The Meanings of Goddess

©2006 Max Dashu

So much confusion has been sown about goddess veneration. Resistance to seeing any sacral value in ancient female icons has been a sticking point in academia. There, emphasis is usually placed on theoretical frameworks that ignore the pervasive sense of sacredness in aboriginal cultures. There is also fundamental misunderstanding of what the Women’s Spirituality movement means in speaingk of Goddess or goddesses. These are some of my reflections on these gaps and what needs to be clarified.

Goddess is a contested word today. In popular culture it has been totally desacralized, disrespected, stripped down and trivialized. People talk about a sex goddess (movie star) or a diva—which is Italian for “goddess,” but mostly used to describe singers with overinflated egos. It’s hardly a reverent term. It has no cultural standing of its own in mainstream society, after a long history of deprecation.

Schools still teach the patriarchal Greek and Roman archetypes, the vain and capricious Venus, the jealous and meddling Hera. Further up the academic ladder, university students are discouraged from using the word “goddess” to describe ancient female icons; the reductive “fertility idol” continues to be the preferred term. It is clearly risky to talk about goddesses, except to ridicule feminist “fantasy” or “ideology.” Many intellectuals consider sardonic and cynical readings of Goddess hip, and dismiss the whole idea as a woo-woo illusion with no possible relevance in a post-modern or hi-tech world.

Goddess talk has a forbidden charge in all kinds of settings. Marxists and positivists want no part of it, not too surprisingly where materialism is not only the point of departure but also the destination. Even in Women’s Studies, examination of Goddess-oriented culture and history is generally stigmatized as utopianism and regarded as an embarrassment that detracts from the acceptability of a field already under seige.

The patriarchal religions, however, still carry a venerable aura of time-honored usage, and have roared back into currency in recent decades. Scholars tend to be much more cautious on this ground: these constituencies must not be offended, even when they rest on foundational myths and structures that heavily privilege men and the masculine. In fact, these scriptures and institutions originate in times when the transmission of Goddess veneration was being interrupted, severed and broken.

Something important was negated in that cultural break, in each time and place where it happened: spirituality honoring the female as creative, sovereign, and potent in her own right, as transcendent as well as immanent. Also lost was a wealth of spiritual observances led by women and values defined by women. This is not to over-idealize the pagan world of Southwest Asia and the Mediterranean, which had long been patriarchal, but simply to recognize that paganism did retain a cultural freight of very ancient origins.

Though priestesses had become marginalized, they still maintained spheres of influence, particularly at the local level. And their power was attacked and bitterly fought down as the patriarchal religious institutions were established. For example, repression did away with Christian priestesses such as the Montanists of Anatolia, or the Sicilian and Breton women who officiated at Mass, or the “heretical” Kollyridian women who worshipped Mary with loaves.

As we know, Goddess reverence came to be forbidden as “idolatry” and “whoring after false gods,” attacked as “heresy” and “blasphemy” and “shirk,”* persecuted as “devil-worship,” and finally stigmatized as “superstition” and “cult.” This repression was led by the social elite. Goddess veneration lapsed into invisibility, as if wiped out, but its vestiges persisted among the common people, marginalized and unmentionable.
* Shirk (literally “sharing”) is an Islamic concept of blasphemy with a specific meaning of “ascribing partners to god,” but more broadly refers to goddess reverence, or veneration of any other deity than Allah (literally, “the god”).

Mary Ford Grabowsky described the cultural remainder of this process as “the crushed feminine.” [See The Sacred Feminine: Essential Women’s Wisdom Through the Ages.] A French historian of the witch hunts, Robert Muchembled, referred to the abased condition of European women in the 17th century as la femme vaincue: the “vanquished woman.” I’ve also detailed the cultural outcome of “women possessed” in my unpublished Secret History of the Witches. [For excerpts see www.suppressedhistories.net/secrethistory.html ] It was out of this long cultural exile and dispossession in “Western civilization” that women rose up to reaffirm Goddess, refusing her relegation to heresy, blasphemy, and the unspeakable, which is female power.

The Goddess movement recognizes the political function of male-supremacist religion, and resolves to overthrow its dominionist foundations. We challenge theologies which make females stand for the “inferior,” material realm, which equate us with sexuality and decree submission to male privilege. We repudiate hierarchy, not only male domination, but also the demonization of matter, of bodies, of darkness in patriarchal religion. We recognize how the twisted ideas fo diabolism were used to target first European goddess reverence, and later dark peoples and Indigenous religions.

In Starhawk's words, we value power within, and power with, not power over. We disavow ideas of superiority/inferiority, the idea of us down here under Him or even Her “up there,” and anything that smacks of pompous authoritarianism. This is why many feminists prefer “spirituality” to the notion of “religion,” which is so deeply stained with dominance behaviors and institutional rigidities. (Alhough religio originally meant “bound together.”) Some say: “earth-based religion,” feeling that even “spirituality” implies a rejecting the sacredness of the earthly, in the pattern of dominionist religion.

Goddess feminists understand that religious symbolism is not irrelevant happenstance, but a deep encoding of values. Subordination in this sphere, or exclusion from it, has consequences all along the cultural line. It shapes attitudes, behavior and human relations. There’s a reason why religion has been a pivotal battleground in establishing systems of domination. The power of symbolism is also utilized by media and mass-market advertising, which deploys it to manipulate human feeling and motivation in sophisticated ways. To ignore these forces would be foolish.

When Goddess women talk about the profound formative potency of image and symbol and mythos, it is not taken seriously in the halls of academe. It’s usually dismissed as romanticism, imaginary fantasy. But the same observation takes on prestigious weightiness when others wrap it in the robes of literary or psychological theory, especially when phrased in French, as l’imaginaire.  It would be considered gauche to mistake this meaning for the English “imaginary,” which has become synonymous with  “not real.” Thus, theorists have deemed it advisable either to adopt another term, the “imaginal,” or to just stick with the French, which always sounds impressive anyway.

The good news is that some of what we have been saying is coming in through another door. The bad news is that they don’t want to hear it from us. They want any consideration of sexual politics stripped out, so that the discourse can be kept safely abstract and psychological. And it must be theoretical, not spiritual, for the play-acting of objectivity.

All this boils down to conflicting views of what is real and significant. Humans are more than rational beings. The mind is powerful, but the heart is greater. We live grounded in a dreaming consciousness of the numinous, where our awareness of ourselves arises. So do our values and the ways we connect with each other. If in this dream-realm of culture, the female is deprecated and subordinated, is ruled out from being named and pictured as divine, creator, or source of being, the effect on girls and women is immeasurably negative and demoralizing.

Conversely, the Catholic hierarchy keeps insisting that the maleness of god and christ is non-negotiable. (Hmmm: even as I write, the software keeps trying to make me capitalize those titles.) The popes say the priest must be masculine because he stands for christ, who therefore represents maleness as well as divinity. The Virgin Mary represents the female, but Church doctrine vehemently insists that she is not goddess and is beneath the heavenly father.

Of course, there are other methods of imaginally subjugating the female, as can be seen in Greek and Norse mythology, or Babylonian scriptures, or Indra’s attacks on the dawn-goddess Ushas in the Rg Veda. Patriarchal Hindu theologians retain the goddesses but portray them as pativrat? [“vowed unto a lord”] who serve their husbands , dutifully rubbing their feet or plastered to their sides like clinging vines. The Manusmrti prescribed that a wife should worship her husband, however lacking in virtue he may be, “as a god.”

But female sovereignty is attested by other voices in the multi-stranded web of culture called “Hinduism.” These voices say that Dev? is the ultimate Reality and that Shiva cannot even move a limb without Shakti. These voices say that Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva are like tiny flakes of red kumkum in the bindi dot on Devi’s forehead. Tantrik voices say that women are all Dev? herself; that to harm any woman is to do violence to Goddess.

The deep stream of Goddess veneration also resurfaced under Christianity in the form of Black Madonnas and Our Lady of the Local Animist Sanctuary. This popular animist veneration comes from a pagan source, going back to Celtic times and before, different than the theologians’ virgin vessel and handmaid of the Lord. Over centuries, of course, these strands coalesced to a greater or lesser degree. But folk reverence never yielded to the priestly prohibitions against worshipping Mary, or the many goddesses-in-disguise that re-emerged in the form of “saints.” And “saint” itself simply means “holy one,” from the Latin root sanctus.

So much of the disagreement comes down to language. We have to recognize the limitations of language, and of translation. It’s important to note the variation in cultural approaches to the sacred. The Dineh / Navajo speak of the “holy people” rather than “gods and goddesses.” Indigenous people generally are more likely to speak of “Our Mother,” or of “Mothers,” who can be direct ancestors, forces of nature, law-givers, or primordial creators. Diasporic Africans adopted the Catholic terminology of the saints in order to smuggle their own orishas or loas into the churches. The Maya and Peruvians did the same. 

The further back we look into the roots of the words we use for the Divine, the more they resemble concepts in aboriginal philosophies. For example, deity, divinity, and the latinate names for “goddess” (dea, déesse, diosa, and so on) spring from a proto-Indo-European root—*deiwa (f), *deiwos (m)—that means “shining.” From this same root come “day” and also “Diana,” having branched into solar and lunar manifestations of light. “Goddess” is a latinized feminine form of the Germanic word “god,” which comes from an old proto-Germanic root *gudhan (dh standing for a slashed d, pronounced as in “then.”) Its original meaning is still debated, but both of the proposed roots point to ritual. Most linguists favor *ghau, “to call on, invoke,” while the alternative *gheu means "to pour libation."

Because of the long history of persecution, English and most European languages have a limited vocabulary for pagan and shamanic concepts. This is why words like shaman (from Evenk, in NE Siberia) or mana (from Polynesian languages) were borrowed. Some of the most heavily repressed observances in Europe revolved around ancestor veneration, an important part of the spectrum of what we are calling Goddess. This stands out in the megalithic tradition, with its ancestral grandmother stones; the names and stories about Bóann whose “house” is New Grange (Brugh na Boann); Bui, the Cailleach Bhéara, and any number of other goddesses in Ireland, where the lore was well-documented.

The Goddess movement affirms a sacral view of the world, the conviction that we are kin within a whole, a flow and circle of life. As Ruth Barrett has written, for many “the Goddess is not an entity but the web of life itself.” (We might say that the web too is a Being we can hardly perceive because we are within, like cells in a great body.) Some British Goddess folk have expressed this diverse continuum as “the one and the many.” [See Wood and Water journal] Most of us don’t relate to rigid categories of monotheism vs. polytheism, or transcendent vs. immanent, or even theism vs. atheism. Some simply say Spirit, the divine spark present in all beings.

Another way of putting it is Essence: the source of being from which we all arise. Mary Daly calls it Quintessence: that which permeates all Nature, the Spirit that gives life to the universe, the “real source.” Feminists with Buddhist leanings call it Mother Essence or the Mother Luminosity. In ancestor religion it includes the human mothers living and dead, and the mother within us, who swells in our breasts and wombs and blood, whether we have biological children or not, whether we even have wombs or breasts anymore. This experience of the body as sacred and filled with vital force (Indic ojas, Chinese jing, and a thousand other names) has little in common with the theoretical construct of “essentialism” (see Part II, below). It belongs to animist philosophy (animism: another “spirit” word), and aligns with concepts of microcosm and macrocosm, “as above, so below.”

Most spiritual feminists conceive of Goddess and the Sacred Woman as a continuum, encompassing living beings, spirits, ancestors, essences, qualities and vast governing principles like Maat, Tao, and Wyrd—Fate being another name for divine Law. We see parallels in the pagan Gothic Halioruna (“holy mystery”) and the Great Mystery of aboriginal North America. For us Nature is holy, ultimate Reality, and the fount of wisdom.

That there are Mysteries does not necessarily lead to the mystification practiced in authoritarian institutions. Our reverence has nothing in common with abasement, or the submission demanded by doctrines of dominance. It flows toward what is valued and admired, what causes awe: a rushing river, wind moving through a great forest, the fire-patterns in embers. It is roused by powerful music and art, incantation and drumming and dance. There we enter into the Presence where knowing and healing arise.

We have deists and atheists and polytheists and panentheists among us. Each aspires to follow the deepest truth she can uncover within herself. For that reason there are many different approaches: some pray, some invoke, some take the deities as symbols, others as beings, or Being. Still others ride the currents of mystic bewilderment, recognizing the impossibility of condensing their experiences into language.

We affirm the long-reviled Female, now expanding out of ancient cultural confinements. In her liberation males will be transfigured too. There is room for the gods, without the taint of lordship and oppression. In the ultimate sense, gender is ephemeral, and in a just world it would not matter, but we live in a world that is severely out of balance, afflicted with male domination to a high degree. So in our invocations it is She.

