[Author’s Note: This essay was published in S/HE: An International Journal of Goddress Studiess V5 N1 (2026). Footnotes numbers of these sequels do not match with those in the original publication.]
Born through Goddess Studies and Feminist Spirituality
Decades ago, I was instrumental in establishing the section of Goddess Studies in the regional conference of the Academy of American Religion.[1] Nonetheless, my research of Magoism, then called (not Ceto-Magoism yet), remained a marginalized voice within Goddess Studies. I sensed that Magoism came across too alien to most scholars associated with Goddess Studies. And that was expected. My reconstruction of Magoism did not share the root with Christian-based feminist spirituality or Eurocentric Goddess Studies from the beginning. While the Creatrix was not a central focus in Goddess Studies, Magoism sprouted in a different soil-bed, Korean/East Asian area studies.
Creatrix Studies rooted in Ceto-Magoism is not an Eastern alternative to Western Goddess Studies. It is not an alternative to anything. Its methodology dismantles dualism of any kind by the matriversal nature of Ceto-Magoist cosmology. Creatrix Studies is not a young sister to feminist spirituality or Goddess Studies but the oldest sister who has been forgotten. Ultimately, it is the progenitor to all shades of human intelligence, a yet-to-be-known field of study. Put differently, Creatrix Studies prompts non-patriarchal and non-dualist cosmology, which I call matri-cosmology. Ceto-Magoism takes human-cetacean hybrid intelligence as a reification of matriversal reality and interrogates it in its own light, matri-cosmology. In short, Creatrix Studies enables the category of the whole, the Great Unity of ALL in the Cosmic Mother, as a field of academic study. Its non-dualistic, etiological, and matriversal nature poses itself as an epistemological eruption.
Goddess Studies has been dominated by Euro-centric perspectives. I am not just referring to its scholarship only but the very process that it is produced. As a non-English speaking feminist of Korean origin, I was left alone in classroom interactions and in the discourse on the Goddess or the female divine thereafter. Eurocentrism was too conspicuous to address in the scholarly groups of Goddess Studies and feminist spirituality. I was subjected to racism and ethnocentrism from raw attitudes to subtle dismissals for decades. Put bluntly, Goddess Studies lacks the methodology that is matriversal. And that is not accidental. Without a worldview that relativizes Eurocentric scholarship, it is difficult to stay outside Eurocentric hegemony in the modern era. When it is contained within Eurocentric discourse, individual scholars are not given the option of being open in all directions.
I am trying to bring attention to the linguistic and epistemic predicament that modern Goddess Studies faces. Without matri-cosmology that relativizes patriarchal religions and mythologies, women and Goddesses are entrapped with patriarchal relationships. The word, “Goddess,” is caught in the linguistic dilemma, derivative of “God.” Linguistically, it can’t stand alone without the tie to “God.” I mentioned this elsewhere earlier:
It is true that the English term “Goddess” is incapable of conveying the original and ultimate status of the Female Divine. Derived from “God,” “Goddess” is linguistically hampered in the sense that it can’t be perceived without an association with “God.” [2]
The Christian Goddess scholarship faces the same dynamic. When Goddess scholarship is methodologically unseparated from the God or patriarchal theology, it loses an impetus to be matriversal. That said, Creatrix Studies contributes to Goddess Studies by relocating the latter under the Ceto-Magoist cosmological premise that patriarchal religions and mythologies are derivative and appropriate the consciousness of the Cosmic Mother. Goddess Studies remains hampered linguistically and epistemologically, insofar as it is in denial or oblivion of her unhappy marriage with patriarchal religions and mythologies.
Creatrix Studies shifts the focus, from the Goddess (the counterpart of the male God or the raped by the latter) to the Creatrix (the Source of ALL, both the female and the male). The ultimate sex dyad (the male and the female) melts away within the dynamic of the Great Unity, represented as the triad or the nine. Creatrix Studies reenthrones the Female as the Sovereign of the Matriverse. “Creatrix,” the Female (S/HE), matriversalizes “Goddess,” the female (She). I noted earlier in my book and said, “The symbol of the Female (S/HE) is not a sex indicator. Encompassing the All, the Female is the Way of the Universe.”[3] Creatrix Studies concerns the Female as the Creatrix.
