Author’s Note: Today’s post is the 4000th FAR blog post! I first became aware of the Feminism and Religion blog when participating in a symposium honoring the life and work of Carol P. Christ in October 2021. I was inspired to write a piece on Christ’s contribution to ecofeminism, that was posted in the FAR blog a year ago today. I wanted to post another piece on Christ on the anniversary of that first post. I’m delighted that it is the 4000th, and so fitting that it is written in honor of Carol Christ, who was such an important part of the FAR blog.
A while ago, a friend asked me what spiritual reading I’d been doing lately. I told him that I’d been revisiting classics from the past. When he asked me who specifically, the first name I mentioned was Carol Christ. Even though he was a minister, he had never heard of her. Sadly, I suspect the same would be true for the vast majority of ministers, priests, rabbis, theologians, and other religious leaders. Yet, I can think of no one who has had a greater influence on my religious and spiritual thought and beliefs.
During the last few years I have spent hours listening to the haunting cries of Sandhill cranes, awaiting them at the river, stunned each time as I glimpsed a flock float to the ground, great gray wings extended to break their fall as talons touched earth, attended to enthusiastic family greetings and muted conversations, felt a sense of devastating loss when these birds circled overhead to say goodbye each year before heading north to breed (while I lived in New Mexico), and then discovering to my joy that they live and breed here in Maine. I still experience the same hunger to glimpse families in Fryeburg each October and lose time watching their loving family dynamics. I continue to feel intense grief and loss at crane leave-taking remaining baffled by the intensity of my own responses. In the last week I think I have finally uncovered the roots of the story behind the cranes and me…
These birds are prehistoric in origin and have the strongest family ties. The families never break up and when separated greet each other joyously even after a few hours as small groups fly to different feeding areas. Incredibly poignant. There is always one that stands watch at night, a protector, so the others can sleep in peace, one leg extended, usually in water. I am in love with these birds but until a few days ago did not understand the powerful pull their presence exerts over me.
Samhain, the Witches ‘New Year’ was a busy time for me. I did a workshop at a local large artist facility Lowe Mill Arts in Huntsville, Alabama. I watched and participated in a releasing burning ceremony the next night at the same artist site. There is so much we are needing to release especially with where we are in the world right now.
And then the following night, I was in charge of a Fire Circle at the Witches Ball at Mill Kat Healing Arts Center where I host my weekly circles.
I admit to some trepidation hosting the very public Fire Circle. I live in the deep south of Alabama most definitely not known for its open mindedness. A friend told me that she shared the Witches Ball event on her facebook page and received the comment, ‘that is how they indoctrinate you.’
Oh my.
But we are not in a time to be deterred by fear. I have been called to share this magic. And people need it.
Image from an Egyptian tomb ca. 1314-1200 BCE. Isis is giving nourishment in the form of fruit and drink,
In many cultures of the world, including our own, trees are considered the ancestors of humanity – own our ancestors.
Trees are connected with great goddesses throughout antiquity. We see this in the bible where, as I’ve noted before, the Tree of Life is Eve’s tree for the word Eve means life. It is, in essence, the Tree of Eve. Goddesses in trees feeding humans were common themes in ancient Middle Eastern art. The tree was Hers to give freely of as she wished.
Anthropologist and religious scholar, Mircea Eliade writes extensively about the associations of trees ancestral connection to humans. He calls them both mystical and mythical.[1] His examples include the Miao groups of Southern China and Southeast Asia who “worship the bamboo as their ancestor.” He also notes Australian tribes who view the mimosa as their progenitor. And there is a tribe from Madagascar, called Antaivandrika which means “people of the tree,” who considered themselves descended from the banana tree.
If you’ve ever had a Tarot reading or played with reading cards yourself, you’re probably familiar with the work of Pamela Coleman Smith, illustrator of the great-grandmother of all contemporary Tarot decks—The Rider Waite Smith Deck. First published in 1909, the illustrations in most contemporary decks are direct descendants of Smith’s work. Yet most people who engage with Tarot are unaware of Smith’s significant contribution to the world of Tarot. In my eyes, Pamela Coleman Smith is an Unsung Heroine.
This blogpost is a reflection on my experience creating a podcast series concerning religious trauma experienced in cults as well as how to heal from traumatic cult experiences.
