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Studying the history of the contemporary Pagan movement in the United States is incomplete without understanding the contribution of 2nd wave feminism, the lesbian land movement, and women's search and development of Goddess Spirituality.
The sacralisation of the female body through positing an especial relationship between women and nature has been problematised by secular feminists as promoting an essentialist vision of the gendered subject. Locating the contemporary Goddess movement’s foregrounding of myth, symbol and the generativity of organic nature within a broader ideological rejection of secular, technocratic modernity, this paper draws attention to the political and discursive links between the celebration of romanticist tropes, revaluing women’s psychic and bodily experience, the unconscious, and ‘the feminine’. The conceptions of the embodied female subject produced by this worldview are politically ambivalent, both emancipatory and conservative in differing contexts. I argue that a further repercussion of the movement’s citing of romanticist myth is an underlying reliance on conservative discourses of race, ethnicity and culture: a recurring narrative of reclaiming indigenous, European, matriarchal ‘roots’ produces white Western women as the suppressed Other of patriarchal colonisation, categorically linking them to marginalised and oppressed subjectivity regardless of difference. This narrative hinders the recognition of present-day postcolonial contexts, (paradoxically) enabling Orientalist practices as countercultural identity markers within a framework of European ‘indigenous’ Goddess culture, and pervasive ethnocultural essentialism. More significantly, the possibility of mobilising a politics of intersectionality within feminist Goddess spirituality is rendered less likely. However, I also suggest that this configuration is not inevitable, in that a feminist critique of secular modernity is not uniformly tied to the more reactionary ideologies implicated in the romanticist episteme.
Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, 2012
This review essay classifies my contribution as one of only seven ‘scientific’ treatments among the twenty-four chapters. It is thus highly complimentary to me.
University of Oregon, 2021
This thesis investigates the iconography used by specific groups of modern Pagan women in the contemporary United States to represent the feminine divine, the meanings attributed to them by women and by broader communities, and the values these images and meanings reinforce. Through a collection of goddess iconography, interviews with female practitioners, and participant observations in Neopagan events, the personal and communal values of this spiritual movement are explored. This thesis will follow a multidisciplinary approach, which combines folklore, anthropology, and gender studies. Subcultural scholarship will help to establish whether or not goddess spirituality falls under such a distinction as well as to illuminate the ways in which the images might be subverting the dominant Western culture.
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 2000
One of the outstanding features of the feminist spirituality movement is its pronounced visual orientation. Drawing heavily on feminist art of the 1970s and beyond, feminist spirituality is especially interested in representations of goddesses and women, which are used for ritual and meditation, among other purposes. After describing the visual materials of feminist spirituality and discussing how they work to symbolize the movement’s thealogy, I argue that this use of female images is problematic in feminist terms for two reasons: first, because it tends to perpetuate the objectification and specularization of women familiar in sexist western culture, as well as women’s often self-defeating preoccupation with bodily appearance; and second, because religiously it limits goddesses (and through them, women) in a way that the male deities of Western religion—who are almost always considered to be beyond representation—are not limited.
Female Leaders in New Religious Movements, 2017
US Wicca and the broader American contemporary Pagan movement developed in tandem with the 1970s political women's movement. 1 In feminist Witchcraft traditions, female priestesses developed innovative rituals that celebrated women's experiences in the world. They focused on roles played in familial and social relationships; bodily functions of the female sex (e.g., menarche, menstruation, menopause, fertility and infertility, pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation); sexism encountered in the workplace; and the need for healing from sexual abuse. Women seeking these rituals did not necessarily experience every one of these, but women's spirituality rituals focused on experiences commonly shared by females. Wiccan feminist
The Goddess Is Hungry: A Critical Essay on Feminism, Spirituality, and the Commodification of the Feminine, 2026
This critical essay examines the political and symbolic hollowing of contemporary feminist discourse through the commodification of spirituality, with particular focus on the popularized narratives of the so-called “sacred feminine.” Adopting a hybrid approach that combines feminist theory, cultural critique, symbolic psychology, and essayistic writing, the text analyzes how spiritual practices and empowerment discourses aimed at women, when absorbed by neoliberal market logic, tend to function as forms of subjective anesthesia rather than genuine transformation. Rather than dismissing spirituality altogether, the essay distinguishes spirituality as an embodied, ethical pursuit from spirituality as a compensatory escape under conditions of structural oppression. It argues that the marketization of feminine spirituality redirects political discontent into individualized practices of self-regulation, thereby weakening its emancipatory potential. The essay ultimately calls for a repoliticization of the feminine, reconnecting it to material conditions, ethical responsibility, and the courage of conflict as prerequisites for an embodied and non-conformist spirituality.
