RCG-I Seasonal Salon Summer Solstice 2009

RCGI Home Page

Salon Home Page

Summer Solstice 2009 Salon Home Page

By Choice or Chance

Study of Goddess Myths and Images

Return of the Guard

Shamanic Healing Crystals

Contributors

Approaches to the Study of Goddess Myths and Images

Part I of IV

Goddess Studies is not a new field. For more than a hundred and fifty years, pioneering women have examined the role that religious imagery has on people, both men and women. They have taken variant approaches, from imagining a different world to critiquing the limited religious visions offered by monotheistic religions. This 4-part series describes the lives of these pioneers, as well as the approaches to goddess studies to which they gave rise. The series is excerpted from "The Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines" (Praeger 2010).

Study of goddess myths and images forms part of many disciplines: history, religious studies, literature, psychology, anthropology, art, classics. Each discipline has its approved and appropriate methods of study, as well as its canon of approved authors and theorists. But those who seek to study goddesses face considerable difficulties in applying approved methods. Earlier scholars may have been biased, either consciously or unconsciously. This bias may reveal itself in selection of subjects for study. For instance, many more studies exist of male shamanism than of the same religious activity performed by women. Or the bias can take the form of neglecting an important traditional women’s activity, such as spinning or cooking. Information may be lost this way, for an ethnographer recording the lives of a polytheistic people who does not inquire about whether there is a vegetation goddess may publish the sole book on the subject, based on an assumption that hunting rather than gardening is the most important sustenance activity.

Even the best scholars are motivated by their own life experience and interests, and until relatively recently women were not permitted equal access to higher education. England’s prestigious University of Cambridge did not offer degrees to women until a mere sixty years ago. Assumptions based on class background, too, influenced the work of earlier scholars of religion. Finally, but most importantly, most writers about the subject came from a monotheistic background that colored their understanding of goddess religion and myth. Even doubters and atheists emerged from a male-centered monotheistic society, whose impact on the study of goddesses cannot be underestimated.

Despite limitations of gender, race, and class, women scholars have for more than 150 years studied goddesses and related subjects. This section describes some of those women and the influence they have had upon goddess studies. Each represents a specific approach to the field, based on life experiences as well as academic training. Each of them creatively applied theories and methods, sometimes stirring controversy in the process. Although other methods also exist that can be profitably applied to the study of goddess myths and images, those described here represent the most significant contributions to the field by women scholars and creative artists.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Examining scripture as a woman

Many scholars of women and religion are primarily interested in religion rather than women. In Stanton’s case, the reverse was the case. Driven to understand the influences upon women’s lives, she determined that religion was one of the most powerful. Her feminism led her to her creation of The Woman’s Bible, which she considered her major work, a definitive statement of societal support for oppression of women. But today, biographers tend to focus on her leadership of the 19th century women’s movement rather than on her writings about religion.

Her impact on that historic movement was unquestionably significant. Elizabeth was born November 12, 1815, into a prominent New York family. Her father was a lawyer, legislator and judge. Peter Teabout, first a slave and later a freeman in the household, cared for Elizabeth and her siblings. When Peter took the Cady children to Episcopal church each Sunday, they sat in back with him, rather than in front with white families, a pattern of behavior later echoed in Elizabeth’s abolitionist activities.

Unusually for her time, Elizabeth was not educated at home but at the coeducational Johnstown Academy, where her studies included Latin, Greek and mathematics, all subjects not usually taught to women. She especially excelled in Greek, but when she graduated, young men she had bested in classes moved on to colleges closed to women. Elizabeth enrolled in Troy Female Seminary, founded by visionary educator Emma Willard. There she encountered revivalist preacher Charles Finney, who first terrified Elizabeth with his depictions of the perdition she faced as a freethinking woman, then drove her permanently away from Christianity.

Soon after, Elizabeth met abolitionist orator Henry Brewster Stanton. They married in 1840, when Elizabeth was an “old maid” of 25. The couple had seven children, the last born when Elizabeth was 44. The couple’s home hosted such prominent intellectuals and activists as Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Frederick Douglass. Both Elizabeth and her husband were leaders in the progressive movements of their time.

