Matriarchy, Pleasure & Why Rage is Sacred

Welcome, wild one. I’m Annette ~ artist, storyteller, and medicine woman. These writings are intimate transmissions from my life, offered in the hope they stir something true in yours. When I am not here, you will find me weaving potions over at Wild Nettle, or guiding those ready to deepen into their own becoming. I’m glad you’re here. If you’d like to stay a while, your paid subscription is deeply appreciated. Otherwise, sign up for my free newsletter, where I will be sharing exciting ways we get to play and create together!

Why hellooooo there?

Hello fellow human feelers and star beings, incarnated into fleshy blood and bones on a very special yet peculiar planet, floating amongst katrillions of other bodies, aliens, and universes.

What on Earth are we getting up to here on Earth?

What beautiful and horrendous things have we humans been up to of late?

In what strange universe did we decide it was a good idea to confine ourselves into physical boxes, sit behind little black boxes all day, only to return to our mini boxes at night to take the edge off from all that being boxed in… allowing our attention — aka our souls — to be pulled into screens that (I don’t know about you) most of us don’t have any real clue how this all actually works?

All in the name of productivity?
Or entertainment?
Or advancement?

Artificial intelligence, did they say?

I don’t know about you… but the times feel strange.

I mean, yes, the times are always somewhat bizarre… but lately they feel particularly… heated, and yet also… aimless?

At least for me.

Life is moving at such a fast pace that I often find myself sitting in my parked car quite literally sitting just to pause, just to catch a breath.

My automated instinct is to pick up my phone, to check my apps, to scroll… because the comfort of that familiar ritual somehow “soothes” me?

The other day, a neighbour’s gardener warned me that sitting in my car outside my new home, somewhat aimlessly looking at my cellphone, is actually a recipe for a robbery.

That was enough to jolt me awake.

He went on to tell me a horrendous story of an elderly lady who was followed home and robbed while sitting in her car - on her phone, of course.

It was a healthy warning.

And a little reminder of the universal signs I receive daily to stay the course - to not dissociate, to not distract.

These times are asking us to be wide-a-fucking-wake.

And yet it can be all too easy to collapse into… apathy?

Right now it feels like it’s either apathy…
or emotions that are all consuming.

Rage?

Outrage?

Grief?

Anyone else out there?

I loved a recent podcast with Glennon Doyle and Meggan Watterson, which I listened to on her “We Can Do Hard Things,” about how the rage is no longer inside of us… it is, in fact, OUT.

As in, we should all be OUTraged.

As in, no you are not mad for feeling… well, mad.

And yet, I will sometimes find myself looking around in shopping centres, sitting at shmancy dinner tables, wondering if I am, in fact, stark raving mad… because, well, no one else seems to be showing signs of madness?

Or sadness, even?

It is very possible (and most likely) that it’s a matter of expression more than it is a matter of feeling. I know there are many fellow mad ones out there, but they, like me at times, have become very skilled at looking like they have their shit together, like their “shit don’t stink,” and like they know exactly what’s going on…

I do wonder though, and can find myself looping into stories of well… perhaps I am a bit mad.

Or, as I’ve been told my whole life, “a bit of a drama queen.”

Even writing this to you, I feel tears welling in my eyes, heat in my chest, and a heaviness in my throat - a longing to let some of this spill out.

Bleeding through words… because sometimes I don’t really know what else to do.

I mean… I do what I can do.

I interrupt stupid dinner conversations that are steeped in unconscious righteousness or a complete lack of awareness.

I grow out my armpit and pubic hairs, enjoying the delicious duty of educating boy-men conditioned by porn to think a grown woman should look like a child.

I scream at the top of my lungs in my car, chanting ancient Polish witch invocations, causing fellow drivers alongside me to stare on in… horror?

Sometimes resonance.

Lately, I find myself lying on patches of earth wherever I can find her, just crying or simply being there, feeling. Whether it’s in a park, at the beach, or on some strange patch of lawn at someone’s home, I fully angel-splay myself out, limbs wide open like a total weirdo, just letting myself feel. it. all.

It’s so delicious and necessary these days, I could not give two shits who’s watching.

I also make sweet tender love to myself, and sometimes to my partner/lover/ex -whatever (more on that another time).

In the Radical Woman Initiation journey I am guiding (and let me tell you, it has indeed been an initiation for us all) we are deep inside the Slut spiral, unravelling generations of shame and fear woven into women’s bodies - into all human bodies.

A shame that has been shaped and reinforced over thousands of years through doctrines and systems that attempted to sever sex from the sacred.

Pleasure is the great interrupter to the BS we are witnessing in this world.

As Audre Lorde and Adrienne Maree Brown remind us, patriarchy thrives on a body disconnected from pleasure.

How can we possibly take the time to touch and make love to our bodies when so much violence is unfolding?

Well… that is exactly it.

That is why we must.

We must touch.
We must feel.
We must refuse to drown ourselves in suffering or collapse into apathy.

