[Editor’s Note: This and the forthcoming sequels are originally published in Goddesses in Myth, History and Culture (2018 Mago Books). Part 6 discusses nine beliefs and the importance of the ancient Greek Goddesses.]
Greek Goddess Thealogy and the Contemporary Women’s Spirituality Movement for Eco-Social Justice
When we study goddess/goddesses, we endeavor thea-logy, from the Greek words for thea/goddess and for logos/meaning (to be distinguished from theology, the study of the meaning of god). Given the panoply of Greek Goddesses, what can we say about the thealogy of the multi-faceted Greek Goddesses? In particular, what do they offer to women and men personally, and what do they offer to the ecological crises and social injustices of our day? I have identified nine significant beliefs about the ancient Greek Goddesses that are valuable for us today.
Nature embedded and embodied Greek Goddess traditions express the inter-relatedness of the female-spirit-body with awesome natural powers. The Greek Goddesses were seen as nature-embedded, embodied Spirits. There was a closeness between deities and humans, between humans and the rest of nature, rather than an “otherness.” The close relationships of goddesses-nature-humans were the font of living and of beneficial relationships with other species, each with its own powers and practical knowledge. As a sign of their interconnectedness with nature, each of the Greek Goddesses had plants and animals especially sacred to them: for Aphrodite it was the dove; for Athena, the owl and snake; for Artemis, the deer and bear; for Demeter, the poppy, grains, and snake. The ecological disasters that afflict peoples and other beings around the world today, can be alleviated by humans seeing the beneficial interconnectedness of many species, including humans, within the complex eco-systems of land, sea, and air that evolved to be in balance.
Love is the heart of the cosmos and human relations. The Greek peoples worshiped many goddesses and enacted their rites in order to preserve and nurture their own survival and flourishing, from one generation to the next. These rites honored life’s major experiences of most intense joy and sorrow. While the male god traditions adapted to increasing threats of warfare from outside of Greece, and to the strife from inside Greece between city-states; the goddess traditions were in some ways more long-lasting, in the sense that they transmitted, as at Eleusis, the belief in the loving heart of the cosmos, the mother-daughter bond, and the bonds of human family and community. Our modern secularized culture has largely lost these beliefs. Their restoration will go far toward mitigating the sense of alienation and lack of belonging so many people feel today. They can restore the possibilities of love that so many long for.
The principle of justice is woven into the fabric of the universe and human hearts. The desire for justice, like the desire for freedom, is inherent in our human nature. Women’s strength comes, in part, from a sense of cosmic justice, the conviction that there are powers within the universe that implicitly and explicitly strive to manifest the fullness of life for all beings, from the smallest to the largest.[1] The French philosopher Simone Weil compares the Greek idea of Nemesis to the Buddhist concept of karma; and she laments the loss of the belief in cosmic justice in the West, a justice that “operates automatically to penalize the abuse of force. Under the name of Nemesis, it functions as …conceptions of limit, measure, equilibrium, which ought to determine the conduct of life.”[2] The sister Titan Goddesses Diké, Themis, and Nemesis instantiated a sense of justice, of due proportions, of balance and fairness, of natural and social order, maintained by the very fabric of the universe. Such embodiments can stand us in good stead in our own day, when we are called upon to work more strenuously for what is morally right and good for individuals, families, and communities, all species, and the planet. As Martin Luther King emphasized, “While the arc of the moral universe is long, it bends toward justice.”[3]
Peace is linked to love and social justice. The early Great Goddesses were pre-eminent during a time of relative peace, and they inspired peace-keeping among their peoples. When need be, they inspired solidarity against assault or invasion. For example, in Cyprus, people worshipped the Goddess of Love and did not worship the gods of war. To put it another way, where the Goddess of Love reigned, people did not desire war. The Greeks revered Irene, Goddess of Peace, as the one who nurtures abundance. Since Irene was the offspring of Themis and Zeus, we see that Peace was born when Zeus was mated to Social Justice. Upheld by the Greek Goddesses more often than not, the love of peace coupled with social justice is a divine purpose that calls for our respect and striving once again.
