Truth in Flux: Goddess Feminism as a Late Modern Religion

Religion (1996) 26, 199–213

Truth in Flux: Goddess Feminism as a Late Modern Religion M R Goddess feminism is a new emancipatory religion which appears to typify postmodern religion, but which, using Anthony Giddens’ social theory, I prefer to understand as having a peculiarly late modern reflexive character. And it is, I suggest, Goddess religion’s reflexivity that imposes immense strains on its capacity to be or become the world-altering religion most of its adherents would want it to be. This religion is founded within a modern political struggle to bring about the demise of patriarchy: a system of non-relation held to be global and structurally continuous over 5000 years. Goddess feminism is premised on the necessity of a collective moral confrontation with patriarchy and the planetary injustice and suffering it causes. And yet thealogians’ reflexive criticism of the authoritative nature of traditions makes them unable to ground their religion in a fully collective, normative, ontological and moral account of the Goddess. Goddess feminists’ struggle for sexual, economic and environmental justice may also be impeded by their configuration of the Goddess as a female trinity whose hypostases sacralise moral ambiguity and by their resistance to divine and human authoritative judgements. My task in this paper is not that of arguing for the truth or falsity of thealogical claims, but that of showing how Goddess religion’s late modern reflexivity is both liberative and may ultimately stunt its own development. ? 1996 Academic Press Limited

The ‘Postmodern’ Characteristics of Goddess Religion Susanne Heine’s remark that ‘the women who revive their goddesses do not believe in them’,1 would, if true, imply that Goddess religion2 is less a religion than a merely psychotherapeutic or antiquarian exercise, in which case there would be little or no reason to write this article. But it seems to me, and to other commentators, that Goddess religion is an alternative, but comprehensive, religion, phenomenologically comparable to other religions. Goddess religion celebrates a divine principle, has rites of purification, a priestesshood, forms of social organization, a sacred history, a cosmology, sacred texts, sacred sites, festivals, rites of passage and initiation (especially at menarche), articulated values, and a growing number of adherents in Europe, America and Australasia—all of which take it beyond the realm of a private spirituality. The point needs to be made because, as Donate Pahnke has noted, on the one hand, Goddess feminists deny that they constitute a religion; they wish to distance themselves from ‘religion’ as a patriarchal project; a dogmatic, expansionist, authoritarian, institutional structure subordinating the creature to his or her creator. When comparing its own practices to those of patriarchal religions, Goddess feminism calls itself a spirituality. On the other hand, Goddess feminists (in Germany at least) assume that their practices are ‘true’ religion, and religion at its most effective.3 Following Joachim Wach’s understanding of religion, Cynthia Eller has persuasively argued that Goddess religion in America is ‘creating a new religion in our time’ because it situates itself in relation to a numinous reality in theoretical, practical and social ways. [Goddess feminists], with their devotion to nature or goddess and their stories of ancient matriarchies, their practice of ritual and magic, and their many groups, workshops, and retreats, are clearly practising religion by this definition.4 0048–721X/96/030199 + 15 $18.00/0

? 1996 Academic Press Limited

200 M. Raphael But the characteristic that would most qualify Goddess feminism for the classification ‘postmodern’ religion is its eclectic, non-credal, laissez-faire thealogy.5 Contemporary thealogy constitutes a collage of images of the Goddess, none of which is held to be truer than another. In the late 1970s Starhawk, Goddess religion’s best-known priestess/thealogian, observed that her thealogy shifts with her mood: It all depends on how I feel. When I feel weak, she is someone who can help and protect me. When I feel strong, she is the symbol of my own power. At other times I feel her as the natural energy in my body and the world.6

Here, whether it is Starhawk’s thealogy that shifts with her mood, or the transpersonal nature of the Goddess is, perhaps deliberately, left unclear. In the same vein, she writes, I have spoken of the Goddess as psychological symbol and also as manifest reality. She is both. She exists, and we create Her.7

Thealogy’s frank eclecticism, perspectivism, individualism and pragmatism seems to signal the ‘postmodern’ move from transcendence to immanence. Caitlin Matthews, a well-known British exponent and practitioner of Goddess religion, assures her readers that in ‘finding a myth of the Goddess to live by’, there is ‘only one criteria [sic] in such a choice: does it work for you?’ She writes that ‘the rule of the Goddess is that there is no rule’ and that therefore the only authority on which Goddess religion is based is derived from confidence in one’s own experience.8 Espousing the spiritual benefits of democratic plurivocality, thealogians are then compelled to welcome its result: transient, local, incommensurate thealogical claims loosely unified by consensual statements, which like Starhawk’s declaration that ‘All that lives (and all that is, lives), all that serves life, is Goddess’,9 are sufficiently vague as to virtually guarantee inclusivity. Of course, thealogical discourse has distinguishing features. It has to: without some criteria by which adherents can identify themselves as such, Goddess religion could not conceive of itself, as it does, as an experiential and political community. Nonetheless, the communal purpose of thealogy is only to make ‘conversation about women’s spirituality . . . deeper and more meaningful.’10 And for the purposes of ‘conversation’ all would agree that the Goddess is at least a symbol or ‘one of the oldest names’ for the realization of women’s collective and individual potential (‘womanpower’).11 For some, like Carol Christ, that seems to be the central function of the term ‘Goddess’. There is also basic agreement on two further points. First that the Goddess is not an object of faith but of immediate, self-authenticating experience. And second, that she is nature: the earth is her body, or she is immanent in the cyclic processes of nature, women and in all sexual energies. Above all, female embodiment replicates (either symbolically or actually) the cosmogonic or regenerative activity of the Goddess. Where female reproductive functions were cast as more or less profane in patriarchal religions, they are now sacralized. In short, the Goddess is usually more than a useful fiction: a psychotherapeutic device for the revalorization of the female self. And no Goddess feminist that I have come across would go so far down the postmodern road as to claim that the Goddess has no existence beyond the texts or discourses that refer to her. However, it tends to be more the inspirational idea of the Goddess that is transformatory, rather than transformation being dependent on the actuality of

