of history – her-story – which tends to hark back to a hypothesized prepatriarchal utopia of peace, egalitarianism, Goddess worship and matriarchy.[1] This version of events is often bolstered by (contentious) archaeological evidence.[2] One sees this version of history most clearly in Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade (1987). Eisler advances the notion that matriarchal ‘partnership’ models of society preceded and later competed with, patriarchal ‘dominator’ forms of social organization, and were oppressed by them in the end. Carolyn Merchant anticipates Eisler with a critique of the development of the dual systems of patriarchy and capitalism. She argues for twin historical constructions of woman as nature and man as culture.[3] She contends that nature came to be viewed as ‘wild’, ‘fecund’ and ‘disordered’ in comparison to the increasingly neat ordered logic of the cultural realm. For Merchant, the conflict between the carnal, ‘disordered sexuality’ of the female and the cerebral male rationality catalysed the scapegoating of women during the witch craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – the mythologized ‘burning times’ which codified the normative gender roles of modernity and the dominance of men.[4]
Whatever the authenticity of these histories, the equation of
women and nature has influenced the form, content and direction of both
Goddess spirituality and the wider Pagan movement.[5] In particular, as
women attempt to forge new ways of being that are independent of
- ↑ See Charlene Spretnak, Lost Goddesses of Early Greece, Boston: Beacon 1978; Marija Gimbutas, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe: Myths and Cult Objects, Berkeley: University of California 1982; The Language of the Goddess, San Francisco: Harper & Row 1989; Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor, The Ancient Religion of the Great Cosmic Mother of All, Trondheim: Rainbow 1981; The Great Cosmic Mother, San Francisco: Harper & Row 1987; Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our Story, Our Future, San Francisco: Harper and Row 1987; Asphodel Long, In a Chariot Drawn by Lions, London: Women’s Press 1992. Critiques of the Gimbutasian position have been outlined by, for example, Ronald Hutton, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles, Oxford: Blackwell 1991, 37-42; Philip G. Davis, Goddess Unmasked, Dallas, TX: Spence Publishing Co. 1998.
- ↑ For example, Gimbutas, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe; The Language of the Goddess.
- ↑ Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, San Francisco: Harper Collins 1980; also Sherry S. Ortner, ‘Is female to male as nature is to culture?’ in Michelle Z. Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (eds.), Woman, Culture and Society, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1974, 67-87.
- ↑ Marianne Hester, Lewd Women and Wicked Witches: A Study of the Dynamics of Male Domination, London: Routledge 1992; Loretta Orion, Never Again the Burning Times: Paganism Revived, Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press 1995.
- ↑ Cf Salomonsen, Enchanted Feminism, 69-70.
