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Concept
Goddess movement
Summary
The Goddess movement includes spiritual beliefs or practices (chiefly neopagan) that emerged predominantly in North America, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand in the 1970s. The movement grew as a reaction to Abrahamic religions, which have only gods with whom are referred by male pronouns, and it uses goddess worship and may include a focus on women or on one or more understandings of gender or femininity.
The Goddess movement is a widespread non-centralized trend in neopaganism, and it therefore has no centralized tenets of belief. Practices vary widely, from the name and the number of goddesses worshipped to the specific rituals and rites that are used. Some, such as Dianic Wicca, exclusively worship female deities, but others do not. Belief systems range from monotheistic to polytheism to pantheistic and encompass a range of theological variety similar to that in the broader neopagan community. Common pluralistic belief means that a self-identified Goddess worshiper could theoretically worship any number of different goddesses from cultures all over the world. Based on its characteristics, the Goddess movement is also referred to as a form of cultural religiosity that is increasingly diverse, geographically widespread, eclectic, and more dynamic in process.
In the 19th century, some first-wave feminists such as Matilda Joslyn Gage and Elizabeth Cady Stanton published their ideas describing a female deity, whilst anthropologists such as Johann Jakob Bachofen examined the ideas of prehistoric matriarchal Goddess cultures in the Mediterranean region. There are also post-traditional Goddess feminists who claim that female theologies are more ancient, having emerged in and around Europe during the Upper Paleolithic period or 30,000 years ago: the Great Goddess hypothesis. It is said that these theologies were suppressed in the west when Christianity outlawed all pre-Christian religions through a series of edicts by Theodosius I. These ideas gained additional traction during the second-wave feminism movement.
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