Firstly, I had to be very intentional about the word survivor as opposed to victim. Survivor was the obvious choice because I used to cringe when thinking of myself as a victim. However, As I heal, I can honor both the survivor and the victim, for they are the same. I cannot forget to acknowledge though that some victims do not survive and this is the same concerning cults. Many people at this very moment are in exile or in hiding from their cults when they escape and for that reason some of the people who engaged in this series were forced to engage anonymously.
This post draws much from a previous post I wrote back in 2013, which generated great discussion in the comments. I came back to it as I was reflecting on our sisters’ revolution in Iran, Women, Life, Freedom, following the death of Mahsa “Zina” Amini while she was in the custody of the “morality police” in Iran. This woman-led movement has been nonstop for seven weeks. I’m in full support of the women and have continued to learn more about their context and history. The movement is powerful and inspiring, heavy and difficult, but its energy is alive and blazing. There is an impromptu song that has come to represent the movement; the song was created by linking real-time tweets and Instagram posts together – you can hear the song, read the lyrics, and see the screenshots in the video below:
Now the post I’m drawing back to from 2013 – a little different from the original – but one intended to invite us to reflect on our engagement with and support of one another across place and difference. And about the relationship between the local and global, and the need to hold a balance of both.
Twelve years ago, I published my novel Daughters of the Witching Hill, drawn from the true story of the Pendle Witches of 1612. The story of these wisewomen and healers still haunts and enchants me to this day.
“Are you the store manager?” the liquor vendor asks.
“No, I’m just part time. Started this week.”
I am working at a local convenience store on the poor side of town where I now live.
“I’m just doing this part time to pay my basic bills so that I can do what I want.”
“And what is that?,” he asks.
“I have a computer app that is my passion. I host Sacred Circles. I do webinars and events. I just bought ten acres of land, and I want to do things on there.”
Heal. Help.
It rather feels as if I might be able to do that there as well. Because it is not the side of town with all the fancy subdivisions, it feels as if there is more community. These are Alabama locals. And compared to the plastic world that I am more familiar with, 85% of their customers pay in cash. Blue collar work trucks, construction crews, concrete workers, dump truck drivers, electricians and poor people. Women wearing chemo scarves. Another tells me, “I keep losing weight each week. Don’t know why.” Bony. Stumbling. Hobbling. But I watch all of them keep going.
My book Sitting on the Hag Seat carries the blue cover I designed. Buried in the blue, riding the spiral Wheel of Return, stands a small Sheela-na-gig. The Sheela’ s origins remain unknown and controversial. It sometimes seem to me that the less explanation exists for a mysterious object or occasion, the more emotional attachment accrues to the opinions of diverging theorists. However, no matter what symbolism is ascribed to Sheela-na gig, her frequent placement above church doors or in the walls of cities, castles and watch towers, does seem to support a protective aspect not necessarily at odds with other attributions.
The heat wave was real. Suzie squinted into the afternoon light glinting off her pink ’69 VW. How was that still running, she thought, rebuilt and rebuilt? Work?
That’s how. And that’s how she’d keep running. Work. You just had to not freak out. You just had to not over heat.
But it was 125 degrees in Bakersfield. And she, like everyone else, had no air conditioning. And it wasn’t supposed to get better—it was supposed to get worse. She got in her VW and drove with the windows down—no AC– but a breeze was better than nothing. She pulled into the parking lot and waited for a spot to open up. She turned off her car to wait. Ten minutes but it was worth it. Six p.m. – it was a good time to have come. She walked out and got into the cart area.
Barely inside the supermarket she stood and let the air wash over her—air conditioning. Conditioning the air. The security guard asked if she was a buyer or a browser. Browsers could be in the front area with the carts, as long as there was room. Buyers could enter and walk up and down, and down and up—the breeze lifting the sweat from their skin.
One of my oldest friends who I met when I was eight years old reached out to me the other day saying that if there was ever anything she could do, please let her know. She lives in another state far away but is a subscriber to one of my blogs so she has been aware of the various things going on in my life (second divorce, so many changes and transitions in my life yet again, etc.)
Her note said if there was ever anything she could do to help, just let her know.
And I thought to myself: hmmmmmm.
You see I just put a new feature on my app where it emails local events to local users, and one of the first steps in getting this to work is having those local events on the app. So I asked her if she would mind helping me put local events on the app.
We had not actually talked in a long time, and when we had a zoom call to discuss this, I broke down crying.
I felt the pity from her. I also saw just how far I had departed from ‘normal.’
