Review
Pagan, Goddess, Mother was a joy to read. It is moving, heartfelt, experiential, and reflective! It beautifully conveys the potential of pagan/goddess mothering, is accessible to a wide audience, and contributes to empowering mothering practices well into the future. -Mary Condren PhD is director of Woman Spirit Ireland, author of The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion and Power in Celtic Ireland and teaches at the Centre for Gender and Women?s Studies, Trinity College Dublin. While there are many guidebooks on how to be a mother, and many works on the experience of mothering, no other book specifically addresses the challenges to mothering presented to someone who self identifies as a Pagan and a Goddess devotee. Most Pagans tend to feel somewhat isolated as their path is not a mainstream one. Therefore, most mothers who are also Pagans are considerably isolated. This anthology presents compelling personal accounts of being a Pagan, a Goddess devotee and also a mother, and how those roles both compete with each other, and also blend and support each other. The book speaks to those experiences and provides the connection and knowledge that lets women in this situation know that they are not alone, that the path they are traveling has been traveled before, and that there are others that share their experience. - Candace C. Kant, Ph.D. Academic Dean Cherry Hill Seminary This anthology brought forth by Jordan and Alexandre emerges during an unprecedented time of timeliness when our world has paused en masse to collectively overcome a global pandemic, searching for new models of living, connecting, thriving, Being. Through the voices of mothers and whispers of mother lineages, this rich polyphony of Pagan and Goddess-centered stories and scholarship is like the deep, primordial sigh of our EarthMother ? She bleeds as She births forth a new matristic paradigm. It is in Her image where we must now rethink, renegotiate, re-heal, and ultimately rebirth ourselves, our planet, and our sense of the sacred. - Wennifer Lin-Haver, PhD
About the Author
Chandra Alexandre, PhD, is a Tantric Bhairavi who has served as a spiritual leader for the past 20 years in the San Francisco Bay Area through SHARANYA (www.sharanya.org), a federally-recognized goddess temple she founded after receiving direction from her teacher in India to “Go and spread Mother Worship!” Dedicated to Her mysteries as pathways to personal transformation and social justice, Chandra works both in community and in the nonprofit sector for change. She received diksha (initiation) into Tantra in India, her PhD in Asian & Comparative Studies from CIIS (with an MA in Women’s Spirituality), and her DMin in Creation Spirituality. She also holds an MBA in sustainable management and is a certified fundraising professional specializing in internationally-focused causes and grassroots women-led change. Nane Jordan, PhD, is a birthkeeper, artist-scholar, community worker, and mother of two daughters. Nane has been active in mother-centred birth for over 30 years, and is devoted to women’s spirituality, the divine feminine/female, Mother Earth, and goddess scholarship. She completed her MA in Women’s Spirituality (New College of California), a PhD in Education (UBC), and was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Paris 8, France. Nané currently works in Indigenous family services, and was a lecturer in art education at UBC. She pursues narrative, arts-based, life writing research, collaborative artistic practices (see: http://www.gestareartcollective.com), and publishes widely, including the anthology Placenta Wit: Mother Stories, Rituals, and Research (Demeter Press, 2017).
