In the early 1970s, sectors of the new women's movement, seeking a feminist spirituality, began to reclaim the ideas of original matriarchy and the primacy of a female deity. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthropologists such as Bachofen and Briffault, who had written about an original matriarchy, were rediscovered. Their work was received with surprise and joy and was seen as proof of the “truth” of human history that had been kept from women by a patriarchal conspiracy. For these new feminists, however, such ideas were not simply theories about original female power that might buttress a new equality; they were also the foundations for a new, or renewed, religion. Circles of women and some men gathered around worship of the “Goddess,” presumed to be the original deity of human history.
Goddess worship was linked to “female” values that promoted peace, harmony with nature, equality, and love for all. In opposition, “masculine” values, enshrined in the male supreme deity of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, promoted male domination, aggressive violence, subjugation of women, and exploitation of the earth. The reclaiming of Goddess worship took on the vision of a redemption of humanity and the earth from the nadir of violence and destruction that had been unleashed by patriarchal religion and rule.
THE BEGINNINGS OF FEMINIST WICCA
Two books published in the 1970s were important in popularizing the feminist reclamation of matriarchy and Goddess worship: Elizabeth Gould Davis's The First Sex (1971) and Merlin Stone's When God Was a Woman (1976).1 Davis argues that women literally were the original human beings, reproducing parthenogenetically. Males were the result of a mutation, she theorizes, arising when one of the X chromosomes of the female was broken into a Y. Davis notes that males with double YY chromosomes are criminals, suggesting that all males by nature are half criminals, with a violent, aggressive nature different from that of women. Davis speculates that an early lost civilization, composed only of women, was the original source of culture. This civilization, vegetarian and pacific, worshipped the female solely and invented all the arts and agriculture. But with a shift in the earth's poles, Antarctica, once tropical, was lost into the ice, and this culture was destroyed. Descendants of its people traveled across the earth, planting matriarchal civilizations.
The mutant males were originally smaller than women, who kept them under control. Davis speaks of males as only “glorified gonads” and the “frightened victims” of women. But women's habit of selecting large males as mates gradually produced men who were larger and stronger than women. At a certain point, men revolted against female domination and took revenge, harboring a vast hatred of women because of their lingering memory of women's original primacy and superiority. Davis sees this patriarchal revolution as originating from pastoral nomads, exemplified by the Hebrews. She refers to these Semites as cultureless barbarians who had “never achieved a civilization of their own.”2 They overthrew the goddess civilizations, enthroning in place of the goddess a male deity of strife, vengeance, and male domination.
Although the Semites were the prime source of patriarchy, it is the Christian church that spread this malignancy, Davis declares. She describes Christianity as imbued with a “psychopathic determination to degrade the female and annihilate her soul.” It spread “like a bloody stain,” bringing rapine wherever it touched. But goddess-worshipping Celtic cultures of Europe continued to resist and covertly enthroned a substitute goddess, in the figure of Mary. Davis credits the Puritans of the seventeenth century with the final triumph of patriarchal domination, eliminating any female divinity.3 The nineteenth century virtually prohibited the economic independence of women. But women's resistance is again arising, Davis predicts, and will soon bring a matriarchal counterrevolution to save humanity from destruction.
She describes this matriarchal counterrevolution of the coming “Aquarian Age” in apocalyptic tones:
The ages of masculism are now drawing to a close. Their dying days are lit up by a final flare of universal violence and despair such as the world has seldom before seen. Men of goodwill turn in every direction seeking cures for their perishing society, but to no avail. Any and all social reforms superimposed on our sick civilization can be no more effective than a bandage on a gaping and putrefying wound. Only the complete and total demolition of the social body will cure the fatal illness. Only the overthrow of the three-thousand-year-old beast of masculist materialism will save the race.
In the new science of the twenty-first century, not physical force but spiritual force will lead the way. Mental and spiritual gifts will be more in demand than gifts of a physical nature. Extrasensory perception will take precedence over sensory perception. And in this sphere women will again predominate. She who was revered and worshiped by early man because of her power to see the unseen will once again be the pivot—not as sex but as divine woman—about whom the next civilization will, as of old, revolve.4
Merlin Stone is less apocalyptic in her vision of the future and describes a somewhat less dramatic shift from goddess worship and female power to patriarchy and worship of a male god. She speculates that originally the male role in procreation was unknown, with the woman seen as the sole parent. Matrilineal societies, which venerated the female as the Divine Ancestress, were then the rule. She does not construe this earlier society as one of female domination, although she is vague about this. Rather, men played their role alongside women, although it was a role structured by their lineage from their mothers, not their fathers.
According to Stone, the Indo-Europeans, who invaded from the north sometime around the middle of the third millennium (with some earlier waves going back to 4000 BCE), were responsible for the overthrow of these matrilineal, goddess-worshipping societies. The Indo-Europeans already had an aggressive, militaristic society, worshipping a supreme male war god and driving horse-drawn war chariots. Stone argues that the Jews were the primary carriers of this patriarchal overthrow of goddess worship. But since this contradicts her thesis that the Indo-Europeans are to blame, she speculates that Abraham was influenced by a “conclave of Indo-Europeans” who had migrated to his native city of Ur. She also believes that the Levites were Indo-Europeans, imposing patriarchy and male monotheism on the goddess-worshipping Hebrew tribes of Canaanite culture.5
Like Davis, Stone sees the Christian church as the vehicle for spreading patriarchy and male monotheism to the West, although she also mentions the “Mohammedans” as carrying this revolution forward in the East. These two religions “finish the job of killing the Goddess.” But with the advent of the Enlightenment and feminism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, women began to revolt against male domination. Stone ends with the modest hope that men and women will find a new way of living together in mutual respect, seeing “the world and its riches as a place that belongs to every living being on it.” Only then can we “begin to say we have become a truly civilized species.”6 Stone in this book does not call for a new goddess-worshipping religion or imagine an apocalyptic return to female predominance, although she would later become very interested in the rise of new religious movements centered on the Goddess.
