Goddesses and
Neopagans
The Earth is our Mother, we must take care of her. Hey younga, Ho younga, Hey young young. Her sacred ground we walk upon with every step . . . . Hey younga, Ho younga, Hey young young.
— Medicine Wheel Chant to Honor the Earth Mother
The Goddess of Pele was on a rampage!
A fiery deity, the volcano hissed her anger, spewing molten lava and sulfurous ash over the heaving sides of Kilauea.
Those who worship Pele say her five-year snit of eruptions began the very day the first geothermal permit was issued in 1983. The Department of Land and Natural Resources wants to drill into the mountain's sides to tap geothermal energy.
In a First Amendment case reminiscent of the clash between loggers and Indians in the northwest corner of California, the attempted harnessing of Kilauea in Hawaii's Volcanoes National Park has touched off an inferno of controversy. Proponents think the geothermal energy within Kilauea's hissing heart could supply power for the entire chain of oil-dependent islands. But Pele's devotees, who see her as a living Goddess, believe the plan not only violates their religious rights, but is destroying the object of their worship.
"They are punching holes in what we consider her body," Lehua Lopez, a member of the Pele Defense Fund, explained
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angrily. "She has eaten 58 houses already. She's causing people to be sick. She's mad."1
Pele worshipers, said to number in the thousands, aren't the only ones who see a direct connection between earthly catastrophe and deitific displeasure. Harmonic Convergence insiders grimly predicted that human failure to generate enough positive energy on August 16, 1987, could call down Earth Mother's wrath.
"There may have to be some cataclysmic events," Zena Starfire of Mill Valley, California, warned darkly. "There has to be some way for the Earth to blow off her negativity."
This is a familiar theme in the New Age scenario, where Earth is actually a goddess whose ancient name is Gaia (from Greek mythology). The goddess "has been seriously 'wounded' by the expansion of human civilization, and now there must come a universal atonement for these many millennia of grief on 'her' part through an event or process New Agers cryptically and ominously call 'the cleansing,' " according to a paper on the New Age movement.2
"The recent upsurge of volcanic action, earthquakes and unusual weather patterns," reasoned Regina Ryan and John Travis in their Wellness Workbook "may well be messages from Gaia, calling us to pay attention to her needs. If we continue to ignore her communications, there may be even harsher outbursts as Gaia is forced to take more drastic action to regain balance."3
The "Gaia hypothesis," while based in ancient mythology, has enjoyed a recent revival inspired by the environmental activists and New Age aficionados of the 1980s and 1990s. It squares with the New Age worldview that the Earth is a conscious, living entity with a "mind" that in turn participates in some universal or cosmic Mind.4
New Age writer George Seielstad summarizes the cosmic ecology of the Gaia hypothesis:
Life, acting as a collectivity and over a global basis, actively regulates and modulates the environment in just such a way as to optimize the very conditions under which that life can flourish. Earth's biosphere (life) is not independent of the atmosphere (air), hydrosphere (oceans), or lithosphere (soil). Instead, all are parts of a coherent whole. Insofar as that whole maintains a constant temperature and a compatible chemical
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composition — in short, a benign homeostasis — within a constantly changing setting, it can be considered alive.5
Life, said Ilya Prigogine, Belgian chemist, Nobel laureate, and a prop for New Age science, "is the supreme expression of the self-organizing processes that occur."6 (We'll return to Prigogine and other New Age scientists in chapter 20.)
In addition to their roots in Greek and Roman mythology, the themes of the Great Mother and the Great Goddess are grounded in Eastern religions. For example, the Sanskrit root ma (or matr), meaning "production," underlies the belief that everything is the product of the Great Goddess, the One whose body is all manifestation.
The Great Goddess Kali of India, observed New Age psychologist Ken Wilber, "when viewed in her highest form as wife of Shiva, is a perfect example of the assimilation of the old Great Mother mythology . . . which serves actual sacrifice in awareness, not substitute sacrifice in blood."7
Nature-based religion, particularly that of the Goddess and of Wicca (or "witchcraft"), is strong within the New Age strand often referred to as "ecofeminism." This feminist spirituality began to flower during the radical cultural movement of the 1970s. It views men as brutalizing women through sexual violence and pornographic exploitation, and dominating them through a stern, overbearing, male "sky-god."
Female fear and resentment further festered through what feminist cultural historian Charlene Spretnak has called the "patriarchal culture with its hierarchical, militaristic, mechanistic, industrialist forms."8 As a result of prominent attention paid to these views, feminism and feminine consciousness have flourished.
