Feminism and Religion

From the Archives: That Which Is Sacred by Max Dashu

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 webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence. ― Rainer Maria Rilke

Sappho in a Locrian Mode by Carolyn Lee Boyd

The world Sappho envisions in her poetry is one with many lessons for us in the 21st century about how to live. While ancient Greek society, especially in later eras, was deeply misogynistic and women had few rights, Sappho’s words evoke a perspective in which goddesses, especially Aphrodite, are revered and the connection of worshippers to goddesses is intimate, art created by women is celebrated, women’s relationships are central to one’s well being, and love and sensuality are enjoyed.

But words only tell part of the story. Sappho’s poetry was meant to be sung, and while we can’t hear the songs she wrote, I think it is interesting to note that Anne Carson, in her 2003 translation “If Not, Winter” says that Sappho is credited with inventing the Locrian musical mode. A mode is a scale in which the progression of notes follows a set pattern of whole and half notes. We are all familiar with the major mode that makes music sound happy (Happy Birthday song) and the natural minor mode that we use for sad music (House of the Rising Sun). But there are many other modes, and the Locrian mode is one of them. (just a note: the Locrian mode is the same as the Greek Mixolydian mode and completely different from the modern Mixolydian mode, just to be confusing.)

Moving to Ursula: Dream Wisdom and the Sacred Feminine by Rabbi Jill Hammer, PhD

For the last seven years, I have been conducting research for my book Undertorah: An Earth-Based Kabbalah of Dreams, which is about to appear courtesy of Ayin Press. On this writing journey, I’ve interviewed seventy dreamers, and have studied pre-modern dreams from texts of ancient Israel and ancient Sumer to dream accounts of women kabbalists and Chasidic masters. I’ve also sat with my own dreams and their odd truths. Many of the dreams I’ve encountered express powerful visions of the feminine. I find these often odd and eerie visions particularly useful in expressing “the multiplicity of experiences of [the feminine]… rather than an imposed definition of those experiences…”[i]

Full Moon Prayer by Sara Wright

Lupita (Mary Guadalupe Tree of Life)

Your steel points of light

Your branches of Light (Asherah)

glow in grave darkness.

Hecate’s second moon is Red.

The raven slices the sky into shards.

The river catches shivering stars.

We remember the First Mother…

Patiently, painfully,

we return the parts to the Whole.

See the Wolf who hides

behind the Tree,

the door?

Welcome him in.

Only then can we begin…

Lupita,

Your needled points of light

glow in grave darkness.

This kind of prayer is said during the dark months when shadows are feared and the nights are long. I use it at the solstice or the full moon before the winter solstice, a fire festival. But it can be used any time during the dark months. There are good reasons for this kind of prayer. It is so important to acknowledge our shadow and to invite him/her in as a friend, not as an enemy. Otherwise harmful projections occur as we place undesirable qualities that we can’t own onto others.

In Indigenous traditions there are always masked personages that act out these shadow qualities in sometimes very humorous or scary ways. The Tewa have a masked dancer who uses a whip to strike the ground. In central Europe masked dancers walk the streets creating havoc in rural areas even today. These figures are acting out the shadow in us all, keeping it present so this energy does not go underground where it can become quite deadly.

Sara is a naturalist, ethologist (a person who studies animals in their natural habitats) (former) Jungian Pattern Analyst, and a writer. She publishes her work regularly in a number of different venues and is presently living in Maine.

Carol P. Christ’s Legacy: ON NOT GETTING WHAT WE WANT AND LEARNING TO BE GRATEFUL FOR WHAT WE HAVE

Moderator’s Note: We here at FAR have been so fortunate to work along side Carol Christ for many years. She died from cancer in July, 2021. To honor her legacy, as well as allow as many people as possible to read her thought-provoking and important blogs, we are pleased to offer this new column to highlight her work. We will be picking out special blogs for reposting. This blog was originally posted March 26, 2012. You can read it long with its original comments here. Carol mentions a book she was writing with Judith Plaskow at the time with the working title: God After Feminism. The book was published in 2016 under the title of Goddess and God in the World: Conversations in Embedded Theology. You can find it here.

Many women’s dreams have not been realized. How do we come to terms with this thealogically?

