discourse both producing and produced by spiritual feminist
ritual practice and celebration.
Thealogy’s focus on female moral, spiritual, symbolic,
and biological difference and its privileging of the divine and
human bond between mothers and daughters have made it
hospitable to lesbians and any who protest the erasure of the
Goddess and her replacement by an exclusively male God
styled as king, lord, father, or as a nonpersonal power whose
transcendental otherness empties the natural, embodied
world of its value. It is notable, however, that thealogy is not
without its male adherents and sympathizers. These are espe-
cially to be found in the pagan elements of the men’s spiritu-
ality movement and in modern Witchcraft, or Wicca—
arguably the only Western religion that honors the female
as an embodiment of the divine. Indeed, thealogy is often,
but not invariably, a function of feminist Wicca, where
women ritually align their energies with those natural and
biological forces whose “Goddess-power” can be channeled
or “drawn down” to the purposes of creative change.
However, not everyone in the Goddess movement is
willing to espouse a thealogy. There is little doubt that a sig-
nificant proportion of Goddess feminists would regard
thealogy as the arrogation of their experience by an elite mi-
nority of feminist academics. Precisely because it is a dis-
course, thealogy might also seem epistemically superfluous—
women already find and know the Goddess in the processes
of their own embodiment and in the very fabric and energies
of the natural world immediately around them.
THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN THEALOGY AND FEMINIST
THEOLOGY. Thealogy is something of a boundary discourse.
There are those on the gynocentric or woman-centered left
of Jewish and Christian feminism who would want to term
themselves theo/alogians because they find the vestiges of the
Goddess or “God-She” within their own traditions as Hoch-
mah, Shekhinah, Sophia, and other “female faces” of the di-
vine. Others would consider thealogy to be inherently pagan
in that paganism already honors a female natural/divine prin-
ciple (albeit one whose powers are balanced by a male genera-
tive principle). Paganism also celebrates the transformatory
power of female sacrality and repudiates the monotheistic
(masculine) legal dispensation of salvation and (masculine)
saviors offering redemption from the sin that is so often
premised on a redemption from female sexuality.
While it shares much of paganism’s religious orienta-
tion, thealogy and late-twentieth-century feminist theology
have in common an original political impetus and an
ecofeminist, relational, inclusivist attempt to reclaim
women’s history and female experience—especially that of
mothers. Both thealogy and feminist theology are in sharp
opposition to patriarchal conflict and economics. There is,
however, a long-standing and regrettable mutual hostility be-
tween some Goddess feminists and Christian feminists. The
latter are critical of thealogy’s supposed accommodation of
goddesses who represent patriarchal constructs of the femi-
nine that are subordinate to male deities. Christian and other
feminists are also critical of what they consider to be
thealogy’s escapist historiography and its tendentious inter-
pretation of traces of goddess worship in texts and land-
scapes. Thealogy’s supposed ethical polarization of the mas-
culine and the feminine is also rejected as unduly essentialist.
For feminists in the biblical traditions, God may be like a
mother, but is not herself the Mother. Likewise, thealogy’s
celebration of a divinity whose will is located in and mediat-
ed by natural forces, as well as its apparent detachment of
women from the history of thought and culture, is widely
considered by other feminists (both secular and religious) to
be unhelpful to the cause of women. An ecological account
of femaleness and of change seems to confirm the traditional
patriarchal derogation of women as subrational and properly
marginal to the political and historical process.Christian and Jewish feminist theology countermands
the gynophobia and misogyny of its traditions, persevering
with faiths considered originally or essentially liberative.
Thealogy, by contrast, argues that these traditions cannot
make sense of or do justice to a woman’s personal and collec-
tive experience; patriarchal religion is not merely inhospita-
ble to women but also spiritually and politically harmful.CONCEPTS OF THE GODDESS. Thealogy can be monotheis-
tic, polytheistic, or nontheistic in character. The nonsyste-
matic, nondogmatic fluidity of its conception of the Goddess
allows it to move freely between technical distinctions con-
sidered, in any case, to be artificial. Most thealogy, however,
postulates a single Goddess—“the Goddess”—in whom all
the female divinities named in the world’s past and present
religions inhere. She is one who might be petitioned and who
might reveal herself to the subject in dreams, visions, and the
imagination.The Triple Goddess invoked by feminist Wicca is prob-
ably the most characteristic of popular thealogy. Here the
Goddess wears three aspects: maiden, mother, and crone.
Considered the first of the world’s religious trinities, the Tri-
ple Goddess hypostatizes the three aspects or stages of
women’s lives as they pass through girlhood into maturity
and motherhood and on into postmenopausal old age. The
Triple Goddess exemplifies how all change—both creative
and destructive—is part of a cyclic and interdependent natu-
ral/divine economy. Incorporating all possibilities, she is not
omniscient, morally perfect, or omnipotent.For others—especially the thealogical avant-garde of the
late 1970s and 1980s—the Goddess is not a real external di-
vinity but a psychologically and politically liberating arche-
type offering women a new sense of self-worth. A variation
on this theme is the view that the Goddess—the power and
dance of being—is inseparable from the fullness of a
woman’s own becoming. Mary Daly, for example, uses the
word Goddess as a metaphor or “verb” naming women’s post-
patriarchal self-realization and active participation in the
powers of female being. Since thealogy can be contingent
upon its author’s shifting emotions and stage of life, thealo-THEALOGY 9099