Chapter 4 Women, Goddesses, and Gender Affinity in Spirit-Writing
In: Communicating with the GodsSearch for other papers by Elena Valussi in
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Abstract
This chapter presents an overview of the presence of women and goddesses in spirit-writing circles from the earliest materials available to us, in an effort to make women in this tradition more visible, and their activities more acknowledged. I wish to explore the role of actual women within spirit-writing circles, the role of goddesses as communicators and transmitters of texts, and the gender-specific connection established between women and goddesses during this transmission. I also wish to render the implicit gender roles of male and female divinities more explicit in the context of spirit-writing transmission. The history of spirit-writing, and especially of women’s presence within it, is far from complete so I will shift between periods, regions, types of literature, and social contexts, in order to provide an initial introduction to this topic. The last part of the chapter will focus more specifically on the transmission of spirit written texts at the core of the tradition of self-cultivation for women called female alchemy (nüdan 女丹).