What Is Goddess Tradition?

Circle Round: Raising Children in Goddess Traditions
by Starhawk

In our rushed, stressed society, it's sometimes difficult to spend meaningful time as a family. Now Starhawk, Diane Baker, and Anne Hill offer new ways to foster a sense of togetherness through celebrations that honor the sacredness of life and our Mother Earth.

Goddess tradition embraces the wheel of life, the never-ending cycle of birth, growth, love, fulfillment, and death. Each turn of the wheel is presented here, in eight holidays spanning the changing seasons, in rites of passage for life transitions, and in the elements of fire, air, water, earth, and spirit. Circle Round is rich with songs, rituals, craft and cooking projects, and read-aloud stories, as well as suggestions for how you can create your own unique family traditions. Here are just some of the ways to make each event in the cycle of life more special:

• Mark Summer Solstice by making sweet-smelling herb pillows for good dreams
• Send a teenager off to college with the Leaving Behind and Carrying With rituals
• Comfort an injured child with the Tree of Life meditation
• Commemorate a loved one by planting or donating a tree

As a one-of-a-kind resource for people of many faiths and beliefs, Circle Round will be a beloved companion in your home for years to come.

Chapter 1

Not long ago I (Starhawk) was part of a circle of women celebrating the First Blood ritual of my Goddess-daughter Shannon. We walked a labyrinth cut into a meadow on a ridge of the coastal mountains; we strung necklaces of blessings and beads; we bathed her in a clear stream trickling through a grotto of moss-covered rocks. The ritual felt as ancient as the spirals we traced on her back and shoulders with henna paste, and at the same time as contemporary as the self-tanning cream her mother added to the paste to make the designs last longer. In that way, our ritual was a perfect expression of the old/new character of the Goddess tradition itself: primeval as the big-bellied sculptures of Paleolithic cave dwellers, modern as the thousands of Pagans linked on the Internet.

Goddess tradition is indeed both the oldest and youngest of spiritual paths. For as long as human beings have existed, the numinous powers of conceiving, birthing, feeding, and bleeding have stirred the imagination wherever people lived in close relationship with the earth. For generations, the European-based expressions of that long tradition were suppressed or forgotten. But over the last twenty years, as our ecological and social crises have deepened, more and more women and men have been newly drawn toward a spirituality that puts the earth at center.

Most Pagans, therefore, have come to the Goddess in adult life. We are faced with the challenge of rearing our children in traditions in which we ourselves were not raised. The heart of our ritual for Shannon, for example, was the time we spent telling stories about our own first menstruations, which were not celebrated with gifts and magic. Our tales were charged with the awkward feelings and embarrassment of the women of our generation, born at midcentury into a world in which rituals such as Shannon's were mentioned only in anthropology texts. We stand between two worlds: the world of our parents and grandparents, in which rituals such as Shannon's are unthinkable, and the world of our daughters and sons, grandchildren, and Goddess-children, for whom we hope such celebrations will become the norm.

How, then, do we answer our children when they ask questions about life and death, about causes and origins, about right and wrong?

In this section we present the basic worldview and some of the core myths of the Goddess tradition. If you are brand-new to Goddess tradition, the following discussion will help you understand the concepts and values that underlie our stories and rituals. If you have many years of experience creating ritual on your own, what follows will clarify our interpretations. If you identify strongly with some other spiritual tradition, or with none at all, you will find here both differences and points of similarity with your own beliefs.

The stories and explanations that follow are meant not as gospel but as a workable framework for rituals and traditions that we hope will develop many unique expressions reflecting your own encounters with the sacred and the needs of your own community.

Goddess Tradition: Explanations for Children

Who Is the Goddess?

The earth is a living being whom we call the Goddess. Everything around us is alive and part of her living body; animals and plants, of course, but also some things that may not ordinarily seem to be alive, such as rocks, mountains, streams, rivers, stars, and clouds.

Even though we are separate people, all of us are part of her, just as each of your fingers is a part of your hand. And the earth herself is part of the larger living body of the universe, just as your hand is part of your arm, and your arm is part of your body.

Each living being is important and sacred, the way each part of your body is important to you. When something is sacred, we must take care of it and respect it. Human life is sacred to us, and so are the plants and the animals and all the elements that make life possible. If one thing is hurt, it hurts us all - just as when you cut even the tip of your little finger, you feel the pain all over.

The Goddess is always close to us. You touch the Goddess whenever you hug somebody, climb a tree, smell a flower, or pet a cat. The water we drink, the food we eat, and the ground we walk on are all part of the Goddess.

We also believe in many different Goddesses and Gods, whom we call by many different names. They are all spirit parts of the living universe, and there are many beautiful stories about them. To Pagans, each Goddess and God is a different way of trying to understand the universe. The universe is so enormous that our minds cannot understand it all at once, only in parts. We know that different people have different names they use for Goddesses and Gods, and that's good. The universe-being is like a great jigsaw puzzle. Each of us has a piece of the puzzle, and the more pieces we place together, the more we can understand about the whole. No one group or piece has all the picture; no one idea is right for everybody. The Goddess tradition teaches us to respect other beliefs and ways of thinking.

The Goddesses and Gods can help us in different ways. When we call on a particular Goddess or God, it's as if we stepped into that piece of the jigsaw puzzle. In the movie Mary Poppins, the children step into a chalk picture and it comes alive and takes them into another world. Calling on a particular Goddess or God is a bit like that. In our imagination, that piece of the puzzle comes alive for us, and we learn something only that Goddess or God can teach us. In this book, the many stories about different Goddesses and Gods are like magic pictures we can enter.

The Circle of Life

Life is a circle. We are born, we grow up, and we die. But death too is part of the circle, not a final end. When we die, we are told, our spirit goes to a place where we can rest and grow young again, and be with the Goddess and the old Gods. We call this place Summerland, or the Isle of Apples, or the Land of Youth, and we imagine it as a beautiful land across a dark sea, outside of ordinary time. There we can think about what we learned in this life and what we might do in our next life. When we are ready, we are reborn in some new form. When someone we love dies, we are sad because we can't see them and talk to them in our daily lives anymore, and we will miss them. But we are not afraid for them, because we know that they will be in a place of peace and love and beauty.

We can't see the dead, or talk to them, except in our minds, but some of us do have dreams or visions of the dead. Sometimes we receive very clear messages from them. Some of us remember other lifetimes or know things that we learned in other lives. But mostly we know that life is a circle because we see how everything in nature moves in circles.

The moon is born as a silver crescent, grows to be round and full, and wanes away to darkness, only to be born again. The seasons change from warm to cold and back to warm, or from rainy to dry to rainy. Baby plants grow up as green shoots from the earth, grow tall, blossom, set seed, and die. The seed falls to the earth and goes underground, only to rise again in the spring.

Copyright © 1998 by Miriam Simos, Diane Baker and Anne Hill.

About the Author

Starhawk, author of The Fifth Sacred Thing and Walking to Mercury, lives with her husband, step-children, and Goddess-children in San Francisco, where she works with the Reclaiming collective. Diane Baker, a writer, attorney, and co-founder of the Reclaiming collective, lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband and two daughters. Anne Hill, a teacher, writer, and musician, works with the Reclaiming collective and lives in Sebastopol, California, with her husband and three children.