First Unitarian Universalist Society of Albany

"A-Historical Wicca"

Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore October 28, 2001

READINGS

From Philip G. Davis's book, Goddess Unmasked: The Rise of Neopagan Feminist Spirituality:

The Goddess movement is based on a distinctive view of history. Goddess literature posits a sort of three-stage scheme: golden age gynocentric Goddess cultures at the origins of human history; a relatively recent fall from glory into barbarous patriarchy; and an imminent New Age in which the true and foundational values of the Goddess civilization will be reasserted, saving us from violence and ecological disaster. The New Age represents a radical change from the present system, with new beliefs and values, and even new forms of awareness and spiritual perception.

This scheme, which I call the neopagan paradigm, allows us to make yet another set of comparisons. Secularism is usually wedded to belief in human progress-if we permit science to go its untrammeled way, it will gradually remove the greatest obstacles to human fulfillment and provide us with more and better goods and techniques as we proceed, although in and of itself progress has no fixed goal. Biblical religion is founded on the view that God does have an ultimate end in store for the universe as a whole and for every individual in particular; the timing and the manner of the end, however, are entirely his prerogatives.

All three points of view look for a happier future. They differ on whether we will reach it by continuing to progress on our present course, by adopting a revolutionary change in our beliefs and values, or by orienting ourselves toward a transcendent being who will achieve his own purposes in his own time.

Goddess movement espouses divine immanence, an intuitive and experiential approach to truth, a subjective style of moral relativism, and a view of history which I have dubbed the neopagan paradigm. It sets itself against traditional biblical religion, which affirms a transcendent creator and the consequent need for revelation, moral absolutism founded on the revealed will of the creator, and an eschatological view of the course and destination of history. Though the opposition is not always so sharp, the Goddess movement also presents itself as an alternative to secular materialism, which is characterized by a denial of the spiritual, an emphasis on empiricism and rationalism at the expense of feeling and intuition, an objective and value-free moral relativism, and a goal of continued progress in the same vein as we have come to know over the past two centuries. (Page 99)

From Cynthia Eller's book The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won't Give Women a Future:

¼origins thinking usually rests on a rather curious (though also quite common) notion of "the natural." According to this view, there is a way of living and thinking that is in harmony with our "natural" proclivities, and there was a time when we effortlessly lived like this. This way of being is precultural, instinctual. Life since then, by contrast, is false, constructed. To know who we really are, to decide what we must do to foster our happiness and that of the rest of the ecosystem, we need to be in dialogue with who we were: which is at the same time who we are truly supposed to be. It is this kind of thinking that imagines that by observing how foraging peoples live, we will know how we ourselves should live. If they breastfeed their children for four years, then so should we; if they eat a diet high in protein and fiber, then so should we; if they honor motherhood and worship an earth goddess, we can do no less if we want to be true to our "nature." But it should be obvious that when we reach foraging cultures, we have not reached "nature": we have merely uncovered other cultures, ones which mediate as thoroughly between themselves and any imagined human "nature" as ours does (though in quite different ways). As discussed earlier, it is simply not possible to find human nature "uncontaminated" by culture, no matter how far back one looks in human evolution. (Page 183)

SERMON

We live in a time of dissatisfaction with Jewish, Christian and Islamic monotheism, especially among those who gather here on Sunday morning. Two familiar sources of this dissatisfaction arise from the progressive evolution in the status of women and the regressive devolution in the viability of our planet to support human life. The inferior and subservient portrayal of women in those religions’ leadership, practices and sacred texts does not inspire women in their struggle for a more egalitarian societ y or in seeing themselves as leaders in that effort. These traditional monotheistic understandings enshrine a vision of self-serving planetary domination arising from seeing this world as an instrumental stepping stone to an eternal heavenly existence. There is precious little inspiration for the person for whom the planet itself is sacred. There is little guidance and inspiration for people who wish to rescue our planet and restore its viability for future generations.

These contemporary religious needs are driving energies behind the tremendous growth of Wicca, Neopaganism and Goddess worship in the last thirty years. We should not be surprised that changing human visions and needs drive religious inspiration and creativity. The nomadic Israelites' experience of population control by Egypt inspired Moses and Exodus. The Prophets responded to Babylonian captivity. Jesus balanced having to deal with the rebellion against the Romans and the Jewish attraction to Greek culture. Mohammad and his tribal people struggled to adapt to encroaching empires, and social decay and corruption in Mecca. Times of large social change and unrest drive a search for new visions to lead people out of troubled times. Inspired religious leaders always seem to arise to meet the challenge, tapping into the ever-present ferment of alternative religious ideas crying out in the wilderness for attention.

