This fall I’ll be teaching “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven” again. Shirley Ranck wrote this groundbreaking curriculum about women in Western religion in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but it was first published in 1986. The fact that it took the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) at least five years to put it out says a lot about this pioneering course.

The UUA is notoriously liberal, even progressive. But this class pushed the buttons of Unitarian Universalist’s still largely male hierarchy, and they delayed publication. Why? Maybe because it offered consciousness raising within a religious context. Maybe because it included some controversial research. Maybe because those patriarchs could see its long-term consequences: More women embracing the Goddesses in their lives.

It certainly had all of those effects. In fact, the consciousness of UU women — already empowered by political feminism — became raised even further by contact with spiritual feminism. And although the curriculum contained references to the controversial archeologist Marija Gimbutas, that didn’t stop UU women from pouring into Wicca, welcoming both its deities and its ritual. In fact, UU women made Wicca one of the fastest, if not the fastest-growing religion in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

With the help of the UU Women and Religion Committee, Ranck updated and re-issued “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven” last year. It’s still a wonderful course. And it still empowers women in ways that political feminism can’t. Where else would a teacher request that women sketch themselves nude and then talk about how this experience helped them to understand their concerns with body image? Where else would women talk about how patriarchal mothering antagonizes mothers and daughters in a divide-and-conquer strategy that has supported male domination? And where else would women learn about the history of masculine Gods displacing Goddesses?

Those are just some of the topics we dealt with last spring. This fall Kelly Crocker (First Unitarian’s Minister of Religious Education) and I will examine women in Judaism and Christianity as well as introducing the class to Wicca. We will look at the story of Hosea and his wife Gomer; create midrashim (is that the proper plural) concerning Sarah’s experience when Abraham takes their son Isaac to be sacrificed; explore the early Gnostic gospels that the imperial Catholic Church expunged from scripture; talk about Jesus’ mother Mary; and more.

In the last twenty years, I’ve learned a lot about religion. In fact, I only half-jokingly say that after I finished my Ph. D. In 1982, I gave myself a Ph.D. in Goddess Studies. One of the things that has troubled me over those years jumped right into my head as we started preparing the two “Cakes” sessions on Judaism. Many people — including bloggers here at Tikkun Daily – use the term “the Prophetic Tradition” to describe the continuing social justice work begun by the prophets in the Tanakh (Old Testament). By and large these ancient men, speaking as representatives of YHWH, urged the Israelites to take the side of the oppressed, to care for the poor, and create justice and equality in their culture. But they also railed against the Goddesses who were a part of Judaism and told women to know their place and stay out of positions of religious authority.

The use of “the prophetic tradition” as a purely progressive expression reminds me of the historical term applied to the 15th – 17th centuries — the “Renaissance.” Renaissance means literally “new growth,” and implies that this period was an advance over the Middle Ages, also called the “Dark Ages.” But during the Renaissance, women’s economic and social power diminished, and the first holocaust was perpetrated against them. Historians estimate that somewhere between 50,000 and 1,000,000 people (90% of them women) were murdered during what has been called the “burning times.” “Prophetic Tradition” and “Renaissance,” as normally understood, misrepresent the history of half the human race.


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