AT A DEEP LEVEL the human psyche or soul merges with the outer world. In this Jungian depth psychology accords with deep ecology in recognising that nature is a part of ‘the self’.[i] It was Jung who coined the term ‘psychoid unconscious’ to account for the unitary nature of psyche and world.[ii] It is rooted in the unconscious, rather than being unified by an external metaphysical being or reality. More precisely:

“ the “psychoid unconscious” can be considered a further gradation of the unconscious where self and world meet, and where all opposites are reconciled. In the final analysis, then, the individual becomes the linchpin between the micro- and macrocosm.”[iii]

Jung himself argues that the psyche, “which we have a tendency to take for a subjective fact, is really a fact that extends outside of us, outside of time, outside of space like children’s dreams which are a summary of what will be their life’s problem… Our psyche can function as though space did not exist. The psyche can thus be independent of space, of time and of causality… The archetype is outside of me as well as in me. The psychoid archetype only resembles the psyche: animals, plants, the wind behave like us.” [iv]

[i] See Donald Broadribb (1995) The Mystical Chorus, 248.

[ii] C.G. Jung , ‘Mysterium Conjunctionis’ in: The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol.14: paras, 552 and 788.

[iii] Curtis D. Smith, ‘Psychological Ultimacy: Jung and the Human Basis of Religious Meaning’, Religious Humanism, v.25, no.4 ( 1991), 177.

[iv] Lawrence W. Jaffe, Liberating the Heart (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1990), 73; see also Ferne Jensen, (ed.), C.G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff (San Francisco: Analytical Psychology Club of San Francisco, 1982), 62 & 65.

ARCHETYPES SUPPLY THE MOTIFS with which to structure the chaos of experience and they also structure the developing psyche itself. At this juncture it is important to briefly try and consider the nature of archetypes and, in particular, certain component archetypes of the psyche – for example the ego, persona, self, psychoid and God-image (Imago Dei) – which, as we shall see later, figure prominently in certain conceptions of landscape. Carl Jung argued that:

“the archetypes are as it were the hidden foundations of the conscious mind, or, to use another comparison, the roots which the psyche has sunk, not only in the earth in the narrower sense but in the world in general. Archetypes are systems of readiness for action, and at the same time images and emotions.”[i]

However Jung’s definitions of the ‘collective unconscious’ and ‘archetypes’ are fluid. Heisig claims that Jung “invokes for the archetypes at least three different theoretical functions: (1) as models for classifying psychological data, such archetypes are used as offering evidence helping to suggest the hypothesis of a collective unconscious (2) as specific innate patterns of psychic behaviour, they function as the formal causes of the psychic phenomena that constitute the data (3) as the primordial structures behind specific fantasy-images, they are said to embody the meaning of the processes of collective unconscious”[ii] Whatever the precise and definitive definition of Jung’s concepts of the ‘collective unconscious’ and ‘archetypes’, there is no doubt that he was the first immediate father of archetypal psychology. It is from Jung, for example, that comes the idea that:

“the basic and universal structures of the psyche, the formal patterns of its relational modes, are archetypal patterns. These are like psychic organs, congenitally given with the psyche itself (yet not necessarily genetically inherited), even if somewhat modified by historical and geographic factors. These patterns or archai appear in the arts, religions, dreams, and social customs of all peoples, and they manifest spontaneously in mental disorders. For Jung they are anthropological and cultural, and also spiritual in that they transcend the empirical world of time and place.”[iii]

Hillman, who takes a rather postmodern line, emphasises the cultural, mythical, metaphorical and imaginal aspects of archetypes: “archetypal psychology’s first links are with culture and imagination rather than with medical and empirical psychologies, which tend to confine psychology to the positivistic manifestations of the nineteenth-century condition of the soul”.[iv] For Hillman the irreducible language of archetypes is found in the “metaphorical discourse of myths”, thus:

“To study human nature at its most basic level, one must turn to culture (mythology, religion, art, architecture, epic, drama, ritual) where these patterns are portrayed. The full implication of this move away from bio-chemical, socio-historical, and personal-behavioristic bases for human nature and toward the imaginative has been articulated by Hillman as “the poetic basis of mind”. Support for the archetypal and psychological significance of myth, besides the work of Jung, comes from Ernest Cassirer, Karl Kerenyi, Erich Neumann, Heinrich Zimmer, Gilbert Durand, Joseph Campbell, and David Miller.”[v]

