“All children are our children.” As I was posting my recent blog about the shooting of black men by the police, these words came into my mind with the force of revelation. At the time I was looking at a photograph of Philando Castile, taken at his place of work. Yes, I thought, my heart opening: “he is my child too.” This widening of the heart is at the center of the maternal values of ancient and contemporary matriarchal cultures around the world. It is a feeling some of us who were mothered well enough or who mothered children—including children not our own—carry within us. Is this the healing balm our world needs today?
Maternal values? So many of us turn up our noses at such a “gendered” term. Perhaps we were not mothered enough in our families of origin. Perhaps we still feel un-mothered. Perhaps we don’t want to be told that we have to become mothers. Perhaps we fear that if we become mothers, we will be only mothers—all of our other ambitions and desires will have to take second place.
In recent years “the Sacred Feminine” has become interchangeable with (for some) and preferable to (for others) “Goddess” and “Goddess feminism.” The terms Goddess and feminism, it is sometimes argued, raise hackles: Is Goddess to replace God? And if so why? Does feminism imply an aggressive stance? And if so, against whom or what?
In contrast, the term “sacred feminine” (with or without caps) feels warm and fuzzy, implying love, care, and concern without invoking the G word or even the M(other) word–about which some people have mixed feelings. Advocates of the sacred feminine stand against no one, for men have their “sacred feminine” sides, while women have their “sacred masculine” sides as well.
Nothing lost, and much to be gained. Right? Wrong.
Perseus with the Head of Medusa: Sacred Masculine and Sacred Feminine?
When Goddess feminism emerged onto the scene early in the feminist movement, it had a political edge. It was about women affirming, as Meg Christian crooned in “Ode to a Gym Teacher,” that “being female means you still can be strong.” Goddess feminism arose in clear opposition to patriarchy and patriarchal religions. It was born of an explicit critique of societies organized around male domination, violence, and war; and of the male God or Gods of patriarchal religions as justifying domination, violence, and war. In this context, “the sacred masculine” was not understood to be a neutral or positive concept. To the contrary, the male Gods of patriarchy were understood to be at the center of symbol systems that justify domination.
The terms “the masculine” and “the feminine” were floating around and sometimes evoked in early feminist discussions, but when examined more closely, they were rejected by most feminists as mired in sex role stereotypes. The psychologist Carl Jung, for example, associated the masculine with the ego and rationality and the feminine with the unconscious. True, he argued that modern western society had developed too far in the direction of the masculine and needed a fresh infusion of the feminine in order to achieve “wholeness.” This sounded good, but when feminists looked further, they discovered that Jung and his followers harbored a fear of the uncontrolled feminine.
Jungians consider the unconscious to be the repository of undisciplined desires, fears, and aggressive feelings that require the rational control of the ego. Though strong and intelligent women were among Jung’s most important followers, Jung and his male companions retained a fear of independent women, speaking of women who developed their rational sides fully enough to argue with men and male authorities as “animus-ridden,” a term not meant as a compliment.
Hades Abducting Persephone: Marriage of Sacred Masculine and Sacred Feminine?
Jungians, following Erich Neumann, understand the progress of history through an evolutionary model in which humanity began in a matriarchal stage in which the unconscious reigned. This period of culture, which spawned the image of the Great and Terrible Mother, was primitive and irrational. Matriarchy was naturally superseded by patriarchy, in which the individual, the ego, and rationality emerged. In the patriarchal stage of culture, male Gods and heroes were the primary symbols, and rationality reigned supreme.
The patriarchal stage of culture had its limitations, which were revealed in the two World Wars of the twentieth century and the nuclear and environmental crises that followed. Rational man, Jungians argued, had come to the point where he needed to reconnect with his feminine side. The unconscious feminine was now understood to be a nurturing matrix that included the body, nature, and feeling, from which rational man should and could never fully separate himself.
The great archaeologist Marija Gimbutas also spoke of two cultures within Europe, an earlier matrifocal one she called Old Europe and a later patriarchal one. The Jungian Joseph Campbell endorsed Gimbutas’ work, leading some to assume that Gimbutas and Jungians hold similar theories of human history. In fact they do not: Gimbutas did not subscribe to an evolutionary theory of culture. She would never have said that the earlier matrifocal culture “had to be superseded” by the later patriarchal culture “in order for civilization to advance.” The clear conclusion to be drawn from Gimbutas’ work is that the patriarchal culture was in almost every way inferior to the one it replaced.
