Myth – Page 14 – Feminism and Religion

Stories for (Re)creation in the New Year by Natalie Weaver

Natalie Weaver edited Two New Years’ Eves ago, I came to the realization that I did not need to watch the television countdown to ring in midnight and begin the New Year. I had always watched the show with my family as a child, and even while it made me feel curiously bad, I still somehow felt like it was an obligatory component of the day, right up there with kisses, well wishes, blowers, horns, and sparkling wine. Since we seldom went to an actual New Year’s party, it was a way of connecting with the world. I gave it up, though, when I ultimately deemed the musical guests and hosts to be unviewable.

I was not looking to make a new tradition per se that year when I decided to light a hunk of myrrh in the fireplace. The myrrh had come to me as a gift in a Three Kings Christmas set. It made a pretty decent blaze because I had placed it atop a bed of shallow candle wax from an old votive candle. Let me say, while it smelled lovely and burned a long time, I do not recommend doing this – the fire became alarmingly vigorous for a little while. Anyway, I spread a cloth on the floor and set out some food, calling my family together to sit in a circle by the hearth. We dimmed the lights, and by fire I read the Epic of Gilgamesh (with some tasteful PG 13 edits) from 11:00 pm until 1:00 am. I had been reading great epics to the kids, and it seemed somehow appropriate to return to Babylon that year. We did not mark the New Year at a precise moment but rather sailed into it on the tides of an ancient tale. It was a revelation to us all, mostly because we were reclaiming that night from the media usurpers who had defined it for us for most of our lives.

This year, we intended to do something similar until we ended up throwing an impromptu party for some friends and their children. I knew they would all have limited interest in my second annual fire reading, so we just fed them and eventually counted down the final moments of 2014 on my watch. But, after they left, we returned to the myth, this time reading the Babylonian Epic of Creation. We hit the mark, as the story itself was ritually performed at each New Year. It carried us deep into the first day of 2015 and was also a great revelation. Continue reading “Stories for (Re)creation in the New Year by Natalie Weaver”

Morrigan, Celtic Goddess of Sovereignty, War and Fertility by Judith Shaw

Morrigan, Celtic Goddess of War and Death, is a dark goddess we mortals tend to approach with fear and trepidation. A great Warrior Goddess, She represents the more terrifiying aspects of female energy; sensuality, magic, prophecy, revenge, and war. She could either shapeshift into a crow or raven or be accompanied by them. In the Ulster cycle stories she also appears as a cow, a wolf and an eel. This indicates Her connection to prosperity, sovereignty and the land. Encompassing all essential divine functions, She is the Goddess of War, Sovereignty, Fertility and the Land.

Continue reading “Morrigan, Celtic Goddess of Sovereignty, War and Fertility by Judith Shaw”

An Archaic Trinity of Goddesses? Not Necessarily. by Barbara Ardinger

Barbara Ardinger In her comment following my last post which was about mythology, my friend, Carol Christ, expands on my paragraph about how the so-called “ancient triple goddess” was really invented in 1948 by Robert Graves in his book, The White Goddess. (Thanks, Carol.)

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, when the Goddess movement was just getting up on its feet and our ovular books were being published, the idea arose that if “they” have a holy trinity, “we” have one, too. And ours is older and holier. We see it in the three phases of the moon, new (Virgin), full (Mother), and dark (Crone). Here’s a tiny sample of these books that changed the lives of so many women and men:

Woman’s Mysteries Ancient and Modern by M. Esther Harding (1971, but first published in 1933)
The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974) by Marija Gimbutas
When God Was a Woman (1976) by Merlin Stone
Lost Goddesses of Early Greece: A Collection of Pre-Hellenic Myths (1978) by Charlene Spretnak
The first edition of The Spiral Dance (1979) by Starhawk
The Chalice and the Blade (1987) by Riane Eisler
Laughter of Aphrodite (1987) by Carol P. Christ
The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries (1989) by Z. Budapest
The Reflowering of the Goddess (1990) by Gloria Feman Orenstein
Whence the Goddesses: A Source Book (1990) by Miriam Robbins Dexter

Triple goddess? ’Tain’t so. Our beloved triple goddess is one of our foundational myths. It’s nice and it’s perhaps inspiring, but it’s only a myth. Anyone who looks at a calendar or almanac—or up into the sky every night for a month—can easily see that the moon doesn’t have three phases. It has four: waxing, full, waning, and dark. And since the late 20^th century, women have lived long enough to go through more than three stages of life. Continue reading “An Archaic Trinity of Goddesses? Not Necessarily. by Barbara Ardinger”

Reclaiming the Feminist Beginnings of America’s Thanksgiving by Michele Stopera Freyhauf

For those who are unaware of my research focus and methodology, I try to use history to reconstruct or reclaim the feminine voice through more of an exegetical lens rather than an eisegetical or ideological lens. When it comes to Thanksgiving, I have yet another opportunity to restore credit to or at least bring visibility back to a woman who fought for Thanksgiving to be recognized as a national holiday on the last Thursday of November. Her works, though plentiful and sometimes known only by title, are largely forgotten to history; Sarah Josepha Buell Hale (1788-1879) is responsible for Thanksgiving becoming a national holiday in the United States.

