INTRODUCTION

My interest in goddesses of the ancient Near East and Greece goes back to 1954, when I began studying the religious worldviews of these societies.1 In a course on Greek tragedy with Robert Palmer (translator of Walter Otto's work on Dionysus), I read writers such as Jane Harrison and was introduced to the theory that a matriarchal society had preceded the rise of patriarchy in ancient Greek and Mediterranean societies.² As I continued to pursue these interests at Scripps College and the Claremont Graduate School, I focused on the classics and early Christianity. In particular, I studied the Greek and Near Eastern background of Hebrew and early Christian thought, Platonism and Neoplatonism,³ and various religious movements, such as the mystery religions of the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman worlds, in which Cybele, Isis, and other goddesses were central. It became evident to me that the Hebrew religion and Christianity, far from simply repressing and leaving behind these “pagan” religious worldviews, had appropriated and reinterpreted them. The Christianity that emerged in the first to fourth century was, in many ways, a reinterpreted synthesis of the religious worldviews of the ancient Mediterranean world.

In studying the Hebrew Bible and early Christianity side by side with ancient paganism, I found myself attracted to the prophetic traditions that sided with the poor and oppressed and denounced the rich and powerful. As I became involved in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, this spiritual lineage undergirded my commitment to justice. Although the ancient pagan religions that I had been studying seemed to lack this prophetic social justice tradition, I nevertheless continued to regard them as offering valid spiritual worldviews, as did my mentors, such as Robert Palmer, who frankly preferred ancient paganism to Christianity.

I began to think in terms of complementary spiritualities—pagan, prophetic, and contemplative.4 Pagan spirituality, typical of most indigenous religions, focuses on the renewal of the earth and human life within the changing seasons. Prophetic spirituality focuses on the struggle to restore just and harmonious relations among humans and with the earth in a covenantal relation with a creating and redeeming God, over against a world dominated by great systems of oppression and injustice. Contemplative spirituality withdraws from the “illusions” of transitory existence and seeks to unite the soul with the permanent source of reality.

I saw ancient Judaism building on pagan spirituality and reinterpreting it in the light of a historical and prophetic viewpoint. In the Hellenistic era, Jewish thinkers such as Philo appropriated Neoplatonic thought and used it to develop a mystical hermeneutics and a contemplative practice of Judaism. Christianity also built on and reinterpreted these many layers of spirituality. In its focus on ascetic, monastic life, it emphasized the contemplative path for more than a millennium, but it never lost the seasonal spirituality on which the church year was based. Periodically, prophetic spirituality was recovered in order to struggle against systems of injustice, including those within the church itself. Today, modern ecological movements have rediscovered the spirituality of earth renewal, marrying it to prophetic critique. Thus, each of these spiritualities not only has a distinct validity but also continually interacts with the others in new and creative ways.

In 1968, a feminist critique of male-dominated societies started to emerge in the civil rights movement. In the early sixties, I had already questioned the way Catholicism treated women's sexuality and reproductive role.⁵ Now I began to reflect on how women had been marginalized throughout the whole of religious history, asking what had been the causes of this long history of domination and what might be sources for the affirmation of women as full and equal persons. My first essay on this subject, written originally in the late sixties, had the provocative title “Male Chauvinist Theology and the Anger of Women.”⁶

In 1972, I was invited to teach for a year at Harvard Divinity School “under” the Chauncey Stillman Chair of Roman Catholic Studies.⁷ There, I developed a course that attempted to sort out this religious history from the perspective of women, going from the prehistoric period to the era of the Hellenistic mystery religions and the emergence of early Christianity. Drawing on E. O. James's 1959 book The Cult of the Mother Goddess, I started by talking about the thesis that a Mother Goddess had been universally worshipped in the prehistoric Near East.⁸ I showed pictures of the Paleolithic and Neolithic female figures that were said to represent this Mother Goddess.

I was surprised and intrigued when my students, almost all feminist women, were repelled by these images. The large breasts, bellies, and buttocks of these figures, with truncated hands and feet and a head that lacked facial features, struck them as exploitative images of the female. To their minds, the societies that made these images valued women's bodies as a source of sex and nurture but did not value women's person or agency. The students argued that these prehistoric images depicted a woman as all buttocks, breasts, and belly, not as a person with facial features who saw, thought, or spoke, not as a person who moved around on her own two feet and took charge of things with her hands.

