The Sacred Feminine at the Parliament of World Religions
by: Nancy Vedder-Shults on December 31st, 2009 | 14 Comments »
Goddess of Willendorf, 22,000-24,00 BCE
I’m surprised that almost none of us blogged about the Parliament of World Religions (PWR) in Melbourne, Australia (12/3 – 12/9). I realize that the US Congress was still discussing the health care bill, Obama had just given his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and the Copenhagen Climate conference was underway. So we all have good excuses.
Here at Tikkun Daily, we heard from Dave Belden, who wrote about Rabbi Michael Lerner’s workshop on the spiritual progressive movement. And Rabbi Lerner also wrote about the great disappointment world spiritual leaders at the PWR felt at Obama’s speech in Oslo. But otherwise, there wasn’t a peep about this important gathering that happens every five years.
For members of my religion — both feminist pagans and members of the Goddess Movement across a variety of faiths — it seems to have been a very exciting experience. From what I’ve read, both the Goddess movement and paganism were well-received, something that has rarely happened before. In fact, Phyllis Curott was quoted on the Women at the Parliament blog site as saying that back in 1993 she had difficulty finding anyone else who would appear on a panel about the Sacred Feminine and very few attended. She went on to say that
Things certainly seem to have changed with this Parliament and the Sacred Feminine was clearly rising!
Both interfaith and intrafaith workshops and panels addressed the problems and opportunities facing women. When it came to the problems, there was a panel on Breaking Through Patriarchy: New Visions for Women of Faith. Speaking at this session were Sister Joan Chittister (Benedictine nun) plus several other feminist activists — Jane Sloan, Jacqueline Ogega, Katherine Marshall, and Jean Duff. This panel addressed the dire situation of many women in the world (1.3 billion living in poverty) and the need to bridge the gender gap in order to deal with these inequities. Sister Joan writes that the panelists focused on
The exclusion of women from religious consciousness, the enthronement of the male as an excuse for the exclusion of women’s spiritual insights and the effects of that marginalization on religion itself — as well as on the society around us — [and these topics] filled large conference rooms in the [convention] center and sounded the [death] knell of the old, masculine frontiers of religions everywhere.
Oh, how I wish I could believe that were true! The fact that Sister Joan’s discussion the next day overfilled its scheduled hall, and had to be moved to an auditorium so that over 500 people could listen to her speak, may point in that direction. In fact, one delegate to the Parliament said that
Sister Joan [was] clearly the rock star of this Parliament.
So perhaps we’re moving in the right direction. When I listened to what she had to say, I could see why people flocked to her talks. Talking about poverty, she said:
The first problem, of course, is to distinguish natural poverty from unnatural poverty. The fact that a tsunami might wipe out coastal villages creates a kind of natural poverty that we can only alleviate, not avoid. The fact that women are paid less than men for doing the very same work is unnatural poverty. Of course we can stop that, as we can the exploitation of child labor and the national greed that underlies it all. But to do all of that, we need to start teaching another version of “Thou shalt not steal …” which is clearly a religious question. It’s impossible to talk about eliminating poverty without talking about the elimination of sexism and the elimination of militarism. Why we seldom hear homilies about those things in Christian churches may be the Christian question of the age.
That sounds a lot like things I’ve read here at Tikkun Daily.
Panelist Jacqueline Ogega, who established the African Women of Faith Network and is director of the women’s program at the World Conference of Religions for Peace, also led a discussion of the impact of women in conflict resolution. Although she lamented that
Most of the time we look at women as victims of conflict rather than as [resolving conflicts] and it is very important for us to shift that mentality.
She went on to recount how at the height of the civil war in Sierra Leone, a group of women from differing faiths — distraught at their children being forcibly recruited as soldiers — decided to confront the rebels in their mountain bases. After negotiations, the rebels allowed them to take some of the child soldiers back with them. Religious women also banded together after the Rwanda genocide to overcome the distrust between Hutus and Tutsis. These incidents are examples of how women have contributed to resolving conflicts in Africa, even though they are largely excluded at the political level.
