334 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 39, Number 3  September 2016

Listen to the Words of the Great

Mother: The Goddess Art of
Mary Beth Edelson
Mary F. Zawadzki

For some American feminist artists in the 1970s
the Goddess and the multiplicity of Her mytholo-
gies and images throughout history provided a
valuable source of inspiration in developing a new
visual language outside the realm of what Carol P.
Christ and Judith Plaskow call “God-language”
(4). Through a variety of media such as painting,
sculpture, photography, and performance art,
these artists utilized Goddess imagery to explore
the possibilities of a feminine divine and personal
power. One such artist, Mary Beth Edelson (b.
1933), participated in the feminist reclamation of
Goddess mythology and imagery that challenged
prevalent notions of female identity and function
while honoring the roots of women’s history. Her
active participation in the feminist theological cri-
tique of Western male-dominated religions places
Edelson’s work within the slippery and, more
often avoided, realm of theological theory and
practice. More specifically, it fits into the dis-
course of the Women’s Spirituality Movement of
the 1970s, particularly in their questioning of
“God-language” and the usefulness of the three
main Western religions, that of Judaism, Chris-
tianity, and Islam. Additionally, Edelson’s claim
to have been “involved with Goddess a long time
before the Women’s Spirituality Movement,”
combined with the specific poses she assumes in
some of her photographs, her ritual nudity, and
the descriptive language she uses to talk about her
relationship with the Goddess and the rituals she
performed, suggests that she was either directly
involved in, or has a working knowledge of, the
Neo-Pagan movement, more specifically of Wicca
(Kimball 99).1
Throughout the 1970s, Edelson used ritualistic
forms in her performance art and Goddess ima-
gery in the manipulation of the black and white
photographs that documented many of her per-
formance rituals. These rituals fall into three dif-
ferent types: private rituals performed alone in a
desolate area and recorded by a camera set on a
timer, rituals done with friends and family that
were not recorded, and public rituals that
included both selected participants and a public
who witnessed the art act, which were sometimes
recorded. This essay focuses primarily on the
manipulated photographs taken during Edelson’s
private performance rituals at Outer Banks,
North Carolina, in 1973. The photographs are of
a nude Edelson, standing with her arms stretched
over her head, legs spread wide with the camera
looking up at her body (Figures 1–4). She used
the same photograph multiple times. Each time
she altered the images by drawing or painting
heads of Goddesses or other Goddess-based attri-
butes such as those found in the Hindu depictions
of Kali Ma, pre-Christian sculptures of Sheela na

Mary F. Zawadzki is Assistant Professor of Art History at Texas A&M. Her research primarily focuses on nineteenth-century
American art, art and esthetic education, and print technology. She is the Area Chair for American Studies for the Mid-Atlantic
Popular and American Culture Association and serves on its Advisory Board.
The Journal of American Culture, 39:3
© 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
 Listen to the Words of the Great Mother  Mary F. Zawadzki 335

Figure 2. Mary Beth Edelson. Jumping Jack Sheela.

Figure 1. Mary Beth Edelson. Sheela Plays Kali. Performance at Outer Banks, North Carolina, 1973.
Performance at Outer Banks, North Carolina, 1973. Jumpin Jack Sheela, 1973, ink and marker on silver
Sheela Plays Kali, 1973, ink, china marker, paper gelatin print
collage on silver gelatin print

Figure 3. Mary Beth Edelson. Trickster Body.

Performance at Outer Banks, North Carolina, 1973.
Figure 4. Mary Beth Edelson. Red Kali.
Trickster Body, 1975, collage and oil paint on silver
Performance at Outer Banks, North Carolina, 1973.
print
Red Kali, 1973, Oil paint, china marker, ink on
silver print
336 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 39, Number 3  September 2016
Gig, or Greek images of Baubo. She also added
color, lines, or other abstract designs that suggest
energy fields or movement directly onto the pho-
tographs. The conflation of her own body with
that of the Goddess is a personally transformative
exercise that makes personal power accessible
since the act anchors herself into the notion of the
“divine within” suggested by both Neo-Pagans
and Carl Jung; and a politically transformative act
that uses the idea of “self-as-Goddess” to promote
the ideological questioning of stereotypical gen-
der roles. Edelson’s “self-as-Goddess” provides
an alternative to male divinity and, more impor-
tantly, deconstructs the male-centric language
associated with the Judio-Christian-Islamic reli-
gions, thereby, subverting the cultural, social, and
political power of God-language and those reli-
gions that promote it.
Reclaiming the Goddess
In 1975, in a Unitarian Church in Boston, a
spirituality conference called “Through the
Looking Glass,” was organized by five women
who called themselves Pomegranate Produc-
tions. Its purpose paralleled that of what was
becoming the Women’s Spirituality Movement,
a movement that questioned the role of women
in religion, women’s history in religion, and the
language of religion. The women involved,
many of whom were theologians, religious lead-
ers, artists, and academics, questioned the obvi-
ous absence of female clergy, church leaders,
and rabbis; the misogynistic treatment of
women within the religious traditions; and the
male-centered language within the sacred texts
that lead specifically to the oppression of
women within the traditions. Many in the move-
ment questioned the veracity and usefulness of
the three main Western traditions, that of Chris-
tianity, Judaism, and Islam. The movement split
into two opposing views: those who believed in
the value of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradi-
tions and worked within those traditions to
reconstruct the sacred language, to find positive
examples of women within the sacred texts, and
to institute female ecclesiastical leadership; and
those who believed that the entire Western tra-
dition was useless to women and the very cause
of her oppression in the first place. Therefore,
they believed that it should be abandoned all
together, replacing it with either Goddess-
spirituality or a framework of androgyny.2 The
conference organizers hoped to attract a couple
hundred participants. Eighteen hundred women
attended, including Mary Beth Edelson.
