I always had a sense that if there was a God, there
had to be a Goddess. Host-Hostess. Steward-Stewardess.
Actor-Actress. In my heart I knew there had to be
a yin to the yang I grew up knowing as the Divine source
of all that is. I just did not have a clue as to how to find
Her.
It wasn’t until I was in seminary school that I
began to truly see the many feminine faces of God, known
as Goddess, as she exists in so many of the world's
religions and traditions. My path included many bumps,
questions and doubts along the way. I share my insights
with you because I suspect that many people raised in
our traditional religious culture may find it hard to
believe--and perhaps even sacrilegious to consider--that the male God of the Bible is one of many
interpretations of divine presence that exist in the
world’s religions.
Fortunately, I was trained by a seminary that
encourages free thinking and exploration. Its motto is
"Never instead of, always in addition to." In
order to embrace all faiths we were taught that God is
one source and yet that source manifests in many ways,
through many paths, religions and spiritual practices.
And that God is represented by a wide-range of deities
with different names.
Nevertheless, the fear of acknowledging a feminine
face of God grabbed hold of me in the middle of seminary
school. I was doing what seminarians are supposed to
do... grappling with God. As I studied
comparative religion, I was trying to reconcile the
belief system I was raised with--God is a man, no two
ways about it--with the new belief systems I was
learning--The Divine is neither male or female
and/or The Divine is indeed both male and female.
One day I was praying to a feminine deity...and I became
panic stricken: What if the Male God gets mad at me and
cuts me off? What if he’s saying, Oh, switching
teams, eh? We’ll see about that...
Many people are even afraid to consider the Divine as
feminine in form or nature. Yet I learned on my personal
journey that in order to be truly whole, whether we are
women or men, we must embrace both the male and feminine
aspects of the divine--and we must embrace those
aspects of ourselves and of one another.
I discovered that I am among so many women--and
men--searching for spirituality that brings both The
Father and The Mother to the table. As we desperately
seek balance and peace on our planet, and in these times
of deeply disturbing and frightening world events, many
of us are searching for what’s been missing in modern
life. And I believe one of the most important missing
pieces of our lives has been The Sacred Feminine--not
instead of, but in addition to, The Sacred Male.
In the tradition of all-inclusive spirituality, we refer
to the Divine as God, Goddess, All there is.
She is there, in between the lines
When I first began to search for signs of the Mother in
the world’s religions, I found a few beautiful
examples, including the "she aspect". One
was in the gentle spiritual practice known as Taoism,
founded by Loa Tzu in the 6th Century B.C.E.. The
Taoists explain the origin of all that is as feminine,
yet is manifested as both male and female, in what is
known as the Yin and the Yang. It is this energy that
the Taoist religious text Tao Te Ching attributes
to the creation of the cosmos. "Conceived of as
having no name, it is the originator of heaven and
earth...it is the Mother of all things."
In Kabbalah, the mystical aspect of Judaism, the
indwelling aspect of God, also known as Shekinah, is
considered to be the feminine aspect of God. Kabbalists
also know the soul as "She." Consider this
petition to the divine from the tradition of mystical
Judaism:
"My soul aches to receive your love. Only by the
tenderness of your light can she be healed. Engage my
soul that she may taste your ecstasy."
The Judaic scriptures and the Gnostic Christian
doctrines also include wisdom as a feminine aspect. She
is called, Sophia and considered the personification of
wisdom.
The Buddhists confer that Praj-na-para-mita (which
means the perfection of wisdom) is feminine. An
important Buddhist text, Sariputra, puts it this
way: "The perfection of wisdom gives light, O
Lord. I pay homage to the perfection of wisdom. She is
worthy of homage. She is unstained and the world cannot
stain her."
