Review by Booklist Review
This scholarly yet accessible gathering of essays knows its audience well. Editor Nicholson is aware that those interested in her subject fall into three groups: passionate feminists, who'll read anything with the word goddess in the title; spiritualists of all stripes, including Jungians and New Age charismatics; and the merely curious, who wonder what this "reawakening" business is all about. The book has something for everyone, without being too simplistic for the converted or too obscure for the uninitiated. Cross-cultural emphasis is strong throughout, as the various authors discuss the "feminine principle" and its relationship to goddess myths. A good selection for general-interest audiences and a must-have for libraries with strong feminism or New Age collections. --Pat Monaghan
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this trenchant anthology, Nicholson ( Ancient Wisdom--Modern Insight ) gathers the work of 23 theologians, historians and other scholars in pursuit of what Stone, a pioneer of modern studies of the mother-Goddess, calls ``the universal feminine principle''--``the concept of a divine principle in the universe that is specifically associated with the female gender.'' These essays collectively imply that this feminine principle is far more profound than a simplistic antithesis of all that we think of as masculine. Addressing cultural representations of the mother-Goddess, female worship traditions and Goddess-centered rites, and the psychological, social and political implications of a feminine principle, the discussions are commendably free of jargon, combative rhetoric and scholarly infighting. In a particularly intriguing entry, psychologist June Singer suggests that by imagining their own deaths, hence letting go of a distorting sense of self-importance, women in a patriarchal society may reconcile the ``masculine'' definition of self through choice of career with the ``feminine'' emphasis on relations. Illustrations not seen by PW. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
