Page:Vital New Matters - The Speculative Turn in the Study of Religion and Gender.pdf/18

Rh (2) the Goddess is symbol of the life, death and rebirth energy in nature and culture, in personal and communal life; (3) the Goddess is symbol of the affirmation of the legitimacy and beauty of female power (made possible by the new becoming of women in the women’s liberation movement).

These perspectives could be elaborated and combined in various ways without disagreements or internal tensions surfacing. Thus, deity could be experienced, evoked and ritualized as single (the Great Goddess, the Mother Goddess), as triple (Maiden, Mother, Crone) and/or through culturally, religiously and mythically diverse individual goddesses (Athena, Cerridwen, Isis, Hecate, Kali, Tara and others). Female sacrality, in turn, could be either located within, as an energistic, psychic or archetypal reality, or projected outside, as a transcendent hypostatization of certain female qualities, as a combination of both, such as the life, death, rebirth energy cited above, or else as something else entirely. The movement demonstrated a ‘democratic plurivocality’, a remarkable tolerance of difference, with writers such as Long arguing that only the idea of female deity mattered because it affirms ‘that women can have a close relationship with the divine ... however that divine is envisaged.’ This state of affairs did not persist.

From the late 1980s and early 1990s tensions could be identified within the Goddess movement. Despite an ongoing resistance to argumentative relations with their fellows, alternative interpretations of the nature of Goddess were becoming important. A non-comprehensive list of tensions includes: realist vs antirealist, singular/Goddess vs plural/goddesses, Pagan vs New Age, feminist vs nonfeminist, countercultural vs conservative, exoteric vs esoteric. Some evidence of these tensions in the United Kingdom could be discerned in the Challenging New Age Patriarchy conference, at Malvern in 1990, the appearance of The Journal of Radical Feminist Spirituality, Magic and the Goddess: From the Flames and Monica Sjöö’s New Age & Armageddon. All of these voiced a strong dissatisfaction with developing trends, frequently articulated in terms of depoliticization, New Age appropriation, commodification and hijacking. A contributor to the journal From the Flames is representative of these concerns: 61