Women on the Path of the Goddess: Sacred Technologies of the Everyday

Abstract

Contemporary spiritualties are often portrayed as a turn to a subjective and individualized form of religion, consisting of individually held truth claims or private peak experiences that are generated sporadically at retreats and workshops. The portrayal is ultimately related to a perception of everyday life in contemporary Euro-America as mundane, rationalized, and secular, but also the exclusion of practices centered on the body, the home and the everyday from what is deemed properly religious. This article explores the sacred technologies of the everyday among women in England who identify as Goddess worshippers. The purpose is to further the understanding of religion and the everyday, as well as the conceptualization of contemporary Goddess-worship as lived religion. Through examining narratives on the intersection between religion and everyday activities, the technologies of imbuing everyday life with a sacred dimension become visible. The sacred technologies imply skills that enable both imagining and relating to the sacred. The women consciously and diligently work to cultivate skills that would allow them to sense and make sense of the sacred, in other words, to foster a sense of withness through the means of a host of practices. I argue that the women actively endeavor to establish an everyday world that is experienced as inherently different from the secular and religious fields in their surroundings; hence it is not from disenchantment or an endeavor with no social consequences. The women’s everyday is indeed infused with different strategies where the body, different practices, and material objects are central in cultivating a specific religious disposition that ultimately will change the way the women engage with and orient themselves in the world.