JudithLaura.com
JudithLaura.com
Other Goddess Writings by Judith Laura
Winter Solstice Invocation in Goddess Pages, Issue 1, Samhain 2006
Is There Gender Equity in Hermetic Qabalah? in Matrifocus, Beltane 2002 issue
Seasonal Guided Meditation: Autumn Equinox in Matrifocus, Lammas 2003 issue
Invocation and devocation/blessing in "Dancing the Goddess Home" Ritual, Goddess 2000.
Thealogical Musingsfrom The Beltane Papers, (Issue 27, Spring '02)
excerpted from The Beltane Papers (Issue
28, Autumn '02) "She Who Flows through All" is an ancient Goddess epithet. A full understanding of this phrase connects us to humanity’s Goddess-worshiping past and opens the way to the future of Goddess religion. Concrete manifestations of goddesses with their many names and characteristics connect us to the millions of people who honored the divine as female over the centuries. Understanding Goddess as Flow connects us to the most advanced concepts of today’s science. Yet it can also be understood more simply. For example, Goddess is the flow of rivers to the sea, the flow of our blood, the flow of love between people, and the flow of air in breeze, hurricane and jet stream. She is what connects us–not only like a link in a chain, but also like an electrical current. . . . . . . I believe this goes one step beyond immanence because it means that not only is She immanent in people and other life-forms, but she is also present in interactions among individuals, between people and animals, and between humans and the spirit world or spiritual plane. This concept is consistent with the latest science which, on the quantum level, sees all matter as an interactive flow. To me, it is no accident that the concept of interactivity in Goddess spirituality and interactivity in computer communications has occurred in quick succession. It’s even possible that the re-emergence of Goddess consciousness several years before the emergence of the Internet and World Wide Web may have helped manifest these technological forms in the physical world. And it becomes a magic circle–because our experience of this interactivity as we go online further opens the way for understanding and experiencing the divine as interactive and interconnected. Understanding the divine, or Goddess, as flow does not mean we have to discard honoring concrete representations of Goddess. On the contrary, honoring Goddess as Gaia, Asherah, Isis, Aphrodite, Hecate, Brigit, etc., not only connects us to our goddess-worshiping past but also may be more appropriate when working with specific problems, or calling on specific energies. Goddesses can be understood as representing aspects of the flow or as being concrete presentations of that flow, just as matter is a concrete presentation of quantum flow. To understand Goddess
as flow is to understand that we interact with Her in the creative process and in our
daily lives. It is to affirm that we are co-creators with She Who Flows Through All. |
"I don’t identify as a Witch or a Pagan–but my spiritual practice is Goddess-centered," a woman said after one of my workshops. "What do I call myself?"
I replied that I usually told people I was involved in Goddess spirituality, or that I honored the Goddess.
"That’s not enough," she said. "When people tell me they’re Methodist or Catholic or Hindu. I want to be able to say I’m.....what?"
I wasn’t able to fill in that blank a few years ago, but I want to thank her for drawing my attention to the importance of naming both ourselves and the groups we belong to.
The power of naming is no stranger to women’s spirituality. Most of us are aware that in Genesis 2, after creating Adam, God gives him the power to name every living creature, including naming "woman," because she was "of man"–made from his body. In Genesis 3, Adam further names her "Eve," using what we now know is a Goddess epithet, "mother of all living." Adam’s naming privilege represents his power over all Earth’s creatures, including Eve; it represents man’s power over nature and woman.
Such power over others is not our goal; rather, we seek to retain our own power, to be self-empowered. Recognizing that naming represents empowerment, some feminists devised alternative spellings, such as wimmin, womyn, wombyn, to show we are not "of man." (Perhaps it’s my background as an editor, but I never adopted these, feeling that we could reclaim the word "woman" as an elongation of womb, and see "man" as a creature lacking the "wo" of the womb.)
Many of us also chose to rename ourselves. Some took a magical name when initiated into a coven or other group, perhaps at Brigid or Candlemas (also a traditional time to name a group). Others, like me, dropped however many patrilineal surnames we had accumulated and called ourselves by just our given names. Often names we give ourselves become more "real" than our legal names.
Why? Besides being self-empowering, naming imparts meaning. The name you give yourself expresses something you feel is important about yourself. It occurs to me that Internet "screen names" have some of these elements.
Though their primary purpose may appear to be anonymity, in most cases, people sign their emails or posts to mailing lists with their "real" names. But, just as with magical names, the screen names they choose may reveal more about them than their legal names.
When you name a group, you are defining that group’s identity and giving it concrete being. At first people whose practice was Goddess-centered may have backed away from calling themselves anything sounding like a religion. They were turned off by organized religion and it seemed that nondefinition would insure an absence of dogma. Today I feel we do ourselves a disservice by continuing to be nonames.To not name ourselves is to risk becoming invisible–both to ourselves and to others. To not have a name is to be in peril of not existing, disappearing, becoming subsumed into other groups. This has already started to happen. Women who came to the Goddess through feminist spirituality, for lack of any visible alternative, may join Wiccan or Pagan groups that give short shrift to women and women’s issues, despite having goddesses in their pantheons. Those who don’t find a home in Witchcraft or other Pagan groups may simply lose interest in Goddess spirituality because they have no cohesive group to identify with.
