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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
In her FAR post earlier this year,[i] “Why Feminism Needs the Fierce Goddesses,” Susan Foster argues that a “flagging” feminist movement needs the revitalizing energy of the “fierce goddesses” of ancient times to challenge the patriarchal forces that seem to be on the rise as increasingly we find women’s lives and freedoms constrained. She writes, “the dark goddesses of ancient times have been submerged in our psyches, but they serve as a repository of fierce energy, of female rage against injustice.” She continues, “It’s important and healthy for us as women to reclaim our anger, using it to protect ourselves and fight for our rights in systems that are oppressive.”
Reading this, I immediately thought of Beverly Wildung Harrison’s, “The Power of Anger in the Work of Love,” and China Galland’s, The Bond Between Women: A Journey to Fierce Compassion. Anger as the work of love; fierce compassion. In this time of mass shootings, insurrection, the ongoing assault on women, LGBTQ, and BIPOC peoples, when rage seems so easily fueled by hate, envy, and greed, it is the rage based in love and compassion that is most needed. This is the rage of the fierce dark goddesses who are moved to act against injustice, the rage of the feminism I love. With its source in love and compassion, it is a rage that rebels in the best sense of the word – that at once refuses injustice and affirms dignity and respect, that speaks truth to power, that is grounded in solidarity and friendship, and values the immanence of the earth, the water, the body, and the divine spark in all beings.[ii]
At first glance the ancient belief that bees were birthed from dead bulls seems odd. But if we delve deeply into pre-historical artifacts we discover the mythopoetic roots of this idea.
Our Paleolithic ancestors lived immersed in nature within the cyclical nature of time. For them the moon, which revealed monthly, yearly and even longer cycles of time, became the symbol of the cycle of birth, death and regeneration.
I watched her hand stroke along my arm, so gently, so lovingly. Her voice whispered, “I love you, Trelawney. I love you, Trelawney.” The soft, tender caress felt poignant, healing, magical. I wept with gratitude.
It was my own hand stroking me. My own voice.
I want you to take a moment and imagine the person you love best in the world. Is there anyone? Is there someone you love utterly, you think of with pure, unconditional, compassionate, embracing, affirming, tender, protective, loyal, sacred love? Close your eyes a moment and let that feeling of pure love fill your heart until you understand that feeling with every fiber of your being. Do you have that Love? Truly feel it and know it with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength?
Part 1 was posted last week, you can read it here.
I have been conversing with plants most of my life sensing the reciprocal nature of green beings and treating them as equals, so I was delighted by the bean’s behavior, although not surprised (western science has finally caught up with Indigenous knowledge as new studies indicate that plants listen/ and respond – see Gagliano, Simard). My magic bean is thriving, and every morning I make a promise to Scarlet Runner that the day will come when s/he will finally be free to climb to the stars… Relationships like this one sustain me.
Opening the door to mist ‘Mary’s Garden’ is entering another magic realm. Ferns I never planted are unfurling. Two hemlock seedling have emerald bristles on the tips of their needles, Partridgeberry is spreading, twin flowers are appearing, unknown seeds are sprouting, fungi come and go, lichens abound, some cascading from pieces of old wood. One old piece of pine bark supports the tiniest fungal trumpets. This terrarium is a source of endless enchantment and comfort on the coldest winter day.
Carol Christ at the Conference of Women Theologians
Today I am publishing an early work on female language for God that I wrote with Emma Trout at the first Conference of Women Theologians in 1971. Highly contested at the conference, this essay is a foreshadowing of my subsequent work on the need for female imagery for divinity.
Rereading this essay more than four decades later, I am gratified to see that though we began our essay with the image of God giving birth (which I still view as an important image), Emma and I were aware of the danger that female imagery for God could reinforce “a false sexual polarity.” We insisted then that female imagery for God must not repeat sex role stereotypes, but rather must shatter them.
I am surprised that we also mentioned the need for a new non-static or process metaphysic, a theme I did pursue until I wrote Rebirth of the Goddessand then She Who Changesseveral decades later.
While the references in the essay are dated, the issues it raises are not. Though many mainline Christian and Jewish communities have adopted inclusive language, active experimentation with female language for God is relegated to the fringes of these groups. And while Goddess feminists resist gender stereotypes, some New Age teachers and Neo-Pagan groups perpetuate the idea that the Divine Feminine is receptive, loving, and giving, while the Divine Masculine is active, assertive, and aggressive.
Conference of Women Theologians 1971
ALTERNATIVE IMAGES OF GOD: COMMUNAL THEOLOGY BY CAROL CHRIST AND EMMA TROUT
How much better for theology to conceive of God the Creator as pregnant with the world, giving birth to it and nourishing it, than of God the divine Watchmaker who set the machine ticking millions of years ago. — Penelope Washbourne Chen in “Rediscovering the Feminine in God” The Tower alumni magazine
Even though we know that God Himself is not really a male, we have made use of no other images in talking about Him. As Mary Daly has pointed out, images have a way of perpetuating themselves even though we conceptually know better. (“After the Death of God the Father”) The image of God as a male authority figure serves to legitimize the structures of subordination (oppression) of women to (by) men. The problem is to conceive God in such a way that God’s masculinity does not function as a legitimation system for the oppression of women.
The imaging of God as male has two aspects: 1) the poverty of our language, and 2) the impoverishing of our vision of God by exclusive use of characteristics which our culture has attributed to and limited to the male in conceptualizing and imaging God. In the first of these two aspects we find images of God as Father, King, Lord; our language has no pronoun which is able to embrace and/or transcend both sexes. Our language forces us to think of God as male; we need words like “she-he,” “father-mother,” “daughter-son,” “brother-sister.” Regarding the second aspect: in the Western tradition, particularly the Christian theological tradition our ideas and images have been impoverished by almost exclusive use of “male” characteristics in conceptualizing and imaging God.
For example, initiative, transcendence, authority, primacy, leadership, control and order have all been conceived in static, self-sufficient, abstractly rational terms, in correspondence with masculine stereotypes. An alternative image of God suggested by Penelope Washbourne Chen, imaging God as pregnant, giving birth to, and nurturing the world, presents us with a more dynamic way of conceiving God. Philosophically, this image of God would find expression in the neo-classical metaphysics or process view of reality of Whitehead and Hartshorne, rather than the static ontology of the Greek tradition.
. . .
Let us now turn to the alternatives. Underlying the problem of choosing among the alternative conceptions/images of God is the problem of the evaluation of sexual differences. If, for example, one believes sexual differences are a fundamental polarity in human experience, she will find it appropriate to see this polarity reflected in the deity. If, on the other hand, one does not see sexual differences as a fundamental polarity, she will be wary of correcting a false male image/concept of God by introducing a “female” element which may serve to further legitimize a false sexual polarity.
If one is open to the possibility that sexual differences may not be fundamental, the real question is how to shatter the idol of a male deity without either 1) substituting a reverse idol of a female deity, or 2) legitimizing a false sexual polarity.
Photos of Carol speaking at the Conference of Women Theologians and of the Conference Participants from the Alverno College archives. Thanks to Sarah Shutkin for providing a copy of the essay from the Alverno College Library Archives.
Feminism and Religion 