THE LEADERSHIP OF Z. BUDAPEST AND STARHAWK
The 1970s also saw the growth of feminist “witchcraft,” in which Z. (Zsuzsanna) Budapest played a key role. Modern witchcraft as a goddess-worshipping religion was developed in England in the 1940s by Gerald Gardener, who blended the speculative theories of British anthropologist Margaret Murray with ceremonial magic. (Murray had argued that medieval witchcraft was the survival of ancient goddess-worshipping paganism, which Christianity sought to repress.)7 Gardener believed that worship of the Goddess and the Horned God (a male consort, with horns and goat legs, like the Greek God Pan) survived in secret covens that had handed down their teachings and practices into the twentieth century. He claimed to have been initiated into the “craft” in 1939 by one of the last surviving covens in England. Gardener's version of witchcraft, however, was male-dominated; the feminine deity was an enhancement of a male-centered complementarity. It fell to Z. Budapest to synthesize the ceremonial practices of witchcraft, or Wicca, with the feminist liberation movement of the 1970s.8
Budapest explained that she derived her knowledge of witchcraft from her mother, who in turn had been taught by a woman from a hereditary line of witches. Budapest's mother, Masika Szilagyi, was born in rural Hungary of a suffragist mother, Llona. Budapest claimed that Masika had no father, having been conceived “immaculately” in her mother's womb, without male fertilization. As a tiny infant, Masika was nurtured by Victoria, an old servant who worked in the house and was a witch. Victoria taught Masika the arts of witchcraft, “how to bless and how to curse; how diseases are cured with natural herbs; how to understand the language of animals; how to read tarot cards and omens; how to speak with spirits.”9 Budapest situated these practices in the context of the emerging women's movement, dubbing her group the “Susan B. Anthony Coven Number One.” She opened a shop of witch-craft books and material in Venice, California, and began to train groups of women in the “craft.”10
Budapest assumes the “sacred history” of an original matriarchal society and a later “fall into patriarchy.” She holds that goddess worship was once the universal religion, expressing the feminine life principle of the universe. She describes the matriarchal era as a golden age that prioritized love as the ruling power of society and cultivated the arts of health and beauty. Jewelry, painting, bathing and care of the body, superior sewage systems, refined feelings, and sexual pleasure characterized matriarchal civilizations, she argues. Men in such societies were content to remain identified with their mothers, growing from sons into lovers, but not seeking domination.11
The ancient matriarchies exiled aggressive males who rejected this mother-centered relationship with women. These exiled males, Budapest theorizes, were the root of the patriarchal revolt against original matriarchy. They formed gangs that lurked on the edge of matriarchal civilizations, gathering strength to attack them, to seize, rape, and enslave the women. Such male hordes swarmed into Greece and the Near East from the north. Some were partly integrated into matriarchal civilizations, but gradually the males rose to dominance and overthrew female rule. With the overthrow of mother rule came a religious war that subordinated and then eventually eliminated the worship of the goddess, substituting an aggressive god of patriarchal male dominance. The ancient male god as son and lover of the mother was transformed into a warrior father god of male rule over women.12
Budapest believes that the essence of Judaism can be characterized by this backlash of patriarchal war against goddess spirituality. Christianity, she observes, has certain muted echoes of goddess religion, especially in the worship of Mary. But its dominant ethos expresses the Jewish war against the goddess, and it has become the primary vehicle for spreading this war as a global faith. The Asian religions also preserve some feminine elements but are basically patriarchal.13 Feminist Wicca represents a rediscovery and redevelopment of the original matricentric religion of life. It is emerging as the spiritual expression of the revolt against patriarchy in modern times. Patriarchal religions and societies represent the principles of death and are inherently destructive. They are digging their own graves and threatening to destroy the ecological balance of the earth. Thus, feminist Wicca embodies a struggle of life against death, for the very survival of humanity and the earth.
In Budapest's thealogy, the Goddess symbolizes the immanent life process of the universe. This life principle is one of plurality in dynamic interconnection, symbolized as trinity, or threeness.14 Maleness has its place within this female-centered plurality, as the expression of the dying and rising of life within the sustaining female life principle. Patriarchal maleness, however, splits off this male function of dying and rising from its maternal matrix, distorting it into death in a purely destructive sense. Patriarchal gods thus are typically war gods, gods of death and destruction. In patriarchal religion and culture, dynamic plurality in interconnection is distorted into mutually exclusive dualities of “good” and “evil.” The body, the woman, and the earth are both subordinated and identified with the negative pole in male-dominant dualisms.
The ultimate goal of feminist Wicca is not only to restore the worship of the feminine life principle but also to integrate the male principle of dying and rising back into it. Thus, men who accept their position as mother-identified, nondominant males have their place in Wicca. But Budapest herself practices what she calls “Dianic” witchcraft exclusively for women.15 She sees this female-separatist form of witchcraft as necessary in order to form the basis for resistance to patriarchal destructive power and to wean women away from their interiorization of subordination to patriarchy.
Dianic witch covens do not admit male members or teach men the secrets of the craft, since there is too much danger that men will use the power of spells, blessings, and curses to injure women. Men who show the proper feminist spirit are allowed to learn herbology, the healing arts, and the general philosophy of Wicca, but not its core rituals.16 The Dianic covens consider this strategy of exclusion as part of a necessary transition to a new society. Once women's full equality is won, which implies the conversion of men to the female-identified life principle and acceptance of their own place within it, then men can enter more fully into the mysteries of Wicca.
Budapest's two key books, self-published in 1979 and 1980, The Holy Book of Women's Mysteries, Part I, and The Holy Book of Women's Mysteries, Part II, partly belie this secrecy by making these mysteries available to the general public. Presumably, such description attracts interested practitioners but does not give them the actual tools to practice the craft without initiation. These books express the general worldview and thealogy of Wicca, although they are largely liturgical hand-books on how to practice the craft. The first book expounds the calendar of the eight “sabbaths” of the Sacred Wheel of the year: the Winter Solstice (December 21), Candlemas (February 3), the Spring Equinox (March 21), May Eve (April 30), the Midsummer Solstice (June 21), Lammas (August 1), Samhain (September 21), and Hallowmas (October 31), detailing rites for the observance of each sabbath.