Truth in Flux: Goddess Feminism as a Late Modern Religion 201 intentional divine activity as it has been in traditional religions. So although these ‘beliefs’ might represent the beginnings of a partially elaborated religious tradition, Goddess feminists’ strong preference for talking about experience rather than belief makes an unstable basis for tradition which, by definition, transcends the contingent. Goddess religion seems to be more confident of its ritual practices than its beliefs, which are optional. Perhaps Goddess religion’s greatest attraction for women is its provision of collective and solitary rituals that help women to ‘work through’ traumatic experiences such as divorce,12 rape and abortion that traditional religions regard as either sinful or beneath sacred notice. Most of these rituals are typically ‘postmodern’ in often being written and used by individuals; in insisting that there is no ‘correct’ way to perform a given ritual, and in being practised in networks or webs of local groups or covens, rather than in authoritative institutions. These ritual practices are especially important to feminist witches13 and include, among other things, and eclectic mix of pathworking or guided meditation, various forms of divination, spells,14 shamanic trance therapies,15 hexing (rare),16 and rituals of purification using menstrual blood.17 All these ritual practices are interconnected as ways of unblocking obstructions to the flow of energy that fosters human and planetary health. They are intentionally post/pre-modern in being a deliberate return to a world view both biblical religions and modern science would call superstitious. Given that patriarchy is believed to be parasitic upon female energies, and therefore inflicts continuous and systemic damage upon women/nature, Goddess religion’s preoccupation with the immediate and urgent task of healing (rather than theoretical reflection) is understandable. So too is its philosophical reticence over the source and nature of its power to heal. For in common with other postmodernists, thealogians are wholly critical of the rational, self-determining male subject, politically continuous with the history of his god called God. Thealogy has no wish to simply reproduce the masculinist account of divine sovereignty and redemptive power in a feminized form. All religious feminism is greatly supported by postmodernists’ deconstruction of the subject— especially the divine monarchical super-subject who, from on high, graciously redeems the societies who created him. Postmodernism’s insistence that knowledge is ideologically constituted and mediated is exemplified in Goddess religion’s attempt to thealogize without authority. Scenting the danger of alienating femaleness and divinity, which have so recently been (re)united by religious feminism, there is, among thealogians, a marked reluctance to postulate or worship transcendent deities—even female ones. If women are, in themselves, sufficient incarnations of the Goddess, then it is feared that a monotheistic thealogy would permit the authoritarian centralization of power in one external meta-woman and divert and alienate power from human women. To make the Goddess transcendent of individual women could imply that some experiences are more approximate to the truth of the Goddess than others. And if this were so, the magisterial elaboration of that truth into mutually compatible claims might silence some voices and privilege others. No woman is given that opportunity or that authority over even one other. Thus Joan Mallonee feared that if she wrote down the revelations of the Goddess she had received through her dreams, the material would evolve into a dogma, a theology. I had a strong desire to speak about the images which were so strong and powerful, so individual and personal, but I had no desire to create the implication that She would be the same for others as She was for me.18

202 M. Raphael Starhawk and all other thealogians insist that feminist religious power is not ‘power-over’ but, ‘power-from-within’ or ‘power-for’. Goddess-power is not, therefore, susceptible to centralization or hierarchical organization. Indeed, part of thealogy’s appeal to women who perceive themselves as holistic, intuitive ‘right-brained’ thinkers, is in being an art, not a discipline. Thealogy gives free reign to the mythopoeic imagination; it blurs the distinction between female humanity and female divinity. Almost by definition a heretical system, Goddess feminism resists any sort of canonical process. It has no pretensions to orthodoxy or orthopraxis as the closed frontiers of both are held to foreclose thealogical possibility and multiply the hostile alterities that threaten the healthy ecology of the world’s spiritualities. Yet many Goddess feminists want to preserve the Goddess’ immanence within individual women almost to the point of identity, in which case it becomes difficult to proclaim the Goddess as an intentional agent in her own right. The tendency to deify femaleness is compounded by thealogy’s pagan (and now, ‘postmodern’) rejection of a linear salvation history. In common with postmodern aesthetics, thealogy is suspicious of modernist linearity (especially that of linear historical and rational schemata) as being hostile to nature. The Goddess is characterized by her cyclicity and is the source and/or symbol of the sacred power of cosmic, lunar and seasonal cycles of decay and regeneration characterized as ‘female’ and of which female reproductivity is a microcosm. A religion which celebrates natural flux as the form and function of divine activity would hardly tolerate thealogical or political fixity. Therefore much of the instability of this religious (anti) system is integral to its own thealogical and temporal model; a model which would preclude the modern hopes of moral progression towards the permanently transformed world order which, ironically, the feminist dynamic of Goddess religion drives towards. For where the Goddess is the symbol or locus of biological and political regeneration, that regeneration is more chaotic than rational. Unlike God’s taxonomic ordering of the cosmos at or near the beginning of its history as described by the Priestly writer in the Hebrew Bible, chaotic divine generativity implies that life is in flux by virtue of its being alive and its processes cannot be plotted in advance. Classical theism’s attribution to God of omnipotence and an omniscient knowledge of ends is ruled out in thealogy from the outset. Instead, using the language of chaology, Jane Caputi has discerned the owl-like ‘face’ of the Goddess in the chaological phenomenon of the ‘Strange Attractor’: a spiralling ‘pull’ on dynamical systems, channelling and patterning their turbulence into new order.19 Under a chaos model, the emergence of Goddess feminism as a social phenomenon is, in quantitative terms, a flap of the butterfly’s wing. But it is an introduction of religio-political turbulence into a patriarchal system whose sense of its own permanence is illusory and which is as unstable as any other social, conceptual or biological system—including thealogy itself.20 Starhawk’s recent science-fiction novel, The Fifth Sacred Thing, is a narrative expression of her thealogy and epitomizes this apparently postmodern destabilization of the traditional world order and its customary religious expectations. It gives an elusive impression of the Goddess as neither personal nor impersonal; neither interventionary nor non-interventionary; neither comforting nor indifferent. In the novel, one small part of California has established itself as a green, pagan (but pluralistic) society. This spiritual feminist utopia is attacked by the ‘Stewards’: a nightmarish ecocidal regime that neighbours its territory. During her struggle against the Stewards, the feminist pagan heroine, Madrone, recalls that ‘one of the names of the Goddess was All Possibility’, and she fleetingly wishes, ‘for a more comforting deity, one who would at least claim that only the good possibilities would come to pass.’ The ‘Goddess of all Possibilities’