Then of course, there is Grace. In Christian Theology
it is the expression of Gods love in his free and
unmerited assistance. And, as the New Testament puts it,
Grace can only be conferred through Faith. Isn’t it
interesting that those are names assigned to women? That
Grace and Faith evoke perhaps the greatest sense of
connection to the Divine, yet do so in the name and
essence of the feminine. I was excited to see that when
you dig around a bit you will find the feminine between
the lines of well-established religions. Still, I was
searching for a God who looked like me--feminine in
nature and in her manifestations...The spiritual mother
I longed for.
Hail Mary
Conventional religious belief is obviously dominated
by references to and images of a male Divine, whispering
ever so softly of feminine energies between the lines.
Yet Catholicism has given us our most tangible
mainstream connection. Mary, mother of God’s only
begotten son, along with a handful of popular female
saints, have been the most highly visible aspect of the
feminine in the traditional religion for 2,000 years.
Because of that, The Blessed Virgin cuts across
religious boundaries. She is, in many ways, the adopted
spiritual mother of all women, and people of many faiths
embrace her. She has been solely responsible for keeping
the sacred feminine alive for a couple of millennium.
Yet there are many cultures that are rich with
mythology, spiritual practices, religious experiences
and sacred texts that show us many ways in which The
Goddess has been and can be worshipped, remembered and
evoked.
It is extraordinary to realize that just over 2000
years ago, less than 40 years before the birth of
Jesus Christ, queen Cleopatra of Egypt prayed to the
mother Goddess, Isis, who was the favored deity of the
Queen’s temples. Cleopatra’s beloved, Julius Caesar,
bowed to Isis’ Roman counterpart, the Goddess Venus.
What was considered sacrilegious in their day was not
the worship of Goddesses… but Caesar’s worship of
Cleopatra, which was so intense that he erected a statue
of Cleopatra as Venus, but looking like Isis, in a holy
temple to the Roman Goddess. The Romans did not
appreciate that interfaith approach to Goddess
worship back then.
When the Romans conquered Egypt, they ultimately
replaced the antiquities and images of Isis and her
infant Horus with images and icons of Mary and the baby
Jesus.
Although Mary and Jesus are the most famous mother
and child, the image of the mother and the child (or the
pregnant, fertile mother) abound as a motif of cultures
that worshiped The Great Mother. Joseph Campbell often
said that the same essence of the Divine Feminine could
be found in the religious mythology and folklore of
every culture. Many of the stories are the same, yet the
names and specific circumstances change according to
cultural tradition.
History of the Goddess
The earliest signs of Goddess worship date as far
back as 33,000 years ago. One of the most famous
artifacts of the Divine Feminine is The Venus of
Willendorf, which is believed to have been carved in
stone 20,000 to 30,000 thousand years ago. And while she
looks like a rotund female--pregnant and
voluptuous--when you place a replica of her famous
statue flat on her back, she takes on the form of
the earth--the hills and valleys, mountains and ravines,
are all in her body.
And that is how the ancients worshiped The Great
Mother--as Mother of the Earth, Mother Earth and Mom
Nature. They followed an earth-based religion. The Great
Goddess Mother was the earth--alive, growing, pulsating
with life. She was fertility, death and regeneration, as
witnessed in the flowers and trees, the moon and the
ocean, the cycles of life and nature. She was seen in so
many diverse forms--fluid, capable of assuming any role.
Much like our own mothers.
She was revered as the great power because women were
seen as the great power. It was human women who could
conceive, birth, and nurture children from their own
bodies. A Miracle. But a miracle akin to the magic of
mother earth--who could nurture flowers in the summer,
protect them in her womb in the winter, and magically
let them grow again in spring.
It is believed by many scholars that it was the
eruption of violence as perpetrated by the newer, male
dominated cultures that obliterated the peaceful, earth
honoring ways of Goddess worship and paved the way for
the strong hold of Christianity and eventually the
obliteration of the Goddess from religion, religious
texts and teachings.
