Why Women Need the Goddess
At the close of Ntosake Shange’s stupendously successful Broadway play for floored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, a tall beautiful black woman rises from despair to cry out, “I found God in myself and I loved her fiercely.”1 Her discovery is echoed by women and around the country who meet spontaneously in small groups on full moons, solstices, and equinoxes to celebrate the Goddess as symbol of life and earth powers and waxing and waning energies in the universe and in themselves.2
It is the night of the full moon. Nine women stand in a circle, on a rocky hill about the city. The western sky is rosy with the setting sun; in the east the moon’s face begins to peer above the horizon…The woman pours out a cup of wine onto the earth, refills it and raises it high. “Hail, Tana, Mother of mothers?” she cries. “Awaken from your long sleep, and return to your children again!”3
What are the political and psychological effects of this fierce new love of the divine in themselves for women whose spiritual experience has been focused by the male God of Judaism and Christianity? Is the spiritual dimension of feminism a passing diversion, an escape from difficult but necessary political work? Or does the emergence of the symbol of Goddess among women have significant political and psychological ramifications for the feminist movement?
To answer this question, we must first understand the importance of religious symbols and ritual in human life and consider the effect of male symbolism of God on women. According to anthropologist Clifford Geertz religious symbols shape a cultural ethos, defining the deepest values of a society and the persons in it. “Religion,” Geertz writes, “is a system of symbols which act to produce powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting mods and motivations.”4 In the people of a given culture. A “mood” for Geertz is a psychological attitude such as awe, trust, and respect, while a “motivation” is the social and political trajectory created by a mood that transforms mythos into ethos, symbol system into social and political reality. Symbols have both psychological and political effects, because they create their inner conditions (deep-seated attitudes and feelings) that lead people to feel comfortable with or to accept social and political arrangements that correspond to the symbol system.
Because religion has such a compelling hold on the deep psyches of so many people, feminists cannot afford to leave it in the hands of the fathers. Even people who no longer “believe in God” or participate in the institutional structure of patriarchal religion still may not be free of the power of the symbolism of God that Father. A symbol’s effect does not depend on rational assent, for a symbol also functions on levels of the psyche other than the rational. Religion fulfills deep psychic needs by providing symbols and rituals that enable people to cope with crisis situations in human life (death, evil, suffering) and to pass through life’s important transitions (birth, sexuality, death).5 Even people who consider themselves completely secularized will often find themselves sitting in a church or synagogue when a friend or relative gets married or when a parent or friend has died. The symbols associated with these important rituals cannot fail to affect the deep or unconscious structures of the mind of even a person who has rejected these symbolisms on a conscious level—especially if a person is under stress. The reason for the continuing effects of religious symbols is that the mind abhors a vacuum. Symbol systems cannot simply be rejected; they must be replaced. Where there is no replacement, the mind will revert to familiar structures at times of crisis, bafflement, or defeat.
Religions centered on the worship of a male God create “moods” and “motivations” that keep women in a state of psychological dependence on men and male authority, while at the same time legitimating the political and social authority of fathers and sons in the institutions of society.
Religious symbol systems focused around exclusively male images of divinity create the impression that female power can never be fully legitimate of wholly beneficent. This message need never be explicitly state (as, for example, it is in the story of Eve) for its effect to be felt. A woman completely ignorant of the myths of female evil in biblical religion nonetheless acknowledges the anomaly of female power when she prays exclusively to a male God. She may see herself as like God (created in the image of God) only by denying her own sexual identity and affirming God’s transcendence of sexual identity. But she can never have the experience that is freely available to every man and boy in her culture, of having her full sexual identity affirmed as being in the image of likeness of God. In Geertz’s terms, her “mood” is one of trust in male power as salvific (leading to salvation) and distrust of female power in herself and other women as Inferior or dangerous Such a powerful, pervasive and long-lasting “mood” cannot fail to become a “motivation” that translates into social and political reality.
