This discussion of nine touchtones of Goddess religion that "can offer us guidance as we attempt to live its vision in our world" was published in Carol P. Christ, Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality, (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1997), "Mythos and Ethos in Goddess Religion," pp. 165-70. ©Carol P. Christ, not to be reprinted without written permission of the author.
The nine touchstones presented are these:
Goddess religion, like all religions, is a mythos, a system of symbols and rituals, that shapes an ethos, providing a sense of what is real and establishing patterns of action. The insight that all beings in the web of life are deeply connected is the central ethical vision of Goddess religion. Native American teacher Dhyani Ywahoo expresses this conception: "The wisdom of our ancestors wherever they came from, basically points to one truth: everything is in relation to you. Native Americans say, 'all my relations,' acknowledging ... connection to everything that is alive."10 This vision is the antithesis of the illusion of dominators that they are superior to other beings and other people.
Those of us who have grown up in dominator cultures must learn again to value the experience of connection. The rituals and symbols of Goddess religion provide this link, bringing experience and deep feeling to consciousness so that they can shape our lives; helping us broaden and deepen our understanding of our interdependence to include all beings and all people; binding us to others and shaping communities in which concern for the earth and all people can be embodied.11
The symbols and rituals of Goddess religion celebrate our connection to the cycles of the moon and the seasons of the sun and our participation in the mysteries of birth, death, and renewal. They encourage us to appreciate diversity and difference: Darkness and light, springtime and winter, all people and all beings are sacred. Goddess symbols honor the body of the Goddess and our own bodies, calling us to embrace embodied life and to care for the earth body. They affirm the sacredness of the earth in its concrete particularity, naming the ground on which we stand as holy. Goddess images resacralize the female body, enabling women to take pride in our female selves, encouraging men to treat women and children with respect and to acknowledge their own connection to the life force. This is the ethos, the sense of what is real and valuable, created by the mythos of Goddess religion.
Ethics is grounded in an ethos, the way of life of a culture, which in turn is shaped by a mythos. Individual choices, such as what to do when a child throws a tantrum or whether to buy a car, are important. But just as crucial are the decisions we make as societies about how we support the nurturers of life and whether public transportation is available. This means that we must always think about the larger context, the mythos and the ethos, in which decisions are made. The larger context in which the ethics of Goddess religion is emerging is shaped by the mythos and ethos of domination. Our ethical decision making thus takes place "within a broken web."12 We are children of violence and this limits our ability to act as we might choose.
One of our tasks is to create a new mythos and a new ethos that can help us resist the values of dominator cultures. Through symbols and rituals we name our values and strengthen our commitment, creating alternatives to the images presented in both higher education and mass media. Changing consciousness will not magically transform the structures of society, as some New Age philosophers imagine. But we will not be able to change the structures of society if we continue to celebrate a mythos that supports the ethos and the structures of domination.
Even if we succeed in creating a new mythos and a new ethos, our capacity for moral reasoning will still be rooted in our bodies. We cannot pretend to have universal knowledge. We can only say how it seems to us when we take the widest perspective we can. Since moral decision making occurs within a world that is constantly changing and where all interests cannot be harmonized, decisions are rarely between right and wrong. More often than not, we must choose to do the best we can in a given situation, knowing that some harm may be done. Moral action always takes place within the context of the "ambiguity" of life.13 Thus Goddess religion cannot provide us with a new Ten Commandments or with universal ethical principles.
Still, we must ask whether Goddess religion can offer us any guidance as we attempt to live its vision in our world. In my life, I have discovered nine touchstones that can help to translate the mythos of Goddess religion into an ethos, a way of ethical living.14 A touchstone is different from a principle or a commandment. Like a beautiful pebble on the shore of the sea, a touchstone is discovered by attending to the concrete. It does not derive from a source outside ourselves, but rather is discovered within the web of life. A touchstone can be consulted for guidance, but it does not tell us precisely what to do in any concrete situation. A touchstone is one among many. Ethical guidelines can never be reduced to a perfect and complete list. They are relative to the situations in which we live. New touchstones can be added as they are discovered. Those that have outlived their usefulness can be discarded.