Certainly, I do not have to go into the disparity that befell women during the 1800’s when it came to education and overall fundamental rights – that is a history with which we are all well familiar. Hale was educated through her brother, Horatio Gates Buell, who shared his education while attending Dartmouth College and “seemed very unwilling that [Hale] should be deprived of all his collegiate advantages,” and through her husband, David Hale, a lawyer who helped her cultivate her writing skills in the evenings. They even established a small literary club with their friends that allowed her to write. Hale was left a widow at a very young age with five children, the oldest age 7. Hale, like so many women during that time period, had to find a way to support herself and her family.

After authoring a book of poems with her sister-in-law, The Genius of Oblivion and Other Original Poems, Hale, in 1827, published her first novel called Northwood – a book published the same year as Uncle Tom’s Cabin that also challenged slavery. From fame gained through this novel, Hale obtained a job as an editor of a women’s magazine, Ladies Book (later Godey’s Ladies Book then American Ladies Magazine), where she worked for about 40 years. She wrote about half of the material contained in the magazines, as a means of helping to educated women. Hale helped to discover and promote such authors as Edger Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lydia Maria Child, Catherine Sedgwick, Lucretia Mott, Emma Willard, Susan B. Anthony, Henry David Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

She is credited for helping to establish Vassar College for women and wrote the familiar child’s poem “Mary had a Little Lamb” in 1830 (Poems for Our Children, republished in Juvenile Miscellany), Traits of American Life, which contained the story of “The Thanksgiving of the Heart:”

Continue reading “Reclaiming the Feminist Beginnings of America’s Thanksgiving by Michele Stopera Freyhauf”

Scholars of Mythology by Barbara Ardinger

Barbara Ardinger Here’s how my mind leaps around. I was mooning about and trying to figure out what I wanted to write for this blog when I picked up one of the books in the stack at the other end of the couch. I bought The Mythology of Eden by Arthur George and Elena George because I’d read the thoughtful review by Judith Laura, a Goddess scholar I know and respect.

In their introduction, the Georges present a paragraph by biblical scholar Millar Burrows that explains that myth is:

a symbolic, approximate expression of truth which the human mind cannot perceive sharply and completely, but can only glimpse vaguely, and therefore cannot adequately or accurately express. … It implies not falsehood, but truth; not primitive, naïve misunderstanding, but insight more profound than scientific description and logical analysis can ever achieve. The language of myth in this sense is consciously inadequate, being simply the nearest we can come to a formulation of what we can see very darkly. … The procedure is quite legitimate if [we] understand what is being done (p. xii). (Burrows’ book is An Outline of Biblical Theology, published in 1946.)

Mind leap: Wow, I said to myself, does this describe the revisionist fairy tales I write? I try to see through that dark glass more clearly and recast old ideas in new ways. (I hope this doesn’t sound too pretentious. I don’t mean it to.)

Mind leap: And, I further said to myself, we scholars who write for Feminism and Religion often write about myth, though we don’t always acknowledge that our religious stories are indeed myths. It’s like the old joke—“If I believe it, it’s religion. If you (or they) believe it, it’s myth.” Even though we sometimes call our myths the inerrant word of this god or that goddess, the stories in all of our holy books are our instructive myths. Read Burrows’ definition again. Continue reading “Scholars of Mythology by Barbara Ardinger “

Cerridwen, Dark Goddess of Transformation, Inspiration and Knowledge by Judith Shaw

Cerridwen, Dark Goddess of Transformation, Inspiration and Knowledge is best known as the mother of Taliesen, the greatest of all the Welsh poets. But Her story is much older and Her powers run deep.

Cerridwen (“White Sow”, or “White Crafty One”) has many other names: Dark Moon Goddess, Great Mother, White Lady of Inspiration and Death, Goddess of Nature, and Grain Goddess. She rules the realms of death, fertility, regeneration, inspiration, magic, enchantment and knowledge. Her ritual pursuit of Gwion Bach symbolizes the changing of the seasons, nature’s yearly cycle of death and rebirth.