Many say that this She is found in our own inner spark, a microcosm of the entire Vastness, and a gateway to it. We say She rather than It, rejecting the impersonal object in favor of a numinous and melodic approach to consciousness. In the same spirit, many of us prefer to say Goddess rather than “the Goddess,” which carries a sense of A Thing or Idea rather than Essence and Presence.

However she is understood (and whether she is experienced in body-knowing or relational or conceptual ways) we address what we hold sacred through this mirror of Goddess. We know this creates a profound transformative impact on the patriarchal world we live in. The opening of cultural doors that have been slammed shut and tightly locked up for millennia is momentous and hugely significant. Prophecies that female sovereignty will re-emerge have circulated among the First Nations of North America for at least a century now.

Invoking the names of Goddess, recreating her many images, answers a deep hunger in women, and among a growing number of men, to restore balance, for justice and truth. This longing is felt beyond pagan circles. It’s a call, a cry mounting from women within the majoritarian religions, propelling a movement that transcends traditional religious boundaries.

II: Goddess Heresies:
the legacies of stigma in academia

The controversy over goddess figurines, and whether they should be so called, illustrates the chasm between spiritual feminists and most of academia. We especially need to look at the conflicting values and agendas that come into play when we discuss what “goddess” meant in historical context. Saying “goddess” causes nervous discomfort, whether out of fears of superstitious fantasy or political threat or cultural illegitimacy or out-and-out blasphemy. The interpretations offered by scientistic positivists, Marxists, orthodox theologians, and post-structuralists have many differences, but in one respect they are similar. They don’t like to hear goddess talk, and especially don’t want to hear that it has any political significance.

I would like to turn the lens around to face this aversion, and trace the Western academic allergy to anything “goddess” back to its historical origins in the Catholic Church. The first professors were doctors of the Church, whose doctrine shaped all fields of study, and governed what could be said and thought.

The genealogy of this doctrine starts with the early clergy who regarded all pagan deities as demonic, idolatrous abominations—and also as serious competitors of their own religion. The priesthood fought a relentless war to stamp out the old ethnic religions. They enlisted the state to use force, and they also waged a cultural offensive through sermons, canon law, and penitential books. In the process, they inadvertently became the first recorders of pagan European tradition, including goddess reverence.

What they wrote was distorted by their bias. They saw the old stories as ignorant, deluded, and blasphemous. To them it was all devilish superstitio, a word which comes from the Latin for “that which remains” of ancient observances. So they resorted to editorial revisions and spin. For example, the monastics who wrote down the rich orature of ancient Ireland transformed folk goddesses and land spirits into sinful women who repented. Or they added revisionist endings to kill off these female divinities. But the Irish scribes, like the Icelandic ones, allowed much to slip through, because they could yet not bring themselves to let the old pagan stories go entirely. We can see here two major strategies of contending with goddess tradition: ban it outright, or reconfigure and assimilate it.

In the early middle ages, the priestly goal of overhauling folk religion was an uphill climb. European cultures remained saturated with pagan festivals, deities, shrines, rituals, charms and proverbs. The priestly doctrine on pagan folk goddesses in this period was summarized by the Canon Episcopii (literally, “the bishop’s rod”). It acknowledged that witches worshipped a goddess, but cast her as the devil, and portrayed them as deluded women who had lost their grip on reality. (Sounds familiar.) Witches are not wise women but fools, said the church doctors, and it is heresy to believe that they really commune with pagan goddesses. Whoever believed that was “beyond doubt an infidel and a pagan.”

By the clergy’s own admission, plenty of people still fit into that category. In the late 900s, bishop Raterius of Verona deplored popular veneration of a goddess he called Diana. He observed that “one third of the world is subject to her,” especially “credulous little women.” Other writings by churchmen also condemned a folk belief in women who go by night with a goddess, riding like shamans on the backs of spirit animals. A demonized version of these shamanic traditions later became the central myth of the diabolist witch hunts.

The cathedral schools, like the priesthood itself, barred female participation. The first medieval universities grew out of these all-male schools. Their ranks soon swelled with monastics from the new Dominican and Franciscan orders. Scholasticism developed in these early universities, with theologians bending Aristotelian rationalism to the service of Catholic doctrine. As oxymoronic as that may sound, these two systems shared a strong belief in female inferiority and male supremacy. Albertus Magnus found congenial Aristotle’s belief that women were misbegotten men, with “a faulty and defective nature.” Or as Aquinas put it, a woman is “subject to the man on account of the weakness of her nature,” a mere vessel for incubating the “divine” sperm.

The scholastics and university doctors became leading promoters of church doctrine, with misogynist and racist demonology on the academic menu. These obsessions spilled over into the diabolist witch persecutions that gathered steam in the 1300s. The learned doctors of the Sorbonne led the charge, issuing a proclamation in 1398 that witchcraft was a rapidly spreading revival of ancient pagan ways and a threat to society.  As H. C. Lea wrote, “The University then proceeded to declare that there was an implied contract with Satan in every superstitious observance…” [Lea, Materials Toward a History of Witchcraft, 464. It’s important to note that secular witch persecutions had been going on for much longer. Here we are looking at how hunts driven by diabolist theology developed, and the role of church doctors in leading the charge. The poisons they cooked up eventually spilled over into the secular hunts as well.]

Scholasticism bore fruit in the reign of the demonologists. The folk goddesses were pursued through the pages of witch trial transcripts and transformed into a sadistic male devil in the torture chambers. Witch hunts raged through the Renaissance and the baroque era into the 1700s. Women were terrorized and beaten down, the denaturalization of European folk culture advanced, as a mechanistic view of the universe took hold. Dark peoples were demonized and the colonization of the Americas, Africa, Australia, and the Islands went forward with the help of doctrines that they too were “devil-worshippers.”

From the heyday of the Inquisition to the Reformation and beyond, university professors were involved in witch trials, making binding pronouncements on their legal and theological issues. Physician oversight of witch trials too was common in Catholic and Protestant regions, in hunts run by inquisitors or by state magistrates alike. Even the few who protested against the torture trials, like Dr. Johan Weyer, believed that the diabolist stories were “the follies of old women,” the “deluded confession of demoniacally possessed old hags,” and “silly and miserable” women suffering from the uterine disease of melancholy.

Das Uble Weib ("The Common Woman"), Germany, late1400s

Weyer explained it all by citing Augustine, Chrysostom and Paul “concerning the credulity and frailty of the female sex,” which he called “inconstant” and “wicked.” [Weyer, Johan, De Præstigiis demonum, in Witches Devils and Doctors in the Renaissance, ed. Mora, George, Renaissance Texts and Studies, Binghamton, NY. 1991, p 181; Levack, Brian, The Witch-hunt in Early Modern Europe, Longman, NY 1987, pp 56, 137] Exceptions like Cornelius Agrippa, who denounced the whole process and expressed compassion for its victims, were rare indeed (and he was forced into exile for speaking out).

It was only later in the witch craze that some learned professors began to take a more skeptical or critical stance on the hunts. The inertia of doctrine was tremendous, and the risk of losing reputation (or much more) was real. And those who did finally condemn the embarrassing disgrace of the witch hunts often blamed delusional women for the whole mess, looking past the machinery of torture. Not a few modern writers about the witch craze have continued this tack. (Let’s pause again to note the resemblance of this idea of delusional women to the non-credibility attached to spiritual feminists.)

Goddesses who could no longer be named as such survived in folk observance, hiding out as faeries and apocryphal saints. Then, after so many centuries of being condemned by the Church, folk tradition lost again, in the Enlightenment rejection of peasant “superstition.” The Age of Reason had no place for harvest goddesses or megalithic gran’mères or for faery healers. The universe was all a great machine, and everything could be named (preferably in Latin or Greek) and catalogued into a hierarchy. What ethnic peasants thought no longer counted—and what they believed was changing too, although more slowly.

Only after all this did the Romantic and evolutionary modern schools emerge, the ones that so many writers insist on pointing to as the fount of “utopian” feminist theories. (No. There really are other ways of looking at this history than what 19th century white men thought up.) However, academicians who are fond of railing against mother-right discourse as a throwback to outmoded scholarly fads would do well to avoid the example of other precursors: the scholastics who thundered against the dangers of heresy, and would brook no discussion of ideas that threatened the prevailing doctrine. 

The Modern University

Scientism triumphed, and though much upheaval accompanied the sag in Christian doctrinal supremacy in the universities, the shift was almost seamless when it came to the deeply-embedded codes of female inferiority. Secular science carried these over into its new rationalist model of patriarchy. It simply replaced the religious justification of male supremacy with medical and biological explanations for it. Masculist bias easily passed for science, though today Darwin’s opinion on the natural submission of females reads clearly as naked belief, and so do Freud’s theories of penis envy and female masochism.

Only a very few Renaissance women had managed to breach the ramparts of the men-only universities, nearly all of them daughters of Italian scholars. Women from wealthy families were often educated by private tutors, but their access to broader participation was conditional on their admission to elite male circles. A few women passed for male in order to study at university; a female student disguised as a man was ousted from the Kraków Academy while Copernicus was attending.

In the 1600s occasional prodigies breached the walls, like Anna Maria van Schurmann who taught at the University of Utrecht. But they were a mere handful, and they faced tremendous prejudice. Not for nothing did so many female scholars pen impassioned defenses of female rights and learning: van Schurmann, Christine de Pisane, Lucrezia Marinella, Sor Juana de la Cruz. It took a ducal decree to get Dorothea Erxleben into a German university, enabling her to become the first woman M.D. in 1754.

It was not until the 1800s that women began to open up the universities. They came as lone females, or as tiny minorities for whom the necessity of assimilating to the all-male culture was paramount. To do otherwise was to fail. They faced ridicule, and the constant threat of ridicule, and sometimes male riots, as happened at Harvard and other colleges, including the famed medical school at Edinburgh: "On 18 November 1870, the women were to attend an anatomy exam at Surgeons Hall in Edinburgh. As they approached the building, they were confronted by a large crowd of students and several hundred onlookers. They were verbally abused and pelted with refuse, and the gate to the building was slammed in their face. ... The riot represented the culmination of months of harassment and bullying that the women faced during their studies; they had obscenities shouted at them in the streets, doors slammed in their face, and dirty or threatening letters were sent to them as part of this campaign of abuse."

The caption ought to read: "Male students rioted to keep women out of exams at Surgeons Hall"

Women did not have the option to frame the terms of debate. That process of female entry into institutions higher learning began only about 150 years ago. Much has changed since then—but not as much as some would like to think. Although the number of female students reached parity in the late 20th century, female   professors have not, least of all in tenured positions or department chairs. (Most of these are men, while most adjuncts and migrant contract teachers are women.) Feminist scholars began Women’s Studies, which many treated as a joke, and it remains a field under siege. In ideas, too, what passes for rigor is often weighed down with long-established cultural biases, ranking and prestige behaviors. Oppositional styles of debate that mischaracterize other positions for the sake of “winning” remain common. Sometimes this misrepresentation descends to the level of name-calling, as I discuss below.

All of this is related to the colossal stigma in academia on feminists who challenge the unexamined heretical nature of “goddess.” Academicians have been highly resistant, speaking generally, to seeing ancient female iconography as goddesses or having any sacral value. Most insist that goddess veneration has no historical significance or sexual-politics worth considering. They seem unwilling to entertain the idea that it undergoes cultural shifts as patriarchy advances, or to look at complex patterns of cultural stratification. They loudly demand “proof” for the sacred character of neolithic figurines, but do not raise objections to assumptions that patriarchy is a universal and panhistorical condition. Feminists who call the figurines “goddesses” are seen as being ideological, but not their opponents—even when their books bear titles like Goddess Unmasked.

Stigma in Academia

The social sciences carried over the old doctrinal prejudices against goddess reverence and witchcraft. There was never a moment when this bias was widely acknowledged and examined, where these ideas were released from their assigned heretical status. This stigma, like the disdain for feminism itself, has shaped orthodox academic reactions to feminist spiritual discourses. They are easily dismissed as unacceptable and delusional wishful thinking.

One way of accomplishing this is through reductionism. A diversity of perspectives are batched together, collapsed into a single stereotypical caricature, and assigned a definition that can easily be dismissed, such as “essentialism” or “utopianism.” Once painted into such a corner, the targets can easily be dismissed as outsiders who don’t know what they’re talking about. This has nothing to do with really considering what is being said. Ideas that cannot be made to fit the caricature are simply ignored, dropped, out of the discussion.

