Goddess movement
[3][4] The movement grew as a reaction both against Abrahamic religions,[2] which exclusively have gods who are referred to using masculine grammatical articles and pronouns,[5][6] and secularism.
[2] 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.
[9][10] 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.
In the 1960s and 1970s, feminists who became interested in the history of religion also refer to the work of Helen Diner (1965),[15] whose book Mothers and Amazons: An Outline of Female Empires was first published in German in 1932; Mary Esther Harding (1935),[16] the first significant Jungian psychoanalyst in the United States; Elizabeth Gould Davis (1971); and Merlin Stone (1976).
"[18] 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.
[23] 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.
For instance, 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.
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.
[33][34][35] 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.
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.
The former emerged from among Jewish and Christian adherents and maintains that the Goddess serves as the means of talking about, imagining, or relating to the divine and this is demonstrated in the push to recover the feminine face of God based on scriptural and historical sources.
[38][better source needed] On the other hand, the theology that the Goddess is a deity, with importantly and unchangeably female persona, emerged out of the feminists who came from polytheistic faiths such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Native American, and traditional African religions.
[38] The goddesses in this theology are rarely understood as metaphors or images since they have distinct individual features and that worshippers can interact with their suprahuman personages or symbols.
[30] Because the Crone aspect of the Goddess is understood by some to be destructive at times, some consider it to contain both positive and negative imagery and to present an ethical quandary.
[42] Other Goddess ethical beliefs are that one should not harm the interconnected web of life, and that peace and partnership should be the goals, rather than war and domination.
According to Goddess theologian Carol P. Christ the following are ethical touchstones: "Nurture life; Walk in love and beauty; Trust the knowledge that comes through the body; Speak the truth about conflict, pain, and suffering; Take only what you need; Think about the consequences of your actions for seven generations; Approach the taking of life with great restraint; Practice great generosity; Repair the web.
Heide Göttner-Abendroth, working in the 1970s to mid-1980s, called these cultures "matriarchies", introducing a feminist field of "Modern Matriarchal Studies".
These scholars deny such a reversal, asserting these prehistoric cultures were egalitarian, though matrilineal - inherited assets and parentage traced through the maternal line.
[9][47][52][53][54] According to Riane Eisler, cultures in which women and men shared power, and which worshiped female deities, were more peaceful than the patriarchal societies that followed.
Ian Hodder's reinterpretation of Gimbutas[46] and Mellaart's works[49] disputes the existence of "matriarchal" or "matrifocal" cultures, as do some other archaeologists and historians in this field.
Marija Gimbutas, often dubbed "Grandmother of the Goddess Movement" in the 1990s,[58] continues to be cited by many feminist writers, including Max Dashu.
[73][74] She is the author of The Witches' Creed, which lays out the basics of Wiccan religious belief and philosophy; including the polarity of the God and the Goddess as the two great "powers of Nature" and the two "mystical pillars" of the religion.
The idea of witchcraft as the remnants of an old pagan religion was first suggested to a wide readership by Margaret Murray's books, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, The God of the Witches (1933) and The Divine King in England.
The Dianic view is that separatism, in a world where gender roles were once strictly defined, is sometimes considered dangerous because it challenges what they see as patriarchal assumptions of Western culture.
First broadcast on PBS in 1988 as a documentary interview with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, written by Joseph Campbell, was also released in the same year as a book created under the direction of the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
It is in the agricultural world of ancient Mesopotamia, the Egyptian Nile, and in the earlier planting-culture systems that the Goddess is the dominant mythic form.
[85] For the Goddess-movement practitioners, Gaia personifies the entire earthly ecosystem and is the means to achieve harmonic symbiosis or the wholeness and balance within the natural worlds and physical environment.
[30][31] Here, humans are considered on equal level with non-human inhabitants since all must be accorded the same moral and religious consideration, respect, and reverence.
The former is sometimes mistaken as a subcategory of the latter due to the way the goddess movement draw from many resources that are New Age in character, including esoterica, mystery traditions, magic, astrology, divinatory techniques, and shamanism.
[88] The specific period of its founding can be traced back to the civil action during the 1970s' Diablo Canyon protest, which opposed the construction of a nuclear plant.
