19 Facts About Goddess movement

Goddess movement includes spiritual beliefs or practices which emerged predominantly in North America, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand in the 1970s.

The movement grew as a reaction to perceptions of predominant organized religion as male-dominated, and makes use of goddess worship and can include a focus on female people, or on one or more understandings of gender or femininity.

Goddess movement is a widespread, non-centralized trend in Neopaganism, and therefore has no centralized tenets of belief.

Since the 1970s, Goddess Spirituality has emerged as a recognizable international cultural movement.

In 1978 Carol P Christ's widely reprinted essay "Why Women Need the Goddess, " which argues in favor of the concept of there having been an ancient religion of a supreme goddess, was presented as the keynote address to an audience of over 500 at the "Great Goddess Re-emerging" conference at the University of California, Santa Cruz; it was first published in The Great Goddess Issue of Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics .

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The Goddess movement has found voice in various films and self-published media, such as the Women and Spirituality trilogy made by Donna Read for the National Film Board of Canada.

Mythological sources of the Goddess movement are often often considered modern reconstructions of ancient myths that predated a "patriarchal period, " a theory influenced by the Kurgan hypothesis and, therefore, very little would have been written about them.

Many Goddess movement authors agree and describe Goddess movement as, at one and the same time, immanently pantheistic and panentheistic.

Theological variations that characterize the Goddess movement can be classified into two: the views that describe the Goddess as a metaphor and those that consider the Goddess as a deity.

The former emerged from among Jewish and Christian adherents and maintains that the Goddess movement serves as the means of talking about, imagining, or relating to the divine and this is demonstrated in the push to recover the feminine face of God based on scriptural and historical sources.

The Maiden aspect of the Goddess movement is the archetype of a young woman or a child, representing independence and strength; the Mother aspect is the archetype of a nurturing mature woman; and the Crone aspect is the archetype of an old woman that represents wisdom, change, and transformation.

Crone aspect of the Goddess movement is understood by some to be destructive at times, some consider it to contain both positive and negative imagery and to present an ethical quandary.

Goddess movement's presented a theory of the transformation of prehistoric cultures in which the local goddess was primary and the male god, if any, derived his power from the goddess.

The Goddess movement is often portrayed with strong lunar symbolism, drawing on various deities such as Diana, Hecate, and Isis, and is often depicted as the Maiden, Mother, and Crone triad popularized by Robert Graves .

Goddess movement's is the author of The Witches' Creed, which lays out the basics of Wiccan religious belief and philosophy; including the polarity of the God and the Goddess as the two great "powers of Nature" and the two "mystical pillars" of the religion.

Wicca and Neopaganism, and to some extent the Goddess movement, were influenced by 19th-century occultism, such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, as well as the Romantic movement in which both male and female were valued and honored as sacred, in contrast to and perhaps in reaction to mainstream Christian spirituality, especially if veneration of Mary by most Christians is not considered.

In Wicca the Moon is the symbol of the Goddess movement and the Sun is the symbol of the God; and the central liturgical mystery and ritual act is "The Great Rite" or Hieros Gamos, which is a symbolic union of the God and the Goddess movement, as the primal male and female powers of the cosmos.

Many of those in the Goddess movement become involved in ecofeminism, and are concerned with environmental and ecological issues.

The former is sometimes mistaken as a subcategory of the latter due to the way the goddess movement draw from many resources that are New Age in character, including esoterica, mystery traditions, magic, astrology, divinatory techniques, and shamanism.