Ruether - Goddesses and the divine feminine: a Western religious history

My interest in goddesses of the ancient Near East and Greece goes back to 1954, when I began studying the religious worldviews of these societies. and various religious movements, such as the mystery religions of the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman worlds, in which Cybele, Isis, and other goddesses were central. It became evident to me that the Hebrew religion and Christianity, far from simply repressing and leaving behind these pagan religious worldviews, had appropriated and reinterpreted them. The Christianity that emerged in the first to fourth century was, in many ways, a reinterpreted synthesis of the religious worldviews of the ancient Mediterranean world.

In studying the Hebrew Bible and early Christianity side by side with ancient paganism, I found myself attracted to the prophetic traditions that sided with the poor and oppressed and denounced the rich and powerful. As I became involved in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, this spiritual lineage undergirded my commitment to justice. Although the ancient pagan religions that I had been studying seemed to lack this prophetic social justice tradition, I nevertheless continuedto regard them as offering valid spiritual worldviews, as did my mentors, such as Robert Palmer, who frankly preferred ancient paganism to Christianity.

I began to think in terms of complementary spiritualitiespagan, prophetic, and contemplative. Pagan spirituality, typical of most indigenous religions, focuses on the renewal of the earth and human life within the changing seasons. Prophetic spirituality focuses on the struggle to restore just and harmonious relations among humans and with the earth in a covenantal relation with a creating and redeeming God, over against a world dominated by great systems of oppression and injustice. Contemplative spirituality withdraws from the illusions of transitory existence and seeks to unite the soul with the permanent source of reality.

I saw ancient Judaism building on pagan spirituality and reinterpreting it in the light of a historical and prophetic viewpoint. In the Hellenistic era, Jewish thinkers such as Philo appropriated Neoplatonic thought and used it to develop a mystical hermeneutics and a contemplative practice of Judaism. Christianity also built on and reinterpreted these many layers of spirituality. In its focus on ascetic, monastic life, it emphasized the contemplative path for more than a millennium, but it never lost the seasonal spirituality on which the church year was based. Periodically, prophetic spirituality was recovered in order to struggle against systems of injustice, including those within the church itself. Today, modern ecological movements have rediscovered the spirituality of earth renewal, marrying it to prophetic critique. Thus, each of these spiritualities not only has a distinct validity but also continually interacts with the others in new and creative ways.

In 1968, a feminist critique of male-dominated societies started to emerge in the civil rights movement. In the early sixties, I had already questioned the way Catholicism treated women's sexuality and reproductive role.

In 1972, I was invited to teach for a year at Harvard Divinity School under the Chauncey Stillman Chair of Roman Catholic Studies.the Paleolithic and Neolithic female figures that were said to represent this Mother Goddess.

I was surprised and intrigued when my students, almost all feminist women, were repelled by these images. The large breasts, bellies, and buttocks of these figures, with truncated hands and feet and a head that lacked facial features, struck them as exploitative images of the female. To their minds, the societies that made these images valued women's bodies as a source of sex and nurture but did not value women's person or agency. The students argued that these prehistoric images depicted a woman as all buttocks, breasts, and belly, not as a person with facial features who saw, thought, or spoke, not as a person who moved around on her own two feet and took charge of things with her hands.

Until then, I had assumed that the existence of these ancient female figurines was proof that women had been respected and had wielded power in these ancient matriarchal, or at least prepatriarchal, societies. Later in the 1970s, a new movement of Goddess religion would emerge that would again interpret these ancient figurines as testimony of a positive view of women. For example, Anne Barstow, in her article The Prehistoric Goddess, talks of being thrilled by these images and feeling that, for the first time, her female body had been affirmed.)as evidence of a time when women held leading positions in society and were revered and worshipped as primary exemplars of the divine. But my students' negative reaction to these same images made me aware that both of these responses are projections from our modern context and that neither view may have much to do with what the creators of these images actually had in mind.

Also in the 1970s, I began to read in the emerging field of feminist anthropology, which questioned the entire theory of matriarchal origins and explored the more complex ways in which gender and male-female relations developed in various societies. I also became aware of how much the concept of an original matriarchal society, superseded by patriarchy, was itself a product of nineteenth-century European societies marked by their own acute conflicts between masculine and feminine constructions of genderconflicts that reflected the beginning of the feminist movement and the efforts to marginalize and repress it. In the 1950s and early 1960s, I had encountered this theory of matriarchal origins in the works of classical archaeologists and historians, and I now began to reread these accounts more as products of their own European context and less as reliable accounts of prehistoric antiquity.