In her comment following my last post which was about mythology, my friend, Carol Christ, expands on my paragraph about how the so-called “ancient triple goddess” was really invented in 1948 by Robert Graves in his book, The White Goddess. (Thanks, Carol.)
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, when the Goddess movement was just getting up on its feet and our ovular books were being published, the idea arose that if “they” have a holy trinity, “we” have one, too. And ours is older and holier. We see it in the three phases of the moon, new (Virgin), full (Mother), and dark (Crone). Here’s a tiny sample of these books that changed the lives of so many women and men:
- Woman’s Mysteries Ancient and Modern by M. Esther Harding (1971, but first published in 1933)
- The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974) by Marija Gimbutas
- When God Was a Woman (1976) by Merlin Stone
- Lost Goddesses of Early Greece: A Collection of Pre-Hellenic Myths (1978) by Charlene Spretnak
- The first edition of The Spiral Dance (1979) by Starhawk
- The Chalice and the Blade (1987) by Riane Eisler
- Laughter of Aphrodite (1987) by Carol P. Christ
- The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries (1989) by Z. Budapest
- The Reflowering of the Goddess (1990) by Gloria Feman Orenstein
- Whence the Goddesses: A Source Book (1990) by Miriam Robbins Dexter
Triple goddess? ’Tain’t so. Our beloved triple goddess is one of our foundational myths. It’s nice and it’s perhaps inspiring, but it’s only a myth. Anyone who looks at a calendar or almanac—or up into the sky every night for a month—can easily see that the moon doesn’t have three phases. It has four: waxing, full, waning, and dark. And since the late 20th century, women have lived long enough to go through more than three stages of life. Continue reading “An Archaic Trinity of Goddesses? Not Necessarily. by Barbara Ardinger”
feminismandreligion.com 