In the second book, Budapest describes the necessary tools: the setup of the altar, the knife, the wand, the cord, the chalice, the pentagon, the cauldron, candles, oils, and incenses. She explains the meaning of various oils, perfumes, and colors as well as the functions of healing herbs. The volume contains instructions for gathering a coven, casting a sacred circle, and raising a “cone of power” in the group. (A “cone of power” is a practice of chanting that creates focused group energy.) Details concerning the interpretation of dreams, changing the weather, and divination are also included. Various kinds of spells are delineated, such as spells for sustaining health, winning the love of another, influencing the mind of another, achieving success in school or work, getting a job, changing one's luck, and attracting money. Negative spells also have their place: spells to stop harassment, to hex a rapist, to protect against danger, to punish someone who has brought harm, even to free political prisoners. But spells may not be used frivolously. One must be sure that the persons hexed are truly guilty. The basic ethic of the craft is summed up in the phrase “Harm none and do what thou wilt.”17
A witch may practice the craft both in a tightly bonded coven, led by a high priestess, and alone, in her own home before a personal altar. In community, the rites of the year and ritual circles are performed; alone, a witch may engage in rituals of daily life, such as self-blessing or blessing of the day and night, as well as casting spells for bringing good fortune and hexing evildoers. In addition, mass celebrations, or “groves,” bring together many women at major festivals or gatherings. Celebrations are typically carried out “sky clad”—naked, save for flowers and jewelry—and thus demand care in selecting protected venues.
Budapest's view of the role of the high priestess is somewhat hierarchical. This priestess is given the dominant role in teaching others, orchestrating rituals, and managing the flow of energy in the group. Budapest cautions against extreme egalitarianism that refuses to recognize and venerate the high priestess, warning that it can lead to resentment, anger, and ultimately chaos. She also points out the necessity of having an assistant who is attuned to the energy of the high priestess and helps orient the group toward her leadership.18
Z. Budapest's most important disciple as thealogian-theorist and organizer-teacher of feminist Wicca is undoubtedly Starhawk (Miriam Simos), although Starhawk also credits other teachers and claims to have been initiated and trained in the “faery” tradition going back to the Old Religion of the British Isles.19 Starhawk, as a trained psychotherapist, brings a sophisticated sense of the processes of personal healing and group dynamics to her practice and theory of Wicca.
Starhawk grew up in the Jewish tradition and began college at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1968. Her interest in witchcraft was sparked by dis cussion of the subject in an anthropology class. She and a friend then offered their own class in witchcraft as a way of learning about it themselves. Only in the early 1970s did she meet real Wiccans, particularly Z. Budapest, and begin to attend women's rituals, under Budapest's leadership. After an unsuccessful move to New York City, with the hope of becoming a published novelist, she returned to California and moved to San Francisco, where she started to meet other members of the growing pagan community and to teach classes in ritual (from which her covens, such as the Compost Coven, were formed).20
From her teaching and practice in forming communities, Starhawk wrote her first major book on feminist Wicca, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess, published first in 1979. In the 1980s, she became increasingly involved in antiwar and ecological activism. From this political experience, she began to shape a perspective on feminist Wiccan spirituality and ritual that was integrally linked to and expressed through political action. These further developments of her thought are reflected in her 1982 and 1987 books, Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics and Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery.21
Starhawk also taught for more than ten years in Dominican priest Matthew Fox's Institute of Culture and Creation Spirituality, based at the Catholic Holy Names College in Oakland.22 This association brought her into contact with new forms of Christian feminist and ecological spirituality remarkably similar to the worldview that she was developing in feminist Wicca. This experience, among others, broadened Starhawk's worldview ecumenically, leading her to recognize patterns of spirituality in other religions similar to her own perspective. She no longer assumed a simple dichotomy that cast Christianity and other “patriarchal religions” as solely destructive and Wicca as the sole positive religion, a view that Z. Budapest tended to reflect in her 1970s work.23
In the 1989 revised edition of The Spiral Dance, Starhawk notes the ways her worldview changed over the decade since the book's initial publication, although most of its essentials remained the same. One area of change was her view of maleness and femaleness. Her earlier work reflected an essentialist view of distinct female and male “energies” found predominantly either in women or in men. By the late 1980s, she had rejected this Jungian-influenced dichotomy, in favor of seeing both women and men as complex wholes, each with a full range of energies.24 Patriarchal cultures, she asserts, have split men and women into dualities, assigning a certain profile of powers to men and complementary or negative opposites to women, but this distorts the true capacities of both sexes. Likewise, goddess and god are neither role models for women and men nor manifestations of dual energies in the cosmos; rather, they reflect complex interconnections within and between both men and women.
Starhawk does not accept the Dianic form of separatist witchcraft practiced by Z. Budapest, seeking instead to include both women and men in her covens. Increasingly, she has moved away from a dualistic scheme of female and male roles as Goddess and Horned God in these covens in favor of a view that sees these capacities in both genders. Starhawk's political work also sensitized her to class and ethnic diversity and the necessity of recognizing a plurality of cultural perspectives. She sees her brand of Wicca as a revival of traditional forms of shamanism from the British Isles. In her view, many cultures throughout the world, particularly the nonwhite world, have never completely lost their shaman traditions. Witches such as herself need to respect the shamanism of other ethnic groups rather than seeing their own perspective as universal or trying to appropriate the traditions of other groups.25
This embrace of cultural diversity makes Starhawk ecumenical toward the many kinds of shamanistic traditions throughout the world. She also sees remnants of immanent spirituality in traditional patriarchal religions, such as Christianity, that are reemerging and being renewed through the challenges of feminism and ecological crisis. She believes that Wiccans should not demonize other groups as the “enemy”—a pattern of patriarchal religion from which they themselves have suffered—but should instead be prepared to embrace life-giving spirituality wherever it is found.26
This ecumenism and the embrace of diversity do not obviate a basic distinction in Starhawk's thought between a life-giving spirituality of immanence of life in and through all things, promoting complex interconnection and community, in contrast to patterns of estrangement that divide the world between heaven and earth, good and evil, men and women, and set up systems of domination of some over others. But she has come to see the tension between immanent interconnection and community versus estrangement and domination as complexly situated in various religions and cultures. As a person raised in the Jewish tradition, Starhawk avoids the anti-Semitic Jew-blaming found in many earlier goddess traditions, even in the work of Z. Budapest. Rather, she celebrates elements of goddess worship found in Jewish esoteric traditions such as Kabbalah, while recognizing the patterns of patriarchy found in normative Judaism.27
Starhawk also critiques the tendency toward hierarchy and the dominant role of the high priestess found in Budapest's work.28 She seeks to overcome all elements of “power over” in her communities and to develop patterns of relationship that are more genuinely circular and egalitarian, while recognizing that some persons in a group have particular talents and skills. Any community needs recognized leadership, she argues, but this might take the form of recognizing a great diversity of gifts and roles and circulating these roles over time rather than setting up one person as a permanent high priestess.
