COMPOST AS MANIFESTATION AND SYMBOL OF THE GODDESS

Lethea F. Erz

© Copyright 1996, all rights reserved

I: Compost -- one of the Goddess's most brilliant ideas

A fable of creation and consequences 

Shortly after the beginning, the Goddess in her benevolent wisdom created the compost process — to demonstrate her powers of birth, death and regeneration at an earthly level that human minds could comprehend; to help life continue renewing itself without her constant intervention; to remind human beings of their interconnectedness with everything that exists, and to give humanity an opportunity to participate in the ongoing sacred process of creating and sustaining life on earth.

But over time, humans (especially males) forgot the lessons of compost. Men replaced the benevolent Earth Mother Goddess with a distant, detached and vengeful Sky Father God. They declared themselves separate and superior to Mother Nature and everything female, all the while forcing the earth and women to feed and care for them so they could be free to think "higher" thoughts and invent technologies to perform nature's processes faster and more efficiently. They replaced compost with chemical fertilizers. They built weapons and fought wars. They used up the natural resources of the earth with little thought of sustaining future life.

The by-products of human technologies began to poison the earth and its creatures. Other species started dying out. The quality of human life began to diminish. The future of life on earth, including human life, was threatened by human weapons and wastes. Many people realized that something was out of balance, but their Sky God did nothing to help them.

Then many women, and some men, rediscovered the Goddess. They then remembered how humans had once lived in harmony with each other and with nature. They saw that by splitting their gods from the earth, their minds from their bodies, their selves from each other and from other creatures, they had cut themselves off from the sacred source of their own existence. Thus they threatened themselves, and all living beings, with nonexistence.

These visionary humans, whose sight extended both backward and forward in time, rediscovered the lessons symbolized by compost: they realized their interconnection with everything in the universe, they acknowledged their dependence on the earth and everything on it, they started cleaning up their messes, they began recycling their wastes. And they started composting again.

Those women and men who realized the unity of their bodies and minds with nature began writing about the lessons they'd learned. They questioned all they'd been taught, and they created new teachings more in line with respect for nature and the sustenance of life. Some wrote of the Goddess; some wrote of her many manifestations, one of which is compost.

This paper is an exploration of compost as a manifestation and symbol of the Goddess.

I will explore how compost can be viewed as a manifestation of the Goddess: what do they have in common? I'll discuss why it might serve the Goddess to manifest in this particular non-embodied form (or any non-embodied form, for that matter).

I will argue that compost fulfills a crucial human need for metaphors which emphasize both humanity's interconnectedness with all of existence and its active participation in the birth/death/regeneration cycles that are a central aspect of the religion of the Goddess. This is the major issue in feminist thealogy I wish to address in this paper.

Resources

I will call upon the writings of Carol P. Christ, Starhawk, Susan Griffin, Sallie McFague, and several authors included in WomanSpirit Rising and Weaving the Visions, co-edited by Christ and Judith Plaskow. Elinor Gadon, Riane Eisler, and Jonas Salk have also been important resources in the process of developing my thoughts.

Why this interests me

Carol P. Christ writes: "As scholars, we should strive to constantly remember that we are grounded in particular experiences and histories, while seeking ever to expand the range of our empathy, our ability to imagine the perspectives of others." While my interest in the spirituality of compost has expanded in this paper to include the perspectives of writers we have read in "TheAlogy" class, it originated in a strong personal need — especially in times of loss and personal crisis — to experience myself as part of an interconnected universe. The following, written spontaneously in class when the idea of "compost thealogy" first came up, expresses this relevant aspect of my own spiritual journey:

"I am a part of all that exists, and I am connected to everything in the universe." Those are the words of an affirmation I made up to repeat when jogging, during a particularly painful period of my life following the unexpected desertion of a man with whom I was engaged and planning a lifetime of partnership. I desperately needed to believe those words, and I hoped their repetition would implant the conviction in my unconscious mind. I came to this belief, not through intuition (which for a long time I distrusted or felt myself devoid of), but through a rational, intellectual process. I'd been an atheist since age 19, having decided that my inquiring, critical mind and the religion of my upbringing (conventional, conservative Methodist) were mutually exclusive; so I abandoned faith in favor of reason, never considering that there might be a position other than the extremes of that dualism.