Part 1 was posted yesterday. You can read it here. The Norns were explaining the mess they had made when they got drunk at a Valhalla party.
The Norns looked at me with sadness. “We knocked over one of our looms/templates/arrangements”
Their tone changed, they looked at each other and I thought I could see emotion churning. They were arguing and then they stopped. They turned toward me and looked sheepish, that is if divinities can look sheepish. “It was a disaster/calamity/debacle.”
“Tell me then,” I was growing impatient.
Verdandi: “Well you see the loom we knocked over was . . .”
“What?” I almost shouted at them.
Urd: “It was the loom holding the pattern from Salim/Jerusalem.”
In 2020, I began writing my biography because some weird things were happening in my life including some which were time-bending. To help make sense of it, I wrote up “conversations” with the mythical characters of Persephone, Inanna and the Norns of the Norse. Throughout my bio, I speak to the Norns as an out loud meditation on the nature of time, fate and energy.
The three Norn sisters are Urd, Verdandi and Skuld. Their names come from Old Norse which is not a spoken language. The actual translation of their names is open to speculation. In general, here are their common meanings.
Urd – past
Verdandi – happening or present
Skuld – future or debt.
By mythological tradition, they show up at a child’s birth and then weave their “fateful” decisions about that child’s life into a tapestry. They are considered more powerful and fearsome than the gods because even the gods are ruled by the hands of fate (or Norns in this case). They were also treated as oracles where kings and warriors went to consult them much as was done in Delphi Greece.[1]
TRIGGER WARNING: Post divorce, I find myself redefining my relationships and want to share some discoveries I have made about sex and intimacy, and how that relates to my spirituality and identity as a feminist. I freely admit they might be a bit shocking.
Post divorce, I have had three ‘relationships’. Okay who am I kidding, I’ve had sex with three men. I suppose you could call them ‘relationships’. We talked. We texted. We fucked.
All three were painful in their own way. All three were pleasurable in their own way.
I’m redefining this area of my life just like I am redefining all the areas in my life. ‘Cernunnos’ points the way. This is one of my favorite cards in my Druid Craft Tarot deck, and I pull it often.
‘Cernunnos’ is the Lord of the Animals. “This card represents the raw power of the instincts and of Nature, and also the dangers of delusion and excess, but offers the potential for achieving both freedom and abundance.”
Like so much else in life, it’s all about the balance.
Early morning lap swim at the local pool is generally a peaceful space for me. It’s usually pretty uneventful. I try to go three times a week; I don’t always feel like going, but I always feel better after I do. The other day, though, something happened that upset my equilibrium and got me thinking.
When I showed up at the pool, ready to mind my own business and get a good workout in, I was happy to see three empty lanes. I don’t mind splitting a lane when needed, but it is a nice little luxury to have a lane all to myself. I chose one of the empty lanes, and in the next few minutes, two other swimmers arrived and filled in the other two. I did a long, leisurely warm-up and then stopped at the wall to find that another swimmer had joined me in my lane.
As he swam back and forth on the right side of the lane and I did the same on the left, I realized that he was taking up more than his fair share of the lane. I felt a little annoyed and disrespected. But it didn’t seem like a big deal. I started on my next set.
I am a few months out of my second marriage. There will be no third. I know my task right now is to become self-sufficient.
Thanks to my second husband, I have valuable Project Management skills. He set up an S-Corporation when he was out of work in Illinois and handed it over to me when he found a salaried job. I gained needed self-confidence over the past eight years and figured out that I am good at Project Management.
Now I need to convince another company of that. Because I am not good at sales and no longer have my main client in my company and with my divorce, I need a steady income.
I thought I had found one.
I was reached out to by a supposedly Swiss company called HAND-Lease that leases and sells extremely large equipment from $25,000 up to $55 million. They had just established a Pennsylvania office and were now opening a Birmingham office. I was phone screened by a customer service employee who said if they were interested, the Human Resource department would reach out to me for a longer interview.
Moderator’s Note: The was originally posted on January 20, 2014
Last week I reflected on Angela Yarber’s insightful essay and painting on Jephthah’s daughter. For those who did not read the earlier posts, the story of Jephthah’s daughter is found in the Hebrew Bible. Jephthah’s daughter was sacrificed by her father after he swore in the heat of battle that if his side won, he would sacrifice the first person he would see on returning home. Angela called us to reflect on who Jephthah’s daughter is in our time.
