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JFSR 30.1 (2014) 83–107
LORDING IT OVER THE GODDESS
Water, Gender, and Human-Environmental Relations
Veronica Strang
Focusing on human engagements with water, this article steps
back from specically cultural or historical contexts in order to
trace the larger patterns of social, religious and technological
change that have transformed most societies’ relationships with
their environments. It examines transitions from totemic “nature
religions” to male-dominated and hierarchical belief systems,
and considers how these intersected with shifts to settlement
and agriculture, differentiated gender roles, and stratied socio-
political arrangements. With developments in farming, enlarging
societies moved from egalitarian partnerships with other species
and ecosystems to more directive interactions. Irrigation chan-
neled water into human interests. Initially seen as embodying fe-
male principles, it became the gift of male religious beings. From
being a common good, it became subject to male property rights.
Long understood as the substance of social and spiritual regen-
eration, it was reframed as an economic “asset.” Observing these
transformations, the article also considers long-term contraows:
indigenous struggles; subaltern religions; and environmentalist
and feminist challenges to sociopolitical inequalities.
Through a focus on water and gender, this article considers critical transi-
tions in the historical trajectories of most societies, from animistic and polytheis-
tic “nature religions,” which venerated localized female, male, and androgynous
forces, to increasingly male-dominated and hierarchical belief systems, which
valorized humanized and more distant religious gures. These transitions in-
tersected with shifts from hunting and gathering to settlement and agriculture,
changes in gender roles, and the emergence of stratied sociopolitical arrange-
ments. As technologies such as irrigation developed and societies enlarged, hu-
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Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 30.1
84
man-environmental relations also moved away from egalitarian and reciprocal
partnerships with other species and ecosystems to more directive interactions.
These cosmological and material changes are readily apparent in the history
of water. Often seen initially as an embodiment of female principles, water be-
came the gift of powerful male religious beings. From being owned collectively,
it became the focus of primarily male property rights and control. From being
understood as the substance of social and spiritual regeneration, it became an
economic “asset.” In tracing these patterns, the article also highlights longstand-
ing ideological ows between indigenous people’s struggles to maintain their
own lifeways; the attempts of subaltern religious groups to reestablish more
equitable social and human-environmental relations; conservation movements’
hopes for more sustainable coexistence with other species, and feminist chal-
lenges to sociopolitical inequalities.1
Methodological Terrains
Rather than focusing on a particular historical or cultural context, this arti-
cle considers seemingly recurring patterns across them. There are limitations to
this interdisciplinary “big-picture” perspective. Unless vast and encyclopedic, it
elides the evidential grounding provided by more specic historical and ethno-
graphic approaches, subsuming a host of historicalities, particularities, and di-
versities. It is openly comparative, resisting pressures to theorize social change
only through a frame of historical and cultural relativity.2 It cannot engage more
than eetingly with complex debates about particular spatiotemporal contexts.
However, what the big-picture approach can do is trace patterns and cross-con-
nections that are difcult to discern through closer analyses. It can provide in-
sights and raise critical (and exciting) questions about gender relations, long-
term trajectories of human development, and recursive relationships between
social, cosmological, and technological changes.
1 A number of my former colleagues in New Zealand provided positive input to this work in
its early stages: Kathryn Rountree, Maureen Molloy, Christine Dureau, Mark Busse, and Claudia
Gross. In Durham, Douglas Davies, a leading scholar in this area, was immensely kind in provid-
ing extensive feedback on a later draft. I am also grateful both to him and to Marilyn Strathern for
encouraging conversations about “big-picture” thinking. And I would like to thank the anonymous
reviewers for their encouraging, meticulous, and helpful comments.
2 I have suggested elsewhere that the acknowledgment of a broadly comparative theoretical
framework and an appreciation of cultural and historical specicities are/should be intellectually
complementary rather than mutually exclusive. It is commonly assumed that only cultural relativity
can be ethical. But debates on ethics have raised the point that cultural relativity can also be seen as
an abdication of wider responsibilities. Given that gender inequalities recur across cultural and his-
torical boundaries, it may be that comparison can also be “ethical.” See Veronica Strang, “Common
Senses: Water, Sensory Experience and the Generation of Meaning,” Journal of Material Culture
10, no. 1 (2005): 93–121; and Pat Caplan, ed., The Ethics of Anthropology: Debates and Dilemmas
(New York: Routledge, 2003).
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Strang: Lording It Over the Goddess
85
There is both a methodological and political case for this approach: disci-
pline-based scholarship mines specic historical periods and cultural contexts
to reach deep understandings. While such depth is vital, it is equally import-
ant, from time to time, to draw on more diverse areas of knowledge to ask
larger, more general questions. Why do gender inequalities recur across time
and space? How do technological changes articulate with changing cosmologi-
cal precepts? What has caused human-environmental relationships to become
so exploitative? Methodologically, such questions require interdisciplinary ap-
proaches and cross-cultural conversations. And, politically, to achieve change,
we need to understand how and why human societies repeat patterns of devel-
opment that, no matter how persistent, are socially and ecologically unsustain-
able and unjust.
Through a Glass Darkly
Prehistory can only be seen “through a glass, darkly,”3 but archaeological
evidence suggests some broad commonalities. Clans of hunter-gatherers, gov-
erned by all their (male and female) elders, inhabited sentient cultural land-
scapes containing numerous and variously gendered spiritual beings and forces
that were simultaneously potent, benecent, and dangerous. This animated ma-
terial world responded to human actions, providing resources, offering protec-
tion, or dispensing punishment when laws were violated. Deities took totemic
forms as animals or elements of the environment. Sculptures and images made
between approximately 30,000 BCE and 10,000 BCE also depicted female
forms, the meanings of which have been intensely debated.4 With little explana-
tory record, these debates can never be completely resolved, but the persistent
presence of female beings in prehistoric iconography suggests, at least, some
cosmological gender complementarity.
Archaeological and early documentary records also contain multiple ser-
pentine gures, sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes neither or
both.5 Their form mirrors water’s uid characteristics, and it would appear that
aspects of the environment have often been symbolically gendered according
to their particular attributes.6 Thus water sources were often seen as embody-
3 1 Corinthians 13:12 (KJV).
4 The most well-known are the Venus of Willendorf, a limestone gure discovered at a Pa-
laeolithic site in Austria; the Venus of Lespugue, a mammoth-ivory gure found in the cave of
Les Rideaux; and the Venus of Lausell, a similarly ancient carving at the entrance to a cave in the
Dordogne.
5 Asit Biswas, History of Hydrology (Amsterdam: North-Holland, American Elsevier, 1970);
and Karl Butzer, Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1976).
6 Because humans “use the world to think with” cognitively and metaphorically, the mate-
rial properties of water have tended to manifest serpentine water-like beings, often being depicted
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Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 30.1
86
ing “feminine” principles, homologously echoing women’s containment of uid,
life-sustaining places. There are, of course, many cultural variations: each spa-
tiotemporal context—the inhabitance of arid or well-watered areas, the nomadic
exibilities of pastoralism, or agricultural needs for reliable water sources—has
brought its own particular ways of using and venerating water.7 However, there
are also undercurrents of commonality in each specically cultural adaptation,
and recurrent patterns in their developments over time.
