Searching for Reflections: Women's Paths to a Feminist Pagan Spirituality Group

Abstract

Increasingly women are participating in groups which challenge masculinist images of the religious cosmos. In Australia there is evidence of a flourishing 'feminist spirituality movement' across the range of traditional religious institutions as well as in pagan or goddess oriented groups. The power energising these groups is the need to identify and/or create a symbolic cosmos that affirms women's ways of being and translate these into an ethos that will transform human structures of relating. However, primarily, women seek the emotional and spiritual support of feminist spirituality groups because they affirm women's ways of being. This paper presents the results of a preliminary study that sought women's reasons for joining a pagan women's spirituality group which operated in Brisbane from 1992-1999. It identifies the dynamics of internalised voices of oppression as well as the outer questing of women, who, having rejected Christianity, seek a spiritual worldview that can reflect and affirm some deeply felt sense of female being which they experience