Page 14 RAIN April/May 1983 Descent to the Goddess, A Way of Initiation for Women Sylvia Brinton Perera Inner City Books Box 1272, Station Q Toronto, Canada M4T 2P4 Emerging as a woman in the sixties and seventies.. .being cut loose from mother as role model. . .set free, but homeless.. .feeling power and independence, great surges of new possibilities. . .but a curious emptiness and betrayal. . .great confusion in partnering, a desire to be met.. .stirring of deeper instincts not honored. . . "The return to the goddess, for renewal in a feminine source-ground and spirit, is a vitally important aspect of modem woman’s quest for wholeness.” As "daughters of the patriarchy” we have achieved successful personae by adopting the logic of our time, but have sent the full niystery and potency of the feminine instinct and spirit-pattern underground. It is our work, then, to retrieve her, not merely for our own personal wholeness, but for a better bal- £mce in the world today. How do we retrieve the feminine? As a therapist, Perera discovered echoes of the ancient Sumerian myth "descent of Inanna” in her clients’ dreams and images. Her ability to highly personalize these parallels is startling and illuminating. With the myth of Inanna as guide and support, Perera asks us to descend to the underworld of our psyche, where the dark and repressed aspect of the feminine resides. Descent to the Goddess provides both men and women with a sense of hope and purpose as we answer the challenge to honor the feminine in our lives. —Mary Ramsay Mary Ramsay lives in western Massachusetts, teaches dance at a private high school, and is presently an intern at the Mary Whitehouse Institute where she studies authentic movement. WOMEN ASTRONOMERS OF THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION by Margaret Alic All abstract knowledge, all knowledge which is dry, it is cautioned, must be abandoned to the laborious and solid mind of man. "For this reason,” it is further reasoned, "women will never learn geometry.” Immanuel Kant Kant should have known better. Women natural philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries contributed ideas that helped to shape the Scientific Revolution. And women continued to teach' themselves geometry and the other branches of mathematics, as they had for centuries. By applying their mathematics to the study of the heavens, they helped to transform the science of astronomy from mystical speculation to an empirical body of knowledge. But the contributions of these women astronomers were in the realm of the mundane — the day- to-day drudgeiy of observation and calculation. Therefore, most women astronomers of the period have remained unrecognized and three hundred years later we still think of mathematics and astronomy as masculine pursuits. A century before Newton, Copernicus revolutionized astronomy by placing the sun at the center of the universe, with the earth orbiting around it and spinning daily on its axis. Soon after. Queen Sophia of Denmark, herself an avid chemist and astronomer, built an observatory at Uraniborg for Tycho Brahe. It was here that Tycho’s widowed sister Sofie (c. 1556-1643) taught herself astronomy. Although alchemy was her primary interest, Sofie worked in the observatory as Tycho’s colleague for many years. Meanwhile, as Galileo took up the battle for the Copemican cosmology, Johannes Kepler utilized the Brahes’ crucial new observations to determine the elliptical orbits of the planets. Women mathematicians and observers then set to work filling in the details. Maria Cunitz was the first woman to attempt to correct Kepler’s Rudolphine Tables of planetary motion, a problem of major concern to seventeenth-century science. Bom in Silesia in 1610, the eldest daughter of a physician, Maria exhibited an early interest in astronomy. At the age of twenty she married Elias von Lowen, a physician and amateur astronomer. With his encouragement, she set about making new reductions of old observations in order to simplify the Rudolphine Tables. Written in both German and Latin, it was published at Frankfurt in 1650. In an unusual reversal of roles, she acknowledged her husband’s able assistance in the preface to her book. Maria Cunitz died in 1664 while again fleeing the ravages of war. Already another Polish woman was making the new, more accurate observations needed to improve upon her work. At the age of sixteen, the beautiful Elisabeth Korpmann became the second wife of Hevelius, a wealthy Danzig engraver and amateur astronomer. Hevelius set out to construct a new star catalogue and revise Kepler’s tables. Elisabeth worked at her husband’s side for the next ten years, until 1679 when a great fire swept through Danzig. The observatory, all of their data and most of the printed copies of Hevelius’ Machinae Celestas were destroyed. With the advent of telescopic observations, illustrations became an important adjunct to astronomical treatises. Maria Clara Eimmart (1676-1707) was one of the earliest of these astronomical artists. The daughter of a successful painter, engraver and amateur astronomer, she used telescopic observations to illustrate her father’s Micrographia Stellarum Phases Lunae Ultra 300. Their Nuremberg
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