The second immediate father of archetypal psychology is Henry Corbin (1903-1978), the French scholar, philosopher, mystic and translator/interpreter of early Islamic and pre-Islamic mystical thought.[vi] And, as Hillman points out, the predecessors of Jung and Corbin go back to:

“…the Neoplatonic tradition via Vico and the Renaissance (Ficino), through Proclus and Plotinus, to Plato (Phaedo, Phaedrus, Meno, Symposium, Timaeus), and most recently to Heraclitus (Corbin’s works on Avicenna, Ibn’Arabi, and Sohrawardi belong also to this tradition as does the work of Kathleen Raine on William Blake [1758-1835] and on Thomas Taylor, the English translator of the main writings of Plato and the Neoplatonists.”[vii]

[i] C.G. Jung, ‘Mind and Earth’, in: The Collected Works of C.G. Jung,( 1953-78). vol.10, para. 53.

[ii] See James W. Heisig (1979) Imago Dei – A Study of C.G. Jung’s Psychology of Religion, 137.

[iii] James Hillman, (1993) Archetypal Psychology, 2.

[iv] Ibid, 1.

[v] Ibid, 3.

[vi] Ibid, 3.

[vii] Ibid, 4.

DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY, the modern field whose interest is in the unconscious levels of the psyche – that is, the deeper meanings of the soul – is itself no modern term. According to James Hillman, Jung is:

“…the immediate ancestor in a long line that stretches back through Freud, Dilthy, Coleridge, Schelling, Vico, Ficino, Plotinus, and Plato to Heraclitus – and with even more branches which have yet to be traced. Heraclitus lies near the roots of this ancestral tree of thought, since he was the earliest to take psyche as his ancestral first principle, to imagine the soul in terms of flux and to speak of its depth without measure.”[i]

Depth psychology is fundamentally an archetypal psychology of image. The Imagination is crucial to the psyche or soul. Hillman argues that in working towards a psychology of soul that is based in a psychology of image, suggests “both a poetic basis of mind and a psychology that starts neither in the physiology of the brain, the structure of language, the organisation of society, nor the analysis of behaviour, but in the processes of the imagination.”[ii] Ever since Heraclitus said “You could not discover the limits of the soul (psyche), even if you travelled every road to do so; such is the depth (bathun) of its meaning (logos)”[iii] – the dimension of soul has been depth, not breadth or height. Soul is not on the surface or in superficialities but reaches down into hidden depths. For Hillman:

“The terms psyche and soul can be used interchangeably, although there is a tendency to escape the ambiguity of the word soul by recourse to the more biological, more modern psyche. Psyche is used more as a natural concomitant to physical life, perhaps reducible to it. Soul, on the other hand, has metaphysical and romantic overtones. It shares frontiers with religion.”[iv]

Hillman has a preference for ‘soul’ over ‘psyche’; however Jung, after wavering between describing the object of psychology as ‘seele’ (soul) and ‘psyche’, eventually after 1933 settled for ‘psyche’.[v] If it is accepted that there is an equivalence between ‘psyche’ and ‘soul’, the problem of how to define such a limitless concept remains. Hillman concludes that it resists all definition, as do all ultimate symbols, root metaphors for systems of human thought.[vi] Jung himself never claimed to know what the psyche is. This was despite the fact that he “traced the origin of all religious traditions to the extraordinary creativity found in the human psyche”.[vii]

While it may not be possible to define ‘psyche’, an attempt can be made at a descriptive model. Jung proposed a model of the psyche based upon clinical psychiatric evidence and his very extensive study of cultures past and present. His model is that of a three-tiered structure correlated to different life-stages or ages – (1) an individual conscious ego (younger than our physical age); (2) a personal unconscious (going back to birth and prenatal experiences); (3) a collective unconscious (continuing the whole spiritual heritage of humankind’s evolution born anew in the brain structure of every individual). Unlike the personal unconscious, which is made up of memories, the collective unconscious is made up of propensities or originating patterns which Jung called archetypes.

[i] James Hillman, ReVisioning Psychology (New York:Harper & Row Publishers, 1975), xi.

