Pilgrimage – Page 2 – Feminism and Religion

Carol P. Christ and the Pilgrimage to the Goddess: Online Memorial Gathering, December 20, 2023

Dear FAR community,

Two and a half years ago, our beloved friend and mentor Carol P. Christ passed to the realm of the ancestors. It’s been wonderful to read her archive posts every week as well as so many posts remembering and referencing her brilliant work. The FAR community was so important to her: as Carol herself pointed out, she not only offered her own posts each Monday, she also read and responded to every post, every day. I also cherish the daily connection to our FAR ‘family’, and find profound comfort for the loss of such a tremendous presence through this daily connection with others who knew her and miss her as as I do.

Initiation and Descent, part 2 by Terry Folks

Part 1 was posted yesterday, you can read it here.

Stage Nine – Reward (Seizing the Sword) – Healing the Mother/Daughter Split

Some contemporary versions of the Heroine’s Journey have the heroine or hero seizing the sword quite dramatically. She takes possession of the treasure ‘sword’ as knowledge, experience, or greater understanding. My reward was more subtle but deeply profound. It took Her awhile to help me understand but eventually I stopped fighting and leaned into Mother Mountain. When I was calmer, when I became still, stopped trying so hard … when I finally surrendered I was able to ask Her why.

Why Mother Mountain? Why COVID? Why now?

Her response was as clear as though She was speaking in my ear:

“It was the only way we could meet each other. Every step you have taken up to now has led you to this sacred moment.”

I wept.

Initiation and Descent part 1 by Terry Folks

Review: In my first two posts about my recent Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete, I invited you to consider your stage in your current Heroine’s Journey as you followed me.

In my hybrid of Joseph Campbell’s mono-myth with feminist scholar Maureen Murdock’s version, the first six stages of the Heroine’s journey are: Ordinary World, the Call to Adventure, Refusal of the Call, Arrival of Mentors, Crossing the First Threshold, and Encounters with Tests, Allies, and Enemies. These archetypal stages were overlaid with Murdock’s Separation from the Feminine, Identification with the Masculine, Gathering of Allies, Road of Trials, Meeting Ogres and Dragons, Finding the Boon of Success, and Awakening to Feelings of Spiritual Aridity and Death.

Briefly: At home on Vancouver Island, Canada, I was overworked, other-focused, burnt out and overwhelmed with horrific family crises. I was terrified of doing the Goddess Pilgrimage on my own. I finally accepted divine assistance and flew to Crete. I tested positive for COVID on the first day of the pilgrimage.

My Pilgrimage to Crete – September 2023, Part 2 by Terry Folks

Part 1 was posted yesterday.

Stage Four – Mentor Appears

Joseph Campbell spoke of ‘mentors’ appearing to help the sojourner, and what Maureen Murdock called the gathering of allies. In my hybrid of these two archetypal journeys, there may be several mentors – human, power animals, divine guides or a combination. She could be a wise elder who helps the heroine prepare for the journey or gives her a gift for later use. In my case the wise elder was my 93 year old mom who became one of my mentors. When I expressed my excitement and fears, she said what she always says when I – one of her seven children – am facing a challenge: “Go get’em Tiger!” She also offered financial support so I could take time away from my psychotherapy practice.

Two other mentors showed up in what Carl Jung called my ‘active imagination’: Carol Christ and Marija Gimbutas. Both have transitioned so my active imagination conjured their support as divine intervention. I reread Carol’s reflections and teachings on the pilgrimage, and watched the videos she made as inspiration. I felt her invitation. I was ready to change.

My Pilgrimage to Crete – September 2023, Part 1 by Terry Folks

Carol Christ’s Legacy honored by Laura Shannon, and the Ariadne Institute

Adventure by Autumn Skye with permission of artist

When I teach the Heroine’s Journey in my Sophia Women’s Wisdom Group, I draw on Joseph Campbell’s idea of the mono-myth, an archetypal story that resonates with every human across time: The Hero’s Journey. I combine Campbell’s ideas with pieces of feminist Maureen Murdock’s heroine’s journey to recognize the unique pathway of the feminine. I call this my hybrid heroic journey. If you are not familiar with Maureen Murdock’s work, I invite you to see how she brought her feminist eye to Campbell’s iconic Hero’s Journey in her book The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness. After her conversation with Joseph Campbell six years prior to his transition, Murdock felt he missed “that the focus of female spiritual development was to heal the internal split between woman and her feminine nature” (p. 2). In my hybrid heroic journey, that split in the early stages is internalized negative masculinity. The rejection of our feminine nature may appear differently in each woman’s life but it is often characterized by treating ourselves how we imagine men perceive us.

My recent Pilgrimage to Crete was astonishing; my epiphany, gradual. As I share my adventure, imagine stages of your own heroine’s journey wherever you are in that cycle. I hope that by sharing this series, you will experience a real life example of Dion Fortune’s definition of magic: ‘The art of changing consciousness at will’. Starhawk, Truth or Dare, 1988.