This work of community building leads Starhawk to differentiate three kinds of power: “power over,” “power within,” and “power with.”29 “Power over,” or domination, is the form of power foundational to patriarchal cultures. It expresses a view of power as the control and use of some by others and has so shaped our consciousness that it has come to be identified with the very nature of consciousness itself. The work of feminist spirituality and ritual is a long process, not only of resisting systems and cultures of domination outside Wiccan groups but also of exorcising the many ways those within this movement continue to interiorize patterns of power that assume either control over others or passivity toward such control. In Starhawk's practice, magic, ritual, trance, and visualization increasingly coincide with processes of inward growth by which persons free themselves from their inner demons of self-hate and are able to enter into a community of equals.30
Wiccan spirituality is about freeing individuals and communities from these patterns of domination, or “power over,” by linking each person in themselves and in community with their own inner power. By coming in contact with their own inner worth, beauty, talents, and life force, women and men can overthrow the internalized patterns of domination and subjugation within and among them. But Wiccan spirituality is more than simply coming in contact with one's own inner power. There is also a need to find new ways of respecting and interacting with each other's power in a way that is not based on new forms of control. This kind of relation to one another's power Starhawk calls “power with.”31
Becoming tuned to one another's power allows a member of the community to offer inspired suggestions for action and the others to intuitively develop a consensus about supporting such actions, recognizing that they feel “right” rather than being threatened by the creativity of others. The community thus avoids both the negative side of egalitarianism, as a flattening of all to a common dullness, and the tendency to stab natural leaders in the back. This concept of “power with” is key to Starhawk's effort to recognize special talents and capacities for leadership without setting up new hierarchies.
Starhawk's political activism in the antiwar and ecological movements, including brief incarcerations, brought her into intimate contact with the violence of the military and the police. This contact deepened her analysis of the subtle and complex combinations of direct violence and the internalization of passivity, self-hatred, and horizontal violence among the oppressed. In her later books, descriptions of the jail experiences of women who had been arrested for participating in protests provide graphic illustrations of the psychosocial processes of control and resistance to control.32 In recent years, she has developed perceptive methods of channeling group energy into nonviolent demonstrations against oppressive world power, such as the World Trade Organization, helping to avoid chaotic outbreaks of violence that justify police retaliation.33
“Magic” as the transformation of consciousness in relation to outward circumstances takes on a more overt political aspect in her thought and work. Protest rituals conducted at a nuclear test site or a weapons factory merge symbolic and political action. It has become evident to Starhawk that feminist spirituality must be more than individual or small-group solutions to personal problems, although that remains an important aspect. There must also be systemic change of the economic, political, and social systems of domination and oppression.34
Starhawk preserves the basic Wiccan view of history, but it becomes more inclusive of diverse histories in her developing thought. She believes that there was once a time of matricentric culture, where deity was seen as the immanent life force of the whole universe, linking all peoples, men and women, with one another in complex interconnection and community. Every people originally had forms of religion that expressed this matricentric society and values. This culture and its forms of social relationships were gradually subverted at different times in the transition from Paleolithic to Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures, but remnants of it survived in the many forms of shamanism found in every culture, better preserved in some than in others.35
Key to the patriarchal revolution was the development of systems of domination by a few and oppression of others, ratified by a worldview of dualistic hierarchies. The inner core of patriarchal culture is estrangement, the estrangement of mind from body, men from women, thought from feeling, humans from the earth. These patterns of domination and estrangement are now bringing humans to a stage of such global violence, militarism, and ecological pollution that life on earth itself is threatened. A new consciousness—found in feminist Wicca, but also in many renewed forms of earth-centered spirituality in religions throughout the world—represents the rising of the human and earth spirit to resist this destructive onslaught and reverse the patterns of domination and estrangement.36
Although Starhawk sees the roots of the patriarchal revolution in ancient societies of five or six thousand years ago, she argues that these patterns of estrangement and destructive domination significantly intensified much more recently, in the transition to modernity in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Drawing on the work of historian of science Carolyn Merchant,37 Starhawk sees this as the decisive period of the shift from an organic to a mechanistic view of the natural world and the human place in it.
Christianity, although patriarchal, preserved covertly many elements of earlier goddess-worshipping cultures and continued to see the divine as an immanent organic power of life in all things. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw not only the culmination of attempts to destroy the last remnants of European shamanism, by labeling witchcraft as “devil worship,” but also a series of other economic and cultural shifts that made the patterns of domination and estrangement much more rigid.
In the epilogue of Dreaming the Dark, expanded in the 1997 edition, Starhawk seeks to epitomize the many aspects of the pervasive estrangement and domination now spreading as a global culture, from Western roots, threatening the destruction of the whole earth.38 In England, the center of the initial shift to modernity, these new patterns were expressed in developments such as the enclosure movement, which uprooted peasants from the land, turning them into a landless proletariat for the new industrial economy or foot soldiers for colonialist expansion. The rise of the market economy; expanding Western colonialist control over Asia, Africa, and Latin America and warring against the earlier cultures of those areas; subjugation of peoples and lands; the professionalization of knowledge and institutionalized education; the removal of women particularly from forms of knowledge passed down in the family and from participation in the work of a family-based economy—all these are aspects of a shift to a more total system of estrangement and domination.
Desacralization of the universe is key to shaping the world into resources for appropriation into an industrial and market economy. This shift to a new stage of the culture of domination and estrangement did not take place without struggle: the persecution of witches; the war on many popular protest groups, such as the Diggers and Ranters in seventeenth-century England;39 crusades against the cultures of indigenous peoples of the non-Western world. In this compact conclusion of her book, Starhawk joins the Wiccan “sacred story” of the persecution and survival of European witchcraft with many other stories of oppressed people both within the Western world and in postcolonial struggles in the non-Western world.
