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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
Athens Greece: A small group of pagans pledged Thursday to hold a protest prayer among the Acropolis temples, more than 1,500 years after Christians stamped out worship of the ancient Greek gods.
Group spokeswoman Doretta Peppa said the worshippers would pray Sunday to Athena-goddess of wisdom and patron of ancient Athens-to protect the 2,500 year-old site. Peppa said followers of the old religion object to the removal of hundreds of sculptural masterpieces from a museum on the Acropolis to a large new building." (2008)
"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)
DANAANS, THE: The people of the goddess Dana, often mentioned in Irish medieval romance. They were one of the three Nemedian families who survived the Fomorian victory, and returned to Ireland at a later period. By some it was said that they came "out of heaven," and by others that they sprang from four cities, in which they learned science and craftsmanship, and from each of which they brought away a magical treasure. From Falias they brought the Stone of Destiny (Lia Fail) from Gorias an invincible sword; from Finias a magical spear; and from Murias the Cauldron of the Dagda. They were believed to have been wafted to Ireland on a magic cloud, carrying their treasures with them. After a victorious battle they took possession of the whole of Ireland, except Connacht which was given to the vanquished. The Danaans were the representatives of power and beauty, of science and poetry, to the writer of the myth; to the common people they were gods of earth. In their battles they were subject to death, but it was by magical powers that they conquered their mortal foes."
-Lewis Spence
An Encyclopedia of Occultism
"The Great Goddess.....is the incarnation of the Feminine Self that unfolds in the history of mankind as in the history of every individual woman; its reality determines individual as well as collective life."
-Erich Neuman
The Great Mother
"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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"Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children."
-William Makepeace (1811-1863)
"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
"Although pre-Islamic Arabs worshiped goddesses, women's place in society was, by all accounts massively grim. The principles of compassion and pacifism we have pasted onto societies with female deities can be wishful thinking and historically inaccurate, though useful and hopeful for establishing ideals by which the feminine might gain its equal place in today's world. And it was not only pre-Islamic Arabs who exercised a double standard. The ancient Greeks, for example, despite their highly populated pantheon of goddesses, were terrific misogynists; neither were women well treated in ancient Egypt, where Isis was adored."
Jennifer heath
The Scimitar and the Veil: Extraordinary Women of Islam
"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, Yahweh. 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 Mandeans 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 the Christian Fathers, the blonde and naked Venus was the ultimate demon, the most shameful of the company of Olympian demons, plucked as an example of the odious immorality of her times. Thousands of images of her must have been destroyed as symbols of Rome's decadent past. yet it was exactly this sensationally erotic goddess, more than any other of the demonized deities, who was to survive her attacks for many centuries to come. Venus was to find a new and lasting guise in the medieval world of Christianity, where her abhorred blonde hair would become an essential element of her power."
Joanna Pitman
On Blondes
"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
"ANN LEE may be one of the most extraordinary and mysterious women in the history of Western culture, From humble origins in Manchester, England, where she was born in 1736, this illiterate daughter of a blacksmith became a visionary religious leader who was thought by her followers to have been the second incarnation of Christ. When she died in America at age forty-eight, having brought her faithful to a new land on the eve of the Revolution, she left behind a religious movement that was to have thousands of followers and become our most important and successful utopian community."
-Richard Francis
Ann the Word: the Story of Ann Lee Female Messiah Mother of the Shakers The Woman Clothed with the Sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars..."
Revelation XII,1
"O Thou holy and eternal Savior of the human race, ever lavish in thy bounties to mortals of thy choice. Thou bestowest a sweet mother's affection upon the misfortunes of wretched men. Nor day nor night, nor even a moment of timepasses which is not replete with thy benefits. By sea and land thou protectest men. Thou dispellest the storms of life and strechest forthThy right hand of salvation, by which Thou unravellest even the inextricably tangled web of Fate. Thou dost alleviate the tempests of Fortune and restrainest the harmful courses of the stars. Thee the heavenly ones worship and the gods infernal reverence. Thou turnest the earth in its orb; Thou givest light tot he sun; Thou rulest the world; Thou treadest Death underfoot. To Thee the stars are responsive; by Thee the seasons return and the gods rejoice and the elements are in subjection. At Thy command the winds blow; the clouds bestow bestow their refreshing; the seeds bud and the fruits increase. The birds that range the heaven, the beasts on the mountains, the serpents lurking in their den, the fish that swim the sea, are awe-inspired by Thy majesty. But, as for me, I am too feeble to render thee sufficient praise, and too poor in earthly possessions to offer Thee fitting sacrifices. I lack the eloquence to express what I feel about thy majesty; no, nor would a thousand lips, nor a thousand tongues, nor a perpetual uninterrupted prayer suffice. But, a pious though poor worshipper, I shall essay to do all within my power; Thy divine countenance and most holy deity I shall guard and keep for ever hidden in the secret place of my heart."
-Lucius addresses the following thanksgiving to Isis on his initiation
"Bromyard, the Dominican preacher from Hereford, was a regular denouncer of the dangerously attractive Mary Magdalene. She appears in his preaching anthology as Luxuria, the personification of all filth relating to sexual desire and forbidden pleasures. Fornication was the typical feminine crime, he believed, and the weapon of temptation was her beauty. 'a beautiful woman is a temple built over a sewer,' he declared, warning the men in his congregation that to look at a woman was unsafe and that to overcome thoughts of them he should close his eyes and occupy his mind with holy thoughts. Beauty, the Devil's instrument, he said, attacks thought the female glories, primarily her hair; and those who dye their hair blonde do so with sexual motives in mind. The Dominican friar Thomas Cantimpre ranted against the vanities of women spending hours tending their hair in imitation of the seductive Mary Magdalene. They washed, combed and colored it, he claimed, in order to 'consume and madden with their manes'. For good measure, he added the revolting reflection that these coiffures and complex headdresses of bought hair were a haven for worms and lice and their eggs. His words echoed the warnings of Gilles d'Orleans, a contemporary of Bromyard's preaching in Paris, who regularly remind his parishioners that the fashionable blonde wigs they wore were likely to be made from the hair of those now enduring hell or purgatory. it is not know how much hair was pillaged from the graves of female corpses for the purpose of wigmaking, but for many hundreds of years such accusations formed the ammunition of moralists."
Joanna Pitman
On blondes
Our Mother who art in heaven,
Sister I call Thy name
Our time has come,
Our will be done,
On earth, and it will be heaven
Give us the right to earn our daily bread
And forgive us our trespasses
As we forgive men who trespass
Against us.
And lead us not into subservience,
But deliver us from Adam,
For thine is the freedom and the
Power and the glory
Forever.
in the name of the Mother, and of the Daughter, and of the holy Grandmother,
Awomen
("Mater Nostra," which was read on the steps of St Patrick's Cathedral in New York City)
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Book: "The End of Silence: Women and the Priesthood" by Karen Armstrong
Book: "The Triumph of the Moon" by Ronald Hutton
Book: "Hypatia Of Alexandria: Mathematician and Martyr" by Michael Deakin
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
Book: "Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece" by Joan Breton Connell
Book: "Ann The Word" by Richard Francis