Reading Jonas Salk's Anatomy of Reality at age 39 opened my eyes to the possibility of a metaphysics based in the scientific paradigm in which I had invested the "faith" of my mind (though I wouldn't have used those terms, then). Salk's scientific explanation of the interconnection of all that exists opened me to a conception of spirituality that had nothing to do with the "religion" that I had rejected as destructive and in many ways "evil."

Ironically, following those thoughts led me to question the scientific paradigm itself, and opened my whole being to the "great mysteries" that I'm now exploring. A "scientific explanation" opened the door to a line of thought that resulted in a revaluing of the "non-scientific" and a conception of the integration of ways of being and perceiving far beyond the "purely rational" and scientific. The image of yin/yang, integrating dualisms in an interdependent whole, became the most relevant symbol to me, then, as now; as a model for the interconnection of all that exists, and of relationship as the most important of processes.

Reflecting on the foregoing, I recognize that the yin/yang symbol, while still very meaningful to me, is also very abstract. Because I have a strong need to integrate my spiritual beliefs with my daily life and actions in the world, I need a multitude of symbols, some abstract, some very tangible. For me, compost is such a tangible symbol of interconnectedness, one which literally "grounds" me in the ongoing earth cycles of birth, death, decay, transformation, and rebirth.

These cycles are processes associated with the Great Mother Goddess through the woman-and-nature connection written of by Christ and Griffin, among others. My compost pile itself has the gently rounded form of a pregnant woman's belly.

And yet, compost itself is not a gendered thing; in fact, it incorporates both genders in the living things that compose (decompose?) it. That fact, too, serves a need in me — to have symbols of the sacred which are not associated with one sex or the other. For although I derive great psychospiritual benefit from the many powerful, positive, sexual images of embodied goddesses, I have not (yet) experienced the universal energy through them. The dynamic relationship of matter and process manifest in compost is more congruent with my personal experience of "Great Mystery" — my term for the transcendent/immanent power which Salk calls evolution and Christ calls eros.

Finally, because I live and work in partnership with men, and because I believe that the efforts of men are as necessary as those of women to solve the crises humanity has created, I seek spiritual metaphors which are relevant and useful for both sexes. I believe compost meets that need.

II: Why and how the Goddess is manifest in compost, and why this is important

The meanings of compost

My American Heritage Dictionary defines compost as follows: "noun. 1. A mixture of decaying organic matter, such as leaves and manure, used as fertilizer. 2. A composition;

mixture. verb. 1 To fertilize with compost. 2. To convert (organic matter) to compost."

My own usage of the word combines all of these meanings, and expands the "decaying organic matter" to include animal (and even human) remains.

I wish to acknowledge Starhawk for inspiring my musings on the spiritual aspects of compost. Her "Compost Coven," referred to several times in The Spiral Dance, was a combination of diverse men and women who came together to learn about witchcraft and in the process transformed themselves. Her use of the term illustrates its value as a metaphor for human interconnectedness, growth, and transformation. In the following paragraphs, I will expand upon my vision of compost as noun and verb, matter and process, both literally and symbolically interconnecting all the elements of the universe.

What compost means to me

The compost heap in my back garden, even here in the city, is made up of many elements. On a small patch of unpaved earth, I place the organic scraps that I don't put directly into my body at mealtime. Here go the broccoli stems, the apple cores, the seeds of the cantaloupe. Here go the fishbones, far from the rivers and oceans where the fish once swam. Here goes the uneaten bread, transformed from grain that grew in the earth, already host to other life forms like molds. Here go eggshells, broken containers of once-potential life that emerged from the body of a hen, sacrificed to provide my body's cells with protein. Here go the alfalfa pellets that absorb the urine and feces of my indoor-dwelling cat, along with the excrement that remains from the cat's diet of animal and vegetable matter. Here go the leaves that fall from the trees, and the grass trimmings from the yard, and the wilted flowers from the vase of my altar to the Earth Mother Goddess that gives birth to the cosmos.

