Restoring the Goddess: Equal Rites for Modern Women - Hardcover

Walker, Barbara G.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1573927864 ISBN 13: 9781573927864

Publisher: Prometheus, 2000

Synopsis

"In the beginning, in the time that was no time, nothing existed but the Womb. And the Womb was a limitless dark cauldron of all things in potential: a chaotic blood-soup of matter and energy, fluid as water yet mud-solid with salts of the earth; red-hot as fire yet restlessly churning and bubbling with all the winds. And the Womb was the Mother, before She took form and gave form to Existence. She was the Deep. . . ."With this dramatic, poetic recasting of the Genesis myth, Barbara Walker begins this highly original and fascinating work, which is both an incisive critique of patriarchal religion and a bold proposal to establish a liberating alternative to the Judeo-Christian myth. She envisions a religion and a spirituality compatible with women's essential role in society and free of all the superstition and demeaning imagery characteristic of traditional, male-dominated religion. In place of theology she suggests "thealogy," replacing the academic study of the God concept with a down-to-earth "knowledge of the goddess" - a knowledge that incorporates the scientific understanding of the universe and recognizes the symbolic nature of religious concepts and the psychobiological foundations of religion. Rejecting the transcendent deity of patriarchal religion, thealogy would revere an immanent personification of the real universe, especially of the sacred Earth, the only source of life we know.Hearkening back to the widespread worship of a mother goddess at the dawn of civilization, Walker argues for a restoration of this primal religious sensibility, which celebrated the Earth's fertility and woman's innate power to bear new life. Women are already rediscovering this ancient form of spirituality, Walker shows, and redefining modern religion to conform to woman's new appreciation of their rights and the long history of male dominance.

About this title

About the Author

Barbara G. Walker (Nokomis, FL) is a highly successful feminist writer of both fiction and nonfiction works. Her previous books include Feminist Fairy Tales, Amazon: A Novel, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects, and The Skeptical Feminist.

From the Inside Flap

For centuries, partiarchal religion has justified its existence using a male-dominated mythology: a birth-giving father, his male child shedding life-giving blood, long lists of biblical "begats" tracing family lines from father to son. Followers of Judeo-Christian faiths have long been taught to accept these myths as literal truths, and patriarchal societies throughout history have all used these "truths" in their attempts to stratify humankind by gender: Men rule, women are fuled over. In Restoring the Goddess, internationally recognized feminist Barbara G. Walker presents "thealogy," an alternative to the traditional patriarchal mythology, compatible with women's essential role in society and free of all the superstition and demeaning imagery characteristic of traditional male-dominated religion. Replacing the academic study of the god concept, this down-to-earth "knowledge of the Goddess" incorporates the scientific understanding of the universe, recognizes the purely symbolic nature of religious concepts, and celebrates the innate and singular power of the female to create and bear life. Rejecting the transcendent deity of patriarchal religion, thealogy reveres an immanent personification of the real universe and the sacred Earth, the true source of life. This fascinating and highly original work is both an incisive criqitue of male-dominated religion and a bold proposal to establish a liberating alternative to the Judeo-Christian myth. Tracing human history from the widespread worship of a mother Goddess at the dawn of civilization through the early church's excising of feminine references in scripture and beyond to the resulting modern sexist societies, Walker seeks to restore this primal religious sensibility, which celebrated the Earth's fertility and woman's unique power to replenish the species. Using comments gleaned from personal interviews with a variety of women, presented at the end of each chapter, Walker illustrates that women are already rediscovering these ancient forms and redefining the modern outlook in response to their new appreciation of women's rights and the long history of male dominance.

Reviews

Walker's assessment of patriarchy's suppression of both knowledge and celebration of the Goddess compels her, as it has many before her, to begin restoring the lore of the Great Goddess. But Walker, a feminist author who has explored the dimensions of female myth and symbol in her previous fiction and nonfiction, does an odd thing here. Rather than offer yet another mythographer's source book, she wisely transforms her text away from the usual dialogue with the reader into an effervescent polylogue with other women about what such a restoration could mean and how it should be undertaken. As a result, Walker's enormously challenging and revealing book presents a community of voices. This is a volume of women talking: about the Goddess and patriarchy, about physicality, reproduction and the image of the Goddess, about rituals and purposes, about the New Age and about women's problems and fears as the Goddess re-emerges into secular culture. This format encourages continuing discussion in women's groups across the country about what Walker and other feminists term "thealogy," which she distinguishes from patriarchal theology. Thealogy returns worship tradition to the rediscovery of the sacred in the ordinary and transforms the undervalued lives of women into spiritual adventure. This book offers visible evidence of the advantages of redefining modern religion through women's participatory engagement. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Despite its subtitle, this book addresses few specific rites or practices. Instead, readers are taken on a rambling tour of the horrors of patriarchy and Christianity (which Walker sees as inextricably intertwined) and offered criticisms of Islam and New Age fads. Blending mythology, revisionist history, and biblical criticism, Walker (Feminist Fairy Tales) calls for a new metaphor as a guide to human relationships rather than a new religion. Walker's Goddess is not a specific being but instead the communal spirit of women, particularly the nurturing mother. Readers interested in tracing the historical claims will be frustrated by footnotes that generally lead back to Walker's Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets or Charles Bufe's The Heretic's Handbook of Quotations rather than to original sources. Alternating chapters based on interviews of women involved in Goddess religions offer some insight, but simply stringing together quotes is confusing, and the quality of the quotes varies greatly. Not recommended.
-Jan Blodgett, Davidson Coll. Lib., NC
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Prometheus
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1573927864
• ISBN 13: 9781573927864
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 424