I've been watching the development of new spiritualities within Unitarian Universalism with mixed feelings. On one hand, I'm one of the revolutionary prophets bringing Buddhist thought into Unitarian Universalism and encouraging us to focus on spiritual practice as a way to improve the quality of life for ourselves and for the planet. While I have found great value and meaning in a synthesis of Unitarian Universalism, I know it is not for everyone. Unfortunately, Buddhism has some mixed messages in it for women. The meditation practice I advocate is transmitted to the West through a monastic tradition. Although in Chinese and Tibetan Buddhism one finds positive images of women, they are few and far between. Not that the core of the Buddha's teaching is misogynist but rather its core message is more gender neutral.

Goddess worship, on the other hand, is full of positive images of women. The image of the divine as sexual and pro-creative, material and embodied, healing and renewing, affirms the whole of women's identity and life experience, not just a piece. Goddess worship is this worldly and affirms the planetary web of interdependence we celebrate in Unitarian Universalism. As an eco-feminist vision of religion, Goddess worship is hard to excel.

My ambivalence about Goddess worship may have roots in the fact that I'm a man. Not that I don't worship the feminine at times in the form incarnated in my wife Philomena. But there are women's life experiences that inspire powerful spiritual feelings such as pregnancy and childbirth that I will never have. I'll never experience menses or menopause. Just as women feel excluded from some of the phallic metaphors of patriarchal religion, I also feel excluded from women's mysteries.

As unique religious embodiments teaching common themes about the value of human existence and the sacred possibilities within it, I'm just fine with women and men having different yet parallel paths of religious expression. I'm even fine with the fact that some men may find more meaning in a matriarchal Goddess centered path and a woman in a patriarchal God centered path. Where I get a little defensive is when one path asserts its superiority over the other.

Every religious tradition has to figure out some way to claim its authority to attract adherents. One of the powerful ways to assert that authority is to lay claim to an ancient tradition and to innovate within it. Judaism reaches back to the creation of the world and the Garden of Eden. Christianity adopts the Torah then re-labels it the Old Testament and attaches to it the New Testament. The Christian scriptures are a multileveled reinterpretation of the Jewish scriptures, an interpretation not welcomed by the Jews I might add. Mohammad took them both as sacred text but came up with his own interpretation of their messages and added his own unique ideas. Each tradition wants to make the claim that it is the heir of the real message God has been revealing and his former prophets haven't quite got it right yet.

Some leaders in the Goddess movement felt the urge to do the same thing. But instead of reinterpreting Jewish, Christian and Islamic scriptures once again, they reached back to a time before them and laid claim to an ancient Goddess worshiping matriarchal tradition that was wiped out by patriarchy three to five thousand years ago. Hinted at in cave paintings, archeological artifacts, and mythology and knitted together by modern feminist analysis, this lost heritage is the missing ingredient in our male dominated culture that must be restored and replace patriarchal religion.

Have any of you heard this theory of patriarchy defeating a matriarchal prehistory that dated back tens of thousands of years? I've grown up during a time when this thinking was popularized first by Elizabeth Gould Davis in her book titled The First Sex published in 1971, by people like Mary Daly in Beyond God the Father and Riane Eisler in The Chalice and the Blade, just to name a few authors. Being Unitarian Universalist and a sensitive guy always open to new ideas, I'm embarrassed to say I've accepted this revisionist history fairly uncritically. I've even preached about it.

What alerted me to question this theory was an article in the Atlantic Monthly in January titled, "The Scholar and the Goddess." Two books were cited, one by Cynthia Eller and the other by Phillip Davis, that evaluated the evidence for the matriarchal theory and traced the history of Goddess worship and Wicca. I bought them both and studied their arguments.

It is important to note right away that Wicca is not the rediscovery of an ancient pre-Christian religious tradition. Few followers of Wicca even claim that. Davis charts its precursors in the esoteric practices of Alchemy, the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons during the time of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Wicca, in its contemporary form, comes from the design of two men, Gerald B. Gardner and Aleister Crowley during the last 100 years. The tradition of Goddess worship is much older than Wicca and should be considered separately.

The evidence of Goddess worship and matriarchal society in prehistory is found in four primary places: archeological finds, art, mythology and ethnographic information collected about contemporary indigenous people. Eller points out at the outset how difficult it is to look at four thousand year old artifacts and figure out what they mean. Imagine an archeologist five thousand years from today finding a copy of Cosmopolitan, filled with glamorous pictures of women and few pictures of men. Wouldn't that possibly lead you to believe women were worshiped if you couldn't decipher the text?

An important source of evidence arguing for Goddess worship is found in the many primitive figurines that have been found with breasts and big hips and a lack of many statues of men although phallic images are frequently found. While many cave paintings depict hunting, spirals and triangles, interpreted as female symbols are also found. Caves and even some ancient architecture in Malta are interpreted as representing the female body. There are a number of myths from around the world that describe a loss of female power to men, suggesting a time when women had more equal power with men.

