FOREWORD
The Goddess reveals many aspects of herself in Hallie Iglehart Austen’s magnificently conceived book. The reader becomes an Initiate into the feminine mysteries if the images and words within these pages are felt and known inwardly, illuminating the hidden, obvious truth: “Of course—the Creator and Comforter would have a feminine form.”
The author, whose previous book Womanspirit was a significant contribution to women’s spirituality, has now assembled and organized a major collection of images of the sacred feminine. She writes of the Goddesses with the ease of someone who knows them well, and in introducing them, she provides us with a sketch of the historical, archeological, mythological, and anthropological context in which they existed or were found.
But Austen’s book does more than provide us with information, it offers the possibility of having a subjective experience. There is a priestess in this author, whose arrangement and progression of the Goddesses is an enactment of ritual invocation that takes us from Creation to Transformation and then to Celebration. Her inclusion and choice of chants, poetry and ritual invites us to hear words, feel the cadence, respond with feelings and imagination, and thus shift out of the objective realm into a liminal one. As archetypal images, Goddesses have the potential to be experienced inwardly to begin with, which is then enhanced by the accompanying text.
The consequence of becoming subjectively aware of the Goddess or being touched by her in any of her forms is great, for—as Starhawk’s chant says—“She changes everything she touches and everything she touches, changes.”
This idea, however heretical it is to Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditionalists, is just the beginning of insight into the mysterious nature of the Goddess and the presence of the Goddess in women. That divinity and psyche have a feminine aspect that is deeply sacred, awesome and embodied rings true archetypally. This is knowledge that we have within us, part of the collective unconscious that we all share. It is knowledge that has been repressed by patriarchal religions, which has stressed that men rule by divine right, and have dominion over the Earth and over women who—unlike men—were said not to have been made in the image of God. The images in The Heart of the Goddess believe what we are still told about the exclusively masculine nature of the deity.
As the author of Goddesses in Everywoman, I did extensive research into goddess mythology, which makes me very aware that this book has the potential to become a major source of information. But I see that the potential of this book to initiate and change women and some exceptional men is its greater potential. The woman who absorbs the images as she looks at the photographs and understands the implications of what she is reading, or hears the poetry and chants and uses her imagination, or enacts rituals and feels something shift within herself, usually finds that her dream life, indeed her whole life, is affected, for she is changing from within and is taking in and taking on an awareness of the sacredness and strength in women through meeting the Goddesses.
In preparation for writing this Foreword, I dismantled the manuscript and covered my entire living room floor with the color copies of the photographs that appear in the book. I gazed around me at the lot of them, as well as picking them up one at a time to take each one in individually. I found that they were either immediately charismatic or they grew on me. Most of us have been brought up to be ashamed of our bodies and our genitals, and the dominant culture values only youthful, slender (and usually Caucasian) figures as beautiful. But as I lived with the images of this book, what was strange became familiar, those that were initially off-putting to me became beautiful in their own way or awesome, worth of respect and acceptance.
Certainly there is a destructive aspect to the feminine, in women as well as in Goddesses, just as in the natural world, decay and death are necessary parts of the process of regeneration. Unless we know and respect this complexity that the Transformative Goddesses represent (that which is undeveloped or repressed or rejected), we are split off and separated from what they are in ourselves: earthiness, lustiness, sexuality, power, ecstasy, death.
We cannot encounter the Goddess without women, for the Goddess either has the form of a woman (when she is seen in a vision or represented by a sculpture or painting, for example) or she is experienced through a woman. It is in a woman’s arms, for instance, that we may meet the Mother Goddess or the Goddess of Love. Even when feminine qualities are deified and abstracted as life-giving, or life-sustaining, they are still embodied. When the planet Earth is revered as Gaia, for example, this is not just an idea or just a spirit, but the presence of the Goddess in living matter.
Since Goddesses and women share attributes, to look upon the many images of the Goddess contained in The Heart of the Goddess is both to see her myriad forms, and for women, to see reflections of themselves in her.
To be moved by these images is to be part of what I have long been calling “the last wave of the women’s movement,” otherwise called “women’s spirituality.” It is the acceptance of women’s experience as sacred, as spiritual, and whatever women do to honor what they know, as ritual.
This book is an invocation of the Goddess.
Jean Shinoda Bolen, MD
