Rosemary Radford Ruether • GODDESSES AND THE DIVINE FEMININE A Western Religious History University of California Press Berkeley Los Angeles London University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2005 by The Regents of the University of California The author and publisher have made considerable effort to contact copyright holders and to secure permission prior to publication. Any copyright holder who remains unacknowledged may contact the publisher, who will correct the oversight at the earliest opportunity. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Goddesses and the divine feminine : a Western religious history / Rosemary Radford Ruether. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-23146-5 (alk. paper) 1. Goddesses. 2. Women and religion. 3. Goddess religion. I. Title. BL325.F4R84 2005 202'.114—dc22 2004029226 Manufactured in the United States of America 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper). CONTENTS List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Gender and the Problem of Prehistory 2. Goddesses and World Renewal in the Ancient Mediterranean 3. The Hebrew God and Gender 4. Savior Goddesses in the Mystery Religions and Gnosticism 5. The Spiritual Feminine in New Testament and Patristic Christianity 6. Feminine Symbols in Medieval Religious Literature 7. Tonantzin-Guadalupe: The Meeting of Aztec and Christian Female Symbols in Mexico 8. Mary and Wisdom in Protestant Mystical Millennialism 9. Contested Gender Status and Imagining Ancient Matriarchy 10. The Return of the Goddess Conclusion Notes Index ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Venus of Willendorf 2. Bull, bucrania, and bulls' horns 3. Leaping figure above bulls' heads 4. Leaping figure 5. Vultures swooping down on headless human corpses 6. Seated female figure between two leopards 7. The Goddess Inanna, with foot on back of a lion 8. The courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi 9. Inanna riding ahead of a war chariot 10. Inanna/Ishtar, as Goddess of war, bringing captives to the king 11. The Goddess Anat on a war chariot 12. The Goddess Isis suckling an infant pharaoh 13. Isis and Nephthys behind Osiris 14. Osiris with wheat growing from his body 15. Osiris begetting Horus by Isis 16. The birth of Horus in the papyrus swamps 17. Demeter and Kore (Persephone) 18. Asherah figurine 19. Shekinah holding the baby Moses 20. Magna Mater seated in her chariot, pulled by lions 21. Meter (Cybele) and Attis 22. Ceremony performed by worshippers of Isis 23. Worshippers of Isis 24. Lion-headed Aion of Time 25. Feminine Holy Spirit between the Father and the Son 26. Mary as woman clothed with the sun 27. Mary as Wisdom, on the lion throne 28. Madonna of the Misericordia by Piero della Francesca 29. The Annunciation 30. The Virgin of the Great Panagia 31. Vierge ouvrante 32. Page for Assumption from feast-day gospel 33. The Assumption of Mary by Titian 34. The Virgin of the Immaculate Conception 35. The Coronation of Mary by Jacopo Torriti 36. The cosmic wheel, the universe as an egg, by Hildegard of Bingen 37. Hildegard of Bingen receiving revelations from God's Holy Spirit 38. Hildegard of Bingen's image of Wisdom, the Mother Church 39. The crucifixion of Christ and the sacraments, by Hildegard of Bingen 40. The struggle against evil within the church, by Hildegard of Bingen 41. The Aztec Earth Goddess Coatlicue 42. The dismembered Goddess Coyolxauhqui 43. Xochitecatl women figurines 44. Virgin of Guadalupe 45. The Virgin with Two Angels by Lucas van Leyden 46. Witches concocting an ointment for flying to the Sabbath, by Hans Baldung Grien 47. Illustration to Apocalypse 17, the Whore of Babylon ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank many people who have given me critical feedback on this work. This list includes Gale Yee of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Cheryl Anderson of Garrett-Evangelical in Evanston, Illinois, for reading the chapter on Hebrew scripture; Luise Schottroff of the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley for reading the section on the New Testament; Margaret Conkey and Carolyn Merchant of the University of California at Berkeley for reading the material on anthropology; David Lawrence of the Swedenborgian Institute at the Pacific School of Religion for reading the section on Swedenborg; Moses Penumaka, doctoral student at the Graduate Theological Union, for his extensive work in scanning and preparing the pictures for the book; and the students in the Spring 2003 course “Goddesses and the Spiritual Feminine,” for their reflections on what the material in this book means to them. INTRODUCTION My interest in goddesses of the ancient Near East and Greece goes back to 1954, when I began studying the religious worldviews of these societies.1 In a course on Greek tragedy with Robert Palmer (translator of Walter Otto's work on Dionysus), I read writers such as Jane Harrison and was introduced to the theory that a matriarchal society had preceded the rise of patriarchy in ancient Greek and Mediterranean societies.2 As I continued to pursue these interests at Scripps College and the Claremont Graduate School, I focused on the classics and early Christianity. In particular, I studied the Greek and Near Eastern background of Hebrew and early Christian thought, Platonism and Neoplatonism,3 and various religious movements, such as the mystery religions of the Hellenistic and Greco- Roman worlds, in which Cybele, Isis, and other goddesses were central. It became evident to me that the Hebrew religion and Christianity, far from simply repressing and leaving behind these “pagan” religious worldviews, had appropriated and reinterpreted them. The Christianity that emerged in the first to fourth century was, in many ways, a reinterpreted synthesis of the religious worldviews of the ancient Mediterranean world. In studying the Hebrew Bible and early Christianity side by side with ancient paganism, I found myself attracted to the prophetic traditions that sided with the poor and oppressed and denounced the rich and powerful. As I became