[ii] Ibid, xi.

[iii] Ibid, xi. & 231 notes. See reference to Philip Wheelwright, Heraclitus (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1959), Fragment 42.

[iv] Thomas Moore(ed.) & James Hillman, The Essential James Hillman – A Blue Fire (London: Routledge, 1990), 20. Note: Hillman’s books tend to use ‘soul’ rather than ‘psyche’. ‘Soul’ is the dominant theme in his entire work.

[v] James W. Heisig, Imago Dei – A Study of C.G. Jung’s Psychology of Religion (London: Associated University Presses, 1979), 159-160.

[vi] James Hillman, Archetypal Psychology – A Brief Account (Dallas: Spring Publications, Inc. 1993), 16.

[vii] Lloyd Geering (1992) Religious Trailblazers, 30.

WHILE TWENTIETH CENTURY behavioural psychology denies the existence of spirituality, soul and even consciousness, in line with scientific positivism,[i] there is a long historical tradition of locating spirituality or ‘God’ within the individual, in both psychology and religion – hence Jungian depth and archetypal psychology, world mythology, Gnosticism, Buddhism, Western and Eastern mysticism and the ancient primal and polytheistic religions of the world.

Depth and archetypal psychology maintain the idea of spirituality as being inner, inherent in the mind, or intrinsic to the psyche or soul. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875-1961), one of the greatest explorers of the human mind and a life-long student of world religions, both historical and cultural – is more than any other Western thinker in recent times associated with the search for inner spirituality. His thinking spans both modernism and postmodernism. English writer and broadcaster J.B Priestly (1894-1984), wrote of Jung in the Sunday Telegraph:

“He was on a giant scale…he was a master physician of the soul in his insights, a profound sage in his conclusions. He is also one of Western Man’s great liberators.” [ii]

Perceiving ‘spirituality as intrinsic to the psyche’ is both a recent phenomenon as well as having its roots in antiquity. However it has never been a mainstream focus of religion in the monotheistic West – and it is outside the orthodox religious establishments that it is again being seriously considered. Donald Broadribb argues that ‘God’ is increasingly being seen in terms of inner experience and process.

“In line with the more introverted religious philosophies of the East to which many Westerners are turning, “God” has come to be understood more and more as an inner experience and less and less as an identifiable “object” existing apart from the individual.”[iii]

Both Jung and the Gnostics of the early Christian period saw spirituality as an intrinsic property of the psyche. Self-exploration at the deepest levels, both believed, leads to spiritual wakening. In fact, “a true spiritual experience may be one of the most basic drives in the psyche, and may even be an essential psychological need.”[iv] Curtis Smith summarises Jung’s view that “the human position is supreme, with the psyche and its realization serving as the basis of religious meaning.”[v] To realise the psyche is to realise one’s interconnectedness with all things:

“At the farthest reaches of the self-realization process the boundary between psyche and world blurs to the point of extinction, so that rather than an impenetrable wall separating psyche and world, psyche and world appear as points on a continuum, forming an indivisible whole. For Jung, therefore human existence is simultaneously universal and particular… to realize the self is to realize one’s interconnectedness with all things.”[vi]

For Jung all religious experience is psychic in origin. While he is arguably the twentieth century’s greatest thinker on religion and spirituality as grounded in the psyche, and hence of depth or imaginative psychology, he is not the only thinker to link spirituality with the psyche. Even Freud (1856-1939), who made a devastating critique of religion on the “manifest” level as illusion, was on the “latent” level preoccupied with religion as mystery deep within the psyche.[vii]

THE INTERIOR JOURNEY into the depths of the psyche in search for the ground of all being, is inherent to both mysticism and depth psychology. Even within the Western monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which were not originally mystical, there are schools of thought and prominent individuals who have emphasised the subjective experience. ‘God’ and the Pleroma (representing a map of the soul) were not external realities ‘out there’ but were to be found within. Karen Armstrong, for example, points out that the Gnostics “showed that many of the new converts to Christianity were not satisfied with the traditional idea of God which they had inherited from Judaism.”[viii] Hippolytus in the Heresies admonishes:

“Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is within you makes everything his own and says, My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body. Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate. Learn how it happens that one watches without willing, loves without willing. If you carefully investigate these matters, you will find him in yourself.” [ix]

