“The Celts, Nature and the Goddess” By Rev. Kim D. Wilson Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Poconos March 17, 2019 Back in the late 80s, I was a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Lehigh Valley. We had an interim minister, the Rev. Beverly Bumbaugh. She and her husband, Rev. David Bumbaugh, taught a course on ancient Goddesses. [show 2 goddess slides] Most early religions around the world were polytheistic, with gods and goddesses all intimately connected with the earth and the sky, and its seasons and other natural cycles. I got a glimpse of an ancient world in which women were held in special regard because of their ability to create new life. The ancient religions in Europe had very close ties to Nature, which they saw as feminine, with its cycles of birth and growth, decay and death. The Goddess represented those cycles. In our modern culture, it’s not always easy to imagine a life truly immersed in Nature, where gratitude naturally arises because of Nature’s gifts, and a life completely dependent upon Nature and vulnerable to Nature’s extremes. In the ancient world, different beings were responsible for everything in the human realm. In the ancient Celtic culture, which I’m going to be talking more about in a few minutes, everything in nature was interwoven with their lives. They recognized that the entire world was ensouled. There were gods and goddesses of every aspect of the natural world which underpinned everything in their daily lives. We might wonder what happened to all those religions, with their gods and goddesses. And the answer, of course, is complicated, and there is a lot we don’t know and may never know. One thing that we can observe is that whenever two cultures come together, their respective religious beliefs undergo some kind of transformation. In the case of the ancient Israelites, when they conquered the Canaanites in the second millennium BCE, they warned their people not to give any credence to the Canaanite goddess, Asherah. You can read some of these warnings in the Hebrew Bible. 1 Some scholars of ancient near eastern religion think that before the second millennium BCE, Asherah or another goddess may have been the consort of Yahweh, the Israelites’ god. But by the time of the Israelites of the Hebrew Bible, they were adamant about purging their religion of any worship of the goddess, or of any other god. There are other places in the Hebrew Bible that reveal a shift toward the patriarchal and a devaluing of the female. The creation story in Genesis began to be re-interpreted by some early feminist theologians in the 1970s as a discrediting of the feminine, casting former symbols of the feminine sacred in a negative light: the Tree of Life and its Fruit, the Mother of All the Living, and the Sacred Snake. One theory of the shift away from goddess worship is that writing and reading brought about profound changes in religion and gender relations. Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Hebrews and other cultures had learned to record laws, stories, and other important information through writing. Leonard Schlain, who has written on the subject says, “One pernicious effect of literacy has gone largely unnoticed: writing subliminally fosters a patriarchal outlook. Writing of any kind, but especially its alphabetic form, diminishes feminine values and with them, women’s power in the culture.” Apparently, becoming literate literally changes the brain’s wiring. While everyone has features of both, Schlain defines the feminine outlook as a “holistic, simultaneous, synthetic, and concrete view of the world” and the masculine as a “linear, sequential, reductionist” one characterized by abstract thinking. Schlain apparently makes a well-researched, compelling case in his book, which I have ordered. So I’ll have to get back to you with the details. Another change that was involved in ushering in the era of patriarchy is the move from a hunter-gatherer, subsistence culture, toward agricultural societies with the cultivation of crops. Once there was a need to store food, acquiring and controlling resources became more important. Men were good at this. Whoever had more land, more buildings and food had more power. With more power concentrated among men came the desire to acquire and control more property and material goods, which created wealth, and thus different classes. And once 2 greed sets in, we all know how that goes… Woman then had less power, and important men would want to worship important gods, and not female deities. I’ve been reading a book called, Goddess and God in the new World, by Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow, two early feminist theologians who managed to bring new voices into the male-only world of theology. Both were in the graduate theological studies program at Yale University in the early 70s. Carol and Judith were the only women in the program, and it could be a lonely place. Once, Judith Plaskow commented to a male classmate that she was having trouble making sense of some theologian’s work, and the young man said, “Don’t worry your little head about it,” as he actually patted her on the head. Carol Christ writes, “In both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, God is imagined to have a body and to feel, to love and to suffer,” as humans do. Yet Christian theology had separated the divine from the body and from the world, from Nature, and placed it remotely in the sky, in some other dimension. God became transcendent and no longer immanent in the world. These pioneering young women, Christ and Plaskow, persevered. They were united in their belief that theology was not all intellectual and abstract, as they were being taught at Yale, but that a holistic theology needed to be one that is embodied and experienced in the world. Carol Christ later traveled to Greece to study ancient goddess worship in the Minoan culture. She began to reject Christianity as too disempowering of women. She began to embrace a concept of the goddess for herself. After much reflection and writing, which have opened the eyes of many thousands of women, and men, she has come to define the Goddess as, “the intelligent embodied love that is in all being.” During the early days of feminism and conscious-raising, Christ recognized that an understanding of the goddess, the sacred feminine, could help contemporary women reclaim their wholeness, and this is the work she has been engaged in since then. In today’s Celtic Christian cultures, there are still remnants of earlier goddesses and gods, and their world and religion have retained deep ties with the natural world. [show slide of triple goddess] 3 The poet, philosopher and Catholic scholar John O’Donohue wrote: All through Celtic poetry you find the color, power, and intensity of nature. How beautifully it recognizes the wind, the flowers, the breaking of the waves on the land. Celtic spirituality hallows the moon and adores the life force of the sun. Many of the ancient Celtic gods were close to the sources of fertility and belonging. Since the Celts were a nature people, the world of nature was both a presence and a companion. Nature nourished them; it was here that they felt their deepest belonging and affinity. Celtic nature poetry is suffused with this warmth, wonder, and belonging. He offers as an example one of the oldest known Celtic prayers: I arise today Through the strength of heaven, light of sun, Radiance of moon, Splendor of fire, Speed of lightning, Swiftness of wind, Depth of sea, Stability of earth, Firmness of rock. The Celtic culture at one time influenced most of Europe [show map slide]. Through various wars and take-overs of land, the Celts now occupy only the areas of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany and maybe a few other places. The Irish Celts were never taken over by foreign powers, which may be why they’ve been able to retain their strong culture. We’re told that Christianity came to Ireland by way of St. Patrick, which isn’t entirely true. He wasn’t the first Christian to come to Ireland. But Patrick was apparently more successful than his predecessors. Excerpt, adapted, from Philip Freeman, author of a book on the life of St. Patrick: The historical Patrick was a spoiled and rebellious young Roman citizen living a life of luxury in fifth-century Britain when he was kidnapped from his 4 family’s estate as a teenager and sold into slavery across the sea in Ireland. For six years he endured brutal conditions as he watched over his master’s sheep on a lonely mountain in a strange land. He went to Ireland an atheist, but there heard what he believed was the voice of God. One day he escaped and found passage back to Britain on a ship of pirates. His family welcomed back their long-lost son and assumed he would take up his life of privilege, but Patrick heard a different call. [He spent fifteen years studying to become a priest.] He then returned to Ireland to bring a new way of life to a people who had once enslaved him. He faced opposition, threats of violence, and criticism from church officials, [who did not approve of his methods.] [Patrick respected the traditions and ways of the people, and encouraged them to adopt a form of Christianity that did not discourage their veneration of nature, and did not expect them to completely give up their existing religious practices and beliefs. ] From somewhere deep inside him, he found the compassion and forgiveness to work among a people who had brought nothing but pain to his life.