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Re-Imagining Inanna: The Gendered Reappropriation of the Ancient Goddess in Modern Goddess Worship
Abstract
Re-Imagining Inanna: The Gendered Reappropriation of the Ancient Goddess in Modern Goddess Worship examines the specifically gendered reconstruction of the ancient Mesopotamian deity Inanna in modern Goddess worship. This paper argues that the reconstruction of Inanna in modern Goddess worship is an imaginative process based upon unexamined gendered assumptions of what is properly feminine for a great goddess. The result of this process is a constructed image of Inanna that is incongruent with the personality of Inanna as imagined in ancient Mesopotamia. Moreover, this incongruence leads to an examination of the Pagan approach to history and an analysis of the sociological features present in contemporary Paganism that allows for these selective reconstructions.
Cyberhenge examines the use of Internet technology in shaping religious traditions and rituals. Cowan asks how and why Neopaganism has embraced the Internet in such an innovative and imaginative way.
Goddess feminism is a new emancipatory religion which appears to typify postmodern religion, but which, using Anthony Giddens' social theory, I prefer to understand as having a peculiarly late modern reflexive character. And it is, I suggest, Goddess religion's reflexivity that imposes immense strains on its capacity to be or become the world-altering religion most of its adherents would want it to be. This religion is founded within a modern political struggle to bring about the demise of patriarchy: a system of non-relation held to be global and structurally continuous over 5000 years. Goddess feminism is premised on the necessity of a collective moral confrontation with patriarchy and the planetary injustice and suffering it causes. And yet thealogians' reflexive criticism of the authoritative nature of traditions makes them unable to ground their religion in a fully collective, normative, ontological and moral account of the Goddess. Goddess feminists' struggle for sexual, economic and environmental justice may also be impeded by their configuration of the Goddess as a female trinity whose hypostases sacralise moral ambiguity and by their resistance to divine and human authoritative judgements. My task in this paper is not that of arguing for the truth or falsity of thealogical claims, but that of showing how Goddess religion's late modern reflexivity is both liberative and may ultimately stunt its own development.