Truth in Flux: Goddess Feminism as a Late Modern Religion 203 whispers as a voice in her ear, ‘All means all . . . I proliferate, I don’t discriminate. But you have the knife. I spin a billion, billion threads, now, cut some, and weave with the rest.’21 It is becoming clear that this radically undetermined perception of history extends methodologically to the thealogical project itself. A further mark of thealogy’s popular ‘postmodern’ character is its sense that modernity is collapsing or over and is about to be displaced by a return to (a reconstructed) pre-modern matrifocal authenticity, recycled to post-modern requirements. In its project of healing modernity’s degradation of women/nature, thealogy is reluctant to use spiritual resources from the recent past, or, indeed, the fourteen or so centuries of the dominant Christian worldview. It circumvents all patriarchal history because nothing can be expected of it (not only because postmodernists contest that a unified historical record has ceased to be possible).

Goddess Feminism as an Exemplar of Late Modern Religion To devote an article to whether Goddess feminism exemplifies postmodern or late modern trends in religion may appear to be succumbing to a quibble over terminology. But it is not. For Goddess religion is founded upon the will to situate itself ‘post’ whatever modernity might be. It submits that it represents a paradigm shift and a severance from modernity, and the emergence of a transformed consciousness akin to what Ewart Cousins has described as that of the ‘Second Axial Period’.22 For Goddess feminists, the ‘return of the Goddess’ is ushering in a new age: ‘This is the time of the end—the end of patriarchy, the end of the profane. It is the time of the Grandmother’s return, and it is a great time indeed.’23 Goddess feminism, like previous countercultural, romantic movements, is resolutely anti-modern. Its magical practices and its resacralization of nature as a nexus of essentially female energies are defiant of the mechanization and disenchantment of nature by modern Baconian science and industrial capitalism. ( Jean Mountaingrove, for example, writing of her menstrual connection to the lunar Goddess, claimed: ‘I have heard a call across a million years, I will answer it.’)24 Goddess feminism is profoundly critical of all patriarchal tradition as a ‘mind-forged manacle’: a sacralized ordering of the world by men whose disconnection from nature/femaleness has, a priori, evacuated its traditions of moral and religious authority and, in modernity, accelerated the pace of its degradation. But although Goddess religion intends to be the first post-patriarchal (and because modernity epitomizes the patriarchal posture, therefore postmodern) religion, its self-perception may be a misconception. It seems more accurate to classify it as a late modern religion whose anti-modern, organicist values are those of an emergent and marginal cultural milieu within a global context of rapid capitalist ‘development’ or modernization.25 In this case, I would like to examine how the almost paradigmatically ‘postmodern’ features of Goddess religion I described in the previous section of this paper may be interpreted more fruitfully in terms of what Anthony Giddens has called ‘reflexive’ modernity. By ‘reflexivity’ Giddens means not so much a general existential selfawareness, but the way in which in the late modern period ‘‘thought and action are constantly refracted back upon one another.’’26 In late modernity all traditions—even traditions of criticism—are themselves subjected to the corrosion of modern techniques of questioning and revision. Modernity—by its own logic—turns its critical knowledge of the social construction of knowledge on its own truth claims.27 That the ‘postmodern’ deconstruction of dualistic ontologies and grand religiohistorical schemata does not, in fact, represent contemporary religion’s clean break from

204 M. Raphael modernity, but, using Giddens’ social theory, an intensification or outworking of certain elements of the modern orientation, has been argued before—notably by Philip Mellow and Chris Shilling.28 So too, in 1989 Howard Eilberg-Schwartz argued that feminist witchcraft is, in many respects, not a rejection of the Enlightenment, but, ironically, its ‘offspring’ and its completion: it turns the Enlightenment critique of religion against the Enlightenment’s quasi-religious cult of Reason.29 He showed that Enlightenment philosophers’ criticism of the eighteenth-century Church’s exploitation and manipulation of the populace is echoed in that levelled by feminist witches at patriarchal religions today.30 Eilberg-Schwartz claimed that when feminists return (selectively) to ancient paganism and prefer religions of nature over religions of history, their arguments parallel those of the deists who were in part ‘responsible for the emergence of the modern period.’31 But whilst Eilberg-Schwartz’s paper may imply that modern and ‘postmodern’ elements can simply co-exist in Goddess feminism (in its manifestation as feminist witchcraft), I want to suggest that late modern hermeneutical suspicions and earlier modern feminist elements in Goddess feminism are in conflict with one another and defuse its impetus as a religion whose self-imposed task is to (re)establish a global, matrifocal peace within the immanent Goddess. That is, thealogy’s reflexivity undermines the earlier modern emancipatory elements which have comprised the historical, political and moral dynamic of religious feminism since the nineteenth century and which continue to inform Goddess religion’s criticism of patriarchy. Philip Mellor has disputed Giddens’ polarization of tradition and modernity, and has drawn attention to ‘the persistence of overarching, normative structures within the reflexivity of modernity.’ We need, he says, to ‘allow for the fact that reflexivity and normativity are not necessarily mutually exclusive options.’32 The phenomenon of Goddess religion would support his point, for here older pagan and feminist normative traditions attempt to structure a religion whose newer psychological and political reflexivity has been turned into a methodological virtue. We have already seen that in the name of modern tolerance and self-realization thealogy refuses to impose any authority (even feminist) on itself and is therefore subject to the kind of fragmentation, relativization, and psychologization that Giddens describes as features of late modern cultural phenomena. Thealogy’s relativization of the ontological status of the Goddess has a typically late modern historical context. According to Asphodel Long, in the mid-1970s, when Goddess feminism began to emerge from the women’s liberation movement, the term ‘Goddess’ functioned ‘as a synonym for a woman with newly regained self-worth.’ At this time, the term was essentially a liberative device: a way of affirming the full participation of femaleness in divinity and of renouncing women’s need for husbands, priests or messiahs to mediate between themselves and the divine. This early period of Goddess feminism was more interested in the psychological and political effects of religio-political heresy than in asking normative questions about the nature of the Goddess and her relation to female being. Long, who has practised, taught, and published on Goddess religion from its beginnings, finds that Goddess feminists only begin to show interest in the ontological status of the Goddess when they are ‘well advanced into Goddess culture and action and are interested in debate on the subject. It actually bothers very few seekers.’33 This pragmatic emphasis on Goddess religion’s psychological and political effects (rather than its status as a set of truth claims) undoubtedly has liberative effects. As Giddens has noted, late modern reflexivity is an open-ended process that by its nature

