The idea that prehistoric hunters and foragers, as they developed into farmers and agriculturalists, worshipped a goddess figure, has become a central tenet in New Age goddess movements. Archaeological discoveries indicate the importance of the female role in the fertility of crops. Rites to encourage crops to grow developed into fertility cults. She established the bond between animal fertility and plant fruitfulness. She regulated the seasons and the courses of the planets. In her original Phrygian form the Goddess is associated with mountains, hollows and wild places. She was the mistress of life and death, representing a unifying, cosmic, nurturing whole. Because the lunar cycle has the same periodicity as a woman’s menstrual cycle, worship of the goddess is a lunar religion. In time, however, society became more patriarchal and the peaceful goddess religion was replaced and suppressed by an aggressive, male, solar religion (1).
Conventional scholarship disputes (when it does not ignore) all of this. The academic view is that, far from dating back to prehistoric times, the Goddess is a social and cultural construction that can be traced back no further than nineteenth century France and Germany where it represented the imaginary feminine ideal of Romantic male writers. One of the key figures in this was the Frenchman Alphonse Constant, better known as Eliphas Levi. Levi’s work exerted a profound influence over André Breton as he developed the philosophy of surrealism. (2) Levi was a magician who saw that the imagination is not the creator of illusion but the illuminator of reality. He believed that Man was capable of overcoming all barriers and limits to attain ‘the full and entire conquest of his faculties and his future’.(3) Even death, the greatest of all apparent antinomies, was envisaged as lying on a continuum with life, to be viewed like the shedding of a garment; simply the movement of molecules towards liberation.
Levi developed the idea that human minds are not closed vessels but linked with other minds and the universal network of nature. Woman, with her supposed closeness to nature, held a privileged position in this regard; she was conceptualised as being in close contact with the transforming agents of the universe. To love a woman is to be, through her, close to magic power.
From Levi and the Romantic Movement comes the importance of women’s sexuality and her link with nature. Levi’s ideas were highly influential in the developing occult world of Victorian Paris and London. His writings were certainly known to Mathers and the founders of the Golden Dawn. From Levi and Mathers is but a short step to Robert Graves who, within the pages of The White Goddess (4) developed the idea of a tripartite moon goddess. From Graves it is but another short step to Gerald Gardner’s Wicca and subsequent derivatives.
Colquhoun dedicated a suite of drawings of dryads, and associated poems to the Goddess:
In 1971 I made a number of drawings based on the
automatic process known as decalcomania which
evoke the spirit of various trees: Beech, Rowan, Ash,
Willow, Oak, Vine and Silver Fir. Some of these, and the
poetic sequence, I offer to the White Goddess at a time
when wasteful technology is threatening the plant life
(and with it all the organic life) of earth and the
waters. (5)
Notes
1. Gimbutas, M. Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe. Thames and Hudson, London, 1974.
2. Balakian, A. André Breton: Magus of Surrealism. Oxford University Press, New York, 1971. Chapter three includes a discussion of Levi’s influence on Breton’s emerging theories.
3. Quoted by Andrews, N.J. La Mère Humanité: femininity in the Romantic socialism of Pierre Leroux and the Abé A-L Constant. Journal of the History of Ideas 2002, 63, 697-716.
4. Graves, R. The White Goddess Faber and Faber, London, 1948.
5. Colquhoun, I. Grimoire of the Entangled Thicket. Ore Publications, Stevenage, 1973.
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