Post by Blu on Dec 2, 2004 17:59:33 GMT -5
Searching for the Divine Feminine Host/Musée’Orsay/Paris
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 that I grew up knowing as the divine source of all that is. I just did not have a clue how to find Her. In seminary I began to truly see the many feminine faces of God, known as Goddess, in the world’s religions and traditions. 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. 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 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 in which I was raised – God is a man, no two ways about it – with the new belief systems I was learning – the divine is neither male nor 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 masculine and feminine aspects of the divine – and we must embrace those aspects of ourselves and of each other. I discovered that I am among 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 redisturbing 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 masculine. In the tradition of all-inclusive spirituality, we refer to the divine as God, Goddess, All-There-Is. When I first began to search for signs of the Mother in the world’s religions, I found a beautiful example of including the “she aspect” in the gentle spiritual practice known as Taoism, founded by Lao Tzu in the 6th Century B.C.E. The Taoists explain the origin of all that is as feminine, yet 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. Buddhists refer to Praj-na-para-mita (which means the perfection of wisdom) as 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.”
In Christian theology, grace is the expression of God’s love as seen in His unmerited assistance. Grace can only be conferred through faith. Isn’t it interesting that those are names assigned to women? Grace and faith evoke perhaps the greatest sense of connection to the divine, yet do so in the name and essence of the feminine. When you dig around a bit you will find the feminine between the lines of wellestablished 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 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, has 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 millennia. Yet there are many cultures that are rich with mythology, spiritual practices, religious experiences, and sacred texts that show us so many ways in which the goddess has been and can be worshiped, remembered, and evoked. Just over 2,000 years ago, less than 40 years before the birth of Jesus Christ, Cleopatra, queen 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’s 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. Centuries later the images of Isis and her infant Horus were replaced 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“ statuette, which is believed to have been carved in stone 20,000 to 30,000 years ago. She is a very rotund female, pregnant and voluptuous, and when you place a replica of her flat on her back, she takes on the form of the earth: the hills and valleys, mountains and ravines, all are 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 redisturbing ligion. 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 firm hold of Christianity and eventually the obliteration of the goddess from religion, religious texts, and teachings. Native shamanic cultures Shamanism – 50,000 years old and still going strong, and considered the oldest of all religious traditions – 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? When 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. Merlin Stone, in her groundbreaking book When God Was a Woman, described goddess this way: She is the “divine feminine principle” or the “sacred feminine principle in the universe.” Today we are seeing a resurgence of the divine feminine and an observance of the feminine as sacred.
To read the entire thing! go to:
www.edgarcayce.org/venture_inward/01022003/article.asp?ID=Searching_for_the_Divine_Feminine
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 that I grew up knowing as the divine source of all that is. I just did not have a clue how to find Her. In seminary I began to truly see the many feminine faces of God, known as Goddess, in the world’s religions and traditions. 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. 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 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 in which I was raised – God is a man, no two ways about it – with the new belief systems I was learning – the divine is neither male nor 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 masculine and feminine aspects of the divine – and we must embrace those aspects of ourselves and of each other. I discovered that I am among 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 redisturbing 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 masculine. In the tradition of all-inclusive spirituality, we refer to the divine as God, Goddess, All-There-Is. When I first began to search for signs of the Mother in the world’s religions, I found a beautiful example of including the “she aspect” in the gentle spiritual practice known as Taoism, founded by Lao Tzu in the 6th Century B.C.E. The Taoists explain the origin of all that is as feminine, yet 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. Buddhists refer to Praj-na-para-mita (which means the perfection of wisdom) as 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.”
In Christian theology, grace is the expression of God’s love as seen in His unmerited assistance. Grace can only be conferred through faith. Isn’t it interesting that those are names assigned to women? Grace and faith evoke perhaps the greatest sense of connection to the divine, yet do so in the name and essence of the feminine. When you dig around a bit you will find the feminine between the lines of wellestablished 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 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, has 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 millennia. Yet there are many cultures that are rich with mythology, spiritual practices, religious experiences, and sacred texts that show us so many ways in which the goddess has been and can be worshiped, remembered, and evoked. Just over 2,000 years ago, less than 40 years before the birth of Jesus Christ, Cleopatra, queen 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’s 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. Centuries later the images of Isis and her infant Horus were replaced 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“ statuette, which is believed to have been carved in stone 20,000 to 30,000 years ago. She is a very rotund female, pregnant and voluptuous, and when you place a replica of her flat on her back, she takes on the form of the earth: the hills and valleys, mountains and ravines, all are 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 redisturbing ligion. 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 firm hold of Christianity and eventually the obliteration of the goddess from religion, religious texts, and teachings. Native shamanic cultures Shamanism – 50,000 years old and still going strong, and considered the oldest of all religious traditions – 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? When 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. Merlin Stone, in her groundbreaking book When God Was a Woman, described goddess this way: She is the “divine feminine principle” or the “sacred feminine principle in the universe.” Today we are seeing a resurgence of the divine feminine and an observance of the feminine as sacred.
To read the entire thing! go to:
www.edgarcayce.org/venture_inward/01022003/article.asp?ID=Searching_for_the_Divine_Feminine