Monday, September 05, 2005
wickedary
Another book I am currently grazing through is Wickedary (the link is to an online version) by Mary Daly. In fact, I was thinking about it alot when I wrote my decolonized tongue entry. It is hard to explain but Wickedary is basically is an attempt to remake the English language according to feminist principles. New words are created. Old words are given new meanings, new spellings, new etymologies. My words can't really do it justice. Check it out.
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2 comments:
Interesting.
From your religious viewpoint what do you make of this?
I note that the title is derived from the Wiccan (witch) practices and this is obvious when perusing the definitions ('angel' for example).
In Islam there is the concept of People of the Book. There is one God, but throughout human history he sent prophets. Some prophets (Jesus, Moses, Abraham, etc.) are named in the Quran and we know something about. But other prophets we don't know about. And so through the centuries, many Muslims have been open to the possibility that the teachings of other religions might actually represent aspects of an authentic message from God.
So in general I'm open to the idea that maybe Buddha, or Lao Tzu or Confucius or Krishna were prophets. And by the same token, maybe millenia ago God sent prophets to the Celtic people, and Wicca in some form came from God, just as Judaism or Christianity.
From what I've read about it, even when Wiccans talk about different "gods" they seem to think of them as aspects of a male and female pair of gods, who are themselves manifestions of a single entity.
To be honest, I also don't know how much "faith" Wiccans necessarily have. I don't mean that in a derrogatory way. But in conversations I've had with neo-pagans online, they didn't necessarily think what they were doing was "real" but they thought that particpating in rituals and acting out certain mythological symbols could evoke Jungian archetypes and have certain psychological effects.
To be more honest, I also wasn't thinking of the Wickedary from a religious perspective as much as an attempt to remake English in a certain way, more for political reasons.
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