“Goddess images are truthful and encouraging, but reified/objectified images of‘The Goddess’ can be mere substitutes for ‘God, ’ failing to convey that Being is a Verb, and that She is many verbs.” —Mary Daly
The goddess has many faces, many manifestations—none of which are mutually exclusive. Diversity, multiplicity, and shape-shifting are her most striking characteristics. Ways of approaching the goddess today fall into five basic albeit overlapping groups: a concern with the historical goddess as she exists in other cultures—Tara, Kali, Oya—or the prehistoric goddess of our own Western tradition—the so-called “fertility” goddesses such as the Venus of Wilendorf; the view that the goddesses depicted in mythology—mainly Greek, but increasingly from other sources such as Sumerian and Egyptian—are emblematic of certain psychological types or archetypes of modern women; Christian feminists who see Mary as a Goddess figure; those who see the Goddess as a vital spirit abroad in the land, a felt personal spirit which only has to be called to be present; and the goddess as nature, ground, or basic space. Within these broad outlines, as the following readings reveal, variations abound, as do interpretations and reactions.
I conducted an experiement recently and asked a wide variety of women how they envisioned the goddess. Here are the results.
The Goddess Envisioned
Responses ranged from “I don’t” to complex answers with layers of meaning. The most dismissive were those who had the least contact with current ideas about the goddess or were unsympathetic to the spiritual dimensions of the women’s movement in general. Some saw the goddess as a spontaneously arising spiritual force evoked by an overabundance of yang energy in the culture, a source of renewal and sanity for women and men oppressed by centuries of patriarchy. To others the goddess simply meant God in drag, a means by which a “she” can be included in our descriptions of the Godhead. To many, the goddess is a vital source of nurturing energy available to anyone who has the courage and imagination to name Her. To the psychologically inclined, she becomes a constellation of feminine archetypes, partly but not completely defined by the Greek goddesses as interpreted by Jungian therapists. For the cynical, the whole goddess movement is a feminist ego trip taken advantage of by New Age bookstores to sell more cards.
For many women, the goddess isn’t an idea, but a felt presence in their lives. Nelle Morton in The Journey Home gives a vivid sense of how the goddess “takes over” for her in crisis moments—like in a bumpy landing in a disabled plane. This experience of a presence “just under the skin” is repeated by women all over the country. A video producer from the San Francisco Bay Area reported: “My goddess group began spontaneously, I found myself building an altar and creating simple rituals because they seemed right in the moment. I talked to other women—one a complete stranger in a laundromat—who were doing the same thing. When we started meeting, this nonverbal spirit that we came to call the goddess seemed to invest what we did with meaning. Something alive and vibrant—some presence—started working through us. For the first time, 1 feel that 1 am having my own religious experience rather than something made for someone else that doesn’t quite fit.”
For some, using the term goddess creates a sense of the sacred in a way that the word God—with all of its patriarchal associations— does not. Contact with the idea of the goddess helps to break down the concept of God as male and leads to knowledge of how this informs our ideas about women. A nurse once told me, “I found it tremendously revealing the first time I heard someone use the term goddess instead of god. I couldn’t take the deity seriously as a ‘she. ’ Then I realized how denigrated the universal ‘she’ is in our culture. I see how it all connects now, why you feminists recognize Christianity with its male god as the linchpin for patriarchy. Still, I don’t think that using the term goddess is much of a solution.” Carol Christ points out in “Why Women Need the Goddess” that using the term goddess is a way of empowering the female and feminine in our culture. Even among those who acknowledge their need for and the presence of the goddess in their lives, there are a wide varieties of ways in which she is envisioned. Catholics will refer you to Mary, Buddhists to Tara, Chinese to Kwan Yin, Africans to Oya, and so on, depending on what their religions include in the way of feminine deities. For others, goddess denotes such Greek figures as Hera or Aphrodite or—especially with Jungian therapists— psychological archetypes which correspond to these mythic females. To some it seems that these popular images are patriarchal versions of the female, whereas the real goddess is something completely different—something that doesn’t blink at death but has a pitiless, primal power. Sylvia Perera discusses this concept of the goddess in The Descent to the Goddess.
For others, goddess worship—whatever form it takes—is a stage that one goes through. As a Yoga teacher put it: “I used to be ‘into’ the goddess, but now it seems dualistic. 1 have an altar that has gods and goddess. I think the emphasis on the goddess was something we needed to get out of the patriarchal mind set.”
