Not only that, but as long as we have a divine Father who is able to create without a divine Mother, women’s creative acts are viewed as superfluous or secondary. And as long as the feminine is missing in the Divine, men would continue to experience entitlement and women would be prey to self-doubt and disempowerment. It was that simple.
Internalizing the Divine Feminine provides women with the healing affirmation that they are persons in their own right, that they can make choices, that they are worthy and entitled and do not need permission. The internalization of the Sacred Feminine tells us our gender is a valuable and marvelous thing to be. It suggests the “goodness of female sexuality and the equal authority of the experience of women.”8
As I spilled these thoughts across the pages in my journal, I recalled a story a woman had told about her six-year-old daughter. The child, freshly home from Sunday school, was reporting to her mother what she’d learned that day about God. Over and over she referred to God as “he.” Her mother asked, “Why do you say ‘he,’ Ashley?”
“Because God is a man, Mommy.”
“But why is God a man?”
Ashley thought a moment. “I guess because God thought that was the best thing to be.”
There’s something infinitely sad about little girls who grow up understanding (usually unconsciously) that if God is male, it’s because male is the most valuable thing to be. This belief resonates in a thousand hidden ways in their lives. It slowly cripples girl children, and it cripples female adults.
In one of her essays, Nelle Morton wrote, “The Goddess shattered the image of myself as a dependent person and cleared my brain, so I could come into the power that was me all along.”9
The second thing I wrote down that day was that exclusive male imagery of the Divine not only instilled an imbalance within human consciousness, it legitimized patriarchal power in the culture at large. Here alone is enough reason to recover the Divine Feminine, for there is a real and undeniable connection between the repression of the feminine in our deity and the repression of women. Mary Daly’s famous statement had never seemed more true to me: “If God is male, then male is God.”10
As I pondered other reasons for recovering female images of the Divine, I remembered the biblical claim that humans were made in the image of God. Now since human meant both male and female, didn’t that mean both male and female should be used when referring to the Divine? It seemed so logical, so simple, so obvious, that it made one wonder, as McFague put it, “what all the fuss is about.”
She suggests that the fuss is because Western theology has been infected by a fear of female sexuality. She points out that while sexuality is cloaked in the male metaphor for God, it seems blatant in a female metaphor. We are so familiar with male metaphors and their sexuality has been so masked that when female metaphors appear, they seem overtly sexual by comparison.11 They register in us as taboo.
The fear of and resistance to feminine images goes deep. I knew that from my own experience with those feelings. I’d spoken to women who could not say the word Goddess without whispering, laughing nervously, or looking over their shoulders for the lightning bolt that a jealous Father-God was bound to aim at them for daring such a thing. I’d seen people stomp out of a worship service when prayers were said to Mother-Father God. The fear and resistance were evident, too, in those who refused to consider her at all.
I remembered the time I discussed this fear and resistance with a minister who was genuinely interested in creating inclusiveness in his church. He thought we should forgo recovering Divine Feminine images and move directly toward abstract, androgynous images; we should neuter the language and symbol of the Divine. He said we should use only the word God, not Father or he or his.
“But the word God does not register in us as neuter,” I said. “Technically it may not imply any particular gender, but what registers and functions in the mind is male.”
As McFague says, androgynous terms only “conceal androcentric and male assumptions behind the abstraction.”12 How many times had I heard someone say, “God is not male. He is spirit”?
The minister looked at me. “Then where does that leave us?”
“I think it leaves us in the position of finding ways to speak of the Divine equally in female as well as male terms,” I said.
He looked at me with alarm and dismay as his own ambivalence about the feminine surfaced. “Oh dear,” he said.
The “oh dear” reaction is common. It’s the uh-oh-what-will-they-think? how-can-it-be-done? questions that surface inside.
But that day in my study, I came to a new sense of the urgency and importance behind it. I felt in my bones how crucial it was, “oh dear” response or not.
When I closed my journal, it seemed as if a gate that had been open only a few inches had suddenly been flung wide. I made a decision. I would not limit my quest. I would go through the gate with what Zen Buddhists call “beginner’s mind,” the attitude of approaching something with a mind empty and free, ready for anything, open to everything. I wouldn’t tell myself things like, “don’t think that, don’t approach that, don’t explore that.” I would be Eve opening her eyes on creation for the first time. I would give myself permission to go wherever my quest took me.
And it took me to some pretty surprising places.
THE COMING OF HERSELF
One night soon after this, I had a dream. In it the Goddess was born. Her messengers came like angels of annunciation and told me her name. It was: “Herself.”
I woke up thinking, The Goddess, Herself.
It sounds a little odd, I suppose, but that became my name for the Divine Feminine.
Relating to Herself is like having your own personal big bang. She comes with an eruption of consciousness that is like a new universe being born, one that is forever expanding outward. The thing we need to realize, of course, is that the place of expansion is always on the border. On the edge. If we’re going to turn from restrictive God-talk and images that confine the Divine to one gender, if we’re going to become whole, we have to go to the edge.
Now for the paradox. When we get there, we find it’s not the edge at all. No, the edge is still further in the distance. The thing is, you can never overtake the Divine.