To this pile of respectfully cast-off nature come the nocturnal animals. The raccoons and squirrels forage for edible morsels and carry them away; the pile never looks the same as when I last visited it. Birds peck at the seeds, insects feast on the tiniest scraps, microorganisms break things down into unrecognizable forms, and worms rise from the moist earth and further transform what remains, as their bodies pass through it, and it passes through their bodies.

Light energy, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, arrives from the sun to warm the mixture and alter its chemistry. Water falls from the sky, evaporated from ocean and lake and sewer system, further breaking down the molecules from kitchen and garden and litter box. Grasses grow up, tomato and squash seed themselves in the fertile waste with no help from me. And when the seasons have turned, alternately warming and cooling, wetting and drying, I have a pile of moist, nutrient-rich soil to spread on my newly-planted broccoli, which will grow with the aid of sun and water and minerals from the earth, and the pollination of bees and the soil-loosening of earthworms, until I cut it and eat it and throw the unused scraps on the compost heap to continue the never-ending cycle.

And how am I part of the process? During a romantic dinner with my partner, I eat the broccoli, as well as the strawberries grown in the soil of Chile and the kiwis grown in New Zealand and the tuna caught in the North Atlantic Ocean. My body processes these things; they become blood and bone and hair and skin and energy to run and talk and write this paper. They become the eggs which could, potentially, combine with my partner's sperm to create a new human life.

I breathe the air scented by jasmine and honeysuckle, and filled with heavy metals from the exhaust of several million automobiles. I drink water containing minerals and microorganisms and sewage (processed, of course) and chlorine to kill off bacteria that might upset the stomach and liver and intestines that process my food and send my body's wastes back into the water system to flow into the water table and rivers and ocean to evaporate and fall as rain on the fields of wheat, and gardens of broccoli, and compost heaps.

My body cells constantly renew themselves; every seven years every cell in my body has been changed. Matter cannot be destroyed, the scientists say, so those dead cells must return to the earth through the air, the water, my own excrement, the contents of my vacuum-cleaner bag.

I climb a mountain. The pebble that slips into my leather boot (I bless the cow that died for my comfort) bruises my foot, and my body's repair processes rush to work. My footprints remain on the mountain path until wind or rain or other hikers erase them. I smile in awe and pleasure at the beauty of rocks and sky and snow and trees, and my brain floods my tissues with endorphins of joy. My feet upon the mountain alter it forever, just as the mountain alters me.

I show my slides of the climb, with light projected through a combination of metal and glass and electronic energy from the earth. I tell the story of my experiences on the mountain. My friends who watch and listen experience chemical changes in their brains, along with the feelings in their spirits. Through me, they have an experience of nature's wonders; perhaps they decide to climb a mountain someday, too.

And someday I will die. Instead of going into the ground to become compost directly, I will be cremated. My daughter (in whom my spirit but not my genes lives on, because she is adopted, the daughter of the widower whose desertion once triggered my own psychic death/rebirth) will climb a mountain we two climbed together in life, and will scatter my ashes in the wind.

The matter of my body, which once took the form of broccoli and eggs and milk and bread and water and bone and blood and skin and muscle and brain and nerve and neurotransmitter, transformed by fire, will return to the air and the earth and the water. After unknown ages, perhaps it will become part of the soil that nourishes the grain that will become another's bread and body. Perhaps it will become glacier ice, then runoff, then silt in the river where the salmon lays its eggs. Perhaps it will blow in the wind, into the eye of another mountain-climber, who will stop and rub her eye and think that it's "just a speck of dust." Little will she know that that speck contains my spirit, my history, and the history of all the elements that were part of me and of other forms of life and non-life before, back into the infinite past, and on into the infinite future.

