Goddess Remembered

There have been forces that were going toward the negative, toward the destructive and forces that were going toward the positive, toward the wisdom path. And I think if we can get that message out to more young people, that there are cultural choices, and economic choices.

Goddess Remembered is a 1989 Canadian documentary on the Goddess movement and feminist theories surrounding Goddess worship in Old European Culture according to Marija Gimbutas, and Merlin Stone's When God Was a Woman.

Charlene Spretnak

• The kind of connectedness women's spirituality and goddess spirituality teaches about the earth is missing in politics today and the people who are guiding our countries see only nature as a resource for industrial growth. They don't see the sacredness and the interconnectedness and the simple fact that we live on a finite planet.

• And this is where we live today: suddenly everything was fortified; the warrior was honored; we follow a "sky god"; and we have a "patriarchal" social system. I don't think you can understand patriarchy unless you look at the fact that fear is at the core. Fear that female sexuality will somehow become this chaotic force. That nature will become this chaotic force overtaking us. So we have to have everything tightly controlled and hierarchically ordered. In every cultural era, there have been forces that were going toward the negative, toward the destructive and forces that were going toward the positive, toward the wisdom path. And I think if we can get that message out to more young people, that there are cultural choices, and economic choices.

Luisah Teisch

• The more I listened to what they had to say about the 'Great Bearded White Man in the Sky' the more I realized that he was no one I could talk to. You couldn't say nothing to the 'dude'. He didn't answer prayers. He could 'go off' on you at any minute and you were supposed to be grateful no matter what he did. This is nobody who made any kind of sense to me in my naiveity. So I put him down and hung with Mary [the mother of God].

• It helps me a lot to remember that I'm an ancestress of tomorrow and that what I say and do today - 5,000 years from now - may be coded into the symbolism of what they believed then. If you think that way, no tiny act is meaningless. Everything becomes very, very important.

Other

• The spiritual journey of Earth's peoples began with the idea of a goddess, universally called 'The Great Mother'.

• History books call it "The Dawn of Western Civilization", The "Golden Age" of Greece. For the man, it was the beginning. For the woman, it was the end. The Greeks announced that history would now begin and proceeded to obliterate or pervert the 25,000 years that had gone before.

• Athena was redefined: Once the Goddess of Wisdom, she became the Goddess of War. The violent and the erotic became linked as they never had before.

• Man, said Man, had always been the natural master of the earth. He was now also the co-creator: Athena sprang, fully armed, from the brow of Zeus; Eve was born from Adam's rib. Female inferiority forever was proclaimed by the book of Genesis.

• The 'conquerer' has replaced the 'nurturer' as the symbol to be respected.