pagan holidays were appropriated, and their shrines were rededicated to saints. Goddess shrines often became the sites of churches named “St. Mary’s” or “Our Lady.” Many people, however, continued with their pagan worship under the Christian veneer. Eventually the word pagan came to mean evil or even satanic in Christian usage, but it has recently been retrieved by contemporary neopagans, many of them feminists, and restored to its original meaning of nature-oriented spirituality. Feminist spirituality has emerged from the search for feminine images of the divine, and is a growing movement in which earth and nature goddesses are emphasized, often in connection with the ecological concerns of ecofeminism. Many women in the feminist spirituality movement do not believe literally in deities, but employ the imagery of female divinity and strength to express something internal and external, one’s own spirit or inner being, and the living forces inherent in the natural world which manifest in the budding of plants and the return of fertility to the land every year.

The pagan and Afro-Caribbean patterns of clandestine spirituality are reflected in the novel from the beginning. When Necie, one of the Ya-Yas, accuses the others of making up their own religion, she implies that they have replaced God with Mary as a goddess:

“I thought you only prayed to Mother Most Merciful, cher,” Teensy said. “Didn’t you eighty-six the Old Fart?”

“Please, Teensy,” Necie said, “stop it. You do that just to shock me.”

“Well, that’s true,” Vivi explained. “I did give up on God the Father. . . . But I thought in this case I better cover all my bases.”

“Always a good idea,” Caro said.

“It can never hurt to keep praying to them all is what I say,” said Necie, the only one who still thought the Pope wasn’t senile. “Since the Holy Trinity does still exist, even though y’all have reinvented the Catholic religion to suit yourselves.”

“Come on, Necie,” Teensy said. “Don’t get preachy. You know we’re all good Catholics au Coeur.” (12)

Although the Ya-Yas consider themselves Catholic, Vivi uses nature-oriented goddess appellations whenever she speaks about or prays to the sacred as Lady of the Fields and Prairies, Lady of the Shooting Stars or Queen of the Moon and Stars (17-19). At the same time, her vocabulary could be interpreted as traditional Marian piety.

Necie, the most conservative of the four, is the most conventionally religious but nonetheless participates in every act of clandestine spirituality in the novel. It is she who, in the scene above, establishes the limits of the Ya-Yas’ secret religion by marking the boundaries of acceptable Catholic practice. By saying that one can “keep praying to them all,” she leaves space for the Ya-Yas’ unique way of being religious without rejection of Catholicism.

Sidda orients herself toward a feminine image of the divine from beginning to end. She repeatedly refers to the energy that she feels emanating down from the moon and up from the earth, both traditionally associated with the goddess in many cultures. Wells frames the entire novel with scenes in which Sidda experiences the love of the Blessed Mother while basking in the moonlight (Prologue and 356).

The same Moon Lady functions as a divine mother to the four Ya-Yas in their youth. As small children having a sleepover at Vivi’s house, they slip out to the bayou, where they enact a sisterhood ceremony. Their ritual contains a reading of a make believe origins legend, a “secret history” of an Edenic primordial time when a band of Amazon-like women roamed Louisiana. They could travel all the way from New Orleans to Shreveport on the treetops. After a hurricane and encounters with vicious alligators, only four survived: the four Ya-Ya sisters.

They are adopted for special protection by the Moon Lady in Biblical language, using the same words as when God declared Jesus to be his son: “You are my daughters in whom I am well pleased” (69-71, cf. New Jerusalem Bible, Mark 1:11). When Necie objects to the Biblical borrowing, Teensy retorts that “The Bible doesn’t own those words” (71). Teensy’s retort gives a clue to the entire Ya-Ya approach to spirituality: on one hand, words and images can be borrowed from any source, because no one has a monopoly on any form of religious expression. On the other hand, they lean toward conventional Christian words and images, appropriated in creative and secretive ways.

The children’s ritual episode is embedded in a longer passage in which Vivi’s father brings gifts home from Cuba (62-76). It is a particularly revealing example of hidden spirituality. Almost certainly the statue of the Virgin Mary represents a Santeria orisha (spirit or deity), probably Oshun, a goddess associated with the element water, the moon and the earth’s fertility in birth and regeneration.⁹Vivi’s mother, Buggy, the recipient of the gift, insists that the statue looks like a “tart” and has its/her adornments removed, including the beads, which are important ritual objects in Santeria. For Vivi and her friends, the statue provides a pattern of clandestine goddess veneration directly related to Louisiana’s own Afro-Caribbean tradition, Voodoo. Oshun, or Erzulie as she is known in Haitian Voodoo, is syncretized with the Virgin Mary, but has some radically different attributes. Oshun and Erzulie combine compassion (a Marian virtue also typical of many goddesses) with sensuality and seductiveness (resembling the Greek Aphrodite or the Roman Venus). Santeria initiates possessed by the spirit of Oshun take on many characteristics of a “tart,” but at the same time dispense compassion and caring to the Santeria community.