Resistance to social injustice, including rebellion against male dominance, is a sacred responsibility to oneself, to others, the cosmos, and the Divine. When the Indo-European Hellenic clans dominated the Greek mainland, the Aegean Islands, Crete, and beyond, the Great Goddesses of the Neolithic were fragmented into many different goddesses, reduced in powers, confined by patriarchal molds, and their identities increasingly distorted or even reversed, as with Pandora. However, many of the Greek Goddesses rebelled against the patriarchal gods, whether it was Demeter, Hera, Artemis, Aphrodite, Medusa, the Furies, or Nemesis. Nemesis empowers us to say no to wrong. The Furies still speak through the pangs of a guilty conscience. We are reminded by the mythos of Demeter and Persephone not to give up on finding one another; to resist violations of all kinds; and to find a way to return from the Underworlds of life to the source of love. The thealogy of the Greek Goddesses includes the strength of opposition to male dominance and other injustices. Today it is Gaia herself who is rebelling against eco-social injustice.
Divine female powers are healing and transformative, providing more empowered and equitable relationships. Greek Goddess powers included healing powers, as with the goddesses Hygeia (Health), Demeter, Persephone, Athena, and also Aphrodite, who could be invoked for healing a broken heart with erotic, maternal, or universal love. The stronger the mother-daughter bond, and the stronger women can become, then the stronger men can become in sharing mutually satisfying partnerships with women and men, in sharing power more equitably, beyond the limitations of male dominance and the absolute hierarchical dualisms of oppressively strict binary genders. The stronger women and men become in partnerships with their own sex and with their reproductively complementary sex, the more variable the gender roles and gender freedom, the healthier the next generations will be; not only in creating families but in all social relations, among humans, and between humans and other-than-human species.
Life’s complexity encompasses the One, the Two, and the Many. The ancient goddess-centered cultures of Greece worshipped various constellations of deities: the Mother/Daughter; Goddess and Consort; Goddess and God, twin Sister and Brother, Sisters, and various others. Some cultures, as in Crete, believed in one divine wholeness of life symbolized as the Great Mother who brought forth both male and female children and all the multiplicitous creatures of existence. Their thealogy was a pluralistic monotheism, of One-in-Many, Many-in-One. In Greece, the Mysteries of Demeter and her Daughter centered on the Mother/Daughter, as Two in One, and all were held within the unifying Mysteries of Life. The Mysteries manifested in a myriad of ways, and so it was easy to combine the all-embracing Mysteries with a pantheon of many deities. Here was diversity within unity. Simultaneously believing in the One, the Two, and the Manyoffers a beneficial spiritual cosmology and worldview for us to adapt today to develop solidarity, polarity, and pluralism. For our present-day culture is overly dualistic, fragmented, and divided according to differences of nature (like sex, race, or age) and differences of social invention (class).
Divine immanence and transcendence, in balance, confirm the sacredness of all. The goddess traditions of ancient Greece represent a balance of immanence and transcendence. The goddesses were transcendent, greater-than-human Dynamisms who could be called upon for empowerment from beyond the activities of humans, in order for humans to transcend their conditions (and conditioning) toward a better way of being and becoming. And the Greek Goddesses were also divine powers within nature and culture, immanent within women and men: as love, wisdom, grace, creativity, courage, strength, and many other idealized qualities. While at first Greek Goddesses were perceived as the very powers of nature—the sun or moon, earth or sea, the energies of birthing and dying—they also were increasingly anthropomorphized and given human form; and so they came to represent both human ideals and foibles. While they had extraordinary powers, the goddesses were not infallible, they were not absolute, they had shortcomings and made mistakes, they had physical and moral limitations (as did the gods). And so there was no sense of absolute power, or of absolute good or absolute evil. If today we could see nature, including all humans, as having divinity within, divinity-in-the-process-of-becoming-more-whole, we would come closer to a much needed re-sacralization of existence. By balancing our beliefs in the immanence and the transcendence of Spirit, we will be more apt to find solutions to our social conflicts, and this could go a long way toward preventing ecological disasters. Life is ultimately mysterious, and love is the greatest mystery of all. From tending the hearth-fires, to birthing and cherishing children, to sacred marriage, to creating the many arts and crafts of daily life, to producing many of life’s festivals, to wise political counsel, to feeding all the people, to protecting against assault and invasion, to caring for the sick and dying, women’s participation in the Mysteries of the Goddess and the Mysteries of Life have been indispensable to human life, culture, and history. The power of love within all these activities of human kindness remains a great mystery, the greatest of all. We cannot explain how it exists or how it works. It is a gift.