In Beyond God the Father, feminist theologian Mary Daly detailed the psychological and political ramifications of father religion for women.
If God in “his” heaven is a father ruling his people, then it is the “nature” of things and according to divine plan and the order of the universe that society be male dominated. Within this context, a mystification of roles takes place: The husband dominating his wife represents God “himself.” The images and values of given society have been projected into the realm of dogmas and “Articles of Faith,” and these in turn justify the social structures which have given rise to them and which sustain their plausibility.6
Philosopher Simone de Beauvoir was well aware of the function of patriarchal religion as legitimizer of male power. As she wrote: Man enjoys the great advantage of having a god endorse the code he writes; and since man exercises a sovereign authority over women it is especially fortunate that this authority has been vested in him by the Supreme Being. For the Jew, Mohammedans, and Christians, among others, man is Master by divine right; the fear of God will therefore repress any impulse to revolt in the downtrodden female.7
This brief discussion of the psychological and political effects of God religion puts us in an excellent position to begin to understand the significance of the symbol of Goddess for women. In discussing the meaning of the Goddess, my method will first be phenomenological. I will isolate a meaning of the symbol of the Goddess as it has emerged in the lives of contemporary women, I will then discuss its psychological a political significance by contrasting the “moods” and “motivations” engendered by Goddess symbols with those She is saying engendered by Christian symbolism. I will also correlate Goddess symbolism with themes that have emerged in the women’s movement in order to show how Goddess symbolism undergird and legitimates the concerns of the women’s movement, much as god symbolism in Christianity undergirded the interests of men in patriarchy. I will discuss four aspects of goddess symbolism here: The Goddess as affirmation of female power, the female body, the female will, and women’s bonds and heritage. There are, of course, many other meanings of the goddess that I will not discuss here.
The sources for the symbol of the goddess, in contemporary spirituality are traditions of Goddess worship and modern women’s experience. The ancient Mediterranean, pre-Christian Europeans, Native American, Mesoamerican, Hindu, African, and other traditions are rich sources for Goddess symbolism. But these traditions are filtered through modern women’s experiences. Traditions of Goddesses’ subordination to Gods, for example, are ignored. Ancient traditions are tapped selectively and eclectically, but they are not considered authoritative for modern consciousness. The Goddess symbol has emerged spontaneously in the dreams, fantasies, and thoughts of many women in the past several years. Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie reported that they were surprised to discover widespread interest in spirituality, including the Goddess, among feminists around the country in the summer of 1974. 8 WomanSpirit magazine, which published its first issue in 1974 and had contributors from across the United States, expressed the grass-roots nature of the women’s spirituality movement. In 1976, a journal devoted to the Goddess emerged, titled Lady Unique. In 1975, the first women’s spirituality conference was held in Boston and attended by 1800 women. In 1978, a University of Santa Cruz conference on the Goddess drew over 500 people. Sources for this essay are these manifestations of the Goddess in modern women’s experiences as reported in WomanSpirit, Lady Unique, and elsewhere, and as expressed in conversations I have and with women who have been thinking about the Goddess and women’s spirituality.
The simplest and most basic meaning of the symbol of Goddess is the acknowledgment of the legitimacy of female power as a beneficent and independent power. A woman who echoes Ntosake Shange’s dramatic statement, “I found god in myself and I loved her fiercely,” is saying, “Female power is strong and creative.” She is saying that the divine principle, the saving and sustaining power, is in herself, that she will no longer look to men or male figures as saviors. The strength and independence of female power can be intuited by contemplating ancient and modern images of the Goddess. This meaning of the symbol of Goddess is simple and obvious, and yet it is difficult for many to comprehend. It stands in sharp contrast to the paradigms of female dependence on males that have been predominant in Western religion and culture. The internationally acclaimed novelist Monique Wittig captured the novelty and flavor of the affirmation of female power when she wrote in her mythic work Les Guerilleres.
