11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Helen: An undeserved bad rap, July 10, 2000
This review is from: Helen (Hardcover)
The absence of an index or a bibliography was a major annoyance to me in reading this work. You just have to plow through the notes and appendix to find the author's sources - whether he has read Marija Gumbutas or Gerda Lerner or Rene Eisler or Merle Stone. And you can't look up words or place names. Much of the material in the notes could, I think, have been incorporated into the text so that the reader doesn't have to keep flipping back and forth from notes to text. Also, the beginning chapter was verbose and repetitive compared to what follows. But all that aside, *Helen* is a splendid and scholarly book worthy of being read and reread, mainly for its psychological depth and sophisticated scholarship. It's like champagne and caviar. Elegant.
Drawing on a vast and impressive classical base, Meagher explores the question of Helen and by extension of Pandora, Ariadne, Aphrodite, Eve and Mary - in other words - all the goddesses and mortals who epitomize womankind. They are woman's "eikon" or "eidos", not individuals. Moreover, they are men's projection of womankind, not the reality.
Meagher doesn't spend much time on sociological answers to the problem of misogyny such as that males stamped out the goddess religion so that they could take over the property owned by females (as Merlin Stone has charged in *When God Was a Woman*) or that virulent gender persecution was due to left-brain unbalance brought on by literacy (as Leonard Shlain has suggested in *The Alphabet vs. the Goddess*) or even that misogyny is a reflection of man's jealousy of woman's procreative powers as numerous scholars have declared. Instead, he explores the deep psychological depths of man's hatred for woman through the centuries and comes up with man's experience of powerlessness over his desire. Desire turns to hate and rage over that powerlessness until he wants to control and punish the object of his desire. That is why, in his mind, the victim (woman) is always to blame. "Constitutionally out of control, [man's] thirst for control is seemingly insatiable." Love and war are eternally linked. "Kredemna" in Greek means both a city's battlements and women's veils and eros has thanatos as an overtone.
Meagher draws on history, literature, and archeology to make his case that Helen and all her sisters throughout time have gotten a raw deal. Helen was just part of the process of simultaneously deifying and demoninzing woman. She was "sundered, disempowered and eroticized."
In his conclusion, Meagher says that "...when history is murdered and the past is forgotten, a great many things are lost. This volume has focused on two: the humanity and the divinity of woman." I believe that anybody interested in the subject will want to read this book.
pamhan99@aol.com
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