Another factor in the development of feminism within the New Age movement has been the recent focus on various forms of neopaganism extracted from Western and pre-Christian "primal" cultures.
According to new religions expert Robert Ellwood, women — exhilarated over the discovery of a religion that exalts the female role — now realize that many of the Eastern
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religions "have been repressive in many ways. They [those religions] don't have the appeal they did in the 1960s."9
Intertwining female homage with the divinity of nature especially appeals to the ecofeminists. In a speech at a conference on ecofeminism, Spretnak, a leading New Age spokeswoman, said:
We would not have been interested in "Yahweh with a skirt," a distant, detached, domineering godhead who happened to be female. What was cosmologically wholesome and healing was the discovery of the Divine as immanent in and around us. What was intriguing was the sacred link of the Goddess in her many guises with totemic animals and plants, sacred groves, womblike caves, the moon-rhythm blood of menses, the ecstatic dance — the experience of knowing Gaia, her voluptuous contours and fertile plains, her flowing waters that give life, her animals as teachers.10
Feminist spirituality has captivated many women dropouts from traditional Christianity. Twelve of seventeen former nuns who left their orders to embrace lesbianism now practice neopaganism, according to the book, Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence. These "New-Age nuns" are into "astrology, Goddess imagery, tarot, dreamwork, I Ching, herbal healing, meditation, massage and body . . . and psychic work. We are creating communal rituals for solstices, equinoxes, and full moons."11
A group of quaker women, relating to the vision of one of their number who saw a Goddess fall "as a star from Venus to Earth," worship and meditate upon their star Goddess.12
On the radical edge of New Age feminism is the serious proposal of Deena Metzger that "holy prostitutes" be reinstated as the conduit for the sacred. Beyond the temple attendants, she advocates that all women become prostitutes "as a means for resacralizing the body and regaining spiritual power lost with the advent of patriarchal religion."13
Others, like Beverly Hills "medicine woman" Lynn Andrews, are less radical. She speaks of balancing the male and female aspects within each of us, rather than asserting sheer female power. Healing the feminine consciousness within men as well as within women will lead to a "sacred androgyny," she believes.14
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But by most measures, "female energy" is where it's at in New Age circles: Sun Bear's 1987 Bear Tribe Catalogue, for instance, lists sixty-four books on the topic — including connections to the Goddess, making magic in sex and politics, and using the witches' cabaia. But only six books on "male energy" — one of them being Herb Goldberg's Hazards of Being Male — are in the catalog.15
In addition to feminine Goddess worshipers, neopagans include among their numbers Celtic revivalist witches; creators of Greek, Egyptian, Norse, and Druid revivals; and those who experiment with various forms of ceremonial magic (often spelled "magick" to distinguish it from the stage-show version), sorcery, animism, divination, and witchcraft.
"Neo-pagans think of their religion as based on what one does, not on what one believes," declared Margot Adler, the popular New Age author of Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today. Adler is a priestess in a coven of witches (usually a group of thirteen) and conducts workshops on contemporary neopaganism titled "Magic, Wicca, and Goddess Spirituality."
She added in a Unitarian-Universalist magazine article: "Most Neo-pagan religions have few creeds and no prophets. They are based on seasonal celebration, the cycles of planting and harvesting, on custom and experience rather than the written word."16
Practitioners of New Age witchcraft are coming out of the broom closet. Religion experts estimate there are perhaps 50,000 witches in the United States, although the figure could be higher since many still choose anonymity.17
The practice of modern witchcraft has soared as witches have successfully exorcised the "Inquisition image" the craft has borne for centuries, and as New Age syncretism has enfolded a panoply of spiritual paths all said to bring equal access to the divine One. "Sky-clad" (nude) ritual ceremonies are fewer in most neopagan groups of the 1980s than a decade or so earlier. Also, practicing "black" magic, sacrificing animals, casting evil spells, and engaging in voodoo rites and sex orgies are downplayed, and most witches deny that they believe in — much less worship — Satan. That is not to deny
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however, the existence of satanist groups (we'll consider them later under the topic of evil and the demonic in New Age religion).