By 1975, her artistic agenda paralleled that of
the Women’s Spirituality Movement, in that both
artist and movement sought to challenge the patri-
archal religions and the language and symbols
within. In doing so, both hoped to align women
with a new sense of divine strength and freedom,
provide strong gynocentric images to identify
with, and release the self from thousands of years
of patriarchal religious oppression, in turn releas-
ing all women from the oppression that perme-
ated Western society. Edelson states in her
conversation with Carolee Schneemann that she
was “in favor of creating my own contemporary
feminist sacred practice, which was rupture with
and challenge to organized religions,” aligning her
practice with those feminists in the Women’s
Spirituality Movement who wanted to completely
do away with Western religions and develop a
religious practice based on the Goddess that was
organic, changing, and growing (The Art of Mary
Beth Edelson 170).
Edelson claims to have been working with
Goddess imagery and mythology before the con-
ference, dating her coming to the Goddess in
1961, when she was pregnant with her first child.
She states, “[I] experienced what was happening
to my body as holy, as sacred. The work that I
conceived during this period reflects my attitude
. . .” (“See for Yourself” 312). Where, then, did her
knowledge and practical usage of Goddess ima-
gery, mythology, and ritual structure in the early
1960s and 1970s come from? According to Gloria
Feman Orenstein, Edelson and her fellow God-
dess artists were inspired to explore the transfor-
mative and political possibilities of the Goddess
by the writing of archaeologist, Marija Gimbutas,
 Listen to the Words of the Great Mother  Mary F. Zawadzki
and sculptor, Merlin Stone (176). Both authors
participated in the process of rediscovering and
reclaiming women’s history and their historical
contributions, regardless of the caliber of these
contributions. Most importantly, the authors
explored the possibility of a Goddess-worship-
ping, European matriarchy existent in Paleo- and
Neolithic societies. Furthermore, Orenstein sug-
gests that the Jungian concept of the collective
unconscious explains why many feminist artists
who never heard about the Goddess before were
suddenly dreaming about Her and creating God-
dess-centric images. She states that at that
moment of the late 1960s and early 1970s, she
“had also come to believe that the archetype of
the Great Goddess was emerging in the universal
psyche at that moment in history” (176).
It is certainly true that feminists of all disci-
plines were engaged in recovering historical
female figures and their accomplishments in order
to write women’s history, or “herstory” as Oren-
stein calls it. However, Orenstein fails to take into
consideration the cultural, or in this case, the
countercultural, zeitgeist in America at this time.
Instead, she claims the Goddess and Her study as
solely part of the feminist movement, creating a
cosmic mythology to verify her claims.
In her book, Drawing Down the Moon:
Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other
Pagans in America Today, Margot Adler argues
that the anthropological study, The Witch-Cult in
Western Europe (1921), by Margaret Murray, and
Robert Grave’s work, The White Goddess (1949),
had tremendous influence in bringing Goddess-
consciousness into the West, and, in turn, moti-
vated individuals to re-establish working Neo-
Pagan religions for Her worship. She states that
many of the Neo-Pagans she interviewed for her
book “noted that after World War II a number of
books put forth the idea of goddess worship as a
way to turn humanity from its destructive course”
(59). By the mid-1950s Goddess worship in the
form of the Witchcraft Revival was well under-
way in England and it is said to have made its way
to America by the early 1960s with the arrival of
Raymond and Rosemary Buckland, practitioners
of the Garnerian Witchcraft tradition. Whether or
337
not there were Neo-Pagan groups already practic-
ing in America when the Bucklands arrived is up
for debate. What is important is that the Goddess
and Her worship took hold of American con-
sciousness by the early 1960s, and was fueled by
the visionary quests of a free-thinking, anti-
authoritarian, counterculture that sought alterna-
tive ways of spiritual being. Two of the earliest
Neo-Pagan books published in America, Buck-
land’s, Witchcraft from the Inside (1971) and Issac
Bonewits’ Real Magic (1971), indicate that by
1971 there was a reading public interested in such
topics, a public who would be directed via the
books’ bibliographies to Gerald Gardner’s earlier
writing of the mid-1950s regarding the Goddess
and witchcraft practices.
By the time Second Wave feminism gained full
momentum in the 1970s, the Goddess and Her
worship had already been present in both the
counterculture that fed revolutionary thinkers,
artists, and movements and in the academy with
the publications of archeologists and anthropolo-
gists who were in support of, or against, Margaret
Murray. Although the myth of an ancient, God-
dess-worshipping matriarchy was and is highly
contested, the concept of the Goddess, Her
mythology, and Her worship by women-in-
power played a pivotal role for many feminists
who were engaged in theological questioning. The
inclusion of this theological discourse by women
like Starhawk, Z. Budapest, and Vicki Nobel, who
were contemporary practitioners of the Neo-
Pagan tradition of witchcraft, provided a living,
practicing, and growing alternative to patriarchal
theological structures. Goddess mythology pro-
vided a new way of thinking about the female
body and its functions, and Her diversity of forms
provided an alternative to the stereotypical femi-
nine gender roles.