The turning point in Stanton’s life came in 1840, when she and Henry attended the International Anti-Slavery Convention in London. Although women delegates carried appropriate credentials, male delegates refused to seat them; a compromise allowed women to witness, but not participate in, the deliberations. At the meeting was Quaker minister and feminist Lucretia Mott, who became Elizabeth’s lifelong friend and, with her, an organizer of the first public meeting for women’s suffrage. Held in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, the meeting drew nearly 300 people including some 40 men. The convention’s “Declaration of Sentiments,” written by Stanton, was modeled on the United States Declaration of Independence. Among its accusations about how men kept women from full participation in society were the following:

“He allows her in church, as well as State, but a subordinate position, claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the Church.

“He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and her God.”

Thus, early in her feminist career, Stanton connected religious beliefs with oppression of women. But she did not expand upon that insight for several decades, during which time she worked as an organizer for the cause of suffrage, a cause that did not reach its conclusion until American women gained the vote in 1920. Discouraged by the slowness of the suffrage cause, Elizabeth in the 1870s turned her attention to the role that religion plays in limiting women’s rights. She argued that the Bible, far from being divinely inspired, was written by humans and aimed at establishing a social code in which women were subservient to men. Together with several other women scholars, she produced The Woman’s Bible, whose publication infuriated those who saw it as an assault on divine truth.

The Woman’s Bible focuses on patriarchal religion rather than goddesses, but Stanton’s emphasis on questioning scriptural truth while promoting women’s equality has continued. Today, liturgies for “mother/father god” and the concept of the church as feminine (“womanchurch”), as well as pressures for ordination of women in Christian denominations, stem from awareness that religion is a human construct and, as such, has deficiencies connected to social inequities. Writers who deconstruct and reconstruct such Christian female figures as Sophia (Holy Wisdom), the Virgin Mary, and Mary Magdalene, participate in the movement begun with Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments and Woman’s Bible.

Stanton died on October 26, 1902, nearly two decades before women won the right to vote in the United States. Two countries in which women are still not permitted to vote are Saudi Arabia and Vatican City.

Jane Ellen Harrison: Ritual and matriarchy in classical art

In the middle of the 19th century, the opening of higher education to women meant new avenues were opened for study of goddesses. Education was still not widely available. Only women whose economic status, race and class put them at the pinnacle of privilege in Europe and America could avail themselves of the new educational opportunities. Many of those women, aware of their groundbreaking position, became advocates for expansion of women’s rights. Access to education created a generation of thinkers who questioned received truth in numerous fields.

One such field was “the classics,” long a prestigious academic arena in which scholars debated the meaning of Greek and Roman myths and literature. Because most 19th century women were educated at home, they failed to learn enough Latin and Greek for classical study. But a woman scholar soon challenged male hegemony in the study of Greek mythology.

Born September 9, 1850, Jane Ellen Harrison was the first woman classics scholar of renown. Although her primary education was with governesses at her family home in Yorkshire, Harrison showed an early aptitude for languages, ultimately mastering sixteen. As a young woman, she entered Cheltenham Ladies’ College and then the new women’s college at Newnham in Cambridge, whose graduates were not granted degrees but “certificates.” No college at the time awarded the doctorate to women, although Harrison was awarded several honorary degrees. Later, she was invited back to serve as lecturer at Newnham, a position she held until retirement.

From student days, Harrison made friends among artists and intellectuals. Virginia Wolff was a close friend, and she knew others of the Bloomsbury group well. Gathering around herself a cadre of brilliant fellow scholars, she helped create the Cambridge Ritualists group. Joined by Gilbert Murray and Francis Cornford, Harrison applied the newly emerging ideas of anthropology to the classics—an interdisciplinary move that was groundbreaking at the time.

Harrison launched her career by lecturing on women’s rights. Harrison not only supported women’s suffrage. She also used anthropological insights to expand the argument for gender equality. Her lectures on Greek art and mythology drew crowds of women eager to hear her unusual theories. Influenced by the work of the German scholar Johann Bachofen, who in 1861 published the influential and still-controversial book Myth, Religion and Mother-right, Harrison argued that one can detect traces of matriarchy in Greek religion.

