This was originally posted on June 10, 2012
A man in the group leaned forward and asked, “But how did the Goddess get overcome?” So I told him. Young “warrior heroes” came galloping out of the Russian steppes and the Caucasus Mountains, including Afghanistan, which no one (not even Alexander the so-called Great) has ever conquered. The boys were carrying their thunder-solar-sky gods with them.
Continue reading “From the Archives: Where Did the Gods Come From? by Barbara Ardinger”
In many cultures of the world, including our own, trees are considered the ancestors of humanity – own our ancestors.
Trees are connected with great goddesses throughout antiquity. We see this in the bible where, as I’ve noted before, the Tree of Life is Eve’s tree for the word Eve means life. It is, in essence, the Tree of Eve. Goddesses in trees feeding humans were common themes in ancient Middle Eastern art. The tree was Hers to give freely of as she wished.
Anthropologist and religious scholar, Mircea Eliade writes extensively about the associations of trees ancestral connection to humans. He calls them both mystical and mythical.[1] His examples include the Miao groups of Southern China and Southeast Asia who “worship the bamboo as their ancestor.” He also notes Australian tribes who view the mimosa as their progenitor. And there is a tribe from Madagascar, called Antaivandrika which means “people of the tree,” who considered themselves descended from the banana tree.
Continue reading “Biblical Poetry – Trees by Janet Maika’i Rudolph”
One of my oldest friends who I met when I was eight years old reached out to me the other day saying that if there was ever anything she could do, please let her know. She lives in another state far away but is a subscriber to one of my blogs so she has been aware of the various things going on in my life (second divorce, so many changes and transitions in my life yet again, etc.)
Her note said if there was ever anything she could do to help, just let her know.
And I thought to myself: hmmmmmm.
You see I just put a new feature on my app where it emails local events to local users, and one of the first steps in getting this to work is having those local events on the app. So I asked her if she would mind helping me put local events on the app.
We had not actually talked in a long time, and when we had a zoom call to discuss this, I broke down crying.
I felt the pity from her. I also saw just how far I had departed from ‘normal.’
But I don’t want to be ‘normal’.
Continue reading “What is Wrong with This Picture? Rewriting Eve by Caryn MacGrandle”Last month I wrote about the Garden of Eden. You can read it here:
In that post, I described how Eden is essentially a garden of treasures. What are those treasures? I believe that they are seeds, the most prolific and creative element for spreading life here on Earth. Below is my own fantastical story about the Garden and how the seeds came to reside there.
Sinuous and serpentine, Hawwah, Hayyat, Eve emerged from Apsû, carrying within her seeds, fertilized eggs, and all the fruitfulness and abundance therein.
Continue reading “Eden, Eve and a Tale of Seeds by Janet Maika’i Rudolph”
Over the past few months, I’ve been struggling to write posts. This month is no different. I am currently sitting with four different half-drafts on three semi-related topics, none of which I seem to be able to complete. I’ve gone back to each of them numerous times. I write. I erase. I rewrite. I copy bits of one into another to save for some other time. I’m left with one sentence: this week’s Torah parshah is Bereshit (Genesis 1:1-6:8). Great. Glad to know that. Now what?
When writing, I often find myself in one of two camps given the current state of the world. Either, I have so much to say that I have no clear idea where to start, so I write three pages of more or less nonsense. Or, I find myself just so inundated with information that I don’t know where my opinion begins and another’s ends. I write another 3 pages of completely different nonsense. I get fed up with both. I start praying better thoughts will just write themselves. They don’t.
Continue reading “Write on Lilith! (Write on Eve!) by Ivy Helman”
This blog post is the 3rd in a series of looking for female deities in the bible who have been translated out of easy reach or otherwise hidden within its words. In my last blog post I discussed bird imagery and the bible. It is available here.
