===========================================================================
                   In Goddesses They Trust
                      by Christina Robb
===========================================================================
SOURCE : The Boston Globe, Monday July 9,1990
         (Submitted to us by Little Gator)
===========================================================================
 
   Last fall Anita Dana was a disenchanted Lutheran who had never been to 
a meeting of women in a church without a male minister present. She decided
to try attending the Unitarian Universalist Church of Greater Lynn, and
three months later she stood before the altar of the UU church and invoked
a goddess.

   "Mother of all life, be radiant within us," she prayed. "Breathe with
our nostrils. Touch with our hands..."

   Beside Dana were a dozen women. They had just finished a course about
goddess worship and women's roles in religion called "Cakes for the Queen
of Heaven." The popular unitarian course is one of scores of ways that
women and some men across the country are creating a "goddess movement" in
response to archeological discoveries and theological debates about
primeval goddess worship.
 
   "I never thought about goddesses except in mythology and in fiction,"
says Claudia Luck, who took the course with Dana. "I didn't realize there
was a historical basis for goddesses." But by the time the women designed
and led a service for the whole congregation last January, Luck knew
enough to stand in the pulpit and explain : Before the religions of 
Judaism and Christianity and before the god-heavy pantheons of ancient
Greece and Rome, paleolithic and neolithic people all over the world
worshipped a goddess in three persons - maiden, mother and crone.
 
   "Over many centuries, teh world was witrness to a shift in power from
goddess to male gods," Luck said, and the goddesses' symbols - the black
of the crone, the female body in all its stages, cats, snakes, the witch's
coven of goddess-worshippers - were recast as symbols of evil.
 
   They sang. They read poems. They called out the names of the women who
had meant the most to them. And at the end of the service, "there wasn't
a dry eye in the house," says Edie Cunningham, who met with her Course
mates in the Swampscott church one evening last month to talk about the
effect the course has had on them. Cunningham was "the crone of the group,"
as she proudly announced, and she took the course only weeks after her
daughter had been murdered. "It helped me heal. It really did," she says.
 
   "The thing that I loved about the group... was the differences in the
ages, the differences in the backgrounds, the career women, the housewives,
the mothers, all joining," says Elaine Gonsalves. "This society is so
guilt-ridden - 'What do you mean you're staying home and being a housewife?
Isn't there more to life than that? What do you mean you're leaving your
children?"
 
   These women started their course with a look at their own body images 
and went on via their memories of their own mothers to explore lost 
goddess religions, which reveared female bodies that looked more like Golda
Meir than Barbie. The result, says Sally MacDougall, who works in a 
battered women's shelter and led the course in Swampscott, "was tremendous
validation of my female experience."
 
   "Cakes," as the UU course is affectionately called by the women who take
it, was written by a Unitarian scholar named Shirley Rank and first
offered by the denomination as a course of special study for women in 1986.
Since then, as many as 800 of the denomination's 1,000 congregations have
offered the course at least once, says Elizabeth Anastos, the coordinator
of curriculum developement for the Unitarian Universalist Association,
which is based in Boston.
 
   Methodist, Congregational and Episcopal women's groups - including an
order of nuns in Oklahoma - as well as womne's groups that are not part
of any church have bought and taken the course. Many women who are not
Unitarians, but can't find a cirriculum like it in their own churches, take
the course at Unitarian Churches. Most of the course groups continue to
meet after the last session.
 
   "I never felt spiritually connected with organized religion," Claudia
Luck says. She went to church for the friendships, not the ritual. But the
service of goddess-worship and celebration of women that she and her 
"Cakes"-mates put together was different. "It was the most powerful
spiritual experience I've ever had," Luck says.
   
    Though the course is designed for women, some Unitarian men's groups
have taken it. And like the religions it studies, the course does not 
reject men in any way. It excludes only exclusiveness and the patriarchal
strictures of traditional religion that make many women feel, as Anita
Dana puts it, that "when God is male, males are God" and women are not. The
prehistoric goddess religion these women are imagining or reviving is one
in which women are embraced because "the fruit of Her womb is the fruit of
your womb - and then all beings are divine because they all emanate from
the Goddess," Chris Hansen, another Swampscott course member, says.
  
   Many Women fin themselves drawn to this movement because it takes them
beyond the political anger of feminism and work for women's rights "to a
deeper place," Janice Drake says. Drake is a recovering alcholic who found
she needed a goddess as her Higher Power when she got involved in Alcholics
Annonymous.
 
   "I think it's changed my personal outlook from one of despair and anger
to one of hope," Drake says at a workshop on water rituals and the Goddess.
The workshop is taught at Native Spirit, a Sudbury bookshop and adult
education center that specializes in goddess lore with a Native American
flavour. "This is still very much feminism, but its not so angry," Drake
says. "It's power without the anger," says another woman at the workshop,
who asks that he rname not be used.
 
   "I was raised a Catholic, and it really bothered me that a woman 
couldn't be a priest," says Bobbie, another workshop participant, who
doesn't want her last name used. "To me it was that I was a soul trapped in
an inferior body. That was the message." She took "Cakes" at a Unitarian
Church, "and that just released so much for me," she says. "When you're
brought up Catholic, you just can't even think something without going to
confession." But after "cakes," Bobbie started to think goddess and attend
goddess workshops like the one at Native Spirit. And she started going to
an Episcopal church. "But when we say the Our Father, I say as loud as I
can, "Our Mother, who art in Heaven..."
 
