The Goddess Movement

Six years ago I wrote a post outlining what the PUA community referred to then as “Chick Crack“. It was a pretty straight forward post that I delved into just to explain why playing to women’s propensity to believe in the spiritual – or what women would consider spiritual – is an effective technique in Game. I always thought it was funny how accurate this presumption about women was when I came across it.

Of all the strippers I’d ‘dated’ in the past every one subscribed to some form of non-mainstream spiritualism. This girl Angie I used to bang kept Tarot cards in her pink lady’s devotional Bible, another professed to be a psychic; in fact the only people I’ve ever known who self-seriously wanted me to believe they were in fact psychic were all women.

[…] For the stripper set this seems to be par for the course, but I wish I could say this chick-crack phenomenon was limited to just women who had some vacuous spiritual/emotional hole in their lives to fill. No, all women (yes I said all) are predisposed to the intrigue that metaphysical imaginings sparks in them. If it smacks of secret, covert knowledge, privy only to a chosen few, then you’ve got an attentive listener in a woman. UFOs, palm reading (always a classic), psychic premonition, ‘gifts of prophecy’, really anything that hints at knowledge beyond the ordinary is fair game. Chick Crack is not just limited to off-brand spiritualisms either, you’ll find that far more women than men will develop (conveniently) an affinity for, and are more invested in, religion than men.

In the wake of the Anthony Bourdain “suicide“, and the scramble to absolve Asia Argento of any complicity in his decision to hang himself, I came across this post about Asia’s penchant for Witchcraft. Apparently Wicca is somewhat more than a hobby for her. As you look at these pictures it’s important to remember that this is a 42 year old woman (and her friends) who sincerely believes in this stuff.

In Chick Crack I also made reference as to why I believe women’s being predisposed to beliefs in the supernatural is a desire for secret power from an innate position of female powerlessness.

Feminine Mythology

Women’s natural pull towards the mysterious and metaphysical has its roots in the sex’s historical characterizations. In keeping with the very useful associations of women’s unknowability and feminine mystique, it’s perhaps unsurprising that we find most mythologized representations of women and femininity cast as brooding, fickle, rapacious and often as a temptress, possessing secret knowledge that foolish men (the mere mortals) are neither capable of, nor encouraged to understand. Sometimes childlike, often conveniently eroticized, women are literally cast as forces of nature – whether sexualized nymphs or tempestuous witches, each characterization relies on women possessing some form of secret or forbidden connection to the metaphysical. Even the commanding presence of Joan of Arc, while leading the armies of France, had a connection to something otherworldly. By their very nature, feminine mythology, by default, presumes women are more in tune with the nature of reality, while surpassing the ignorance of brutish men.

Women revel in their mythology. Since covert forms of communication are the preferred language of women, their affinity for secret information is a natural fit. Ever wonder why gossip seems to be uniquely endemic to women? Look no further than women’s innate impulse to acquire secret knowledge. Take away the Vampires and Werewolves – the metaphysical component – from the Twilight series and what you’re left with is a relatively bland romance novel. Add the otherworldly and you have a runaway hit popular with every female age demographic, from tweens to octogenarians.

In women’s evolutionary past, concealment meant everything. Confusing a man as to the true genetic heritage of his children was often a matter of life or death. Pursuing pluralistic sexual strategies depends upon creating a characterization of women as legitimately unknowable, thus the feminine mystique is instituted. Ergo, the sociological PR campaign over the course of millennia has been to perpetuate the mystery of woman.

From an evolutionary perspective it makes sense that physically weaker tribal women would seek some sort of mastery over the men in their lives who could punish or kill them and their offspring at will. As I’ve covered in many essays, women are biologically and psychologically more attuned to deeper communication and the emotive states of other people. Women have a far greater capacity to understand subcommunications and subcommunicate themselves among their own sex. This is borne out by multiple brain scan studies and research on the architecture of men and women’s brains.

To the blunt, overt, relatively nuance-less interpretive processes of men this subcommunication can be both frustrating and mysterious. It’s the mysterious part that women learned to reinforce and exploit in their dealings with men long ago. This is where we get the idea of the seductress or the ‘keeper of mysterious secrets’ archetype (witch, midwife, nature goddess) for women. It’s less important that women would actually be more in tune with the supernatural, but rather it’s more important that they believe it’s a general truth about all women. Men might be skeptical, or they may buy into that mystique, revere it and encourage other men to believe something similar. Usually how a man adopts or rejects that archetype is determined by his own self-understanding and his Game according to it and his sexual market value.