“There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember…You say there are not words to describe it, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent. “ 9
While Wittig does not speak directly of the Goddess here, she captures the “mood” of joyous celebration of female freedom and independence that is created in women who define their identities through the symbol of Goddess. Artist, Mary Beth Edelson, expressed the political “motivations” inspired by the Goddess when she wrote:
“The ascending archetypal symbols of the feminine unfold today in the psyche of modern Everywoman. They encompass the multiple forms of the Great Goddess. Reaching across the centuries we take the hands of our Ancient Slaters. The Great Goddess alive and well is riding to announce to the patriarchs that their 5000 years are up—Hallelujah! Here we come! 10
The affirmation of female power contained in the Goddess symbol has both psychological and political consequences. Psychologically, it means the defeat of the view engendered by patriarchy that women’s power is inferior and dangerous. This new “mood” of affirmation of female power also leads to new “motivations”’ it supports and undergirds women’s trust in their own power and the power of other women in family and society.
If the simplest meaning of the Goddess symbol is an affirmation of the legitimacy and beneficence of female power, 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 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 earth cycles of the universe. Others seem quite comfortable with the notion of Goddess as a divine female protector and creator and would find their experience all Goddess limited by the assertion that she is not also out there as well as within themselves and in all-natural processes. When asked what the symbol of Goddess means, feminist priestess Starhawk replied: “It all depends on how I feel. When I feel weak, she is someone who can help and protect me. When I feel strong, she is the symbol of my own power. At other times I feel her as the natural energy in my body and the world.” 11
How are we to evaluate such a statement? Theologians might call these the words of a sloppy thinker. But my deepest intuition tells me they contain a wisdom that Western theological thought has lost.
To theologians, these differing views of the “meaning “ of the symbol of Goddess might seems to threaten a replay of the trinitarian controversies. Is there, perhaps, a way of doing theology that would not lead immediately into dogmatic controversy, would not require theologians to say definitively that one understanding is true and the others are false? Could people’s relation to a common symbol be made primary and varying interpretations be acknowledged? The diversity of explications of the meaning of the Goddess symbol suggests that symbols have a richer significance than any explications of their meaning can express, a point literary critics have long insisted on. This phenomenological fact suggests that theologians may need to give more than lip service to a theory of symbol in which the symbol is viewed as the primary fact and meanings are viewed as secondary. It also suggests that a theology of the Goddess would be very different from the theology we have known in the west. But to spell out this notion of the primacy of symbol in theology in contrast to the primacy of the explanation of theology would be the topic of another paper. Let me simply state that women, who have been deprived of a female religious symbol system for centuries, recognize the power the primacy of symbols. I believe women must develop a theory of symbol and theology congruent with their experience at the same time as they “remember and invent” new symbol systems.
A second important implication of the Goddess symbol for women is the affirmation of the female body and the life cycle expressed in it. Because of women’s unique position as menstruants, birth-givers, and those who have traditionally cared for the young and dying, women’s connection to the body, nature, and this world has been obvious. Women were denigrated because they seemed more carnal, fleshy, and earthy than the culture-creating males.12 The misogynist antibody tradition in Western thought is symbolized in the myth of Eve who is traditionally viewed as a sexual temptress, the epitome of women’s carnal nature. Their tradition reaches its nadir in the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Evil-Doing Women), which states, “All witchcraft stems from carnal lust, which in women is insatiable.”13 The Virgin Mary, the positive female image in Christianity, does not contradict Christian denigration of the female body and its powers. The Virgin Mary is revered because she, in her perpetual virginity, transcends the carnal sexuality attributed to most women.
