How we Began the Movement of Goddess Feminist Activist Spirituality in the 21st Century (Part 1) by Helen Hye-Sook Hwang

Mago is an East Asian/Korean word for the Cosmic Mother or the Creatrix. This piece is written as the first of a four-part essay. In this series I am surveying the past 9 years of The Mago Work (A collective effort to restore the consciousness of Mago, the Creatrix), which birthed the Movement of Goddess Feminist Activist Spirituality, while being shaped by the latter.

The movement called Goddess Feminist Activist Spirituality (hereafter GFAS) has been with us since about a decade ago. I am referring to a particular brand of the movement under the rubric of The Mago Work (a collective effort to restore the consciousness of Mago, the Creatrix), in the sense that it rose voluntarily to connect and bring forth socio-cultural-epistemological changes through social media (epistemological as in relating to the nature of knowledge – to how we know). The movement of GFAS seamlessly ties in with that of the Maternal Gift Economy advocated by Genevieve Vaughan. At the outlook, the movement of GFAS produced the anthologies, She Rises, She Summons, and Celebrating the Goddess, as well as the Girl God Books anthologies and my own books on Magoism (the Way of Mago, the Creatrix). The venues that the movement involves remain countless and as diverse and broad as the works of our authors.

I coined the phrase, Goddess Feminist Activist Spirituality, along with the first volume of the She Rises trilogy at the conception of the collective writing project. For the first volume of She Rises: Why Goddess Feminism, Activism and Spirituality?, many spiritual feminists and activists (writers, researchers, poets, artists, and advocates) came forth from around the world and formed the fulcrum of the Loom (fulcrum being the point on which a lever rests or is supported and on which it pivots). Thus, the foundation of the GFAS Movement was established. Among those who took the leading role were Kaalii Cargill, Trista Hendren, Wennifer Lin, and myself. We carried out the tasks of planning, promoting, co-editing, and publishing. As a co-editor, the executive director, and the publisher of Mago Books, I provided the wheel carrier, which in turn chiseled out the initial look of The Mago Work.

How did we start the Movement of GFAS? The Facebook’s group, The Mago Circle, which I began in 2012, was the greenhouse wherein the idea of the She Rises trilogy was gestated, birthed, and nurtured. The announcement of Call for Contributions of the first volume was as follows:

Title: “She Rises: Why Goddess Feminism, Activism, or Spirituality?” The Collective Writing Series

This project began as a discussion in The Mago Circle, Facebook Group, on March 6, 2014. It has grown to a substantive enough volume of manuscript to dream of becoming a book! Hitherto received contributions have been published as sequels in Return to Mago E-Magazine (http://magoism.net/). We would like to collate your contributions together with longer essays into a book. To be published as printed books and e-books by Mago Books.

Together with The Mago Circle, there were the Girl God Books and Return to Mago E-Magazine to create the birth of the She Rises trilogy. They are still actively pumping the water to foster the evolution of the GFAS Movement. The desire to come together among Goddessians and create something tangible and impactful was the force behind our movement. And the burgeoning social media was there for us to virtually meet and connect with one another. A total of about 250 contributors participated in the She Rises trilogy for the duration of four years: For She Rises Volume 1, 93 contributors gathered (2015). For She Rises Volume 2, 96 contributors gathered the following year (2016). And for She Rises Volume 3, 59 contributors (2019).

After the second volume of She Rises, I undertook another trilogy of Celebrating the Goddess. We have published the first volume, Celebrating Seasons of the Goddess (Mago Books, 2017) and the second volume, Celebrating Intercosmic Kinship of the Goddess (Mago Books, 2023). The She Rises trilogy invoked the She Summons series whose first volume, She Summons: Why Goddess Feminism, Activism and Spirituality? was published in 2021, amidst the high-COVID period. The Movement of Goddess Feminist Activist Spirituality set in a boundless locus embraced multiple and diverse approaches to the topic of the female divine. Organic and fluid, it is still undergoing the process of morphosis. It is my hope that our voices in the early 21^st century fertilize what is still coming and shaping.

This year marks the ninth year of the first volume of She Rises which will be discussed in tomorrow’s blogpost. The lapse of nine years, that is, claiming the Nine Symbol, has the power of putting the GFAS Movement into the Reality of WE/HERE/NOW wherein we meet our pre-patriarchal predecessors. In honor of completing the first spiral of nine years, I am opening the door of the Mago Bookstore and releasing them to the public free of charge so that they can be widely visible, appreciated, and studied by anyone discovering our voices collectively and/or individually. E-book versions of the She Rises trilogy are available below. I hope you meet our authors in three volumes (villages) who carried the torch of the GFAS Movement.