Native American and indigenous shamanic cultures
The shamanic religion--50,000 years old and still
going strong, and considered the oldest of all religions--also reveres the mother, along with the father. She
is the earth, the Great Mother. Some cultures call her
Patchamama or Corn Woman. She is the nurturer who feeds
us from her own body and sustains all of life. In Native
American cultures she is represented by the turtle--a
hard shell with a soft inside. A popular Lakota chant
sums it up well: "The earth is our mother... we
must take care of her."
Who is the Goddess?
Like most people who are unfamiliar with the concept
and rich spirituality of including The Goddess, the
first time I began to explore the aspect of Feminine
Divine called Goddess I was afraid that it meant I had
to worship only a SHE and practice a spirituality that
excluded men. Wrong.
Almost three decades ago, Merlin Stone wrote a
groundbreaking book called When God Was A Woman,
tracing cultures that worshipped "The Goddess"
or "Goddesses". She described Goddess this
way: She is the "divine feminine principle" or
the "sacred feminine principle in the
universe."
In this millennium we are seeing a resurgence of the
Divine Feminine and an observance of the feminine as
sacred. We are seeing her in history, art, folklore,
religion, spirituality, archeology, media, and
mythology.
Many scholars and clergy agree that we need Her help
to midwife this new point in history... Because she
brings to our world--and our lives--those qualities
that, as discussed, even some traditional religions and
most mystical religions assign as feminine qualities:
Wisdom and the expression of the Soul. When we tap into
wisdom and follow the call of our souls we can then
forgive, be tolerant, appreciate everyone’s individual
evolution, and love without conditions. The energy of
the Divine Feminine also balances the energy of the
male; without it, the qualities traditionally associated
with male energy--which include warring and
aggression--will get completely out of hand.
Rich spiritual traditions and religious
mythology can help in everyday life
The natural progression of my search for the Divine
Feminine is to write a book that puts together all that
I have learned about the Goddess and how she can help us
in our daily lives. In researching my book, A Goddess
Is A Girl’s Best Friend (Perigee, Fall 2002), I
found thousands of ways the Divine Feminine is
personified in different cultures. The rich mythology of
the Feminine Divine has reemerged to offer role
models--and guidance--to modern men and women. She
comes to us as The Mother, and also the Maiden and The
Wise Woman. She is also Sister, Daughter, Best Friend.
For example:
- The Greek Goddess Aphrodite, also known as the Roman
Goddess, Venus, is Goddess of Love and Infatuation. She
has completely insinuated herself in our culture,
helping us to evoke the love within us all and
encouraging us to experience high romance.
- The Egyptian Goddess Isis is one of the most revered
Goddesses, worshipped as Queen of Heaven in the ancient
Egyptian religions. A healing and resurrection Goddess
who was also considered a physician, she brought her
beloved Osiris back to life from the dead and bore his
child Horus, who went on to be the chosen son to
represent the father, on earth. She lives on through her
image and energy in reliefs on ancient temples and tomb
walls. She shows us we can heal, survive our grief, and
live fruitful lives.
- The Chinese Goddess Kuan Yin is a beautiful
Bodhisattva who has captured the heart of Buddhist
worshipers and beyond, just as Mary has captured the
heart of so many in her religion of origin and around
the world. She comes to tell us to be merciful and
compassionate--especially to be our own merciful
mothers.
- Lakshmi is the Hindu Goddess of Good Fortune who
brings abundance and beauty into our lives, pouring her
gifts upon us. She, like Aphrodite, was born of the
milky waters of the sea. She is symbolized as beautiful
woman with four arms, one pouring coins into the ocean
from whence she came. She is still worshipped daily in
Hindu temples and homes, as are all Goddesses in that
tradition. Read
More About Lakshmi in Rev. Laurie Sue's Monthly Column
at SoulfulLiving.com.
All that is Divine is both Female and Male
The Hindus teach us that the Divine essence of all
that is is the creative summary of both male and female
principle. And so do the Taoists, who show us the
feminine and the masculine principle that feed one
another and make up the whole in the symbol of Yin/Yang.
