No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Mother Earth as Metaphor: A Healing Pattern of Grieving and Giving Birth
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
Abstract
Mother Earth is often revered as a goddess in world mythology, but seldom recognized as also an important metaphor in the biblical theology of Old and New Testaments. The image of the earth as grieving mother is a recurrent theme, used in Scripture to symbolize the movement from tragedy and loss to the beginnings of hope. It is an image rich in implications for a theological approach to ecological questions, a search for human and sexual wholeness in a technological age, and a study of the relationship of biblical thought to the universal process of mythogenesis. More than this, however, it touches most deeply the human quest for the lost mother and the role of Christ's passion in the renewal of spiritual connectedness to the natural world.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The College Theology Society 1994
References
1 The “Venus of Willendorf,” found in Austria and dating back to ca 20,000 B. C. E., is one of the earliest Earth Mother fertility figures known See Sȷoo, Monico and Mor, BarbaraThe Great Cosmic: Mother Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987)Google Scholar
2 Classic studies of the Mother in world mythology include Dietench, Albrecht, Mutter Erde: Ein Versuch üher Volksreligion (Leipzig: Tübner, 1905)Google Scholar, Briffault, Robert, The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1927)Google Scholar, Neumann, Erich, The Great Mother (New York: Pantheon, 1955)Google Scholar, van der Leeuw, Gerhardus, Religion in Essence and Manifestation (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), I: 91–100Google Scholar
3 Moltmann, Jürgen, God in Creation (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), 299Google Scholar
4 The relationship of myth to biblical religion and its potential (as well as its limits) for illumining religious experience are important questions underlying the argument of this essay For a discussion of these questions, see Batto, Bernard F, Slaying the Dragon: Mythmaking in the Biblical Tradition (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1992)Google Scholar, Doty, William G, Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1986)Google Scholar, Eliade, Mircea, Myth and Reality (New York: Harper & Row, 1963)Google Scholar, Panikkar, Raimundo, Myth, Faith and Hermeneutics (New York: Paulist, 1979)Google Scholar, Lane, Belden C, “Myth,” The New Dictionary of Catholic Spirituality (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1993), 692–95Google Scholar
5 Patai, Raphael, The Hebrew Goddess (New York: Ktav, 1967)Google Scholar, shows how images of the cosmic mother came to be incorporated into Jewish thought about God, despite the resistance of ancient Israel to its neighboring religious traditions
6 Paper, Jordan, “Through the Earth Darkly: The Female Spirit in Native American Religions” in Vecsey, Christopher, ed, Religion in Native North America (Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1990), 57Google Scholar
7 Swentzell, Rina and Naranjo, Tito, “Nurturing: The Gia at Santa Clara Pueblo,” El Palacio 92: 1 (Summer-Fall 1986)Google Scholar
8 Paper, , “Through the Earth Darkly,” 14Google Scholar
9 Tuan, Yi-Fu, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 89.Google Scholar
10 “Ask the earth and she will tell you that she must mourn for the countless thousands who come to birth upon her. In the beginning all sprang from her, and there are more still to come; yet almost all her children go to perdition, and vast numbers of them are wiped out. Who then, has the better right to be mourning—the earth, which has lost such vast numbers, or you, whose sorrow is for one only?” (II Esdras 10:9-11).
11 Dorothee Sölle describes the linguistic process by which hope emerges from the expression of grief in her book, Suffering (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975), 61–86.Google Scholar
12 Brueggemann, Walter, The Prophetic Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978), 53Google Scholar, describes the prophet's ministry as one of “articulated grief.”
13 Brueggemann, Walter, Israel's Praise: Doxology Against Idolatry and Ideology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988), 42, 58–60.Google Scholar
14 Estes, Clarissa Pinkola, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (New York: Ballantine, 1992), 25–31.Google Scholar
15 This tale is echoed in a similar Hopi creation myth from northeast Arizona. See Erdoes, Richard and Ortiz, Alfonso, eds., American Indian Myths and Legends (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 11–13.Google Scholar
16 Julian of Norwich, Showings, ed. Colledge, Edmund and Walsh, James (New York: Paulist, 1978), chap. 60, 297-99.Google Scholar
17 See Nash, James A., Loving Nature: Ecological Integrity and Christian Responsibility (Nashville: Abingdon, 1991).Google Scholar
18 Merchant, Carolyn, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980), 30.Google Scholar
19 This needs to be qualified, as René Dubos observes, by the fact that deforestation and overgrazing were problems in the ancient Mediterranean world, despite Greco-Roman religions taking it for granted that animals, trees, rivers, and mountains have deep spiritual significance and deserve respect. See “Franciscan Conservation versus Benedictine Stewardship” in David, and Spring, Eileen, eds., Ecology and Religion in History (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 119–21.Google Scholar
20 Merchant, , Death of Nature, xv–xix.Google Scholar
21 See Sexon, Michael, “Myth: The Way We Were or the Way We Are” in Hall, T. William, ed., Introduction to the Study of Religion (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978).Google Scholar
22 Swan, James A, Nature as Teacher and Healer (New York: Villard Books, 1992), 73Google Scholar
23 Julian of Norwich, Showings, chap 18, 210 See Fox, Matthew, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance (San FranciscoHarper & Row, 1988), 124Google Scholar
24 Mathews, Caitlm, The Celtic Tradition (Shaftesbury, Dorset: Element Books, 1989), 97Google Scholar
25 Lovelock, James, The Ages of Gaia (New York: Norton, 1988), 19.Google Scholar
26 Moltmann, , God in Creation, 5–7, 31.Google Scholar
27 These can be seen to derive from the Noachic covenant offered in Genesis 9:8-17 and renewed in Hosea 2:18, embracing the whole of creation in God's redemptive plan. See Williams, George H., “Christian Attitudes Toward Nature,” Christian Scholar's Review 2/2 (Spring 1972): 122–24.Google Scholar
28 Uhlein, Gabriele O.S.F., ed., Meditations with Hildegard of Bingen (Santa Fe, NM: Bear, 1982), 64.Google Scholar
29 Estes, , Women Who Run with the Wolves, 25.Google Scholar
30 According to the Seneca tradition of “the storytelling stone” in western New York, all stories were originally derived from a great speaking stone discovered in the woods above Canandaigua Lake. It was through this stone that the earth first spoke.
31 Gill, Sam, Mother Earth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).Google Scholar
32 Diamond, See Irene and Orenstein, Gloria F., eds., Reweaving the Earth: The Emergence of Ecofeminism (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990).Google Scholar
33 de Chardin, Pierre Teilhard, Hymn of the Universe (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), 68–71.Google Scholar
34 Julian of Norwich, Showings, chap. 5, 183.
35 Morrison, Toni, Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987), 88–89Google Scholar
36 See Estes, , Women Who Run with the Wolves, 29, 196.Google Scholar