A Greek Goddess thealogy shares with us these nine beliefs in the meaning of goddess/es that can serve as guidelines for behaviors that are beneficial to self, family, community, nature, the cosmos, the deities, and the Great Mysteries. How many of these beliefs might you invite into your life?
- Nature-embedded and embodied Goddess traditions express the closeness of the human spirit with awesome natural powers.
- Divine immanence and transcendence, in balance, confirm the sacredness of all.
- Love is the heart of the cosmos and human relations.
- The principle of justice is woven into the fabric of the universe and human hearts.
- Resistance to social injustice, including rebellion against male dominance, is a sacred responsibility to oneself, others, the cosmos, and the Divine.
- Divine female powers are healing and transformative, providing more empowered, equitable relationships.
- Peace is linked to love and social justice.
- Life’s complexity encompasses the One, the Two, and the Many; Diversity within Unity; pluralism, polarity, and solidarity.
- Life is ultimately mysterious, and love is the greatest mystery of all.
Many of these beliefs are found in the burgeoning women’s spirituality movements of today, including the Goddess devotions of women and men, young and old, and peoples of all colors, classes, and diverse religions. In the Spring of 1978, Carol P. Christ gave the keynote address for “The Great Goddess Re-emerging” conference at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her speech, “Why Women Need the Goddess: Phenomenological, Psychological, and Political Reflections,” has become one of the classics of the Women’s Spirituality Movement. Christ proposes that the power of the Goddess, as a symbol of the divine, is four-fold: to affirm and legitimate female powers as beneficent; to affirm the female body and its life cycles; to affirm women’s will; and to affirm women’s bonds with one another and a positive female heritage. She writes: “As women struggle to create a new culture in which women’s power, bodies, will, and bonds are celebrated, it seems natural that the Goddess would reemerge as symbol of the newfound beauty, strength, and power of women.”[4] Increasing numbers of women are identifying as priestesses of goddess/es and taking on the mantle of spiritual leadership in goddess-revering communities.
It is not only with the resurgence of goddess devotion that the Sacred Feminine continues to increase in cultural power. Within the Roman Catholic Church as well as in Protestantism, there is a new interest in Marian devotion.[5] The “cult of Mary,” so strong during the European Medieval Age, is revived in devotions to Mary today. Pope John Paul II wanted to establish Mary as “Co-Redemptress” with Jesus, from the beginning of Creation; but this was not yet to be, as Spretnak explains in her book, Missing Mary: The Queen of Heaven and Her Re-Emergence in the Modern Church.[6] While some Roman Catholic women continue to see Mary as meek and mild, others around the world are finding new ways to relate to Mary, the Mother of Jesus, Mother of God, and to the Feminine Divine, or the Feminine Face of God. Some are embracing Mary Magdalene, beloved of Jesus, and her leadership in the early Christian Church, calling themselves Magdelenian Christians; and some women are actively seeking ordination as priests in the Roman Catholic Church.[7] Some Catholic and Protestant women are turning in their devotions to Brigid of Ireland, either as goddess, saint, or both.[8]
Religion scholar Elizabeth Ursic illustrates this phenomenon of women turning to the Feminine Divine in Women, Ritual, and Power: Placing Female Imagery of God in Christian Worship, where she considers the themes of charismatic leadership, community, personal prayer experience, and evangelization. [9] She also discusses how some Christians are embracing a “bi-spirituality” and celebrating both Christian and Pagan rituals (as occurs frequently, she says, in Scotland). Catholic scholar Mary Ann Beavis discusses the combining of Christianity and Goddess devotion in her book on Christian Goddess Spirituality: Enchanting Christianity.[10] Increasing numbers of women are being ordained into spiritual leadership in Protestant denominations, and more and more women are becoming rabbis and spiritual leaders in the Jewish traditions, as we see in the work of Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, author of She Who Dwells Within: A Feminist Revision of a Renewed Judaism; and of Jill Hammer and Taya Shere, authors of The Hebrew Priestess: Ancient and New Visions of Jewish Women’s Spiritual Leadership.[11]
In tandem with feminist reforms from within Jewish and Christian, Buddhist and Hindu, and other religious traditions, much of the contemporary Women’s Spirituality Movement flourishes outside of male-centered and androcratic religions. It centers on the myriad faces and marvelous powers of the goddess/es, in conjunction with a strong commitment to the movements for ecological and social justice. The First Wave of the Women’s Movement in the nineteenth century was fostered by white women’s dedication to the abolition of slavery and to the struggle for women’s reproductive, sexual, social, economic, political, and religious rights. A commitment to social justice for women and other humans has also motivated the Second Wave of the Women’s Movement in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; as it does for the Third Wave, that is just now beginning to crest.
