The Concept of the Goddess

Sandra Billington, Miranda Green, Sandra Billington, Miranda Green

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9780415144216
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134641512
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Anthropology

The Concept of the Goddess explores the function and nature of goddesses and their cults in many cultures, including:
* Celtic
* Roman
* Norse
* Caucasian
* Japanese traditions.
The contributors explore the reasons for the existence of so many goddesses in the mythology of patriarchal societies and show that goddesses have also assumed more masculine roles, with war, hunting and sovereignty being equally important aspects of their cults.

CHAPTER ONE
THE CONCEPT OF THE GODDESS

Juliette Wood

The last ten years have seen an upsurge in the study of the feminine aspect of the sacred. Archaeologists, theologians, feminist critics, psychologists and popular writers have produced analyses of every type imaginable, and ‘the Goddess’ has become one of the buzz words of New Age, neo-pagan and certain feminist writers. By no means everything discussed here fits under the umbrella of the New Age: much of the scholarship dates from before the term was coined, and many of the writers would reject such a title. However, in its emphasis on the necessity to revitalize culture, New Age thinking in its broadest sense provides a good starting-point for examining both the historical background and the current range of thought about the Goddess.¹

The importance of New Age thinking in the late twentieth century has been widely recognized, and despite recent media attention to some of its more dramatic features, it is a phenomenon which cannot be written off as trivial (Ellwood 1992:59–60). Critics and historians stress the similarity of New Age thinking to the kind of alternative spirituality that has reappeared regularly in Western societies. Despite the essentially discrete nature of these spiritual movements, certain themes recur: for example, belief in the perfectibility of human kind, at least on the non-material plane; the direct access of all to enlightenment without the need of institutions such as priesthoods. Spirit and matter are viewed as intimately connected in a basically hierarchical, ordered, complexly integrated world (often presided over by a benign but impersonal force such as the Numen or Gaia). Priority is nevertheless given to the spiritual, and one of the aims of these movements is to open the individual’s consciousness to some kind of non-material understanding. This understanding of the complexities of the cosmos comes about through a process of initiation which, although not directed by an institutionalized priesthood, is often facilitated by contact with an intermediary being. These intermediaries take various forms: the psychopomps of the Neo platonists, the angelic beings of ritual magic, the spirit guides of theosophy, the aliens of modern Ufologists, and the neo-pagan gods which are a feature of late twentieth-century alternative thought. This brings us to the subject of the Goddess.

The hierarchical world-view, the link between matter and spirit, the use of personalized beings as intermediaries in initiation have an old and distinguished pedigree in this type of spirituality, and their validity depends on intuition and belief. However, at least since the eighteenth century, many alternative spiritual movements have also sought empirical validation. For example, mesmerism explained itself in terms of the theory of electricity; spiritualism sought validation in parapsychology; alternative healing frequently draws on quantum physics; and, to bring us back to the Goddess once again, much contemporary neo-pagan study draws on archaeological and anthropological work, as well as on the work of comparative mythologists. The scholarship itself is not, of course, part of the alternative world-view, but it does make significant contributions to the conceptual framework, especially in regard to notions of antiquity, and the nature of myth and how it relates to the present. My argument here is that a number of modern Goddess-studies resemble influential nineteenth-century models of culture in their use of archaeology and anthropology, in the assumptions they draw about early society, in their definition of myth, and in their conception of the relationship of the past to the present. Folklorists can make a special contribution to this debate. Ideas about the nature of culture as embodied in the writings of such men as E.B.Tylor and J.G. Frazer were crucial to the discipline of folklore for over fifty years, and this gives folklore a unique perspective on the conceptual models that underpin aspects of Goddess-studies. In addition, folklore studies are much more concerned with the nature of belief and can provide a framework for understanding some of the assumptions of these studies (see Dorson 1968, 1972; Wilson 1979).²