Old woman (witch or fairy) spinning. Woodcut attributed to Holbein from Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae 1547
The Pendle Witches
As a spiritual person, I am fascinated with women’s experience of the sacred. We women, for the past five-thousand years of patriarchy, have been side-lined and marginalized by every established religion in the world. But in every age, there have been women who have heroically rebelled against this patriarchal stranglehold to claim their authentic spiritual experience. Often it has involved looking within rather than without for spiritual guidance.
Thus far in my essay series, A Visionary History of Women, I’ve discussed Hildegard of Bingen and Margery Kempe who carved out their own woman-centered paths as mystics.
But what about women whose mystical experiences fell outside of the parameters of any organized religion?
One of the most important texts I have ever read was J. Kelly Gadol’s essay, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” She points out that while elite European men were experiencing a Renaissance, women’s rights and lifestyle choices were becoming increasingly constricted during this period. The Renaissance was a very dangerous time to be female–women were the primary targets of the mass witch-hunting hysteria sweeping across Europe. Witchcraft persecutions were not a phenomenon of medieval superstition, as is commonly believed, but of the Renaissance and the Reformation, stretching up to the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment.
Anton Woensam’s idea of the perfect Renaissance woman: silent and obedient
The pre-Reformation Catholic Church, for all its problems and abuses, at least offered a space for female mystical and visionary experience. However, the hard-line Protestantism that followed the Reformation offered no space at all. If you saw visions or whispered prayer charms or left offerings at a holy well or lit a fire on midsummer eve to protect your cattle, you were suddenly seen as a witch, in league with the devil.
In winter 2002, I moved to Lancashire, in northern England. The back of my house looked out on Pendle Hill, famous for its legends of the Pendle Witches of 1612, the amazing real women at the heart of my novel Daughters of the Witching Hill.
In 1612, in one of the most meticulously documented witch trials in English history, seven women and two men from Pendle Forest were hanged as witches, based on testimony given by a nine-year-old girl.
The most notorious of the accused was Elizabeth Southerns, alias Old Demdike. Allow me to introduce you to a woman of power who changed my life forever.
This is how Thomas Potts describes her in The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, the official trial transcripts.
She was a very old woman, about the age of Foure-score yeares, and had
been a Witch for fiftie yeares. Shee dwelt in the Forrest of Pendle, a vast
place, fitte for her profession: What shee committed in her time, no man
knows. . . . Shee was a generall agent for the Devill in all these partes: no
man escaped her, or her Furies.
Bess Southerns was a wisewoman of longstanding repute. What fascinated me was not that she had been arrested on witchcraft charges, but that she practiced her craft for decades before anyone dared to interfere with her or stand in her way. Cunning craft, the art of using charms to heal both humans and livestock was her family trade. When interrogated by her magistrate, she freely admitted to being a wisewoman and healer, even bragged about her familiar spirit Tibb, who appeared to her in the likeness of a beautiful young man.
At the time of her arrest, she lived in a place called Malkin Tower. Widow and matriarch of her clan, she lived with her widowed daughter and her three grandchildren, the most promising one being Alizon, a teenager who showed every promise of becoming a wisewoman as mighty of her grandmother.
In England, as opposed to Scotland and Continental Europe, witchcraft persecutions had been rare. Bess had been able to practice her craft in peace. This all changed when the Scottish King James I ascended to the English throne. King James was obsessed with the occult and had even written a book called Daemonologie—a witchhunter’s handbook—that his magistrates were expected to read.
The tide was turning for Bess and her family.
When a pedlar suffered a stroke after exchanging harsh words with Bess’s granddaughter Alizon, the local magistrate, eager to make his name as a witchfinder, played neighbors and family members against each other until suspicion and paranoia reached frenzied heights.
Alizon, first to be arrested, was the last to be tried at Lancaster in August, 1612. Her final recorded words on the day before she was hanged for witchcraft are a passionate tribute to her grandmother’s power as a healer. John Law, the pedlar Alizon had supposedly lamed, appeared before her. John Law, perhaps pitying the condemned young woman, said that if she had the power to lame him, she must also have the power to cure him. Alizon sadly told him that she lacked the powers to do so, but that if her grandmother, Old Mother Demdike, had lived, she could and would have healed him and restored him to full health.
