Me.

A friend of mine pointed out a website about Vedanta over our listserv, and while I was going to reply to the list itself... it occurred to me that the reply was far more about what I'm comfortable with and what I'm not than about any feedback I might have as far as her choices for herself. So since this has basically nothing to do with her, I'm going to post it here instead in a space that can be as much about me as I ruddy well please.

It's interesting, definitely. Looks like they're trying really hard to have all the foreigner-friendly bits of Hinduism without actually including all the distinctively-Indian bits. They've done a decent job of this, but it includes a lot of the same social structuring (even without caste)--mainly the whole notion of karma and reincarnation. While it's certainly appealing to think that we can make good things happen for ourselves by doing good things, and while it's even more appealing to think that any good which happens to us is deserved, and just, and otherwise Totally Rightfully Ours... I'm not sure how comfortable I am with it because of the other implications.

Obviously, I don't have to be comfortable with a tradition that isn't mine, and I wanted to state clearly that I'm aware of this. I just think that the notion of karma is more or less entirely there to reinforce inequality. Here's what I mean. On this page: http://www.vedanta.org/wiv/philosophy/karma.html they say:

"Nothing happens to us by the whim of some outside agency: we ourselves are responsible for what life brings us; all of us are reaping the results of our own previous actions in this life or in previous lives."

If all they mean by this is that no divine power is affecting human fates--that only humans are doing this to each other--then I can't really argue. However, if they're arguing that it's a natural law that nothing comes to an INDIVIDUAL person undeserved... then I start to take issue. It means that rich people have all that money because they're better than poor people, that sick people are sick because they lack piety or virtue, and there is no injustice anywhere because justice is cosmically assured.

That's where I'm seeing the cultural trappings here that they haven't gotten rid of. In a cosmology like Hinduism where social inequality is quite explicitly ordained by the gods, they introduced karma to explain why certain people have certain places, and why it's just plain silly to try to be any place other than what you were born into (see Krishna's urgings to Arjuna in the Bhagvad-Gita). You're there because you deserve to be, and so your qualities were arranged in such a way that the place you deserve is the best place for you at the time and everybody stays where they "belong," in their proper place.

So while this is certainly a very cool way to try and universalize Hinduism, I thought their claims to making it effectively no longer an Indian thing are sort of disingenuous--except to the extent that privileged people in all cultures like to believe their privilege is some kind of manifestation of divine justice. Of course, the alternative is to take karma as a very good and very personal reason to take an interest in the fates of others (since alleviating even their justly-earned suffering is still a pretty swell thing to try and do). But any time a religion says, "Everybody is, on some level, exactly where and what they deserve to be to the exact extent that they deserve," is going to throw up red flags for me.

But then, I guess that's why I don't identify as Hindu or Vedanta or really anything close. It just doesn't mesh with what I believe is true about the human experience, so it doesn't fit with me personally. If this makes more sense for my friend than it does for me, I'm glad she found it. I'm just uncertain about their claims that this isn't Indian Hinduism anymore... because to a dalit it would probably sure as hell still look like it.

Holy shit. That was long.

A friend of mine pointed out a website about Vedanta over our listserv, and while I was going to reply to the list itself... it occurred to me that the reply was far more about what I'm comfortable with and what I'm not than about any feedback I might have as far as her choices for herself. So since this has basically nothing to do with her, I'm going to post it here instead in a space that can be as much about me as I ruddy well please.

It's interesting, definitely. Looks like they're trying really hard to have all the foreigner-friendly bits of Hinduism without actually including all the distinctively-Indian bits. They've done a decent job of this, but it includes a lot of the same social structuring (even without caste)--mainly the whole notion of karma and reincarnation. While it's certainly appealing to think that we can make good things happen for ourselves by doing good things, and while it's even more appealing to think that any good which happens to us is deserved, and just, and otherwise Totally Rightfully Ours... I'm not sure how comfortable I am with it because of the other implications.

Obviously, I don't have to be comfortable with a tradition that isn't mine, and I wanted to state clearly that I'm aware of this. I just think that the notion of karma is more or less entirely there to reinforce inequality. Here's what I mean. On this page: http://www.vedanta.org/wiv/philosophy/karma.html they say:

"Nothing happens to us by the whim of some outside agency: we ourselves are responsible for what life brings us; all of us are reaping the results of our own previous actions in this life or in previous lives."

