When God Was a Woman

By Richard N. Ostling

To mark Earth Day last week, four women and two men stood on a hilltop outside Mount Horeb, Wis., literally praying to Mother Earth. "Sacred Earth Power, bring healing to planet Earth," intoned barefoot Selena Fox, priestess of Circle Sanctuary. Worshipers responded with a crescendo chant, "Clean soil. Clean soil," then pledged to do a variety of ecological good deeds and joined in a hug. Similar nature worship was part of Earth Day festivals from Boston, where the Goddess Gospel singers performed on the waterfront, to Berkeley, where devotees drummed and sang for a crowd.

The ceremonies were part of a growing U.S. spiritual movement: Goddess worship, the effort to create a female-centered focus for spiritual expression. Most participants are women who seek a deity other than God the Father, and a faith less patriarchal than the Judeo-Christian tradition seems to offer. Adherents claim the movement involves as many as 100,000 U.S. women.

Though such ancient goddesses as Isis or Astarte are often invoked, most worship occurs in the name of a vague generic "Goddess," often depicted as Mother Earth or Gaia in line with environmental awareness. "The Goddess is not just the female version of God. She represents a different concept," says Merlin Stone, author of When God Was a Woman. While the Judeo-Christian God is transcendent, the Goddess is located "within each individual and all things in nature," she says.

Various groups follow a mixed brew of Wicca (witchcraft), paganism, New Age ideas and evocations of female power, some inspired by Native American and African traditions. Though a minority enacts malevolent spell casting and magic (not Satanism, these worshipers insist), most embrace benign beliefs, especially harmony with nature. While some draw upon ancient rituals, others invent new ones.

Despite Christianity's centuries of opposition to paganism, some old-line churches are opening up to the Goddess. A witch teaches in an institute at the Roman Catholic Holy Names College in California. A book by two United Methodist pastors proposes experimental Bible readings about the crucifixion that replace Jesus with Sophia (Wisdom), a name for the divine personality used by Goddess-minded Christians.

Movement advocates say Goddess worship restores a prehistoric belief that was eradicated in Europe and the Middle East around 6,000 years ago by patriarchal invaders. The prepatriarchal utopia is portrayed as egalitarian, peace loving and "gynocentric." New scholarly backing for the creed comes from archaeologist Marija Gimbutas in The Language of the Goddess (Harper & Row) and the forthcoming Civilization of the Goddess. The author contends that worship of the "Old European Great Goddess" goes back to 25,000 B.C., though Gimbutas' major evidence stems from farming cultures in southeastern Europe from 6500 B.C. on, especially their ubiquitous female statuettes.

There are numerous skeptics, including female religious thinkers. Carole Fontaine of Andover Newton Theological School, for one, complains that feminist writers delete historical evidence that is "embarrassing or contradictory." Carol Meyers of Duke University argues that there is no proof that the figurines cited by Gimbutas were objects of worship, much less representations of a single Goddess. None of that, however, has deterred adherents. Whether they are reviving a vanished faith or inventing a new one, it is the gender of the deity that counts.

With reporting by Michael P. Harris/New York and Elizabeth L''Hommedieu/San Francisco

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