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Charlene Spetnak and Earth Goddess Worship

December 5, 2008

Modern western society is largely consumed by a static human cycle of life and death but gives little recognition to the cycle of rebirth inherent in nature. Charlene Spetnak attributes this oversight to the rise of patriarchal religions and the subsequent downfall of traditional Earth Goddess worship which had prevailed in pre-Abrahamic traditions. Spetnak argues that “The Goddess, as a metaphor for divine immanence and the transcendent sacred whole, expresses ongoing regenerations with the cycles of her Earthbody” (442). Just as the womb is the sacred vessel that allows the continuance of humanity, the earth is the sacred vessel that facilitates all life.

“… Goddess spirituality is the perceptual shift from the death-based sense of existence that underlies patriarchal culture to a regeneration-based awareness, an embrace of life as a cycle of creative rebirths, a dynamic participation in the processes of infinity” (442)

Sustainable human coexistence with the earth is often sabotaged solely by a limited frame of reference. When a single lifetime or a single generation is considered independently from all lives or all life, we lose our primary rationale for preserving our environment. Spetnek fervently rejects this narrow mindset and advocates Goddess worship to draw oneself “from the fragmentation and lonely atomization of modernity to the deepest levels of connectedness”. From this footing we’re capable of looking beyond ecological dominance and working not “in opposition to nature but as a potentially harmonious extension of nature” (442).

Filed under: Perspectives on the Environment