Who on Earth is the Goddess?

Mother, not maker,
Born, and not made;
Though her children forsake her,
Allured or afraid,
Praying prayers to the God of their fashion, she stirs not for all that have prayed.

—Algernon Charles Swinburne, 1871

A couple decades after writing “Theagenesis: The Birth of the Goddess,” Oberon Zell and his life-partner, Morning Glory Zell, expanded on the concept of Gaean Spirituality in the essay “Who on Earth is the Goddess?” which combines academic discourse, poetry, and spiritual evangelism to make the case for a new ecofeminist religious movement distilled from the disparate elements of Neo-Paganism. The Zells open their essay by asserting the existence of a near-universal prehistoric religion dedicated to a single Great Goddess, an idea promoted by the Goddess Movement of the time. They locate this basic goddess worship in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America, suggesting that it was an expression of an intrinsic human understanding of the nature of the cosmos. Like the Gaea character in Marvel Comics (discussed previously), this Great Goddess was known in many manifestations and by many names, such as Ishtar, Isis, Yemanja, Kwan Yin, and Changing Woman. They go further, indeed, to agree with the British occultist Dion Fortune that all the diverse goddesses of the world’s pantheons are but manifestations of a universal feminine deity that operates on a cosmic scale.

The Zells describe this über-goddess in a poetic digression as Great Mother Nature: “Her womb is the quasar, the white hole through which all energy pours into creation, and Her all-devouring mouth is the black hole itself through which all matter is consumed to be reborn once again as between Her thighs the universe is squeezed from spirit.” They then play with the similarities between the words matter, mater, and mother and create an image of the Milky Way in the night sky flowing from the “galactic breast” of the “Star Goddess Nuit” but quickly return to more earthbound musings. The Earth Mother, Gaea, (our living world, as described in “Theagenesis”) is the offspring of this universal Mother Nature and has, as the essay illustrates, been traditionally envisioned as having three interrelated aspects. Foremost among these is the fertility-themed trinity of Maiden, Mother, and Crone—which they suggest may be personified by the Greek goddesses Aphrodite, Demeter (as mother of Persephone), and Hecate. Another prominent triad is the three Fates (Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos) of Greek myth and their Norse counterparts, the three Norns (Urd, Skuld, and Verdanda), who were said to administer the destinies of mortals. The nine Muses (of Greek mythology and later the roller-skating musical fantasy film Xanadu) are included as a trio of trios. The Zells even posit that such a triplication of the divine feminine survives in Christian theology as the much-lauded virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity.

However, despite this multiplicity and diversity and despite enjoying global dominance for nearly 30,000 years, worship of the Great Goddess (whether in the form of the Earth Mother or her cosmic matron) was suppressed with the rise of patriarchal monotheism in the Iron Age, which survives to the present in the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This idea is not unique to Oberon and Morning Glory Zell but can be traced back to the early 20th-century writings of the British scholar Jane Ellen Harrison, who was in turn inspired by European intellectuals of the Romantic tradition throughout the previous century. Historian Ronald Hutton traces this philosophical lineage in his book Pagan Britain, where he suggests it arose as a reaction against the Industrial Revolution. Actual archaeological evidence for such a global Neolithic matriarchal monotheism, he points out, is lacking. However, Hutton does not seek to discredit the Goddess Movement as a modern religion, only to show that their interpretation of the evidence for Neolithic practices is one of many possible readings. Therefore, while the academic / scientific underpinnings of the Zells’ justification for Gaean Spirituality are debatable, their call for a more feminist and ecological conceptualization of the divine remains compelling.

The Zells then turn their attention to re-stating many of the basic concepts regarding the Earth as a single living organism first presented in “Theagenesis,” connecting them with Native American animist beliefs and similar ideas in the work of 19th-century economic historian Arnold Toynbee, who warned of the threat to the environment resulting from the tendency to view the riches of the earth as “natural resources” to be exploited by mankind—a view unfortunately supported by the Bible’s Book of Genesis. Toynbee specifically cites the rise of patriarchal monotheism as the driving force behind the “recklessly extravagant consumption of nature’s irreplaceable treasures” and the pollution that results from their industrialized extraction. The Zells then attempt to describe the process by which patriarchal monotheism supplanted worship of the Great Goddess (matriarchal monotheism) by causing it to break down into polytheism. These individualized—and therefore weakened—goddesses could then be “married off” to gods and thereby be relegated to a subordinate position. They cite the case of the Hindu “Great Mother” Mahadevi, who they say was subdivided into the triple-goddess figures of Saraswati, Lakshmi, and Kali in order to be made the consorts of the dominant male deities Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, respectively. Also Rhea, goddess of Crete, was eventually split into various goddesses of the Greek pantheon. In this way, the Zells argue, the formerly revered figure of the Great Goddess came to be associated with the second-class status women were afforded in the rigidly patriarchal societies that arose in the Bronze Age, and the human race has drifted further from the sustainable way of the Earth Mother ever since.

