Page:What Men Want - Initial Thoughts on the Male Goddess Movement.pdf/8

Rh of history – her-story – which tends to hark back to a hypothesized prepatriarchal utopia of peace, egalitarianism, Goddess worship and matriarchy. This version of events is often bolstered by (contentious) archaeological evidence. One sees this version of history most clearly in Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade (1987). Eisler advances the notion that matriarchal ‘partnership’ models of society preceded and later competed with, patriarchal ‘dominator’ forms of social organization, and were oppressed by them in the end. Carolyn Merchant anticipates Eisler with a critique of the development of the dual systems of patriarchy and capitalism. She argues for twin historical constructions of woman as nature and man as culture. She contends that nature came to be viewed as ‘wild’, ‘fecund’ and ‘disordered’ in comparison to the increasingly neat ordered logic of the cultural realm. For Merchant, the conflict between the carnal, ‘disordered sexuality’ of the female and the cerebral male rationality catalysed the scapegoating of women during the witch craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – the mythologized ‘burning times’ which codified the normative gender roles of modernity and the dominance of men.

Whatever the authenticity of these histories, the equation of women and nature has influenced the form, content and direction of both Goddess spirituality and the wider Pagan movement. In particular, as women attempt to forge new ways of being that are independent of 312