THE STORYTELLER"S G.o.dDESS.
by Carolyn McVickar Edwards.
Introduction.
The Journey to the New Land Book List Acknowledgments
I am overflowing with grat.i.tude at the idea that I am actually getting to write this page. I feel like thanking everyone I"ve ever met for affecting me, holding me, supporting me. Somehow I"ve made it to today: I"m alive and I"m well and I"m telling stories.
This book would never have happened without the incomparable work of Merlin Stone who wrote Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood, on which I have relied tremendously. I also owe a great deal of insight to Jean Shinoda Bolen"s G.o.ddesses in Everywoman and Barbara Walker"s The Woman"s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. Many other authors responsible for inspiration for this work are listed in the Book List.
Maureen Larkin lent me Ancient Mirrors, and Ellen Toomey told me about Ariadne Weaver"s "Equal Rites for Women" cla.s.s that was the occasion of my homecoming to Sacred Woman. Thanks to Donna Andrews; Danielle Berner; Jackie Braun; Z. Budapest; Susan Burke; Jean Calderaro; Frances Dean; Lenel D"Emma; Erin Donahue; Debbie Downer; Joanne Edel; Alan, Helen, Kathleen, Madeleine, and Norval Edwards; Meredith Ellen; Cynthia Evers; Sharon Frame; Rose Garfmkle; Johanna Gladieux; Leslie Grant; Carla Heins; Jean Jacote; Claire Jeanette; Sue Kubek; Gary Lebow; Genny LeM organ Maria Weber-Oliviera; Scott Parker; Renee Neville; Patrice Scott; Sandra Siegel; and Barbara Weigle. Thanks to my editor, Barbara Moulton, and her a.s.sistant, Barbara Archer. Thank you to Thomas Mills for his help with my writing over the five years I worked with him.
Thanks to all the people with whom I have shared Twelve-Step meetings, and to the people who began those meetings in the 1930s. Thank you to all the people who have made circles and rituals with me.
Before I learned about the G.o.ddess, I discovered the Moon. At twenty-eight, in another country, I suddenly, for the first time in my life, really looked at the moon. I have seen in Her ever since the face of a woman who alternately cries in pain and throws her head back in song. It is from my relationship to this stunning globe that I draw inspiration and strength. She is my mirror and my scope. She is now the G.o.ddess for me, and in Her ever-changing simplicity I rest.
Introduction.
STORIES are humankind"s oldest way of talking about and taking in truths. In every society may be found stories that portray religious or cultural values to its people. From the Bhagavad Gita to the Bible, stories are the means by which people identify their deities and values and make them tangible.
Modern urban people, however, are becoming increasingly disconnected from G.o.ds and values that split mind from body, soul from Earth, and dark from wisdom. Some are inventing a new brand of culture, a new religion. Whether they are remembering it in states of creative trance, reconvening it from shards of history and anthropology, or winging it in candlelit living rooms, they are re-enchanting themselves with the Great Feminine Principle. By Her invocation, they are weaving a web of life with strands of death and the dark. They are telling their personal stories in the context of ritual: they are calling up ancient knowings mixed with right-now longing for healing, communal vulnerability, and everyday intimacy with Sister Earth. They call their religion G.o.ddess spirituality, Earth-centered spirituality, G.o.ddess consciousness, or neo paganism all refer to the present-day revival of Earth-based religions and the sense that Earth is sacred and divine. It is an att.i.tude and way of life practiced by many different ancient peoples and by groups of indigenous peoples today.
Like people from all times, we who long for the G.o.ddess need Her stories to know Her. This book is a collection of thirty stories about thirty-four G.o.ddesses from twenty cultures I have both found and invented these stories, spinning them from bits of her story. Each story is accompanied by an introduction that places it in cultural and historical context, talks about the story"s origin, and mentions the props I use to invoke that story"s G.o.ddess.
A treasury of G.o.ddess stories cannot be complete. Her shapes and lore are too myriad for that. For me, this collection lacks at least the story of Nu Kua, the Great Snail Woman of ancient China; the story of Allat, G.o.ddess of the Sun, who preceded the currently worshiped male G.o.d Allah of Islam; and a story that honors woman-for-woman s.e.xual love on a divine scale.
One author"s scope of time and research is bound to be limited. Other tellers, authors, parents, and teachers will talk and talk of the G.o.ddess until Her lore permeates the culture. For Her face, in story form, is as many colored as our own. Her hands are as young and as weathered. Her truths are the paradoxical and sensual mysteries we seek. Her stories are meant to be shared aloud. Whether shouted into the wind at the edge of the sea, told in the candlelight of urban indoor ritual, or read at the edge of a child"s bed, these stories are for the beginnings and deepenings of knowing Her without end.