For me, Herself was and is primarily an inner experience—not “out there,” not “back there,” but ultimately “in here.” I agree with Nelle Morton when she wrote:
When I speak of Goddess I am in no way referring to an entity “out there,” who appears miraculously as a fairy godmother and turns the pumpkin into a carriage. I am in no way referring to a Goddess “back there” as if I participate in resurrecting an ancient religion. In the sense that I am woman I see the Goddess in myself.13
To embrace Goddess is simply to discover the Divine in yourself as powerfully and vividly feminine. Since the day in the stone circle at Avebury, the Divine Feminine was becoming a presence, an experience, a knowing born deep inside. She was becoming more than a concept in my head—something abstract and separate—or a figure out of the ancient past.
Sogyal Rinpoche, a Tibetan spiritual teacher, says, “We often assume that simply because we understand something intellectually . . . we have actually realized it. This is a great delusion.”14 Women need to understand the Sacred Feminine in our heads, but most of all we need to “realize” her in our souls.
And the moment does come. When we set out to find the integrity of our feminine souls, when we defy and dare and venture beyond prefabricated identities and little cages and patriarchy’s dogma into the circle of deep feminine ground, the moment of realizing Goddess Within comes.
Carol P. Christ tells of a moment like that when she heard a still small voice saying, “In God is a woman like yourself,” and embracing this truth became the beginning of claiming her female being.15
The first time Nelle Morton embraced the female aspect of divinity was in 1972 at the second annual conference on women exploring theology. At that time she had a
lready conceptualized the Feminine Divine, but it was confined mostly to the region of intellect.
She writes about that pivotal day when sixty-five women gathered for worship in the oratory. They sat on cushions on the floor, facing one another. The leader rose and read the passage from Corinthians that says, “If anyone is in Christ, now he is a new creation.” But the reader read it this way: “If anyone is in Christ, now she is a new creation.”
This is what happened to Nelle Morton, in her own words:
I felt hit in the pit of my stomach. It was as if the reader had said, “You are now coming into your full humanity. That which has been programmed out is authentically yours—essentially you.” It was as if intimate, infinite, and transcending power had enfolded me, as if great wings had spread themselves around the seated women. . . .
Suddenly I came to, my hand on my stomach, my mouth open.. . . When I looked about me, it seemed many other women were responding as I had. The leader paused. Then one of the women lifted her fist in the air and shouted, “Yeah! Yeah!” All the women followed as the oratory rang with “Yeah! YEAH! YEAH!”
This was the first time I experienced a female deity. I had conceptualized one before, but I had not experienced one directly.16
Her experience, like mine, suggests that Herself is found not so much in the conceptualization of feminine imagery (though that’s very important) as in the act of embracing the one contained within it, in the experience of being relational with her.
After Avebury, I realized that a big part of grounding the inner experience involves recovering external images and symbols that have carried and pointed toward her presence. I wanted to know the ways Herself had been experienced by humans throughout history, to allow those images and symbols to sink in, resonate, enliven, evoke, fortify, and expand the deeps of my female life. So began a passionate work of recovery. I started to repossess the Divine Feminine presence within the Christian tradition as well as in the lost history of the ancient Goddess.
Herself as Ancient Goddess
Several years after this period of discovery, during my trip to Crete, the other women and I walked among the ruins of an ancient Minoan town known today as Gournia. Crete was one of the last places on earth where the Great Goddess flourished, and we wandered up the hill, seeking the remains of a religious sanctuary where once women had come to worship her. They’d come bringing offerings of fruit and grain, leaving them on a special altar called a kernos stone. Now, thirty-five hundred years later, we were planning to do the same thing.
We found the courtyard leading to the ancient sanctuary, and with our hands overflowing with grapes, pears, lemons, seeds, nuts, and beans, we began a procession across it to the kernos stone. According to our guidebook, the stone was supposed to be just west of the courtyard, beside some steps. It would be easily distinguishable by the thirty-two time-worn receptacles carved around the edge of the stone to receive offerings. We came to the steps and gathered around an impressive stone located in the spot the map indicated. Only it was not the kernos stone.
We spread out, inspecting stones, searching for the lost altar. Ten minutes passed, fifteen, twenty. Still no altar. Finally another woman and I found it—a small, unlikely looking rock surrounded by weeds but bearing the thirty-two receptacles.
As we gathered around it, I couldn’t help but think how metaphoric the episode had been. There we were, fifteen women searching for an altar to the Goddess lost among the ruins of history and neglect. And it struck me: I’d had to find my inner connection to the Sacred Feminine the same way. I’d had to put orthodox guidebooks aside and set out on my own. I’d had to reclaim those lost, ancient altars in order to find my way.
Standing in a circle around the lost altar stone, we brushed away the dust, then adorned it with our offerings, pouring wine, milk, and honey into its crevices. By participating, I seemed to be reclaiming more than that one altar; I was retrieving a consciousness that had been lost, one in which women had the right to define for ourselves what is sacred, one that connected me to my deepest self, other women, the earth, and the Sacred Feminine embodied within them all.17
This retrieval, though, had really begun for me the summer I dreamed of Herself and began to search for her within ancient Goddess history.
