Goddess movement

The Goddess movement is a revivalistic Neopagan religious movement^[1][2] which includes spiritual beliefs and practices that emerged primarily in the United States in the late 1960s^[1] and predominantly in the Western world^[2] during the 1970s.^[3][4] The movement grew as a reaction both against patriarchal Abrahamic religions,^[2] which exclusively conceive their gods as males who are referred to using masculine grammatical articles and pronouns,^[5][6] and secularism.^[7] It revolves around Goddess worship and the veneration for the divine feminine,^[8] and may include a focus on women or on one or more understandings of gender or femininity.^[2][8]

The Goddess movement is a widespread non-centralized trend in modern Paganism, and it therefore has no centralized tenets of belief.^[9] Beliefs and practices vary widely among Goddess worshippers, from the name and the number of goddesses worshipped to the specific rituals and rites that are used.^[2] Some, such as Dianic Wicca,^[8] exclusively worship female deities, but others do not. Belief systems range from monotheistic to polytheistic to pantheistic, and encompass a range of theological variety similar to that in the broader Neopagan community.^[2][8] Common pluralistic belief means that a self-identified Goddess worshipper could theoretically worship any number of different female deities from various cultures and religions all over the world.^[10][11] Based on its characteristics, the Goddess movement is also referred to as a form of cultural religiosity that is increasingly diverse, geographically widespread, eclectic, and more dynamic in process.^[12] According to a 2000 survey, the estimated population of adherents to the Goddess movement consists of 500,000 people in the United States and 120,000 people in the United Kingdom.^[13]