The Great Goddess, Mother Nature

I was recently asked a question by a friend of mine, regarding portrayals of the divine. She asked whether or not it was helpful to portray the Great Goddess in human form. Using a small statue to represent someone so boundless, so vastly supreme, may seem fruitless. Is it possible to accurately depict Her? Is it helpful to try and depict Her in human form? Since my childhood, I like to imagine Her as a warm and loving mother, but I knew that she was much more than that. And image we come up with is merely a symbolic representation of our experience of the divine. 

The Metamorphoses of Apuleius describes a vision of the Great Goddess. She emerges from the sea, to announce that she is known by many names... "the Phrygians call me the mother of the Gods: the Athenians, Minerva: the Cyprians, Venus: the Candians, Diana: the Sicilians Proserpina: the Eleusians, Ceres: some Juno, other Bellona, other Hecate: and principally the Aethiopians which dwell in the Orient, and the Aegyptians which are excellent in all kind of ancient doctrine, and by their proper ceremonies accustome to worship mee, doe call mee Queene Isis." The Cult of Isis spread throughout the Roman Empire during the formative centuries of Christianity. Inscriptions show followers in Gaul, Spain, Pannonia, Germany, Arabia, Asia Minor, Portugal and many shrines even in Britain.

In India, the Great Goddess is called Mahadevi. The Devi Mahatmya is a Sanskrit text composed around c. 400-500 CE which states; "She is eternal (and is thus beyond our knowledge) and pervades the world which may accordingly be called her form. Yet for the assistance of the lustrous souls, she appears in different forms." Shaktism is a denomination of Hinduism whish focuses on Mahadevi as the absolute, ultimate Godhead. All other forms of divinity, female or male, are considered to be merely her diverse manifestations.

To me, the Great Goddess is a representation of Mother Nature, the one who births us all. Her physical body is the Universe, pulsing with her life essence. Each human being is just a tiny molecule in her infinite body. She is the ultimate reality, the one beyond which there is no other. As a child, I imagined her as a beautiful woman with long flowing brown hair and a long green and blue dress. I didn't know of any religions that worshipped such a deity, so I decided to create my own. My temple was a small circle of birch trees, and the name I gave my deity was Alla, Swedish for "All". The Greek word for "All" is Pan, and so pantheism is the belief in a god who is all.

I didn't come across the word 'pantheism' until several years later when I was in my early teens. I realised this would be a good term to describe my beliefs about the universe. When I was in my mid twenties, I came across the philosophical speaker Alan Watts. He really helped verbalise some of these feelings I had of mystical oneness with all that exists. The Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes pantheism as "the belief that every existing entity is, only one Being; and that all other forms of reality are either modes (or appearances) of it or identical with it.” The consciousness of every flower, every beetle, every tree and squirrel, every human and dog, is the consciousness of that one great being which we call universe. Zeno of Citium explained it thus; "No part can be sentient where the whole is not sentient; parts of the cosmos are sentient, therefore the cosmos is sentient."

In my opinion, this pantheistic sense of god is the same god that all the religions of the world worship. Mohandas Gandhi explained it like this; "Everyone has faith in God though everyone does not know it. For everyone has faith in himself and that multiplied to the nth degree is God. The sum total of all that lives is God. We may not be God, but we are of God, even as a little drop of water is of the ocean." And you needn't use the word 'god' at all, you can just call it 'universe', 'the cosmos', 'the all'. Labels are just sign posts which point toward the thing we're talking about, so if you feel a certain word describes what you're talking about more accurately than 'god' then go with what makes the most sense to you.

The word 'pantheism' was, as far as we can tell, invented by the English mathematician Joseph Raphson. He referred to 'pantheismus' as the belief in an all-containing and all-penetrating impersonal god, which he called 'pantheos' meaning 'all-god' or the god which is all. Raphson called followers of this view 'pantheists' because they believe in "a certain universal substance, material as well as intelligent, that fashions all things that exist out of its own essence." The Irish philosopher John Toland described this as; "The power and energy of All, which has created all and which governs all...is God, which you may call Spirit and Soul of the Universe. This is why the Socratic Associates have been called pantheists, because according to them this soul cannot be separated from the Universe itself."

This is a deity in whom you may lose yourself completely. Realising our oneness with the Great Goddess, we recognise an indissoluble bond with all that is. And this is why we depict Her in human form, because humans are One with the Supreme Being. The knowledge of this ultimate unity is what I call 'enlightenment' and it's something we tend to forget about in every day life when we are distracted by superficial things. A deity statue should not be a distraction from the true nature of the divine. If you find that it limits your perception of Her, don't use an image. Look in the mirror and remember who you really are, you are not just a human, you are part of the Great Goddess.