Modern feminism provides the context for study of the Goddess in the last few decades. Within the context of religion, it has attempted to rebalance or redefine the relationship between male/female aspects of the deity. Typical of this more radical feminist theology is the belief that the feminine has somehow been ‘lost’, or deliberately repressed by institutional religions with their overwhelming focus on patriarchal male deities (McCance 1990:167–73). The feminine is therefore sought outside the context of organized religion and/or historically prior to its appearance. In addition, religion and society are linked in a very direct way; the assumption being that where ‘goddesses’ are worshipped, women are empowered with a status equal to if not higher than that of men, and, further, that feminine power is ecologically harmonious and pacifistic (Gimbutas 1991:vi–xi, 324; Gadon 1989:341–4, 353, 359–60; Baring and Cashford 1991:9).

Opinion varies widely, although a number of writers express disquiet with the extreme historicism of many Goddess-studies and suggest alternatives. In an article which surveys the concept of Goddess-worship in contemporary feminist thinking, Dawn McCance considers Rosemary Renter’s position, which dismisses the cult of the mother-goddess as a false understanding of origins and states that such feminist spiritualities succumb to the suppressed animus of paternal religion (McCance 1990:172, quoting Reuter). Writers such as Carol Christ suggest that neither biblical nor prehistoric traditions of ancient goddesses are needed but that new traditions must be created (Christ 1989:240–51; McCance 1990:171). A recent study by Ross Kraemer focuses on women’s role in actual religious contexts rather than in the context of theories of primal matriarchies. Kraemer points out that the dilemma of gynocentric myths in patriarchal societies is not resolved by seeing them as a reflection of earlier, less repressive, more gynocentric societies (Kraemer 1992:208). The existence or non-existence of a unified Goddess-religion is an important issue even among writers who reject or offer an alternative (Barstow 1983:7–15; Ehrenburg 1989:63–76; Fleming 1969:246–61).

Many scholars distinguish clearly, and quite rightly, between a literal interpretation of the Goddess, and metaphorical use of the Goddess paradigm. The former accepts as historical fact that an ancient and unified system of belief and practice characterized by a matriarchal culture and centred on a powerful goddess figure existed at some identifiable historical period. The latter sees the Goddess as a non-historical archetype or a poetic metaphor. The focus here is on the former literal position, which is currently widely held.

Robert Graves’s classic The White Goddess, an influential and oftquoted work in modern studies, provides a good illustration of some of the ideas about early culture, and of the methodology that supports these ideas.³ The work is an exposition of Graves’s poetic ideas: namely, that the inspiration for all poetry has been the feminine principle, which the author calls ‘the White Goddess’ (Musgrove 1962:3), although Graves never makes clear whether the ‘goddess’ is a metaphor or a reality (ibid.: 19). As an exposition of a personal mythology it has much in common with William Blake, but Graves’s premise that history and mythology reflect the conflict between patriarchal and matriarchal cultures coincides with an important stream in modern Goddess-studies. His work is in the tradition of Victorian synthesists—sweeping through enormous quantities of data for the pattern which informs it all. He entitled his book a ‘historical grammar of poetic myth’, in which myth is a kind of universal poetic discourse, a highly imaginative and, to a poet such as Graves, highly valued impulse of the human mind. His working methods are those of the comparativist strongly rooted in the classics. He was influenced, as perhaps no other poet at the time, by the work of Sir James Frazer (Vickery 1972:1–25). The popularity of Graves’s work stems not just from its subject-matter but from the fact that it shares, in its orientation to the past and in its attitude to myth, many of the concepts and assumptions that underpin much neo-pagan Goddess-study (Hutton 1991:145).

