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The Bride As Goddess (excerpt)
By Cornelia Powell | December 22, 2008
I promised to share with you a excerpt from a presentation, The Colours of the Goddess, that I recently gave at a symposium in Williamsburg, Virginia. The longer presentation was originally prepared for a Women’s Conference in Cuzco, Peru several years ago. (For another excerpt from my “goddess” presentation, see the Love Notes page in the current Weddings of Grace Online Magazine.):
A practice of past cultures — and continued today in some societies — heralds the bride as a heroine and sees that she is honored and attended to like a queen: she is bathed, perfumed, painted, pierced, bejeweled, coiffed, wrapped, draped, veiled, adorned with flowers, extravagantly dressed (sometimes changing costumes several times over days- or week-long ceremonies), and she is elevated to goddess stature!
So with all of this adoration over many centuries, was the bride possibly seen as the “epiphany of the goddess”? Was she considered an embodiment of Aphrodite, goddess of love and procreation; Hera, goddess of marriage and nurturing; or Demeter, goddess of motherhood?
For thousands of years, Goddesses were real to most of the world’s population. Goddess religions were considered nature religions, personifying nature’s abundance and life-giving powers. Therefore, their rites-of-passage ceremonies captured nature’s mystery and magic. Although today’s bride doesn’t go through the extensiveness of ancient rituals (but we borrow from them all!), this goddess essence is indeed part of the modern bride’s lineage.
Perhaps part of the wide appeal of the modern bride — to the observer as well for the woman considering marriage — that as a bride, she is seen on some subconscious level as a reminder of (or perhaps simply a yearning for) this goddess spirit: nurturing, wise, beautiful, and self-renewing. Is a woman tapping into her own goddess nature as a bride? Does the bride’s rite-of-passage represent a deeper need to unequivocally express her femininity — to be part of the mystery?
Then again, it may just be no more than a woman’s desire to dress in sensuous “goddess clothes” or, fueled by the fairy princess myth, “live out a dream that may very well have haunted them from girlhood,” like Darcy Cosper declares in her book, Wedding Season. As author Caroline Weber (who I met her at the symposium in Williamsburg), wrote in her New York Times review of The Diana Chronicles by Tina Brown:
“Ladies, let’s be honest: who really among us hasn’t dreamed of becoming a princess?” Women around the world, “sometimes against their better judgment,” fall entranced by the glamorous prospects and “redemptive metamorphosis that this particular myth promises.”
Since a rite-of-passage is designed to move you closer to your true spirit, I tell brides-to-be of every age and persuasion: “Don’t settle for being a princess for a day, be a goddess for a lifetime!”
Topics: Costume, For Brides, Women's Notes |