“I am all of Motherhood.” 🌾

The Two Goddesses rosary (The Free Range Priestess). 

Every so often, I pay a visit to my local Mary shrine and grotto. Sometimes it's to see the flowers, to surround myself with beauty and peace. Others, I'm searching for a sense of closure about my Catholic upbringing. I never seem to find it. 

As I wandered through the lush gardens, my eyes caught on an art installation that stopped me dead in my tracks: a marble statue of Mary weeping over her fallen son. She cradled his body in her arms, bent with grief, tears streaming down her cheeks. Something about the scene reminded of the other famous grieving mother of world mythology, and I couldn't help but ask myself- 

Why do I honor Demeter, and not Mary? Why Demeter, when Mary’s grief is so graceful and Hers is so, well... extreme? 

Growing up Catholic, I chafed against Mary as a model of womanhood. Religious authorities praised her meekness, her grace, and her submission to God, creating a perfect ideal that I could never live up to. God wants teenage Mary to get pregnant out of wedlock? May it be so. God wants Mary to remain a lifelong virgin? May it be so. God wants Mary to watch her only son die on the cross? May it be so. The whole situation just felt profoundly injust to me. 

Then Persephone showed up in my life, a Goddess who stole my heart so completely that there was no question of being Catholic anymore. Demeter entered my life a few months later. I moved on from my Mary-angst, but I never got over the sense that my first religion had rejected fundamental parts of who I am: my queer identity, my anger, my sexuality. And I felt that the Marian model of womanhood was to blame. 

Now, years later, I was standing in the grotto, thinking again about submission to God's will (better known as “Fate,” in a Pagan context). In that moment, I decided to reframe "submission to God" as "accepting your destiny.” Think of the Greek heroes who hear a prophecy and do everything in their power to prevent it, accidentally fulfilling it in the process. Wouldn't their lives have turned out better if they had just listened to the damn oracle? 🤣

Maybe Mary's "submission to God" isn't a sign of weakness, but rather, a mark of of emotional maturity. Maybe Mary possesses a different kind of strength than the fierce, sensual Goddesses of the ancient world. Her softness is her strength, and her compassion is her power. I suppose that not every female rolemodel can, or should, be an Artemis-type badass. 

There's a Goddess dear to my heart who was unwilling to accept to the will of Zeus/God/Fate when She lost Her own child. Demeter's aspect, Erinyes (Fury), is one of my favorite parts of Her worship, but it's also one of the most theologically difficult.

Demeter is simply so exquisitely human. Her anger over the loss of Persephone is a stand-in for OUR anger about the human condition. Young people die. Children are abused. In some parts of the world, young girls are still separated from their mothers and married off to strangers. Yes- bad things happen to good people. "Why should we take it standing," argues the myth of Demeter- "Shouldn't we do everything in our power to fight back?"

I mean, Demeter literally makes the world stop in Her grief. So many of us wish we could do that. 

I love Demeter's righteous spirit. If Mary teaches us when to accept hardship, Demeter teaches us when to resist. This is especially poignant in combination to Her Thesmophoros (Bringer of Laws) aspect, which could arguably give Her a social-justicey bent. When Demeter demands Persephone’s return, I’m cheering for Her. When Demeter goes “Not my dryad, you bitch!” and punishes the heck out of Erysichthon, I’m cheering for Her. When Demeter pops off at Metaneira… Well, I don’t even know how to feel about that one. But Her speech in the Homeric hymn was pretty badass. 

The problem is that Demeter takes it so far. What about the children who die in the famines of Her creation? What about Erysichthon’s young daughter, sold into slavery to buy more food for her starving father? And couldn’t Demeter have been a little bit more gracious with poor Metaneira, who was understandably freaked out by the sight of her baby in a fire?  

The easiest way to come to peace with Demeter’s wrathful side is to see Her as a personification of the agricultural cycle. Mother Nature can be both bountiful and brutal. But that naturalistic explanation doesn’t satisfy me on its own; the Gods are supposed to be role models to humanity, not just mindlessly destructive forces.

I’m willing to embrace a flawed Demeter, but I’m currently exploring the belief that the Gods always act virtuously. And I can’t seem to reconcile that belief with Demeter’s mythology. 

It was reading the short story “A Company of Crones” in Suz Thackston’s new book, A Pile of Stones, that helped me finally come to some peace. As I lost myself in words of power, I realized that we will never be able to fit the Gods into our narrowly-defined boxes of what is beautiful or good. The Gods are luminous, terrible, wonderful. We can try to understand and rationalize, but sometimes we just need to sit with Their complexity. 

Suz writes,

“Rape me, abuse me, vilify me, and my toxicity sickens the land.” 

“I am all of Motherhood. Not just your pallid pantomime of self-deprecation and fat squirting breasts.” 

“Our power does not lie in our beauty. We have no need to seduce you. If you do not find us in our crone-selves, you will not know us at all.” 

Wow. 

I’ve been debating the merits of Demeter vs Mary for years, but in the light of a message like that, it seems silly to discuss what makes a “good” Mother Goddess. All I know is that when I left the grotto, I had no desire to honor Mary or become Catholic again. Instead, I was thinking about Demeter: how I love Her, how grateful I am to serve Her- how I wish I could build Her a grotto of Her own. 

In the Gods,

Rose Eleusis 🌹