One of the most-used dismissals is the stereotype of Goddess monotheism. It ignores the diversity of perspectives, and misrepresents their complexity. It sidetracks analysis of cultural shifts toward patriarchy, and discussion of history bearing on gender politics, toward (usually inaccurate) assessments of a scholar’s personal beliefs. Of course, such a charge only works against spiritual feminists. There is no question of attacking adherents of the Abrahamic religions for being god monotheists. Their religion is irrelevant and it would be in bad taste to bring it up. Their credibility is not in question.

Another weapon in the arsenal is ridicule. An ad feminam slur is repeated over and over, taking on a life of its own and drowning out the voices that contradict its assumptions. Some of the most-used slurs are “New Age,” “golden-age,” “feminist ideologue,” “without evidence,” and that old favorite, “cult.”

The latest bizarre development in this name-calling is that male scholars whose research findings support the existence of goddess culture are attempting to escape its stigma by preemptively attacking Goddess feminists. Judith Laura shines a light on this phenomenon in her blog Medusa Coils. In her review of Did God Have a Wife? (April 10, 2007),she refutes William Dever’s references to the “foolishness perpetuated by the ‘Goddess movement’.” The excerpts she quotes from his book are illustrative in their tone, and almost a catalog of the pejoratives hurled at Goddess feminists:  

“Some doctrinaire feminists have gone to extremes, of course, arguing without any evidence that originally there was only one Great Mother who… was dethroned by upstart male deities in later historical times and was thereafter suppressed. This was most forcibly argued by the European archaeologist Marija Gimbutas in books  like Language of the Goddess (1989). Such pseudo-scholarship has been embraced  by various New Age Goddess cults and “Neopagan” religions…. Some of these groups want to adopt me when I give public lectures, but the portrait I am painting here should give them no comfort.”  [emphasis added]

Oh, that will show them. Dever is really holding the line against those heretics, that is doctrinaire feminists, who are extreme by definition. (Nothing is more doctrinaire than bald anti-feminist rhetoric.) In her detailed examination of Dever’s allegations, Laura lays bare his misrepresentations and self-contradictions. She concludes, and I have to agree, that he is “jumping on the Goddess feminist-bashing bandwagon” out of fears for his own credibility. [See also her earlier piece on the appropriation of Goddess feminists ideas without crediting them, while disparaging them: "Article Double Whammies Goddess." [No longer online: medusacoils.blogspot.com/2006/08/article-double-whammies-goddess.html]

The silencing of women’s interpretation by intimidation, stigma and name-calling reproduces the religious legacy of silencing female speech and authority to teach—all the more so when those female voices come from outside the academy. These patterns must be recognized and named if we are to move forward.

On “Authoritarian Attitudes”

In Ancient Goddesses: the Myths and the Evidence, Goddess perspectives are called “problematic,” even “dangerous.” (And again, treated as a single point of view.) Editors Lucy Goodison and Christine Morris are critical of “this strong cultural offensive” which, they say, is based on a feminist reversal of 19th century cultural evolutionary theories. (No, it is not, no matter how many times this charge is repeated.) They go on to say that “the attempt to reconstruct a literal past has appealed to authoritarian attitudes and fundamentalist principles which we find deeply troubling.” [12-3]

What do they mean by “a literal past?” Maybe it is a postmodernist thumbs-down to the idea that anything can be known about history. If so, I can’t go there, and neither will most historians. There is no point to studying any of this material if no interpretation can be meaningful. Our grasp of the past is provisional, shifting as we learn more, and it will always have gaps, but the new things being uncovered are giving us a clearer picture all the time—and smashing old verities in the process.

The doctrine of an unknowable past has a corollary: that no analysis of the cultural genesis and historical patterns of male domination is possible. This is the really entrenched fundamentalism: the one that asserts that masculine supremacy is a universal and inalterable given of human society. That is biological determinism. And that is where the authoritarian attitude is entrenched, in an unwillingness to entertain and explore another possibility. I hear from students tussling with these rigidities all the time. We who have undertaken to analyze the historical trend toward patriarchy are bucking a long-standing dogma that has prevailed in anthropology, archaeology and history since the 1960s (in the latest round) and longer.

I’m all for avoiding fundamentalism, wherever it rears its head, but these denunciations of authoritarianism seems curiously one-sided. Goddess thinkers are not the ones sitting in the endowed chairs, and we are well aware of our outsider status. Some assume a defensive stance in the face of the contempt of certain archaeologists and classicists, but that is hardly authoritarian! It is rather a reaction to authoritarianism.

Let’s be clear. I don’t insist that all feminists must agree with Goddess perspectives. They do not, and that is fine. Some feminist scholars are critics of Goddess interpretations, many of them oriented to post-structuralist theory, some Marxists or queer theorists. However, it does not seem too much to ask for them not to misrepresent our perspectives (plural, not singular) or attack them as illegitimate, especially in the same language as manifest anti-feminists are using. Don’t close the gates on us. Let’s have the dialogue! But it has to get into specifics, not just theory.

Under the prevailing model, to be open about your standpoint is taken as a negative. Feminists have made it a scholarly practice to disclose standpoint. For their pains, they are frequently treated as lacking credibility. The institutional norm is still to claim a stance of objectivity. This is the privilege of the dominant school of thought, which needs no other authentication than its analytical rationalism which purports to see all as if from above. That’s their story, and they’re sticking to it.

Understandably, we are skeptical. We’ve seen too many books labeling a female-breasted statue a “god,” too little documentation provided and too much slant, too many omissions of relevant information about female artifacts. These experiences have engendered a healthy suspicion about the vaunted “objectivity” of academic sources. Our challenge to this claim has not gone over well.

In their essay in Ancient Goddesses, “Rethinking Figurines,” Ruth Tringham and Meg Conkey accuse spiritual feminists of creating “an authoritative and totalizing account of ‘the past’.” Again the vexed question of authority rears its head—not for Lord Renfrew, but for spiritual feminists. For their part, Goodison and Morris do concede some value to opening spiritual questions but nevertheless perceive that a search for “authority” and “a new orthodoxy, leads to intolerance.” [13] They are worried about “monopolizing of ‘truth’.”

Well, so are we (though we aren’t talking about the same culprits!) but the above does not sound like a tolerant discourse to me. It looks like the viewpoint of a low-prestige group is being denied a hearing and castigated for asserting its right to speak. For groups that have historically been denied authority (women, feminists, pagans, non-academics) to interpret the cultural record, it is beyond ironic to be accused of authoritarianism. For us to claim any authority whatsoever is to overstep.

We make easy targets, while colleagues in high places are let off the hook. For example, Goodison and Morris criticize Goddess theorists for failing to address the context of finds [13-15], but this critique should rightly be leveled at archaeologists, who typically failed to provide that very information until quite recently. In fact, most of them deemphasize the female figurines, and often omit identifying information. In my experience reading countless archaeological reports and summary literature, it is difficult to identify even the site provenance for a figurine, to say nothing of whether it was found in a house or shrine or burial, or what was found with it.

Of figurines and rubbish

Tringham and Conkey view ritual as a means for groups to establish dominance over others, by “household, senior members, senior males.” Or, they propose, the figurines could be part of male-female competition, or female resistance in the form of “sexual insults” to males. [42ff] Here they invoke a new anthropological concept of… pussy-whipping. This is quite a negative take on the most widespread cultural artifact of the neolithic: that creating images of women is an attack on men. Not a single parallel example from living societies is offered for this theory (nor can I think of one.) There are many examples of sacral uses for female figurines, ritual “dolls,” and so on. Why exactly is this possibility rejected out of hand? More to the point, why assume female subordination or gender competition in the neolithic? Nothing about the figurines, or in the neolithic finds, suggests male dominance. Yet this seems to be the only assumption that is considered admissible.

It is frequently claimed that the figurines could not have had sacral valence because they were found in “rubbish dumps.” Talk about projecting cultural values on the past. Some cultures buried the dead in middens, and with offerings. We can safely assume that they were not regarded as garbage. In the case of the figurines, Johanna Stuckey of York University has pointed out that it makes more sense to look at some of these “refuse dumps” as ritual deposit sites. She notes that examples are known in ancient southwest Asia, and recent excavations on the island of Keros (where over half of all the famous Cycladic statues have been found) have shown that they were deliberately broken and then brought to the site. [Asherah listserv, Jan 1 2007] Readers will be interested to know that Colin Renfrew and others excavating this site are recognizing it as an important religious center. (No word yet on whether they are using the G-word.) [Associated Press report, Dec. 31, 2006, via the Stone Pages Archeonews]

Quite a bit has been written by now about the practice of consecrating objects as vessels for sacred energy and then discarding them when the ritual is completed. In many cases such objects are deliberately broken, as has been observed for many of the smaller ceramic figurines. This is quite consistent with some living ritual cultures. As W.T. Elmore observed back in 1913, Telegu people made images of goddesses of earth or clay, and later discarded them: “In every case the worship is addressed to an outside spirit which has taken up its residence, temporary or otherwise, in the object. The Dravidian makes a god [sic] for the day and throws it away, or leaves it on the boundaries. After one day, it is nothing and the cattle may trample it underfoot.” [Elmore, Dravidian Gods in Modern Hinduism, New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 147, 19, 68. Although Elmore uses the word “god,” nearly all the deities described in his book are female.]

Of course, we know that many sacred images are clearly imbued with great power and cherished with reverence over centuries, like the holy stones of Kybele and the Arabian deity stones, and the emerald goddess that Ecuadorians hid from the Spanish conquistadores. Temple statues are generally regarded as holding accumulated spiritual energy from their consecration and ceremonial over long periods of time.

But being broken or discarded does not prove that an object lacked sacred meaning. The red flint carvings of sacred women in the Cahokian culture of Illnois, notably the socalled Birger figurine, were ceremonially broken. [Birger figurine]

About Naming: “Idols”

In the past several decades, some of the more offensive descriptions of the female figurines, such as “dancing girls” or “concubines,” have fallen out of scholarly use. Press reports, however, are still breathlessly describing finds of “an 8,000 year old sex goddess.” But “fertility idol” is still very current and in fact has enjoyed a vigorous comeback, as using “goddess” became the scholarly equivalent of walking onto a target range, at least in Anglophone universities. (Italian scholars still publish books titled Dea Madre.) “Fertility idol” became a handy substitute when some sacral meaning was clearly involved but it was considered undesirable to say so: in other words, to say “goddess.”

But it is hardly scientific to name the figurines as “idols,” especially given the negative cultural associations the term evokes. It throws us back to the biblical ban on “worshipping stocks and stones.” We need a word that does not reproduce an old religious bias against traditions long considered to be Other, “primitive” and “superstitious.” It might be argued that at least the term concedes a religious context, but in fact, that is exactly what is being denied.

Many scholars seem determined to go to great lengths to avoid concluding that early female images were sacred. It has been proposed, for example, that the abstract marble sculptures of women from the ancient Cycladic islands were toys, in spite of their size and weight, or the fact they remain stylistically consistent over a period of eight centuries, or that they are found in concentrated deposits.

Another unlikely but common explanation treats the ancient figurines as pornography, without bothering to explain the frequency of their finds in burials, shrines, kitchen areas, or among ritual items. This idea really does bear the marks of modern assumptions. Along with the tiresome “fertility idol” stereotype, it keeps pounding out the idea that women are sex, or women are reproductive function: objects manipulated by and for men. There is no room here for embodied female expression of self, for women’s interpretation of their own experience, in ritual and through culture (as the painted or incised symbols on many figurines speak to).

The semantic games get really convoluted. For example, what can Karel van der Toorn mean? in saying that the Israelite figurines are not goddesses but perhaps “cult images used for devotional or prophylactic purposes.” [Ancient Goddesses: the Myths and the Evidence, 94] Toward what are the devotional rites directed (the “cult”) and by what power is protection achieved? (Or, in materialist terms, by what power do people believe it is achieved?). Such cultural practices still imply religion or its residues (as in “magical” rites that have been denatured of nearly all religious content over long periods). The same questions arise for fertility, healing, and the other proposed uses of the figurines—what is the source of their power?—and these critiques are simply not addressing them.

Votive offerings—to whom?

These issues came up in January 2005 when Carol Myers of Duke University spoke at the Pacific School of Religion on “The Religious Culture of Israelites.” I appreciated much of what she had to say, particularly her concern to rescue women’s religious practices from obscurity and devaluation. She decried the dismissal of women's religious practices as unimportant “magic.” She gave evidence that they dealt with “life and death” matters such as childbirth, and drew some dramatic parallels to modern ethnographic accounts of women’s rituals in the region.

