In Her Image Quotes

“Whether we perceive Her as transcendent or immanent or both, the Goddess in Her rich and varied forms allows us to make new meaning of our experiences as women. She offers us a vision of being female that extends far beyond the limits of our cultural image, and reclaims to deep significance all that has been split off or lost. Through Her, we can reclaim the life of our bodies, our self-generative creativity, the meaningfulness of the entire cycle of our lives from childhood to old age, find a new connectedness to nature, even come to understand our rage and destructiveness as balance points for our capacities to nurture and to love. Through Her we are reborn into connection with the 'container' for our lives that the unhealed child in us is crying for. The Goddess visions us anew, outside of the eyes of patriarchy.”
― Kathie Carlson, In Her Image

“There was a time when to be a woman was to be directly in the image of the Divine. There was a time when God was a Woman and Her spaciousness filled the vision and touched the hearts of every man, woman, and child who worshiped Her. She was called Goddess, Lady, Mother of All. Her manifestations were many: Huntress and Mistress of Animals, Lady of the Plants, Queen of Heaven and Earth, Creator, Sustainer, and Destroyer. It was She who created life and nourished it and She was deprived it and took it away. All things were subject to the Great Mother who was the origin and resource of every living thing and of the inanimate world as well.

The diversity and richness of Her images attest to a vision of Woman among the ancients that was spacious, complex and multifaceted. This vision conveyed to feminine experience depth of meaning, awesome power, and profound value. So much that is lost, split off, devalued, or left unnamed in women's experiences today was once integrated into a vast vision of femaleness that was so valued, it was seen as holy. This included sexuality, menstruation, birthing, mothering, menopause, aging, and power to name but a few areas in women's lives that were valued by Goddess-worshiping peoples in ancient times but that have been devalued or stereotyped in our own. To turn back to these ancient images, to try to reconstruct their meaning in their own times as best we can, and to dream them forward into new meaning for our own time deepens and enriches our experience of ourselves as women, The multiple faces of the feminine God expand our vision of what a woman is and offer us a broader possibility for reclaiming and naming our own experiences. They also help us, by contrast, to identify more clearly the patriarchal vision of women inherent in our own cultural tradition and to determine for ourselves which aspects of that particular vision accurately comprehend our experience and which do not. This aids in the true naming of ourselves which is the central individuation task of women today.”
― Kathie Carlson, In Her Image