If all they mean by this is that no divine power is affecting human fates--that only humans are doing this to each other--then I can't really argue. However, if they're arguing that it's a natural law that nothing comes to an INDIVIDUAL person undeserved... then I start to take issue. It means that rich people have all that money because they're better than poor people, that sick people are sick because they lack piety or virtue, and there is no injustice anywhere because justice is cosmically assured.

That's where I'm seeing the cultural trappings here that they haven't gotten rid of. In a cosmology like Hinduism where social inequality is quite explicitly ordained by the gods, they introduced karma to explain why certain people have certain places, and why it's just plain silly to try to be any place other than what you were born into (see Krishna's urgings to Arjuna in the Bhagvad-Gita). You're there because you deserve to be, and so your qualities were arranged in such a way that the place you deserve is the best place for you at the time and everybody stays where they "belong," in their proper place.

So while this is certainly a very cool way to try and universalize Hinduism, I thought their claims to making it effectively no longer an Indian thing are sort of disingenuous--except to the extent that privileged people in all cultures like to believe their privilege is some kind of manifestation of divine justice. Of course, the alternative is to take karma as a very good and very personal reason to take an interest in the fates of others (since alleviating even their justly-earned suffering is still a pretty swell thing to try and do). But any time a religion says, "Everybody is, on some level, exactly where and what they deserve to be to the exact extent that they deserve," is going to throw up red flags for me.

But then, I guess that's why I don't identify as Hindu or Vedanta or really anything close. It just doesn't mesh with what I believe is true about the human experience, so it doesn't fit with me personally. If this makes more sense for my friend than it does for me, I'm glad she found it. I'm just uncertain about their claims that this isn't Indian Hinduism anymore... because to a dalit it would probably sure as hell still look like it.

Holy shit. That was long.

Someone on a board I frequent asked this question.

I ask this question because I feel a bit of a interest in some Hindu deities. Vishnu, Shiva, Kali, etc.

However, I'm under the impression that it is pretty explicit in Hinduism that there is no conversion. That your born into it, not invited in, etc. There is a purification type ceremonies for those that converted to Islam/Christianity as an effort to get back to come back to their born faith, but there is no conversion process.

However, does this prohibit the worship of deities? Is that considered innapropriate??

My reservations when it comes to add-mixing with Hinduism are that it's a really colonialist thing to do, appropriating bits and pieces of someone else's religion, chucking the original embedded meanings, and creating your own out of symbols that (to Hindus) probably didn't actually mean anything to you to begin with.

It's not merely that it's difficult to convert. It's also not merely a matter of "being a poser is bad, mmkay." It's a matter of having enough respect for a nation and a culture that has had its ownership of itself taken away by British colonialism, and is still working hard to get that power back. I would feel like I was shoving them backward in that struggle by appropriating their religion without paying extreme care to respect for the original cultural context.

A good example: There are a lot of Western Kali-worshippers who don't really actually care how Indians revere Kali. They may know one or two stories about her that sounded kinda cool, and she's sorta dark and scary which is how they feel sometimes, but Kali will be nice to them so it's not like they'll really have to deal with her wreaking havoc on their lives. Right? I mean, their Kali isn't at all like that scary indiscriminately-destroying goddess of violent transformation. Their Kali is theirs.

But this is disrespectful to the culture in which it came, the role that Kali plays within that culture, and if you believe that the gods are literally and actually real, it's disrespectful to Kali (since it entails uprooting her from her context, ignoring who she is, and telling her she needs to start being someone else).

It's possible to do this respectfully, and I have finally found some who do. But it's something to be very very careful about. Indians and Hindus have spent long enough in history being told that their culture, history, and traditions do not rightly belong to them. It's important for cultural outsiders not to participate in that by claiming what is theirs for ourselves.

More responses to this are at the thread here.

A question came up on a forum I frequent.

Is it Wrong to stray from specified guidlines within a path? Will doing so tarnish a given practice? Will doing so show disrespect to those that have "done the work"? Should we adhere to the rules? Conversely, does holding onto the traditions from maybe thousands of years in the past keep us from moving forward? Should we take what we like, what is of use, and discard the rest?

Here's what I think. This is an easier question to answer with religions like Islam that have a core statement of faith. If you believe that there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet, that's all you have to believe. The other Pillars of Faith are all about action. So whatever else you believe, that one statement is your criterion. As I understand it, if you're on board with that, you're on board with Islam. If not, you're not.

