Customer Reviews

The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion, and Power in Celtic Ireland

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This book should not be out of print, furthermore, every Irish descendant should read it. The Serpent and the Goddess is an in-depth exploration of the demise of the feminine in Ireland by a Romanized and patriarchal Christian tradition. Condren pulls no punches and she probably could have thrown a few more. The hopeful aire to the book is the fact that the Irish feminine has not disappeared, and her piece by piece, step by step mapping of the suppression of the feminine in the Celtic traditions is done in such a manner to almost offer a prophetic vision of her return, within both primal, druidic as well as in Celtic Christian ways.

A history of the many faces of the Celtic Bridget, from Goddess to Catholic Saint. Read about the legends and the politics that forced changes to them.

I have a guilty admission to make: I was misled by the presence of footnotes. When I bought this book, I was looking for something interesting, historical, and scholarly about Irish history. The words "Women's Studies" lurking in small print on the back cover should have been a tipoff that this book wasn't what I was looking for. Mary Condren argues that, before the advent of Christianity, Ireland was a matriarchal society, where family relationships kept warfare and bloodshed in check, and women and men lived, worked, and shared power on equal terms. In this society, the Goddess was only one of many deities worshiped, and each region had its own special interpretation of what she was. Then, Condren asserts, Christianity came along. To enforce the idea of one God, societies that adopted Christianity also had to adopt patriarchy and national monarchy. Also, she argues, the very nature of Christianity results in the repression of women. She uses the examples of Brigit and the Virgin Mary, among others, to illustrate her view of how Irish society and religion changed through the adoption of Christianity. In her opinion, changed for the worse. The book is well-written, fairly interesting, and Condren's arguments don't make any amazing leaps that I can't follow. However, she doesn't offer enough (any?) background to make the underlying assumptions that her arguments are built on believable. She doesn't convince me that pre-Christian Ireland was an almost-paradise, and I'm not convinced that Christianity requires patriarchy, monarchy, and female repression. I can't help but think of this book as anything but a rabid feminist rant with no visible means of support.