General – Page 76 – Feminism and Religion

The Legacy of the Goddess: Heroines, Warriors and Witches from World Mythology to Folktales and Fairy Tales by Rachel McCoppin

Part 2, Part 1 was posted yesterday

Chapter 4, “Monstrous Females and Ghost Women,” “traces the many female characters within folktales and fairy tales who appear as monstrous, materializing in the forms of giantesses, succubi, mermaids, rusalki, etc. Just as in many ancient myths, even though these monstrous women appear in folktales and fairy tales as hindrances to the quest of the hero, they ultimately serve to educate male heroes about the true meaning of their quest, which again often aligns with concepts associated with mythic goddesses. The many ghost women who appear in folktales and fairy tales around the world are also discussed in this chapter, as they often serve as agents to teach male heroes about how they, particularly as females, have been wronged by males or by patriarchal systems, and thus have been thwarted from completing their own heroic quests” (McCoppin, p. 9).

Though most myths around the world display male heroes partaking on heroic quests, and seldom focus on heroines who participate in their own heroic journeys, this is not at all the case with folktales and fairy tales, as hundreds of folktales and fairy tales portray strong, independent female heroines who indeed partake on their own heroic quests. Therefore, the second half of Legacy of the Goddess focuses on the formidable heroines found in many folktales and fairy tales from around the globe.

The Legacy of the Goddess: Heroines, Warriors and Witches from World Mythology to Folktales and Fairy Tales by Rachel McCoppin

This is part 1 of a two part posing. Part 2 will be posted tomorrow.

In this blog post, I would like to take the opportunity to discuss my new book, entitled: The Legacy of the Goddess: Heroines, Warriors and Witches from World Mythology to Folktales and Fairy Tales. This book argues that hundreds of folktales and fairy tales from around the world have preserved elements related to goddess worship from the sacred myths of many ancient civilizations.

Powerful goddesses were worshipped in most global cultures for centuries, until, in many regions, episodes of diffusion, conquest, colonialism, etc. caused the worship of these goddesses to be revised, lessened, or in some cases eliminated. To “preserve at least part of the reverence of goddesses, as well as the memory of the powerful religious and social roles women once held as representatives of goddesses”, hundreds of folktales and fairy tales were created, “told, and retold, most often by women storytellers” to impart goddess ideology (McCoppin, 2023, p. 5). Thus, many folktales and fairy tales portray myriad examples of powerful female characters who portray important messages connected to the goddesses and sacred women of ancient mythology.

The Gift of Breathable Air – Fire and Air – Before the Turning by Sara Wright

In the last two hours the air has finally cleared – clouds, light drizzle (the blessing of even a few drops of rain) and sweetly scented air allows my nose to pick up the intoxicating fragrance of the lemon lilies on my porch – For the last 40 hours we have been breathing dead air – or death air as I call it. Headaches for me, and sneezing coughing dogs force me to keep the windows closed, the porch door shut, and unless it is necessary, we stay inside.

All of us are so sensitive to atmospheric changes…

This time the pollution comes from Canadian wildfires – nine million acres of forests are still burning. When I emailed a friend about the air in Montreal she quipped how the air had cleared and the US had exaggerated the problem (not one word about the fate of the trees – this well-known feminist woman considers herself an environmentalist). I wondered just how accurate her assessment was because here in Maine the air was not breathable, and the blue skies were only softened by haze. I didn’t need the clean air index to tell me that we were all breathing poison. Just the thought of more burning forests ANYWHERE chills me leaving me in a state of profound despair.

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Sophia, Goddess, and Feminist Spirituality: Imagining the Future

This was originally posted on September 17, 2018

Though represented by its detractors as an incursion of paganism into

Christianity, and presented as an integrally and intrinsically Christian phenomenon by its supporters, the truth about the Re-Imagining Conference and movement is that it was a product of a wider feminist awakening. The critique of patriarchal religions that emerged in the academy and in churches and synagogues in the late 1960s and early 1970s was part of the emerging feminist uprising. The feminist movement placed a question mark over all patriarchal texts and traditions, secular and religious, and as such was beholden to none.

In the spring of 1971, Roman Catholic Christian Mary Daly published “After the Death of God the Father” in the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal. She asserted that the God whose death was touted in the “Death of God” movement was an idol fashioned in the image of male power and authority. She called for “the becoming of new symbols” to express the new becoming of women. In the summer of 1971, a group of nuns from Alverno College convened the first Conference of Women Theologians. Besides sparking dialogue about the role of women in religions, the conference endorsed my call to form a women’s group at the fall meetings of the American Academy of Religion, up until then a gathering of several thousand male scholars of religion, with only a handful of women scholars in attendance. At winter solstice, Z Budapest launched the Susan B. Anthony Coven #1 in Los Angeles publishing a Manifesto calling on women to return to the ancient religion of the Goddess.

Bathsheba: From Survivor of Sexual Abuse to Queen Mother by Linda Cooper Costelloe

Bathsheba by Artemisia Gentileschi, wikimedia commons, public domain

The image we have of Bathsheba is that of a scheming temptress. That’s the way she’s been portrayed in media, such as the 1951 movie, David and Bathsheba, and Leonard Cohen’s song, Hallelujah. She deliberately bathed on a rooftop in sight of King David. She caught his eye and he was helpless to withstand her charms. The Bible does not support that image of Bathsheba, however. It says that Bathsheba was used and abused by David, and God was displeased.