involved in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, this spiritual lineage undergirded my commitment to justice. Although the ancient pagan religions that I had been studying seemed to lack this prophetic social justice tradition, I nevertheless continued to regard them as offering valid spiritual worldviews, as did my mentors, such as Robert Palmer, who frankly preferred ancient paganism to Christianity. I began to think in terms of complementary spiritualities—pagan, prophetic, and contemplative.4 Pagan spirituality, typical of most indigenous religions, focuses on the renewal of the earth and human life within the changing seasons. Prophetic spirituality focuses on the struggle to restore just and harmonious relations among humans and with the earth in a covenantal relation with a creating and redeeming God, over against a world dominated by great systems of oppression and injustice. Contemplative spirituality withdraws from the “illusions” of transitory existence and seeks to unite the soul with the permanent source of reality. I saw ancient Judaism building on pagan spirituality and reinterpreting it in the light of a historical and prophetic viewpoint. In the Hellenistic era, Jewish thinkers such as Philo appropriated Neoplatonic thought and used it to develop a mystical hermeneutics and a contemplative practice of Judaism. Christianity also built on and reinterpreted these many layers of spirituality. In its focus on ascetic, monastic life, it emphasized the contemplative path for more than a millennium, but it never lost the seasonal spirituality on which the church year was based. Periodically, prophetic spirituality was recovered in order to struggle against systems of injustice, including those within the church itself. Today, modern ecological movements have rediscovered the spirituality of earth renewal, marrying it to prophetic critique. Thus, each of these spiritualities not only has a distinct validity but also continually interacts with the others in new and creative ways. In 1968, a feminist critique of male-dominated societies started to emerge in the civil rights movement. In the early sixties, I had already questioned the way Catholicism treated women's sexuality and reproductive role.5 Now I began to reflect on how women had been marginalized throughout the whole of religious history, asking what had been the causes of this long history of domination and what might be sources for the affirmation of women as full and equal persons. My first essay on this subject, written originally in the late sixties, had the provocative title “Male Chauvinist Theology and the Anger of Women.”6 In 1972, I was invited to teach for a year at Harvard Divinity School “under” the Chauncey Stillman Chair of Roman Catholic Studies.7 There, I developed a course that attempted to sort out this religious history from the perspective of women, going from the prehistoric period to the era of the Hellenistic mystery religions and the emergence of early Christianity. Drawing on E. O. James's 1959 book The Cult of the Mother Goddess, I started by talking about the thesis that a Mother Goddess had been universally worshipped in the prehistoric Near East.8 I showed pictures of the Paleolithic and Neolithic female figures that were said to represent this Mother Goddess. I was surprised and intrigued when my students, almost all feminist women, were repelled by these images. The large breasts, bellies, and buttocks of these figures, with truncated hands and feet and a head that lacked facial features, struck them as exploitative images of the female. To their minds, the societies that made these images valued women's bodies as a source of sex and nurture but did not value women's person or agency. The students argued that these did not value women's person or agency. The students argued that these prehistoric images depicted a woman as all buttocks, breasts, and belly, not as a person with facial features who saw, thought, or spoke, not as a person who moved around on her own two feet and took charge of things with her hands. Until then, I had assumed that the existence of these ancient female figurines was “proof” that women had been respected and had wielded power in these ancient matriarchal, or at least prepatriarchal, societies. Later in the 1970s, a new movement of “Goddess” religion would emerge that would again interpret these ancient figurines as testimony of a positive view of women. For example, Anne Barstow, in her article “The Prehistoric Goddess,” talks of being thrilled by these images and feeling that, for the first time, her female body had been affirmed.9 Other books on prehistoric goddesses similarly celebrated these fat, faceless, handless, feetless images with large breasts, buttocks, and bellies—such as the Venus of Willendorf (c. 25,000 BCE) (fig. 1)—as evidence of a time when women held leading positions in society and were revered and worshipped as primary exemplars of the divine. But my students' negative reaction to these same images made me aware that both of these responses are projections from our modern context and that neither view may have much to do with what the creators of these images actually had in mind. Also in the 1970s, I began to read in the emerging field of feminist anthropology, which questioned the entire theory of “matriarchal origins” and explored the more complex ways in which gender and male-female relations developed in various societies.10 I also became aware of how much the concept of an original matriarchal society, superseded by patriarchy, was itself a product of nineteenth-century European societies marked by their own acute conflicts between “masculine” and “feminine” constructions of gender—conflicts that reflected the beginning of the feminist movement and the efforts to marginalize and repress it. In the 1950s and early 1960s, I had encountered this theory of matriarchal origins in the works of classical archaeologists and historians, and I now began to reread these accounts more as products of their own European context and less as reliable accounts of prehistoric antiquity.