Other novels have been written about the Pendle Witches, but mine is the only one to tell the story from Bess and Alizon’s point of view. I longed to give these women what their own world denied them—their own voice, their own story.
May the voices and visions of our motherline guide us to claim our own voice, our own story, our own vision, our own power. May we all be wisewomen walking forward.
Mary Sharratt is committed to telling women’s stories. If you enjoyed this article, you might want to check out her novel Daughters of the Witching Hilland visit her website.
On the recent Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete, I visited the Historical Museum in Heraklion where I saw a beautiful embroidered silk panel of a mermaid identified only as having come from Koustogerako, a village in western Crete. As it is unlikely that a man in a Cretan village would have been talented in embroidery, in this case “Anonymous” most definitely “was a woman.”
In this thread painting a mermaid surrounded by fish is holding the anchor of a ship in one hand and a fish in the other. In Greece the mermaid is the protectress of sailors. In a well-known legend, a mermaid said to be the sister of Alexander the Great, emerges from the sea in front of a ship during a storm and asks: “Is Alexander the Great still living?” If the sailors answer, “Yes, he lives and reigns,” the ship is saved.
During the past week I attended a Los Angeles premiere of a new documentaryAnita: Speaking Truth to Power (Dir: Freida Lee Mock USA, 2013). The screening was sold out and I had great seats saved for me– sitting with a friend who works at Samuel Goldwyn, the distributor of this fine film.
In 1991, Anita Hill provided testimony she hoped would serve to dissemble the nomination of Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court justice. Although the vote would end up being close (52-48) Hill’s testimony did not serve to dissuade the decision — Clarence Thomas’ nomination was confirmed and he was appointed to a life term on the Supreme Court four days after Hill’s testimony concluded. Here is an outline of the debate.
I remember watching the hearings in 1991 at a friend’s house in Sacramento, CA where I was couch-surfing with another friend while we were in Sacramento from Los Angeles to protest for gay rights—to speak our truth to power. I remember being amazed that she was doing this—and that it was being televised. We were glued to the set before we went off to the protest we were attending.
I’m on a mission to write women back into history, because, to a large extent, women have been written out of history. Their lives and deeds have become lost to us. To uncover their buried stories, we must act as detectives, studying the sparse clues that have been handed down to us. We must learn to read between the lines and fill in the blanks. My writer’s journey is about reclaiming the lost heroines of history and giving voice to that lost motherline.
Many of my novels address spiritual themes. As a spiritual person, I’m very interested in women’s experience of the sacred. As well as being written out of history, we women, for the past five-thousand years of patriarchy, have been side-lined and marginalized by every established religion in the world. Even in alternative spiritual movements, male teachers and leaders have abused their authority over their female students and followers.
But in every age, there have been women who have heroically rebelled against this patriarchal stranglehold to claim their authentic spiritual experience. Often it has involved looking within rather than without for spiritual guidance. Many of these women have been mystics.
What is a mystic?
The American Dictionary states that mysticism is the belief that it is possible to directly receive truth or achieve communication with the divine through prayer and contemplation. In other words, according to my personal definition, you don’t need a priest or other authority figure. The divine mysteries are within your own heart.
Some of the most famous mystics of the Western spiritual tradition have been women who plunged deep within their souls for spiritual guidance and emerged with ecstatic, prophetic, and radical insights.
Many of us imagine female mystics as cloistered women, like Hildegard of Bingen, but what would it be like to be a married woman with children and experience divine visions when you’re in the middle of making dinner or doing the laundry?
One of the most eccentric mystics of the late Middle Ages was a desperate housewife and failed businesswoman from Norfolk, England, named Margery Kempe (c. 1373 – after 1438). She is the heroine of my novel Revelations.
She ran a brewery and then a horse mill to grind grain, but both businesses failed. Around the age of 40, Margery had reached her breaking point. She was done. The mother of fourteen children, she feared that another pregnancy might kill her, but she couldn’t trust her husband to leave her alone, because canon law upheld his right to sexual congress without her consent. More than anything, Margery wanted to literally walk away from her marriage and go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
Since divorce wasn’t an option, she traveled to nearby Norwich to seek spiritual counsel from the anchoress Julian of Norwich, one of the greatest mystics of all time. Margery confessed to Julian that she had been haunted by visceral, body-seizing spiritual visions for the past twenty years. In my novel, Julian, recognizing Margery as a fellow mystic, made a confession of her own. She had written a secret book of her mystical visions, entitled Revelations of Divine Love, the first book in English written by a woman. In an age where heretics were burned at the stake, this was a dangerous text, describing an unconditionally loving God who appeared as Mother and threatened the established Church’s insistence on eternal damnation. Nearing the end of her life, Julian entrusted the book to Margery, who hid the manuscript in a secret compartment in her pilgrim’s staff.
