I align feminist activism with much of my faith. Thank Starhawk for that. She’s the Wiccan scholar who first wrote — thirty years ago — about eco-feminist witches standing up to suits who were wrecking the planet. We leaned on her books to educate us about the sacred feminine and then we practiced this wisdom via ceremony in a nearby hallowed wood.
Goddess worship in the modern era has always been relegated to counterculture, and so it is especially intriguing to witness the surge of renewed interest in the ‘craft, and with it the concurrent interest in crystals and astrology. But when searching on-line about the goddess, information is limited. For example, when inputting words like sacred feminine or goddess in the search engine on Instagram, what appears are pages dedicated to astrological advice or representations of Greco Roman goddesses. Google search “goddess” and you find the same. But none of these places (at least towards the top of any search engine) will provide a deeper understanding of goddesses before the conquering hoards came along. (Hecate may be the exception. But that’s a different letter).
If Greco-Roman goddesses are the mainstay of how we ingest the sacred feminine then we are left in a bit of a bind because of the misogynistic structures deeply embedded in the sources of how we have come to know the goddess. When worshippers reclaim a goddess from Greece, how can we experience them beyond the splintered, narrow version that the patriarchy has encoded? We might call upon Aphrodite, known as the goddess of love, beauty and sexuality, for instance, but these more common features reflect a diminished role, vastly different than the one of prominence proffered from her Mesopotamian heritage — and one where the earlier form held much greater importance.
Plenty of scholars would agree that Greece offers us concepts of divinity in woman-form but with strings attached. Ann Baring, from the must-read Myths of the Goddess, writes, “At its finest, Greek mythology can be seen as the working out of a right relationship between dynamic sky/sun gods of invading Indo Europeans and the older lunar agricultural stratum of pre-Hellenic goddess culture that had been established for many millennia.”
But unfortunately, at its worst, the succeeding mythology also emphasizes war and conquest, re situating the conquered culture as debased and trivialized (aka, othered) and codifies misogyny, ageism, racism, ableism and classism.
(And while we’re on the subject, I also recommend Charlene Spretnak’s Lost Goddesses of Early Greece for more on pre-Hellenic myths)
If we borrow from some well-known mythologists, they will argue that ancient myth correlates to the rituals and social values of the cultures who extolled the stories of their gods. If this is so, does that mean we are reifying the very values of those patriarchies we are trying to resist? How then do we do this if our only stories (keeping with Aphrodite as an example) are ones in which beauty is the center piece for the woman deity? (see Judgment of Paris if you need reminding) and let’s add along with it transgressions of adultery and mean spiritedness toward mortal women.
Perhaps the popularity of the Greco-Roman world is sustained not just because that is where we get ideas about Democracy but because, as Mircea Eliade espoused, archaic people were more attuned to life because of their connection to nature, which was considered sacred. He offers that when modern men use myth (like a time machine) they can regenerate their own hopefulness.
Though I love the keeping of a mantra where nature is a sacred reality, obviously, Eliade’s reasoning is problematic for witches and/or feminists. Stories enshrined in the canons of early western literature dignify women about as much as the Old Testament does. How are we to respond to the writings from misogynists like Homer and Hesiod for some “return to paradise time” for us to dip our toes in? By the time the Greek poets had put the myths of the gods to pen, much of goddess culture and the social values of women from those cultures, had been erased.
Erasure of Aphrodite’s earlier cults reflects women’s diminished power. It is easy to see how the Aphrodite of pop culture is extolled and then internalized into our own ways of thinking and feeling. Faking normal on social media, that includes air-brushed and photo shopped filters of professionally posed, hyper-sexualized teen-agers, demonstrates how misunderstood and misaligned goddesses are situated in the capitalistic, consumerist, longing for beauty-driven industry of modernity. Don’t get me wrong, I have ongoing conversations with myself about obligatory spending on beauty products and which photos of me I’ll let my husband post on Facebook. I am not immune. This continues to serve the patriarchies’ value systems that limit women’s worth. And though we have evidence that those with power are aware of the damage that is done to young women every day, nothing much changes. Instead, Instagram posts are strikingly similar to the story of three goddesses in a beauty contest in keeping with dominant culture’s narrow ideas (aka beauty and sexuality) about what the term goddess means. Because Aphrodite wins, she awards the judge, Pairs, the most beautiful woman in the world as a prize which afterward jumpstarts the Trojan War.
Don’t we owe it to the goddess, and to ourselves, to go deeper, beyond the meme, beyond the quick stop, drive-by scrolling of beautiful people?
Some of the earliest traditions honoring Aphrodite were those of the living marriage between her and Adonis. The stories proliferate through Aphrodite’s connection to Inanna, a Sumerian goddess whose sacred marriage rituals denote the lesser-known power and equanimity afforded to women in the Bronze age. These rituals were annual; two lovers displayed on two couches strewn with flowers and fruit. The following day an effigy of Adonis is thrown into the water witnessed by people singing songs of his eventual rebirth. By exploring the rituals, stories and imagery associated with a goddess before patriarchal bands decimated goddess cultures, we can claim a larger part of our prehistories that are rich in women’s leadership.
It may be easy to minimalize these traditions as fertility rituals but the world of our ancestor’s enjoyed nature as a sacred reality and the relationship between the goddess and her lover was evidence that the universe could be renewed. Such a vision helps us to imagine that the goddess was once as once as large as the universe itself.