Goddess movement

The Goddess movement is a revivalistic Neopagan religious movement which includes spiritual beliefs and practices that emerged primarily in the United States in the late 1960s and predominantly in the Western world during the 1970s. The movement grew as a reaction both against patriarchal Abrahamic religions, which refer to God to using masculine grammatical articles and pronouns, and secularism. 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. The Goddess movement is a widespread non-centralized trend in modern Paganism, and it therefore has no centralized tenets of belief. 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. 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. 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. 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. According to a 2000 survey, the estimated population of adherents to the Goddess movement consists of 500,000 people in the United States and 120,000 people in the United Kingdom.