[Author’s Note: This is the Introduction chapter from: Pagan, Goddess, Mother, edited by Nané Jordan and Chandra Alexandre, Demeter Press, 2021, pp. 11-28, https://demeterpress.org/books/pagan-goddess-mother/.]
Introduction (continued)
Pagan and Goddess: Unruly Terms
Pagan and Goddess spiritual movements and practices are multifaceted and diverse—it is not our intention to define and debate these various theologies, thealogies, philosophies, and traditions. Rather, this anthology adds to the literature of these fields from mother- and family-centred perspectives, offering insight to the study of women and others as mothers in religion and spirituality. We have chosen to capitalize the terms “Pagan” and “Goddess” to keep these two terms in view throughout our introduction. But this need not be so—anthology authors may or may not capitalize these terms in the chapters that follow. The mother-authors of this anthology are each unique in their voices and visions, reflecting how Pagan and Goddess pathways allow for differing expressions and multiple contexts.
Throughout Western, European-based history, the terms “Pagan” and “Goddess” were deemed derogatory titles. The term “Pagan” was historically used in a negative sense to define and denigrate non- Christians as being heathens or irreligious (Ball 423). This was especially so as Christianity came to dominate all forms of faith and spirituality in the European historical context and extended into European histories of global colonization. In its contemporary, Western-based spiritual use, the term “Pagan” has been reclaimed to honour the beliefs and practices of pre-Christians, of sacred Indigenous and ancestral spiritual traditions, and regarding contemporary polytheistic (multiple divinities), Earth- based, and pantheistic or panentheistic (divinity as pervading nature and the cosmos) views. In this, nature, all life forms, and the land itself, including elements of water, fire, earth, and air, are regarded as sacred, alive, and full of spirit, with the human body being equally sacred. From the term Pagan comes the “neo-Pagan” movement, which references the modern revival of Pagan beliefs, deities, festivals, and celebrations (Adler). From its Latin root, Pagan means a “country dweller,” as in peoples who lived closely with the Earth and the cycles of nature. As defined in this volume by Pagan theologian Christine Hoff Kraemer, Western spiritual movements in contemporary Pagansim include “Wicca, Druidry, Heathenry, and various reconstructionist Polytheisms” (this volume). Further terms for Pagan spirituality include “the Craft” or the “Old Religion,” which refer to the aforementioned pre-Christian religious identification and involve valuing women’s wisdom and female spiritual power.
Another unruly term related to Pagan and Goddess spirituality is the infamous “witch.” As noted by women’s history scholar Max Dashu, “Modern Western culture is saturated with demonized concepts of the witch, while lacking knowledge about authentic cultural practices of its own past” (59). Dashu points to lineages of the term “witch” across proto Indo-European languages as related to words for “wise woman,” “wisdom,” and “seer, prophet, or sage” (60). The witch as an archetypal female figure—with her European history of vilification through the mass persecution of women in the historical “Burning Times” (Reid), turned modern, magical icon of North Amer-ican movie and TV fame (e.g., Harry Potter and Maleficent)—is a powerful, galvanizing term. Some Pagan and Goddess practitioners have reclaimed the word “witch” to identify themselves. For witches, this statement reclaims and empowers women’s social status, self-authorization, and bodied, sexual life-giving capacities beyond patriarchal control. Contemporary witches identify across Pagan and Goddess spiritual pathways—seeking to break through historical and contemporary misogyny and to offer liberation through a spiritual revival of female/feminine power and magic for modern life. The practice of magic is active in many traditions as a tool for nature-, self-, community-, and spirit-based connections, with potential for trans- formation, healing, and inner growth through rituals and celebrations.
