It wasn’t what you’d call an in-depth piece—the New York Beacon wasn’t exactly noted for its coverage of Nobel Prize winners—but it seemed like a pretty decent matching of journal and subject. While there wasn’t a photo of Angelica accompanying the interview (and that seemed a mistake), there was a loving description of one of her homes, in the canyons north of Hollywood, and a rather breathless listing of the original artwork hanging there: Frida Khalo, Mary Cassatt, Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe’s polaroids of Patti Smith, an ancient vase fragment depicting Sappho’s lament for the virgin Gorgo.
The (female) interviewer was obviously bewitched by Angelica. It was easy to see why—Angelica was so charming, her answers to even personal questions funny and self-deprecating. I could just imagine her, lounging on her white leather sofa with the picture windows overlooking the canyon. She wore expensively tasteful clothes: Italian sandals, pleated cream-colored skirt, jade green silk blouse. The interviewer noted that she wore simple jewelry, silver earrings shaped like crescent moons, and a moon-shaped silver pendant around her neck.
I learned that her husband the duke had been eighteen years her senior, and had died during a sailing trip in the Aegean five years ago. Following his death, Angelica returned to the States and began writing in earnest. Her first two books, The Nysean Fields and Amazons in America, had been published as trade paperbacks by a small New Age press. The books had become surprise best-sellers, and a cause célèbre in both New Age and small press circles. After Amazons in America turned up on the New York Times best-seller list, Angelica started giving workshops stressing the same things she invoked in her books: how women should avoid becoming victims, how they should take responsibility for their own failures as well as successes; how they should learn to recognize the Goddess within themselves. There was a strong occult slant to all of this, with the Goddess (whom Angelica called Othiym) standing in for that ubiquitous Greater Power favored by adherents of AA and its ilk.
And, unlike any Twelve-Step program or women’s self-help group that I’d ever heard of, there were some genuinely disturbing elements in Angelica’s Goddess-worship. The emphasis on the division between the sexes, rather than their union; a certain disregard for the importance of family or any other ties except for those between the Goddess and her followers. In the little I’d read of other, similar, female gurus—Shirley MacLaine, Lynn Andrews, Marianne Williamson—there was always an emphasis on the powers of love and forgiveness, of the importance of loving yourself so you could better love someone else.
Angelica didn’t buy it.
“That’s condescending to women.” Furiano’s brilliant green eyes narrowed as she reached for her Limoges teacup. “For thousands of years, women have wasted their lives taking care of men—tending their homes and their children and their castles and their farms, tending their offices and corporations and schools, making sure they look young enough and beautiful enough to keep a man—and why? Because we have been brainwashed into thinking that men are necessary for our happiness and self-esteem—”
The reporter gently suggested that perhaps it wasn’t as bad as all that. Dr. Furiano bristled.
[Dr. Furiano: I was impressed.]
“Come now—you’re a woman, you know what it’s like! I say, “Enough.” We’ve all put in our time being Aphrodite and Hera”—the goddesses of Love and the Hearth respectively—“we’ve all been the dutiful daughters and good mothers and noble prostitutes and loyal secretaries. It’s time to acknowledge that there are other roles for us to play. That we can be warriors, not just in the skies and in the armed services, but on the home front, where most of the battles are fought anyway. That we can be lovers but also leaders; that we are not victims! Everybody knows that women really are the stronger sex—you read accounts of shipwrecks and accidents, the journals from the Donner Party… it’s the men who go down whimpering, and the women who walk out of the jungle alive. If men had menstrual periods, they’d have ten paid sick days a month! And can you imagine a man having a baby? Why, we would have discovered a cure for childbirth a hundred years ago!
I laughed. This sounded like the old Angelica.
Dr. Furiano offered me more tea; a young man (a graduate student in cultural anthropology, Dr. Furiano told me later, working for her as a summer intern) came out bearing a silver tray of tiny butter cookies shaped like horns. I asked her if her next book was going to be an extension of her earlier work, or if she had done away with men altogether.
“Not yet! You see, I still find uses for them—” She laughed, and her grad student grinned. “No, truly, I have many men in my life, I always have. My father raised me after my mother died when I was an infant, and he was probably the greatest single influence on me. I absolutely do not have a vendetta against men.
“My new book—my new book is called Waking the Moon and will be published this summer. I always try to have my publication dates coincide with one of the Goddess’s ancient holidays—though this one will be out before Lammas, which is a celebration of the harvest that used to end with the sacrifice of beautiful young men to the great Goddess. When people think of human sacrifices, they think of the Carthaginians tossing children into the flames, or beautiful virgin women tied to the stake. But actually the first and greatest sacrifices in human history were nearly always of men, in an effort to appease the Goddess. So it is easy to understand how men might have gotten a little concerned, and ended up seizing control of things out of desperation—”
And, this reporter thought, you can see why Dr. Furiano’s own work is met with controversy wherever she goes.
“But, of course, we really can’t really do that anymore, I mean at least not legally, and so…”
There was more of this sort of talk; then,
Dr. Furiano leaned closer to me. Through the window behind her, I could just glimpse the crescent moon gleaming above the Hollywood Hills.
“You know,” she said, “all I’ve really done is follow in the footsteps of those who went before me. The great female archaeologists of our time, June Harrington and Magda Kurtz and Marijta Gimbutas, women who discovered so much about the Goddess cultures of ancient Europe, and who inspired people like me to go searching for more answers.
“I found my answers in the ruins of ancient temples in Estavia and Crete and Turkey. I found them in what I discovered there about the goddess Othiym, and now I want to share my knowledge with women everywhere.”
She pointed to the window behind her. “Waking the Moon isn’t just about personal empowerment. It’s really about something much, much bigger, about all of us—women and men—reaching outside of ourselves and using that chthonic aspect of our own natures to change the world. To take a world and a race on the brink of self-destruction and shake it back to life again. I truly believe that very drastic measures will be needed to change things, if we are to survive. There is a quote from Robert Graves which I find quite interesting, considering he wrote it nearly fifty years ago, in The White Goddess—