by Carrie Gress
The contemporary story about goddess worship really only dates back to the 1970s, although promoters of it leave us with the impression that it is much older. Goddess worship, which is supposed to supplant the worship of a masculine God, rests upon the notion that before the patriarchy, matriarchies of women were in charge of things. Under the leadership of women, so the story goes, the world was peaceful, creative, beautiful, living in perfect harmony. With the arrival of the patriarchy, all of this changed; greed, violence, rape, and discord filled the earth. The goddess movement and goddess worship seek to restore the world to the harmony that existed under the matriarchy, particularly by helping women find “the goddess within”—their own special spark of divinity. A masculine God must be rejected because it is that model that brought about all the discord.
Women, according to the narrative, should be worshiped as divinities. Once a woman identifies her own goddess within, her moral decision-making will be led by “the goddess” through emotion and intuition, intense interior experiences, and “consciousness raising,” instead of patriarchal enslavement to reason or logic. When the goddess movement has spread far enough, a New Age will be ushered in, offering perfect harmony between people and the environment. The rule by women will reclaim a balanced and serene existence among all of creation. “Only masculine ego,” goddess movement author Elizabeth Gould Davis wrote, “stands in the way of decent society.”2 Lesbianism, because it unites women together, is viewed as the highest form of sexual ideal. The sexual liberation of women is essential to the liberation of women and progress toward the matriarchal ideal.
There is at least one not-so-small problem with the goddess movement: it is built upon a bunch of nonsense. Cobbled together in the 1970s, the new religion of choice among radical feminism is built upon virtually no historical evidence that matriarchies were serene and harmonious utopias; in fact, there is plenty of evidence of the opposite, which we will see later. Books like God is a Woman, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess, Dreaming in the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics, and Womanspirit Rising are all a mishmash of pagan religions, sexual liberation, and misanthropy—guided by the principle articulated by one member: “Remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.”3 Truth, logic, and reason are the enemy. Invention (fabrication, lies) are good too because truth is of little value. Nothing, certainly not the truth, can stand in the way of the narrative.
Divinizing women, promoting lesbianism, abandoning logic and reason, and lying should be enough to make the connection between the goddess movement and an anti-Marian spirit clear. Unfortunately, this movement isn’t limited to a small cabal of witches; it has much longer tentacles.
Culture Awash in the Goddess
Knowledge of myths and biblical stories of old are meant to be informative and help us understand human nature, which is why children are often encouraged to learn Greek myths or other types of mythology. This new focus upon goddesses, however, isn’t about accurately depicting these ancient stories to teach ancient truths but re-presenting them in new packaging to appeal to modern feminist women. Mythical women of every stripe have been rebranded for contemporary use. Wicca has claimed to be following the lead of the goddess Diana or Artemis. Jezebel, once the name of the murderous Old Testament queen, is now an edgy online magazine. And Lilith—a night demon of old—became patroness of Lilith Fair, a music festival for female musical artists, and the Lilith Fund, established for women to get abortions after Hurricane Harvey struck Houston in 2017. The infiltration of the goddess movement has been subtle, so subtle that most have missed it, but slowly our culture has become awash in goddess emulation and worship. Even Jennifer Aniston has bought into it: “You know when I feel inwardly beautiful? When I am with my girlfriends and we are having a ‘goddess circle.’”4
The music industry offers some of the most blatant examples of the power of the goddess movement among us today. Madonna has perhaps done the most to entrench the anti-Mary/goddess worship ideal into our culture. The first and most obvious thing she did was to rebrand the name Madonna. Prior to Madonna Louise Ciccone’s arrival onto the music scene, the name Madonna was holy and belonged uniquely to Our Lady. Madonna Louise tarnished the brand. Badly. Even her confirmation name is rich with irony; it is Veronica, which means “true image,” referring to the cloth that Veronica used to wipe Christ’s face when he was on the Way of the Cross. With her boytoy persona, consistent vulgarity, over-cooked sensuality, and foray into desecrating religious themes, she looks like a good anti-Marian pin-up (or mug shot?). But all of that was surpassed by her 2013 Super Bowl Halftime Show where she pulled out all of the sacrilegious stops by performing the equivalent of a twelve-minute satanic ritual. Before the event, she told Anderson Cooper, “The Super Bowl is kind of like the Holy of Holies in America. I’ll come at halfway of the ‘church experience’ and I’m gonna have to deliver a sermon. It’ll have to be very impactful.”5 Her detailed performance was not just another Hollywood production but carefully orchestrated to include satanic and pagan symbols of divinity.
