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Dianic Wicca , also known as Dianic Witchcraft , [1] is a neopagan religion of female-centered goddess ritual and tradition. While some adherents identify as Wiccan , it differs from most traditions of Wicca in that only goddesses are honored whereas most Wiccan traditions honor both female and male deities.
While there is more than one tradition that calls itself Dianic, [3] the best known is the female-only variety, [1] founded by Zsuzsanna Budapest in the United States in the s. Dianic Wiccans of the Budapest lineage worship the Goddess , who they see as containing all goddesses, from all cultures; she is seen as the source of all living things and containing all that is within her.
They focus especially on healing themselves from the wounds of the patriarchy while affirming their own womanhood. Rituals can include reenacting religious and spiritual lore from a feminist standpoint, celebrating the female body, and mourning society's abuses of women. However, many other Dianic witches notably Budapest do not consider hexing or binding of those who attack women to be wrong, and actively encourage the binding of rapists.
Like other Wiccans, Dianics may form covens , attend festivals , celebrate the eight major Wiccan holidays , and gather on Esbats. Dianics may also gather in less formal Circles. It's the natural law, as women fare so fares the world, their children, and that's everybody. If you lift up the women you have lifted up humanity. Men have to learn to develop their own mysteries.
Where is the order of Attis? Not only research it, but then popularize it as well as I have done. Where are the Dionysian rites?
I think men are lazy in this aspect by not working this up for themselves. It's their own task, not ours. There is therapeutic value inherent in Dianic ritual—many women use it to overcome personal trauma and raise awareness about violence towards women, earning comparisons to feminist consciousness-raising groups in the s and 70s.
In one ethnographic study of such a ritual, women shifted their understanding of power from the hands of their abusers to themselves. It was found that this ritual had improved self-perception in participants in the short-term, and that the results could be sustained with ongoing practice. Dianics pride themselves on the inclusion of lesbian and bisexual members.
It is a goal within many covens to explore female sexuality and sensuality outside of male control, and many rituals function to affirm lesbian sexuality, [13] making it a popular tradition for women who have come out. Dianic Wicca developed from the Women's Liberation Movement and covens traditionally align themselves with radical feminism. These covens reject trans people who were born male. Aradia , or The Gospel of the Witches claims that ancient Diana, Aphrodite , Aradia, and Herodius cults linked to the Sacred Mysteries are the origin of the all-female coven and many witch myths as we know them.
The primordial feminine creative-preservative-destructive energy, Shakti , is considered to be the motive force behind all action and existence in the phenomenal cosmos. The cosmos itself is purusha , the unchanging, infinite, immanent, and transcendent reality that is the Divine Ground of all being, the "world soul".
Believe me, coming out of the "broom closet" is a one-way trip. The Mother Goddess, or Great Goddess , is a composite of various feminine deities from past and present world cultures, worshiped by modern Wicca and others broadly known as Neopagans. It seems that several groups around the country, in such places as Norfolk , [] Cheshire [] and the New Forest had set themselves up as continuing in the tradition of Murray's Witch-Cult, albeit with influences coming from disparate sources such as ceremonial magic , folk magic , Freemasonry , Theosophy , Romanticism , Druidry , classical mythology , and Asian religions. In Lewis, James R. Chinese Tibetic Sub-Saharan African:
This masculine potential is actualized by feminine dynamism, embodied in multitudinous goddesses who are ultimately all manifestations of the One Great Mother. Mother Maya or Shakti, herself, can free the individual from demons of ego, ignorance, and desire that bind the soul in maya illusion. Practitioners of the Tantric tradition focus on Shakti to free themselves from the cycle of karma.
The Mother Goddess, or Great Goddess , is a composite of various feminine deities from past and present world cultures, worshiped by modern Wicca and others broadly known as Neopagans. She is considered sometimes identified as a Triple Goddess , who takes the form of Maiden, Mother, and Crone archetypes. She is associated with the full moon and stars, the Earth , and the sea. In Wicca , the Earth Goddess is sometimes called Gaia. Carl Gustav Jung suggested that the archetypal mother was a part of the collective unconscious of all humans, and various Jungian students, e.
Erich Neumann and Ernst Whitmont , have argued that such mother imagery underpins many mythologies , and precedes the image of the paternal "father", in such religious systems. Such speculations help explain the universality of such mother goddess imagery around the world. The Upper Paleolithic Venus figurines have been sometimes explained as depictions of an Earth Goddess similar to Gaia. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see Mother Earth. Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology.