Bachofen theorized that society passed through several stages, beginning with undifferentiated sexual promiscuity (“hetaerism,” derived from a Greek work for “prostitute”), then evolving into a matriarchal social organization based on agricultural mystery religions. From there, society continued its upward (to Bachofen) development through a transitional Dionysian phase into the Apollonian, patriarchal modern world. The influence of Darwin’s evolutionary theory is obvious in Bachofen’s work, which in turn influenced Frederic Engels’ Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State.

Greek mythology and religion were enormously influential in England at the time. Only Rome and its myths held anything near the prestige of the Greeks. For one of the country’s first well-educated women to find hints of women’s power in the Greek past was nothing short of sensational. In her most important work, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, Harrison reconstructed rituals from artifacts and literature, then analyzed them to understand the parts women played, arguing that women’s influence far exceeded that previously assumed. Despite her early devotion to Bachofen’s theories, Harrison moved past him, questioning how women’s rituals were part of Greek culture, unquestionably a patriarchal society. She served as inspiration and mentor to many later women scholars who explored whether one can detect submerged women’s religious realities in patriarchal cultures. Although the structuralist method of the Cambridge Rituals is unfashionable today, Harrison’s challenge to examine ritual as well as text remains a useful and potent way of seeing diverse realities within a culture. Scholars who use post-modern and deconstructionist approaches to myth and ritual, especially approaches which analyze what is missing from a text as well as what is visible, are heirs to Harrison’s work.

Harrison retired from teaching in 1922 and died in 1928. Her influence reached beyond the classics into the arts, for she influenced such modernist writers as HD (Hilda Doolittle), whose poems on Greek goddesses have inspired many contemporary creative writers.

Lady Augusta Gregory: Collecting from “the folk”

In the middle of the 19th century, wealthy Englishmen enjoyed outings at such mysterious monuments as Stonehenge and Avebury. But they typically ignored the rural people who lived out their lives among such artifacts of the past. Rather than collecting local tales about Stonehenge, “antiquarians” preferred to spin their own theories of why and how it might have been used.

But antiquarian research shifted its focus when a new term, “folklore” was coined by William Thoms. A rush to record tales from the countryside began. As most early collectors worked without recording machines, there were inevitable changes, sometimes subtle and sometimes more so, between the spoken and the written word. In addition, most collectors were men, and most were Christian, leading to errors in interpretation.

Yet the work of Elias Lonnröt in collecting Finnish myths, of the Grimm brothers in collecting German tales from the women of their family, cannot be overestimated. Because such tales often had roots in pre-Christian cultures, the value to goddess scholarship of folktale collections cannot be overstated. Folklore collecting took place in the United States and in other areas of the globe; such collecting continues even today, although folklore is now an academic discipline rather than the hobby of a few, usually wealthy, amateurs.

Among those early collectors was a rarity: an educated women whose collection of Irish folklore remains a standard work in the field. Augusta Persse was born on March 15, 1852, the youngest daughter on the huge Roxborough estate near Loughrea in County Galway. Both father and mother came from the Ascendancy, landed gentry with roots in England rather than in Gaelic-speaking Ireland. Yet Augusta would become one of the most prominent recorders of stories from Irish tradition, even learning the Irish language in order to do her work better.

Augusta was educated at home, where like her later friend, poet William Butler Yeats, she became fascinated by stories told by the family’s Irish servants, especially the articulate Mary Sheridan. Augusta, an intelligent and vivacious young woman, made a surprising match in Sr. William Henry Gregory, despite being an “old maid” of 28. Thirty-five years older than Augusta and a widower, Gregory had returned to Coole Park, not far from the Persse family, from his position as Governor General of Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Augusta moved to his large Georgian house with its extensive library and began her education in earnest, for her parents had not allowed books in their home.