A good illustration of Graves’s methodology is his use of Welsh material in the discussion of the figure of Ceridwen. Welsh tradition was an important influence on his work (Musgrove 1962:56). He does not suffer from the druidic fantasies of Nash and Spence and takes account of current Welsh scholarship, such as the suggestion that Welsh poetry had a prose context similar to Irish (Graves 1961:74–8)—an innovative theory for its day. He is aware of Iolo Morganwg’s dubious sources and of W.J. Gruffydd’s theories on the relationship between medieval Welsh tales and Irish hero-tales. His command of the scholarship is impressive, and still he gets it wrong. Part of the problem with his analysis of the character of Ceridwen, a powerful supernatural female who appears in Hanes Taliesin, and with his study of some of the poems ascribed to the historical poet Taliesin, derives from Graves’s wildly inaccurate philological speculation. His suggestion that Ceridwen is an avatar of the White Goddess is supported by analysing the name as cerdd—translated as song/inspiration—and wen as white. Graves is depending on Macculloch here and so is not entirely to blame (ibid.: 27–30, 67). However, cerdd meaning inspiration is not actually attested in any of the citings in modern Welsh dictionaries, and cerdd > cerid is an extremely unlikely development in any case.⁴ A more fundamental problem is his attitude to the dating of the material. Graves’s source is the translation that appears at the end of Charlotte Guest’s Mabinogion. The texts of Hanes Taliesin are much later than those of the Mabinogion, dating from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, while the poems appear in an earlier manuscript, Llyfr Taliesin. Graves had no way of knowing this, but he automatically assumed the texts to be centuries older than their first appearance in manuscript. The prose material associated with Taliesin contains a number of wonder-tale episodes, local legends and a saucy novella tale. Nevertheless, scholars who have examined this material have persistently ignored its early modern narrative context and read it as pertaining to an ancient period in which it had a more meaningful cohesion, embodying ideas relating to metempsychosis (Scott 1930), druidic doctrine (Nash 1848), shamanism (Ford 1992) or, as here, a Goddess-myth. The assumption that non-rational features of certain texts—in this instance the shape-changing and magical activities of the characters—must belong to the past is a basic premise in nineteenth-century approaches to culture. It is rooted in the conception of contemporary rationality; therefore the non-rational features of texts such as these cannot be contemporary and need to be explained by some feature of the past. Myth for Graves is a creative impulse behind all literature, not a narrative genre. The result is a very evocative but rather imprecise category which can, particularly when applied to material with an oral or traditional dimension, become the sum of valued literary qualities or valued narrative themes and motifs. In this context the term ‘myth’ no longer relates to a category of narrative but becomes an affirmation of a story’s importance: a linguistically positive sign rather than a description.

Elsewhere Graves suggests that this myth of Mother-goddess and son, which he sees as basic to all European literature, was found among peoples living in an area Graves calls ‘the Aegean world’ prior to the second millennium BC. At this time a number of invasions occurred, resulting in a synthesis rather than a displacement, and

the connection between the early myths of the Hebrews, the Greeks and the Celts is that all three races were civilized by the same Aegean people whom they conquered and absorbed…the popular appeal of modern Catholicism, despite the patriarchal Trinity and all-male priesthood, is based rather on the Aegean Mother and Son religious tradition, to which it has slowly reverted, than on…Indo-European warrior-god elements.

(Graves 1948)

Fascinating as Graves is, the combination of poor philology, inadequate texts and out-of-date archaeology needs to be pointed out. When, as with Graves, one has a highly speculative model based on very open-ended data, the danger is that the writer may follow personal imagination rather than provide insight into the culture from which the data comes. Nevertheless, Graves articulates a continuity between past and present; a past where the Goddess was worshipped in a unified and harmonious society and which, despite the restrictiveness of subsequent historical developments, reaches out to inform the present.