When I touch my body, I let the world know I am STILL here.

When I touch another body - especially one I once deemed “unworthy” of my love - I refuse the conditioning that tells me to separate.

I begin to unravel my shame.

I begin to unravel years of hurt that taught me to blame, to judge, and to choose the familiarity of isolation over the ache for connection.

And so instead, I meet my body, and I meet this other body, with such tender love that it breaks me wide open.

I allow the heat of my own hurt to warm my heart and ignite my pussy - erupting in shivers of pleasure, of love, of a deep knowing in my blood and my bones that yes… this is that place.

That place out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing

That place out beyond notions of good and bad, sacred and sinful

A holy place of being so totally fucking human.

This, to me, is radical.

…

For most of my “adult” life, I have been told, mostly by the men in my family, that this is all just a “phase.”

As if the work I have been doing to address generational trauma and the dissociation I sometimes experience in my body is something I will eventually “grow out of.”

As if a decade of devotion to women’s work and research will simply… tire out of me.

As if one day all of this passionate energy will simply subside and I will… what? return to a “real” job?

“Move on” from the urgency I feel to care for the plight of womanhood, the Earth?

Humanity?

And yet… nowadays when I look around me it feels more and more that this urgency is beginning to infiltrate the lives of many more of us…

I even have my dad, the doctor, sending me dance reels about the importance of somatic therapy and freeing up our emotions… YouTube clips exposing the very real corruption within medical systems, political systems, systems he and I fought vehemently about.

I acknowledge that this is the precise moment to practice the most radical kind of compassion and kindness.

To be the fertile ground for those beginning to ask important questions, unravelling themselves from a system they have spent their entire lives trusting… identifying with.

I resonated so deeply with what Glennon Doyle and these fierce women were speaking to.

This feeling that many of us felt during those “pandemic” times, a kind of enough is enough.

A sense that something is way off and who, or what, are where do we go from here…

How do we protect the children?

When do we say no more.

What are our individual roles and responsibilities in perpetuating this system?

How have we become pawns of the patriarchy - subjugating, contorting, and deluding ourselves in the name of “progress” that is, in truth, taking us further and further away from our bodies and the body of the Earth?

Away from our hearts and the hearts of our humanity?

…

It excites me that there seems to be another wave on social media right now, with people all sharing about matriarchy - and hallelujah!

When I first began studying matriarchal tribes through the Academy Hagia, diving deep into the anthropological evidence of cultures that have lived in harmonious relationships with each other and the earth, both historically and still today, I experienced a paradigm shift in consciousness.

An ontological shock.

This new (yet ancient) information, rooted in long-buried and overlooked truths, quite literally shook me out of what I had come to understand as “reality.

Sort of like what happened when, in my early 20’s, I smoked some toad venom in Ibiza and felt my brain and body explode into a million fragmented pieces… basically dissolving into the grass, the trees, the bees - becoming ‘one with the universe’ as they like to call it - hello, 5-MeO-DMT.

The reason studying matriarchal societies for three years, with world-renowned philosopher and educator Dr. Heide Goettner-Abendroth, was so transformative is because it gave me a roadmap: a tangible, lived example of how an entire civilisation can organise itself in a way that is peace-first.

What many people get wrong is assuming that a matriarchy is simply the reverse of a patriarchy. As humans who have grown up within patriarchal systems, we are conditioned to see everything through the lens of power over.

Patriarchy is a pyramid and operates as a hierarchy, with historically white men at the top. Nature and animals are placed beneath us, and in order to maintain this structure, domination and extraction become the norm.

A matriarchy, however, is a circle, with the mother at the centre. It is not women over men, or nature over humans. A matriarchy is a circular system in which maternal values and the needs of the mother are central to how the whole is organised.

Etymologically speaking, both patriarchy and matriarchy include the ancient Greek word “arché,” which holds multiple meanings depending on context. In matriarchy, “arché” refers to the origin or source of something, while the prefix “matri,” from the Latin mater, meaning “mother.” Matriarchy thus directly translates to “mother at the source,” or “the origin of mothers” - quite literally, we come from the mother.

In patriarchy, however, the context shifts, and “arché” comes to mean authority, rule, or control. The prefix “patri,” from the Latin pater, meaning “father,” leads to the definition “rule of the fathers,” describing a system in which men hold ultimate authority and rely on domination, by whatever means necessary, to maintain their positions of power.

And wow have we seen that desperation to maintain power playing out in our world today…

When I started seeing, hearing, and learning from actual matriarchal societies, this notion of them as mythical or extinct began to subside. Suddenly, I was being exposed to real, documented cultures, some of which continue to exist still today, organised around cooperation, kinship, and non-dominance.

Societies that have been described as places where rape, as we understand it, does not exist - where the social, relational, and cultural conditions that give rise to the violence we have come to accept as “normal” are fundamentally absent.