Religions like Hinduism, Wicca, etc. are much trickier. A hard statement of faith like that--while extremely useful from a perspective of creating and sustaining a cultural identity for the group--is difficult precisely because excluding what is "not us" from what is "us" is contrary to what many Pagans want to see happening. Which basically means that developing any kind of coherent cultural identity within the group is contrary to what many Pagans want to see happening.

Christianity is somewhere in the middle. There are certainly statements of faith ("Jesus Christ is the son of the One True God and he died to redeem us from sin" or the like), but because there are so many definitions with their own interest in developing a unique core identity (which means they allow and exclude beliefs or believers based on criteria of their own in order to keep a coherent definition of their group)... there is a lot of fuzziness there. For example, multiple schools of thought about the nature of Christ.

There are the Nestorians, who feel that Jesus the man and Christ the son of God are effectively two different essences, even though they're centered around one guy and one name. Catholics are obviously not down with this (since whether the Virgin Mary was mother to just the human nature of Jesus or whether she birthed the whole kit and caboodle is kind of an important disputing point for them).

What I'm saying with all of this is that there are a lot of Muslims who meet the clearly-defined criteria set out by Islam, and are therefore justifiably defined as Muslim. There are Muslims who fit culturally but may not believe in the Shahadah. Islam has an easier time defining one as Muslim and one not than traditions like the various Pagan groups.

My personal feeling is that traditional groups are including and excluding certain beliefs out of a desire to maintain a cohesive identity. They basically just want to be able to know who they are. This isn't important to some Pagan groups, but out of respect to the ones that do place a priority on it, I wouldn't claim their name unless I fit their definitions. For groups that don't care who claims their name, sometimes I will when I'm intersecting with them.

So for me it's not about needing to define myself "correctly." It's about defining myself in a way that is respectful to the groups I may or may not be a part of depending on how much of a priority they place on being cohesive and how important it is to them to know who they are as a group.

So for me, it's not about an "Old Guard" needing to control their followers. It's about a group controlling their own identity, and if I respect them I'll let them do that for themselves if they need it. I won't take away their power to know who they are by clinging on to the group and muddling things up if the truth is that I'm actually something different from them.

That felt like a long ramble, but I hope I sort of got around to the point in there somewhere.

For other answers to this question, see the thread here.

A question came up on a forum I frequent.

Is it Wrong to stray from specified guidlines within a path? Will doing so tarnish a given practice? Will doing so show disrespect to those that have "done the work"? Should we adhere to the rules? Conversely, does holding onto the traditions from maybe thousands of years in the past keep us from moving forward? Should we take what we like, what is of use, and discard the rest?

Here's what I think. This is an easier question to answer with religions like Islam that have a core statement of faith. If you believe that there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet, that's all you have to believe. The other Pillars of Faith are all about action. So whatever else you believe, that one statement is your criterion. As I understand it, if you're on board with that, you're on board with Islam. If not, you're not.

Religions like Hinduism, Wicca, etc. are much trickier. A hard statement of faith like that--while extremely useful from a perspective of creating and sustaining a cultural identity for the group--is difficult precisely because excluding what is "not us" from what is "us" is contrary to what many Pagans want to see happening. Which basically means that developing any kind of coherent cultural identity within the group is contrary to what many Pagans want to see happening.

Christianity is somewhere in the middle. There are certainly statements of faith ("Jesus Christ is the son of the One True God and he died to redeem us from sin" or the like), but because there are so many definitions with their own interest in developing a unique core identity (which means they allow and exclude beliefs or believers based on criteria of their own in order to keep a coherent definition of their group)... there is a lot of fuzziness there. For example, multiple schools of thought about the nature of Christ.

There are the Nestorians, who feel that Jesus the man and Christ the son of God are effectively two different essences, even though they're centered around one guy and one name. Catholics are obviously not down with this (since whether the Virgin Mary was mother to just the human nature of Jesus or whether she birthed the whole kit and caboodle is kind of an important disputing point for them).

What I'm saying with all of this is that there are a lot of Muslims who meet the clearly-defined criteria set out by Islam, and are therefore justifiably defined as Muslim. There are Muslims who fit culturally but may not believe in the Shahadah. Islam has an easier time defining one as Muslim and one not than traditions like the various Pagan groups.

My personal feeling is that traditional groups are including and excluding certain beliefs out of a desire to maintain a cohesive identity. They basically just want to be able to know who they are. This isn't important to some Pagan groups, but out of respect to the ones that do place a priority on it, I wouldn't claim their name unless I fit their definitions. For groups that don't care who claims their name, sometimes I will when I'm intersecting with them.

