Oracle of the Goddess

By Anna Franklin

Illustrated by Paul Mason

"Listen to the words of the Great Mother, who of old was called among men Artemis, Astarte, Diana, Aphrodite, Ceridwen, Isis and many other names..." Doreen Valiente The Book of Shadows

 The Goddess has been known to every race and in every corner of the world. She has had many names and many faces. She is chaste virgin and passionate lover, fruitful mother and barren crone, creator of life and bringer of death. In many places, the feminine side of the divine has continued to be acknowledged, though in the western world, goddesses have been banished and demonised for centuries. ‘God’ is viewed as exclusively male.

Towards the end of the Bronze Age the settled Goddess worshippers were overrun by tribes of Aryan and Semitic descent. These warriors worshipped sky and thunder gods, gods of battle, fire and storm, a mythology which developed in the later Palaeolithic Age amongst these nomads who had to contend with a much harsher environment. The invasions had a dramatic impact on the Goddess cultures from Europe to India. The invaders were patriarchal, rode horses, herded cattle and prohibited writing. They appeared as Hittites in Anatolia, as Hurrians and Kassites in Mesopotamia, Achaeans and Dorians in Greece, and Aryans in the Indus valley. Wherever they penetrated they established themselves as the ruling caste. They introduced the idea of the opposition of light and darkness, rather than the totality of the older view. They introduced the idea that man was separate from the deity, and the deity was separate from creation. All that was good and noble was attributed to the master Gods, all that was the native nurture power of the older religion of the Goddess was related to the darkness, which became a negative concept.

In early Sumeria, Egypt and Crete, women played a public role, owning property and transacting business. Sisters and brothers inherited equally. After 2,300 BCE their status deteriorated. The Semitic tribes regarded women merely as the property of men. Brothers, husbands and fathers had the right of life or death over them. Daughters could be sold into slavery or exposed to die. Sons inherited all property. The Aryan peoples had no priestesses and regarded women as chattels.

The concept of the single male deity, a father needing no mother, gradually took hold. The role of the Goddess was denied, and in consequence the status of women was lowered. Christianity, Judaism and Islam converted the Goddess mythology into stories of evil, building churches over sacred sites, and declaring the old gods and goddesses to be demons, or where this was difficult, changing them to Christian saints, as the goddess Brighid became St Brigit in Ireland. Women became less than second class citizens in religion, some theologians even denying them souls. Even today, many deny that women can become priests – a vocation, intelligence, faith and dedication meaning nothing alongside the fact of possessing the wrong set of genitalia. This is a world view that has women as an adjunct to creation, a view that keeps her in her place. All that is male is glorified; all that is female is denigrated as unclean and unfit – too earthly for participation in the worship of a glorious, exclusively male deity who lives apart from his sinful creation. Of course, many Christians, Moslems and Jews are far more enlightened than this, but it remains a lop-sided view of spirituality. The English occultist Dion Fortune said that any religion without a goddess is half atheist.

The deep-seated need for a female aspect to deity has persisted throughout the centuries. Denied a goddess who understood the patterns of their lives, their sorrows and their joys, women met this need through cults of various saints, particularly the veneration of the Virgin Mary. However, these saints are never whole women and only holy because they deny their female natures. Mary’s womanhood is repudiated by the church – her son was conceived without sexual intercourse, she gave birth with no pain and without rupturing her hymen; she lived with her husband as a celebrate. The message is clear – holiness is only achievable by denying normal human love.

In the twentieth century, men and women began to realise that female spirituality and the role of the goddess had been denied. Feminists and modern Pagans alike have striven to restore this balance, most recognising male and female spirituality in equilibrium, two halves of an harmonious whole. This world view regards humans as part of nature, children of the Great Mother, along with the Earth, plants and animals, all related in a single whole. The Goddess is revealed in manifest nature, part of it and part of us.

The Goddess Oracle is a 25 card deck illustrating Goddesses from all around the world. The accompanying book details the mythology of the Goddesses and their lessons. The cards are designed to be used with divination, meditation and pathworking.