Paganism writ-large encompasses many peace-loving ways of life. Most Pagan communities value individual autonomy and self- actualization. Some operate under a hierarchical order with progressive levels of leadership, whereas others engage community consensus. Furthermore, some Pagans chose to practice alone. Deities worshipped or honoured in Paganism come from wide-ranging sources—including ancient Greek, Egyptian, British, Irish, African, East Asian, and Middle Eastern traditions—and may reflect male, female, or gender fluid forms. Some Pagans honour sacred wisdoms, such as the Tarot or Kabbala, whereas others access pantheons and deities from folklore and myth in an extensive array that can be both personal and varied (Adler).
Traversing this spiritual terrain, “Goddess” is an equally contested term. Being an “other” to male-centred divinity, this word claims the power of female/feminine divinity in singular and multiple forms. Whereas some people may speak of and honour “the Goddess” as a singular Supreme Being, others worship Goddesses from many cultures and/or in many forms. Feminist theologian Mary Daly pointed out over forty years ago in, Beyond God the Father, that patriarchal religions revering a male-only, father God tend to legitimize hierarchical, power- over, and oppressive relations in daily social life that place male above female and father over mother. Countering these patriarchal symbolic, physical, and psychological effects, Goddess spirituality in its contemp- orary North American feminist revival seeks to empower and validate women’s lives, bodies, and spiritual experiences (Christ). Goddess as a spiritual “She,” thus reflects, through varied female and feminine forms, the experiences of women’s lives through a diversity of expressions and traditions.
Reclaiming Goddess(es) in singular and multiple forms has been a central practice of the women’s spirituality movement in North America. Women’s spirituality as a social movement is conjunct with feminist politics. Although it includes secular concerns for women’s rights and critiques of patriarchy towards women’s empowerment, women’s spirit- uality goes further to reimagine religion, culture, society, personhood, and community from spiritualized, postpatriarchal views (Spretnak). Women’s, feminist, and Goddess spirituality struggled to give birth to and liberate the very notion of Goddess. Through such spiritual, cultural, political, and bodied liberations—often anathema to the views and practices of organized religion—visions and practices of female-centred spirituality have emerged through contemporary practices. These traditions are forwarded and embodied by American women’s spirituality leaders, such as Elinor Gadon, Luisah Teish, Zsuzsanna Budapest, Vicki Noble, and Judy Grahn. As editors, we note these particular names, as we studied with these feminist foremothers in the San Francisco Bay Area. We also acknowledge the many women and others who further lead and co-create together through vital, emergent pathways.
Contemporary practitioners of Goddess spirituality may practice solo or be part of larger organized communities. Such organizations include the emergence of registered Goddess Temples, such the Glastonbury Goddess Temple in England, which celebrates the local Goddesses of Avalon and the British Isles (Jones), or Chandra’s own Devi Mandir (Goddess Temple), SHARANYA, in the San Francisco Bay Area. SHARANYA engages Divine Mother Goddess worship in a lineage tradition from India, offering a sanctuary to many.
Goddess practitioners may act as priestess-leaders in their communities; they hold women’s circles in person and online and create leadership pathways and communities dedicated to personal and planetary transformation in service to such values as compassion, social justice, self-care, and truth. This includes the priestess work of author Molly Remer in this volume, who tends the Creative Spirit Circle of Brigid’s Grove. Such practitioners may work in tune with the seasons and the bodied cycles of women’s lives. They gather people to celebrate and ritualize menstruation, pregnancy, birth, mothering (of children or projects), menopause, and the passage to Crone in becoming elders, creating reflective spaces for women to share life stories and ideas.
Celebrating the creative forces of female bodies and mothering itself through Goddess spirituality is felt to support women’s lifecycles as interconnected to the vitality of relationships, work, creative projects, and activism. Experientially, the Goddess and divine feminine is not merely an external object of worship, but it lies within—alive in the body itself as sacred. This is not meant to essentialize femaleness but to liberate bodied oppression, and to become more rooted in one’s body and life, with the power to self-authorize needs, yearnings, and choices. American dance educator Vajra Ma notes that although feminism has developed “crucial cognitive understandings to dismantle patriarchal concepts,” women “still need to cultivate full embodiment at the subtle, neural level … to restore their wombs and subtle bodies … the next wave of feminism must take women fully into the body” (233). Women living from their “wild feminine” (Kent) through Goddess spirituality reclaim creative potentials of their womb sources and resources from previously unexplored or even traumatized bodied lives due to patriarchal social conditioning, restrictions, and harm. Additionally, a postpatriarchal religion or spiritual pathway that validates and holds space for Mother Goddesses alongside the lived experiences of mothers provides vital supportive qualities to mothers’ challenging lives, as noted by authors in this anthology.
