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Review: Textbook on Women and Goddesses

Women and Goddesses in Myth and Sacred Text:  An Anthology, Tamara Agha-Jaffar, editor.  New York:  Pearson Longman, 2005.

Reviewed by Johanna H. Stuckey, Ph.D., York University, Toronto, Canada

Women and Goddesses in Myth and Sacred Text

When I was teaching Goddess courses in the 1970s to 1990s, I would have been really grateful to have had access to this textbook. It does what few other such books do: it provides key selections in translation from religious and mythical material pertaining to the goddess/woman being studied. Thus, students can dip into, among others, such works as the Babylonian creation story, the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, the Qur’an, and the Ramayana.

The goddesses and sacred women Agha-Jaffar treats are as follows: Isis, Inanna, Tiamat, Demeter and Persephone, Circe, Medea, Sita, Kali, Amaterasu, Kuan Yin, Lilith, Eve, Virgin Mary, Hawwa, Maryam, Oshun, White Buffalo Woman, and Corn Mother. If I had been picking the ones to include, I probably would have left out two of the sacred women (Circe and Medea) and added the Canaanite/Israelite Asherah and another Greek or Asian goddess or both. However, Agha-Jaffar’s choices reflect the course she was teaching and for which she devised this textbook.

Continue reading “Review: Textbook on Women and Goddesses”

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History of Goddess Studies

Minoan Era Golden Bee

Patricia Monaghan has written a series of articles called “Approaches to the Study of Goddess Myths and Images” for the Seasonal Salon, the on-line journal for the Re-formed Congregation of the Goddess, International.  The articles explore the contributions of pioneer researchers over the last 150 years.

Link here for the first of these articles:

Seasonal Salon, Monaghan, Part 1

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Web Resources for Managing References

 

In her recent editorial in Matrifocus, Sage Starwalker lists  these two great sites for managing, searching, and sharing scholarly references on the web.  Thanks, Sage!

CiteULike

http://www.citeulike.org/

a service for managing, discovering, and sharing scholarly references

Bibster

http://bibster.semanticweb.org/

a system that assists researchers in managing, searching, and sharing bibliographic metadata; “…it provides the possibility to search on a distributed peer-to-peer network … (and) an easy way to share data with other researchers.”

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“The Goddess Movement Beyond the Baby Boom”

Minoan Era Golden Bee

One of the problems that has plagued feminist movements in the past is that one generation of “movers and shakers” has not found a way to communicate with the next generation.  In this informative editorial Sage Starwalker addresses cross-generational communication through the use of social networking and other technologies.  In order for us to keep growing and moving forward, we “elders” must find ways to bridge the gap and overcome any reluctance to meet our younger sisters in the places where they meet (probably on the internet).  This article ought to be required reading for those of us who want to open such a dialogue.

http://www.matrifocus.com/LAM09/editorial.htm