There are a lot of derivative character archetypes that stem from the basic ‘mysterious woman’ root. That might be anything from a healer, nurturer, mother type rooted in what used to be the mystery of women’s life-giving capacity, to the force of nature sorceress, to the eroticized sexual seductress (nymph, siren) or even the high-priestess of the holy temple of prostitution (an ancient brothel madame). Over the course of history, since our hunter-gatherer beginnings, this means to influence and power for women has coalesced into what we popularly imagine about women’s mysterious nature. Only today we call it a ‘woman’s intuition’ and we make appeals to fortune and fate when a guy get’s “lucky” and a woman favors him with her sexuality. It’s all socialized solutions to evolutionary problems, but if we add an element of ‘magic’ to the equation it makes explaining failures and appreciating successes that much easier.

Today, the belief in this nature is still very much reinforced in society. Thus, we get women subscribing to what amounts to a collective pathology – they are encouraged to believe in their ‘magical’ sensitivities to spirits and forces beyond the sensitivities of (ostensibly) “powerful” men. To fight the mythological Patriarchy women rely on a mythological tool. In Chick Crack I made mention of a stripper I used to have as a friend-with-benefits who was very attuned to the “spirit world”. As such the whole gamut of the supernatural was free game for her to use. She’d read my Tarot cards, my palm, throw in some eastern mysticism and wash it all down with a read through her pink ladies’ devotional Bible. Granted, ‘Angie‘ was an extreme case, but all women are in someway, or say they are in someway, privy to metaphysical understandings which men are not. And today we read and listen to male leaders in mainstream religions adopt and parrot back this “women are closer to God than men” mantra which is directly linked to the ‘spiritual women’ mystique.

The old trope of a Woman’s Intuition is an example of this belief in something beyond the ken of men. And this is also an important aspect of boys’ Blue Pill conditioning – girls/women possess some unearthly connection to God or something supernatural which further cements the idea that they should to defer authority to girls and women if they want to “please God the Goddess”. You might think this hard to believe in our age of technology, but only the context of the supernatural has shifted. Even the most objectively rational boys and men strongly believe in the ‘soul mate myth‘ despite atheism or agnosticism. This belief of the faithless is directly related to the unknowability of the female. Even modern atheists have a tendency to fall prey to the “someone for everyone” religion when it comes to connecting with the opposite sex.

It’s my belief that this presumption of a greater sensitivity to the supernatural is an aspect of women’s evolved mental firmware. Regardless of how false it may be, a woman with the disposition to encourage men to believe that she has some otherworldly connection despite the world or circumstances around them, one that would lead men to venerate her in the long term, would’ve been a powerful social adaptation in ensuring her and her children’s security. No doubt women readers will trot out the reflexive “Well men have been shamans and soothsayers and the patriarchal leaders of churches too”, and this is true, but those men lacked the female elemental advantage in their believability. Even their own belief sets encompassed the ‘spiritual woman’ tropes for better or worse. The wise old wizard is definitely an archetype, but that wizard lacks the feminine mystique and the sexual components only women possess in exercising that power.

Modern Witchcraft

Today we see a distinct falling away from the old order of acknowledging the supernatural. Less and less people subscribe to religion in its conventional sense. The Millennial generation wants nothing to do with “organized religion”, yet they still seek the structure to life it used to provide. So instead we hear the compromise about being “spiritual, but not religious” as if accepting the possibility of the metaphysical is something expected, but the taint of the “religious” is left for older generations. Even in what passes for contemporary religion the influence of the Feminine Imperative is ever-present. The spiritual, the metaphysical, the religious, all are still useful tools for women to consolidate power with. As men abdicate more authority to the feminine, as they themselves are the products of a continuous social feminization, we see a wholesale handover of the spiritual to the direction of women. The male leadership of mainstream religions is itself compromised with the imperatives and priorities of women who are already presumed to be “more in tune with God or the supernatural”. As such they exercise the Feminine Imperative and assimilate women’s stake on the spiritual by being proxy agents for women’s authority.

Today I was linked a story about how Episcopalians have begun to Remove the Man from their religion. Apparently this marks the beginning of rewriting the doctrine of this religion by erasing all masculine pronouns for God. Of course I expect the predictable retorts that Episcopalians aren’t real Christians, but theirs is just one of the more glaring examples of how the feminization of religion progresses. The latent purpose is a wholesale removal of anything conventionally masculine from religion, and/or placing the feminine as the primary connection with the supernatural. Whether it’s mainstream religion or psychic reading, a woman is at the center of that mysticism. If you want a perspective into the things to come for a female-led mega-religion look no further than the teaching of Rev. Shannon Johnson Kershner (dual surname noted). God is not male is the clarion call of the priestesses (and their male ‘ally’ priests) of this new religion.