Other events at the PWR focused on the sacred feminine from several different faiths. A Creative Exploration of the Sacred Feminine brought together women from diverse traditions, including Celtic spirituality, Sikhism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and Roman Catholicism. Attendees were greeted by eight women holding posters of the feminine face of deity: Green Tara, Mary and Child, Lakshmi, Kuan Yin, the Black Madonna, Durga, Kali, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and Saraswati. As soft music played and images flowed on a large screen in the front, the conference room filled with more than 125 women and men. After a moment of meditation and global connections, panelists offered poems, songs, music, and dance to honor the Goddess.
Even when the topic wasn’t specifically the Divine Feminine, the theme of women’s participation in the world’s religions surfaced in subversive or dissident ways. When a 10-member (!), all-male presentation on Global Spiritual Leadership convened, attendees created an uproar about the absence of women on the panel. The issue effectively monopolized the entire time allotment, and both men and women seemed equally supportive of this position. Men’s love of the Sacred Feminine was also in evidence in another panel discussion entitled Men Who Love the Goddess, where four articulate and intelligent men described the importance of the Sacred Feminine in their lives.
In the end, the Women at the Parliament said
The standing joke around [the PWR was] that ‘Born Again Pagan’ T shirts should be sold in the halls of the Parliament because that’s what everyone will be by the end of the session!
That’s what I’ll blog about next time — the pagan experience at PWR. I want to thank Judith Laura at Medusa Coils for pointing me to the Women at the Parliament blog site.
You’re welcome! Thank you for this terrifically informative post, Nancy.
Judith Laura, blogging as Medusa on Medusa Coils
I also wanted to say thanks for adding much insight and some hope to a long and just struggle. My daughter, Lisa, completed a thesis entitled ‘Challenging Male Hegemony: A Case History of Women’s Experiences In British and U.S. Higher Education, 1970-2002′. I’ll pass your post on to her and I’m sure she would want me to add her thanks also. Warmest regards, Tom
Very interesting post, Nancy. Thank you and happy new year to you!
This does sound great. My only experience of anything like this was a World Council of Churches meeting in Addis Ababa I happened to walk in on in about 1970, full of purple-clothed bishops and worthy gentlemen and I can’t recall even a sniff of the sacred feminine. The idea of a 73-year-old nun as the rock star of the event is gorgeous.
I would have liked to be at the ‘Men Who Love the Goddess’ discussion. It relates strongly to your Nice Guys Finish First post, and to the whole issue of how progressive men find role models today. It seems to me that if one tries to feel out where the most energy is in the progressive world for a good long time now there has been more among women than among men. Not least because I am the father of a young man, this concerns me a great deal.
The Goddess movement has been thoroughly discredited, There is an excellent exhibition at NYU’s center for study of the ancient world, http://www.nyu.edu/isaw/exhibitions/oldeurope/ , showing what was really the case. There are lots of members of the “goddess movement” who are furious at this.
I co-presented two programs at the Parliament, and had been uncertain about whether to categorize my proposals as “Pagan” or “Goddess”, deciding in the end for “Pagan”. I am very pleased that I did – it was an amazing group to be part of and there was no conflict with “Goddess” – on the contrary: I came away prepared to be more consciously part of the restoration of the term “Pagan” … this was an unexpected outcome for me.