India, Ireland, Greece, and the Middle East are severally represented; G.o.ddess worship in these cultures is current, close to the surface, or closely bound up with current secular or Judeo-Christian mythologies.
Seven G.o.ddess Principles: Truths Inside of Truths In writing this book, I mean to sit with you at the hearth of our mutual wonder and wisdom and to spin for you, Grandma style, stories and reflections about the Great Mother of us all. I hope that some of Her stories will become beloved to you that all, snuggled in the context of seven principles that crystallize something of Her essence in my life, will crackle a certainty of Her inside you. Together we are reviving an ancient Earth-centered religion. We are sharing truths of Her that flow from each of us in order to make a whole as ever changing and powerful as the ocean.
The G.o.ddess takes hundreds of forms; Her names and stories lie for us to piece together like fragments of pottery in red earth. The stories in this book are the ones that came to me largely from the inspiration of Merlin Stone"s Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood between 1984 and 1990. I have grouped them, according to seven G.o.ddess principles, as follows:
I. All in All: Healing the Split.
The G.o.ddess is both dark and light.
II. Constant Change: The Everlasting Cycle.
The G.o.ddess is the endless circle of life and death. III. Spirit Incarnate: G.o.ddess As Earth and Body.
The G.o.ddess is the stuff of the Planet and our fleshly selves.
IV. The Force of Life: s.e.xuality and Creativity.
The G.o.ddess is everlasting, burgeoning desire.
V. Surrender.
The G.o.ddess loosens cities from foundations and flesh from bones.
VI. G.o.ddess As Archetype.
The G.o.ddess is the Great Feminine of our individual and collective unconscious, emerging again for full and life-changing honor by our conscious selves. VII. Recovery of Herstory.
The G.o.ddess has been worshiped by civilizations of people whose reverence for Female and Earth has been smeared from history. In reclaiming that her story the story of ourselves as human becomes whole.
Once, when I was a little girl, I played for an afternoon with a set of Russian nesting dolls. I feel wistful even now thinking of them. They were st.u.r.dy and round, kindly, with rosy cheeks and painted smiles and shawls. They all looked exactly alike, except that none of them were the same size. Each got progressively smaller and came apart at her ample waist in order that all the smaller dolls fit inside. With immense satisfaction I played with their glossy little bodies, taking them apart (some of them, all of them), arranging them in patterns, returning them to their sisters" bellies, and counting them with all the dreamy keenness of a miser with her gold.
My seven G.o.ddess principles feel like those Russian nesting dolls as I fondle their intricacies and imagine how they may fit together. The principles seem not hierarchical but concentric in relation to each other. The most flexible concept of the G.o.ddess"s totality of light and dark seems like the mama doll that holds within her all the other concepts. Like each doll, each principle can be examined separately, but each is fully itself when played with as part of a spiral of questions and truths.
G.o.ddess principles invite wondering and questions along with their truths. This sense of continuous pondering and unfolding, like the surprise of the next doll in those sweet onion layers, is perhaps most precious of all to me on this spiritual path. Continual discovery and truth-from-within counters the dogmatic forcefulness of the fundamentalist Christianity in which I was raised. In that religion, absolute truth lay in a book, and authorities frowned when I used my mind to question or object to the "facts" I was taught.
G.o.ddess As Metaphor
Earth is Woman. This is the basic metaphor of G.o.ddess-centered spirituality. Resacralizing Her, Earth and Woman, is now our task.
Such a task it is! In it we stand, shadows and fiery projections of the women who will be and have been. Figures we are, like the Great Metaph.o.r.ess Herself, with mountainous b.r.e.a.s.t.s and soft, valleyed bellies. Like rivers, the blood of Woman runs in us, encoding, preserving, and brandishing the rage, the tenderness, the sorrow, and the stories that change us.
How do we change? First, we take back, over and over again, the sacredness of our W7oman selves: our bodies; our s.e.xualities; our birth-giving, creation-making beings. Then we retrieve from misuse and abuse all the concepts the patriarchy relates to our femaleness: body, blood, under, deep, color, dark, below, wetness, depth, intuition, divination.
Next, when we open emotionally and spiritually to realizing Earth Herself as sacred W7oman, we are stunned at the similarities between Her physical and psychological rapes and our own. Repeatedly, we find our new notions of individual selfhood curled like fetuses inside our understanding of our relationship to ourselves as Planet. When we think not as scientists but in service of our hearts, we find our personal recoveries paralleling the ecological recovery of the Planet.
