[Late Carol P. Christ (1945-2021) accepted my invitation to write a foreword to my book, The Mago Way: Re-discovering Mago, the Great Goddess from East Asia, prior to 2015. This essay is her Foreword. I met Carol P. Christ in person on several occasions. As she mentions in her Foreword, Carol was invited to become the fifth scholar on my dissertation committee around 2003, a team of five faculty members from Claremont Graduate University, Claremont School of Theology, and Claremont Colleges. My first meeting with Dr. Christ was a tough one but our paths continued crossing thereafter. One semester, she taught a course (on the Goddess topic in relation to Process Theology) at Claremont School of Theology during which time we had some close interactions. I did not take her class but we may have run into each other in other events. She and I went out to a Chinese restaurant and had friendly conversations over lunch. At one point, we emailed each other frequently. And I remember myself making a phone call to her in Lesbos Island, Greece and we spoke. I had a first person narrative that Carol loved gardening and was later getting involved in political activism in her town. One day, Mary Daly called me to ask for the contact information of Carol Christ (Mary knew that I was in touch with Carol Christ). I had been in close contact with Mary Daly since 1994 (see my essay series of Commemorating Mary Daly). I must have mentioned to Mary that Carol published her book, She Who Changes, by Palgrave Macmillan. Daly was searching for a publisher for her latest book, Amazon Grace. So I bridged the two to speak to each other by phone. Indeed, Daly’s Amazon Grace was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2006. In my memory of Carol P. Christ, I thank you, Carol, for the gift of your life and work. Rest in peace.]
Foreword by Carol P. Christ, Ph.D. (Excerpt from The Mago Way by Helen Hye-Sook Hwang).
With her dissertation and her on-going work Helen Hye-Sook Hwang has opened up a new way of thinking about East Asian Goddesses that decenters the Goddesses of particular national or religious traditions—such as Chinese Goddesses or Buddhist Goddesses. Her ground-breaking work suggests that seemingly independent Goddess traditions are rooted in a common East Asian prehistoric tradition which she names Magoism. Hwang shows that prehistoric Goddess traditions predate Buddhism, Confucianism, Shintoism, and other Eastern traditions, including Korean shamanism. Her work also reveals commonalities between prehistoric Goddess traditions in East and West, making it clear the “rebirth of the Goddess” is not an exclusively Western phenomenon.
I first met Helen Hye-Sook Hwang when I was asked to become a late addition to her dissertation committee at Claremont Graduate University. Because of their lack of familiarity with her subject matter and radical approach to it, Hwang’s committee was mystified by her topic, “Seeking Mago, the Great Goddess.” I was asked to step in due to my knowledge of the work of Marija Gimbutas on the prehistoric Goddess of Neolithic Old Europe. Though I had not studied East Asian Goddesses in depth, my intuition, based on the history of European Goddesses, was that East Asian Goddesses had their roots in prehistory.
Traditional scholarship, whether focused on Eastern or Western traditions, assumes that “history” begins with written records dated around 3000 BCE or later. Almost all written records, East and West, stem from patriarchal societies ruled by warrior kings. Written law codes reflect the subordination of women in patriarchal societies. However, comparison of early and later law codes indicates that in many cases women had legal and economic powers that were gradually eroded. Mythological texts also imply that women and Goddesses once held power that was later taken from them. The notion that history is defined by written records limits history to that last 5000 years, leaving the first 100,000 years of human history out of the picture. So-called “prehistory” includes the many long years when human beings survived by gathering and hunting in the Paleolithic era (Old Stone Age), as well as the early years of agriculture in the Neolithic era (New Stone Age), which began about 10,000 years ago in different areas of the world. Some would argue that the first 100,000 years of human history were pre-patriarchal and that patriarchy became normative at different times in different places, especially if patriarchy is defined by the control of female sexuality, private property, and war.[i]
According to Marija Gimbutas, Neolithic Old Europe (c. 6500-3500 BCE) was peaceful, sedentary, highly artistic, egalitarian, matrilineal and probably matrilocal, and revered the Goddess as the power of birth, death, and regeneration in all of life. The peaceful cultures of Old Europe were overthrown by nomadic warriors who entered Europe from the Russian steppes north and east of the Black Sea. Their culture was horse-riding, patriarchal, patrilineal, warlike, not highly artistic, and they worshipped male Gods identified with the shining powers of the sun and the shining bronze of their weapons. As the power of the patriarchal warriors grew, the Goddesses of Old Europe were subordinated to male Gods. Thus were developed the familiar Goddesses of Greek mythology: Athena who sprung fully armed from the head of Zeus, Hera, the betrayed wife, and Aphrodite the Goddess of sexual pleasure. Gimbutas taught us that these all-too-human Goddesses were cut off from their primordial roots in the powers of birth, death, and regeneration.[ii]
Hwang’s work promises a similar revolutionary rewriting of cultural and religious history in “Old East Asia.” In addition to revealing a Goddess tradition at the root of later patriarchal traditions in East Asia, Hwang’s work raises the question of how and when East Asian traditions became patriarchal. It answers the question of where the later Goddesses came from, and why they were added to or became prominent in largely patriarchal traditions. As Hwang shows, the Goddess was already there and could not be fully suppressed or completely ignored. The origin of the Daoist Goddess (or Immortal) Magu is no longer shrouded in mystery. It can also be more fully understood why a male Bodhisattva became the much-loved Buddhist Goddess of compassion, Guan Yin.