The similarity between Graves’s methodology and ideas and nineteenth-century models of social organization and myth is an important one, linking recent interest in the Goddess with a particular approach to culture (Hutton 1991:325–8). E.B.Tylor proposed a universal model for culture in which every society progresses from savagery through barbarism to civilization; from irrationality to rationality. He drew heavily on ethnological data which was becoming available in the nineteenth century, often as a by-product of imperial expansion, and he was influenced by the then current legal debate on whether early society was patriarchal or matriarchal. Tylor viewed a whole range of behaviour (e.g. folktales and folk-customs) as survivals from an earlier and less rational stage of culture which lingered on in rural areas and among primitive people (Tambiah 1990:42–51; Dorson 1968). Sir James Frazer worked within a framework of strict rationally-based cultural progression similar to Tylor’s but applied it more specifically to religious thought. Frazer located the religious impulse in the universal experience of an annually repeated agricultural cycle whose meaning was expressed in myths and rituals which reflected the yearly death and rebirth of a vegetation god. Ethnological data, here too a by-product of imperial expansion, classical literature and even the Bible, was examined for traces of this ‘primitive’ world-view. As with Tylor, this world-view gave way to a rational understanding of the world, at least among educated, urban Europeans. However, the survivals of these primitive myths and rituals could be found among the rural folk of Europe as well as among technologically simple societies the world over (Vickery 1973:38–67).

What both evolutionary models and modern Goddess-paradigms have in common is a view of early society as an organic whole whose cultural pattern is predictable, universal and progressive. Society evolves from simpler to more complex forms. The process of transition does not always eradicate all modes of thought characteristic of an earlier stage. They can still be identified at a later stage as non-rational survivals, obvious because they do not conform, or at least do not appear to conform, to the prevailing world-view of the culture. Indeed, so similar are the assumptions and the methodology of many modern Goddess-studies that, in her universality and persistence, the Goddess resembles Frazer’s Dying God, resuscitated once again and cross-dressed. However, there is an important difference. Whereas Tylor and Frazer both espoused models of culture which were rational and progressive, many twentieth-century studies of the Goddess view cultural change as loss of the integrity that the Goddess represents. As a consequence, cultural change becomes essentially de-evolutionary, with the past seen in terms of a lost paradise, and the future in terms of a possible utopia. Revitalization is an important aspect of feminist Goddess-theory (Townsend 1990:179–80), with archaeology and history becoming the basis for millenarian reconstruction. Gimbutas’s archaeological theories are central to this position (Gimbutas 1974; 1989; 1...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE: THE LIFE AND WORKS OF HILDA ELLIS DAVIDSON
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE: THE CONCEPT OF THE GODDESS
• CHAPTER TWO: THE CELTIC GODDESS AS HEALER
• CHAPTER THREE: NOW YOU SEE HER, NOW YOU DON’T: SOME NOTES ON THE CONCEPTION OF FEMALE SHAPE-SHIFTERS IN SCANDINAVIAN TRADITIONS
• CHAPTER FOUR: FREYJA AND FRIGG
• CHAPTER FIVE: FREYJA—A GODDESS WITH MANY NAMES
• CHAPTER SIX: MEG AND HER DAUGHTERS: SOME TRACES OF GODDESS-BELIEFS IN MEGALITHIC FOLKLORE?
• CHAPTER SEVEN: MILK AND THE NORTHERN GODDESS
• CHAPTER EIGHT: COVENTINA’S WELL
• CHAPTER NINE: NEMESIS AND BELLONA: A PRELIMINARY STUDY OF TWO NEGLECTED GODDESSES
• CHAPTER TEN: FORS FORTUNA IN ANCIENT ROME
• CHAPTER ELEVEN: TRANSMUTATIONS OF AN IRISH GODDESS
• CHAPTER TWELVE: ASPECTS OF THE EARTH-GODDESS IN THE TRADITIONS OF THE BANSHEE IN IRELAND
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN THE CAUCASIAN HUNTING-DIVINITY, MALE AND FEMALE: TRACES OF THE HUNTING-GODDESS IN OSSETIC FOLKLORE
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN THE MISTRESS OF ANIMALS IN JAPAN: YAMANOKAMI