Until then, I had assumed that the existence of these ancient female figurines was “proof” that women had been respected and had wielded power in these ancient matriarchal, or at least prepatriarchal, societies. Later in the 1970s, a new movement of “Goddess” religion would emerge that would again interpret these ancient figurines as testimony of a positive view of women. For example, Anne Barstow, in her article “The Prehistoric Goddess,” talks of being thrilled by these images and feeling that, for the first time, her female body had been affirmed.9 Other books on prehistoric goddesses similarly celebrated these fat, faceless, handless, feetless images with large breasts, buttocks, and bellies—such as the Venus of Willendorf (c. 25,000 BCE) (fig. 1)—as evidence of a time when women held leading positions in society and were revered and worshipped as primary exemplars of the divine. But my students' negative reaction to these same images made me aware that both of these responses are projections from our modern context and that neither view may have much to do with what the creators of these images actually had in mind.

Also in the 1970s, I began to read in the emerging field of feminist anthropology, which questioned the entire theory of “matriarchal origins” and explored the more complex ways in which gender and male-female relations developed in various societies.¹⁰ I also became aware of how much the concept of an original matriarchal society, superseded by patriarchy, was itself a product of nineteenth-century European societies marked by their own acute conflicts between “masculine” and “feminine” constructions of gender—conflicts that reflected the beginning of the feminist movement and the efforts to marginalize and repress it. In the 1950s and early 1960s, I had encountered this theory of matriarchal origins in the works of classical archaeologists and historians, and I now began to reread these accounts more as products of their own European context and less as reliable accounts of prehistoric antiquity.

FIGURE 1
Venus of Willendorf, c. 25,000 BCE. Limestone statuette with traces of red coloring, height 4 in., from Willendorf, Wachau, Lower Austria. The ample volume of the sacred female celebrates her capacity for nurture. (Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna; photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY)

The emerging movement of Goddess spirituality took hold of these nineteenth-century writings, however, interpreting them uncritically as proof of an ancient matriarchal society overthrown by patriarchy. Several women students in theological schools, seeking more positive sources for a feminist theology, gravitated to these Goddess movements and attempted to discredit any effort to draw on Jewish and Christian sources. Some of these Goddess “thealogians,” such as Carol Christ, criticized persons like myself and Elizabeth Fiorenza for not being “radical” enough, for remaining mere “reformers” because we failed to embrace the Goddess and continued to mine Jewish and Christian sources of tradition.11

I wrote responses to these views, and for a few years a heated interchange took place between myself and the emerging Goddess feminists.¹² I felt the need both to explicate the reasons for my perspective and to warn against a simplistic appropriation of a thesis of matriarchal origins. I also questioned the “essentialist” view of the female as embodiment of nurturing, life-affirming virtues, vis-à-vis the male as paradigm of aggressive militarism, that often lurked behind these modern Goddess spiritualities. Goddess feminists, however, misread these warnings as a rejection of their own option for a new path of spiritual development. Some assumed that I was motivated by the belief that the Jewish and Christian traditions were the only valid religions and that no one should leave them for some alternative path.

This was not at all my view at that time, nor has it been my view in the years that followed. I have taken for granted since the 1950s that Christianity is one religion among others and that all religions have their negative sides, including marginalizing women to one degree or another. Feminists have no perfect option from some past tradition. This means that we can choose from various options such as Judaism, Christianity, or Buddhism, or we can pursue new options by seeking to recover other ancient traditions. But as we go deeper into these traditions, we find the need to be “reformers” and reinterpreters of those traditions. A fully pro-woman feminist theology and spirituality did not exist in the past in any clearly recoverable sense, although all these traditions contain many hints of alternative perspectives.

Only in the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first have women been in a position to seek a more adequate alternative religion that will fully affirm us as women. I object to any Christian exclusivism and also to any simplistic reversal of Christian exclusivism that sets a prehistoric goddess religion as the true source of feminist faith, defining Christianity and Judaism as totally worthless. Feminists need to recognize that in whatever tradition we choose to stand, we are reinterpreting from our own context.