Madonna isn’t the only musician to “channel” goddesses. Beyoncé followed the “Queen of Pop” in her own appearances, dressing as Youruba goddess Yeye Oshun—the goddess of fertility, motherhood, and passing generations. She imitated this goddess at the 2017 Grammys when she was pregnant with twins, identifying further with the Nigerian goddess, who is said to have also given birth to twins.
Pop artist Rihanna has said that Madonna is her biggest influence, idolizing her because of her capacity to constantly reinvent herself. Rihanna is hoping to be named the “black Madonna.” Yet again, a pop star is trying to claim another of Our Lady’s titles, while whittling away at any remaining moral fabric of the culture.
Not to be left out as a goddess groupie, pop sensation Ariana Grande released a song in 2018 called “God is a Woman.” The song details the sexual relationship between a man and a woman, where the woman claims to be God because of all the pleasure she can bring him. The lyrics—too explicit to print—even compares having illicit sexual relations to praying, just to make sure the sacrilege is perfectly clear.
The Woman of Folly
Anti-Marian archetypes are rife in Scripture and literature. Scripture makes it clear that there is a type of woman who needs to be avoided, whose influence will always lead to bad places. Eve is certainly the primal example, with Jezebel, Salome, and the Whore of Babylon as other standouts. The book of Proverbs speaks of the Woman of Folly, who promises life but leads to death. Here is one warning:
Saving you from a stranger,
from a foreign woman with her smooth words,
One who forsakes the companion of her youth
and forgets the covenant of her God;
For her path sinks down to death,
and her footsteps lead to the shades.
None who enter there come back,
or gain the paths of life. (Prv 2:16–19 NABRE)
And another: “Wisdom builds her house but Folly tears hers down with her own hands” (Prv 14:1).
The woman of folly inflicts gross spiritual and physical damage. Her toxicity spreads like a cancer on a soul and society. She is manipulative, deceitful, deceptive, seductive, and narcissistic. She quietly destroys others with a smile on her face and nary a prick to her conscience. She teaches others to do the same, enthralling and entrapping them with her beauty, her aloof sophistication, and her faux kindness. Sirens, gorgons, harpies, Scylla, Medusa, Echidna, Astarte, Lamia, and Isis are among the scores of women of folly that come down to us through mythology and literature. Two others, in particular, serve as the most prominent women of folly archetypes, two whose vices seem to be making further in-roads today and who serve as broader categories for us to put the rest into and show us all the ways women can go wrong: Jezebel and Lilith.
Jezebel
Sin is, as the Church has told us for millennia, banal and uncreative, so those who are enslaved by it ha
ve very little room to differentiate themselves from others. For this reason, so many women of folly will remind us of Jezebel.
Featured in the first book of Kings, Jezebel was the queen of Israel as the wife of King Ahab. Although evil before marrying her, under her influence, Ahab came to serve and worship the god of Baal. He became a passive and controlled subject in his own kingdom, while Jezebel ruthlessly murdered true prophets and upheld soothsayers. When Ahab was sullen that Naboth, a vineyard owner, would not sell Ahab his vineyard, Jezebel took matters into her own hands and had Naboth stoned to death. Eventually, Ahab repented of his wrongdoing, but Jezebel did not. For her transgressions, she was eventually thrown out of a window to her death, where her body was eaten by dogs.