In some cases, the goddess is not personified, but perceived in more general terms. The early Christian gnostics and some modern feminist theologians see her as the Holy Spirit. “I see the Goddess everywhere,” a witch recently remarked. “She is everything: rivers, trees, mountains, other people. Men have kept us from our true religion, our connections with ourselves. . . . During the women’s holocaust, The Burning Times, thousands of women were burned as witches. Mainly because they had power—the power of the goddess.” The goddess as mother nature has becomes increasingly important in eco-feminism, especially as it overlaps with the Native American vision of a world in which there is respect for the fourlegged and winged as well as “all my relations.”
In the wonderful Canadian movie Goddess Remembered, Jean Bolen remarks that she has a sense of the goddess as “life force, as affiliation, as that which links us all on a deep level to be one with each other and with nature.” This reflects the concept in Tibetan Buddhism that the feminine is the ground, basic space; that whenever something comes into form, it is masculine.
Not everyone equates the feminine with the goddess, nor finds goddess worship desirable. “I thought god was bad enough,” a student informed me, “why mess around with all this goddess business?” Thus, for some, the term goddess itself grates, and the women who use the word appear irritating and pretentious. A rebirther summed it up: “Hawaii is full of goddesses. Women ‘honor’ the goddess in each other. It’s sort of a mutual ego-plumping activity. No one is named Cindy or Jane anymore, but Shekhinah or Isis. Instead of having regular jobs, they’re ‘Keepers of the Light’ or‘Temple Virgins. ’ They’re into goddess jewelry--lots of it and tons of filmy clothes. The goddess movement has become decidedly decadent. Certainly in Hawaii, and probably in places like Mt. Shasta as well.”
Many people do have a problem with the self-importance or commercialization of the goddess movement, but retain a direct connection to the goddess herself. A writer: “I used to snub the goddess movement because I didn’t like the women who were attracted to it. But in a women’s creative group, I felt this wonderful sense of openness that I’d never experienced before. It’s hard to put into words, but now I think the goddess is space. A sort of sympathetic openness in which I can define myself, become who I really am.”
Kimberley Snow, The Sante Fe Sun, August, 1993
Why Women Need the Goddess
If the simplest meaning of the Goddess symbol is an affirmation of the legitimacy and beneficence of female power writ large, then a question immediately arises, “Is the Goddess simply female power writ large, and if so, why bother with the symbol of Goddess at all? Or does the symbol refer to a Goddess ' out there’ who is not reducible to a human potential?” The many women who have rediscovered the power of the Goddess would give three answers to this question: (1) The Goddess is divine female, a personification who can be invoked in prayer and ritual;
(2) the Goddess is symbol of the life, death, and rebirth energy in nature and culture, in personal and communal life; and (3) the Goddess is the symbol of the affirmation of the legitimacy and beauty of female power (made possible by the new becoming of women in the women’s liberation movement). If one were to ask these women which answer is the “correct” one, different responses would be given. Some would assert that the Goddess definitely is not “out there,” that the symbol of a divinity “out there” is part of the legacy of patriarchal oppression, which brings with it the authoritarianism, hierarchicalism, and dogmatic rigidity associated with biblical monotheistic religions. They might assert that the Goddess symbol reflects the sacred power within women and nature, suggesting the connectedness between women’s cycles of menstruation, birth, and menopause, and the life and death cycles of the universe. Others seem quite comfortable with the notion of Goddess as divine female protector and creator and would find their experience of the Goddess limited by the assertion that she is not also out there as well as within themselves and in all natural processes.
Carol P. Christ in Womenspirit Rising
Earth-based religions incorporate the idea of a shaman or healer who is able to contact spirits through uisions or bp traveling to the underworld. This is done for the sake of the community—to heal a member of the tribe or to attain information needed for group survival or harmony. In the past few decades, a renewed interest in Native American religions has provided a model for living in balance with nature as well as a wealth of shamanic practices for women. Some think that the original shamans were women; certainly the tradition includes women and provides a powerful sphere for channeling female energy coupled with concern for the community. Joan Halifax rightly warns that the ego stands ready to insist on the credit when we take on the role of a shaman. “Psychic inflation” also results when an individual woman assumes goddess energy as her own personal property, not something that links her to the world at large. This linkage of ego to a personified goddess may account for the criticisms of pretention and unnecessary drama leveled against the goddess movement.
