Truth in Flux: Goddess Feminism as a Late Modern Religion
✍ Scribed by Melissa Raphael
- Book ID
- 102620111
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 1996
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 111 KB
- Volume
- 26
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0048-721X
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
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 religion 2 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