Goddess Spirituality – Feminism and Religion

Nine Goddesses Every Woman Should Know by Annie Finch

Are you a woman (or man) who has lost touch with yourself spiritually — or

has never gotten in touch with yourself spiritually — or who just wants more joy in each day? If so, you may want to try entwining more goddess energy into your life. Many anthropologists believe that human societies were originally goddess-centered, and goddesses are still worshipped on every continent. Whatever your desire — strength, wisdom, compassion, fertility, creativity, sexuality — there is a goddess who can help you. Connecting with the goddesses who call to you — in the form of jewelry or art, words and music, or simply your thoughts — can sweeten and enhance your days with bright threads of unity, wonder, and female power.

But how to begin? The number and diversity of goddesses loved, worshipped, and celebrated throughout time and into the present, in every corner of the earth, is so breathtakingly large that trying to keep track of them can feel like counting the stars. To start you off, here are nine of my own favorite goddesses, chosen from among the most popular female divinities celebrated today (please note that many of them may also be known by different names or spellings).

Durga. The great Hindu mother goddess Durga is really nine goddesses in one. Durga’s nine manifestations — embodying qualities from courage to piety to blissful joy — are celebrated in India during a huge nine-day festival called Navarati. Durga is often pictured as a fierce goddess with many arms riding a lion. I have revered her ever since I found an ancient and powerful stone carving of her in the Asian wing of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. You can call on Durga’s invincible spirit when you need to be strong to your core!

Me (5^th from right) with friends at a Durga Puja Celebration in Kolkata, India, many-armed Sculpture of Durga in background

Notes from the Cauldron of Change, by Molly Remer

Mirabai Starr writes that to be a mystic is to “harvest the bounty of your own soul garden,” a place that is “both wild and tended,” sometimes lush and sometimes arid.

As summer’s heat presses in
and the clamor of growth and change
rises to a peak of abundance and urgency,
we may begin to hear a summons
from deep within.
The cauldron call begins,
at first a whisper
and then an irresistible song
that leads us away from the to-do list
and into a mystical realm
in which dreams and desire meet
and begin to bubble into possibility.
May we grant ourselves space
for descent,
even in the middle of all that
is hot and bright and beautiful.
May we listen to the yearning we feel
to explore the depths,
stepping out of the light
and into the cool shadows
that beckons us to steep.
Right here,
right now,
in the middle of all that swirls,
is when we are invited to stop,
to put our ears back down
to our souls
and listen hard.
It is now that we are invited
to step into the cauldron of change,
to sink down
and in
and let everything we are carrying
soften and melt away
while we remember how it feels
to simmer in everything
we have made,
all that we love to taste
and serve.

For years now, August has been my “Cauldron Month,” a dedicated time in which I take my life into the metaphorical cauldron of being, to reflect, to re-collect, to reconnect, to consider what I’m “simmering” in, what is bubbling and brewing in my days, and what needs to be scooped out of the pot. It is time in which I review the year to date and consider where I’m going, what I’m savoring, and what I’m dishing up to serve.

How We ALL Need the Goddesses Now . . . by Annie Finch

Carol Christ, in her 1978 clarion call “Why Women Need the Goddess,” summarized four powerful, foundational ways that the Sacred Feminine urgently matters for women crawling out from under patriarchy. Each way helps to heal the psychic damage of our upbringings and surmount the profound losses of our violated herstory. Christ shows how Goddess belief and worship affirms the legitimacy of our power, the sacredness of our bodies, the honoring of our will—and the centrality of our connections with our foremothers and each other.

All this is still so true. All so important.

AND . . . Christ’s framing of Goddessness as a precious path of women’s transformation is not enough anymore.

Times have changed in the forty years since Christ published her essay. Today’s world has been fast plummeting into an even more blatantly hellish (no, I don’t want to insult the source of that word, Goddess Hel, guardian of life and death—so I will change the adjective!) into an even more blatantly patriarchal state of affairs.

From the Archives: Epona – Goddess of the Land by Deanne Quarrie

This was originally posted on June 29, 2016

This week I bought a pendant that caught my attention. It is Celtic knot work of horses, meant to represent Epona. This triggered my interest in Epona and off I went to learn more.

Epona is a goddess from Gaul. Sadly, any information about her from those early days of worship are lost to us. This is the case of the most ancient deities from that region and time in history. It is thought that she was picked up in Gaul by the conscripted soldiers of the Roman Army who saw a depiction of her upon her horse and they adopted her. Since this army rode across the land on horseback, she was the perfect deity to pay homage to and so, she traveled with them. She soon made it to Rome and is one of only a few deities, not originally Roman, to be worshiped in the Roman Empire.

Earthprayer, by Molly M. Remer

Sometimes I describe my work and writing as “a love song to the Ozarks.” I am deeply embedded, body and soul, in this land that I come from, my bloodland, the place where I belong. Seven generations of my family have called these wooded hillsides and stony ridgetops home. This is my mystery school, where I explore hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the earth.

The Earth is my teacher
I shall always want
I witness her still meadows
She leadeth me to green pastures
She restoreth my soul
On tree covered hills
She reminds me I am home
and, yea, I walk in her valleys
and I fear no suffering
She is with me
Her mountains and rolling rivers
they comfort me joy bubbles through my veins
and enlivens my footsteps
my cup runneth over
truly I stand
in mysterious awareness
all the days of my life
and She holds me
in the palm of her hand
forever.

