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SCHOLAR ISLAND |
Goddess
"Of all the pantheon, Great Mother Nature has been the hardest to kill."
C.S. Lewis
"In the Craft, we do not believe in the Goddess-we connect with Her; through trees, animals, through other human beings, through ourselves. She is here. She is within us all. She is the full circle: earth, fire, water, and essence-body, mind, spirit, emotions, change."
Starhawk
"I will sing of well-founded Gaia, Mother of All, eldest of all beings, she feeds all creatures that are in the world, all that go upon the goodly land and all that are in the paths of the sea, and all that fly: these are fed of her store."
Homer (7th century BCE)
"If we experience our connection to the finite and changing earth deeply, then we must find the thought of its destruction and mutilation intolerable."
Carol P. Christ
"You see me here, Lucius, in answer to your prayer. I am Nature, the universal Mother, mistress of all the elements, primordial child of time, sovereign of all things spiritual, queen of the dead, queen also of the immortals, the single manifestation of all gods and goddesses there are.....though I am worshipped in many aspects , known by countless names, and propitiated with all manner of different rites yet the whole round earth venerates me."
Apuleius
The Golden Ass (The Goddess Isis speaks to Lucius)
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"Seest thou not what they do in the cities of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem?....The women knead dough to make cakes for the Queen of Heaven." (Jeremiah 7:17-18)
"Then all the men which knew that their wives had burned incense unto other gods, and all the women that stood by, a great multitude, even all the people that dwelt in the land of Egypt, in Pathros, answered Jeremiah, saying....we will certainly....burn incense to the Queen of Heaven....as we have done...in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem: for then....we....were well, and saw no evil....(and the women said) when we burned incense....and poured out drink offerings to her, did we make her cakes to worship her...without our men?" (Jeremiah, 44:14-19)
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"The first step in the elevation of woman to her true position, as an equal factor in human progress, is the cultivation of the religious sentiment in regard to her dignity and equality, the recognition by the rising generation of an ideal Heavenly Mother, to whom their prays should be addressed, as well as to a Father.
If language has any meaning, we have in these texts a plain declaration of the existence of the feminine element in the Godhead, equal in power and glory with the masculine. The Heavenly Mother and Father."
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"Why indeed must "God" be a noun? Why not a verb-the most active and dynamic of all? Hasn’t the naming of "God" as a noun been an act of murdering that dynamic verb? And isn’t the Verb infinitely more personal than a mere static noun? The anthromorphic symbols for God may be intended to convey personality, but they fail to convey God is Be-ing. Women now who are experiencing the shock of nonbeing and the surge of self-affirmation against this are inclined to perceive transcendence as the Verb in which we participate-live, move, and have our being. This Verb-the Verb of Verbs- is intransitive. It need not be conceived as having an object that limits dynamism."
Mary Daly
Beyond God the Father.
"We are told monotheism began with the Jews, that it was the great "spiritual invention of the religious leader Moses." This is not so. The worship of one God, like everything else in religion, began with the worship of the Goddess."
Monica Sjoo & Barbara Mor
The Great Cosmic Mother
"The Queen of Heaven can often be identified by the particular emphasis placed by her worshippers on baking and offering cakes to her. And this was the case amongst the early Christian women's sect of Collyridians who baked cakes in honour of Mary, Queen of Heaven. Such cake-making was a feature of goddess worship throughout the Near East. A hymn to Ishtar includes the lines:' O Ishtar, I have made a preparation of milk, cake grilled bread and salt, hear me and be kind. Another hymn to her states: 'O Ishtar, I look on your face, and I make an offering of pure milk with a baked cake....Cakes baked and offered to the Queen of Skies may have had an image of the goddess on them."
Asphodel P. Long
In A Chariot Drawn By Lions
"While the Queen of Heaven reigns in her own right, it has recently been suggested that she be recognized as the consort of the King of Heaven, that is, the Lord, Jahweh. And this raises the topic of God's one-ness; does it include the female aspect as goddess or does God have a consort, worshipped with Him, or separately? While it is usual to think of God's biblical relationship with Israel as that of husband with wife, this is a theological polemic. Today it is being suggested that God's consort or wife, as much a deity as he himself, was acknowledged in the person of the Lady Asherah, whom we have already met in the Canaanite tradition."
Asphodel P. Long
In a Chariot Drawn by Lions
"Why is it continually inferred that the age of the "pagan" religions, the time of the worship of female deities (if mentioned at all), was dark and chaotic, mysterious and evil, without the light of order and reason that supposedly accompanied the later male religions, when it has been archaeologically confirmed that the earliest law, government, medicine, agriculture, architecture, metallurgy, wheeled vehicles, ceramics, textiles, and written language were initially developed in societies that worshipped the Goddess?"
Merlin Stone
"Yet other accounts tell of Adam’s first consort, Lilith, before he was enchanted by Eve. Lilith was handmaiden to the Matronit, and she left Adam because he tried to dominate her. Escaping to the Red Sea, she cried "Why should I lie beneath you? I am your equal!’ A Sumerian terracotta relief depicting Lilith (dating from around 2000 BC) shows her naked and winged ,standing on the backs of two lions. Although not a goddess in the traditional sense, her incarnate spirit was said to flourish in Solomon’s most renowned lover, the Queen of Sheba. Lilith is described in the book of the esoteric Mandeeans of Iraq as the "Daughter of the Underworld.’ Throughout history to the present day she has represented the fundamental ethic of female opportunity."
Bloodline of the Holy Grail
"The burning question remains: Why do women continue to give our gifts-of spiritual devotion, of impassioned energy, of mental brightness, of profound social concern-to-male-dominated and male-defined religious institutions which are based, structurally and ideologically, on a searing contempt and hatred for women?"
Monica Sjoo & Barbara Mor
The Great Cosmic Mother
"These heretical women – how audacious they are! They have no modesty; they are bold enough to teach, to engage in argument, to enact exorcisms, to undertake cures, and it may be, even to baptize!
"Do you not know that everyone of you is an Eve? The sentence of God on your sex lives on in this age…Women are the gate by which the demon enters…weak women…it is on your account that Jesus died."
Tertuillian
"To say the people who worshipped the Goddess were deeply religious would be to understate, and largely miss, the point. For here there was no separation between the secular and the sacred. As religious historians point out, in prehistoric and, to a large extent, well into historic times, religion was life, and life was religion."
Riane Eisler
The Chalice and the Blade
"So, from the ‘Pyrenees to Lake Baikal, the evidence now is before us of a late Stone Age mythology in which the outstanding single figure was the Naked Goddess."
Joseph Campbell
Book: "The Triumph of the Moon" by Ronald Hutton
Book: "The White Goddess" by Robert Graves
Book: "The Cult of the Black Virgin, Revised Edition" by Ean Begg
Book: "In a Chariot Drawn by Lions" by Asphodel P. Long
Book: "Sex,Time & Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution." by Leonard Shalain
Book: "The alphabet and the Goddess" by Leonard Shalain
Book: "The Goddess, The Grail & The Lodge" by Alan Butler
Book: "Hypatia's Heritage: A History of Women in Science from Antiquity through the nineteenth century" by Margaret Alic
Book: "Cleopatra of Egypt: From History to Myth" Ed. by S. Walker & P. Higgs
Book: "Mary Magdalene: Christianity's Hidden Goddess" by Lynn Pickett
Book: "The Banned Book Of Mary: How Her Story Was Suppressed by the Church and Hidden in Art for Centuries" by Ronald F. Hock
Book: "The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets" by Barbara G. Walker
Book: "The Book of Gods & Goddesses: A Visual Directory of Ancient & Modern Deities" by Eric Chaline