THE THEALOGY OF CAROL CHRIST
Perhaps the leading thealogian seeking to create a comprehensive account of the religious and ethical worldview implied by Goddess thought and practice is Carol Christ. Christ grew up in California in a family of mixed religious traditions: Catholic, Protestant, Christian Scientist. She attended a Presbyterian church as a child and adolescent. As an undergraduate at Stanford University, she was attracted to the study of Hebrew scripture and Jewish thought, especially to the work of Martin Buber. She went on to do graduate work in religion at Yale. While completing a degree in theology, she was drawn to literature as a source for the spiritual quest, both women's literature, such as that of Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, Kate Chopin, Adrienne Rich, and Ntozake Shange, and also the Jewish Holocaust novels of Elie Weisel. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on Weisel's stories, and her first book, Diving Deep and Surfacing, grew from her studies of women's literature.40
Christ's early work in religion and literature was an attempt to connect theology to the experiences of people's lives, her own and those of others. Christ was also inspired by the feminist insights that “the personal is political” and that “theology begins with experience.” In her work, she consistently combines reflection on her personal journey with theological reflection, using a model that she has come to call “embodied embedded thinking.”41
The study of Weisel and Jewish history shocked Christ into a realization of the deep evils that had been perpetrated by Christian anti-Judaism, culminating in the Holocaust. Feminist writings and the feminist movement made her increasingly aware of how Christianity was permeated with patterns of thought that legitimated the subordination of and contempt for women and modeled divine power after the male warrior. For these reasons, she became increasingly alienated from Christianity and found it impossible to go to church.
In 1974, while writing about Elie Wiesel's anger at God for not intervening to stop the Holocaust, she expressed her own anger at God for not preventing the oppression and violation of women. In the silence that followed, she heard a still, small voice saying, “In God is a woman like yourself. She shares your suffering.”42 In 1975, through Naomi Goldenberg, her fellow student at Yale, Christ became aware of the Wiccan movement and the work of Z. Budapest. Back home in California, Christ was introduced to the women's spirituality movement. Later that year, she and Goldenberg took an alternative university class on witchcraft from Starhawk.43
As Christ was drawn into the Goddess movement, she began to participate in rituals with Starhawk and also to create her own rituals and group. She experienced the Wiccan movement as “coming home” to a worldview that had always been her deepest intuition, but one that she had been discouraged from validating by her androcentric upbringing and education. She began to articulate her rejection of Christianity in favor of the Goddess in academic meetings, such as the Women and Religion section of the American Academy of Religion, and in major articles such as the much reprinted “Why Women Need the Goddess.”44
Most of the leading feminist theologians, however, declined to follow her in this new option or to validate her new path. She felt betrayed by this response from feminists in religious studies but took heart at the growing number of ordinary women who were being drawn into the Goddess movement.45 She was also increasingly aware that her new “journey to the Goddess” was imperiling her chances of finding employment in religious studies, where jobs were open mainly to Christians.
Leaving religious studies for women's studies allowed Christ to refocus her career goals. She married, found a promising job at San José State University in California, and seemed to settle into the trajectory of the typical American academic dream, with a large house and mortgage. In a few years, however, she began to experience deep burnout from the academic rat race, driving the polluted freeways between home and work, teaching students who were often uninterested and were taking her courses merely to fulfill requirements. Her marriage was falling apart. She had begun to journey to Greece during the summers to study and teach Goddess traditions in their ancient settings, and she finally decided to give up her academic career and move permanently to Greece, settling at first on the island of Lesbos, where the poet Sappho had lived in ancient times.46
Although Christ says that she “never for one moment looked back” from this decision,47 she went through a period of deep depression in the early 1990s. An intense love relationship had ended. She felt unable to write, experiencing writer's block. Feelings of isolation and failure and the fear that she was unlovable resurfaced and brought suicidal thoughts. She even felt abandoned by the Goddess and was angry at her. The refrain “no one loves you, no one will ever love you, you might as well die” echoed in her mind.48 She spent most of her time renovating a newly purchased apartment in Athens, hoping to welcome her parents to Greece for their first visit. Instead, she received word that her mother had been diagnosed with cancer.
Christ's trip back to her parents' home to be with her mother in her dying days became a revelatory turning point. As her mother died, Christ felt bathed in an ambiance of love and experienced the deepest nature of the universe as embodied love.49 This experience decisively resolved her uncertainty as to whether the Goddess was simply a metaphor for oneself or the sum total of an indifferent “nature” (the views of two of her closest friends, Naomi Goldenberg and Judith Plaskow) or whether the Goddess represented an embodied personal power within and beyond us who cares for us. Christ now felt that she had the experiential basis for clearly choosing the latter view.50
At the same time, she examined her relation to her father and found that it explained the roots of her tendencies to feel abandoned, betrayed, and despairing. She realized that her father, the son of an alcoholic father, had compensated by establishing a rigid pattern of control, acted out in demands for perfection and judgmental criticism toward her. Her tendency to believe that she could never be good enough and was always going to prove unlovable had its roots in how her father had related to her.51
These experiences and insights enabled Christ to return to her adopted home in Greece, pull out of her feeling of despair, and regain her creative energy. The process of bringing a group of women on a “goddess” pilgrimage to the island of Crete, where she led them in retracing and performing rituals at the sites of ancient goddess worship in Minoan culture, reconnected her with her experience of the Goddess. This reassured her that the Goddess had not abandoned her but indeed continued to love her and would always love her. “My muse returned. Words were flowing out of me, the more poetic words I came to Greece to write. I would return again and again to the mountains and caves of Crete, by myself, with friends and with other pilgrims. My life would be filled with amazing grace, love abounding and overflowing.”52
Building on her new energy and insights, Christ was able to complete a manuscript she had started some years before, which explained the thealogy of the Goddess in a more systematic way. It was published in 1997 as Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality. Further work in this direction appears in her book She Who Changes: Re-Imagining the Divine in the World, in which she integrates process theology into Goddess thealogy. Her more recent work brings together both her new stage of psychological development and her experiences of living in Greece and experiencing the Greek goddesses in their ancient home, allowing her to modify and nuance the understanding of the Goddess that she had drawn from the tutelage of the Wiccan movement in the United States.
