Restoring the Goddess: Equal rites for modern women. - book review

Sociology of Religion, Spring, 2002 by Wendy Griffin

Restoring the Goddess: Equal rites for modern women, by BARBARA G. WALKER. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000, 422 pp. $25.95 (cloth)

Barbara C. Walker is probably best known for her Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, a treasured staple in the libraries of many feminists and Goddess celebrants. It is often used as the ultimate authority in the Goddess community on subjects as diverse as the origin of the belief in a cat's nine lives to the existence of "the matriarchate." In 1983, when the book first appeared, no one had attempted to focus on women, prehistory, myth and folklore to the extent that Walker did, and her leaps of faith and in places, outrageous assumptions, were not challenged. Women were hungry to learn about what they were calling herstory, and they devoured the book eagerly, usually without teasing apart fact from fiction. They still do.

Walker's latest book, Restoring the Goddess: Equal rites for modern women, is presented as scholarship on thealogy and, as such, was sent to Sociology of Religion for review. The book proposes to study Goddess thealogy (thea as is female divinity) by examining what female practitioners actually believe. It is organized around themes such as what is wrong with patriarchy, women's physicality and reproduction, rituals, images of divinity, and visions of the future. Each section begins with Walker's reflections on the topic and is followed by open-ended interviews with individual women that appear to support Walker's thesis.

Therein lies a major problem. We are never given any information on these women -- nothing on how they were selected or interviewed, no demographics, not how long they have been practitioners, not even the total number of women responding. It is unclear whether each response is even from a single woman. They are individuated in the chapters by a small graphic design which might suggest individual women or a way of grouping certain ideas together, and one woman may be represented several times. Nor is there any explanation of why on one topic there might be eight responses and another fifty-seven. Did other respondents fail to address that topic or simply repeat what was printed, or did they differ in an important way? We cannot cell if the women are representative of the Goddess community or hand-picked because their understanding supports Walker's. What is clear is that, with her many years in the Goddess community, her books and products, and her position as an authority, Walker's ideas on thealogy were de veloping long before this book was begun.

Her casual sense of scholarly writing is frankly disturbing. For example, she repeats at least three times (pages 81, 114, 167) that "millions" of people (twice she says specifically nine million) were put to death for the crime of witchcraft. But scholarship since the early 90s has consistently shown that this number, originally invoked 100 years ago by Matilda Joselyn Gage, is the grossest distortion. A different kind of problem is evident when Walker tells us that, "It is written that the Goddess's true firstborn took the form of the divine serpent" (p. 22) or that "ancients" believed that menstrual cycles were established by the Moon Goddess (p. 118) but she never tells us where it is written, what cultures or time periods she is talking about, or where she got this information, although she regularly refers to her own encyclopedia as a reference.

Walker also allows her own biases to distort both data and the conclusions drawn from them. For example, she points to studies that show a disproportionate profession of religious faith among incarcerated criminals, and believes this argues against those who claim that only the fear of God can make a person behave. Apparently it doesn't occur to her that a person might become religious in prison for a variety of reasons. Her strange conclusion from these studies is that atheists "tend to be law-abiding, tax-paying, responsible citizens, not inclined to criminal behavior" (p. 190). In another place, she argues without any attempt at proof that, "Arrogant princes of the church don't believe for a minute in Mary's unbiological existence, but they give her to the naive masses as a sop, to stave off the rebellion of the Goddess-hungry" (p. 352).

If Walker, who has a Ph.D., had represented this book as written for the trade, it would be one thing. But she presents the book as a scholarly one, and it fails on that count. It is, however, an interesting book, and the comments from some of the women fascinating, from their descriptions of how they use magic to how they experience the Goddess manifest in their daily lives. It is a book that will shape attitudes and beliefs among Goddess celebrants, and, as data, it is of interest to sociologists of religion.