Goddess Unmasked - Review

By Philip G. Davis. Spence Publishing, New York, 1998. ISBN 0-9653208-9-8. 418 pp. Hardcover, $29.95.

One of the fastest-growing new religions today is a neopagan tradition termed "Goddess spirituality." It is especially popular among New Age disciples and radical feminists but its teachings are accepted at least in part by a large segment of society. The Goddess whispers a seductive tale of a golden age in a distant past. A paradise supposedly existed in Europe and probably elsewhere during the Neolithic era (fans of the Goddess greatly prefer that dignified-sounding term to the more comprehensible "New Stone Age"). Supposedly, there was little or no conflict, little or no social hierarchy, and most especially, no gender discrimination or sexual inequality. The reason these Goddess societies were such paradises, we are told, was because they were "gynocentric" (woman-centered), perhaps even actually "matriarchal." Indeed, the U.N. Fourth Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 featured a full-size "reconstruction" of a supposed "ancient matriarchal village," complete with a giant pair of female breasts, one above the other, to guard the entrance.

The only problem with this tidy picture is that it is wholly unsupported by sound scholarship, rejected by virtually all professional scholars whose field of expertise lies within the Goddess's claims. With few exceptions, however, these scholars are reluctant to speak out too forcefully against Goddess misinformation for fear of being branded "anti-feminist." Consequently, the Goddess claims have seldom been critically examined. With Goddess Unmasked, we now have a book that brings together the best refutation of rampant Goddess nonsense, written by a professor of religious studies at the University of Prince Edward Island in Canada. Davis observes that "we do not possess a single translated text" from any of these supposed major Goddess cultures, leaving anyone who is so inclined free to attribute to those vanished societies whatever social arrangements they are most eager to promote in our own.

Indeed, a cynic might suggest that the Goddess can only reign supreme over societies in which no one can read or write. (But some movements are so irrational that they are impossible to satirize. Neurosurgeon Dr. Leonard Shlain suggests exactly that in The Alphabet vs. The Goddess: when logical left-brained patriarchs invented writing, it doomed the intuitive, right-brained Goddess cultures!)

Today Goddess misinformation has entered the curriculum in far more places than most people realize. The Goddess actively promotes "alternative medicine," especially in schools of nursing. Davis quotes from one prominent neopagan book: "Women have always been healers, and the knowledge of healing - of aura work, colors, herbs and homeopathy, reflexology, midwifery, massage, crystals, and trance states - have always been part of the goddess' mysteries." The Goddess misrepresents the history of religion, depicting it as a struggle between warm and nurturing female-oriented religions and exploitative, death-dealing male-dominated ones; conventional scholarship knows nothing of this supposed struggle, or indeed of those categories of religions. (The Goddess Kali, worshipped widely in India, demanded human sacrifice. She ruled over a society in which a person's caste was fixed at birth, and widows were burned on their husband's funeral pyre. The Goddess writers, notes Davis, present their evidence highly selectively.) Indeed, the Goddess misrepresents the entire history of civilization, portraying it as a struggle between early utopian, female-dominated societies, and later violent, hierarchical and patriarchal ones; professional historians dispute that there ever was a "matriarchal" or "woman-centered" stage of civilization.

Perhaps most seductively of all, the Goddess misrepresents her own history, claiming to be the heir of an unbroken line of covert pagans and druids who secretly preserved the Goddess's occult healing ways since remote antiquity despite Christian persecution. Davis convincingly traces the origin of the contemporary Goddess movement not to classical antiquity but to nineteenth-century French and German Romanticism. "Nothing about the Goddess myth correlates with what we know of the ancient civilizations which her devotees claim as their foremothers; everything, however, has clearly identifiable roots in the modern subcultures which began with Romanticism and the nineteenth-century occult revival." In Romanticism, "the supreme importance of feelings, and the purity of the primitive," were emphasized.

"The prized Romantic values of emotion, intuition, affinity with nature, and boundless love coincided with the qualities which traditional stereotypes had already assigned to women."

In his version of Faust, Goethe wrote of mysterious, otherwise-unknown beings called "The Mothers," whose power Mephistopheles acknowledged to be far greater than his own. Goethe concluded that work with his enigmatic and famous line, "The Eternal Feminine draws us on high." Works by utopian social reformers like the Count of Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Auguste Comte, Jules Michelet, Alphonse Constant, and others, enormously influential in their day, promoted a viewpoint Davis describes as "the Romantic idealization of women as spiritually pure channels of love, intuitively connected to nature." These utopians, who sought not merely to improve society but to create a literal paradise on Earth, suggested that the key to re-establishing Eden lay in the redemptive powers of woman as messiah. Indeed, one French Saint-Simonist group proclaimed in 1832 the imminent appearance of a female messiah, and symbolically kept an empty chair for her to preside over their meetings. When she failed to appear in France, a vision showed her appearing in Constantinople in 1833, resulting in an expedition to search for her there; she was never found.