The circle of black and white halves show two opposite
energies, from whose interactions and fluctuation, the
universe and its diverse forms emerge. Tibetan Buddhist
do the same with their most sacred objects, dorje and
bell. The bell represents the feminine and the dorje is
the male principal. No worship service is ever conducted
without use of each, together, one held in each hand.
In these systems of belief.... You can’t have one
without the other. You can’t have day without the
night. You can’t have man without woman, or masculine
without feminine. In very, very simple form, you can
forget about toast for the rest of your life... you can’t
plug in a toaster without both the male plug and the
female outlet.
When we really understand that the Divine nature of
all that is contains both the masculine and the feminine
principles, it begins to make sense that men and women
each contain those Divine principle; that the energy of
the Goddess exists within all of us; and that one energy
might at some times be more prominent than the other.
For example, any man or woman in a traffic jam may
choose to evoke their male energy by vocalizing
dissatisfaction with the traffic or even trying by
driving aggressively. On the other end of the spectrum,
both the man and the woman who share a moment of gentle
nurturing and loving are operating from a more receptive
and gentle feminine energy.
We are all children of God, Goddess, All There Is.
When we acknowledge that we are all Divine, as well as
complex beings that are both feminine and masculine
in nature, we can begin to access true balance in our
lives. It is in acknowledging that these qualities exist
in all of us that we begin to find balance in our
relationship to ourselves, our relationships to one
another, and in our relationship to the world we live
in.
| I Believe The Goddess Is
Re-emerging Just In Time…
The Goddess is re-emerging to show us another side of
ourselves. Or at least to help us consider God is both
masculine and feminine in nature, and therefore, that we
all possess The Divine Within. She’s come just in
time. Here’s why:
Women feel left out of traditional religion. It’s
not just about becoming a clergy person or having power,
it’s about being able to recognize our own divinity.
Men have been able to recognize their divinity through
worship of a male divine. It’s time that women access
The Goddess Within but first… we need role models.
- Men are shut off from their feminine energy and,
quite frankly, their softness in many cases, and there is
so little in religious environments in our culture--and most of the world’s cultures--that nurtures that
side of males. Because of this, men are suffering, and
our world is suffering, because we still do not
completely support the idea of men being sensitive,
loving, gentle, forgiving, healing, even mushy. This is
so odd, because that was exactly what the ministry of
Jesus Christ was about. Jesus was, in so many ways, the
embodiment of both the male and female principle. Of
Mary Magdalene, it has been said, "he could not see
her in tears without himself weeping." He spent
every waking moment of his ministry embracing people in
his love and continues to do so. I mean, who would dare
call Christ a wimp? Yet, we often label men who are in
touch with that part of themselves by that name.
- Because of the ingrained idea of a male divinity,
our relationship lives are utterly confusing. Love means
war when instead of accessing all the qualities of the
male and feminine in ourselves, we seek partners to make
us whole. We have to learn to come into relationships
whole and we can only do that when we embrace all
aspects of the Divine.
- We’ve got kids to raise and it’s time we teach
them that all of who they are is okay; that their
sex doesn’t have to assign them to specific gender
roles; that we are all made up of the male and female
principle, the yin-yang. If we raise our boys to know
the divine only in male terms than we deny them access
to a part of themselves, and if we teach our girls that
the Feminine Divine only exists in fairy tales, they
will grow up as Barbie Dolls instead of as Goddesses.
- We live in a world that is spinning out of control.
This became so painfully evident in the September 11,
2001 attack on our nation, which brought forth a
darkness that shocked and pained us all. But even before
that, we were at war with one another and within
ourselves, and our world reeled with imbalances:
violence in our schools, people starving to death on a
planet that has plenty of food to feed everyone, one
natural catastrophe after another. Mom Nature has been
trying to get our attention. God, Goddess, All There Is
has been whispering in our ear… We must take stock
of our world and ourselves. We must change, now.
