By Caryn MacGrandle
We hear a great deal these days about the hunger for community — the epidemic of loneliness, the fraying of social fabric, the search for belonging in an increasingly isolated world. Many kinds of community are rising to meet that need. But what makes a Goddess community different?
I’ll start with my own story, because I think it speaks to something universal.
She found me
A dozen years ago, at a low point in my life, I found ‘women’s circles’. I could not find a local one so in the ‘if you can’t find it, build it’ belief, I started hosting and started the divine feminine app as a directory to help us find each other.
In one of our first circles, we did a “power” exercise’ where we dug deep to find a figure of personal power in our mind. I described a woman on a cliff by the sea, dressed in green, with compassion, strength, wisdom in her face. My friend listened, and then said, with wide eyes: “That’s Brigid.”
I had never heard of Brigid.
But that experience cracked something open in me. I began to learn about Brigid — her domains of healing, poetry, and the forge; her sacred flame kept burning through centuries of suppression; her role as a ‘bridge’, too powerful to be banished with the advent of Christianity, so she transitioned from a Goddess to a Saint.
And in learning about her, I began to recognize aspects of myself I hadn’t had words for.
This is what it means to “invoke” a Goddess or an archetype. You don’t have to believe you are summoning a literal deity. What you are doing is calling on a story, a set of traits, a way of moving through the world — and finding that it moves through you. The power isn’t diminished by the metaphor. If anything, the metaphor is the power.
Cycles and circles, not lecterns
The first women’s circles that I hosted were in the shed behind my house in Saint Charles, Illinois — a finished space we called the Moon Lodge. It was small. It held objects that called to us: pictures, candles, incense, pillows. It was sacred.
Sacred is not a complicated concept. Walk into a cathedral, a mosque, a synagogue, an old-growth forest — and you feel it. The pace changes. You drop into a different register. Space has been set aside from ordinary life. What I understood, hosting circles in that shed, was that we could create this. We didn’t need an institution. We needed intention, a circle of women, and a willingness to slow down.
This is the structural difference between a Goddess community and most others: it is organized around circles and cycles, not lecterns and hierarchies. Knowledge is held in common. Leadership rotates. The moon’s phases matter. The seasons are honored. The body is not something to transcend — it is the instrument through which we know the sacred.
“Inviting the Goddess into your life is about reclaiming your own sovereignty — and helping others to do the same.” – Caryn MacGrandle
No box
When I attended the Parliament of the World’s Religions, I went to register and looked down the list of faith traditions represented. There was no box for Goddess spirituality.
Sit with that for a moment.
I believe the divine feminine lives inside every tradition on Earth. She is Kuan Yin and Mary and Brigid and Isis and Pele and the Shekinah and the Black Madonna. She has never been fully erased — but she has been demoted, domesticated, and pushed to the margins of most of the world’s organized religions for centuries. We are living in a moment when that is changing. The Goddess doesn’t need a box on a registration form. But we, her devotees, deserve to be counted.
Taking back the words
Two words have been distorted by popular culture, and it’s time to reclaim them both.
The word Witch has begun its rehabilitation — from the wart-nosed villain of children’s stories to something closer to truth: a woman who works with the earth, its cycles, its gifts, to heal and to live in tune with the natural world. We’re still in the middle of that reclamation, but it’s happening.
The word Goddess still needs work. In popular culture it conjures sequins and tiaras and a particular kind of performed femininity. It has been sexualized, trivialized, turned into an aesthetic. But the Goddess at her deepest is not about how you look. She is about sovereignty. She is about embodiment — using your senses, inhabiting your body, living inside this human skin with full presence. She is sensual in the oldest sense: awake to the world.
I also want to speak directly to the women I know — powerful, wise women who have been doing deep work for decades — who shy away from the word Goddess. I understand. The associations are real and they are limiting. But the answer is to reclaim the word, not abandon it. Imagine what it means when it’s fully itself. Imagine communities built around that.
A note on popular culture and fear
My daughter recently told me about a new film — a horror movie called Obsession — in which a young man acquires a ‘One Wish Willow’. My daughter told me it was the type of thing I would have – a magical object obtained from an occult store. The young man makes a wish with the stick for an unrequired love to love him above all else. The wish is granted. The result is violence, madness, and destruction. The film seems designed to teach us that “messing with this kind of power” leads to chaos.
There is a wisdom insight buried in “be careful what you wish for.” But notice how quickly the seed of ancient wisdom gets buried under an avalanche of fear. The underlying theme of the movie appears to be the corruption of her soul because he took things into his own hands.
A Goddess community teaches us something different: that power within — sovereignty, self-knowledge, aligned will — does not lead to chaos. It leads to healing. We are a human race that is ready for that lesson.
It is time to set aside this deep fear that the patriarchy feels is necessary to control the masses.
Goddess communities already exist
The world my friend Annie Finch and I have been pushing toward is not just a dream. It is out there already and increasing everywhere. Goddess temples and communities are opening, gathering, and growing. Some that are listed on the divine feminine app:
- Glastonbury Goddess Temple — Glastonbury, England
- Goddess Temple Trowbridge — Trowbridge, UK (newly opened)
- Mother Grove Goddess Temple – Asheville, NC
- Temple of Goddess Spirituality — Nevada
- The Goddess Temple — Denver, CO
- Mt Shasta Goddess Temple – Dunsmuir, CA
- Mothertree — Louisville, KY
- TurtleWomyn’s Moon Lodgeher — Ramona, CA
- Herchurch — San Francisco, CA
If you lead or belong to a community like this — or if you simply hold a desire to connect with Goddess-led women in your area — I invite you to list yourself on the Divine Feminine App. You don’t need a temple. You don’t need to host circles. A desire to connect is enough.
Find Your Local Web
“We cannot be our truest selves unless we find our Goddess Sisters.” – Annie Finch
Find and list Goddess communities or your desire to find one at TheDivineFeminineApp.com — and join the conversation about what it means to build the sacred feminine world we know is possible.
It is time and She is calling.
Here are me and my good friends discussing Goddess communities on Goddess Matters podcast!
