INTRODUCTION
1. A note here on capitalization: Christians have established the tradition of capitalizing the word “god” when it refers to the god of the Bible and Christian faith and lowercasing it in reference to all other gods and goddesses. This practice reflects their view that only the biblical god is the true god and all others are false and nonexistent idols. This is not the view of this book. The policy I have followed here is to lowercase the words “god” and “goddess” when they are used in a more generic way, including references to the Hebrew or Christian god. I capitalize the word “god” or “goddess” when it refers to a particular god or goddess, such as the Goddess Isis, or to the biblical and Christian God as a statement of belief. I also capitalize “goddess” in statements about this deity as object or expression of faith in the contemporary goddess religions.
2. Walter Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult, trans. Robert B. Palmer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965); Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903; New York: Meridian Books, 1955); Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912; New York: University Books, 1962). For a discussion of Harrison's thought, see chapter 9 of this volume.
3. Philip Merlan, author of From Platonism to Neoplatonism (The Hague: M. N. Nijh off, 1953), was one of my mentors at Scripps College.
4. I developed this thesis of three interactive spiritualities—pagan, prophetic, and mystical-contemplative—primarily in lectures to students. The thesis is presumed but not specifically explicated in my published writing, although my book Women-Church: Theology and Practice of Feminist Liturgical Communities (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986) refers to the nature-renewal roots of Jewish and Christian liturgy (pp. 99–104).
5. In a number of writings in the mid-1960s, I advanced a critique of the traditional Catholic view of sexuality and the reproductive roles of women. See, for example, “The Difficult Decision: Contraception,” in The Experience of Marriage: The Testimony of Catholic Laymen, ed. Michael Novak (New York: Macmillan, 1964), pp. 69–81; “A Question of Dignity, a Question of Freedom,” in What Modern Catholics Think of Birth Control, ed. William Birmingham (New York: New American Library, 1964), pp. 233–240; and “Birth Control and the Ideals of Marital Sexuality,” in Contraception and Holiness, ed. Thomas Roberts, S.J. (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967), pp. 72–91.
6. Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Male Chauvinist Theology and the Anger of Women,” Cross Currents 21, no. 2 (Spring 1971): 173–184.
7. Although I was invited to teach at Harvard through the funds of the Chauncey Stillman Chair of Roman Catholic Studies, the faculty there decided that I was not sufficiently senior to hold this title and gave me instead the title of Visiting Lecturer in Catholic Studies. I jokingly referred to myself during that year of teaching as sitting “under” the Stillman Chair rather than “on” it, a story I recounted at the November 2002 Harvard conference on recovering the history of feminism in religion.
8. E. O. James, The Cult of the Mother Goddess (New York: Praeger, 1959).
9. Anne L. Barstow, “The Prehistoric Goddess,” in The Book of the Goddess, Past and Present: An Introduction to Her Religion, ed. Carl Olson (New York: Crossroads, 1983), pp. 7–15.
10. See, for example, Kay Martin and Barbara Voorhies, The Female of the Species (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975). For a fuller account of feminist anthropology and its view of the development of gender roles, see chapter 1 of this volume.
11. For her development of this typology, broadened into what she called “Type 1, Type 2, and Type 3” feminist thinkers, see Carol Christ, “Symbols of Goddess and God,” in The Laughter of Aphrodite: Reflections on a Journey to the Goddess (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), pp. 135–160.
12. This interchange was sparked particularly by Naomi Goldenberg's book The Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979). My article “A Religion for Women: Sources and Strategies” (Christianity and Crisis, December 10, 1979, pp. 307–311) sought to evaluate positive and negative aspects of Goldenberg's thesis that the Jewish and Christian symbols are to be rejected as totally pro-male and hostile to women. In the light of Goldenberg's and Christ's responses to my critique, I further elaborated my view in “Goddesses and Witches: Liberation and Counter-Cultural Feminism” (Christianity and Crisis, September 10–17, 1980, pp. 842–847).
13. This claim is found in a recent article by Naomi Goldenberg; see “Witches and Words,” Feminist Theology 12, no. 2 (January 2004): 203–211.
14. Charlene Spretnak, ed., The Politics of Women's Spirituality: Essays on the Rise of Spiritual Power Within the Feminist Movement (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1982); Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987).
To clarify, the term “matriarchal” refers to a society dominated by women as mothers; a “matricentric” society is centered on women as mothers but is not dominated by them.
15. Cynthia Eller, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won't Give Women a Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). This book evoked outraged responses from some adherents of the Gimbutas thesis. See also its hostile treatment in Naomi Goldenberg's article “Witches and Words.” My review of the book appears in the Anglican Theological Review 83, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 894–895.
16. On ecological rethinking, see, for example, the volumes in the series Religions of the World and Ecology, edited by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim for Harvard University Press, which focus on ten world religions and the recovery of their traditions in light of the ecological challenge. The series covers Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Confucianism, indigenous religions, Sikhism, and Daoism.
Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff has been particularly notable in his efforts to include the new perspectives of ecology and feminism in his work; see, for example, his Ecology and Liberation (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Press, 1995); and Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Press, 1997). His efforts have been criticized, however, by Brazilian ecofeminist theologian Ivone Gebara; see her Out of the Depths: Women's Experience of Evil and Salvation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002), pp. 163, 164.
The efforts of indigenous theologies are expressed in the movements to create a “teología india” in the Latin American context. See, for example, Teología india: Sabiduria indigena, fuente de esperanza (Peru: IDEA, 1997).
17. The major book that expresses this vision of an alternative society is a project of the International Forum on Globalization: see John Cavanagh et al., Alternatives to Economic Globalization (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2002).
18. In an infamous quotation, Pat Robertson defines feminists as compelling women to “leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.” See Rosemary R. Ruether, Christianity and the Making of the Modern Family: Ruling Ideologies, Diverse Realities (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), pp. 174, 275n58.
CHAPTER 1: GENDER AND THE PROBLEM OF PREHISTORY
1. See James Mellaart's account of this development in The Neolithic of the Near East (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975).
2. See Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evocation of an Image (London: Penguin, 1991). See also Marija Gimbutas, The Civilization of the Goddess (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), p. 222.
3. See Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, eds., Man the Hunter (Chicago: Aldine, 1968), a symposium collection; refer particularly to the article by Sherwood L. Washburn, C. S. Lancaster, William Laughlin, and Jules H. Steward, “Hunting and Evolution,” pp. 293–346.
4. See Melanie G. Wiber, Erect Men and Undulating Women: The Visual Imagery of Gender, “Race,” and Progress in Reconstructive Images of Human Evolution (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfred-Laurier University Press, 1997).
5. See Joan M. Gero, “Genderlithics,” and Russell G. Handsman, “Whose Art Was Found at Lepenski Vir?” in Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory, ed. Joan M. Gero and Margaret W. Conkey (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 329–365.
6. Johann Jakob Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: Selected Writings of J. J. Bachofen, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967); Sir Arthur Evans, The Palace of Minos at Knossos, 4 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1921–1936).
7. Lewis H. Morgan, Ancient Society: Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery Through Barbarism to Civilization (New York: Henry Holt, 1877); Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, ed. Eleanor B. Leacock (1884; New York: International Publishers, 1972).
8. Engels, Origin of the Family, p. 218.
9. Matilda Joslyn Gage, Woman, Church, and State: A Historical Account of the Status of Woman Through the Christian Ages, with Reminiscences of the Matriarchate (1893; Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1980).
10. For an overview of the work of Franz Boas, see Regna Darnell, And Along Came Boas: Continuity and Revolution in Americanist Anthropology (Philadelphia: John Benjamin, 1998).
11. Robert Lowie, Primitive Society (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), pp. 184–185.
12. For a critique of “origins” research as legitimation of dominant social forms, see Margaret W. Conkey, “Original Narratives: The Political Economy of Gender in Archaeology,” in Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Post-modern Era, ed. Micaela di Leonardo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 102–139.
13. Elman R. Service, Primitive Social Organization: An Evolutionary Perspective (New York: Random House, 1962).
14. Elman R. Service, The Hunters (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 11.
15. Lionel Tiger, Men in Groups (New York: Random House, 1969).
16. Service, Primitive Social Organization, p. 43.
17. See M. Kay Martin and Barbara Voorhies, The Female of the Species (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), table 7-1, p. 181; also Frances Dahlberg, ed., Woman the Gatherer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981).
18. Margaret Ehrenberg, Women in Prehistory (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1989), pp. 46–50.
19. Ibid., pp. 39, 42–43.
20. Martin and Voorhies, Female of the Species, pp. 184–187.
21. Lee and DeVore, Man the Hunter, pp. 3, 85–89.
22. Martin and Voorhies, Female of the Species, pp. 201–202; see also Jane C. Goodale, Tiwi Wives (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971).
23. Martin and Voorhies, Female of the Species, pp. 197–199.
24. See Cheryl P. Claassen, “Gender, Shellfishing, and the Shell Mound Archaic,” in Gero and Conkey, Engendering Archaeology, pp. 276–300.
25. Martin and Voorhies, Female of the Species, pp. 229–241.
26. For a description of trade in Neolithic Anatolia, see James Mellaart, Earliest Civilizations of the Near East (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), pp. 124–125.
27. Martin and Voorhies, Female of the Species, pp. 241–246.
28. See Peggy Reeves Sanday, Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Sanday studied 150 preindustrial societies. She characterized 32 percent as egalitarian in the sense that economic power and political power were balanced, with no aggressive violence against women. She described 28 percent of the societies as markedly male-dominated. Although women performed much of the labor, they were excluded from economic and political decision making and subjected to a high level of male violence, beating, and rape. Finally, Sanday characterized 40 percent of the societies as conflictual, in which women had considerable economic power, based on their productive labor, but were excluded from political decisions. Although men in these societies lacked full dominance, they had developed patterns of cultural hostility to women, male bonding that excluded women, and myths and rituals of male overthrow of female power.
29. See, for example, William Barnett's review of Marija Gimbutas's The Language of the Goddess (American Journal of Archaeology 96, no. 1 [1992]: 170–171) and Ruth Tringham's review of Gimbutas's The Civilization of the Goddess (American Anthropologist 95, no. 1 [1993]: 196–197).
30. Marija Gimbutas, Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe, 7000–3500 B.C. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974; republished with a new introduction as Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, 6500–3500 B.C. [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982]); Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1989); Gimbutas, Civilization of the Goddess; Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987); Charlene Spretnak, ed., The Politics of Women's Spirituality: Essays on the Rise of Spiritual Power Within the Feminist Movement (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1982).
31. See Valerie Abrahamsen, “Essays in Honor of Marija Gimbutas: A Response,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 13, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 69–74.
32. Gimbutas, Civilization of the Goddess, p. 324.
33. Cynthia Eller, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won't Give Women a Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000).
34. See, for instance, the following works by Marija Gimbutas: “Achilleion, a Neolithic Mound in Thessaly: Preliminary Report on 1973 and 1974 Excavations,” Journal of Field Archaeology 1 (1974): 277–302; Figurines: Neolithic Macedonia as Reflected in Excavations at Anza, Southeast Yugoslavia, Monumenta Archaeologica 1 (Los Angeles: Institute of Archaeology, University of California at Los Angeles, 1976), pp. 198–241; “Gold Treasures at Varna,” Archaeology 30, no. 1 (1977): 44–51.
35. Compare the introduction to Gimbutas's 1974 Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe, pp. 13–15, with that of the 1982 Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, pp. 9–15.
36. Gimbutas, Civilization of the Goddess, p. 263.
37. See Eller, Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, pp. 119–133; and Lynn Meskell, “Goddesses, Gimbutas, and New Age Archaeology,” Antiquity 69 (1995): 74–86.
38. See Meskell, “Goddesses, Gimbutas, and New Age Archaeology”; and Margaret W. Conkey and Ruth Tringham, “Archaeology and the Goddess: Exploring the Contours of Feminist Archaeology,” in Feminisms in the Academy, ed. Domna C. Stanton and Abigail J. Stewart (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), pp. 199–247. Also see Margaret Conkey and Ruth Tringham, “Rethinking Figurines: A Critical View from Archaeology to Gimbutas, the “Goddess,” and Popular Culture,” in Ancient Goddesses: The Myths and the Evidence, ed. Lucy Goodison and Christine Morris (London: British Museum Press, 1998), pp. 22–45.
39. Gimbutas, Civilization of the Goddess, p. 335.
40. See Martin and Voorhies, Female of the Species, pp. 225–228; see also Judith K. Brown, “Economic Organization and the Position of Women Among the Iroquois,” Ethnohistory 17 (1970): 151–167.
41. See the discussion among J. D. Clark, Irven DeVore, F. C. Howell, Richard Sharp, and Colin Turnbull, “Use of Ethnography in Reconstructing the Past,” in Lee and DeVore, Man the Hunter, pp. 287–289.
42. Compare Gimbutas, Goddesses and Gods, p. 237; and Gimbutas, Language of the Goddess, p. xxii.
43. See Gimbutas, Language of the Goddess, p. 265; and Gimbutas, Civilization of the Goddess, p. 245. Gimbutas seems to have gotten this odd idea from D. O. Cameron, Symbols of Birth and Death in the Neolithic Era (London: Kengen Deane, 1981), figure 7–19. See the discussion in Eller, Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, p. 146.
44. Gimbutas, Civilization of the Goddess, pp. 351–401.
45. Ibid., pp. 347–348. See also Marija Gimbutas, The Living Goddesses, ed. Miriam Robbins Dexter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 165–171, as well as the discussion of matriarchy among the Celts and Basques, pp. 172–187.
46. Ruth Tringham and Dusan Krstic, ed., Selevac: A Neolithic Village in Yugoslavia, Monumenta Archaeologica 15 (Los Angeles: Institute of Archaeology, University of California at Los Angeles, 1990); Silva Marinescu-Bâlcu, Tîrpefti: From Prehistory to History in Eastern Romania, trans. Georgeta Bolomey, Oxford British Archaeological Reports, International Series 107 (Oxford: BAR, 1981); David W. Anthony, “Nazi and Ecofeminist Prehistories: Ideology and Empiricism in Indo-European Archaeology,” in Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology, ed. Philip Kohl and Clare Fawcett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 1–32.
47. Gimbutas, Civilization of the Goddess, p. 252.
48. James Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük: A Neolithic Town in Anatolia (London: Thames and Hudson, 1967).
49. See James Mellaart, Udo Hirsh, and Belkis Balpinar, The Goddess from Anatolia, 4 vols. (Milan: Eskenazi, 1989).
50. Anne L. Barstow, “The Uses of Archaeology for Women's History: James Mellaart's Work on the Neolithic Goddess at Çatal Hüyük,” Feminist Studies 4, no. 3 (October 1978): 7–18.
51. Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük, pp. 68–69.
52. See Mellaart, Neolithic of the Near East, p. 101.
53. Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük, pp. 208, 209.
54. Barstow, “Uses of Archaeology for Women's History.”
55. Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük, p. 60. See also Ian Hodder, ed., On the Surface: Çatalhöyük, 1993–1995, Çatalhöyük Project, vol. 1, British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara monograph 22 (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research and Çatalhöyük Research Trust, 1996); Ian Hodder, “The Past as Passion and Play: Çatalhöyük as a Site of Conflict in the Construction of Multiple Pasts,” in Archaeology Under Fire: Politics, Nationalism, and Heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, ed. Lynn Meskell (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 124–139.
56. Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük, plates 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 61, 62, 63, 64, and pp. 170–176; Mellaart, Hirsh, and Balpinar, Goddess from Anatolia, vol. 1, plates 2, 5–12, pp. 8–9.
57. See Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük, pp. 101, 110, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 121–122, 124, 125. Lotte Motz has disputed the exaggerated focus on fertility and motherhood as the meaning of Paleolithic and Neolithic figurines generally; she suggests that the spread-legged figure in Çatal Hüyük may be engaged in ritual genital display, not birth. See Motz, Faces of the Goddess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 125.