Upon returning from their nighttime ceremony at the bayou, the Ya-Yas bow to the statue and address her as their tribal protectress, the divine Moon Lady. Just as she adopts them as her people, they adopt her as their goddess. They restore the statue’s painted beauty and return her sacred Santeria necklaces, now also sanctified as the Royal Ya-Ya Jewels. They paint their own bodies at the creek and wear the beads. By painting the goddess with the same makeup and replacing the beads around her neck, they forge a symbolic connection with her. Vivi falls asleep that night with the silent words in her head: “The Ya-Yas are my real family. . . . I am of the great and royal tribe of Ya-Yas. . . The Moon Lady is my Mother” (75).

Buggy’s austere religiosity represents a punitive form of piety, based on apparent self-abnegation, but really dominated by self-righteous fury. She remakes the Virgin Mary in her own image, both literally and theologically. She often says that the Virgin would like to see the Ya-Yas performing certain actions that please her, as though she and Mary share the same viewpoint. Her Mary seems to enjoy the suffering of the girls. At the same time, Buggy limits the Virgin’s importance, just as she confines herself within the boundaries of acceptable feminine piety. Buggy’s invocations of Mary as divine are always subordinate to male religious power, such as God the Father, Jesus, and even radio preacher Father Coughlin (63). Although she makes frequent references to the Virgin Mary, real power for Buggy is always masculine.

Buggy’s attempts to control and punish Vivi involve placing her under patriarchal religious power as well, by sending her to a strict Catholic boarding school. St. Augustine, after whom the school in the novel is named, represents a particularly anti-nature strand of Catholic tradition. The theologian Augustine of Hippo was a proponent of a dualistic worldview in which the “flesh” (the body) and all material reality (the earth, nature) were considered an evil snare that endangered the soul. The dualism, prominent in Christian thought, originated in Greek philosophy. The soul and abstract reason were always held to be superior to matter, and were necessary to give undifferentiated matter an orderly form. The Christian versions of the dualism made the body, nature, and earth not only inferior, but evil. The life of the flesh was said to be a life of self-indulgence, associated with humanity’s “fallen” nature; hence the cruel attitudes of the nuns in the novel toward the body and its needs. Vivi, whose name indicates her connection with the life force, with liveliness, is sent to St. Augustine’s, where she is subjected to a regime that almost kills her in an attempt to disembody her symbolically, to de-vivify her, and thereby allegedly save her soul (193-230). In her letter to the nuns at St. Augustine’s, Buggy herself employs dualistic language, urging them to “act fast in Our Lady’s name so that we may save my daughter . . . if I do not remove her from the temptations of the world, she will die before she has the chance to bloom in the spirit” (196). Vivi’s body is the focus of Buggy’s rage as she removes Vivi from her bed to depart for St. Augustine’s: “Silently, and with every flick of the linens, Buggy rejected Vivi’s firm, flowering adolescent body, which had, until moments before, warmed the bed” (203). The school’s attacks on bodily comfort include the prohibition of pillows, singing, music, dancing, and baths, although the nuns permit showers. Wastefulness with toilet paper is particularly egregious to them. The food is so repulsive that Vivi loses her appetite and weakens to the point of collapse (212-17).

At the school, run by nuns living under, and upholding, the patriarchal power of the church, Vivi’s name is stripped from her and replaced with her saint’s name, Joan, a reference to St. Joan of Arc. Although the purpose of the change, on the surface, is to rob Vivi of her identity and substitute a saint’s name as a way of taming her, the name Joan conjures up a much richer cluster of meanings, encompassing torture, sacrifice, and execution by the church itself. However, Joan is also a symbol of great rebellious strength, which she received from her “voices” speaking to her through the forces of nature. Although she was posthumously rehabilitated and canonized by the church, Joan is sometimes reclaimed by pagan feminists as someone who thumbed her nose at church authority, while claiming a more direct connection with divinity through nature (Sjoo and Mor 205, 301). Many goddess images are associated with her voices, such as a sacred tree, water, verdant valleys, and groves, although she was, on the surface, a Catholic. Thus the pattern emerges once again in the novel of pagan energy and divine life force bubbling under a veneer of staid Catholicism.