In their multiplicity and relative gender equality, the deities inhabiting
early cultural landscapes demonstrate Èmile Durkheim’s maxim that societies
compose their gods in their own images.8 Hunter-gatherers with gerontocratic,
egalitarian forms of leadership would therefore be expected to have multiple
and variously gendered spiritual representatives—an expectation supported by
the traditional beliefs of contemporary hunter-gatherer groups. More hierar-
chical social arrangements tend to generate fewer and more powerful beings,
which decrease in number as government centralizes. Thus archaeologist and
historian James Breasted suggested that “monotheism appears when people
have before them a model of a powerful, centralized government.”9
as shining and/or multicolored, uid and, ephemeral in form. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 89. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); George Lakoff and
Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); and Strang,
“Common Senses.”
7 There are many specically located historical and ethnographic accounts, but some useful
examples include Bruno David and Julian Thomas, eds., Handbook of Landscape Archaeology,
World Archaeological Congress (WAC) Research Handbook Series (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast
Press, 2008); Paul D’Arcy, The People of the Sea: Environment, Identity, and History in Oceania
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006); Kathleen Galvin, “Transitions: Pastoralists Living with
Change,” Annual Review of Anthropology 38 (2009): 185–98; and Elizabeth Shove, Comfort, Clean-
liness, and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality (Oxford: Berg, 2003).
8 Èmile Durkheim observed that classicatory systems are “modelled on the social organisa-
tion” thus “the essential categories of thought may be the product of social factors” (The Elementary
Forms of the Religious Life [1915; reprint, London: Allen and Unwin, 1968], 145). Talcott Parsons
notes that this enabled Durkheim to conclude that “society is always the real object of religious
veneration” (“The Theoretical Development of the Sociology of Religion,” in Essays on Sociological
Theory Pure and Applied [Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1949, 197-211, 206. And Swanson’s view is that
“the relation of men to their society is like that of the worshipper to his god” (Guy Swanson, The
Birth of the Gods: The Origin of Primitive Beliefs, [1968, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press],
15). As Arthur Hocart commented, “myth, ritual and social organisation are inseparably connected
and cannot protably be studied apart” (The Life-Giving Myth and Other Essays [1952, reprint,
London: Methuen, 1970], xi).
9 James Breasted, The Dawn of Conscience (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933),
quoted in Swanson, Birth of the Gods, 75. This resonates with Sigmund Freud’s hypothesis that
monotheism came out of Egypt with Moses, despite its prevailing polytheism, as “the reection of
a Pharaoh autocratically governing a great world Empire.” He also noted that many early societies
had more powerful creator beings as a backdrop to more localized polytheistic arrangements. See
Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London:
Hogarth Press, 1974), 105.
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Strang: Lording It Over the Goddess
87
This is a recursive relationship: cosmological beliefs serve to afrm and
uphold sociopolitical arrangements and vice versa. But it is a triangular rather
than linear relationship: beliefs and values are manifested in practice, and when
practices change, it follows that religious and political arrangements will also be
affected. Thus—though this transition seems to have occurred only when ag-
riculture advanced well beyond early small-scale horticulture—sociologist and
social psychologist Guy Swanson highlights a critical link between technology
and religion in the parallel emergence of monotheistic beliefs and “societies
which have the most stable sources of food, namely a settled agriculture,” ob-
serving that “complexity of social organization requires increased resources to
permit its appearance and sustain its functioning.”10
By examining the dynamic relationships between cosmological understand-
ings, sociopolitical arrangements, and material practices, this article considers
how human adaptive processes have reshaped gender relations. The intention is
neither to suggest a linear evolutionary perspective nor to essentialize gender. I
merely observe that among the varied rates and trajectories of change in multi-
ple societies there appear to be some broader and consistent patterns in move-
ments from at political structures and animistic “nature religions” to more
hierarchical, sociopolitical arrangements in which power and status accrued
to men, human agency superseded that of the environment, and cosmological
explanations of the world produced increasingly humanized (and increasingly
unequal) male and female deities, until even these were replaced by patriarchal
monotheism. I suggest that people’s relationships with water, and the develop-
ment of more directive ways of engaging with it, have been critical in enabling
these changes. And I ask what it would take to regain more egalitarian social,
religious, and environmental relations.
From Hydrolatry to Idolatry
Water is central to every aspect of human life. Prehistoric societies clus-
tered near resource-rich wetlands, lakes, rivers, and seashores and migrated
along waterways and shorelines. The remnants of their art and material culture
illustrate that water has always featured prominently in people’s religious be-
liefs. Water’s core meanings as a life-giving, generative element have pertained,
even as people’s ways of being in the world have altered radically across time
and space.11 Equally persistent is a keen awareness of water’s “dark” side: it can
submerge or sweep away; dangers lie in its depths.
10 Swanson’s theories suggest a rather linear evolutionary movement from simple to complex
societies (Birth of the Gods, 11). With diverse societal trajectories in mind, I would frame this more
as an issue of scale, with enlarging societies tending to require/enable regional or national gover-
nance, and new economic practices requiring greater specialization and diversity.
11 Veronica Strang, The Meaning of Water (Oxford: Berg, 2004).
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Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 30.1
88
Rock art in various parts of the world suggests that the earliest hunter-gath-
erer societies practiced hydrolatry—valorizing water’s life-giving properties
and propitiating powerful water beings. Water was thus the great generative
element in an animated, sentient environment seen as having agency equal or
superior to that of its human inhabitants. It appeared in multiple origin myths
as a life-creating force. For contemporary hunter-gatherers water has retained
precisely this role: for example, the cosmologies of
Aboriginal Australians have focused on the Rain-
bow Serpent for millennia.12
Figures 1 and 2. Ancient rock art serpents, such as these in Cape York, can be
found in many parts of Australia. Photo by author. The Rainbow Serpent also
appears in recent and contemporary art, as in this bark painting from Western
Arnhem Land by the Kunwinjku artist Yirawala, which depicts the Rainbow
Serpent Ngalyod giving birth to Aboriginal people..Courtesy of Pitt Rivers
Museum, Oxford.
Composed of water, the serpent created all human, animal, and plant spe-
cies in the Dreamtime. It remains in the land, continuing to generate human
spirit beings and the resources on which they depend. This focus on water as
an original animating force echoes early belief systems elsewhere. For example,
the Ur-Babylonians believed the earth was created out of the primordial waters
12 Comparable imagery in prehistoric cave art in Malawi depicts rainbows and serpent beings,
and these also appear in traditional local stories about the water/mother goddess Makewana, or the
serpent Napolo, who causes oods and landslides (Veronica Strang, eld notes 2013, in author’s
possession).
Fig is
insuf-
cient res-
olution
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strang.indd 88 3/23/2014 11:08:12 PM
Strang: Lording It Over the Goddess
89
of Nun, and that such waters still surged below it.13 Egyptian mythology de-
scribes what historian Simon Schama calls a “(literally) seminal fable” of Osiris
and the Nile.14
In a pre-Christian European context, Celtic tribes, dependent on a small-
scale mixed economy, made sacrices at holy wells that provided access to uid
“feminine” forces, surrounded by complementary “masculine” groves of trees.
Roman records of the invasion of Britain provide some details, with the poet
Lucan (39–65 CE) describing a “Druid grove” and “barbaric” ritual practices.15
This gender complementarity is also demonstrated in their nomenclature: many
rivers were seen to embody specic female deities such as Sinann (the River
Shannon) and Sequana (the River Seine).16 Wooden and stone henges, whose
design may have drawn inspiration from a notion of “groves,” were commonly
built with avenues leading to related water bodies into which worshippers cast
votive offerings.17
A Rising Tide
In the millennia preceding Christianity, some human societies settled and
domesticated plants more systematically, with agriculture emerging in the Near
East from approximately 8000 to 3000 BCE. They also began to engage with
water directively. At rst, this entailed only subtle material alterations: in south-
west Asia and Papua New Guinea, for example, they modied swamps to assist
the growth of taro. At around 6,000 BCE, more intensive rice cultivation ap-
peared in China and other parts of Asia, as Neolithic societies used stone tools
and digging sticks to build levees to impound receding oods.18
But simply capitalizing on oods in relatively minor ways didn’t initiate rad-
ical changes in gender or power relations. As archaeologists Marija Gimbutas,
Shan Winn, and Daniel Shimabuku have recorded, Neolithic societies in Tur-
key at this time were matrifocal and egalitarian.19 Similarly, feminist philoso-
13 Biswas, History of Hydrology.
14 This relationship also became the focus of the Roman cult of Isis and Serapis. Simon
Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: Fontana Press, 1996), 256.
