goddess – Feminism and Religion

The Legacy of Carol P. Christ: A Radical Conclusion: We Are Our Own Authorities

This was originally posted on August 11, 2014

Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza articulated a widely held tenet of feminist theology when she stated that feminism places a question mark over all inherited texts and traditions. This means that feminists cannot and must not accept any teaching or traditional way of performing religious acts simply because “the Bible [or the Koran or the minister or the priest or the rabbi or the imam or the guru] tells me so.”

Instead, feminists must question every text and tradition and the words of every religious leader to see whether or not they promote the full humanity of women. The implication of this is that we must acknowledge and take responsibility for becoming our own authorities—as individuals and in communities.

A tongue –in-cheek letter that began circulating on the internet in 2000 under the title “Why Can’t I Own a Canadian?” makes the point that even those who claim to be adhering to every “jot and tittle” of the Holy Book are in fact choosing to accept some aspects of tradition while rejecting others.

The letter begins:

Dear Dr. Laura,

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them.

The author of the letter continues:

Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can’t I own Canadians?

The Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Good Theology is Feminist Theology

The was originally posted on July 21, 2014

Judith Plaskow and I are just now completing the draft of the manuscript of the book we have been working on for the past 2 ½ years. It has a new title: Two Views of Goddess and God for Our Time.* I have been thinking of little else for the past few weeks. An editor who is considering our book said that she was hoping we could address our book to an audience larger than the feminist theology community. Thinking about this, a light dawned: if feminist theology is right that traditional theology denies the full humanity of women, then good theology must be feminist theology. Our work is not tangential to the theological mainstream, but is at its center.

We have revised the Introduction and Conclusion to the book with the assumption that our work should appeal not just to other feminists, but to a wide range of intelligent readers and thinkers. The fact that we were asked to participate in a dialogue about the nature of God in Tikkun magazine’s Summer 2014 inspires us to hope that we are right that feminist theology is becoming part of the progressive theological mainstream.

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: JUSTICE AND PREJUDICE IN THE “PROPHETIC TRADITION”

This was originally posted July 14, 2014

Besides being advocates of social justice, the prophets of Israel were advocates of “exclusive monotheism,” exclusively “male monotheism,” “religious othering,” and “religious prejudice.”

Many progressive Jews and Christians find inspiration in prophets because of their insistence that their God cares about the poor and “the widow at the gate.” For progressive Christians, Jesus stands in the prophetic tradition, and the core of his message is “concern for the poor.” For progressive Jews the prophetic tradition is the root of their concern for human rights.

Those who locate their spirituality and concern for social justice in the prophets can point proudly to Martin Luther King and the many priests, ministers, and rabbis, as well as ordinary Christians and Jews who marched with him as exemplars of the prophetic tradition.

But the prophetic tradition also has a nasty underside.

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Rituals Of Spring and Greek Easter

This was originally posted on May 6, 2013

Though I am not a Christian any more, I don’t want to sit home alone on Easter Day. Besides being a Christian ritual, Greek Easter is a time to eat lamb with family and friends, and to celebrate the coming of spring by feasting out-of-doors in flowering fields or in a garden filled with flowers, bees, butterflies, and birds. Such rituals have been celebrated from time immemorial.

Greek Easter came late this year, only yesterday, May 5. I prepared for an Easter party in my garden for weeks. My garden is planted with herbs and aromatics—lavender, thyme, oregano, rosemary, curry plant, rue, sage, cistus, rose-scented geranium, sweet william, cat mint and several other kinds of mint, bee balm, and roses and fruit trees, including lemon, bitter orange, pomegranate, olive, quince, and cherry. Everything blossoms in spring, attracting bees and butterflies.

I began weeding and pruning about 6 weeks ago. This year I had to remove many overgrown lavender plants. For the last 3 weeks in addition to ongoing weeding and pruning, I have been replanting lavender which I have promised myself to prune “way back” in the fall, along with purple sage, blue daisies, and thyme. Though there is bare ground in some parts of the garden, in other parts mature plants and trees are in full flower.

