The Secret Life of Lady Liberty - The American Goddess

I'm so happy to feel her deep importance to this nation beginning to return. One of the most important "vacuums of the feminine" in America has to do with our structure of government. While we based it on the very successful model of the Iroquois Confederacy, what was left out of our Constitution was, in my opinion, the most important aspect of checks and balances. Can you speak about that?

Laura E. Cortner: Thanks Meryl Ann! This is one of our favorite topics and one of the reasons we wrote this book about the Statue of Liberty in the first place.

One of the biggest "secrets" about Lady Liberty that we are referring to in the title of our book is her Native American ancestry. This is evident symbolically and from an art history standpoint when you examine the images of the so-called Indian Queen on the earliest European travel literature of the late 1500s.

These European artists depicted the new land as a voluptuous, mostly naked, dark-skinned woman -- and we can elaborate later, if you like, about how this "Indian Queen" image unconsciously continues to influence our domination paradigm in the United States even today, in terms of environmental stewardship. But what you're pointing to with your first question is the missing element in the U.S. Constitution: namely, the voice of the Council of the Clan Mothers.

Our founders borrowed heavily from the Native governing structures they observed in their neighboring societies, in particular the League of the Iroquois. And when you compare the two governments side by side, U.S. and Iroquois, you can immediately see the esteemed position in which the Iroquois held their women.

The Council of the Clan Mothers among the Iroquois, or to more correctly name them, the Haudenosaunee, is on par with the U.S. Supreme Court. The wise women made all the most important decisions for their nation. The women determined when to go to war and when to negotiate peace; they were the ones who voted in the chiefs, and they held the power of impeachment; the women owned all the property and retained it in times of divorce, and on and on.

But though John Adams and others acknowledged their indebtedness to the Native Americans for inspiring the American Revolution and providing a framework for their new experiment in self-rule, Adams spoke for many when he voiced his fear of giving too much power to the women.

I'll let Bob tell you what John Adams said in praise of the Iroquois, but here's what he said in reply to Abigail Adams when she famously told him to "remember the ladies," (i.e, women's rights) when drafting this new declaration of independence they were all talking about. His reply to her was tongue-in-cheek, saying women are already so powerful that the men were at their feet. He joked that if in their declaration of independence from the King that they simultaneously freed the women from the centuries of legal repression that was preventing them from education and employment or even personhood, then they would face what he called the dreaded "petticoat revolution." In other words, it scared him less to take on the King of England and his mighty army of redcoats and mercenaries than it did to change the laws that continued to suppress women's equal access to full citizenship.

Dr. Bob Hieronimus: That's right, and thanks for inviting us to this interview, Meryl Ann. Practically all of the founders we learn about in school wrote at one time or another about their praise for the governing methods of the Indians. John Adams said that the U.S. Constitution was the Americans' attempt to "set up a government of . . . modern Indians." That was in his Defence of the Constitutions in 1787.

Thomas Paine wrote, "To understand what the state of society ought to be, it is necessary to have some idea of the natural state of man, such as it is at this day among the Indians of North America. . . . [Poverty was a creation] of what is called civilized life. It exists not in the natural state. . . . The life of an Indian is a continual holiday compared to the poor of Europe."

This respect that our founders felt for the Native Americans is a subject that I always try to bring up whenever I'm being interviewed by the History Channel or the Discovery Channel or the many other shows I've done about the "secrets" of the founding fathers.

You know my doctoral dissertation is a humanistic and transpersonal interpretation of the Reverse of the Great Seal, that mysterious eye in the triangle over an unfinished pyramid.

Today, thanks to these many documentaries I've appeared on, most Americans THINK they know this symbol means "Illuminati" or "Freemasons" or worse, "Satanic." That's why I almost always refuse these interview requests any more. They will cut out the parts when I'm talking about the influence of the League of the Iroquois and how much we owe to them, and they will leave in all the edited bits from my symbolic analysis of the Great Seal or the layout of Washington, DC, that links them however tenuously to the Freemasons. Oftentimes what I say will be skewed into whatever conspiracy theory they are trying to spin for whatever ratings season they are in.

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