ABSTRACT
A sceptic I met at a party several years ago, having listened to a potted account of my research, pronounced that feminist witchcraft/Goddess spirituality was a ‘designer religion’. It was a flippant and patronizing remark, but also fairly astute. While I would agree with Greenwood (2000a: 121) that ‘magic is often viewed by practitioners as a way of healing the individual from the effects of a fragmented rationalist and materialist world’, magical beliefs and practices are themselves an assemblage of fragments from numerous diverse sources. Goddess spirituality draws on prehistoric, classical, Celtic, ancient Egyptian, Nordic and Near Eastern goddess images, and invokes a wide range of goddesses from contemporary non-Western cultures with a vigorous and unabashed eclecticism. It draws on a range of philosophical perspectives and religious traditions: the holistic, cosmological worldview of the Greek philosophers, the Romantic view that nature is an organic totality, the Hegelian view which sought to transcend dualisms, the Hindu concept of karma with its recognition of continuous cycles of change (Morris 1987: 8), Jungian ideas about the collective unconscious and archetypes, and poststructuralist ideas about the collapse of metanarratives and the legitimacy, or inevitability, of pastiche. It draws on the women’s movement, the ecology movement, the peace movement, indigenous peoples’ myths and rituals, alternative healing, and aspects of New Age philosophies and therapies. It attracts women who are smart, arty, left-wing, right-brained,
into recycling and rebirthing, tofu and the tarot, who are committed to both personal empowerment and social transformation.