Dr. Myers was adamant, however, that the pillar figurines did not, could not, represent Asherah or have any sacramental valence, being votive figurines only. No one has proven that they represent Asherah, and there are other possibilities. Maybe they represent ancestral mothers, like the teraphim of earlier centuries. Still, those who deny that they represent goddesses have yet to address to whom or what these votives were being offered. (That is the meaning of the word votive, a vow of offering.) They also must account for the fact that the pillar figurines were created at a time when the prophets were railing against popular veneration of deities other than YHWH, notably the goddess Asherah. Kings were destroying their shrines and knocking down pillars named for Asherah. This is the historical context of the clay pillar women. 

Dr. Myers insisted on drawing a sharp distinction between the Israelite pillar figurines and other statuettes that she did acknowledge as goddesses, one Syrian and another a Hathor-coiffed Canaanite. Asked what was the difference, she said that she looked for how well they were made, whether they wore special garb or insignia, or were made of precious metals. (So much for the mud-sculpted Durgas and Nigerian mbari figures, or the straw-plaited rice goddesses of Indonesia—or even the millennia-old tradition of ceramic figurines in the Levant and Mesopotamia) However, in Myers’ Powerpoint presentation, both the acknowledged “goddesses” and the presumed “non-goddesses” displayed the same iconographic gesture: hands cupping the breasts, a sign that goes back deep into the neolithic, many thousands of years before we can identify any ethnicity in the region. The ritual culture of this era centers on these female icons, which remain the prototype for art over the next 5000 years. They represent an unshaken cultural continuity, right up through the period when the prophets were denouncing goddess veneration.

Carol Meyers tried to staunch any suggestion that the figurines had to do with the sacred, even though the title of her lecture referenced women’s “religious culture.” She disparaged “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven” (a ground-breaking feminist spiritual practicum created for the Unitarian Church), saying essentially that it was legitimate to talk about the practices, but not about their religious content. But since the original passage in Jeremiah pointedly linked these practices with a female deity, there is no avoiding that discussion. And why would an objective scholar want to? Why is discussion of goddess reverence in historical context treated as radioactive, if not for the persistence of its ancient biblical derogation?

Meyers made a point of saying that archaeologists reject these goddess interpretations. This has been true of most British and American archaeologists, but not of all archaeologists, as I have pointed out elsewhere. [See my 2000 article “Knocking Down Straw Dolls,” http://www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/eller.html] And this may be changing, as the previously cited report on Renfrew’s Keros excavation suggests—and his own acknowledgment that the site is a shrine.

In the Judaic context, the interpretation has already changed. No discussion of this subject can fail to acknowledge the seismic shift in Biblical studies caused by the Hebrew inscriptions at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud and Khirbet el Qom, which invoke Asherah and pair her with the god of Judaism. And other lesser-known texts of this kind have been found, to say nothing of the iconic evidence. [Examples can be found in the works of Ruth Hestrin, Jenny Kien, Joanna Stuckey, Tilde Binger, and William Dever, to name a few.]

There is by now widespread recognition that a lively substratum of goddess-oriented belief and practice thrived in ancient Judah, and even more so in the northern kingdom of Israel. (An exhibit at the Pacific School of Religion where Meyers gave her lecture showed a refreshing openness to seeing the figurines as an expression of Asherah veneration.) In the end, it seemed to me that, although Myers was critical of the "magic" thesis, her interpretation of “votive” objects devoid of veneration ended up coming pretty close to it. She never explained what she thought their religious content was.

I do share her antipathy to the “magic” label. Centuries after the pillar goddesses, Talmudic writers feared and denounced such female rituals as witchcraft, pure and simple. See Meir Bar-Ilan’s wonderful essay, “Witches in the Bible and in the Talmud,” [dead link] <http://faculty.biu.ac/il/~baarilm/witches.html> We can agree this far: such accounts disparaged women’s spiritual practices, with a palpable fear in the mix.

It’s important to repeat that we are looking at a broader interpretation of “goddess” than the narrow defile to which orthodox theorists have relegated it. What spiritual feminists have been developing over the past 35 years sees women’s embodied experience in relation to their spiritual iconography, their ritual culture, and their expression—until this is interrupted through historical interventions—of the sacred in a female form. (I’ll return to this importance issue of embodiment—and “essentialism”—in Part III.)

On historical shifts and the process of patriarchalization

The critics of “simplistic” goddess narratives themselves present a highly simplistic view. There could not have been a Great Mother “utopia,” so neolithic societies had to be patriarchal. If goddesses exist in patriarchal cultures, then it follows that they can possess no special significance for women or basis for female power and resistance within the cultural scheme. These polarized extremes illustrate a denial of patriarchy’s development as a historical process. It is not the unavoidable default state of humanity, but a set of political accretions that build up.

Why not consider that there may have been shifts toward patriarchy in different places, under different conditions? And look at successive intensifications of it in the same place, over time. This is the real study, a much richer picture than the cartoon descriptions. There is plenty of evidence for what we can call cultural stratification, in which older layers are retained, kept separate and even hidden by Indigenous or common people, and appropriated, modified, transformed or superceded by newly dominant groups. We can track increasingly patriarchal adstrata created by these elite classes or ethnicities, and gradual transformations over time.

Ancient Iraqi literature shows numerous myths in which powerful goddesses are overthrown, eclipsed and replaced. The creatrix Nammu or Mother Hubur is supplanted by Enki. Tiamat is slain by Marduk. [see James Pritchard’s classic anthology Ancient Near Eastern Texts, or Tikvah Frymer-Kensky’s In the Wake of the Goddesses (which is however far more perceptive about patriarchal developments in the Iraqi literature than in the Biblical).] Priesthoods redefine goddesses and dynasties appropriate them for their own political purposes, as happened with Ishtar, who became a goddess of the empire. Even at this point, though, the goddesses retain some of their original meaning and potency for women and commoners. Village women continue to invoke them for blessing and protection in rites that may bear little resemblance to those practiced by the priestly elite. So, for example, the ceramic figurines of neolithic origin persist in Sumeria, and continue through imperial Akkadia, Babylonia, Assyria, and Chaldea, before finally disappearing in the Christian era.

Other cases are the appropriation of goddess powers by Zeus in the Greek world, and by Odin in Viking times. All these are part of a larger historical pattern of movement toward more patriarchal structures, a complex process not reducible to golden age narratives. It must be tracked through the disappearance of attested female spheres of power, such as the female Arab chiefs and priestesses, and matricultures described in classical literature such as Pausanias, Strabo, the Mahabharata, as well as in living oratures.

This persistence of ancient religious imperatives often withstands ethnic and class hierarchy as well. I’ve noticed a pattern of commoners, male as well as female, upholding old forms of goddess veneration in the face of a patriarchal elite that controls the temples and other institutions. India offers especially dramatic instances of this dynamic. One example is discussed in a brilliant article by Frédérique Apffel Marglin and Purna Chandra Mishra, “Death and Regeneration: Brahmin and non-Brahmin Narratives.” They show how an aboriginal goddess known as Mangal? was incorporated into a brahmanized superstory, while oppressed-caste groups maintained their own tradition of the goddess as a forest and river being who is venerated in the form of a pot.

People from outcaste groups are not permitted to enter the temple but their rites nevertheless remain a central part of the festivals originated by their ancestors. The researchers had considerable trouble getting the common people’s account, since the Brahmin priest angrily interrupted it when the low-caste teller said, “Mangal? is the creator of Jagann?tha.” He was rebuked, that is, for asserting that the Adivasi goddess is senior to the Vaishnava god, whose story reframes her myth in the brahmin narrative. [in Devotion Divine: Bhakti Traditions from the Regions of India, ed. Diana Eck and Francois Mallison, Paris: Ecole Francaise d’Extreme-Orient, 1991, pp 209-230. Thanks to Dr. Julia Jean for making this article available to me.]

Here the precedence of the aboriginal goddess is still being upheld. Other narratives show a goddess who, although the creatrix of everything, is eventually formally subordinated by one of her own male creations. A folk story of Andhra Pradesh tells how Adya (“original one”) was “born to herself” from the water. She quickly matured and desired a partner. She took the form of a bird, sat on a lotus and laid three eggs. The first spoiled, the second gave rise to the sun, moon, and stars, and the third produced the gods Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. She nurtured them at her breast, and when they were matured, she asked them (!) for sex. Shiva agreed, on condition that she would give him her third eye. [Pattanaik, Devdutt, The Goddess in India, Rochester VT: Inner Traditions, 2000, pp 13-14]

So an original creatrix story is hybridized with a supremacist overlay, which makes the goddess lose her superior power to a male god on account of female sexuality. This type of reformulation is basic to the way sociopolitical transformations are wrought into mythic culture. It’s important to know that this story exists against a background of Shakta (goddess-oriented) traditions of Adya Shakti or Ad? Parashakti, in which Goddess remains the “original supreme power.” It is this female power which is revised for the purposes of male dominion.

The theme of a female creation egg that bursts open and releases the sun, moon and stars also shows up in unrelated cultures. In Egypt the Egg, and life emerging from it, are formed according to the power of the goddess Maat. In Finland, the Egg becomes hot while resting on the body of Luonotar, daughter of Nature, as she floats on the primal waters. When everything bursts forth from the Egg, it is she who molds the land. (Is it Goddess monotheism to point out these similarities?)

In another version of the reconfigured Indian story, it is Ammavaru whose egg creates the Hindu trinity. After she gives her spiritual eye to Shiva, he conquers her. This apparently means that he kills her: “From her body emerged all the village goddesses.” [Pattanaik, 152] Here we have yet another modification, in which the original goddess appears in new forms. The local goddesses emerge from Ammavaru, and they also partake fully of her essence.

This essence is not a biological -ism, but a spiritual quality of being not reducible by rational analysis. Nor is the interplay between these forms a linear affair: “When activated, each goddess is the Great Goddess,” writes Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. ["Moving Devi" in Cultural Critique, No. 47. (Winter, 2001), pp. 120-163] Or in the words of Anandamayi M?, “How can the One be distinct from the infinite Multiplicity? The many exist in the One and the One in the many.” [Conway, Timothy, Women of Power and Grace, Santa Barbara, 1994, p 164]

What the patriarchs thought

In historical perspective, the fact that goddesses exist (or survive) in some patriarchal societies does not disprove the significance of cultural archetypes for human relations and values. They don’t only reflect them, but also condition them. We have to look at how the myths function and how they change, why they change.

Myth is a lens onto gender relations, values, norms and codes. The shift to male dominance is inevitably reflected in mythology over the course of time. We can see how priestly theological systems demote female deities, and also gradually displace priestesses over time. Another, more severe cultural overturning demands that female deity be discarded altogether, and masculine religious language adopted—and enforced—instead. This extreme is perfectly illustrated by the church patriarch Athanasius in a sermon raging against the worship of Isis and Aphrodite:

And would that their idolatrous madness had stopped short at males, and that they had not brought down the title of deity to females. For even women, whom it is not safe to admit to deliberation about public affairs, they worship and serve with the honor due to God… [“Against the Heathen,” Fathers of the Church <www.knight.org/Advent>]

A contemporary Christian writer Lactantius likewise concludes, with tortured reasoning I won’t go into, that the very belief in goddesses demonstrates that all pagan gods are false. Finally he declares that no deity could be female, because women are feeble and gods are powerful. [The Divine Institutes, Book I: The false worship of the gods, http://ccel.wheaton.edu/fathers/ANF-07/ECF07.TXT [broken link]

Putting it another way, the church father Augustine wrote, “For woman is not the image of God, whereas the man alone is the image of God.” This is still the rationale the Catholic hierarchy uses to deny women priestly ordination: that females cannot model Christ, and maleness is the crucial qualification for priesthood. Even men who have had testicles removed are disqualified. We have seen the result; male exclusivity is preserved at all costs, even to the protection of priests who molest and rape children.

The Muslim story behind the so-called “Satanic Verses” also illustrates the sexual politics behind goddess suppression. The name refers to an excised Quranic passage that in its original form admitted the three principal goddesses of the Arabian pantheon into Islam. Abu Jafar al-Tabari (d. 923 CE) reported that a revelation came to Muhammad in the Ka'aba: "Have you then considered Allat and al–Uzza/ And Manat, the third, the last?/ These are the exalted birds (gharaniq,  Numidian cranes) / Whose intercession is approved." (Another translation renders it as “whose intercession is devoutly to be wished.”)

