the once and future goddess

In a roundabout way, this is part of a follow-up on the Mary stuff I was blogging about earlier:

These days I'm grazing through a couple of related books. One is called the Once and Future Goddess by Elinor W. Gadon which looks at religion from the Paleolithic period to the modern day and highlights and describes different forms of Goddess worship.

The general claim is that while many ancient humans worshiped a male (Judeo-Christian) God, a Sky Father who is distinct from creation, and who reinforces a male-dominated patriarchal social order, originally a more prevalent and older kind of religion worshiped a female Goddess, an Earth Mother who is more intimately related to creation. The world comes out of her. She represents, among other things, the sanctity of human reproduction, and presumably affirms either a matriarchal or an egalitarian social order. I remember many years ago having a conversation with someone who was telling me that way back in the day before folks completely understood the birds and the bees, the fact that women could produce new life was a pretty amazing thing and so societies tended to be matriarchal. (I happen to think its still pretty amazing.) But then later on when men figured out they had something to do with it too, some of the wonder and amazement went away.

The book tells the story of how Goddess worship has existed in different civilizations around the world, and was often suppressed by the male God worshippers. But then the book also goes into how Goddess worship has managed to survive, resist and re-emerge in modern times. And Gadon actually mentioned the Virgen de Guadalupe (along with the cult of the Black Madonnas, and Marian devotion in general) as forms of Goddess worship within Christianity.

I get the feeling that Gadon would probably lump Islam in as a patriarchal male God worshipping religion but as a Muslim, I would have two main responses.

Firstly, I find Islam to be very clear when it comes to saying that God is ultimately beyond the capacity of human language to adequately describe. He is not like anything in creation, so in particular, orthodox Muslims would insist that God is neither male nor female. Anyone who says differently is standing on shaky theological ground.

Secondly, since we can't help but use human language and images to talk about God, it is worth noting that some of the theological imagery and language which comes up in Islam is POWERFULLY feminine.

For example, every sura of the Quran (except one) begins with the widespread Islamic invocation "Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim" (In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate) and these common names for Allah (ar-Rahman, ar-Rahim) are both etymologically related to the concept of womb.

If you are interested, a really good resource for further information about this feminine aspect of God is the book The Tao of Islam: A soucebook on gender relationships in Islamic thought.

In any case, it definitely seems inappropriate to set up "Allah" as a male God in competition with the "Goddess". Instead, there is only one Supreme Being. Muslims try to approach that Supreme Being by following Islam, while in modern times, certain neo-Pagans are trying to approach that same Supreme Being in a very different way.