The Goddess movement is a revivalistic Neopagan religious movement which includes spiritual beliefs and practices that emerged primarily in the United States in the late 1960s and predominantly in the Western world during the 1970s. | at Archive.org The movement grew as a reaction both against patriarchal Abrahamic religions, which refer to God to using masculine grammatical articles and pronouns, and secularism. It revolves around Goddess worship and the veneration for the divine feminine, and may include a focus on women or on one or more understandings of gender or femininity.
The Goddess movement is a widespread non-centralized trend in modern Paganism, and it therefore has no centralized tenets of belief. Beliefs and practices vary widely among Goddess worshippers, from the name and the number of goddesses worshipped to the specific rituals and rites that are used. Some, such as Dianic Wicca, exclusively worship female deities, but others do not. Belief systems range from monotheistic to polytheistic to pantheistic, and encompass a range of theological variety similar to that in the broader Neopagan community. Common pluralistic belief means that a self-identified Goddess worshipper could theoretically worship any number of different female deities from various cultures and religions all over the world.
Based on its characteristics, the Goddess movement is also referred to as a form of cultural religiosity that is increasingly diverse, geographically widespread, eclectic, and more dynamic in process. p. 61. According to a 2000 survey, the estimated population of adherents to the Goddess movement consists of 500,000 people in the United States and 120,000 people in the United Kingdom.
Background and precursors
In the 19th century, some first-wave feminists such as Matilda Joslyn Gage and Elizabeth Cady Stanton published their ideas describing a female deity, whilst anthropologists such as Johann Jakob Bachofen examined the ideas of prehistoric, matriarchal Goddess cultures in the Mediterranean region. There are also post-traditional Goddess feminists who claim that female theologies are more ancient, having emerged in and around Prehistoric Europe during the Upper Paleolithic period or 30,000 years ago: the Great Goddess hypothesis. They affirm that female spirituality and matriarchal religions were suppressed in the Western world when the Christianized Roman Empire outlawed and persecuted all pre-Christian religions through a series of edicts by the Emperor Theodosius I. These ideas gained additional traction during the second-wave feminism movement. In the 1960s and 1970s, feminists who became interested in the history of religion also refer to the work of Helen Diner (1965), whose book Mothers and Amazons: An Outline of Female Empires was first published in German in 1932; Mary Esther Harding (1935); Elizabeth Gould Davis (1971); and Merlin Stone (1976).
Since the 1970s, the Goddess movement has emerged as a recognizable, international cultural phenomenon. In 1978, Carol P. Christ wrote the essay Why Women Need the Goddess, which argues in favor of the hypothesis of a primitive, matriarchal religion based on the worship of a supreme Mother Goddess, and was presented as the keynote address to an audience of over 500 at the "Great Goddess Re-emerging" conference at the University of California, Santa Cruz; it was first published in The Great Goddess Issue of Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics (1978). Christ also co-edited the classic feminist religion anthologies Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality (1989) and Womanspirit Rising (1979/1989) (the latter included her essay Why Women Need the Goddess).
From 1974 to 1984, WomanSpirit, a journal edited in Oregon by Jean and Ruth Mountaingrove, published articles, poetry, and rituals by women, exploring ideas and feelings about female deity. The journal The Beltane Papers, which started publication at about the same time, continued until mid-2011. The Goddess movement has found voice in various films and self-published media, such as the Women and Spirituality trilogy made by Donna Read for the National Film Board of Canada.
Brotherhood of the Golden Arrow Maria de Naglowska, a Russian émigré in France, established and led a short-living occult, sexual magical, and Satanic society known as the Brotherhood of the Golden Arrow () in Paris from 1932 to 1935. Naglowska's occult teaching centered on what she called the "Third Term of the Trinity", in which the Holy Spirit of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is recognized as the divine feminine.
Church of Aphrodite
One of the earliest precursor to the contemporary Goddess movement was the Church of Aphrodite, a religious organization founded and registered in 1938 by male feminist Gleb Botkin, first in West Hempstead, New York and later in Charlottesville, Virginia. The Monotheistic church believes in a singular female goddess, who is named after the ancient Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite. The relationship between the Goddess Aphrodite and the visible world may be illustrated by that between a mother and her child, and the creation of the world was like a woman giving birth. The church did not continue long after Botkin's death in 1969, some of his followers went on to join new Neopagan movements.