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: COMPLICATIONS AND CONFUSIONS IN DISCUSSIONS OF THE GODDESS

This was originally posted on May 12, 2014

Although writing in patriarchal Greece from a patriarchal perspective, Hesiod said in his Theogony or Birth of the Gods that Gaia or Earth alone was the mother of the Mountains, Sky, and Sea. With the male Sky she gave birth to the next generation of deities known as the “Titans,” who were overthrown by Zeus. Hesiod’s was a “tale with a point of view” in which “it was necessary” for the “forces of civilization”–for him represented by warrior God and rapist Zeus–to violently overthrow and replace earlier conceptions of the origin life on earth and presumably also to overthrow and replace the people and societies that created them.

With the triumph of Christianity in the age of Constantine in the 4th century AD, Christus Victor replaced Zeus in the cities, while the religion of Mother Earth continued to be practiced in the countryside. Over time, many of the attributes of Mother Earth were assimilated into the image of Mary, and priests began to perform rituals earlier dedicated to Mother Earth, such as blessing the fields and the seeds before planting. In the Middle Ages “the Goddess” re-emerged within Western Christianity in devotion to the Virgin Mary, the female saints, and figures such as Lady Wisdom, at the same time that the history of the Goddess was being erased.

In the middle of the 19th century, in Das Mutterrecht (The Mother Right), J. J. Bachofen stunned the scholarly world with his theory that matrilineal kinship, matrilineal inheritance, and reverence for the Great Mother were to be found at the origins of civilization. Bachofen challenged the view that patriarchy and the worship of male Gods had existed “from the beginning .”

Mother/Meter: Reclaiming Poetry’s Sacred Goddess Languages by Annie Finch

Those of us on the paths of the Divine Feminine can go to great lengths to approach Her. We might read and study hard-to-find books, invest time and money to visit temples and museums, and seek out Goddesses-related power spots around the world. We might acquire ceremonial jewelry and devotional artworks, attend conferences, track down Goddesses-inspired music, and apprentice with teachers from spiritual traditions that may be far removed from our own heritage. We might invest in supplies and training to craft devotional music, art, sculpture, and apparel, and create or attend performances, healings, and rituals honoring the Feminine Sacred.

Yet there is one important ritual activity that we routinely forget and ignore, one that we know was key to Goddess worship whenever we have written prayers, from Demeter to Inanna, Isis to Freyja, Hekate to Sarasvati. This time-honored practice is simple to learn, costs nothing to use, and quickly, safely, and legally creates an altered state of mind that brilliantly and efficiently connects us with our spirits, the natural world, the Divine Feminine, and each other. And furthermore, this ancient sacred craft is not limited to indigenous or ancient cultures but is already part of the familiar heritage of anyone who speaks English, so there is no danger of cultural appropriation in using it.

My God Bleeds With Me by Jsabél Bilqís

My god bleeds with me
Her feet right beside mine for morning gratitudes
Soles to soils, we touch skin to skin
She’s vast like me
And I love her

My god grieves when I do
My sorrows meet Hers at the ocean shore
Vial for vial, our tears make our medicine
She can transmute anything, just like me
And I love Her

She courts me
leaves me love notes in the shapes of flower petals
winks at me in amber sunsets
morning serenades and juicy fruits
She loves me! She lifes me!
And I love and I life Her too

Goddess Architectures: How Cultures Shape Sacred Feminine Power

In this essay, I address a gap in goddess spirituality, between a rhetoric of celebrating the body, and lack of truly embodied practice. I reflect on the archetypal language commonly used in goddess spirituality, tracing its roots in Greek mythology and depth psychology while questioning its cultural limits.

By introducing the notion of “goddess architectures”, I explore how ecological, social and cosmological contexts shape symbolic structures, and how sacred feminine power can be named, distributed, embodied or obscured across cultures. Finally, I propose movement as a way back to lived experience beyond symbolic and linguistic frameworks.

Goddess Spirituality into the Lived Body

Over the past thirty years of researching and practising goddess spirituality, I noticed a persistent discrepancy. While this field speaks about honouring the body as sacred, in practice it often feels like rhetorical lip service. The language of embodiment is present, but remains disconnected from the body on many levels.

Moving through the Midlife Threshold

Goddess Qi Gong as a New Compass

There is a deep and insidious taboo around ageing that leaves so many of our experiences as women unspoken, as if the physical, emotional, hormonal and mental shifts of growing older should be suffered alone and hidden behind doors.

What if we can turn midlife into a positive initiation that we share together? Would it be possible to learn to read our body and psyche differently? Might practising conscious movement literally help us move through this phase? And what would happen if we re-orient ourselves towards the many faces of the Goddess?

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.