With Julian’s blessing, Margery set off on the adventure of a lifetime to spread Julian’s radical, female vision of the Divine. Her travels took her to Rome, Jerusalem, and Santiago de Compostela. When she returned to England, she was arrested and tried for heresy several times and came close to being burned at the stake. The authorities couldn’t seem to handle this independent woman who traveled on her own and who dared to preach to other women in public. She preserved her story for posterity in The Book of Margery Kempe, the first autobiography written in English.
Margery offers inspiration for those of us who seek to live as mystics and contemplatives in the full stream of worldly life.
Mary Sharratt is committed to telling women’s stories. Please check out her acclaimed novel Illuminations, drawn from the dramatic life of Hildegard von Bingen, and her new novelRevelations, about the mystical pilgrim Margery Kempe and her friendship with Julian of Norwich. Visit her website.
I’m on a mission to write women back into history, because, to a large extent, women have been written out of history. Their lives and deeds have become lost to us. To uncover their buried stories, we must act as detectives, studying the sparse clues that have been handed down to us. We must learn to read between the lines and fill in the blanks. My writer’s journey is about reclaiming the lost heroines of history. My quest is to give voice to the ancestral memory of that lost motherline.
My novels address spiritual themes. As a spiritual person, I’m very interested in women’s experience of the sacred. As well as being written out of history, we women, for the past five-thousand years of patriarchy, have been side-lined and marginalized by every established religion in the world. Even in alternative spiritual movements, male teachers and leaders have abused their authority over their female students and followers.
But in every age, there have been women who have heroically rebelled against this patriarchal stranglehold to claim their authentic spiritual experience. Often it has involved looking within rather than without for spiritual guidance.
One of these women was Hildegard of Bingen, the heroine of my novel Illuminations. Born in the lush green Rhineland in present day Germany, Hildegard (who lived from 1098–1179) was a Benedictine abbess and one of the most accomplished people of her time. She founded two monastic communities for women, composed an entire corpus of sacred music, and wrote nine books on subjects as diverse as theology, cosmology, botany, medicine, linguistics, and human sexuality, an intellectual outpouring that was unprecedented for a 12th-century woman. Her prophecies earned her the title Sybil of the Rhine.
Hildegard’s vision of Sapientia, Divine Wisdom.
An outspoken critic of Church corruption, she courted controversy. Though women were forbidden to preach, Hildegard embarked on four preaching tours in which she delivered apocalyptic sermons warning her male superiors in the Church that they must reform their evil ways or suffer divine wrath. But she had to pay the price for being so outspoken. Late in her life, she and her nuns were the subject of an interdict (a collective excommunication) that was lifted only a few months before her death. Hildegard nearly died an outcast, her fate hauntingly similar to that of many canceled women in our contemporary cancel culture.
Hildegard’s theology of the Feminine Divine has made her a pivotal figure in feminist spirituality.
A key concept in her philosophy is Viriditas, or greening power, her revelation of the animating life force manifest in the natural world that infuses all creation with moisture and vitality. To her, the divine was manifest in every leaf and blade of grass. Just as a ray of sunlight is the sun, Hildegard believed that a flower or a stone was God, though not the whole of God. Creation revealed the face of the invisible creator. Hildegard celebrated the sacred in nature, something highly relevant for us in this age of climate change and the destruction of natural habitats.
I, the fiery life of divine essence, am aflame beyond the beauty of the meadows, I gleam in the waters, and I burn in the sun, moon and stars . . . . I awaken everything to life. Hildegard von Bingen, Liber Divinorum (Book of Divine Works)
Hildegard’s philosophy of Viriditas went hand in hand with her celebration of the Feminine Divine. Although the established Church of her day could not have been more male-dominated, Hildegard called God Mother, and said that she could only bear to look upon divinity in her visions if God appeared to her in feminine form. Her visions revealed God as a cosmic egg, nurturing all of life like a womb. Masculine imagery of the creator tends to focus on God’s transcendence, but Hildegard’s revelations of the Feminine Divine celebrated immanence, of God being present in all things, in every aspect of this greening, burgeoning, blessed world.
