The Living Goddess
I have written and given talks on the figure of The Goddess in nature and history. I am far from being expert in the field and wrote out of a genuine interest and curiosity, as one who affirms the sacredness of Earth against the dominant conceptions of a disenchanting science. But here and there my work here has caught the attention of others, impressing those more expert than I. My interest here is bound up with my concern to critique the idea that we live in a meaningless universe. If I am a critic of a naturalism that is reified through the disenchanting lens of science, I am favourable to that naturalism that sees nature as alive and animate, with ourselves a part.
Max Weber wrote famously on ‘the disenchantment of the world.’ In the original German, ‘disenchantment’ refers to the ‘de-magification’ of the world, a ‘dis-godding’ and devaluation. A disenchanting science holds that the world is objectively valueless, purposeless, and meaningless. Against that, I hold that the world is objectively valuable, purposeful, and meaningful – there is a good that inheres in the world. We are co-creators in an animate, participatory universe, moving and not static.
Human beings possess a cosmic longing for meaning and belonging, a search for reunion that is planted within them. How are we to be in relation to spirit? A reverence for Nature is a good beginning. We are all looking for answers, and the answer that there is no meaning to life other than survival and reproduction is no answer at all.
Critchley, P., 2013. The Eternal Womanly. [e-book] Available through: Academia website <http://mmu.academia.edu/PeterCritchley/Papers
This paper should be read in conjunction with
Critchley, P. 2012., Of Gods and Gaia: Men as Gods Gambling with Gaia [e-book] Available through: Academia website <http://mmu.academia.edu/PeterCritchley/Books
This book consists of three parts, Part III which is entitled The Goddess Species and contains sections entitled ‘The Renascent Goddess,’ ‘When the Witches Ride Again,’ ‘The Re-enchantment of the World,’ ‘The Animal Shadow,’ ‘Earth Energies,’ ‘The Vital Spirit of Nature,’ ‘The Numinous,’ ‘From Earth Goddess to Sky-God,’ ‘Nature Alive and Nature Dead,’ ‘The Death of Pan.’
Goddesses, Animality, and Nature (2010) 18,297
I also have a fuller text entitled The Goddess Species which needs to be properly edited before publication.
It’s all about living in tune with Earth energies and Earth spirits, attunement. Being charged with natural energy, pulling the energy around us into ourselves to spark our own energy. Creation, union, and reunion in attunement with the moving force that nourishes and sustains all things. Reunion is a reawakening through which we begin to recover our primal birth-right and experience the sheer, intoxicating joy of the aliveness of alive. The Goddess is the turning spiral that whirls us in and out of existence, opening our eyes to see there is no struggle of life against the universe, no extraneous power to feared, obeyed, and served, and nothing to be saved from. Only love: love of self and of others, love of other beings and bodies, of trees, of stones, of sky and clouds, of seas and rivers, of all that runs and flies and swims and crawls on the face of Nature – living in harmony with the rhythm and seasons of the Earth. We come to Earth with a purpose and there is something good for us to do.
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