15 Julius Caesar’s military reports provide some details, as does Pliny’s work. See The Pharsalia,
of Lucan, Transl. Edward Ridley, 1896, Adelaide, e-books. http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/lucan/
pharsalia/complete.html
16 Janet Bord and Colin Bord, Sacred Waters: Holy Wells and Water Lore in Britain and Ire-
land (London: Granada, 1985).
17 Colin Richards, “Henges and Water: Towards an Elemental Understanding of Monumen-
tality and Landscape in Late Neolithic Britain,” Journal of Material Culture 1, no. 3 (1996): 313–35.
18 Jan Christie, “Water and Rice in Early Java and Bali,” in A World of Water: Rain, Rivers and
Seas in Southeast Asian Histories, ed. Peter Boomgaard (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007), 235–58.
19 Marija Gimbutas, Shan Winn, and Daniel Shimabuku, Achilleion: a Neolithic Settlement in
Thessaly, Greece, 6400–5600 B.C. (Los Angeles: Institute of Archaeology, University of California,
1989).
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Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 30.1
90
pher Heide Goettner-Abendroth’s work conrms a vision of matriarchal, gift
exchange–based social forms in early agricultural societies.20 In these contexts,
goddesses and serpent beings continued to thrive.21 However, as agriculture be-
came established as a major economic mode, more directively managerial water
management practices began to emerge. Dating from approximately 3200 BCE,
illustrations of King Scorpion cutting the rst irrigation channel in Egypt signal
the emergence of more complex and ambitious irrigation schemes.22
Initially, these new irrigators worked with seasonal ows, measuring an-
nual oods and coordinating economic activities with the natural movements of
water through the environment. But the expansion of agriculture had signicant
social effects: the investment of labor in irrigation schemes, elds, and crops
required new forms of land and property ownership.23 Clans and their limited
common property regimes were replaced by more fragmented family units with
increasingly male lines of inheritance.24 There were new “domestic” and “pub-
lic” spaces and greater divergence in gender roles. Larger-scale water manage-
ment and economic activity also encouraged regional and more hierarchical
political arrangements and, with the establishment of increasingly patriarchal
systems, both women and “nature” were increasingly treated as subservient to
male “culture.” Thus Herodotus (writing around 440 BCE) recorded that by
3,000 BCE, the rst Egyptian pharaoh, King Menes, was established and build-
ing the rst dam on the Nile, supporting historian Karl Wittfogel’s observation
that political power is coterminous with the control of water resources.25
Power is also central to human-environmental relations. As technologi-
cal developments enabled societies to be more directive, there was a shift in
agency between humans and their material environments (and other species).
Hunter-gatherers had subtly maximized their resource use and their activities
(for example, hunting megafauna, or clearing landscapes with re), had some
long-term ecological effects. But the introduction of irrigation was critical: with
sophisticated technologies for directing water into human endeavors—dams,
20 Heide Goettner-Abendroth, ed., Societies of Peace: Matriarchies Past, Present, and Future
(Toronto: Inanna Publications, 2009).
21 Gimbutas, Winn, and Shimbaku; and Miriam Robbins Dexter, Whence the Goddesses: A
Source Book (New York: Pergamon, 1990).
22 Biswas, History of Hydrology, 4. See also Tony Wilkinson, ed., “Ancient Near East and
Americas,” Special Issue, Water History 2, no. 2 (2010).
23 Maurits Ertsen and Heather Hoag, eds., “Roman and Byzantine Empires,” Special Issue,
Water History 4, no. 1 (2012).
24 Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, trans. Ernest
Untermann (1884; reprint, Chicago: C. H. Kerr, 1902).
25 George Rawlinson, trans., The History of Herodotus (440 BCE) (n.d.), accessed November
21, 2011, http://classics.mit.edu/Herodotus/history.html; and Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A
Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957).
strang.indd 90 3/23/2014 11:08:13 PM
Strang: Lording It Over the Goddess
91
channels, qanats,26 water-lifting machines,27 and waterwheels—a more empow-
ered and human-focused relationship with the material world and its other in-
habitants emerged.
The religious veneration of water and “nature beings” maintained some
momentum, and such deities remained located in the material environment,
inhabiting specic rivers and lakes, circulating hydrologically, or manifesting
in mountains and trees. The early Romans, for example, celebrated river god-
desses such as Minerva with well-dressing rituals called Fontanalia. But such
cosmologies were undergoing important changes. Where societies developed
irrigation, deities were decreasingly represented as animistic serpent beings,
generalized earthy greenness, or totemic animal and bird species; instead, they
began to take on more humanized and more specically gendered persona.28
The Greeks retained a vision of a generative “world stream” O
¯keanós, a ser-
pentine water cycle that united earth and sky and was the source of all freshwa-
ter rivers.29 But early Greek art and material culture provides a rich evidential
record of both nonhuman and human, female, male, and androgynous deities.30
In Rome, too, innovative water technologies ourished,31 and, in a move with
long-term consequences in reframing water as a “resource,” the Romans also
created legal and bureaucratic systems for managing water.32 Imperial hege-
mony served to export these ideas and material culture, thus conquered Celtic
tribes in Britain, such as the “water dwelling” Durotriges in Dorset, found
themselves enslaved on the treadmills of Roman waterwheels, while their local
26 Qanats were developed on the Iranian peninsula in the rst century CE. An inuential early
technology for transporting irrigation water in arid regions, they consisted of vertical shafts linked by
underground canals.
27 King Sennacherib (705–681 BCE) not only dammed the Euphrates but also invented wa-
ter-lifting machines, enabling Assyria to produce cotton – one of the thirstiest crops in the world
(Biswas, History of Hydrology, 26).
28 Some signs of gender complementarity remained in hermaphrodite gures. For example,
an early Egyptian Nile deity, Hapi, was “depicted as a fat, bearded man with full breasts from which
gushed the life giving water” (Biswas, History of Hydrology, 109).
29 Norman Austin, Meaning and Being in Myth (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univer-
sity Press, 1989).
30 Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (1955; reprint, London: Penguin, 1992).
31 Rome’s rst aqueduct, the Aqua Appia, was commissioned in 312 BCE by censor Appius
Claudius Caecus.
32 As Christer Bruun points out, earlier legal systems dealt with water management, but,
“among the Romans, law became a system of thought. Other ancient societies too had their laws,
even collections of laws. The oldest legal code known to us, and surely the most famous one, is the
Code of Hammurabi (of Babylon), from shortly before 1750 BCE . . . §55: ‘If a man has opened
his trench for irrigation (and) has been slack and so has let the waters carry away (the soil on) his
neighbour’s field, he shall pay corn [grain] corresponding to (the amount of the crop which) his
neighbour (has raised)’” (“Imperial Power, Legislation, and Water Management in the Roman
Empire,” Insights, Journal of the Institute of Advanced Study 3, no. 10[2010]: 1–24, quotation on 4).
