Introduction

First of all, the title, Goddesses, Goddesses, boldly intimates that in our contemporary Age torn apart by adherents of warring Gods, we may expect to find here something unusual, culturally rare, and doubly spirited and pleasurable. As in much of her other work, Janine Canan manifests for her readers the presence of the Sacred Feminine, the “other” deity who has been so strictly suppressed from the domains of acceptable public discourse. And yet, as her work indicates, there are increasing numbers who are willing to call out the name of Goddess, seeking to make known, to share and to nurture a growing community among women and men who seek an alternative to the domineering male-centered religions of not only the modern era, but the past two and more thousand years in much of the West and the East.

               Goddesses, Goddesses is about the celebration of the traditions of the Feminine Divine that stretch back into the earliest traces of human memory. It is also about cultural dimensions of life that interface with the spiritual or religious considerations of Canan’s search for her own life’s meaning. The contemporary Women’s Spirituality movement is very much about an embodied, Earth-based, Nature-embedded and relational sensibility and practice, and these values are to be found in this book of essays from the first to last page.

Many of these essays are about the friendships of this remarkable woman poet, author and psychiatrist, with an array of cultural luminaries, mostly of the late Twentieth Century. These include philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch; beat poet Diane Di Prima; mystical love-lyricist James Broughton; archaeologist and mythologer Marija Gimbutas; sarode player and teacher Ali Akbar Khan; lesbian poet Lynn Lonidier; early Twentieth Century German lyric poet Else Lasker-Schüler; the dazzling array of poets collected for her anthology, She Rises like the Sun: Invocations of the Goddess by Contemporary American Women Poets, including Maya Angelou, Susan Griffin, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, Audre Lorde, Mary Mackey, Paula Gunn Allen, Carol Lee Sanchez, May Sarton, and more; the Yaqui Indian poet Alma Villanueva; the “hugging saint of India,” avatar of Divine Mother and major philanthropist, Amma; and herself as poet and essayist. Canan offers us the gift of encountering these wonders of the human spirit, as if she had arranged a special party of her friends and invited us all to attend.

The Women’s Spirituality movement is also about women including ourselves in the story, in the bigger picture, and not always leaving ourselves until last, or neglected altogether. And this is perhaps the most intriguing part of the book—that Canan weaves her own personal-cultural-spiritual autobiography through the essays so as to allow us to come to know her, slowly, enjoyably, over the years, until we finally glimpse the shape and flow of her own lifetime of searching to affirm and honor the beauty of nature, the feminine, the use of language itself. As she interweaves her personal feelings, political events, and encounters with great minds of our times, she also mediates and midwives the deepening of self-knowledge and self-understanding of those of us who listen to her closely, as if in conversation with a good friend.

This book is not only a treasure-trove of stories about famous people from an avid admirer and literary portrait artist, and a moving memoir of a multi-faceted and talented woman poet and channeler of psychological wisdom, it is a treasure-trove of poetry and prose linked by the common threads of love of language and love of life. Whether Canan sings to us in prose or poetry, or recites for us the poetry of others, these two great loves of hers are poured onto every page for our pleasure and inspiration.

—Mara Keller, PhD

Director, Women’s Spirituality, Philosophy & Religion
California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco