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Citation: S/HE: An International Journal of Goddess Studies V1 N2 (2022)
Publisher: Mago Books (https://magobooks.com)
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Website: https://sheijgs.space
Published date: October 31, 2022
Publisher: Helen Hye-Sook Hwang, Ph.D.
Mago Books Editorial Representative: Matthew Kim Hagen, M.A.
Co-founders: Mary Ann Beavis, Ph.D. and Helen Hye-Sook Hwang, Ph.D.
Editorial Advisor: Mary Ann Beavis, Ph.D.
Co-editors: Krista Rodin, Ph.D. and Kaalii Cargill, Ph.D.
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Abstract: This essay explores a thealogy of birth for birthing love through a matricentric Goddess-feminist lens. I seek to re-evaluate and restore birth-giving itself as Goddess-force and as an embodied source of maternal empowerment towards ecstatic love—for mothers giving birth and all those being born. In this rebirthing task, I critique patriarchal systems of medical authority that disempower mothers’ birth experiences, while highlighting contemporary mother-centred streams of birthing through midwifery and freebirth social movements. In all, I consider thealogical points from Carol P. Christ, to nourish Goddess foundations for experiential understandings of the love-centred power of living from maternal gifts of birth-force.
Key words: thealogy of birth, love, Goddessing, matricentric feminism, freebirth, midwifery
To delight in the existence of others. To delight in our own life.[1]
I sit in an inflated tub of warm water in my living room giving birth to my baby. Tender, warm water guides me into a deepening trance, holding and relaxing me in this fluid embrace. I am held in the womb of some Great Mother Goddess, even as I hold my baby in the amniotic waters of my own womb. Instinctively, my hands are working with each sensation as I raise my palms up out of the water, stretching them wide open like a salutation to Goddess, “yes I feel your presence Mother, as I am Mother now.” These intuitive gestures come to me as I am in what is known as “active labour.” I would more describe this as a multi-dimensional trance-dance of the universe, a meditation beyond meditations. With my hands stretched wide, I find myself hissssss-ing as sensations built down low and then up along the sides of my womb. There is no mistaking this ssssssssnake-like sound that guides my body to open in giving birth.[2]
I share this storied segment of giving birth to my first daughter at home – a transmission of birth experience to re-enter this creative, embodied text. The juice of my writing is born from spiritual feminist scholarly roots that nourish new forms of research, spiritual imaginaries, and ways of being, where experience from and in a female body is honoured as source of knowing and text. In her text, Rebirth of the Goddess, Carol P. Christ writes of “embodied thinking” as an alternate to the mythos of purely objective thought, “when we think through the body, we reflect upon standpoints embedded in our life experiences, histories, values…and interests.”[3] As embodied beings, “We admit that our scholarship is passionate, is interested, is aimed at transforming the world we have inherited.”[4]…
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[1] Carol P. Christ, She Who Changes: Re-imagining the Divine in the World (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 122.
[2] Adapted from Nané Jordan, “Birthdance, Earthdance: The Power and Passion of Women Giving Birth, a pilgrim’s path to birth”(MA thesis, New College of California, 2002).
[3] Carol P. Christ, Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality (New York: Routledge, 1997), 34-35.
[4] Ibid., 53.
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S/HE: An International Journal of Goddess Studies Volume 1 Number 2 (2022)