Gods & Goddesses
The Resurgence of the Goddess

The Resurgence of the Divine Feminine : Lecture notes from talks given by Sorita D'Este at London Earth Mysteries (2003) and Witchfest (2004).
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"I am all that is and was and ever shall be", the words of Isis from Ancient Egypt.

But how well did the goddess survive through the ages after Christianity had spread its brand of monotheistic patriarchy across Europe? It is obvious that in countries such as India various goddesses like Kali and Lakshmi have survived for millennia, so perhaps I should have titled this talk "The resurgence of the divine feminine in Europe"!

The first place to look has to be the Christian church itself. The virgin Mary with baby Jesus was an image that held much in common with Isis with baby Horus, and indeed some of the older imagery was incorporated into early Christian representations.

However, although it is a nice romantic image to think of goddesses such as Isis and Aphrodite surviving through Mary, it is not very realistic. The cult of Mary was not really significant until the twelfth century, with the introduction of the Ave Maria. This is not to say that poetry, shrines and writings about Mary did not occur, but they were more isolated to areas rather than being a widespread and popular belief. It is interesting to note that of all the groups in the Dark Ages, the Saxons seemed to be the one most concerned with Mary worship.

From a cynical point of view, we may note that many Marian shrines were associated with miracles, and became extremely wealthy through offerings made by pilgrims. By the fifteenth century, Mary was everywhere in Christianity, and her worship spreading so dramatically was largely due to the monasteries, who had perpetuated her worship through the previous three centuries and expanded the canonical verse and perception of her.

Through the Middle Ages the influence of Mary grew and grew. Most people do not realise quite how all-pervading she has been. Indeed if there is a universal goddess, it is Mary. Let us have a look at some of the acts associated with Mary during these times for a clearer perspective.

In 1381 Richard II consecrated England to Mary as "her dowry". Louis XIII consecrated France to Mary in 1638, declaring "We consecrate to her particularly our person, our state, our crown and our subjects". King Casimir did the same with Poland in 1656. In 1643 by order of King Phillip IV of Spain all of the Spanish colonies in South America were dedicated to Mary, and in 1664 King John IV did the same for the Portugese colonies, followed by Austria a year later. And in 1846 the bishops of America did the same for the United States.

In 1856 the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was decreed by the Catholic church. This is often misrepresented, for it really declares that Mary was without sin, and was the first person to be so, for she had to be to bear Jesus. So Mary becomes the perfect one before Jesus!

From mother of Jesus, the view of Mary changed so that she became Queen of Heaven, Gate of heaven, the interceder with God.

And Mary is even present in Islam. Mohammed wrote of his daughter Fatima, "Thou shalt be the most blessed of all the women in Paradise, after Mary." The worship of Mary, and Fatima as an aspect of Mary, have spread this incredible upsurge through Islam as well as Christianity. Visions of Mary have occurred in Muslim countries and caused a similar reaction to that in Christian countries, and do not require any change of faith to be seen as veneration of a holy and potent figure of within their own religion.

Around 1950 there is another change. Perhaps as the result of two World Wars, shattering many images of faith and changing the face of world politics, economics and society. In 1950 Pope Pius XII declared the assumption of Mary, so she shared with Jesus the ascension to heaven. In a poll beforehand, over 90% of bishops and theologians were in favour of this move, showing an awareness of a need for greater attention to the feminine.

Pope John Paul II credited Mary with saving him after the assassination attempt on his life. His personal motto is "totus tuus sum Maria" or Mary I am all yours, and this is embroidered inside his robes in the Latin, he has also put the M for Mary in his coat of arms. Since then, on several occasions, he has dedicated the whole word to Mary! And this is supposed to be the patriarchy? It is clear when we look more closely at what has happened with the Catholic Church that it is the greatest propagator of goddess worship in modern times, through Mary as the most popular figure in the church.

And to give an example with excerpts from one of Pope John Paul II's public addresses, given in 1993 to 375,000 people:
"With my heart full of praise for the Queen of Heaven … I greet all of you who are present in this solemn liturgy … this liturgy presents you Mary, as the woman clothed with the sun …. In Mary the final victory of life over death is already a reality …. O Mary as Mother of the Church, you guide us still from your place in heaven and help us to increase in holiness"

And this is being spread by the Catholics! Time magazine wrote "John Paul II has made Mary's unifying power a centrepiece of his papal arsenal. He has visited countless Marian shrines during his globe trotting, and invokes the Madonna's aid in nearly every discourse and prayer that he delivers." We can see that the power of the divine feminine is clearly recognised by the Catholic church, even if many people choose to ignore this fact as not fitting in with their preconceptions about Christianity.