The pursuit of eco-social justice has animated the Women’s Spirituality Movement in the United States since its inception.[12]Activism for eco-social justice in the contemporary women’s movement was never simply the work of white, middle-class women; it is found in the multi-racial, multi-class, multi-age works of women spiritual leaders and Goddess scholars throughout the U.S., including: Jan Aldredge-Clanton, Paula Gunn Allen, Martha Ann, Gloria Anzaldua, Alka Arora, Angeles Arrien, AfraShe Asungi, Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Ashoka Bandarage, Ruth Barrett, Mary Ann Beavis (Canada), Beyoncé, Cristina Biaggi, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Stacy Boorn, Carolyn Brandy, Zsuzsannah Budapest, Janine Canan, Kathie Carlson, Ana Castillo, Carol P. Christ, Lisa Christie, Joan Cichon, , Phyllis Curott, Mary Daly, Max Dashu, Miriam Robbins Dexter, Kim Duckett, Brooke Medicine Eagle, Riane Eisler, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Rose Wognum Frances, Elinor Gadon, Marija Gimbutas, Starr Goode, Judy Grahn, Susan Griffin, Jo Harjo, Donna Hennes, Linda Hogan, bell hooks, Helen LaKelly Hunt, Helen Hye-Sook Hwang, Hallie Austen Iglehart, Eahr Joan, Buffie Johnson, June Jordan, Krissy Keefer, Mara Lynn Keller, Anne Key, Maxine Hong Kingston, Valerie Kuar, Winona LaDuke, Audre Lorde, Vajra Ma, Mary Mackey, Barbara Mann, Joan Marler, Pat Monaghan, Cherrie Moraga, Aurora Levins Morales, Musawa, Vicki Noble, Mayumi Oda, Ava Park, Judith Plaskow, Arisika Razak, Sid Reger, Lydia Ruyle, Carol Lee Sanchez, Deborah Santana, Ntozake Shange, Miranda Shaw, Leslie Marmon Silko, Charlene Spretnak, Starhawk, Merlin Stone, Inès Talamantez, Karen Tate, Luisah Teish, Elizabeth Ursic, Genevieve Vaughn, Alice Walker, Susun S. Weed, Annette Williams, Oprah Winfrey, and many more In concert with the thousands of leading women’s spirituality voices in the United States, there are millions more around the world.
In response to the Women’s Spirituality Movement, art historian Elinor Gadon, author of The Once and Future Goddess: A Symbol for Our Time,[13] founded a Women’s Spirituality graduate program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in 1993 in San Francisco. Its diverse faculty, curriculum, and student body are co-creating the new field of Women’s Spirituality in academia, with emphases on Women, Gender, Spirituality and Social Justice; Women and World Religions; Feminist and Ecofeminist Philosophy and Activism; and Women’s Mysteries, Sacred Arts, and Healing.[14] Its transdisciplinary and multicultural model of education includes a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-gender, multi-class, multi-generational, multi-ability, multi-spiritual, multi-religious, post-patriarchal, post-colonial, and decolonizing graduate program. This integral approach includes the body, mind, heart, and spirit. It has graduated 50 PhD and 102 MA students, who are producing new scholarship and opportunities for the free expression of women’s spiritual experiences and gifts. In addition to recovering knowledge of women’s spiritual contributions from around the world, they hold that “our cultures need more heart and more spirit, a heart of compassion and a spirit of resistance, resilience, and perseverance!”[15]
There are many more initiatives that involve Goddess Studies and a celebration of the free, embodied spirituality of women. Thanks to founder Patricia Monaghan, there is a bi-annual, national academic conference for the Study for Women and Mythology. Jade River and Lynnie Levy founded the Reformed Congregation of the Goddess-International, headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin; it runs a Women’s Theological Institute that offers priestess training and other classes. Women’s Spirituality scholar, publisher, and priestess Anne Key has founded the publishing house, Goddess Ink. Helen Hye-Sook Hwang has founded Mago Books, named for the East Asian Great Mother Goddess. Gina Messina and Xochitl Alviso sustain the “Feminism and Religion” blog in conjunction with the associated publishing house for Feminist Studies in Religion, FSR Books. Laura Krajewski organizes the Goddess Spirit Rising conference in southern California. The Women’s Task Force of the Parliament of the World’s Religions and the Women’s Caucus of the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature are co-sponsoring the “1000 Women in Religion Project” to add spiritual women’s profiles to Wikipedia; at the beginning of 2018, only 17% of the biographies on this platform were about women (which Wikipedia itself admits is a form of “systemic bias” [16]). The CIIS Women’s Spirituality graduate studies program will celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary in October 2018, by inaugurating a bi-annual conference for Women Rising! New Visions for a Post-Patriarchal World.