Truth in Flux: Goddess Feminism as a Late Modern Religion 205 offers opportunities of social transformation. Whilst modern management of society is typically alienating, modern critical reflexivity nonetheless provokes and ‘furthers the appropriation of new possibilities’.34 Indeed, the modern pace and scope of change in religion and society, modernity’s sense of its own discontinuity with tradition and its critical self-awareness have provided academic and social space for emancipatory religions like that of Goddess feminism itself. Perhaps, then, the way in which Goddess feminists choose and construct their own religious identities, and by correlation, the form and identity of the Goddess, is not so much a brand new attitude to religious truth claims, as, in Giddens’ terms, a late form of modern individualism; part of the private narrative of the self-empowered reflexive (or self-observing) self—whose ever new and more rewarding definition has become the individual’s own responsibility. As Giddens points out, this therapeutic observation of the self is more than just a function of Western individualism. In late modernity ‘what the individual becomes is dependent on the reconstructive endeavours in which she or he engages’ and ‘self-understanding is subordinated to the more inclusive and fundamental aim of building/rebuilding a coherent and rewarding sense of identity.’35 In their search for a new religious identity, Goddess feminists are characteristically modern in their critical hostility to tradition—a word almost equated with patriarchal authoritarianism. In the modern fashion, Goddess religion severs itself from tradition and looks towards a utopian future. It is dependent on the possibility of religious discontinuity; a ‘changing of the gods’. For example, Monica Sjöö and others dramatically choreographed their sense of the end of what Asia Shepsut has called ‘the Dark Age of Monotheism’, by dancing, drumming and declaring the ‘end of patriarchy’ before the altar in Bristol Cathedral during a Sunday morning service in 1993.36 Here, Goddess religion’s very awareness of its place in (and thence beyond) the grand narrative of patriarchal history is enough to disqualify it from the title ‘postmodern’ (at least in the Lyotardian sense of the term). According to Giddens, late modern reflexivity is subverting the certainties of early modernity by its ‘discontinuist’ processes of continual revision and ‘probably we are only now, in the late twentieth century, beginning to realize in a full sense how deeply unsettling this outlook is.’37 Goddess feminism is unsettling, to me at least, because it trusts only private experience. This fragments thealogical discourse and arrests the development of its emergent tradition by subordinating communal and normative theoretical reflection to contingent experience. And in this respect thealogy fails to ask the characteristically ‘postmodern’ constructivist question of whether private experiences of the Goddess might not be mediated, organized by, or at least reciprocally related to communal conceptual structures which would help a woman to identify and value the experience as that of the Goddess in the first place.38 In privileging private experience over received, communal synthesis, thealogy is insistent that it is a second order endeavour and will not, therefore, decide on the nature of the Goddess in advance of particular women’s experience. Whatever the virtues of demoting theory, the radical privatization of Goddess feminists’ religious experience may damage the religion in the long term. The meaning of religious experience in/of the Goddess may not survive the paucity of normative thealogical claims against which private claims might be evaluated. Systemic resistance to normative tradition as it has been used in patriarchy also seems to entail resistance to any tradition Goddess religionists’ own experience might come to constitute. Reflexivity undermines the possibility of long-term religious meaning and hope. Having broken with tradition per se, embracing the chaotic dynamics of the experimental, and

206 M. Raphael encouraging the chronic revision of their own emergent tradition eliminates stable points of political and religious reference and identity. This makes thealogy an inherently fragile and unstable basis for Goddess religion, especially if the purpose of religion is to provide ‘systems of cognitive orientation relative to problems of meaning . . . acceptance of which is treated as a moral obligation by the actor.’39 Even if Goddess religion has (ambiguously) postmodern characteristics, the Goddess it invokes can also appear in quite unpostmodern guises, showing that it has not entirely relinquished universalistic discourses. Some Goddess feminists (like Asphodel Long, who retains a strong Jewish identity and an Enlightenment feminist’s belief that women can and do rationally transcend their biology) have wanted to remind other Goddess feminists that the thealogical pantheon includes a plethora of goddesses of wisdom and justice like Hochmah or the Egyptian Ma’at.40 These goddesses, revived within the modern period, represent rational, universal values like truth, justice and good measure whose value no longer solely consists in their being instruments of divine cosmic rule, but also as being socially and environmentally desirable in themselves. Or again, in Starhawk’s novel The Fifth Sacred Thing, while the invading armies of the Stewards gather for attack, a group hold a paganized Seder meal and after the meal they speak of the possibility of deliverance from evil. Bird, Madrone’s lover, speaks of a time when he was ‘in Egypt’, saying that his escape was not deliverance by ‘an old guy with a beard, and it wasn’t a big lady in the sky. But when I was trapped there, something did reach for me.’ He explains that this ‘something’ is not directly concerned with victories or defeats, or even surviving or dying: I’m trying to say that this, this livingness we’re all in and of, has something in it that reaches for freedom. Maybe that quality isn’t first or most central. It could be just like a single thin thread buried in a whole carpet. But it’s there. The outstretched hand is there. If you reach for it, it’ll grab you back.41

