Tower of Ivory , House of Gold
Jeanne Shannon
There was no room for goddesses in the fundamentalist Christian religion of my childhood in the 1940 ’ s in the Appalachian Mountains of southwestern Virginia . God was the only deity , and He was decidedly male . He was also controlling , punitive and judgmental , especially where women were concerned . If you looked closely , you could see that this God thought women were the work of the Devil .
But I found goddesses in books , especially in a volume of literature for children that my mother , a teacher , had studied in college when she was working toward her degree in elementary education . That book recounted some of the myths of Greece , Rome and Scandinavia , and in these there were always a lot of goddesses around .
I remember an April a ernoon , so as silk and fragrant with white apple flowers , when I yearned to go outside and build an altar to … what ? Certainly not to the angry , scary old man who was called God in Sunday sermons and evening revival meetings . Certainly not to Jesus , bleeding on a cross , though I felt sorry for his suffering and thought he was a more appealing personality than “ God .”
So I went out into the shining , transparent-yellow a ernoon and carried a little table into the yard , and decked it with clover flowers and blossoms of the wild plum trees and the Japanese quince . I spread my arms and held my hands palms up , in what I must have known instinctively was a gesture of worship , and praised the force that caused the earth to flower . I wished that the church would offer ceremonies like that , instead of depressing sermons about