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Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 30.1
92
water beings were renamed for goddesses in a Roman pantheon inhabited, like
that of the Greeks, with increasingly humanized deities.
Figure 3. A mosaic in ancient Rhodes suggests the coexistence of nonhuman
and humanized deities. Photo by author.
It has been posited that in these and other early religious pantheons “god-
dess worship” sometimes superseded the veneration of masculine deities. Poet
and writer on antiquity Robert Graves claimed that contemporaneous human
societies shared, “a homogenous system of religious ideas, based on the worship
of the many-titled Mother Goddess.”33 The notion of a matriarchal golden age of
gynocracy had considerable appeal, particularly to the founders of the contem-
porary Goddess movement.34 As what theologian Melissa Raphael describes as
an “emancipatory metaphor”35 it continues to inspire goddess-focused religions;
however, it has been heavily critiqued in the academy.36 It is not the object here
to try to resolve these debates, but merely to note that, whether “goddesses” or
33 Graves, Greek Myths, 13. See also Johann Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht: Eine Untersuchung
Uber Die Gynaikokratie der Alten Welt Nach Ihrer Religiosen Und Rechtlichen Natur, Vol. 1 (1861;
reprint, Stuttgart: Basel B. Schwabe, 1948).
34 Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess (San Fran-
cisco: Harper & Row, 1979).
35 Melissa Raphael, Introducing Theology: Discourse on the Goddess (Shefeld: Shefeld Ac-
ademic Press 1999).
36 Peter Ucko, Anthropomorphic Figurines of Predynastic Egypt and Neolithic Crete
(London: Andrew Szmidla, 1968); and Margaret Conkey and Ruth Tringham, “Archaeology and the
Goddess: Exploring the Contours of Feminist Archaeology,” in Feminisms in the Academy: Rethink-
Fig is
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resolution
at
effective
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Strang: Lording It Over the Goddess
93
not, supreme or not, female gures maintained a strong and clearly meaningful
presence as powerful deities in many early religious schemes. So why did this
veneration of the feminine decline?
With agricultural development, women continued to be centrally involved
in water use, but were increasingly conned to domestic roles as “water car-
riers,” a vision that was to dominate the classical era, simultaneously dening
women’s labor while retaining earlier notions of water’s generative power. Water
management, conversely, became a primarily male domain that required wider
political coordination as technology expanded.
In developing humanized forms of polytheism, cosmological beliefs re-
ected these more directive human-environmental relationships. Though as-
sisted by inuxes of Indo-European cultures that encouraged the patriarchy
of Greek and Scandinavian religions, this shift in agency was not conned to
Europe. Asian religions, though still valorizing dragons and water serpents, also
became populated by humanized gods and goddesses who moved rivers and
seas, sent or withheld rain depending on whether they were sufciently propiti-
ated, and expressed their disapproval with storms and oods. The Great Yu, for
example, rst “harnessed the water” in China:
Yu the Great, is said to have brought civilization to China . . . His great
achievement was to allow the waters of the Huanghe to ow through nar-
row deles. The river was blocked by high mountains, so the gods sent
Yu to put the territory in order. Not only did he master the Huanghe,
but also all the rivers in China . . . After completing these Herculean
works, [he] was allowed to found the rst dynasty in Chinese history, the
Xia (2207–1766 BCE).37
Though humanized, female water deities remained powerful in some areas. In
Bali, for instance, traditional irrigation schemes still fall under the authority
of water goddesses, whose worship (albeit led by male priests) mediates the
distribution of water to small rice-growing communities.38 But female deities
fared less well in larger societies where irrigation enabled intensied agricul-
tural production, population growth, and urbanization. A concomitant need for
more infrastructural management encouraged centralized forms of governance,
sowing the rst seeds of the nation-states that emerged in Europe between the
medieval period and the eighteenth century.39
ing the Disciplines, ed. Domna Stanton and Abigail Stewart (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1995).
37 Florence Padovani, “Chinese Way of Harnessing Rivers: The Yangtze River,” in A History of
Water, ed. Terje Tvedt and Eva Jakobsson (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 120–43, esp. 121.
38 Stephen Lansing, Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Land-
scape of Bali (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).
39 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reections on the Origins and Spread of Na-
tionalism (London, New York: Verso, 1991).
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Increasingly patriarchal governance was reected in the appearance of
more powerful male gods, and deities became disembedded from local envi-
ronments, instead inhabiting Olympus and other more distant locations.40 Many
female deities originally manifested in water-related serpentine forms became
not only humanized but also masculinized. Rivers changed gender, acquiring
male river gods and masculine “dynamism.”41 Thus Zeus, whose earlier, gentler
persona as a serpent was portrayed in Athenian votive tablets as “the Kindly
God,” became a serpent-slaying warrior god.42 Other powerful female water
deities of the pre-Hellenic period came to be represented as “monstrous”: the
Harpies surged up out of Stygian depths to snatch food from the hungry; Scylla
and Charybdis drowned sailors; and Medusa (who retained distinctive serpen-
tine elements) turned her adversaries to stone.43 In this way, the power of water
and nature was cast as an adversary to be conquered and forced into service.
From approximately 1500 BCE into the earliest centuries CE, there was
a orescence of male culture-hero, super-hero gods whose sole purpose was to
slay the powerful water serpent beings that had preceded them. In Babylonia,
Marduk prevailed over the serpent Tiamat, “a female spirit of primeval chaos.”44
In Greek mythology, Zeus slew Typhon, the serpent child of the Earth goddess
Gaia, assuring the reign of the Olympian gods. Perseus killed a sea monster
to rescue Andromeda as well as slaying Medusa. Apollo killed Python and so
appropriated the feminine powers of the oracle at Delphi.45 Hercules did away
with the many-headed Lernean Hydra.46 In Scandinavia, Beowulf triumphed
40 The disembedding of social and spiritual being from local environments has major sociopo-
litical implications. Thus the removal of previously localized deities to “otherworld” locations such
as Olympus, Valhalla, and so on can be interpreted in Durkheimian terms as a key indicator of the
emergence of more centralized and hierarchical political forms and greater social and ecological
alienation. See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957).
41 Swamps and wetlands were simultaneously feminized and reframed as disorderly, danger-
ous “nether regions” Rodney Giblett, Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1996), 87.
42 Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology (New York: Arkana, 1968).
43 David Gilmore, Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Ter-
rors (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 38–41; Miriam Robbins Dexter, “The
Frightful Goddess: Birds, Snakes, and Witches,” in Varia on the Indo-European Past: Papers in
Memory of Marija Gimbutas, ed. Miriam Robbins Dexter and Edgar Polomé, Journal of Indo-Euro-
pean Studies Monograph 19 (Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man, 1997): 124–54.
44 Samantha Riches, Saint George: Hero, Martyr, and Myth (Stroud: Sutton Publishing,
2000),30.
45 Python’s name means “he who has achieved understanding.” According to Austin, its cog-
nate in Sanskrit is Buddha (Meaning and Being in Myth, 95).
46 There is some ambivalence in this story: according to Herodotus, Hercules was also the
progenitor of the whole race of serpent-worshipping Scythians, through his intercourse with the
Serpent Echidna (Herodotus IV, 9). James Fergusson, “Tree and Serpent Worship in India,” in An-
thropological Review 27 (1869): 217–23.
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over the female serpent mother of Grendel, a “banished monster,” and an “ad-
versary of God.”47 Cosmologies therefore became heavily populated by male
warrior beings whose role, it seemed, was to triumph over the feminine ele-
ments, over other societies, and, eventually, over all other gods.
