Living in the Lap of the Goddess: The Feminist Spirituality Movement in America

Cynthia Eller is a scholar of American religion, and this early book, published by an independent religious studies press, is a sympathetic ethnographic and historical account of the American feminist spirituality movement, written from close engagement with its practitioners rather than from outside detachment, a closeness this record states plainly. It describes the movement's rituals, its Goddess centred theology and its emergence from second wave feminism, treating the movement's devotional life on its own terms. Eller's own later book, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, revisited the historical claims this earlier book described more sympathetically and argued against the specific thesis of a suppressed prehistoric goddess worshipping culture, a shift in her own published position this record also carries. This record has not independently traced scholarly rebuttal to this book's descriptive claims. Use it for the movement's practice, ritual and self understanding as of the early 1990s; use Eller's own later book for the critical historical assessment of its foundational prehistory claim.