She Rises: Why Goddess Feminism, Activism and Spirituality?

[Bbook] She Rises V1

She Rises: How… Goddess Feminism, Activism and Spirituality?

[Bbook] She Rises V2 Mainbook

She Rises: What… Goddess Feminism, Activism and Spirituality?

[Bbook] She Rises Vol 3 (Mainbook)

For my part, my commitment to the GFAS Movement derived from my research and advocacy of Magoism, the Way of Mago, the Creatrix. I wrote in She Rises Volume 1 and Trista Hendren reiterated in her  Girl God Books website:

Knowing the Great Goddess itself is an act of Goddess feminism/activism/spirituality. ‘To know’ is an active verb. To know the Goddess is an act that hurls one to an uncharted territory in the patriarchal foreground. Precisely, in that bewildered place we find the door to the Way of the Goddess. We are collectively waking up to the deep memory that ancients paved a way for us to remember.

She Rises invites everyone including agnostics and atheists. More to the point, it defies the very notion of an ‘agnostic’ or ‘atheist’—and ‘believer’ or ‘non-believer’— concepts derived from the dualistic thinking of the monotheistic patriarchal religions. We do not have to believe in the Goddess. Or one may ‘believe’ in the Goddess no more than one “believes” in one’s ancestor … It is a whole new way of thinking, not believing. As direct offspring of the Great Goddess/Mago, we humans are endowed with Her divine nature … Our knowing is not static, however, but ever unfolding and evolving. Our thinking is not a mere cerebral activity. It is the rudder of our action. A deep thinking leads to gynocentric knowing …

At the time of writing the introduction to the first volume, not knowing that the first volume would be shortly followed by two sequels, I felt that I was shouting out a spell (the act of executing the She Rises trilogy) to the dark​ night sky wishing that it would be picked up by the Cosmic Force. ​I had been marching into the unknown territory for many years and mostly alone. Results would not be in my hands, I thought. Apparently, my spell worked. I was met with surprise that Goddess feminists, activists, and spiritual practitioners came from near and far and summoned in unison the birth of the She Rises trilogy​ in those coming years. As I continued my writing and advocacy on Magoism (the Way of the Creatrix), Mago Books and Mago Academy began to operate. We saw many more anthologies from Girl God Books since the first volume of She Rises. We need to hear from others how the projects of our contributors have fared since then.

My research of the female divine has always been Mago Halmi (Great Mother, Grandmother, and Crone). Ten years ago, I didn’t have apt vocabularies to articulate the matriversal (of the maternally perceived universe) scale and implication of my research. For example, now I call Mago the Creatrix or the Cosmic Mother rather than the Great Goddess. In fact, I have replaced “the Great Goddess” with “S/HE” the Origin of ALL (in both sexes and in-betweens). Now I call “Knowing the Great Goddess” the Matriversal Consciousness. I could not say then that we needed Creatrix Studies or S/HE Divine Studies. Despite that, I uttered an urgent need of restoring the Old Way of the Great Goddess, which would be an utterly new way of thinking to moderns and would transform us. Now I can say that Magoism is short for Ceto-Magoism (the Cetacean-caused Way of the Creatrix).

“Ceto” and “Cetacean” refers to the order marine mammals such as a whale, dolphin, or porpoise. Ceto-Magoism or Magoist Cetaceanism refers to the matriversal consciousness of Mago, the Creatrix, founded on the veneration of whales as the exemplar of the planetary leader for pre- and proto-patriarchal Shaman Queen Mothers), see my latest book: Reader: Toward Magoist Cetaceanism (Mago Books, 2023).

The launch of the Movement of GFAS was a necessary step to enter the matriversal consciousness collectively. I am unpacking the Ceto-Magoist mandate inherited to us moderns from a pre-patriarchal time, to be discussed in my sequel essays. That is why I undertook the Movement of GFAS.

Bio

Dr. Hwang is a philosopher, researcher, author, publisher, and advocate of Magoist Cetaceanism, the matriversal consciousness of cetacean veneration embodied in the socio-historical-cultural expressions of traditional Korea and beyond. After earning her MA and Ph.D. in Religion with emphasis on Feminist Studies from Claremont Graduate University, CA., she pursued M.A. degree at UCLA, CA. Having founded The Mago Work and Mago Community, Hwang has recently launched the S/HE Conference and the S/HE Forum. Hwang’s publications include Reader: Toward Magoist Cetaceanism, S/HE: An International Journal of Goddess Studies, Celebrating Intercosmic Kinship of the Goddess, Goddesses in Myth, History and Culture, Mago Almanac, The Mago Way, She Rises trilogy, Celebrating the Goddess series, She Summons Volume 1, The Budoji Workbook, and Return to Mago E-Magazine.