The Neolithic revolution, described as one of the “great advances” in human life, is defined by three inventions or discoveries: agriculture, weaving, and pottery.[iii] Anthropologists and pre-historians will concede that agriculture was probably invented by “woman the gatherer,” who picked fruits and vegetables, collected nuts and seeds, and prepared them for eating. It would have been women who noticed that seeds dropped at a cooking site in one year might sprout up into plants by the time the group returned to it the next year. The theory that women invented agriculture is supported by folkloric and other evidence suggesting that women worldwide have been in charge of horticulture (agriculture without an animal-drawn plow). Women passed the secrets of how to preserve seeds in a cold dark place and when and how to plant them from mother to daughter. These secrets, which were in fact scientific knowledge discovered by “woman the scientist,” were passed on as mysteries that connected the power of women to give birth and nurture life with the symbol of Mother Earth as a Great and Giving Mother.
Anthropologists and pre-historians will also agree that women were the likely inventors of weaving because weaving is women’s work in almost all traditional cultures.[iv] The secrets of weaving too were passed down from mother to daughter over the millennia. The processes of spinning flax or wool into thread and weaving it on a loom into cloth were technological innovations, discovered by “woman the inventor.” They too were understood to be mysteries of transformation analogized to the power of the female body to create life. Woman the inventor also discovered how to make pottery. As the preparers of food, women would have been the ones to notice that a fragile clay bowl or pot that fell into a fire could become strong enough to hold liquid and to be used repeatedly. The secrets of where to find clay, how to mold it using snake coils, how to fire it, and how to decorate it, would also have been passed from mother to daughter. These processes were understood to be mysteries of transformation connected to the powers of women to create and nurture life.
It is likely that discovery and control of the three mysteries that defined the Neolithic revolution gave women considerable power in Neolithic societies in every area of the world. However, as Peggy Reeves Sanday’s cross-cultural studies reveal, “female power” is not “female dominance.” In societies organized around female power, mothers are honored, but women do not dominate, because they care about the welfare of all of their children, both female and male.[v] Despite popular misconceptions, matriarchy is not the mirror image of patriarchy. In matriarchal societies women do not rape men, beat men into submission, or hold men as slaves. Rather, matriarchal societies are egalitarian. Grandmothers and great-uncles share power with checks and balances that assure that everyone’s needs are taken into account.
Heide Goettner-Abendroth originated modern matriarchal studies, which has moved beyond the Western focus of early discussions of matriarchy to include and make central indigenous cultures in Asia, Africa, and South America. Goettner-Abendroth has isolated four characteristics of matriarchal societies: 1) they are generally horticultural and distribute wealth through gift-giving; 2) they honor motherhood and are usually matrilineal (family line traced through the mother) and matrilocal (women and sometimes men remain in their birth clans); 3) their social structures are egalitarian with no great disparities of power or wealth; 4) they tend to view Earth as a Great and Giving Mother and to understand all of life to be sacred. While earlier theorists of matriarchy subscribed to an evolutionary model of culture in which matriarchy had to be superseded by patriarchy in order for culture to evolve, modern matriarchal studies does not consider patriarchy to be an advance in culture; rather it looks to matriarchal societies for clues for human survival.[vi] Following Mary Daly, Hwang prefers to name these societies “gynocracy.” “Matriarchy” foregrounds motherhood which also functions as a symbol for women’s cultural contributions in female power societies. “Gynocracy,” on the other hand, calls attention to the fact that female power societies honor women for their cultural contributions and not only for the power to give birth to and nurture human beings. Whichever term is preferred, both matriarchy and gynocracy refer to egalitarian female-centered societies in which all people and the web of life are valued, and in which the Earth and its sacred places are symbolized as female and as Mother.
