Remembering the Goddess We Lost

Why so many women are searching for a feminine face of the Divine

For much of my life, I felt something was missing from the spirituality I’d inherited, though I couldn’t have explained what it was at the time. I only knew that I struggled to see myself reflected in it. The older I became, the more I found myself questioning why the Divine always seemed to have a masculine face and voice.

That questioning stayed with me for years.

I grew up in the early 70s when the women’s liberation movement was at its height. This informed some of my worldview, but underneath it, I held a deep intuitive knowing that women hadn’t always been treated as chattel and second-class citizens. Even as a teenager, I saw how patriarchy damages, demeans, and devalues women. This questioning led me to reading about ancient cultures, and it became a favorite hobby.

I love learning how beliefs and societies have changed over the years, especially as it relates to spirituality. It’s interesting for me to discover how ancient peoples revered the land, natural phenomena, and divine beings and how this affected their culture. This information helps me in understanding our current society and culture, especially how it affects women. We can learn from the past to inform our present and future. I believe we can change our society by returning to the beliefs once held by our ancestors and updating them for our modern era.

When the Divine Was Feminine

Today, many people perceive God as male.

But did you know, God was once a woman?

In our distant past, our ancestors worshiped the Divine Feminine through Goddess spirituality—gathering under the stars in sacred groves, even in temples dedicated to the Goddess. They called her the Great Mother, the Queen of Heaven, the Caretaker of the Underworld, the Maiden Hunter, or the Shining One. In many stories, she birthed the world into being.

This has always made sense to me. Women are the ones who give birth and bring new beings into the world. The mythology of a male god creating the world—by himself—always made me scratch my head. It didn’t feel plausible, especially concerning the maxim, “As above, so below. As below, so above.” To me, this reflects that what exists in the sacred finds expression in the physical world.

As I continued exploring ancient cultures, my intuition guided me to discover that across civilizations and across centuries, traces of the Feminine Divine appeared again and again.

For thousands and thousands of years, the supreme deity was the Goddess. The gods were her sons and/or consorts. Societies were matrilineal; property passed through the mother-line. It’s always clear who the mother of a child is. According to Riane Eisler in her book, The Chalice and the Blade, many ancient societies were egalitarian and lived in peace. Women were spiritual and secular leaders alongside and in concert with men.

The Rise of Patriarchy

Yet the stories preserved from those long-ago eras also reveal a world beginning to change. The Goddess didn’t disappear all at once. Her presence slowly faded as new systems of power took hold. Societies began to change as men reached for more power in controlling property and land.

The system of patriarchy took over. Property passed not through the mother-line, but through the father-line. And now, because men needed assurance that the child their property passed to was truly their son, they had to control women. They made them property.

And the world has never been the same.

The loss wasn’t only cultural or political. It changed how we understood ourselves, the sacred, and our place in the world.

How Patriarchy Silenced the Goddess

As patriarchal religions took hold, we lost the balance between masculine and feminine divine energy. The once-thriving ancient Goddess religions that celebrated the Divine Feminine faded into myth. The nurturing, compassionate goddesses were replaced by all-powerful, and often vengeful, gods. As I studied these stories, I began noticing echoes of that change within the myths themselves.

Inanna’s story of descending into the underworld paints a picture of patriarchy’s early attempts to usurp the roles once held by the Goddess. This myth begins with Inanna preparing to visit her sister’s realm, the world of the dead, and Inanna allows her consort Dumuzi to rule her kingdom in her absence. When Inanna finally returns, she finds Dumuzi not in mourning, but “clothed in a magnificent garment and seated magnificently on a throne.”

Dumuzi’s usurpation of Inanna’s rule may reflect the growing attitude of a patriarchal, male-dominated religious and secular worldview. It echoes the larger cultural changes beginning to reshape the ancient world.

Whether or not my interpretation is historically accurate, the story stayed with me because it reflected something I’d begun realizing in my life. Long before I recognized it, I felt the absence of the feminine face of the Divine. I didn’t yet know that many other women were asking similar questions about spirituality, religion, and where women fit within the sacred.

That absence shaped more of my life than I realized.

Searching for the Feminine Divine in a Masculine World

In our modern society, where monotheism and “God the Father” are so prevalent, many women are seeking a divine feminine awakening. I was one of them—longing for a spirituality reflecting my experience as a woman and my connection to the feminine divine.

I grew up in a Christian sect where “God the Father” was all-powerful, and any mention of “God the Mother” was only in brief passing. She didn’t have a name or a face. The Mormon Church taught me God created man in his own image.

But I wasn’t a man. I was a woman.

The story of Eve, the first woman, created from Adam’s rib, taught me that women were an after-thought and less than men.

Then I found the Goddess and Goddess spirituality.