The denigration of the female body is expressed in cultural and religious taboos surrounding menstruation, childbirth, and menopause in women. While menstruation taboos may have originated in a perception of the awesome powers of the female body, 14 they degenerated into a simple perception that there is something “wrong” with female bodily functions. Menstruating women were forbidden to enter the sanctuary in ancient Hebrew and premodern Christina communities. Although only Orthodox Jews still enforce religious taboos against menstruant women, few women in our culture grow up affirming their menstruation as a connection to sacred power. Most women learn that menstruation is a curse and grow up believing that the bloody facts of menstruation are best hidden away. Feminists challenge this attitude to the female body. Judy Chicago’s art piece “Menstruation Bathroom” broke these menstrual taboos. In a sterile white bathroom, she exhibited boxes of Tampax and Kotex on an open shelf, and the wastepaper basket was overflowing with bloody tampon as and sanitary napkins.15 Many women who viewed the piece felt relieved to have their “dirty secret” out in the open.
The denigration of the female body and its powers is further expressed in Western culture’s attitudes toward childbirth.18 Religious iconographies do not celebrate the birth-giver, and there is no theology or ritual that enables a woman to celebrate the process of birth as a spiritual experience. Indeed, Jewish and Christian traditions also had blood taboos concerning the woman who had recently given birth. While these religious taboos are rarely enforced today (again, only by Orthodox Jews), they have secular equivalents. Giving birth is treated as a disease requiring hospitalization, and the woman is viewed as a passive object, anesthetized to ensure her acquiescence to the will of the doctor. The women’s liberation movement has challenged these cultural attitudes, and many feminists have joined with advocates of natural childbirth and home birth in emphasizing the need for women to control and take pride in their bodies, including the birth process.
Western culture also gives little dignity to the postmenopausal or aging woman. It is no secret that our culture is based on a denial of aging and death, and that women suffer more severely from this denial than men. Women are placed on a pedestal and considered powerful when they are young and beautiful, but they are said to lose this power as they age. As feminists have pointed out, the “power” of the young woman is illusory, since beauty standards are defined by men, and since few women are considered (or consider themselves) beautiful for more than a few years of their lives. Some men are viewed as wise and authoritative in age, but old women are pitied and shunned. Religious iconography supports this cultural attitude towards aging women. The purity and virginity of Mary and the female saints is often expressed in the iconographic convention of perpetual youth. Moreover, religious mythology associates aging women with evil in the symbol of the wicked old witch. Feminists have challenged cultural myths of aging women and have urged women to reject patriarchal beauty standards and to celebrate the distinctive beauty of women of all ages.
The symbol of Goddess aids the process of naming and reclaiming the female body and its cycles and processes. In the ancient world and among modern women, the Goddess symbol represents the birth, death, and rebirth processes of the natural and human worlds. The female body is viewed as the direct incarnation of waxing waning, life and death cycles in the universe. This is sometimes expressed through the symbolic connections between the twenty-eight-day cycles of menstruation and the twenty-eight-day cycles of the moon. Moreover, the Goddess is celebrated in the triple aspect of youth, maturity, and age, or maiden, mother, and crone. The potentiality of young girls is celebrated in the nymph or maiden aspect of the Goddess. The Goddess as mother is sometimes depicted giving birth, and giving birth is viewed as a symbol for all the creative, life-giving powers of the universe.17 The life-giving powers of the Goddess in her creative-aspect are not limited to physical birth, for the Goddess is also seen as the creator of all the arts of civilization, including healing, writing, and the giving of just law. Women in the middle of life who are not physical mothers, may give birth to poems, songs, and books or nurture other men, women, and children. They too are incarnations of the Goddess in her creative, life-giving aspect. At the end of life, women incarnate the crone aspect of the Goddess. The wise old woman, the woman who knows from experience what life is about, the woman whose closeness to her own death gives her a distance and perspective on the problems of life, is celebrated as the third aspect of the Goddess. Thus, women learn to value youth, creativity, and wisdom in themselves and other women.
