Tag: Goddess worship

She Alone Was There In The Beginning: Nature Creatrix by Stuart Dean

Stuart WordPress photoI concluded my last post by suggesting that “Creator” in the Declaration of Independence (DI) should have been ‘Creatrix.’  Though ‘Creator’ imbues the DI with a bit of quasi-scriptural authority, the possessive pronoun “their” before it effectively limits the full benefits of creation to men.  That alone should have precluded even the suggestion that the DI effectively endorses Christianity or that it constitutes the basis for a civil religion.

Quite obviously that has not been the case, but that should not be taken to validate the misogyny the DI manifests.  ‘Creator,’ the masculine form of the Latin noun derived from the verb ‘to create’ (‘Creatrix’ is the feminine), is unambiguously masculine in a way that ‘God’ simply is not.  Its appearance in the DI raises the suspicion that it was selected to underscore the masculinity of “Nature’s God,” the phase used in the DI’s opening paragraph.  Surely some of the signatories of the DI knew their Latin authors well enough to know how peculiar it is to speak of Nature as having or needing a God.  Perhaps they wanted to clarify things. Continue reading “She Alone Was There In The Beginning: Nature Creatrix by Stuart Dean”

Almighty Isis by Elizabeth Cunningham

Elizabeth Cunningham headshot jpegWhen the press began using I.S.I.S. as a perhaps inaccurate and now obsolete acronym for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, diverse groups made a connection with the Egyptian goddess who was once worshiped all over the Greco- Roman empire. A pagan organization protested the appropriation of the goddess’s name. Others took it as a sign that the self-declared Islamic State represented the anti-Christ or confirmed a conspiracy by the Illuminati. (Divinity of any kind seems to attract human projection.)

When I was doing research for my novel, The Passion of Mary Magdalen, Isis found a special place in my heart. A lover and mother goddess, later associated with both Mary Magdalen and the Virgin Mary, Isis appealed to people from all classes and cultures, especially to women, respectable Roman matrons and prostitutes alike. Continue reading “Almighty Isis by Elizabeth Cunningham”

Translations of the Bible (and Translators) are Important to Women by Jennifer Sharp

One of the most interesting topics is the theory that YHWH’s roots may be found in information about the ancient Goddess IO, and that YHWH is an inclusive name for an inclusive deity.

Some years ago I read the Bible and objected to passages about women. That was when works by Ruether, Stone, Daly, Schüssler Fiorenza, Eisler, etc. became available. I read all of the feminist writers I could find. Because of this reading, I looked up biblical passages in different Bibles.  I began to notice something rather curious. A passage in one Bible would say “she did it” – the same passage in another Bible would say, “he did it.” “This,” my current minister would say, “This is the word of God. You can believe in it.” “Believe in it”? Which biblical passage was I supposed to believe – the “she” or the “he”?

Being a questioning person, I got serious. I searched the University of Wisconsin bookstore shelves for required reading in Hebrew and Semitic studies, acquired references listed in bibliographies of those books, read about the development of the biblical text, purchased interlinear Bibles, Hebrew and Greek grammars, analytical lexicons, concordances, commentaries, and more English versions of the Bible and eventually took a class in Hebrew. Continue reading “Translations of the Bible (and Translators) are Important to Women by Jennifer Sharp”