What a pleasure to read this collection of diverse scholarly voices who speak of global mythological/spiritual traditions from within a Goddess frame: that is, from within a frame where She is understood as primal in an organic way, and without any apology. This is Volume 1 of proceedings from an annual conference of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology. It is a documentation of the papers from the 2014 gathering that many (who read this blog) would love to have been able to be present to: this book makes all this research and thoughtful presentation accessible, and expands the conversation that so many of us thirst for.
On page 1 the editors describe:
Mythology is the branch of knowledge or field of study of the important stories we tell ourselves that enable us to gather meaning in our daily lives … myths are cultural and spiritual stories that arise out of humanity’s experience of life on earth. Myths speak to a deep and real desire in us to understand our context here on earth while yearning to comprehend our connection to our ancestors and our roots, to share experiences that transcend binaries and boundaries, and to envision the future from a liminal present. Myths allow us to see ourselves as both timeless and historical beings. Through awakening belief, mythic stories afford us an opportunity to participate in a non-material realm, a realm of sacred, creative power, whose intimations we experience in our encounters with ourselves and with the world around us through a multitude of modalities, such as ritual, art, storytelling and dance. They are the threads that link our present with our past and serve to shape our future.
As I began reading, I kept thinking of women who would like to read the specific essays, and of my own hunger for the integrity and wholeness of the female (my self and my kind) that set me on the Goddess path almost four decades ago, of my passion to know Her and express Her – in a world/context where She was silenced, always seen as a problem. Though I have done much research and practice in these past decades, I found that this volume fed and fired my ongoing hunger to know more of Her.
In the first essay by Mara Lynn Keller, there is a very useful and succinct analysis of the unique contribution and significance of the work of Marija Gimbutas, to the fields of knowledge. A little further along Mara offers a wonderful explanation of the use of the term “Goddess”, quoting Charlene Spretnak; an explanation that is so much richer and Earth-based than much of current superficial use of the term. This essay offers a quote from Marija Gimbutas of the true nature of “civilization”, what it is not, and what it is; and discusses some of the resistance to the metanarrative of “a goddess-revering civilization at the root of European culture”[1].
The next essay by Joan M. Cichon[2]begins with a succinct appraisal of archaeomythology, which is Marija Gimbutas’s method, and the precise nature of the worldview developed by this methodology. This essay begins with the question of whether “a Goddess was worshipped in ancient Malta”, and in the answering of that question and a few related others, develops a useful comparison of previous archaeologists’ worldviews and theories with that of Marija Gimbutas: thus offering clarity about what that difference is. She also describes how unfamiliar the language of the Goddess has been to many archaeologists, how interpretations have been made from minds committed to defence and authority as essential to social structure, rather than ceremony and celebration of life cycles and being. In the process Joan Cichon refers to texts that would provide a rich resource for further independent study, if desired. She also uses Marija Gimbutas’s method to analyse the icon and worship of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa in Poland, and Her link “to Old Europe, to Isis, and to the ancient Great Mother Goddess”[3].
In “Honoring the Web: Indigenous Wisdom and the Power of Place”, which was the keynote address and dedicated to co-founder of ASWM Patricia Monaghan, Arieahn Matamonasa-Bennett discusses and expands the definition, use and implications of the term indigenous. She speaks of the “collective grief of humanity”[4], the legacy of colonization and that “all of our ancestors were from earth-based cultures”[5]. She refers to the importance of understanding our oldest mind, the “metaphoric mind”[6], and refers also to the work of Thomas Berry, Joanna Macy, Brian Swimme and other significant scientists and ecologists who contribute to the “understanding of life as a web of interconnected, interdependent relationships”[7]. Arieahn speaks of the shared values of indigenous peoples around the world, and a primary one being the preserving of their stories, languages, customs, songs and philosophies: she expands the concept of activism to include the remembering of the sacred, to using your breath to speak and educate, using your particular gifts as medicine for the world.
“Ariadne, Mistress of the Labyrinth: Reclaiming Ariadnian Crete” by Alexandra K. Cichon was a wonderful read, of re-storying Ariadne’s “imperishable thread” and her labyrinth; experienced as uniting the visible and invisible worlds, embodying the goddess’s “vision of life as a living unity”[8].
I loved Mary Beth Moser’s “Wild Women of the Waters: Remembering the Anguane of the Italian Alps”; impressed yet again to see such scholarship dedicated to the female point of view, the studious regard for matrifocal priorities. We (globally) hardly have a language to speak of such priorities, because our minds in general have been formed by patrifocal and industrialised, mechanistic frames. This essay is such a beautiful placement of the female as agent, grounded in the traditions and folk stories of Mary Beth’s ancestral place of the Italian Alps. It deserves much contemplation, to re-invoke this authentic magic, manifest in the cycles of life, represented in the hag/witch; a wisdom that had almost disappeared over time largely due to christianisation.
Reading the essay on “Artemis as Protectress of Female Mysteries: Modern Worship in the Dianic Tradition in America” by Denise Saint Arnault, I felt hungry for the scholarly story of Her. Artemis was one of my first Goddesses, when I started on the Goddess path: She spoke to me. She appeared to me first as a Mother Bear in a dream, when I was deciding to leave my children for studies overseas: She was really upset and I dialogued with Her. This essay affirms Artemis in her untamed role, “living on the edge, outside the center … not defined by another”[9]: representing a specifically female-centered cosmology, wherein the goddess is celebrated as “the primary source of all … the sacred, unified divine being, sovereign and inviolable, fundamental and complete”[10]– all dualities, elements and myriad forms arise from her.
Other essays/papers in this wonderfully rich volume are exciting just in their titles, and hold as much in their content:
“Securely Attached: Brazilians and Their Black Madonnas” by April Heaslip
“Weaving Cross-Cultural Narratives: Curanderismo and Psychotherapy” by Natasha Redina
“The Goddess and the Myth of Citizen Rights” by Gayatri Devi and Savithri Shankar de Tourreil
“Demeter and the Eleusinian Mysteries: Ancient Origins and Modern Impact” by Joan M Cichon
The Three Faces of Persephone: Cup, Demoted Sproutling and Disembodied Psychosis” by Alexis Martin Faaberg
“Deity in Sisterhood: The Collective Sacred Female in Germanic Europe” by Dawn E. Work-MaKinne
Each one invites exploration, and the joining of a journey into deep knowledge of Goddess as She has been present over the ages, and as She rises again.
To purchase a copy: Myths Shattered and Restored
[1]Mara Lynn Keller, “Archeaomythology as Academic Field and Methodology: Bridging Science and Religion, Empericism and Sprituality”, p. 11.
[2]“Archaeomythology from Neolithic Malta to Modern Poland: Apprehending the Material and Spiritual Realities of Ancient and Present-Day Cultures”, pp.37-62.
[3]p. 54.
[4]p. 66.
[5]p. 67.
[6]p. 68.
[7]p. 68.
[8]p. 90 quoting Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess, p. xi.
[9]p. 155.
[10]p.155.