One aspect of Wiccan religion that Christ has come to reject through her experiences in Greece is the concept and practice of magic. She identifies the idea of magic as part of a very American and patriarchal quest for control, based on the belief that individuals can bend reality to their will. She also sees this quest for control duplicated in New Age spirituality in the United States, which can imply that individuals can get whatever they want and that if they have bad experiences, it is because they have “chosen” them.53 Christ, by contrast, insists that we are only partially in control of our lives and that many things happen to us, good and bad, which we do not choose. She herself seeks to let go of control and “go with the flow,” becoming able to interact with events outside her control rather than becoming upset when everything does not go as planned.54
Her life in Greece has given her a critical perspective on the Goddess movement in the United States. She sees American Goddess spirituality as heavily based on ideas that seek to “create” the Goddess through focusing their will and energy to “raise a cone of power.” This practice reflects a lack of groundedness in a land whose history bespeaks a long tradition of the presence of the Goddess. Euro-Americans are uprooted people who left lands in Europe that had such histories. They despoiled the indigenous peoples of the Americas without ever integrating with their culture. Instead, their myths have centered on conquest of the land and a historical destiny and selection by a God unconnected with the land in which they live.55
By contrast, the Greeks live in a land dotted with sites of prepatriarchal goddess worship. Even though their culture and religion are patriarchal, under the surface the people of Greece still live in continuity with these earlier roots. Many little churches signal a cave or other holy site of earlier goddess worship, often linked in Crete with sacred trees. Their icons celebrate Mary as the “all holy” (Panagia), also linked with sacred trees. Christ herself has warmed to these aspects of Greek folk Christianity and has shared in the veneration of icons and sacred myrtle trees with communities of Orthodox nuns in areas such as Crete, which she believes are continuing elements of the ancient religion. Her goddess tours include visits to such communities of nuns, as well as trips to caves and ruins of ancient palaces, as part of a living history still inscribed in the Cretan land and its people.56 Christ describes the Greek people, men as well as women, as being much more in touch with their bodies and feelings than Americans are, and she writes that they have taught her to “let go” and be in touch with the natural flow of life.57
Although Christ still affirms the “sacred history” of original matrifocal societies in which humans were in harmony with one another and the land, societies that were then overthrown by patriarchy, her reading and her response to critics have nuanced her account. She firmly rejects the description of this “prepatriarchal” time as “matriarchy.”58 Rather, she sees it more as an egalitarian complementarity, in which women as well as men had their spheres of power and expertise. Women's areas of life were equally venerated and not subordinated to those of men. In preindustrial subsistence societies, such as parts of rural Greece, much of that pattern of complementary power and skill continues, although the female sphere has been devalued in official rhetoric and women disempowered.59
The “fall into patriarchy” in her account has also become more complex—it is less a dramatic overthrow of a female-dominated utopian society by horse-riding outsiders and more a complex process in which both internal evolution and outside invasion played roles. As early gardening societies in which women played a predominant role changed to plow agriculture, men took control of the land and its produce. The invention of bronze and iron created more powerful weapons. Warfare spread and with it the enslavement of the conquered. Those who had developed these militaristic and hierarchical patterns conquered those who remained more pacific and imposed their patterns on these peaceable peoples. Christ considers war-fare as the key development that created patriarchal patterns of society and its supporting ideologies.60
Myths of the defeat and slaying of a goddess supported the transition to the new society. In other cases, goddesses were co-opted to become auxiliary supporters of the patriarchal order. Goddess religion is partly an attempt to resurrect, through imaginative reading of early artifacts, the patterns of egalitarian harmony among men, women, and nature that existed in prepatriarchal times. It is also partly a modern development that seeks to deconstruct the patterns of patriarchal religion and envision how its alienated hierarchical dualisms could be reintegrated into a life-giving communion. The victory of a new society is not guaranteed by some all-powerful deity. Rather, one can only try in many small ways to create more life-giving patterns of relationship and to hope that it is not too late to prevent some massive destruction of life on earth by global warfare and ecological devastation.61
In her efforts to give a more comprehensive account of thealogy, parallel to the traditional topics of systematic theology, Christ seeks to avoid any simple reversal of patriarchal dualisms. It is not enough simply to value the female, the body, the earth, the emotions, and the unconscious, although this may be a necessary starting point. Rather, one must overcome the dualistic hierarchy of male and female, mind and body, heaven and earth, feeling and thinking, dark and light, the one and the many, transcendence and immanence, transforming them into a new interactive unity.62
Her definition of the Goddess as “intelligent embodied love as the ground of all being” seeks to glimpse this kind of vision. Polytheism and monotheism are integrated in a vision of a Goddess with many names, experienced in many ways in different cultures and lands, but manifesting an underlying unity of the earth and all its beings. Christ also allows that we need to widen this definition to include the universe, though she wishes to focus primarily on our planet, the earth.63 The Goddess (who can also be called by male metaphors, although Christ finds the female metaphor preferable in order to jolt our minds out of their traditional patterns) is the immanent life energy in all things. But the Goddess is more than simply the sum of what is. In some ways, she is also transcendent—not in the sense of being split off into a disconnected heaven, but in the sense of an interactive, loving relation with existing beings. She is both mind and body, spirit and matter, not as a dualism of one against the other, but as one embodied energy and spirit. Here, Christ draws on process theology for a description of the Goddess as the power of loving persuasion that calls beings into transformative response, but who also suffers when beings refuse to respond and instead relate to one another with hostility.64
For Christ, life is inherently finite. There is no heaven of immortal life beyond this earth. Although she believes that love outweighs tragedy, we all encounter irreparable losses that cannot be remedied or justified; such losses are part of natural life, and we have to accept them.65 There is also massive unjust violence and loss of life, which we should resist and try to prevent by undoing the systems that cause such injustice. We live on in the many new beings that arise from the disintegrating bodies of dead animals and plants and in the spirits and memories of those who come after us—in other words, we live on in the ongoing body of Gaia (Earth)-Goddess. We need to accept our own finitude and integrate ourselves into the cycles of life rather than trying to resist death.66 Life goes on precisely through the rhythms of birth, growth, disintegration, death, and rebirth. The Goddess lives in this cyclical rhythm of life.
In response to the essentialist/anti-essentialist debate, Christ insists that biology matters. Men and women have different bodies, which give them different experiences and capacities. Unlike men, women menstruate; they give birth and suckle babies. Goddess religion celebrates and valorizes the female body and its functions and thus restores beauty and dignity to that which has been devalued in patriarchal religions. But beyond these particular differences, Christ sees men and women as much the same. They have similar intellectual and moral capacities. Men are as capable of loving tenderness as women, and women are as capable of hatred and evil as men. Patriarchy has constructed men and women into false opposites. Women need to learn to love their particularities as females, and men need to both value these female particularities in women and get back in touch with their own bodies and feelings.67 To do this, it is particularly important for men to participate in childbirth and child raising. All humans need to reintegrate ourselves into the rhythms of Gaia, into the earth life process, in order to reconstruct a harmonious way of life with one another on earth.