Burning Woman, by Lucy H. Pearce, 10th Anniversary Edition, Book Review by Beth Bartlett

As someone who came into feminism in the late 1970s early 1980s, reading Lucy Pearce’s Burning Woman was re-entering the power and promise of women-centered feminism – the heyday of Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Mary Daly, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Andrea Dworkin, Charlotte Bunch, China Galland, Riane Eisler, Carol Christ, Gloria Anzaldúa, Susan Griffin, Starhawk, Sara Ruddick.[i] It was the era of reclaiming the Feminine from its patriarchal definitions and women defining themselves outside of patriarchy – celebrating women’s spirituality, art, music, language, bodies, sexuality, birthing, voices, and power – when feminism was about transforming patriarchy rather than fitting into it — when Meg Christian proudly sang Betsy Rose’s “Glad to Be a Woman.”

And then everything changed. Just as women were coming into our own beyond patriarchy, women-centered feminism came to a halt due to pressures both from within feminism and without – with a whole school of deconstructionist feminists[ii] now critiquing women-defined women as “essentialists,” and moving back to minimizing rather than maximizing the differences between the sexes,[iii] with an emphasis on abolishing the gender binary, welcoming trans and non-binary folk, and questioning the whole concept of “women.” Indeed, one of my Women’s Studies, now Gender Studies, students asked me privately if it was okay to call herself a “woman” because the term had become so forbidden among many of the students. At this time, feminist theorist Nancy Hartsock raised the important question, “Why is that just at the moment when so many of us who have been silenced begin to demand the right to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather than objects of history, that just then the concept of subjecthood becomes problematic?”[iv]

Spring Lessons, by Molly M. Remer

Let us trust the cycles
of retreat and renewal
alive in both the land
and in our hearts right now
as the melody of belonging
continues to serenade us
and we follow April’s determination
to create and shape
this world anew.

And, so,
April arrives
all at once
to enliven the land,
trailing cool breezes
and the first blush of pollen possibility
across fields and forests,
fence rows and farms.
She blankets open spaces
with purple clover and violets,
with chickweed and dandelion.
When we pause to listen,
we can hear the laughter of awakening rippling behind her.
She brings an invitation into healing,
into extending outward and reaching up.
She offers wild promise
and tender hope
and the sweet, fresh breath of change.
Let us soften into spring,
into this invitation,
into restoration and reclamation.
It is now that we choose.
Let us be content to be here,
witnessing the changes,
leaning into the wind,
and savoring the blooming.
Let us trust the cycles
of retreat and renewal
alive in both the land
and in our hearts right now
as the melody of belonging
continues to serenade us
and we follow April’s determination
to create and shape
this world anew.

I have been writing for Feminism and Religion for 13 years. This past summer, I compiled a post with 13 summer lessons from 13 years of posts here at FAR. I bookended that post with a Winter Lessons post as well. Now, here are thirteen lessons to share from past spring posts:

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Maiden, Mother, Crone: Ancient Tradition or New Creative Synthesis?

This was originally posted on August 8, 2016

Carol P. Christ by Michael Bakas high resoultion

The image of the Goddess as Maiden, Mother, Crone is widespread in contemporary Goddess Spirituality. The Triple Goddess honors three ages of women, in contrast to the wider culture that: affirms young women as sex objects while shaming them as sluts; celebrates mothers on Mother’s Day, while providing few legal and economic protections for mothers; and ignores older women.

Though Goddess feminists have created rituals for menstruation and birth, I suspect that a greater number of rituals have celebrated “croning.” The reasons for this are twofold. One is that women have time and space to reflect on the meaning of life in middle age. The other is that aging women are not honored and respected in the wider culture–creating a need for rituals that do just that. Many women I know have spoken of the empowerment they felt in their croning rituals.

On the other hand, many women I know have not been particularly interested in a croning ritual.

In the Belly of Winter: Tending the Sacred Flame by Molly M. Remer

It is February, the belly of winter. We stand in the doorway between worlds, a thin, pale light ahead of us, just beginning to gather itself at the horizon. While life may feel still and inspiration frozen, something in us is listening for the first faint whispers of spring. In earth-centered, neopagan spiritual traditions drawing inspiration from old Celtic holidays, the holiday of Imbolc is on February 1-2. Imbolc is based on an old Irish word that means “in the belly.” One of my favorite reminders to myself at any time of year, not just February, is to cradle myself in the belly of the moment.* To be in the belly reminds us that we need not be focused on arriving or figuring it all out, instead we incubate, we gestate, we draw nourishment from deep within. We do not have to be ready. We are becoming. We are in the belly of winter, and the work of the belly is to hold, to warm, to nourish what is not yet visible.

In the middle of winter as well as in the middle of national crises, international conflict, and climate disaster, the world can feel grim and gray, and like hope and optimism are misplaced or even extinguished. We may feel burned out, used up, or simply too tired to offer anything of value.

Goddess Architectures: How Cultures Shape Sacred Feminine Power

In this essay, I address a gap in goddess spirituality, between a rhetoric of celebrating the body, and lack of truly embodied practice. I reflect on the archetypal language commonly used in goddess spirituality, tracing its roots in Greek mythology and depth psychology while questioning its cultural limits.

By introducing the notion of “goddess architectures”, I explore how ecological, social and cosmological contexts shape symbolic structures, and how sacred feminine power can be named, distributed, embodied or obscured across cultures. Finally, I propose movement as a way back to lived experience beyond symbolic and linguistic frameworks.

Goddess Spirituality into the Lived Body

Over the past thirty years of researching and practising goddess spirituality, I noticed a persistent discrepancy. While this field speaks about honouring the body as sacred, in practice it often feels like rhetorical lip service. The language of embodiment is present, but remains disconnected from the body on many levels.