Another point of contention, recently revived, charges Christian feminists with arguing that Goddess feminists “have no ethics.”13 Goddess feminists such as Starhawk, a person who demonstrates the deep prophetic ethics being developed by a major leader of the Goddess tradition, are cited as evidence to the contrary. But this conflict misinterprets what I have said. In my own experience, as I have explained, the ancient pagan traditions lacked the prophetic spirituality that I discovered in the Hebrew tradition. But this does not mean that ancient paganisms had no other valuable spiritualities. It also does not suggest that modern feminist pagans lack a prophetic social justice ethic. For me, feminism itself is a prophetic social justice ethic. Modern feminist pagans are developing their thought not simply from the effort to recover ancient paganisms but also from the background of Western religious traditions from which they come. A feminist pagan such as Starhawk, coming from the Jewish tradition, synthesizes both prophetic and earth-renewal spiritualities from roots in her own Jewish history as well as from the pagan traditions she has adopted.

The twenty-five years since these debates began have seen some shifting and realignment of the cultural terrain in western Europe and North America. On the one hand, Goddess and neopagan movements have become increasingly “normalized,” finding their place in academe and in gatherings of world religions, such as the Parliament of the World's Religions. (Adherents of these movements have even become chaplains in the U.S. Army.) Their spokespersons have nuanced their articulation of their own assumptions, recognizing the degree to which their views are a new interpretation of spirituality and not simply a literal recovery of something prehistoric. Either-or dichotomies between good paganism and bad Christianity, or vice versa, have given way to the beginning of ecumenism, in which all movements that seek a feminist earth-renewal spirituality in various traditions can see one another as partners.

On the other hand, new conflicts between various feminist perspectives have also arisen. In the 1980s, Goddess feminists appropriated the work of archaeologist Marija Gimbutas as proof of prehistoric matriarchal or matricentric societies overthrown by invading patriarchalists, a viewpoint popularly disseminated by writers such as Charlene Spretnak and Riane Eisler.14 The emerging community of feminist paleoarchaeologists, alarmed by what they saw as bad archaeology, responded with a critique of Gimbutas's work. They sought to define a feminist archaeological stand-point that was neither an argument for recovery of original matriarchy nor a defense of universal patriarchy. This academic critique, popularized by writers such as Cynthia Eller, led to renewed charges of “betrayal” from Goddess feminists.¹⁵

At the same time, a surge of extremely aggressive patriarchal fundamentalism has appeared in all the dominant world religions—Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and even in Asian religions—that seeks to beat women back into “their place,” by force, if necessary, as well as by various methods of blame and shame. Feminists and feminism have become targets worldwide. In the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, evangelical Christian fundamentalism merged with American militarism and an aspiration for world domination, spurring efforts to dismantle women's reproductive rights, environmental protections, and international cooperation among nations.

Yet, the unmasking of this unilateral U.S. aggression has itself sparked a world-wide peace movement in opposition to the American attack on Iraq, a movement that has also attempted to link together all the various protest movements against military and economic domination and to envision a global alternative. It seems to me that the moment has come for various feminist movements not only to ally with one another but also to align themselves with this global movement to build an alternative way of being together on this one planet.

Goddess and Christian feminists need to see that they share many of the same values and even a similar theo/alogy, which views divinity not as a male transcendent Other of dominating power, but rather as the energy of sustaining and renewing life. This emergent common theo/alogy is also shared with other religious movements and activists, such as those engaged in ecological rethinking of the various world religions, liberation theologians who are incorporating ecological and feminist challenges into their thought, and indigenous peoples whose theologies seek to resurrect their ancient traditions and to confront the threat of neoliberalism to their traditional ways of life.16

These many religious movements themselves need to ally with women's, labor, peasant, antiwar, and environmental movements in a global front of resistance and alternative development of society. In the slogan that emerged from the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, we all need to join hands in a common declaration that “a different world is possible.”¹⁷

I hope that this book can be a small contribution to shaping one piece of this global alliance. It seeks to sort out that piece of history that connects ancient Near Eastern societies, as they rose from their Neolithic roots, with the contemporary Western feminist efforts to reevaluate how they are linked to those roots today. This book restates my own ongoing reflection on this history over a fifty-year period. It expresses a critique of theories of ancient matriarchy, while at the same time affirming the movements that seek to reinterpret those roots today for a feminist-ecological spirituality. My hope is to further an alliance among the many forms of religious feminism, while recognizing that we are all reinterpreting ancient traditions and imagery that are ambivalent and whose ancient meaning is partly lost to us. I believe that we share mostly common values, and I also believe that we are all being beaten with the same stick by fundamentalists, for whom “lesbian feminist witch” is the common label for us all.¹⁸

