In memorium Monica Sjoo

Monica Sjoo, artist, writer, and a key figure in Goddess spirituality, died Monday.

With Barbara Mor, she coauthored The Great Cosmic Mother: Discovering the Religion of the Earth (Harper San Francisco: 1987). She also wrote Return of the Dark/Light Mother and other works.

In an email circulated this week, Starhawk writes of her,

The last time I saw Monica, she came for a night to the Earth Activist Training I was coteaching in England. She presided over the ritual we were having that night in her wheelchair, sitting by the fire like an embodiment of the Crone herself. We told stories, of the walk and the Stonehenge ritual, of Greenham and the antinuclear actions of the eighties, of the early years of the feminist spirituality movement. The younger women activists—and the men—listened with rapt attention to a history most of them had never heard. Monica seemed strong, at peace, complete. That is how I will remember her, her silver hair shining in the firelight, her eyes alight. One of the mothers of the women’s spirituality movement is gone. May the Goddess embrace her, take her into her loving arms, and bring her strong, creative spirit around the circle to rebirth.

A poem she wrote as her son Sean was dying of cancer is here.