Bona dea

Years ago, and well into my seventh month of pregnancy in New York City, it occurred to me one day that, as I would be unable to run from a fast predator, I was lucky not to run into an urban panther. These weekly blogs will consider women's lives from the perspective of one who is now older.

I enjoy spending time with my three-year-old grandson. His play is rather truck-intensive, with some dragons and dinosaurs thrown in. He loves books and reading, but trucks are his first, second, and third love.

This got me to thinking about how my children played when they were three. My son was a dinosaur aficionado and fascinated with trains. My daughter enjoyed adornment; she wore a little pink tutu skirt over her clothes every day for months. I was beginning to get worried, as mothers do, until we met a little boy in the supermarket who wore, in true Viking fashion, a metal colander on his head. I stopped worrying about the tutu.

Someone gave my girl a tall bride doll, one that had been in the family for a while and its white dress was a bit tattered. My mother made a sapphire blue velvet dress for the doll; my daughter nearly swooned with happiness.

I was watching her dressing up this doll. She put ribbon bows on the dress, a flower garland and a veil on the doll’s head, flowers in each hand. And I realized that the result looked very like the shrines of Mary statutes in my grammar school, similarly decorated during the month of May. With positively no external information to sway her, my three-year-old was performing a ritual; the impulse, apparently, and the method, certainly, were much the same as common adult religious practices.

Where did that come from? Was my girl expressing an inherent link with the goddess? Great Mother, Queen of Heaven, Goddess of the Universe -- can knowledge of her be hard-wired in us, demonstrated by little ones too young to have it burned, beaten, or mocked out of them?

As I get older, the concept of the divine for me has no personality, is rather a great force, energy, unifying all. But when I need a face there, the divine face is always a goddess, and has been so for decades. But I’ve kept this sub rosa; it’s still not completely safe. Study most any culture’s stories, and a male pantheon has been superimposed upon an older goddess religion and even the memory of that erased, or consigned to “myth” and “fertility rites.” The violence of the new religions tried to wipe the goddess from the earth.

Suppressing women’s religious rites made suppressing and subjugating women all the easier. Blaming Eve for the loss of paradise has allowed -- no, justified -- male dominance and oppression of women. In her book When God Was a Woman, Merlin Stone asks, “What had life been like for women who lived in a society that venerated a wise and valiant female Creator?”

Can you imagine?