In Korean, Mago is, among the myriad epithets, referred to the Triad Creatrix (Johwa Samsin) or the Triad Divine (Samsin).[4] The Korean word “sin (神divine)” is etymologically matriversal or neutral, as it, derivative of Mago, the Creatrix, indicates both sexed divine personalities. Ceto-Magoist Studies reminds that Goddess Studies without securing cosmological independence from patriarchal religions loses its radical impetus. Goddess Studies faces a methodological impasse. Lacking epistemic apparatuses, it remains aloof to the consciousness of the Cosmic Mother. Its epistemological divorce from patriarchal theological premises is inherently challenged where historiographies and mythographies are tightly patriarchal.[5] Where mythologies and religions remain patriarchal, Goddess scholarship tends to be revisionist at best.
Creatrix Studies summons a new methodology beyond the attempts of “transvestitism (putting a skirt on the male God)” and “sexual reassignment surgery.” Creatrix Studies aims at a whole new theology, thealogy. Creatrix Studies may be seen as a new branch of feminist spirituality with the focus on creatrix-spirituality or creatrix-thealogy. Speaking from the Ceto-Magoist vantage perspective, feminist spirituality alone remains isolated from the influence of matriversal cosmology. Mago, the Creatrix, breaks off the heterosexualizing paradigm imposed by patriarchal theologies. Theology that excludes the Creatrix is patriarchal by definition. The Creatrix stands outside the patriarchal context. S/HE is the Origin of ALL. Patriarchal religions and mythologies, derivative of the Matriversal Story, prove to be corruptive. Creatrix Studies is not content with the method of reversing the reversed within the context of patriarchal religions.
Navigating within the Second-Wave Feminism
Ceto-Magoism did not grow as a direct offspring of the second-wave feminism. It was born on the periphery of feminist spirituality. The peculiarity (Old Korean, pre-patriarchal, and matriversal) of Ceto-Magoism did not fit the Euro-centric framework of feminist spirituality. As an interdisciplinary study, it nestled in the intersection of feminist spirituality, Goddess Studies, and Korean/East Asian Studies. The third field, Korean/East Asian Studies, holds the key to unlock the otherness of the second-wave feminist movement. Creatrix Studies does not grow out of the Eurocentric second-wave feminist movement. It draws from non-Western epistemology. Equally true is that Creatrix Studies does not stand for the women of color feminist voice. Precisely, it is iconoclastic when it comes to the dualistic dynamic, the female vs. the male, white women vs. women of color, the west vs. the east and the like. Ultimately, it poses a challenge to pre-established academic studies. Speaking deductively, it relativizes patriarchal scholarship and shows its myopic and reductionist property. I foresee that Creatrix Studies heralds the arrival of a new timespace, not by the expansion of AI per se but by the AI adoption of matriverasalism. Ceto-Magoist Studies proclaims a new heaven, the Mother Land, reroutes the human world in alignment with the course of matriversal becoming, the only ontology for the Matriverse.
Creatrix Studies was in preparation for a new path, while remained unnamed for more than two decades. My study of Magoism remained on the periphery within the studies of feminist spirituality and Goddess Studies from the start. Magoism neither sprang from within the western hotbed of the second-wave feminist movement, nor fit the latter as it evolved. I was subjected to silent treatments by the major scholars of feminist spirituality or Goddess Studies.[6] An integrative voice identified as non-white, Korean, radical, and matriversal was left in the shadow of the second-wave feminist movement.[7] I was failing for job interviews for many years.[8] My Magoist Studies came across unruly within the Euro-centric Goddess scholarly praxes. As an advocate of Ceto-Magoism or matriversal feminism, I don’t see myself as an heir of white feminism or women-of-color feminism. Standing outside the dualistic framework, Ceto-Magoist Studies opens an encompassing matrix by drawing from matri-cosmology inherited from the pre-patriarchal past. My advocacy of Creatrix Studies is drawn from the matriversal worldview expressed in ancient Korean/East Asian philosophies. My non-Western identity plays an important role in the formation of Creatrix Studies.
