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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete
Nine Touchstones of Goddess Spirituality by Carol P. Christ

 

When I write it sometimes seems as if the words are coming from "between the worlds" This was the case when I "rewrote" the 10 Commandments.

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  • Lynne Haines
    Lynne Haines says #
    I adore your revision of the comandments. I wrote a Prayer to express my love and understanding of the Divine Feminine. I hope r

Posted by on in SageWoman Blogs
Facing Depression

 

The suicide death of Robin Williams prompted me to reflect again on my own experience with depression and to share my story in the hope that it can help others.

In my twenties, thirties, and forties, I suffered severe intermittent depressions. My life in those days was a series of ups and downs. When I feel in love and was having good sex, I was in love with the world and could literally feel energy radiating from my body connecting it to the world. When I was dumped, the energy retreated, and I crawled into a dark hole of despair and self-pity from which there seemed to be no escape. In the in-between times, I carried on my life with neither the highs or the lows.

In recent days, a number of people have tried to describe what depression feels like. Here is what it felt like to me.

 It was as if my mind had a single track on which were repeated a few deadly words: “No one loves me. No one will ever love me. I might as well die.” I could not erase the track or jump to another one. The words repeated themselves relentlessly in my mind.

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  • Me
    Me says #
    Carol, Thank you for speaking out about your past struggles with depression. Having lived with bipolar disorder for almost two de
Carol Christ on Voices of the Sacred Feminine Radio
Listen to Carol Christ on Joy of Life in Ancient Crete 6 pm PST July 16 or listen later online-Voices of the Sacred Feminine with Karen Tate.

Joy of Life in Ancient Crete w/Carol Christ& Matthew Fox on Meister Echhart
 
Scholar, author and foremother, Carol Christ joins us tonight to discuss The Goddess and the Joy of Life in Ancient Crete.  We'll delve into new research on matriarchies, the difference from patriarchy, define "love is free" in matriarchal societies and chat about Crete being a "gift giving" society.   We'll talk about ancient rituals on Crete, redefine patriarchal myths and discuss the "immanental turn" in feminist theologies - and more.....
 
Join Carol in Crete on a Goddess Pilgrimage www.goddessariadne.org
 
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Societies of Peace, Societies of EndlessWar

While I was in Crete on the Goddess Pilgrimage teaching about and experiencing a Society of Peace where violence and domination were neither celebrated nor encouraged, another war broke out in Iraq, breaking my heart, breaking all of our hearts—yet again. When will we ever learn, oh when will we ever learn?

I am sometimes asked why I continue to lead the Goddess Pilgrimages to Crete after more than 20 years. I am also asked why I don’t lead pilgrimages to other parts of Greece where Goddesses were also worshipped. One of the answers to these questions is that in Crete I am not simply teaching about the existence of Goddess worship, but also about the possibility that cultures can live without celebrating violence, war, and domination.

For many people the idea that a relatively “advanced” civilization could exist without violence and war is considered to be a romantic fantasy, a dream of a golden age that never existed. This is the “party line” in the academy today—as it always has been.

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  • Carol P. Christ
    Carol P. Christ says #
    Thanks. I am lucky enough to have Barbara Lee as my representative, as I still vote from a previous address in Berkeley.
  • Ted Czukor
    Ted Czukor says #
    I am outraged by endless war (a most unpopular attitude, here in Arizona), and I have signed the petition. I hope the NSA doesn't
A New Glossary for Crete: The Power of Naming
The words we use affect our thinking. In the case of ancient Crete the repetition of the terms “Palace,” “Palace of Knossos,” “King Minos,” “Minoan,” “Priest-King,” and “Prince of the Lilies” shape the way we understand history–even when we ourselves know these terms are incorrect. We must engage in “new naming.”

Ariadne. May have been a name of the Goddess of pre-patriarchal Crete. The ending “ne” signifies that Ariadne is not of Greek or Indo-European origin and thus predates the later Greek myths.

