(Essay 2) Language for Goddess: Divine Expression by Glenys Livingstone Ph.D.

This essay is part 2 of an edited excerpt from Chapter 1 of the author’s book PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion.

It has often seemed generally clearer for me to speak of the “Female Metaphor” rather than “Goddess” since I wished to acknowledge that any language we have for deity or the divine is metaphor, and also I have not wished to imply a ‘God in drag’. I do however, like to use the term “Goddess” especially because I think humans do need to get acclimatized to Her expressed in this form – She has for too long been relegated to the fringes. According to the Webster’s Dictionary, a metaphor is a word or phrase used “to suggest a likeness”[i]; and “Goddess” is a figure of speech suggesting a likeness of femaleness in the divine, or the divine in femaleness. Few argue with that, though many do argue that “God” does not suggest a likeness of maleness in the divine, or the divine in maleness. The term “Goddess” does seem to evoke a different visceral impulse and visualization, which is worth noting. Some primal cultures seem to have never used an equivalent term, but neither was there any problem with a feeling for the Female as Sacred Entity: “Grandmother” spirits and ancestors were greatly revered[ii].

I usually speak of particular Goddesses with a capital ‘g’ – Demeter or Persephone for example, all of whom for me partake in the Female Metaphor; they are particular conflagrations of, are holons of, the Female Metaphor. I use a capital “g” even for these particular Goddesses, partly for political reasons, that is, so their divinity is remembered; but also signifying that I am not simply speaking of an archetype of the Olympian pantheon. As evidence suggests, long before the Goddesses were colonized, married off, raped and caught in sordid plots against each other, they were faces of a Matrix and a Cosmic Power.

“Archetype” is a word frequently used to name/describe the Female Metaphor, though it is much less often used to describe other (male) Deities. I prefer not to speak of Her as “archetype”, as this tends to connote a “mindstruct” – something “merely” cultural – and what I wish to convey is the sense of Her as a “physic” of the Universe. Some who use the term “archetype” do appear to mean just that; that is, “archetype” as a “physic”. Joseph Campbell’s view is that archetypes arise not so much “from the mental sphere of rational ideation”[iii], as from the single psychophysiological source common to all humans – the body[iv]. In that sense archetypes arise from “bioenergies that are the essence of life itself”[v]. For Campbell, archetypes

are biologically grounded and at once the motivating powers and connoted references of the historically conditioned metaphorical figures of mythologies around the world … (and) … are, like the laws of space, unchanged by changes of location[vi].

This would seem to be the sense in which I mean the Female Metaphor, and at home with the Cosmogenetic Principle of a dynamic creative Cosmos, which I will speak of later. However, in general I feel that the word “archetype” confuses the fundamental sense of the Triple Face Dynamic as I wish to convey it/Her. The evolutionary cosmic dynamics – Cosmogenesis – are not culturally induced phenomena, nor is the cyclical dynamic of the Triple Goddess Metaphor. The Cosmogenesis in which we find ourselves is at once completely physical and manifest, as well as “intra”-physical and unmanifest – it is not “meta”-physical and separate, it is intrinsic with the physical. Physicist David Bohm speaks in terms of “implicate” and “explicate” orders, wherein the “explicate” (or “manifest”, as I have termed it) is “a special and distinguished form contained within the general totality of all the implicate orders”[vii] (or “unmanifest”, as I have termed it). In this way Bohm develops a way of speaking about a “universe of unbroken wholeness”[viii] which is how I understand the physics of the Female Metaphor.

Similiarly, some common Pagan language that is used today does not communicate the actual physics of the Universe that it aspires to celebrate, or is at least unhelpful to the changing of our minds; for example, at times Light and Dark are spoken of as being in a battle, which is also the story told in many other religions, in various ways. Often at Winter Solstice for example, the celebrations are languaged as marking Light’s “victory over the darkness of winter”[ix]. Other Pagan sources say it is Dark’s victory – that at Winter Solstice, “darkness triumphs”[x]. Either way it is being storied as a battle, which in actual fact the Sun is not engaged in. I do not think that these expressions conjure a desirable or insightful story about the Light and Dark phenomena caused by Sun’s relationship with Earth. This kind of language does not do this ancient Earth-Wisdom tradition justice for our time, and perhaps it never did amongst those who observed, studied and reflected upon, and taught the Earth Wisdom. Our language needs to fit our understanding of the Universe, needs to fit us (humans and all beings) into – story us into – the Universe, as our minds know it. Language is important to this work of re-inventing and re-storying.

Feminist Theology – Thealogy – Poetry

The re-storying as I have done it in the work of PaGaian Cosmology is not feminist theology, nor is it thea-logy. Although generally thealogy speaks of our Place as sacred, and frequently with an understanding that “Goddess” is immanent in this place, that She is not an external Deity; I wish to be clear that what I am speaking of, is not a Deity. PaGaian Cosmology is therefore not “theology” nor even “thealogy”. It is a cosmology because what I am speaking of and with is Cosmos – a Place. Earth-based religious traditions and Goddess traditions speak of this Place itself as sacred. “PaGaian” cosmology is a way of speaking about this Place: it implies a metaphor and a practice. It is a synthesis of “celebrating Gaia-Goddess-Cosmos” … a metaphor that one is IN. Thus I like to name the process of this synthesis as “Poetry”. I feel that all “theology” and “thea-logy” was meant to be Poetry – what else could it be in its attempt to describe matters of an ultimate nature. Yet it seems to me that most of what has passed for theology has ended up actually a description of a dead butterfly pinned in a glass case, not one that is alive and flitting about the garden – a dynamic moving being. Cosmos is a Place, dynamic and moving, alive and changing, which is indistinguishable from participatory selves, which remains ultimately mysterious and indefinable; thus ultimately only able to be spoken of metaphorically. This then is Poetry.

Meet Mago Contributor Glenys Livingstone

 

NOTES:

[i] Webster’s Third International Dictionary of the English Language, p.1420.

[ii] Hallie iglehart Austen refers to this in her discussion of “Language” in The Heart of the Goddess, p.xxi.

[iii] Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, p.11.

[iv] Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, p.12.

[v] Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, p.13.

[vi] Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, p.19

[vii] David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, p.xv.

[viii] David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, p.xv.

[ix] Vivianne Crowley, Celtic Wisdom: Seasonal Rituals and Festivals, p.40.

[x] Starhawk, The Spiral Dance, p.198.

REFERENCES:

Bohm, David. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. NY: Routledge, 1995.

Campbell, Joseph. The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion. NY: HarperPerrenial, 1995.

Crowley, Vivianne. Celtic Wisdom: Seasonal Rituals and Festivals. NY: Sterling , 1998.

Iglehart Austen, Hallie. The Heart of the Goddess. Berkeley: Wingbow Press, 1990.

Livingstone, Glenys. PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion. Lincoln NE: iUniverse, 2005.

Starhawk. The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. NY: Harper and Row, 1999 edition.

Webster’s Third International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1986.