By concentrating on the divine energy within, rather than the nature of an external God outside, the mystic was better able to ‘untie the knots’ within the psyche and take ownership of personal ‘evil’, or the unrealised shadowside which conflicts with the ego, as Jung defined it. This was rather similar to the psychoanalytic attempt to unlock complexes which impede mental health and fulfilled living. Karen Armstrong, theologian and a former nun, argues:

“One of the problems of ethical monotheism is that it isolates evil. Because we cannot accept the idea that there is evil in our God, there is a danger that we will not be able to endure it within ourselves. It can then be pushed away and made monstrous and inhuman. The terrifying image of Satan in Western Christendom was such a distorted projection.” [x]

It is not hard to see that the mystic was often at odds with the certainties of mainstream and more dogmatic forms of religion. Since each individual had “had a unique experience of God, it followed that no one religion could express the whole of the divine mystery”.[xi] Donald Broadribb makes the point that:

“Judaism, Christianity and Islam in their main streams have at times during their history persecuted union mystics as heretics who deny the essential division between humanity and God, reserving the possible full union of human and divine for only one person (Jesus, in Christianity) or denying it altogether (as in Judaism and Islam).” [xii]

MYTHOLOGY which is a feature of primal religions, the pagan and the early matriarchal religions, has often been an attempt to explain the inner world of the psyche. However as Armstrong points out, the Gods and Goddesses of the myths were regarded as heathen, inferior and a challenge to the supremacy of the monotheistic God of the prophets of Israel:

“The prophets had declared war on mythology: their God was active in history and in current political events rather than in the primordial sacred time of myth.” [xiii]

Mythology was reasserted however when some monotheists turned to mysticism. Inadvertently or not, the mystics reissued the challenge to the supremacy of a monotheistic God idealised in dogmatic and politically orientated religious traditions. The mystical experience of “God” has characteristics common to all faiths and hence it tends to pull down the barriers separating religions. Armstrong further describes the mystical experience as being subjective, involving an interior journey.

“[It is] not a perception of an objective fact outside the self: it is undertaken through the image-making part of the mind – often called the imagination – rather than through the more cerebral, logical faculty. Finally, it is something that the mystic creates in himself or herself deliberately: certain physical or mental exercises yield the final vision; it does not always come upon them unawares.” [xiv]

Both Freud and Jung turned to the myths of the ancients to explain the inner world of the psyche and the unconscious.

The American Joseph Campbell’s (1904-1987) work in the study of world comparative mythology and comparative religion, also has strong affinities with Jung and depth psychology. As Armstrong points out, the current enthusiasm for psychoanalysis in the West can be seen as a desire for some kind of mysticism because there are arresting similarities between the two disciplines.[xv]

[i] Behaviourism is a school of psychology that regards objective observable aspects of the behaviour of organisms as the only valid subject of study; cf. Collins English Dictionary, eds., Hanks, P., Long, T.H., Urdang, L. (London: Collins, 1977),132. See also; A Dictionary of Philosophy, eds., Speake, J., Isaacs, A. (London: Pan Books, 1979), 37; The Oxford Companion to the Mind, ed., Richard L. Gregory (Oxford University Press, 1987), 71-74 ; The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed., Ted Honderich (Oxford University Press, 1995), 81-2.

[ii] J.B. Priestly, Sunday Telegraph. See review C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Great Britain: Fount Paperbacks, 1977. First published, 1961)

[iii] Donald Broadribb, The Mystical Chorus – Jung and the Religious Dimension (Australia: Millenium Books, 1995), 127.

[iv] John Pennachio, ‘Gnostic Illumination and Carl Jung’s Individuation’, Journal of Religion and Health v.31, no.3, Fall (1992), 245.

[v] Curtis D. Smith, ‘Psychological Ultimacy: Jung and the Human Basis of Religious Meaning’, Religious Humanism v.25, no.4 (1991), 174.

[vi] Ibid, 178.

[vii] R. Melvin Keiser, ‘Postcritical Religion and the Latent Freud’, Zygon v.25. no.4 (1990), 433.

[viii] Karen Armstrong, A History of God (London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1994), 115.

[ix] Hippolytus, Heresies 8.15. 1-2 as cited in Armstrong, Ibid, 114.

