Jung and Goddess: the significance of Jungian and post-Jungian theory to the development of the Western Goddess Movement

This study is concerned with the significance of Jungian and post-Jungian theory to the development of the contemporary Western Goddess Movement, which includes the various self-identified nature-based, Pagan, Goddess Feminism, Goddess Consciousness, Goddess Spirituality, Wicca, and Goddess-centred faith traditions that have seen a combined increase in Western adherents over the past five decades and share a common goal to claim Goddess as an active part of Western consciousness and faith traditions. The Western Goddess Movement has been strongly influenced by Jung’s thought, and by feminist revisions of Jungian Theory, sometimes interpreted idiosyncratically, but presented as a route to personal and spiritual transformation. The analysis examines ways in which women encounter Goddess through a process of Jungian Individuation and traces the development of Jungian and post-Jungian theories by identifying the key thinkers and central ideas that helped to shape the development of the Western Goddess Movement. It does so through a close reading and analysis of five biographical ‘rebirth’ memoirs published between 1981 and 1998: Christine Downing’s (1981) The Goddess: Mythological Images of the Feminine; Jean Shinoda Bolen’s (1994) Crossing to Avalon: A Woman’s Midlife Pilgrimage; Sue Monk Kidd’s (1996) The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman’s Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine; Margaret Starbird’s (1998) The Goddess in the Gospels: Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine; and Phyllis Curott’s (1998) Book of Shadows: A Modern Woman’s Journey into the Wisdom of Witchcraft and the Magic of the Goddess. These five memoirs reflect the diversity of the faith traditions in the Western Goddess Movement. The enquiry centres upon two parallel and complementary research threads: 1) critically examining the content of the memoirs in order to determine their contribution to the development of the Goddess Movement and 2) charting and sourcing the development of the major Jungian and post-Jungian theories championed in the memoirs in order to evaluate the significance of Jungian and post-Jungian thought in the Movement. The aim of this study was to gain a better understanding of the original research question: what is the significance of Jungian and post-Jungian theory for the development of the Western Goddess Movement? Each memoir is subjected to critical review of its intended audiences, its achievements, its functions and strengths, and its theoretical frameworks. Research results offered more than the experiences of five Western women, it also provided evidence to analyse the significance of Jungian and post-Jungian theory to the development of the Western Goddess Movement. The findings demonstrate the vital contributions of the analytical psychology of Carl Jung, and post-Jungians M Esther Harding, Erich Neumann, Christine Downing, E.C. Whitmont, and Jean Shinoda Bolen; the additional contributions of Sue Monk Kidd, Margaret Starbird, and Phyllis Curott, and exhibit Jungian and post-Jungian pathways to Goddess. Through a variety of approaches to Jungian categories, these memoirs constitute a literature of Individuation for the Western Goddess Movement.

Beyond orientalism: 'The Stranger' and 'Colonial Cosmopolitanism' in the romantic period novel

Going beyond Orientalism in its examination of novels dealing with British colonisation in the West, as well as the East Indies, the postcolonial frame of my thesis develops recent theorisations of the Romantic ‘stranger’. Analysing a range of novels from the much anthologised Mansfield Park (1814), to less well-known narratives such as John Thelwall’s The Daughter of Adoption (1801) and Sir Walter Scott’s Saint Ronan’s Well (1823), my thesis seeks to account for a model of ‘colonial cosmopolitanism’ within fiction of the period. Considering the cosmopolitan dimensions of the transferential rhetoric of slavery, my thesis explores the ways in which, Jane Austen, Amelia Opie and Maria Edgeworth consider the position of women in domestic society through a West Indian frame. Demonstrating the need for reform both at home and abroad, such novels are representative of a fledgling cosmopolitanism that is often overlooked in current criticism. In seeking to account for ‘colonial cosmopolitanism’ as a new model for reading fiction composed during the Romantic period, my thesis attempts to add further nuance to current understandings of sympathetic exchange during the process of British colonisation. In chapters four and five I will develop my analysis of novels dealing with colonial expansion in the Caribbean to consider novels which deal with the Indian subcontinent. Although stopping short of questioning colonial expansion, discourses of ‘colonial cosmopolitanism’, as my thesis demonstrates, provided a foundation for humanitarian and cultural engagement which was mutually transformative for both the coloniser and the colonised.