And what of me? What of the uniqueness of my intangible spirit? My lover and daughter and friends will carry my image in their minds' eyes and the feeling of my hugs and my skin and hair in the cells of their bodies, the memories of their senses. Their ears will remember the music I made, their spirits will recall the laughter and tears and tenderness (and even the arguments) we shared. Perhaps both acquaintances and strangers will continue to be affected by the ideas I shared through my storytelling, teaching, and writing. I have no doubt that the world will be different — physically and spiritually — because I lived and ate and breathed and thought and spoke and wrote and died.

Just so, the world is affected by all of us who share earth and water and sunlight and food and stories and music and love and violence and pollution and the potential for transformation. How can anyone, knowing these scientifically-validated "facts of nature," deny that "he" is also part of nature; how can "man" possibly continue to assert that "he was set on this world as a stranger."?

How can compost be a manifestation of the Goddess?

Carol P. Christ comes close to describing my own experience of the sacred when she writes: "For me, spirituality is experiencing connectedness to the life force within all living things." Christ describes this "life force" as "eros" and relates her personal experience of it as mediated through the goddess Aphrodite and through grounding in the earth. Compost, as I have just described it, is for me an embodiment of this connectedness, both of matter and of process. And you can't get much more "grounded" than compost, which actually becomes part of the earth itself. Further, compost illustrates the vital interaction and interdependence of all things, living and non-living.

Starhawk writes: "... erotic energy inherently generates and celebrates diversity. And Goddess religion, at its heart, is precisely about the erotic dance of life playing through all of nature and culture." I believe that compost, uniting diverse elements as I've described it above, illustrates this very "erotic dance of life" which unites nature and culture and which she places at the heart of Goddess religion.

Starhawk goes on to state: "The three core principles of Goddess religion are immanence, interconnection, and community. Immanence means that the Goddess, the Gods, are embodied, that we are each a manifestation of the living being of earth, that nature, culture, and life in all their diversity are sacred." This describes, for me, the immanence of the Goddess within compost. The sacred is immanent in compost, because the potential for all that can later grow from it is implicit within the elements that make it up.

Yet compost also manifests the Goddess in her transcendent aspect, for the Goddess cannot be split into the immanent/transcendent dualism characteristic of male monotheism. As Carol P. Christ writes: "The power of the Goddess is within nature, in the cyclic processes of birth, growth, change, death, and transformation, and in the eros that connects all living things. But that does not mean that she is reducible to natural powers." Compost manifests transcendent power in that the force that causes its potentials to unfold is not controlled by any one of its elements, not even humans. For we have taken upon ourselves the power to destroy life, but we do not know how to create it, and we may not even know how to preserve it — that remains to be seen! Christ says: "I find the Goddess in my deepest self-knowledge, and I know her as powers of life, death, and transformation that are inside me, but certainly also outside me as well. She is an image with metaphoric power to transform my understanding of self and world..." These are Goddess powers I find in my images of compost, as well.

Of the Goddess and community, Starhawk says: "Community includes not only people but also the animals, plants, soil, air and water and energy systems that support our lives. Community is personal — one's closest friends, relatives, and lovers, those to whom we are accountable. But in a time of global communications, catastrophes, and potential violence, community must also be seen as reaching out to include all the earth." Compost, as a physical entity, illustrates the community of people, animals, plants, soil, air, water, and energy systems in microcosm. And compost, as a natural process available to people worldwide, regardless of wealth, might well become a unifying symbol of humanity's efforts to use the earth's resources in a more sustainable fashion.

Compost also manifests sacred female power as viewed by many Native Americans. Laguna Pueblo/Sioux Paula Gunn Allen writes of the tribal view of "the sacred" as meaning "possessing power." She says: "The concept of power among tribal people is related to their understanding of the relationships that occur between the human and nonhuman worlds. They believe that all are linked within one vast, living sphere, that the linkage is not material but spiritual, and that its essence is the power that enables magical things to happen. Among these magical things are transformations of objects from one form to another..."