Ariadnian. The name I have given to the Old European pre-patriarchal culture of Crete, from arrival of the Neolithic settlers from Anatolia c.7000 BCE to the Mycenaean invasion c.1450 BCE. Arthur Evans named the Bronze Age (c.3000-1450 BCE) culture of Crete “Minoan” after King Minos of Greek mythology, son of Zeus and Europa, husband of Pasiphae, father of Ariadne, whose gift of the secret of the labyrinth to Theseus led to the downfall of her culture. Evans assumed that Minoan Crete was ruled by a King.

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  • Carol P. Christ
    Carol P. Christ says #
    with my blessings
  • Ariadne Weaver
    Ariadne Weaver says #
    Carol, I have long been impressed by your scholarship, but this brief blog is mind-boggling. So much re-information in so few para
  • Paola Suarez
    Paola Suarez says #
    Names do have power! Thank you Carol for the work you are doing to reclaim the truth and power of Ariadnian Crete! Will be sharing
TWO MEANINGS OF ANTHROPOMORPHISM

“The error of anthropomorphism” is defined as the fallacy of attributing human or human-like qualities to divinity. Recent conversations with friends have provoked me to ask in what sense anthropomorphism is an error.

The Greek philosophers may have been the first to name anthropomorphism as a philosophical error in thinking about God. Embarrassed by stories of the exploits of Zeus and other Gods and Goddesses, they drew a distinction between myth, which they considered to be fanciful and false, and the true understanding of divinity provided by rational contemplation or philosophical thought. For Plato “God” was the self-sufficient transcendent One who had no body and was not constituted by relationship to anything. For Aristotle, God was the unmoved mover.

Jewish and Christian theologians adopted the distinction between mythical and philosophical thinking in order to explain or explain away the contradictions they perceived between the portrayal of God in the Bible and their own philosophical understandings of divine power. While some philosophers would have preferred to abolish myth, Jewish and Christian thinkers could not do away with the Bible nor did they wish to prohibit its use in liturgy.

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  • Carol P. Christ
    Carol P. Christ says #
    Could not agree more. Charles Hartshorne called this theory "panpsychism" literally soul everywhere, in his definition, every indi
  • Ted Czukor
    Ted Czukor says #
    I LOVE that - "The real fallacy is the a-pathetic fallacy of not attributing feelings to other than human life forms." I marvel at
  • Ted Czukor
    Ted Czukor says #
    Well put. Anthropomorphism was also derided as a deluded belief that animals have human-like emotions and intelligence - something
COMPLICATIONS AND CONFUSIONS IN DISCUSSIONS OF THE GODDESS

Although writing in patriarchal Greece from a patriarchal perspective, Hesiod said in hisTheogony or Birth of the Gods that Gaia or Earth alone was the mother of the Mountains, Sky, and Sea. With the male Sky she gave birth to the next generation of deities known as the “Titans,” who were overthrown by Zeus. Hesiod’s was a “tale with a point of view” in which “it was necessary” for the “forces of civilization”–for him represented by warrior God and rapist Zeus–to violently overthrow and replace earlier conceptions of the origin life on earth and presumably also to overthrow and replace the people and societies that created them.

With the triumph of Christianity in the age of Constantine in the 4th century AD, Christus Victor replaced Zeus in the cities, while the religion of Mother Earth continued to be practiced in the countryside. Over time, many of the attributes of Mother Earth were assimilated into the image of Mary, and priests began to perform rituals earlier dedicated to Mother Earth, such as blessing the fields and the seeds before planting. In the Middle Ages “the Goddess” re-emerged within Western Christianity in devotion to the Virgin Mary, the female saints, and figures such as Lady Wisdom, at the same time that the history of the Goddess was being erased.

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  • Constance Tippett Chandler
    Constance Tippett Chandler says #
    Thank you for great overview of History and Herstory! As as artist, I believe that Gimbutas's books said it all. She had tons o
  • Carol P. Christ
    Carol P. Christ says #
    Amen brother!!! And then we must ask if academics who consider Gimbutas a wild-eyed kook have their heads screwed on straight.
  • Ted Czukor
    Ted Czukor says #
    Thank you for this excellent history. Given the current state of our male military-dominated world, and the concomitant disregard

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