By midcentury, Neo-Pagan groups in both Bri-
tain and the United States, particularly Wiccan
covens, started to practice a modern interpretation
of what can be called European shamanism. The
core doctrines of this practice are believed by
many Neo-Pagans to have continued into the
modern day by the efforts of old European fami-
lies. This assumed unbroken tradition of
338 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 39, Number 3  September 2016
European shamanic practices was said to have
been handed down since Paleo- and Neolithic
times through the matriarchy and went under-
ground during the Inquisition, only to resurface
in the writing of folklorists, archeologists, mem-
bers of secret magical societies, and self-declared
witches in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Within this practice, adherents honor
the various Goddesses and Gods from around the
world, although in some covens, especially those
stemming out of feminist discourse, only the
Goddess is worshipped in Her many forms. The
primary doctrines that link the majority of Neo-
Pagan traditions are that of a profound respect
and connection to the natural world, and an
understanding that the divine (Goddess and God)
is within. How this translates into practice is as
diverse as the people who practice Neo-Paganism.
For some, the Earth and all of Her creatures are
literally a manifestation of the female divine; for
others these are intellectual symbols that work
within a culturally defined psyche. Some see the
changing seasons and the phases of the moon as
an unchanging connection to our past cultures
and, like those cultures, these changes should be
marked with celebrations and religious ritual.
Others connect these changes with those of the
aging human body, seeing themselves mirrored in
the natural cycles of birth, life, death, and rebirth.3
It is impossible to separate Neo-Paganism from
the growth of Goddess-awareness among those
theologians, artists and scholars involved in the
Women’s Spirituality Movement because they
share much of the same literature, depend on the
same mythology of a Paleo- and Neolithic wor-
ship by matriarchal cultures, and because of the
inclusion of practicing witches like Starhawk and
Z. Budapest within the movement.
Becoming the Goddess
It is the Neo-Pagan, specifically that of the
Wiccan tradition, definition, relationship, and
expression of the divine that is most important
for understanding Edelson’s 1973 Outer Bank
rituals and photographs. That is not to suggest
that Edelson is Wiccan. However, her pose in
the photographs Sheela Plays Kali (Figure 1),
Jumping Jack Sheela (Figure 2), Trickster Body
(Figure 3), and Red Kali (Figure 4) and their
alterations suggest that she was very much
aware of its beliefs and ritualistic traditions.
They are all produced from the same pho-
tograph and in turn, from the same ritual. Edel-
son’s use of photography to document her
rituals serve two purposes: to document private
and public rituals and to produce art work from
the private rituals that she documents, as seen in
the manipulation of the Outer Banks pho-
tographs. However, these photographs often
have a very amateurish quality to them and
seem to be more like quick snapshots than fin-
ished pieces of photographic art. This can be
explained by Edelson’s personal preferences
regarding documentation, especially the differ-
ences she draws between documenting public
rituals versus her private rituals. With regard to
documenting public rituals, Edelson is very
much concerned with the distracting quality of
a camera and is aware that the presence of a
camera could possibly change the experience for
both the participants and the audience. In this
regard, the actual art work is the ritual, and the
documentation becomes secondary. In many
cases, Edelson will ask the audience for permis-
sion to document the performance, will docu-
ment the rehearsal, or will not document it at
all (Zelevansky 40). However, her private rituals
are done specifically for the camera, often with
the intention of manipulating the printed pho-
tograph as an autonomous piece of art. These
rituals are done in isolated areas and alone with
the camera set on time release, allowing for
spontaneity as Edelson performs the ritual,
which explains the unfinished quality of the
photographs. She chooses not to have someone
else document the rituals as that would make
her aware of someone else’s presence and there-
fore change the way she moves within ritual.
As she has stated, “Another person would
change the psychic space” (“See for Yourself”
313).
 Listen to the Words of the Great Mother  Mary F. Zawadzki 339

In the photograph that Edelson manipulates for

each of the four finished pieces cited here, she sets
the camera lower than her body, cropping her legs
at her shins. She stands wide-legged, allowing the
camera to fully capture her vagina, as well as her
exposed, open body. Her arms are raised partly
over her head and she assumes a pose that she
associates with “calling on the Goddess; [her] way
of getting Her attention, identifying with Her,
and slipping into Her body. [She] was calling on
energy and on Spirit” (Kimball 98). Thirteen years
later, Edelson said in her essay “See for Yourself:
Women’s Spirituality in Holistic Art” that the
Outer Banks rituals and photographs were her
way of calling Goddess through her own body:
The body is where we live, the home of our spirit. I
was summoning Goddess to make house calls, talking
to Goddess with the body, and ending the dialogue
with being. These photographic body rituals were an
outward visual image to present to my community of
the manifestation and recognition of the Goddess
within. (314)

Her explanation of her intention and her pose

mimic those of Wiccans who practice the ritualis-
tic embodiment of the Goddess, called Drawing
Down the Moon. This practice, performed specif-
ically within ritual, is usually done either by the
High Priestess and Priest of more traditional, sex-
ually polar covens such as in the Gardnerian and
Alexandrian traditions of Wicca or by the High
Priestess herself in the Dianic and feminist tradi-
tions. The concept within Wicca mirrors that of
Edelson, as illustrated by Margot Adler as she
explains the concept of Drawing Down the
Moon:
Many covens also engage in more “spiritual” or “reli-
gious” workings. Many of the revivalist covens have
rituals in which the Goddess, symbolized by the
moon, is “drawn down” into a priestess of the coven
who, at times, goes into a trance and is “possessed by”
or “incarnates” the Goddess force. [quotation marks
hers]. (109)
This comparison between Edelson’s intention
and Wiccan practice is best illustrated by compar-
ing her Outer Banks photographs with a pho-
tograph that appears in Adler’s book, that of
“Drawing Down the Moon onto the Wiccan Pri-
estess Elspeth” (Figure 5). It becomes immedi-
ately obvious that the pose each woman assumes is
Figure 5. Govan. Drawing Down the Moon onto
the Wiccan Priestess Elspeth, from Margot Adler,
Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids,
Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America
Today. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.
