It may interest you to know that Goddess Spirituality is a recognised movement that has its roots in the 1960s when the Age of Aquarius heralded a time of revolution.  The invention of the pill contributed to rapidly changing attitudes towards sex and women’s ownership of their bodies, while the larger social revolt targeted conservatism of middle class respectability, colonialism and the Vietnam War.  Suddenly women were freed from the tyranny of their own biology[1] and the emerging Women’s Liberation Movement spawned a new found independence and spirituality that sought the sacred embodied in a female form.

In tracing the roots of Feminist / Goddess spirituality, feminist scholars see this movement as an off-shoot of the wider Womens’ Liberation Movement of North America and Western Europe, where women had become disenfranchised and alienated with what they perceived as an absence of the feminine within Judeo-Christian religious discourse.[2]  Wanting to reclaim their lost female cultural and religious agency, women sought to discover evidence of a lost matriarchy or goddess worshiping society, which was largely made possible by the growing availability of information on the subject.  These works were then reinterpreted by western feminists as evidence of a matrifocal, gynocentric culture espousing life-loving, peaceful and gender equal qualities.[3]

Wendy Griffin[4] speaks of the early roots of the goddess movement recalling in 1972 in Los Angeles, the first coven of feminist witches that practised Witchcraft as a religion, meeting under the tutelage of Zsuzsanna Budapest.  Within a few years, several hundred women were gathering to celebrate their revisioning of female divinity through ritual practise. Griffin’s research revealed that the participants in goddess rituals used symbols and images to create a framework of meaning that encapsulates goddess spirituality as defining a new ethos. That philosophy was intended to redefine power, authority, sexuality and social relations between the spiritual and the physical.  In the goddess movement, the physical is firmly anchored in the female body, an element common to all manifestations of this movement.  

Influence of Witchcraft, Paganism and Magic 

Whilst the Womens’ Liberation Movement influenced Goddess spirituality by revisioning womens’ power, bodies and sexuality, Witchcraft, Paganism and magic gained popularity by offering women an alternative spiritual practice, one which referenced nature and the feminine and which viewed sexuality as sacred.  The rebirth of interest in Wicca, Paganism and magic grew out of the occult revival that occurred in England and Europe in the late nineteenth century.  The occult revival was an eclectic fusion of esoteric and eastern spiritual wisdom that witnessed women like Madam Blavatsky, co-founder of the Theosophical Society in 1890, bringing eastern knowledge of the Tibetan spiritual masters to the west.  In California, channelling the spirit world became de rigeur, with a proliferation of mediums bringing through messages from the departed, accompanied by table tilting and ectoplasmic manifestations.  The Order of the Golden Dawn, a High Magical secret society was also founded that believed spiritual inspiration could be activated by invocation and ritual focused acts of imagination.[5]

Two figures which emerge into the first half of the twentieth century which had a profound effect on modern magic and the practice of Witchcraft are the occultist Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) and Gerald Gardner (1884 1964). Crowley is more commonly known for his interests in ritual sex magic and gained the title of “the most wicked man in the world”, often called the Beast.  Gardner claimed to have been initiated into a witches’ coven in the 1930s and is thought to be responsible for the revival of what we know today as the modern practice of Wicca or Neo-Paganism.  He claims to have been initiated by a witch known as “Old Dorothy” who represented a lineage of authentic witches who could trace their roots back to pre-Christianity.[6] Gerald Gardner

It was the United States in the 1970s that became the centre for modern Paganism and Witchcraft, which energy became channeled into a different phenomenon – the rise of the women’s spirituality movement.[7]  As a witch was seen as a modern representation of independent female power, this image was adopted in the United States to become the main source of modern feminist thought and power.  Two feminist writers of that era, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English who published Witches, Midwives and Nurses in 1972, put forward that some nine million women were killed in the witch trials across Europe and America from the 14th to 17th centuries, contending that these women had been the healers, midwives and holders of knowledge pertaining to natural medicine and earth wisdom.  They believe their destruction had been a desecration of female power and knowledge.  (These figures of 9 million deaths are said to have been wildly inflated and contemporary research now suggests figures more like 60,000 witches died [Jones 2002]).

Daly (1973) added that the over-throw of prehistoric women-centred cultures had been the beginning of all the world’s ills, calling all women to rediscover their true self in the image of the goddess.By 1978 the first battle of the feminist revolution had begun with its inherent belief in the supremacy of a female goddess and that Witchcraft was the vessel which had preserved the remnants of goddess-centred religion with the sacred status of women in tact.[8]  After all, Witchcraft in essence is an earth-based or nature religion and the Great Goddess is its principal deity.[9]

Starhawk[10] at the centre of this burgeoning movement in Los Angeles, wrote that feminist spirituality, Paganism and Witchcraft all overlap but are not identical.  Pagans, and even witches may not be feminists.  She says:

Many individuals are drawn to earth-based spiritual traditions, to the celebration of the seasonal cycles and the awakening of broader dimensions of consciousness, without an analysis of the interplay of power and gender.  But the feminist Craft has grown enormously, including many men as well as women who are participating in many areas of social and political struggle.

Ronald Hutton explains that Starhawk and Zsuzsanna Budapest were the significant proponents of feminist Witchcraft throughout the 1980s with the goddess spirituality movement fully taking root in the 1990s.  This term became an umbrella that included the search for a prehistoric Great Goddess who administered to ancient woman-centred cultures.  It also came to represent a movement aimed at recovering female spirituality, and by the late 1990s it signified the spiritual power within women, whether they believed in actual deities or not.  Goddess spirituality had formed an identity that was greater than just Paganism or Witchcraft alone, it was a composite that revered the feminine in all its manifestations and in all ages and parts of the world.

Excerpt from Masters Thesis:

Hieros Gamos:  Sacred sexuality Ancient and Modern (How sacred sexuality is manifesting in a current western milieu and what is the emerging role of the modern day sacred prostitute)

Kerri Ryan © (2008)