Monthly Archives: October 2012

This week I had another guest post published and the Feminism and Religion blog. Lots of powerful voices there and I’m really proud to be included amongst them!
Who is She? The Existence of an Ontological Goddess

I do feel Her presence directly in my life—call it an energy, call it the sacred feminine, call it the divine, call it source, call it soul, call it spirit, call it the great mystery…I perceive a web of relatedness and love within the world and I choose to put a feminine form to that energy—to name it and know it as Goddess…

And then, based on a blog post here by the same name, my essay about The Role of Death in the Circle of Life was published in the Fall Equinox issue of The Oracle.

While looking up something else, I came across the Wikipedia entry for Goddess movement and appreciated this explanation of who/what Goddess is:

Another point of discussion is whether the Goddess is immanent, or transcendent, or both, or something else. Starhawk (1988) speaks of the Goddess as immanent (infusing all of nature) but sometimes also simultaneously transcendent (existing independently of the material world). Many Goddess authors agree and also describe Goddess as, at one and the same time, immanently pantheistic and panentheistic. The former means that Goddess flows into and through each individual aspect of nature—each tree, blade of grass, human, animal, planet; the latter means that all exist within the Goddess (Starhawk 1979, Laura 1997, Christ 1997).

Starhawk (1979:77) also speaks of the Goddess as both a psychological symbol and “manifest reality. She exists and we create Her” (italics hers). Laura (1997:175) describes Goddess as being interactive. Possibly building on Mary Daly’s (1973 and 1978) suggestion that the divine be understood not as a Being (noun), but as Be-ing (verb), Carol P. Christ (2003), shows the similarities between Goddess theology and process theology, and suggests that Goddess theologians adopt more of the process viewpoint.