For Gimbutas, the agricultural societies of Neolithic Old Europe were peaceful, egalitarian, sedentary, highly artistic, matrifocal and probably matrilineal, worshiping the Goddess as the powers of birth, death, and regeneration. These societies did not evolve into a higher stage of culture, but were violently overthrown by Indo-European invaders. The culture the Indo-Europeans introduced into Europe was nomadic, patriarchal, patrilineal, warlike, horse-riding, not artistic, worshiping the shining Gods of the sun as reflected in their bronze weapons. Gimbutas did not look forward to a new “marriage” of matrifocal and patriarchal cultures. Rather she hoped for the re-emergence of the values of the earlier culture. Her theories had a critical edge: she did not approve of cultures organized around domination, violence, and war.
This critical edge is exactly what is lost when we begin to substitute the terms “sacred feminine” for “the Goddess” or “Goddess feminism” and “sacred masculine” for “patriarchy” and “patriarchal Gods.” When we allege that we all have our “masculine and feminine sides,” and that it is important “to reunite the masculine and the feminine,” it is easy to forget that in our history, the so-called sacred masculine has been associated with domination, violence, and war.
If we hope to create societies without domination, violence, and war, then we must transform the distorted images of masculinity and femininity that have been developed in patriarchy. We must insist that domination, violence, and war are no more part of masculinity or male nature than passivity and lack of consciousness are part of femininity or female nature. It may feel good to speak of reuniting the masculine and the feminine, but feeling good will not help us to transform cultures built on domination, violence, and war.
Recently in a conversation with a noted archaeologist and his male graduate student assistant, I proposed that the absence of war and the trappings of war, including images of larger than life-size warrior kings, suggested to me that we should not understand the social structure of ancient Crete on the model of patriarchal kingship. “Kings are always warriors,” I said, “yet there is no clear and convincing evidence of organized warfare in ancient Crete. And,” I continued, “because warrior kingship is not a ‘natural state,’ but one achieved through warfare and domination, kings must legitimate and celebrate their power through larger than life-size images of themselves. Such images were common in ancient Sumer and in ancient Egypt, but are not found in ancient Crete.”
Why is it so important to take only what we really need? Because everything we take harms another life. I included this Native American teaching as one of the Nine Touchstones I offered as a counterpoint to the Ten Commandments in Rebirth of the Goddess.
Recently, I have begun to realize that the concept of taking only what you need is the heart* of sustainability ethics, an ethical system that can orient us to living in harmony with others and the natural world. The practice of great generosity is its counterpoint. When you have worked for, received, or accumulated more than you need, you should give it away.
The reason these principles are important is because “taking what you need” is “taking” from the web of life. We “take” other lives (whether plants or animals) in order to eat, to clothe ourselves, to build houses, and in agricultural societies to clear land to plant, to remove unwanted plants (weeds) from cultivated land. In our industrial age, we “take” so much more to fuel our cars and to provide electricity. To take more than we need is to do unnecessary violence to the web of life. When we give away what we don’t need we help others to survive, and we also help to ensure that no more lives than necessary are taken.
On the first Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete, we decided to incorporate the give-away as part of our closing ritual. It is nice to give and receive a gift at the end of an intense two weeks spent with other pilgrims. However, I am coming to realize that in comparison with the deeper meaning and intention of the ritual, our give-away, like the practice of giving presents in our wider culture, is superficial. When we give gifts to friends we try not to give too much or too little. When we give to children we often do so without regard to what they really need. When we receive gifts, we may feel burdened with one more thing we don’t want or need.
Being raised in acquisitive and throw-away cultures, it is not surprising that few of us have any real idea what the principles of taking only what you need and giving away mean. In traditional cultures, there are constraints on accumulation. If women in your family had to weave and sew and embroider all of your clothing, and if this process was time-consuming and involved time taken from other tasks, you would not be likely to have been given or to have learned to demand more clothes than you really need. Similarly, if all of the food for a clan is produced by its own labor, people would be unlikely to grow more than they needed to eat and store for the winter.
I suspect that all of this changed when wars of conquest became integrated into social structures. When other groups were conquered, their precious goods, including ritual items and ritual clothing and jewelry, were appropriated by the victors as “the spoils of war.” Land and people too were “the spoils of war,” and with the introduction of slave labor and the acquisition of lands that belonged to others, an excess of everything could be produced for the benefit of the ruling class, or to be more accurate, the war lords. This is another story, and I have discussed it elsewhere.
To return to the question at hand, I am suggesting that if we wish to live sustainably on planet earth, we must return to the values of our ancestors, distant and not so distant, who practiced taking what you need and sharing what you don’t need. These values are not the exclusive property of Native Americans, but are the values of the ancestors of all of us, if we go back far enough. As I have discussed, these values are still practiced in rural Crete.And they are the foundation of living matriarchal cultures. Many of us who have traveled have met people in rural cultures who have little, yet seem happier than anyone we know at home.