Such transformations of form take place in compost, which promotes the growth of new plants which feed people. Allen describes her belief that "many American Indian tribes thought that the primary potency in the universe was female..." based in the "knowledge that the power to make life is the source of all power and that no other power can gainsay it." This reasoning further links the transformative magic of compost to the life-generating powers of female deity: what non-Native Americans call the Goddess.

In compost, the Goddess helps life continue renewing itself without her constant intervention

Nelle Morton writes of her own experience that "The Goddess works herself out of business. She doesn't hang around to receive thanks." I take this to mean: the Goddess provides us with all we need for self-empowerment and ongoing self-transformation. This is quite a contrast with the narcissistic, "autonomous" male creator god described by Catherine Keller who encourages humanity's co-dependence by insisting that humans remain worshipful and childlike supplicants for the bounty of their emotionally-uninvolved "father." The Goddess, a nurturing and connected mother, nonetheless fosters her creation's empowerment by providing the tools and processes needed for continuing self-sustenance. Compost exemplifies such "tools and processes."

Why should the Goddess manifest as compost?

To demonstrate her powers of birth, death and regeneration at an earthly level that human minds could comprehend;

Human beings have always struggled to comprehend the awesome powers of the universe: the mysteries of birth and growth and death and the cycles of the seasons. Marija Gimbutas has written of the earliest evidence of religious practice in the archaeological records of Neolithic Europe, where a "Mother-Goddess" was worshipped as "creator and cosmogenic woman."

Gimbutas writes: "There were, in my opinion, two primary aspects of the Goddess presented by the effigies. The first is 'She Who Is the Giver of All' — giver of life, of moisture, of food, of happiness — and 'Taker of All,' i.e., death. The second aspect of the Goddess is Her association with the periodic awakening of nature: She is springtime, the new moon, rebirth, regeneration, and metamorphosis." With the exception of "the new moon," all of the aspects of the Goddess just mentioned are also aspects of compost as I have described it.

The small statues of large-bodied, often pregnant, women found in Paleolithic and later Neolithic sites indicate that early humans recognized the life-giving connections between the body of woman and that of the Earth-Mother. From the earth came the food to sustain the bodies of humans, and the earth took those bodies back for transformation after death. According to Gimbutas, these roles of the Goddess as giver, taker, and transformer of life were not separated. Nor are they separated in compost. From compost comes the food to nourish human bodies, and human bodies become part of the cosmic composting process after they die, providing food for other organisms which in turn become food in a never-ending cycle of transformation.

To give men an image of the sacred which connects them to nature rather than transcending it

Although women can take satisfaction in knowing that compost's life/death/transformation functions are those of the Goddess; as stated earlier, compost itself is non-gendered — as a process it works equally on women and men, who equally receive its benefits.

Because I agree with scholars quoted in Christ/Plaskow's WomanSpirit Rising and Weaving the Visions, and with Christ in Laughter of Aphrodite, who demonstrate the importance of female images of the sacred to counteract the destructive and woman-negating images of male gods that dominate Western religion and culture; I also see that men need alternatives to traditional monotheistic gods. They need images of maleness as nurturing and life-sustaining, but such images are hard to find in today's world. Thus, gender-neutral images of life-giving interconnectedness, as found in compost, may be crucial for men who want to get away from destructive patriarchal concepts of deity and who have not yet found any nurturing, life-giving sacred images that are not explicitly female.

To help humanity create images of the sacred that imply a morality and action in harmony with natural life-promoting cycles, rather than seeking to transcend or avoid them.

Human language is full of hierarchical imagery, especially language referring to the sacred. Many well-meaning people use such language when they refer to their source of inner guidance, not pausing to consider what this implies for their connection to the earth and to natural processes. With the strong earth-connection of compost, we may speak of "deeper wisdom" and "deeper Self," as I have done for several years; recognizing, like Starhawk, that use of terms like "higher wisdom" and "higher self" implies a hierarchical dualism, a "... high/low metaphor for good/evil, advanced/primitive, evolved/unevolved, and the like [that] perpetuated an underlying denigration of the earth, the body, and the material world."

