Bodies

Giselle Vincent is doing some serious thinking about Goddess Feminists and how, and why, they practice Drawing Down the Moon.

Goddess Feminists have a strong sense of being able to know the divine through body experience. The body becomes a locus for the divine, and a medium through which to experience and learn about the divine. As Amy Hollywood writes, “the goal of consciously pursued bodily practices and rituals is ultimately to render conscious training unnecessary” (2004: 63): that is, in repeatedly enacting the empowering transformation of embodiment rituals, Goddess Feminists render the empowerment permanent in the individual.

Embodiment rituals enable a woman to be not Other to the divine. At the same time, embodiment admits the Other and admits that the divine is (at least partially) Other.[4] This is especially so in the context of Goddess Feminist groups wherein the divine is personal rather than (or in addition to) psychological or archetypal. In embodiment, a woman’s self (or selves) does not disappear. The Other becomes part of the woman’s self and yet is not part of her. Hence, embodiment requires a woman to have a sense of self that can be multiple and can change.

Embodiment is an active opening of the self to the unknown Other, an opening to change and transformation. That each woman embodies a goddess in a different way reflects the Goddess Feminist teaching that no goddess can be fully defined because Goddess is always changing. For Goddess Feminists, the self lives in the simultaneous multiplicity or becoming with/in the divine. The becoming of self or selves and the becoming of the divine are intersecting, reciprocal, and particular or non-universal.

You can read the whole thing in this quarter's Matrifocus.

Picture found here.