gians are generally content to subscribe to a fluid combina-
tion of all of these views.
Carol P. Christ and Starhawk are the world’s most influ-
ential thealogians. While Starhawk’s thealogy informs and
emerges from the communal political context of San Francis-
co’s Reclaiming Network, Carol Christ’s work offers the
most focused thealogical discussion. Like many other God-
dess feminists, Christ disowns goddesses who are or have
been revered in patriarchal religions as mere aspects or attri-
butes (sometimes violent or death-dealing) of a supreme
male deity or who are subordinate to other male gods. In-
stead, in Rebirth of the Goddess (1997, pp. xv–xvi), she experi-
ences and theorizes the Goddess as the reconnective power
of intelligent embodied love that is the ground of all being:
a source of hope and political and ecological healing that will
reunite the world and the divine. Her foundational article
“Why Women Need the Goddess” (1979) enumerates the
reasons why women realize their spiritual and political power
from celebration of the Goddess. However, for Carol Christ,
the Goddess is also one to whom one might pray and who
cares about the individual. Most recently, her book She Who
Changes (2003) offers a relational thealogy that draws on the
process philosophy of Charles Hartshorne to reimagine the
changing world as the body of Goddess/God.
THEALOGICAL HISTORY AND ETHICS. Thealogy construes
the historical process as belonging to the nonlinear history
of nature, which is itself a natural history of the Goddess and
therefore of each female body. The female body—whether
that of a woman or the earth itself—is a generative site of
the transformative power of which time itself is a part. But
since patriarchy is founded upon the continual historical and
psychological “murder” of the Goddess and the appropria-
tion of her power, history also has a temporal sequence: a his-
tory of erasure and suppression, whose knowing is mediated
not so much through textual evidence as by one’s ontological
and physical situation in the landscape and sites associated
with the Goddess. Thealogical history tells an archaeological,
political, and ecological story of which the subject’s own
story is an inalienable part.
Although thealogical time is primarily and essentially
nonlinear, its periodizations are derived from the work of
feminist scholars such as Marija Gimbutas, Merlin Stone,
Barbara Walker, and others who claim, on largely archaeo-
logical grounds, that the female divine was originally univer-
sally revered in apparently peace-loving matrifocal cultures
dating from about 30,000 BCE. By about 2000 BCE invasions
of Indo-European warriors were destroying the cult of the
Great Mother, which went underground by the fifth century
CE with the ascendancy of early Christianity, only to re-
emerge in the priestesshoods and individuals who have dis-
covered the Goddess in the late twentieth century. This tem-
poral scheme has a narrative and psychological function in
helping women to “remember” a time when their sacral, bio-
logical, and cultural power was revered.
Yet not all thealogians are persuaded that this historiog-
raphy is a necessary condition of thealogy; even those in-
clined to support the thesis of a primary and universal cult
of the Goddess also allow that its value may be less historical
than inspirational. It may be that a primary function of
thealogical historiography is to offer a mythography that rel-
ativizes patriarchal religion and politics as neither original
nor necessary to the world order, but rather an ecologically
and spiritually unsustainable aberration.
It is arguable that thealogy’s organicist conception of life
is inimical to the establishment of ordinary ethical obliga-
tions and norms. The thealogical construal of creation and
destruction as a single natural/divine process organically reg-
ulated by change rather than law can appear to weaken the
distinction between good and evil. Traditional religious no-
tions of human transcendence and perfectibility become, at
best, otiose. Nonetheless, evil is not entirely naturalized by
thealogy. The ecological connections between all living
things and the meta-intelligence of nature impose a conse-
quentialist practical ethic of restraint, generosity, and care.
Cast as patriarchy itself, evil is politicized and prophetically
named in ritualized direct action as the domination and ex-
ploitation of the Goddess/earth that tears the life-giving con-
nections of her web and all that depends on it.
SEE ALSO Feminist Theology; Gender and Religion, over-
view article and article on History of Study; Goddess Wor-
ship; Paganism, Anglo-Saxon; Patriarchy and Matriarchy;
Wicca; Witchcraft.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Christ, Carol. “Why Women Need the Goddess: Phenomenologi-
cal, Psychological, and Political Reflections.” In Womanspirit
Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, edited by Carol Christ
and Judith Plaskow. New York, 1979; reprint, 1992. An in-
fluential article that draws on the work of Clifford Geertz to
outline the religious, political, and psychological reasons
why women should, in its author’s view, turn to Goddess
spirituality.
Christ, Carol. Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist
Spirituality. Reading, Mass., 1997. Exemplifies thealogy’s
commitment to academic research that derives meaning
from the significant interconnections between theory and the
scholar’s own spiritual journey.
Christ, Carol. She Who Changes: Re-Imagining the Divine in the
World. New York, 2003. Draws on the process philosophy
of Charles Hartshorne to present a thealogy in which the re-
lational power of “Goddess/God” is immanent in a changing
world.
Daly, Mary. Outercourse: The Be-Dazzling Voyage. London, 1992.
An autobiographical approach to radical feminist philoso-
phy, in which the post-Christian “leap beyond patriarchal re-
ligion” that Daly makes in her earlier books is further elabo-
rated.
Eller, Cynthia. Living in the Lap of the Goddess: The Feminist Spiri-
tuality Movement in America. Boston, 1993. Provides an
overview of the Goddess tradition and a detailed phenome-
nological account of the feminist Spiritualist movement in
the United States.9100 THEALOGY