A goddess, a female deity, contrasts with male deities, known as "gods". A great many cultures have their own goddesses, sometimes alone, but more often as part of a larger pantheon that includes both of the conventional genders and in some cases even hermaphroditic deities. The Goddess can provide a female version of or analogue to God; sometimes, the relationship is more rooted in Monism, as opposed to a straight-cut Monotheism or Polytheism, and the Goddess and God are seen as part of one transcendental monad.
__Hinduism__
Hinduism admits a complex belief system that sees many gods and goddesses as being representative of and/or emanative from a single source, either a formless, infinite, impersonal monad known as Brahman, or a single God seen by some sects as Vishnu, others Shiva, or still others Devi, the mother goddess, providing a large range of belief system with Vedic scripture. Thus, many analogues between passive male ground and dynamic female energy have lead to the personification of such energies as male and female pairs, often envisioned as male gods and their wives. The transcendent monad, Brahman, transcends categories but its representation through the existential duality that is limited by time, space and causation, simply put the universe as we know it, occurs through the categories of male God and female energy, working as a pair. Brahma pairs with Sarasvati, Vishnu with Lakshmi, and Shiva with Uma, Parvati, or Durga. Kali is a form of Parvati. A further step was taken by the idea of the shaktas, or Hindu worshippers of the Goddess. Their, and much of Hindu tantra's, ideology sees Shakti as the principle of energy through which all divinity functions, thus showing the masculine to be dependent on the feminine. Indeed, in the great shakta scripture known as the Devi Mahatmya, all the goddesses are shown to be aspects of one presiding female force, one in truth and many in expression, giving the world and the cosmos the galvanic energy for motion. It is expressed through both philosophical tracts and metaphor that the potentiality of masculine being is given actuation by the feminine divine. The strong monist bent in Hinduism defies polytheist or monotheist categorization and for this reason local deities of different village regions in India are easily seen by outsiders as their own Goddess in different form.
__Judaism & Christianity__
Post Neolithic Monotheist cultures, which recognise only one central deity, generally do not recognise Goddess; recent history has overwhelmingly presented the single Deity in masculine terms, constantly using the masculine pronoun "he", and images like "Father", "Son", and "Lord". This trend has almost entirely excluded the feminine pronoun "she" as sacred, and images such as "Mother", "Daughter", and "Lady" as divine. (Although mainstream Judaism uses masculine words to describe G-d, Judaism maintains that G-d has no gender.)
While some mystics within the monotheist religions have used these feminine forms, such as the early Christian Collyridians, who viewed Mary as a Goddess; the medieval visionary Julian of Norwich; the Judaic Shekinah and the Gnostic Sophia traditions; and discreetly expressed Sufi texts in Islam, belief in feminine deity under Christianity was usually deemed heretical, and characteristic of heresy. Since the 1980s Christian feminists have challenged this view; some such as Mary Daly no longer consider themselves Christian but others continue to seek room within their traditions for the Divine Feminine and for female spiritual leadership.
__Other traditional religions__
Religions which recognise many deities as forms of the divine, in other words most ancestral religions, have no difficulty in including female deities. In "women's religions", a Goddess is surprisingly not typical, although such religions certainly never centre on a monotheist God (Sered Goddess, Mother, Sacred Sister 1996) and often lack deities as Westerners understand them.
__Neopaganism__
Wiccan and Neopagan practice includes veneration of the Great Goddess along with the Horned God. Dianic Wiccans celebrate only the Goddess or goddesses. While not all Pagans make the God an important part of their religion, none would deny the Goddess as a central Pagan tradition in general (it is important to recall the diversity of both Goddess and Pagan movements).
__Terminology__
Notes on terms:
* Sometimes the "Wiccan" and "Neopagan" coalesce, but for most, "Wiccan" clearly stands distinct as one type of Neopagan, as among those who consider themselves Pagan or Neopagan there are many non-Wiccans.
* Many academics favour the neologism 'Neopagan' which most Pagans detest, pointing out that modern forms of a faith obviously differ from historical or prehistoric forms. We do not, for example, generally speak of 'Neotantra' or 'Neobuddhism'.
* Goddess and Pagan devotees do not usually use the term "worship", as this implies an acutely hierarchical dialogue between deity and human, with the human in a very humble mode. To indicate the self-assertion and dynamic interaction between divine and human (or as some would say, two kinds of divine) they prefer terms like "veneration".
__Mother Earth__
Recently strong associations have arisen of the Goddess with Mother Earth (or Mother Nature), and with the Moon. These metaphors have very wide currency, to the point of becoming assumed as dogma, but some Pagans affectionately criticise them. Many cultures -- the Celts and the Egyptians, for example -- do not figure the Moon or the Earth (see Geb) as female, although the popular Western model certainly lent itself to phallic imagery at the time of the Moon landings in the 1960s and 1970s.