1994
This dissertation examines one aspect of how new cultural meanings have developed among some contemporary American women. This particular development concerns a shift in their meaning system away from male-centered symbols towards a meaning system that includes and even emphasizes feminine symbolic forms. From an outsider's point of view, the contemporary "goddess movement" might be seen as a fad, but what does it mean from an insider's perspective? This dissertation presents an ethnographic exploration in depth from the insider's point of view, into the lives of eight women for whom goddess symbols have become an integral part of their meaning systems, their consciousness, and their social worlds. This study explores the emergence of goddess forms in the experience of these informants. It examines what images appear in their consciousness, how they interpret these patterns, and how their interpretations of these patterns affect their daily lives within their s...
Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, 2013
Ideas of radical feminism, Goddess Spirituality and Feminist Witchcraft— which originated in the United States during the late 1960s and the 1970s before taking root in Britain—were introduced to British Wiccans during the latter half of the 1970s and throughout the 1980s. Several United Kingdom-based radical feminists who combined their newfound political awareness with Goddess Spirituality acted as important conduits for the transference of these ideas. In the case of the artist and Goddess-feminist Monica Sjöö (1938-2005), I show some of the ways in which radical and spiritual feminist religious ideas did, contrary to a commonly held view, influence the British Pagan scene in the 1960s and 1970s.
Since the 1970s America has inherited Britain's place as the world center of modern paganism. One of America's significant contributions to neopaganism is the transformation of Wicca into a feminist spiritual practice. Some American feminist witches have suggested that the roots of witchcraft may be found in goddess polytheism. American goddess worship seems to differ, however, from other named-goddess worship elsewhere in the world, in that the goddess of much American paganism has no single name or identity. She is, as Starhawk wrote, "the cycle of birth, growth, death, and regeneration." Exploring the development of goddess worship in the United States since 1970 will show how this nonhierarchical, nondogmatic, spiritual practice has developed into very personal and community spiritual practices that celebrate the goddess.
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The historical transition from the Late Antique world to the Early Middle Ages was characterized by the decline of traditional polytheistic paganism and its replacement by Christian Trinitarian monotheism in Europe. In the early modern era colonial expansion and missions established this form of religion throughout the world (Neill, 1975 [1964]; Lewis, 2004). With the advent of modernity and particularly the Enlightenment, reason and secularism challenged Christian normativity and the influence of churches declined. The secularization thesis initially argued that religion would wither and die entirely; such faith would be unnecessary, as science would provide undisputed and rationally evidenced meaning for human life (Clark, 2003: 559-560). However, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw an upsurge in scholarly and popular interest in non-Christian religions, both ancient and modern. In the twentieth century these intellectual currents crossed the boundary between academic interest and actual religious practice, and dramatically manifested in a variety of new religions devoted to the revived worship of the Goddess, including Wicca (the Craft), Feminist Spirituality and Ecopaganism (Hanegraff, 1998: 85-88). This chapter investigates the mythology of originary matriarchy and the Great Goddess, and examines Wicca, Feminist Spirituality (primarily Goddess-centred but also within the Judeo-Christian tradition) and the broader Pagan movement as new traditions actively reviving the Goddess. The Goddess serves to critique the Christian God; her gender challenges the masculine norm and her sometime multiplicity challenges monotheistic unity and erasing of difference (Morgan, 1999: 51-59). Worshippers of the Goddess, male and female, view themselves as revitalizing a decadent and dying Western society, and as participants in a revolution that will save the environment and assure a better future for humanity (Rountree, 2002: 486). Finally, this chapter will comment briefly on the effect of the return of the Goddess on the academic study of religion.
Murphy Pizza and James R. Lewis (eds.), Handbook of Contemporary Paganism (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2009), ix + 649 pp., ISBN: 978-900416373-7, € 145.00.
