This ambitious work, co-authored by two professors of English, Christopher Fee (Gettysburg College) and David Leeming (University of Connecticut), sets out to cover the myths of the Great Mother from ancient India in the east, via Iran, the Near East, and Greco-Roman culture to Norse culture and Ireland in the north and west respectively, in order to explore this central aspect of ancient spiritual thought as a window into human history and the deepest roots of our beliefs. In addition to an introduction presenting “The Many Guises of the Goddess,” the book consists of five chapters leading us from India to Ireland, and a conclusion, which gives a short discussion of “The Identity of the Goddess.” A short final section presents further reading on each of the five chapters, general acknowledgements, photo acknowledgements, and an index.
It is said that as long as humans have sought god, they found the goddess; accordingly, this book seeks to analyse the goddess and understand the evolution of woman as deity in many cultures. The authors are thus concerned with drawing parallels, although they state that the deities, be they god or goddess, “always reflect the souls of [those] who worship them” (9); accordingly, they change as cultures change. The authors, consequently, use the goddess to gaze into the lives and souls of those who worshipped her. An overarching theme of the book is “[t]he emergence, dominance and subsequent subordination and erasure of powerful female figures of worship” (9), since, the authors claim, the goddess became subordinated to the god as humans became mobile and looked upon male deities for assurances of survival in movement and battle. Here one may object that although the methods of transportation have changed, it is a historical fact that people have always been mobile and belligerent, especially when food or other important requirements have been at stake. Nonetheless, the topic of the goddess, according to the authors, has never “been more relevant than it is today” (9). Moreover, Western civilization “traces some large cultural debt to” the “ancient ancestors” discussed in the volume; hence, “ancient transformations regarding the role of women and of conceptions of the feminine divinities are of urgent interest to those who have a stake in modern gender roles” (9). We are also informed that “the emphasis of the book is on the patterns of ways in which goddesses, as opposed to male deities, transform and evolve,” and “how such changes may be correlated with cultural and religious shifts.”
All the chapters are structured in the same way. Since the goddess is connected to humankind’s earliest agricultural civilizations, chapter 1, “The Dawn of the Indian Goddess,” starts the journey, addressing issues concerning female agency and power, with a section on “Genesis,” followed by one on the “Faces of the Goddess.” The chapter deals with various goddesses and their characteristics in Indian culture—from the Great Goddess, Devi, to the two faces of Kali, the blessing and nurturing mother versus her aspect as a killer with a great appetite for drinking the blood of her human victims. The chapter concludes by noting that “as Mother Earth, everything that emerges from her is also preserved by her and ultimately is returned to her” (34), a statement which indeed is relevant to all the various Mother Goddesses treated in the book.
Chapter 2, “The Religious Conversion of the Near Eastern Goddess,” starts with the “Faces of the Goddess” by stating the importance of “the nurturing and beneficent figure of the Cosmic Cow” in Iranian mythology (41), a topic which is also important in Mediterranean cultures (one may mention Hera of the Greeks). The chapter also introduces the importance of the equine association of relevant goddesses, a topic which is also found in the Mediterranean area and further north, among the Celts. We learn how “[t]he ancient Avestan Anahita…in a sense…converted to a new, Islamic form when Fatima, daughter of the Prophet, takes on the epithet of the Powerful Pure One; [and] Islamic women were…encouraged to take Fatima as a role model” (49).
Chapter 3, “The Scourge of the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean Goddess,” discusses mythologies in a variety of cultures and places, including Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. We are informed that “a group called ‘Habiru’ by the Egyptians moved out from Egypt into Canaan in about 1250 BCE, to be the ancestors of the Hebrew people” (60). This is one of the instances where it would have been fruitful to cite a reference, especially since this is not a standard accepted view among scholars. According to Anson Rainey, for instance, there is absolutely no relationship “between the habiru, who are well documented in Egyptian and Near Eastern inscriptions, and the Hebrews of the Bible.” [1] The same chapter also deals with the replacement of former goddesses by Mary, as a new Queen of Heaven, in the aftermath of the Hebrew prophets who saw the goddess Asherah “as a threat to the emerging monotheistic religion of the Israelites” (65). It would have been interesting to have a discussion of whether the ideologists’ demands were followed by the people, since reading their repeated reports about peoples’ transgressions towards the very monotheistic “Almighty God” by continuing their old cultic customs, such as performing sacrifices and making offerings on the high places, seems to present another version of monotheism in practical life.
This chapter then moves on to Greek religion, where mythology also “is patriarchal in character” (66). This is reconfirmed by the authors when stating that “[w]ith the emergence of Zeus…goddess power was strongly reduced,” exemplified by Demeter, who in the authors’ terms “is a ‘single mother’ with limited power” (78). When reading the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, however, one may obtain a more nuanced view of this assertion. Indeed, the authors also state that Demeter forced Zeus himself to compromise after he threatened the very existence of humanity by preventing grain from sprouting (80). The topic may illustrate that neither goddesses nor the women they reflect were totally powerless, after all. One may also add that the Mysteries at Eleusis did not begin in the fifth-century BCE, as the authors claim (80), since the mysteries actually took place for more than one thousand years, from the archaic period until the cult site was destroyed by the Goths in 395 CE.
The two final chapters, chapter 4, “The Battle Lust of the Northern Goddess,” and chapter 5, “The Seductive Destruction of the Goddess of the Western Isles,” are the best chapters in the volume, presumably also representing the authors’ main field of research, covering the Viking or rather Old Norse culture of Scandinavia and its links with neighboring peoples. Chapter 4 brings in much broader source material than the former chapters, and the authors continue drawing parallels between the various cultures discussed, such as when examining the similarities between the Indian practice of sati and episodes like that in Norse texts (111-112), despite the distance between the two cultures. Here, one may add that if we have traces of sati in Norse culture, we certainly also have them in Greek culture, as evidenced by the tragedian Euripides’s Suppliants (verse 1070), when Evadne threw herself on her husband Kapaneus’s funeral pyre and died in front of her father’s eyes.
The last chapter brings us to the cultural ancestors of the British and the Irish, the Celts, who moved from east to west. One of the most widespread faces of the Celtic goddess is the equine deity Epona (127), whose face or attributes are encountered in several of the Irish and Welsh goddesses discussed, also with parallel references to more southern and eastern variants. One may add that Demeter also has an equine aspect, which may help to fill in one of the holes between the cultures at hand. This goddess also lamented her dead daughter in the aforementioned Demeter hymn, and although the authors claim that a mourning woman embodies “a feminine figure [who] has no power but to lament” (152), one may argue that in some of the cultures discussed, women’s laments have been seen as dangerous voices, both in antiquity and in more recent times.
The conclusion continues drawing parallels, also including some words about goddesses from Africa, via China and Mexico, the latter of which also has replaced an earlier goddess with the Virgin of Guadalupe, one of the many appearances of the Virgin Mary. She, by the way, also appears today to her devotees, especially the female ones, in Europe as well, Greece and Italy included, though the authors claim the Christian Mary is a survival of the goddess, in modern times manifested in New Age resurrections such as Gaia.
All in all, The Goddess: Myths of the Great Mother is well written, especially the last two chapters, but such an ambitious topic would have benefitted from being treated by various experts in the relevant fields. Perhaps in the future one may see such a book, also treating the goddesses in the cultures which are mentioned only in the conclusion; and, if female scholars are among the contributors, the goddesses might also be described somewhat differently.
Note:
[1] Anson Rainey, “Who Were the Early Israelites?” Biblical Archaeology Review 34 (2008): 51-55.
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[Review length: 1541 words • Review posted on November 8, 2017]