Representing a Korean/East Asian feminist perspective, Magoist Studies remained visible but unrecognized within the fields of feminist spirituality and Goddess Studies for more than two decades.[9] Its integrative voice, self-identified as non-white, Korean, radical, and matriversal, met non-responses from scholars or treated as a peculiar shade of “women of color,” if recognized. Neither white feminism nor women-of-color feminism was ready for Creatrix Studies. The radical unity implied in matriversal cosmology drew its own impetus from elsewhere, the mytho-historical-cultural legacy of Old Korea (the One People and the One Land of the Creatrix). In retrospect, non-responses or silent treatments served me better. In fact, I would not be content with the responses of patronization or tokenism. Simply left alone, I continued my own intellectual alchemy. I needed time to cross-examine the primary sources of Magoism amongst themselves and within the broader cross-cultural context beyond Korea and East Asia. In my alchemical laboratory, I applied the principle of radical otherness. I consciously opted not to employ the framework of Christian theology, which I was familiar with. I consciously refused to use the category of “women of color” for myself or for my study of Magoism. I consciously chose to be attentive to the perspective of dominant white feminism.
The radical otherness that I felt fueled the process of my Ceto-Magoist inner alchemy. Intriguingly, what held me within the scope of the second-wave feminist movement was my connection with Mary Daly, the post-Christian feminist philosopher. My study of Magoism was born as a culturally remote reification of Mary Daly’s post-Christian thought. I must say that I inherited Daly’s feminist thought but moved out from the post-Christianity modality. Despite our differences, her thought was the torch that lighted my path for the three decades from the early 1990s. Her neologisms and wordplays left an imprint in my mind. I did not realize that I began to follow her footsteps in coining new words, as I advanced to my course of Magoism.
I took into my heart her radical critique of Christianity, the vision of women’s liberation, and the vision of female be-coming, a Woman. I did not doubt her advocacy of women’s courage-taking to be, leave behind, and create. Like a sponge, I absorbed her post-Christian feminist philosophy. And I thought I had a vantage position to let go of Christianity for good as a Korean woman born in the non-Christian cultural milieu. My theological divorce from Christianity was done once and for all, while hers continued to linger as a counter-Christian feminism. I felt deeply sorry for Daly that her thoughts concerned Christianity all the way through rather than jumping off beyond Christianity.[10] Daly did not choose to leave the parameters of Christianity. Or she could not. She was a radical post-Christian philosopher. I wondered if Western feminists could theologically devorce Christianity.
In an early stage of my feminist journey in the early 1990s, Daly’s radical feminist philosophy affirmed my insight on Christianity to be patriarchal, colonialist, and dualistic, and the desire to search for own intellectual/spiritual path as a feminist of Korean descent. I was well aware of my own otherness to the Euro-centric feminist movement. I saw Daly as sister to Nietzsche in her deconstructive advocacy of the Christian traditional theology.[11] Unlike Nietzsche’s nihilism, Daly’s post-Christian radical feminist philosophy resorted to Universal Sisterhood.
I followed her threefold methodology, which she explained in her book, Beyond God the Father, “The Problem, The Purpose, and the Method,”[12] and interwoven the themes of women’s liberation, naming patriarchy, and reconstructing the pre-patriarchally-originated matriversal cosmology. My reconstruction of Ceto-Magoism involves a similar trajectory to that of Mary Daly in coining terms and notions to extend women’s mind. The first word that I coined “Magoism,” referring to the mytho-historical-cultural-cosmological ramifications of Old Korea wherein Mago is revered as the Creatrix.
I am a Dalyan at the core. I loved her books. My favorites were Gyn/Ecology, Wickedary, and Outercourse. I must confess that I deeply absorbed her ideas and literary techniques in conveying the unfolding reality, which I call the matriversal reality of WE/HERE/NOW. Because I translated her first two books in Korean in the early 1990s,[13] I tend to remember better the passages from her second book, Beyond God the Father. In her “Original Reintroduction” to Beyond God the Father, written prior to its 1985 republication, she termed subtitles as “Living ‘On the Boundary’: Then and Now,” “Power of Presence, Now,” and the like.[14] I did not doubt that it was about my intellectual life undertaken in the U.S. academia. I began to appear in her public and events.[15] And she cited me in her last two books for our conversations.[16] In fact, in her last book, Amazon Grace, she employed some Korean female names, which I gave her upon request.[17] I wrote my first encounter with her and our ongoing friendship in my essays.[18]
Daly proposed the collective vision for women’s solidarity beyond differences. Although her vision served to awaken women, it had a flaw to empower women collectively. Outside the milieu of Christianity or a patriarchal religion, women would be left without resources for material, emotional, and cosmological self-reliance. Further, most white feminists remained blind or silent to white patriarchy. Insofar as white feminists embraced white identity without a critical analysis of white patriarchy, the second-wave feminist movement faced self-contradiction, ill-equipped to implement the ideal of Sisterhood. Matriversal feminism enables women to form an ally with the Natural World.