Why should we view God as female? Well, it’s so that little girls can become pastors, with Kershner saying, ““I wanted to make sure that little girls knew that God could call them to be pastors, too.”

For the MeToo / Time’s Up generation God is female, the supernatural is more aligned with the feminine. I’ve made this observation before (before the #MeToo moral panic arrived) but there’s been a growing push on the part of men to relinquish any spiritual authority from a masculine perspective for decades now. The largely secular impetus of the MeToo movement is now finding its way into a religious environment that has been primed and ready for it (largely due to its acquiescing, complicit, and thoroughly Blue Pill male leadership) for a long time. MeToo was a natural fit for a feminine-primary church that needed its push to consolidate power even in the most patriarchal of religions. MeToo has given women license to finally be overt in their design on religion and spirituality – not unlike Open Hypergamy has been embraced in the mainstream.

In celebration of this conversion of religion to feminine-primacy we get the feminist Beyoncé “worship” services in formerly traditional cathedrals. Millennials may be falling away from the old church, but they fill the new church to overflow-capacity when ‘god’ is female.

The take home message for this essay is this; womankind has been intimately aware of the complicity of men in granting them a default connection to the supernatural. While we may not profess a formal belief in such, men are eager to accommodate female power in this arena – especially if in doing so it endears women to the men who play along with it. Professing a belief in the supernatural is simply good Game. The early PUAs picked up on this and used it to their advantage. However, this abdication of moral authority – an authority founded in masculine pretenses – goes far beyond getting your palm read by an earthy stripper you want to bang. This compromising of moral authority to the feminine by men is just the next phase in conceding all social and political authority to the Feminine Imperative. If God or a ‘higher power’ is the foundation of moral authority, and women are universally presumed to be more in touch with that higher power, the next step is to cede that authority to the sex that has a more direct line to that power.

What prompted me to consider writing this essay was a link I was sent in response to the story about Asia Argento’s involvement in modern day Wicca. I listened to a bit of a podcast by Vox Day recently in which he was asked his thoughts about modern paganism. He said, and I paraphrase, “Paganism today is just kids LARPing to the idea of old world religions. They’re role playing something akin to Dungeons and Dragons with no real belief.” I thought this was interesting in light of the article I was sent on Neo-Paganism and the Feminist Spirituality Movement:

However, some women were not willing to identify themselves as “witches”, and there arose a form of Goddess worship without any of the trappings of witchcraft. As Nevill Drury explains, “Although some Goddess-worshippers continued to refer to themselves as witches, others abandoned the term altogether, preferring to regard their neopagan practice as a universal feminist religion, drawing on mythologies from many different ancient cultures.” This has been called “Goddess worship” and the “Goddess movement”. These terms are frequently used interchangeably with, but should be distinguished from, “feminist spirituality”, which includes the Goddess movement, but also feminist Christianity, feminist Judaism, etc.

[…]

The principal beliefs of the Goddess movement are that the Goddess is a radically immanent deity and she can be experienced directly. The Earth is seen as the body of the Goddess and women are understood to connect to the Goddess through their experience of their own bodies, as well as the “body” of the earth. Goddess feminists also believe that the Goddess is constantly changing, manifest in the changing of the seasons and the human life-cycle, and perpetually self-renewed.

The Goddess movement offers women a new self-image and facilitates women finding their own innate goodness and natural divinity. It enables women to redeem and revalue the “feminine principle” and offers them positive images and symbols of female empowerment.

It may seem easy to dismiss the influence of the feminine on what is re-evolving into a new feminine-world order of spirituality, but I think it would be foolish dismiss the influences of the Feminine Imperative – the Goddess Movement – that is manifesting itself incrementally in the power vacuum left by the abdication of masculine moral authority to the feminine. We read that Millennials may not be “as religious” as previous generations, but that doesn’t mean they don’t seek out ‘spiritual, but not religious’ metaphysical connections. They seek direction, and connection in religion, but they seek it in the secular, gynocentric terms they’ve been conditioned to believe they should define themselves by. A similar parallel exists on the masculine side too. One of the reasons for Jordan Peterson’s popularity is his ‘ministering’ to a generation of “lost boys” seeking direction in life. He is every bit one of the Lords of the New Church in the same way that the Goddess Movement speaks to another demographic of lost souls who seek absolution in the “divine feminine” – also a term Peterson is fond of.