For Christ, the root of evil in human life is the denial of love.68 To deny love is not only to distort one's own life but also to set off a chain reaction that distorts loving relationships for generations to come. She sees this pattern in the relation of her father to the alcoholism of his father, and, in turn, in her father's controlling inability to love her wholeheartedly. Denial of love causes endless suffering, making us blame ourselves for our unhappiness rather than recognizing the source of our suffering.
Christ argues that patriarchal cultures enshrine relationships of control, domination, and violence. The distortion of relations caused by the denial of love is transmitted not only between parents and children but also in schools, religion, the military, the arts—in all the institutions of society. She thus sees in her own family experience a key element that helps to explain human failure to love and to relate to one another in life-giving ways.
Christ believes that the symbol of the Goddess has the metaphorical power to unsettle deeply rooted cultural symbolisms that enshrine and perpetuate these patterns of violence, hierarchy, and domination. This belief gives urgency to her decision to focus the energies of her life on the rebirth of the Goddess in contemporary Western culture. For her, the Goddess is a symbol who radiates a transforming power that calls us to change all the institutions of dominating societies and cultures.69
THE DEVELOPING NEOPAGAN MOVEMENT
In the mid-1970s, the neopagan movement began to organize on national and regional levels and to seek legal status as a recognized American religion. On March 1, 1975, some forty witches from fifteen California covens came together in Oakland to explore their differences and commonalities. On that day, they founded an organization called the Covenant of the Goddess and designated a committee to draft a charter and by-laws. On the summer solstice of that year, 150 witches and pagans gathered at a retreat in California's Mendocino County for midsummer festival, where they unanimously ratified the charter and by-laws of the Covenant of the Goddess.
The organization seeks to carefully balance centralizing functions and local control. A national board handles issues of legal standing and questions about the craft as a whole. The governing body is the grand council, made up of representatives of all member covens. Board members cannot vote at council meetings. Covens geographically close enough to meet on a regular basis have local councils, which sponsor festivals, set up training programs, and establish the credentials of member covens. The Covenant of the Goddess does not ordain, but it does issue ministerial credentials to members designated by particular covens. The Covenant does not make pronouncements about the legitimacy of any group that does not join the organization, but it has “determined that we who are members of the Covenant are of the same religion and respect some essentially identical Craft Laws.”70
Representatives of the Covenant of the Goddess participated in meetings of the Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago (August 28 to September 5, 1993), Capetown, South Africa (December 1–8, 1999), and Barcelona, Spain (July 7–13, 2004). The participation of the Covenant and other neopagan groups aroused criticism from conservative and orthodox Christians, but their presence was affirmed by the organizers of the parliament. The parliament, first held in Chicago in 1893, has typically been a forum for smaller religious groups seeking recognition in American culture vis-à-vis dominant forms of Christianity.71 In more recent meetings of the parliament, groups such as Sikhs, Jains, and Baha'i have also been well represented.
The Covenant of the Goddess held workshops and prepared papers and pamphlets for distribution at the 1993, 1999, and 2004 parliaments, explaining who they were to the other participants and the general public. One of these papers, written by Selene Fox, leader of the Circle Sanctuary of Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin, is titled “I Am Pagan.”72 It is an appealing, two-page description of her faith as a pagan:
I am Pagan. I am part of the whole of Nature. The Rocks, the Animals, the Plants, the Elements, and Stars are my relatives. Other humans are my sisters and brothers, whatever their races, colors, genders, sexual orientation, nationalities, religions, lifestyles. Planet Earth in my home. I am part of this large family of Nature, not the master of it. I have my own special part to play and I seek to discover and play that part to the best of my ability. I seek to live in harmony with others in the family of Nature, treating others with respect.
The paper talks about the eight seasonal festivals held by the Covenant and the celebrations that mark the seasons of life: “I celebrate the changing seasons, the turning of the Wheel of the Year.... I also honor the seasons of life within my life's journey, beginnings, growth, fruition, harvest, endings, rest and beginnings again. Life is a Circle with many cycles. With every Ending comes a new Beginning, within Death there is the promise of Rebirth.” Fox then describes magic as “intentional consciousness change.” Citing the Wiccan Rede (credo), “And it harm none, do what you will,” she discusses magic as healing rituals, “to help and to heal others, myself and the Planet.”
Theologically, Fox defines herself as a pantheist, “acknowledging the Divine is everywhere and in everything.” All that has a physical body also has a spiritual body. The physical and the spiritual are intertwined. Creator and Creation are interconnected. Although she honors many manifestations of the divine in gods and goddesses, Fox also finds a oneness underlying all things: “I honor Divine Oneness, the Unity of All.” She describes paganism as a tolerant, nonproselytizing religion, although it is open to anyone truly interested. There is no one “right way for everyone. There are many paths up the mountain of spiritual understanding.”
According to Fox, paganism is a religion concerned about ecology, militarism, and social justice:
I hear the cries of Mother Earth who is upset with the harm being done to the environment by humankind. I am dismayed by the pollution of the air, the soil and the waters, and by the domination games being played by nations with the fire of nuclear missiles and other weapons of mass destruction. I am also concerned about the spiritual pollution on the Planet, selfishness, hatred, greed for money and addiction, violence and despair. Yet as I perceive these problems, I also perceive cleansing and healing happening on Planet Earth at this time. I know that I can help in at least a small way to bring Planet Earth into greater balance by seeking balance in my own life, by being a catalyst for restoring balance in the lives of others, and by working for a better environment.
Fox concludes with these words: “I am pagan. Nature spirituality is my religion and my life's foundation. Nature is my spiritual teacher and holy book. I am part of Nature and Nature is part of me. My understanding of Nature's inner mysteries grows as I journey on this spiritual path.”
