This odd little book, a kaleidoscopic exploration of why three gendered figures of the sacred matter within western culture, could not have been written had I never lived for a time outside of western culture, specifically in Budapest, Hungary. On that drizzly January afternoon when I first stepped off the airplane I was not, however, anticipating all the ways in which my immersion in a different social order, different symbolic system, and different cultural imaginary would change the way I thought about my own cultural presuppositions. I had no idea that over the next two and a half years I would be coaxed, cajoled, lured, seduced, and occasionally body-slammed (metaphorically speaking) into perceiving certain western cultural assumptions about women, female agency and the sacred as culturally specific assumptions. I just desperately wanted a strong cup of tea.

This book is the result of innumerable cups of tea, coffee, beer and wine consumed over passionate conversations with some numinous subjects of/in Central and Eastern Europe. Through these conversations I grew to comprehend that I was surrounded by the most extraordinary, strangely almost familiar, group of epistemic, moral and political subjects. Knowledge, power, authority: my fiercely feminine colleagues were drenched with such agency, a fact which they took perfectly for granted, yet which filled me with questions. I was familiar with such subjects only in diluted form.

For causing me to wonder what happened to women’s knowledge, power and authority in western culture I am particularly indebted to the following people: Jelisaveta Blagojevič, Marina Blagojevič, Magda Fręś, Laima Kreivytė, Olga Kuchinskaya, Jasmina Lukič, Natalia Monakhova, Miglena Nikolchina, Nadya Radulova, Kornelia Slavova, Eszter Timár, Katarzyna Więckowska, and Jirina Zachova.

For their feminist theological support and encouraging words at exactly the right times I thank Marcella Althaus-Reid, Julie Clague, Catherine Keller, and Rosemary Radford Ruether.

Without Olga Kuchinskaya’s fierce editorial eye and even fiercer belief in this book it would not exist; Katarzyna Więckowska’s willingness to read piece after piece and to share her own words and thoughts on subjectivity kept me writing in dry times and helped immeasurably to extend the horizons of these pages. Sometimes ‘thank you’ is inadequate.

Jericho Burg, Peta Cox, Rebecca Davis, Thea Gaia, Celia de Jong, Polly McGee, Kyoung-Hee Moon, Lucy Neave, Louise Ott, Rebecca Pallavicini, Teresa Prowse, Motoe Sasaki – in very different ways they all enabled me to make it through a rather non-numinous time in my life. I am most grateful for their presence and support, whether fleeting or enduring. For her indexing genius, eggplant korma recipe, and rather a lot more, a special thank you to Peta Cox. Dorothy Broom, Lekkie Hopkins, and Margaret Jolly are, for reasons unrelated to this essay, deserving of champagne and caviar; instead, I include their names here. Lastly, and again, there is Laima Kreivytė, dabar ir visada mano švyturys.

The author gratefully acknowledges that a section of chapter one is reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd from Lucy Tatman, ‘Mind the Gap: A Feminist Underground Guide to Transcendence, Maybe,’ (© Sage Publications, 2000), and that Sage Publications Ltd has also granted permission for a slightly edited version of Lucy Tatman, ‘Blasphemous Thoughts,’ (© Sage Publications, 2004) to be reprinted as chapter two. An extended version of chapter seven, also titled ‘Corporeality and the Numinous,’ appears in Corporeal Inscriptions, eds. Edyta Lorek-Jezińska and Katarzyna Wieçkowska (Torun, Poland: Nicholas Copernicus University Press, 2005).