Figure. 4. Benvenuto Cellini’s sculpture of Perseus standing on the slain body
of Medusa, at the Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence. Photo courtesy of Mary Ann
Sullivan.
Though Shalt Have No Other God
As monotheism gained ascendancy, the serpent slayings intensied, most
particularly in Christian societies. Saint George, Saint Michael, Saint Patrick,
and others, all dispatched powerful serpent (and invariably water-related)
beings.48 These efforts crystallized in the Garden of Eden with the ultimate
repudiation not just of the serpent but of Nature itself. Ortner presents this
as the basis for a vital conceptual separation between wild, untamed, and fe-
47 Seamus Heaney, Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (New York: Norton, 2000): 9; and
Miriam Robbins Dexter, “Reections on the Goddess *Donu,” Mankind Quarterly 30, nos. 1–2
(1990): 45–58.
48 Being imaginatively composed of water and its hydrological movements, cosmological ser-
pent beings are associated with water in multiple cultural narratives: they inhabit oceans or rivers,
dwell in swamps, caves or underground places, or are found in clouds and rain.
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Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 30.1
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male Nature and purportedly rational, enlightened male Culture.49 Though
the formulation of more dualistic cosmological models was not as clear-cut as
this suggests, having much earlier temporal roots, the more distinct “othering”
of the nonhuman in the emerging monotheisms was a critical development in
human-environmental relationships, and similarly important in afrming more
polarized and unequal notions of gender.50
Origin myths were reformed accordingly, superimposing directive patri-
archal gures. Thus Plato’s rendition of Greek creation stories, in Timaeus’s
Dialogue, describes primal unformed matter that is both a receptacle and a
“nurse.” “He imagines a disembodied male mind as divine architect, or Demi-
urgos, shaping this matter into the cosmos.”51 In biblical narratives of Genesis,
God quells the chaotically primal waters. The Deluge remains as a violent pun-
ishment for human sin, but is also reframed as a cleansing God-directed bap-
tism of the world. There is a plethora of biblical imagery describing how water
streams down from the Temple, rains down to fertilize the soil as a gift from a
magnanimous God, or is withheld when He is displeased.
Just as Nature was recast as the subject of male agency, so too were women.
“Exclusively male God-language”52 established religious practices in which
“men hold most or all of the roles of authority and prestige.”53 To maintain this
authority it was necessary to ensure that alternative religious views and their
“evil” serpents were thoroughly exorcised. Centuries of such efforts followed,
in which nature-worshipping “heretics” were hounded to death: thus multiple
images of Saint George show him either slaying the serpent or dispatching pa-
gans. Papal decrees (for example the remit given to Saint Augustine54) required
evangelical missionaries to build churches over or alongside ancient holy wells,
to rename them after Christian saints, and to appropriate for these saints any
49 Sherry Ortner, “Is Female to Nature as Male is to Culture?” in Women, Culture, and Soci-
ety, ed. Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976),
67–87.
50 More general agreement has emerged that notions of gender are most usefully conceived
as a continuum (Veronica Strang, “Familiar Forms: Homologues, Culture, and Gender in Northern
Australia,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society 5, no. 1 [1999]: 75–95). Some cultural con-
texts contain multiple potential gender identity positions along this, and considerable license to shift
between its polarities. However, where dualistic notions dominate, more centrally located or ambig-
uous identities have tended to become “abominations” (Douglas Davies, personal communication
with author, 2013).
51 Rosemary Ruether, “Ecofeminism: Symbolic and Social Connections of the Oppression of
Women and the Domination of Nature,” in Ecofeminism and the Sacred, ed. Carol Adams (New
York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1993), 326.
52 Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow, eds., Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion
(San Francisco: Harper, 1992), vii.
53 Rita Gross, Feminism and Religion: An Introduction (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 106.
54 Saint Augustine, in his text The City of God against the Pagans, castigated pagans for their
rituals propitiating goddesses and for promoting the notion of a Mother Goddess (Book VII, 24, 25),
trans. William Green (London: Heinemann, 1963).
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“miraculous” qualities they might possess.55 Vestigial animistic and polythe-
istic religious beliefs and practices were culled through “witch hunting” that
expressed deep anxieties about subversive female powers. As feminist writer
Barbara Walker says, “Diana’s cult was so widespread in the pagan world that
early Christians viewed her as their major rival, which was why she later became
‘Queen of Witches.’”56
Figure 5. A holy well in Dorset, renamed for Saint Augustine, lies just below
the potent gure of the pre-Christian chalk giant at Cerne Abbas. Photo by
author.
A medieval desire to repudiate religions valorizing fertility, fecundity, and
“base human nature” encouraged punitive forms of asceticism that repressed
sexual and sensory impulses. In early Latin and Greek Christianity, the body
became a site of shameful desire, separated from a soul whose main purpose
was to transcend earthly form. To be seen as having any place in this scheme,
women had to reject their sexuality.57 As anthropologist and theologian Douglas
Davies observes, men too had to be celibate in order to achieve spiritual status.
He also points out that these ideas had an important hydrological dimension:
waterless, “lifeless” desert became a space for purication, and in the Acts of
55 Strang, Meaning of Water.
56 Barbara Walker, The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (New York: Harper and
Row, 1993), 535.
57 Ruether, Ecofeminism.
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the Apostles, notions of blood and uid as generative substances were replaced
by an idea of generative “spirit.”58
Cartesian intellectual dualism served a similar purpose, separating the
enlightened “rational” mind from the (putatively) uncultured body. These in-
ner-directed dualisms were externalized “epigenetically”59 in the hope that ei-
ther a patriarchal deity and/or Culture would similarly control unruly and fe-
cund Nature herself, making her a compliant servant to “mankind” through
carefully channeled generative processes.
The history of malignant waters is long. Old church fathers such as Origen,
Jerome, and Chrysostom believed that nature and all external materialities were
diabolic and in need of combating. In the words of Chrysostom, one had to
bring “the beast under control” by “banishing the ood of unworthy passions.”
Aquinas, too preached the necessity of human domination over the rest of the
world.60
The belief that Nature must be tamed was fully expressed in water manage-
ment. The Domesday Book (1086) records water mills along almost every mile
of the rivers in southern England. Through the Middle Ages, environmentally
directive technologies increased exponentially. Water pumps, bores, pipes, and
canals became central to economic production. Wetlands, formerly treasured
for their rich resources, were recast as fetid and feminized “nether regions”
and drained to enlarge agricultural areas.61 In urban settlements, where butch-
ery, tanning, and other nascent industries spewed pollution into streams, water
became undrinkable and was seen, increasingly, as the source of miasma and
disease.62 Such negative views echoed longstanding fears about water’s potential
“dark side.” But its pre-Christian meanings as a life-giving, healing, and cleans-
ing force owed on too, in Christian ideas about “holy water” and its ability to
purify with God’s grace. Thus, in the 1300s, as the plague decimated popula-
tions across Europe, people rushed to bathe in rivers (for example the Stour in
Dorset) believed to have curative properties.63
Christianized holy wells retained their (saintly) healing powers until the
58 Dualism had its own complexities: religious celibates were to some extend degendered,
forming a kind of third category. And, though monotheistic, Christianity congured God the Father
the Son and the Holy Spirit in triadic form (Douglas Davies, personal communication with author,
2013).
59 Georg Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1979).
60 Peter Harrison, “Subduing the Earth: Genesis 1, Early Modern Science, and the Exploita-
tion of Nature,” Journal of Religion 79, no. 1 (1999): 86–109, esp. 91, cited in Karen Lykke-Syse and
Terje Oestigaard, eds., Perceptions of Water in Britain from Early Modern Times to the Present: An
Introduction (Bergen: BRIC Press, 2010), 24.
