Goddess Spirituality is a recognised movement that has its roots in the 1960s when the Age of Aquarius heralded a time of revolution. The invention of the pill contributed to rapidly changing attitudes towards sex and women’s ownership of their bodies, while the larger social revolt targeted conservatism of middle class respectability, colonialism and the Vietnam War. Suddenly women were freed from the tyranny of their own biology and the emerging Women’s Liberation Movement spawned a new found independence and spirituality that sought the sacred embodied in a female form.
In tracing the roots of Feminist / Goddess spirituality, feminist scholars see this movement as an off-shoot of the wider Womens’ Liberation Movement of North America and Western Europe, where women had become disenfranchised and alienated with what they perceived as an absence of the feminine within Judeo-Christian religious discourse.[2] Wanting to reclaim their lost female cultural and religious agency, women sought to discover evidence of a lost matriarchy or goddess worshiping society, which was largely made possible by the growing availability of information on the subject. These works were then reinterpreted by western feminists as evidence of a matrifocal, gynocentric culture espousing life-loving, peaceful and gender equal qualities.
Wendy Griffin speaks of the early roots of the goddess movement recalling in 1972 in Los Angeles, the first coven of feminist witches that practised witchcraft as a religion, meeting under the tutelage of Zsuzsanna Budapest. Within a few years, several hundred women were gathering to celebrate their revisioning of female divinity through ritual practise. Griffin’s research revealed that the participants in goddess rituals used symbols and images to create a framework of meaning that encapsulates goddess spirituality as defining a new ethos. That philosophy was intended to redefine power, authority, sexuality and social relations between the spiritual and the physical. In the goddess movement, the physical is firmly anchored in the female body, an element common to all manifestations of this movement.
Free eBooks (Can Be Downloaded):
Vladimir Antonov - Classics Of Spiritual Philosophy And The PresentJohn Nash - Spirituality And Gender
Franceska De Grandis - Goddess Initiation