New York author Rick Carrier told me that his book, The
Mother of God, is about a female deity who walks the
earth to come and tell us: CLEAN UP YOUR ROOM. It is
time to clean up our planet, our personal lives, our
pain, our wounding of one another and our earth, our
relationships, our bad habits, our unconsciousness.
The Feminine Divine lives to love and protect all
her children. She’s there for us, always. But she’s
screaming out for our attention: "Listen to your
mother," she calls, "I know what’s best for
you!" |
Sources for More Information:
1. Return of The Great Goddess, Edited by
Burleigh Muten (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1997)
2. When The Drummers Were Women by Layne Redmond
(Three Rivers Press, 1998)
3. Men and the Goddesses: Feminine Archetypes in
Western Literature, by Tom Absher (Park Street
Press,1990)
4. Encyclopedia of GODS--Over 2,500 Deities of the
World, by Michael Jordon (Facts on File, 1993)
5. The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions,
edited by John Bowker (Oxford Press, 1997)
6. An Anthology of Sacred Texts By & About Women,
edited by Serenity Young (Crossroad Press, 1993)
7. Listen To Her: Women of The Hebrew Bible, by
Miki Raver (Chronicle Books, 1998)
8. The Goddesses In Art by Lanier Graham (Artebras,
1997)
9. When God Was A Woman by Merlin Stone (Hartcourt-Brace,
1976)
10. The New Book of Goddesses and Heroines by
Patricia Monaghan (Llewellyn Publications, 1997)
11. The Devi Gita: The Song of the Goddess
,Translation, Annotation, Commentary by C. Mackenzie
Brown (SUNY Press, 1998)
12. Holy Bible (St. James)
13. Kabbalah As I See It By Rabbi Joseph H.
Gelberman (self published). Rabbi Gelberman, founder of
the New Seminary, is credited with having coined the
phrase: "Never instead of, always in addition
to."
© Copyright 2001
Reverend Laurie Sue Brockway All Rights Reserved.
Reverend Laurie Sue Brockway is an author, teacher
and contemporary clergy person who specializes in
matters of the heart and soul. As an ordained interfaith
minister and non-denominational wedding officiant, it is
her honor to regularly marry couples in love.
Prior to becoming a minister she enjoyed a successful
and colorful 20 years in media as a widely published
journalist, editor and author of several books on
relationships and romance—as well as being a noted
spokesperson on those topics. She was editor-in-chief of
two national magazines and several regional
publications, and her articles have been published
around the world and in many newspapers and national
magazines, such as the NY Daily News, The
Washington Post, Women’s News, New Woman,
Ladies’ Home Journal and Child.
She evolved years of specialized reporting in the field
of male-female relationship dynamics into a more
spiritual pursuit that led her to train to be an
interfaith minister, and then establish her wedding
ministry along with a number of popular relationship
enhancement programs. Her wedding ministry is based in
New York.
She is also dedicated to bringing about a deeper
awareness and understanding of the Divine Feminine. As a
graduate of The New Seminary in NYC, the world’s
premier seminary for interfaith ministers, she was
educated and trained in the tenants, spiritual practice
and worship of many faiths. She became a specialist in
the feminine aspects of God in all the world’s
religions. Today, she is widely recognized as a
minister, teacher and scribe specializing in women’s
spirituality and The Divine Feminine from an interfaith
and all-inclusive perspective. She is on the
board of directors of World Light Fellowship, heading up
their Feminine Faces of God programs, and is
Founder of Our Mother’s House, a cyber ministry at www.OurMothersHouse.org.
Long devoted to helping women access the
"Goddess Within," she is currently working on
two books that bring the wisdom of ancient archetypes to
modern women. Her newest book, A Goddess Is a Girl’s
Best Friend, is due out in Fall 2002.
To be placed on a mailing list for information about A
Goddess Is A Girl’s Best Friend: OurMothersHouse@aol.com
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