Once upon a time, I tried to get my brain around the God vs Goddess thing. The whole “there must be balance” shebang. God’s super manly man traits and abilities are there to balance Goddess’ mega feminine female skills and quirks, and that’s why there are two. I made a list in my witchy diary of God and Goddess traits to try and get my head around it, and it looked a little like this.

Male: Violence, anger, rationality, business, agression, action, money, success, logic

Female: Empathy, psychicness, family, divination, love, emotion, receptive, children

This made me annoyed. It’s just stereotyped genders into their crappy “traditional” roles, (I, man, go forth and earm money and have a life, and I, woman, stay at home, make babies and cry over stuff) which helps no-one. What a mess.

I know the idea behind the theory was that the masculine and feminine traits are all mixed up so everyone gets a dollop of both, (like in the yin/yang symbol) but in that case, why divide stuff into masculine and feminine? Why can’t it just be stuff with no gender?

I think the balance theory is held over from our crappy past, where men and women had to be as different and separate as possible so that men could feel OK about treating women like shit. There has to be a separation of masculine and feminine, because otherwise no-one is better than the other one, and we know how that’s very important in patriarchy.

We all know now of course that girls can do everything that boys can (except physical stuff like girls are the only ones that can make new people and boys tend to be better at lifting stuff) so the whole clear cut masculine vs feminine thing is really out of date.

I think we need to bring this into our spirituality. In my view, God and Goddess are expressions of the same force covering exactly the same stuff – love, war, nurturing, magic, transformation – only slightly differently. Neither one is better than the other, and neither one needs the other to be complete or balanced, as they are already balanced in themselves.

So we can sod the balancing-one-gender-with-the-other guilt, as it’s pointless. Goddess is whole on her own, as is God. Wether you want to work with them together or separately is entirely up to you.