The possibilities of reclaiming the female body and its cycles have been expressed in a number of Goddess-centered rituals. Hallie Austen Iglehart and Barbry MyOwn created a summer solstice ritual to celebrate menstruation and birth. The women simulated a birth canal and birthed each other into their circle. They raised power by placing their hands on each other’s bellies and chanting together. Finally, they marked each other’s faces with rich, dark menstrual blood saying, “This is the blood that promises renewal. This is the Blood that promises sustenance. This I the blood that promises life.” 18 From hidden dirty secret to symbol of the life power of the Goddess, women’s blood has come full circle. Other women have created rituals that celebrate the crone aspect of the Goddess, especially at Halloween, an ancient holiday. On this day, the wisdom of the old woman is celebrated, and it is also recognized that the old must die so that the new can be born.
The “mood” created by the symbol of the Goddess in triple aspect is one of positive, joyful affirmation of the female body and its cycles and acceptance of aging and death as well as live. The “medications” are to overcome menstrual taboos, to return the birth process to the hands of women, and to change cultural attitudes about age and death. Changing cultural attitudes toward the female body would help to overcome the spirit-flesh, mind-body dualisms of Western culture, since, as Ruether has pointed out, the denigration of the female body is at the heart of these dualisms. The Goddess as symbol of the revaluation of the body and nature thus also undergirds the human potential and ecology movements. The “mood” is one of affirmation, awe, and respect for the body and nature, and the “motivation” is respect for the teachings of the body and value of all living things.
A third important implication of the Goddess symbol for women is the positive valuation of will in Goddess-centered ritual, especially in Goddess-centered ritual magic and spellcasting in womanspirit and feminist witchcraft circles. The basic notion behind ritual magic and spell casting is energy as power, Here the Goddess is a center or focus of power and energy; she if the personification of the energy that flows between beings in the natural and human worlds. In Goddess circles, energy is raised by chanting or dancing. According to Starhawk, “Witches conceive of psychic energy as having form and substance that can be perceived and directed by those with a trained awareness. The power generated within the circle is built into a cone form, and at its peak is released—to the Goddess, to reenergize the members of the coven, or to do a specific work such as healing.” 19 In ritual magic, the energy raised is directed by willpower. Woman who celebrate in Goddess circles believe they can achieve their wills in the world.
The emphasis on the will is important for women, because women traditionally have been taught to devalue their wills, to believe that they cannot achieve their will through their own power, and even to suspect that the assertion of will is evil. Faith Wildung’s poem, “Waiting,” from which I will quote only a short segment, sums up women’s sense that their lives are defined not by their own will, but by waiting for others to take the initiative.
Waiting for my breasts to develop
Waiting to wear a bra
Waiting to menstruate
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Waiting for life to begin,
Waiting to be somebody
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Waiting to get married
Waiting for my wedding day
Waiting for my wedding night
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Waiting for the end of the day
Waiting for sleep.
Waiting . . . 20
Patriarchal religion has enforced the view that female initiative and will are evil through the juxtaposition of Eve and Mary. Eve caused the fall by asserting her will against the command of God while Mary began the new age with her response to God’s initiative, “Let it be done to me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38). Even for men, patriarchal religion values the passive will subordinate to divine initiative. The classical doctrines of sin and grace view sin as the prideful assertion of will and grace as the obedient subordination of the human will to the divine initiative or order. While this view of will might be questioned from a human perspective, Valerie Saiving has argued that it has particularly deleterious consequences for women in Western culture. According to Saiving, Western culture encourages males in the assertion of will, and this it may make some sense to view the male form of sin as an excess of will. But since culture discourages females in the assertion of will, the traditional doctrines of sin and grace encourage women to remain in their form of sin, which is self-negation or insufficient assertion of will. 21 One possible reason the will is denigrated in a patriarchal religious framework is that both human and divine will are often pictured as arbitrary self-initiated, and exercised without regard for other wills.
In a Goddess-centered contest, in contrast, the will is valued. A woman is encouraged to know her will, to believe that her will is valid and to believe that her will can be achieved in the world, three powers traditionally denied to her in patriarchy. In a Goddess-centered framework, a woman’s will is not subordinated to the Lord God as king and ruler, nor to men as his representatives. Thus, a woman is not reduced to waiting and acquiescing in the wills of others as she is in patriarchy. But neither does she adopt, the egocentric form of will that pursues self-interest without regard for the interests of others.