   Apara Borrowes-Toabe, an Akido expert and body therapist who has studied
goddess religions for years, teaches the Sudbury workshop. She leads the
women in chants and offers them burning sage as incense and a Mayan rain
rattle made of tiny crystals in a hollow log. She sits with them in 
meditative silence, teaches them drumming and tells them stories. On a
recent Thursday, she lectured and showed slides at Interface in Watertown
for a presentation she calls "From the Goddess to the Rule of the Fathers,"
which depicts in archaeology and art some of the stories she tells.
 
   "This way was already old 7,000 years ago. It was old then. It was as
old as people," Borrowes-Toabe says in an interview at her home in 
Sudbury. "There wasn't the seperation between deity and individual person
that I grew up with in the [Presbyterian] church that I was raised in,
where you have the minister as the intercessor," she says.
 
   "The Goddess is immensley primal. She is life. This life is not 
something to be transcended and the body is not something to be hidden and
denied," Borrowes-Toabe says. And for women who begin studying goddess
religions with her or in other places, "I think the Goddess first and
foremost for a lot of people starts as the healing of the body."
 
   The Goddess also leads to the healing of the earth. "She is the nurturer
so she calls forth in us teh part of us that wants to take care of things.
It's no accident that consciousness of the goddess is arising when we're
about to destroy our worls. She's rising up and saying, 'Wait a minute.
This is a beautiful creation. Let's save it," Borrowes-Toabe says.
 
   In fact the greatest boon that thge goddess movement brings 
Borrowes-Toabe is its believable vision that for tens of thousands of 
years, before metals and horses were used for war, there was a religion of
cooperation and peace on earth. From more than 30,000 icons of women's
bodies gathered from parts of central Europe that she has studied for half
a century, California archaeologist Marija Gimbutas hypothesizes that
starting in the Paleolithic age, human religion was a kind of female
monotheism - a worship of one goddess depicted in many animal and temporal
forms. Gimbutas believs that this religion supported the transition from
hunting and gathering to farming but did not survive the shift to
hierarchial, war-based economies.
 
   "It is so incredibly freeing and healing for me to begin to know that
people have lived on the earth peacefully together," Borrowes-Toabe says.
"The facts that have been literally unearthed about these cultures that
existed in teh past simply provide us with something to dream with."
 
   Goddess religion is a hhot topic in theological schools - especially
schools that emphasize women's studies programs, such as Episcopal and
Harvard divinity schools in Cambridge. But the goddess theology of Carol
Christ, the goddess art history of Elinor Gadon, the goddess religious
history of Charlene Spretnak and the goddess archaeology of Marija Gimbutas
are for sale in mainstream bookstores and have popular audiences that reach
far beyond divinity schools. One divinity student at Borrowes-Toabe's
workshop says she is looking for groups that are actually creating rituals
and worshipping goddesses as a kind of field work, because she wants to
experience what she's studying with her body and her heart as well as her
head. The rest are there because they're fascinated.
 
   Several women at the workshop say they don't want to be quoted by name,
but they all want to testify in the goddess' behalf. And this wariness
harbouring enthusiasm appears in many women involved in this movement.
The Unitarian women have an established church to back them and seem less
worried about what people will think. Others don't want to be dismissed
as "weirdos" or burned as witches, but they are having the spiritual time
of their lives, and they can't stop talking about it.
 
   "As soon as I said the word 'goddess,' I knew that I was a heritic,
that was the thing that couldn't be said," says Kathleen Sands. Sands 
teaches religious studies at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and
has just completed her doctoral thesis, on teh problem of evil as examined
by two female theologians, at Boston College.
 
   Sands wasn't ready to pray to a goddess when she first heard the power
in teh word. But she refused to go on feeling "what it feels like to be
associated with the degraded, split-off sexual" that she felt she had been
taught as a Catholic.
 
   Long before, after years of "deep religious and theological involvement
in Christianity," Sands says, "I realized that the demonizing of women
and the trivializing of women wasn't an anomaly in the tradition. It was
key." She also knew that "in practice we ahve very little knowledge of
what Christianity is or has been, because most Christians through most of
history haven't been literate."
 
   Many local, slightly heretical customs preserve elements of goddess
worship in all the nooks and cranies of Christianity as well as in major
saints, such as the Irish Bridget, and all the major Christian  festivals:
The wintry brith of the messiah is an old festival of the Egyptian goddess
Isis; the word Easter comes from the Middle Eastern Goddess Astarte, who 
was celebrated in the spring.
 
   So, between learning about goddesses and being able to worshop them, 
Sands spent some alienated years not fitting in with her old Christian
friends and yet not ready for goddess-worship. "I had friends who said,
'OOh, you're so angry," she recalls, "As if the anger was my fault."
 
   Three years ago, Sands ebgan worshipping goddess by many ancient names
- Demter, Astarte, Hecate - at the solstices and equinoxes and lunar
quater days (Mayday, Lammas, Halloween, Candlemas) with a group of friends
from several traditions. Meeting outside, they cast a circle, invoke the
directions, chant and sing, dance and feast. "Since I'm an intellectual
by trade, I do not go to ritual to think or talk. I go to ritual to go to
the well," she says.
 
   That word - goddess - that scared her when she first said it years ago
still makes her feel danger. "I'm still scared," Sands says. "I feel that
I'm in deeper waters, deeper than my Christianity was able to take me."
 
                          #30