At some level we know that accumulating things does not make us happy. At the same time, prodded by advertising, we continue to shop compulsively and to buy things we don’t need. It will not be an easy task to change our patterns of consumption. If we could do so, our economic system would collapse, because it is based on creating needs for more and more things. This is why chosen or forced “austerity” threatens the capitalist system. You and I may not need all of the things we are used to buying, but if large numbers of us stop spending, the makers and sellers of goods suffer. On the other hand, the world will not survive if we carry on as we are, because we are depleting the world’s resources.
Dream Closet
What would happen if each of us, like the subjects on the popular reality programs on hoarding, went through each of the rooms of our homes and designated the things we really need and gave the rest away? What if we then took a good look at our homes and asked if we really need the space we have. I presume this would be a long term process in which we would continually discover that we don’t need things we have always thought we could not live without.
Hoarder’s Home
What if we stopped buying what we do not need and gave a large portion of our income and savings to others? Would we discover what it means to live in harmony with others and the whole web of life? Could we learn how to flourish with others, not at the expense of others?
*I am not saying these are the only ethical touchstones we need to build an ethics of sustainability, but I do believe they are at its center.
For me the word “matriarchy” expresses the certainty that “another world” can exist—a world not based in domination and hierarchy or violence and war.
The word “matriarchy” makes people’s hair stand on end as they imagine the mirror-image of patriarchy: societies in which women dominate men, beat men, rape men, hold men as slaves, and demand obedience from men. Some who do not protest very loudly or at all against patriarchy are horrified by the very idea of matriarchy. To be fair, most feminists have also been schooled not to use the “m” word.
Early in my academic career, I read “The Myth of Matriarchy” by Joan Bamberger and learned that the idea of matriarchy gone wrong has been used by men to justify patriarchy. From other academics I learned that in matrilineal societies, uncles have a great deal of power—so therefore there never was a matriarchy. I was also aware that Jungian and other proponents of a “matriarchal stage” in the development of culture have argued that matriarchy had to be succeeded by patriarchy in order for societies to evolve to a “higher” stage. Unlike many of my colleagues I stubbornly held onto the belief that there must have been “a better way” prior to patriarchy. Continue reading “MATRIARCHY: DARING TO USE THE “M” WORD by Carol P. Christ”
The charge of “essentialism” has become equivalent to the “kiss of death” in recent feminist discussions. In this context it is taboo to speak of Mother Earth. Yet, I would argue there are good reasons for speaking of Mother Earth that do not add up to essentialism. What if the values associated with motherhood are viewed as the highest values? What if the image of Mother Earth encourages all of us to recognize the gift of life and to share the gifts we have been given with others?
For those not familiar with the “essentialism” debate in feminist theory, it might be useful to define “essentialism.” In philosophy, essentialism is the idea that every “thing” has an “essence” which defines it. In its pure form, essentialism is a by-product of Platonic “idealism” which states, for example, that the “idea” of table is prior to every actual table and that every actual table is an embodiment of the idea of table.
Aristotle disagreed with the Platonic view “way back then,” arguing that the idea of what a table is can be inferred from actual tables, and so on for every “thing.” There is no need for an idea to exist prior to the existence of anything. Rather ideas help us to name and categorize existing things. In the 20th century “existentialism” again challenged “essentialism,” asserting that “existence precedes essence.” Existentialism argued that free individuals are defined by what they do, not by what they “are” prior to or apart from their actions.
When Whitehead said that all western philosophy can be understood as a footnote to Plato, he was referring in part to disagreements among philosophers about the relationship of ideas to things and existence to essence.
“The mystery of God in feminist theological discourse” is the subtitle of Elizabeth Johnson’s widely read She Who Is.The notion that God is “a mystery” is rarely questioned in feminist theologies. But maybe it should be.
Although it is true that the finite cannot encompass the infinite, and that all knowledge is rooted in particular standpoints, I do not agree that the first and last thing to be said about the divine power is that it is “a mystery.” Indeed as I will argue here, speaking about God as “a mystery” obscures more than it “reveals.”
The notion that Goddess or God is “a mystery” is rooted in notions of “a God out there” that most spiritual feminists reject. Goddess or God “in” the world is, I suggest, not unknown, but known, not hidden, but revealed–in the beauty of the world and in ordinary acts of love and generosity.
