Goddesses: Mysteries Of The Feminine Divine (Collected Works Of Joseph Campbell) Download Free (EPUB, PDF)
Joseph Campbell brought mythology to a mass audience. His bestselling books, including The Power of Myth and The Hero with a Thousand Faces, are the rare blockbusters that are also scholarly classics.While Campbell’s work reached wide and deep as he covered the world’s great mythological traditions, he never wrote a book on goddesses in world mythology. He did, however, have much to say on the subject. Between 1972 and 1986 he gave over twenty lectures and workshops on goddesses, exploring the figures, functions, symbols, and themes of the feminine divine, following them through their transformations across cultures and epochs.In this provocative volume, editor Safron Rossi—a goddess studies scholar, professor of mythology, and curator of collections at Opus Archives, which holds the Joseph Campbell archival manuscript collection and personal library—collects these lectures for the first time. In them, Campbell traces the evolution of the feminine divine from one Great Goddess to many, from Neolithic Old Europe to the Renaissance. He sheds new light on classical motifs and reveals how the feminine divine symbolizes the archetypal energies of transformation, initiation, and inspiration.
Series: Collected Works of Joseph Campbell
Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: New World Library (December 10, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1608681823
ISBN-13: 978-1608681822
Product Dimensions: 1 x 5.8 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #38,576 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #13 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > New Age & Spirituality > Goddesses #23 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Other Religions, Practices & Sacred Texts > Mysticism #84 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Religious Studies > Comparative Religion
Being raised Catholic, with the “old man in the sky God;” presided over by an exclusively male priesthood; I often felt as if something was missing. How could the God of unconditional love only be male and only choose men to lead “HIS” Church? If God loves us without condition and if we are indeed “made in the image and likeness of God, where was the God in whose image I was made? Furthermore, wouldn’t women, then be equally worthy to lead God’s Church? While the veneration of Mary somewhat satisfied these longings, she still wasn’t God. These questions eventually led me on the search for a feminine image of God that I could call my own, and one that I intuitively knew could be found.Gratefully, I was not the only one troubled by the exclusively male God of the Western religious traditions and have found much comfort in the research that has been accomplished in uncovering the abundant examples of the Feminine Divine in cultures and religions across epochs, including Her presence in the Judeo-Christian tradition.In, Goddesses – Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, by Joseph Campbell, I have found another worthy resource in my on-going exploration of the Feminine Divine. Whereas some of the conclusions Campbell presents have since been refuted, this collection provides a worthy addition to the study of the Feminine Divine, and unlike many books written on this topic, Campbell presents this topic in a way that is accessible to anyone.In this collection of previously unpublished lectures given to lay audiences in the 1980’s, the reader will get an overview of the research contemporary to the time.
Joseph Campbell is a well known scholar of mythology who has taught a number if years at the University level and has authored numerous books. His material is gold as far as I am concerned . AT the same time as being scholarly his style is also highly readable and enjoyable. Read this and you will get lots of information. Beware though because this book may well change your perspective on things.Change it did. Many scholars such as Margaret Murray and Marija Gambutas have stated that in man kinds beginning there was a whorl wide religion that revered the Goddess. Now perhaps that was an overstatement but there were places that venerated the Goddess. Three such areas were identified South Eastern Europe plus Greece and Mesopatamia, South East Asia and part of Central AMerica. THese three areas had mastered agriculture and planting. THe societies tended to be settled into communities and there was at the time no threat of invasion or violence. THe Goddesses reign lasted from the Paleolithic to Neolithic times.The Earth was seen as the mother. From her came all life and at the end all life returned to her. You did not have to be awesome to pick some fruit. Women were cultivators, admired for their beauty. Men were idolized based on how they performed their tasks. In the houses one would find figurines or Venus statues, These could be goddess statues or fertility votives. Men had their rituals in underground caves which were highly representative of the Goddesses womb. The sun was a feminine sign as was the lion and the cat and the snake. The sun radiated on the earth and represented freedom from time and space. Lions were royalty and serpents represented wisdom and life force.For the male representation it was the bull. The bull was lunar.
As someone who is doing research on the goddess and understanding the portrayal of women in culture, I was a bit disappointed in this book.There is very impressive literature circulating about the Goddess, despite biases, which I feel covers much better the subject than Campbell. I find that his writing covers only as much as the surface might bring back - it doesn't seem that he tried to challenge himself to see if this information connected, or even if it made sense in this interpretation. I am aware he mentioned that, at the time, very little scholarship had been done on the feminine in history outside of the stereotypical 'man was hunter and superior, woman was pregnant sex-baby machine and thus inferior' mode of thinking in archaeology, etc.Campbell's infatuation with myths is both positive and detrimental. In a world that is struggling out of the cultural desecration and dehumanization of 'prehistoric people' thanks to Christian dogma, Campbell's dedication to myths are a welcome respite when you are attempting to understand the evolution of faith and the continual borrowing/amalgamation of beliefs over time. Yet, where Campbell fails is in his inability to separate himself and his message from his myth. He makes grand generalizations and has a negative, perplexing tendency to say that X means Y without really showing the in-between or X process of how he got there. During reading, I wondered if he was trying to create a link between Judeo-Christian beliefs and 'pagan' religion/cultures, as while he does note the Semitic cultural desecration of the neighboring deities as troubling, did not seem to go further than was necessary into understanding how far-ranging this mentality became in Western civilization.
Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth (The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion (The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) The Hero with a Thousand Faces (The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) Beyond the Outer Shores: The Untold Odyssey of Ed Ricketts, the Pioneering Ecologist Who Inspired John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell King Arthur and the Goddess of the Land: The Divine Feminine in the Mabinogion The Goddess in America: The Divine Feminine in Cultural Context The Divine Feminine in Biblical Wisdom Literature: Selections Annotated & Explained (SkyLight Illuminations) FOUR BOOKS. MYSTERIES; DIVINE SCIENCE, PRINCIPLE & PRACTICE; SHORT LESSONS IN DIVINE SCIENCE; VARIOUS ARTICLES (Timeless Wisdom Collection) Leaves of Yggdrasil: Runes, Gods, Magic, Feminine Mysteries, and Folklore (Llewellyn's Teutonic Magick Series) The Collected Works of Billy Graham: Three Bestselling Works Complete in One Volume (Angels, How to Be Born Again, and The Holy Spirit) The Divine Romance - Collected Talks and Essays. Volume 2 (Self-Realization Fellowship) The Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy) BOOKS:HOW TO BE FREE FROM SICKNESSES AND DISEASES(DIVINE HEALTH): DIVINE HEALTH SCRIPTURES Coloring Mandalas 3: Circles of the Sacred Feminine (An Adult Coloring Book) Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (Oxford Paperbacks) The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine Sacred Woman: A Guide to Healing the Feminine Body, Mind, and Spirit Reclaiming The Menstrual Matrix : Evolving Feminine Wisdom A Workbook Women in Buddhism: Images of the Feminine in the Mahayana Tradition
