Goddess 'Remembered'? Pure Origins in the Historical Metanarrative of Goddess Feminism

IntroductionThe spiritual journey of earth's peoples began with the idea of a Goddess, universally called the Great Mother .... Only recently [the last 6000 years]...has the earth and the female perspective been ignored. A growing number of people are looking to the past through women's spirituality to find new visions for the future. (Donna Read, director & narrator of Goddess Remembered)In this paper I focus on scholarship associated with the western goddess spirituality movement, paying particular attention to the construct of world pre/history found therein. Nina Lykke alludes to this when describing 'the goddess metaphor' as a 'common landmark for the international wave of spiritual ecofeminism' involving a 'modern nostalgic construction of a good (non-existent) origin to return to' (1996: 23). The mythological origin in question is a pre-patriarchal world comprised of matriarchal or, rather, matrifocal goddess cultures. Many goddess feminists now prefer terms such as 'matrifocal' or 'gynocentric' due to 'matriarchy's' implication of domination by women rather than egalitarianism; either way, however, the narrative of a world decline for 'women' after 'prehistory' still depicts a universalized and 'overly utopian past from which women fell'''(Merchant 2003: 30). On terminology, it should also be noted that 'spiritual ecofeminism' can be used more broadly to include Hindu, Christian and Jewish feminists (for eg., by Ruether 2005: 307). In addition, goddess feminists are not necessarily ecofeminist in their concerns in a sustained way, while many ecofeminist scholars are not goddess feminists. It is therefore clearer to use the phrase 'goddess feminism' to designate spiritual feminism's goddess wing.Goddess Remembered (1989) was part one of a three-part film series entitled 'Women and Spirituality' (National Film Board of Canada, 1989-92), which could now be regarded as a classic statement of goddess feminism. I screen the documentary in a world gender history course I coordinate, in a week on the original 'matriarchy' debate; and student responses to it are thought-provoking. The series featured a San Francisco feminist meeting (date unstated) of leading North American scholars and activists associated with goddess spirituality that included Charlene Spretnak, Starhawk, Carol Christ, Luisah Teish and Merlin Stone.Goddess spirituality has become especially strong in North America, but has been indebted to various inspirations from abroad. One author emphasizes that well before the 1970s there were British influences on the growth of goddess worship in the U.S.; by the seventies, the Dianic pagan Wicca of Hungarian-born Zsusanna Budapest was also playing a leading role in spreading the faith (Husain 2003: 152-530). Both Cynthia Eller (1991: 281) and Wendy Griffin (1995: 35-6) comment on the difficulty of estimating the size of the neo-pagan goddess spirituality movement in the United States. One survey cited by Eller indicated that in San Francisco in the eighties around 30% of feminists defined their religion as pagan. Shahrukh Husain's estimate of around 100,000 neo-pagans in the U.S. by the 1990s, about half of whom identified with witchcraft, was probably a conservative one (151). Apart from neo-paganism and feminist 'Wicca' or witchcraft, goddess feminism has drawn on other expressions of spiritual feminism; and ecofeminism as well. Today it still owes much to Second Wave radical feminism and to its offshoot of cultural feminism that was centred on building a 'woman-identified' culture-an obvious example being the embracement of woman-centred alternatives to patriarchal religion such as goddess worship and engaging in spiritual/'magical' rituals that are intended to valorize and empower women.The discourse on a matriarchal or gynocentric prehistory, on the other hand, extends back to nineteenth century works such as the far-from-feminist Mother Right by Jacob Bachofen (1861). In contrast, Friedrich Engels in his Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) set out to locate the origins of women's oppression in order that ultimately it could be overcome-under socialism/communism. …

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