This is a version of a talk I gave at the "Women and the Divine" conference in 2007. As I recall there were about 90 women delegates and 6 men. In the book that formed the conference proceedings I was the only male contributor, something I am still chuffed about. The book chapter was a chance to present my five-fold scheme of religious development as elaborated on in my book Secularism: The Hidden Origins of Disbelief. (Note that while I have chosen an image of Mother Meera to represent women's spirituality, the essay does not reference her.)
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This paper suggests that Abrahamic monotheism in the form of Judaism, Christianity and Islam has become a constraint on women seeking a feminine spirituality. The West has made an identification “religion = God” that needs to be abandoned as other types of religion become better-known. The breaking down of this assumption is shown to remove much of what is patriarchal and alienating about religion for women, while the spiritual “flat-land” of postmodernism is shown to be unhelpful. Instead a five-fold scheme of the spiritual life is presented in which monotheism stands as an equal alongside shamanism, goddess polytheism, warrior polytheism and the transcendent.
Keywords: monotheism, shamanism, polytheism, goddess, women’s spirituality, transcendent, Irigaray.
First published: Book chapter in Howie, Gillian and Jobling, J’annine (Eds.), Women and the Divine: Touching Transcendence, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Year: 2009, no of words: 7,334
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