So for me it's not about needing to define myself "correctly." It's about defining myself in a way that is respectful to the groups I may or may not be a part of depending on how much of a priority they place on being cohesive and how important it is to them to know who they are as a group.

So for me, it's not about an "Old Guard" needing to control their followers. It's about a group controlling their own identity, and if I respect them I'll let them do that for themselves if they need it. I won't take away their power to know who they are by clinging on to the group and muddling things up if the truth is that I'm actually something different from them.

That felt like a long ramble, but I hope I sort of got around to the point in there somewhere.

For other answers to this question, see the thread here.

Begali and Oriya night was WIN.

It was waaaay better than last year. Bengali night is fantastic. There was so much dancing! =D

Some women started dancing sorta spontaneously and when I went over to investigate, I was sorta shuffled and pressured into joining. This is probably because I was a nearby woman in a sari, since they didn't grab any of the others. It was nice feeling so welcomed.

And then GARBA DANCING. Yes. Yes yes yes.

I love Navratri, I love Indian people, I love Durga, I love dancing.

JAI MATA-JI!

I feel it is important to note that a goddess tradition is not inherently feminist. If the tradition in question elevates (brace yourself for awful jargon) patriarchal heteronormative gender roles, what have you really achieved?

For example, Hinduism has a lot of really strongly goddess-centered worship. It's still one of the most strictly patriarchal religions you'll find. Mentioning goddess figures like Kali as emblems that "empower" women is naive, and I seldom hear it from people who know how Kali is viewed in her native pantheon.

Gods do have a core of power in them that is inherently feminine. Their "shakti." Now, when there was a buffalo demon that the gods couldn't get rid of, and it was causing all kinds of issues. Mahisha's most obnoxious power was to generate more demons by bleeding. Every injury dropped his blood on the ground, and every drop of blood became a new demon. A real pain, that one. The gods, in order to deal with this, all pitched in from their shakti. Each contributed a piece of a new goddess so that she would be perfect. Her hair, her face, her breasts, her arms, her weapons, etc. each came from another god. Her name was Durga.

Durga went out to meet Mahisha on the field of battle. At first he proposed marriage to this beautiful goddess, but after a torrent of particularly vile curses from her he decided that fighting was also fine. During the battle, according to some tellings, Durga became so angry that her shakti sprang forward from her. Now, keep in mind that she was already made from the nastiest and most powerful shakti energy of the other gods. What came out of her was Kali.

A giant, long-limbed, black-skinned woman with dead babies for earrings, arms for a skirt, and a necklace of skulls burst forth and began tearing through the ranks of demons. She found a particularly gruesome way of preventing Mahisha from creating new soldiers. Whenever one of her enemies bled, she stretched out her long red tongue and drank the blood up before it could hit the earth and create more demons.

Well, the other gods all thought this was grand until the battle was over and they realized they couldn't stop her. They thought they'd distilled the destructive power of their shakti, and as it turns out it still wasn't pure womanly wrath just yet. What they created they could still control; you can tell Durga "enough is enough," but Kali has no such inclination to heed her divine masters.

It took Shiva, the destroyer, lying down at her feet to get her to stop. The realization that she was killing her husband finally triggered this raging shakti's better nature, and she calmed back down. Parvati, the aspect of the goddess who acts as Shiva's "good wife," (as opposed to Kali who tends to encourage him and instigate the destroyer) will still occasionally transform into Kali when she gets a little too angry and out of control.

What this tells us is that Hindu religion acknowledges female power. What this doesn't say is that female power is a good thing. It says that when you don't keep women on a short enough leash, the great power they hold inside them is a danger to the whole world itself. This is why you see Indian women with long braided hair. It is symbolic of keeping all that hot fiery power under control. Women in Hinduism have great potential within them, but there is a difference between strength and power. If a woman bends all her power toward enduring hardship and sustaining her family, she is good. If a woman drives her power outward upon the world, she is Kali. She is to be feared, and she must be stopped.

Indian feminists have been "reclaiming" Kali in a similar manner to western feminists reclaiming the figure Lilith from the Jewish Rabbinic tradition. The idea is to take a goddess who's supposed to illustrate why independent women are scary, and put a gloss of "but it's actually okay, really" over the whole thing. I think this is questionable, and I don't approve of it. However, lots of Indian women clearly do feel this is an empowering and positive thing, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt. It seems like a bad idea to me, but they've proven me wrong, so what the hell do I know.