[x] Karen Armstrong (1994) A History of God, 287.

[xi] Ibid, 275.

[xii] Donald Broadribb (1995) The Mystical Chorus,122.

[xiii] Karen Armstrong (1994) A History of God, 244.

[xiv] Ibid, 253.

[xv] Ibid, 245.

NEW EMERGENCE AND COMPLEXITY SCIENCE (Postmodern Science) also recognizes spirituality. Indeed, there has been a sea-change in science, for while spirituality has made a return in ‘secular’ society, science itself has become less materialist, reductionist, mechanistic and deterministic. For example theoretical biologist and complexity theory pioneer Stuart Kauffman notes that the “process of reinventing the sacred requires a fresh understanding of science that takes into account complexity theory and the idea of emergence. It will require a shift from reductionism, the way of thinking that still dominates our scientific world view.”[i]

James Lovelock, Lynn Margulis, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Rupert Sheldrake, David Bohm, Roger Sperry and John Hitchcock are just a few of the more notable scientists who have challenged the traditional axioms of science, revolutionising perception of the world in such a way that the spiritual and the immaterial are allowed a foot in the door. The blurring of mind and matter, or spirit and matter, challenges the materialist and reductionist, mechanistic science of the modern era – advocates of which have separated off and marginalised the concept of ‘spirit’, often relegating it to the realm of formal, traditional and archaic religion.

The modernist view of an objective science which discovers Truth by examining what is ‘out there’ – hence the material and empirical world – has been further undermined by questions from biologists about the independent nature of cognition. Biologists and neurophysiologists Maturana and Varela argue that the act of cognition does not simply mirror objective reality “out there”. Cognition is an active process, rooted in our biological structure, by which we actually create our world of experience through our coexistence. In arguing thus, they walk on the razor’s edge, eschewing the extremes of representationalism (objectivism) and solipsism (idealism).[ii] This new view of the world is relational and holistic.

Arguably, a new postmodern science is called for with new tools required for the description of this reality. Indeed, quantum physicist David Bohm, argued in 1988 for a “Postmodern Science and a Postmodern World”.[iii] For Bohm, a postmodern science would not separate matter and consciousness; meaning and value are as much integral aspects of the world as they are of us.[iv] Elsewhere Bohm has proposed that the workings of the subatomic world only make sense if we assume the existence of other more complex non-local levels of reality beyond the quantum.[v] The level in which we live, where the particles appear to be separate, he called the ‘explicate order’ – but behind this is a deeper reality, in which separateness dissolves; and he called this the ‘implicate order’

Roger Sperry summed up the changes in science in the latter part of the twentieth century and maintained that the prospects for uniting science and religion are brightened by recently changed views of consciousness and mind-body interaction.[vi] In essence, Sperry’s argument is that when the molecules and atoms of our world are seen to be moved by higher level forces that are not reducible in principle to the fundamental forces of physics – then mental, vital and spiritual forces, long excluded and denounced by materialist philosophy, are reinstated in non-mystical form. Sperry’s concepts of spirituality and theology are broad and not equated with traditional religious institutions. Sperry concludes:

“…a naturalistic, scientific, or pantheistic theology is seen to yield a moral framework and outlook that has new credibility, satisfying spiritual and esthetic appeal and at the same time promotes values that would appear to be of the type needed to counter current global trends toward worsening world conditions.”[vii]

A broad concept of spirituality, unconfined to conventional religions is also held by quantum physicist John Hitchcock. In (1991) The Web of the Universe: Jung, the “new physics” and human spirituality, Hitchcock states that scientists can no longer ignore spirituality because spirit is inherently within matter; “…our “models” evolve toward greater and greater depth and subtlety. The case, as we now understand it, amounts to a spiritual imperative, even for physics itself.”[vii] Hitchcock also argues that:

“With the new visibility of the dimension of spirit in the atom, we can now see that from the point of view of physics, the physicist cannot avoid dealing with spirit, but must take account of the “models” evolve toward greater and greater depth and subtlety. The case, as we now understand it, amounts to a spiritual imperative, even for physics itself.”[ix]

A new postmodern science has opened up the concept of spirit within matter and behind matter.

[i] Stuart Kauffman, ‘God of Creativity’, New Scientist, 10 May (2008), 52. See reference to Stuart Kauffman, Re-inventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 2008).

