Introduction

The seed of this project sprang from a panel discussion in which I was involved three years ago. The Pagan Activist Network sponsored the panel, and answered questions about general religious issues, along with members of Intervarsity Christian Fellowship and United Campus Ministry, as a means for students on campus to find out more about neopaganism and its beliefs. One of the questions we received that night lodged itself in the back of my mind and refused to depart. A young woman, noting that Christians were sustained in situations of exceptional suffering by their faith in the salvation offered by Christ, wanted to know what kept neopagans going in similar situations. I didn’t have a satisfactory answer for her. I hadn’t thought much about it; I was young, idealistic, and relatively new to my faith, and as such had not been exposed to a situation in which I would need that kind of support. The question refused to leave me, however, and when I found myself in need of a SIP topic, it seemed a natural choice. By this point, my personal spirituality had evolved from a broadly neopagan outlook to one that was more specifically Goddess-centered. I therefore decided to investigate the ways in which Goddess spirituality and its practitioners dealt with the problem of evil.

I quickly realized that, in order to discuss the ways in which Goddess spirituality provided a hope in the face of evil, I needed to know what “evil” meant. My Christian upbringing had given me some ideas, which I eventually distilled into a definition: evil is “a state of being outside divine favor, grace, or approval.” The more I considered that definition, though, the less applicable I found it to my situation. Goddess religion doesn’t deal much in “states” of being; the authors I consulted spoke of evil acts, or, more frequently, harmful acts, but didn’t refer to people or other living things as being “evil”. I soon became engrossed in the task of clarifying what “evil” is for those who practice Goddess religion.

It’s significant to note at this point that I was interested in clarifying this question for an audience greater than myself. I didn’t want to come up with a personal definition of “evil”; I wanted a definition that drew on the writings of the Goddess movement as a whole, something that would describe the experience of a broad range of people, not just myself. I wanted to study the collective experience of evil in Goddess religion. This desire brought me away from writing an autobiography, and steered me toward phenomenology, which examines experiences as a route to discovering something about the subject of those experiences. Although no study had yet been done of the phenomenology of evil in Goddess spirituality, Paul Ricoeur’s book The Symbolism of Evil had explored the topic in the Christian tradition, so I began my search with his work.

Examining Ricoeur’s work (and Paul Tillich’s work on symbols, from which Ricoeur draws heavily) gave me a firm methodological foundation for constructing a phenomenology. Ricoeur’s phenomenology of evil, however, proved inadequate to describe the the experience of Goddess religion. Ricoeur was concerned with characterizing the Christian experience of evil; his assumptions and typologies reflected this concern. Goddess spirituality clearly proceeded from a very different experience of evil, one that differed radically from the Christian tradition. It was obvious that a phenomenology of evil in Goddess religion would require a new set of definitions and categories.

With that requirement in mind, I began to examine the primary written expressions of the experience of Goddess spirituality; namely, the books written by practitioners and thealogians of the movement. Ricoeur’s phenomenology drew upon symbols and myths as the most spontaneous expressions of the Christian experience available to him. The Goddess movement, by comparison, is much younger and much less canonically oriented than Christianity and the religions out of which it grew. Consequently, the writings of the movement’s members form the most spontaneous expression of their experiences. I quickly discovered that “evil” was not a primary concern for these authors: many of them never used the word at all, nor did it appear in the indices of their books. Instead I found references to oppression, to systems of power and their function in society, particularly the way that power structures serve to oppress women. I began to realize that to examine the experience of evil in Goddess spirituality, I would have to conduct a phenomenology of oppression instead of one of evil.

Much as Ricoeur categorized the Christian experience of evil into three discrete experiences (defilement, sin, and guilt), I saw that the Goddess experience of oppression could be grouped into three fundamental categories. Estrangement is the experience of division: man from woman, mind from body, white from colored, God from creation. Estrangement leads to injustice, in which an estranged pair is prioritized, sacralizing one side of the dualism while demonizing the other. These two experiences constitute a psychological and spiritual oppression of women. When these attitudes are embodied in the physical world, a third experience arises: the experience of physical harm. The physical being of women is oppressed - economically, politically, and sexually. Taken together, these three experiences constitute a general experience of oppression shared by the women in the Goddess tradition.

I then returned to my original question: how do women in the Goddess tradition deal with evil, or, more in their terms, with oppression? I found that the Goddess tradition is engaged in the process of transforming society by creating an alternative to the power structures that facilitate oppression. Since they perceive that these structures are rooted in and justified by the symbols of our culture, they are engaging in the process of consciously creating a new symbol to guide human interaction: the symbol of the Goddess. The Goddess-symbol provides a way of apprehending the world that overcomes estrangement and injustice. Likewise, the ethics of Goddess spirituality work to counteract the experience of physical harm.

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