Book Reviews
The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, Barbara G. Walker. (ISBN: 0062509268.)A great reference tool, and wonderful for dipping into - it makes a refreshing change from the books that cover mythology from a masculine perspective. Entries are alphabetical, and the only real problem with my version is that it has no index (although one is available by post if you send off for it.) The main entries sometimes have little notes alongside, and citations at the bottom of the entry and at the back of the book; words in bold lead to other entries. It doesn't just cover gods, goddesses, demons and saints: it also covers concepts like 'blood' and 'blessing', sacred animals and symbols like the 'raven' or the 'rose', and historical events like the Inquisition. I find it very useful. To give you a feel for the style, here's an entry:
"Astarte.
the Bible calls her Asherah or Astoreth, the Goddess worshipped by Solomon (1 Kings 11:5).
To the Arabs the Goddess was Athtar, "Venus in the Morning." In Aramaic she was Attar-Sa-mayin, "Morining Star of Heaven," uniting two sexes in herself, like Lucifer the Morning Star and Diana Lucifera. Her Hurrian name was Attart, or sometimes Ishara, another form of Ishtar, "the Star." To Canaanites, she was Celestial Ruler, Mistress of Kingship, mother of all baalim (gods).
Lady of Byblos, one of the oldest forms of the Great Goddess in the Middle East, identified with Egypt's Hathor, Mycenae's Demeter, Cyprus's Aphrodite.
Her shrine at Byblos dated back to the Neolithic and flourished throughout the Bronze Age. She was the same creating-preserving-and-destroyingGoddess worshipped by all Indo-European cultures, and still typified by Kali as the symbol of Nature. Astarte was the "true sovereign of the world," tirelessly creating and destroying, eliminating the old and generating the new. Sidonian kings could not rule without her permission. Each king styled himself first and foremost "Priest of Astarte."
Sumerian cylinder seals from Lagash, ca 2300 BCE, showed the Goddess in a pose identical with Kali's love-and-death sacramental posture, squatting on top of her consort's body.
Astarte ruled all the spirits of the dead who lived in heaven wearing bodies of light, visible from earth as stars. Hence, she was known as Astroarche, "Queen of the Stars." She was the mother of all souls in heaven, the Moon surrounded by her star children, whom she gave their "astral" (starry) bodies. Occultists still speak of the astral body as an invisible double, having forgotten the word's original connotation of starlight.
Astarte-Ashtoreth was transformed into a devil by Christian writers, who automatically assume that any deity mentioned in the Bible other than Yahweh was one of the denizens of hell. She was also masculinised. One finds in books of the 15th and 16th centuries a demon Ashtoreth or Astaroth, a "duke" or "prince" of hell. Milton knew better; he spoke of "Astarte, queen of heaven, with crescent horns."
Scholars who really understood the mystery of Astarte recognised in her one of the ancient prototypes of the virgin Mary. In Syria and Egypt her sacred dramas celebrated the rebirth of the solar god from the celestial virgin each 25th of December. A newborn child was exhibited, while the cry went up that the virgin had brought forth. Frazer says, "No doubt the virgin who thus conceived and bore a son on the twenty-fifth of December the great Oriental Goddess whom the Semites called the Heavenly Virgin or simply the Heavenly Goddess; in Semitic lands she was a form of Astarte.""
The Story of V, Catherine Blackledge. (ISBN: 0753817764.)
This is a fascinating book about the vagina through the ages and throughout the world. It covers ancient mythology, folktales, goddesses and superstitions, as well as literature, art, the art of making love, sex, and biology. Some of the sections on biology can get a little dense, and it is definitely an academic text, so occasionally it's a bit on the dry and dusty side, but it's mostly well-written and engaging. Here's a paragraph from the introduction:
"How do you feel about female genitalia? What does the vagina mean to you? For many, the vagina is the seat of female sexual pleasure, the site of the creation of humankind and the channel for its birth. For both women and men it is also a potent arouser of sexuality. Yet these are not the only views of the vagina. For some, the vagina signifies sacred sexuality. It is an object of worship, recognised as the font of life, an icon of fertility. In stark contrast, the vagina appears elsewhere as an emasculating, castrating fearsome toothed organ - the vagina dentata. Meanwhile, many, if not all, cultures see this portion of female anatomy as something which, in public, women must cover up at all costs. The word 'vagina' is one that is avoided in the majority of conversations, and from the top shelves of convenience stores doctored female genital images peer down. So many ways of perceiving the vagina, so which one do you plump for?"
The Descent of Woman, Elaine Morgan. (ISBN: 0285627007.)
I love this book. I'm sure it's badly out of date by now (my version dates from 1989), but I loved the way it showed me evolution and anthropology from a woman's perspective, without the "cave*man*" stereotypes. It was the first popular science book I read that I felt included me as a woman, where so often women were (and still are) an adjunct or an afterthought to the theories of (mostly male) scientists. It's still worth reading as a feminist text that points out (and pokes holes in) the unconscious androcentricity that pervades supposedly neutral and objective scientific thought even now. Here are a few words from Chapter One:
"[Men] are now prepared to debate the most complex problems of economic reform not in terms of the will of God, but in terms of the sexual behaviour of the cichlid fish; so that if a woman claims equal pay or the right to promotion there is usually an authoritative male thinker around to deliver a brief homily on hormones, and point out that what she secretly intends by this, and what will inevitably result, is the 'psychological castration' of the men in her life. [...] The legend of the jungle heritage and the evolution of man as a hunting carnivore has taken root in man's mind as firmly as Genesis ever did. He may even genuinely believe that equal pay will do something terrible to his gonads."
"I longed to find a volume that would begin: 'When the first ancestor of the human race descended from the trees, she had not yet developed the mighty brain that was to distinguish her from all other species...'"