Terminology
Associated terms sometimes used within the movement include the following:
Goddesses refers to a local or specific deity linked clearly to a particular culture and often to particular aspects, attributes, and powers (for example: the Mesopotamian goddess Inanna/Ishtar; Athena; or Hindu goddesses like Sarasvati, the goddess of learning, poetry, music, inspiration, and wisdom; and Lakshmi goddess of wealth and sovereignty). The Goddess or the Great Goddess is a female deity that is regarded as primary. Such a religious system existed historically in many cultures, though not under the same names and not necessarily with the same traits. If there is a male god, he is often seen as her equal, or his powers may be seen as deriving from her. These terms are not usually understood to refer a single deity that is identical across cultures but rather a concept common in many ancient cultures, which those in the Goddess movement want to restore. Goddess Spirituality is sometimes used as a synonym for Goddess movement and sometimes as the spiritual practice that is part of the Goddess movement. It could also refer to the Goddess movement's ethos, particularly when used to construct Christianity as the diametrical opposite of the Goddess movement. Here, the term becomes a distinguishing concept that sets the movement apart from Christianity with little room for overlap. Priestess refers to women who dedicate themselves to one or more goddesses. It may or may not include leadership of a group, and it may or may not include legal ordination. The analogous term for men is "priest." However, not everyone who dedicates themselves to the Goddess or goddesses calls themselves a priestess (or priest). Thealogy is a term whose first use in the context of feminist analysis of religion and discussion of Goddess is usually credited to Naomi Goldenberg, who used the term in her book Changing of the Gods. It substitutes the Greek feminine prefix "thea-" for the supposedly generic use of the Greek masculine prefix "theo-". It refers to the activity of determining the meaning of Goddess as opposed to theology, which reflects on the meaning of God. Frequently used to mean analysis of Goddess thought and mysticism, it can also be used more liberally to mean any kind of divine, not just deity divine, as in meditation, ethics, ritual pragmatics.
Capitalization of terms such as "Goddess" and "Goddesses" usually vary with author or with the style guides of publications or publishers. Within the Goddess community, members generally consider it proper to capitalize the word "Goddess", but not necessary when generic references are made, as in the word "goddesses".
Use of mythological materials Participants in the Goddess movement often invoke ancient religion and mythology. Some skeptics argue that these have been reconstructed from ancient sources and others are modern inventions. Creation myths are not seen as conflicting with scientific understanding but rather as being poetic, metaphoric statements that are compatible with, for example, the theory of evolution, modern cosmology, and physics. Mythological sources of the Goddess movement are often considered modern reconstructions of ancient myths that predated a "patriarchal period", the Great Goddess hypothesis, influenced by the Kurgan hypothesis, and therefore very little would have been written about them. Aside from the reflection of ancient understanding of these, there are adherents who also turn to contemporary scholarship and literature such as Robert Graves' The White Goddess. Some of this work's interpretation of the Greek mythology (based mainly on James Frazer's The Golden Bough, such as the annual sacrifice of a king that represents a god) were adopted as the basis to describe the goddess' aging and rejuvenation with the seasons. The myth of Demeter and Persephone is one that has often been reinterpreted.
A common claim within the Goddess movement is that myths from supposed ancient matriarchal societies were behind key elements in Christianity, particularly in the beliefs that "matriarchies fostering goddess worship influenced the attitudes of early Christians toward Mary" and that "the Catholic Church was originally matriarchal with Mary Magdalene, not Peter, as its head." The Goddess movement views devotion to female Christian figures such as the female saints as a continuation of ancient Goddess worship.
Theology
Goddess spirituality characteristically shows diversity: no central body defines its dogma. Yet there is evolving consensus on some issues such as: the Goddess in relation to polytheism, monotheism, and pantheism; and immanence versus transcendence, and other ways to understand the nature of the Goddess. There is also the emerging agreement that the Goddess fulfills the basic functions of empowering women and fostering ethical and harmonious relationships among different peoples as well as between humans, animals, and nature.
One or many?
One question often asked is whether Goddess adherents believe in one Goddess or many Goddesses: Is Goddess spirituality monotheistic or polytheistic? This is not an issue for many of those in the Goddess movement, whose conceptualization of divinity is more all-encompassing. The terms "the Goddess", or "Great Goddess" may appear monotheistic because the singular noun is used. However, these terms are most commonly used as code or shorthand for one or all of the following: to refer to certain types of prehistoric goddesses; to encompass all goddesses (a form of henotheism); to refer to a modern metaphoric concept of female deity; to describe a form of energy, or a process.
The concept of a singular divine being with many expressions is not a new development in thought: it has been a major theme in India for many centuries, at the very least as far back as the 5th century, though hymns in the early Vedas too speak of a one-Goddess-many-goddesses concept.Jayran, Shan. Presentation at Goddess Studies Colloquium. Bristol, United Kingdom (2000).
Within or without?