The Embodied Goddess: Feminist Witchcraft and Female Divinityt †

This paper uses a phenornenological approach and descriptive analysis to examine the religion of feminist witches and women in the American Goddess movement. By drawing on interviews with participants in the field and focusing on three specific mythopoeic images used in religious rituals, it explores how these women use consciously created myths and symbols both to shape a framework of meaning that reinterprets the relationship between the spiritual and the material, and attempts to redefine power, authority, sexuality, and social relations. Ethnographic data for this paper were col' lected during a period of four years through participant observation and in-depth interviews with ferminist witches and priestesses of the Goddess.