Goddess

Clan of the Goddess: Celtic Wisdom and Ritual for Women by C. C. Brondwin (New Page Press) Like the early Celtic Clan Mothers, who encouraged women to be confident and spunky, this book helps women to believe in the feminine divine within their souls. With irrepressible humor and delightful flair, the author illustrates the basic principles of Goddess teachings so readers can develop steadfast faith in their personal power and use these newfound skills to enrich their lives. Weaving a rich tapestry of authentic Celtic wisdom with the brilliant-colored threads of today's result-oriented visualization and motivational techniques, this book raises awareness while accelerating the spiritual experience. It takes the reader on a fulfilling journey of personal transformation and invites her find her power base--her magick, to unburden and improve the health of her soul; and reduce the damaging influence of past sorrows so the Goddess within can fulfill her heartfelt dreams and ambitions.

DANCING IN THE FLAMES

The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness

by Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson

Shambhala

$14.00, paper, 240 pages, notes, credits

1-57062-313-9

hardcover:

This provocative book about the Dark Goddess is a rich and intimate exploration that brings together history, mythology, psychology, and religion. The authors offer some unique twists upon well-worn Jungian ideas providing some wise counsel on the nature psychic transformation. The major task of soul-making is to enter the realms of the Dark Goddess in order to bring the secret of beauty into the light of the world. How did patriarchy imagine that we could survive as individuals or as species self-exiled from Her, the source of life and death? Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson guide us most skillfully and insightfully along the path of a renewed wisdom tradition. The Dark Goddess’s hidden presence in the psyches of men and women becomes visible through Marion Goodman and Elinor Dickson’s perceptive insights. Seen and unseen, appreciated or denigrated, in history, myth, and culture as well as in individuals, the Dark Goddess carries transformative power and feminine Wisdom, which are revealed in this beautifully conceived book that can affect the reader like a major dream or evocative poem.

MARION WOODMAN is a Jungian analyst who is internationally known as a teacher, lecturer, and workshop leader. She is the author of numerous books, including Addiction to Perfection and Leaving My Father’s House.

ELINOR DICKSON, PH.D., is a psychologist, Jungian therapist, lecturer, and workshop leader. She is Director of Psychological Services at St. Michael’s Hospital, Toronto, Ontario.

THE WHITE GODDESS

A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth

by Robert Graves

Noonday Press

$15.00, paper, 511 pages, notes, index

0-374-50493-8

An enormously versatile and prolific writer, poet, translator, and critic Robert Graves was best known for his eccentric historical novels about Rome and for his studies of the mythological and psychological sources of poetry. He considered himself as primarily a poet. It is as a poetic critic that Graves helped formulated the thealogy of Wicca through his wonderfully, learned, dense, imaginative, witty and faked scholarship known as THE WHITE GODDESS, which now celebrates its 50th anniversary of its publication in 1948. It is perhaps his finest and the most popular of these works. In this book Graves explores the stories behind the earliest of European deities, the White Goddess of Birth, Love, and Death, who was worshipped under countless titles. She was beautiful, fickle, wise, and implacable, and in one of her later forms she is known as the Ninefold Muse, patroness of the white magic of poetry. In this brilliant tapestry of poetic and religious scholarship, Graves uncovers the obscure and mysterious power of "pure poetry" and its peculiar, mythic language. His identification of motifs of the Goddess set the foundation of Neo-Pagan thought.

ROBERT GRAVES (1895-1985), born in London, was one of the most talented, colorful, and prolific men of letters in the twentieth century. He is best known for his historical novels, I, Claudius and Claudius the God. He spent much of his life on the island of Majorca. Other important novels that offer insights into the poetic aspects of the Goddess and Jesus is King Jesus. Greek Myths I & II is a two volume important reference, though its scholarship is quixotic. Graves' poetry is a bit formal by today's more free verse conventions, but many of his poems are true gems.