58. See Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük, fig. 27, p. 115; fig. 38, p. 125; fig. 40, p. 127. One such figure has a slightly raised belly with red concentric circles, which causes Mellaart to pronounce this figure “clearly pregnant” (pp. 113–114).
59. Ibid., fig. 29, p. 116. The paired figures are shown in fig. 23, p. 109; and fig. 26, p. 113.
60. Ibid., pp. 166–168; Mellaart, Hirsh, and Balpinar, Goddess from Anatolia, plate 13, 1-2, p. 58.
61. Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük, pp. 101, 106, 107, 111, 126, 128; fig. 21, p. 107; figs. 41 and 42, p. 128.
62. See Eller, Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, p. 147.
63. Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük, plate 67 and fig. 52, p. 184.
64. Ibid., figs. 49, 50, 51, pp. 182–183; plate 83, p. 184.
65. Peter Ucko, Anthropomorphic Figurines of Predynastic Egypt, and Neolithic Crete, with Comparative Material from the Prehistoric Near East and Mainland Greece (London: A. Szmidla, 1968), pp. 356, 361, 369. I have made my own survey of the hundreds of female figurines in Gimbutas's three volumes and have found only three of a woman with child: see Goddesses and Gods, p. 144; Language of the Goddess, fig. 58, p. 37; and Civilization of the Goddess, fig. 8–3, p. 311.
66. See David Horrobin, The Madness of Adam and Eve: How Schizophrenia Shaped Humanity (London: Bantam, 2001), pp. 76–77, for the suggestion that fat Neolithic figures may refer to this survival value.
67. Conkey and Tringham suggest that some archaeologists have too readily lent themselves to promoting the fertility goddess idea: “In one form or another some archaeologists have provided the authentication, intentionally or unintentionally,” citing Mellaart as an example (“Archaeology and the Goddess,” p. 108).
68. See the two major collections of articles: Rita Wright, ed., Gender and Archaeology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); and Gero and Conkey, Engendering Archaeology. For a useful bibliography through 1992, see Elisabeth A. Bacus, A Gendered Past: A Critical Bibliography of Gender in Archaeology, Technical Reports no. 25 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology, 1993).
69. Tringham, Review, Civilization of the Goddess, p. 197.
70. Meskell, “Goddesses, Gimbutas, and New Age Archaeology,” p. 76.
71. For a critique that presents the concept of the nuclear family with working husband and dependent children as a middle-class, twentieth-century ideology, see Rosemary R. Ruether, Christianity and the Making of the Modern Family: Ruling Ideologies, Diverse Realities (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000).
72. See Ehrenberg, Women in Prehistory, pp. 99–107; also Martin and Voorhies, Female of the Species, pp. 276–332.
CHAPTER 2: GODDESSES AND WORLD RENEWAL IN THE ANCIENT MEDITERRANEAN
1. See Susan Pollock, Ancient Mesopotamia: The Eden That Never Was (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 150–171. Also see Denise Schmandt-Besserat, Before Writing: From Counting to Cuneiform, 2 vols. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992).
2. Nisaba is the Goddess of grain storage and the arts of writing and accounting; see Tikva Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth (New York: Free Press, 1992), pp. 34, 39–40.
3. See Joan Goodnick Westenholz, “Enheduanna, En-priestess, Hen of Nanna, Spouse of Nanna,” in Dumu-e2-Dub-ba-a: Studies in Honor of Ake W. Sjoberg, ed. Hermann Behrens, Darlene Loding, and Martha Roth (Philadelphia: University Museum, 1989), pp. 539–556. On naditu and other women trained as scribes, see Rivkah Harris, Gender and Old Age in Mesopotamia: The Gilgamesh Epic and Other Ancient Literature (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), pp. 149–150.
4. See Pollock, Ancient Mesopotamia, pp. 45–116. Also see Hans Nissen, The Early History of the Ancient Near East, 9000–2000 BC (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 129–164; and Guillermo Algaze, The Uruk World System: The Dynamics of Expansion of Early Mesopotamian Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
5. Pollock, Ancient Mesopotamia, pp. 94–96.
6. See “Enki and Nimmah: The Creation of Humankind,” in Myths of Enki: The Crafty God, ed. Samuel Noah Kramer and John Maier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 31–33.
7. Pollock, Ancient Mesopotamia, pp. 117–148; J. Nicholas Postgate, Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 126–128, 230–240.
8. For a major study of the various forms of servitude in the neo-Babylonian period, see M. A. Dandamaev, Slavery in Babylonia (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1984). See also Igor Diakonoff, “Slaves, Helots, and Serfs in Early Antiquity,” Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 22 (1974): 45–78; and I. J. Gelb, “Prisoners of War in Early Mesopotamia,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 32 (1973): 70–98.
9. See Susan Pollock, “Women in a Man's World: Images of Sumerian Women,” in Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory, ed. Joan Gero and Margaret Conkey (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 366–387.
10. Rivkah Harris, “Independent Women in Ancient Mesopotamia,” in Women's Earliest Records: From Egypt and Western Asia, ed. Barbara S. Lesko (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), pp. 150–156.
11. See Rita P. Wright, “Technology, Gender, and Class: Worlds of Difference in Ur III Mesopotamia,” in Gender and Archaeology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), pp. 79–110. Also see Samuel Noah Kramer, “The Women of Ancient Sumer,” in La femme dans la Proche-Orient antique, ed. J. M. Durand (Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1989), pp. 107–155; Kazuya Maekawa, “Female Weavers and Their Children,” Acta Sumerologica 2 (1980): 81–125; and Kazuya Maekawa, “Collective Labor Service in Girsu-Lagash: The Pre-Sargonic and Ur III Periods,” in Labor in the Ancient Near East, ed. M. A. Powell (New Haven, Conn.: American Oriental Society, 1987), pp. 49–72.
12. Thorkild Jacobsen, Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 73, 79–91.
13. See the chart of the Sumerian pantheon in Samuel Noah Kramer and Diane Wolkstein, Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), pp. ix–xi.
14. Jacobsen, Treasures of Darkness, pp. 81–84.
15. Kramer and Maier, Myths of Enki, pp. 38–56.
16. Ibid., pp. 57–68.
17. Jacobsen, Treasures of Darkness, pp. 86–92.
18. Goddesses as patrons of cities were included in divine assemblies, however; see ibid., pp. 86–91.
19. Kramer and Maier, Myths of Enki, pp. 22–30, 33–37; also Jacobsen, Treasures of Darkness, pp. 104–110.
20. Jacobsen, Treasures of Darkness, pp. 229–230. See also Neal Walls, “Desire in Death's Realm: Sex, Power, and Violence in ‘Nergal and Ereshkigal,’” in his Desire, Discord, and Death: Approaches to Near Eastern Myth (Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research, 2001), pp. 127–182.
21. For the full text, see “The Creation Epic,” in Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, ed. James P. Pritchard (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950), pp. 60–72. This text has been extensively studied; see Jacobsen, Treasures of Darkness, pp. 165–192.
22. The Code of Hammurabi, promulgated in 1726 BCE, reflects a strictly patriarchal and hierarchical society that had less acknowledgment of women's independent property rights than earlier legal documents would seem to indicate; see “Code of Hammurabi,” in Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, pp. 163–180.
23. Ibid., p. 119.
24. William W. Hallo and J. J. A. Van Dijk, The Exaltation of Inanna (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968), pp. 15–19. For another translation of this hymn and also two other others by Enheduanna, see Betty de Shong Meador, Inanna, Lady of the Largest Heart: Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess, Enheduanna (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000).
25. Meador, Inanna, pp. 31–35.
26. Kramer and Wolkstein, Inanna, pp. 30–34.
27. Ibid., p. 37.
28. Ibid., pp. 37–47.
29. Ibid., p. 52.
30. Ibid., p. 71.
31. Epic of Gilgamesh 3.4.6–7; Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, p. 79. Gilgamesh was the semidivine king of Erech, hero of a collection of stories making up this epic.
32. “Prayer of Lamentation to Ishtar,” Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, p. 384.
33. Ibid., p. 385.
34. See Rivkah Harris's interpretation of the persona of Inanna as one of liminality and contradictions expressed in carnival (Gender and Old Age, pp. 158–171). Enheduanna's hymns to Inanna also depict her gender-bending; see Meador, Inanna, pp. 124, 127, 162–167.
35. For a critique of the modern scholarly ideas concerning sacred prostitution, a concept derived from Herodotus's unreliable comments, see Phyllis Bird's essay “‘To Play the Harlot’: An Inquiry into an Old Testament Metaphor,” in Bird, Missing Persons and Mistaken Identities: Women and Gender in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), pp. 219–236. Also see Jerrold S. Cooper, “Sacred Marriage and Popular Cult in Early Mesopotamia,” in Official Cult and Popular Religion in the Ancient Near East, ed. E. Matsushima (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1993), pp. 81–96. Samuel Noah Kramer assumes that the rite was sexually enacted (The Sacred Marriage Rite: Aspects of Faith, Myth, and Ritual in Ancient Sumer [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969], pp. 49–66), but this assumption has been questioned by others. Mesopotamian cults believed that the god's statue embodied the god, and they used it to carry out many rites: being put to bed, awakening, feeding, and bathing. Thus, a rite of sexual union could also have been carried out using the statue rather than having humans engage in intercourse. Undoubtedly, an abundance of prostitutes of various classes existed, including sophisticated courtesans who, it was believed, taught the refinements of sexual pleasure as a “civilizing art.” Inanna was seen as their patron, but that does not imply that they were respected. For a discussion, see Jean Bottero, Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 165–198.
36. N. Wyatt, Religious Texts from Ugarit: The Words of Ilimilku and His Colleagues (Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), p. 14; D. Pardee, “Ugaritic Inscriptions,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, ed. E. M. Meyers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), vol. 5, p. 264.
37. For an account of these ritual texts, see Gregorio del Olmo Lete, Canaanite Religion, According to the Liturgical Texts of Ugarit (Bethesda, Md.: CDL Press, 1999).
38. See Wyatt, Religious Texts, p. 21.
39. For a discussion of Baal's parentage, see Neal H. Walls, The Goddess Anat in Ugaritic Myth (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992), pp. 929–933.
40. Wyatt, Religious Texts, pp. 39, 41. Standard translation of these texts is found in Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, pp. 129–155. I use the translations from Wyatt's Religious Texts, which represents fifty years of careful work on these texts.
41. KTU 1.3, ii, 5–35; Wyatt, Religious Texts, pp. 72–75. (KTU is the abbreviation used for Die Kelalphabetischen Texte aus Urgarit, the texts of the Ugaritic tablets.)
42. See J. B. Lloyd, “Anat and the ‘Double’ Massacre in KTU 1.3 ii,” in Ugarit, Religion, and Culture: Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Ugarit, Religion, and Culture, Edinburgh, July 1994, ed. N. Wyatt, W. G. E. Watson, and J. B. Lloyd (Munster: Ugarit-Verlag, 1996), pp. 151–165.
43. KTU 1.3, iii, 15–20, and 1.3, iii, 37–42; Wyatt, Religious Texts, pp. 78, 79.
44. KTU 1.3, iv, 40–45; Wyatt, Religious Texts, p. 82.
45. KTU 1.10, iii, 5–10, and 1.11; Wyatt, Religious Texts, pp. 158–159, 161.
46. Neal H. Walls (The Goddess Anat) argues that Anat is sexually inactive and that Baal's sexual relations are with his harem of wives, not with Anat. This view is also found in P. L. Day, “Anat,” in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, ed. K. Van der Toorn, B. Becking, and P. W. van der Horst (Leiden: Brill, 1995), col. 62–77. These texts seem to clearly dispute this version.
47. KTU 1.3, v, 1–6; Wyatt, Religious Texts, p. 84.
48. KTU 1.4, iv, 41–44, and 1.4, v, 5; Wyatt, Religious Texts, pp. 100–101.
49. KTU 1.4, v, 20–27, and 1.4, vii, 59; Wyatt, Religious Texts, pp. 102, 111.
50. KTU 1.5, vi, 10–22; Wyatt, Religious Texts, pp. 126–127.
51. KTU 1.6, i, 1–25; Wyatt, Religious Texts, pp. 128–130.
52. KTU 1.6, ii, 30, and 1.6, ii, 31–35; Wyatt, Religious Texts, p. 135. (I follow Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, p. 140, ii, 36, for the translation “in the field she sowed him,” rather than using Wyatt's language, “on the steppe she abandoned him.”)
53. KTU 1.6, iii, 5–9; Wyatt, Religious Texts, p. 137.
54. KTU 1.6, v, 5, and 1.6, vi, 35; Wyatt, Religious Texts, pp. 140, 143.
55. KTU 1.17–1.19; Wyatt, Religious Texts, pp. 248–312.
56. See Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, p. 155.
57. The term compañera, for a woman, has been used in the context of Latin American revolutionary relationships between men and women. It suggests a partnership that is at once sexual, loving, and loyal, at times childbearing, yet unmarried, with each partner remaining independent. The partnership is one of equality and joint effort, including militant struggle, for a common historical purpose.
58. R. E. Witt, Isis in the Greco-Roman World (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971), pp. 46–58.
59. See J. Gwyn Griffiths, Plutarch's de Iside et Osiride (Cambridge: University of Wales Press, 1970), esp. intro., pp. 5–110.
60. “Creation by Atum,” in Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, p. 3. On brother-sister marriages in Egypt, see J. Gwyn Griffiths, The Origins of Osiris (Berlin: Verlag Bruno Hessing, 1966), pp. 132–143.
61. See fig. 2, “Osiris in the erica tree with Isis and Nephthys,” first century BCE, Denderah; figs. 7 and 8, “Isis and Nephthys guarding the sarcophagus of Ramses III,” twentieth dynasty, c. 1194–1163 BCE; fig. 12: “Nephthys and Isis guarding the inner doors of the third shrine of Tutankhamun,” c. 1325 BCE; all found in Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evocation of an Image (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 229, 236–237, 244.
62. Ibid., pp. 235, 250–251.
63. Fig. 18, “Isis with King Seti I on her lap”; and fig. 19, “Isis suckling Seti I”; ibid., p. 251.
64. See E. A. Wallis Budge, Osiris: The Egyptian Religion of Resurrection (New York: University Books, 1961), pp. 305–347 and frontispiece plate.
65. Baring and Cashford, Myth of the Goddess, p. 238; also see fig. 9, “Osiris with wheat growing from his body, watered by priest,” the Ptolemaic temple of Isis at Philae, in ibid., p. 238.
66. “Theology of Memphis,” Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, pp. 5–6.
67. Compare Plutarch's story of Isis as a nurse in the palace of Byblos (chap. 15), in Griffiths, Plutarch's de Iside et Osiride, p. 141, with Demeter as a nurse in the palace of Celeus in Eleusis, in Homeric Hymns, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn White (New York: Putnam, 1920), pp. 301–309. On the Isis cult at Byblos, see Griffiths, Plutarch's de Iside et Osiride, pp. 319–321.
68. See fig. 10, “Isis helping Seti I to raise the Djed pillar of Osiris,” nineteenth dynasty, c. 1300 BCE, Temple of Seti I, Abylos; fig. 3, “Isis as a Kite conceiving Horus”; both in Baring and Cashford, Myth of the Goddess, pp. 242, 230. On the phallic character of the Osiris story, see Tom Hare, ReMembering Osiris: Number, Gender, and the Word in Ancient Egyptian Representational Systems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 22–23; figs. 3.6 and 3.7, pp. 120–121.
69. See Budge, Osiris, p. 94.
70. Text and translation in E. A. Wallis Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (London: Methuen, 1904), pp. 222–240.