Now, we begin to think of water as the blood of the G.o.ddess, from Whose flow comes all life. We think of Earth as Her body and see Her curves in the hills and mountains; tree limbs begin to look like Her arms. We sense the air as Her breath, and the mystery of fire becomes Her will and Her spirit. In such an att.i.tude of worship, we no longer take for granted electrical lighting; nuclear poison is akin to the rape of a child by a father. When we call the weather the emotions of the G.o.ddess, controlling and categorizing instead of respecting and honoring seem the efforts of a rigid, unimaginative parent. We call Earth Woman: Mother, Daughter, Sister, Baby, Crone, Child, Lover. We call Her Teacher, Doctor, Healer, Inventor. We look at the ways we are She and She is we, and we want to twirl in the subway station and shake out ribboned tambourines.
Is a metaphor real? To my way of understanding, metaphor is probably the most powerful and complete way to understand any significant concept. For me, the deepest spiritual concepts are elusive. My grasp on them comes and goes, depending on my current situation. And always they are ideas; I can"t see them. I need to make my concepts tangible if I am to understand and grasp them on deeper than intellectual levels. When, for example, I envision the seasons of Earth as the Navajo people"s Changing Woman, the inveterate turning of the world becomes as personal as my own menstrual cycle. In the Egyptian G.o.ddess Isis, I know the cycle of the grains that keep me alive as I know a mother and her child. Knowing the Hebrew Shekina, I know wisdom as if She were a lover, ephemeral and thrillingly present at once.
G.o.ddess spirituality is all about making spiritual truths tangible.
More than that, spiritual truths in G.o.ddess spirituality are tangible.
In Earth-centered spirituality, the tangible, physical world is not shameful something to dominate while we are here and to leave behind when we die. The physical in G.o.ddess spirituality is the source of all that we are and know.
Where Does the G.o.ddess Come From?
In cultures all over the world in all times, the image of the circle has been sacred. Before we had a s.p.a.ceship to prove it, before maps were precise, humans sensed the circularity of life and the world.
Humans have always known that the personal womb is life"s entry point and the Earth"s womb is its exit.
Before the present patriarchal times, humans expressed this knowledge in their conceptualization of the Creator as Mother.
They recognized their Creator as Preserver; they knew Her as Destroyer.
They called Her hundreds of names: Danu, Kali, Mayahuel, Astarte. They divided Her into thousands of aspects in order to more precisely worship Her: Queen of Light, Ruler of the Underworld, Giver of Numbers and Strategy, Keeper of Pleasure, Lady of the Land. From our patriarchal perspective, we call G.o.ddess-worshiping peoples indigenous, aboriginal, or rural. We observe that these people are invariably tied intimately to the land, and that they contact their environment as if it were alive.
Our own histories have been written as if this point of view were "other." We thus have great trouble remembering that our view of Earth as a dirt clod was perpetrated on us as children, and on our ancestors, just as it is being perpetrated by our "modern" cultures on "third world" cultures today. As doc.u.mented by Merlin Stone and Riane Eisler, among others, the G.o.ddess was actually worshiped for thousands of years. We urban peoples are as distanced from the live Earth as people have ever been. But we are also the people whose book learning and psychological sophistication opens us to the Ancient Within and Without as we have never been open before. In this time of great danger and great recovery, we are calling on Her again to help us treasure ourselves and re-enchant our Planet. We are hungry, and She is feeding our souls.
All in All: Healing the Split Out camping a couple of years ago while the sun beat its way around the edge of the day, I lay exhausted on a mat, grateful for the shade provided by the pines above me. Tired and vulnerable as I was, I found myself thinking of those trees as kind, providing me with shade out of their goodness and love. As represented by Eve in the biblical creation story, I had been taught that Nature was beautiful but evil and in need of control. Now, in my involvement with the G.o.ddess, I wanted to reverse that. I wanted to think of Nature as good. But my insistence on understanding Her as one way or the other broke on me suddenly. I realized that She is neither good nor evil: She encompa.s.ses both those experiences. She is all and nothing. She just is.
Earth-centered spirituality is a whole new way of thinking about opposites. In this culture, we are used to dividing the world into good and bad. We think of light as good and dark as bad. High is good; low is bad. The three-part G.o.dhead is all male. It is high in the sky. It represents the Mind, the Word, the Spirit. The Feminine, or what is of the body and the Earth, is low. It is sinful. G.o.d the Father is container of all good, and the Christian Devil (whose horned face was borrowed from the ancient Europeans" image of the G.o.ddess"s Consort, G.o.d of Plenty and Harvest) is container of all evil.
In our patriarchal culture, we are encouraged to split off the parts of ourselves we find fearsome or shameful. We are encouraged to "agree"
that anything mysterious or "other" belongs to the "dark" and that dark is bad. Our bodies and their functions are bad. So are our deepest wishes and our "negative" emotions. All must be dominated and controlled by our "lighter,"