I'm mentioning this to explain my reservations about western goddess feminism. The idea that all western women need is a goddess to replace the Hebrew God is, to me, an overly-simplistic way of looking at patriarchy. "Men have placed a god in charge of everything. If we replace it with a woman, everyone will acknowledge feminine power!" We've already seen that merely elevating a woman to godhood does not necessarily mean women will be empowered by the image, since Hinduism uses goddesses all the time to teach women their proper place.

So back to my reservations about Wiccan goddess worship. Does the goddess present a heteronormative gender role? Does the goddess present a new kind of femininity that is empowering to her followers?

Let me tell you how I see the goddess. The mother of us all--including the god, creator and nourisher and wise matron: maiden, mother, crone. She's a virgin until she chooses her lover, at which point they have lots of sex, she bears his child while he's off being dead in the underworld, and then through her he is born again. Cycle moves on. She is emotion, wisdom, maternity, the moon. Meanwhile, the god is the sun. He inseminates the earth, which bears forth all sorts of good fertile stuff, and then he goes out and goes hunting and shit while the goddess nurtures the earth.

Basically? She's a woman, in all the ways women have been taught to be women by men. She doesn't show up this way in all Wiccan practice, but looking at the myths of my own religion from the point of view of a religion scholar, I wonder how many other Wiccans think about this. When they talk about their great celestial mother, how conscious are they that they're boiling a woman down to one function: childrearing?

It's possible that I noticed this because I, like everyone else in my family for a few generations, have mother issues. I've had enough of being someone's child; I don't want another mother up in the moon with superpowers, thank you very much. So in rejecting this way of relating to the goddess, I am keenly aware of how seldom I see anything else. Because the maternal metaphor rings hollow for me, I notice the absence of other expressions of love for the divine feminine.

It was when I was considering this emotional block of mine that I noticed a sort of philosophical one as well. As a woman who is doing everything she can to avoid becoming a mother right now, I can't identify with a goddess who is so easy to reduce to that one social function. Not only can I not identify with her... I shouldn't have to. Why, in this day and age, should the first and most common option be a mother goddess?

I realize Dianic Wicca is the exception, but I don't feel like joining a tradition that thinks it can restore the cosmic balance by instituting a matriarchy as unfair and judgmental as any patriarchy. I couldn't embrace a tradition that believed excluding men would somehow rectify their exclusion of women.

So here's what I have to choose from, it seems. I can attach myself to a tradition that sees the goddess primarily as our mom (and who really thinks about their mother as being anything but their mother? As if she didn't have a life before her kids were born or after they left...), or a tradition that sees the goddess as the be-all end-all of worship and no use for men at all?

This is why my devotional practices, in private, are more centered on the god. This goddess everyone else loves so much... I don't know her. And I don't think she'd know me very well, either.

I feel it is important to note that a goddess tradition is not inherently feminist. If the tradition in question elevates (brace yourself for awful jargon) patriarchal heteronormative gender roles, what have you really achieved?

For example, Hinduism has a lot of really strongly goddess-centered worship. It's still one of the most strictly patriarchal religions you'll find. Mentioning goddess figures like Kali as emblems that "empower" women is naive, and I seldom hear it from people who know how Kali is viewed in her native pantheon.

Gods do have a core of power in them that is inherently feminine. Their "shakti." Now, when there was a buffalo demon that the gods couldn't get rid of, and it was causing all kinds of issues. Mahisha's most obnoxious power was to generate more demons by bleeding. Every injury dropped his blood on the ground, and every drop of blood became a new demon. A real pain, that one. The gods, in order to deal with this, all pitched in from their shakti. Each contributed a piece of a new goddess so that she would be perfect. Her hair, her face, her breasts, her arms, her weapons, etc. each came from another god. Her name was Durga.

Durga went out to meet Mahisha on the field of battle. At first he proposed marriage to this beautiful goddess, but after a torrent of particularly vile curses from her he decided that fighting was also fine. During the battle, according to some tellings, Durga became so angry that her shakti sprang forward from her. Now, keep in mind that she was already made from the nastiest and most powerful shakti energy of the other gods. What came out of her was Kali.

A giant, long-limbed, black-skinned woman with dead babies for earrings, arms for a skirt, and a necklace of skulls burst forth and began tearing through the ranks of demons. She found a particularly gruesome way of preventing Mahisha from creating new soldiers. Whenever one of her enemies bled, she stretched out her long red tongue and drank the blood up before it could hit the earth and create more demons.

