S/HE: An International Journal of Goddess Studies V5 N2, 2026

Lived Thealogy: Immanence, Ritual, Nature, and Embodied Goddess Practice in a Contemporary Goddess Temple

Shelly M. Nixon

Abstract This article develops lived thealogy as an analytic framework for interpreting the spiritual narratives of eight women affiliated with a contemporary Goddess temple in the Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina. Drawing on narrative inquiry, organic inquiry, and the Listening Guide, the study examines how understandings of female divinity were generated through ritual, bodily perception, relationships with particular Goddesses, creative making, ecological encounter, caregiving, grief, and community participation. The participants were not interviewed about the scholarly term thealogy; lived thealogy is therefore the author’s interpretive category rather than a participant label. Direct testimony shows that Goddess Spirituality was not reducible to belief in a female deity. Participants described sacred presence as sensed in prayer, meditation, altars, clay, trees, animals, care work, ancestral relationship, and the contested life of a religious community. Five interrelated dimensions emerged: embodied encounter, ritual-material practice, ecological relation, creative making, and care across loss and transformation. The temple served some participants as spiritual home, while others withdrew because of burnout, organizational conflict, or a mismatch between the temple’s structure and their changing needs. Lived thealogy thus names a situated process of meaning-making, not a uniform doctrine. The framework contributes an empirically grounded account of thealogy while retaining critical attention to essentialism, racial and cultural power, gender inclusion, appropriation, and the limits of a small, relatively homogeneous sample. 

Keywords thealogy; Goddess Spirituality; lived religion; ritual; embodiment; ecofeminism; material religion; organic inquiry; Goddess temple

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