71. Griffiths, Plutarch's de Iside et Osiride, pp. 145, 151.
72. Ibid., pp. 145–146.
73. “The Contest of Horus and Seth for the Rule,” in Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, pp. 14–17. For a Freudian interpretation of this contest between Horus and Seth as well as Horus's relation to Isis, see Neal Walls, “On the Couch with Horus and Seth,” in his Desire, Discord, and Death, pp. 93–125.
74. “The God and His Unknown Name,” in Walls, Desire, Discord, and Death, p. 12.
75. Ibid., p. 14.
76. Contemporary Goddess thought sees the theme of mother-son lovers as central to Goddess worship; see Baring and Cashford, Myth of the Goddess, esp. pp. 1–45. But this theme is not confirmed in these ancient Near Eastern goddess traditions. This view seems to have been derived from James Frazer's interpretation of the relation of Cybele and Attis as mother and son; see his The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1942), pp. 347–348, 356.
77. See “To Demeter,” in White, Homeric Hymns, pp. 289–313. Also see George E. Mylonas, Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 3.
78. “To Demeter,” lines 480–484.
79. On the history of the site, see Mylonas, Eleusis, pp. 23–186.
80. Ibid., pp. 20–22, 229–237. Only at the very end of the existence of the sanctuary was this tradition broken, when a Mithraic shrine was added to the Eleusinian area; the last Hierophant was also a priest of Mithras (ibid., pp. 8, 183, 313).
81. Ibid., pp. 243–280.
82. On this cult, see Lewis Richard Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), vol. 3, pp. 89–92.
83. See Lotte Motz, The Faces of the Goddess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 129.
84. These stories of Demeter's rape by Zeus and Poseidon come from Pausanias (8:42) and Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus 2.22; see Motz, Faces of the Goddess, p. 126.
85. See Aristophanes, Lysistrata, in Complete Greek Drama, ed. Whitney J. Oates and Eugene O'Neill (New York: Random House, 1938), vol. 2, pp. 805–859.
CHAPTER 3: THE HEBREW GOD AND GENDER
1. Norman K. Gottwald, The Politics of Ancient Israel (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), pp. 166–167. For a discussion of the idea that the exodus story was appropriated by Saul as a national charter myth of the new royal power, see Karel van der Toorn, Family Religion in Babylonia, Syria, and Israel: Continuity and Change in the Forms of Religious Life (Leiden: Brill, 1996), pp. 291–302, 349–351, 375–376.
2. See Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and Other Deities (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989); Robert Karl Gnuse, No Other Gods: Emergent Monotheism in Israel (Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997); and Bob Becking, Meindert Dijkstra, Karel Vriezen, and Marjo C. A. Korpel, Only One God? Monotheism in Ancient Israel and the Veneration of the Goddess Asherah (Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001). For a contrary view, see Jeffrey H. Tigay, You Shall Have No Other Gods: Israelite Religion in the Light of Hebrew Inscriptions, Harvard Semitic Studies 31 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986).
3. See Saul M. Olyan, Asherah and the Cult of Yahweh in Israel (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988); Tilde Binger, Asherah: Goddesses in Ugarit, Israel, and the Old Testament (Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997); J. A. Emerton, “Yahweh and His Asherah: The Goddess or Her Symbol?” Vetus Testamentum 49, no. 3 (1999): 315–337; Judith M. Hadley, The Cult of Asherah in Ancient Israel and Judah: Evidence for a Hebrew Goddess (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
4. Binger, Asherah, pp. 94–109.
5. Judith Hadley, “Yahweh and ‘His Asherah’: Archaeological and Textual Evidence for the Cult of the Goddess,” in Ein Gott allein? JHWH-Verehrung und biblischer monotheismus im kontext der israelitischen und altorientalischen religionsgeschichte, ed. Walter Dietrich and Martin A. Klopfenstein (Freiburg: Universitätsverlag Freiburg, 1994), pp. 235–268.
6. See Tikva Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth (New York: Free Press, 1992), pp. 159–160; and John B. Burns, “Female Pillar Figurines of the Iron Age: A Study in Text and Artifact,” Andrews University Seminary Studies 36, no. 1 (1998): 23–50.
7. See Gale Yee, “‘She Is Not My Wife and I Am Not Her Husband’: A Materialist Reading of Hosea 1–2,” Biblical Interpretation 9, no. 4 (2001): 345–383 (reprinted in Gale A. Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve: Woman as Evil in the Hebrew Bible [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003], pp. 81–109); and N. K. Gottwald, “From Tribal Existence to Empire: The Socio-Historic Context for the Rise of the Hebrew Prophets,” in God and Capitalism: A Prophetic Critique of the Market Economy, ed. J. Mark Thomas and Vern Visick (Madison, Wisc.: WIAR Editions, 1991), pp. 11–29.
8. Olyan, Asherah, pp. 3–22.
9. Ibid. See also Susan Ackerman, Under Every Green Tree: Popular Religion in Sixth-Century Judah (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992).
10. Smith, Early History of God, pp. 152–153.
11. Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses, pp. 83–99.
12. See Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, God's Phallus: And Other Problems for Men and Monotheism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), p. 86.
13. Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses, pp. 187–198.
14. Smith, Early History of God, pp. 7–11.
15. Ibid., p. 51; A. Mazar, “The ‘Bull Site’: An Iron Age I Open Cult Place,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 247 (1982): 27–42; A. Mazar, “On Cult Places and Early Israelites: A Response to Michael Coogan,” Biblical Archaeologist Review 15, no. 4 (1988): 45.
16. Smith, Early History of God, pp. 41–61. See also van der Toorn, Family Religion, pp. 240–241, 316–338.
17. Smith, Early History of God, pp. 52–53. See also John Day, God's Conflict with the Dragon and the Sea: Echoes of a Canaanite Myth in the Old Testament (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
18. Smith, Early History of God, pp. 61–64.
19. Ibid., pp. 63–64.
20. John Gardner and John Maier, eds., Gilgamesh (New York: Knopf, 1984), tablet 1, col. iv, p. 77.
21. Eilberg-Schwartz, God's Phallus, pp. 139–141.
22. Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses, pp. 97–98.
23. Phyllis Trible has argued that this language makes God androgynous; see these two works by Trible: “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 12 (1973): 39–42; and God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978). For critiques of this view, see J. W. Miller, “Depatriarchalizing God in Biblical Interpretation,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 48 (1986): 609–616; M. Gruber, “The Motherhood of God in Second Isaiah,” Revue Biblique 90 (1983): 351–359; and J. J. Schmitt, “The Motherhood of God and Zion as Mother,” Revue Biblique 92 (1985): 557–569.
24. Gardner and Maier, Gilgamesh, tablet 6, col. 1, p. 149. Neal Walls interprets the spurning of Inanna by Gilgamesh as a homoerotic preference for his relation with Enkidu; see Walls, “The Allure of Gilgamesh,” in Desire, Discord, and Death: Approaches to Near Eastern Myth (Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research, 2001), pp. 34–68.
25. Eilberg-Schwartz, God's Phallus, p. 3.
26. Smith, Early History of God, pp. 41–45; Else K. Holt, “‘... Urged on by his wife Jezebel’: A Literary Reading of I Kgs 18 in Context,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 9, no. 1 (1995): 83–96; Yigael Yadin, “The ‘House of Ba'al’ of Ahab and Jezebel in Samaria and That of Athalia in Judah,” in Archaeology in the Levant, ed. Roger Moorey and Peter Parr (Warminster, U.K.: Aris and Phillips, 1978), pp. 127–135.
27. Yee, “‘She Is Not My Wife,’” pp. 348–350.
28. For discussion of Herodotus's description, see L. M. Epstein, “Sacred Prostitution,” in Sex Laws and Customs in Judaism (New York: Bloch, 1948), pp. 152–157.
29. See Phyllis Bird, “‘To Play the Harlot’: An Inquiry into an Old Testament Metaphor,” in Missing Persons and Mistaken Identities: Women and Gender in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), pp. 219–236; C. J. Fisher, “Cultic Prostitution in the Ancient Near East? A Reappraisal,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 6 (1976): 225–236; R. A. Oden, “Religious Identity and the Sacred Prostitution Accusation,” in The Bible Without Theology: The Theological Tradition and the Alternatives to It (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), pp. 137–153; Richard A. Henshaw, Female and Male: The Cultic Personnel, the Bible, and the Rest of the Ancient Near East (Allison, Pa.: Pickwick, 1994), pp. 218–256.
30. Christopher R. Seitz, Theology in Conflict: Reactions to the Exile in the Book of Jeremiah (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1989); Angela Bauer, Gender in the Book of Jeremiah: A Feminist Literary Reading (New York: Lang, 1998); Joseph Blenkinsopp, Ezekiel (Louisville, Ky.: John Knox Press, 1990).
31. Peggy L. Day, “Adulterous Jerusalem's Imagined Demise: Death of a Metaphor in Ezekiel XVI,” Vetus Testamentum 50 (2000): 285–309; Peggy L. Day, “The Bitch Had It Coming to Her: Rhetoric and Interpretation in Ezekiel 16,” Biblical Interpretation 8 (2000): 231–254; Julie Galambush, Jerusalem in the Book of Ezekiel: The City as Yahweh's Wife, Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Series 130 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992).
32. Sororal polygyny (marriage to two sisters) was common in Israel at this time; see Naomi Steinberg, Kinship and Marriage in Genesis: A Household Economic Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), pp. 45–46, 115–134, 152.
33. Mary E. Shields, “Gender and Violence in Ezekiel 23,” Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), vol. 1, pp. 86–105; Fokkelien van Dijk-Hemmes, “The Metaphorization of Woman in Prophetic Speech: An Analysis of Ezekiel 23,” in On Gendering Texts: Female and Male Voices in the Hebrew Bible, ed. Athalya Brenner and Fokkelien van Dijk-Hemmes (Leiden: Brill, 1993), pp. 167–176.
34. For an analysis of the rhetoric of sexual abuse and its implications for psychology, see Renita J. Reems, Battered Love: Marriage, Sex, and Violence in the Hebrew Prophets (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995). See also T. Drorah Setel, “Prophets and Pornography: Female Imagery in Hosea,” in Feminist Interpretations of the Bible, ed. Letty Russell (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1985), pp. 86–95.
35. For a discussion of when the poems were first assembled, see Michael V. Fox, The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 186–190; and Athalya Brenner, The Song of Songs (Sheffield, U.K.: JSOT Press, 1989), pp. 57–61. A fragment of the Song at Qumran shows that the poem had attained a degree of sanctity before the first century CE; see Fox, Song of Songs, p. 189.
36. Rabbi Akiva declared: “Whoever warbles the Song of Songs at banqueting houses, treating it like an ordinary song, has no portion in the World to Come” (Tosefta Sanhedrin 12:10); see Fox, Song of Songs, pp. 249–250.
37. Phyllis Trible positions the Song of Songs in this eschatological relation to the “love relation of God and humanity gone awry”; see Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, pp. 72–143.
38. Brenner, Song of Songs, pp. 65, 89–90.
39. See Shelomo Dov Goitein, “Women as Creators of Biblical Genres,” trans. M. Carasik, Prooftexts 8 (1988): 1–33.
40. I follow Fox's interpretation here, understanding the girl's darkness to refer to sunburned skin from outdoor work, not to ethnicity (Fox, Song of Songs, p. 101).
41. See Fox's interpretation of the seal and the brothers' comments about their little sister in ibid., pp. 169, 171–173.
42. In Rabbi Akiva's words: “For all the writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the holy of the holies” (Mishna Yadayim. 3:5).
43. Fox, Song of Songs, pp. 181–183.
44. Ibid., pp. 52, 55.
45. Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sacred Marriage Rite (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), pp. 85–106.
46. See, for example, Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs, trans. Kilian Walsh (Spencer, Mass.: Cistercian Publications, 1971). Also see chapter 6 of this volume.
47. See Eilberg-Schwartz, God's Phallus, pp. 164–168, 183–186; and Fiona C. Black, “Unlikely Bedfellows: Allegorical and Feminist Readings of the Song of Songs 7:1–8,” in A Feminist Companion to the Song of Songs, ed. Athalya Brenner (Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), pp. 104–129.
48. H. Ringgren, Word and Wisdom: Studies in the Hypostatization of Divine Qualities and Functions in the Ancient Near East (Lund, Sweden: Hakan Ohlssons Boktryckeri, 1947), pp. 34–36; Claudia V. Camp, Wisdom and the Feminine in the Book of Proverbs (Decatur, Ga.: Almond Press, 1985), pp. 72–77; Roland E. Murphy, “The Personification of Wisdom,” in Wisdom in Ancient Israel: Essays in Honor of J. A. Emerton, ed. John Day et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 222–233; Judith E. McKinley, Gendering Wisdom the Host: Biblical Invitations to Eat and Drink (Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), pp. 38–44.
49. C. Bauer-Kayatz, Studien zu Proverbien 1–9, Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament, vol. 22 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1966); Hans Conselmann, “The Mother of Wisdom,” in The Future of Our Religious Past, ed. John Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 230–243.
50. Bernhard Lang, Wisdom and the Book of Proverbs: A Hebrew Goddess Redefined (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1986), pp. 126–131.
51. John Day, “Foreign Semitic Influences on the Wisdom of Israel and Its Appropriation in the Book of Proverbs,” in Day, Wisdom in Ancient Israel, pp. 55–70.
52. Judith M. Hadley, “Wisdom and the Goddess,” in Day, Wisdom in Ancient Israel, pp. 234–243.
53. Leo G. Perdue, “Wisdom and Social History in Proverbs 1–9,” in Wisdom, You Are My Sister: Studies in Honor of Roland E. Murphy, ed. Michael L. Barre (Washington, D.C.: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1997), pp. 78–101.
54. Comments on the meaning of personified Folly abound: see, for example, these three essays in A Feminist Companion to the Wisdom Literature, ed. Athalya Brenner (Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995): Gale A. Yee, “‘I Have Perfumed My Bed with Myrrh’: The Foreign Woman in Proverbs 1–9,” pp. 110–126; Gale A. Yee, “A Socio-Literary Production of the Foreign Woman in Proverbs,” pp. 127–130; and Meike Heijerman, “Who Would Blame Her? The ‘Strange Woman’ in Proverbs 7,” pp. 100–109. See also Joseph Blenkinsopp, “The Social Context of the ‘Outsider Woman’ in Proverbs 1–9,” Biblica 72 (1991): 457–473; McKinley, Gendering Wisdom the Host, pp. 81–99; and Claudia V. Camp, Wise, Strange, and Holy: The Strange Woman and the Making of the Bible (Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), pp. 40–71.
55. Camp, Wisdom and the Feminine, pp. 99–103.
56. See Yee, “‘I Have Perfumed My Bed with Myrrh,’” p. 121.
57. See McKinley, Gendering Wisdom the Host, pp. 44–56.
58. Ibid., pp. 56–58.
59. The term ‘amon has been translated as either “master worker” or “little child”; see Prov. 8:30 and note, Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1952), p. 669.
60. See Leo G. Perdue, Wisdom and Creation: The Theology of the Wisdom Literature (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), pp. 77–92.
61. Ibid., pp. 248–250.
62. Ibid., pp. 184–186.
63. For the history and interpretation of the Wisdom of Solomon, see Silvia Schroer, “The Wisdom of Solomon,” in Searching the Scriptures, ed. Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza (New York: Crossroads, 1993–1995), vol. 2, pp. 17–38.
64. Ibid., pp. 291–322; William Horbury, “The Christian Use and the Jewish Origins of the Wisdom of Solomon,” in Day, Wisdom in Ancient Israel, pp. 182–196.
65. For possible reflections of women's counseling roles as prophetesses, mothers, and wives, see Silva Schroer, “Wise and Counseling Women in Ancient Israel: Literary and Historical Ideals of the Personified Hokma,” in Brenner, Feminist Companion to the Wisdom Literature, pp. 67–84. See also Schroer's commentary on the Wisdom of Solomon in Fiorenza, Searching the Scriptures, vol. 2, pp. 17–38, for a possible reference to the Therapeutae.
