THEALOGY

THEALOGY . In 1979 Naomi Goldenberg first used the word thealogy to denote feminist discourse on the Goddess (thea ) rather than God (theo ), proclaiming in her book Changing of the Gods (1979) that "we are about to learn what happens when father-gods die for a whole generation" (p. 37). Although father-gods are, in fact, alive and well in the world's religions, thealogy has become widely known to scholars of religion and gender and of emergent religion as a provocation to a spiritual and political shift away from the androcentric (male-centered) theological paradigm. Instead, thealogy offers a group of largely participant, experientially grounded texts that explore the many dimensions of female becoming: that of the Goddess, of women, and of nature as encompassing both of these.

Although thealogy is a product, at least in part, of the neo-romantic hippie movement of the 1960s and 1970s, it is also and more immediately a feminist project. Like Christian and Jewish feminist theology, thealogy developed from both the nineteenth-century proto-feminist vision of the feminine as a redemptive locus of moral and spiritual value and the sexual egalitarianism of the second wave secular women's movement. Rejecting the wholesale secularism of early second wave feminism, but drawing on the separatist elements of radical feminism, thealogy developed the feminist criticism of religion as the divinization of masculinity (patriarchy having, as Kate Millet once put it, "God on its side") not to relinquish the divine as such, but to repudiate exclusively masculine models of the divine.

Insofar as it serves the contemporary Goddess movement, thealogy might be said to be the discourse of a new women's religion (one of the very few living women's religions in the world today). Thealogy has emerged from a network of groups and journals, and from a small but growing academic literature with a predominantly North American, British, German, and Australasian readership. Although thealogy can now be studied in universities up to the doctoral level, it is itself resistant to the reintroduction of any totalizing monotheism or to any merely feminized conception of God. Rather, it is derived from feminist reflection on women's experience and on the sacral power of femaleness. There is no authoritative tradition or corpus to which the thealogian must defer. It is a nonprofessional, non-normative discourse both producing and produced by spiritual feminist ritual practice and celebration.

Thealogy's focus on female moral, spiritual, symbolic, and biological difference and its privileging of the divine and human bond between mothers and daughters have made it hospitable to lesbians and any who protest the erasure of the Goddess and her replacement by an exclusively male God styled as king, lord, father, or as a nonpersonal power whose transcendental otherness empties the natural, embodied world of its value. It is notable, however, that thealogy is not without its male adherents and sympathizers. These are especially to be found in the pagan elements of the men's spirituality movement and in modern Witchcraft, or Wicca—arguably the only Western religion that honors the female as an embodiment of the divine. Indeed, thealogy is often, but not invariably, a function of feminist Wicca, where women ritually align their energies with those natural and biological forces whose "Goddess-power" can be channeled or "drawn down" to the purposes of creative change.

However, not everyone in the Goddess movement is willing to espouse a thealogy. There is little doubt that a significant proportion of Goddess feminists would regard thealogy as the arrogation of their experience by an elite minority of feminist academics. Precisely because it is a discourse, thealogy might also seem epistemically superfluous—women already find and know the Goddess in the processes of their own embodiment and in the very fabric and energies of the natural world immediately around them.

The Distinction Between Thealogy and Feminist Theology

Thealogy is something of a boundary discourse. There are those on the gynocentric or woman-centered left of Jewish and Christian feminism who would want to term themselves theo/alogians because they find the vestiges of the Goddess or "God-She" within their own traditions as Hochmah, Shekhinah, Sophia, and other "female faces" of the divine. Others would consider thealogy to be inherently pagan in that paganism already honors a female natural/divine principle (albeit one whose powers are balanced by a male generative principle). Paganism also celebrates the transformatory power of female sacrality and repudiates the monotheistic (masculine) legal dispensation of salvation and (masculine) saviors offering redemption from the sin that is so often premised on a redemption from female sexuality.

While it shares much of paganism's religious orientation, thealogy and late-twentieth-century feminist theology have in common an original political impetus and an ecofeminist, relational, inclusivist attempt to reclaim women's history and female experience—especially that of mothers. Both thealogy and feminist theology are in sharp opposition to patriarchal conflict and economics. There is, however, a long-standing and regrettable mutual hostility between some Goddess feminists and Christian feminists. The latter are critical of thealogy's supposed accommodation of goddesses who represent patriarchal constructs of the feminine that are subordinate to male deities. Christian and other feminists are also critical of what they consider to be thealogy's escapist historiography and its tendentious interpretation of traces of goddess worship in texts and landscapes. Thealogy's supposed ethical polarization of the masculine and the feminine is also rejected as unduly essentialist. For feminists in the biblical traditions, God may be like a mother, but is not herself the Mother. Likewise, thealogy's celebration of a divinity whose will is located in and mediated by natural forces, as well as its apparent detachment of women from the history of thought and culture, is widely considered by other feminists (both secular and religious) to be unhelpful to the cause of women. An ecological account of femaleness and of change seems to confirm the traditional patriarchal derogation of women as subrational and properly marginal to the political and historical process.