[ii] For example see Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, The Tree of Knowledge – The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (Boston: New Science Library, 1987), 241.

[iii] David Bohm, ‘Postmodern Science and a Postmodern World’ in: David Ray Griffin ed., The Re-enchantment of Science – Postmodern Proposals (State University of New York Press, 1988), 57-68

[iv] Ibid, 68.

[v] David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981).

[vi] Roger Sperry, ‘Changed Concepts of Brain and Consciousness: Some Value Implications’, Zygon v.20. no.1 (1985), 41-57.

[vii] Ibid,56.

[viii] John Hitchcock, The Web of the Universe: Jung, the “New Physics” and Human Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1991), 45.

[ix] Ibid,45.

ECOSPIRITUALITY HAS BEEN ARGUED to be more important as a movement than any one of the great world religions. Ecospirituality is the experience of the Divine Presence or Divine Reality in the natural world.

This yearning for and returning to humankind’s first religious awakening is a recent re-recognition of a timeless truth – and on these terms it is a recent development in the history of spirituality. Ecospirituality, Gaia spirituality, Nature-earth spirituality or Nature-mysticism are all new terms for this recent development.

Wayne Teasdale is one who maintains that ecospirituality and the Green Movement have emerged out of the negative results of modern industrial society. The destruction of the natural world has reawakened a passion for wilderness consciousness and nature-mysticism which is really a sort of spiritual or inner illumination. “It is the ability to perceive the Presence of the Divine immanent in the natural world”; and this is, as Evelyn Underhill tells us, “an overpowering apprehension”.[i]

Teasdale concludes that ecospirituality is the most important development of the twentieth century, ranking it in significance to the discovery of the printing press and the Copernican Revolution. It brings a shift in paradigm, which brings with it a revolution in human consciousness. Teasdale maintains:

“Eco-spirituality is singularly more significant, as a movement, than any one of the great world religions, when regarded from the larger perspective of the earth process.”[ii]

[i] Wayne Teasdale, ‘Nature-Mysticism as the Basis of Eco-Spirituality’, Studies in Formative Spirituality, v.12, no.2 (1991), 218-219. Note: Teasdale refers to Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (New York: Dutton, 1961), 234.

[ii] Ibid, 230.

THE FEMINIST REVOLUTION in the latter half of the twentieth century has embraced the new wave of secular spirituality. This has involved a challenge to, and a rebellion against, traditional patriarchal religions and of necessity a re-definition of what is essential in religion for women – a reconsideration of spirituality.

The roll-call perhaps begins with the coolly observant French academic and writer Simone de Beauvoir who, although not professing to be a feminist at the time of writing The Second Sex in the 1940s, has had a pioneering role in the challenge by feminist philosophy to the prevailing patriarchal ideologies of the twentieth century[i]. Then there was Merlin Stone who examined and dissected the archaeological evidence for the Goddess and the patriarchal Judeo-Christian cultures’ suppression of women and their matriarchal religions[ii]. Stone was closely followed by Naomi Goldenberg, a psychologist of religion and feminist theologian who maintained that “When feminists succeed in changing the position of women in Christianity and Judaism, they will shake these religions at their roots.” [iii]

American academic Mary Daly is perhaps the most damning, challenging, radical and creative of the recent feminist theologians and philosophers. A former nun and a Professor of Theology at Boston College, her critique of the detrimental effects of patriarchal religion is chilling[iv]. More recently Muslim feminists, for example Irshad Manji (2003), have risked their lives by taking on fundamentalist patriarchal Islam.[v]

Feminist philosophers and theologians have confronted the authority of the dominant patriarchal monotheistic Western religious traditions and establishments head-on. They have realised that women’s spirituality and dignity have been plundered and defiled along with the natural world. Based on this they have searched out and created alternatives. For example, the association of postmodern theology with process theology, the ecological movement and the feminization of the divine, is pivotal in the work of ecofeminist theologian Carol P. Christ[vi] Postmodernist arguments are frequently used by feminists. For example, Ellen Leonard argues that no theology can claim universality and all theologies are political:

“Traditional Western theology is now seen as determined by dominant world powers and groups. The critique of this theology comes from the “new theologies” which argue that Western theology is culture-bound, church-centred, male-dominated, age-dominated, procapitalist, anticommunist, nonrevolutionary and overly theoretical.”[vii]

These feminist revolutionaries reject dualistic and hierarchical thinking which devalues women, body and nature.[viii] They demand a re-visioning of the divine and a new theology in the light of contemporary experience – especially woman’s experience.

