HVK Archives: An American in search of female God
An American in search of female God - The Asian Age
S P Nanda
()
26 September 1996
Title : An American in search of female God
Author : S P Nanda
Publication : The Asian Age
Date : September 26, 1996
Her Indian conception of the Goddess being a living force
developed into a deep conviction in less than three
decades of research has now prompted her to launch a
women's spirituality movement in America and Europe,
though not yet an organised one. It aims at demolishing
the so-called truths "sanctioned by religious and secular
authorities," that "a male god created the world, humans
have the right to dominate nature, and man has a right to
dominate woman."
Ms Elinor Gadon, who propagates Devi or Goddess religion,
found herself in an alien culture when she came from
California in 1967 for a year with her family to Calcutta
where her husband, Dr Herman Gadon, was a visiting pro-
fessor at IIM. "I could not say just how ... but being
in a culture so different from my own in which the femi-
nine was celebrated in sensuous images of great power,
both human and divine, was profoundly unsettling," she
observed in her best-seller The Once and Future Goddess.
The book, a product of Ms Gadon's years of research with
the help of the fragmentary archaeological evidence to
show the primacy of Goddess religion universally, is
running its seventh print, having sold 40,000 copies in
the West since it was first published in 1989. Ms Gadon
is now trying to disseminate findings of "Goddess reli-
gion" through women's spirituality movement.
During her recent visit to Orissa, she said that with the
advent of Christianity, the Godhead was destroyed in the
West. The "patriarchal Indo-Europeans" overthrew the
cultures where the Goddess flourished from earliest times
and imposed worship of their sky nods.
In the beginning, God was a woman all over the world. As
evident from archaeological evidence, prehistoric peoples
worshipped a female deity and Goddess religion persisted
for nearly 30,000 years, beginning in the late Palaeo-
lithi, the Ice Age. She said the Goddess is again becom-
ing ,a symbol women's empowerment, a catalyst for an
emerging earth-centred spirituality," emblem of a new
political movement and a model for resacralising woman's
body and the mystery of human sexuality."
With the coming of agriculture, the Goddess' religion
flowered. "The worship was sensual, celebrating the
erotic, embracing all that was alive. Religious quest
was for renewal, for the regeneration of life. and the
Goddess was the life force," she said.
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