During the struggle against the Stewards, the Goddess is often, but not always, present to pagan consciousness and is on the side of the pagans in so far as a nature divinity can show her support through natural ‘signs’ like the strategic swarming of bees or washing Madrone’s drowning body towards the boat that would rescue her. The ecofeminist utopia and the main characters survive. (In a sense, feminist witchcraft, as opposed to non-Wiccan Goddess religion, does not need a stable thealogy because feminist witchcraft is a self-empowering magical system where, theoretically, no one is left entirely at the mercy of attack.) The Goddess has also been presented by one of her foremost non-Wiccan exponents as having considerable ‘power-over’ people’s fate. Monica Sjöö, who co-authored the influential The Great Cosmic Mother, usually prefaces (perhaps almost contextualizes) her work by recounting the tragic deaths of her two young sons—Lief through a road accident and Sean through cancer. In a moving lament for Lief she asks, ‘Why did the great Mother take you back now/when you envisaged a future and dreamed of things to come?’ A few lines later she writes of his serenity in death ‘at rest in the arms of the Cosmic Mother.’42 As he died she ‘experienced flying with him on great white wings into a great loving light-presence’, and yet after his deaths she ‘lost [her] faith in the Goddess and even feared her.’43 So some Goddess feminists (some of the time) do speak and write of the Goddess at least as if she were an intentional agent in her own right: an object of spiritual longing who is directly accessible through the inner self, through dreams, trances, heightened pre-menstrual awareness and so forth. The Goddess is

Truth in Flux: Goddess Feminism as a Late Modern Religion 207 sometimes even imaged as both immanent and sitting at the centre of the universe, enfolding it within her breast, or as being out ‘among the stars in deep space’.44 Such personalistic evocations of the Goddess preserve thealogy’s (sparse) discursive continuities with the Western theological tradition (though perhaps the point of radical religious feminism is precisely to sever them).

Tensions Within Goddess Feminism as a Late Modern Religion It has become apparent that whilst Goddess feminism is happy for the Goddess to be imaged in a temporary and local manner, it nonetheless looks to the Goddess to symbolize, or even will a permanent, global shift towards relational, organicist thinking and praxis; her effects should be public and total. However, the Goddess has no moral responsibility to the world because, unlike the God of classical theism, she did not create it in the image of her perfect goodness. And having made no salvific promises, she cannot be blamed for her non-intervention in particular historical crises. Instead, the Goddess’ numinosity consists largely in her intrinsic ambiguity. In its most austere forms, the contemporary Triple Goddess as Virgin, Mother and Crone does not exemplify moral excellence and so cannot command it in others (leaving those who exploit women/nature morally unjudged). The Virgin aspect is indifferent to permanent relational connections; the Mother aspect is loving and nurturing (though not necessarily so); and the Crone aspect is an indifferently degenerative power. This trinity spares the female sacred its customary modern domestication by bourgeois moral expectations of the feminine: it is realistic about human femaleness and becomes a way of refusing sentimental ideologies of feminine sanctity. So on the one hand, feminist paganism can be realistic about divine and human femaleness to the point of jettisoning its feminist ethics (which is traditionally premised on the pacific, relational nature of women). But on the other hand, thealogy urges women to engage in biophilic direct actions like the establishment of peace camps which are premised on the (heroic) practices of non-violence and a profound ethic of respect for life. So far from divinizing femininity by projecting it onto an unfailingly gentle, productive, and forgiving mother Goddess (as it is often thought to do), feminist paganism can go the other way and make it difficult to derive from thealogy the sort of pacific ethical/political values that radical feminism wants to prescribe. I have suggested that the tension between thealogy’s reflexivity and the normative political values it shares with Jewish and Christian feminism do not allow it to maximize its theoretical opportunities to offer meaning and the promise of justice and consolation (however metaphorical) to its adherents. I shall now illustrate my point with reference to the way in which Goddess religion might, because of this tension, fail to engage meaningfully with the problem of (relatively) innocent suffering caused by the moral evil of others. In most forms of Christian feminism the tension between the normative values of feminism and late modern reflexivity is far less marked than it is in neopagan feminism. For example, the Catholic feminist Rosemary Ruether ignores the prevalent postmodern criticism of grand religious narratives and looks to the prophetic promise, mediated by Enlightenment Marxism and feminism, that God’s intervention in history is to judge the oppressor and liberate women: ‘the oppressed of the oppressed’. Similarly, the Korean Protestant feminist Minjung (liberation) theologian Chung Hyun Kyung can invoke the han of Korean folk religion—those murdered spirits who cry out for the just resolution of the wrongs they have suffered in life and the manner of their death.