The touchstones I have found are applicable to individuals, communities, and societies. These nine touchstones of the ethics of Goddess religion are:
To nurture life is to manifest the power of the Goddess as the nurturer of life. To honor, respect, and support mothers and children. To recognize all people and all beings as connected in the web of life. To embody the intelligent love that is the ground of all being. There are many ways to nurture life: caring for children; tending a garden; healing the sick; creating a hospice for the dying; helping women gain self-esteem; speaking the truth about violence; replanting forests; working to end war. How different our world would be if we made nurturing life the criterion of all that we do. What if we asked ourselves every night: How does what I did today nurture life? Midwife and healer Ariska Razak names the radical implications of putting nurture first: "If we begin with loving care for the young, and extend that to social caring for all people and personal concern for the planet, we would have a different world."15 An ethic based in the nurturing of life has a great deal in common with the "ethic of care" described by psychologist Carol Gilligan as a female mode of ethical thinking.16 I believe that if men were more involved with the nurturing of life in all its aspects, we would recognize the ethic of care as a human mode of moral behavior.
To walk in love and beauty is to appreciate the infinite diversity of all beings in the natural world, including ourselves and other human beings, and to sense that everything wants to be loved. This understanding has been conveyed to us in Navajo chants and in the words of Martin Buber, Susan Griffin, and Alice Walker. When we walk in love and beauty, we open our hearts to the world, to all our relations. We are stunned by beauty, and our hearts fill up and spill over with love. A song by Libby Roderick gives a sense of the loss we suffer when those around us do not walk in love and beauty:
How could anyone ever tell you
You are anything less than beautiful? How could anyone ever tell you
You are less than whole?
How could anyone fail to notice
that your love is like a miracle?
How deeply you're connected to my soul.17
The melody to this song is like a lullaby. As it is sung to us, we sense the healing that could occur if we all learned to walk in love and beauty.
To trust the knowledge that comes through the body means to take seriously that our bodies are ourselves and that sensation and feeling are the guardians of life. To experience the joy and pain that come to us through the body. To allow the power of the erotic to lead us to question the denial of pleasure and satisfaction that is inherent in the ethos of domination. To ground ourselves in the earth and to acknowledge our interdependence in the web of life. Trusting body experience also means never giving ourselves over to any authority — no wise man, no guru, no spiritual teacher, no spiritual tradition, no politician, no wise woman, no one. The ethos of domination has encouraged us to put our faith in external authorities, and this has led to great suffering and harm. A prayer called the Charge of the Goddess counters this pattern, reminding us: "If that which you seek you find not within yourself, you will never find it without."18 Not trusting authorities does not mean that we cannot learn from others. Learning from those who have gone before us is part of interdependent life. But nothing should be accepted unquestioningly. Everything must be tested in our own experience.
To speak the truth about conflict, pain, and suffering means not idealizing life. Not denying the realities of our personal and social lives. For many of us, childhood and other traumas have been intensified because conflict was denied and we were not allowed to feel our pain. Denial is also a social phenomenon. Americans can continue to assert that we live in the "greatest society on earth" only if we deny the violence and ecological destruction that is occurring all around us. Many in Hitler's Germany denied the reality of the gas chambers. Denial is only possible when we sever our minds from our bodies. When we trust the knowledge that comes through our bodies, we feel our own joy and suffering and the suffering and joy of others and the earth body.
Taking only what you need and thinking about the consequences of your actions for seven generations are touchstones that come from the Native Americans.19 The first acknowledges that conflict — taking the lives of other beings — is inherent in human life and thus encourages restraint. The second affirms interconnection and asks us to consider not only our own needs, but those of all our relations for seven generations as we take and give back to the circle of life. Seven generations is a very long time. It is about as far into the future as the human imagination can stretch. We are not asked to hold ourselves to impossible models of perfection, but to consider the consequences of our actions on a scale we can comprehend.
Approaching the taking of life with great restraint is implicit in taking only what we need. I have made it a separate touchstone because those of us who live in industrialized countries take so much more than we really need without thinking of the lives that are lost. And because as individuals, communities, and societies we so readily resort to violence and warfare to resolve personal, ethnic, and national conflicts.