There are other mythological characters who have this similar spirit. One is called Le-hev-hev, a name that means “that which draws us to it so that it may devour us.”6 This Jezebel spirit can be seen in Salome, the wife of Herod, who had her daughter ask for the head of John the Baptist on a platter. A common characteristic is that a Jezebel type will enslave or trap her prey and then devour it, much like a black widow spider. J. R. R. Tolkien used the image of a ruthless spider as the guard of Mordor, Shelob, a female spider who paralyzes and then devours her prey (it was Galadriel’s light—a symbol of Mary—that saved Frodo and Sam from the voracious spider).
A richer description of the manipulation of a Jezebel spirit includes confusion, intimidation, draining the opposition through argumentation, refusing facts, changing the subject when proven wrong, blaming others for her faults, use of pseudo-friendships to acquire favors and accrue power, and eventually conquering the opposition through destruction or betrayal. Like King Ahab, Adam, Herod, and others, men under the spell of a Jezebel tend to give way to her cunning, while becoming passively open to her vicious whims. The goddess movement espouses many of these characteristics, particularly the way it denies the importance of truth, denigrates the virtues of men, and divinizes women.
Lilith
In the 1960s, Anton LaVey, considered the father of Satanism and dubbed the “Black pope,” predicted that the year 1966 would usher in the age of Satan or, more specifically, the age of Lilith. While the word of a Satanist shouldn’t hold much stock, if we look back at the last fifty years, there certainly has been an uptick in the demonic, specifically that of targeting women and the resurgence of the cult of Lilith.
But who is this Lilith? She has been called the wife of Satan and a blood-sucking night demon. James Joyce called her the patroness of abortion, and she has been featured in the work of Victor Hugo, as well as that of George MacDonald in his book Lilith, A Romance. C. S. Lewis used her as his model for Jadis, the White Witch, and even Michelangelo drew her as a temptress in the Garden of Eden. Exorcists warn of her, and rituals abound historically to protect against her. Even the word lullaby comes from the Arabic words meaning “beware of Lilith.” Despite all this, few today have any idea who she is.
Her story has been told around hearths and firesides for millennia. First mentioned in The Epic of Gilgamesh, the legends about her predate Genesis, and millennia-old cave carvings of her have been found in Egypt, Sumeria, Babylonia, and Greece. She is often depicted as an owl because she works at night, or as a large-breasted woman with owls at her feet. In every mythological story, she is an evil woman, a demon, or a monstrous creature. She is the terror of the night. Her name stems from the ancient Sumerian word for female demon or wind spirits and she is said to dwell in the desert.
Other attributes include preying mostly upon infants and pregnant women, breasts that are filled with poison instead of milk, and seducing men in their sleep (one variation of her name describes an infertile and sexually frustrated woman who aggressively pursues young men, which also has a familiar ring in our day). In short, she embodies chaos, destruction, and ungodliness.
Lilith appears once in Scripture in the book of Isaiah. As the Old Testament book explains, Yahweh is going to smite the land of Edom and it will become a sterile desert, with roaming wild animals. “Wildcats shall meet desert beasts, satyrs shall call to one another; There shall the lilith repose, and find for herself a place to rest” (Is 34:14 NABRE). It’s clear that Isaiah and those to whom he is writing are aware of who Lilith is and that she is not a sign of God’s favor. “The wilderness traditionally symbolizes mental and physical barrenness; it is a place where creativity and life itself are easily extinguished. Lilith, the feminine opposite of masculine order, is banished from fertile territory and exiled to barren wasteland.”7 Lilith resides in this barren place of doom.
Lilith’s story took on new energy sometime between the eighth and tenth centuries in the book Alphabet of Ben Sira. The anonymous text was written to reconcile the apparent inconsistency in Scripture between the two stories of the creation of man and woman in Genesis 1 and 2. In Genesis 1, the Alphabet proposes, the first man and first woman, Adam and Lilith, were created at the same time and immediately started fighting for supremacy. Lilith, refusing to submit to Adam, stomps out of the Garden of Eden. She then blasphemes God, gets banished from Eden altogether, and turns into a winged devil. As a further punishment, one hundred of her children are to be killed each day. She lives out her vengeance through the seduction of men to bolster her own fertility, while wantonly killing infants who have not been protected against her.