208 M. Raphael But the term ‘evil’ has uncomfortably dualistic and metaphysical connotations for many contemporary feminists—especially thealogians. Starhawk, for example, writes, ‘ ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘evil’’ are not concepts I find useful in discussing Goddess-thealogy, I think they only confuse us.’45 Nonetheless, despite its own relativist rhetoric, Goddess feminism does have an uncompromising idea and experience of evil as the abuse and alienation of rights from women, subject men and non-human life forms by institutions sacralizing and privileging masculinity. Indeed, for most Goddess feminists, the contemporary renaissance of Goddess religion is founded upon, and in spite of, a historical defeat of the good. The victory of Indo-European patriarchal culture over matrifocal Goddess-worshipping cultures between the third and second millennium BCE, and patriarchy’s more recent annihilation of matrifocal earth religion during the Witch Craze from the fourteenth to the beginning of the eighteenth centuries are the two most important cases in point. We need to examine, then, how it is that thealogy refuses to resolve religio-existential problems like that of innocent suffering, and yet founds its identity on being a religious product of the innocent suffering of women over several thousand years. In itself, the fluidity of the Goddess may not be an obstacle to thealogical judgements or resolutions. After all, religions are usually subject to profound change in the process of indigenization and doctrinal conflict. The God of theism undoubtedly has a history and modern theism has tolerated competing and mutually qualifying models of God, albeit in dialectical tension with normative traditions of God’s transcendent, morally perfect personality. There is nothing unusual in theistic religions making paradoxical statements about their God. But thealogy’s relish of the paradoxical, and its elevation of randomness, flux and shift is unusual and becomes problematic when one tries to apply thealogy collectively and in sufficient detail to a given moral crisis such as the unprovoked attack of a strong country, ethnic group or person upon a more vulnerable one to prove supremacy, or the rapid degradation of the earth by industrial capitalism. Because Goddess religion ascribes little or no moral transcendence to the Goddess, it becomes difficult to use the Goddess as the religious justification for a struggle against evil, or to construct meaning in the face of it. Evil is not evidence against the existence of the Goddess. Firstly, the existence of the Goddess as an independently subsisting divine reality is not dogmatically established. And secondly, many of the things theology has associated with evil or suffering (impermanence, disease and natural disasters) are not problematic for thealogy. It would be unreasonable to attribute moral responsibility to the divine for suffering when (natural) evil is an ecological and thealogical given. Thus Sjöö: The Goddess contains within herself all energies and is the centre from where they emanate. She can live with paradoxes and mystery and Her message to us is: ‘As I dying live, so you dying will live again.’ In the natural world, light and dark are interwoven without contradiction and disharmony.46

So thealogians want to say that although all is not well with the world, there is nothing inherently wrong with it. For Starhawk, in experiencing the Goddess, ‘‘we can open new eyes and see that there is nothing to be saved from . . . There is only the Goddess, the Mother, the turning spiral that whirls us in and out of existence.’’47 If a thealogy of impermanence and change offers any consolation it may only be in the meagre comfort of knowing that no evil will last forever; that evil regimes, persons and

Truth in Flux: Goddess Feminism as a Late Modern Religion 209 situations that cause great suffering are subject to the same processes of dissolution as everything else. Yet if the Goddess does not, in some sense, judge moral enormities like sadism and the mass extinction of species through human carelessness and greed, then that god/dess will become too abstracted from the world to satisfy the feminist nature of the religion. It is thealogy’s eclectic use of several non-normative religion-mythical grand narratives at once that imposes some of the greatest strains on thealogians’ attempts to articulate religious meaning, if only for themselves. There are at least three grand narratives running at once and in different directions. First, there is the modern feminist grand narrative of the outworking of justice in which there will eventually be an irrevocable transformation of the world order from a patriarchal to a post-patriarchal one. Second, there is the thealogical assimilation of Lovelock and Margulis’ Gaia hypothesis. In one narrative version of this theory the Goddess/Earth is imaged as dying from the polluted wounds of industrial rape. Here human survival is dependent on the survival of the Goddess: ‘If She dies, so do we; if She transforms and survives, so might we.’48 This narrative has a tendency to induce religio-moral passivity in that where the Goddess and nature are pantheistically identical, the Goddess cannot be resistant to moral evil, any more than nature can intentionally frustrate or judge moral evil. In the other more prevalent narrative version of the Gaia hypothesis, the Goddess/Earth is dying but will destroy us before we destroy her. By now the anthropocentrism of the grand Enlightenment narrative of feminist revolution has been tempered, or even rendered invisible, by the contemporary mingling of the green and feminist revolutions in the new, biocentric, ecofeminist movement. Popular religious versions of the Gaia hypothesis can, then, actually undermine thealogical ethical values by giving the impression that the planetary suffering wrought by (patriarchal) environmental degradation is merely an impersonal consequence of human choice against which the Dark Goddess simply asserts her will to maintain or restore homeostasis within her own systems. In one instance, Starhawk portrays the Goddess as ‘the intersection of chance with choices and actions made before.’ Drought, the destruction of the ozone layer, and aberrant weather patterns are ‘not punishment, not even justice, but consequence.’49 This Goddess is indifferent to human suffering, even if she does not intend it. Self-preservation makes her callous. Karen Whiting, for example, can subordinate human suffering to gynocentric myth, claiming that when humans starve on land that has become barren, this may be understood as Demeter rescuing her daughter from patriarchy and death: ‘‘If you were the human beings starving, you wouldn’t necessarily find that palatable or acceptable, but . . . it seems to me that what we call evil, in the realm of the Goddess, is often in the service of the good.’’50 In this, deep ecology’s unsentimental, not to say callous, biocentrism,51 is often echoed in thealogy’s. Deep ecology refuses to privilege the value of human existence over non-human existence or to confer any absolute ontological distinction to human being. It cannot justify sacrificing the needs of the ecological whole for those of particular human needs, especially where modern beliefs about human moral evolution have been relinquished. This late modern sense of the moral failure of modernity has led to humans writing humankind out of history altogether. Reflexive modernity has finally, and perhaps logically, produced a biocentrism, which however justifiable in itself, has undermined thealogy’s religious and feminist purposiveness. In principle, thealogy in a radically biocentric context can remain credible in the face of any