Such dualisms lead to strange behaviors. For example, American burial customs reflect a horror of and alienation from the natural processes of death, decay, and regeneration. Many families spend fortunes to seal their dead loved ones in air- and watertight coffins within hermetically-closed mausoleums, isolating them from the forces of nature, taking up space on the earth while adding nothing to it. The non-embodied "soul," meanwhile, is thought to live eternally in some nonmaterial "heaven." Only a culture with a non-earth-based spirituality could come up with such a bizarre practice, which actually demonstrates a profound selfishness: taking sustenance from the earth while giving nothing useful back. My belief is that a "compost spirituality" provides a much more "natural" form of immortality, which is certainly more attractive to me than biblical concepts of heaven.

Compost provides the basis for a concept of immortality, in the sense that the elements that make up the human body obviously continue to exist, in many transformations, for all of eternity. Although the integrity of the individual spirit is not implied, neither does it seem so important in a worldview that stresses each individual's essential part in a world of eternal natural cycles of renewal, decay, transformation, and rebirth.

Composting is the Goddess/nature's form of recycling. It happens in the wilderness, without human intervention, and it can be done consciously by humans. Once human beings recognize the ways that their bodies, too, are a part of the cosmic compost pile (yes, the Goddess created humanity in her own image!), they surely must take better care with the wastes they put into their (literal) "ground of being."

Thus recognizing their existence as being derived from the earth and dependent on it, humans might redefine "good" and "evil." Carol P. Christ writes: "Goddess religion, unlike monotheism, claims no revealed law or transcendent principle of justice. The capacity for moral judgment is found within nature. The source of morality is eros, the deep feeling of connection to other people and all beings in the web of life." Instead of the good being associated with transcending and denying the needs of the body, as it is in most of the world's currently-dominant religions, in a "compost morality" the good would be defined as whatever promotes life — not just human life, but all life (since the human body contains elements of all life).

Therefore, "good" compost is effective compost — it promotes the growth of new life so the cycle can continue. "Bad" compost just doesn't work, or, worse, is actually destructive to life. "Bad" compost might have large quantities of non-biodegradable materials, for example, or poisonous substances like the herbicides and industrial chemicals still in common use. Very few currently "man-made" items are good for compost — not plastic, not metal (they take much too long to decompose), certainly not nuclear wastes! Judged by the standards of compost morality, human beings aren't doing very well on this planet at this time.

Why the Goddess's manifestation as compost is important: SURVIVAL

For life to continue on earth, it's essential for humans to identify themselves as part of nature rather than separate from it

If this is true, if the Goddess wants life to continue (and how could any creator not want her creation to go on existing?) then compost is a brilliant way for the Goddess to remind human beings of their interconnectedness with everything that exists.

Carol P. Christ writes: "We must be encouraged to broaden our understanding of those to whom we are connected to include all people and all beings. As we reflect upon our interdependence, we come to understand that our lives truly are connected to the lives of all other beings on the planet." Reflecting on compost is one way for humans to realize this interdependence.

The connectedness of humanity to everything else in the unfolding universe is a point repeatedly made in Sallie McFague's The Body of God. This quote, in particular, demonstrates awareness of the same kinds of connections I explored in my reflection on compost:

"My body was originally formed from an ovum and sperm in my mother's body, and this ovum and sperm were formed of matter which came into the bloodstream of my father and mother from the world outside. I am formed of the matter of the universe and am linked through it to the remotest stars in time and space. My body has passed through all the stages of evolution through which matter was first formed into atoms and molecules, when the living cell appeared. I have passed through every stage from protoplasm to fish and animal... If I could know myself, I would know matter and life... since all are contained within me."