66. Carol A. Newsom, “Women and the Discourse of Patriarchal Wisdom: A Study of Proverbs 1–9,” in Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel, ed. Peggy L. Day (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), pp. 142–146.
CHAPTER 4: SAVIOR GODDESSES IN THE MYSTERY RELIGIONS AND GNOSTICISM
1. Examples of such studies from the History of Religions School include Franz Cumont, Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism (New York: Dover, 1911); and Richard Reitzenstein, Hellenistic Mystery-Religions: Their Basic Ideas and Significance, trans. John E. Steely (1910; Pittsburgh: Pickwick Press, 1978). See Gilbert Murray, Four Stages of Greek Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1912), p. 103; later, Five Stages of Greek Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930).
2. Murray, Four Stages of Greek Religion, p. 103.
3. See, for example, John Herman Randall, Hellenistic Ways of Deliverance and the Making of the Christian Synthesis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).
4. This is the argument made in Giulia Sfameni Gasparro, Soteriology and Mystic Aspects in the Cult of Cybele and Attis (Leiden: Brill, 1985).
5. Lynn E. Roller, In Search of God the Mother: The Cult of the Anatolian Cybele (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 63–115.
6. Roller (ibid., pp. 9–24, 168–169) argues that the idea of irrational, ecstatic rites as “oriental” is itself a Greek stereotype of the “oriental,” which has been picked up and repeated in the more recent stereotypes of “oriental” religion in modern European scholarship, as in Cumont's Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism.
7. Ibid., pp. 177–182, 237–259; compare with Gasparro, Soteriology and Mystic Aspects, p. 26.
8. Roller, In Search of God the Mother, pp. 263–325; also Maarten J. Vermaseren, Cybele and Attis: The Myth and Cult (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), pp. 38–63.
9. Vermaseren, Cybele and Attis, pp. 113–124. See also Gasparro, Soteriology and Mystic Aspects, pp. 84–106, on the lack of eschatology as central to these rites. Compare Robert Turcan, The Cults of the Roman Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 44–47.
10. Gasparro, Soteriology and Mystic Aspects, pp. 107–118; Turcan, Cults of the Roman Empire, pp. 49–65. See also Robert Duthoy, The Taurobolium: Its Evolution and Terminology (Leiden: Brill, 1969).
11. See Reginald E. Witt, Isis in the Greco-Roman World (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971), pp. 46–58; Frederick Solmsen, Isis Among the Greeks and Romans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 1–26; and Sharon Kelly Heyob, The Cult of Isis Among Women in the Greco-Roman World (Leiden: Brill, 1975), pp. 2–10. See also Turcan, Cults of the Roman Empire, pp. 76–78.
12. An earlier form of the story has been attributed to Lucian of Samosata, but this is doubtful. See an excerpt from this novel in Apuleius, The Golden Ass, trans. Robert Graves (New York: Pocket Library, 1955), pp. 261–264. The original story probably goes back to the Metamorphoses, by Lucian of Patras; see Harold E. Butler, “Apuleius,” in Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. Max Cary et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), pp. 73–74.
13. Apuleius, The Golden Ass, pp. 238–239.
14. Ibid., p. 252. See also Turcan, Cults of the Roman Empire, pp. 119–121.
15. Robert Graves, introduction to Apuleius, The Golden Ass, pp. x–xi.
16. See Homer Odyssey 4.561–569; Hesiod Work and Days 167–173.
17. Franz Cumont, Astrology and Religion Among the Greeks and Romans (New York: Putnam, 1912), pp. 1–35.
18. Plato Timaeus 41–42.
19. See Herbert J. Rose, “Transmigration,” in Cary et al., Oxford Classical Dictionary, p. 921.
20. “Poimandres,” in Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), p. 153.
21. Margherita Guarducci, ed. and trans., Epigraphii Graeca 4.263; quoted in Jocelyn Godwin, Mystery Religions in the Ancient World (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981), p. 36.
22. Burke R. Lawton, “Shoel in Ancient Hebrew and Jewish Literature” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1918).
23. Rachel Z. Dulin, “Old Age in Hebrew Scripture: A Phenomenological Study” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1962).
24. See Lawrence Mills, Avesta Eschatology Compared with the Book of Daniel and Revelation (Chicago: Open Court Press, 1908).
25. The apocalypses of the second century BCE think of the risen ones as joining those alive at that time in temporal life. Only in later apocalypses of the first centuries BCE and CE do we find the idea of an eternal kingdom separated from a temporal one. This development was traced in Rosemary R. Ruether, “A Historical and Textual Analysis of the Relationship Between Futurism and Eschatology in the Apocalyptic Texts of the Inter-Testamental Period” (BA diss., Scripps College, 1958), chap. 4.
26. See Catherine Keller's book The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York: Routledge, 2002); see also her essay “No More Sea: The Lost Chaos of the Eschaton,” in Christianity and Ecology, ed. Rosemary R. Ruether and Dieter I. Hessel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 183–198.
27. See, for example, Philo On the Creation of the World, secs. 7–10.
28. Philo On Drunkenness 30–32, in Philo, ed. F. H. Colson and G. H. Whitaker (New York: Putnam, 1930), pp. 333, 335.
29. Philo On the Creation of the World, secs. 47, 53.
30. Philo On the Therapeutae; for a translation, see Natum N. Glazer, ed., The Essential Philo (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), pp. 311–330.
31. Jorunn Buckley describes this diversity of views in her study of six gnostic systems; see Female Fault and Fulfillment in Gnosticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986).
32. See Michael A. Williams, “Variety in Gnostic Perspectives on Gender,” in Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism, ed. Karen L. King (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), pp. 2–22.
33. Karen L. King, “Sophia and Christ in the Apocryphon of John,” in King, Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism, pp. 158–176.
34. See George W. MacRae, “The Jewish Background on the Gnostic Sophia Myth,” Novum Testamentum 12 (1970): 86–101.
35. Apocryphon of John II, 2, 13; in The Nag Hammadi Library in English, ed. James M. Robinson (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 99.
36. The many names for this figure are all variations on the word “thought”: Pronoia means “forethought,” Epinoia means “thought as purpose,” and Ennoia means “the act of thinking.”
37. Robinson, Nag Hammadi Library, pp. 100–102.
38. The term “wisdom of the thought” indicates that she is a version of the first female emanation that is the Thought of God (see note 36 above).
39. Robinson, Nag Hammadi Library, pp. 103–104.
40. The figure of a man with a lion face and a serpent wrapped around his body was a typical image of the lord of time and fate in Mithraism; the image seems to have been drawn from this tradition. See Franz Cumont, Mysteries of Mithra (Chicago: Open Court Publishers, 1910), pp. 105, 106; also Leroy A. Campbell, Mithraic Iconography and Ideology (Leiden: Brill, 1968), plate 11 (from Ostia), p. 312; and plate 16 (from Florence), p. 665.
41. Robinson, Nag Hammadi Library, pp. 105–106.
42. The Apocryphon of John text claims to interpret the Genesis passage but gives it a different meaning: “Do not think it is as Moses said, ‘above the waters.’ No, but when she had seen the wickedness which had happened, and the theft which her son had committed, she repented. And forgetfulness overcame her in the darkness of ignorance and she began to become ashamed.” (IV, 21, 13–14 adds “and she did not dare to return but she was moving about. And the moving was going to and fro.”) See Robinson, Nag Hammadi Library, p. 106.
43. Ibid., pp. 110–112. The Berlin Codex makes the female powers speak as the eagle from the tree, while the Nag Hammadi II version Christianizes it as “I” (Christ); see King, “Sophia and Christ in the Apocryphon of John,” pp. 158–176.
44. The Hypostasis of the Archons was composed in Greek, probably in Egypt; Bentley Layton places it in the third century CE (Robinson, Nag Hammadi Library, p. 152).
45. Ibid., p. 153.
46. Ibid., p. 154.
47. Ibid., p. 155.
48. Ibid., p. 156.
49. Ibid., pp. 156–157.
50. Ibid., pp. 157–160.
51. The Trimorphic Protennoia is contemporaneous with the Apocryphon of John and attained its final form about 200 CE, according to editor John D. Turner; see ibid., p. 461.
52. Ibid., pp. 461–462.
53. Ibid., p. 467.
54. Deirdre J. Good protests the scholarly interpretation of the gnostic Sophia as only a negative “cosmic Eve,” arguing that this view neglects her celestial component in the pleroma as an expression of the female First Thought (Reconstructing the Tradition of Sophia in Gnostic Literature [Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987]).
55. For the Greek medical background of this view of the female's “formlessness,” see Richard Smith, “Sex Education in Gnostic Schools,” in King, Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism, pp. 345–360.
56. As noted in this chapter, the Apocryphon of John and the Hypostasis of the Archons differ on whose image is reflected in the waters. The former describes it as the image of Perfect Man, which inspired the archons to try to imitate him in Adam; whereas the latter writes that it is the female spiritual power, inspiring the archons to make Adam in order to attract the female downward.
57. On Norea, see two essays in King, Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism: Anne McGuire, “Virginity and Subversion: Norea Against the Powers,” pp. 239–258; and Birger A. Pearson, “Revisiting Norea,” pp. 265–275.
58. Although the authors represented in Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism insist that “symbolism is not sociology” and that we know little about the actual roles played by women in gnostic groups, we do know that one gnostic group, that of Simon Magnus, appointed a woman, Helen, to represent the female deity; see Madeleine Scopello, “Jewish and Christian Heroines in the Nag Hammadi Library,” in King, Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism, pp. 71–95.
59. The image of Mary Magdalene as a prostitute comes from confusing the unnamed woman in Luke 7:37–48 with the Mary Magdalene who is cured of “seven devils” by Jesus in Luke 8:2. This confusion belongs to the exegetical work of Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century, particularly in his Homily 33. See also Susan Haskin, Mary Magdalene: Myth and Metaphor (London: HarperCollins, 1993), pp. 95–97.
60. The leading woman disciple in these gnostic writings is variously called Maria, Mariam, or Mariamme. This woman is Mary Magdalene. She is not to be confused with Mary, the mother of Jesus, who is identified as such when she appears in some of the writings.
61. The Sophia of Jesus Christ is a Christianization of a pre-Christian religious tract, called Eugnostos the Blessed, that converted this writing into a revelation discourse of the risen Christ with his disciples. The aim of both tracts was to establish a supercelestial world beyond the visible world. Christ is seen as coming from this supercelestial world and revealing knowledge of it to his followers. The Sophia of Jesus Christ exists in a Coptic translation, found in the Nag Hammadi library, and also in a Coptic version in the Berlin Codex, found in 1896 and sold to the Berlin Museum. There is also a Greek fragment in the Oxyrhynchus papyri. The Eugnostos may go back to the first century CE; its Christianization, in the Sophia of Jesus Christ, probably occurred in the early second century CE. For an English translation, by Douglas M. Parrott, see Robinson, Nag Hammadi Library, pp. 206–228.
62. The Dialogue of the Savior is a fragmentary and composite text with parallels to the Gospel of Thomas. Originally written in Greek sometime in the second century CE, it exists only in a Coptic translation in the Nag Hammadi Codices. For an English translation, by Helmut Koester and Elaine Pagels, see ibid., pp. 229–238.
63. The First Apocalypse of James probably emerged from a Jewish-Christian gnostic group around the end of the second century CE. It exists in two Coptic codices. For an English translation, by William R. Schoedel, see ibid., pp. 242–248.
64. The Gospel of Thomas was composed as early as the second half of the first century CE and may have been written originally in Aramaic or Syriac. Several fragments in Greek survive, and a Coptic translation was found in the Nag Hammadi Codices. For an English translation, by Thomas O. Lambdin, see ibid., pp. 117–130.
Concerning the demand that women go through a double transformation “upward,” see Jorunn Buckley, “An Interpretation of Logion 114 in the Gospel of Thomas,” in her Female Fault and Fulfillment in Gnosticism, pp. 84–104.
65. The Gospel of Philip is a collection of theological teachings about ethics and the sacraments. It comes from the late second to third centuries CE and is known only as a Coptic translation in the Nag Hammadi Codices. For an English translation, by Wesley W. Isenberg, see Robinson, Nag Hammadi Library, pp. 131–151.
Also see Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley, “‘The Holy Spirit Is a Double Name’: Holy Spirit, Mary, and Sophia in the Gospel of Philip,” in King, Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism, pp. 211–227.
66. The Pistis Sophia is a long composite document that takes the form of conversations between the risen Lord and his disciples. The document is known from 1773 when it was purchased by a British manuscript collector, Thomas Askew. It comes from Egypt and was written in the third century CE. For an English translation, see Pistis Sophia, trans. Carl Schmidt and Violet McDermot (Leiden: Brill, 1978); quotations from 1.17, 1.36, 2.72, 4.146.
67. The Gospel of Mary exists in the Berlin Codices. The Coptic manuscript dates to the early fifth century CE, while the Greek fragment goes back to the early third century CE. The translation by George MacRae and R. Mcl. Wilson in Robinson, Nag Hammadi Library, pp. 471–474, uses androcentric language. Karen King offers an inclusive-language translation, which she sees as closer to the original meaning, and gives preference to the Greek fragment over the Coptic translation; see King, “Gospel of Mary,” in The Complete Gospels, ed. R. J. Miller (Sonoma, Calif.: Polebridge Press, 1992), pp. 357–366.
For further detailed commentary on the Gospel of Mary, see Karen King, “The Gospel of Mary,” in Searching the Scriptures: A Feminist Commentary, ed. Elizabeth S. Fiorenza (New York: Crossroads, 1994), vol. 2, pp. 601–635.
68. The Greek fragment suggests that only Levi goes out to preach the gospel, whereas the Coptic version suggests that all the disciples, including Mary Magdalene, go out to preach; see King, “Gospel of Mary”; and Karen King, The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Polebridge Press, 2003), p. 18.
CHAPTER 5: THE SPIRITUAL FEMININE IN NEW TESTAMENT AND PATRISTIC CHRISTIANITY
1. For a critique of the ideology which held that orthodoxy was the original Christianity of Jesus's teachings and that heresy (gnosticism) was a later deviation, see Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971).
2. On the mingling of apocalyptic and Wisdom traditions at the time of the rise of Christianity, see Silva Schroer, Wisdom Has Built Her House: Studies on the Figure of Sophia in the Bible (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1996), p. 122. Schroer counters the view of Luise Schottroff that the Wisdom tradition is elitist, in contrast to the prophetic tradition, which is egalitarian and is the primary tradition for women concerned about a liberating gospel. This debate is discussed in Elizabeth S. Fiorenza, Jesus: Miriam's Child, Sophia's Prophet: Critical Issues in Feminist Christology (New York: Continuum, 1994), pp. 155–157.
3. See Ben Witherington, Jesus the Sage: The Pilgrimage of Wisdom (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), pp. 85–117.
4. The apocalyptic tradition is represented by the book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible and by Revelation in the New Testament, together with the inter-testamental apocalypses; see R. H. Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), vol. 2.
5. On the early fusion of the creation narrative from Wisdom and the eschatological narrative of apocalypse in the Christological hymns, see Witherington, Jesus the Sage, pp. 252–253, 290. Stevan Davies sees the fusion of Wisdom and Kingdom language into an early realized eschatology in the Gospel of Thomas, which he views as a mid-first-century document, parallel to Q. Thomas's theology of baptismal-realized eschatology that existed among some of the Corinthians against whom Paul was reacting in Corinthians 1–4; see Davies, The Gospel of Thomas and Christian Wisdom (New York: Seabury Press, 1983), pp. 77–78, 138–147.