Although I am as neurotic as the next person, I am also really wonderful—intelligent, emotionally available, beautiful (if I do say so myself), sweet, caring, and bold. I love to dance, swim, and think about the meaning of life. I passionately wanted to find someone with whom to share my life. I did everything I could to make that happen—including years of therapy and even giving up my job and moving half way around the world when I felt I had exhausted the possibilities at home.

For much of my adult life I have asked myself: What is wrong with me? Why can’t I find what everybody else has? Even though I knew that there were a lot of other really great women in my generation in my position and even though I knew that many of my friends were with men I wouldn’t chose to be with, I still asked: What is wrong with me?

What’s Your Feminism I.Q.? by Barbara Ardinger

Let’s begin a new year by finding out what we know about feminist history and goddess scholarship. Take this little quiz and find out where you stand as a Feminism/Goddess Scholar. (It’s okay to laugh at some of the choices. Laughing shows you’re paying attention.)

1. Who wrote When God Was a Woman?

a. Ernest Hemingway b. Merlin Stone

c. Sharyn McCrumb d. Isabel Allende

Transitions by Esther Nelson

It’s been a rough couple of years. Even though thousands of miles distanced us from the first-discovered Covid-19 outbreak (late 2019) in China, the virus soon traveled the world, doing what viruses do best—infect us, spread, morph, and then infect us, spread, morph all over again. More than five million people worldwide, including close to one million Americans, have died as a result. Shutdowns affected us economically and socially, making it difficult (sometimes impossible) to stay connected with family and friends.

An effective vaccine arrived on the scene in early 2021, yet many Americans (half?) eligible for vaccination have refused the life-saving injections, citing a variety of reasons: distrust of the vaccine—“It was developed too quickly;” invincibility—“I never get sick, never even had the flu;” and individualism—“Nobody gets to tell me what to do with my body.” (Many of those “hands off my body” people, though, have no problem telling those of us who have a uterus what we can and cannot do with its contents.)

Longing for Darkness by Elizabeth Ann Bartlett

When I moved to Minnesota, everyone back home voiced concern about how cold the winters would be. Nobody warned me about how dark they would be, nor how long the dark would last. For years, I complained, but gradually I have come to embrace the dark. The dark invites us to slow down, to rest, to sleep, to dream. It is a time to open to our depths, and to others. There is a kind of magic in the dark. Without the harsh light of judgment, in the dark we are more likely to share our secrets and stories, our wounds and our wonderings, our hearts and hopes with each other. As the deciduous trees lose their leaves, the sky opens as well, giving birth to the night sky. The winter dark gives us the gift of stars, giving me a sense of my place in the universe. They arrive like old friends. The Seven Sisters of the Pleiades appear in the evening, and Orion greets me every morning. When Hale-Bopp was visible from earth, I looked for her on my late-night drives home, and there she would be, my constant companion on those cold winter nights. The stars remind us that we are not alone, that we are all related, for we are all made of the stuff of stars.

Slaying Dragons Our Own Way, Part II by Carolyn Lee Boyd

Assipattle and the Mester Stoorworm is a Scottish dragon-slayer folk tale with many enticing details linking it to elements of an older culture centering the Earth with a reverence for female spiritual power. You can read a summary of the story and these clues in Part I.

While the tale was obviously not originally meant to reflect the 21st century, it has echoes of our own society’s challenges today, including inequality, injustice, violence, and ecological disaster. It may be a revision of an older story but, not knowing what that story was, we can perhaps re-envision the story to be meaningful for our own time with the characters and practices hinted at in the details. Maybe something like this (I’ve named Assipattle’s unnamed sister Morag) …

Slaying Dragons Our Own Way, Part I by Carolyn Lee Boyd

In winter people traditionally gather around the fire to enjoy stories as the stormy winds thunder outside. Come closer to the hearth as I regale you with Assipattle and the Mester Stoorworm, a centuries-old dragon-slayer folk story from Scotland’s Orkney Islands with many Norse elements. On the surface, it is a fairy tale about a village threatened by a gigantic sea serpent and how they responded to this existential threat. Though meant to entertain with its adventure and romance, it also has many details that perhaps link it to older roots of a culture that centered the Earth and healing and revered female spiritual power, all of which are profoundly needed in our own time. If we re-envision the tale through the lens of these clues, we may be able to find guidance for how our own communities — local, national, and global — can more successfully confront profound challenges.

Here is the summarized original tale: