Goddesses and the divine feminine: a Western religious history

Abstract

Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History. By Rosemary Radford Ruether. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Pp. ? + 382; acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 cloth, $18.95 paper) Contemporary popular culture is now so full of claims surrounding the divine feminine drat it's difficult to sort them out. Some ideas include that early human cultures were peaceful and productive because they worshipped goddesses; that the gnostic gospels preserve the idea of the feminine divine, and for that reason were excluded from orthodoxy; that the worship of the Virgin Mary is a continuation of this veneration, a form of feminist resistance to patriarchal oppression; that Hildegard of Bingen was an early feminist theologian; that the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe is really an ancient Aztec goddess, Tonatzin. Many of these claims have become dogma in their own right among practitioners of feminist spirituality and New Age religions. But is there any truth to them? Feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether comes to the rescue with this gem - a scholarly study of the female faces of the divine in their various iterations, from prehistoric times into the present, based on solid evidence rather than wishful thinking, and written with the insight of a religious historian. Ruether's central goal in this book is not to sort out the relative truth or fiction of competing claims, but to trace the history that connects ancient religions with contemporary feminist attempts to re-examine, revive and reclaim aspects of them for the purpose of building a more satisfying and just way of being in the world. As such, it grows out of her own lifelong experience as a both a theologian and a politically committed feminist. Her hope is that this book will be of value to feminists all along the religious spectrum, from Jewish and Christian spiritual feminists, to radical witches and neo-pagans, in that it illustrates their shared roots and common values and works to create alliances among them. But it will also appeal to a much broader audience seeking historically accurate information about putative links between early religions and contemporary adaptations of them. It would be ideal for use in classes on women and religion, and more broadly on Western religious history. Ruether started her career as a religious historian of the ancient Near East, and it's here that she begins her story by tackling the problems inherent in teasing out clues about gender and religious praxis from prehistoric archeological evidence, a partial record of material culture that is notoriously difficult to interpret. In order to properly contextualize contemporary archeological ways of understanding evidence, she must also present a history of earlier archeological theories of cultural and social evolution, including nineteenth-century models (and their twentieth-century redactions) that are often adopted uncritically and enthusiastically by some spiritual feminists. That she does this as clearly and judiciously as she does, despite lacking archeological training, is to her credit. …