The Goddess La D Esse

This spirited, emboldening guidebook includes more than fifty ways to get in touch with your inner divinity. Written to empower and inspire, this positive book teaches you how to connect with your inner Goddess, uncover your true goals, and create a healthy plan for achievement. With fun games and exercises, along with a list of additional resources, The Goddess in Every Girl will start you on a path of self-discovery and expression—physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Be confident. Be creative. Be beautiful. Be the person you want to be! Complete astrological tables let you look up your own personal Goddess ally in the areas of life purpose, emotions, body awareness, love, nature, energy, and passion. With more than fifty activities—such as a guided journey to the Goddess center, directions for keeping a Goddess journal, breathing exercises, meditations, and instructions on creating a sacred ritual space for self-transformation—you will find the answers within yourself. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you live, what you look like, how much you weigh, what your parents do, whether you are rich or poor, popular or not—you have the power of the Goddess within you. You only have to set it free!

Queen Elizabeth I was an iconic figure in England during her reign, with many contemporary English portraits and literary works extolling her virtue and political acumen. In Spain, however, her image was markedly different. While few Spanish fictional or historical writings focus primarily on Elizabeth, numerous works either allude to her or incorporate her as a character. The Image of Elizabeth I in Early Modern Spain explores the fictionalized, historical, and visual representations of Elizabeth I and their impact on the Spanish collective imagination. Drawing on works by Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Pedro de Ribadeneira, Luis de Góngora, Cristóbal de Virués, Antonio Coello, and Calderón de la Barca, among others, the contributors to this volume limn contradictory assessments of Elizabeth’s physical appearance, private life, personality, and reign. In doing so they articulate the various and sometimes conflicting ways in which the Tudor monarch became both the primary figure in English propaganda efforts against Spain and a central part of the Spanish political agenda. This edited volume revives and questions the image of Elizabeth I in early modern Spain as a means of exploring how the queen’s persona, as mediated by its Spanish reception, has shaped the ways in which we understand Anglo-Spanish relations during a critical era for both kingdoms.

Contrary to popular belief, the medieval religious imagination did not restrict itself to masculine images of God but envisaged the divine in multiple forms. In fact, the God of medieval Christendom was the Father of only one Son but many daughters—including Lady Philosophy, Lady Love, Dame Nature, and Eternal Wisdom. God and the Goddesses is a study in medieval imaginative theology, examining the numerous daughters of God who appear in allegorical poems, theological fictions, and the visions of holy women. We have tended to understand these deities as mere personifications and poetic figures, but that, Barbara Newman contends, is a mistake. These goddesses are neither pagan survivals nor versions of the Great Goddess constructed in archetypal psychology, but distinctive creations of the Christian imagination. As emanations of the Divine, mediators between God and the cosmos, embodied universals, and ravishing objects of identification and desire, medieval goddesses transformed and deepened Christendom's concept of God, introducing religious possibilities beyond the ambit of scholastic theology and bringing them to vibrant imaginative life. Building a bridge between secular and religious conceptions of allegorized female power, Newman advances such questions as whether medieval writers believed in their goddesses and, if so, in what manner. She investigates whether the personifications encountered in poetic fictions can be distinguished from those that appear in religious visions and questions how medieval writers reconcile their statements about the multiple daughters of God with orthodox devotion to the Son of God. Furthermore, she examines why forms of feminine God-talk that strike many Christians today as subversive or heretical did not threaten medieval churchmen. Weaving together such disparate texts as the writings of Latin and vernacular poets, medieval schoolmen, liturgists, and male and female mystics and visionaries, God and the Goddesses is a direct challenge to modern theologians to reconsider the role of goddesses in the Christian tradition.

Reproduction of the original.