almost identical: wide-legged and completely open
with arms up over the head. In each photograph
and ritual practice, the woman is assuming God-
dess-spirit. Such a ritual practice is present in the
traditional strains of Wicca and probably was
instituted in the late 1940s or early 1950s by Gerald
Gardner. However, the actual public appearance of
this practice would have to wait until the early 1980s
with the publication of Janet and Stewart Farrar’s
Eight Sabbats for Witches (1981), in which they
describe the mechanics of Drawing Down the Moon.
Previously one would need direct contact with the
practice, either through intimate coven training or
through attending various Neo-Pagan festivals and
gatherings that have occurred in the United States
since the early 1960s. This leads one to believe that
340 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 39, Number 3  September 2016
Edelson had some contact with the actual ritualistic
practice of Drawing Down the Moon.
In both Edelson’s ritual and the Wiccan ritual,
the body is the locus for the experience of the
divine and as a site for transformation of self. For
Wiccans, this is illustrated in the poem “The
Charge of the Goddess,” written by Doreen
Valiente in the mid 1950s. The poem is a modern
reinterpretation of passages found in Charles G.
Leland’s Aradia: Gospel of the Witches of 1899,
which is supposedly a true recording of the prac-
tices and beliefs of an unbroken witchcraft tradi-
tion called Strega that he encountered in his
travels in Italy. The poem begins,
Listen to the words of the Great Mother, She who of
old was also called among men Artemis, Astarte,
Athene, Dione, Melusine, Aphrodite, Cerridwen,
Dana, Cybele, Isis, Bride, and by many other names,
and continues in the first person as if the Goddess is
speaking directly to Her followers. (54).
What becomes immediately obvious is that
Goddess encompasses a multitude of names, per-
sonalities, and characters; and that She requires
only one thing from seekers—for them to find the
divine within. How one does this is also provided
by the poem:
Whenever ye have need of anything, once in the
month, and better it be when the Moon be full, then ye
shall assemble in some secret place and adore the spirit
of me, who am Queen of all witches. (54)
This passage describes how, when, and
where the followers of the Goddess should
worship, taking the form of a celebratory reli-
gious ritual. Valiente continues by outlining
the proper way to worship, including being
nude which, according to the poem, is a defi-
ant gesture that defines the human body as
autonomous from all forms of authority.4
Adler states that ritual nudity has a “leveling
quality” that creates equality among human
bodies regardless of sex, age, beauty, or lack
thereof (112). The human body is taken for
what it is: an organic form that is in the pro-
cess of aging and that, at the moment of ritual,
is in the process of exploring, finding, and
becoming divine. It is through the body that
one experiences a true expression of divinity,
that according to the mystery, is found within,
as illustrated in this passage:
And thou who thinkest to seek for me, know thy seek-
ing and yearning shall avail thee not, unless thou know
this mystery, that if that which thou seekest thou findest
not within thee, thou wilt never find it without thee.
For behold, I have been with thee from the beginning,
and I am that which is attained at the end of desire.
(Valiente 55)
For some practitioners, nudity is a way to
expose oneself to ritual and magical experiences
within the safe space of a coven without having
to first unravel the social identity that comes
with grooming and clothing. Trust within a
working group is a key element that fosters a
comfortable environment for nudity, which
eventually allows for deeper and more personal
experiences (Starhawk 71). The body is accepted
as a natural, organic part of life, and yet it holds
the potentiality of inner divine power that
comes to the fore in ritual space. It is not
neglected for an intellectual experience; rather it
is a tool for transformation and manifestation of
self. In addition, according to Valiente’s
“Charge of the Goddess” nudity is a sign that a
witch is truly free from slavery. In light of both
the Neo-Pagan and Women’s Spirituality Move-
ments, this can be interpreted as being free from
the doctrines of chastity and modesty of the
Western, patriarchal religions. Edelson uses her
nudity not to draw attention to what is essential
to femaleness, but rather as a similar proclama-
tion of freedom and personal power (The Art of
Mary Beth Edelson 170). Although much of the
body art of the 1970s was certainly rooted in a
defiant and assertive reclamation of the female
body, Edelson links her body art with issues of
becoming the Goddess and transformation. In
this way, her nudity can be read in the same
way as Wiccan ritual nudity, in that both are
utilized as tools of experience for transforma-
tion and as symbols for freedom.
For both Wiccans and Edelson this transforma-
tion of self and the direct experience of divine
power takes place in ritual space. In an interview
with a modern witch, Adler defines the purpose
of ritual as a way
 Listen to the Words of the Great Mother  Mary F. Zawadzki
to change the mind of the human being. It’s a sacred
drama in which you are the audience as well as the par-
ticipant, and the purpose of it is to activate parts of the
mind that are not activated by everyday activity. We
are talking about the parts of the mind that produce . . .
the connection between the eternal power and your-
self. (141)
In an interview with Gayle Kimball, Edelson
uses this same type of language when she
describes her private Outer Banks rituals:
“Ritual should go beyond exercises. It should
take us into another state, facilitate bringing
about change and release” (99). Both Wiccans
and Edelson see ritual as a practice that is done
specifically to bring about a change in con-
sciousness. In the same interview, Edelson
specifically states that one of the purposes for
her private rituals was to “get in touch with my
greater self” (99). What is significant in all of
these statements is the language that is used by
both artist and Wiccan, a language that suggests
a common influential root, that of Carl Jung.