The Goddess-centered context provides a different understanding of the will than that available in the traditional patriarchal religious framework. In the Goddess framework, will can be achieved only when it is exercised in harmony, with the energies and wills of other beings. Wise women, for example, raise a cone of healing energy at the full moon or solstice when the lunar or solar energies are at their high points with respect to the earth. This discipline encourages them to recognize that not all times are propitious for the achieving of every will. Similarly, they know that spring is a time for new beginnings in work and love, summer a time for producing external manifestations of inner potentialities, and fall or winter times for stripping down to the inner core and extending roots. Such awareness of waxing and waning processes in the universe discourages arbitrary ego-centered assertion of will, while at the same time encouraging the assertion of individual will in cooperation with natural energies and the energies created by the wills of others. Wise women also have a tradition that whatever is sent out will be returned, and this reminds them to assert their wills in cooperative and healing rather than egocentric and destructive ways. This view of will allows women to begin to recognize, claim, and assert their wills without adopting the worst characteristics of the patriarchal understanding and use of will. In the Goddess-centered framework the “mood” is one of positive affirmation of person will in the contest of the energies of other wills or beings. The “motivation” is for women to know and assert their wills in cooperation with other sills and energies. This of course does not mean that women always assert their wills in positive and life-affirming ways. Women’s capacity for evil is, of course, as great as men’s. My purpose is simply to contrast the differing attitudes toward the exercise of will per se and the female will in particular, in Goddess-centered religious and in the Christian God-centered religion.
The fourth and final aspect of Goddess symbolism that I will discuss here is the significance of the Goddess for a revaluation of women’s bonds and heritage. As Virginia Woolf has said, “Chloe like Olivia” a statement about a woman’s relation to another woman, is a sentence that rarely occurs in fiction. Men have written the stories, and they have written about women almost exclusively in their relations to men. 22 The celebration of women’s bonds to each other as mothers and daughters, as colleagues and coworkers, as sisters, friends, and lovers, is beginning to occur in the new literature and culture created by women in the women’s movement. While I believe that the revaluing of each of these bonds is important, I will focus on the mother-daughter bond, in part because I believe it may be the key to the others.
Adrienne Rich has pointed out that the mother-daughter bond, perhaps the most important of women’s bonds, “resonant with charges…the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other,” 23 is rarely celebrated in patriarchal religion and culture. Christianity celebrates the father’s relation to the son and the mother’s relation to the son, but the story of mother and daughter is missing. So, too, in patriarchal literature and psychology the mothers and daughters rarely exist. Volumes have been written about the oedipal complex, but little has been written about the girl’s relation to her mother. Moreover, as de Beauvoir has noted, the mother-daughter relation is distorted in patriarchy because the mother must give her daughter over to men in a male-defined culture in which women are viewed as inferior. The mother must socialize her daughter to be subordinate to men, and if her daughter challenges patriarchal norms, the mother is likely to defend the patriarchal structures against her own daughter. 24
These patterns are changing in the new culture created by women in which the bonds of women to women are beginning to be celebrated. Holly Near has written several songs that celebrate women’s bonds and women’s heritage. In one of her finest songs she writes of an “old-time woman” who is “waiting to die.” A young woman feels for the life that has passed the old woman by and begins to cry, but the old woman looks her in the eye and says, “If I had not suffered, you wouldn’t be wearing those jeans/Being an old-time woman ain’t as bad as it seems.” 25 This song, which Near has said was inspired by her grandmother, expresses and celebrates a bond and a heritage passed down from one woman to another. In another of Near’s songs, she sings of a “a hiking-boot mother who’s seeing the world/For the first time with her own little girl.” In this song, the mother tells the drifter who has been traveling with her to pack up and travel alone if he thinks “traveling three is a drag” because “I’ve got a little one who loves me as much as you need me/And darling, that’s loving enough.”26 This song is significant because the mother places her relationship to her daughter above her relationship to a man, something women rarely do in patriarchy. 27
