Coyote's Den

Should Goddess Rule the God?

April 7, 2001

This isn't going to be a very long article. But there's something that distresses me a little tiny bit.

In my universe... there is a strong female force... a great mother. But there is also a male force, a great father.

I have been told... kinda had my nose rubbed in it at times, that we've "lived in a partiarchal society long enough". That too much power and attention was given to the God force, and the goddess was ignored. That we are out of balance as a result.

Okay... I can see that.

But the solution many folks offer is "Well. Now we'll just swing in the other direction to restore the balance."

I don't see how that restores the balance. I think it just creates a different type of imbalance.

I think the divine can manifest as male or female (as well as many other ways of course). Both are important to us. We need a mother and a father. I'm not much of a deity-worshipping type anyway. But when I do honor all my relations... I don't play favorites to the girls or the boys.

As for "the father god has already had his time".. whose father?

My father doesn't tell his children "love me or burn in hell," And he doesn't say "worship only me and ignore your mother", or "women aren't as important as men". I dunno whose father that is, but he ain't mine!

I'm not going to presume to tell someone "You have to worship both" or "You cannot focus on the Goddess". I'm not about to tell someone else how to go about their own earth-healing or other religious practices.

But when I pray... I pray to all my relations equally. The animals and people I share my world with... the spirits, the trees and stones... the earth below, the sky above and even to myself. I will not set my mother over my father, or my father over my mother. I will not stand on or under anyone else.

I have watched these strange reactive behaviors among some folks... some will get all goddess-focused... (understandable: how can you NOT love the goddess?) and then guys (or ladies who happen to have a male patron) will feel all put out. So they'll do these "reclaim the god power" things that are either weird Politically Correct, "Men can like flowers too" kinds of things (Well, duh!) or obnoxious "Grunt! Me WARRIOR! BLAHG! PROTECT PUNY WOMANS!"

What I guess I'm getting at, in my roundabout way here, is that I think we could use some good, healthy models for male divinity as well as female. I think that the god has suffered almost as much as the goddess from our society's ideas in recent millennia. Men have had it easier than women, but haven't been made _stronger_. All gods but you-know-who have been made out to be demons and evil and sick. Men have been told it is good to act badly to or look down on women. That won't get better because someone suddenly says "Look.. the Goddess is better than any icky old God."

We don't need to revile half of the creative force, simply because the human race has perverted and misused and misunderstood a part of that force.

If there's one thing that I've learned from my experiences of the Divine Female, it's that she would have us put our focus on correcting a wrong, before punishing a scapegoat. I believe she would rather we heal our perceptions of both aspects of the divine, not succumb to using the same foolish tactics we've seen others use and which we believe are wrong.

What we ought to be doing is finding the best expressions of divinity within ourselves, and finding and reinforcing the best ideals of our relationship with the divine.

I don't care to debate, in this essay, whether the gods would exist without us, or whether the gods have their own separate existence. What I believe is at fault here is our perceptions of, and our assumptions about the divine. And that is what we must heal.

If it is wrong to disrespect the female half of the divine, and not give her equal importance and respect as we attribute to the male principle, then it is also wrong to disrespect the male half.

We do not have to accept the idea that to be male is to be brutal, and ignorant, and domineering and jealous. We do not have to accept the image of the divine that foolish or evil or misguided people have presented to us and taught us. We do not have to be limited by what has gone before.