COUNTERCULTURAL SPIRITUALISTS PERCEPTIONS OF THE GODDESS

This article explores how the Goddess movement might influence the spi ritual worldviews of women and men who do not consider themselves to b e exclusively worshippers of the Goddess. Excerpts from in-depth inter views with alternative spiritualists suggest that the Goddess movement can spiritually empower women and help them to articulate gender-bare d inequalities, even when women do not label themselves as Goddess wor shippers in the strict sense. However, these women also believe that t he Guddess is one necessary half of a spiritual whole, and so also inc lude non-Goddess images of the divine in their spiritual systems, incl uding images of the male. Men might also seek a ''balance'' between ma le and female symbols of the divine, but they might view the Goddess a s more nurturing or expressive than self-empowering.