s the sunlight falls gently through the canopy of leaves to daub mottled patterns on the floor of the glade, the intense little group is reaching a pinnacle of high emotion. They have cast the circle, they have evoked the spiritual powers, they have chanted and sung. Now the librarian, the counselor, the artist, the entrepreneur and the others within the circle grasp each other’s hands. Eyes locked together, the women whisper the joyous affirmation. “Thou art Goddess!” “Thou art Goddess!”

As the traffic builds and the smog rises from the streets up the walls of the office towers, the driver searches in vain for a place to pull over. With a wry smile on her face, she calls whimsically to the Goddess of Parking: “Hail Asphalta, full of grace, help me find a parking space!” A few minutes later, the car safely deposited, she goes about her business.

As the two thousand delegates to the conference listen and applaud, one speaker after another points towards their shared vision of a beautiful new world. It is an ecumenical church conference, and the audience contains Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, Roman Catholics and members of almost a dozen other denominations, eager to take the vision home with them and pass it on. “We are here together in order to destroy this patriarchal idolatry of Christianity,” they hear. “We invoke Sophia, Divine Wisdom, who chose to play with all the people of the world. Her voice has been silenced too long ... Our maker Sophia, we are women in your image.” And they applaud again, cheer and weep for sheer emotion.

As the twentieth century comes to a close, the search for meaning in life is on again in earnest. Mainline churches continue to wither, but new religious movements are flourishing, and even forcing traditional denominations to adapt to a changing spiritual and political agenda. For a growing number of people, the search has not been in vain: they have found the Goddess. But who is she, and where did she come from? Do they really know what they have found?

Setting the Stage for Her Appearing
In 1950, no one had heard of Goddess spirituality; now, as we approach the end of the millennium, the Goddess is being proclaimed and celebrated in important sectors of modern society, and she shows no sign of retreating to her previous state of obscurity. On the contrary, we are likely to meet her more often and in a greater variety of places as the new millennium begins. It is time to tell her true story.

Goddess spirituality is a new religion. Like most religions, it is meant to be much more than a weekly break from the hectic routine of work, workouts, and socializing which constitutes life in the cities of the modern West. An effective religion shapes its believers’ understanding of reality as a whole, of their own place in the scheme of things, of those values which are worthy of upholding and of course of human history. The Goddess movement makes provocative assertions in fields as diverse as theology, anthropology, ancient history, sociology, psychology, and art history.

As many writers of all shades of opinion have noted, we live in paradoxical times. By most obvious standards of measurement, life has never been better. Never have so many people lived such long and healthy lives, with more access to information and goods, than those of the West in the late twentieth century. The scourge of smallpox, for instance, is a fact of history rather than a fact of life, and the struggle against other diseases has witnessed similar remarkable victories. My wife’s grandmother often marveled that man had progressed from Kitty Hawk to moon landings within her lifetime, and the same story could be told of the development from telegraph to telephone to telecommunications, and of many other fields of technological accomplishment. More people, and more kinds of people, have access to education and the ownership of property than ever before.

Other standards of measurement tell a different story, however. We live in a time of widespread personal alienation and social dislocation. Even in the West, where we have so far been spared the actual collapse of nations (such as occurred in the former USSR and Yugoslavia), we have witnessed a long-term pattern of steadily decreasing trust and participation in political and religious institutions. The legal definition of “family” is being readjusted, simply because the traditional definition fits too small a percentage of contemporary households—including those where children are being raised. The increasing rates of homelessness, addiction, suicide and various forms of violence add to the unease with which many of us face the present and the immediate future.

As foster parents of many years’ standing, my wife and I have often encountered this paradox face-to-face in the form of an anguished young person desperately adrift in one of the wealthiest and most comfortable societies ever to appear on the face of the earth. We ourselves happen to live far from the urban ghettos, in a small rural Canadian province which is known to the world at large as the tranquil home of Anne of Green Gables. It is a place “safe” enough that people still commonly leave their cars and homes unlocked. Nonetheless, we have seen at first hand the devastating effects of violence and abuse, drug addiction and family breakdown. The fact that we Westerners can now broadcast vivid images of wealth and leisure into the homes and communities of places like Bangladesh only heightens the paradox of our apparent “prosperity.”

How did we come to this? That is the larger question which interests me. Clearly, though, if something that looks as improbable as the Goddess movement can experience such striking success, we must acknowledge that large numbers of people are ready to turn away from established patterns of life and thought and embrace truly radical alternatives.

Quenching a Spiritual Thirst
On the one hand, we have the modernistic worldview based on materialism, empiricism and rationalism, offering the lure of individual freedom and the benefits of science and technology. On the other, we see a somewhat nostalgic appeal to the heart and the spirit, offering emotional fulfillment and the comfort to be drawn from intimate connection with one’s own kind. It is from the latter that today’s “revived” paganism, including Goddess spirituality, draws its sustenance and support.

Thinkers of the Enlightenment had devoted a good deal of their intellectual energy to attacks on the church. Their critiques were sufficiently impressive that traditional Christianity seemed to be discredited as an option for many intelligent and educated people. When some of them started having second thoughts about modernism and began looking for alternatives, they bypassed the Christian heritage altogether and sought renewed inspiration from the pagan religions of antiquity. “Pagan” derives from a Latin word which originally meant someone who lived in the countryside; because the rural populations of Europe were often the last to be reached by Christian missionaries, “pagan” became a common designation for the practitioner of a pre-Christian religion. Romanticism encouraged the rise of “neopaganism,” the idea of looking to this distant past for guidance to a better future. This sort of future would not be the result of modernist progress, building on the recent growth of science and technology; rather, it would represent a fundamental change in the way we think, act and work. Thus we encounter the term “New Age” as the conventional label for the fulfillment of neopagan hopes.