6. Witherington argues for the position that Jesus identified himself as Wisdom (Jesus the Sage, pp. 203–204). Davies sees the union of Kingdom and Wisdom language as possibly going back to Jesus but notes that this is different from Jesus actually identifying himself as Messiah or Wisdom (Gospel of Thomas, p. 98).
7. New Testament scholars have long disputed the idea that Jesus called himself Messiah. See Marcus J. Borg's discussion of a noneschatological Jesus in his Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1994), pp. 47–96.
8. For a discussion of the Wisdom background of these Christological hymns, see Elizabeth S. Fiorenza, “Wisdom Mythology and the Christological Hymns of the New Testament,” in Aspects of Wisdom in Judaism and Early Christianity, ed. Robert L. Wilken (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1975), pp. 17–41.
9. For a discussion of the likelihood that the hymn was given a Christian editing to add references to the church and the blood of the cross, see Edward Lohse, Colossians and Philemon (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), pp. 53–54.
10. See Davies, Gospel of Thomas, pp. 100–104.
11. On Wisdom in the Q tradition, see Witherington, Jesus the Sage, pp. 219–235; and Fiorenza, Jesus, pp. 139–145.
12. See Witherington, Jesus the Sage, pp. 341–368. Also see Celia M. Deutsch, Lady Wisdom, Jesus, and the Sages: Metaphor and Social Context in Matthew's Gospel (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1996), pp. 49–54; and M. Jack Suggs, Wisdom Christology and Law in Matthew's Gospel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 57, 97.
13. See Fiorenza, Jesus, pp. 141–145.
14. See John Ashton, “The Transformation of Wisdom: A Study of the Prologue of John's Gospel,” New Testament Studies 32 (1986): 161–186.
15. See particularly Sharon H. Ringe, Wisdom's Friends: Community and Christology in the Fourth Gospel (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1999), pp. 46–63.
16. The term “friends” in John 15:12–15 echoes language from the Wisdom of Solomon 8:28, where it is said that Wisdom “enters into holy souls and makes them God's friends and prophets.” On the importance of friendship as a model of community in John, see Ringe, Wisdom's Friends, pp. 64–83.
17. On the role of Philo in the shift from Wisdom to Logos, see Schorer, Wisdom Has Built Her House, p. 39; Fiorenza, “Wisdom Mythology,” p. 34; and Ringe, Wisdom's Friends, p. 43.
18. See Witherington, Jesus the Sage, pp. 386–387, for an insistence that Jesus's maleness necessitates the male grammatical gender in describing his divinity. Also see Raymond Brown, The Gospel of John (New York: Doubleday, 1966), vol. 1, p. 523.
19. Fiorenza, Jesus, pp. 152–154.
20. To contrast the books included in the Greek canon, still the basis for the Catholic Bible today, and the Hebrew canon followed by Protestants, see The Jerusalem Bible (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), pp. xv–xvi.
21. The modern Orthodox writer Sergius Bulgakov has developed a Sophiology in which Wisdom is the ousia, or ground of being, that sustains the three persons of the Trinity; see Bulgakov, Sophia, the Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology (Hudson, N.Y.: Lindesfarne Press, 1993).
22. “The Gospel of Philip,” 17a, in The New Testament Apocrypha, ed. Wilhelm Schneemelcher (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1991), vol. 1, p. 190.
23. “The Gospel of the Hebrews,” frag. 3, is quoted in Jerome's commentary on Isaiah 40:9 (M. Adriaen and F. Glorie, eds., Corpus Christianorum Series Latina [Turnholti, Belgium: Brepols, 1963], vol. 73, p. 459). The translation of the Gospel of the Hebrews is found in Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 1; see p. 177.
24. James H. Charlesworth, ed. and trans., The Odes of Solomon: The Syriac Texts (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1977).
25. See Susan Ashbrook Harvey, “Feminine Imagery for the Divine: The Holy Spirit, the Odes of Solomon, and Early Syriac Tradition,” St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly 37, no. 2 (1993): 115; and Susan Ashbrook Harvey, “The Odes of Solomon,” in Searching the Scriptures: A Feminist Commentary, ed. Elizabeth S. Fiorenza (New York: Cross-roads, 1994), vol. 2, pp. 86–96. See also Sebastian Brock, “The Holy Spirit as Feminine in Early Syriac Literature,” in After Eve: Women, Theology, and the Christian Tradition, ed. Janet M. Soskice (London: Collins, 1990), pp. 71–85.
26. See Sebastian Brock, The Holy Spirit in the Syrian Baptismal Tradition, vol. 9, Syrian Church Series (Bronx, N.Y., 1979). The milk and honey baptismal Eucharist is found in the third-century Apostolic Tradition, attributed to Hippolytus; see Paul Bradshaw, Maxwell Johnson, and L. Edward Phillips, eds., The Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002), chap. 21. Also see Andrew McGowan, Ascetic Eucharists: Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), pp. 107–117.
27. Charlesworth, Odes of Solomon, pp. 42 (Ode 8.14), 124 (Ode 35.5), 138 (Ode 40).
28. Ibid., pp. 82–83 (Ode 19).
29. Ibid., pp. 98 (Ode 24), 108 (Ode 28), 29 (Ode 6), 66 (Ode 14.8).
30. Ibid., pp. 120 (Ode 33), 126–127 (Ode 36).
31. Clement of Alexandria The Instructor 1.6, translated in Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. A. Cleveland Coxe (Buffalo, N.Y.: Christian Literature Publishing, 1885), vol. 2, pp.215–222.
32. See Harvey, “Feminine Imagery,” p. 137; and Sebastian Brock, trans., A Garland of Hymns from the Early Church (McLean, Va.: St. Athanasius' Coptic Publishing Center, 1989), pp. 63–68. Concerning the feminine in Ephrem's language for the Spirit, see Sebastian Brock, The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1988), pp. 168–172.
33. Gregory Nyssa is quoted in Verna E. F. Harrison, “Male and Female in Cappadocian Theology,” Journal of Theological Studies 41, no. 2 (October 1990): 441.
34. Ibid., p. 442.
35. Gregory Nazianzus, “Fifth Theological Oration: ‘On the Holy Spirit,’”in The Christology of the Later Fathers, ed. E. R. Harvey and C. Richardson, Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia, Md.: Westminster Press, 1954), vol. 3, p. 198.
36. Jerome's commentary on Isaiah 40:9–11 (Adriaen and Glorie, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, vol. 73, pt. 1, p. 459).
37. See Harrison, “Male and Female in Cappadocian Theology,” pp. 442–471.
38. Augustine, On the Trinity, 12.12.17, in St. Augustine: The Trinity, trans. Stephen McKenna (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press of America, 1963), p. 359; Kim Power, Veiled Desire: Augustine on Women (New York: Continuum, 1996), pp. 140–143.
39. See Harvey, “Feminine Imagery,” pp. 120–121; and Harvey, “Odes of Solomon,” p. 96. For a more extended discussion, see Brock, “The Holy Spirit as Feminine,” pp. 75–85.
40. See Adele Yarbro Collins, “Feminine Symbolism in the Book of Revelation,” Biblical Interpretation 1, no. 1 (1993): 27.
41. On Hippolytus's commentary on the Canticle, see Berthold Altaner, Patrology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1960), p. 186.
42. Origen Prologue 1, in The Song of Songs, Commentary and Homilies, trans. R. P. Lawson (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1957), p. 21.
43. Ibid., pp. 22–24.
44. Ibid., 1.1 (pp. 59–61), 2.1 (pp. 91–93), 3.9 (pp. 199–200).
45. Origen De Principiis 2.1.4, in Origen: On First Principles, trans. G. W. Butterworth (New York: Harper and Row, 1966).
46. For an account of Origen's catechetical school, see Eusebius Ecclesiastical History 6.18.2. Gregory Thaumaurgus attended the school and wrote an account of the curriculum taught there in his panegyric on Origen. The Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry also commented that the Greek philosophers were part of Origen's curriculum; see Eusebius Ecclesiastical History 6.19.7–8.
47. Origen Prologue 1, 1.1 (Lawson, pp. 61–62).
48. See Erwin R. Goodenough, By Light, Light: The Mystic Gospel of Hellenistic Judaism (Amsterdam: Philo Press, 1969).
49. See Mary Astell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 1–24.
50. Some of this discussion reflects Rufinus's Latin translation of Origen's commentary on the Song of Songs; see Lawson, Song of Songs, pp. 200–201.
51. Gregory Nyssa, Commentary on the Song of Songs, trans. with introduction by Casimir McCambley (Brookline, Mass.: Hellenic College Press, 1987), Homily 1, p. 47.
52. Ibid., Homily 7, pp. 145–146.
53. Charles Christopher Mierow, trans., The Letters of St. Jerome (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1963), epistle 22.25, p. 158.
54. Methodius, The Symposium: A Treatise on Chastity, trans. Herbert Musurillo (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1958), Logos 2, Theophilia's speech, pp. 48–58.
55. Ibid., pp. 76, 87.
56. Ibid., pp. 42, 44–46.
57. Tertullian De Anima 43, in The Writings of Tertullian, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Christian Library (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1870), vol. 2, p. 509.
58. Methodius, Symposium, p. 66.
59. Carolyn Osiek, ed., Shepherd of Hermas (Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, 1999), 2.1–4 (pp. 46–48).
60. Ibid., 2.4 (p. 58).
61. Ibid., 3.1–2 (pp. 60–61), 3.8 (p. 76).
62. Ibid., 3.9 (p. 80).
63. Ibid., 3.10–13 (pp. 83–84).
64. See Joseph C. Plumpe, Mater Ecclesia: An Inquiry into the Concept of the Church as Mother in Early Christianity (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1943), pp. 18–80.
65. Cyprian, The Unity of the Church, trans. Maurice Bevenot (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1957), 5.6 (p. 48).
66. Power, Veiled Desire, pp. 236–237.
67. Ambrose De Virg. 1.31; Augustine Serm. 190.2; Augustine de Virg. 7. For discussion, see Power, Veiled Desire, pp. 187–189.
68. Raymond E. Brown, ed., Mary in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), pp. 53, 286–287.
69. Ibid., pp. 74–77, 107–111.
70. Walter J. Burghardt believes that this analogy goes back to the beginning of the second century in the writings of Papias, bishop of Hierapolis; see Burghardt's “Mary in Eastern Patristic Thought,” in Mariology, ed. Juniper B. Carol (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing, 1957), vol. 2, pp. 88–89.
71. Justin Martyr Dialogue with Trypho 100, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1950), vol. 1, p. 249.
72. Irenaeus Against Heresies 3.22.4, in ibid., vol. 1, p. 455.
73. Ibid., 5.19.1 (p. 547).
74. On the significance of Jesus being called “Mary's son,” and a view of him as the illegitimate child of Mary, see Jane Schaberg, The Illegitimacy of Jesus: A Feminist Theological Interpretation of the Infancy Narratives (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987).
75. “The Proevangelium of James,” in Apocryphal Gospels, Acts, and Revelations, trans. Alexander Walker (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1873), pp. 1–15.
76. Ibid., chaps. 19–20, pp. 11–12.
77. Tertullian De Monogamia 8; see also his De Carne Christi 4, in which he assumes that Jesus was born naturally, against the views of the heretic Marcion.
78. Origen Homily VII on Luke 1.39–45, in Homilies on Luke, trans. Joseph T. Lienhard (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1996), p. 30.
79. Jerome, “On the Perpetual Virginity of the Blessed Virgin Against Helvidius,” in Dogmatic and Polemical Works, trans. John N. Hritzu, vol. 53, the Fathers of the Church (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1965), pp. 3–43.
80. Jerome Adversus Jovinius, in Jerome: Letters and Select Work, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, series 2, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1954), pp. 346–416. See also David G. Hunter, “Resistance to the Virginal Ideal in Late Fourth Century Rome: The Case of Jovinian,” Theological Studies 48 (1987): 45–64.
81. Jovinian was condemned by synods at Rome under Pope Siricius (392 CE) and at Milan under Ambrose (393 CE).
82. For a discussion of the history and theology of this controversy, see Giovanni Miegge, The Virgin Mary: The Roman Catholic Marian Doctrine (London: Lutterworth Press, 1955), pp. 53–67. Also see Burghardt, “Mary in Eastern Patristic Thought,” pp. 119–125.
83. For the “Tome of Leo” that provided the Roman view of the two natures and one person in Christ, as well as the Chalcedonian decree, see Edward R. Hardy and Cyril C. Richardson, eds., Christology of the Later Fathers (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), pp. 359–374.
84. Miegge, The Virgin Mary, pp. 59–60, 67. Also see Stephen Benko, The Virgin Goddess: Studies in the Pagan and Christian Roots of Mariology (Leiden: Brill, 1993), pp. 250–262.
85. “The Gospel of Bartholomew” in Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 1, p. 543.
86. Ibid., pp. 544–545.
87. “The Book of John Concerning the Falling Asleep of Mary,” in Walker, Apocryphal Gospels, pp. 504–514.
88. “On the Passing of Mary,” in ibid., pp. 529–530.
89. See Mary Clayton, The Apocryphal Gospels of Mary in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 15.
90. Augustine De natura et gratia, chap. 36; see Miegge, The Virgin Mary, p. 110.
91. See the discussion in Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth of the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Knopf, 1976), xxii.
CHAPTER 6: FEMININE SYMBOLS IN MEDIEVAL RELIGIOUS LITERATURE
1. For a readable overview of medieval Mariology, see Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth of the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Knopf, 1976), esp. pp. 81–331.
2. John Damascene On the Falling Asleep of the Mother of God 2.14, in Paul F. Palmer, ed., Mary in the Documents of the Church (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1952), p. 60.
3. Nicephorus Callistus Xanthopoulous Ecclesiastical History 15.4.14, in F. C. Baur, Die Epochen der Kirchlichen Geschichtsschreibung (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1962).
4. Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, p. 88.
5. See Elizabeth of Schönau, “The Resurrection of the Blessed Virgin,” in Elizabeth of Schönau: The Complete Works, ed. and trans. Anne L. Clark (New York: Paulist Press, 2000), pp. 209–212.
6. Bernard of Clairvaux, Letter 174; quoted in full in Giovanni Miegge, The Virgin Mary: The Roman Catholic Marian Doctrine (London: Lutterworth Press, 1955), p. 114.
7. Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica 3.27.1–6; quoted in Miegge, The Virgin Mary, pp. 116–117.
8. Duns Scotus, commentary on Book 4 of Peter Lombard's Sentences, 1.3.3.1; quoted in Miegge, The Virgin Mary, p. 124.
9. Daniel A. Dombrowski and Robert Deltete, A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
10. See Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, pp. 242–243; Heiko Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Durham, N.C.: Labyrinth Press, 1983), pp. 283–286.
11. Miegge, The Virgin Mary, p. 127.
12. Bernard of Clairvaux, “Sermon on the Octave of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary,” quoted in ibid., pp. 138–139.
13. This tale is recounted in Alfonso de Liguori's Glories of the Most Holy Mary (1750); see Miegge, The Virgin Mary, p. 148.
14. Concerning this concept of “pure nature” and its application to Mary, see Oberman, Harvest, pp. 47–49, 300–302, 309.
15. Ibid., p. 294.
16. Ibid., pp. 298–303. Also see Miegge, The Virgin Mary, pp. 155–177; and Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, pp. 206–223.
17. See Tim Unsworth, “Mary as Co-Redemptrix,” National Catholic Reporter, July 18, 1997.
18. See these works by Hildegard of Bingen: Scivias, ed. Adelgundis Fuehrkoetter, Corpus Christianorum: Continuatio Mediaevalis, vol. 43–43a (Turnholti, Belgium: Brepols, 1978) (English edition: Hildegard of Bingen: Scivias, trans. Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop [New York: Paulist Press, 1990]); The Book of the Rewards of Life, trans. Bruce W. Hozeski (New York: Garland Press, 1994); Hildegard of Bingen's Book of Divine Works, ed. Matthew Fox and trans. Robert Cunningham (Santa Fe, N. Mex.: Bear and Company, 1987).