You can’t complete a discussion about birds without also bringing up Lilith. She appears by name only in one place in the bible; Isaiah 34:14. Isaiah uses the word liyliyth as a feature in a hellish landscape. Although it is also a name, liyliyth is treated as a common noun. The most prevalent translation is “screech owl” although others have included such names as night creature, night monster, night hag, and she-vampire. Continue reading “Yes There are Goddesses in the Bible, Part 3”
This title isn’t entirely true. Eve would need an exceptionally well thought out replacement for Her name to be as sweet as it already it. That is because Eve’s name is unique, multi-dimensional and integral to the Bible’s mysteries. The Hebrew word for Eve translated to English means “life.”
And Adam called his wife’s name Eve;
because she was the mother of all living.
Genesis 3:20
Barbara Walker wrote about variations of Eve’s name as they appeared in neighboring cultures. Eve in Hebrew is pronounced variously as hawah or chavah. Walker wrote that in many middle-eastern cultures, Her name was the hallmark of “superior feminine power. To the Hittites, she was Hawwah, Life.’ To the Persians, she was Hvov, ‘the Earth.’ Aramaeans called her Hawah ‘Mother of All Living.” (The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, p 289.) In other words, She was a Great Goddess in Her own right. Her name was and is still is reminiscent of the awesome power that She has held in our lives. Continue reading “Eve by Any Other Name… by Janet Maika’i Rudolph”
The serpent in the Bible is treated as Eve’s partner in crime, a malevolent seducer who is responsible for humankind’s expulsion from paradise. But did you know there are serpents who figure positively in the Bible? There are serpent priests, a feathered serpent and a healing serpent. Check out this passage:
Be ye therefore wise as serpents
Matthew 10:16
Levites were serpent priests as evidenced by the etymology of their name. The root word levi is seen in the name of the creature “leviathan,” the giant serpent. This is reminiscent of the Pythia, the oracle from Delphi whose title is derived from the root word python.
The feathered serpent referenced in Isaiah 30:6 is a seraph, usually translated as a “fiery flying serpent.”
Continue reading “Eve is the Hero of the Garden of Eden, Part 2 by Janet Maika’i Rudolph”
She is a tree of life to those who embrace her
and those who lay hold of her are blessed.
Proverbs 3:18 (Berean Study Bible)
Eve’s story, as it has been passed onto us from the Bible, makes Her responsible for manki . . .ahem . . .humankind’s being cursed for all time. The story as our culture sets it up is that the serpent is an evil tempter with Eve as a weakling co-conspirator. Both Eve and the serpent are considered guilty parties, responsible for their own drawing down of the curse.
At the risk of being rude: BULLSHIT!
In truth, Eve’s story is a powerful tale complete with a magical talking serpent. And it only communicates directly with Eve, and never with Adam. Why?
BECAUSE THIS IS EVE’S STORY.
Continue reading “Eve is the Hero of the Garden of Eden, Part 1 by Janet Maika’i Rudolph”
Ever since the election of You-Know-Who, I have been doing a lot of creative writing.
Ever since the election of You-Know-Who, I have been doing a lot of creative writing. Unlike academic publications, policy reports, or my dissertation, creative writing, much like my mentor Dr. Marie Cartier has written about, provided me with a needed escape from a world that seems to grow darker with each passing day. In college, I served as Poetry Editor for the Wisconsin Review, the oldest literary journal in Wisconsin. Continue reading “What I Believe (Post-2016) by John Erickson”
Katharine (Kate) Bushnell (1855-1946) was by any measure a remarkable figure in the history of Christian feminism. A global anti-trafficking activist and author of God’s Word to Women, a fascinating feminist theology that recasts the entire biblical narrative as a story of liberation for women, Bushnell was once widely known throughout the late-nineteenth-century Protestant world.
A Midwestern Methodist, Bushnell came of age in Evanston, IL. After a brief stint as a medical missionary to China, she helped launch the American “social purity” movement by leading a dramatic exposé of the trafficking of women in Wisconsin lumber camps. Drawing attention to the injustices women faced under the Victorian sexual double standard, Bushnell helped break the “conspiracy of silence” that inhibited discussion of sexuality among “respectable” women and men. She then took her activism overseas, where she exposed the abusive practices of the British army in colonial India, particularly when it came to the confinement and abuse of local women in military brothels. Continue reading “Katharine Bushnell—The Most Important Christian Feminist You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Of by Kristin Kobes Du Mez”
A man in the group leaned forward and asked, “But how did the Goddess get overcome?” So I told him. Young “warrior heroes” came galloping out of the Russian steppes and the Caucasus Mountains, including Afghanistan, which no one (not even Alexander the so-called Great) has ever conquered. The boys were carrying their thunder-solar-sky gods with them.
