In contrast, the individual female self as Goddess is almost a standard in contemporary paganism. Laurie Finke relates self-deification to the claiming of power for medieval women (Wiethaus, 41) and it is empowerment that twentieth-century witches have in mind as well. Carol Christ says, "The simplest and most basic meaning of the symbol of Goddess is the acknowledgement of the legitimacy of female power" (Christ, 277). These are the words of "The Charge of the Star Goddess":

I am the beauty of the green earth, the white moon among the stars, The mystery of the deep waters, the desire of human heart; And you who think to seek for me -- Know that your seeking and yearning will avail you not Unless you know the Mystery: That if that which you seek you find not within you, You shall never find it without. For behold, I have been with you from the beginning, And I am that which is attained at the end of desire (Spretnak, 303, see also Budapest, 137).

Starhawk is also very specific about women embodying deity.

There is no dichotomy between spirit and flesh, no split between Godhead and the world. The Goddess is manifest in the world, she brings life into being, is nature, is flesh.. . The Goddess is also earth--Mother Earth, who sustains all growing things, who is the body, our bones and cells . . She is found in the world around us, in the cycles and seasons of nature, and in mind, body, spirit, and emotions within each of us. Thou art Goddess. I am Goddess. All that lives (and all that is, lives), all that serves life, is Goddess (Starhawk, 262-263).

These words are much the same as those used by Marguerite of Porete in the fourteenth century: "What is, is God" (Porete, 133). Although it is probably true that the experience of self-as-God was different for medieval women, the question of prior intention, which is clearly an element of the self-as-Goddess visions of twentieth-century witches, is an interesting one when medieval women's visions are considered. Either the theological idea of pantheism was already a part of Marguerite's religious ideology (which seems unlikely), and was then manifested in her vision, or a wholly new and unfortunately heretical notion was part of the unintentioned content of her vision--and the visions of several other women as well. The biographical details of Marguerite's life are so scanty that it is unlikely that we will ever know very much about other aspects of her theology.
An important objective of Wiccan ritual is the realization of the self as Ultimate, as a living manifestation of female deity. Starhawk refers to the "Charge of the Star Goddess" and explains further in The Spiral Dance:

Finally we learn the Mystery--that unless we find the Goddess within ourselves we will never find Her without. She is both internal and external; as solid as a rock, as changeable as our own internal image of Her. She is manifest within each of us--so where else should we look? The Goddess is the "end of desire," its goal and its completion. In Witchcraft, desire is itself seen as a manifestation of the Goddess. We do not seek to conquer or escape from our desires--we seek to fulfill them. Desire is the glue of the universe; it binds the electron to the nucleus, the planet to the sun--and so creates form, creates the world. To follow desire to its end is to unite with that which is desired, to become one with it, with the Goddess. We are already one with the Goddess--She has been with us from the beginning. So fulfillment becomes, not a matter of self-indulgence, but of self-awareness. For women, the Goddess is the symbol of the inmost self, and the beneficient, nurturing, liberating power within woman. The cosmos is modeled on the female body, which is sacred. All phases of life are sacred: Age is a blessing, not a curse. The Goddess does not limit women to the body; She awakens the mind and spirit and emotions. Through Her, we can know the power of our anger and aggression, as well as the power of our love. . . . To invoke the Goddess is to awaken the Goddess within, to become, for a time, that aspect we invoke. (Starhawk 1989: 98-99).

Medieval women wrote, "I am God, the end of desire" (Porete, 125). Contemporary women write, "I am Goddess, the end of desire"(Starhawk, 1989: 98). Since the gender of the speaker is the same, it is safe to assume that the identification of the self as a female with the gendered nature of deity is also the same, at least within this limited context.
This is not to suggest that medieval women were comfortable with the idea of a god who was exclusively female, or with the identification of self with God. Marguerite was exceptional; many women of this period, including Hildegard, Gertrude, and even Julian, had internalized the misogyny of their culture, especially that of the institutional church, and that misogyny is reflected in their writing at least as often as woman-affirming sentiments are. There are also numerous other differences between these women, differences in self-image but also in worldview and in perceptions of the place of women in society. These differences cannot be minimized or wished away, and efforts by feminist writers to identify and label twelfth-century mystics as feminists are, while understandable, nevertheless misguided and anachronistic (see Giles, 3).
Nevertheless, it is undeniable that there are startling similarities between the visionary affective piety of medieval women mystics and the woman-affirming celebratory religious rituals and visions of twentieth-century witches and neopagans. These similarities can be seen in the content of the visions themselves, in the interpretations of the visions, and in the enhanced self-image of the women who experienced the visions.
Additionally, women mystics across the centuries have tended to approach religious experience differently from men, in that they generally do not to engage in speculative or philosophical mysticism. Jantzen notes that for medieval women mystics, "the source of their spirituality was experiential more than intellectual" (Jantzen, 159), and this is true of twentieth-century mystics as well. The actual experience of life in/as a physical body was and is an integral part of women's spirituality, and lofty philosophical speculations on the nature of the soul and of deity have never replaced the reality of embodiment in women's religious thought, no matter how sophisticated their theology. Thus, as Jantzen points out, women's mystical experiences tend to have more in common with each other than they do with men's experiences (Jantzen,133, 155), and this is true, as demonstrated above, even among women of very different religious traditions and across many centuries.

Epilogue
*It is noteworthy that Grace Jantzen has pointed out that the construction offered by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience, which has been used as the definitive model of mysticism for several decades, presents serious problems for a feminist analysis of mysticism. Jantzen writes: "Far from being a neutral, objective account, the Jamesian account of mysticism accepted by modern philosophers of religion is an account inextricably intertwined with issues of power and gender in ways which feminists need to deconstruct." She discusses at some length her view that both mystical experience and the interpretation of mystical experience are heavily gender-inflected. See Jantzen, Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism, 342-346.

Works Cited