It is impossible to name all the phenomenal arisings of women’s spirituality—in solitude, in small and large circles, temples and retreat centers, academic degrees and publishing houses, conferences and marches, and the many arts of music, dance, song, poetry, novels, theatre, film, painting, sculpture, jewelry-making, costume-making, and cooking.[17] The “matriarchal aesthetic” of the ancient goddess cultures is manifest in celebrations among women and men of various genders, creating an emergent global culture of spirituality based on respect, mutuality, and eco-social justice.
Goddess people work on many issues of eco-social justice—regarding poverty and homelessness, climate change, education for girls and women, preserving sacred lands of Indigenous peoples, affirming LGBTQ brothers and sisters, and those with differing abilities, treating diseases, fighting sex-trafficking, opposing gun violence, and averting war by building the conditions for peace. In the name of reciprocity and mutuality, I invite eco-social activists and other people of conscience to support the freedom to worship Goddess without fear of prejudice or persecution. “The Freedom of Religion to worship Goddess is a social justice issue!”[18]
Why, again, are the Greek Goddesses important for us today?
Since neither the Greek deities nor anything human was considered absolute, there were no absolute dogmas in Greek religion. This avoided what I have called, philosophically, the error of absolute hierarchical dualism, where dyads of deity/human, human/nature, man/woman, etc. are constructed into superior/inferior dualisms that assign absolute superiority to one side of the same coin (for example, divinity over humanity, the male over the female, one’s own race over others, the young over the old or vice versa, the upper classes over the lower classes). the lack of absolute hierarchical dualisms in ancient Greece countered people’s tendencies to see other humans, including enemies, as “totally other.” Our replication of pathological, absolute hierarchical dualisms of religion, gender, race, age, or class are destructive to the social fabric of family and society. At the same time, an over-emphasis on pluralism can be lacking in any sense of commonality or solidarity. Dualisms and pluralisms need to be tempered with a strong commitment to the search for solidarity among different and differing peoples. Many of the pathological dualisms can be transformed into complementary dyads or polarities creating dynamic diversities with both uniqueness and commonalities, like holograms interfacing and generating ever-new patterns of fascination and beauty.
For me, as for many women and men, the divine-human heritage manifested in the Greek Goddess traditions, when consciously drawn upon, brings new strength and courage and love of self and others. For many, the Greek Goddesses represent powers and symbols that are healing and transforming. They may be archetypes that guide a woman toward a more affirmative and fulfilling understanding of herself and others. They may be metaphors and role models that guide a man toward a more fulfilling understanding of himself and of women also. The myriad faces of the goddess/es help us understand the broad range of marvelous powers among the great diversities of women. They call us to understand the divine-human-female heritage in the many goddess traditions of the world. They invite us to re-sacralize our relations, to make sacred our everyday lives. They remind us that the universe is on our side, implicitly seeking the best for each of us. They call us towards a better life, a life that is more embodied, nature-embedded, community-minded, socially just, wise, loving, beautiful, creative, and joyful!
(End of the essay)
[1] The Noble-prize-winning biochemist Albert Szent-Gyorgi, who discovered vitamin C, writes of the “syntropy” of the universe that creates more complex and efficacious forms of life, in contrast to entropy. “Albert Szent-Györgyi and the Vitamin C,” Imagine Hungary, last modified Oct 2, 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20111016104054/http://www.imaginehungary.com/talent-science/albert-szent-gyo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeVITdHsY6Irgyi-and-the-vitamin-c/.
[2] Simone Weil, The Iliad: Or The Poem of Force (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill, Pamphlet 91, [1940], 1956), 15.
[3] Martin Luther King, “Where Do We go From Here?” speech, August 16, 1967, Atlanta. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeVITdHsY6I/, April 21, 2018.
