Page:Vital New Matters - The Speculative Turn in the Study of Religion and Gender.pdf/17

Rh 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, while academics such as Naomi Goldenberg, Melissa Raphael and Cynthia Eller have delineated and theorized the movement in historical, phenomenological and social scientific terms. 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; 60