That July Betty and I traveled to New Mexico, where we visited friend and artist Meinrad Craighead, who painted magnificent images of the Divine Mother. We sat one afternoon in her studio talking and looking at her new paintings. One painting, portraying a woman in a red-hooded cloak positioned between two owls, caught my eye. I studied the woman’s face, the labyrinth in her belly, feeling drawn to the image in the same way I was drawn to the Cartoon of St. Anne. The painting was called Hagia Sophia.
Meinrad’s studio had seven altars, which seemed to me like tiny windows into her soul, a soul deeply grounded in the Divine Feminine. As I looked from altar to altar, I felt the desire to create my own sacred space. Back home, I hung a shelf on a wall of my study. It stayed empty while I waited, not sure what to place on it. I figured I would know when the time came.
I came to know a few months later, once again traveling, this time in San Francisco. In the area to speak at a writer’s conference, I took time out to visit the Archives for Research in Archetypal Symbolism at the Jung Institute.
The assistant curator casually told me about the tens of thousands of slides they had on file—mythological and symbolic images from around the world and every epoch of history. He gestured toward a wall of file drawers, then opened one at random. He pulled out a slide and dropped it into a small viewing screen. I was looking at the Minoan Snake Goddess of Crete. Out of thirty thousand or so slides. Here she was again, the figure I’d dreamed about and later discovered as I researched the myth of Ariadne, the figure I’d come across often as I read Goddess history.
Herself, I thought.
Merlin Stone’s provocative line, “At the very dawn of religion, God was a woman. Do you remember?”18 flickered through my mind and sent an electric shudder through me. As I stared at the image, down deep some part of me did remember. I felt the same connection and love I’d felt at Avebury. Only now I understood that what I was experiencing was the recognition and presence of Goddess Within.
When fall came, I stumbled upon a museum catalog that offered lovely replicas of the Minoan Goddess and ordered one.
Over the next few months I went on remembering her. I explored many of her ancient images, but I wasn’t interested in worshiping neolithic figures. I was, however, immensely interested in relating to them as transmitters of possibility.
I grew compelled by the consciousness behind these ancient Goddess images, a consciousness in which the Divine was imaged in feminine form, in which women were honored as equals, and in which earth and nature were sacred. Indeed, the more I reached back into Goddess history, the more a portal opened through which I could retrieve it.
It’s not that I felt we should go backward in history to a bygone time and live out the old matriarchal consciousness as it was then. The ancient Goddess cultures were probably not utopia, but still they appear to have been remarkably egalitarian and nonviolent. The feminine was honored, sexuality was sacred, and the cultures apparently supported no splits between nature and spirit.
The images of Goddess reflect this consciousness. They reveal to us what we’ve excised from our lives today. I didn’t want to toss aside the evolutionary progress we’d achieved or the masculine symbols of God. Rather, I wanted to wed them with lost feminine dimensions, whose origins and promise lay unclaimed in antiquity.
Reclaiming the ancient feminine consciousness as a model of what’s possible, integrating it into the world as it is now evolving, and balancing it with masculine symbol, image, and power together allow us to go forward and create an utterly new consciousness, one large enough and strong enough to carry us into the future.
Perhaps one of the most important things I learned as I explored the ancient Goddess and retrieved thi
s consciousness was that these Divine Female images reflected the wholeness of divinity. This was a new and explosive realization—that the fullness of deity can rest in a single female form.
Theologian Elizabeth A. Johnson clarifies this immensely important point. She presents three distinct approaches frequently taken as we seek to recover the Sacred Feminine:
One seeks to give “feminine” qualities to God who is still nevertheless imagined predominantly as a male person. Another purports to uncover a “feminine” dimension in God, often finding this realized in the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. A third seeks speech about God in which the fullness of female humanity as well as of male humanity and cosmic reality may serve as divine symbol, in equivalent ways.19
My approach became the third way. My aim wasn’t helping Yahweh get in touch with his “feminine side.” I wasn’t interested in merely identifying one aspect of the Trinity as feminine. When we stop there, inevitably the feminine aspect ends up secondary and subordinate, acting in the same “limited roles in which females are allowed to act in the patriarchal social order.”20
I was interested in a balance, which meant envisioning female image, form, and symbol that could contain the fullness of divinity, just as there were male image, form, and symbol that contained the fullness of divinity.
As I recovered ancient Goddess images, I saw that Herself encompassed all divine activities, not just ones typically stereotyped as feminine. In other words, she should not just be relegated passive and nurturing qualities, but active and powerful ones. She would not only be associated with earth and sexuality, but with order and justice as well.
The replica of the Minoan Goddess, which I’d ordered, arrived a few days before Christmas, having come all the way from Greece. I opened the box, dug through the straw, and found an exquisite statue cast in plaster and hand-painted in delicate earth tones. Twelve inches tall, she wore a flounced skirt, the bodice open in the ancient Cretan style, exposing her life-giving breasts. On her head sat a cat, and in her upraised hands she held two red snakes, all symbols of the feminine.