Why Are People Worshipping the Virgin Mary as a Goddess?

Thérèse (a pseudonym) grew up in the United States in a traditionalist minority of the Catholic Church that believes Mass should be celebrated in Latin and pressures women to wear a veil. Recently, she left her faith. She now worships multiple goddesses and is a devotee of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. But she still venerates Mary, the mother of Jesus in the Bible. And unlike many Catholics, and Christians more generally, Thérèse views Mary as a goddess.

Although many Catholics may see her shift as shocking, Thérèse argues that connecting with Mary as a deity traces back to her childhood, when her traditionalist Catholic mother prayed directly to Mary to ask for things. According to Thérèse, Mary delivered on those requests—not as a human intercessor to God, as she is conceived of in Christianity, but as a goddess with power in her own right.

Thérèse is not alone. Growing numbers of people around the world are reclaiming Mary as a goddess. It’s part of a movement reinvigorating goddess worship as a spiritual antidote to a world where patriarchal, heteronormative religions dominate in many countries. As religious scholar Téa Nicolae writes, “images of feminine divinity offer women the opportunity to find meaningfulness, empowerment, and sexual or psychological healing.”

But there’s an irony at the heart of worshipping Mary to counteract patriarchy. Mary has often been used as a tool of the patriarchy to uphold a definition of womanhood as meaning submissive, obedient, maternal, and sexually pure. That’s the image I grew up with.

Similar to Thérèse—whom I met in an LGBTQ+ ex-traditionalist circle—I was raised in a conservative Polish Catholic parish in Illinois, where Marian devotion was central to my construction of gender and sexuality. The purity culture program I participated in asked every girl to place a white rose on the altar beside a statue of Mary, our eyes downturned in a sign of submission. Mary became an icon of patriarchal Christianity for me. She was an ideal that I and every other middle-school girl in that program could never attain.

Reclaiming Mary is a way to fight religious extremism and achieve spiritual liberation.

Since then, I have come to see Mary as a prophetess of love and acceptance who queers traditional gender norms. Reclaiming Mary is a large part of how I have navigated my Catholic faith. So, as a religious scholar studying modern goddess worship over the past five years, I have focused my research and interviews on the veneration of Mary. I am fascinated by how Marian goddess worshippers grapple with complicated issues surrounding patriarchy and gender norms.

I am exploring the questions: How did Mary come to be worshipped as a goddess? Why would feminist practitioners gravitate to the virgin mother, on whose shoulders modern patriarchal Christianity rests? And what does this reveal about people’s quest to reclaim the feminine in the divine?

THE GODDESS WORSHIP REVIVAL

In the 1960s and ’70s, amid women’s rights marches and the fight for reproductive justice, a subculture of women began worshipping goddesses. These women were reacting to patriarchal Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—that center a male-presenting God and are predominantly run by male religious leaders.

As feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether wrote, the “male bias” of Judaism and Christianity creates a universe and religious symbols that “ratify male domination and female subordination as the normative way of understanding the world and God.” Goddess worshipper Sahra Henlin has put it more bluntly: “Modern-day religions are … a giant sausage fest.”

By contrast, the goddess worship movement argues for a spirituality rooted in the divine feminine, which exalts feminine or gender-bending spiritual power. Practitioners draw on art historian Merlin Stone’s 1976 book When God Was a Woman and the work of archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. These writers proposed a hypothesis that several ancient, matriarchal, goddess-worshipping societies lived in peace and harmony before they were destroyed by warrior societies that installed patriarchal systems that revere male gods. (A number of Gimbutas’ colleagues expressed skepticism about her ideas.)

Today, with increasing far-right patriarchal and religious extremism around the world, people disenchanted with or hurt by male-centric religions, primarily Christianity, are reinvigorating goddess worship.

This worldwide movement is unstructured, often taking place in online workshops, virtual worship services such as the Venus Chvrch, and in private practice. Practitioners typically engage with goddesses whose qualities they identify with or wish to invite into their lives. For example, as the religious scholar Nicolae explains, “Aphrodite, bestower of beauty and passion, would be summoned for matters of love or fertility, whereas the fierce [Hindu goddess] Kali would be conjured for strength and courage.” Some queer women glorify the Greek goddesses Artemis (associated with hunting, wild animals, and unmarried women) and Hecate (linked with magic, witchcraft, and the night).