Al-Kalbi attested that these verses were based on the traditional invocation that the Quraysh (Muhammad’s tribe) made while ritually walking around the Ka'aba. A hadith says that Gabriel later revealed that Satan had inspired these verses. Muhammad then removed them and replaced them with the present version:

"Have you then considered Allat and al–Uzza/ And Manat, the third, the last?/ What! for you the males and for Him the females! This indeed is an unjust division! They are nothing but names which you have named, you and your fathers; Allah has not sent for them any authority. They follow nothing but conjecture and their low desires." [Sura 53:19] In case there was any ambiguity about the sexual politics, this follows a few verses later: "Most surely they who do not believe in the hereafter/ name the angels with female names." [Sura 53:56]

It’s interesting that most of the controversy over the meanings of Goddess has fixated on proving or disproving that goddess reverence reflects or effects better status for women. But little has been said in the scholarly debate about the eagerness of masculine priesthoods to negate or do away with this cultural precedent for sovereign female power, so closely associated with priestesses. This model mattered enough for them to feel it was important to displace, or to destroy.

There’s an intriging example in northern Iran where goddess veneration is connected with (relatively) high status for women. The mountain village of Alasht is called “the town of women.” It also has a shrine called Dokhtar-e Pak (Immaculate Girl). “Locals believe that this shrine belongs to a grand lady and according to an old myth, men should not approach the shrine or they will be bitten by its guardian serpent.” But women and girls go there to pray every weekend. [“Alasht, the Town of Women,” Wikipedia, Accessed: Jan 31, 2007]

According to the scholar Parviz Varjavand, the Alasht sanctuary was originally dedicated to the goddess Nahid. She is a form of the Avestan goddess Anahita (and Armenian Anahid). One of her titles in the Zoroastrian scriptures is “the Pure,” like the name of the Alasht shrine. The Wikipedia account concludes, “Walking in the streets of Alasht, men should remember that facing any woman they must lower their head and say hello, because this is the village of women.”

 

III: Essentialism or Essence?
Out from the land of theory

I am the incomprehensible silence
And the memory that will not be forgotten
I am the voice whose sound is everywhere
And the speech that appears in many forms
I am the utterance of my own name

      —Thunder, Perfect Mind, Nag Hammadi Scriptures, circa 200 CE

They have lost sight of the Mystery. For at least twenty years the Goddess movement has been assailed as “essentialist” by post-modernist theorists. They mean that an innate female essence is being claimed, in a biological determinism and rigid gender categorization. Alison Stone is not alone in noting that “within academic writing the charge of essentialism is used in a very adversarial way, as an allegation of the worst crime.” [“What is essentialism?” [www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/twine/ecofem/essentialism.html ] Some theorists even equate talking about “women” with “gender essentialism,” although it is not biology but historical, cultural, political, social developments and patterns that are being discussed.

There is a fear underlying the “essentialism” charge: that gendered symbolism locks women into the very categories that lie at the root of their oppression. But why assume that femaleness itself is the oppression, or gender for that matter? The problem is domination, and absolutism. All human societies are gendered, with no exceptions—but there is a huge variation in how gender functions. It is the structuring of patriarchal gender systems and cultural norms that need to be looked at. Are they rigid or flexible; are they colonizing or egalitarian, voluntary or forced?

Here we understand [human] nature as static. We think women can do certain things but not others. —Dr. A.A. al-Abdulhai, King Saud University, Riyadh, Nov. 29, 2006 [http://hrw.org/reports/2008/saudiarabia0408/3.htm#_Toc195704433]

Wives, on the other hand, were created to be ‘helpers’ to their husbands (Gen. 2:18). A wife’s submission to her husband does not decrease her worth but rather enhances her value to her husband and to the Lord (I Pet. 3:4). --Baptist Faith and Message Report, approved at Southern Baptists Convention, USA, June 9, 1998 [www.utm.edu/staff/caldwwell/bfm/1963-1998/report1998.html]

The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman—whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands. –Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Vol II, part II, p. 327

We still live in a cultural setting that has long insisted on masculine deity, priesthood, and theology—and still does, within the dominant religions. But it is considered bad form to call male-dominant institutions essentialist, as they indubitably are, whether they are run by religious fundamentalists or sociobiologists or network executives. Traditional cultures, too, are rarely described in these terms, though many certainly do qualify. Yet it is spiritual feminists who have been the primary target of “essentialism” accusations for the past two decades.

Goddess feminists are saying that the long-devalued female must be restored, recreated, and redefined in a liberatory way. Truth and justice demand it (and yes, we affirm that such things are possible). We embrace positive female story and symbolism as empowering to women, as a potent force in reshaping cultural values and behaviors. We reaffirm embodiment as sacred, in the face of a long history of deprecating the body—especially the female body, whose sacred symbolism has been expropriated, colonized in myriad ways, and reconfigured as “obscene.” To confuse this transformative reclamation with “essentialism” misunderstands and distorts its meaning.

It is not about essentialism but Essence: being, immanence, the soulful nature of things, including matter itself. This goes to the realm of Mystery: real experiences and insights that can’t be explained in words, only perceived by our right-brain consciousness. We don’t reject the rational, but wholeness demands that we learn to reintegrate it with the totality of our awareness, including its mythic and melodic aspects, the dream-consciousness.

Huang! Hu! Vague! Ungraspable! In the center, there are things.
Miao! Ming! Profound! Mysterious! In the center, there are essences,
       most true essences.
       —Hun Yüan Huang-Di Sheng-Zhi [in Schipper, The Taoist Body, 117]

Mmiri di egwu! Water is awesome! —Igbo praise to Ogbuide, Mami Wata. Shown: shrine that women covered in uli paintings, SE Nigeria

T-cho, the Sun, said: “You are my children, I am your mother. I will make the light. I will shine for you.” She went to the East. Suddenly light spread all over the Earth. As she passed over the Earth a drop of blood fell from her to the ground, and from this blood and earth sprang the first people, the Children of the Sun, the Uchees. [Yuchi creation story, in Swanton, John R., Myths and Tales of the Southeastern Indians, Washington: Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 88, Smithsonian Institution,1929:84]

These concepts of vital Essence represent something very different from the theoretical projection of “essentialism.” They are fundamental to Indigenous spiritual philosophy, are being reclaimed in the feminist spirituality movements, and glints of them survive in mainstream religions also. They grow from the spiritual ground that predates the consolidation of the “major religions” that people are fighting over now, a division that separated the religious and secular, everyday life, sexuality and death, from the sacred. This splitting severed awareness of the Whole, or in Lakota parlance, the Sacred Hoop. 

Essence is one way of referring to the innate power within living beings, which is described in much greater complexity in all Indigenous philosophies of spirit. There is the Akan kra and Hawaian mana, the sielé of Lithuania, the earth-soul and sky spirit of the Haudenosaunee. The ancient Egyptians broke it down into seven different kinds of soul, from the ka and the name-soul to the heart-spirit and the ba which outlasts the body. There are the shen, qi and jing of Chinese philosophy. I’m not equating all these concepts, just spraying a shower of illustrations for the many categories of soul, spirit, or essence that are missing from modern thought. Scientism has unilaterally dismissed these concepts as superstition—but can’t account for precognitive dreams or dramatic cures by healers.

The jeremiads against essentialism treat the signs of woman as merely biological and irrelevant, forcing them into a narrow theoretical defile. It’s really a Catch-22: on the one hand, the authoritarian narrative of Western Civ posits the female’s insignificance in religion, directly or by omission. “There’s no evidence for it.” So we brought the evidence, but now that the female figurines and effigy vessels, the vulva stones and breastpots have surfaced to wider notice, they are being ruled inadmissible precisely because of their unequivocal femaleness, now being read as “essentialism.” The discussion is not about the classic icons of the neolithic, and a comparative study of international scale, but about dogma, and who has the authority to challenge it.

The postmodernist view rejects the concept of “goddess.” It doesn’t fit with the rationalist gaze, or analysis wrapped in high theory, the leftbrain worldview. Postmodernism claims to escape and transcend all categories and “metanarratives,” even as it busily creates new ones. (Where would it be without “essentialism”? “difference”? “subjectivity”?—but there can be no “women.”) In the extreme, some even say that nothing is possible outside the framework of constructed power. This is why feminist formulations are treated as necessarily derivative of earlier masculine ones. They can never be understood on their own terms—only reduced to previous categories. In the wake of supposedly “destabilizing” and “decentering” high theory, recourse to masculine authority has made a big comeback.

PoMo has a heavy literate bias, as the cliché about “texts inscribed on bodies” illustrates. Orature (orally transmitted culture) is always seen through the lens of “the literature.” It must be filtered through this external gaze, and analyzed by it. A positive reformulation of “female” is considered too subjective, suspect for its advocacy, and not transgressive in academically fashionable ways. It must be “troubled” and “decentered.” This last ignores the fact the female has already been marginalized for ages in the “great civilizations.”

The blasting away at this particular target is overdue for some “troubling” of its own, and there are indications that this trend is beginning to implode at last. For example (and excuse a moment of arcane lingo), some writers have advocated “strategic essentialism” as a way for women to move through and deal with patriarchy. Others have reassessed the condemnation of Luce Irigaray as “essentialist” for her advocacy of woman as subject, her declaration of the need to develop “female writing,” women’s language and genealogies, and her critique of “phallogocentric” culture (“he is/she is not”). Naomi Schor blew away the whole game by declaring essentialism itself an “essentialist concept.” [Barnett, Hilaire, Introduction to Feminist Jurisprudence, London: Cavendish, 1998, p 159]

 The late great Gloria Anzaldúa was one of the first to clear some space through the theoretical brush. She spoke to the way that inner, psychic reality gets discounted as “mysticism,” “New Age,” “utopian.” She said, “The dominant reality/academia wants to sever the dreamer’s connections; it doesn’t want to connect the personal and the academic, the spiritual and the intellectual, or the emotions and the body.” [Anzaldua, Interviews / Entrevistas, ed. Ana Louise Keating, New York: Routledge, 2000, p 144]

Anzaldúa said that the academic “high theorists” had declared it incorrect to talk about spiritual knowing “because they’re afraid it’s something innate and therefore they’ll be labeled essentialists.” [161] She herself was accused of being “essentialist,” but simply disregarded the complaint as irrelevant. [281-2] Anzaldúa was absorbed in a quest for Conocimiento, by which she meant awareness of all realms of consciousness and powers, encompassing not just seeing but spiritual action: “a little serpent for counter-knowledge.” [266]



She asked, “How do we know? How do we perceive?” [178] And other questions arise: how do we make meaning --and who gets to do that? Who gets heard, who has the platform, who is shouted down, who is ridiculed. The question of authority and having a place to stand, an authentic cultural root, looms large.

Contesting and contracting the meanings of “Goddess”

Hilda Ellis Davidson expresses puzzlement at the allure of Goddess reverence: “We are faced with the question of why the goddess concept stubbornly refuses to die...” [Roles of the Northern Goddess, London: Routledge, 1988, p 12] Why should it die at all? Who wants that to happen, and why? And why are masculine deity concepts not challenged with equal fervor? As I described in Part One of this essay, the academic discomfort with the concept of Goddess goes back to its roots in the cathedral schools and the long European repression of folk religion.

“Respect for Women Yes, Worship of Goddesses No” is the title of a column that Wendy Doniger wrote for a web dialogue on religion sponsored by the Washington Post. A professor of South Asian Studies who has written many books on Hinduism, Doniger is acutely conscious of the patriarchal bias in that tradition (and has taken considerable fire for writing about it, including having eggs thrown at her by Hindu fundamentalists). But she equates the bias of the male-authored scriptures with the totality of the tradition, which is a mistake. Doniger states that men’s belief in female powers makes them all the more determined to control them, and concludes that “There is generally, therefore, an inverse ratio between the worship of goddesses and the granting of rights to human women.”

There’s certainly no question that India is a patriarchal society, but the persistence of goddess veneration there is unique among modern “great civilizations.” It’s hardly a typical case, and in fact India’s goddess traditions are enormously varied. Doniger’s inverse ratio proposition is easily falsifiable; if it were true, then the status of women in Christian and Islamic societies, or in atheistic Communist ones, would be exalted. Her simplistic formula is unlikely to explain the complex cultural realities of India (or anywhere else). You only have to look at the immense popularity of Ammachi, who is overturning barriers to female ordination and bringing about other shifts in encrusted gender ideology.

