The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image [Paperback]

Jules Cashford (Author), Anne Baring (Author), Laurens Van Der Post (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1993

This is 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The authors of this ground-breaking, rich, ambitious work attempt to trace the evolution of consciousness by following humanity's changing attitudes toward female deities, from the Paleolithic mother goddess enshrined in figurines to Inanna of Sumer, Isis of Egypt, Aphrodite of Greece, and beyond. Baring, a London-based Jungian analyst, and Cashford, who writes on mythology, regard the formal disappearance of goddess myths as a pivotal event signaling the devaluation of the feminine and the opposition of feeling to thinking. They interpret the Virgin Mary as the unrecognized mother goddess of Christianity, identify hidden images of the goddess in the Old Testament and demonstrate that a Hebrew goddess existed in various forms such as the Shekhinah, founder of the world in Kabbalism. A wonderfully readable synthesis, this monumental study is packed wth scores of riveting illustrations. It will serve as a sourcebook for students of myth, feminists and those seeking to balance and integrate masculine and feminine components of their psyche.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 800 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (June 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140192921
• ISBN-13: 978-0140192926
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #259,077 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

82 of 83 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The definitive, no-BS, intelligent story of the Goddess, February 23, 2003

By 

Kelly (Fantasy Literature) (Columbia, MO United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (Paperback)

This book took me about a week to finish, and I count it a week well spent. This is, bar none, the best book I've seen yet about the goddess religions of the ancient world. It has its limitations--it mainly covers Europe and the Middle East--but it is amazingly thorough on the stuff it does cover.

Many goddess books have the weakness of bad scholarship--they believe that the world used to be a certain way just because someone else told them so, or because they wish it was so. This is not one of them. To give you an example, an issue often in contention between goddess-folks and other researchers is, were the "Venus figurines" really meant to represent goddesses? Usually, authors either dismiss those statues as pornography, or else laugh off the suggestion that they are pornography with equal disdain. Baring and Cashford tackle the issue head-on, eventually deciding the figures are not simply pornographic based on their abstractness. Writing about prehistory always requires some speculation, but this book is a breath of fresh air in that it provides arguments and evidence every time the authors must make a leap of faith.

Baring and Cashford begin there, with the statues of matronly women found in European caves, and trace the transmission of the archetype of the goddess from prehistory to the twentieth century. Each culture was influenced by those before it and near it, and the stories and images they honored can be used as a map of changes in human consciousness. The goddess in ancient times was seen as the spirit of the natural world; as humans began to distance themselves from the natural world, the goddess became seen as a symbol of "mere" physicality and the god as the "higher" symbol of spirit. Finally we get the image of Eve, the first sinner, who carries all the ancient goddess symbols for political reasons--the leaders of the time were trying to distance Judaism from the polytheistic traditions of their neighbors. But this image was blown out of proportion--taken as literal history, the story of Eve was used to denigrate the goddess, human women, sex, and nature all at once.

Beautifully written, scholarly, and insightful, this is a very good book about the goddess archetype--and doesn't even fall into the common pitfall of assuming that all human women can be defined by this archetype. This is the kind of book that is good for the goddess movement, rather than embarrassing.

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars May reach a little too far but does cover a lot of good turf, December 16, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (Paperback)

Quite scholarly and well-educated, Baring and Cashford offer a widely-scoped yet controlled and well-written survey of the Goddesses in ancient religions. At times the interpretations of the artwork may become a little breathy, but as a fellow lover of art I will forgive that. At other times, the authors will stretch to make connections between Goddess traditions(particularly in the chapter on Mary - e.g., as Goddess of War?) that do not quite reach. This book is, however, an excellent overview of the Divine Feminine and moves to revitalize a long-neglected aspect of spirituality. Among their most powerful arguments is the idea that the psyche and the drive for spirituality and religion is a "structure," not a "process": humans possessed a fully matured spirituality by the time they could be called "human beings." This helps to open the way for the reader to discover that ancient religions are no more primitive than modern religions, nor modern religions any more sophisticated than ancient ones - they are simply different. I do recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of religions as well as to those Searchers who feel there is more to God than YHWH.

36 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Information-packed and still, concise., December 31, 2000

By 

Vixengrl (Philadelphia, PA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (Paperback)

This is a book which explores the goddess myth from its paleolithic beginnings to the current time, and it is both a good read in the sense of possessing clarity of intent and good structure, and also in being consistently interesting. There is more history, scholarship, depth, and intellegence in this work than one might expect, and it is a good reference for those interested in history, in myth, and those who simply wish to understand the feminine aspect of divinity.