Some practitioners invoke goddesses from their own cultural heritage. Cydney Gray, the owner of the spiritual store Rose da Rua in New Orleans and one of my interviewees, reconnects with their African roots through Oshun, a river goddess in the West African Yoruba tradition.

However, Nicolae notes that practitioners, who are typically “Western,” often connect with goddesses from non-Western spiritual traditions. Critics call out these practices as cultural appropriation. Anthropologist Kathryn Rountree writes of goddess worshippers, “There is something very unsettling, not to mention rather phony, about (yet another) Western group, disaffected by its own culture, openly appropriating from another culture what it sees as desirable.”

This spiritual terrain is difficult to navigate, in large part because of a historic war on goddess worship. Both today and for thousands of years before the rise of Abrahamic religions, people around the globe have been worshipping female deities. These goddesses are often powerful, skilled, and sensual. The female deity in many cultures, wrote Stone in When God Was a Woman, is a “creator and lawmaker of the universe, prophetess, provider of human destinies, inventor, healer, hunter, and valiant leader in battle.”

But as patriarchal religions grew in prominence, goddess worship was suppressed. Colonial powers aligned with Christianity banned practices honoring goddesses and attempted to replace (or merge) female deities with Mary. But Mary, as depicted in the Bible, is fundamentally different from powerful, sensual creator goddesses. She is nonsexual, obedient, and a human.

As a result, some women from Christian traditions who are seeking empowering manifestations of the divine feminine feel they must look outside their religious upbringing. This is potentially problematic, depending on each person’s heritage and the goddesses they choose to worship. Alternatively (or in addition), some women choose to reimagine Mary.

HOW SOME GODDESS WORSHIPPERS ELEVATE MARY AS A DEITY

Hettienne Grobler was raised in South Africa in the Dutch Reformed Church, which supported the country’s system of apartheid. “It was a fundamentally conservative and racist and patriarchal regime and religion,” she explained to me in an interview. This church was anti-Catholic and openly criticized devotion to Mary.

Thérèse says she rejects the submissive persona of Mary, which she believes is a construct of patriarchy. In doing so, she says she has discovered and connected with Mary’s fierce spirit.

Grobler’s Temple of Mary and many goddess worshippers lean into qualities within Mary that some call the dark feminine, which emphasizes independence, power, sexuality, intuition, and instinct. Mary Henlin’s handpainted statues visualize Mary as darker goddesses Lilith and Hecate. This isn’t entirely unexpected. Depictions of violent Madonnas—who kill or maim people who offend them—have been a key part of Marian devotion.

Vginmary, an artist based in Poland whom I have profiled, views Mary and other goddesses as being “furious” with how women have been stripped of their rights, and how the icon of Mary has been co-opted as a model for purity culture, homophobia, and submission to men.

Marian worship schools such as the Temple of Mary and the Seven Sisters Mystery School also subvert the submissive image of Mary, as well as provide pathways for women to become priestesses and trained religious elders. Given that women are still barred from the priesthood in the Catholic Church, many women find these opportunities empowering.

These feminist liberation perspectives are still entangled with patriarchal notions of gender. Some say the emphasis on the divine feminine—and the divine masculine counterpoint highlighted by some Marian goddess worshippers—reinforces gender essentialism and harms LGBTQ+ communities.

There’s no easy way to navigate the search for healing and empowerment through goddess worship and the veneration of Mary. But for many people, that quest remains worthwhile because Mary holds a special place in their hearts. “A lot of pagans are trying to leave Christianity … but I always feel like, woe to the tree who forgets its roots,” Thérèse says. “I know I have very deep roots in Marian Catholicism, so I don’t want to forget that.”

For Thérèse, Grobler, and others, reclaiming Mary is a way to fight religious extremism and achieve spiritual liberation. And for many who have struggled with the Catholic Church, worshipping Mary as a goddess means holding tight to a religious figure who they believe stands firmly against exclusion and inequality.