THE COURAGE OF TURTLES - Central Washington University

Unger 31
Despite these nuances, the two groups who worship the Goddess share a basic
world view. As expressed in the movement's extensive literature, prehistory is Aherstory,@
a matriarchal golden age dreamily similar to Woodstock C full of peace, love,
organic meals, be-ins, and the kind of communal ecstasy one might have experienced at
the feet of Janis Joplin (though the physical ideal here is more like Mama Cass).
Some give the Goddess political and social veils, but underneath them, she is the
Great Mother. Worshiping her-through dance and study, art and herbal medicine,
meditation and witchcraft-has resulted in a balanced, natural way of life for many
women and quite a few men as well.
In a videotape made at a summer-solstice camp in the Sierra Nevadas, Charlotte
Kelly, once married to a minister and now the director of the Women=s Alliance in
Oakland, California, tells how embracing a feminine deity validated her sense of self. AI
took assertiveness training,@ she says, Abut there was no way in which I was really
embodying the power of my own womanhood.@ Church rituals had no meaning for her:
AI didn=t have any place for the beauty of my own soul.@
In a documentary about the movement, dashiki-clad author and teacher Luisah
Teish recalls that as a child, Athe more I listened to what they had to say about the great
bearded white man in the sky, the more I realized he was nobody I could talk to. You
couldn=t say nothing to the dude. He didn=t answer prayers.@
Jean Shinoda Bolen, a psychiatrist and the author of Goddesses in Everywoman,
says she sees the Goddess not as a figurehead but as a Alife force, as affiliation, as that
which links us all at a deep level to be one with each other and one with nature, and in
that, we are all connected with Gaia, or Mother Earth.@
This grassroots religious movement is a subculture with its own politics, morality,
aesthetics, and language. Its inhabitants have redesigned the tarot deck, the calendar,
astrology, medicine, ancient history, and the dictionary. (AIt=s feminist thealogy, not
theo-,@ says Carol Buizone, the owner of Enchantments, correcting a customer.) Words
like Awimmin,@ Awomon,@ and Awomyn@ are ubiquitous. Such elements have trickled into
the mainstream, enough to provoke riotous laughter from audiences when satirized in
Off Broadway's Kathy and Mo Show. And to be sure, some of the activity associated
with Goddess worship is as wacky as anything patriarchal societies ever invented.
There is, for example, a book that invites its readers to find their Agoddess type.@
Are you Athena, Aphrodite, Hera, or Demeter? (This is even more fun than being a Leo.)
In the summer-solstice-camp video, a woman intones, AWe are the teachers of the
New Dawn. We are the Ones.@ Other participants, wearing horned headdresses,
feathered masks, and wispy gowns, dance through the forest, grunting and gesticulating,
keening and moaning.
If that doesn't seem extreme, then how about one of the most influential books on
Goddess spirituality, Starhawk's The Spiral Dance, which has instructions for casting a
ASpell to Be Friends With Your Womb@: ALight a RED CANDLE. Face South. With the