The number of Marian shrines around the world has continued to grow and expand massively, there are at least 937 in France alone. Apparitions and visions of Mary are seen in every corner of the globe, attracting huge numbers of pilgrims. Lourdes attracts at least 5.5 million pilgrims a year, the Black Madonna in Poland 5 million, Fatima in Portugal 4.5 million, Knock in Ireland 1.5 million, The Shrine of Our Lady of Guadaalupe in mexico City, 20 million! And the list goes on. What pagan goddess boasts such worship?

So what about the saints, and the survival of goddesses as saints, like Bride becoming St Bride or Brigid. Again this can be seen originally as a phenomena localised to areas rather than a universal spreading of worship. The saints allowed magic to be done on a localised scale within the confines of the church, through prayer and devotion. Of course with the spread of Mary's worship has also come an increase in the worship of the saints. A saint for every occasion. Praying to saints is magic that can be sanctioned by the church.

The main survival of the goddess through the Middle Ages from a perspective that would flower into modern pagan goddess worship was more through poetic writings. In such writings the dominant figure is the goddess of love - Aphrodite-Venus.

At the turn of the 19th century came the Romantic Movement. Through the writings and art of this movement the Moon and Earth goddesses also became more prominent with the Love goddess, especially through such poets as Keats and Shelley, and later Swinburne.

The beginning of the magickal revival in the late 19th century started to give more focus to Goddess worship. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, with such prominent women as Moina Mathers, Florence Farr and Annie Horniman, began to introduce goddesses like Isis back more prominently into magick.

From the Golden Dawn came the figure of Aleister Crowley, venerating the goddess as an ideal through figures like Nuit, the star goddess, and Babalon as the sexual goddess. This was not reflected in his treatment of women in his personal life unfortunately, even though he received his most important work, Liber Al, the Book of the Law, through his wife Rose in Cairo in 1904.

Some would point to Margaret Murray and her writings in the 1920s on the survival of the medieval witch cult. However Murray focused more on the God of the Witches in her work, which was academically somewhat full of holes. At the same time Dion Fortune was writing, and it is curious that for someone who was essentially a Christian mystic, her most influential works should be the two novels about Morgan leFay, priestess of Isis, in The Sea Priestess and Moon Magic.

A concept that Dion Fortune put across in these books, which weren't published until the late forties and early fifties, was that "all goddesses are one goddess." This has led to the widespread use of the generic term "the goddess" to describe the vast array of goddesses, with many people seeing the different goddesses as all aspects of a greater whole.

And then we come to Gerald Gardner and Wicca. Surely this is indicative of a revival of Goddess worship. No, it wasn't, well not to start with anyway. The early Gardnerian material was focused much more on the Horned God. Gardner did however perpetuate the Fortune viewpoint, with such phrases in the Charge of the Goddess as "Listen to the words of the Great mother, who of old was also called among men Artemis, Astarte, Dione, Melusine, Aphrodite, Cerridwen, Diana, Arianrhod, Bride, and by many other names."

The 1950s see the real beginning of the goddess revival with particularly significant input into the Goddess resurgence. One of these was the publication in 1951 of Robert Graves "White Goddess". This work, although again not entirely factually accurate, was a beautiful poetic perception that was to significantly affect paganism and the pre-eminence of the goddess in the modern revival.

Likewise, the initiation of Doreen Valiente into Wicca, and her subsequent rewriting of much of the material, made Wicca into a much more goddess-centred religion. Her crowning work probably being her rendition of The Charge of the Goddess. Although this draws on much earlier work, especially Crowley and Leland's Aradia: Gospel of the Witches, it is a stunningly beautiful vision of the Goddess that has been influential ever since.

The sexual revolution of the late sixties brought about an increase in awareness of the divine feminine, and from the social melting pot of change this created, came the women's movement and a desire to reclaim the divine feminine. Writers such as Z Budapest, Merlin Stone, Mary Daly and Monica Sjoo began producing material which although not always academically accurate, portrayed the goddess as an eternal figure. A golden age of matriarchy and the burning times became modern myths that women could identify with, and gave them a focus.

As a result of such writings, and at a time when Wicca was becoming much more popular through Alex and Maxine Saunders, the Goddess was re-entering the mainstream of alternative religion. She was already present in Catholicism with the growth of the Mary cult in the twentieth century. It is worth commenting in passing that the two greatest icons of modern sexuality, Marilyn Monroe and Madonna both have names which derive from this worship.

