Goddess Spirituality and Nature in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

Participants in Goddess spirituality in New Zealand share two fundamental characteristics: their feminist political stance and their deep sense of connection with, love for and concern about the natural environment. Eschewing the essentialist formulation of women/nature, men/culture, they wish to dismantle all such dualisms, to advocate the embracing of Green philosophies and practices by all people, and to promote a worldview that honors the sanctity and inter-relatedness of all life. To some extent, these ideas have much in common with indigenous Maori ideas about nature, even though each belief complex is uniquely embedded in its own culture and unique relationship to landscape and history. Nonetheless, Goddess spirituality’s ideas about nature have a great deal more in common with worldviews that perceive the ‘natural world’ as entirely animate and intimately connected with humanity than they do with the ideas of modern capitalist societies, which reduce nature to an inanimate resource available for human exploitation.