Well, the other gods all thought this was grand until the battle was over and they realized they couldn't stop her. They thought they'd distilled the destructive power of their shakti, and as it turns out it still wasn't pure womanly wrath just yet. What they created they could still control; you can tell Durga "enough is enough," but Kali has no such inclination to heed her divine masters.

It took Shiva, the destroyer, lying down at her feet to get her to stop. The realization that she was killing her husband finally triggered this raging shakti's better nature, and she calmed back down. Parvati, the aspect of the goddess who acts as Shiva's "good wife," (as opposed to Kali who tends to encourage him and instigate the destroyer) will still occasionally transform into Kali when she gets a little too angry and out of control.

What this tells us is that Hindu religion acknowledges female power. What this doesn't say is that female power is a good thing. It says that when you don't keep women on a short enough leash, the great power they hold inside them is a danger to the whole world itself. This is why you see Indian women with long braided hair. It is symbolic of keeping all that hot fiery power under control. Women in Hinduism have great potential within them, but there is a difference between strength and power. If a woman bends all her power toward enduring hardship and sustaining her family, she is good. If a woman drives her power outward upon the world, she is Kali. She is to be feared, and she must be stopped.

Indian feminists have been "reclaiming" Kali in a similar manner to western feminists reclaiming the figure Lilith from the Jewish Rabbinic tradition. The idea is to take a goddess who's supposed to illustrate why independent women are scary, and put a gloss of "but it's actually okay, really" over the whole thing. I think this is questionable, and I don't approve of it. However, lots of Indian women clearly do feel this is an empowering and positive thing, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt. It seems like a bad idea to me, but they've proven me wrong, so what the hell do I know.

I'm mentioning this to explain my reservations about western goddess feminism. The idea that all western women need is a goddess to replace the Hebrew God is, to me, an overly-simplistic way of looking at patriarchy. "Men have placed a god in charge of everything. If we replace it with a woman, everyone will acknowledge feminine power!" We've already seen that merely elevating a woman to godhood does not necessarily mean women will be empowered by the image, since Hinduism uses goddesses all the time to teach women their proper place.

So back to my reservations about Wiccan goddess worship. Does the goddess present a heteronormative gender role? Does the goddess present a new kind of femininity that is empowering to her followers?

Let me tell you how I see the goddess. The mother of us all--including the god, creator and nourisher and wise matron: maiden, mother, crone. She's a virgin until she chooses her lover, at which point they have lots of sex, she bears his child while he's off being dead in the underworld, and then through her he is born again. Cycle moves on. She is emotion, wisdom, maternity, the moon. Meanwhile, the god is the sun. He inseminates the earth, which bears forth all sorts of good fertile stuff, and then he goes out and goes hunting and shit while the goddess nurtures the earth.

Basically? She's a woman, in all the ways women have been taught to be women by men. She doesn't show up this way in all Wiccan practice, but looking at the myths of my own religion from the point of view of a religion scholar, I wonder how many other Wiccans think about this. When they talk about their great celestial mother, how conscious are they that they're boiling a woman down to one function: childrearing?

It's possible that I noticed this because I, like everyone else in my family for a few generations, have mother issues. I've had enough of being someone's child; I don't want another mother up in the moon with superpowers, thank you very much. So in rejecting this way of relating to the goddess, I am keenly aware of how seldom I see anything else. Because the maternal metaphor rings hollow for me, I notice the absence of other expressions of love for the divine feminine.

It was when I was considering this emotional block of mine that I noticed a sort of philosophical one as well. As a woman who is doing everything she can to avoid becoming a mother right now, I can't identify with a goddess who is so easy to reduce to that one social function. Not only can I not identify with her... I shouldn't have to. Why, in this day and age, should the first and most common option be a mother goddess?

I realize Dianic Wicca is the exception, but I don't feel like joining a tradition that thinks it can restore the cosmic balance by instituting a matriarchy as unfair and judgmental as any patriarchy. I couldn't embrace a tradition that believed excluding men would somehow rectify their exclusion of women.

So here's what I have to choose from, it seems. I can attach myself to a tradition that sees the goddess primarily as our mom (and who really thinks about their mother as being anything but their mother? As if she didn't have a life before her kids were born or after they left...), or a tradition that sees the goddess as the be-all end-all of worship and no use for men at all?

This is why my devotional practices, in private, are more centered on the god. This goddess everyone else loves so much... I don't know her. And I don't think she'd know me very well, either.