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Perhaps most seductively of all, the Goddess misrepresents her own history, claiming to be the heir of an unbroken line of covert pagans and druids who secretly preserved the Goddess' occult healing ways since remote antiquity despite Christian persecution. Davis convincingly traces the origin of the contemporary Goddess movement not to classical antiquity but to 19th-century French and German Romanticism. "Nothing about the Goddess myth correlates with what we know of the ancient civilizations which her devotees claim as their foremothers; everything, however, has clearly identifiable roots in the modern subcultures which began with Romanticism and the nineteenth-century occult revival." In Romanticism, "the supreme importance of feelings, and the purity of the primitive," were emphasized.
"The prized Romantic values of emotion, intuition, affinity with nature, and boundless love coincided with the qualities which traditional stereotypes had already assigned to women."
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Goddess Worship
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