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Goddess in the Palace:
Queen Elizabeth I of England
by Sister Usha and Brother Osiris
We at Divinely Female believe that the Supreme Goddess, creatrix of all life, lives within the body of every woman. We tell now the true tale of a woman who consciously presented herself as superhuman, and in so doing, had a major impact on the course of human history.
Elizabeth was the daughter of King Henry VIII of England and Henry's second wife, Anne Boleyn. Anne was beheaded when Elizabeth was still a small child, so Elizabeth spent most of her childhood in seclusion, hidden from the political turmult surrounding Henry's reign. Henry's most important act was removing England from the Roman Catholic Church, proclaiming himself leader of the Church of England. This of course did not meet with the approval of the Pope, nor of Catholics throughout Europe.
Elizabeth's half-sister, Mary, became Queen after Henry's death. She was Catholic and attempted to force England to revert to Catholicism. She earned the nickname "Bloody Mary" because of the large number of Protestants executed by the State during her short reign. Mary died childless, passing the throne to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth was a timid young woman, ill-prepared to lead a country in such turbulent times. Violence between Catholics and Protestants was rampant not only in England but all over Europe. Elizabeth reversed her sister's policies and reinstated the Church of England that her father had created. This brought the anger of the Roman Catholic hierarchy upon her. Catholics conspired to remove her from the thone so that her Catholic cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, could become Queen of England. Even the Pope in Rome is believed to have participated in this effort, allegedly issuing a secret decree calling for Elizabeth's assassination.
Elizabeth was still an unmarried young woman at this point. Her advisors urged her to use this fact to her advantage in the traditional manner, by marrying a powerful person who could protect her. Some encouraged her to marry a prominent Spaniard so that the Spanish would protect England from the French. Others suggested exactly the opposite.
She opted for a more creative approach: marrying noone. She proclaimed herself the "Virgin Queen," in imitation of the Catholic goddess, the Virgin Mary. We should probably digress at this point to justify our description of the Virgin Mary as a goddess, a term Catholics themselves do not use in describing her. Mary of Nazareth, mother of Jesus, is a secondary character in the Bible. It would appear to the casual observer that the attention the Roman Catholic Church has paid to her over the past 2000 years is very disproportionate to her role in the gospels. The reason for this is that the Virgin Mary has little to do with Mary of Nazareth. Most of the cultures of the ancient Middle-East had a goddess as a prominent part of the religion. Isis was her name in Egypt; other cultures called her Inanna, Astarte, Ishtar, or other names. She had, among her many titles, "Virgin Goddess, Mother of all the Other Gods and Goddesses." She was called a virgin not in the sense that she remained a virgin forever, but rather in the sense that she was a virgin the first time she gave birth. When these regions became Christianized, many of the attributes and much of the symbolism of the goddess were transferred to Mary. This was a grass-roots phenomenon, the common people insisting on a female presence in the faith over the objections of male religious leaders.
Returning to Elizabeth, she sought to make herself the Protestant (or at least the Anglican) equivalent of the Virgin Mary. She created a supernatural mystique around herself, so that people would view her as something larger than life. Whenever she appeared in public, she would paint her face white and wear clothes that made her appear larger than she was. Press censorship was extremely tight, allowing no criticism of her. Even portraits were restricted. In those days, there were no paparazzi taking candid photos of monarchs. Any painter making a portrait of Elizabeth was required by law to trace onto the canvas an officially approved outline of her face, then add hair and clothing around it. As a result, historians are not entirely sure what Elizabeth really looked like.
Her plan worked. She gave Englishmen someone to look up to, someone to worship, someone to whom to devote their lives and their energies. Elizabeth ruled England for 40 years. By the end of her reign, England was the most powerful country in Europe, well on its way to attaining the superpower status it enjoyed for several centuries into the future. This was in no small part to her ingenious method of creating a goddess-like image of herself.
We hasten to add that we do not approve of everything Elizabeth did on the throne. She used coersion and violence quite frequently, something we attribute not to the woman herself but rather to the times in which she lived. But her courage and imagination in insisting on her own independence and the continued well-being of her nation is and should be an inspiration to us all.