Is God a man or a woman? The answer to that question is that God is neither male nor female - God is "That." But if you insist on God having a gender, then God is more female than male, because the masculine is contained within the feminine. [Mata Amritanandamayi, “The Awakening of Universal Motherhood,” www.amritapuri.org/amma/un2002/awaken3.php]

There are countless women giving voice to change within India, including religious change. Vasudha Narayanan calls for the perspectives of women and people of oppressed castes to be heard and included in any discussion of “Hinduism.” She urges, “listen to the goddesses—not the demure, circumspect ones but the dynamic ones who possess and who are progressive.” [“Who Speaks for Hinduism?” quoted in Dianne Jenett, “A Million Shaktis Rising: Pongala, a Women's Festival in Kerala, India. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 21.1 (2005) 35-55, Online:
http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/journal_of_feminist_studies_in_religion/v021/21.1jenett.html]

I once heard Madhu Kishwar speak about how Indian activists created a new goddess, Manushi Swacchanarayani. (Manushi is the feminist journal that Kishwar co-founded, and the second name could be translated as “goddess of the broom.”) She is a protector of poor street vendors, sweeping away not only refuse but also government corruption: the extortion and beatings of vendors who refuse to pay bribes, the confiscation and destruction of their goods. Like many classic Indian goddesses, Swacchanarayani has multiple arms, but she holds some non-traditional items. One is a videocam used to document goons attacking the stalls, which has been a most effective tool in stopping the assaults. [Kishwar, “The Descent of the Broom Wielding Goddess of Good Government,” April 2, 2008, Radcliffe Institute, Cambridge] A shrine to this goddess stands in the marketplace, which has flowered as a site of popular empowerment under her watch.

It’s fruitful to examine where the diverse strands connect, contradict, and submerge, especially those that subvert the dominant Indian social order: the Dalit traditions of Yellama and Mariamma, for example, or the re-framing of old myths in the Dev? Bhagavatam to restore the sovereignty of Goddess. In a body of revolutionary tales about the Mahavidya goddesses, Dev? not only refuses to obey her husband, but she makes him freeze in his tracks by revealing her infinite glory. [See David Kinsley’s wonderful Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: the Ten Mahavidyas, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997]

The sage Ananadamayi M? dramatically enacted this full-bore overwhelm of masculine authority as a young woman. She was sitting in meditation with a shawl over her face when her husband entered the room with a male guest. He sharply rebuked her for not immediately rising to attend to them: “Who do you think you are?”

Slowly the young woman lifted the cloth from her face. The energy emanating from her was so intense that, as they recalled later, both men involuntarily leapt backward. “Purna brahma narayana,” she replied. “I am the all-pervading reality.” [Johnsen, Linda, Daughters of the Goddess: the Women Saints of India, St Paul MN: Yes International, 1995]

The same insight is expressed in a Shakta (Goddess-oriented) scripture, the Devi-Upanishad:

The gods, approaching the resplendent Goddess, asked her, “Who are you?” Devi replied, “I am the form of the Immensity; from me the world arises as Nature and as Person.”

This is one of many ways of conceiving the Divine. Some nowadays call it immanence or panentheism: the divine present in everything. Carol Christ comments that “panentheism shares with monotheism ‘the intuition of unity,’ the sense that the divine power is a unifying principle in the world.” [Christ, She Who Changes: Re-Imagining the Divine Into the World, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, p 209] Or, to put it in scientific terms, Bell’s theorem proposes that the separate parts of the universe are deeply connected at a fundamental level. Einstein called it the unified field theory.

I’m reminded of a video clip that recently streaked around the Net, of a talk by brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor. She suffered a stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain that temporarily incapacitated her rational and linear mind. The experience changed her perspective on the nature of reality:

And I lost my balance and I'm propped up against the wall. And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can't define where I begin and where I end. Because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall. And all I could detect was this energy. Energy. … And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of energy around me. And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there. [“My Stroke of Insight” Feb. 2008 www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229 (Video version); blog.ted.com/2008/03/jill_bolte_tayl.php#more (Text version)]

Modern projections?

Lotte Motz charges that feminist spiritual writers are imposing 20th century notions on the ancients. [Motz, Faces of the Goddess, New York: Oxford, 1997, p 38] And she is not alone in making this accusation. Please, someone explain: in what way are any other modern historical interpretations, whether Marxist or post-structuralist or processualist, less tied to present-day cultural concepts? None of these interpretations account for the pervasiveness of the sacred in living Indigenous cultures. That emphasis on the sacred as present in everyday life is likely to have been true for neolithic villagers, too.

It is not modern attitudes being projected on the ancients when women resurrect sayings recorded in ancient literature, such as the famous aretalogy of the Kemetic goddess Neith:

The Universe is the Goddess. She is not separate from it, She did not create it and then let it be. She is what is, what was, and what will be. [Cheryl Straffon, Daughters of the Earth, 2007, 55. Emphasis added. Aretalogy: praise litanies in the form “I am.”]

The symbolism of ancient female iconography itself has had a huge influence on women seeking a female Divine. Our very study of this symbolism—and our analysis of what sets it apart from male-dominant systems—has been made a centerpiece of the anti-essentialism argument. But that argument never names as “essentialist” the ancient societies, or living cultures for that matter, that so heavily emphasized mythic symbols of femaleness: vulvas, breasts, women’s bodies. Enough of this quibbling. It’s past time to acknowledge the overwhelming femaleness of the oldest human iconography, and its cultural significance.

An online review of Motz’s book illustrates stereotypical ideas circulating about Goddess feminism: “Many contemporary feminists believe that early humans worshipped a nurturing Mother Goddess, who was displaced by autocratic male deities. This book examines the maternal deities of various cultures and religions but finds no signs of a common origin for a primordial Great Mother.” But that simplistic and reductionist model so often laid to our charge completely misses the point. Why does there have to be a single origin, other than our common humanity? (Maybe there is, as Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum posits in Dark Mother, though it is difficult to prove cultural origins at such profound time depths—and equally difficult to disprove them.) But few are claiming a great diffusion from a single great goddess. It is rather that feminist researchers have noticed what can only be described as a staggering amount of similarities in ancient ritual art, from the female figurines to ceremonial vessels.

These deep continuities resound between archaic cultural artifacts across the planet, in the absence of any clear, or even conceivable, historical lines of transmission. There is no reason whatsoever for drawing a diffusionist link between mother-pots in Bulgaria of the 6th millennium BCE and Argentina of the 16th century CE, over 7000 years apart in time and half a world away; and yet their thematic unity is striking. The women who made these artifacts had something in common in their way of looking at the world, at life and death and relationship, when they molded their waterbird vessels with women’s breasts, or to take another example, female effigy vessels with the crying eyes to bury with their dead kin. [See “Icons of the Matrix” for this and other instances of symbolic resonances.]

Here we are not looking at a common historical origin or cultural linkage through contact, but something more profound: a pattern of human response to, and inter-relation with, the living world of nature, that is communicated and enacted through signs and ritual. These striking patterns—or let’s call them concordances—arise independently and repeatedly in widely divergent cultural contexts.

We’ve been treated to repeated academic warnings of the “dangers” of “goddess monotheism.” None of the writers flogging this threat concern themselves with the historical monotheism that restricted divinity to a single male god, which remains wrapped in thick layers of authority and prestige. They can’t quite grasp that the Goddess movement does not adhere to monotheism, in present day practice or historical interpretation. Approaches run the gamut from polytheism to panentheism to (getting technical here) henotheism, as well as non-theistic play with myths and symbols. Countless attempts to explain this have been passed over unheard. Heide Göttner-Abendroth spoke for many when she wrote,

[Goddess] does not mean an omnipotent, omniscient supreme Mother in Heaven, a counterpart to God the Father. On the contrary. This concept signifies nothing more—and nothing less—than the inherent spiritual capacity in every individual, which harmoniously expresses itself together with the totality of the intellectual, emotional, and physical capacities of the person. The Goddess does not exist independent of these capacities; she is something like the unifying thread, the vitality, the energy of life. In this sense, the Goddess is present in every person and in all creatures and elements that possess or impart the vital energy.” [Göttner-Abendroth, The Dancing Goddess, Boston: Beacon Press 1991 (1982), 217]

No mother goddess?

Many academic writers feel impelled to deplore the “essentialist” concept of a “mother goddess,” although goddesses were directly known by this title in numerous cultures. Isis notwithstanding, Lotte Motz insists that there was never any Mother Goddess, and goes so far as to claim that “mother” has nothing to do with Kybele’s titles of Great Mother (Magna Mater) and Mother of the Gods (Mater Deum). She writes, “no creature [!] could be further from the celebration of biological motherhood, and the title Magna Mater surely designates her as a great queen.” [Faces of the Goddess, p. 120] This is extreme even for goddess-averse academia, and in line with Motz’s other peculiarities, such as the usage of “men” to mean people, or defining “shaman” as “the man of visionary powers.” [61] But she is in step with the ruling trend of dismissing “mother goddess” as an irrelevant modernism—and a purely “biological” one at that.

Mater Deum is no isolated title, however, since it occurs in a broad and deep swath of religious tradition. “Mother of the Gods” is attested for Neith in ancient Egypt, Athirat in the Ugaritic scriptures (Syria), Aditi in the Rg Veda (V 1.111.19), Teteoinan of the Aztecs (or Coatlicue in other accounts), Nana Burukú of Dahomey and beyond, Allat of the Nabataean Arabs, Ninhursag of Sumeria, Kiririsha and Mashta of the Elamites (Iran), or Kasogoanaga of the Chamacoco (Chaco region of South America, who is named “mother of the spirits.”) There are also Grandmothers: Hannahanna of the Hurrians, in what is now Turkey, and the Grandmother Creator of the Shawnee, Kokomtheyna.

The title Mother of All yields similarly rich attestations: Nyame of Ashanti (Ghana); Terra Ops of the ancient Latins; Barbelo and several other Gnostic goddesses (as Mother of the All); Amaná of the Calinya Caribs (Surinam); Aluna of the Kogi (Colombia); the Uralic Mother of Nature; Wu Sheng Lao Mu in China, or more conceptually, descriptions of the Tao as “the creating Mother of whatever exists under heaven.” In Australia, this name belongs to Ngalyod, Mutjingga, and Kunapipi, who is described as “one mother for all people everywhere.” [Peggy Grove, “Myths, Glyphs and Rituals of a Living Goddess Tradition, in Revision, Vol 21 #3, p 12]

Such titles could be multiplied, with considerable overlap. For example, the Yoruba sea goddess Yemanja is Mother of the Orishas, and also called Mother of All. The Laguna writer Leslie Marmon Silko talks story about Thought Woman as Mother Creator, and also, with her three sisters, as Mother Creators. [Silko, Yellow Woman and A Beauty of Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996, pp 63-64] ( Yet more Goddess Creators, many also titled mothers or grandmothers, could be enumerated, but I refrain for reasons of length.)

None of this is to say that “mother” is the only signifier for Goddess, or an indispensible one. There are creator goddesses, fates and lawgivers, immanent powers of land, sea, and sky, of fire or clouds, of animals and birds, and goddesses representing divine principles, cycles, or planets. However, none of these categories are exclusive of “mother,” and in a great many traditions, this attribute mixes freely and frequently with the others, including some, such as warrior or destroyer, that conflict with the more conservative images of what “mother” might signify. If we look to Indigenous religions, “mother” is a truly expansive concept, and a divine one.

“The Mothers”

In aboriginal spiritual philosophies, it is extremely common to name spirits and deities as “mothers,” and by other kinship names. In South America, they are often described as mothers of waters, of animals, of special power places. The Kamayura speak of mama’é, mother spirits of animals, fish, and food plants. The Guaraní venerate Ñandecy, “Our Mother,” who lives in the east, beyond the sea, in the Land Without Evil. She is First Woman, another title common among Indigenous peoples, and also takes the form of a green snake. After the Spanish invasions,  Ñandecy inspired successive Guarani liberation movements seeking to end European domination.

In Brazil, the Tupí say that that every animal has its own spirit mother, and that Putcha Çy is “mother of animals,” who follow her thunderous roar. She protects them from hunters, and often takes the form of a tortoise or coatá monkey. She lives in the springs at the headwaters of rivers. [Otto Zerries, in Pre-Columbian American Religions, ed. Walter Krickeberg et al, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968, pp 260-1]

In Colombia, a song of the matrilineal Kagabá people expresses their veneration of a Mother as the sacred source of everything:

The Mother of Songs, the mother of our whole seed, bore us in the beginning. She is the mother of all races of men [sic] and the mother of all tribes. She is the mother of the thunder, the mother of the rivers, the mother of trees and of all kinds of things. She is the mother of songs and dances. She is the mother of the older brother stones. She is the mother of the grain and the mother of all things. She is the mother of the younger brother Frenchmen and of the strangers. She is the mother of the dance paraphenalia and of all temples, and the only mother we have. She is the mother of the animals, the only one, and the mother of the Milky Way. It was the mother herself who began to baptize. She gave us the limestone coca dish. She is the mother of the rain, the only one we have. She alone is the mother of things, she alone... [in Neumann, Erich, The Great Mother, Princeton University Press, 1972 (1963), p 85]

The Kogi (also called the Kagabá) speak of a Great Mother as the origin of everything, as the primordial sea from which it all emerged. She is Aluna, a name variously translated as spirit, vitality, awareness, reality. The eloquent Kagabá chant quoted above flatly contradicts pronouncements that no culture ever conceived of a Great Mother.