61 Giblett, Postmodern Wetlands.
62 Jean-Pierre Goubert, The Conquest of Water: The Advent of Health in the Industrial Age,
trans. A. Wilson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).
63 Strang, Meaning of Water.
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1500s, when the Reformation, in particular Calvinism, attacked beliefs in holy
water and wells as “popish magic and superstition.”64 There were campaigns
to use such places for profane purposes, for instance redeploying holy water
stoups as pig-feeding troughs, but religious historian Terje Oestigaard observes
that “even though the Reformation tried to end water worship, the cult was
so important and such an intrinsic part of culture and religion that it contin-
ued for centuries, with nobles and commoners alike making pilgrimages to the
holy wells with the aim of attaining long life and prosperity.”65 It was with the
Reformation, too, that the institution of marriage became normative, providing
new opportunities for dualism in ideas about gender and status.66 Thus, once
again, cosmological changes intersected with shifting social arrangements and
material practices.
The God in the Machine
The rejection of ideas that spiritual power and agency was located in water,
and the growing instrumentality of human relations with it, was tied closely
to the advancement of science, which introduced a new form of patriarchy.
Building on Greek philosophers’ efforts to understand the material world, pri-
marily male scholars sought to investigate water’s properties. This constituted
a further shift in agency and control, bifurcating the world into active subject
and passive object, as Australian ecofeminist Val Plumwood says, “in a way that
refuses objects elements of commonality, mind, or intentionality.”67 Historian
Gary Deason describes the emergence of a mechanistic view of Nature: “the
mechanical view rested on a single, fundamental assumption: matter is passive.
It possesses no active, internal forces.”68 It was directed, instead, by natural
“laws” and animated only by the divine word of God. Thus ecology was recast as
technology, providing a basis for a “radical discontinuity” between humans (as
the sole possessors of reason) and nonhuman Nature69 (though at the time, of
course, “reason” was seen as the province of only half of the human population).
This shift in human-environmental relations brought “an increasing em-
64 Arthur Gribben, Holy Wells and Sacred Water Sources in Britain and England, An Anno-
tated Bibliography (London: Garland Publishing, 1992), 4, 16.
65 Terje Oestigaard, “The Topography of Holy Water in England after the Reformation,” in
The Ideas of Water from Antiquity to Modern Times, ed. Terje Tvedt and Terje Oestigaard (London:
I. B. Tauris, 2010), 15–34. 22.
66 Douglas Davies, personal communication with author, 2013.
67 Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (London: Rout-
ledge, 2002), 45.
68 Gary Deason, “Reformation Theology and the Mechanistic Concept of Nature,” in God and
Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, ed. David Lindberg
and Ronald Numbers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 168.
69 Plumwood, Environmental Culture, 100, 122.
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Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 30.1
100
phasis on the utility of natural things” to meet human needs and divine purpos-
es.70 The new cosmological framework of the Enlightenment brought more ab-
stract and objective “religions” composed along “essentially rationalist lines.”71
Polyvalent concepts of Nature in the Renaissance came to be dominated by
Immanuel Kant’s notions of “pure” and “practical” reason and Sir Francis Ba-
con’s “inward instinct.” “Nature according to this view is simply another mode
of divine operation . . . divine power pervades nature itself.”72 Thus, as Davies
says, “the Psalms dwell quite specically on the wonders of God’s work in nature
. . . it is an expression of God’s will and power.”73
The assertion of absolute divine authority required the eradication of
“witchcraft,” “superstition,” and “heresy.” Even as scientic understandings
leapt forward in the postmedieval period, the church made continued efforts
to erase the last traces of nature religions that venerated and ascribed agency
to an animate material world. Major scientic discoveries were interspersed by
punitive repressions of subaltern cosmologies.74 Thus Galileo’s publication of
Two New Sciences in 1638 and René Descartes’s Principia Philosophiae in 1644
preceded the Rouen witch trials of 1670. Sir Isaac Newton published Principia
in 1687 and Optics in 1704. In 1717, Edmond Halley revealed Earth’s place in
the stars. Yet the burning, hanging, drowning and beheading of (mostly female)
“witches” continued throughout the eighteenth and even into the early nine-
teenth century: ve were sentenced to death in Lyons in 1745; in Switzerland
Anna Göldi was beheaded in 1782; in 1789 Giovanna Bonnano was hanged in
Italy; Maria da Conceição was executed in Brazil in 1798; a Native American
called Leatherlips was executed with a tomahawk in 1810; and Barbara Zdunk
was burned to death in Poland in 1811.75
In the longer term, increasingly secular cosmological explanations were
probably more effective in discouraging hydrolatry and nature worship. Though
some major holy wells, such as Lourdes, continued to be the focus of pilgrim-
ages, in the 1700–1800s, the majority became health spas,76 although it could be
70 Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 161–62.
71 Peter Harrison, “Religion” and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), 2.
72 Ibid., 5–6.
73 Douglas Davies, “Christianity,” in Attitudes to Nature, ed. Jean Holm and John Bowker
(London: Pinter Publishers, 1994), 28–52, quotation on 35.
74 Susan Grifn, Women and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (New York: Harper and Row,
2000).
75 Alan Kors and Edward Peters suggest that approximately 50,000 “witches” were executed in
Europe and America, 75-80 percent of whom were women (Alan Kors and Edward Peters, Witch-
craft in Europe, 400–1700: A Documentary History (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2001).
76 Susan Anderson and Bruce Tabb, eds., Water, Leisure and Culture: European Historical
Perspectives (Oxford: Berg, 2002).
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argued that even this scientic conversion to being “recreational” places merely
reframed their original meanings in a secular idiom.
Another important change that came with monotheism and “enlightened”
rationality was a shift toward individuated forms of resource ownership, which
required commensurately individual constructions of social identity. Although
water, being elusive in its material nature, continued to be seen as a common
good, land and resources were rapidly enclosed and privatized, falling almost
exclusively into male hands and lines of inheritance. Thus, over time, women,
who had been elders in common with men, had been party to collective forms
of ownership, had jointly upheld lexicons of knowledge, and had been repre-
sented by powerful female deities, found themselves increasingly propertyless,
voteless and voiceless as men controlled the land and resources, the knowledge
bases of religion and science, political processes, and public discourse.
Land and resource enclosures were driven by intensifying economic prac-
tices and population growth. Such pressures for expansion encouraged wide-
spread exploration and colonization. A patriarchal religious cosmology, in which
male Culture strove for dominance over Nature, was readily extended to clas-
sifying “the other” (that is to say putatively “primitive” societies) as part of that
unruly feminized chaos requiring “civilization.” Having worked hard to excise
nature religions from their own industrializing societies, monotheistic patriar-
chies therefore extended their evangelical efforts to dissuade “savage” societies
from worshipping water, trees, animistic beings, and the like. And science, too,
emerging to occupy center stage, would help disabuse them of these foolish
“superstitions.”
From the 1500s on,77 hegemonic colonial enterprises stretched to encom-
pass entire continents, simultaneously appropriating land and resources and
requiring their inhabitants to conform to new religious and scientic modes
of thought. Indigenous people became subject to larger, more hierarchical ar-
rangements in which, along with women and children, they found themselves
at the bottom of a social heap in which more power was held by even the lowest
classes of European men. White male elites dominated political life, and all
were ruled, ultimately, by a male God and His representative monarch.
