Friday, January 13, 2012

A Goddess 'First' From Australia

In their just-published book, Gaia Emerging: Goddess Beliefs and Practices in Australia, authors Patricia Rose and Tricia Szirom include the results of their large survey of people involved specifically in Goddess spirituality. Patricia Rose was nice enough to let me preview a few pages and I want to tell you about it because, as far as I know, it is the first book to survey this many people--more 300--specifically about their Goddess beliefs and attitudes (there have been reports of surveys of Pagans, sometimes with those in the Goddess movement as a subset, but this survey focuses on Goddessians only.) The authors give both the survey statistics and comments from respondents on such topics as "immanent or transcendent?" "Goddess as Nature/Earth/Cosmos," "Goddess as Life/energy," Goddess as Relational," etc., as well as statistics on the group surveyed, such as gender, age, income, partnered status, nationality (mostly Australian), and amount of time they have been on "their Goddess journey." The book also gives information on "ancient goddess religion" and its suppression, and the emergence of modern Goddess veneration globally, as well as information specific to Australia. Right now, the book, available in both paper and as an ebook, needs to be ordered from Australia. Two web sites currently offer the book: Gaia’s Garden , and the publisher, Gaia’s Ink, a wholly-owned branch of the Goddess Association in Australia (G.A.I.A.) , to which Rose and Szirom have donated the book.

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2 Comments:

At Sunday, January 15, 2012 3:43:00 PM, Anonymous Daniel Cohen said...

How does this compare to Cynthia Eller's "Living in the Lap of the Goddess"? I am not sure if that was based on a formal survey, or just on interviews with people. Eller's later work has been much criticised by Goddess people, but this one was well-regarded.

 
At Thursday, January 19, 2012 10:59:00 PM, Anonymous Prima Vera said...

Just interviews. So that would be a big difference. And 300 people who are Goddess worshipers is a lot to me. Eller's book is about US. This book has a lot about Australia, according to this post. And I'm not sure that anything by Eller is well-regarded by Goddess people at this point.

 

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Judith Laura


More blogs about /goddess/feminist theology/spiritual feminism/pagan/feminist spirituality/.