Susan Griffin writes eloquently of humanity's embeddedness within nature and on the importance of our realizing that fact: "We know ourselves to be made from this earth. We know this earth is made from our bodies." With these two sentences she recognizes the cyclical truth also illustrated by compost. And we can know ourselves, as she says: "For we see ourselves. And we are nature. We are nature seeing nature. We are nature with a concept of nature."

Sallie McFague uses the above quote from Griffin to introduce scientific evidence of our interconnectedness with nature. She writes: "Everything that exists — from the most distant galaxies to the tiniest fragment of life — has a common beginning and a common history: at some level and in a remote or intimate way, everything is related to everything else." By evoking what she calls the "common creation story" (based on the "Big Bang" theory now accepted by most scientists) McFague elaborates another source of organic interrelatedness: the common origin of everything that exists.

McFague acknowledges, however, that the common creation story can be described in "an atomistic or reductionist way, with a mechanical rather than an organic model," though she works hard to persuade the reader to prefer the organic interpretation. McFague's model of an interconnected, interdependent universe, which she calls "the body of God" is complementary with my view of compost as "the body of the Goddess." But compost has a slight advantage, in that it is indisputably an organic model.

To give humanity an opportunity to participate in the ongoing sacred process of creating and sustaining life on earth.

Compost provides human beings with a way to help "open up" the "closed system" of our ecosphere. McFague, in her discussion of the "house rules" of life on earth, notes that "The health of the planet depends not on the quantity and vitality of human beings (or on any of the other so-called higher mammals), but on the quantity and health of plants. The hierarchy of value and importance is reversed: we cannot live a day without the plants, but they would prosper indefinitely without us..." By photosynthetically converting our only ever-renewed source of energy — sunlight — into carbohydrates, plants create the basic food source for all life forms. In the process, they recycle the molecules of dead and decaying organisms into new life forms, thus neutralizing the entropic effects of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Therefore compost, first by breaking down dead organisms and then by providing fertilizer for plant growth, is a vital element in countering the loss of available energy on the earth. The mentality of composting is one way for humankind to "consider how our present actions will affect the world unto seven generations" and to leave our descendants a world which is not significantly deteriorated. Obviously, this requires a major reversal of current thinking and behavior.

Realizing how we are part of the cosmic composting process can also help modern humans feel a tangible sense of connection with the earth that is a part of Native American tradition, but which has not been part of institutionalized Western religions up to now. Many traditional peoples base their concept of the sacred in the earth from which they spring. For Native Americans, spirituality is based in the earth, particularly the earth where they live and bury their ancestors. Lacota Luther Standing Bear said of his people: "We are of the soil and the soil is of us."

Carol P. Christ says: "...I believe that spirituality must be rooted in connection to a particular place..." Ideally, we would all have a sacred landscape to which we feel we belong. However, in our highly-mobile, global society, many people move around so much that they have no sense of being rooted in a particular place. This would seem to cut them off from access to the many benefits of such earth-based spiritual beliefs and practices.

To counter this problem, however, I believe that "compost spirituality" makes every place on earth sacred, and every thing on earth, as well. For if we contain atoms that once were part of the sea, or the rocks of a particular place, or the fruit of a particular tree, is there not something within us that may resonate when it finds "its own"? We may find ourselves trembling in recognition of the holy in places thousands of miles from where we were born or now reside. We may become more sensitive to our connections with all forms of existence, both great and small. Hugging trees may no longer seem so strange and "airy-fairy" as some people now think!

The composting of ideas: creating new growth from decaying paradigms

Continuing the use of compost as a multi-leveled metaphor for transformation, how do we apply it to the level of ideas? Ecofeminists and many other people concerned with the state of the world would certainly agree that many of the ruling symbols of patriarchal domination are "ready for the compost heap." Is it possible to integrate any of the ideas from the decaying patriarchy with the richness of the discoveries of archaeomythology, fertilizing the mixture with feminist and gylanic thought to create a new ecological worldview?