I felt that “Goddess” as Earth Mother had the final say at the event, when in the closing ceremony She – as Mother Earth – was invoked by both Elder Prof Joy Wandin Murphy and Elder Bob Randell, and all present were given painted stones with blessings mentioning Her as we left the assembly.
my reports about some of my experience: http://parliament.pagannewswirecollective.com/2009/12/pwr-reflections-from-australian-pagan-presenter/
and at http://medusacoils.blogspot.com/
and an interview here: http://www.abc.net.au/sundaynights/stories/s2769536.htm
Glenys
P.S. in response to “Goddess movement” being “discredited” … the hearts and minds of the people of Earth tell a different story. Like the bubble of air in a fish tank – Her tendency is to rise to the open air where She belongs, and so She is! many “members” of ? are furious about this. :D
messy,
While I do have my own reservations about ‘gendering’ God in any way, I believe that the participants at PWR were focusing at least as much on contemporary perceptions of the feminine aspects of Divinity as on historical, or speculative prehistoric expressions.
These ‘feminine’ conceptions of the Divine are at least as legitimate as the male projections of ‘God’ as a petulant, narcissistic, wife-beating, child-abusing, feral ancient Middle-Eastern male with which the Abrahamic religious texts have presented us – if not more so.
So I’d like to understand what your point is.
Are you suggesting that God has a penis?
Thank you, Rob Fox, for that articulate and graphic response, which highlights the problem of projecting human gender constructs onto our conception of the Divine. I would also like to add that, although the ISAW exhibition page discusses the debate among scholars regarding the meaning of female figurines found throughout Old Europe, it certainly offers no evidence that this theory has been “thoroughly discredited.” Although the curators espouse the skepticism typical of established academia of any ideas outside of the long-accepted norms, the narrative on the website clearly presents this theory as one of many. In fact, although the curators speak condescendingly of both Marija Gimbutas (even while they freely use her research to inform the exhibit–the term “Old Europe” was coined by Gimbutas) and the current crop of scholars currently contributing groundbreaking new scholarship and research under the auspices of Goddess Theory, the fact that this exhibit is happening at all is a direct result of her work specifically chronicling the Neolithic female figurines from across Old Europe. This can hardly be construed as “thoroughly discrediting” the Goddess movement.
Marija Gimbutas is one of many scientists who start out great and somehow lose it. The “Goddess Civilization” theory is a modern construct which has nothing to do with anything ancient. It postulates a feminist golden age, where there was no war, or strife or conflict of any kind. Then the evil White guys came and ruined everything.
It’s to some extent racist and sexist. If anybody out there in NYC, go see the exhibition. Don’t take my word for it.
“THE Goddess” as postulated by the “goddess movement” was never worshipped in ancient times. Goddess, yes. THE Goddess. No.
You know, this is the same old boilerplate claim, “these utopian ideas have been debunked,” “totally discredited,” variations on that theme. Rarely are any concrete criticisms offered, just theoretical anathemata against the heretics.
What’s worse is that the scholarly doctrine-keepers deny a platform to knowledeable women like Joan Marler, who is fully capable of holding her own in debates over the validity of Gimbutas’ work. The absence in the lecture series of her voice, and voices from other researchers who are considering the different patterns in neolithic societies, makes it possible for messy thinkers to dismiss them. For them only the speakers invited define “what was really the case.” There is not a free exchange of ideas, just a stacked deck in a very stale game.
So they keep searching for Big Men and social stratification that the archaeology doesn’t show, except at Varna, which they elevate because the accumulation of gold there looks advanced to them. And familiar. That’s what Western Civ does and they feel much more comfortable with that. The preponderance of female iconography, the egalitarian village setups and absence of social classes can’t be allowed to mean a thing.
And they pull a Limbaugh and start accusing those who attempt to right the colossal sexual and eurocentric imbalance in standard cultural histories of being “racist and sexist.” With the same amount of credibility.
Gimbutas’ work was all about the multifaceted (“polytheistic” if you like) display of Goddess: that is, a sense of Her (or the Universe’s} Oneness does not exclude infinite Deities. There does not need to be argument about either polytheism or monotheism … in Goddess Language both exist at the same time.
And yes I do suggest that the construct of “God” has a penis. To my mind the term is not gender neutral though I understand that many regard it as so: but I would ask what is the Body in the mind when the when the “God” word is spoken … check it out – yours may be without a sexed body, or maybe it is all genders! But there is nothing radical about a God (all-Mighty Male) taking over All Maternal capacities. Our dear Mary Daly who has just passed/transformed this week has written sufficiently about all this without my needing to go on.