Chapter 1 attempts to sort out this question of gender and prehistory, particularly in the conflict between those who endorse the perspective of Marija Gimbutas and the feminist archaeologists who have critiqued it. In this chapter and in the first part of chapter 2, I suggest a mediating way of viewing this development from prehistoric to early patriarchal societies, which sees the earlier societies as more egalitarian but probably not female-dominated.

The second part of chapter 2 focuses on four major goddesses of the ancient Mediterranean world: Inanna/Ishtar, Anat, Isis, and Demeter. In my view, it is not evident that these goddesses ever existed in order to express a matricentric society. In the form in which their stories have come down to us, the first three goddesses express a construction of female divinity that sacralizes not only male but also royal or class-dominated societies. The figure of the Goddess Demeter seems to me more ambivalent, both assuming patriarchal rule and protesting against its abuse of women, while sustaining earth renewal and hope for life after death.

Chapter 3 looks at the gradually diminishing presence of the female consort of El/Yahweh in Hebrew thought, as well as the recreation, after the exile, of a new Hebrew Goddess in the figure of Wisdom. But this Hebrew Goddess is hardly a feminist. She is juxtaposed to a hostile view of the “bad foreign woman” and functions primarily to link males to males, a male divine father to human sons, and human fathers, as parents and teachers, to human sons. This raises the question, which I take up in the conclusion of this work, of why men need the Goddess. Instead of the expected story line in which patriarchal religion suppresses all female imagery of the divine, what we see in some lines of Jewish and Christian history is a periodic reinvention of goddesses by men to serve male interests.

For me, this is a major part of the difficulty in any effort by women, either historically or today, to lay hold of these goddesses for feminist purposes. In order to have them become resources for feminism, we need to come to terms with the way these goddesses and female divine symbols reflect male constructions of the female, at least in the form they have come down to us. This is why I titled this book Goddesses and the Divine Feminine. I believe that the term “feminine” (as distinct from “feminist”) signals an androcentric shaping of the female image.

The fourth chapter looks at how goddesses and female symbols of the divine functioned in two major movements that sought religious salvation in the context of Greco-Roman society, the mystery religions and gnosticism. Although both have been passed down to us shaped by a male point of view, both included women as priestesses, religious leaders, and adherents. Unfortunately, we have no texts by women in which we can glimpse how women saw their relation to the goddesses of the mystery religions. Gnosticism is even more complex: despite its androcentric view of divinity, it had powerful female deities and suggested a kind of subversion of the whole dominant patriarchal society and cosmos. Perhaps we glimpse here a proto-feminist movement in the context of an international, colonized society of antiquity.

Chapter 5 traces female symbols in early Christianity from the first to the fourth century. Here, we see a further masculinization of female symbols, such as Wisdom, that Christianity appropriated from its Jewish roots. At the same time, however, a powerful new set of female symbols of the divine and the redeemed human, as female Holy Spirit, Mother Church, bridal soul, and finally as Mary, Mother of God, began to be elaborated.

The sixth chapter continues the account of this development of Mariology through the medieval world. The chapter then turns to five medieval women mystics who laid hold of these female symbols—Wisdom, Mother Church, and bridal soul—to affirm their own spiritual journeys as women empowered to speak, write, teach, and guide other women.

Chapter 7 detours from western European religious history to see how female images of the divine played out in the violent encounter of the Aztec world with its Spanish conquerors in Mexico in the sixteenth century. In Aztec society, we find an aggressive, militarist patriarchy, whose religious worldview culminated in a continual round of human sacrifice to sustain a fragile sun and cosmos. Somewhat more egalitarian societies with some female leadership may have existed before the Aztecs, but this knowledge is hard to recover, given our sources, which mostly come from the Franciscan friars who sought to convert the indigenous peoples to Christianity. Yet Aztec and pre-Aztec Mesoamerican worldviews were rooted in a vision of the dialectical interconnection of male and female divinity in the ultimate source of life, played out on every level of cosmic and human reality.

