Book Talk

The National Catholic Reporter plugs a new book by longtime NCR contributor and famous feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether. The book “Goddesses and the Divine Feminine, A Western Religious History” examines the history of sacred female imagery in Western culture.

“In the 1950s NCR columnist Rosemary Ruether began to study goddesses of the ancient Near East and Greece. At the time, she was introduced to theories that ancient societies had originally been matriarchal and had ?fallen? into patriarchy. In the 1970s she developed a class for the Harvard Divinity School based on a thesis, popular among feminists, that the archaeological discovery of figurines depicting female forms was proof of such woman-dominated societies. To her surprise, the students in the class — almost all of them feminist women — did not think the figurines expressed a positive view of women at all but thought that the fat, faceless, large-breasted female forms were exploitative and repellent. Their reaction, says Ruether, ‘made me aware that both of these responses are projections from our modern context and that neither view may have much to do with what the creators of these images actually had in mind.’“

Also interesting is this synopsis from the publishers:

“Rosemary Radford Ruether begins her exploration of the divine feminine with an analysis of prehistoric archaeology that challenges the popular idea that, until their overthrow by male-dominated monotheism, many ancient societies were matriarchal in structure, governed by a feminine divinity and existing in harmony with nature. For Ruether, the historical evidence suggests the reality about these societies is much more complex. She goes on to consider key myths and rituals from Sumerian, Babylonian, Egyptian, and Anatolian cultures; to examine the relationships among gender, deity, and nature in the Hebrew religion; and to discuss the development of Mariology and female mysticism in medieval Catholicism, and the continuation of Wisdom mysticism in Protestanism. She also gives a provocative analysis of the meeting of Aztec and Christian female symbols in Mexico and of today’s neo-pagan movements in the United States.”

You can read the first chapter online. I am interested in reading her chaper on modern Paganism. The last chapter of her book according the table of contents is called “The Return of the Goddess”.

Tags: Neopaganism