Feminism and Religion

How Women’s Ritual Dances Help Heal the Trauma of Patriarchy

In the northern hemisphere we have entered the final phase of waxing darkness before the winter solstice, the yearly gift which invites us to rest, renew, and heal. Yet so many of us lead such full and active lives, how do we find time for essential being amid all of our essential doing?

Since Neolithic times at least, women have gathered in sacred circles to sing and dance together. Regular circle dance offers mini-opportunities to rest and renew, as we take time out from our busy daily lives and allow ourselves to be held by the larger circle.

While our bodies move, our minds rest, and our spirits become refreshed. We follow in the footsteps of the ancestors of the human family, connecting with ourselves, each other, and universal themes of life, release and regeneration.

*Women’s circle dance. Terracotta, Palaikastro, Crete,*
*1350–1300 BCE. Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete.*
*Photo: Laura Shannon.*

Poems for My Motherline by Carolyn Lee Boyd

November is a time when the veil is thin between the worlds of the living and the dead. As I slip into the magic of this time of year, I think about my motherline: my mother, my mother’s mother, my mother’s mother’s mother, and so on down myriad generations to the beginning of humanity. I am lucky that I am able to trace my motherline back to 15th century England and discover some of the stories of these women whose labor and sacrifice gave me life. These three poems are some of the thoughts turned into poetry that I have had about my motherline over the years. They are chronological, beginning with my experience of being at my mother’s bedside as she died. Next is an ode to the generations of my motherline who migrated over and over again, seeking homes where they could find well being and peace for themselves and their children (while acknowledging in this note that, with each migration, they displaced people already living there, destroying their well being and peace). Finally, a poem about our generation’s place between those who lived before us and those who will live after us and what we have to offer each other. May we all gaze through the thin veil at one another, no matter which generation we are, with compassion and love..

Gratitudes by Beth Bartlett

After several stressful and demanding weeks, I had five days ahead of me with no responsibilities except to my dog, who gives as much if not more than he gets. I had a long drive ahead of me, but it was the peak of the autumnal bouquet that filled nearly every moment of the ten-hour drive. Plus, I was headed to my soul’s resting place. Only an hour into my drive I could feel the tension in my bodymind melt away. I actually felt lighter. The spaciousness of the days ahead emptied me of every bit of negativity and in its place — gratitudes.

This was not the practice of recognizing and writing down three things I was grateful for at the end of the day, something I have practiced as a discipline off and on for many years. It was instead much more spontaneous and spirit-filled. Throughout the day the gratitudes simply arose in my being.

The audiobook I was listening to filled me with appreciation for all the people in my former workplace who had done all the unseen work for the decades I had worked there – the ones who did the bookkeeping for my paychecks, my retirement fund, my healthcare; the ones who helped keep my computer running and the heat and lights on; the ones who cleaned the hallways and the classrooms; the ones who plowed the parking lots.

Ex-Good Wife Adventures by Laura Montoya

I had a severe mental breakdown last Tuesday after learning that my romantic interest—the most fictional, imagined, and fleeting of them all—had started a relationship with a fantastic woman. I found out he had a girlfriend in the middle of a brownie party, dressed in leather and holding a helium balloon. So, I approached him and asked him why the hell he’d ghosted me. He’d started a relationship with the Italian diva after categorically rejecting the idea of us ever having a serious relationship. “I’m not ready for a serious relationship at this point in my life,” he’d repeatedly told me during our dates-not-dates, only to find him again two months later in a seemingly very committed romantic venture with the curly-haired European beauty. I don’t blame him; she’s wonderful, and I wish them the best, sincerely, bitterly, but sincerely.

But beyond the characters in this temporary teenage story in my 35s, I remember realizing that day that I wasn’t going to blame anyone but myself. It was my fault again, for being naive, for being infatuated so fast, for waiting for a man to see me and appreciate me. So, I sank into the depths of guilt and the “why me, God?” Why me? (Insert here tears, mucus, babas, and a scream, with your imagination) The male God looked at me, smirking, and asked, “Do I know you?” But seriously, why can’t any man take me seriously? I asked God why I wasn’t attractive enough for someone to risk everything for me.

The Grandmother Way by Sara Wright

The last day of August is upon us. It’s so cool here in the hollow that I decide to winnow the second batch of my elderberries sitting outdoors where Coalie can keep a sharp eye on me from her dog bed on the porch. I note that hummingbirds are thinning out. As I begin this separation of berry from stem, I imagine that I am connected to all women everywhere through what is often called (pejoratively) ‘woman’s work’. Women who were the first seed keepers and berry winnowers like today’s Indigenous peoples that still follow the old ways. Oh, I am grateful to be sitting among them in my imagination. Still, I yearn. I wish I could share this task with just one other woman, and for a moment sink into that familiar loneliness. As I look at my purple stained fingers reflecting on how exquisite a natural dye this must make, I think I might try to collect another batch of berries to experiment with.

I am not sure just when all thought ceased but every year, I experience this phenomenon while plucking purple elderberries with my fingers… and then? Two hours later the winnowing is done, just as I begin to lose the sun. Returning to the house I finish my tinctures in minutes, pouring amethyst berries into jars and covering them with alcohol. After steeping for six weeks this medicine will help me ward off colds and flu. Covid too. I am mindful that elderberries are a gift from nature that I receive each year. Gratitude overflows at this time of the ‘Gathering In’.

The Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Death with Dignity

This was originally posted on 11/3/14

In the summer of 1960 when I was 14 years old my much loved grandmother Mae Inglis Christ died of a cancer that affected her brain. The last time I saw my Nannie was shortly after her diagnosis in the early spring. While we were visiting, the cancer affected her back, and she took to her bed. In those days children were not allowed in hospitals. I never saw my grandmother alive again, but my mother told us that our grandmother was hooked up to tubes much longer than she should have been. Mother vowed, “This will never happen to me.” I was driven to the funeral in a limousine with my grandmother’s girlfriends. They spoke about my grandmother’s last days, describing how (because her mind was affected by cancer) my little grandmother had screamed and screamed at them for not visiting–even though they were with her every day. They found my grandmother’s outbursts so traumatic that they said they were relieved to see her looking so peaceful in her coffin.

Who Turns the Wheel? Gender in the Modern Pagan Year, part 2 by Myriapath

Part 1, yesterday traced how the eight-festival Wheel of the Year was assembled in the middle of the twentieth century from older ingredients, some surviving only in a line or two of medieval writing. It began with a blessing. Writing for this site in July 2017, Carol P. Christ closed a post with words that name no gender at all: “As we bless the Source of Life, so we are blessed.” We return to it at the end.”

The divine couple, and who was told no

The gendering was there from the beginning. Hutton describes Gardner’s earliest seasonal rites as pairing a god and a goddess, “a divine couple who were intrinsically linked to the annual cycle of winter and summer”, the god predominating in the cold-season festivals and the goddess in the warm-season pair.

The seasonal love story that many readers first meet as something ancient is a modern liturgical pattern, not a preserved pre-Christian myth. That does not make it less meaningful to those who keep it; it makes it datable.

The pattern also carried an exclusion. The World Religions and Spirituality Project, in its profile of the Minoan Brotherhood, describes Gardner’s Wicca as a “fertility religion” organized around male-female polarity, God and Goddess, high priest and high priestess, and records that “Gardner was homophobic and refused initiation to anyone whom he thought was homosexual”, noting that Alex Sanders and Doreen Valiente rejected that exclusion. A framework built on a heterosexual pair puts pressure on those it does not fit, and some people built elsewhere.

Who Turns the Wheel? Gender in the Modern Pagan Year, part 1 by Myriapath

A blessing, and a calendar younger than it sounds

Pick up almost any introduction to the modern Pagan festival year and you will meet a couple: a goddess of the growing season and a god born, crowned and cut down at harvest. Writing for this site in July 2017, Carol P. Christ described Lammas as the point at which “the young male God identified with the harvest … is sacrificed.” She closed the same post with a blessing that names no gender at all: “As we bless the Source of Life, so we are blessed.”

The eight-festival Wheel of the Year and its divine-couple story were assembled in the middle of the twentieth century by people whose names, meetings and dates are known. That recency is exactly why the wording has been open to revision, and revised it has been, in public and on the record. What follows traces that rewriting rather than judging it.

How the eight festivals came together

In a 2008 study in Folklore, the historian Ronald Hutton traces the eight festivals to two separate modern sources. The solstice and equinox feasts descend from Edward Williams, better known as Iolo Morganwg, who invented four Druidic solar festivals between 1792 and 1826. The quarter days come from Margaret Murray’s now rejected account of witch festivals.

God Is a Woman by Michael Aaron Cody

Why does calling God a woman sound more outrageous than calling God a man? For thousands of years, we’ve said it without questioning it: The Father, the Lord, the Almighty. We assigned a masculine identity to the supposed creator of existence, reflected in Matthew 6:9. But look at the biology of human reproduction and the answer gets uncomfortable fast. If God is responsible for life, why assign that responsibility to a male when bringing human life into the world is overwhelmingly feminine? Who decided God was a man in the first place?

I have believed for many years that God, if such a being exists, is female. Because of biology, every human being who ever lived developed inside a woman. Every king, scientist, philosopher, pope, rabbi, imam, and religious authority owes his existence to the female reproductive system. Yet somehow, the ultimate creator is male? Human embryos begin with sexually undifferentiated reproductive structures. In typical male development, the SRY gene activates a pathway involving SOX9, initiating testicular formation. Female development involves WNT4 and RSPO1. Both sexes develop reproductive anatomy from common embryonic structures, indicating no universal masculine starting point, no biological throne reserved for men.

Gloria Naylor: Redirecting the Spotlight, American Woman Writer (1950-2016), part 2 by Maria Dintino

part 1 was posted yesterday

Mama Day

By the time Gloria Naylor wrote her the third novel, Mama Day (1988), she was a master, able to infuse the story with such richness, connection and love that the reader is enveloped in a state of amazement while reading. This spell involves the “spiritual vision, or more accurately, third sight, that empowers Mama Day” (51).

The manifestation of the matriarchal lineage in Mama Day creates a dizzying suspension in time, with dubious connections to the past, tied to current happenings, along with the struggle and hope for the future. Sometimes it is hard to decipher exactly what is going on and you are left to decide for yourself what you see, hear, understand and believe. As the narrator says, “Truth is never fixed”(38).

This novel is set on Willow Springs, a fictional rendition of one of the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, “a uniquely maternal island paradise that defies geographic limits”(38).