Until then, I didn’t realize there were spiritual paths that centered women and honored the Divine Feminine. At first, this helped me heal from some of my past wounds and trauma caused by growing up in a patriarchal world. But as I continued working with the Goddess, I began recognizing that I’d found what I’d been seeking for most of my life. What began as curiosity slowly became a relationship.

Meeting the Goddess Within

Through Goddess spirituality, I discovered the Divine Feminine not as a distant deity, but as an energy within every woman. I heard her call to reclaim our sacred balance and sovereignty.

For me, Goddess spirituality isn’t a religion but rather a way of living and relating—to myself, to the sacred, and to the world around me. People often ask what Goddess spirituality is. For me, it’s less about worshiping a deity and more about living in relationship with the sacred through the Feminine Divine. This spirituality allows me to remember when people worshiped the Feminine Divine and held her in reverence. I can remember the ancient Goddesses and find solace in their energy.

It’s quite different from the patriarchal god I grew up knowing, where he sits on a throne, tossing lightning bolts or delivering punishment. Rather than some Being “out there somewhere” judging me for any transgressions I might commit, the Goddess loves me unconditionally. She comes to me in times of need. Realizing this changed the way I understood both spirituality and myself.

As a woman, I can connect to the Goddess in ways I never could with a father figure. How can a male god ever understand the pain of menstruation or childbirth? Or the joy of feeling life move for the first time in the womb, or nursing a baby?

The more I walk this path, the more I recognize her presence not only beyond me, but within me.

The Goddess in Every Woman

The more I connected with the Goddess and her presence with me, the more I saw her reflected in other women. I recognize the Feminine Divine in my laughter, my resilience, my creativity, and in other women as well. Divine Feminine spirituality shows me that we are both human and sacred—that I’m not separate from the Divine, but part of it.

I can see myself in the face of the Goddess, in her many names, aspects, and forms. Whether she is the young girl moving into womanhood with her first menses or the fierce maiden finding her voice and her sexuality, I can relate to her. I remember those days of discovery.

As a mother raising my child, I could see myself in the Goddess’s mother aspect and called on her for guidance. Now that I’m older but not old, the Goddess as a queen or matriarch shows me I have sovereignty over my life. I watch my mother in her waning years, and the Goddess as crone shines in her face.

As I continue deepening my relationship with myself and the Goddess, I look to her many faces for wisdom and guidance. I always find one whose qualities illuminate something I need to reclaim within myself. Minerva guides me to have wisdom. Hecate helps me make a decision, and Amaterasu teaches me to accept my inner beauty. I pray to Lakshmi for abundance and Ma’at for justice. I connect to Isis to remember I am whole and complete, or to Baubo to remember to laugh.

Over the years, I’ve stopped seeing the Goddess as distant mythological figures, and instead, I experience them as companions, even friends, in the unfolding of my life.

That relationship has changed the way I understand both the masculine and the feminine divine.

The Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine in Sacred Balance

For me, following the Goddess isn’t about replacing one imbalance with another. To restore harmony, we must honor both the Goddess and the God—the Divine Feminine and the Divine Masculine—in sacred balance. The heart of Goddess spirituality is Unity in Duality.

Even though I am a priestess and follow the Goddess, it doesn’t mean I discount the divine masculine. The God is her consort, and there is balance and harmony between them.

I believe harmony, balance, and equality occur when women recover and reclaim the parts of themselves life taught them to diminish and hide. This doesn’t require pushing men or rejecting the Divine Masculine. It begins by remembering our value and what we’ve forgotten. I follow the Goddess, and I write from that path and perspective.

Remembering Ourselves

The Goddess is every woman, and every woman is the Goddess. She is in us, and we are part of Her. Remembering this changed the way I see myself and other women, and how I experience the sacred.

Looking back, I can see that I wasn’t only searching for a different spirituality. I was searching for a reflection of myself within the sacred.

In these essays, I share my journey in finding myself and recovering the parts of myself I’ve hidden to fit into a patriarchal society.

Through my connection and dance with the Goddess, I’ve found a deep sense of serenity, contentment, and joy that I never experienced in my past religious life. Finally, after decades of searching, I’ve recovered parts of myself I once believed I’d lost, and I am happy with myself and who I am. The search that began when I was young finally brought me home to myself.

Because now I know God looks like me…

She is a woman.

Sometimes we recognize something in a piece of writing not because it teaches us something new, but because it gives shape to something we’ve already been feeling.

If parts of this essay resonated with you, you might spend a few moments reflecting on what it stirred, remembered, or brought into focus for you.

1. Have there been moments in your life when you felt disconnected from the spirituality, beliefs, or stories you inherited? What did that experience feel like for you?

2. Have you ever felt drawn toward a different way of understanding the sacred, even if you couldn’t explain why? What was calling to you?

3. As you sit with this idea of remembering rather than becoming, what feels familiar, recognized, or already present within you?

I invite you to join the conversation on my Substack, Lunar Ink & Alchemy, to share your experience and insights from reading this essay.