Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to reflect on the relations between women and religion, by analysing a new form of spirituality coming from the Anglophone world, Goddess Spirituality, which has arrived in Italy in the new millennium. The analysis moves from secondary data on alternative spiritualities in Italy and is based on ethnographic research carried out in 2013–14 by one of the authors in the Turin Goddess Spirituality group. We chose this group because it was the first in Italy where the Avalon tradition developed in Glastonbury by Kathy Jones (founder of the earliest officially recognized Goddess temple) took root.

Goddess Spirituality is one of the most important – and in some ways challenging – forms where the movement of rediscovering paths of the sacred female are evident. Specifically, this movement grew out of both reinterpretation of monotheistic religions’ sacred texts carried out by feminist scholars (Daly, 1973; Ruether, 1983; Schussler-Fiorenza, 2013) and archaeological, historical and mythographical studies witnessing the existence of Neolithic matrifocal societies in ancient Europe devoted to worshipping the Goddess or Great Mother (Stone, 1976; Gimbutas, 1989, 1991; Eisler, 1987), in synergy with the feminist movement and the first groups experimenting the practices and rituals on which this spirituality is based. Leading pioneers of the Goddess Spirituality movement were Starhawk and Vicki Noble in the United States and Kathy Jones in the United Kingdom.

The most recent surveys on Italians’ religiosity in Italy (Garelli, 2014, 2016) contain no traces of feminine spirituality because it has no critical mass, that is to say a small number of people follow alternative spiritualities.3 As some studies demonstrate (Crespi and Ruspini, 2014; Giorgi and Palmisano, 2016), while an ever-increasing proportion of women leave the Catholic Church, the majority do not redirect their spiritual seeking outside the Catholic milieu by approaching the world of so-called alternative spiritualities.

Italian alternative spirituality, on the other hand, has been studied in some qualitative research (Giordan, 2006) and, more recently, paying particular attention to proposals aimed mainly at women (Fedele and Knibbe, 2013; Berzano and Palmisano, 2014; Bernacchi, 2016; Pibiri, 2016).