Although Edelson states in her autobiographical
monograph that she eventually came to reject
Jung and all forms of patriarchal writing, she
states elsewhere that she read Jung in the early
1960s and even attended a five-year Jungian
seminar on mythology, collective consciousness,
and Goddesses (The Art of Mary Beth Edelson
27 and 170). According to Adler, so did many
Neo-Pagans who were specifically interested in
his theories of the collective unconscious, arche-
types, and the use of personal and cultural
mythology.5
Jung’s theories place a premium on the priority
of the unconscious over the Freudian ego. It is in
the unconscious that a person finds meaning and
value to human life, and it is in the unconscious
that myth—both personal and cultural—are born.
It is also in the unconscious that we encounter
what Jung called the archetype, which can be
defined as an “inborn potential” (Rowland 29).
Jung’s theories revolve around the process of nor-
mal individualization, by which the ego is prop-
erly instructed by the archetype that the
unconscious contains. His theories are heavily
religious in that the archetypes are gods and
goddess since
341
they are the most active powers in the formation of the
human subject who constantly affect her encounters
with the outer world. Like gods (or goddesses), arche-
types make the person by representing themselves in
the person’s life (through mental images). (Rowland
32)
In other words, the Goddess- or God-arche-
type creates the person by becoming a symbolic
image within a person’s life. This is where
reclaiming Goddess imagery and language
becomes quite powerful for women, especially
women whose archetypes have been culturally
defined by the God-language of patriarchal reli-
gions. The goal of individualization is self-realiza-
tion, and the self is governed by the god/goddess
potential archetype, while ego is secondary and
always dependent upon and energized by the
divine self (Rowland 33). A sense of disconnection
and alienation from the divine arises when the ego
is not properly educated by the archetype, there-
fore blocking the ability of self (divine) realiza-
tion.
For Wiccans, ritual provides a way to tap into
the unconscious to recreate the necessary balance
between the ego and the divine-self. One of the
best translations of Jungian theory into Wicca is
by the Wiccan High Priestess and feminist, Star-
hawk. In her book, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth
of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess, she
redefines Jungian terminology within the doctri-
nes of the Faery tradition of Wicca. According to
Starhawk, the Talking Self corresponds to the ego
and the conscious mind, while the Younger Self
corresponds to the unconscious. The Younger Self
understands the world through dreams, visions,
emotions, and intuitions, while the Talking Self
organizes what the Younger Self experiences.
Starhawk even goes so far to say that classical psy-
choanalysis, that is, Jung, developed from
attempts to understand the language of the
Younger Self (and not the other way around) (45).
The Deep Self, or what Jung would consider the
divine-self, is the numinous quality of the god/
goddess archetype that is so important to proper
individualization. The Younger Self/the uncon-
scious is the only Self that has a direct commu-
nicative relationship with the Deep Self, while
also maintaining a communicative relationship
342 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 39, Number 3  September 2016

with the Talking Self/the conscious mind/ego.
The only way to successfully reconnect the ego to
the divine self, hence self-realization, is through
the Younger Self and the unconscious, and the
only way to do that is through art, music, ritual,
dreams, and play. Ritual is necessary to tap into
and become the divine-self, and this is true for
both Wiccans and Edelson.
Particularly important for both is the practice
of Drawing Down the Moon. The ritual becomes
a time that is set aside from the everyday, and the
practice is a meditative way to call up the divine-
self and embody that archetype within the Talk-
ing, conscious Self. After the ritual was over and
the photographs were printed, Edelson visually
becomes the Goddess again by physically drawing
Goddess imagery onto her self-in-transition-in-
becoming-Goddess-from-within. She gives a
visual account of what she experienced in her ritu-
als, thereby creating “an outward visual image to
present to [her] community of the manifestation
and recognition of the Goddess within” (“See for
Yourself” 314). It is this type of image that added
to the growing vocabulary of Goddess-language.
In Jungian terms, Edelson’s imagery helped to
create a culturally defined mental image that
could be assimilated by the unconscious arche-
types of other women, which feed directly from
the collective unconscious that creates and defines
the mythologies upon which these archetypes
depend.
Antiessentialist Witch Hunt
In the postmodern academic environment of
the 1980s, Edelson’s body-as-Goddess pho-
tographs, as well as much of the body-focused art
of the 1960s and 1970s, were relegated to the infe-
rior domain of “essentialism,” a development in
the art world that Edelson aligns metaphorically
with a modern day “witch hunt,” as seen in her
conversation with Carolee Schneemann:
the essentialist/anti-essentialist question, the witch
hunt that went on mostly during the 80s over the body
work that was sometimes grounded in nature,
sometimes in spirituality, but always in the body—
what academics decided was ‘essentialism.’ A court
with judge and jury, but without the accused bring
present. (The Art of Mary Beth Edelson 172)
In the same conversation between the two
artists, as well as in her “open letter” to Thomas
McEvilley that addressed his 1989 lecture, “Cur-
rents and Crosscurrents in Feminist Art,” and was
published in the New Art Examiner in April 1989,
Edelson stresses that although artists like Ana
Mendieta, Carolee Schneemann, and herself used
their own naked bodies as the subject of their art
work, their purposes in doing so were radically
different (“Male Grazing” 592-97). For example,
in her Silueta Series, Mendieta used her own body
in the Goddess pose—arms stretched over her
head like that of a Cretan figurine—to trace and
carve her form into the Earth. Like Edelson,
Mendieta engaged in rituals that she documented
with photography. However, according to the
artist, she was concerned with re-establishing the
link between the Earth as a source of sustenance
rather than personally manifesting the Goddess.