In fact, among aboriginal South Americans, “mother” seems to be a primary way of talking about deity. In Quechua, Mama (“mother”) is also translated in sacral contexts as “goddess,” and similarly for Tata (“father”). Thus, Peruvians invoked and made prayers and offerings to Pachamama, Mother Earth; Mama Quilla, Mother Moon; Saramama, Corn Mother, and so on. Further south, the Mapuche prayed to the Grandmothers and Grandfathers of the Directions.

The Calinya Caribs speak of Amaná, a self-conceiving Mother whose essence is Time, existing through eternity, and who has borne all beings. Amaná lives in the waters of the heavens, in the Pleiades, in the form of a woman-serpent. She renews herself continually by sloughing off her skin, and can take any shape. Shamans commune with her and with the mothers of rocks at the headwaters of rivers for visions and healing. Amaná governs all spirits of the waters, and is also called Wala Yumu, “spirit of the kinds.” [Zerries, 245-6]

In the far north, the Inuit speak of Takanakapsaluk, the Sea Mother, who created the great ocean mammals, and the Caribou Mother, who created land animals by speaking magical words of power, and made their skin from her own leather breeches. [Rasmussen, 1929, 69-70; Boas III:122] These Mothers are also old women, like the primary female spirit of the Cheyenne, Old Woman. The monolithic stone women scattered across the steppes of Central Asia are ancestors known as bülbül, “grandmothers.”

Sacred mothers also persisted in parts of Europe, most dramatically among the incompletely-christianized Latvians. They venerated over fifty mat?s, “mothers” of earthly and heavenly powers: of earth, forests, and fields, sea, waves, rivers, rain, fog, and wind, as well as threshing houses, markets, gardens, roads, linen, wine, flowers, and the dead. Traces remain in the faery faiths, too; the French with their bonnes dames, “good women,” the Germans their holzweibel, “woodwoman,” or in many places, simply “the ladies” who were often sighted near certain rocks or springs.

We could also look to India, where every village has own goddess, and even great cities are named for local goddesses of place: Mumbai (Bombay) and Calcutta (Kalighat, the “river-steps of Kali”). Devdutt Pattanaik writes that the Gramadev? (village goddess) “is perceived as the local manifestation of the cosmic mother-goddess,” an observation repeated by many commentators on rural Indian religion. [Nagar, Shanti Lal, Universal Goddess, Delhi: Atma Ram & Sons, 1988, p 152]

The pervasive Goddess veneration of India has made itself felt on the regional and national levels, too, on the tongues of seers such as Sri Ramakrishna of Dakshineswar: “The Mother projects the entire world, moment by moment, from her own ecstasy. Simply remember that all comes from her, belongs to her, abides in her, and disappears into her…” [in Hixson, Lex, Great Swan: Meetings with Ramakrishna, NY: Larson 1997] (Beware of interpolating “goddess monotheism” here; from the same mouth came the praises of many other forms of deity, although Kali was Ramakrishna’s ishta devata, “beloved deity.”)

Africa is one of the strongholds of mother-veneration. The Yoruba speak of awon iya wa, “Our Mothers,” who are seen on a continuum of deities and ancestors. Awon iya wa is “a collective term for female ancestors, female deities, and for older living women, whose power over the reproductive capacities of all women is held in awe by Yoruba men.” These mothers are also called “the owners of the world.” [Pemberton 1989 “The Carvers of the Northeast,” in Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, edited by Henry John Drewel et al., New York: Harry Abrams. 1989: 210] In a patriarchal world, their wrath must be placated through the masked gelede dances.

African women’s rites of the mothers often function as a base of their identity and empowerment, even in patrilineal and patrilocal societies. In Igbo country, even as Onitsha women married out, they brought with them shrines to “the mothers,” and made conical clay mounds as dwelling places for the Oma spirit of nurturing and maternity. [Amadiume, Ifi, African Matriarchal Foundations: the case of Igbo societies. NY and London: Karnak House and Red Sea Press, 1995 (1987), p 19]

Ifi Amadiume lays out a paradigmatic Igbo history of an Indigenous matrilineage that preserved veneration of its ancestral goddess under “patriarchal incursion.” Nnobi oral histories feature a hunter, Aho-from-the-wild, who met the divine woman Idemili near a stream and married her. Idemili had more powerful influence than her husband, “and so she spread her idols everywhere.” This is one strand of the tradition.

Over time, writes Amadiume, as the Igbo shifted to a patrilineal and patrilocal order, conflicting themes of female subordination arose: “Thus, the all-powerful goddess Idemili was domesticated and made the wife of a less powerful god, Aho.” And a junior third wife at that. [Amadiume, 59-61] Their much-courted daughter married out, taking a ritual pot with her, and she too spread her shrines around. [Amadiume, 39] In spite of the formal “domestication” of these female powers under the new order, they remain the central mythic figures of the region.

More than that, Amadiume tells us, “The goddess religion provided an integrated administrative and judicial system, which extended from Nnobi to all the communities along the Oji Iyi Idemili stream…” [Amadiume, 54] Nnobi is the major ritual center for the goddess Idemili, whose veneration was shared by other towns along the Idemili river. The patriarchal kings of Nri later assume rulership of the region, but Nnobi pays no tribute to them, and in fact the kings must make pilgrimages to the Idemili shrine. [Amadiume, 38-39] So the goddess still exerts considerable cultural and political pull, as do the elder women who figure in her rites (even though a male shrine priest in women’s dress now presides over the sanctuary).

The Gouandousou statues of the Bambara display the various and multivalent meanings of Goddess, including the kind academics routinely reject as untenably “essentialist” because of their connection to body mysteries: menstruation, pregnancy and lactation. This is “dangerous” terrain, both in animist terms and for the sexual politics of patriarchy. In Bambara culture (as for countless others) it is a terrain of female potency. “For them these statues represent either Mousso Koroni the supernatural female creator, Gouandousou the gifted and powerful historical figure, or female ancestors as a collectivity.” The images also carry meanings of mother, milk-giver, child-bearer and worker. [Imperato, Pascal James, Buffoons, Queens and Wooden Horsemen, NY: Kilimi, 42-43]

A comparable spectrum of spiritual beings exists in Senufo thought: deities, ancestors, and wilderness spirits. Anita Glaze writes, “Central to Senufo religion is the conception of a bipartite deity called Kòlotyölöö in its aspect of divine creator, and Màlëëö or Kàtyelëëö in its aspect of protective, nurturing being.” The last two names mean “Ancient Mother” and “Ancient Woman.” The creator divinity is remote and cannot be approached directly, only through other deities. [Glaze, Anita, “Woman Power and Art in a Senufo Village,” African Arts, Vol 8, No. 3 (Spring, 1975) p 29]

Linguistic indicators points to a shift that masculinized this creator: “There is some evidence to suggest that Kòlotyölöö was originally considered female in nature (työlöö wii, for example, means ‘woman’ or ‘wife’ in Tyebara), although present usage suggests a neuter or even a paternal image.” [Glaze, 64] If so, this is yet another instance of female deity changed to male within a patriarchal culture-shift. [See Paula Gunn Allen on the displacement of female spirits by males in The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, Beacon Press, Boston, 1986, p 41; and Tikvah Frymer Kensky on Sumerian goddesses being turned into gods, in Whence the Goddesses] In the Senufo context, such a shift may well date to men’s takeover of the Poro society from its female founders, as the oral histories describe.

Other considerations

Because of the stereotypical bracketing of “mother goddess,” I have to emphasize spiritual feminists’ wariness of restricting Goddess to this form, all the way back to the early 70s. We repudiated the old doctrines that said motherhood was a woman’s only proper place, and that a subordinated one, or necessarily a heterosexual one—but we did not deny the sacral value of motherhood. What we rejected was the coercive pressure to eliminate all other female identities, and the prescriptive colonization of women’s bodies and labor. We rejected the idea that the sacred female was a merely a vessel for a superior masculine power, as Mary the handmaiden of the Lord says in Christian scripture: “Let it be done to me according to thy will.”

German woodcut of the Virgin Mary circa 1500

Marija Gimbutas too explicitly foreswore this patriarchal bracketing, while never denying cultural importance to the mother aspect of deity. She called “Mother Goddess” as a catch-all term a “misconception,” writing: “It is true that there are mother images and protectors of young life, and there was a Mother Earth and Mother of the Dead, but the rest of female images can’t be generalized under the term Mother Goddess.” [Language of the Goddess, p 316. Thanks to Judith Laura for calling my attention to this quote, which of course doesn’t resemble the stereotyped profile of Gimbutas; but then, few of her detractors have actually read her.]

Reacting to pressures to deny any mother goddess, as some kind of loyalty oath to anti-essentialism, would be a mistake. We don’t have to affirm the narrow, colonized definition of “mother” insisted on by the dominant culture to recognize the importance of mothering. It represents a shared ground of deep experience, relationship, and love—and does not have to exclude other images of the Sacred Woman. Even the Amazons venerated Artemis the many-breasted Mother of All.

Most women become mothers, and the entire society rests on their foundational work. But precious little authority remains to them nowadays. Although society pays lip service to mothers, in practice they are disregarded and disempowered—economically, politically, and legally. In the USA, no law protects mothers from hiring discrimination, so  “maternal profiling” is rampant, and mothers are paid less on average than women without children. Maternity leave is ridiculously short, and single motherhood remains a major predictor of lifelong poverty. Divorced mothers who work in the home lose custody of their children, more often than not, in court custody challenges. Meanwhile their authority as educators has been vitiated by the mass media. So mothers are mobilizing in a growing social movement and redefining themselves.

A powerfully down-to-earth Goddess as a Jewish mother is evoked in comedian Sherry Glaser’s performance “Oh my Goddess.” She features Ma holding forth on the fate of creation since she took a 5000-year-long nap, leaving “your father” in charge of the kids. “He started acting like he’s the only God in the universe… and let you play with guns and bombs and missiles. Not in my house!” [“God’s better half just woke up, and boy is she mad.” Jessica Werner, San Francisco Chronicle, June 22, 2006] Glaser told an interviewer that “we are way out of whack on earth, so if we restore the mother and serve, honor, protect, pleasure her, everything will be all right. I do believe that.”

So do lots of women in the Two Thirds world, where maternalism is an important element in the women’s movements as well as in the traditional cultures. Nigerian feminist writers have especially emphasized this. Maternalism can have its drawbacks in patriarchal societies, which create misery for women who can’t bear children, and for divorced women where children are by custom given over to the fatherline. But the spiritual aspects of motherhood as a female sphere of power are not to be overlooked, as African and American Indian women have been pointing out. As Paula Gunn Allen writes, “To address a person as ‘mother’ is to pay the highest ritual respect.” [The Sacred Hoop, p 16]

In India, Ammachi is spreading her message of “The Awakening of Universal Motherhood” which recalls the aboriginal value placed on social motherhood as the highest good:

Anyone - woman or man - who has the courage to overcome the limitations of the mind can attain the state of universal motherhood. The principle of motherhood is as vast and powerful as the universe. With the power of motherhood within her, a woman can influence the entire world. The love of awakened motherhood is a love and compassion felt not only towards one's own children, but towards all people, animals and plants, rocks and rivers - a love extended to all of nature, all beings. Indeed, to a woman in whom the state of true motherhood has awakened, all creatures are her children. This love, this motherhood, is Divine Love - and that is God. [http://www.amritapuri.org/amma/un2002/awaken3.php]

Re-enchanting the world

In so-called “Western” culture we are living with the loss of the mythic. Or to put it more accurately, it has been bound, twisted, displaced, and appropriated for commercial ends. Our imaginal life is in the hands of the movie industry, TV network heads, advertising and media conglomerates. Female leads, or even decent parts, have dropped precipitously, and it is common to see movie ads with five or seven male characters and one sexualized female. The big studios are run by men, the big directors are male, and they give us anorexic female prototypes, most of whom who age out before 40, often paired with male leads several decades older. Sexist obsessions rule the music industry, too, propagating the toxicity of ho’dom and gyrating female trophies. The single most profitable Internet industry is online porn (and its outliers, like the spam that came across my email last week: “Drive your weapon into her until she screams.”)