The great majority of people who call themselves witches, says Gordon Melton of the Institute for Study of American Religion at Santa Barbara, "follow the nature-oriented polytheistic worship of the Great Mother Goddess," whose names include Diana, Isis, Demeter, Hecate, Cubele or Demeter, as well as Gaia.18
Miriam Starhawk, one of the best-known propagandists for Wicca, writes and lectures widely about witchcraft and is on the faculty of an institute in spirituality at Holy Names College in Oakland, California. Harvard Divinity School has offered courses on neopaganism and hosted meetings of witches, according to Westmont College sociologist Ron Enroth.19
There are Goddess bookshops and jewelry stores; pagan Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and performance theaters; witches' newspapers, computerized information networks, and professional societies. And even a witches' cemetery was dedicated near Los Angeles not long ago.20
Full Moon meditations — rollicking celebrations of Goddess worship and ritual symbols of nature — draw heavily from the circles of the well educated and affluent, with the majority of participants being female. Indeed, some of the rituals are open only to women.
Robert Ellwood and Harry Partin classify neopaganism into the magical groups, influenced by the activities of notorious magician Alester Crowley (1875 — 1947) and others, and the "romantic" nature-oriented groups who "prefer woodsy settings to incense and altars" and who "dance and plant trees." Wicca covens, cast in the middle between the two, typically worship a Horned God (Pan) and a Triple Goddess (Virgin, Great Mother, and Crone).21
Though widely diverse, these neopagan ideas about the deities — from Pele to Pan — relate to some kind of "connectional" and symbolic "experience" that is part of the totality of Nature and the Oneness of divine Reality. The spirit of magick, then — which the New Age prefers to call "spirituality" — is expressed in terms of self-empowerment. It is receiving what we need from our "Higher Selves" within and
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from the universe without — what Jack Pursel's channeled entity Lazaris fondly refers to as "God/Goddess/All That Is."22
The New Age magick is, in fact, the Edenic longing for godhood through a certain and secret wisdom that disperses limitations and suffering with the wave of a wand.
Chapter 15 || Table of Contents
1. Tamara Jones, "Fire Goddess Defended: Harnessing of Volcano Is Hot Hawaii Issue," Los Angeles Times, 9 February 1988, pt. 1, 1.
2. "New Age Movement and Anti-Semitism," 1987, a white paper prepared by Four Corners Associates, Denver, Colo., 5.
3. Regina Sara Ryan and John W. Travis, Wellness Workbook (Berkeley, Calif.: Ten Speed Press, 1981), 184.
4. Fritjof Capra, Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 292.
5. George A. Seielstad, Cosmic Ecology: The View from the Outside In (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), 135.
6. Quoted in Kevin Kelly, "Deep Ecology as Religion," Utne Reader (October–November 1985): 68; excerpted from Whole Earth Review (May 1985).
7. Ken Wilber, Up from Eden (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1981), 188.
8. Charlene Spretnak, "Ecofeminism: Our Roots & Flowering," Ecology Center Newsletter 17 (November 1987): 1.
9. Robert Ellwood, interview with author, Los Angeles, Calif., 14 December 1987.
10. Spretnak, "Ecofeminism," 1–2.
11. Rosemary Curb and Nancy Manahan, eds., Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence (Tallahassee, Fla.: Naiad Press, 1985), xxx–xxxi.
12. Texe Marrs, Dark Secrets of the New Age: Satan's Plan for a One World Religion (Westchester, Ill.: Crossway Books/Good News Publishers, 1987), 76.
13. Quoted in Robert Burrows, "Americans Get Religion in the New Age," Christianity Today, 16 May 1986, 21–22.
14. Rose Marie Staubs, "Andrews's Sisters," OMNI (October 1987): 28.
15. Bear Tribe Medicine Society, Bear Tribe Catalogue (Spokane, Wash.: Bear Tribe Medicine Society, 1987), 33–37, 48.
16. Margot Adler, "A Modern Pagan Spiritual View," World (September–October 1987): 10.
17. Carol McGraw, "Bewitching: Covens of the '80s Don't Match Lore Stirred by Tales of Halloweens Past," Los Angeles Times, 31 October 1987, pt. 2, 1.
18. J. Gordon Melton, Encyclopedic Handbook of Cults in America (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1986), 211.
19. "Specific Manifestations of the New Age Movement," lecture at Trinity United Presbyterian Church, Santa Ana, Calif., 24 October 1987.
20. McGraw, "Bewitching."
21. Robert S. Ellwood and Harry B. Partin, Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1988), 155.
22. "Channeling," narrated by Stanley Ralph Ross (Los Angeles: Audio Renaissance Tapes, 1987); New Age Journal (November–December 1987): 38.