Also exported to the colonies was a very different human-environmental
relationship: “In Western society, the application of science to technical con-
trol over nature marched hand in hand with colonialism.”78 While many place-
based indigenous peoples had maintained localized, relatively egalitarian en-
gagements with their surroundings, imposed economic modes were much more
77 There were earlier efforts to impose religious changes on conquered peoples (this being a
feature of most colonial invasions), as well as upsurges of conict between the major monotheistic
religions, for example, in the Crusades. But the technology that enabled major oceanic voyages and
produced massive disparity in military strength permitted far more ambitious colonial enterprises.
78 Ruether, Ecofeminism, 329.
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Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 30.1
102
instrumentalist applying, in both cosmological and technical forms, a vision in
which “Mankind” was expected to hold the balance of power and agency.
The concept of “the environment” itself underlines the reclassication of
the nonhuman world as “other.” Such objectication is fundamentally alien-
ating,79 and there are key relational differences between societies that dwell
“within the sphere” of their material surroundings, and those for whom the
earth is a “globe” to be acted upon.80 The latter view assumes ownership and au-
thority, supporting Plumwood’s earlier argument that Nature-Culture dualism
produces unequal social dichotomies and alienation from nonhuman species.81
Such concerns, articulated by the feminists and conservationists of the 1960s
and 1970s, echoed the Romanticism of the late 1800s, which was similarly crit-
ical both of social elites and the “rationalization” of nature.82
But patterns of change have intellectual and material momentum. In pri-
marily masculine colonial enterprises, patriarchal beliefs and values asserted
their authority despite humanitarian critiques and indigenous resistance.83 Mis-
sionary evangelism was not just directed at conquered societies: there was an
equally zealous technological Crusade to tame and dominate the “wilderness”
of “virgin territory.”84 Nowhere was this more apparent than in colonizers’ ef-
forts to control and channel water resources.85 Dams, canals, and irrigation were
seen as vital civilizing enterprises, most particularly in arid places.86 Journalist
Ernestine Hill’s classic account of Australian irrigation schemes initiated in the
late 1800s describes:
79 Phillipe Descola and Gisli Palsson, Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives
(London: Routledge, 1996); and Veronica Strang, “Knowing Me, Knowing You: Aboriginal and
Euro-Australian concepts of nature as Self and Other,” Worldviews 9, no. 1 (2005): 25–56.
80 Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment (London, New York: Routledge, 2000). Bar-
bara Duden makes a similar point in noting that contemporary medical technology has changed
women’s experiences of pregnancy from an internal feeling of ‘quickening’ to a more disembodied
visual perspective of “the fetus” (Barbara Duden, Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy
and the Unborn, trans. Lee Hoinacki Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
81 Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London, New York: Routledge, 1993).
82 Henry Thoreau, Walden (1954; reprint, Columbus, OH: Merrill, 1969).
83 Henry Reynolds, The Law of the Land (London: Penguin, 1987).
84 Kay Schaffer, Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
85 Accounts of European settlement in Australia and New Zealand show that freshwater re-
sources (which also tended to be important sacred sites for indigenous populations) were always
the rst priority for colonists. See Howard Morphy, “Colonialism, History and the Construction of
Place: The Politics of Landscape in Northern Australia,” in Landscape, Politics, and Perspectives,
ed. Barbara Bender (Oxford: Berg, 1993), 205–43; and Veronica Strang, Uncommon Ground: Cul-
tural Landscapes and Environmental Values (Oxford: Berg, 1997).
86 Parallels could be drawn with discourses about drainage and sanitation in the industrial so-
cieties of Europe, where “civilization” has long been seen as coterminous with the control of unruly
water ows and waste. See Goubert, Conquest of Water; Ivan Illich, H2O and the Waters of Forget-
fulness (London: Marion Boyars, 1986); and Strang, Meaning of Water.
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the transguration of a continent by irrigational science . . . The in-
visible and illimitable waters of Australia are now being revealed and
redeemed, in afnity with our fertile soils to be a habitation for mankind
. . . the sweeping oods lost in sea and sand, can all be saved . . . Aus-
tralia Felix was an arid waste, a hell of heat and ies . . . The Lord gave
the rains and rivers only to dry them up and take them back again. One
man questioned the divine Creator’s plan, a Glasgow Scot named Hugh
McColl . . . Irrigation was his cry.87
This modern serpent slayer/water conqueror linked up with another Australian
hero, Alfred Deakin, who “looked far into the future and saw ‘the bare and
blinding desert transmuted by industry and intelligence into orchards and elds
of waving grain’ . . . The Victorian Government listened with interests to the
youthful St Paul, approved his plan and set him to achieve the miracle.”88 Hill’s
account describes the “Miracle of the Murray,” the “Apostles of Irrigation,” and
a vision of “Utopia on the Murray.” There are biblical “Years of the Locust,”
“Gentle Rain from Heaven,” and sometimes punitive “Acts of God.” But as
McColl’s reported willingness to “question the divine Creator’s plan” attests,
this was not just an assertion of monotheistic authority; rather it was equally an
instrumental vision of human (male) agency, in which “the environment” was an
object of material subordination.
Figure 6. Wivenhoe Dam, southeast Queensland. Photo by author.
87 Ernestine Hill, Water into Gold: The Taming of the Mighty Murray River (London: Angus
and Robertson, 1965 [1937]): v, 39.
88 Hill, Water into Gold, 40.
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The twentieth-century secularization of water heavily submerged its reli-
gious meanings. As H2O, philosopher Ivan Illich argues, it became “not water,
but a stuff which industrial society creates . . . the twentieth century has trans-
mogried water into a uid with which archetypal waters cannot be mixed.”89
Core generative meanings were still celebrated in the lakes and elaborate foun-
tains symbolizing the social capital of the rich. The construction of urban water
supply systems, expressed the agency and moral rectitude of Victorian philan-
thropists. But, as these examples suggest, the process of controlling water—
abstracting it, treating it chemically, redistributing it through sophisticated
distribution schemes—had acculturated it sufciently that it was more readily
imagined as a product of human, primarily male, actors: engineers, chemists,
and water managers.
Though secularity is often presented as diametrically opposed to religious
thinking, Durkheim’s view of religious cosmologies as a mirror of sociopoliti-
cal arrangements can be as readily applied to scientic understandings of the
world. There is coherence between the authority of science and that presented
by patriarchal monotheism. Both, in effect, place “expert” knowledge and the
agency of events in male human hands, and support hierarchies of power in
which women and nonhumans are disempowered. Both are upheld by what po-
litical scientist Niamh Reilly calls “oppressive discursive practices” that enable
subjugation and exploitation.90 By separating Culture and Nature, both encour-
age an instrumental approach in which both people and things are only valuable
if they are “productive” in the right way. Such utilitarianism is exemplied by
recent ideas about “ecosystem services” in which each aspect of ecology, each
species and biological process, is measured to see how much (and whether) it
serves human needs and those of a neoliberal market.
Power relations are similarly expressed in another important change in
human relations with water: the extension of earlier forms of enclosure to ap-
propriate water resources. In the last two centuries, there has been rising ten-
sion between longstanding views of water as a common good,91 and efforts to
privatize it as a commercial resource (a process still dependent on the Roman
law that operationalized water management in the rst place). In Britain, efforts
by Victorian water companies to take over municipal roles as water suppliers
were pushed back by postwar nationalization, then, in the 1980s, such collective
thinking was overridden by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s determina-
tion to privatize the water industry. This generated massive public resentment,
89 Illich, H2O, 7.
90 Niamh Reilly, “Rethinking the Interplay of Feminism and Secularism in a Neo-secular
Age,” Feminist Review 97 (2011): 5–31. See also Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge,
trans. A. Sheridan Smith (1972; reprint, London: Routledge, 2002).
