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"The myth of the Goddess is the oldest myth we know; the evolution of that myth tells the story of how our understanding of ourselves--as we have achieved it through the images of our goddesses and gods--has developed over the millennia of human history. Yet today the Goddess seems to have disappeared, and only the God remains. But it has not always been so." "In this definitive and powerfully argued study, scholarly yet accessible, Jules Cashford and Anne Baring draw upon art and mythology, poetry and literature, archaeology and psychology, to show how the myth of the Goddess has been lost from our formal Judaeo-Christian images of the divine. They explain what happened to the Goddess, when and how she was excluded, and the implications to us of this loss." "They trace the image of the Great Mother Goddess of the Palaeolithic and Neolithic times through the Bronze and Iron Ages to the Virgin Mary, 'Queen of Heaven'. They show how the God separated from the originally androgynous Goddess and eventually came to stand alone as the creator of the world. But the Goddess, however devalued and debased, did not go away; the image of the universe as an organic, living and sacred whole--which is the essence of the Goddess myth--could not be eradicated, and went underground." "This leaves an imbalance in the masculine and feminine images of the psyche. The authors argue that successive patterns of myth, legend and history demonstrate the importance of bringing the feminine and masculine images into harmony with each other, which is only possible when both are acknowledged. In earlier times the 'Sacred Marriage' of Goddess and God symbolized this harmony: Inanna and Dumuzi in Sumeria, Ishtar and Tammuz in Babylonia, Isis and Osiris in Egypt, Cybele and Attis in Anatolia, Aphrodite and Adonis in Greece--and, in the language of the image but not the doctrine, Mary and Jesus in Christianity. The parallels and similarities in all the Goddess myths are so striking that they suggest a continuous tradition of images throughout history." "Today the Goddess is re-emerging in the surprising guise of New Science, which offers a vision of the universe as a living whole that can only be understood as a unity--and the scientists express themselves in images that belong to the old Goddess myth. This book's detailed evocation, description and analysis of the stories and images of humanity will surely help to restore the myth of the Goddess to our consciousness."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved… (more)
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(Most of which is not listed here because it's in journals...).
In chapter one Baring and Cashford discuss the
The book is well referenced, but every so often they make a statement of what can only be a historical fact and these statements are unreferenced. Have the authors made these facts up? Have they imagined them? I suggest that they have. This from page 678:
“...we cannot remember [how to think symbolically] if the Imagination is not valued as a mode of perception that brings knowledge.”
Imagination brings knowledge? Really? Does it bring knowledge even of what you have imagined? Surely it would be memory that brings that knowledge. How can if bring knowledge of the beliefs of a dead person?
Looking at the references themselves I notice a definite reliance of secondary sources. I developed rather an obsession with checking each reference. Most of these sources are fine. For example they reference S H Hooke. I’ve read several of this chap’s books and he knows what he’s talking about. When he gives a reference I check it to find out where he’s found that little gem of information. With this book I was checking that I wasn’t being lied to. I had developed some trust issues with the authors. You may well say that this is non-fiction and I should be checking references. You’d be right. Fail to check a reference on Monday and by Tuesday night you’re burning down a 5G phone mast. Twice in the body of the text they give the opinion of dowsers as support for their arguments. I find this appalling. Listen to a dowser on Wednesday and by Thursday afternoon you’ll be wobbling around the WI hall aerating your wombspace.
Baring and Cashford are doing a little mythmaking of their own. They posit a Golden Age in Europe where only a feminine deity was worshipped and women ruled society. War was unknown. Thereafter followed a Fall caused by warlike Asians who invaded and brought their male Gods with them. (This is a Kurgan hypothesis. A perfectly respectable hypothesis. I’m not suggesting the authors are racist. They would of course be descended from these invaders). Over time these male Gods entirely replaced the female in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
As it happens, I agree with the replacement theory and I’ll come back to that in a mo. But I have issues with this Golden Age. They are using the prevalence of female images to infer that the societies were matriarchal. Yet look at the prevalence of images of the Virgin Mary. Does that mean women were dominant in Mediaeval Europe? Does the prevalence of images of women in advertising mean they are dominant today? Furthermore, does the fact that only female images have survived mean that male Gods were not worshipped? Here we can use they own arguments against them. They argue for system of ‘zoë’ and ‘bios’: “Zoë is eternal and infinite life; bios is finite and individual life.” A divine example would be the Mother Goddess and her Son-Lover. One could easily argue that images of Goddesses were carved from stone as representative of something eternal. Images of Gods could have been carved only from wood as repesentative of something that is cyclically reborn. The wood would not survive.
These sort of problems span the whole book but are particularly prevalent in the first chapter. The authors are on firmer ground when we reach the historical period and writings can tell us what the images mean. You may well wonder why I’m giving four stars to a book with this many issues. Well, I enjoyed it. And there is so so much in this nearly 800 page book where they are bang on the money. Several times I checked in disbelief something fantastical that they said only to find it widely confirmed by respectable scholars. I could fill page after page with the good stuff, but I’ll restrict myself to one example. They discuss the Tiamat/Marduk controversy. I find this subject fascinating and have read several books which discuss its repurposing in Genesis 1. These authors were interested in it as evidence for the development of monotheism. Baring and Cashford are interested in it as evidence for the supplanting of a male God for a female. It’s worth noting that those other authors were Protestant men. I shall be forever grateful that they have helped me see they subject in a whole new light.