I remember in those initial years of study being brought to my knees in both relief and horror. As if this ancient grief that lived inside my heart and womb had always known that no, this is not the only way.

Matriarchal cultures have sustained peaceful ways of living for centuries, even millennia, long predating dominance-based systems we have been conditioned to believe are simply “the way things are.”

Why does it matter that we read and learn about matriarchal tribes?

Why did Heide Goettner-Abendroth, who is our final guest speaker on my Radical Woman initiation program, dedicate her entire academic life to researching these societies, publishing extensively, and continuing her work despite widespread dismissal within mainstream academia, eventually leaving her post at Munich University to start her own university, just to disseminate this information?

Because when we reclaim this knowledge - this precise and deeply researched her-story, beyond our current academic version of his-story - we restore memory.

And when we restore memory, we retrieve the map.

And when we retrieve the map… we remember where we are going.

When I studied matriarchal societies, I uncovered a living blueprint; one that showed me not only who we have been as a humanity, but what we are capable of becoming again.

Because it is hard to move toward peace when the dominant narrative teaches us that humanity is inherently competitive and violent.

It is hard to feel hope when the only history we are taught is one of war, conquest, and domination.

It is hard to trust a woman’s voice when her lived experience within a patriarchal system tells her she is less than - that she is merely the product, or possession, of man.

If our origin stories tell us that Eve was made from Adam’s rib, and that her curiosity has been blamed for the suffering of the world…

If our sacred texts exclude Mary’s Gospel, and her own fellow disciples did not believe her account of her relationship with Jesus…

Then how do we ever come to believe ourselves as women?

How do we come to trust our sisters?

Our mothers?

Listening to this podcast with Glennon Doyle and Meggan Watterson helped me finally see the pattern in the pieces I’ve been gathering that have guided me toward becoming a whole human, an embodied woman beyond the confines of the patriarchally objectified version of womanhood I was conditioned into.

We are living in times where we cannot keep turning a blind eye to the devastation and destruction happening around us.

We must wake up to the realisation that we are inherently affected by this system of dominance and oppression.

We must wake up to how we are contorted and manipulated into believing we are “liberated” and “free,” when in truth we are maintaining a status quo that is harming humanity, her future children, and the Earth.

So what on Earth do we do?

This is what the podcast helped me find relief in…

It’s not about knowing exactly what to do.

It’s about refusing to numb out and do nothing.

And so I guess my question to this whole long rant is this: how do we not miss this moment?

How do we choose, even in the smallest ways, to no longer participate in a system built to dominate?

How do we begin taking agency, like Abby Wambach did in the podcast, when she chose to leave the Wasserman Agency because she refused to be associated with any company or individual named in those files?

Agency begins the moment we stop outsourcing our values and start choosing, with clarity, where our energy belongs.

Even if you feel like you don’t have agency, the truth is you do.

Where are you shopping?
Can you support local farmers, local brands?
Do you need more cheap clothing, or can you repurpose what you already have?
Can you choose to spend your money where it actually cares for people and planet?

Capitalism is a spell that convinces us we need more and more, when beneath that hunger is a spiritual lack crying out to be met.

In All About Love, Bell Hooks speaks of the very real crisis of greed.

I am not immune to it.

None of us are.

We fill up our lives with things because meaning has been lost.

We numb out because to truly feel the weight of what is happening can disrupt our ability to function.

Fair enough.

I have had moments where I could not get out of bed. Could not write. Could not sell. Could not carry on “business as usual.”

And yet, I have not spent the last decade building a box of tools to not open it when I need it most.

Get into nature.

Find your people.

You find your people by being honest about how you feel.

The ones who are yours will hold you in your grief and witness your rage without trying to fix or silence you.

They will also remind you to get offline.

To not be sucked in by the screens that are designed to steel your attention.

To breathe.

To stop feeding the very systems that drain and distract you.

It’s a both/and, not either/or.

My prayer for all of us is fierce grace.

Like a lioness.

Like a horse that has the physical strength and power to take action, but who moves with the utmost beauty and precision.

My heart is in prayer with you all, especially those who have become so far removed from their humanity that they continue to enact the harm we are witnessing.

I pray for accountability.

For atonement.

For a return to love.

And I pray that we wake up and do something - however big or small.

Even if it is simply lying on a small patch of earth and crying, in the middle of it all, allowing ourselves to feel.

Because it is human to feel.

And it is necessary to grieve.

For when we grieve, we grieve for each other, and in doing so we allow the rivers of our planet to flow once more.

I love you.

I carry your heart,

I carry it in my heart.

…

{Thank you for taking the time to read this essay, for taking the time to simply be, let these words and prayers wash over you and know you are not alone, your sharing of my essays to other hearts is so appreciated xxx}

The Podcast I spoke about:

Dr Heide Goettner-Abendroth’s Work:

https://hagia.de/en/international-academy-hagia

RADICAL WOMAN Volume 3 waitlist:

https://www.annettemuller.love/radical-woman-waitlist