19. Barbara Newman has produced an elegant edition and translation of the Symphonia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988).
The letters are available in Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, trans. Joseph L. Baird and Radd K. Ehrman, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). A modern Latin edition of Hildegard's letters is found in L. van Acker, ed., Corpus Christianorum (Turnholti, Belgium: Brepols, 1991).
20. The original illuminated manuscript done under Hildegard's supervision in her own scriptorium was taken to Dresden during World War II, where it disappeared. The nuns of Eibingen, however, had prepared a hand-painted facsimile in the 1920s that still exists; see Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard's Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 17–18.
21. See Hildegard Book of Divine Works 1.7 (pp. 13–14); and Newman, Sister of Wisdom, p. 62.
22. Hildegard Book of Divine Works 8.2 (pp. 206–207), 9.14 (p. 219).
23. Ibid., 4.11 (p. 86).
24. This quotation uses Barbara Newman's more literal translation of O Virtus Sapientie; see Newman, Symphonia, Song 2, pp. 100–101.
25. Hildegard Book of Divine Works 2.2 (p. 26).
26. Ibid., image of the Second Vision (p. 23).
27. See Newman, Sister of Wisdom, pp. 51–52, 67–69, 163–164.
28. Ibid., p. 49.
29. See Hildegard Book of the Rewards of Life 1.46 (p. 25), 4.38 (p. 191); and Newman, Sister of Wisdom, p. 49.
30. Hildegard Book of the Rewards of Life 4.38 (p. 191).
31. Image in Hildegard Scivias 3.9 (Hart and Bishop, p. 449).
32. Hildegard Book of Divine Works 8.2 (p. 207).
33. Ibid., 1.7 (pp. 13–14); Hildegard Scivias 1.2.2–9 (Hart and Bishop, pp. 74–76).
34. Hildegard Scivias 1.1 (Hart and Bishop, p. 67); Hildegard, Letter 23 to the Prelates of Mainz, in Baird and Ehrman, Letters, vol. 1, pp. 76–79. See also Newman, Sister of Wisdom, pp. 111–112.
35. Hildegard Book of Divine Works 2.27 (pp. 62–63), 4.18 (p. 95).
36. Ibid., 3.14 (p. 73).
37. Ibid., 4.100 (p. 123).
38. Newman, Sister of Wisdom, pp. 159–160.
39. Ibid., p. 176.
40. In this quotation, I have used Newman's more literal English translation of O Virga Mediatrix, but with my translation of clausi pudoris tui orto; see Newman, Symphonia, Song 18, pp. 124–125.
41. Ibid., Song 10, pp. 114–115.
42. Newman, Sister of Wisdom, pp. 198–204.
43. Hildegard Scivias 3.3 (Hart and Bishop, pp. 343–354).
44. Ibid., 1.5 (Hart and Bishop, pp. 133–136); Newman, Sister of Wisdom, pp. 205–211.
45. Hildegard Scivias 1.3 (Hart and Bishop, pp. 93–105); Newman, Sister of Wisdom, pp. 211–218.
46. See the image in Hildegard Scivias (Hart and Bishop, p. 167).
47. Image in ibid. (Hart and Bishop, p. 235); Newman, Sister of Wisdom, pp. 188–195.
48. Image in Hildegard Scivias (Hart and Bishop, p. 491).
49. Hildegard Book of Divine Works 10.20 (p. 244); Newman, Sister of Wisdom, pp. 238–244.
50. Hildegard, Letter 23, in van Acker, Corpus Christianorum, pp. 65–66.
51. Hildegard Scivias 3.11 (Hart and Bishop, pp. 493–514); Hildegard Book of Divine Works 10.28–32 (pp. 252–258).
52. Hildegard Book of Divine Works 4.78 (p. 113).
53. Hildegard defended her practice of clothing her nuns in white robes and golden crowns as an anticipation of the music of paradise restored in the virginal community in song; see Letter 52R, in Baird and Ehrman, Letters, vol. 1, pp. 128–130.
54. Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs, trans. Kilian Walsh (Spencer, Mass.: Cistercian Publications, 1971), vol. 1, Sermon 3.1, p. 16.
55. Ibid., Sermon 8.9 (Walsh, p. 52).
56. Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs, trans. Irene Edmonds (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1980), vol. 4, Sermon 82.2, p. 172.
57. Ibid., Sermon 69.7 (Edmonds, p. 34).
58. Bernard, On the Song of Songs, vol. 1, Sermon 8.6 (Walsh, p. 49).
59. Bernard of Clairvaux, Life and Works of Saint Bernard: Eighty-Six Sermons on the Song of Solomon, trans. Samuel J. Eales (London: John Hodges, 1896), Sermon 57.10, p. 345.
60. Bernard, On the Song of Songs, vol. 1, Sermon 3.1 (Walsh, p. 20).
61. See Caroline W. Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 31.
62. Bernard, On the Song of Songs, vol. 1, Sermon 12.1 (Walsh, p. 77), Sermon 18 (Walsh, pp. 133–139).
63. Ibid., Sermon 9.7 (Walsh, pp. 58, 59).
64. Bernard, Eighty-Six Sermons, Sermon 38.4 (Eales, p. 245).
65. Bernard, On the Song of Songs, vol. 1, Sermon 12.9 (Walsh, p. 84).
66. Ibid. (Walsh, p. 85).
67. Ibid., Sermon 3.4 (Walsh, p. 23).
68. Ann W. Asell's The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), while well done and insightful, goes too far, in my view, toward an identification of medieval views of the soul with Jungian theories of the anima.
69. Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), pp. 137–167.
70. Newman notes that the literature of courtly love, such as Gottfried's Tristan, adopted language from Cistercian bridal mysticism. She also discusses Richard of St. Victor's treatise The Four Degrees of Violent Charity (c. 1170) in terms of the psychological relation of sexual and spiritual love; ibid., pp. 159–160, 164–165.
71. See Hadewijch, Letters 29 and 30, Poems in Stanzas 29, in Hadewijch: The Complete Works, ed. Mother Columba Hart (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), pp. 114, 119, 207–212. When Hadewijch does see herself as mother in relation to her young Beguines (Letter 29), she does not connect this with impregnation by Christ.
72. On Mary Magdalene in the thought of the three Beguine mystics, see Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans. Frank Tobin (New York: Paulist Press, 1998), 5.23, 6.9 (pp. 203, 235–236); Hadewijch, Poem 3 in Couplets, in Hadewijch: The Complete Works, p. 323; Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls, ed. Ellen L. Babinsky (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), chaps. 76, 93, 124 (pp. 150, 168, 202–206).
73. Mechthild, Flowing Light, 1.22 (p. 50). The word “jubilus” meant rapture or ecstasy; see p. 341n33, in Tobin's translation.
74. Ibid., 3.9 (p. 114).
75. Ibid., 1.22 (pp. 50, 51).
76. Ibid., 2.22 (p. 87), 1.44 (p. 62).
77. Ibid., 1.2 (p. 30), 1.4 (p. 44), 3.2 (p. 108).
78. Ibid., 4.11 (p. 155), 3.10 (pp. 118–119).
79. Hadewijch's identity and the exact dates of her birth and death are disputed. Mother Columba Hart concludes only that “she probably lived in the middle of the thirteenth century” (introduction to Hadewijch: The Complete Works, p. 3).
80. Ibid., Poems in Stanzas 8 (pp. 147–148), 6 (p. 141), 39 (pp. 240–241), 10 (p. 153).
81. Ibid., Poems in Stanzas 7 (p. 145), 15 (p. 165), 28 (p. 206), 11 (p. 155), 14 (p. 164), 28 (p. 207).
82. Ibid., Poems in Stanzas 4 (pp. 138–139).
83. Ibid., Vision 10 (p. 288).
84. Ibid., Vision 12 (p. 296).
85. Ibid., Vision 13 (p. 298).
86. Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, p. 156.
87. Hadewijch, Letter 10, in Hadewijch: The Complete Works, pp. 118–119.
88. See Robert E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972).
89. Marguerite names these scholars as Brother John, a Franciscan; Dom Franco, a Cistercian of the abbey of St. Villiers; and Godfrey of Fontaines, a Master of Theology (Porete, Mirror of Simple Souls, chap. 41 [pp. 221–222]).
90. The text was identified as the work of Marguerite Porete by Romana Guarnieri (“Il movimento del Libero Spirita,” Archivo Italiano per la storia della pietà 4 [1965]: 351–708), and a critical edition was published by Romana Guarnieri and Paul Verdeyen in Corpus Christianorum: Continuatio Mediaevalis, vol. 69 (Turnholti, Belgium: Brepols, 1986). See Porete, Mirror of Simple Souls, introduction by Ellen L. Babinsky, p. 43; and Elizabeth A. Petroff, Medieval Women's Visionary Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 281, 283n13.
91. Porete, Mirror of Simple Souls, chap. 118 (pp. 189–194).
92. Ibid., chap. 60 (pp. 137–138).
93. On the inferiority and “one-eyedness” of Reason, see, for example, ibid., chaps. 9 (p. 87), 13 (pp. 94–96), 36 (p. 117), 53 (pp. 130–131), 116–117 (pp. 186–188).
94. Ibid., chap. 6 (p. 84); see also chaps. 8 (pp. 85–86), 13 (p. 94).
95. Ibid., chaps. 19 (pp. 101–102), 41 (p. 121), 43 (pp. 122–123), 49 (p. 127), 121 (p. 196).
96. Ibid., chaps. 123 (p. 202), 133 (pp. 216–217).
97. For the patristic exploration of this idea that apart from God our reality is the Nihil of precreation, into which we fall in sin, see, for example, Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word (New York: Macmillan, 1946).
98. Porete, Mirror of Simple Souls, chap. 34 (p. 115).
99. Ibid., chaps. 58 (p. 135), 80 (p. 155), 134–135 (pp. 217–218).
100. Ibid., chap. 1 (p. 80).
101. Julian of Norwich, Showings, ed. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), chaps. 1–2 (pp. 125–129). For the Middle English version of the short and long texts, see The Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, ed. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978), pts. 1 and 2.
102. See Grace M. Jantzen, Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian (London: SPCK Press, 1987), pp. 21–25.
103. This view on the nature of evil is developed particularly in Julian's Parable of the Servant (Julian, Showings, chap. 51 [pp. 267–278]). For a discussion, see Jantzen, Julian of Norwich, pp. 190–196.
104. See chapter 39 of Showings, where Julian speaks of sinful souls being healed by the medicines of contrition, compassion, and longing for God, so that the wounds of sin are seen by God as honors. In chapter 56 of the long text, she says that the pains of sin are themselves redemptive: “When our sensuality by the power of Christ's passion can be brought up into the substance, with all the profits of our tribulation which our Lord can make us obtain through mercy and grace” (Julian, Showings, p. 289).
105. See ibid., chap. 27 (pp. 224–226), long text. For an insightful discussion of the resistance by Julian and other women mystics to the doctrine of eternal damnation of souls who die unrepentant, see Barbara Newman, “On the Threshold of Death: Purgatory, Hell, and Religious Women,” in From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, pp. 108–136.
106. Julian, Revelations of Divine Love, chap. 58 (p. 159), long text: trans. James Walsh (New York: Harper and Row, 1961).
107. Ibid., chaps. 58–59 (pp. 159–161).
CHAPTER 7: TONANTZIN-GUADALUPE
1. David Carrasco, Daily Life of the Aztecs: People of the Sun and Earth (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998), p. 226; see also Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of Mexico: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper and Row, 1984).
2. For a study of the work of Andres de Olmos and Bernadino de Sahagún, see particularly Munro S. Edmonson, ed., Sixteenth Century Mexico: The Work of Sahagún (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974).
3. On the question of sources for Mesoamerican history, see David Carrasco, Quetzalcóatl and the Irony of Empire: Myths and Prophecies in the Aztec Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). For information about the work of Miguel Léon-Portilla in the development of Nahua studies, see J. Jorge Klor de Alva, “Nahua Studies, the Allure of the ‘Aztecs,’ and Miguel Léon-Portilla,” in Miguel Léon-Portilla, The Aztec Image of Self and Society: An Introduction to Nahua Culture (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992), pp. vii–xxiii.
4. Roberta H. Markman and Peter T. Markman attempt a discussion of the female figurines of preclassical village culture, but their views are heavily dependent on theories posited by Joseph Campbell and Marija Gimbutas rather than on detailed archaeological work in the region; see The Flayed God: The Mythology of Mesoamerica; Sacred Texts and Images from Pre-Columbian Mexico and Central America (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), pp. 29–55.
5. Miguel Léon-Portilla, Aztec Thought and Culture: A Study in the Ancient Nahuatl Mind, trans. Jack Emory Davis (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), p. 90.
6. Markman and Markman, The Flayed God, p. 66.
7. Ibid.; also see p. 127, a translation of a text probably from Francisco Andrés de Olmos, Historia de los Mexicanos por sus pinturas, on “the Creation of the World.”
8. Ibid., p. 127. On the personality of Tezcatlipoca, see Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs: An Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 79, 83.
9. From Bernadino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, ed. and trans. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Santa Fe, N. Mex.: School of American Research; Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1950–1978), bk. 6, 210; Carrasco, Daily Life of the Aztecs, p. 41.
10. See Rosemary A. Joyce, Gender and Power in Prehispanic Mesoamerica (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), pp. 133–175. Also see Elizabeth M. Brumfield, “Weaving and Cooking: Women's Production in Aztec Mexico,” in Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory, ed. Joan Gero and Margaret Conkey (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 224–251.
11. Rosemary Joyce argues that the Aztecs saw the newborn baby as gender-neutral, to be gender differentiated by transformative rituals that assigned dress, hair styles, and work roles (Gender and Power, pp. 145–149, 177).
12. See Alfredo Lopez-Austin, “La parte femenina del cosmos: Los opuestos complementarios,” La mujer en el mundo prehispanico: Arqueología Mexicana 5, no. 29 (January–February 1998): 6–13.
13. Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 1, 8.
14. Ibid.; see also Markman and Markman, The Flayed God, pp. 188–189.
15. Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 2, 102.
16. Carrasco, Daily Life of the Aztecs, pp. 115–116.
17. Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 1, 11.
18. Léon-Portilla, Aztec Image, pp. 187–188.
19. See Cecilia F. Klein, “Teocuitlatl, ‘Divine Excrement’: The Significance of ‘Holy Shit’ in Ancient Mexico,” Art Journal 52, no. 3 (1993): 20–27.
20. Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 1, 12 (pp. 10, 11).
21. Joyce, Gender and Power, p. 173; Susan D. Gillespie, The Aztec Kings: The Construction of Rulership in Mexican History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989), pp. 62–63, 224–225.
22. Carrasco, Daily Life of the Aztecs, pp. 53–54. See also Alfredo Lopez-Austin, Cuerpo humano e ideología: Las concepciones de los antiquos Nahuas (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 1980), vol. 1, pp. 223–262.
23. Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 6, 93.
24. From the Leyenda de los soles, translated in Markman and Markman, The Flayed God, pp. 132–133.
25. From Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 7 (pp. 3–9); quoted in Markman and Markman, The Flayed God, pp. 121–125.
26. Markman and Markman, The Flayed God, p. 77.
27. This story is contained in the sixteenth-century work Histoyre de Mechique, by French cartographer André Thevet; a translation by F. M. Swenson appears in Markman and Markman, The Flayed God, p. 213.
28. From the Leyenda de los Soles, translated in Markman and Markman, The Flayed God, pp. 134–135.
29. Ibid., pp. 135–136.
30. Clendinnen, Aztecs, pp. 95, 135, 209.
31. One version of the hero's story of Quetzalcóatl appears in Sahagún's Florentine Codex, bk. 3, on the origins of the gods. Another version comes from the Annales de Cuauhtitlán, written in Nahuatl about 1570. Both versions are translated in Markman and Markman, The Flayed God, pp. 353–377.
