In reading that Chalice and Blade book, I got to thinking about about the study of religion, culture and history from non-traditional or minority viewpoints. This has been an enormously popular thing to do, I’m guessing ever since the 70’s, with the rise of feminism. It seems to be especially popular in the study of religion. Or else, this is one of the big things I study, so I end up seeing it all over the place. The hardest part of this kind of scholarship is that everybody ends up having their own “take” on things. And you end up with this sort of hodge-podge of different interpretations of everything, and nobody really agrees or gets anywhere.

My own study of religion has basically lead me to look at religions from the standpoint of stories that people use to help them live their lives. I realized while reading that book that this can also be adapted to help me understand non-traditional interpretations of religions, and how they all fit together. The thing that I seized on here is point of view, in the sense of how a story is told or understood. Stories commonly have a protagonist or hero who goes about different tasks, and struggles against some kind of antagonist. But that’s just one way of telling the story. If you wanted to, you could just as easily switch it all around, and set the classical “villain” as the main character. And if you told it from his perspective, the person you’re used to identifying as the hero is actually the bad guy. And you could take each character in the story, and then you’d realize that for each character, there exists a slightly (or radically) different understanding of the events in the story.

You could also use the metaphor here of the stars. From the earth, we’re used to seeing stars in particular configurations, which we call constellations. But if you were to go to another point in the galaxy and look at the same stars, you’d have entirely different constellations.

I don’t know if this all seems like a very important realization for anybody else, but it really helped me connect a bunch of puzzle pieces when I thought of it.