The Civilization of the Goddess Hodder, I. Religion in the Emergence of Civilization. The image of the Mother Goddess with which we are familiar today has its modern genesis in the writings of Johann Jakob Bachofen. In Bachofen published his famous study Das Mutterrecht in which he developed his theory that human society progressed from hetaerism, characterized by unrestricted sexual relations, to matriarchy, in which women ruled society, and finally to the most advanced stage, patriarchy.
Bachofen conceived of religious practice as progressing in a parallel manner from a belief in a mother goddess to a more advanced belief in a father god, associating belief in a mother deity with a primitive stage in the development of human society: Bachofen believed that the matriarchal form of social organization derived from the maternal mystery religions As we see with Bachofen, modern theories of the Mother Goddess have inevitably been shaped by modern cultural presuppositions about gender.
William Ramsay, the late nineteenth-century archaeologist, who was the first researcher to demonstrate that the principal deity of Phrygia was a mother goddess, drew heavily on Bachofen's theory Roller, Given these observations, Bachofen's repeated emphasis on the necessity of freeing oneself from the cultural prejudices of one's own time if one is to truly understand these ancient cultures takes on an ironic tone.
It is not only Bachofen and Ramsay, but many others after them, who assume the stereotypical femininity of the Mother Goddess. This was largely because of the belief that the worship of fertility goddesses was an important part of agricultural societies all over the world, and also due to a tendency to look at ancient remains through the lens of later-day Hinduism, in which goddess worship had an important place. However, scholars are now increasingly aware of the stylistic and technical differences among assemblages of female figurines.
Further, all goddesses need not have been part of a single goddess cult, and not all ancient goddesses were necessarily associated with maternity.
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In the light of such problems, the term 'Mother Goddess' should be replaced by the longer but more neutral phrase— 'female figurines with likely cultic significance. It is indeed possible that some were either images that were worshipped or votive offerings that were part of some domestic cult or ritual. However, not all female figurines necessarily had such a function.
Whether we are looking at human or animal figurines, in all cases, their possible significance or function has to be assessed, and cannot be assumed. Apart from their form, the context in which they were found is crucial. This lost civilization is usually portrayed as having been amazingly and precociously advanced, possessing technological skills as yet still not developed even by our modern civilization and paranormal capacities of which we are not even aware. This lost civilization or civilizations is usually presented as the mother culture of all subsequent, historically known civilizations, having passed down their knowledge to them.
The lost civilization was, tragically, destroyed, through either a natural cataclysm or some catastrophic technological mishap, and has been somehow hidden from us. There is no archaeological evidence of a supersophisticated civilization years ago—no gleaming cities, no factories powered by Earth energies [ The idea of the ascendancy of the Mother Goddess as the primeval deity can be traced back to nineteenth century culture theory, endorsed by Freud and Jung Parker Pearson The modern manifestation was given a huge impetus in the work of Marija Gimbutas , , To reduce Gimbutas's argument to simplicity, she viewed early Neolithic society as egalitarian, matrifocal, matrilineal, and focused on worshipping a Mother Goddess Tringham , as evidenced by females figurines found in Neolithic sites in the Near East and eastern Mediterranean region.
Few archaeologists support her notion for a number of reasons Meskell ; Tringham , for example. They maintain that the Mother Goddess is an assumption, not a theory, and certainly not a demonstrated thesis.
The critics argue that Gimbutas is blending modern myth, feminist ideology, and psychological theory unsupported by clinical research to impose the Mother Goddess archetype on past societies. Reviewers of that work McPherron ; Runnels find problems with the sample size four 5 x 5 m test units on the slope of a tell , use of dating methods, lack of explanation of field methodology, recording systems or lack thereof, omission of clear criteria for discerning interior versus exterior contexts, typology, statisticsit is hard to find a part of this work not negatively critiqued.
Wesler , pp.
While it is no longer an active scholarly theory, the issue of the Mother Goddess continues to be an exemplar for the problems of studying women in antiquity: Loraux in Duby, G. As the essays that follow suggest, what is more likely is that interpretations of female deities, their intersection with the roles of women in antiquity, and the place of these debates in modern society will be rewritten many times in the future. Talalay in James, S. For instance, the single child of Cybele was conceived upon her while she was in the form of a rock and was never reared by her see Southeastern Europe.