Almost the only story of mother and daughters that has been transmitted in Western culture is the myth of Demeter and Persephone that was the basis of religious rites celebrated by women only, the Thesmophoria, and later formed the basis of the Eleusinian mysteries, which were open to all who spoke Greek. In this story, the daughter, Persephone, is raped away from her mother, Demeter, by the God of the underworld. Unwilling to accept this state of affairs, Demeter rages and withholds fertility from her earth until her daughter is returned to here. What is important for women in this story is that a mother fights for her daughter and for her relation to her daughter. This is completely different from the mother’s relation to her daughter in patriarchy. The “mood” created by the story of Demeter and Persephone is one of celebration of the mother-daughter bond, and the “motivation” is for mothers and daughters to affirm the heritage passed on from mother-to-daughter and to reject the patriarchal pattern where the primary loyalties of mother and daughter must be to men. 28
The symbol of Goddess has much to offer women who are struggling to be rid of the “powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations” of devaluation of female power, denigration of the female body, distrust of female will, and denial of the women’s bonds and heritage that have been engendered by patriarchal religion. As women struggle to create a new culture in which women’s power, bodies, will, and bonds are celebrated, it seems natural that the Goddess would reemerge as symbol of the newfound beauty, strength, and power of woman.
Notes:
1. From the original cast album, Buddah Records, 1976.
2. See Susan Rennie and Kristen Grimstad, “Spiritual Explorations Cross-Country,” Quest 1, No. 4 (1975), 49-51 and WomanSpirit magazine.
3. See Starhawk, “Witchcraft and Women’s Culture,” in WomanSpirit Rising, New York, Harper & Row, 1979, 260.
4. Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures, (New York, Basic Books, 1973, 90)
5. Ibid, 98-108
6. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974).
7. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1953)
8. See Grimstad and Rennie, “Spiritual Explorations Cross-Country,”
9. Monique Wittig, Les Guerilleres, (New York, Avon Books, 1971)
10. Mary Beth Edelson, “Speaking for Myself,” Lady Unique, 1976, 36.
11. Personal communication.
12. This theory of the origins of the Western dualism is stated by Rosemary Ruether in New Woman/New Earth (New York, Seabuty Press, 1975)
13. Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, The Malleus Maleficarum, (New Your, Dover, 1971, 47)
14. Rita M. Gross, “Menstruation and Childbirth as Ritual and Religious Experience in the Religion of Australian Aborigines,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 45, no. 4 (1977) 1147-81.
15. Judy Chicago, Through the Flower (New York, Doubleday & Co. 1975, 106-7)
16. See Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born (New York, Bantam Books, 1977
17. See James Mellaart, Earliest Civilizations of the Near East (New York, McGraw Hill, 1985, 92)
18. Barbry MyOwn, “Ursa Major: Menstrual Moon Celebration,” in Moon, Moon, (Berkeley, Calif and New York, Moon Books and Random House, 1976, 374-87.
19. Starhawk, “Witchcraft and Women’s Culture,” Womanspirit Rising, 266.
20. In Judy Chicago, 213-217
21. Valerie Saiving, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” Journal of Religion 40 (1960), 100-12
22. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1928, 86.
23. Rich, Of Woman Born, 226.
24. De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 448-49.
25. “Old Time Woman,” lyrics by Jeffrey Longley and Holly Near, from Holly Near: A Live Album, Redwood Records, 1974.
26. “Started Out Fine,” by Holly Near from Holly Near: A Live Album.
27. Rich, Of Woman Born, 223.
28. For another version of the story see Charlene Spretnak, Lost Goddesses of Early Greece: A Collection of Pre-Hellenic Myths (Boston Beacon Press, 1984, 105-18.