[4] Carol P. Christ, “Why Women Need the Goddess: Phenomenological, Psychological, and Political Reflections,” in Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, eds. Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow (San Francisco: Harper HarperSanFrancisco, 1979, 1992), 286, see also 273-287.
[5] Anna Carmichael, “Modeled after Mary: A Feminist Collaborative Inquiry Exploring Mary as Heuristic Concept for Women in The Episcopal Church” (PhD diss., California Institute of Integral Studies, 2018).
[6] Charlene Spretnak, Missing Mary: The Queen of Heaven and Her Re-Emergence in the Modern Church (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004; paperback, 2005).
[7] Marcelle Williams, “Women’s Ordination in the United States: A Comparative Study of Women’s Struggle in the Roman Catholic Church, Episcopal Church, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America” (PhD diss., California Institute of Integral Studies, 2016).
[8] Margaret Lynn Mitchell, “Saint Brigid of Fifth Century Ireland: A Feminist Cultural History of Her Abiding Legacy from the Fifth to the Twenty-First Century” (PhD diss., California Institute of Integral Studies, 2015).
[9] Elizabeth Ursic, Women, Ritual, and Power: Placing Female Imagery of God in Christian Worship (New York: State University of New York Press), 2014.
[10] Mary Ann Beavis, Christian Goddess Spirituality: Enchanting Christianity (New York: Routledge, 2016).
[11] Lynn Gottlieb, She Who Dwells Within: A Feminist Revision of a Renewed Judaism (New York: HarperCollins, 1995); Jill Hammer and Taya Shere, The Hebrew Priestess: Ancient and New Visions of Jewish Women’s Spiritual Leadership (Teaneck, NJ: Ben Yehuda Press, 2015).
[12] See Charlene Spretnak, ed., The Politics of Women’s Spirituality (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1982); Mary Ford Grabowsky, ed., Sacred Voices: Essential Women’s Wisdom Through the Ages (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002); Miriam Robbins Dexter and Vicki Noble, eds., Foremothers of the Women’s Spirituality Movement: Elders and Visionaries (New York: Teneo Press, 2015); Deborah Santana, ed., All the Women in My Family Sing: Women Write the World–Essays on Equality, Justice and Freedom (San Francisco: Nothing but the Truth Publishing, 2018).
[13] Elinor Gadon, The Once and Future Goddess, A Symbol for Our Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
[14] See Mara Lynn Keller, “Women’s Spirituality in Higher Education,” Foremothers of Women’s Spirituality, 55-64; “Women’s Spirituality Program”, www.ciis.edu/academics/graduate-programs/womens-spirituality/.
[15] Mara Lynn Keller, “Enhancing the Multicultural Classroom for Multicultural Students,” paper presented at the Symposium on Diversity and Inclusion: Scholarly Explorations (California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, February 24, 2018).
[16] “1000 Women Religion Project,” https://parliamentofreligions.org/parliament/womens-task-force/1000-women-religion-project?utm_source=Email%20Updates&utm_campaign. Accessed April 24, 2018.
[17] Mara Lynn Keller, “Goddess Spirituality,” in Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion, D.A. Leeming, ed., 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Springer: New York, Heidelberg, 2014), 729-735. (Dordrecht, London, 2014). See, for example, the music of Jennifer Berezan, with Linda Tillery and Sharon Burch, Returning, CD recorded in the Oracle Chamber in the Hypogeum at Hal Seflieni, Malta (Albany, CA: Edge of Wonder Records, 2000); films by Donna Read and Starhawk, The Goddess Remembered; The Burning Times; Signs Out of Time: The Story of Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas; Permaculture; the film The Secret Life of Bees, written and directed byGina Prince-Blythewood, produced by Queen Latifa, and based on the novel by Sue Monk Kidd (2008); visual arts by AfraShe Asungi, Rachel Bagby, Cristina Biaggi, Rose Wognum Frances, Tricia Grame, Mayumi Oda, Lydia Ruyle, Remedios Varo.
[18] Mara Lynn Keller, “The Religious Freedom to Worship Goddess is a Social Justice Issue!” Speech for the Faith In Women Plenary, Parliament of the World’s Religions, (Salt Lake City, Utah, October 16, 2015). https://parliamentofreligions.org/videos/professor-mara-lynn-keller-delivers-parliament-keynote-address https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVt2nBds1D0