Christian and Jewish feminist theology countermands the gynophobia and misogyny of its traditions, persevering with faiths considered originally or essentially liberative. Thealogy, by contrast, argues that these traditions cannot make sense of or do justice to a woman's personal and collective experience; patriarchal religion is not merely inhospitable to women but also spiritually and politically harmful.

Concepts of the Goddess

Thealogy can be monotheistic, polytheistic, or nontheistic in character. The nonsystematic, nondogmatic fluidity of its conception of the Goddess allows it to move freely between technical distinctions considered, in any case, to be artificial. Most thealogy, however, postulates a single Goddess—"the Goddess"—in whom all the female divinities named in the world's past and present religions inhere. She is one who might be petitioned and who might reveal herself to the subject in dreams, visions, and the imagination.

The Triple Goddess invoked by feminist Wicca is probably the most characteristic of popular thealogy. Here the Goddess wears three aspects: maiden, mother, and crone. Considered the first of the world's religious trinities, the Triple Goddess hypostatizes the three aspects or stages of women's lives as they pass through girlhood into maturity and motherhood and on into postmenopausal old age. The Triple Goddess exemplifies how all change—both creative and destructive—is part of a cyclic and interdependent natural/divine economy. Incorporating all possibilities, she is not omniscient, morally perfect, or omnipotent.

For others—especially the thealogical avant-garde of the late 1970s and 1980s—the Goddess is not a real external divinity but a psychologically and politically liberating archetype offering women a new sense of self-worth. A variation on this theme is the view that the Goddess—the power and dance of being—is inseparable from the fullness of a woman's own becoming. Mary Daly, for example, uses the word Goddess as a metaphor or "verb" naming women's post-patriarchal self-realization and active participation in the powers of female being. Since thealogy can be contingent upon its author's shifting emotions and stage of life, thealogians are generally content to subscribe to a fluid combination of all of these views.

Carol P. Christ and Starhawk are the world's most influential thealogians. While Starhawk's thealogy informs and emerges from the communal political context of San Francisco's Reclaiming Network, Carol Christ's work offers the most focused thealogical discussion. Like many other Goddess feminists, Christ disowns goddesses who are or have been revered in patriarchal religions as mere aspects or attributes (sometimes violent or death-dealing) of a supreme male deity or who are subordinate to other male gods. Instead, in Rebirth of the Goddess (1997, pp. xv–xvi), she experiences and theorizes the Goddess as the reconnective power of intelligent embodied love that is the ground of all being: a source of hope and political and ecological healing that will reunite the world and the divine. Her foundational article "Why Women Need the Goddess" (1979) enumerates the reasons why women realize their spiritual and political power from celebration of the Goddess. However, for Carol Christ, the Goddess is also one to whom one might pray and who cares about the individual. Most recently, her book She Who Changes (2003) offers a relational thealogy that draws on the process philosophy of Charles Hartshorne to reimagine the changing world as the body of Goddess/God.

Thealogical History and Ethics

Thealogy construes the historical process as belonging to the nonlinear history of nature, which is itself a natural history of the Goddess and therefore of each female body. The female body—whether that of a woman or the earth itself—is a generative site of the transformative power of which time itself is a part. But since patriarchy is founded upon the continual historical and psychological "murder" of the Goddess and the appropriation of her power, history also has a temporal sequence: a history of erasure and suppression, whose knowing is mediated not so much through textual evidence as by one's ontological and physical situation in the landscape and sites associated with the Goddess. Thealogical history tells an archaeological, political, and ecological story of which the subject's own story is an inalienable part.

Although thealogical time is primarily and essentially nonlinear, its periodizations are derived from the work of feminist scholars such as Marija Gimbutas, Merlin Stone, Barbara Walker, and others who claim, on largely archaeological grounds, that the female divine was originally universally revered in apparently peace-loving matrifocal cultures dating from about 30,000 bce. By about 2000 bce invasions of Indo-European warriors were destroying the cult of the Great Mother, which went underground by the fifth century ce with the ascendancy of early Christianity, only to re-emerge in the priestesshoods and individuals who have discovered the Goddess in the late twentieth century. This temporal scheme has a narrative and psychological function in helping women to "remember" a time when their sacral, biological, and cultural power was revered.