210 M. Raphael evil—even the extinction of the human species and all other existing life forms, short of the basic chemical preconditions of life per se. But to simply explain evil away as a failure to acknowledge the ecological nature of suffering or the non-central place of the human species within the cyclic scheme of life and death, is in danger of neglecting traditional prophetic and feminist perceptions of actual and immediate injustices against human beings. Third, thealogians often adopt a cosmological grand narrative of cyclic destruction. Here the biblical and modern models of time as a more or less linear progression towards a given eschatological or technological telos is replaced by a chaotic ‘menstrual’ cosmology in which the Goddess (as Cerridwen, Kali, Siris and others) generates, dissolves, and regenerates life within her churning womb/cauldron.52 Here the Goddess is the vortex from which all things are spun into existence and sucked back out of it. This semi-apocalyptic model, whether actual or imaginal, precludes historical resolutions of the problem of innocent suffering and also renders the modern struggle towards a new and lasting post-patriarchal order ultimately absurd. In sum, the modesty of thealogy’s moral claims on behalf of the Goddess is actually both a strength and a weakness. It is a strength in that thealogy does not have to engage in the theological manoeuvres (or contortions) that events like the Holocaust have imposed upon Jewish and Christian theologians in the second half of this century in order to preserve the credibility and moral worth of the theistic tradition. But the modesty of thealogy’s claims is also a weakness in that a religious system which cannot encompass or engage with such human enormities (however unsuccessfully) may not be a religious system that is morally or emotionally worth bothering with. And even if the Goddess is at times almost identical with the dynamic processes of organic change in time, that does not mean that dissolution and untimely death cease to cause real grief within actual human experience. It may be that if the reality of human wrong-doing and suffering does not count against the existence or worth of a reality called ‘the Goddess’, then thealogy cannot ultimately do some of the most important work of a popular religious theory, namely, to reconcile people to existential pain and to construct meaning in the face of it. The consolations of religion are not trivial. One might be justified in questioning the point of a religious theory that both affirmed the reality of evil and affirmed the reality of (an often personal) Goddess as eternal co-existents. If a religion’s moral competence is one of the best indices of its human worth, Goddess religion is of less worth than it might be if it postulates a divinity for whom evil is only a problem for humanity. Whilst late modernity has been justifiably critical of modern rationalism, we still need good reasons to celebrate a given deity. A goddess worth celebrating must create and ground value in the human as well as the non-human world, which is precisely what the reflexive tendencies of thealogical discourse will not let her do. To conclude, I have had no interest in denigrating Goddess feminism or levelling accusations of sloppy thinking. On the contrary, I have strong sympathies with its religious and environmental politics and strong aesthetic sympathies with its refusal to submit its evolving sensus numinis and its playful methodologies to the dead hand of (a great deal of ) academic theorizing. It is to be expected that thealogy will be fragmented and plural: its theoretical and experiential patterning is not much more than twenty-five years old. It would not, therefore, be reasonable to expect a neatly finished thealogical product. And as thealogy follows ‘experience’ rather than logic, neatly tied and closed systems are precluded from the outset. Rather, the purpose of this paper has been to propose that despite Goddess religion’s strenuous engagement with the evil of

Truth in Flux: Goddess Feminism as a Late Modern Religion 211 patriarchal disconnection through ritual and ritualized direct action, its celebration of flux in all and any forms both vitalizes and weakens the processes of its development as a persuasive tradition. Like Philip Mellor, I have found that reflexivity and normativity can co-exist in contemporary religion, but my discussion of Goddess feminism’s partial engagement with moral evil has illustrated how that co-existence may not be to thealogy’s long-term benefit. Methodologically, the confluence of early and late modern elements in Goddess feminism has also made it difficult to classify and locate in the history of religious ideas. And it seems likely that there are comparable problems of both internal coherence and scholarly classification in other contemporary forms of emancipatory religion.

Notes 1 Christianity and the Goddesses: Systematic Criticism of a Feminist Theology, London, SCM 1988, p. 149. 2 The terms ‘Goddess religion’ and ‘Goddess feminism’ are, in practice, interchangeable and I shall use them as such. 3 Religion and Magic in the Modern Cults of the Great Goddess’, in U. King (ed.), Religion and Gender, Oxford, Blackwell 1995, pp. 167–72. 4 Living in the Lap of the Goddess: The Feminist Spirituality Movement in America, New York: Crossroad 1993, p. 39. 5 The term ‘thealogy’ was coined by Naomi Goldenberg and refers to (semi)theoretical discourse on the nature of thea — the Goddess or female divine principle. See, for instance, Naomi R. Goldenberg, ‘The Return of the Goddess: Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Shift from Theology to Thealogy’, Studies in Religion 16:1 ( January 1987), pp. 37–52. 6 Quoted in Carol Christ, ‘Why Women Need the Goddess: Phenomenological, Psychological, and Political Reflections’, in Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow (eds.), Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, New York: Harper San Francisco 1992, pp. 278–9. Christ’s commentary on these remarks insists that the Goddess is a polysemic symbol and thealogy arises from each woman’s experience. The Goddess is not reducible to one account of her nature. 7 The Spiral Dance: A rebirth of the Religion of the Great Goddess, New York, Harper & Row 1979, p. 81. 8 The Goddess, Shaftesbury, Dorset, Element, 1989, pp. 18–9. 9 ‘Witchcraft and Women’s Culture’, in Christ and Plaskow, Womanspirit Rising, p. 263. It is unclear whether this declaration means that the Goddess is simply the totality of all that is, or that she is manifest in whatever protects (‘serves’) nature—which is a less monistic and more ethically demanding claim. 10 Carol Christ, ‘Heretics and Outsiders: The Struggle Over Female Power in Western Religion’, Soundings 61 (1978): 260–80. p. 278. 11 Christ, ‘Heretics’, p. 274. 12 See, for example, Heather Whiteside’s triad of rituals which she designed to help her come to terms with her divorce. These included a ritual of self-affirmation, a herbal charm to heal her ‘broken heart’, and a three-day candle spell to ease the pain of separation. From Serinity Young, An Anthology of Sacred Texts By and About Women, London, Pandora 1993, p. 431. 13 Feminist witchcraft is a new religion incorporating contemporary feminist politics, Goddess worship, folklore, herbalism and magical practice. All feminist witches are Goddess worshipping, but not all Goddess feminists are witches. 14 For numerous examples of feminist Wiccan spells see Elizabeth Brooke, A Woman’s Book of Shadows. Witchcraft: A Celebration, London, The Women’s Press, 1993. 15 See e.g. Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics, London, Unwin Hyman 1990, pp. 66–70. 16 See Eller, pp. 124–9. 17 Goddess feminism sometimes uses the positive charge or mana of menstrual blood to resacralize a profaned natural space. (Each month at Greenham Common, Moon, a travelling woman, would ritually tie a used ‘blood-cloth’ onto the locked gates of the nuclear installation for this very purpose.) See Celu Amberston, Blessings of the Blood: A Book of Menstrual Lore for Women, Victoria BC, Beach Holme 1991, pp. 60–1.