Furthermore, when Mendieta did perform rituals
and explore spiritualism, it was a deeply personal
exercise to connect her to her ancestral roots in
Cuba, which were severed in 1961 when she
moved to the United States as a result of political
upheaval (Viso 45, 66). In comparison, Edelson’s
exploration of the Goddess was a search for new
language that could subvert God-language. Her
rituals were motivated by self-transformation
through becoming the Goddess rather than heal-
ing the break between self and the Earth, or self
and personal history.
Edelson maintains that an artist’s intention
should be taken into account in critical theory,
rather than critics making art fit within academic
theory regardless of intention (The Art of Mary
Beth Edelson 173). In an interview she stressed
that her art was trivialized by critics and that, as
mentioned above, it underwent a “witch hunt”
when presented in the academy. She said that
what she was working with was an alternative lan-
guage, one that was freeing and powerful, and
shared by women who were not only artists but
also theologians and those looking for powerful
 Listen to the Words of the Great Mother  Mary F. Zawadzki
symbols of the feminine divine. She acknowl-
edged that her art has a spiritual and political
aspect to it, and that is what makes it so dangerous
for the academy. In her opinion, it was safer for
the academy to align her art with essentialism,
robbing it of its powerful spiritual qualities.6
In their criticism of Edelson’s work, both
McEvilley and Cynthia Eller in “Objectification:
the Representation of Goddesses and Women in
Feminist Spirituality” contest that Edelson, using
her own naked body as subject, was supporting
the early feminist exploration of using one’s own
female body as a tool to explore what is essential
in every woman. In other words, using the body
as the subject the artist is purportedly exploring
biological givens that separate and make different
a woman’s body and, in turn, a woman’s experi-
ence, from that of a man. According to this the-
ory, it is within the female body and its
experiences that a woman’s knowledge and cre-
ativity are born, and it is this body-experience that
according to Helene Cixous, in “The Laugh of the
Medusa,” a woman must write, or create in gen-
eral, what she knows: that of the female body
(628-30). Eller argues that anchoring art into the
depiction of a woman’s naked body is dangerous
territory. Not only do such initiatives supposedly
lack the rigorous intellectual theory associated
with postconstructivist and semiotic feminism but
they also play into the traditional representation
of the female body as object for the male gaze
(24). McEvilley furthers this criticism of “writing
one’s body” in his essay, “Redirecting the Gaze.”
In addition to criticizing the use of the naked
female body as the subject for Goddess art, he
clearly defines the essentialism/antiessentialism
debate by setting feminist artists against each
other:
The Great Goddess or body-writing approach had an
unquestioned power that arrested the attention of the
art world. An approach to art history from the outside
its usual purview had established new positions from
with to view its limitations. Still, as the 1970s unfolded,
other artists took different approaches to the question
of feminine identity and self-knowledge. As the
approaches ramified, inner tensions grew among the
artists [italics mine]. Some felt that the Great Goddess
archetype did not subvert but on the contrary
strengthened the sexist ideology in which femaleness
was associated with instinctual drives, the earth, and
343
the unconscious. To emphasize and affirm this cliche
was a bold reversal of values, but without a corre-
sponding bold alteration of concepts. The female body
was still being presented as a signifier of a primal one-
ness that preceded cultural accomplishment, rather
than as a cultural object mediated by discourses, patri-
archal and otherwise, that still needed analysis. Other
strategies arose that were less concerned with reinte-
grating art into a female religious milieu and more con-
cerned with reversing the sexist procedures of art
history in particular and society in general. (194)
In this paragraph, McEvilley not only accuses
Goddess artists like Edelson of affirming tradi-
tional stereotypical “cliches” of sexist ideology,
but also sets up a dichotomy between body
artists/essentialists and critical postconstructivist
artists/antiessentialists by stating that there were
tensions amongst feminist artists. To him, all body
artists were aligned with the theories of Judy Chi-
cago and Miriam Shapiro, who argued that using a
woman’s body and central core—that of the
vagina—was an empowering act of defiance
because a woman’s body, her sexuality, and her
experiences were all but absent from art and soci-
ety, save for the depictions of female bodies for
male consumption. Core imagery and the aesthetic
exploration of one’s own body allowed feminist
artists to “liberate women from negativizing atti-
tudes about female anatomy and their own bod-
ies” (Broude and Garrard 23). Furthermore,
Chicago believed that women, especially women
artists, must not paint “like a man” or mimic
men’s experiences; rather, a woman must “turn
and claim what is uniquely hers, her female iden-
tity” (Chicago 295). According to Chicago, the
female identity rests in the experiences of women
under patriarchy and in the physical identity of
women, that of core imagery.7
McEvilley lumps all Goddess art and body art
together by stating that the artists who were
engaged in such art simply aligned the female
body, hence women, with preculture, ignoring
that the body was an object defined by culture,
hence defined by men. The antiessentialist view
maintains the dichotomy present in the polarities
of mind/body and culture/nature, which can be
continued into more traditional polarities preva-
lent in Western society, particularly that of Wes-
tern male-God religions, such as good/evil, black/
white, God/Satan, and male/female. In utilizing
344 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 39, Number 3  September 2016
language of judgement, McEvilley also places
value on culture over nature and, in turn, male
intellectualization over female body conscious-
ness. He aligns the earth, instinctual drives, and
the unconscious with the negative attributes of
the female and, most importantly, places religion
in opposition to true discourse. In other words,
McEvilley maintains a value system that upholds
a traditional, stereotypical polarity whereby the
cultural, intellectual, rational male-oriented goals
oppress, and control those associated with
women.
