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Title: The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (Arkana S.) by Anne Baring, Jules Cashford ISBN: 0-14-019292-1 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 June, 1993 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.29 (14 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The definitive, no-BS, intelligent story of the Goddess
Comment: This book took me about a week to finish, and I count it a week well spent. This is, bar none, the best book I've seen yet about the goddess religions of the ancient world. It has its limitations--it mainly covers Europe and the Middle East--but it is amazingly thorough on the stuff it does cover.
Many goddess books have the weakness of bad scholarship--they believe that the world used to be a certain way just because someone else told them so, or because they wish it was so. This is not one of them. To give you an example, an issue often in contention between goddess-folks and other researchers is, were the "Venus figurines" really meant to represent goddesses? Usually, authors either dismiss those statues as pornography, or else laugh off the suggestion that they are pornography with equal disdain. Baring and Cashford tackle the issue head-on, eventually deciding the figures are not simply pornographic based on their abstractness. Writing about prehistory always requires some speculation, but this book is a breath of fresh air in that it provides arguments and evidence every time the authors must make a leap of faith.
Baring and Cashford begin there, with the statues of matronly women found in European caves, and trace the transmission of the archetype of the goddess from prehistory to the twentieth century. Each culture was influenced by those before it and near it, and the stories and images they honored can be used as a map of changes in human consciousness. The goddess in ancient times was seen as the spirit of the natural world; as humans began to distance themselves from the natural world, the goddess became seen as a symbol of "mere" physicality and the god as the "higher" symbol of spirit. Finally we get the image of Eve, the first sinner, who carries all the ancient goddess symbols for political reasons--the leaders of the time were trying to distance Judaism from the polytheistic traditions of their neighbors. But this image was blown out of proportion--taken as literal history, the story of Eve was used to denigrate the goddess, human women, sex, and nature all at once.
Beautifully written, scholarly, and insightful, this is a very good book about the goddess archetype--and doesn't even fall into the common pitfall of assuming that all human women can be defined by this archetype. This is the kind of book that is good for the goddess movement, rather than embarrassing.
Rating: 4
Summary: May reach a little too far but does cover a lot of good turf
Comment: Quite scholarly and well-educated, Baring and Cashford offer a widely-scoped yet controlled and well-written survey of the Goddesses in ancient religions. At times the interpretations of the artwork may become a little breathy, but as a fellow lover of art I will forgive that. At other times, the authors will stretch to make connections between Goddess traditions(particularly in the chapter on Mary - e.g., as Goddess of War?) that do not quite reach. This book is, however, an excellent overview of the Divine Feminine and moves to revitalize a long-neglected aspect of spirituality. Among their most powerful arguments is the idea that the psyche and the drive for spirituality and religion is a "structure," not a "process": humans possessed a fully matured spirituality by the time they could be called "human beings." This helps to open the way for the reader to discover that ancient religions are no more primitive than modern religions, nor modern religions any more sophisticated than ancient ones - they are simply different. I do recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of religions as well as to those Searchers who feel there is more to God than YHWH.
Rating: 1
Summary: another goddess fantasy work
Comment: yet another book written by fanciful feminists dreaming of some (wholly imaginary) matriarchal past. The book is full of wild unsubstantiated statements. They talk about goddesses of the paeleolithic era, a period of which there is nothing known about religious practices or beliefs, how could there be? The carved images of women found may be goddesses, or they may not. We don't know. That doesn't stop these nutty women laying down the law on the subject though. All the authors of these batty feminist sprituality books should be made to write out the following a hundred times "WORSHIPPING GODDESSES DOES NOT MEAN A SOCIETY IS MATRIARCHAL" .History is full of partiarcahl goddess-worhsippers, Egyptian, Greek and Roman society were full of goddesses, and they were totally male-domonated societies. And if Christianity was such a terrible male-domonated religion compared to all those lovely goddess worhsipping religions, how come they got so many women converts? Alos they are banging on about moon goddesses as per usual, sun goddesses not getting a mention, though there were plenty. And these women are meant to be psychologists or something, aren't they? They both seem to me to be in urgent need of psychoanalysis themselves.
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Title: When God Was a Woman (Harvest/Hbj Book) by Merlin Stone ISBN: 015696158X Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 01 May, 1978 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth by Monica Sjoo, Barbara Mor ISBN: 0062507915 Publisher: HarperSanFrancisco Pub. Date: 01 August, 1991 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future by Riane Eisler ISBN: 0062502891 Publisher: HarperSanFrancisco Pub. Date: 01 September, 1988 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: The Great Goddess: Reverence of the Divine Feminine from the Paleolithic to the Present by Jean Markale ISBN: 0892817151 Publisher: Inner Traditions International Pub. Date: 01 November, 1999 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: The Living Goddesses by Marija Gimbutas, Miriam Robbins Dexter ISBN: 0520229150 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: 12 January, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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