The Spanish sought to repress all these gods and goddesses in favor of a devotion to the Christian God the Father and his crucified son. Yet the very shock of this meeting and the mixture of the two peoples produced many apparitions of the central female symbol of Spanish Christianity, Mary, most notably in the apparition of Mary as Virgin of Guadalupe. Guadalupe, as the “Goddess of the Americas,” has been and continues to be today a multivalent symbol that can both validate reactionary trends of the patriarchal Mexican church and society and nonetheless be endlessly reappropriated and interpreted from revolutionary, liberative, and feminist perspectives. Again, we are faced with the complex story of how men create goddesses for their own purposes and how, nonetheless, some women claim these goddesses for themselves in creative ways.

The eighth chapter returns to the world of sixteenth-century Europe, in the German context of the Reformation. Here, we see the most extensive effort of patriarchal Christianity to repress all female symbols of the divine. Wisdom, Mother Church, and bridal soul, as well as Mary and female saints, are swept away by church Reformers in favor of an exclusive focus on God the Father and his crucified son. It is this Protestant history that stands behind the assumption of modern Western feminists that patriarchal religion normally seeks to purge all female symbols of the divine. This assumption has obscured the way in which patriarchal religions have continually created new (androcentric) goddesses.

But this view of a patriarchal Protestantism with exclusively male symbols is itself too simple. Protestants have failed to recognize, and to appropriate as part of their tradition, continual waves of mystical and millennialist Protestantism from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, which redeveloped the Wisdom symbol and recreated a vision of God and the human being as androgynous. This Protestant Goddess, Wisdom, was elaborated mainly by men, who sought to affirm their own “feminine side” and to devote themselves to a deity that included the female. Consequently, this renewed Wisdom theology is hardly feminist. Most of this theology of divine and human androgyny either marginalized women entirely or firmly put them in their place as auxiliary to male spiritual development. Yet here, too, women found ways to appropriate this Goddess and reaffirm her from their own perspective.

Chapter 9 takes us to nineteenth-century western Europe and America, where contested gender identities take a more strident form with the emergence of feminism. In response, patriarchal cultures made rigorous efforts to reassert either women's natural inferiority or their idealized complementarity to male roles as rulers of public society. It is in this context that waves of male historians and archaeologists who studied the ancient Mediterranean world sought to reread the roots of European society as a story of the rise of patriarchy from an earlier matriarchy.

This theme was taken up by socialism and early feminism and reinterpreted to affirm liberative hopes for an emerging socialist and/or feminist society. Thus, the Victorian theory of original matriarchy was shaped by two quite different story lines. One line of thought tells it as a story of ascent from an inferior female-dominated society to a superior male-dominated one. Another tells it as a fall-redemption story of an originally harmonious and good world, distorted by a “fall” into evil patriarchy, to be overcome by the emergence of a higher socialist and/or feminist society today.

Chapter 10 recounts how the renewed feminist movement, from the 1970s to today, reappropriated these nineteenth-century theories of matriarchal fall and redemption, seeking a pro-woman spirituality. It traces the emergence of this movement as it developed complex ritual practices for individuals and groups and as theoreticians arose to elaborate its theological and ethical vision for a comprehensive social transformation. Although still seeing this movement as countercultural, leaders of Goddess spirituality have sought to normalize themselves both in the academy and within the spectrum of religious diversity in American society. I believe that Christian feminists should heartily support both of these developments, recognizing our largely common values as well as our common enemies in fundamentalist patriarchal religions.

The book's conclusion recapitulates the argument of the book and also advocates new alliances among ecofeminist perspectives in various religious contexts. Such mutual support is possible without embracing theories about gender in human social evolution that are not historically tenable. One can affirm the validity of alternative Goddess spiritualities in the contemporary context without insisting that everyone accept the thesis of a literal “feminist Eden” in prehistoric human existence.

We need to acknowledge the validity of the many paths from which feminists mine their traditions—whether those traditions are Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Chinese, Korean, or Celtic. All are historically problematic, and yet all have some potential. Finally, I believe that our hope rests in a new way of imagining and enacting our relation to one another and the earth, a way that never fully existed in any of our ancient worlds but that is vitally necessary today to save our planet from destruction.