Only Sister Solange, who continues to use Viviane’s real name, stands apart from the other nuns. When Sister Solange nurses Vivi back to health, she gives her a lavender bath (221), an example of her willingness to use women’s ways of herbal and holistic healing. She denies, and even defies, the Augustinian dualism, saying that the soul needs the body (222). She cautions secrecy from the others at St. Augustine’s, making the character of Solange a part of the pattern of clandestine spirituality under a veneer of ordinary, and patriarchal, Catholicism. In addition to being a secret herbal healer, she also secretly facilitates communication with the mother of one of the other Ya-Ya sisters, Teensy’s mother Genevieve, who rescues Vivi and takes her home. Previously the school administration had cut off communication between Vivi and her friends, by confiscating correspondence. Solange therefore is the only unsevered link, almost an umbilical cord, between Vivi and the mother-goddess-oriented world of the Ya-Yas.

While Vivi perceives the goddess, in her guise as the Moon Lady, as her real mother, her biological mother, Buggy, is the source of her banishment to St Augustine’s, and is therefore the cause of her temporary alienation from the world that flourishes under the protection of the divine mother. Ironically, the literal female ancestress is the one who breaks Vivi’s chain with her spiritual (but secret) female ancestry.

Sidda’s connection with her mother is in danger of disconnection also, because of confidences foolishly shared with a reporter. However, the connection is maintained, and eventually fully healed, by the all-female community, the Ya-Ya sisterhood. Unlike Buggy, whose ultimate allegiance is to a patriarchal god, Sidda draws her energy from the Moon Lady, the same image of the divine who protects Vivi and the Ya-Ya sisterhood as their adopted mother. The sacred connection is therefore unbroken from mother-goddess, the ultimate ancestress, to Vivi and the Ya-Yas to daughter Sidda. At times, she even thinks of her mother as divine. Sidda calls Vivi a “goddess of the creekbank. . . . Some days I worshipped at her feet” (42). The creek in the novel is called Spring Creek, a significant name because goddesses in many cultures are associated with bodies of water (Oshun in Africa, for example) and old European goddesses are specifically connected with springs and wells (Sjoo and Mor 127). Sources of fresh water are metaphorically the wellsprings of the life force itself, gushing up from within the earth. The ocean, salt water, is the place where life began, and it too has goddess associations. Therefore when Sidda, surprised by a whiff of her mother’s unique perfume in Greenwich Village, says, “I live in an ocean of smell, and the ocean is my mother” (43), she is immersing herself in a very ancient tradition. For Sidda, Vivi, whose name means life, became merged with the Great Mother, source of all life.

Although religious themes and allusions appear frequently in the works of Southern writers, Rebecca Wells gives religion a fresh twist which is uniquely Louisianian. By reworking the Voodoo concept of clandestine paganism under the surface of ostensible Catholicism with feminist reclamations of goddess imagery, she has created a new flavor of women’s spirituality in her aptly named novel. Whether or not the “divine secrets” of the title were intentionally meant to evoke the sense of secrecy, the hiddenness, of women’s spiritual reality behind patriarchal religious organizations, she certainly tapped into a living stream of goddess imagery that could never come together in quite the same way outside of Louisiana’s “gumbo ya-ya” culture.

NOTES

1. All notes refer to the paperback edition.

2. This fact is mentioned repeatedly by Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor in The Great Cosmic Mother.

3. All of the elements listed come from my own personal experience with the feminist spirituality movement. Many of them are mentioned separately in various books and articles on the subject, but not necessarily together as a list of characteristics.

4. The dualism in traditional Christianity denigrates “matter,” meaning nature, earth, and the body, in favor of “form,” meaning that which transcends matter, such as the mind, spirit, or soul. St. Augustine, who plays a large symbolic role in the novel, was a proponent of an extreme form of the dualism. Feminist theologians are critical of the dualism because it has negative implications for women. The feminine has been metaphorically associated with the body, while men are traditionally said to be both more rational and more spiritual.

5. A foremother need not be a biological ancestor. For example, Susan B. Anthony is a foremother to feminists with no blood relation.

6. Cynthia Eller says that the feminist spirituality movement itself has a sacred history beginning with a “long-dead golden age in which whole cultures worshipped the Goddess—and nature through her—and lived in peace with themselves, their environment and their neighbors.” The golden age ended in about 3000BCE, with the triumph of patriarchy, according to this view, but Goddess worship was not entirely destroyed. It continued to exist in peasant European culture, despite persecution as witchcraft.

Lady of the Earth and Moon: Goddess Imagery and the Ya-Yas

Lori Rowlett

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