divine feminine – Feminism and Religion

How We ALL Need the Goddesses Now . . . by Annie Finch

Carol Christ, in her 1978 clarion call “Why Women Need the Goddess,” summarized four powerful, foundational ways that the Sacred Feminine urgently matters for women crawling out from under patriarchy. Each way helps to heal the psychic damage of our upbringings and surmount the profound losses of our violated herstory. Christ shows how Goddess belief and worship affirms the legitimacy of our power, the sacredness of our bodies, the honoring of our will—and the centrality of our connections with our foremothers and each other.

All this is still so true. All so important.

AND . . . Christ’s framing of Goddessness as a precious path of women’s transformation is not enough anymore.

Times have changed in the forty years since Christ published her essay. Today’s world has been fast plummeting into an even more blatantly hellish (no, I don’t want to insult the source of that word, Goddess Hel, guardian of life and death—so I will change the adjective!) into an even more blatantly patriarchal state of affairs.

THE GODDESSNESS PRAYER by Annie Finch

A SACRED FEMININE VERSION OF THE LORD’S PRAYER BASED ON A TRANSLATION FROM THE ORIGINAL ARAMAIC

Genevieve Vaughan recently posted, on a Maternal Gift Economy group, a link to a new translation of the Lord’s Prayer directly from the original Aramaic. The translation is by Nabu who describes himself by saying he “decodes the hidden knowledge they buried inside religion, history and science.” Nabu recognizes Neil Douglas-Klotz as the foundational scholar of his own translations as well as adding his own notes. Click here for the link to Nabu’s site. I was excited to find the Divine Feminine playing such an important role in this translation.

When I assembled the restored versions of each line together, the resulting poem was not very well-written or easy to say, let alone to memorize. So I translated the translation into a more succinct and concrete version. I hope it will be useful.

Here is the compilation and my own version below, followed by a few notes on reasons for my translation choices.

How to Talk to a War Goddess: A Poetic Lesson From Sekhmet by Annie Finch

Consensus decision making, according to the mother of matriarchal studies Heidi Goettner-Abendroth, is woven into the definition of matriarchal societies. In these cultures, the respect, empathy, kindness, maturity, and belief in sustainable relationships that consensus implies are foundational. War, as the inimitable Yael Deckelberg sings to us, is “not a woman’s game”; any society that truly hears women will not play it. Overseen through the caring wisdom of circles of elder women in what Genevieve Vaughan calls the Maternal Gift Economy, matriarchal societies have less than no use for such a cruel, stupid, wasteful custom. As my great-aunt Jessie Wallace Hughan, founder of the War Resisters League, used to say, someday humanity will consider war as absurd as we now consider the custom of dueling. But we won’t see the end of this integral outrage in our lifetimes; that day will likely arrive only after we’ve all come to our matriarchal senses.

Meanwhile, here we are again.

From the Archives: Fireless Altars and Crone Encounters By Barbara Ardinger

This was originally posted on Nov 10, 2021

We’ve just entered November, the beginning of winter, the season of darkness. Twenty-odd years ago, I led a group of students through the Wheel of the Year in a class I called Practicing the Presence of the Goddess. (I also wrote a book with the same title.

At Imbolc (February 1), we held a divination party at Louise’s house. At Beltane (May 1), we met at Rose’s house, painted our faces, created wreaths of fresh flowers to embody our summer wishes, and then carried our wreaths of flowers through the streets of Huntington Beach to the ocean, where we cast them into the tide. At Lammas (August 1), we harvested our gardens and cooked a feast in my kitchen.

Legacy of Carol Christ: Can You Kill the Spirit? What Happened to Female Imagery for God in Christian Worship? by Carol P. Christ

When I first began to think about female language and images for God I imagined that changing God-He to God-She and speaking of God as Mother some of the time would be a widespread practice in churches and synagogues by now. I was more worried about whether or not images of God as a dominating Other would remain intact. Would God-She be imaged as a Queen or a Woman of War who at Her whim or will could wreak havoc on Her own people?

Forty years later, very little progress has been made on the question of female imagery for God. I suspect that most people in the pews today have never even had to confront prayers to Sophia, God the Mother, or God-She. Most people consider the issue of female language in the churches to have been resolved with inclusive language liturgies and translations of the Bible that use gender neutral rather than female inclusive language.

In her new book, Women, Ritual, and Power: Placing Female Imagery of God in Christian Worship, Elizabeth Ursic states that one of the reasons that the issue of female language seems less pressing than it once did is because those for whom the issue was important have for the most part left the church. But the question is why.

As Above, So Below—A Cosmic Tale by Mary Gelfand

It was when I was studying to become a Witch that I first encountered the phrase ‘As Above, So Below,’ which I now know to be a paraphrase of a ninth century Hermetic text from an Arabic source. I liked this phrase from the beginning as it expressed something I believed but had struggled to articulate so elegantly. I believe that there is a sacred connection between our earthy human existence and the grandeur of the cosmos—our very bodies are composed of star dust.

I was delighted to discover a more specific description of that connection in the Journey of the Universe, by cosmologist Brian Swimme & Mary Tucker, founder of the Forum on Religion & Ecology at Yale. They discuss the creation of the universe in terms of natural cycles of expansion and contraction, which they also refer to as ‘attraction,’ or gravity. They write “All of space and time and mass and energy began as a ‘single point’ that was trillions of degrees hot and that instantly rushed apart. (p. 4)” That expansion is on-going, billions of years later.

Rhiannon as Midlife Queen Mother by Kelle BanDea

We tend to think of Rhiannon as the fairy maiden on the white horse who entices Pwyll, the King and her future husband, into the Otherworld. Or she is the young mother who is unfairly blamed for the death of her own child until he is restored to her. This is Rhiannon’s story as it is most well-known, and she has become a beloved figure due to it. The image of the beautiful fairy woman on the white horse has become equated, to modern neopagan folks and Goddess-women, with the ancient Celtic and Indo-European horse goddesses. Of all the women in the medieval Welsh lore that we know as the four story ‘branches’ of the Mabinogi, Rhiannon is perhaps the most beloved.

But this is only half of the story.

The Painful Problem and How the Divine Feminine is the Answer by Caryn MacGrandle

Two young kids and an Airline Pilot husband who got caught in the 911 lay-offs, a first divorce, struggling, a second marriage and struggling again. Moving around the country with no ties and not knowing many people. I remember after my first marriage having to move to a less expensive neighborhood, I had the thought “Match.com? I don’t need a Match.com, I need a Friend.com!”

Only “Friend.Com” doesn’t work. It is awkward to go out to lunch “Do you want to be my friend?”

And so I remained isolated and struggling alone.

I drank daily in order to quell my anxiety and fall asleep.

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Essentialism Reconsidered

This was originally posted on September 15, 2014

In my Ecofeminism class we have been discussing essentialism because some feminists have alleged that other feminists, particularly ecofeminists and Goddess feminists, are “essentialists.” They argue that essentialist views reinforce traditional stereotypes including those that designate men as rational and women as emotional. I too find essentialism problematic, but I do not agree that Goddess feminism and ecofeminism are intrinsically essentialist.

Goddess feminists and ecofeminists criticize classical dualism: the traditions of thinking that value reason over emotion and feeling, male over female, man over nature. We argued that the western rational tradition sowed the seeds of the environmental crisis when it separated “man” from “nature.”

Goddess feminists and ecofeminists affirm the connections between women and nature in an environmental worldview that acknowledges the interconnection of all beings in the web of life.