So, for people who are Goddess-centered but don’t know what to call themselves (whether or not they also identify as Pagans), and for others who also may want a name for the spiritual path that is both Goddess-centered and woman-honoring, I’d like offer suggestions for an overall name (comparable to Christianity, Judaism, Hindu,etc.): Goddessism, or Goddessity or Goddessia. The followers could be called Goddessians.
After we imagine our name into being, I can also envision a time, may it be soon, when we establish Goddessia as a religion with its own clergy and many local permanent meeting places perhaps called Temples, or even more simply, Houses. No multi-faith gathering would be considered complete without a Goddessian representative.
Goddessia would welcome diversity as the love of the Goddess embraces all. I can imagine emerging within Goddessia, groups focusing on certain aspects of Her. We might name some of these denominations: Matrist (Great Mother or other Mother imagery), Dianic (Maiden), Kalian (Crone), Tripletarian (triple goddess), Kwantarist (Asian goddesses), Guadalupista or Guadalupera (Central and South American goddesses), Asherastarite (ancient near east goddesses), Willendorfian (European Neolithic goddesses), and Gaians–spirituality and environment.
(Of course Dianic is already in use, though not always with the meaning I gave here, and Gaian is in increasing use, though not always including the Goddess.)
I would call myself a Goddessian of the Asherastarite denomination. How about you?
© Copyright 2002 by Judith Laura
from The Beltane Papers (Issue 32, Twentieth Anniversary Issue, Spring '04)If you told me in the mid-1970s, when I first started exploring the ancient worship of female deities, that less than a quarter century later there would be hundreds of thousands of Goddess worshipers in the U.S., I wouldn't have believed you.
At that time, as I made my way though Mothers and Amazons by Helen Diner and Women's Mysteries by Esther Harding, I felt very alone. Then came journals–first WomanSpirit and a few years later, The Beltane Papers. How thrilling to discover there were 100 or so other women out there, exploring like me.
In the next few years, books updating the information from Diner and Harding began to be published, with an enormous amount of research on ancient Goddess cultures. A few universities instituted programs on women's spirituality. In the Unitarian Universalist church where I was once a lone voice changing male god language to female (or at least neutral) as I sung hymns, eventually thousands more joined me nationwide when the UUs published a new hymnal eliminating solely-male god language. Some Christian and Jewish denominations also began "degenderizing" hymns and prayers. In 1986, two years after The Beltane Papers began publishing, the UUs came out with an adult education course, "Cakes for the Queen of Heaven," which brought thousands of women to Goddess. And it seems only a few years ago that I attended a showing of Donna Read's film trilogy, beginning with "Goddess Remembered," at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. We had arrived! Before the screening most of us thought there were maybe 25 other Goddess people in the area, but looking around the packed auditorium, we realized that there were in fact hundreds, if not thousands, of us. A few years later along came the Internet. How exciting to meet people worldwide on Goddess and women's spirituality lists and to engage in lively discussions of our common concerns and uncommon questions.
But as much progress as we have made, there still remains much to be done. Today resistance by the "old boys" (including female old boys) persists. As the case for ancient Goddess cultures is made more powerfully, so does academic resistance become stronger. Goddess (and feminist) scholars are expected to meet standards not required of their colleagues conducting research from patriarchal points of view. Ground-breaking work in religion by women is still often ignored, with credit going years later to men when they restate the women's discoveries and innovative views. One recent example: Work by women establishing the importance of Mary Magdalene in early Christianity and perhaps as a Goddess priestess was given little attention by the mainstream for years, while in 2003 a novel by a man about a male artist incorporating these same theories is given coverage on prime-time TV and in mass circulation magazines.1 The fact that the novel, The Da Vinci Code, was high on several best seller lists cannot fully explain this coverage. A few years ago, The Red Tent by Anita Diamant, a woman-centered novel set in biblical times, was high on best seller lists for an extended amount of time but was given no such coverage by network TV or mass circulation news magazines.
Goddess spirituality is at a crossroads. Do we continue to be a scattered spiritual path? Or do we become a full-fledged religion? It seems to me that to choose the former is to choose continued marginalization--both by mainstream religions and by Paganism--and eventually to fade into the persisting patriarchal culture.