Witchcraft and Magic: Contemporary North America, 2006
This paper highlights the ways in which the contemporary western Goddess movement negotiates and interacts with post-Enlightenment discourses implicated in modernity, contextualising Neo-Paganism and feminist Goddess spirituality within the enormous cultural shifts of our time.
A counter-tendency to the virtualization of social relations and the deepening of the separation between body, mind and spirit may be represented by the re-birth of Goddesses' worship, which calls for a re-embodiment of women's spirituality and feminist politics. This work starts from representations of the body of the Goddessin different ages and parts of the world -in their relation with the four elements. Through the iconological analysis of female divinities we realize that each of them also represents specific aspects of womanhood. An exploratory research on the contemporary religious experience of the Goddess indicates the existence of a phenomenon of Internet-activism, where women from different cultures, ethnicities and beliefs systems discuss their spiritual issues in a trans-national and inter-religious way. A diffused spirituality, free from institutional and patriarchal control, can be seen as a form of resistance to dogmas and codes that are often perceived as oppressive and far from responding to contemporary needs. Today women as gender are able to confront patriarchal dominance also on the religious terrain, and feminist theology can be seen as a process of overcoming dualities, hierarchies, oppositions -as a leading force toward social and political change in the direction of the common good. A shift of emphasis from God the father to God the mother, from masculine to feminine values, may affect also institutional religions, by empowering women activism around peace, social justice and ecology.
Aries, 2021
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
Theology & Sexuality, 2018
Since the 1970s, some religious practitioners of the contemporary Pagan movement (a.k.a. Neo-Paganism) have embraced spiritual BDSM, or “sacred kink,” as a spiritual discipline relating to their tradition. The “sex wars,” debates around pornography, prostitution, and sadomasochism, have appeared in the history of Wicca and contemporary Paganism. Pagan feminists have brought theological questions to the same debates. They have focused on the Wiccan Rede (“harm none”) and the affirmation of pleasure in Doreen Valiente’s Charge of the Goddess that states that, “All acts of pleasure are [the Goddess’s] rituals.” While support for BDSM has become the dominant public perspective in twenty-first century Paganism, the movement’s late twentieth-century history includes instances of anguish as individuals wrestled with their personal sexual desire and their feminist principles.
Dance, movement & spiritualities, 2017
Welcome to our special issue 'Movements of deities and the Goddess: Contemporary applications and perspectives'. Most of the articles in this collection traverse the disciplinary areas of spiritual feminism and dance and movement studies. Spiritual feminism, sometimes called 'spiritual eco-feminism', differs from 'feminist theology' and 'Jewish and Christian feminism', where women remain within their respective religious traditions and deconstruct and/or re-imagine patriarchal religion from a feminist perspective (Ruether 1989; Umansky 1989). In contrast, spiritual feminism radically challenges and critically departs company from patriarchal religions, often turning to prepatriarchal and telluric (earth-centred) sources for inspiration (Eller 1993; Plaskow and Christ 1989). Women have played an enormous role in articulating spirituality in dance research (
International Journal of Latin American Religions , 2018
Celtic traditions were the guiding forces of a mystical rescue of neo-pagan femininity, which for a few years has influenced the feminization of the neo-Indian and neoMexican movement known as Red Path (Camino Rojo). This is a neo-pagan and panIndianist movement in the Americas. Red Path currently represents an important circuit for women spiritual initiation and a meeting place in the global network among those seeking alternative, holistic spiritualities.The main features of the movement include its emphasis on indigenous knowledge for a spiritual reconnection with Mother Earth, the ancestors, and sacred femininity. Red Path is also a school of Bgrandmothers^ and is a certification for neoshaman initiation. This article describes how Red Path,a neo-pagan movementthatsoughttorootNewAgespiritualityinindigenoustraditionsinMexico, is experiencing a new resignification that appropriates its rituals as ceremonies of a gender spirituality. What new interpretations does the sacred feminine provide to hybridize and reinvent indigenous ceremonies? How is the new interaction between ethnic identity, spiritual identity, and gender identity in female sacred circles negotiated and transformed?The analysis of the network of the feminine circle of Red Path movement draws on the methodology of social network theory as proposed by Manuel Castells, focusing on his study of nodes as observable units that help reveal the points of articulation of a polycentric network that involves node agents, node sites, and key events.
