lifestyles, the Goddess movement interwove these concerns with a more encompassing project of spiritual discovery, empowerment and revolt. Its membership was predominantly, although not exclusively, female. They were primarily located in North America, Europe and Australasia, and they shared many demographic features with the New Age, the Pagan Revival and a range of reformist feminist theologies. Significantly, though, their overriding concerns were separable from these other movements. They expressed a desire to explore the meaning of female deity, to reclaim and ritualize female sacrality and spirituality, to re-mythologize the world according to a female and/or feminist imaginary, to empower and liberate women, and to challenge the hegemony of patriarchal social and religious power. Other spiritual matters were secondary. Self-identified insiders such as Asphodel Long, Carol Christ and Starhawk have produced influential works expressing the movement’s beliefs, practices and thealogies,[1] while academics such as Naomi Goldenberg, Melissa Raphael and Cynthia Eller have delineated and theorized the movement in historical, phenomenological and social scientific terms.[2] It is not my purpose to substantially reproduce those results here, only certain salient features.
In its formative years, notably the 1970s and 1980s, the Goddess
movement exhibited a range of attitudes towards female deity. As Carol
Christ summarized in a threefold typology, members of the movement
might hold to any of the following views:
(1) the Goddess is divine female, a personification who can be invoked in prayer and ritual;
- ↑ A. Long, ‘The Goddess Movement in Britain Today’ in Feminist Theology 5 (1994), 1139; A. Long in ‘The One and the Many: The Great Goddess Revisited’ in Feminist Theology 15 (1997), 13-29; C. Christ, ‘Why Women Need the Goddess: Phenomenological, Psychological, and Political Reflections’ in C. Christ and J. Plaskow, (eds.), Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco 1992, 273-287; C. Christ, Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality, New York: Addison Wesley 1997; Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco 1999 [1979]; Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics, Boston MA.: Beacon Press 1997 [1982].
- ↑ C. Eller, Catherine, Living in the Lap of the Goddess: The Feminist Spirituality Movement in America, New York: Crossroad 1993; N. Goldenberg, Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religion, Boston: Beacon Press 1979; M. Raphael, ‘Truth in Flux: Goddess Feminism as a Late Modern Religion’, Religion, 26 (1996), 199-213. M. Raphael, Thealogy and Embodiment: The Post-Patriarchal Reconstruction of Female Sacrality, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press 1996; M. Raphael, Introducing Thealogy: Discourse on the Goddess, Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press 2000.
