Vision and Intention

Reclaiming the Goddess:
Circle for Women

2009-2010

How might your life have been different if there had been a place for you? A place for you to go… a place of women, to help you learn the ways of woman… a place where you were nurtured from an ancient flow sustaining and steadying you as you sought to become yourself. A place of women to help you find and trust the ancient flow already there within yourself… waiting to be released…
A place of women…
How might your life be different?

~Judith Duerk, Circle of Stones

Vision and Intention

The purpose of this circle is to reclaim and rekindle the Divine Feminine within each of us. Our intention is to offer information and experiential forms which explore the feminine wisdom found in mythology and earth-based spiritual practices. From this lens, we invite each woman to embody and integrate this ancient wisdom and create an image for the Divine as feminine in a way that is uniquely her own.

In offering this opportunity, it is our hope that we can support each other in shifting the imbalance we see in a culture which values and honors traditional masculine principles over feminine ones. As we integrate the paradigm of wholeness and balance into our personal lives, we can then bring it to our families and communities.

The Matrifocal Era

For 25,000 years prior to +/- 3000 BCE, there was an ancient tradition of honoring the blend and balance of the divine feminine and divine masculine. The archaeological record shows a single line of development of a religious system from the Upper Paleolithic through the Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Copper Age, based on a matrifocal social organization.

These early cradles of civilization seem to have been remarkably peaceful. There was a general absence of fortification, signs of destruction through armed conquest, or depictions in the art of men killing each other in battle or raping women. Those seem to have been equitable societies where women and the feminine occupied important social positions. In fact, there is overwhelming evidence that while both female and male deities were worshipped in these societies, the highest power in the universe was seen as the feminine power to give and sustain life. Since life does, after all, emerge from the body of the woman, it would have been only logical that our ancestors first imaged the earth as a Great Mother, a Goddess of nature and spirituality who was the divine source of all birth, death, and regeneration. This Mother Creatrix was invoked by different names in different places, but she was everywhere the symbol of our essential unity, of the oneness of all life on this Earth - the Mother from whose womb all life ensues and to whom all life returns at death, like the cycles of vegetation, to be again reborn.

The Indo-European Era

Some 5000 years ago, Old Europe with her matrifocal system of society and religion ended with the Indo-European invasion and cultural domination, bringing a very different social and religious system, dominated by males and male gods. In this new system, the world was imaged as a pyramid ruled from the top by a male god, with the men made in his image, in turn divinely or naturally ordained to rule over and dominate women, children and the rest of nature. This system has been marked by chronic warfare, patterns of domination, conquest, exploitation, dictatorship and oppression. This pattern of exploitation and subjugation extends not only towards people, but towards the earth as well.

A Vision for a Balanced Future

Realizing there is an alternative to the legacy we have known has powerful implications for our times and the mounting social and ecological crises we face. Out reconnection with millennia-long traditions of respect and reverence for our Mother Earth may be a key component in a more evolved consciousness.

The hierarchical model of patriarchal institutions, where all decisions and power rest with the autocratic ruler or oligarchy at the top, is losing its vitality in the wake of the powerful feminine consciousness being expressed in our modern world. These institutions, which teach that strict obedience is the highest of all virtues, begin to crumble under the "feminine" influence of free thinking, creativity, intuition and relatedness. We see how human thirst for creation rather than destruction is once again on the ascendancy, as women and men all over the world are reclaiming our most ancient consciousness. We also see that the more peaceful and just society we are now trying to construct is not an impossible dream but a realistic possibility rooted in the original direction of our cultural evolution. Our hope is that through this circle, we can all reaffirm our ancient covenant, our sacred bond with our Mother Earth, Goddess of Nature and Spirituality.

Campbell, Joseph & Muses, Charles, Editors, In All Her Names: Explorations of the Divine Feminine. The Goddess of Nature and Spirituality: An Ecomanifesto by Riane Eisler. Harper Collins, New York, NY 1991

Campbell, Joseph & Muses, Charles, Editors, In All Her Names: Explorations of the Divine Feminine. The "Monstrous Venus" of Prehistory: Divine Creatrix by Marija Gimbutas. Harper Collins, New York, NY 1991

Starbird, Margaret, The Woman with the Alabastar Jar, Bear & Company, Rochester, NY 1993

Stone, Merlin, When God Was a Woman, Harcourt, Inc., Orlando, FL 1976