The "spirit of great generosity" advocated by Dhyani Ywahoo is an important guide as we work to transform our cultures and societies. According to Ywahoo, generosity begins with ourselves. If we are to gain the power to act, we must acknowledge that no one of us can take on all the burdens of the world. As we recognize our strengths and forgive our limitations, we can begin to approach others with a generous spirit. Ywahoo asks us to always "speak the best of one another and perceive the best in everything." She adds that "it is a strenuous discipline in these times to practice this."20 We must speak the truth about the harm dominator societies are doing to ourselves, other people, and the web of life. Yet it requires great discipline to understand the harm that white people have done to Native Americans and other people of color without concluding that all white people are mean and that white culture has nothing of value in it. Or to acknowledge the evils of sexism without deciding that all men and everything they have ever done is bad. Or to learn of the roles of Christianity and Judaism in the suppression of Goddess religion and the ethos of interdependence without coming to believe that Judaism and Christianity express no positive ethical values. Or to see the threat that national conflicts present to the human race and the web of life without stating that all of our political leaders are evil. Though great harm has been done, very few people or groups have nothing to commend them. When we polarize situations, we make it difficult for our "adversaries" to change, and we begin to perceive ourselves unrealistically as "all good."
The last touchstone, repair the web, reminds us that we are living in a world where the bonds of relationship and community are broken by violence. Stemming from the Jewish commandment to "repair the world,"21 it calls us to transform our personal relationships, our social and cultural institutions, and our relation to the natural world. In our time, the nurturers of life must work to establish greater harmony, justice, and peace for all beings on earth.
These nine touchstones define the ethos of Goddess religion, providing a framework for ethical decision making but not a blueprint for action. There are still hard decisions which we must make as individuals, communities, and societies. The touchstones of Goddess religion can be embodied in different lifestyles and ethical choices. They do not tell whether individuals or groups are ever justified in resorting to force to defend themselves. Nor do they tell us whether we "need" to eat meat or whether we "need" flush toilets and electricity. But clearly there is no license to justify violence as the ordinary way to defend personal, national, or other interests, to take what others need, or to deplete the earth. Our needs must always be weighed in relation to the needs of other people and other beings for continued life and survival. It is not possible to live in perfect harmony with all people and all beings in the web of life. We cannot live without taking the lives of other living creatures, and we cannot live with other human beings without some degree of conflict. Our choices are always between relative degrees of healing and harming other people and the web of life.
But once we recognize the possibility and value of a life lived in reverence and respect for other people and life in all its diverse forms, it becomes painfully obvious how far modern societies have deviated from this vision. While it may not be easy to decide exactly what "taking only what we need" means in modern technological societies, it is certain that in dominator societies we have been taught that it is our right to take far more than we really need in disregard for the needs of other people and other beings. The violent behavior of individuals and groups and nations is taking too great a toll on human bodies, the body politic, and the earth body. While we may disagree on strategies and priorities for change, if we value the ethos of interdependence, we can agree that those of us living in dominator societies must make radical changes in the way we live.
10. Dhyani Ywahoo, "Renewing the Sacred Hoop," in Judith Plaskow and Carol P. Christ, eds., Weaving the Visions: New Patters in Feminist Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989), p. 275.
11. For depictions of the rituals of Goddess religion, see Starhawk, The Spiral Dance, 2d ed. (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989); and Budapest, Grandmother of Time. Also see Carol P. Christ, Laughter of Aphrodite: Reflections on a Journey to the Goddess (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), especially chap. 11, and Odyssey with the Goddess (New York: Continuum, 1995). Also see Chapter 1 of this book.
12. See Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web: Sexism, Separation, and Self (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986).
13. Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity [1948], trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Citadel Press, 1970), discussed in Chapter 7.
14. The idea of moral touchstones is taken from Maurice Friedman, Touchstones of Reality: Existential Trust and the Community of Peace (New York: Dutton, 1972). My touchstones are different from his.
15. Ariska Razak, "Toward a Womanist Analysis of Birth," in Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein, eds., Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990), p. 172.
16. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
17. Libby Roderick, from the song "How Could Anyone Ever Tell You" on her album entitled "If You See a Dream" (Turtle Island Records).
18. See Starhawk, Spiral Dance, p. 91. The Charge of the Goddess has been attributed to Doreen Valiente; see Cynthia Eller, Living in the Lap of the Goddess: The Feminist Spirituality Movement in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), p. 51.
19. See Ywahoo, "Renewing the Sacred Hoop," p. 276. Also see Brooke Medicine Eagle, Buffalo Woman Comes Singing: The Spirit Song of a Rainbow Medicine Woman (New York: Ballantine, 1991).
20. Ibid., p. 275.
21. See Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990), chap. 6, esp. pp. 218-20.
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