32. The major study of this understanding of Quetzalcóatl and the ideal city is Carrasco, Quetzalcóatl and the Irony of Empire.
33. Ibid.
34. The story of the birth of Huitzilopochtli and the killing of Coyolxauhqui has been translated from Nahuatl by Miguel Léon-Portilla and is reprinted in Miguel Léon-Portilla, ed., Native Mesoamerican Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), pp. 220–225. It also appears in Markman and Markman, The Flayed God, pp. 381–386.
35. See Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, The Aztecs (New York: Rizzoli, 1989), color plate 3, pp. 36–37, for the picture of the Coyolxauhqui stone in situ at the base of the stairs of the Temple Major in Mexico City.
36. This story comes from the Cronica Mexicayolt, written in 1609 by Hernando Alvarado Tezozomoc, the grandson of the Aztec king Motecuhzoma and great-grandson of Azayacatl; translated by Thelma D. Sullivan, it appears in Markman and Markman, The Flayed God, pp. 395–396.
37. See Cecelia F. Klein, “Rethinking Cihuacóatl: Aztec Political Imagery of the Conquered Woman,” in Smoke and Mist: Mesoamerican Studies in Memory of Thelma D. Sullivan, ed. J. Kathryn Josserand and Karen Dakin (Oxford: BAR International Series, 1988), pp. 237–277.
38. Mari Carmen Serra Puche and Karina R. Durand V., “Las mujeres de Xochitecatl,” Arqueología Mexicana 5, no. 29 (January–February 1998): 20–27.
39. Markman and Markman, The Flayed God, p. 369.
40. James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 205.
41. Ibid., pp. 1–58.
42. See J. Jorge Klor de Alva, “Aztec Spirituality and Nahuatized Christianity,” in South and Mesoamerican Native Spirituality: From the Cult of the Feathered Serpent to the Theology of Liberation, ed. Gary H. Gossen (New York: Crossroads, 1993), pp. 179–180.
43. Ibid., pp. 203–260.
44. Gonzalo de Sandovar and his army camped on this hill by order of Cortés, according to the account of the siege found in Bernal Díaz del Castillo, La verdadera historia de la conquista de la Nueva España; see Stafford Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531–1797 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995), pp. 65, 253n72.
45. See Jacques LaFaye, Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness, 1531-1813 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 217–224; D. A. Brading, The Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition Across Five Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 36–37.
46. Brading, Mexican Phoenix, pp. 74–75.
47. LaFaye, Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe, pp. 238–242; Brading, Mexican Phoenix, pp. 268–271. For the text of Montúfar's investigation, see Ernesto de la Torre Villar and Ramiro Navarro de Anda, eds., Testimonios historicos guadalupanos (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982), pp. 36–141. See also Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe, pp. 58–60.
48. LaFaye, Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe, pp. 239, 326nn14, 15, from Montúfar's Investigación.
49. Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 3, 352; quoted in Brading, Mexican Phoenix, pp. 214–215; and Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe, pp. 78–79.
50. See Louise M. Burkhart, “The Cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe,” in Gossen, South and Mesoamerican Native Spirituality, pp. 198–227.
51. Brading quotes a letter from Viceroy Martin Enriquez on September 21, 1575, to Philip II on the church at Tepeyac (Mexican Phoenix, p. 214).
52. Lockhart, Nahuas After the Conquest, p. 246.
53. Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe, pp. 51–52, 63, 70, 215–216.
54. Brading, Mexican Phoenix, pp. 52–53, 54–55; also Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe, p. 67.
55. Miguel Sánchez, Imagen de la Virgen Maria, Madre de Dios de Guadalupe. Milagrosamente aparecida en la Ciudad de Mexico. Celebrada en su historia, con la profecia del capitula doce des Apocalipsis (Mexico City: Imprenta de la Viuda de Bernardo Calderon, 1648); translated in part in Donald Demarest and Coley Taylor, The Dark Virgin: The Book of Our Lady of Guadalupe (New York: Coley Taylor, 1956), pp. 63–96.
56. A new annotated translation of the entire de la Vega text is available in Lisa Sousa, Stafford Poole, and James Lockhart, The Story of Guadalupe: Luis Laso de la Vega's Huei tlamahuicoltica of 1649 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 48–125.
57. Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe, pp. 102–103, 222–223.
58. See Carrasco, Daily Life of the Aztecs, pp. 14, 17.
59. On these earlier Nahuatl accounts, see Burkhart, “Cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe,” p. 215.
60. On the identification of the author of de la Vega's account with Valeriano, see Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe, pp. 83–84, 166–169.
61. Sousa, Poole, and Lockhart, Story of Guadalupe, pp. 1–47.
62. Luis Laso de la Vega, “Carta al autor,” in Sánchez, Imagen de la Virgen Maria, p. 38; see Lafaye, Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe, pp. 246, 327n33.
63. LaFaye, Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe, pp. 246–247.
64. Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe, p. 71. It is not clear whether such alms were ever sent back to the shrine at Extremadura and, if they were, when this practice ceased.
65. For an account of the testimonies and a critique of their credibility, see ibid., pp. 127–143.
66. See Brading, Mexican Phoenix, pp. 76–95. For an English translation of the Tanco text, see Demarest and Taylor, Dark Virgin, pp. 99–112.
67. Brading, Mexican Phoenix, pp. 96–97.
68. Ibid., pp. 108–110.
69. On sixteenth-century Spain's view of itself as an elect people, see ibid., pp. 33–36.
70. Ibid., p. 75. On Creole patriotism in sermons of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe, pp. 151–155, 179–187.
71. Brading, Mexican Phoenix, pp. 201–212. See also Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe, pp. 207–212. For an account of the tradition that St. Thomas preached in Mexico in apostolic times and is remembered in the figure of Quetzalcóatl, see Jacques LaFaye, “St. Thomas-Quetzalcóatl, Apostle of Mexico,” in Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe, pp. 177–208.
72. Brading, Mexican Phoenix, pp. 258–287.
73. See particularly Brading's discussion of the “coronation” and the politics of ultramontanism in late nineteenth-century Mexico (ibid., pp. 288–310).
74. On the rightist politics of Marian public devotion in Europe, see Nicholas Perry and Loreto Echeverria, Under the Heel of Mary (London: Routledge, 1988), esp. pp. 119–122 on Lourdes.
75. Brading, Mexican Phoenix, pp. 311–322.
76. Ibid., pp. 331–341.
77. See John Allen, “He May Not Be Real, But He Is Almost a Saint,” National Catholic Reporter, January 23, 2002, p. 3.
78. See Gabriela Videla, Sergio Mendez Arceo: Un Señor Obispo (Cuernavaca: Correo del Sur, 1982); and Gary MacEoin, The People's Church: Bishop Samuel Ruíz and Why He Matters (New York: Crossroads, 1996).
79. Pablo Richard, The Idols of Death and the God of Life: A Theology (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Press, 1983).
80. Elza Tamez, “Quetzalcóatl y el Dios Cristiano,” in Cuadernos de teología y cultura, no. 6 (San José, Costa Rica, 1992), translated as “Reliving Our Histories: Racial and Cultural Revelations of God,” in New Visions for the Americas: Religious Engagement and Social Transformation, ed. David Batstone (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), pp. 33–56.
81. Ivone Gebara and Maria Clara Bingemer, Mary, Mother of God, Mother of the Poor (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Press, 1989).
82. Ibid., pp. 144–154.
83. Ana Castillo, ed., Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996).
84. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (New York: Ballantine, 1992).
85. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, “La ruta de corizon roto,” in La Diosa de las Américas: Escritos sobre la Virgen de Guadalupe (New York: Vintage Español, 2000), p. 87; my translation from the Spanish.
86. Octavio Paz, foreword to Lafaye, Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe, p. xi.
CHAPTER 8: MARY AND WISDOM IN PROTESTANT MYSTICAL MILLENNIALISM
1. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), vol. 1, p. 128.
2. Martin Luther, Table Talk, vol. 54 of Luther's Works, ed. Theodore G. Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967), p. 15.
3. Martin Luther, Sermons on the Gospel of St. John, 14–16, vol. 24 of Luther's Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1995), p. 320.
4. Thomas A. O'Meara, Mary in Protestant and Catholic Theology (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1966), pp. 109–137.
5. Martin Luther, The Catholic Epistles, vol. 30 of Luther's Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1995), p. 351; Martin Luther, Sermons 2, vol. 52 of Luther's Works, ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974), p. 682; O'Meara, Mary, p. 118.
6. O'Meara, Mary, p. 119.
7. See Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 152.
8. Ibid., p. 159.
9. Martin Luther, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Last Words of David, 2 Samuel 23:1–7, vol. 15 of Luther's Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Hilton C. Oswald (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1995), p. 193.
10. Ibid., p. 130.
11. The classic of Lutheran pietism is the work by Johann Arndt, True Christianity (New York: Paulist Press, 1979).
12. Peter Erb, ed., Jacob Boehme: The Way to Christ (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), introduction, pp. 4–5.
13. See Rufus M. Jones, Spiritual Reformers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Macmillan, 1914).
14. Boehme On Holy Prayer 55 (Erb, pp. 111–112).15
15. Boehme On True Resignation 1.5 (Erb, p. 115).
16. Boehme On the New Birth That Is 2.10, 2.11 (Erb, pp. 144–145).
17. Ibid., 2.18 (Erb, p. 147).
18. Ibid., 2.23 (Erb, p. 148).
19. Ibid.
20. Boehme Conversation Between an Enlightened and an Unenlightened Soul 23 (Erb, p. 230).
21. Ibid., 24 (Erb, pp. 230–231).
22. Ibid., 27 (Erb, pp. 231–242).
23. Boehme On True Repentance 29 (Erb, p. 40).
24. Ibid., 47 (Erb, p. 58).
25. Ibid.
26. Boehme The New Birth That Is 3.6, 3.7 (Erb, p. 150).
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 5.3, 6.12, 6.13 (Erb, pp. 156, 162).
29. Boehme The Supersensual Life 46 (Erb, p. 187).
30. Preface, “The Wars of Solomon and the Peaceable Reign of Solomon” (London, 1700); reproduced in Nils Thune, The Behemists and the Philadelphians: A Contribution to the Study of English Mysticism in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Uppsala: Almquist and Winsells Boktryckeri, 1948), pp. 68–69.
31. See Thomas Schipflinger, Sophia-Maria: A Holistic View of Creation (York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1998), pp. 221–222.
32. See especially Jane Leade, “Message to the Philadelphian Church,” in A Fountain of Gardens Watered by the Rivers of Divine Pleasure and Springing Up in All the Variety of Spiritual Plants... (London: 1697–1701), p. 270. These visions are dated from January to December 1678. (Many of Jane Leade's original manuscripts are now available online at www.passtheword.org/Jane-Lead.)
33. Leade, Fountain of Gardens, pp. 311–312.
34. See Catherine F. Smith, “Jane Leade: The Feminist Mind and Art of a Seventeenth Century Protestant Mystic,” in Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Rosemary R. Ruether and Eleanor McLaughlin (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), p. 194.
35. Leade, Fountain of Gardens, p. 325.
36. Ibid., pp. 326–336.
37. Jane Leade, Revelation of Revelations, Particularly as an Essay Toward an Unsealing, Opening, and Discovering the Seven Seals, the Seven Thunders, and the New Jerusalem State (London: A. Sowle, 1683), pp. 38–44.
38. See Signe Toksvig, Emanuel Swedenborg: Scientist and Mystic (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1948), pp. 14–29. Toksvig sees Bishop Swedberg as a very negative figure, who caused his son to rebel against him. For an alternative view, see Ernst Benz, Emmanuel Swedenborg: Visionary Savant in the Age of Reason (West Chester, Pa.: Swedenborg Foundation, 2002), pp. 3–19.
39. Toksvig, Emanuel Swedenborg, pp. 30–70.
40. Emanuel Swedenborg, Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and Wisdom, trans. Clifford Harley and Doris H. Harley (London: Swedenborg Society, 1969), secs. 29, 31. Swedenborg wrote in Latin. There are dozens of English translations, a situation that allows different interpretations of his ideas.
41. Ibid., secs. 32, 14.
42. Emanuel Swedenborg, Conjugial Love (New York: American Swedenborg Publishing Society, 1871), sec. 83.
43. See Dorothea Harvey, “Swedenborg and Women's Spirituality,” in Rooted in Spirit: A Harvest of Women's Wisdom, ed. Alice B. Skinner (West Chester, Pa.: Chrysalis Books, 1999), pp. 6–11.
44. Swedenborg, Conjugial Love, sec. 32.
45. Ibid., secs. 32–33.
46. Ibid., sec. 33.
47. Toksvig, Swedenborg, pp. 314–324.
48. Mary Ann Meyers, A New World Jerusalem: The Swedenborgian Experience in Community Construction (Westwood, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983). See also Marguerite Beck Block, The New Church in the New World: A Study of Swedenborgianism in America (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1932).
49. Myers, New World Jerusalem, pp. 144–147.
50. See Carl Ernst Yenetchi, “The Role of Gender in Marriage: A Swedenborgian View,” Studia Swedenborgiana 10, no. 1 (October 1996): 63–73.
51. See John K. Billings, “The Spiritual Origins of Sexuality and Genders: The Difference That Makes the Difference,” Studia Swedenborgiana 10, no. 1 (October 1996): 45–62.
52. James Lawrence, the Swedenborgian House of Studies of the Pacific School of Religion, personal communication to the author, April 8, 2003. See also Lawrence's article “Risking on the Side of Compassion,” The Messenger, November 1996, pp. 139–142.
53. For a good sketch of the history of the Harmony Society, see Carl J. R. Arndt, “George Rapp's Harmony Society,” in America's Communal Utopias, ed. Donald E. Pitzer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 57–87.
54. See Hilda Adam Kring, The Harmonists: A Folk-Cultural Approach (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1973), p. 13; citing Aaron Williams, The Harmony Society (Pittsburgh: W. S. Haven, 1866), p. 99.
55. Kring, The Harmonists, pp. 113–120.
56. Testimonies of the Life, Character, Revelations, and Doctrines of Mother Ann Lee, 2nd ed. (Albany, N.Y.: Weed, Parson, 1888), pp. 2–6.
57. Ibid., pp. 6–7.
58. Testimony of Christ's Second Appearing (the Shaker Bible), 4th ed. (Albany, N.Y.: Van Benthuysen, 1856), secs. 5, 7 (p. 504).
59. Ibid., sec. 17 (p. 506).
60. Ibid., sec. 22 (p. 507).
61. Ibid., sec. 29 (p. 508).
62. Ibid., secs. 30, 32, 33 (pp. 508, 509).
63. Ibid., secs. 35, 37, 38 (pp. 517–518).
64. Anna White and Leila S. Taylor, Shakerism: Its Meaning and Message (Columbus, Ohio: Fredereick J. Heer Press, 1904), p. 256.
CHAPTER 9: CONTESTED GENDER STATUS AND IMAGINING ANCIENT MATRIARCHY
1. For an overview, see Rosemary R. Ruether, Christianity and the Making of the Modern Family: Ruling Ideologies, Diverse Realities (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), pp. 83–106.
2. For Kant's and Hegel's views of women, see Ellen Kennedy and Susan Mendus, Women in Western Political Philosophy: Kant to Nietzsche (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), pp. 21–43, 127–258.
3. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792; London: Dent, 1929).
4. Edward H. Clarke, Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for the Girls (1873; New York: Arno Press, 1972).
5. See, for example, G. J. Barker-Benfield, Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes Toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Norton, 1976); and Cynthia E. Russell, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).
