Carol P. Christ – Page 12 – Feminism and Religion

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: The Black Horse: Our Bodies, Our Selves

This was originally posted on Sept 23, 2011

“The driver…falls back like a racing charioteer at the barrier, and with a still more violent backward pull jerks the bit from between the teeth of the lustful horse, drenches his abusive tongue and jaws with blood, and forcing his legs and haunches against the ground reduces him to torment. Finally, after several repetitions of this treatment, the wicked horse abandons his lustful ways; meekly now he executes the wishes of his driver, and when he catches sight of the loved one [i.e. his master] is ready to die of fear.”

I can’t seem to get this image from Plato’s Phaedrus quoted in Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature out of my mind or my body these days. The other day I tried to read the above passage to a friend and my body became so tense that I accidentally cut off the phone connection—twice. Now while I am writing my muscles are tight, and I am beginning to get a headache. I cannot get the image of the black horse out of my mind because “she” (I know that Plato’s horse was a “he”) has lived in my body for as long as I remember. She probably first took root in my body when I began to fear my father’s discipline. She became bigger and stronger every time someone or something in culture told me that my body and the feelings of my body were bad, that I as a girl or woman was unworthy, that the things I cared about were not important, that my thoughts were wrong.

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Football as a Ritual Re-enacting Male Domination Through Force and Violence

This was originally posted on November 18, 2011

The other day when Paula McGee asked on this blog how Penn State students could rally in support of Sandusky, I was also reading a student paper quoting Rianne Eisler’s opinion that peace and environmental justice cannot be achieved in dominator cultures. Xochitl Alvizo commented that we should not be surprised by the reactions of the students as we live in a “rape” culture. I would add that we must examine the culture of male domination through force that is “football,” one of the “sacred cows” of American patriarchy, just as we need to examine the culture of hierarchical male domination of the Vatican in the context of child-rape by priests.

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Let Us Give Thanks for Feminism and Religion Dot Com

This was originally posted January 6, 2014

Feminism and Religion was founded in the late spring of 2011. Throughout the summer Gina Messina-Dysert hounded me about submitting a blog while I ignored her emails because I didn’t think I wanted to take on a new project. Gina was persistent nonetheless. Finally I decided that it would be easier to take an excerpt from a book review I had recently written than to explain why I didn’t want to write something for the blog, and so “Exciting New Research on Matriarchal Societies” became my first contribution.

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Thinking About Thanksgiving

This was originally posted on December 3, 2012

Thanksgiving evokes deep memory and raises questions about what we are celebrating, now that we know the stories we were told about the Pilgrims and the Indians are not the whole truth about America’s early history. I thought about all of this as I prepared for Thanksgiving this year and cleaned up for days afterwards.

Although I do not live in America, I have celebrated Thanksgiving with a group of friends in my home in Greece many times during the past twenty years.

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.

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: As It Might Have Been: Ancestor Stories in the Dreamtime

This was originally posted January 9, 2017

In the middle of the night in waking sleep, I asked my great-great grandmother Annie Corliss to tell me the story of how she met and married James Inglis. This story came through me in a place I have come to call the Dreamtime. The Aboriginal term feels right. As I understand it, this is not a place where the dead speak to the living but rather a space where boundaries blur as the ancestors speak in us.

Annie Corliss’s Story: As It Might Have Been

To See Ourselves in Others: Part Two by Beth Bartlett

Part 1 was posted yesterday. You can read it here.

Patriarchy is a system of male dominance, rooted in the ethos of war which legitimates violence, sanctified by religious symbols, in which men dominate women through the control of female sexuality, with the intent of passing property to male heirs, and in which men who are heroes of war are told to kill men, and are permitted to rape women, to seize land and treasures, to exploit resources, and to own or otherwise dominate conquered people.[i] – Carol Christ

In Part I, I urged against the distancing that intellectual analysis can bring to situations that require us to respond from the depths of our being, and yet, how can one be a reader of this blog and not examine the intertwining strands of patriarchy, religion, women, and war in this current conflict.

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Life in the Tenements

This was originally posted on January 2, 2017

During my ancestor research, I have seen the word “tenement”—with the implication of poverty, filth, and disease–handwritten onto more than one death certificate. Last month, I visited the Lower East Side where my Irish 2x great-grandmother Annie Corliss lived in the tenements near the docks with her husband the Scottish seaman James Inglis and their nine children.

Though the tenements where they lived in the vicinity of Cherry Street a block from the East River have been torn down to build public housing, my newly discovered third cousin Hattie Murphy still lives in the area. She arranged for me to visit the “Irish Outsiders” house in the Tenement Museum on nearby Orchard Street in order to gain an understanding the conditions of life in the tenements in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Crete as the cradle of a culture of peace – Part Two by Laura Shannon

Part One of this article spoke of our collective yearning for peace, and the difficulty of imagining a peaceful world when we are taught to believe that “patriarchy and with it war and domination are universal and inevitable.” (Carol Christ, 2015)

But this is a myth. The peaceful civilisation of Bronze Age Crete lasted two thousand years with no sign of violence, slavery, or war. Most likely matriarchal, matrifocal, and matrilineal, ancient Crete embodied the final flowering of Old Europe. Art and archaeology reveal a life-loving people who honoured the earth, the Goddess, and nature, particularly mountains, caves, and trees. Key values and symbols of this culture of peace survive today in Cretan women’s dances and folk arts including pottery, textiles, baskets, and bread.