The intersectional property of patriarchy, operated through sexist, racist, classist, heterosexist, colonialist, ethnocentric, nationalist, and capitalist ideologies, rules out the very concept of solidarity. Women who take on patriarchal identities face an epistemological improbability for the solidarity of any kind. For example, white women without admitting or recognizing how their white identity partakes in white patriarchy, the ultimate modern predator, provide the cause of undermining the Sisterhood of Women. An anthropocentric feminist perspective is equally blind to the matriversal reality wherein humankind is deemed as kindred to non-human beings. In this mode of thinking, which is patriarchal, diversity becomes the very condition for division. Is the Sisterhood of Women ever plausible? The Sisterhood of Women is possible by leaving behind the patriarchal worldview. The second-wave feminist movement needs to be guided by the non-western, non-white, de-colonialist, and non-anthropocentric feminist consciousness. Ceto-Magoist Studies comes in with the advocacy of matriversal feminism, the women-led soteriological scheme, which aims at the empowerment of women by recognizing the interdependent co-origination of all entities as the progeny of the Cosmic Mother and by restoring the harmony with ALL ELSE in the Matriverse. I suggest matriversal feminism, predicated on Ceto-Magoist cosmology, as the original vision of the matristic world, wherein diversity is celebrated rather than avoided as the cause of domination. In matriversal feminism, women’s liberation entails the liberation of ALL.
Concluding Remarks
Building Creatrix Studies goes beyond my life’s effort. If I were born again as a Korean woman, I would make myself a matriversal scholar and continue to build Creatrix Studies rooted in Ceto-Magoism. There is so much to know and write about. I am overwhelmed. The more I write, the more I have to write about. I just have to protect myself from exhaustion. If my reader feels that Creatrix Studies makes sense, that will be my reward. The topic of Creatrix Studies has escaped myself. While writing this essay, I was run over again and again. I was brought to the memory lane that I did not visite yet. Matriversalism lighted the corners of my consciousness. Events, ideas, and desires started clicking to interconnect. For example, I was carrying the state of mind, fascinated and mesmerized by the children’s book I read at age eight to this day. I fell for the magical story. All along without knowing. It was highly rekindled when I discovered Mary Daly’s radical feminist thought. I fell for Mary Day’s visionary thought. And haunted by the Ceto-Magoist thought of The Zhuangzi, I dug deeper and deeper to listen to the song of whales and meet the dragon. Creatrix Studies transforms anyone and anything it touches. We are embraced by the unfolding reality of WE/HERE/NOW. What matters is not what I know about Ceto-Magoism but where Ceto-Magoism takes us to. I saw too many things. I glimpsed everything. I saw the transition of the Paleolithic to the Neolithic. Paleolithic humans lost the paradisiacal home, which was meant to be. How else could Paleolithic humans do without making a dietary transition from earth-milk to lifeforms as population grew and grew? Jiso had to eat grapes. And we have to offer atonement, as our ancestors did. How else could “the private mind” stop devolving? It had to dash down to see the rise of patriarchy. Old Korean Ceto-Magoists foreseeing the rise of patriarchy carved out matriversal ontology and inscribed it in Ceto-Magoist civilization constituting human lives thereafter. I call that Ceto-Magoist soteriology. They turned the private perspective, one that is strayed from the matriversal consciousness, as tools for self-enlightenment. We cultivate our private mind to be in tune with the Cosmic Music. Archaic Mudang Heads chose our mind to be the site of salvation. Know what the two human-caused catastrophes and be redeemed from them. My tasks in the wake of this essay are getting clearer: I will continue to march into the deep and the wide until I see the dragon vividly. I will let the world’s matter to be in the hands of the world so that we can ride the back of the dragon just like our Ceto-Magoist ancestors did.
[Author’s Note: For Referneces and Appendixes, see S/HE: An International Journal of Goddress Studiess V5 N1 (2026).]
(End of the Essay)
[1] The Goddess Studies section was first established in 2010, together with Nane Jordan.
[2] Helen Hye-Sook Hwang, Introduction in She Rises: Why Goddess Feminist Activist Spirituality? (Mago Books, 2015), 3.
[3] Hwang, The Mago Way, 5; 173.
[4] Hwang, “Mago,” 5.
[5] The same dynamic applies to a topic in “Goddess Studies” across cultures whose history is adamantly patriarchal including “Goddesses in China.”
[6] For example, a prominent scholar of Goddess Studies did not know how to face me. In the late 1990s, I was a graduate student and attended the lecture given by her. After the lecture, I approached her for questions. She ignored me as if she did not see me. I stood there waiting for her attention. She took the question from another woman who came later and stood right next to me. It was an outright racist attitude against her. I left the lecture hall immediately with the scar of emotional distress.
[7] Another prominent scholar of feminist spirituality said to me that she did not like my coinage of “Magoism,” because it created another ideology. Yet another prominent scholar of Goddess Studies who was actively participating in the conference meetings that I took leadership in creating and organizing stopped contacting me for her major projects of the Goddess publication.
[8] A female academic who interviewed me in her office for a teaching position accidentally uttered that she “wanted to see me anyway.” And a male president of a prominent college in the southeast, after making me wait outside his office for an hour by his secretary, asked me in his interview if I knew his college was a Christian college. I said Yes. Faculty members and search committee members had trouble putting me through to the final interview for their job search knowingly or unknowingly.
[9] My feminist activism is geared toward to practice haehok bokbon (resolving delusion and restoring origin).
[10] I wished that she knew the thoughts of Zhuang Zhou. I attempted to explain to her The Zhuangzi so that she may have a new perspective to her Elemental Feminist Philosophy outside Christianity. Now I can see that I wanted her to know the matriversalism that The Zhuangzi unleashes.
[11] I wrote a term essay on Mary Daly’s Radical Feminism in comparison with Friedrich Nietzsche’s Nihilism for my course on Philosophers of Religion, which excluded female philosophers, and published it in a Korean feminist journal. See Helen Hye-Sook Hwang, “A Comparative Study on the Thoughts of Friedrich Nietzsche and Mary Daly: The Difference between Postmodern Thought and Radical Feminist Religious Consciousness,” Hanguk Yeo-seong Cheolhak (한국여성철학 Korean Feminist Philosophy), Vol. 2, 2002, 149-167. I just found out that there was a thesis onNietzsche and Daly. If I had known, I would have cited it. See PeteCostello, “Nietzsche and Daly: Sparks of Friendship A Study of Nietzschean Thought in Daly’s Early Works” (1993), Honors Theses, 1963-2015. https://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/honors_theses/744.
[12] Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation. (Beacon: Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1985, 1973c), 1-12.
[13] I originally planned to translate only one book, Beyond God the Father, with which she agreed. Then, I happened to have one more year prior to taking up my graduate studies. That was how I came to translate her first book, The Church and the Second Sex, as well.
[14] She wrote it after publishing her first three books, Beyond God the Father (1973), Gyn/Ecology (1978), and Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy (1984). She then wrote, Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language (1987).
[15] In her Claremont lecture in 1998, she asked me to read a passage of it during her lecture. I was innocent and carefree of my appearances in her public events, which included a TV show by Roseanne and conferences in the coming years. I don’t think it helped her in any manner because I was not ready to be helpful. But she continued to invite me wherever she went to promote her books and her radical feminist thought.
[16] They are Quintessence: Realizing the archaic future: A radical elemental feminist manifesto and Amazon Grace: Re-calling the courage to sin big.
[17] Mary Daly, Amazon Grace: Re-calling the courage to sin big (1st ed.), New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006.
[18] I have written about my encounter with Mary Daly and published in Return to Mago E-Magazine. Listed in References.
As I was reading I kept thinking about the tremendous amount of resilience you must have had to keep focus and spirits high in the midst of silence and probably some confusion about your ideas. Although I do not completely understand the entirety of your lens and I still have much to read of your work, I appreciate these valuable ideas.