The difference in these two icons reveals a lot about the way the feminine power in society has changed. In the fifties, Marilyn Monroe was the ultimate sexual fantasy, a modern Venus, defined by her associations with powerful men and radiating sexuality and sensuality, whilst her intelligence was ignored - she was supposed to be a dumb blonde. The allegorical quote for Marilyn Monroe was her definition of success - "not having to suck any more cocks".

Whereas Madonna in the eighties and nineties reinvented herself regularly, was in charge of her own affairs, and has had success and adoration on her own terms. Madonna is a reflection of a difference in the energy, the self-sufficiency and ability to beat the men at their own game and not be defined by them as Marilyn Monroe was, perhaps best illustrated by her comment "the world is ruled by pussy"!

From Wicca came a whole range of spin-offs, with writers like Starhawk and Marija Gimbutas continuing to spread the image of the goddess as the pre-eminent divinity. These images concentrated on women reclaiming their power, and more attention was focused on reclaiming demonised goddesses who represented feminine power, like Lilith and Kali.

The accuracy of the images portrayed by feminist writers left a lot to be desired. Very biased interpretations of myths or outright ignoring of parts of myths, or declaring that a god was really a goddess who had been made male were quite common occurrences.

Examining a few of the favourite goddesses of the feminist writers will illustrate this point. Sekhmet, for example, is always portrayed as the fierce sexual power and ability to overcome of women. However she acted at the behest of Ra her father, who banished her to Nubia after her zealous slaughter of most of humanity. Daddy was not impressed!

Likewise Athena, the smart woman. Of course her origins give her away, springing fully formed from Zeus' head without a mother in the process, she was bound to be a god's goddess, as it were, although this has been ignored in some circles. In the Oresteia when it is time for the judgement of Orestes for matricide to avenge the murder of his father by his mother, Athena sides with Apollo against the Furies in decreeing the death of the man more important, and the male role in procreation more important.

Whilst we may disagree with the myth, and agree with the feminists that this is a biased bit of patriarchy, the point is that like the Sekhmet myth, these are very old tales. In ancient times, although goddesses were common in most pantheons, they did not tend to be at the top of the tree, so to speak. A male god was almost inevitably in place as the head of a pantheon.

There is no solid evidence of a matriarchal pre-eminent goddess, earth mother, even in Neolithic times. Figures cited as evidence such as the Venus of Willendorf, could just as easily be fertility figures. And what is often more interesting with such figures is the context they are found in, i.e. what else is with them.

In the case of the Willendorf figure there were, for example, pieces of moldavite, meteoric glass. Considering the magickal significance that has always been attached to meteorites the figure could have been a fertility fetish to be empowered by other magickal items in an age where life expectancy was low and infant mortality high. We cannot say categorically in these cases, and it is a mistake to put our own attributions onto the distant past so categorically.

Also during the seventies came the creation of the Fellowship Of Isis, with its emphasis on the return of the divine feminine, and the importance of this as a balance to the previous centuries of patriarchy. The FOI however, although it placed the emphasis on the goddesses, celebrated their worship including their companion gods in a secondary position, not excluding them as many feminists did.

The FOI also continued the concept of "All goddesses are one goddess", under the "Isis of 10,000 names" banner, suggesting that each goddess was an aspect of a universal goddess, who they represented as Isis.

In many pantheons and traditions, what does come across as a recurring theme is the role of goddesses as the interceder. So for the Gnostics, Sophia as the divine wisdom is far more accessible than any male figure. Likewise to the Jews, Shekinah is the feminine power that represents the action of divinity on earth, in between humanity and Jehovah. As has already been shown, Mary is the ultimate interceder, having largely replaced Jesus in the Catholic church as the entity to approach if you want to get things done.

The attempt to make all goddesses aspects of one goddess may be an attempt to reclaim the universal goddess from the Christians, but it can be seen that they have actually been worshipping her long before the pagan revival, and the resurgence of the divine feminine has been going on for centuries.

Today there are countless groups of people all over the modern world who are working to awaken the worship of the Goddesses of antiquity again. From groups of feminist Womyn to Wiccan Covens, Goddess groups in Glastonbury and large festivals in London in which ceremonies are held for hundreds and thousands of people each year, bringing alive the worship of the Old Goddesses again. But we are still in the minority, and within that minority there is a great deal of disagreement on terminology, bad scholarship and sometimes dogmatic thinking being applied to the work we are doing.

Although we would never want to admit it, modern pagans of the twentieth and twenty-first century are striving to catch up with the Church of Rome when it comes to recognising the Feminine Divine. They may find themselves being subsumed beneath Marian worship if they cannot develop a coherence of thought and belief to match that of the Catholic church.

Diversity has its place, but when it is full of woolly thinking and petty dispute, it does not bode well for the pagan revival of the worship of the ancient goddesses.