The Myth Of The Goddess

A comprehensive, scholarly accessible study, in which the authors draw upon poetry and mythology, art and literature, archaeology and psychology to show how the myth of the goddess has been lost from our formal Judeo-Christian images of the divine. They explain what happened to the goddess, when, and how she was excluded from western culture, and the implications of this loss.

For as long as we have sought god, we have found the goddess. Ruling over the imaginations of humankind’s earliest agricultural civilizations, she played a critical spiritual role as a keeper of nature’s fertile powers and an assurance of the next sustaining harvest. In The Goddess, David Leeming and Christopher Fee take us all the way back into prehistory, tracing the goddess across vast spans of time to tell the epic story of the transformation of belief and what it says about who we are. Leeming and Fee use the goddess to gaze into the lives and souls of the people who worshipped her. They chart the development of traditional Western gender roles through an understanding of the transformation of concepts of the Goddess from her earliest roots in India and Iran to her more familiar faces in Ireland and Iceland. They examine the subordination of the goddess to the god as human civilizations became mobile and began to look upon masculine deities for assurances of survival in movement and battle. And they show how, despite this history, the goddess has remained alive in our spiritual imaginations, in figures such as the Christian Virgin Mother and, in contemporary times, the new-age resurrection of figures such as Gaia. The Goddess explores this central aspect of ancient spiritual thought as a window into human history and the deepest roots of our beliefs.

Britomartis, goddess of the moon, was a clever, active girl who loved to hunt with her bow and arrows.... Britomartis was sacred to fishermen, hunters and sailors.

Honorable Mention for the 2022 Elli Köngäs-Maranda Prize awarded by the Women's Section of the American Folklore Society Goddess characters are revered as feminist heroes in the popular media of many cultures. However, these goddess characters often prove to be less promising and more regressive than most people initially perceive. Goddesses in film, television, and fiction project worldviews and messages that reflect mostly patriarchal culture (included essentialized gender assumptions), in contrast to the feminist, empowering levels many fans and critics observe. Building on critiques of other skeptical scholars, this feminist, folkloristic approach deepens how our remythologizing of the ancient past reflects a contemporary worldview and rhetoric. Structures of contemporary goddess myths often fit typical extremes as either vilified, destructive, dark, and chaotic (typical in film or television); or romanticized, positive, even utopian (typical in women’s speculative fiction). This goddess spectrum persistently essentializes gender, stereotyping women as emotional, intuitive, sexual, motherly beings (good or bad), precluded from complex potential and fuller natures. Within apparent good-over-evil, pop-culture narrative frames, these goddesses all suffer significantly. However, a few recent intersectional writers, like N. K. Jemisin, break through these dark reflections of contemporary power dynamics to offer complex characters who evince “hopepunk.” They resist typical simplified, reductionist absolutes to offer messages that resonate with potential for today’s world. Mythic narratives featuring goddesses often do, but need not, serve merely as ideological mirrors of our culture’s still problematically reductionist approach to women and all humanity.

David Leeming and Jake Page gather some seventy-five of the most potent and meaningful of these tales in an extraordinary rich and readable introduction of this divine figure as she has emerged from prehistory to the present.

The White Goddess is perhaps the finest of Robert Graves's works on the psychological and mythological sources of poetry. In this tapestry of poetic and religious scholarship, Graves explores the stories behind the earliest of European deities—the White Goddess of Birth, Love, and Death—who was worshipped under countless titles. He also uncovers the obscure and mysterious power of "pure poetry" and its peculiar and mythic language.

Discover the adventures of Athena, the ancient Greek goddess of wisdom, war and courage. From her extraordinary birth – sprung from the head of her father, in the midst of a thunderous headache – to her refusal to take no for an answer. Find out how she inspired powerful gods, goddesses and humans and the terrifying fate of those who dared to cross her path. Follow Athena as she competes against her bad-tempered uncle; watch as she turns her enemy into a spider and join her as she keeps Odysseus safe on his remarkable journey home. Prepare to be amazed as you uncover the story of one of the most fearless ancient goddesses, and the tales of a world where humans, gods and goddesses could meet. Illustrated and written by the brilliantly talented sister duo, Isabel and Imogen Greenberg, this is a story of daring for goddesses-in-the-making.

Does the mention of a sun deity make you think of Apollo? Perhaps you should envision a female divinity instead Unlike the Greeks, many Indo-European peoples probably believed a goddess ruled our bright, blazing star. So, dispense with the stereotypes of mainstream culture and set out on a journey of discovery to bring this long-forgotten idol into focus. Through etymology, mythology, and religion, a compelling argument emerges for seeing the sun in feminine terms. Norse, Baltic, Celtic, and Hittite legends, goddesses named Sol and Saule, plus pictures of a variety of artifacts, lend weight to this eye-opening thesis.