The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (Arkana S.)

Rating:
Summary: The missing pieces of the puzzle.
Review: A "must read" for anyone trying to make sense out of whereour culture is going. The two authors have really done their homework and have tied many important ideas together. This book is what every Christian should read in order to understand the mythic basis for Jesus and Mary. The information doesn't weaken one's christian faith, but rather takes it to a broader perspective of what ego-death and resurrection really mean. The book creates the standpoint of Metamorphosis rather than Apocolypse. Another good book in this realm is "The Great Mother", Eric Neumann, however, "The Myth of the Goddess" is more readable and fills in more of the story-details. Many thanks to the authors for a real contribution to the world's body of knowledge.

Rating:
Summary: The New Age Bible Of Spiritual Awakening
Review: all i have to say is that this book helped me with soo many term papers. its has great write ups on many goddesses from many cultures, comparing and contrasting them. If you are interested in any of the goddesses in this book or have to write about them- it gives bibliographies for each secion that are great- and gives you several angles to take in writing about each.
(isis/hathor, mary, demeter, persephone , aphrodite, cybele, innana/ishtar, athena, artemis, bronze age mother goddesses and many more because those are just the chapters i can remember off the top of my head)
:)

Rating:
Summary: May reach a little too far but does cover a lot of good turf
Review: 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:
Summary: The definitive, no-BS, intelligent story of the Goddess
Review: 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:
Summary: The definitive, no-BS, intelligent story of the Goddess
Review: 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:
Summary: May reach a little too far but does cover a lot of good turf
Review: This is a book which explores the goddess myth from its paleolithic beginnings to the current time, and it is both a good read in the sense of possessing clarity of intent and good structure, and also in being consistently interesting. There is more history, scholarship, depth, and intellegence in this work than one might expect, and it is a good reference for those interested in history, in myth, and those who simply wish to understand the feminine aspect of divinity.

Rating:
Summary: The Goddess from a New Perspective
Review: This is a fascinating book, containing information on archeological discoveries of goddess figures from around the world. The historical content is good as well, although sometimes the authors' conclusions on the historical contents drawn from the archeological evidence are stated as fact instead of simply their opinions. However, a very good read, overall. I would recommend this book to anyone.

Rating:
Summary: another goddess fantasy work
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: another goddess fantasy work
Review: 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.