Yet not all thealogians are persuaded that this historiography is a necessary condition of thealogy; even those inclined to support the thesis of a primary and universal cult of the Goddess also allow that its value may be less historical than inspirational. It may be that a primary function of thealogical historiography is to offer a mythography that relativizes patriarchal religion and politics as neither original nor necessary to the world order, but rather an ecologically and spiritually unsustainable aberration.

It is arguable that thealogy's organicist conception of life is inimical to the establishment of ordinary ethical obligations and norms. The thealogical construal of creation and destruction as a single natural/divine process organically regulated by change rather than law can appear to weaken the distinction between good and evil. Traditional religious notions of human transcendence and perfectibility become, at best, otiose. Nonetheless, evil is not entirely naturalized by thealogy. The ecological connections between all living things and the meta-intelligence of nature impose a consequentialist practical ethic of restraint, generosity, and care. Cast as patriarchy itself, evil is politicized and prophetically named in ritualized direct action as the domination and exploitation of the Goddess/earth that tears the life-giving connections of her web and all that depends on it.

Bibliography

Christ, Carol. "Why Women Need the Goddess: Phenomenological, Psychological, and Political Reflections." In Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, edited by Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow. New York, 1979; reprint, 1992. An influential article that draws on the work of Clifford Geertz to outline the religious, political, and psychological reasons why women should, in its author's view, turn to Goddess spirituality.

Christ, Carol. Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality. Reading, Mass., 1997. Exemplifies thealogy's commitment to academic research that derives meaning from the significant interconnections between theory and the scholar's own spiritual journey.

Christ, Carol. She Who Changes: Re-Imagining the Divine in the World. New York, 2003. Draws on the process philosophy of Charles Hartshorne to present a thealogy in which the relational power of "Goddess/God" is immanent in a changing world.

Daly, Mary. Outercourse: The Be-Dazzling Voyage. London, 1992. An autobiographical approach to radical feminist philosophy, in which the post-Christian "leap beyond patriarchal religion" that Daly makes in her earlier books is further elaborated.

Eller, Cynthia. Living in the Lap of the Goddess: The Feminist Spirituality Movement in America. Boston, 1993. Provides an overview of the Goddess tradition and a detailed phenomenological account of the feminist Spiritualist movement in the United States.

Griffin, Wendy, ed. Daughters of the Goddess: Studies of Healing, Identity, and Empowerment. Lanham, Md., 2000. A collection of predominantly theoretical essays written by American and British Goddess feminists writing as academics, practitioners, or both.

Goldenberg, Naomi. Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions. Boston, 1979. A groundbreaking thealogical text, using Jung and other thinkers to urge women to envision the end of patriarchal religions and to experience liberation through new woman-centered spiritualities such as feminist Wicca.

Long, Asphodel "The One or the Many: The Great Goddess Revisited." Feminist Theology 15 (1997): 13–29. Examines the different conception of female deity in the contemporary Goddess movement.

Mantin, Ruth. "Can Goddesses Travel with Nomads and Cyborgs? Feminist Thealogies in a Postmodern Context." Feminist Theology 26 (2001): 21–43. Correlates postmodern feminist accounts of female subjectivity and identity with the thealogical poetics of the "spiraling" journey of the female self.

Raphael, Melissa. Thealogy and Embodiment: The Post-Patriarchal Reconstruction of Female Sacrality. Sheffield, U.K., 1996. A study of Goddess feminism's construal of the female body's transformative power.

Raphael, Melissa. Introducing Thealogy: Discourse on the Goddess. Sheffield, U.K., 1999; Cleveland, 2000. An accessible introduction to Goddess feminist thealogy, historiography, politics, and practice.

Reid-Bowen, Paul. "Reflexive Transformations: Research Comments on Me(n), Feminist Philosophy, and the Thealogial Imagination." In Gender, Religion, and Diversity: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, edited by Ursula King and Tina Beattie, pp. 190–200. London and New York, 2004. A discussion of thealogy and Goddess feminism by a committed male feminist.

Salomonsen, Jone. Enchanted Feminism: Ritual, Gender, and Divinity Among the Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco. London and New York, 2002. Discusses Starhawk's teaching and her continuing influence since the formation of the Reclaiming Collective in 1979. Includes ethnographic descriptions and a theological discussion of the beliefs and practices of their new religious movement.

Starhawk. The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Religion of the Great Goddess. New York, 1979. A pivotal work of thealogical historiography in which Starhawk presents Wicca as a Goddess-worshipping religon that empowers women today.

Melissa Raphael (2005)