Modern Manifestations of Goddess Worship
Pop Psychology
The gods and goddesses of Greek mythology make convenient emblems for all
sorts of abstract and, sometimes, ill-defined ideas.
Jean Shinoda Bolen has written a book entitled Goddesses in
Everywoman: A New Psychology of
Women (1984) in which she attempts to assess a variety of common
female character types and neuroses interms of the principal Greek
Olympian goddesses. Every woman, she states, has goddesses within her, and
(usually) one of these goddesses will be the dominant element in her
psychological makeup: she will "be" an amorous Aphrodite, a chaste
Artemis, or a
motherly Demeter. What these goddesses actually are is left rather vague
by Bolen. She invokes Jungian theories of the
archetype to bolster her
ideas, but does not become very specific about the scientific basis of her
theory. The book was nevertheless popular with readers, so much so that
Bolen was moved to publish a sequel,
Gods in Everyman : A New Psychology of Men's Lives and
Loves (1989).
True Believers
Bolen's books suggest that the goddesses of the Greek pantheon possess a
certain rather ill-defined reality, but stop well short of actual worship
of the goddesses as external beings. There are, however, people who do
worship the gods and, especially, the goddesses of classical mythology.
They call themselves Pagans, Neo-Pagans, Witches, or Wiccan, and they
appear to be among those who have taken full advantage of WWW to spread
their message and maintain a sense of community. You can learn about them
from zseveral sites, including
a Pagan FAQ site, Cogweb, a site maintained by an
organization called Covenant of the Goddess, and other sites. These
organizations do not draw upon Greek mythology alone in defining their
belief systems, but rather employ a sycretism not unlike what we have
seen in other historical periods. A page devoted to The Dark
Goddess illustrates this point very clearly.
Gaia
The Gaia hypothesis is one opf the farthest-reaching mythological
movements in modern culture, involving as it does the most potent of
modern mythologies, science, as well as elements of political activism
and a powerful ancient myth. The basic idea behind the Gaia movement is
that the Earth is not merely a rock but a living organism, and all the
biological entities living on the Eazrth, including human beings, are in
some way part of this larger organism. This idea was first articulated by
James E. Lovelock, a British ecologist, in 1979, but it has found
many
proponents and opponents since that time. Some of these have been
documented on The Earth 2 Web
Page.
created 1/22/97