For in some ways the fire of early feminism that sparked Goddess spirituality's development is sputtering. Paganism (and Wicca) continue to grow, but women's issues so central to Goddess spirituality's beginnings often got lost. It's not unusual for women to learn a little bit about Goddess and then join pre-existing Pagan/Wiccan groups, some of whose patriarchal assumptions are left uncriticized. We need to realize that though a group has Pagan/Wiccan roots it may not be egalitarian; just because a group is polytheistic or includes goddesses does not automatically mean it honors women. This, together with the erroneous confusion of New Age thought with Goddess teachings2 has resulted in the weakening of Goddess focus. Energy that 20 years ago was directed towards establishing equality in both representation of deity and participation of women in spiritual groups has dissipated. For example, the Unitarian Universalist Association has taken its "Cakes" curriculum out-of-print. A good deal of the course's materials have been obsolete for years, due to research and rituals published since the course came out in 1986. Rather than issue an updated version–and even though many UU congregations want to continue giving the course–UUA has abandoned it, leaving member churches to either use as-is the outdated course materials they already have, or to rely on local course leaders to update materials piecemeal themselves.3 A second UU course, "Rise Up and Call Her Name," is also no longer directly available from UUA.4 Christian and Jewish sects–-including both liberal denominations and some evangelical Christian and Orthodox Jewish women's groups–-continue to examine ways to include women both in scriptural interpretation and religious practice. In many cases, however, they are severely restricted by church dogma and tradition, and nearly always stop short of using the term, Goddess.
What is needed to sustain and hopefully spur the growth of Goddess spirituality in the next 20 years? First, a steadfast concern for inclusiveness in language and practice, including representing the divine as female. Second, establishment of Goddess spirituality as a legitimate religion either as part of, or apart from, mainstream Paganism.
To achieve the first, we can ask:
– Do women participate equally in discussions in our mixed gender groups (including covens), or do they defer to, or are they often interrupted by men?
– Are leadership roles, other than high priest/ess, filled as often by women as by men in mixed gender groups?
– Are deities referred to as "the gods" when we actually mean both goddesses and gods?
– Are the group's teaching materials free of sexist assumptions (for example, characteristics assigned to gods and goddesses)?
– Do the books and techniques used for metaphysics (such as tarot, astrology, kabbalah, meditation, magick) depend on outdated patriarchal frameworks?
As for the second, establishing the legitimacy of our spiritual path–this may be trickier, but it is no less important. Many of us don't like the term "religion," mostly because of bad experiences with organized religion. But the root word "religio" means re-linking or re-connecting (with each other and with the divine)–not repressing! I think one of the most important things we can do to gain respect for our rituals, study and scholarship, is to establish the legitimacy of religion honoring the divine as female. Many of us (including me) groan when we think about getting organized. But we need places more accessible, central and permanent to meet, celebrate, and study. We need to keep our tradition of outdoor worship, but we also need our own temples (or "houses") where we can both hold circles and educate ourselves and our families. Some of this work is already begun. The Re-formed Congregation of the Goddess International (RCGI), motherhoused in Madison, Wisc. and accessible on the internet at http://rcgi.org, has established itself as a religion, ordains priestesses, and is trying to build worship space and organize a community for crones, among other projects. Another group, Internet-centered at http://GlobalGoddess.org, is organizing groups in many locations.
Sustaining the achievements of the first generation of modern Goddess women, re-linking with the heritage of female-embodied divinity, connecting with each other in a way that establishes us as a recognizable and recognized religion–-these are the challenges for the next 20 years. Meeting them will, with Goddess blessing, take us even beyond.
REFERENCES
1. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (2003) was given an hour of prime time coverage on ABC News on Nov. 3, 2003 ("Jesus, Mary & Da Vinci," transcript on http://abcnews.go.com/ accessed 12/20/03), and impetus for the cover story in Newsweek Dec. 8, 2003 ("Women of the Bible: Mary Magdalene: Decoding ‘The Da Vinci Code'," also online at http://msnbc.ms.com/id/3606237/, accessed 12/20/03). Books published 10 or more years ago covering similar material about Mary Magdalene include: The Gnostic Gospels (Elaine Pagels, 1979) The Moon Under Her Feet (a footnoted novel, Clysta Kinstler, 1989), and The Woman With the Alabaster Jar (Margaret Starbird, 1993).
2. For a thorough discussion
on the shortcomings of many New Age beliefs and their incompatibility with Goddess, see Monika Sjoo: Return of the Dark/Light Mother or New Age Armageddon? (Plain View 1999)
3. A book with a similar title was published by curriculum author Shirley Ranck (Delphi Press 1995) but is also out of print. A search through google.com for "Cakes for the Queen of Heaven"+Unitarian on 12/18/03 listed numerous congregations giving or planning to give the course. See especially http://www.uuprinceton.org/publish22-12/page5.html for a Princeton church's updating plans.
4. See www.uua.org. It can however, be obtained from its author, Elizabeth Fisher. Contact: lizfisher@igc.org or visit www.foxfables.org/pages/17437/index.htm
(accessed 12/1/03).
© Copyright 2004 by Judith Laura.
More columns from The Beltane Papers: "Do we Create our Own Reality?" "Psychic Gifts," "Death">>>>>
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