Customer Reviews

Lady of the Beasts: The Goddess and Her Sacred Animals

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This book is gorgeous enough to be a coffee-table ornament, and substantial enough that it'll spend more time in your hands than on the coffee table.

Many of the goddesses worshipped in ancient times were envisioned in the form of animals, or depicted with animals, such as the snake, cow, bird, or sow. Buffie Johnson writes lucidly about these goddesses and supplements her work with TONS of pictures. She touches on many different cultures, from the Mediterranean to Scotland and South America. If you're interested in goddess spirituality, you will definitely want this book.

A side note: I really wish I'd had this on hand when I read _The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory_ a few weeks ago. In that book Cynthia Eller tries to disprove matriarchies, and among other things, questions the theory that there was goddess worship in Crete. She says that the two "Snake Goddess" statues don't necessarily prove anything. No, not by themselves. But from Johnson's book, I learned that there were similar but less elaborate statues on altars in people's houses...that a beautifully painted sarcophagus bore a mural of a host of priestesses performing a bull-sacrifice as a lone male flutist trilled in the background...that there were far more images of female power in the "seal stones" than I had seen before. Or that the smaller of the Snake Goddesses wears a rose crown, the sign of Ariadne, though I don't know if they're connected. I still don't know whether there was a matriarchy there, or whether it would have been a good or bad thing if there had been one. But Johnson has convinced me that there were goddesses worshipped there.

This book does occasionally go a little bit overboard, seeing goddess symbolism where there may be no symbolism at all. But in general, it is a beautiful and useful resource that will delight anyone interested in the ancient Ladies.

I bought this book in support of research into the Potnia Theron (Lady of the Beasts) tradition in ancient iconography. This tradition is very important to me personally. A Goddess associated with lions, owls, etc. is central to my spiritual practice.

Lady of the Beasts does contain a delightful collection of animal-related iconography from a wide range of cultures. It was worth the price to me just for this.

That is a good thing, too, because the text is so full of howling errors that I have to assess it to be perfectly useless as any kind of guide to the tradition.

Androgynous figures, or figures of completely indeterminate sex, become Goddesses by default. Just a few examples: A seated figure on a stone from Sweden, shown holding snakes, which reminds me strongly of the Cernunnos (horned God) figure from the Gundestroup cauldron, becomes a Goddess "in birth position." (pp. 175 - 177) True, the figure's legs are spread, but it is seated, not squatting, which -- women, please correct me if I am wrong -- looks like an absolutely hideous and impossible position for birthing. The body is androgynous, but the shape of the head suggests a beard. The lighting on the picture precludes any firm conclusion on the question of beard vs. pointed chin. Another figure, clearly a woman seated on the back of a sow, is in a similar position, but holding one leg up. Johnston cites this as a fertility fetish and suggests the female figure here is also in a birthing position; this one looks much more likely to be that. Interestingly, these images are not linked with the later Sheela-na-gig images from Ireland and elsewhere. Perhaps that is understandable, since the Sheela-na-gig is nowhere linked with animals. At any rate, I can come up with several alternative spiritual interpretations of these figures without much effort at all, which is consistent with the nature of myth and of mythic art.

A figure from a Fremont Indian rock painting (p. 33), with a roughly rectangular body and long ears or horns, becomes a creatrix on no evidence whatever. It could just as well be Coyote, who in some of the stories from the region created the world as one of his jokes (and considering some of the more ribald Coyote stories, his maleness is not in any doubt). Since there are no living Fremont Indians from whom to collect oral tradition, we just don't know.

On p. 19, conveniently unnamed archaeologists from "the Soviet Union" (which no longer existed by the time the book was published) are cited in support of the Universal Paleo-Neo-lithic Mother Goddess myth.

Contrary to Johnston's assertion, Tammuz (Dumuzi) was not originally Ishtar (Inanna)'s son (p. 179). I am particularly displeased when people pervert the grand old stories of the Ancient Near East in support of a vision of all Pagan religions being exemplars of a particular monomyth. They were not, and their very chaotic diversity is part of their power. Much information is potentially lost when authors put their One True Interpretation first and the facts last.

This sort of excess does not serve feminism, Neopaganism, or Goddess spirituality well. It is exactly why those movements, with their infinitely valuable message for humanity, are so easily dismissed by their academic and political critics (who, of course, are the same people in some cases).

It would be so much better to present a balanced view, in which the ancient relations between Gods and Goddesses are preserved in all their messy glory, than to destroy the legacy of ancient Paganism by dismissing and trivializing the male half of it, even in just retaliation for how the female half was treated. Perhaps this is a necessary part of a dialectical process, and the balance I seek is being developed as the wild swings of the pendulum are damped by the critical process. A man can dream.

This book was written very well. It covered many of the Goddesses from all around the world and told their stories. The photos were very helpful in showing the old Goddesses when reading their stores. This is one book that is a must for those studying the old religions.

this book tells about Goddesses and their sacred animals. i don't know what i expected, but still, it is a good book. the chapters tells about different animals; birds, cats, cows, bugs and so on. also, there are many pictures and drawings. only minus comes from the texts...they would be little bit longer.