I attended a book club at a beautiful metaphysical bookstore a few weeks ago where we discussed the conquest of matrilineal civilizations by the patriarchy. A man in the group leaned forward and asked, “But how did the Goddess get overcome?” So I told him. As my friend Miriam Robbins Dexter writes in her essay in The Rule of Mars, young “warrior heroes” came galloping out of the Russian steppes and the Caucasus Mountains, including Afghanistan, which no one (not even Alexander the so-called Great) has ever conquered. The boys were carrying their thunder-solar-sky gods with them. Those gods included Jehovah, Zeus, Jupiter, and Ares. (Allah arrived later.) Some of these young “heroes” were outlaws “who live[d] at the edge of society and are connected in legend and myth to wolves, dogs, or other animals.”[1] Dexter does not use the term “biker gangs,” but that’s what they were. Testosterone-crazed invaders out to have a good time. They ran over every goddess and temple in their path, and to make themselves seem more legitimate, they “married” former Great Goddesses (like Hera) to their thunder gods (Zeus). Their gods are famous for hurling lightning bolts, enticing their generals to invade peaceful, Goddess-worshipping lands (like Canaan), and populating their new turf via rape, which is how the innumerable sons of Zeus were conceived. More recently, during the last two or three millennia, one of those gods has inspired his prophets and preachers to roar about sin and hell and idol-worship and punishment. The new gods and their carriers thus planted the seeds of warfare in society and its literature. I describe one such invasion in the prologue of Secret Lives, where after a horrific vision that causes her the blind herself, the shaman sends her people out into the world to escape the coming hooligans on their horses and become the secretive, dark “little people” of Europe. Continue reading “Where Did the Gods Come From? by Barbara Ardinger”
In the first part, I posed the question about whether or not the so-called “Curse of Eve” could be interpreted alternatively from the traditional understanding of Genesis 3:16a (the result of Eve’s disobedience being the punishment of painful childbirth for all generations of women). I considered an alternate interpretation of “sorrow” rather than “pain” for the verse, a lens through which the punishment could then be seen as impacting the God-human relationship rather than as a condemnation of pain.
I would like to further examine the consequences of this consideration. What if we were bold enough to interpret both the punishments of Adam and Eve (toiling over the land and pain in childbirth, respectively) as symbolic for all of humankind—and, furthermore, as speaking specifically of the God-human relationship? After all, men certainly aren’t the only ones who have toiled in the fields to bring forth food (I say this specifically thinking of a female farmer who lives down the road from me, and remembering her 10-14 hour days laboring over her harvests). Nor are all women subject to painful childbirth; in fact, the documentary Orgasmic Birth specifically devotes its study to women who find the experience of birth both sensual and ecstatic. If interpreting the Scriptural “curses” as literal and final, these not-so-exceptional exceptions would seem to contradict God’s decree. Yet when interpreting the punishments as indicative of a schism in relationship between God and humankind, the implications can be more clearly understood. Continue reading “The “Curse of Eve”—Is Pain Our Punishment? Part 2 by Stacia Guzzo”
I have been involved in several interesting discussions lately involving friends asking me what I thought of the so-called “Curse of Eve.” This “curse,” which is generally used in reference to the pain of childbirth, is assumed from the text of Genesis 3:16a. On one side, I have had friends and colleagues argue that the pains of labor are a direct result of Eve’s sin, and thus all women who bear children will suffer them as a reminder of their inherent sinful nature. On the other hand, I have had friends question this interpretation: Why, they ask, would God use such an incredible event to punish us? And what about women who don’t experience any pain in childbirth at all? Or who do not have children? Is God’s punishment reserved for those who procreate? This doesn’t seem to make much sense in a larger spiritual framework. Continue reading “The “Curse of Eve”—Is Pain Our Punishment? Part I”
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