Page:Vital New Matters - The Speculative Turn in the Study of Religion and Gender.pdf/21

Rh Reid-Bowen: Vital New Matters bedroom, mix potions for love, happiness and success, make sense of your dreams, boost your luck and lower your stress levels, harness your psychic energy and show you how to throw a fabulous goddess party. Chapters include: Chakras and Auras; Magic and Rituals; Dreams; Crystals and Remedies; Astrology; Numerology; Psychic Power; Angels and Goddesses and Mind Miracles.

On the other hand, there is another ‘goddess-oriented’ assemblage which favours alliances with a very different set of material, political and social objects. Exemplary of this other assemblage of object relationships is Starhawk’s summation of her commitments in Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising:

"A deepening earth-based spirituality led me into environmental and antinuclear activism, out of the sense that if the earth is sacred, we should prevent idiots from destroying her and us. Throughout the eighties and nineties I engaged in many nonviolent direct actions on the issues of nuclear power and weapons, and later on militarism, intervention in Central America, the clearcutting of redwood forests, AIDS, and other issues. I was part of a collective of nonviolence trainers and also helped to organize many of the actions."

There may be some hesitation here on the part of the reader. Indeed, one ought to stop. It may be objected that I am selecting evidence, or objects, to fit my hypothesis. The counterclaim is that I am investigating what is real. I may be mistaken, but the attempt is to describe, analyse and make sense of what is there. Is there an assemblage of persons, spiritual self-help books, magical and ritual objects and lifestyle items that demands to be understood as one type of Goddess religion, while another, one that is more concerned with trees, nuclear power and alliances with political activists, ought to be accepted as another? I don’t know. The best I can do is mobilize more evidence of objects and their association to support, or falsify, my case. The value of an object-oriented approach to the Goddess movement is not that humans are side-stepped or erased – they aren’t – but rather that sensitivity to a complex interplay of things, materialities and actants is required. Although economic, political, psychological and sociological avenues of enquiry may be opened up by such an approach, they are not imposed from the outset. One is asked to accept that religious movements and traditions, such as the Goddess movement, are constructed from diverse agencies, parts and formations of ‘thing-power’. 64