Metal music is an enormously rich and challenging cultural phenomenon, which has been captivating me for some years and where many times I found solace and an expression of my own emotions. What happens when the electric guitar meets Thor’s hammer? The effect might be quite bombastic and trigger a sensation of empowerment and enchantment capable of temporarily relocating us to some imaginary places and eldritch times that could cathartically fill up an imagined identity. Finally, this chapter will comment briefly on the effect of the return of the Goddess on the academic study of religion. Worshippers of the Goddess, male and female, view themselves as revitalizing a decadent and dying Western society, and as participants in a revolution that will save the environment and assure a better future for humanity (Rountree, 2002: 486). The Goddess serves to critique the Christian God her gender challenges the masculine norm and her sometime multiplicity challenges monotheistic unity and erasing of difference (Morgan, 1999: 51-59). This chapter investigates the mythology of originary matriarchy and the Great Goddess, and examines Wicca, Feminist Spirituality (primarily Goddess-centred but also within the Judeo-Christian tradition) and the broader Pagan movement as new traditions actively reviving the Goddess. In the twentieth century these intellectual currents crossed the boundary between academic interest and actual religious practice, and dramatically manifested in a variety of new religions devoted to the revived worship of the Goddess, including Wicca (the Craft), Feminist Spirituality and Ecopaganism (Hanegraff, 1998: 85-88). However, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw an upsurge in scholarly and popular interest in non-Christian religions, both ancient and modern.
The secularization thesis initially argued that religion would wither and die entirely such faith would be unnecessary, as science would provide undisputed and rationally evidenced meaning for human life (Clark, 2003: 559-560). With the advent of modernity and particularly the Enlightenment, reason and secularism challenged Christian normativity and the influence of churches declined.
In the early modern era colonial expansion and missions established this form of religion throughout the world (Neill, 1975 Lewis, 2004).
The historical transition from the Late Antique world to the Early Middle Ages was characterized by the decline of traditional polytheistic paganism and its replacement by Christian Trinitarian monotheism in Europe.
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