Certainly, some ideas seem too poisonous to put into any life-nurturing compost pile: chief among them the belief that men are superior to women and have the right to dominate nature, which is associated with women. But as I have argued earlier, widespread acceptance of a compost theory of the interconnectedness and interdependence of all existence would effectively neutralize and decompose such ideas anyway! I believe that men who recognize the sacredness of the earth because it sustains their own lives must necessarily begin to honor the feminine, even if unconsciously, because the association of the earth with "mother" is so deeply ingrained in our cultural mythology.

As women and men transform their relationships with each other and with the earth, perhaps the old, destructive stereotypes of gender will also die and be transformed. I look forward to the day when the only roles automatically associated with gender are those of birth-giver and sperm-donor. Of necessity, those roles will be equally honored, for both are as essential to the continuance of human life as are the earth and the sun to the compost process which sustains that life, and all other life.

III. Conclusion

Catherine Keller and Carol P. Christ are among many thinkers who use the spider web as a potent symbol of interconnectedness among all forms of life. It is a metaphor I also appreciate greatly. Christ writes: "Concern for the web of life is also encouraged or discouraged by the values expressed in the symbol systems and institutional structures of our cultures."

In this paper I have argued for adoption of compost as a symbol because I believe it would encourage such concern for the web of life. Values implied in compost as a fundamental symbol include: the interconnection and interdependence of all the diverse elements within nature, including humanity; the integral link of death, decay and transformation with birth and growth; a commitment to recycling and taking responsibility for human wastes; a commitment to natural sources of energy and growth. I have also argued that a revaluing of feminine energy is implicit in the many ways that compost can be seen as a manifestation of the Goddess. However, because it can also be seen as a non-gendered symbol, compost has validity for men as well as women in humankind's united effort to live in life-sustaining harmony with the cosmos.

Composting is an ancient process, as old as agriculture; it can also be a powerful symbol if reclaimed in this century along with other symbols (like the web) of wholeness and interdependence with the earth. But while ancient in its roots, compost is modern in its relevance to the survival of humanity and other living species. It represents one of the "transformative mysteries symbolized by the Chalice," of which Riane Eisler writes: ".... by intertwining our ancient heritage of gylanic myths and symbols with modern ideas, it will move us forward toward a world that will become more rational, in the true sense of the word; a world animated and guided by the consciousness that both ecologically and socially we are inextricably linked with one another and our environment."

I might add that such a world will not only avert the threat of extinction that may be humanity's prime motivator for change right now, but it will be a world of beauty, fulfillment, and pleasure, a celebration of eros. After all, from compost grows, not only food, but also flowers.

Bibliography

American Heritage Dictionary,

Second College Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976.

Christ, Carol P. Laughter of Aphrodite; Reflections on a Journey to the Goddess. HarperSanFrancisco, 1987.

Christ, Carol P. 1989. See Plaskow, Judith.

Christ, Carol P. The Power of Eros: A Goddess Thealogy. unpublished manuscript.

Christ, Carol and Plaskow, Judith. Womanspirit Rising; A Feminist Reader in Religion. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979. 

Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology; The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon Press, 1978, 1990.

Eisler, Riane. The Chalice & the Blade; Our History, Our Future. HarperSanFrancisco, 1987.

Gimbutas, Marija. The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe; Myths and Cult Images. New and updated edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

Gimbutas, Marija. The Civilization of the Goddess; The World of Old Europe. HarperSanFrancisco, 1991.

Gimbutas, Marija. The Language of the Goddess. HarperSanFrancisco, 1989.

Griffin, Susan. Woman and Nature. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.

Keller, Catherine. From a Broken Web; Separation, Sexism and Self. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.

Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

McFague, Sallie. The Body of God; an Ecological Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993.

Plaskow, Judith and Christ, Carol. Weaving the Visions; New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality. HarperSanFrancisco, 1989.

Salk, Jonas. Anatomy of Reality. Convergence Series. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.

Starhawk. The Spiral Dance; A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979. 

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