:Intro to Religion Blog

What we learned about Goddess pilgrimages on Tuesday of this week was that it is a feminist based religion and is all about nature. We learned that feminist thealogy is a very nature based religion; the Goddess will give birth to the Horned God, and then marry him, and then sacrifices himself to her. When all of these events happen it is a different season. When he is born its winter, when he gets married its summer, and when he sacrifices himself to the Goddess it is autumn. All of these are examples of why the Goddess pilgrimage is part of thealogy.

Different elements that make this pilgrimage and actual pilgrimage, it has travel, community, sacred space, tradition/ritual, relics, and embodiment of myth.  The example of travel is that during the Goddess pilgrimage you take a journey to many different goddess sites, which is also an example of sacred space, not just one but many. Community is defiantly there because there are many followers of the Goddess pilgrimage that come together as feminist. Embodiment of myth has an example above about the Goddess and the Horned God, there are many more stories going along with this pilgrimage.

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On Tuesday we talk about the pilgrimage to Varanasi/Benares, there are five different ways you can go about this pilgrimage, which I thought was very interesting. This city is located on the Ganges River, the first way to do the pilgrimage is the largest and it is 168 miles of walking around the area of the river and city. The next largest is 55 miles, then 15 miles which would be circling the whole city. The next one is going throughout the city and making various stops all around the city and the smallest is actually inside the Vishveshvara temple its self. This temple is the axis mundi of the city and the pilgrimage, because you start at this point and you also end at this point. Thought out this pilgrimage there are 72 shrines for Shiva, which is the God of destruction.

While talking about this pilgrimage we learned a few new words including Puja, ghat, and Mondula. Puja is another name for worship, and when you are referring to a God you are worshiping you put the god’s name first. So for this pilgrimage it would be Shiva Puja because they are worshiping Shiva. Ghat is a word that is referred to the stairs that lead down to the Ganges River, this river is the most holy place in this city, and people come from all over to get their sins washed away by this river. Last is mondula which means circling, because circles are very important to this religion going back to how they believe that everything comes from one thing (Brahman) and live is just one big circle. When people worship they tend to have a lot of motions that involves circles because of the belief that everything is one.

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