Many Goddess practitioners’ identify with pre- or postpatriarchal matriarchal, matrifocal (mother-centred) societies. Contemporary research on mother-centred societies, past and present, contributes to emergent understandings of matriarchal worldviews as systems that sustained human life for a millennia before the current patriarchal, two- thousand-year cycle of human societies, which have become increasingly destructive for life on Mother Earth (e.g., Gimbutus and Goettner- Abendroth). Drawing from this root of matriarchal scholarship, revering the female form as a Goddess, a Divine Mother, or female creator, is understood to predate the worship of a male-centred, father God (Baring and Cashford; Eisler; Stone). Female-bodied forms were the central subjects of prehistoric and Neolithic artwork, highlighting the sacred capacity to give birth and nurture life in balance with a sustaining male/ masculine gender. Ancient cultures drew synchronic, symbolic relationships between the generative maternal body and gifting cycles of Earthly life in the bounty of the land. Archeological evidence has unearthed the dwellings and rites of early European peoples, who appeared to have lived in interrelationship with natural forces and cycles of life, with plants and animals of the Earth as Mother (Gimbutus; van der Meer). Despite modern society’s disconnection from and plundering of Mother Earth, human beings continue to depend on Her for life and thriving. Goddess- and Divine Mother-loving spirituality honours Mother Earth as gifting us life, beauty, and sustenance in the plants, trees, animals, resources, and elements with which we are deeply interrelated.
Speaking to the term “Goddess,” American Pagan and priestess- witch Starhawk noted over thirty years ago that “Whenever we feel the slightly fearful, slightly embarrassed sensation that words like Goddess produce, we can be sure we are on the track of a deep change in the structure as well as the content of our thinking” (4). Yet such deep change takes time. It may be that younger generations are freer to claim “Goddesses” without censure as compared to their feminist foremothers. The potential of Goddess spirituality for women as mothers is to obtain superseding or shared rights and rites (political, spiritual, cultural, and embodied) with their male and fatherly counterparts. However, in North America and worldwide, women continue to face the lived realities of patriarchal cultures and systems, along with political and economic structures of oppression that dominate their lives. Even the living Goddess traditions of India struggle with the place of women and mothers in a patriarchal, caste-based society, as noted by author Kusumita Mukherjee Debnath in this volume. Regarding the South Asian context, authors contend that one can be a Goddess worshipper by day, yet still abuse women by night (Hiltebeitel and Erndl).
Yet a vision of contemporary Goddess spirituality is that Mother Goddesses draw from and legitimize female-centred and maternal embodied social powers, with diverse expressions of the feminine being possible beyond gendered norms. The term “Goddess” can be a potent common ground for multiple pathways and experiences for women as mothers and men as nurturers as well as for transgender people and nonbinary or gender-fluid folks. All are sacred expressions of the human life force and source. Goddess may be a noun for some and a verb for others. As noted by Mago Goddess scholar Helen Hye-Sook Hwang, “S/ he” is the Great Goddess and Primordial Mother (5). Goddess is the Creatrix, the First Mother, a supreme progenitor—MAAAAA! Goddess is a way of life and knowing, a way of being that honours and upholds, rather than oppresses or demotes, feminine and female forms of being human. The Goddess we know and love is inclusive and vast—birthing, beholding, and nurturing the sacredness of all.
(To be continued)
(Meet Mago Contributor) Nane Jordan