The Bible says that David was on his rooftop. It does not say where Bathsheba was, only that she was bathing to purify herself after her period (2 Samuel 11:2-4). She was probably in an inner courtyard. In their book, Flawed Families of the Bible. How God’s Grace Works Through Imperfect Relationships, David E. Garland and Diana R. Garland write: “The laws required ritual washing at the conclusion of her menstrual period. A woman would be highly unlikely to conduct such a cleansing from her menstrual period as a come-on. If she were in public view, she would have washed without disrobing. There is no reason even to assume that she was naked. Public nudity was not acceptable in this ancient Jewish culture but instead was considered shameful. There is no foundation for assuming she was some kind of exhibitionist.”ⁱ

A Poem for Enheduanna by Nan Lundeen

Cuneiform Tablet from Nippur, Sumeria
(Modern Iraq) 2300 – 2100 BCE
_{Mary Harrsch from Springfield, Oregon, USA,}
_{CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>,}
_{via Wikimedia Commons}

In beautiful synchronicity, I received an invitation to submit a poem to an anthology in the voice of a female-identified persona around the same time I first learned of Enheduanna. The first named author and poet was mentioned in my New Moon Womyn’s Circle. When I looked her up, I was flabbergasted. I am a poet, a feminist, and a long-time student of Women’s Spirituality, and yet the world’s first author—a high priestess who worshipped a female supreme deity, was unknown to me.

I learned that Enheduanna was a brilliant poet who wrote with majestic metaphors, who shared her emotions, and who grappled with concepts of the divine as a female supreme deity in and with nature, and with whom she experienced a personal relationship. She lived and wrote around 2300 B.C.E. Scholars say they do not have the specific dates of her birth and death, but they do know that she served as high priestess for 40 years at the city of Ur in what is now Iraq.

Who Gets to Define What it Means to be Pro-Life? by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

The sky and sun on June 7th in the afternoon on Long Island.

Today I am coughing and choking here on Long Island because of our unhealthy air quality. The smoke from the wildfires of Canada have reached us. We, here in NY, are not alone in dealing with air so polluted that breathing is at risk. I think of the CA wildfires, the SpaceX rocket that exploded in April, the Ohio train derailment in Feb. No place is safe.

While coughing and thinking about this, two bits of news came into my consciousness, The first was the Supreme Court ruling narrowing the scope of the Clean Water Act.

My first thought was, do they and their children not have to live in this world too? Do they think they can buy a clean environment for themselves and their families and the rest of us be damned?

The next report I heard was from a prominent conservative commentator who explained how “prolife” he is and went on to describe his “deep concern” for life.

Mary’s Garden by Sara Wright

Opening the doors to mist ‘Mary’s Garden’ each morning is entering a magic realm. My nose sniffs the scent of fertile woodlands even as I gazed out at an impossibly deep white shroud for months, and presently peer out at pale green earth, bees, and budding trees.

All the original contents of Mary’s Garden, mosses, lichens, liverworts, hemlock seedlings, stones and pieces of bark are buried or supported by the richest detritus and soil that I gathered with such care from a protected forest of thousands of acres just before the snow set in last November. There is a small pond in the center of the four-sided container, edged with emerald moss. Two of my animal fetish friends, a Zuni bear and frog live among the greenery. All throughout the winter this lively miniature woodland created a living link to ‘my’ beloved forest, a place I longed to be part of but could not traverse during winter months. Mary’s garden has been a source of endless enchantment and comfort during the coldest winter days.

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: The Heraklion Museum: A Critique of the Neolithic Display

This was originally posted April 2, 2018

If I had been asked to write the words that introduce visitors to the Heraklion Archaeological Museum of Crete to its earliest inhabitants, I would have said something like this:

While there is evidence that human beings visited Crete as early as 150,000 years ago, the first permanent settlers arrived from Anatolia in the New Stone Age or Neolithic era, about 9000 years ago, bringing with them the secrets of agriculture and soon afterward learning the techniques of pottery and weaving. As the gatherers of fruits, nuts, and vegetables and as preparers of food in earlier Old Stone Age or Paleolithic cultures, women would have noticed that seeds dropped at a campsite might sprout into plants. Women most likely discovered the secrets of agriculture that enabled people to settle down in the first farming communities of the New Stone Age. As pottery is associated with women’s work of food storage and preparation, and as weaving is women’s work in most traditional cultures, women probably invented these new technologies as well. Each of these inventions was understood to be a mystery of transformation: seed to plant to harvested crop; clay to snake coil to fired pot; wool or flax to thread to spun cloth. The mysteries were passed on from mother to daughter through songs, stories, and rituals.

Archives from the FAR Founders: Learning Compassion from Inmate Number 74799 by Cynthia Garrity-Bond

This was originally posted on July 21, 2017. This is the first post of our new series to highlight the work of the four founders of FAR, Garrity-Bond, Caroline Kline, Gina Messina and Xochitl Alvizo

Technically I was employed as a lab assistant at our community

Considered standard prison procedure, Michael was scheduled for an autopsy the following day. While my grief over Michael’s death was considerable, it was the pending autopsy that caused my immediate concern. As I pictured Michael on the cold table of steel, the crude instruments sawing and cutting into his already weathered body, I took it upon myself to somehow ease this last assault. I phoned the Tucson corner’s office, hoping to speak to the pathologist who would be performing Michael’s autopsy. With surprising bureaucratic ease, I was transferred to him. After introducing myself, I explained he would be receiving Prisoner 74799, my brother, from Tucson General, and that by all appearances this was just another disposable inmate whose criminal past simply caught up with him, sort of a karma-like ending. His thin, emaciated body, I warned, is covered in tattoos, which I feared might induce a harsher judgment upon this cast away soul. I asked the pathologist that when he begins the post, he please remember Prisoner 74799 was somebody’s son, somebody’s brother, father and friend and more importantly, that this man was loved. “Please” I pleaded, “try to see beyond the obvious signs of poor choices mapped onto his body, instead see he is more than his prison issued number and that Michael Paul, while far from saint, was a man who loved and was loved.”