TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/050691/0506610.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.8 KB | 84 lines

                                                                                RELIGION, Page 73

When God Was a Woman


Worshipers of Mother Earth are part of a Goddess resurgence


    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.

    By Richard N. Ostling. Reported by Michael P. Harris/New
York and Elizabeth L'Hommedieu/San Francisco