The problem with all this evidence is the much greater preponderance of evidence for patriarchal domination in most places around the world. Eller systematically works her way through each argument and undermines it. I've also read a detailed response to her book that debates her in some areas fairly effectively. I don't have the time this morning to get into all the details of their scholarly disputes, although some of them are quite interesting.

However you read the meager evidence we have, whether there were a few examples of matriarchy and probably far more examples of patriarchy or an egalitarian social structure ten thousand years ago, I don't think it really matters that much what actually happened. In fact, some contemporary Goddess worshiper criticize Eller as attacking theories that have been abandoned fifteen years ago.

The bigger mistake is to look backward to a better time and thus justify some regressive change in the present. Many fundamentalist religious traditions do this very thing. They envision a golden age at some time in the past that we have deviated from and we must return to. The problem with this backward gauze is its selectivity. When people look back to the good old days, say, in the 1950's, they selectively forget the repression, the racism, the fear of nuclear war, the diseases that had no treatment or cure. There are few times I'd want to return to in the past two thousand years if I were Jewish. Gays and Lesbians also have little in the past to revere. While Goddess worship may have taken place before the spread of Indo-European influenced languages, it almost surely was done along side the worship of the spirits of animals, thunder and rain gods in a polytheistic pantheon full of deities and spirits enchanting the world.

Current feminist thinking need not be projected into prehistory to build a convincing case for the weaknesses of patriarchal rule and justify moving toward a more egalitarian society. Trying to claim superiority for matriarchy or patriarchy are both losing arguments. The re-enchantment of the world can happen as an innovation in the present rather than a restoration of the past.

The witch Starhawk has some great insights for us this morning in a rebuttal she wrote to the Atlantic Monthly article. They wouldn't publish her comments, but I found them on the web:

Goddess religion is not based on belief, in history, in archaeology, in any Great Goddess past or present. Our spirituality is based on experience, on a direct relationship with the cycles of birth, growth, death and regeneration in nature and in human lives. We see the complex interwoven web of life as sacred, which is to say, real and important, worth protecting, worth taking a stand for. At a time when every major ecosystem on the planet is under assault, calling nature sacred is a radical act because it threatens the overriding value of profit that allows us to despoil the basic life support systems of the earth. And at a time when women still live with the daily threat of violence and the realities of inequality and abuse, it is an equally radical act to envision deity as female and assert the sacred nature of female (and male) sexuality and bodies.

I'm a big believer in seeking truth through one's own experience. This is the foundation of Buddhist practice. The truths ancient women discovered are also true today. The cycles of life have unique content but follow a common pattern from birth to death set by our biology, by immutable physical laws, by social patterns driven by our brain's architecture and chemistry.

So what value can those ancient artifacts have? I spoke with a few Goddess worshiping members of our congregation this past week to better understand how the evocative art of the Minoans, the sculptures of armless and legless women's bodies, the mythic stories speak to them. They all agreed that the historical piece wasn't that important to them. What inspired them came through the images. When you live in a culture that pegs you one down from men, to see these images works against the oppression and instills a sense of value, meaning and possibility that may not have been there before. As a woman, to experience your body as sacred, to have your sexuality affirmed rather than reviled, to have feminine life transitions celebrated rather than demonized is tremendously energizing and affirming.

Hear how Starhawk describes it:

Archaeologists may never be able to prove or disprove [contemporary feminist] theories, but the wealth of ancient images she presents to us are valuable because they work -- they function elegantly, right now, as gateways to that deep connected state. We may never truly know whether Neolithic Minoans saw the spiral as a symbol of regeneration, but I know the amazing, orgasmic power that is raised when we dance a spiral with two thousand people at our Halloween ritual every year. I may never know for certain what was in the mind of the maker of the Paleolithic, big bellied, heavy breasted female figure that sits atop my computer, but she works as a Goddess for me because my own creativity is awakened by looking at her every day.

This kind of affirmation of expanded possibilities for women and men is integral to the Unitarian Universalist vision we practice here. Our religion, forged in the merger of Unitarianism and Universalism almost forty years ago, in many ways is very, very new too. There is no historical precedent for the kind of religion we are creating. We are not a religion of a prophet or book or revelation. The Unitarians and the Universalists have been steadily moving away from orthodoxy and into new ways of envisioning religion since our inception. Goddess worship, as Starhawk describes it, fits well with our innovative approach to spirituality.

We live in a yeasty time for the rising up of new ways to find meaning for our lives that may or may not have resonance with traditional religion. Through our experiment, our experience and the fruits of our efforts, we will discover new ways to worship that affirms and gives life expressed in masculine and feminine images of the holy. Let us not get hung up on which image is superior and focus on the value and meaning both images can bring to and guide our religious journey.