Goddess Cards

Once upon a time, women grew up with goddesses! In the ancient world, the goddess was never far away. For every human concern - birth, death, love, marriage, childbearing, health, art, work, war and peace - there was a corresponding female divinity. In the pre-Christian Greco-Roman world alone, for example, women could cry out to:

Aphrodite/Venus for concerns with erotic love, beauty, fertility

Artemis/Diana for sisterhood, healing, childbearing, hunting

Athena/Minerva for wisdom, war, intellect, domestic arts, invention

Demeter/Ceres for motherhood and harvest

Hera/Juno for marriage and family

Vesta/Hestia for home and hearth

Gaia, the Great Mother

Naturally, goddesses reflected the culture that generated them. Since the Greeks were a passionate people, their goddesses were passionate. Human to the ‘nth degree, they were easy for women to relate to because they shared the strengths, weaknesses, and cultural values of their followers. But they were Super-Human. Incredibly powerful friends and allies. Women believed that their goddesses empathized with them, and that they had the clout to solve their problems and transform their lives.

Better still, unlike today’s Media Goddesses, who all seem cut from the same cloth, the ancient goddesses came in all sizes, shapes, and temperaments. There were goddesses honoring every phase of a woman’s life: maiden, mother, and wise woman. Wisdom and experience were as highly prized as youth and beauty. Some goddesses embodied all three phases. Brigid, the Celtic Triple Goddess of Fire, was one of those. She was also the goddess of war, poetry, music, inspiration and divination. (Talk about multi-tasking!)

No aspect of human life was too insignificant to deserve a patron. Bast, the Cat Goddess of Egypt, was for cat lovers, among other things. Gorgeously depicted as a cat, or as a cat headed woman, she offered consolation to all who mourned the death of a kitty. Your cat wasn’t lost! It had simply “gone to be with Bast.” (How I wish I had known that when my Catty-Puss died!)

The triumph of patriarchal religions such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam knocked goddesses and women off their pedestals. The Great Mother, exemplified by the powerful goddess, Gaia, who was thought to have given birth to all life on Earth, was transformed by the church into a new mother figure - the gentle, submissive Virgin Mary. This relegated women to a more subservient, conservative role in society. It also opened the door to a steady erosion of women’s feelings of power, worth, and self-esteem.

By the time I was growing up, the great archetypal goddesses were no longer part of my world. Yet, despite knowing little about my rich cultural heritage, I found my way back. In a patriarchal world, I still grew up with goddesses! Not the legendary goddesses I celebrated later in my line of greeting cards for women. Instead, I discovered the everyday, REAL goddesses who surround us everywhere, and who are goddesses in their own right.

This process of returning to the Divine Feminine began when my family moved to the West Indies soon after my birth in Borneo. (Yes, Borneo!) We lived in Trinidad until I was 9 years old.

Somehow I knew, without ever being told, that my Trini nanny, Mama Ethel, was a goddess. Nearly six feet tall, she weighed at least 200 pounds. Her face shone like polished ebony. Her lap was the safest place I knew. I can still hear her singing.

Though I loved her best, Mama wasn't the only goddess. Along the roads of rural Trinidad, gorgeous Creole and East Indian women swayed to market with baskets balanced on their heads and babies bouncing on their hips. Curvy? Over-the-top female? You bet! Men whistled and hooted with joy as they passed. How rich and fine they were!

The nymphs, slender European or North American women like my beautiful, Canadian birth mother, Ruth Isabel, paled in comparison. I loved the native goddesses, with their tropical complexions and sensuous shapes - their solidity and competence.

By the time I reached my teens, we had moved to New York, where I finished high school and college. Goddesses were scarce as hen's teeth on my college campus. If a girl had voluptuous hips and breasts, she hid them under baggy sweaters or sweatshirts. (Almost as some tried to hide their brains behind a smile, and a flutter of eyelashes.) Since most admiration was reserved for nymphs, goddesses tried to starve themselves into fashionable shadows of their true selves.

I fought my own battles. Neither nymph nor goddess, I was almost as tall as Mama Ethel—but skinny as a rake, and nicknamed "Bird Legs." I couldn't get it right either. Forgetting the rich diversity of the West Indian goddesses of my childhood, I tried to plump up. I wanted to be a nymph too! Instead, I remained thin as Ribby Ratsoup, the starveling rat in a children's story.

Despite what I thought of as my shortcomings, I met and married a man who loved me as I was. Eventually, we moved to Los Angeles. We had three children: a son and two daughters. My oldest girl was a nymph; the youngest, Amanda, grew up to be a goddess.

How do you raise a goddess in a town where you can never be too rich or too thin? Bombarded with messages that only Thin is In, a curvy girl has a tough time celebrating herself. Especially when Mom joins the enemy, and starts packing her lunch box with carrot sticks.

Years later, I was visiting Amanda in L.A. She was all grown up by then, a singer who was the Founder/Director of Musical Theatre Los Angeles, a little company that offers after-school workshops in singing, dancing and musical theatre to kids. She's a wonderful teacher, daughter and sister. She makes me laugh; she makes me proud. The only thing she isn’t is skinny. That worried her. Worried her sick. It worried me even more. How could she fail to see how unique and beautiful she is?

I remembered the goddesses of my childhood. The ancient goddesses I met later in books. How had I forgotten them? When had I bought into the false myths of the Media Goddess? When had I lost the Real Thing? I didn't waste another minute.

"You're a GODDESS, not a nymph!" I cried, dizzy with re-discovery.

I made her my first GODDESS CARD. It said, “GO, goddess!”

It was the first of a long series of love notes and affirmations I've created for my curvy girl, and for women everywhere in all their rich diversity of size, shape and culture. Accomplished women who've forgotten—as I did, for a while, or who've never been told—that women come in many different packages. And all of them are beautiful.

author: Anne Baird