The Goddess, the Great Goddess, or Goddess
The Goddess refers to a deity who spans many cultures and places, and
many powers. Although Goddess worship appears to mirror monotheism, the
term is frequently used for an inclusive spirituality that may embrace
the God, gods, ancestral spirits, faerie etc. She is commonly seen as
hav¬ing three aspects, who are called the Virgin, Mother and Hag,
or in Celtic mythology the Three Mothers. Often three of the four phases
of the moon (waxing, full, waning) symbolise the three aspects of the
Triple Goddess: put together they appear in a single symbol comprising
a circle flanked by two mirrored crescents. The Virgin Mother aspect
is associated with the waxing Moon. The second aspect is the Lover/ Mother,
the sexual Mother. The third is the Dark Mother
In recent centuries worship of the Goddess has been sup¬pressed by
the Christian Church. One way she survived was in fairy tales and folklore
as the Good Fairy, Fairy Godmother or Queen of the Fairies; another was
in the sanctuary of the Christian Church itself, as the Blessed Virgin
Mary; and she also survived as herself. For some of her Pagan worshippers,
the belief did not die.
As with many pagan practices and symbols the early church took on the
goddess aspect by authorizing the veneration of the Virgin Mary. Not
as Goddess or as a human being with fail¬ings, but as something in
between the `Mother of God'.
The Mary cult, while beneficial in that it preserved the idea of the Goddess
in religion and culture, has had some unhealthy psychological effects on both
women and men. The Virgin Mary concept omitted a vital aspect of the Goddess.
In Mary, she was Virgin and Hag. She gave birth to the God; she mourned him at
the foot of the cross and she attended his body at the tomb: but she was without
sexuality. She became mother not through a physical mating with the God, but
through a psychic fertilization.
Goddess and Pagan devotees do not usually use the term "worship", as
this implies an acutely hierarchical dialogue between deity and human. Their
ideology celebrates the her in a more balanced way along side and equal to the
image of the horned god, wrongly thought of as the devil by those not involved
in the religion. The two represent not the not the forces of good and evil as
in the Christian god and devil. Rather they personify the female/male polarity
of all things in nature.
Mother Earth
Recently strong associations have arisen of the deity with Mother Earth (or Mother
Nature), and with the Moon. These metaphors have very wide currency, to the point
of becoming assumed as dogma, but some Pagans criticise them. Many cultures --
the Celts and the Egyptians, for example -- do not figure the Moon or the Earth.
The Mother Earth motif usefully joins deep emotional loyalties to our mothers
and to the ecological needs of the planet. Goddess culture makes much of spiritual
mothering, mothering the vulnerable, and mothering the planet
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