In addition to their Irish country estate, the Gregorys had a home in London, where they held a weekly salon attended by such dignitaries as Henry James and Alfred Lord Tennyson. They traveled widely. But despite wealth and comfort, Augusta yearned for more. She fell in love with an English poet to whom she wrote a series of scandalous love sonnets—that he published as his own. In Egypt, Lady Gregory became aware of the oppression of colonialism. Inured to it at home, she saw its damaging impact more clearly when abroad. Her first published work was a pamphlet in support of an indigenous uprising in Egypt. But for the next decade, until her husband’s death, she wrote only short stories and memoirs.

Lord Gregory’s death when Augusta was 40 years old, after only twelve years of marriage, freed her financially, emotionally and intellectually. Although her first project was editing her husband’s autobiography, she soon turned her attention to other projects. Within a year, she had begun collecting folktales from the Kiltartan area, the mythically rich area surrounding Coole Park. Often she relied on women storytellers, where male recorders listened predominantly to male seanachies or tale-spinners.

She began to study the Irish language, the better to understand and record folktales. She became a familiar figure on the narrow roads of the west of Ireland, traipsing about in her pony-trap to isolated farms and villages. She encouraged writer friends, including Yeats, to study Irish myths and legends in order to define the emerging nation to itself and to the world. Her many published works include the important Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland as well as several books of Kiltartan stories.

This period of her productive life came to an end with the founding of the now world-famous Abbey Theater, which Lady Gregory created to promote Irish nationalism. She wrote many plays for the theater, many of them short scenes set around her Galway home. Although her plays not often performed today, her work in folklore remains a steady source of information for scholars. Not only are they consulted as primary texts, but the collecting of oral tales continues in Ireland and elsewhere, providing narratives with alternative visions of women’s roles and possibilities. Lady Gregory died on May 22, 1932.

Margaret Murray: “The folk” as witches

While Augusta Gregory’s impetus towards collecting folklore came from her nationalistic vision, a slightly younger woman saw the possibility that such traditions might include evidences of an earlier religion that honored goddesses as well as gods. A trained folklorist, Margaret Murray articulated a theory that remains controversial: that “witchcraft” in Europe was the residue of an earlier pagan religion rather than an aberrant form of Christianity.

Born in Calcutta on July 13, 1863, Margaret Murray was, like many of her class in that era, educated in England. She studied anthropology and linguistics at the University of London while becoming active in the suffragist movement. Late in the 19th century, Murray did archaeological research with the renowned Sir William Flinders Petrie in Egypt, creating an innovative interdisciplinary archaeology for which she attained some renown. She soon established her reputation in Egyptology, working at Manchester Museum and then at University College of London, where she remained until she retired in 1935.

Her appointment followed publication in 1921 of The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, in which she argued that European paganism began in the Neolithic (New Stone Age) and continued despite Christianization. The witch-burnings of the Middle Ages, she argued, were the result of exposure of this religion and an attempt by the Church to eradicate it. She developed this theory further in her 1931 book, The God of the Witches, in which she connected the Christian image of Satan with the pagan Horned God. Murray’s witches practiced in covens of 13, honoring the Horned God and the Goddess. In detecting this alleged underground tradition, Murray was influenced by the renowned mythographer Sir James George Frazer, who defined in The Golden Bough a universal religion based on a sacrificed king whose death restored the fertility of the earth. Murray detected this pattern in European rituals, claiming that witches practiced human sacrifice as well as sexual promiscuity.

The influence of Murray’s book continues to this day, despite some long discounted claims. Thirteen-member covens cannot be upheld from the source literature, yet many practitioners of the reconstructivist religion of Wicca assume an ancient origin for the practice. Similarly, whether European witchcraft represented a survival of an “old faith” has been fiercely argued, with some discounting the theory while others find evidence that some beliefs were indeed ancient and possibly shamanic. Nonetheless, because of the influence of Murray’s work on Gerald Gardner, who claimed to be a “hereditary witch” and promoted witchcraft (today more commonly called Wicca) as an indigenous pagan religion, Murray’s theories remain potent today. As Wiccans acknowledge divinity in feminine as well as masculine form, the influence of Murray’s work on goddess scholarship continues, together with the controversies over its genesis.

After her retirement in 1935, Murray continued to be professionally active. She was elected president of the Folklore Society in 1953, at the age of 90. A decade later, she published her autobiography, My First Hundred Years. She died later that year.