At a coffee shop in Agios Thomas, Crete last month a perfect stranger offered to pay for the coffees and sodas of the 16 women on the Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete. This spirit of great generosity is rarely experienced in the United States or other parts of Europe, but it is still common in rural Crete and some parts of Greece.
In fact our group was in Agios Thomas because our bus driver Babis, also in a spirit of great generosity, insisted on stopping to show us his village when we were passing nearby. He guided us to see Roman rock cut tombs and arranged for the early Byzantine church to be opened. At the end of the our pilgrimage, Babis stopped the bus at a wooded glen beside a small church where he offered us his own homemake raki, wine, and olives, accompanied by local sheep cheese he had purchased while we were climbing a mountain. After every meal that we ate in local tavernas, we were offered bottles of cold raki, fruit, and sweets.
This spirit of great generosity has long been commented on by travelers in Greece, who often speak of it as unexpected (for them) hospitality to the stranger or traveler. That it is, of course. Through the work of Heidi Goettner-Abendroth, I now understand that the famous Greek hospitality to the stranger has deep roots in matriarchal cultures. According to Goettner-Abendroth, equality of wealth is assured through the widely-practiced custom of gift-giving in matriarchal cultures. Continue reading “IS THE SPIRIT OF GREAT GENEROSITY IN CRETE A SURVIVAL OF ANCIENT MATRIARCHAL VALUES? by Carol P. Christ”
I never gave much credence to religion but through my mother, I met G-d, and through her I understood that I’m not a feminist because of the books I’ve read but rather because of the woman I call mom.
The first question I always get asked when I’m in feminist spaces is: “What inspired you to become a feminist?” Although I could go into the various histories revolving around men’s involvement in the early stages of the women’s movement to the similarities between the LGBTQ and women’s movements, my simple answer has always relied on one person: my mother.
I’ll be the first to admit (as well as many other people who will join me in the same chorus) that my mother deserves Sainthood for having put up with all the shenanigans I have, and still continue to, put her through. From running away from our local Catholic church the moment she dropped me off at Sunday School, to swearing like a sailor on leave at a very early age in front of Father Schmidt (who still fondly remembers me and the list I brought in with me to the confessional booth). Continue reading “Truths My Mother Taught Me by John Erickson”
The words we use affect our thinking. In the case of ancient Crete the repetition of the terms “Palace,” “Palace of Knossos,” “King Minos,” “Minoan,” “Priest-King,” and “Prince of the Lilies” shape the way we understand history–even when we ourselves know these terms are incorrect. We must engage in “new naming.”
Ariadne. May have been a name of the Goddess of pre-patriarchal Crete. The ending “ne” signifies that Ariadne is not of Greek or Indo-European origin and thus predates the later Greek myths.
Ariadnian. The name I have given to the Old European pre-patriarchal culture of Crete, from arrival of the Neolithic settlers from Anatolia c.7000 BCE to the Mycenaean invasion c.1450 BCE. Arthur Evans named the Bronze Age (c.3000-1450 BCE) culture of Crete “Minoan” after King Minos of Greek mythology, son of Zeus and Europa, husband of Pasiphae, father of Ariadne, whose gift of the secret of the labyrinth to Theseus led to the downfall of her culture. Evans assumed that Minoan Crete was ruled by a King.
This image I call “Ariadne Dancing” could become the new “icon” of Ariadnian Crete.
It could and should replace the “icon” of the “Priest-King” Arthur Evans’ “imaginatively” reconstructed and named the “Prince of the Lilies.”
“All children are our children.” As I was posting my recent blog about the shooting of black men by the police, these words came into my mind with the force of revelation. At the time I was looking at a photograph of Philando Castile, taken at his place of work. Yes, I thought, my heart opening: “he is my child too.” This widening of the heart is at the center of the maternal values of ancient and contemporary matriarchal cultures around the world. It is a feeling some of us who were mothered well enough or who mothered children—including children not our own—carry within us. Is this the healing balm our world needs today?
ears “the Sacred Feminine” has become interchangeable with (for some) and preferable to (for others) “Goddess” and “Goddess feminism.” The terms Goddess and feminism, it is sometimes argued, raise hackles: Is Goddess to replace God? And if so why? Does feminism imply an aggressive stance? And if so, against whom or what?
A Serpentine Path: Mysteries of the Goddess
The first question I always get asked when I’m in feminist spaces is: “What inspired you to become a feminist?” Although I could go into the various histories revolving around men’s involvement in the early stages of the women’s movement to the similarities between the LGBTQ and women’s movements, my simple answer has always relied on one person: my mother.
Feminism and Religion 