Finding strength in goddesses
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PROVIDENCE, R.I. - Isis is the Egyptian goddess known for her veiled beauty and her power. She molded a serpent from soil. She raised her husband from the dead. Now if she can only fix Laura Schmidt's 1986 Chevrolet Celebrity.
It is a rainy Monday night and Schmidt, a 22-year-old art-gallery director whose nickname is "Tempest," sits in a circle on the floor of her East Side apartment with four friends, a law-office librarian, health-insurance claim worker, and file clerk among them. She drops bits of cedar and spicy scented patchouli in a canister and lights candles.
Then she announces the evening's mission: to cast off illness, mean people, and one more thing. "We'd like to banish poverty ... and, if possible, for my car to find a better place and a new one to come."
Sarah Slater, 31, agrees: "Yes, we need to do some automobile healing. Mine is running pretty rough."
The women are part of the Cauldron of Annwyn Pagan Society, a group of 30 or so people started by Schmidt in 1998 while she was a painting student at the Rhode Island School of Design. They are also part of a number of spirituality seekers - many of them young women disillusioned with the female role models in traditional religions - who are engaging in goddess-worship.
This sort of goddess-worship has nothing to with the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, but with the female deities that grace ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Celtic lore. It takes place, for instance, in living rooms, at the Rhode Island School of Design and in a new-age store on Wickenden Street. It spawned "Goddess2000," a national art project with the slogan "A Goddess on Every Block."
Schmidt, who is one of six Rhode Island contacts for Goddess2000, a Northern California-based project, arranged an event in downtown Providence in September, at which people painted stones with images of goddesses.
Goddess Web sites sell bumper stickers, "goddess tours" take devotees to Crete and Malta, and there is a board game, called Go Goddess! Amazon.com is now touting "The Goddess in the Office," which one reviewer called a breezy book on making your workplace goddess-friendly. (It includes "spells" to cast on the boss.)
Many of those who revere goddesses are part of Paganism, Wicca, and other "Earth-based" religions that link daily life with the seasons - which in ancient myths are often controlled by goddesses. Members of the Cauldron of Annwyn Pagan Society consider themselves traditional witches. They sometimes worship gods, but it's Aphrodite, Athena and Diana on which they focus.
"It's so much easier to think of a girl looking over you," Slater says.
Schmidt was raised in New Jersey, the daughter of a Roman Catholic mother and Reform Jewish father. Mary, the Virgin mother, seemed distant to her. She turned to paganism in her teens.
Her family had a fondness for superstition; they turned their St. Joseph statue upside down when they heard it might help sell their house.
On a recent Monday, in the East Side apartment she shares with her husband, she relies on her own prop: a goddess card deck.
Forget the Joker and Queen of Hearts; this deck contains 48 goddesses from ancient tales. Each woman picks a card and reads the message on it.
Schmidt picks Venus. Whoops and whistles break out. Someone explains that Venus rises naked from the sea.
Catholics revere the Virgin Mary. The feisty Lilith is the symbol for some modern Jewish women (not to mention Sarah McLachlan).
The idea of viewing divine beings as both masculine and feminine goes back centuries, but today's reverence of the figures of ancient lore is likely spawned by feminism and the rise in popularity of Wicca, says Robert Mathieson, professor of Women, Magic and Power at Brown University.
He estimates that there are 300,000 followers of branches of goddess-based spirituality.
It's very empowering, he says, for women to worship a deity that resembles them, and to feel - as they delve into the tarot-card reading and witchcraft - that they have a handle on the unknown.
Say a woman has trouble in relationships. She could turn to Aphrodite, the goddess of love, he says. Is domestic tranquility threatened? Summon Hera, the protector of households.
Eclipse Nielson, an East Side author, teaches a women's spirituality class in Providence.
"What we all agree on is that the goddess is alive and well in the year 2000," she says.
The cauldron devotees say they don't use their gods and goddesses and their witchcraft spells on the mundane. A spell is the last resort, Schmidt says.
But it is done. When one woman received nasty e-mails from a bitter ex-boyfriend, the group went to Lincoln Woods to perform a "healing ritual."
"By Wednesday, the person causing her trouble - his e-mail server went down and he could not send her messages anymore," Schmidt says.
When her husband's boss was being cruel, they bound up a voodoo doll with string. The boss apologized, she says.
More often, though, the deities are "invoked," as it is called, to bring creativity, peace, and to help someone who is ill.
Invoking a goddess is a matter of ceremony. And likely, believing.
At another recent cauldron meeting, 14 people - three of them men - gather in the Rhode Island School of Design's Memorial Building. The women wear flowing gauzy skirts and stand on a floor marked with chalk from a drawing class.
Rebecca Lebeau-Craven, 27, a Brown University researcher on alcohol addictions, stands out in her sweater set and pearl earrings. Her inspiration for alternative spirituality was Jim Morrison, she says.
Schmidt wears dark eyeliner, a cloak, and a necklace with a charm that she calls an "art-nouveau goddess head."
They gather to honor Samhain, which in Celtic tales is the end of the harvest. On a tiny altar sit lavender candles and castanets, for dancing. Smoke curls out of a burner that holds a woodsy incense.
Four people must volunteer to "be" four elements of nature, roles that involves readings and poses. Teamwork is tricky in any religion.
On this night, their imaginations must defy the sounds of sirens outside, so they can go into "a cave."
They count down "into the darkness." A woman, Schmidt says, is in the cave. Who is she?
Someone saw her own mother. Another, a woman in a gorgeous black dress.
"Did you ask her where she got it?" Schmidt jokes.
Later, the women do the grapevine around a shrine. They break into a near-Polka, clapping, and yelling, with trills.
And they sing.
"We all come from the goddess and to her we shall return."
Not by a 1986 Chevy Celebrity they won't. Schmidt now drives a 1989 Chevy Van.