6. Katherine Rogers vividly represents the attacks found in nineteenth-century British musicals and journalism; see “The Drooping Lily: The Nineteenth Century,” in Katherine Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966), pp. 189–225.
7. August Comte, A General View of Positivism, trans. J. H. Bridges (London: Trubner, 1865), p. 245; originally published in French in 1848.
8. Ibid., p. 253.
9. Ibid., p. 288.
10. Horace Bushnell, Women's Suffrage: The Reform Against Nature (New York: Scribner, 1869).
11. Ibid., p. 31.
12. Ibid., pp. 65–66.
13. Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Women,” in Essays: The Works of Schopenhauer, ed. Will Durant (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1928), p. 449.
14. See Joseph Campbell, introduction to Johann Jakob Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: Selected Writings of J. J. Bachofen, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. xxxiv.
15. Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, pp. 100–101.
16. Ibid., p. 89.
17. Ibid., p. 115.
18. Ibid., p. 118.
19. Bachofen, “Myth of Tanaquil,” in ibid., pp. 237–238.
20. John Ferguson McLennan, Patriarchal Theory (London: Macmillan, 1885).
21. Edward B. Tylor, “The Matriarchal Family System,” The Nineteenth Century 40 (July–December 1896): 81–96.
22. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed. (1910–1911), s.v. “The Matriarchate,” vol. 17, p. 889.
23. Arthur Evans, The Palace of Minos at Knossos (London: Macmillan, 1921–1936), vol. 3, pp. 58, 227.
24. Gilbert Murray, Five Stages of Greek Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1925), pp. 15–55. Murray calls the first stage “Saturnia Regna.”
25. Claiming that the ancient goddesses “reflect another condition of things, a relationship traced through the mother, a state of society known by the awkward term matriarchal,” Harrison added a footnote referring to Tylor's article in the July–December 1896 issue of The Nineteenth Century, describing the article as the “clearest and most sensible statement of the facts as to this difficult subject known to me” (Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion [1903; New York: Meridian Books, 1955], p. 261, 261n2).
26. Ibid., p. 273.
27. Ibid., p. 285.
28. Jane Harrison, Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1921; New York: University Books, 1962), pp. xvii–lvi. This volume was printed along with her book Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion.
29. Lewis H. Morgan, Ancient Society: Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery Through Barbarism to Civilization (New York: Henry Holt, 1877), p. 50.
30. Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, ed. Eleanor B. Leacock (1884; New York: International Publishers, 1972).
31. Ibid., pp. 120–121.
32. Ibid., pp. 144–146.
33. On Karl Marx's family life and relation to Engels and his female companion, see Yvonne Kapp, Eleanor Marx, 2 vols. (New York: Pantheon, 1976).
34. August Bebel, Women Under Socialism, 33rd ed., trans. Daniel de Leon (New York: New York Labor News Press, 1904).
35. Ibid., pp. 23, 24.
36. Ibid., p. 30.
37. Ibid., p. 343.
38. Ibid., p. 349.
39. See Rosemary R. Ruether, “Radical Victorians,” in Women and Religion in America, ed. Rosemary R. Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller, vol. 3, 1900–1968 (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 22.
40. See Josephine Conger-Kaneko, “Women and Socialism,” The Progressive Woman 5, no. 55 (December 11, 1912): 8; and Theresa Malkiel, “Women and Socialism,” The Progressive Woman 6, no. 68 (February 6, 1913): 6, 15. Excerpts from these articles can be found in Ruether, “Radical Victorians,” pp. 22–24.
41. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman's Bible, pts. 1 and 2 (1895, 1898; Seattle: Coalition Task Force on Women and Religion, 1974).
42. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, 6 vols. (Rochester, N.Y.: National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1881–1922).
43. See Matilda Joslyn Gage, Woman, Church, and State: A Historical Account of the Status of Woman Through the Christian Ages, with Reminiscences of the Matriarchate (1893; Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1980), pp. 94–128, on the persecution of witches.
44. Sally Roesch Wagner, introduction to ibid., p. xxx.
45. See Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Women's Rights Movement in the United States, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 143–148.
46. See Wagner, introduction to Gage, Woman, Church, and State, pp. xxxi–xxxix.
47. Gage, Woman, Church, and State, p. 8.
48. Ibid., p. 9.
49. Ibid., p. 11.
50. For a Jewish feminist critique of anti-Judaism in this matriarchal tradition, see Annette Duam, “Blaming the Jews for the Death of the Goddess”; and Judith Plaskow, “Blaming the Jews for the Birth of Patriarchy”; both in Nice Jewish Girls, ed. Evelyn Torton Beck (Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, 1982), pp. 303–309, 298–302.
51. Gage, Woman, Church, and State, p. 21.
52. Ibid., p. 22. On the translation of El Shaddai as “many-breasted one,” see www.goodnewsinc.net/v4gn/shaddai.html.
53. Gage, Woman, Church, and State, p. 243.
54. Ibid., p. 23.
55. Ibid., p. 245.
56. Ibid., p. 246.
57. Stanton, Woman's Bible, p. 25.
58. Carrie Chapman Catt, “A Survival of Matriarchy,” Harper's Magazine 128, April 1914, pp. 738–748. Excerpts can be found in Ruether, “Radical Victorians,” pp. 19–22.
59. See Ruether, Christianity and the Making of the Modern Family, pp. 118–121.
60. Robert Briffault, The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions, 3 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1927).
61. Robert Briffault, “The Origin of Love,” in ibid., vol. 1, pp. 117–160.
62. See, for example, Briffault, Mothers, vol. 3, p. 45.
63. Ibid., pp. 507–521.
64. Engels, Origin of the Family, p. 27.
65. Morgan, Ancient Society, p. 553.
66. Ibid., p. 554.
67. Harrison, Prolegomena, p. 299.
68. Ashley Montagu, ed., Marriage, Past and Present: A Debate Between Robert Briffault and Bronislaw Malinowski (Boston: Sargeant, 1956).
69. See, for example, Evelyn Reed, Problems of Women's Liberation: A Marxist Approach (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), which recapitulates Engels's views for an audience of New Left feminists of the late 1960s.
CHAPTER 10: THE RETURN OF THE GODDESS
1. Elizabeth Gould Davis, The First Sex (Baltimore: Penguin, 1971); Merlin Stone, When God Was a Woman (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976). Stone's book was originally titled The Paradise Papers.
2. Davis, First Sex, pp. 34–36, 140–141.
3. Ibid., pp. 202, 203, 241, 286–293.
4. Ibid., p. 339.
5. Stone, When God Was a Woman, pp. 103–104, 179.
6. Ibid., pp. 160, 241.
7. See Gerald B. Gardener, Witchcraft Today (1954; New York: Citadel Press, 1970). Margaret Murray's major books are The God of the Witches (1931; London: Oxford University Press, 1970); and The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971).
8. For a critical history of modern witchcraft, see James W. Baker, “White Witches: Historic Fact and Romantic Fantasy,” in Magical Religion and Modern Witchcraft, ed. James R. Lewis (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1996), pp. 171–192.
9. Z. Budapest, The Holy Book of Women's Mysteries, Part II (Los Angeles: Susan B. Anthony Coven Number One, 1980), p. 168.
10. See Starhawk's account of her first meeting with Z. Budapest in Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess, 2nd rev. ed. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1989), p. 3.
11. See Z. Budapest, Holy Book of Women's Mysteries, Part I (Los Angeles: Susan B. Anthony Coven Number One, 1979), pp. 86–87; and Budapest, Holy Book of Women's Mysteries, Part II, pp. 129–134.
12. Budapest, Holy Book of Women's Mysteries, Part II, p. 212.
13. Ibid., p. 215.
14. Ibid., p. 16.
15. Ibid., pp. 23–25.
16. Ibid., p. 135.
17. Ibid., pp. 75–76, 55.
18. Ibid., pp. 19–20.
19. Starhawk, Spiral Dance, pp. 5, 18–19.
20. Ibid., pp. 2–5.
21. Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982); Starhawk, Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987).
22. In the early 1980s, Father Matthew Fox moved his program on Creation-Centered Spirituality from Mundelein College in Chicago to Holy Names in Oakland. I had been providing the program's lectures on feminist theology, but I was unable to continue lecturing at Holy Names. Fox asked me to recommend another feminist in the Bay Area, and I recommended Starhawk. At that time, Fox was unfamiliar with Star-hawk, but he took my suggestion and invited her to teach. Her work was well received, although in the 1990s Fox would be criticized by the Vatican and conservative Catholics for having invited a “witch” to teach at Holy Names.
23. See Starhawk, Spiral Dance, pp. 249, 202–203n. Compare with Budapest, Holy Book of Women's Mysteries, Part II, p. 46.
24. Starhawk, Spiral Dance, pp. 8–9.
25. Ibid., pp. 16–17, 32, 214. Also see Starhawk, Truth or Dare, pp. 18–19.
26. Starhawk, Truth or Dare, pp. 317–318.
27. Ibid., p. 65; Starhawk, Spiral Dance, p. 36.
28. Starhawk, Spiral Dance, p. 10.
29. Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark, pp. 1–15; Starhawk, Truth or Dare, pp. 8–19.
30. For Starhawk's definition of magic and her comments on using trance to face the “self-hater,” see Starhawk, Truth or Dare, pp. 24–26, 176–178.
31. Ibid., p. 10.
32. See, for example, the description of the confrontation between the women jailed for blockading the Livermore nuclear weapons lab and the guards at Camp Parks, the nearby facility where they were held, which had been a World War II relocation camp for Japanese Americans, in ibid., pp. 4–5.
33. Starhawk, Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising (Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society Publishers, 2002).
34. Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark, pp. 154–182; Starhawk, Truth or Dare, p. 256.
35. See Starhawk, Spiral Dance, pp. 16–19; Starhawk, Truth or Dare, pp. 32–67.
36. See the chapter on resistance and renewal in Starhawk, Truth or Dare, pp. 312–340.
37. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980).
38. Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics, 15th anniv. ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), pp. 183–219.
39. Ibid., pp. 208–210.
40. Carol Christ, Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest (Boston: Beacon Press, 1980). Christ has not written a systematic account of her life but does refer to it in comments scattered throughout her writings. See her Laughter of Aphrodite: Reflections on a Journey to the Goddess (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), pp. 3–8, 106.
41. Carol Christ, She Who Changes: Re-Imagining the Divine in the World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 143.
42. Carol Christ, personal communication to the author, August 15, 2003.
43. Christ, She Who Changes, p. 106.
44. Carol Christ, “Why Women Need the Goddess,” reprinted in Christ, Laughter of Aphrodite, pp. 117–132. On the process of writing this paper and presenting it to a panel of the American Academy of Religion, see ibid., pp. 107–108.
45. Ibid., pp. 14–16, 107.
46. For reference to this decision, see Carol Christ, Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 3, 147.
47. See Christ's Odyssey with the Goddess: A Spiritual Quest in Crete (New York: Continuum, 1995), p. 13.
48. Ibid., p. 16.
49. Ibid., pp. 18–23.
50. See Christ, Rebirth of the Goddess, p. 39.
51. See Christ, Odyssey with the Goddess, pp. 55–58.
52. Ibid., p. 164.
53. Christ, Rebirth of the Goddess, pp. 41–42, 124–125.
54. See Christ, Odyssey with the Goddess, pp. 80–82, 159–160.
55. Christ, Rebirth of the Goddess, pp. 41, 45.
56. Christ, Odyssey with the Goddess, pp. 33–35, 92–94.
57. See, for example, Christ's story “Reluctant Guests at Dionysian Rites,” in ibid., pp. 39–42.
58. Christ, Rebirth of the Goddess, pp. 50, 58–59.
59. Ibid., pp. 50–60.
60. Ibid., pp. 60–62.
61. Ibid., pp. 62–67, 158–159, 170–176.
62. Ibid., pp. 98–104.
63. Ibid., pp. 107–109, 109–112, 90, 91.
64. Ibid., pp. 102, 104–106. See also Christ's essay “Feminist Theology in Post-Traditional Thealogy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Theology, ed. Susan Frank Parsons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 88.
65. Christ, Rebirth of the Goddess, pp. 130–132.
66. Ibid., pp. 132–134.
67. Ibid., pp. 148–150.
68. Ibid., pp. 138–139.
69. Christ, personal communication to the author, August 15, 2003.
70. Flyer, “Who We Are,” prepared for the Parliament of the World's Religions, 1993, 1999, Covenant of the Goddess, p. 2. See the home page of the Covenant of the Goddess, www.cog.org.
71. In the 1893 parliament, Hinduism was represented by Swami Vivekananda, among others. There were five Buddhists, among them Reverend Dharmapala, Soyen Shaku, and Takayoahi Matsuyama. Confucianism was represented by Fung Kwang Yu and Kung Hsein Ho, and Jainism by Muni Amaramji. There were no Sikhs or Baha'i.
72. Circle Sanctuary, Box 219, Mt. Horeb, Wisc. 53572. See the sanctuary's Web site, located at www.circlesanctuary.org.
73. EarthSpirit can be reached at PO Box 723-N, Williamsburg, Mass. 01096. The group's Web site is located at www.earthspirit.com.
74. High Priestess Phyllis W. Curott, “A Portrait of Wicca,” available online at www.silcom.com/~origin.
75. Appropriations Bill for 1986, HR 3036, Amend. 705, 99th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record 131 (1985): 25074; see Catherine Cookson, “Report from the Trenches: A Case Study of Religious Freedom Issues Faced by Wiccans Practicing in the United States,” Journal of Church and State 39 (Autumn 1997): 738.
76. For reports, see www.circlesanctuary.org/liberty.
77. Cookson, “Report from the Trenches,” p. 728n11.
78. See www.circlesanctuary.org/liberty/report/summer2002.htm, p. 2. For a general account of Odinism or Asatru, see Lewis, Magical Religion and Modern Witchcraft, p. 208.
79. See Starhawk, “Why Pagans May Be Conscientious Objectors to War”; and Tony Dominello, “A Wiccan and the Warrior Ethic”; both part of the Covenant of the Goddess information packet, pp. 28, 29. See www.cog.org.
80. For more information on CUUPs, see the Web site www.cuups.org.
81. For a critique of Margaret Murray's view of witchcraft as a survival of goddess-worshipping paganism and a historical account of the witch persecutions in Europe, see my chapter “Witches and Jews: The Demonic Alien in Christian Culture,” in Rosemary Ruether, New Woman, New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), pp. 89–114.
CONCLUSION
1. See these two works by Michael P. Carroll: The Cult of the Virgin Mary: Psychological Origins (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989); and Madonnas That Maim: Popular Catholicism in Italy Since the Fifteenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992).
2. On the homoerotic character of male monotheistic spirituality, see Jeffrey M. Kripel, “A Garland of Talking Heads for the Goddess: Some Autobiographical and Psychoanalytical Reflections on the Western Kali,” in Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses, ed. Alf Hiltebeitel and Kathleen M. Erndl (New York: New York University Press, 2000), pp. 239–268; and Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, God's Phallus: And Other Problems for Men and Monotheism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994).
3. Jeanette Rodriguez, Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment of Mexican American Women (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994).
4. George W. Bush's administration proved to be very astute in managing to reject affirmative action in principle and yet select men and women of color who completely support its agenda as token race and gender “cards.”
5. Rita Gross has argued that Buddhism is liberating for women precisely because it not only lacks a male god but has no god at all; see her Buddhism After Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1993).
6. Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development (London: Zed, 1989); Ivone Gebara, A Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999), pp. 137–171; flyer, “Who We Are,” prepared for the Parliament of the World's Religions, Capetown, South Africa, December 1999, Covenant of the Goddess.
7. Carol Christ suggests that ecofeminist Christians are “stealing” from Goddess thealogy; see her “Feminist Theology in Post-Traditional Thealogy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Theology, ed. Susan Frank Parsons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 8.