As Edelson has argued, it is exactly this polarity
of man-God/woman-Nature, intellect/body,
good/evil that is at the root of the constructivist/
essentialist argument (The Art of Mary Beth Edel-
son 176). It is a polarity that denies the body and
in turn re-establishes what the Women’s Spiritual-
ity Movement called “God-language.” Postmod-
ern discourse has argued that spoken, written, and
visual language controls the mindset and value
system of a society. For example, Judith Barry
and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis state that
A more theoretically informed art can contribute to
enduring changes by addressing itself to structural and
deep-seated causes of women’s oppression rather than
to its effects. A radical feminist art would include an
understanding of how women are constituted through
social practices in culture; once this is understood, it
would be possible to create an aesthetics designed to
subvert the production of ‘women’ as commodity. We
see a need for theory that goes beyond the personal
into the questions of ideology, culture, and the pro-
duction of meaning. (Barry and Flitterman-Lewis 66)
This is exactly what Edelson is doing in her
Goddess art. She is exploring the roots of social
and cultural power found in Western Judio-
Christian-Islamic religion and its symbols, ideas,
and language structure. Her subversion of visual
and written God-language defies essentialist def-
initions and explores the very theoretical basis
of the postconstructionists, that of language,
symbols, and underlying societal power struc-
tures.
In Womanspirit Rising: a Feminist Reader in
Religion, Christ and Plascow state that many
scholars, feminists included, have completely
abandoned religion and religious theory, agreeing
with both Freud and Marx, “that religions keep
people dependent on authority and thwart their
desire to improve their material situations” (1).
As much as the academy discredits religious
thought, and as much as it wants to gloss over
the importance of religion and spirituality in
artists’ lives, it cannot deny the influence that
religion has on human beings and cultures. With
its symbols, myths, rituals, and traditions, reli-
gion, even secular religions such as psychology,
provide meaning, structure, and identity to the
human being. It provides the human subject a
way to decode herself and provides direction in
her life. In Jungian terms this means normalizing
the self, which is rooted in notions of creation
and divinity (Rowland 32-33). Christ and Plas-
cow point out that religion provides human
beings with symbols that, “shape a cultural ethos,
defining the deepest values of society and the
persons in it” (274). It is a powerful language of
symbols, myth, and ritual that have a deep and
lasting effect upon the culture that creates it and
in turn, internalizes it. For Christ,
Symbols have both psychological and political effects,
because they create the inner conditions that lead peo-
ple to feel comfortable with or to accept social and
political arrangements that correspond to the symbol
system. (“Why Women Need the Goddess” 274)
In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions, the
most powerful symbol is that of an omnipotent
male-God who is placed above and away from
human kind. He reigns over His creation with
absolute authority and demands absolute submis-
sion. The Bible states that God created man in
His own image, aligning man with God. Woman,
however, was created to be man’s helper and sub-
ordinate, aligning her with Nature, and through
her own act of will in eating the apple from the
Tree of Knowledge, with sin. In this brief
description of the first three chapters of Genesis,
one starts to see the formation of what Christ
and Plascow call “God-language” (The Holy
Bible, Genesis 1:27, 2:21, 3:1-24). The reader is
told that men are destined to rule the earth and
are God-like. They are of the transcendental
realm since God is unknowable and, in much of
the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions, unrepre-
sentable in art. Women, however, are sinners and
 Listen to the Words of the Great Mother  Mary F. Zawadzki
dirty because of the fall of humankind. Like Nat-
ure, which they are associated with, they are to
be controlled, conquered, and raped:
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be
fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and sub-
due it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and
over the fowl in the air, and over every living thing that
moveth upon the earth. (Genesis 1:28)
Even the most atheistic feminist or scholar
should not ignore the power of God-language
since it still shapes our societal institutions and
defines gender roles. God-language has and
does control the oppression of women even
within secular society. As Edelson points out,
her involvement with the Women’s Spirituality
Movement and religious discourse was and is
specifically a political challenge to God-
language that oppresses women worldwide in
real-time, secular situations:
What we were proposing was not another organized
religion but a participatory paradigmatic sweep that
would affect our collective vision(s) for women’s rights
and human liberation. For example, we challenged
assumptions held across the globe within organized
religions that place women in inferior service-oriented
positions without control over their own lives, status,
or bodies and without the agency to fulfill their poten-
tial. Their situations, especially in the Middle East, have
become all the more painfully clear in recent years.
Religious assumptions and traditions about women
spill over into legal systems in all countries and become
the law of the land, providing official sanction for dis-
crimination. (“Success Has 1,000 Mothers” 31)
Therefore, it is necessary to deconstruct reli-
gion and change, reconstruct or invent new lan-
guages that will replace the old patriarchal
language. Feminist theologians and spiritual lead-
ers agree that by unraveling the symbols, myths,
doctrines and dogma of established, male-
oriented religions, it is quite possible to uncover
the roots of oppression and in turn replace them
with an alternative symbolic language that will
shape and define culture. This is exactly what
many in the Women’s Spirituality Movement,
and those feminist artists who utilized the God-
dess and Her many myths in their art, have tried
to do: to construct a new language utilizing the
Goddess as a symbol to replace and challenge
patriarchal God-language.
