Customer Reviews

In Search of the Lost Feminine: Decoding the Myths That Radically Reshaped Civilization

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I was astonded at the depth and breadth of this work. The scholarahip of ancient history covers material from many ancient cultures. This includes a fresh perspective on Biblical history and especially the place of the person Jesus. The sweep of history of the church and Western civilization from the past to the present enabled me to develop understandings about those times that I had not gotten anywhere else.

At first I had wondered how the claims that were made early in the book would be substantiated but with patience you brought in evidence from many cultures and writings that closed the circle for me and enabled me to accept the validtiy of those claims. Bringing it all down to present day made it quite relevant. The book emerged from the sordidness of the past with a strongly positive view of how far we have already come in undoing what the ancient patriarchal cultures created that have held sway in most western cultures until now. Obviously, we still have far to go.

Thanks so much for contributing to my enlightment. The main contribution was in enabling me to see how the feminist cause is a necessary effort at correcting the deeply rooted beliefs and social structures that have been in place in the western psyche and institutions for centuries. It is not just about equal pay, women in the board room or the oval office and freedom from domination in the home. Nor is it only in the service of women, but it is vital to the liberation of the the human spirit in all human kind, beginning with our children.

Beside all of that, your style of writing and "trial lawyer" method of writing made reading it a pleasure.

I deeply appreciated this work.

Don Wismer
Corrales, NM

Craig Barnes' book gives us our roots as women in Western Civilization, while at the same time liberates both women and men from these "stories" that have become our psychology and social fabric. Without this orientation, our understanding of women and men in today's world is incomplete. If I had only one book to give my own daughter, this would be my choice.

Rarely, during more than 30 years of researching origins of the divine feminine, advocating women's' rights through private and public activism, including creating the gender discrimination class action, Cremins et. al. vs. Merrill Lynch in 1996, have I encountered such well-researched, documented and written scholarly tributes to "the lost feminine" - a history as real as the one we've been fed for the last 3500 or more years in the Western world.

With temperance and reverence, Craig Barnes leads us through the movement of western civilization from EROS to THANATOS - from the pulse to love and to live, to the pulse of death, of destruction. No better example of this insane THANATOS (which Freud recorded well throughout his work) pulse can be found than the world's use of Depleted Uranium (DU) since the first Gulf War. DU is a true weapon of mass destruction. It has unleashed levels of radiation upon the earth (the original divine feminine and great giver of life) that equal the dropping of 400,000 Hiroshima bombs!

With scholarly examination and a lawyer's attention to fact, to detail, to evidence, Barnes elucidates, for women and men, how manufactured our patriarchal history actually is; how women, since the written word of the Greeks and the Hebrews have been stripped of their inherent power and beauty; denied their crucial contribution to our cultures, our world; raped of their cyclical life-giving force; demonized and tortured for their innate flow to ecstasy, to healing, to life, death and rebirth.

Barnes shows how "word created" man has been defined only by his ability to war successfully, control manically, hoard stupendously, and lie horrifically. He details how the Greeks and Hebrews, our "greatest story-tellers," the creators of the written word for the Western world, were truly "telling stories." And these stories, borne of the thrust to cruel power and dominion, had very little foundation in reality.

Barnes articulates gently how we need to embrace the balance of the feminine and masculine. He beacons us back to a time of NO TIME. "In Search of the Lost Feminine" calls us back to our remembrance of ourselves as authentic, Divine beings, female and male.

I would strongly urge any human being searching for how to understand our times, how to create options for redemption as a species, to read over and over again "In Search of the Divine Feminine." -- Anne Kaspar

I need to preface this review by saying I've been jaded about "history of the Goddess" books for several years now.

I got sick of the exaggerated claims that every culture on the planet once worshipped the same Goddess and were so enlightened that no one ever had any kind of conflict until the big bad patriarchs came along. I got sick of the sexist idea that women are innately kinder and gentler than men, that they're less intellectual and more intuitive, and that the world would have few or no problems if it were run by women. Because of these issues, I lost all enthusiasm about a concept that had once enthralled me.

Somehow, this book found me anyway. It was the beautiful cover that drew me first. Then I found myself reading page after page in the store--and decided to buy the book, figuring that even if I ended up disagreeing with half of it, it was interesting, and I might learn something.

Barnes pleasantly surprised me in almost every chapter. This is not the same old rehash of "the history of the Goddess." Yes, there is some covering of familiar ground, but Barnes has new insights to add to the subject. His speculation about the role of the Thera eruption in shaping society and myth was jaw-dropping. I was also fascinated by his thoughts on Greek religion, the Trojan War, and early Christianity. His prose is hypnotic, accessible without being dumbed-down in any way.

The added bonus is that he doesn't try to claim that one gender is superior to the other. Barnes would like to see women achieve completely equal rights with men. He would also like to see society value art, sexuality, nurturance, and the environment more. He doesn't claim that women are more "earthy" than men, just that they have often been considered so, and that when women are devalued the earth usually is as well, and vice versa.

I also liked the way he tied his history in with his experience as a lawyer fighting equal rights cases. It reminds us that the real point of examining this history is not to wallow in past wrongs but to make the world a better place for today's women and men.

I recommend this book, along with Baring and Cashford's _The Myth of the Goddess_, to anyone looking for an intelligent look at the evidence for and against prehistoric female power.

There are many books available that touch in some form or another on the ancient goddess religions, but this is the first to be written by a distinguished attorney and international negotiator proving that the feminine principle has been systematically discredited by the mythology of western civilization. It is both shocking and liberating. Any woman who has a sense of mission about correcting some kind of imbalance in the world will be inflamed by this book like a volcano erupting. If it became a basic textbook in high school, it would change the world for the better.

The book is impressively researched and exhaustively presented. The author has amassed a body of ideas that is irrefutable, and archaeological discoveries make the idea more plausible all the time. That idea is that in pre-recorded history there were cultures in the Mediterranean that were nonviolent, matriarchal and did not suffer from overpopulation. This is in sharp contrast to our Biblical and Greco-Roman accounts of male-dominated nations that were constantly warring to reduce their population.

I recommend this book for any who want a well-rounded alternative view of anthropology. Once you realize just how chauvinistic our version of history is, you will interpret all historical knowledge in a new light.

Why and how did ancient cultures disappear where women were at the heart of their worlds, and how has this disappearance influenced over three thousand years of Western civilization's development? In Search of the Lost Feminine: Decoding the Myths that Radically Reshaped Civilization is a recommended pick for any strong women's studies or women's history holding: it virtually re-writes history and uses archaeological and social facts to follow ancient history to modern times.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

FOR THOSE WHO HAVE WONDERED WHY MALES HAVE DOMINATED VIRTUALLY EVERYTHING FOR AS FAR BACK AS MOST WRITTEN HISTORY COVERS. BARNES POSES INTERESTING INFORMATION AND IDEAS AS TO WHY AND HOW THIS CAME TO BE. NOW THAT WOMEN ARE BEGINNING TO BE ALLOWED A BETTER CHANCE TO REACH THEIR POTENTIAL, THIS IS IMPORTANT INFORMATION.