[Editor’s Note: This was first proposed in The Mago Circle, Facebook Group, on March 6, 2014. We have our voices together below and publish them in sequels. It is an ongoing project and we encourage our reader to join us! Submit yours today to Helen Hwang (magoism@gmail.com). Or visit and contact someone in Return to Mago’s Partner Organizations.]
Introduction by Helen Hye-Sook Hwang and Wennifer Lin-Haver
Helen Hye-Sook Hwang I am asking each of us to consider writing a sentence or paragraph on “Why Goddess Feminism, Activism, or Spirituality?” This idea is prompted by Wennifer Lin-Haver, Founder of Mother Tree Sanctuary, and I agree that we need to and can create a sort of collective writing on the topic. What we write below will be included and published in The Girl God, Mother Tree Sanctuary, and Return to Mago. As a subaltern minority as we seem at the current point of time, Goddessians/Magoists [the term Mago means the Great Goddess] need to make extra efforts to make our voices and presences exposed to the public and inner circles. Length and style are open. Please also include your name, region/state/country, title, and/or website URL. We strongly encourage you if you are located in a place where Goddessians are rarely around. We intend to make a collective testimonial tapestry of WE as Goddessians/Magoists! Please keep this in your mind and join us in this collective effort. Thank you in advance. March 6, 2014 AF (Archaic Future)!
Wennifer Lin-Haver Our “call” started as a conversation between Helen and me where I was expressing to her the real need for Mother Tree Sanctuary to be more articulate with exploring the significance and importance of Goddess in our lives. I was prompted to give such a response, when asked “why” we had to differentiate God and Goddess. “Isn’t everything God?” She asked. And “Isn’t Goddess also God?” “Isn’t it all the same as long was we’re all coming from our ‘higher’ self?” she asked. So I saw this warranted a longer and much deeper discussion. I initially thought I should formulate a response and post it as a Page or Tab in our website, but after some reflection with Helen, I saw how much better it would be if we replied to this question as a diverse and creative collective. I surely do not have all the answers as an individual but perhaps together, we can come up with something more whole, colorful and satisfying. I do hope you will contribute a little something! We are always grateful for all that you have to share.
Liona Rowan I am a Goddess activist because I believe that the current God culture that we live in is so heavily and abhorrently weighted to benefit males and to the detriment of females. Unless and until Goddess is returned to Her rightful place as creatrix and co-creator of ALL we will continue to live in a world that hates, objectifies, attempts to control and denigrate all things female. This will continue at the peril of us all-no matter our gender or sex. We all die if the planet dies.
Liona Rowan Central Texas
Elaine Drew I believe that people need to see themselves reflected in the deity they embrace. Having been raised in a Christian country the only female deity I saw was the Mother, and she was not referred to as a goddess, but placed firmly below the male hierarchy. In my work with goddess imagery I look to redress the balance–to give women equal status in life by giving us equal status in the divine realm, a mirror of earthly reality.
Elaine Drew San Francisco Bay Area, California http//youngandjung.blogspot.com/; http//elainedrew.com/
Jayne DeMente You have all written my thoughts, so I will add the poem from my book Feminine Reformation a goddess meta narrative.
Deep in your warm water Stardust impregnated your womb and I was born… bonded to you then Remembering you now Oh joyful Mothers Day! I knew you as Creatrix, moon, sun and stars and sat in your tree of wisdom among the snakes and birds – I smelled the air and became strong, conscious and loved… I was almost destroyed when you were scarped and I was left helpless at the soul of violence – Oh, unhappy knowledge… I have walked such a dry road, but I have found you, and we wept; as did Persephone and Demeter. May your winged spirit soar free and your story be told and peace be in your body before we are all stardust… amen with joy, oh found Mother.
Jayne DeMente Los Angeles, California http//www.blogtalkradio.com/creatrix-media-live
Hearth Moon Rising Worshiping the Goddess is only natural for a species born of women. The reframing of our creator as a male god is an usurpation of women’s power and the culmination of patriarchal domination. It is time to reaffirm that we are all children of the Great Mother.
Hearth Moon Rising Adirondack Mountains, New York http//invokinganimalmagic.com
Sam Ledger If I know who I am it is from the definition of woman. The inner reflection of the self that guides the source of my soul like a compass. Always then, to my own inner north I journey with my womanhood, into the adventures of life. Once directionless, with my sisters interred internal, I capture of the essence of light in my hand.
Samantha Ledger England
http//samantha-ledger.blogspot.co.uk/
Glenys Livingstone Here is some of the why perhaps an excerpt from a story I wrote about “the Way the Cosmos was for a Country girl 1954 C.E.”
“This God, He was a Mechanic .. figured out how to make bodies work and put them together, with his hands or just spoke it all into being from his great supremely ordered mind. The local solar system and the galaxies just hung up there, whirring around like clocks. The story was that it all got done in seven days. This was not metaphorical. This God was no Poet.
Sometimes inside her, she ached for poetry. It did exist somewhere didn’t it? … once upon a time? But she could not remember clearly. Her mother did read her “once-upon-a-time” stories, called “fairy tales,” that sometimes implied Other Worlds, but often the stories just seemed a more extreme version of what she experienced here.
In the cosmic realms where it really mattered, the female did not create, write, paint, speak anything of consequence; on the contrary she was dangerous to the harmony of things. All the chaos and pain of the world was her fault, the result of her insatiable innate wickedness, or at least, her ineptness and stupidity. And the God ,who was described as “father”, had to send a son to die a horrible death to fix it all up.
Guilt was scribed into the girl, carved into her. How could she ever re-compense the Universe? She would be a good girl …. she would try to make it right. She did not want to be the cause of so much pain. Perhaps if she disappeared, would it be alright then? And then, perhaps, when she had made up for the devastation of her kind, she could be loved? She would not expect it until then.”
Glenys Livingstone Australia
(To be continued in Part 2)
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Honored and grateful to hear the voices of my fellow Goddess sisters…Why is Goddess important to you?