Continue reading “Cerridwen, Dark Goddess of Transformation, Inspiration and Knowledge by Judith Shaw”

The Descent of Inanna to the Underworld by Deanne Quarrie

Inanna provides a many-faceted image of the feminine. She is a goddess of order, fertility, grains, love, war, heaven and earth, healing, and emotion. She is called the “Lady of Myriad Offices”. Most of the powers once held by her, “the embodied, playful, passionately erotic feminine; the powerful, independent, self-willed feminine; the ambitious, regal, many-sided feminine” were eroded by the patriarchy throughout time.

Her descent to the Underworld is a valuable story at any time of the year but even more so here as the wheel turns fully into the dark of the year. During the dark of the year, we are to turn inward, our most introspective work is to be accomplished at this time. It is vital that we enter the darkness as did Inanna, bare and bowed low. Continue reading “The Descent of Inanna to the Underworld by Deanne Quarrie”

Painting Tiamat/Tehom by Angela Yarber

angela Today I am honored to give a lecture on “Queering Iconography: Holy Women Icons from Sappho to Pauli Murray” at the North Star LGBT Center in Winston-Salem, NC. So, I want to continue the theme of featuring some of my queer Holy Women Icons. Joining Virginia Woolf , the Shulamite, Mary Daly, Baby Suggs, Pachamama and Gaia, Frida Kahlo, Salome, Guadalupe and Mary, Fatima, Sojourner Truth, Saraswati, Jarena Lee, Isadora Duncan, Miriam, Lilith, Georgia O’Keeffe, Guanyin, Dorothy Day, Sappho, Jephthah’s daughter, Anna Julia Cooper, the Holy Woman Icon archetype, Maya Angelou, Martha Graham, Pauli Murray, La Negrita, and all my other Holy Women Icons with a folk feminist twist is the often overlooked and misunderstood primordial goddess of creation: tehom.

In Genesis 1 we read, “In beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” It is the creation narrative held dear, formative, and meaningful for countless Jews and Christians. Interestingly, this word, deep, in Hebrew is tehom. Tehom translates as “deep or depths,” but it’s also a cognate for Tiamat, a Babylonian Goddess of creation. Out of the face of the deep, the world begins. Out of tehom, God creates. Out of Tiamat, the earth comes into being. This dancing Babylonian goddess syncretistically intermingles with the creation myth so pivotal to the faith of Christians and Jews in a way that could be terrifying, or beautiful, or—like the chaotic body of Tiamat that brings the world into being—both. Continue reading “Painting Tiamat/Tehom by Angela Yarber”

How the Dark Fairy Carabosse Found the Light by Barbara Ardinger

The dark fairy Carabosse was in a snit. “Here I am,” she fumed, “the smartest, most literate, least mischievous fairy in any world, and no one will listen to me. I’m the best of all possible fairies in the best of all possible worlds. And do I receive my due respect? Why am I not Goddess of the Sun?”

“Hush, dear,” said Carabosse’s amanuensis. “There’s already a sun god. There can’t ever be a sun goddess. The sun shoots out masculine energy—that’s what the mortals say. The moon absorbs and reflects the masculine energy. The moon is the feminine planet.”

“Well, I’m tired of reflecting men’s power. I’m also tired of being ruled by the phases of the moon. I demand to be a sun goddess so I can rule the moon! Grimmella, what’s the moon phase today?”

Grimmella looked at her handy pocket calculator. “It’s eleven percent waning, Almost dark. Which might explain your mood.” As Carabosse sniffed and glared at her, she added, “You can’t be a sun goddess. It’s just not done!”

“Oh, Grimmella,” the dark fairy exclaimed, “don’t be so old-fashioned! Wake up! We’re done with all that reflected light business. I want to be the source of light. Besides, it’s a new century! Even for the mortals. And I’ve done so much for them—for us fairies, too—that I deserve a reward. I deserve to the Goddess of the Sun.” When Grimmella laid her pen down and frowned, the dark fairy went on with her rant. “Do you know who that hubristic Apollo really is?” Continue reading “How the Dark Fairy Carabosse Found the Light by Barbara Ardinger”

Almighty Isis by Elizabeth Cunningham

When the press began using I.S.I.S. as a perhaps inaccurate and now obsolete acronym for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, diverse groups made a connection with the Egyptian goddess who was once worshiped all over the Greco- Roman empire. A pagan organization protested the appropriation of the goddess’s name. Others took it as a sign that the self-declared Islamic State represented the anti-Christ or confirmed a conspiracy by the Illuminati. (Divinity of any kind seems to attract human projection.)

When I was doing research for my novel, The Passion of Mary Magdalen, Isis found a special place in my heart. A lover and mother goddess, later associated with both Mary Magdalen and the Virgin Mary, Isis appealed to people from all classes and cultures, especially to women, respectable Roman matrons and prostitutes alike. Continue reading “Almighty Isis by Elizabeth Cunningham”