Customer Reviews

Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History

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Prof. Ruether has done a fine job in avoiding the radicalizing polemics of the feminist movement and providing a balanced perspective of how the feminine aspect of holiness has been marginalized by patriarchy. She does this without waxing nostalgic about a fancied halcyon day when women ruled peacefully. She convincingly argues that this thesis was never established on anything other than an ideological wannabe basis.
Her final chapter, on the modern Wicca movement, provides a good foundation for establishing a tolerant view of how the feminine aspects of divinity can be incorporated into a holistic view of spirituality. I would have liked to have seen a more in-depth analysis of why the early christian fathers were so determined to eliminate the emphasis on feminine Wisdom and replace it with Jesus , but overall she has given an interesting accounting of the process whereby Christianity (especially the Protestant variety) has become an almost exclusively male preserve. This book is highly recommended for any student of early religion, the feminist movement or aboriginal spirituality.

This is an unusually well-balanced survey of goddesses in history and belief. Compared with other books on the subject, it offers more substantive material and there is an obvious effort to represent each point of view. The reader is given a full account of the manifold manifestations of goddesses throughout history as well as the various feminist viewpoints of today.

This is a remarkable book. REmarkable in every respect, i/e., the amount of information, the clarity of style, the points of view. Certainly, not politically correct, since it dares contradict the excesses of the feminist movement. Everybody interested in the history of the gender war should read it. Kudos.

I just love it. Here's another non-scientist accusing a world-renowned scientist (Marija Gimbutas) of being dogmatic (not to mention dead wrong about half of what she - Marija -- has ever written).

And then what does Ruether do? She dances out with dogmatic statements of her own. As my mother would say, "It's the pot calling the kettle black!" Take the following, for example: "The major stimulus for this development (from the relative peace and equality of the Neolithic to the Bronze-Age hell of war, slavery and poverty) came less from outside nomadic invaders and their horses and more from internal developments triggered by the accumulation of wealth" (p. 39).

How does Ruether - a theologian -- know with such certainty that "The major stimulus for this development came less from outside nomadic invaders and their horses and more from internal developments..."? One wonders: does she know anything about the vast literature on this particular subject? About the competing theories? Apparently not; she dismisses the entire area of research with one blithe paragraph bristling with certainty.

And how is it that a theologian is so certain that these internal developments were "triggered by the accumulation of wealth"?

Ruether doesn't seem to want to get to the truth in this book. It seems to me she wants to hide the truth. A big part of her agenda: We hafta hide the Neolithic Goddess because this goddess will hurt women. She says the Neolithic goddess "duplicates what I suspect is one of the key roots of the need of males to dominate females -- namely, it identifies women predominantly as the representatives of the `natural.' If women, and women alone, personify the forces of nature in the cycles of birth and death, either they need to be dominated by men in order to control these forces of nature, or they are the primary gender that will somehow `save' us from the destructive effects of millennia of male domination of nature" (pp. 39-40).

On the contrary, there's no reason to believe that a strong Neolithic goddess meant women and only women personified nature, or that there were no male gods anywhere in the time/culture period. Does Ruether have a time machine? Did she go back and check?

I'm afraid Ruether's speaking old-speak. Younger women today know that just because women give birth doesn't mean men see them as mere bodies walking around with no heads, abilities, capabilities, or important place in the larger world.

Ruether totally denies the Goddess of the relatively peaceful and healthy Neolithic and devotes almost her entire book to those goddesses that haunted the hellish Bronze and subsequent ages, all of which have been defined by war, conquest, subjugation, social ranking and poverty - right up to the present day.

It's distressing that many theologians these days assume they know enough about science to write books on the subject. Please, Ms. Ruether: leave the science to the scientists and stick to your Bibles.