A quote from triple Doctor Mary Daly, that is pertinent to the original article above that these posted comments are ostensibly referring to – “The Sacred Feminine at the Parliament of the World’s Religions”:
“As the Women’s Movement begins to have its effect upon the fabric of society, transforming it from patriarchy into something that never existed before,… it can become the greatest single challenge to the major religions of the world, Western and Eastern – all of which are essentially sexist. Beliefs and values that have held sway for thousands of years will be questioned as never before. This revolution may well be also the single greatest hope for the survival of spiritual consciousness on this planet.” This is from an article in Ms Magazine from the late 70′s … when BTW Mary still used the term “God” … there are probably better quotes from her available, but I found this one today as I read some of her old work.
I can only assume that messy didn’t read my post, since it had nothing to do with the work of Marija Gimbutas or whether or not the Goddess Movement believes in a monotheistic deity or many Goddesses. My post was about how the Sacred Feminine manifested at the Parliament of World Religions — with many faces, many names, from many traditions, in order to create a more egalitarian balance in the world, i.e. redress the inequalities that contemporary women face in world religions and in today’s societies.
And I want to thank Twinmom for addressing the NYU exhibit on “Old Europe” and the skepticism attendant in academia on any theory (like Gimbutas’) that deviates from long-accepted norms. Marija Gimbutas’ ideas were definitely treated condescendingly on the website messy tells us visit. But how this discredits the Goddess Movement is beyond me!
The Goddess movement is very broad these days. It may be that at the beginning of this revival of the Sacred Feminine in the 1960s and 1970s many women jumped onto an idealized notion of a monotheistic Goddess, but that certainly isn’t the case today. We come from a Christocentric culture, so it makes sense that many of us back then saw The Goddess as we had been taught to see a monotheistic God. But today the American Goddess movement is quite diverse, even in terms of our religious affiliations. That should have been apparent from my description of “A Creative Exploration of the Sacred Feminine” at the PWR: “Attendees were greeted by eight women holding posters of the feminine face of deity: Green Tara, Mary and Child, Kuan Yin, the Black Madonna, Durga, Kali, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and Saraswati.”
And Rob, I also have reservations about gendering deity. Ultimately, the Divine is completely beyond gender, as we all know. But as Mary Daly said in _Beyond God the Father_ back in 1973, “If God is male, then the male is God.” As a result, I find it extremely important in this culture to gender God as female in order to offset the huge imbalance of that exists in the USA today, where most people view God as male. Plus the metaphors of the Sacred Feminine have different resonances than the Sacred Masculine, because of the different ways that we see men and women in our culture. So for both of those reasons, I think the introduction of more female images into our religious repertoire is a good thing.
This whole issue became clear to me when I taught Women’s Studies 101 in the early 1990s at the University of Wisconsin-Madison after not teaching it since the late 1970s. When I began to read the latest femininist research on linguistics, I realized that it was important to make women’s existence linguistically visible and not use gender-neutral terms. Why? Because, for instance, men were being called Chairmen and women Chairpersons. It also turns out that gender-neutral words are assumed to refer to men (in a patriarchy) unless modified by “women” or “female,” for example doctors and women doctors. So women disappear. The same is true with respect to the Sacred Feminine.
Oh, and here’s a great article that looks historically at the stigmas against Goddesses in the academia: http://www.goddess-pages.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=91&Itemid=145
Thanks, Glenys and Max, for fleshing out the possible reasons behind the dismissal of the Goddess Movement and what we have researched, created, and fought for over the past 30 years. I also blogged about this a couple of months ago, so you can go see “The Sacred Feminine” (http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2009/11/17/the-sacred-feminine/#more-7031), post based on a conversation among the Goddess Scholars back then.