The Mother Earth motif usefully joins deep emotional loyalties to our mothers and to the ecological needs of the planet. Since mothering can become targeted so easily as a key resource for supposed 'female inferiority', a thealogy that unambiguously views childbirth and childcare as sacred meets with a warm welcome. Provocatively, Monica Sjoo's painting of 'God giving birth' -- a cartoon of a female outline with a globe/head emerging in soothing blue-greys -- came under a ban from exhibition imposed by her local council on grounds of "obscenity". However, the Mother Earth mythos can also backfire in the case of those whose mothering remained less than wonderful, and some feminists question the over-emphasis on (biological) mothering at a time when increasing numbers of women either refuse, limit, or feel great ambivalence about it. Goddess culture therefore makes much of spiritual mothering (i.e. creativity), mothering the vulnerable, and mothering the planet.
__10,000 Names & Symbols__
The Goddess can appear as the "Lady of the Ten Thousand Names", as did Isis. Adherents refer to her as 'Queen of Heaven', 'Lady of the Beasts', 'Creatrix' and just 'the Lady.' Worshippers sometimes approach her through her different aspects, represented by individual goddesses like Sarasvati, Lakshmi, Uma, Kali (of the Hindu tradition) Isis, Guan Yin, Pele or Athena.
A note on the Hindu view of the mother goddess is that while they are seen as individuals the larger mother goddess worship often sees them subsumed into a larger feminine divine as well. The Hindu liturgy of 108, or even 1008, names is common and the Divine Mother is seen in this multifaceted light as well. Aspects of symbolic mandala (circular meditative designs) and yoni (vagina) reverence are central to certain left-hand forms of Hindu tantra, and the intricate figures drawn (known as yantras) are parallels to other similar signs such as are found in the West to represent the feminine divine.
Some Wiccans perceive the goddess Aradia as a kind of messianic Daughter deity. They revere the yoni or vulva as a symbol of the Goddess, together with the cowrie shell, the (Moon) Crescent, the Earth, the Serpent, the Tree, the five pointed pentagram and the Eight Pointed Star, the Quartered Circle (compare Celtic Cross), and many animals and birds.
__Triple Goddess__
Goddesses or demi-goddesses appear in sets of three in a number of ancient European pagan mythologies; these include the Greek Erinyes (Furies) and Moirae (Fates); the Norse Norns (Fates); Brighid and her two sisters, also called Brighid, from Irish or Keltoi mythology, and so on. One might also see the three witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth as following this pattern. Robert Graves popularised the triad of "Maiden" (or "Virgin"), "Mother" and "Crone", and while this idea did not rest on sound scholarship, his poetic inspiration has gained a tenacious hold.
Considerable variation in the precise conceptions of these figures exists, as typically occurs in Neopaganism and indeed in pagan religions in general. Some choose to interpret them as three stages in a woman's life, separated by menarche and menopause. Others find this too biologically based and rigid, and prefer a freer interpretation, with the Maiden as birth (independent, self-centred, seeking), the Mother as giving birth (interrelated, compassionate nurturing, creating), and the Crone as death and renewal (wholistic, remote, unknowable_ — and all three erotic and wise. Often three of the four phases of the moon (waxing, full, waning) symbolise the three aspects of the Triple Goddess: put together they appear in a single symbol comprising a circle flanked by two mirrored crescents.
Some, however, find the triple incomplete, and prefer to add a fourth aspect. This might be a Dark Goddess or Wisewoman, perhaps as suggested by the missing dark of the moon in the symbolism above, or it might be a specifically erotic goddess standing for a phase of life between Maiden (Virgin) and Mother, or the Warrior between Mother and Crone.
The Triple Goddess as Maiden, Mother and Crone has also reached modern popular culture, such as Neil Gaiman's own conception of the Furies in The Sandman, and elsewhere.
__Gender, Pagan Men__
Of all sectors of Goddess Spirituality, Paganism has the most well developed culture of a divine polarity of gender, which has strong parallels with Tantra. The God is a powerful inspiration to a "third way" for men, neither wimp nor bully but "everything the male can be". While the search for Goddess has involved an unearthing of the hidden, the search for the God, which usually comes afterwards, needs a transformation of ugly, unworkable models of the masculine. Goddessing is an embodied thealogy, and Pagan men find interesting beds, but have to meet the challenge of women of power in order to be invited into them. Paradoxically this means sharing power, and relaxing away from the burden of being eternal fixers and in charge. In almost all ways the divine couple can mirror each other's attributes, as in the Horned Huntress, and Old Horny/ the Hunter. Both represent the Divine Lover found in all mystical traditions. While the priestess is often (though not always) held as slightly pre-eminent, the priest is deeply respected in his own right.
While some Wiccan groups can, in insisting on the sacred polarity, exclude a positive role for homosexuals and lesbians unless they act as ceremonial heterosexuals, others actively welcome a variety of sexual orientation and explore mythos that can reflect it.nike free run 5.0 green