In the 1800s, Lilith was still considered dark and evil and garnered little sympathy, with the exception of George Mac-Donald’s prior mentioned novel, Lilith: A Romance, where he stretches the imagination to see if Christ can redeem even her. But the truly evil spirit of Lilith is certainly alive today in the reality of children killed through abortion, abuse, or neglect. And the seduction of men by women has become so commonplace, aided by the accessibility of contraception and abortion, that it is just part of the culture. The hook-up culture and shows like Sex and the City or Girls that glamorize the lifestyle of “going through men” have made heterosexual sin so banal that more exotic forms of eroticism have become trendy, particularly homosexuality, which opened wide the doors to the now readily accepted LGBT movement.
Today, there are whole collections of Lilith books, racy paperbacks, dark novels, films, music, video games with demonic imagery, obscenity, et cetera, all presented in a “fun” and less threatening manner, yet no less destructive (and perhaps more so). She is now seen to be a noble goddess, who stands up to the patriarchy while endorsing lesbianism, eroticism, and the whole sordid mess.
All of these elements which describe Jezebel and Lilith culminate in the terrible woman represented in Revelation: the Whore of Babylon. Although said to be a woman in the future, she embodies the best of female vice, making her the worst. She doesn’t just reject purity and motherhood; she murders her children and then gets drunk on their blood. Her vices are used to dominate and destroy men, like the devouring spider or murderous Jezebel:
“The kings of the earth have had intercourse with her, and the inhabitants of the earth became drunk on the wine of her harlotry.” Then he carried me away in spirit to a deserted place where I saw a woman seated on a scarlet beast that was covered with blasphemous names, with seven heads and ten horns. The woman was wearing purple and scarlet and adorned with gold, precious stones, and pearls. She held in her hand a gold cup that was filled with the abominable and sordid deeds of her harlotry. On her forehead was written a name, which is a mystery, “Babylon the great, the mother of harlots and of the abominations of the earth.” I saw that the woman was drunk on the blood of the holy ones and on the blood of the witnesses to Jesus. (Rv 17:2–6 NABRE)
Fifty years ago, such a woman was nearly inconceivable, but after the damage wrought during the past decades, the Whore of Babylon now has a familiar ring.
Exorcists Weigh In
Myth and Scripture are not the only places we can find Jezebel and Lilith; they can also be found in the arena of exorcism.
Fr. Gabriele Amorth, who served as the Vatican’s chief exorcist and the ho
norary president of the International Association of Exorcists until he passed away in 2016, is said to have “exorcised Lilith, Beelzebub, and Lucifer and other demons so often now that he feels he can recognize them right at the start of an exorcism.”8 Exorcist Fr. Chad Ripperger has also exorcised the demon of Lilith, whom he describes as “one of the top five, very strong and difficult to get out.”9 Ironically, for all the adulation given to Lilith by radical feminists, Fr. Ripperger explains that “demons are not female but only appear as such.” He adds, “Demons do not have a gender but always appear as male except when they are trying to seduce in some manner.”10 Lilith fits this exception. Father explains, “It is a him that acts like a her. He manifests as male except when trying to convince others that he is a she for some nefarious purpose.” There is plenty of irony in feminists worshipping a demon they believe is female but actually manifests as a male.
As for Jezebel, Fr. Ripperger also confirmed that there is a demonic spirit connected to her. Jezebel, Fr. Ripperger explains, “is a spirit which seeks to undermine authority structures through women primarily, though not exclusively, in which murmuring is used to undermine the authority.”11 She attacks “right order in governance within families, communities, organizations.”12
Demons, in general, do not have the capacity to influence the wider culture if people are not first complicit in sin. For these anti-Marian spirits to gain a foothold in the culture, men and women had to open the door through their own sinfulness, stepping outside of the state of grace, which allowed the demonic to enter into a soul in one form or another. Fr. Ripperger reports, “I tend to find that various demons tend to use the disorders of Original Sin that are proper to women, for example, the desire for self-sufficiency separate from one’s husband, the desire to control, the fear of being hurt, etc. Demons just make hay out of these matters and have gained great ascendancy in our culture.”13