Elixir: In the Valley at the End of Time by Kapka Kassabova, Book review by Laura Shannon

Kapka Kassabova is an award-winning author of poetry, fiction and nonfiction, born in Bulgaria and now living in the Scottish Highlands. Her newest work of narrative nonfiction, Elixir, soars with the luminous prose and unflinching honesty we have come to expect from this brilliantly gifted writer.

Elixir is an extraordinary, profoundly moving book. The moment I finished reading it, I began again from the beginning, pausing only to order multiple copies for friends. Like Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass, Kassabova effortlessly integrates science and the sacred, addressing historical, ecological, and personal trauma with clarity, compassion, and hope. Elixir combines memoir, travel, history, ethnography, botany, philosophy, spirituality, eco-psychology, traditional Chinese medicine, and even alchemy, in a subtle, sophisticated exploration which defies categorisation.

To Stand in the Presence of the Ancients! – Enheduanna, Part 2 by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

Yesterday I wrote about the priestess/scribe Enheduanna and her warrior/king father Sargon. I posited their connection to the codification of patriarchy. They did not invent it, as war and the diminution of women had been happening in some circles. I do wonder, however, if they furthered it along to a point of no return.

Another king of the time, Urukagina from circa 2350 bce[1] codified laws under the guise of reformation. Some of his reforms were progressive in that they sought to protect the poorer classes against aristocracy and the priesthood. But they also were clear to let women “know their place.” Here are the translated words from his laws:

“If a woman to a male has spoken . . .[bad] words(?) which exceed (her rank?), onto the teeth of that woman a baked brick shall be smashed, and that brick will be hung at the main gate.”

ART AND SOUL by Iona Jenkins

One day, during a holiday at the home of Italian friends in the province of Lazio, some forty-five minutes by train from the centre of Rome, I experienced a powerful impression of the Sacred Feminine. She came to me in the Vatican of all places, centuries old male stronghold, and power centre of the Roman Catholic Church.

Even more surprisingly, her presence was more prominent in the Sistine Chapel, the Pope’s own place of prayer, where Cardinals sit in all male conclave. But there she was, shining through the restored colour on that famous ceiling through the brushstrokes of Michelangelo. I was picking up loud echoes immortalised for centuries through his art, tuning into the soul of the artist, seeing his inspiration in terms of angels speaking in colour and light. But then he was called after an Archangel whose name means Who is like God. God is creative, He created heaven and earth according to the scriptures, but now it was looking like She might have created it with him. Somehow over the years in Christianity, the real Sacred Feminine has been hidden away, negated, turned into a virginal statue with little visible life energy from earth.

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Mountain Mother, I Hear You Calling

This was originally posted on July 7, 2014

The mountaintop shrines of Mount Juctas in Archanes, Crete are situated on twin peaks, which may have symbolized breasts. Ancient shrines on the northern peak date from 2200 BCE until at least the end of the Ariadnian (Minoan) period in 1450 BCE. A crevice in the rock was filled with offerings of pottery, clay images of women and men in ritual dress, diseased bodies and body parts, sheep and cattle, and other objects. Excavations to a depth of 13 meters did not reach the bottom layers. Many offerings had been burned, suggesting that the objects were first thrown into fire and then dropped into the crevice. People who climbed the mountain for the festivals would have spilled over both peaks and there may have been shrines as well as fires on both of them.

Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete – Reborn! by Laura Shannon

Thirty years ago, Carol P. Christ founded her Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete, which she wrote about in her book A Serpentine Path: Mysteries of the Goddess (original 1995 title Odyssey with the Goddess) and in numerous posts on this site over the years. She led over 40 groups of women Pilgrims to encounter the history and sacred sites of the peaceful, egalitarian civilisation of Bronze Age Crete.

Here, the Goddess-honouring culture of Old Europe survived the longest, when patriarchal Indo-Europeans were taking over in the ‘Kurgan waves’ Marija Gimbutas has described. The sophisticated artworks of ‘Minoan’ Crete show women in positions of honour and authority, and do not depict violence, slavery, or war. People celebrated at ceremonial centres, made offerings at cave and mountain shrines, and worshipped the Goddess in sacred trees and stones.

Snake Goddess, Knossos, Crete, ca. 1600 BCE [photo: Heraklion Archaeological Museum]

As many readers know, before Carol passed away, she asked me to take on the leadership of her Goddess Pilgrimage, and to serve as her literary executor and the director of her Ariadne Institute for the Study of Myth and Ritual. Deeply moved by her trust in me, and guided by very clear dreams I received around the time of her death, I accepted Carol’s request. In October 2022, after a three-year delay due to the pandemic, the Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete was reborn.