Finally, a woman arrives. She may not know quite where she is or what is growing and what is dead, but she knows she has come through the door of outward searching into. . . well what?
What does it mean to come to the end of searching outside oneself for the truth? What does it mean to enter the sacred garden?
When a woman makes the choice to embody spiritual experience in her life, idealizations go out the window. She has to bring in everything—frailties and strengths, doubts and optimism, whatever she longs to conceal and whatever she’d be delighted to flaunt—and live it out.
–The Feminine Face of God, Sherry Ruth Anderson & Patricia Hopkins
Magic is the ancestor of technology, the ancestor of what we call applied science. Medicine springs from it. The individual medicine [woman] or Big Medicine among the aboriginal inhabitants of this continent was a [woman] who, by reason of special ability and training, was able to do things that the ordinary individual could not do in the way of controlling mysterious forces of nature. The word “medicine” was applied not merely to what we call medicine, but to rain making, cloud making, wind making, getting strength into the war party, harming their enemies, etc. When we want anything done in what we call the arts of technology, we go to a special individual, e.g., physician, engineer, carpenter, plumber, who has a special training. The medicine [woman] was a [woman]technically trained and able to control mysterious forces. Of course, the ordinary member of the tribe as a hunter, fisher, etc., had his training, and he could do the ordinary things in the ordinary way. But if he wanted anything special done, he went to the medicine [woman]–the Shaman.
–Joseph Alexander Leighton