But why the continued resistance to modernity, which has brought so many advantages to so many people? It is still true that the benefits of modernism — primarily physical and materialistic — have offered very little for the soul and spirit. Beauty, joy and love are among the fulfilling but intangible elements of experience which a thoroughgoing modernism downplays. Such intangibles lose their dignity when they are regarded as nothing more than chemical reactions in the brain. A purely rational and materialistic world seems, in some ways, a cold and clinical world in which the most dramatic and inspiring moments of human life have little significance. Indeed, if human beings are ultimately nothing more than temporary combinations of molecules — or, in keeping with evolutionary theory, complicated descendants of pond scum — what is the real value of individuals, of communities, of life itself?

This is essentially a religious issue; the crucial problem is the ultimate value to be ascribed to human beings and their experiences. The Goddess movement of today is proving to be one of the more popular attempts at offering new answers to these questions. It is, therefore, not only an interesting phenomenon in itself; it is also an effective point of entry into some larger questions about the present direction of Western culture.

Where the Goddess Goes for Glory
The Goddess’s credibility has been greatly enhanced by her rising profile in another institutional setting, arguably more authoritative with the general public these days than the churches — higher education. As a group, professors have proven more sympathetic to the Goddess than an average cross-section of the population.

There are good reasons for this. An essential purpose of the modern university is the free and untrammeled exploration of new ideas to promote the extension of knowledge. Of necessity, this means that seemingly-outlandish ideas must be entertained, at least for a while, by some academics; ideally, as they work out the implications of their new insights and hunches, scholars will discard the erroneous and unproductive lines of thinking in favor of more accurate and fruitful conceptions. In such a setting, the Goddess was assured of getting a hearing.

Goddess spirituality soon found favor in many quarters of the academy. One factor here is probably the generational composition of many faculties. There was an enormous growth in the professoriate during the 1960s, as institutions expanded to accommodate the huge numbers of late baby-boomers. Many of those who filled the new positions, being recent graduates or dropouts of doctoral programs, were imbued with the radical consciousness of the 1960s campus and carried this sensibility into their professional careers. The result was the so-called “tenured radical” who is now, frequently, of such age and seniority as to be a dominant influence in institutions of higher education.

As the academic job market dried up in the 1970s and 1980s, this group continued to constitute a large proportion of many teaching staffs, unleavened by a natural and gradual influx of new scholars. Today, new graduates are often the students and protégés of precisely this group, which further enhances the receptivity of academia towards radical ideas. The rise of affirmative action policies has strengthened this trend even more, by ensuring that the groups which benefit from these policies — particularly feminist women — are more likely to get jobs, and thus make up a large proportion of faculties.

Far from being confined to the specialized research interests of individual professors, the Goddess now appears in the mundane world of textbooks. In 1995, Prentice-Hall, a major publisher of university texts, produced Marianne Ferguson’s Women and Religion. Despite its bland title, the book is actually a recitation of the tenets of the Goddess movement, from its opening section on “Early Goddess Cultures” to its concluding comments on innate differences between men’s and women’s spiritualities. Along the way, Ferguson cites Wicca as the only contemporary Goddess religion, and she dismisses critiques of the modern Goddess phenomenon as the work of jealous, threatened male clergy who wish to maintain their control over women’s sexual activities. This little-noticed event is actually a striking development: after the long modern struggle to free higher education from church control, the doctrines of a new religion are being packaged and promoted as factual material for use in publicly funded and accredited institutions of higher education.

Seducing the Masses
Since the Second World War, the Western world has witnessed an amazing reorientation of its religious life. As immigration has increased, traditional religions from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean have established themselves in many of the major centers of Europe and North America. Even more strikingly, new religions and “cults” have sprung up and flourished, and the New Age Movement has grown to embrace a significant proportion of the population in at least some of its attitudes and practices. Social and political issues ranging from poverty and war to the status of women have changed the inner life of the older religious organizations.

In all of this, the goddess movement stands out in a number of ways. It is the only new religion which has made sexuality and gender politics, two of the dominant social concerns of the late twentieth century, central to its very existence and claims. It has ridden the new wave of feminist scholarship to a position of credibility in the academic world, where the thinkers and leaders of the next generation are now absorbing the principles which will guide them for life. And, it has had unique success in spreading frankly pagan images and ideas within traditional, biblically-oriented religious organizations, as well as in such seemingly secular fields as health-care. For all these reasons, and more, Goddess spirituality deserves close investigation.

So, what of the librarian, the counselor, the entrepreneur, and the others we left chanting in the woods? In a modern secular society, few of us would seek to interfere with their recreational rituals. The quiet gentleness of their activities in the glade, however, masks a set of ideas and values which lend themselves all too easily to the destruction of the careers, families and personal lives of a great many people. When an ideology so closely bound to the veneration of biological distinctives becomes entrenched in major institutions and public policy, the opportunity for abuse on a large scale is disturbing indeed.