Coexisting on another misogynist extreme are the fundamentalist religions that demand women stay in their place and submit to male authority. But what passes for the marketplace of ideas is not so different, if you look at the handful of women who make it into the New York Review of Books (on terms), or the outnumbered and outshouted females admitted to sit with the white male punditry, to say nothing of the unchecked misogyny of cable anchormen like Chris Matthews and Tucker Carlson. These tightly-wound cultural phantasms are completely man-made, drenched in toxic whiteness, and hurtling toward a dead end. They have no reference to women’s reality, to the experience of most humans on the planet, or to the natural world. 

Lee Maracle of the Stoh:loh nation writes from Canada, “Western society is an alienated society. Its individuals have come to accept the estrangement of spiritual belief, emotional wellness, physical existence, knowledge, and intellectual development from the central fire from which they arise…. Everything is present in a mold that began shaping before the Greco-Roman cultural ascendance some 2,000 years ago.” [“Decolonizing Native Women,” in Daughters of Mother Earth, Westport CT: Greenwood, 2006, p 33] Maracle lays out how colonization has brought this fragmentation to Indian country. One of its most momentous consequences has been the stripping away of the mothers’ authority in these original cultures.

Such losses are incalculable. Even in the crucible of modern Western Civ, centuries ago, some visionaries understood how mistaken that cultural and personal fragmentation was. We only know of the philosopher Anne Conway (1631-79) thanks to her resurrection from history by feminist researchers. The title of her posthumous book reaches back beyond the classical authorities to a much older worldview: The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy. She wrote, “the distinction between spirit and body is only modal and incremental, not essential and substantial.” [in Paula Findless, “Ideas in the Mind: Gender and Knowledge in the 17th Century”, Hypatia, Vol. 17, No. 1, Winter 2002, p 191] In other words, consciousness is a continuum, an energetic field.

Some fragments survive containing residues of older ways, notably in the faery faiths. Folk accounts of a banished goddess preserve traces of the long struggle between the christian priesthood and popular animism in Europe. The folklorist Grimm commented on the “white ladies” (faeries, land spirits, omen-giving ancestors) who often appeared to European countryfolk, beseeching them to perform some ritual act to free them from a long-standing curse:

Now the pervading thought in all of this of being banned and longing for release I take to be just this, that the pagan deities are represented as still beautiful, rich, powerful, and benevolent, but outcast and unblest, and only on the hardest terms can they be released from the doom pronounced upon them. [Grimm, 968]

These oral traditions retain a defiant affection for the outlawed deities. They speak to the spiritual uprooting, splitting and severing that was inflicted on European cultures, a legacy we are living with today, and attempting to work through. It’s crucial for those of us who are deracinated Europeans to reclaim our own deep cultural roots, before christianization, feudalization, romanization, and find an authentic place to stand, where we are not colonized as females, nor colonizers as whites, in this imperialized global order.

The biggest challenge facing the Goddess movement now, as it expands and is popularized, is to avoid unconsciously reproducing the dominant culture’s biases and exclusions founded on ethnicity and class and colonization. It is crucial to address these issues, for the larger feminist movement, and no less so for its spiritual expressions. Without clear, firm, conscious effort to overcome patterns of privilege, they replicate themselves. Our movement cannot allow itself to be defined by access to resources, whether ownership of land or media, or the ability to conference-hop around the world. Conferences, anthologies, events need to be inclusive and representative of the range of women who actually are creating this resurgence.

I believe we will succeed only by addressing injustice on all levels, including the colonial and imperial. And that requires becoming allies to Indigenous women. Issues of appropriation must be addressed, the insults of New Age rip-offs that have been piled onto the weight of historic  injuries. Much has been written about “spiritual hucksterism” and “shake and bake” shamans. [See “Respect and Responsibility,” 1994, at www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/respect.html ] Becoming an ally means learning about Indigenous women’s spiritual perspectives, as they define them, and respecting their authority to do that. Much more is owed, including solid support for sovereignty issues, but this is one good place to start repairing relations.

It’s not all open road. I’m alarmed about New Age commodification in general, as Goddess culture gets popularized and marketed. Consumerist trendiness and prosperity consciousness corrupt what is genuine, and threaten to overwhelm it. In many people’s minds Goddess already means New Age, which means trouble. In more than a few cases, the rush toward “the divine feminine” literally does mean feminine in its most retrograde media form: recently I’ve seen a lot of art depicting thin, pretty, young, longhaired females, usually white, sticking their breasts out in unnatural positions, and looking just like what we see in the men’s magazines. They don’t appear powerful or present in their bodies, but tense, posed, and decorative.

I’m concerned about Mary Magdalene being recast as a vessel for the divine seed, like the Virgin Mary only-this-time-with-sex. I worry when women believe anti-historical claims that Magdalene was really an acolyte of a Goddess temple, or other kookeries making her a “sacred prostitute.” [See Stephanie Budin’s book The Myth of Sacred Prostitution (2007).] No sooner has the church’s malicious invention of her hookerdom been exposed as a fraud, than it reappears in a new-and-romanticized version.] Some even call Mary Magdalene the progenitrix, by Jesus, of the Merovingian dynasty (vicious, misogynist, slaving murderers that they were), as in the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail. This kind of bunkum feeds the prejudice that feminist spirituality is based on phony history.

Reclamation

Women’s recognition of our mythic exile is powering a widespread impulse to revive and restore Goddess culture. Against the background of patriarchal religion, with its insistence on deity, prophets, saviors, and clergy in a relentlessly masculine image, “‘the Goddess’ becomes a term of liberation and a rallying cry for justice,” as Asphodel Long wrote. [Online review of Concept of the Goddess]

Longing for a female face of the Divine is pouring forth from diverse cultural directions: women of European descent who feel cut off from their pagan roots by a long history of compulsory Christianity; Jewish women reclaiming the Shekhinah, and some the ancient goddess Asherah as well; African-Americans reaching for the pre-captivity sacraments of their ancestors, and as far  back as ancient Egyptian wisdom; Koreans bringing forth Mago, Puertorriqueñas remembering Atabey, and Mexicanas affirming la Guadalupana as Tonantzín.

The Unitarians have been going through this portal of opening to Goddess, and other progressive churches too. In the ‘90s at the breakthrough Re-Imagining Conference, Christian women invoked Sophia in richly sensual terms (and faced a vicious backlash for it). Wendy Griffin told me about radical nuns who are using goddess figurines to represent the sacraments of Earth in their observance of Stations of the Cross. Christian women are embracing Mary Magdalene as a female prophetic figure. Some of the old Gnostic scriptures attributed to her sound very much like Buddhist or Hindu mysticism: “All nature, all formations, all creatures exist in and with one another, and they will be resolved again into their own roots.” [Gospel of Mary, 4:22]

Pongala, the world’s largest women’s ceremony, is carried out annually in Kerala, India, with a million women boiling rice porridge for the goddess Attukal Amm?, Bhagavat?. Dianne Jenett emphasizes the transformative power of this massive Goddess event, where women of all religions and castes make offering together in a spirit of reverence, sisterhood, and generosity. [See Jenett, “A Million Shaktis Rising: Pongala, a Women's Festival in Kerala, India. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 21.1 (2005) 35-55; and
http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/journal_of_feminist_studies_in_religion/v021/21.1jenett.html]

We are going through a huge cultural shift toward restoring the female. However that is defined, it has been disempowered and negated, and it is rising now, through us. We are recreating the arts of invocation, of incantation, of drumming and sacramental dance. We are beginning to expand into litanies of sacred names, processions, banners, and temple-building. “Make processions for me,” said the Lady to Bernedette of Lourdes.

There’s an expansiveness going on. Goddess reverence and earth-based spirituality is bursting out in music and art and theater, video and blogs. Women are dancing for Tara, celebrating Kal? pujas, reaching for the Mother Luminosity or Ad? Parashakti. Asungi is painting African goddesses, Ubaka Hill is drumming them, Arisika Razak is dancing them, along with countless others. The Korean mudang (women shamans) are holding kut for the spirits of women who endured sexual slavery to the Japanese military. These cultural acts not only have tremendous unifying force, they are healing and transformative. They have everything to do with the decolonization of womanhood that is necessary to fully inhabit our bodies and voices, our breath and movement.

Countless women are “resacralizing the female body through Goddess spirituality,” in the words of Wendy Griffin. [“Crafting the Boundaries,” in Griffin, Daughters of the Goddess: Studies of Healing Identify and Empowerment, Walnut Creek CA: Altamira, 2000, p 76-77] If anything has been a central theme of the Goddess resurgence, this is it. The dancer Vajra Ma calls it “BodyKnowing,” authentic wisdom arising from deep within. Louise Paré writes of how conscious movement, sound and breath practices resonate powerfully within the body, throughout all the multiple layers of consciousness. This “morphic resonance” connects with all that is living, and from it arise stories of the female Divine:

I suggest that through intrinsic movement one can experience consciously and directly in one’s body the unfolding energy of the lifeforce which ancient peoples symbolically represented in spirals, circles, and coiling snakes as the Sacred Feminine. …It is my experience that in the conscious expression of each story as it presents itself through woman’s body, transformation is realized, integration develops and consciousness is expanded. [Paré, “Moving Between the Worlds She Brings Forth All Things From Within Her Body: Intrinsic Movement as Transformative Spiritual Practice and Expression of Women’s Spirituality,” Doctoral Dissertation, CIIS, 2002]

The Moving Power of the Mythic

The insights of Carol Christ on the tremendous power of the symbolic and mythic explain why so many women see it as a primary arena of transformation: “A symbol’s effect does not depend on rational assent, for a symbol also functions on levels of the psyche other than the rational.” Christ notes that symbols create cultural contexts experienced even by those who do not adhere to them, as for example at marriages, funerals, or holidays. She makes a most astute observation about the nature of human culture: “Symbol systems can not be rejected, they must be replaced.” [“Why Women Need the Goddess,” 1979, in Womanspirit Rising, 274-275] This pivotal principle helps us to understand why attempts to create social change often falter. They have not yet touched the depths where psyche and culture are transformed.

We are mythic beings. However rational we are on the surface, we swim in a cultural sea of charged signs and stories that affect us on multiple levels. Memes, as anthropologists call them, or thought-forms in spiritualist jargon, have a power created by the collected sum of cultural consensus—or in the case of dominance systems, by coercion and submission. Memes acquire a force of their own, fed by naming, repetition, artistic and ritual enactment. They replicate and spread beyond their original context, long after their creators are dead, and go on to shape new contexts. They have been described as cultural genes or programs, which can be positive or negative, inspired or oppressive, or complex mixtures.

Myth and ritual have transformative power. Ifi Amadiume describes how Igbo women use them in their oaths of solidarity at shrines, in women’s strikes and collective actions of calling men to account by making them eat fufu and swear oaths at the shrine of the goddess Ala. The Igbo Women’s War of 1929 drew extensively on ritual forms— processions, carrying wands, ceremonial dress of leaves—in their mass protest of British colonial taxes and puppet chiefs, which also included tearing down telegraph lines and storming jails to free prisoners. [This union of spiritual and political is not unusual. Many examples are given in my slideshow Rebel Shamans: Indigenous Women Confront Empire, 2006]

The Igbo women’s use of ceremonial regalia toward political ends is one instance of “how metaphor translates into genuine cultural power,” in the words of Judy Grahn. She has delved into the spiritual uses of metaphor: “In examining the power of verbal metaphor, I began to see that we surround ourselves with living, interacting, physically embodied metaphors.” Grahn has named these cultural patterns “metaforms.” She explains, “Some metaphors are so powerful they become translated into physical form…” This goes to the very heart of ritual, whether it is acts or masks or sacred objects that carry that potent meaning. [Grahn, Blood, Bread and Roses, Boston: Beacon, 1993, p 19]

Pagans often talk about how intention can be clarified and magnified through the use of symbols in ceremony. Ruth Barrett writes, “Within ritual, it is through the vehicle of symbols that we give our psyches the messages we choose to internalize.” [“The Power of Ritual,” in Griffin, p 189] Thus the saying, “Magic is the art of changing consciousness at will.” The symbols become conduits for awareness and ways of directing energy, which can be potentized through chant or sounding, drumming, dance, ritual theater, and by the application of essence through water, red ochre or sandalwood paste or cornmeal.  These ways of experiencing energy also allow us to be  transformed by it, through collective intention.

Through ceremony—Essence invoked through symbol—we wash our minds, revitalize our spirits, harmonize our bodies. Through story and myth, we affirm what we value and how things in the world are connected. The meanings of Goddess speak to what we revere, what we are reaching toward, and how, in our deepest core, we know the ultimate nature of reality.

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Max Dashu is a historian, artist, and founder of the Suppressed Histories Archives. More articles and excerpts from her forthcoming Secret History of the Witches are at www.suppressedhistories.net . See her video channel https://www.youtube.com/@maxdashu/videos
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