212 M. Raphael 18 Quoted in Christ, ‘Heretics’, p. 277. 19 Gossips, Gorgons and Crones: The Fates of the Earth, Santa Fe, Bear & Co. 1993, p. 290. 20 For a discussion of the chaos metaphor in radical feminist religion see Melissa Raphael, Thealogy and Embodiment: The Post-Patriarchal Reconstruction of Female Sacrality, Sheffield, Sheffield Academic Press 1996, pp. 220–61. 21 New York, Bantam 1994, p. 207. 22 ‘Spirituality in Today’s World’, in Frank Whaling (ed.), Religion in Today’s World, Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark 1987, pp. 324–31. 23 Paula Gunn Allen, ‘Foreword’ to Caputi, p. xviii. Innumerable claims of this sort have been made. See e.g., Naomi Goldenberg, Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions, Boston, Beacon Press 1979, p. 109; Naomi Ozianec, Daughter of the Goddess: The Sacred Priestess, London, Aquarian 1993, p. 300. 24 In Amberston, Blessings of the Blood, p. 86. 25 Cf. Philip Mellor’s distinction between ‘postmodernism’ as a way of interpreting contemporary culture, and ‘postmodernity’ as modernity’s ‘aftermath’. In ‘Reflexive Traditions: Anthony Giddens, High Modernity, and the Contours of Contemporary Religiosity’, Religious Studies 29 (1993): 111–27, 112. 26 The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press 1990, p. 38. 27 See Giddens, Modernity and Self Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Cambridge, Polity Press 1991, pp. 20–1; Mellor, ‘Reflexive Traditions’, pp. 125–6. 28 See Philip Mellor and Chris Shilling, ‘Reflexive Modernity and the Religious Body’, Religion 24 (1994): 23–42, esp. pp. 26–7. 29 ‘Witches of the West: Neopaganism and Goddess Worship as Enlightenment Religions’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 5 (1989): 77–95, esp. p. 93. 30 ibid., pp. 79–84. 31 ibid., p. 80. 32 ‘Reflexive Traditions’, p. 125. 33 The Goddess Movement in Britain Today’, Feminist Theology 5 (1994): 11–39, p. 15. 34 Modernity and Self-Identity, p. 175; see also The Consequences of Modernity, p. 7. 35 Modernity and Self-Identity, p. 75. 36 See Sjöö, ‘Breaking the Tabu—doing the unthinkable’, From the Flames 10 (1993), pp. 22–3. 37 The Consequences of Modernity, p. 39. 38 See Melissa Raphael, ‘Feminism, Constructivism and Numinous Experience’, Religious Studies 30 (1994), pp. 511–26. 39 T. Parsons, in The Social System, quoted by Mellor and Shilling, ‘Reflexive Modernity’, pp. 35–6. 40 ‘The Goddess in Judaism: An Historical Perspective’, in A. Pirani (ed.), The Absent Mother: Restoring the Goddess to Judaism and Christianity, London, Mandala 1991, p. 52. 41 P. 215. 42 New Age and Armageddon: The Goddesses or the Gurus? Towards a Feminist Vision of the Future, London, The Women’s Press 1992, p. 18. 43 ibid., pp. 17, 1. 44 De-Anna Alba, The Cauldron of Change: Myths, Mysteries and Magick of the Goddess, Illinois, Delphi Press 1993, pp. 11, 14. 45 Roundtable Discussion, ‘If God is God She is not Nice’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 5 (1989): 103–17, 106. 46 New Age and Armageddon, p. 126. 47 ‘Witchcraft as Goddess Religion’, in C. Spretnak (ed.), The Politics of Women’s Spirituality: Essays on the Rise of Spiritual Power Within the Feminist Movement, New York, Anchor Books, 1982, p. 56. 48 Sjöö, New Age and Armageddon, p. 1. 49 The Fifth Sacred Thing, p. 17. 50 Quoted in Eller, p. 139. 51 See e.g. Bill McKibben, The End of Nature, New York, Random House 1989, p. 182. 52 For a contemporary thealogical reconstruction of this eschatology see Barbara Walker, The Crone: Woman of Age, Wisdom and Power, New York, Harper Collins 1988, pp. 92–122.

Truth in Flux: Goddess Feminism as a Late Modern Religion 213 MELISSA RAPHAEL is a Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at Cheltenham and Gloucester College specializing in the field of religion and gender. She has published in a number of journals including Religious Studies and Feminist Theology and is the author of Thealogy and Embodiment: The Post-Patriarchal Reconstruction of Female Sacrality (Sheffield Academic Press, 1996) and the forthcoming Rudolf Otto and the Concept of Holiness (Oxford University Press, 1997). She is currently working on An Introduction to Thealogy for Sheffield Academic Press. Department of Humanities and Religious Studies, Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education, PO Box 220, The Park Campus, The Park, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire GL50 2QF, U.K.