The Mosuo who live on Lake Lugu in the Himalayas are a living matriarchal society of peace. In their system children do not have to “leave home” and “learn to make it on their own.” Both males and females continue to live in the matriarchal clan. Women invite their lovers to share their beds at night, but men return to their maternal clans at the break of day. Love and sex are free because they are not tied to the care of children. All children are welcomed in the maternal clan. Mothers are not isolated. Women of one generation along with their mothers care together for the children of the next. Brothers and uncles are the male role models for boy children. Male and female nature and character are not sharply differentiated: both females and males are understood to be active and productive, and all children are taught to become as loving and giving as the mothers who raised them. One of the main indigenous festivals of the Mosuo is the Mountain-Circling Festival held in honor of Mountain Goddess Gemu whose tears rained down to create Lake Lugu.[vii]
The theories about human history I have discussed here are the context in which I welcome Helen Hye-Sook Hwang’s revolutionary theories and research about Mago as a prehistoric Goddess and Magoism as the prehistoric religion of East Asia. I suspect that Mago and Magoism flourished in and were handed down from egalitarian, matrilineal, matrilocal, and gynocratic or matriarchal clan-based horticultural societies in East Asia like that of the Mosuo. At the heart of Hwang’s research is her cross-cultural compilation of Mago-related place names and folklore. This information will be interpreted from a new perspective in a forthcoming book by Hwang,[viii] which will document the association of Mago with sacred places, including mountains, caves, and water sources, across East Asia. This data and more that will surely be discovered by those who read Hwang’s book, opens up new ground that could become a focus for further investigation by generations of scholars.
In order to unlock the “language of the Goddess” of Old Europe, Marija Gimbutas developed a method that she called “archaeomythology” in which she used folklore and selective readings of patriarchal mythology to interpret the symbols encoded in Neolithic artifacts. If used to study artifacts from prehistoric cultures of East Asia, this method could add new details to the history of Mago and Magoism. Hwang proposes a method she calls “mytho-historic-thealogy.” This method uses folklore and selective readings of historical texts to re-create the early history of Mago and Magoism in East Asia; the addition of the term “thealogy” makes it clear that Hwang’s study of “myth and “history” is also concerned with contemporary meaning.
Gimbutas situated her work within a tradition of “objective” scholarship, and expected that it would be evaluated scientifically. She never offered an explicitly feminist critique of patriarchal scholarship. Nor did she do more than suggest that the worldview of Old Europe was superior to that of patriarchal European cultures and religions. Nonetheless, the feminist and spiritual implications of her work were immediately recognized. I have argued that Gimbutas’s failure to name her perspective as feminist and critical of patriarchy opened the door for critics to dismiss her work in the name of scholarly objectivity, without examining their own patriarchal interests and biases.[ix]
In contrast, Hwang clearly names her standpoint as feminist and her interests as thea-logical. She is openly critical of traditions of scholarship that have been shaped by patriarchal interests that are both religious and nationalist. She does not hide the fact that her research is fueled by a personal, spiritual, and political quest. She is not only seeking to uncover a history that has been ignored and distorted. She is also seeking a history and a mythology in which to ground a feminist spirituality concerned with the well-being of all human beings and all beings in the web of life. It is Helen Hye-Sook Hwang’s fervent hope, and one that I share, that her work will spark a widespread rebirth of the Great Goddess not only in her native Korea, but in all of East Asia. Hwang shows us that the Great Goddess is not limited by ethnicity or nationality. She crosses the boundaries between East and West. If we are willing to listen, She can inspire us once again to live in societies of peace.
Carol P. Christ
[i] I have discussed these issues in Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1997 [New York: Routledge, 1998]), chapter 4. Also see Carol P. Christ, “A New Definition of Patriarchy: Control of Female Sexuality, Private Property, and War,” Feminist Theology 23/3 (2016), forthcoming.
[ii] See The Language of the Goddess (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1991). Although traditional patriarchal scholars in Classics and Archaeology have dismissed Gimbutas’s theories as nothing more than romantic fantasy, most Indo-Europeanists (scholars of Indo-European languages) agree with her that Indo-European languages were introduced into Europe through a series of invasions by Indo-European speaking warriors whose homeland was north and east of the Black Sea. See Edgar C. Polome, “The Impact of Marija Gimbutas on Indo-European Studies,” From the Realm of the Ancestors: An Anthology in Honor of Marija Gimbutas, Joan Marler, ed. (Manchester, CT: Knowledge, Ideas, and Trends, 1997), 102-107.
[iii] See Rebirth of the Goddess, 53-54.
[iv] See Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994).
[v] Peggy Reeves Sanday, Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981); also see her Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).
[vi] See Heide Goettner-Abendroth, Societies of Peace: Matriarchies Past, Present, and Future (Toronto: Inanna Publications, 2009), 19-24.
[vii] Societies of Peace, 23-255; and http://traditions.cultural-china.com/en/115Traditions275.html.
[viii] Helen Hwang, The Mago Hypothesis: Reinstating Mago, the Great Goddess, and Magoism, a Trans-patriarchal Gynocentric Tradition of East Asia (Korea, China, and Japan), tentative title.
[ix] Carol P. Christ, “‘A Different World’: The Challenge of the Work of Marija Gimbutas to the Dominant Worldview of Western Culture,” From the Realm of the Ancestors, 406-415.