In their ecumenical outreach, the Covenant of the Goddess and other groups, such as EarthSpirit in Massachusetts, define themselves as seeking solidarity with any spiritual path that embraces similar concerns about the sacredness of all life.73 One does not find in this literature diatribes against Christians or Jews as inherently patriarchal or opposed to nature. There is a special affinity with the indigenous shamanist religions found throughout the world, such as those of American Indians or Africans. Wicca itself is defined as a revival of the “ancient, pre-Christian indigenous religion of Europe.”74
As Wiccan and neopagan groups became more public, they also faced virulent attacks led by fundamentalist Christians. The most serious threat to Wiccan religious freedom came from the 1985 attempt by Senator Jesse Helms and Representative Robert Walker to deny tax-exempt status to any group defined as “promoting satanism or witchcraft.” Their amendment to HR 3036 defined “Satanism” as “the worship of Satan or the powers of evil” and “witchcraft” as “the use of powers derived from evil spirits, the use of sorcery or the use of supernatural powers with malicious intent.”75 Although Wiccans reject Satanism, or the worship of evil powers, completely, viewing Satan as a Christian idea they do not accept, they realized that this amendment would very likely be applied to them. Concerted nation-wide organizing eventually defeated the amendment. Additionally, Wiccans have sought to rescind local laws against fortunetellers, which are often used to discriminate against Wiccan tarot readers, astrologers, and “metaphysical advisors.” They also organize protests when Wiccans are discriminated against in any field of employment, such as teaching, simply because of their religion.
The Lady Liberty League was organized in 1985 under the Circle Sanctuary to defend Wiccans against all forms of legal and privately organized discrimination and to promote their acceptance in various public sites, such as schools, prisons, and even the U.S. Army.76 Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union have aided Wiccans in these struggles. Through its attorneys and communications network, the Lady Liberty League has taken on an array of cases, including those involving the rights of students to wear symbols of their faith in schools, the rights of pagan students in high schools and colleges to form recognized student groups for worship or study, the acceptance of Wiccan ministers as chaplains in the military and in prisons, state recognition of Wiccans as clergy for weddings, and the right to gather in privately owned camp grounds for festivals or worship without harassment.
Considerable progress has been made in the last fifteen years in the acceptance of Wiccans as chaplains. The U.S. Army's Military Chaplain's Handbook contains an accurate portrayal of Wiccans in chapter 7, under “other groups,” a category that includes the Native American Church, the Baha'i Faith, and the Church of Scientology.77 Wiccans have also served as chaplains in some prisons; priestess Rev. Jamyi Witch at the Waupun Correctional Institute in Wisconsin is one example.
The Wiccan religious liberty network also keeps its eye on the media, protesting the equation of Wiccans with Satanism or Nazism. In the spring 2001 Intelligence Report published by the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, an article entitled “The New Romantics” discussed Asatru, or Odinist, pagans as dangerous racists, in a way that could easily be construed as including all Wiccans or pagans. Although some Odinists, who seek to revive what they regard as “Norse paganism,” do espouse elements of white supremacy, this type of racist paganism is repudiated by other pagans.78 The Liberty League won a clarification of this distinction from Mark Potok, editor of the SPLC Intelligence Report.
The Covenant of the Goddess supports tolerance of differences between member covens on how to interpret paganism. Some pagans, such as Starhawk, are pacifist and reject participation in any violence, while others see the warrior life as part of historical paganism. The Covenant does not take a stand on pacifism, accepting both conscientious objectors and those who embrace a warrior ethic.79 But tolerance clearly has its limits. For example, the Covenant has drawn boundaries and rejected racist forms of paganism. In making such a distinction, the Covenant follows lines similar to those of liberal religion in the United States generally.
Despite constant efforts to define themselves as peaceful, life-affirming nature worshippers, who do not even believe in—much less worship—the devil, Wiccans and pagans continue to be attacked as “devil worshippers,” by Christian conservatives. Seizing on the terms “witch” and “witchcraft” for this movement, Christian conservatives attempt to define Wiccans and pagans in language drawn from the witch persecutions of the late medieval and Reformation periods. The access to media commanded by Christian fundamentalism greatly outweighs that of pagans and Wiccans, putting them at great disadvantage in their ability to define themselves in American public culture. Nevertheless, their successes in the army, prisons, and schools suggest that neopagans are on their way to being accepted within the rubric of American constitutional religious liberty.
Another important indication of the normalization of Goddess-centered paganism in American religion was the acceptance, in 1987, of the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans (CUUPs) within the Unitarian Universalist denomination. CUUPs is an affiliate network of pagan-identified Unitarian Universalists who develop chapters for ritual and education within local churches and seek to educate the denomination on the national level about paganism. CUUPS also networks with the larger pagan community in the United States. Unitarian Universalists have accepted “earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature” as the sixth source of Unitarian Universalist tradition, alongside others, such as Judaism and Christianity. This source is understood to include contemporary neopaganism as well as Native American and other indigenous religious traditions. Unitarian Universalist pagans also promote interreligious dialogue between pagans and other religious traditions.80
In my view, it is the duty of liberal and progressive Christians to defend the religious liberties of Wiccans and pagans. This is the case for several reasons. First, Wicca is a positive movement that affirms the life values that Christians should also affirm, even if Christians might not agree with Wiccans on some aspects of their theologies or on some historical details, such as the existence of an original matricentric civilization overthrown by patriarchal warriors or the view that the witch-hunts in Christian history targeted a goddess-worshipping religion.81 (Wiccans are becoming much more nuanced in these historical claims, in any case.)
Second, although the witchhunts in the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries may not have actually targeted goddess worshippers, these attacks were an egregious crime against innocent and largely poor and powerless women, men, and children. Christians have never repented of this crime or publicly repudiated it. It is high time to do so and to make clear that the people targeted in these persecutions were not Satanists, but harmless people. In the process, Christians must also reject use of the language of that era's witch persecutions against a contemporary religious movement that seeks to be life-affirming and to promote peaceful, harmonious relations among all peoples and the earth.
Beyond the question of religious liberty for Wiccans, many common values are shared by Wiccans and ecofeminists merging from Christianity and other main-stream historic religions. Is ecumenical dialogue possible between Christian ecofeminists and Wiccans? Is a new frontier of religious vision, largely shared across these religious communities today, emerging in response to the challenges of ecological crisis and militarism in modern societies and the questioning of traditional patriarchal religions? It is to these questions that I turn in the concluding reflections of this book.