91 Following a lengthy campaign to formalize human rights to clean water and sanitation, the
UN General Assembly adopted a resolution to this effect in July 2010. United Nations, “Interna-
tional Decade for Action, ‘Water for Life,’ 2005–2015,” accessed February 17, 2014, http://www.
un.org/waterforlifedecade/human_right_to_water.shtml.
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though it stopped short of the violent protests that successfully repelled similar
efforts in Bolivia.92 Such processes of marketization have been repeated inter-
nationally.93 A major result of this economic neocolonialism is that an increasing
percentage of the world’s freshwater resources is now owned by transnational
corporations and their (usually male) shareholders and directors, and physically
controlled by their—again, usually male—hydrologists and engineers, whose
enthusiasm for dams and other schemes for water impoundment and redirec-
tion remains undiminished despite intensifying protests about their social and
ecological impacts.94
Although this is the briefest of sketches, in a long-term, cross-cultural view
of human relations with water, it is possible to discern some coherent patterns.
These show how religious and secular cosmologies, sociopolitical arrangements,
and material practices have articulated, over time, to elevate men in industri-
alized societies to “Lord it over the Goddess,” subjugating women and less
powerful societies, and asserting male ownership and agency in relation to the
physical world, its resources, and its nonhuman inhabitants.
The Goddess in the Mirror
A view of water over time also reects a mirror image. This shows simi-
larly consistent links between subaltern “nature religions” valorizing feminine
principles; egalitarian political arrangements; and a relational ethic that frames
human and nonhuman kinds in more reciprocal terms. Visions of human and
nonhuman equity ow readily between feminism, the civil rights movement,
and environmentalism.95 It is easy to forget, with the incorporation (some would
say appropriation) of the green movement into scientic discourses, that envi-
ronmentalism used to be more radically concerned with sociopolitical relations.
The relevance of gender parity in maintaining other equal partnerships—with
different cultural groups, with other species—seems to have eluded male writ-
ers who have critiqued the alienation of humankind from Nature.96 But it was
92 Robert Albro, “‘The Water is Ours, Carajo!’: Deep Citizenship in Bolivia’s Water War,” in
Social Movements: An Anthropological Reader, ed. June Nash (London: Blackwell, 2005), 249–68.
93 Governments have learned to do this with less confrontational nomenclature. The introduc-
tion of “water trading” in Australia in the 1990s privatized water allocations, reconstructing them as
commercial assets. One result was to awaken “sleeper” licenses and increase water impoundment
and use, rather than delivering the promised ecologically positive market efciencies (Veronica
Strang, Gardening the World: Agency, Identity, and the Ownership of Water [Oxford: Berghahn
Publishers, 2009]).
94 Veronica Strang, “Dam Nation: Cubbie Station and the Waters of the Darling,” in The
Social Life of Water in a Time of Crisis, ed. John Wagner (Oxford: Berghahn, 2013): 36–60.
95 Greta Gaard, Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1993).
96 Descola and Palsson, Nature and Society; and Ingold, Perceptions of the Environment. One
might add to this list James Lovelock, whose efforts to present humankind as the brains of the planet
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Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 30.1
106
clearly foundational to the ideas of ecofeminists such as Mary Daly and Char-
lene Spretnak, and concurs with Susan Grifn’s observation that there is a paral-
lel between the oppression of women and the exploitation of Nature97: “We see
the devastation of the earth and her beings by the corporate warriors as feminist
concerns.It is the same masculinist mentality which would deny us our right to
our own bodies and our own sexuality, and which depends on multiple systems
of dominance and state power to have its way.”98
A long view of human adaptations also suggests that contemporary ideo-
logical countermovements come from deep sources, welling up from prehis-
toric forms of hydrolatry and persisting over time through multiple changes in
form. The recognition that subaltern ideas have ancient cosmological anteced-
ents usefully challenges assumptions that contemporary feminism is intrinsi-
cally at odds with spirituality. In Western societies there has been a signicant
shift away from conventional religions to more diverse forms of spirituality, and
sociologist Peter Berger argues that the world is “de-secularizing” in new di-
rections.99 Another sociologist, Kristen Aune, observes that contemporary fem-
inists are less religious but more spiritual than the general population, under-
lining the abiding appeal of non-patriarchal alternatives.100 Such diversication,
and the emergence of what Reilly calls “cosmopolitan feminism” highlights the
potential for reestablishing stronger links between secular and more spiritual-
ly-oriented feminists and between feminism and other struggles for social and
ecological justice.101 In material terms, subaltern religious practices often cen-
are integrative, but conform to particular ideas about human “rational” superiority (The Ages of
Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth [New York, London: W. W. Norton, 1988]). This underlines
Plumwood’s point that the nonreexive views of “ecoguardian” scientists tend to entrench rather
than challenge anthropocentrism (Environmental Culture, 68).
97 Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press,
1978); Charlene Spretnak, Lost Goddesses of Early Greece: A Collection of Pre-Hellenic Myths
(1978; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1992); and Grifn, Women and Nature.
98 Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism (Halifax, NS: Fernwood, 1993), 14.
99 Paul Heelas, Linda Woodhead, Benjamin Seel, Bronislaw Szerszynski, and Karin Tusting,
The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005);
and Peter Berger, The Desecularization of the World: The Resurgence of Religion in World Politics
(Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1999). See also Grace Davie, Europe—The Exceptional
Case: Parameters of Faith in the Modern World (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002); and David Herbert,
Religion and Civil Society: Rethinking Public Religion in the Contemporary World (Aldershot: Ash-
gate, 2003).
100 Kristen Aune, “Much Less Religious, a Little More Spiritual: The Religious and Spiritual
Views of Third-wave Feminists in the UK,” Feminist Review 97 (2011): 32–55. Aune’s research also
suggested that approximately 50.000 women are leaving the Christian Church in England each year
(Kristin Aune, Sonya Sharma and Giselle Vincett, Women and Religion in the West: Challenging
Secularization (London: Ashgate Publishing, 2008). Kathryn Rountree also notes the rise of neo-
paganism in societies where there have been feminist critiques of patriarchal religious practices
(personal communication with author, 2012).
101 Reilly, “Rethinking the Interplay of Feminism and Secularism,” 26.
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ter on water. Ancient holy wells not only continue to serve as a wellsprings for
subaltern religious ideas102 but are also now the focus of increasing numbers of
contemporary “well dressing” rituals, led by women to strengthen local commu-
nities across Britain.103 And women are major participants in the rising numbers
of conservation groups hoping to regain some control over the management of
local waterways.104
Countermovements hoping to effect change need to address each part of
the recursive triangle. They can demand new social and political arrangements
and take action to address material inequities in areas such as the ownership,
management, and control of water resources. But they also need to recognize
the critical centrality of cosmological beliefs and values that valorize equity and
complementarity in gender and environmental relations. In the last decade,
it has become clear that sympathetic countermovements are beginning to co-
alesce, using globalization itself, and globalized media, to challenge dominant
beliefs, values, and practices. The result is an increasingly vocal critique of patri-
archal, market-driven rule and techno-managerial instrumentality, and an array
of active demands for social and environmental justice. This coalescence raises,
for the rst time, the potential to create more than localized groundswells that
are readily suppressed or ignored. But to make the necessary connections, to
realize this potential, it is vital to pay attention to how similar patterns resonate
across time and space. If we fail to listen, His Story repeats itself.
102 Walter Brenneman and Mary Brenneman, Crossing the Circle at the Holy Wells of Ireland
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995).
103 Strang, Meaning of Water.
104 Strang, Gardening the World.
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