According to Barbara Newman’s book Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine, Hildegard’s Sapientia, or Divine Wisdom, creates the cosmos by existing within it.
O power of wisdom! You encompassed the cosmos, Encircling and embracing all in one living orbit With your three wings: One soars on high, One distills the earth’s essence, And the third hovers everywhere. Hildegard von Bingen, O virtus sapientiae
This might be read as an ecstatic hymn to Sophia, the great Cosmic Mother.
Mary Sharratt is committed to telling women’s stories. Please check out her acclaimed novel Illuminations, drawn from the dramatic life of Hildegard von Bingen, and her new novelRevelations, about the mystical pilgrim Margery Kempe and her friendship with Julian of Norwich. Visit her website.
Is Goddess feminism an old religion or a new creative synthesis? Can it be both? Goddess feminism draws on the feminist affirmation of women’s experiences, women’s bodies, and women’s connection to nature; the feminist critique of transcendent male monotheism as the symbolic expression of male domination of women and nature; and 19th and early 20th century discussions of Goddesses and matriarchy.
Most Goddess and other spiritual feminists have experienced Wiccan rituals, which are often simply called Goddess rituals. For many of us, elements of Wiccan practice strike a chord of knowing, while other aspects seem odd or strange or even just plain weird. What are the roots of Wiccan ritual?
Moderator’s note: This marvelous FAR site has been running for 10 years and has had more than 3,600 posts in that time. There are so many treasures that have been posted in this decade that they tend to get lost in the archives. We are beginning this column so that we can all revisit some of these gems. Today’s blogpost was originally postedMay 20, 2019. You can click here to see the original comments.
Trigger Alert: The bible on its face is quite violent to women.
Amidst the ugliness that is American politics in general and abortion politics specifically, I began to look for guidance to understand what is happening. I ended up pulling out two books that I read long ago. The first is Woe to the Women-The Bible Tells Me So by Annie Laurie Gaylor. Gaylor, in turn, was inspired by the work of Elizabeth Cady Stanton in her The Women’s Bible which was originally published in two parts (1895 and 1898).
I had forgotten how inspired I have been by both books. Together, they motivated me to begin looking at how the bible is a foundational paradigm of our culture. I started researching how translations have been altered from original meanings. I have already written a few blogs about how the representations of Eve have been changed to strip Her of the roots of Her original power. Take a look here and here.
Moderator’s note: This marvelous FAR site has been running for 10 years and has had more than 3,600 posts in that time. There are so many treasures that have been posted in this decade that they tend to get lost in the archives. We have created this column so that we can all revisit some of these gems. Today’s blogpost was originally posted March 6, 2019. It is paired with a new guest post abut Margaret Fell which will be posted tomorrow. You can visit the original post here to see the comments.
This linoprint of Margaret Fell can be orderedhere.
Pendle Hill will forever be associated to the Pendle Witches of 1612 who live on in the undying soul of the landscape and its folklore and who inspired my 2010 novel, Daughters of the Witching Hill. Pendle Hill also gave birth to the Quaker movement.
In 1652, George Fox, a simple weaver’s son and cobbler’s apprentice turned dissenting preacher, wandered across England on a spiritual quest. When he climbed Pendle Hill, his revelation came to him—an event that would change both Fox and the world forever. He envisioned a “great multitude waiting to be gathered.”
Moderator’s note: This marvelous FAR site has been running for 10 years and has had more than 3,600 posts in that time. There are so many treasures that have been posted in this decade that they tend to get lost in the archives. We are beginning this column so that we can all revisit some of these gems. Today’s blogpost was originally posted June 30, 2012. You can visit it here to see the original comments.
We are going through a huge cultural shift toward restoring the female to her full radiance. However you want to define that, it is rising now, through us.
That which is Sacred, what should we call it? We’ve been told to name it he, him, his. That it was blasphemy to do otherwise, to say she, even as they desecrated the Divine with comparisons to mortal overlords, those cruel masters, despoliators, persecutors. No. Reconsider. That fearful address to an authoritarian punisher takes us far from true reverence. Rather revere the roots of Being, manifesting in all Nature around us, within us. The profound silence, and the Deep calling to the Deep.
Deeply I go down into myself. My god is Dark and like a webbingmade of a hundred roots that drink in silence. ― Rainer Maria Rilke
feminismandreligion.com 