“The earth does not belong to us, we belong to it. ” -Black Elk
“There is no form without the gift of the Mother and the Father. From Father Sky comes your consciousness and Mother Earth is your very bones. To sense the balance of the Mother/Father, Father/Mother within one’s own being, one’s own nature, is a way to renew the Earth, to renew our hearts, to renew the vision. ’’ -Dhyani Ywahoo
Shaman Woman
There is a trap in the extraordinary. One begins to feel special and self-important, along with an absence of compassion. Maybe it is disappointing, this talk of simplicity in favor of the more dramatic aspects of being a shaman. What we all want at our core is to be free from suffering; we want to be in a situation of simplicity. We don’t want to be driven by desire, or hate; nor do we wish to be caught in confusion. Moving past these three poisons means that we discover simplicity, harmony, relaxation, compassion, and wisdom. From this awakening arises the impulse to help others. . . .
An aspect that calls to be examined in our lives now has to do with the feminine and the earth. We need to look at our role as women in relation to helping people in our culture discover the extraordinary beauty of the earth. Part of this has come about for me because 1 have made a friend of my womanhood. I’ve discovered my woman shield to be deep and creative. I am not afraid of my woman. I have a strong sense of great joy in being her. By the same token, I have a strong relationship with my man shield, the healer.
There has been a weaving together of sky consciousness with earth consciousness. 1 feel healed intellectually with the gift of Buddhism and from the experience of the shaman. The earth has healed my body.
Now I am bringing a sense of equanimity and harmony between these pairs of opposites to others. It is not so much as something to teach, but as something to be. Those who walk in the wilderness will sense that balance directly. One feels no need to build statues to the goddess. One can sit under a tree. One feels no need to create a throne for her to sit on. Her throne is everywhere on earth.
Joan Halifax Contemporary Shaman Women
Quotes to contemplate:
“To be fed only male images of the divine is to be badly malnourished. ” —Christine Downing
“Sometimes I wonder how I could ever have been so unaware, so unconscious not only of the central importance of the Feminine in how we construct our society and our world, but of what is now my most profound and indispensable sense of self as a woman and a person. ”—Riane Eisler
“Most important, our discovery of Goddess attributes that may not have been previously defined as feminine leads us to the liberating realization that consciousness often includes the element of choice. Recognizing a characteristic that is generally designated as masculine today, but was an attribute of a Goddess several millennia ago, helps us to understand that this characteristic may not be gender specific at all. ” —Merlin Stone
“The purest acts of worship acknowledging her presence within us are the simple, significant gestures toward the natural objects outside us—touching a stone or a tree, drinking water and milk, being with fire or standing in the wind or listening to birds.” —Meinrad Craighead
“The archetypal role of the new femininity is to stand as a priestess of the fullness of life as it is, with its unpredictable pitfalls and unfathomable depths, richness and deprivation, risks and errors, joys and pains. She insists on personal experiencing and personal response to the needs of the human situation.” —Edward C. Whitmont
If female history is different, if female biology is different, if female psychology is different, if all the hundreds of little responses to life’s daily occurrences are different, how can the spirituality be the same?" —Theresa King
“Most of us are used only to awesome holiness of churches and lofty arches, cathedrals where, with stained glass and brooding silences, priests try to emulate the religious atmosphere that is to be found in the living earth in some of her secret places.” —Mabel Dodge Luhan
“Nature is the signature of God. Understanding nature, you begin to see the metaphor, the microcosmic law, the macrocosmic law, that is within us every moment. We don’t have to be incredibly wise. We just need to open our eyes and see what we live in.”—Coqosh Auh-Ho-Oh
Above material excerpted from Keys to the Open Gate, Section Three: Manifestations of the Goddess, available in paperback and Kindle available on Amazon.
The Goddess Envisioned, Kimberley Snow
"Splendid Moments,” Alma Luz Villanueva
Why Women Need the Goddess, Carol P. Christ
Meditation on Six Greek Goddesses, Jennifer and Roger Woolger
Comfort at the Hour of Our Death, Marina Warner
The Holy Virgin, Stephan A. Hoeller
Descending to the Goddess, Syllvia Perera
Earth Goddess, Hallie Iglehart Austen
Shaman Woman, Joan Halifax
Deepening Spirituality Through Nature, Brooke Medicine Eagle
Interview with a Witch, A talk with Patricia Eagle
What In Heaven’s Name Is Going On Over There?, Center for Non-Tradlttonal Religions
African Goddess Oya, Judith Gleason
Isis Healing Meditation, Selena Fox
Shakti, 144 Kimberley Snow
Kali, 149 Ajit Mookerjee
Hymn to Kali, Ramakrishna
Kuan Yin, John Blofeld
The Dakini Principle, Tsultrim Allione
Magic Dance, Thinley Norbu