Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Genuine & Appealing Insight, March 26, 2000
The other reviewer says that if the book had not been presented as history it would deserve a 5 star rating. I also thought when I picked up the book that the historical argument was tremendously tenuous. However, taken as modern artistic interpretation of "Old European" goddess culture, not documentary about such culture, which is all it technically claims to be, it is wonderful. Myths are NOT historical. None of them. Sometimes a historical story is behind a myth, but often not recognizable. But myths are gross revisions of stories. The key is the revisions appeal to some part of the human unconscious, and seem to make "true" statements about the state of the collective human psyche. As such, and the author does after all present these as "reconstructed myth" not actual transcripts of old texts, then anyone reading the fine print would not be mislead about historicity, and the book should get its deserved 5-star rating.
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Glimpses of Goddesses Before They Were Demoted, January 20, 2002
Some of the reviews of this book I believe are misleading. Yes, Ms Spretnak is a feminist; yes, she can be political about it. But I don't think she was presenting an agenda with this book. She took fragments of pre-Hellenic myths, and fleshed them out so they'd make sense. And she did so in a beautiful lyric style!"The goal of such work [extending the knowledge of pre-Hellenic culture] is not the reinstatement of prehistoric cultural structures, but rather the transmission of possibilities" As we know, history is written by the winners, and when the gods we now are most familiar with, the "classical" myths, were brought into the culture, the older myths which were more matrifocal largely vanished. Not to devalue Homer, but there is genuine value in these much older myths, just as we hold Virgil and Homer in high regard for their telling of newer gods. The pre-Hellenic myths give us a glimpse into a culture where Hera (for instance) was powerful in her own right, not merely a consort and sister to Zeus. How can knowing two sides of a story be a bad thing? History may be written by the winners, but those who were conquered left traces of themselves behind, too, and you can read about some of it here.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
a pre-Olympus revisioning...., May 30, 2003
....that might have been longer. After reading the introductory material I was surprised at the brevity of the chapters: a consequence, perhaps, of how much lore has been lost down the centuries.This book broke new ground not only by celebrating the goddesses (and by implication women and femininity) but by pointing out that "the" Greek myths known far and wide were preceded by matriarchal traditions transmuted by incoming Dorian patriarchs (see also the work of Maria Gimbutis and Riane Eisler) and centuries of his-story. The author strives to recover something of the earlier traditions in her lively, and at times lyric, reconstruction of the pre-Olympian goddesses. The book left me with an open reflection. To some extent the story of Ulysses has followed me for years (or I have followed it), and I've come to appreciate what I perceive as the feminine warrior protectiveness of Athena, one of my favorites of the Greek pantheon. As Minerva her visage adorns the Great Seal of my homeland, California. And yet according to this book, Athena was made into a soldier by bloodthirsty male barbarians. Although there can be little doubt about the patriarchal distortions of the Greek goddesses--how many positive stories do you hear about Hera?--I'm wondering if we lose something in relegating quite so much to these distortions. Athena "feels" fiercely protective (but not soldierly) to me in dreams, in active imagination, and in fantasy: is this her quality, an archetypal aspect of her being, or does it merely derive from my being a man raised in a patriarchy? Or a man with an assertive anima? I don't know. In any case this book remains a nice counterbalance to the usual versions of Homeric and Olympian mythology we find even now in most books dealing with Greek deities. There is also a cutting criticism of Jungian conflations of goddess, femininity, and darkness that will delight readers tired of hearing about the passive, yin-like, and shadowy "archetypal feminine," a convenient category for shoring up unjust power relations.
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