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] (North America, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand) during the 1970s.^[3] The movement grew as a reaction both against Abrahamic religions,^[2] which exclusively have gods who are referred to using masculine grammatical articles and pronouns,^[4][5] and secularism.^[6] It revolves around Goddess worship and the veneration for the divine feminine, and may include a focus on women or on one or more understandings of gender or femininity.^[2]

The Goddess movement is a widespread non-centralized trend in modern Paganism, and it therefore has no centralized tenets of belief.^[7] 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, 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] 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.^[8][9] 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.^[10]

The estimated population of the movement is only in the U.S. 500,000 and in the U.K. 120,000.^[11]