For as long as humans have sought god, we have found the goddess. Ruling over the imaginations of our earliest civilizations, she played a critical spiritual role as a keeper of nature’s fertile powers and an assurance of the next sustaining harvest. As people began to migrate across the world, the faces of the goddess and the roles she played were forever changed. The Goddess takes us back into prehistory, tracing the evolution of the goddess across vast spans of time to trace the transformation of belief and what it says about who we are.
The metamorphoses of goddess figures that have taken place and the patterns we may discern in these changes, which span the millennia and a wide spectrum of cultures, have much to teach us about the development of human societies and values. This book shows us that the faces of gods and goddesses reflect the lives and souls of the peoples who worship them. It charts the development of traditional Western gender roles through an understanding of the shifting concepts of the goddess, from her earliest roots in India and Iran to her more familiar faces in Ireland and Iceland, and analyses the eventual subordination of goddesses to gods.
From Demeter to Kali and Guanyin to Gaia, and from mother goddesses to warriors, virgins and destroyers, powerful female figures of worship continue to play a crucial role in belief systems today. The Goddess reveals how spiritual thought ties humanity to its ancient origins and shows us that the story of the goddess is also the story of ourselves.
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Table of contents
- Front Cover
- Half Title
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Introduction: The Many Guises of the Goddess
- I The Dawn of the Indian Goddess
- II The Religious Conversion of the Near Eastern Goddess
- III The Scourge of the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean Goddess
- IV The Battle Lust of the Northern Goddess
- V The Seductive Destruction of the Goddess of the Western Isles
- Conclusion: The Identity of the Goddess
- Further Reading
- Acknowledgements
- Photo Acknowledgements
- Index
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Yes, you can access The Goddess by David Leeming,Christopher Fee,Christopher R. Fee in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Religion. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.