For religious archetypes, icons and myths, feminists have harkened back to a pre-patriarchial era when the Goddess or Goddesses and polytheistic Gods were worshipped.[ix] Feminist theologians have gone inwards into the imagination to focus on the symbolic meaning of the Goddess, Goddesses and other Gods, allowing them to explore new patterns of spirituality.[x]

Like their foremothers of the matriarchial ‘pagan’ religions, feminist theologians have turned to Mother Earth and tried to formulate a spiritual search which is nature and earth-centred. Ecofeminists are at the forefront of the ecology and ecospirituality movements. They have challenged traditional philosophy and theology by advocating a holistic understanding and epistemology with recognition of the spiritual interconnectedness of all of creation and co-responsibility for our world.[xi] Ecofeminists have combined a critique of the destructiveness of patriarchal attitudes to nature and women, with an affirmation of a spiritual search which is nature-earth centred rather than anthropocentric. Ecotheologian and Catholic Priest, Thomas Berry argues that:

“The greatest support for the feminist, anti-patriarchal movement can be found in the ecological movement…What has become progressively clear is the association of the feminine issue with the ecological issue.”[xii]

Ariel Salleh maintains that:

“Ecofeminism confronts not only social institutions and practices, but the language and logics by which Western patriarchy constructs its relation to nature. In doing so, it has already travelled a long way down the very same road that deep ecological opponents of anthropocentricism are looking for.”[xiii]

[i] Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (London: New English Library, 1970), 352.

[ii] Merlin Stone, When God Was a Woman (New York: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976).

[iii] See Changing of the Gods – Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions (Boston:Beacon Press, 1979), 5.

[iv] Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father –Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973); Gyn/Ecology – The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978); Pure Lust – Elemental Feminist Philosophy (London: The Women’s Press, 1984).

[v] Irshad Manji, The Trouble With Islam: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith (Canada: Random House, 2003).

[vi] Carol P. Christ, She Who Changes – Re-imagining the Divine in the World (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003 ).

[vii] Ellen Leonard, ‘Experience as a source for theology: A Canadian and feminist perspective’, Studies in Religion v.19, no.2 (1990), 146.

[viii] See Rosemary Radford Ruether, New Women, New Earth (New York: Seabury, 1975) and ‘Ecology and Human Liberation: A Conflict between the Theology of History and the Theology of Nature?’ in To Change the World: Christology and Cultural Criticism (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 57-70. See also Marsha Hewitt, ‘Women, Nature and Power; Emancipatory Themes in Critical Theory and Feminist Theology’, Studies in Religion v.20, no.3 (1991), 271.

[ix] See Merlin Stone, When God Was a Woman (1976); William G. Dever, ‘Women’s popular religion, suppressed in the Bible, now revealed by archaeology’, Biblical Archaeology Review, v.17, no.2 ( 1991), 64-65; Marija Gimbutas, The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974); – Myths, Legends and Cult Images (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); Charlene Spretnak, ed., The Politics of Women’s Spirituality: Essays on the Rise of Spiritual Power Within the Feminist Movement (Garden City, N.Y: Anchor Press / Doubleday, 1982).

[x] Marsha Hewitt (1991) ‘Women, Nature and Power; Emancipatory Themes in Critical Theory and Feminist Theology’, 157.

[xi] See Sally Mcfague, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987); Rosemary Radford Ruether, New Women , New Earth (New York: Seabury, 1975); Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: the Roaring Inside Her (New York: Harper & Row, 1978); Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1980); Charlene Spretnak, The Spiritual Dimension of Green Politics (Santa Fe: N.M. Bear & Co, 1986); Carol P. Christ, She Who Changes – Re-Imagining the Divine in the World (2003).

[xii] See Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1988) ,160-161.

[xiii] Ariel Salleh, ‘The Ecofeminism/Deep Ecology Debate: A Reply to Patriarchal Reason’, Environmental Ethics v.14, no.3 (1992), 215.