Depiction of Goddesses

Common cross-cultural ways of depicting goddesses can be discerned in the figures of several religious traditions. While the attributes of all goddesses are hardly identical across all cultures, the attributes they do possess frequently owe something to their conceptualization as females and to popular conceptions of female characteristics. To different degrees, female deities also reflect cultural norms, including social norms in which (human) males dominate. The principal goddess figures of three religious cultures--Kuan-yin in Chinese Buddhism, Aphrodite in ancient Greece, and Mary in Christianity--reflect principles that appear to be dominantly female in each culture. This is not to say that they determine that culture entirely, but rather that each represents a dominant stream of thought and felt experience within that culture.

Kinsley describes Kuan-yin, goddess of mercy and compassion who "is quick to answer please from her devotees for help" (Kinsley, 1989, p. 26), as the most popular female deity in the Buddhist tradition that traveled from India to China. He notes that femaleness may not have been an essential attribute of Kuan-yin in its earliest manifestations (a total of 23 separate forms) but that the female form predominated from the 11th century onward, owing to the fusing of Kuan-yin with a variety of indigenous Tibetan and Chinese goddesses identified with compassion and various senses of the power of maternal protectiveness.

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(such as omniscience, omnipotence, immortality) and plays many of the roles associated with goddesses (such as savior, protector promoter of fertility)." The multiplicity of attributes associated with multiple aspects of deity in Buddhist or ancient Greek tradition coalesce in Mary, which does much to explain her prominence in Christianity. To be sure, Christian (and again, especially Catholic) tradition includes in its pantheon a host of female saints, which are more or less the equivalent of goddesses in non-Christian traditions. But nothing in the stream of thought about female saints mitigates Mary's special status for Christianity. Mary very much resembles Kuan-yin in psychological content and reach of power; she is almost the direct obverse of Aphrodite, as we shall see. Because of Mary's special status, her functions overlap, converge, and even apparently contradict one another, at least in human terms. Kinsley's chapter on Mary describes her as virgin, mother, and queen, and in the ordinary course of human logic, virgin and mother are nothing if not contradictory. The biblical description of her as a virgin is cited as a narrative strategy "to underline the exceptional nature of Jesus' conception and birth" (Kinsley, 1989

Category: Philosophy - D