This is of vital importance to Gaean Spirituality, the Zells explain, as Gaea is an immanent divinity in the pantheistic tradition and not a transcendent divinity as is the god of patriarchal monotheism. Whereas “God” is held to exist above or apart from the created universe (the very definition of “supernatural”), Gaea has a physical, temporal existence as the Planet Earth. “She is not an atavistic abstraction,” the authors make clear, “not a mystical metaphor, not a construct of consciousness.” Rather, she is a living being, of which we are a part—as our blood cells, rushing about with their daily chores oblivious to the greater whole, are a part of our human bodies. As such, Gaea is neither omnipotent nor indestructible but vulnerable to the ravages of environmental degradation. Should all life on Earth become extinct—say, if a runaway greenhouse effect creates conditions analogous to those on the planet Venus—then Gaea, too, will die. In the face of myriad environmental crises and the fierce resistance to taking effective measures to remedy them, the Zells see humanity’s only hope in a “total and electrifying change in consciousness,” which, they admit, would “take a miracle.” Nevertheless, they believe that the Neo-Pagan movement offers a path out of the darkness.

The Zells take a moment to express their frustration that this trail is not more well-blazed, despite the efforts since the 1960s of a variety of Pagan communities (by which they mean essentially any modern nature religion), including their own Heinlein-inspired Church of All Worlds. These groups seem to languish in obscurity, they complain, even though various feminist academics, such as Marija Gimbutas, Merlin Stone, Mary Daly, Riane Eisler, and Elizabeth Gould Davis—and even noted male authors such as Joseph Campbell, James Lovelock, and René Dubos—continually clamor for a new approach to religion and/or spirituality. They are heartened, at least, by the rise in popularity of Wicca, which they equate with European Shamanism, as a feminist alternative to mainstream religion. The Zells see an opportunity for a conjunction of Neo-Paganism, Goddess Spirituality, and the Deep Ecology movement to develop into something greater than the sum of its parts. They write, “What is struggling to be born from this blending of pathways is a truly planetary religious metaphor that will transcend all the tradition-specific patterns in the same way the idea of Neo-Paganism absorbed and united a multiplicity of wildly differing but basically polytheistic religious groups in the 1970s. Perhaps what we are looking for could be called Gaean religion.”

In closing, the Zells attribute the emergence of this Gaean awareness in part to the release of photographs of the Earth from space in the late 1960s and early 1970s, particularly NASA’s famous 1972 Blue Marble image of our planet nearly fully illuminated by the sun’s light. Through such images, they suggest, “we have been impelled towards planetary identification,” a necessary first step to understanding that all life on Earth comprises a single organism and thus to despoil the environment is to destroy ourselves. The culmination of this outer-space consciousness-raising is perhaps the 1990 Pale Blue Dot photo taken from the Voyager 1 space probe as it headed into the outskirts of the solar system. The image shows the Earth as a tiny speck suspended in a sunbeam against the empty blackness of deep space. Carl Sagan, who pushed for the photograph to be taken (as it had little scientific value), later observed, “To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.” Sagan’s comments show that the scientist and the Pagan practitioner can be allies at the very least, which is the essence of what I think of as Scientific Paganism. And just as Sagan was noted for popularizing his love of science through the television series Cosmos, the novel Contact, and various non-fiction writings, the Zells assert that the success of their Gaean movement is dependent on communication and education rather than the secrecy often associated with nature-based folk religions and the mystery cults of the ancient world. And so, despite the relatively small, unheralded, and disorganized nature of the Neo-Pagan movement in general and their Gaean Spirituality in particular, Oberon and Morning Glory Zell look to the coming millennium with optimism.

Now, a couple decades into the 21st century, the journey continues.


A version of the Zells’ essay can be found on the Church of All Worlds website.