345
Antiessentialist criticisms have systematically
unraveled an artistic methodology that, according
to Edelson, “was not referring to biological
givens,” but rather
was hell bent on representing the female body accord-
ing to my socially constructed meanings. When I pre-
sented my body I was reconfiguring my femaleness, by
making the female body seeable through my female
gaze and on my own terms. (The Art of Mary Beth
Edelson 173)
While this certainly sounds akin to writing ones
own body-experience, Edelson’s terms are far
from merely celebrating the female body or even
reclaiming the body as subject-self. The above
statement shows that Edelson was working
specifically with reconstructing language and, in
turn, the meaning of “femaleness.” However, she
did not merely replace her body with that of a
generic primal “Great Goddess” as McEvilley
suggests, but rather she explored the complicated
mythologies of specific Goddesses and practiced
transformative rituals to become Goddess.
For Edelson, her exploration into Goddess
imagery and mythology has taken her into a trans-
formation of self, a transformation that she exer-
cises through her very physical manipulation of
the photograph’s surface. Through her private
rituals and her own hand upon the photographs,
Edelson becomes Goddess, a notion that leads not
only to Jungian theory of finding the divine-self
within but also leads to the Wiccan mystery stated
in Doreen Valiente’s “The Charge of the God-
dess.” The mystery is to find Her within yourself,
for you will never find Her outside of yourself.
For feminism the application of this mystery
becomes a powerful personal and political trans-
formation. According to Christ, Goddess mythol-
ogy and imagery can provide an alternative and
powerful language for the self-realization of
women as it breaks free from stereotypical
boundaries placed on women by God-language
(278). By providing a different symbology, Edel-
son questioned language at its roots by exposing
God-language for what it is and providing a pow-
erful alternative.
In much of the writing about Edelson and the
other artists practicing Goddess-art, there is an
346 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 39, Number 3  September 2016
assumption that their images, rooted in the artist’s
naked body, represents woman-as-creator/God-
dess of fertility and childbirth. The assumption
fuels the antiessentialist position, claiming that
Edelson has reduced the thinking women to her
body-basics of procreation. If indeed the
antiessentialists are correct in saying that Edel-
son’s art reduces women to their essentials, one
wonders how one would interpret the pho-
tographs from Outer Banks, especially those that
depict the Goddess Kali Ma who is Creator,
Destroyer, Warrior, Protector of women and chil-
dren, and the Goddess Baubo, the female double
of Dionysus who is the bearer of truth and a trick-
ster (Figures 1, 3, and 4). Are these also indicative
of women? Can we possibly destroy, take up arms
for our beliefs, play jokes, and eat worldly
demons? If we are to read these photographs as
essentialist then we simply must read them as rep-
resenting the diversity found in all women, for if
we take Goddess as our archetype, women can
tap into a full array of human possibilities and
conditions. For we must remember, according to
Jung, man is not created in God’s image, but
rather we are all Gods and Goddesses . . . for self
is truly divine.
Notes
1. While there is much disagreement amongst the Neo-Pagan
practitioners of the meaning of Wicca and Witchcraft, its roots, and
terminology usage, for this paper I will be using Wicca and Witch-
craft, and Witch and Wicca interchangeably. As Margot Adler points
out, Neo-Pagans are a very independent and fiercely individualistic
bunch, therefore there is much disagreement in how to define terms,
how to practice, and what to call oneself (see chapter 5 in Drawing
Down the Moon).
2. For a broad discussion regarding the Women’s Spirituality
Movement see Christ and Plaskow, 1-17.
3. For a more complete discussion regarding Neo-Paganism see:
Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon; Starhawk, Spiral Dance: a
Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (San Francisco:
HarperCollins, 1999 [1979]); and Janet and Stewart Farrar, A
Witches’ Bible: a Complete Witches’ Handbook (Custer, Washington:
Phoenix Publishing, Inc., 1996 [1981, 1984]).
4. Valiente, 54. The complete sentence states, “And ye shall be
free from slavery, and as a sign that ye are really free ye shall be
naked in your rites.” This statement illustrates the belief that what
we put onto our bodies controls our station in life and therefore con-
trols our lived experience. It is commonly believed that this passage
is addressing class differences and not necessary gender differences.
See Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, God-
dess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today (Boston: Bea-
con Press, 1986), 119. She states that in the Gardnerian Witchcraft
tradition in which Doreen Valiente was a priestess, the traditions and
ritual practices are passed from coven to coven via a matriarchal lin-
eage of priestesses. In this tradition it is the priestess who organizes
and leads the coven.
5. See Adler, chapter 3.
6. I spoke with Mary Beth Edelson via telephone on 14 Apr.
2009.
7. In opposition to Chicago and feminist body arts, art his-
torian, Patricia Mainardi, rejected the notion of a feminine art
or feminine esthetic. In her essay, “A Feminine Sensibility?”
Mainardi refutes Chicago’s claim of a “feminine aesthetic” by
arguing that feminist art is first and foremost, political art based
on political ideologies. It is not an art based on “biological
determinism” or the experiences anchored in biology. Mainardi
believes that since feminist art is political it could also be cre-
ated by men. She argues that women should not limit them-
selves to their bodies or their uniquely “feminine” experiences.
Rather, women artists must explore the same subjects and theo-
retical approaches that have been afforded to men for centuries
(Mainardi 295-96).
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