A concise history of the goddess-like figures who evade both Christian and pagan traditions, from the medieval period to the present day In this riveting account, renowned scholar Ronald Hutton explores the history of deity-like figures in Christian Europe. Drawing on anthropology, archaeology, literature, and history, Hutton shows how hags, witches, the Fairy Queen, and the Green Man all came to be, and how they changed over the centuries. Looking closely at four main figures—Mother Earth, the Fairy Queen, the Mistress of the Night, and the Old Woman of Gaelic tradition—Hutton challenges decades of debate around the female figures who have long been thought versions of pre-Christian goddesses. He makes the compelling case that these goddess figures found in the European imagination did not descend from the pre-Christian ancient world, yet have nothing Christian about them. It was in fact nineteenth-century scholars who attempted to establish the narrative of pagan survival that persists today.

Although men dominated early Irish society, women dominated the supernatural. Goddesses of war, fertility and sovereignty ordered human destiny. Christian monks turned these pagan deities into saints, like St. Brigit, or into mortal queens like Medb of Connacht. The Morrigan, the Great Queen, war goddess, remained a figure of awe, but her pagan functions were glossed over and her role was obscured. Rosalind Clark juxtaposes early Irish texts with Anglo-Irish treatments of the same themes by Lady Gregory, James Stephens, and W. B. Yeats. She shows the fall in status of the pagan goddesses, first under medieval Christianity and then under Anglo-Irish culture, where the once-powerful goddess of the land evolved into a weak, melancholy victim, romanticized, unreal, and lacking sexual power or into a hag, the dispenser of death. The human loss only begins to be restored in Yeat's The Death of Cuchulain. Irish Literary Studies Series No. 34.

The contemporary search for the feminine face of God is requiring a re-examination of the relationship of Christianity to the pagan world in which it came to birth. Stephen Benko approaches this study as both an historian and a Christian believer. Inquiring into extra-biblical sources of Marian piety, belief and doctrine, he proposes 'that there is a direct line, unbroken and clearly discernible, from the goddess-cults of the ancients to the reverence paid and eventually the cult accorded to the Virgin Mary.' Chapter by chapter he seeks to establish his conclusion that 'in Mariology the Christian genius preserved and transformed some of the best and noblest ideas that paganism developed. Rather than being a 'regression' into Paganism, Mariology is a progression toward a clearer and better understanding of the feminine aspect of the divine and the role of the female in the history of salvation.' This publication has also been published in hardback, please click here for details.

PRE-CHRISTIAN EUROPEAN & MEDITERRANEAN RELIGIONS. In pre-Christian Britain the Great Goddess was worshipped either as an equal to the Gods or as an individual deity. From the Palaeolithic 'Earth Mother' to the Celtic goddesses of Boadicea and the Brigantes, this land once revered the divine feminine. Investigations into the history of the Great Goddess presents many questions. Over the past five years Simon Brighton and Terry Welbourn set out to discover what happened to the Goddess after she was evicted from her elevated position. Travelling throughout Britain, they have uncovered traces of the divine feminine: from holy wells and shrines, lost underground chambers to folklore, legends and fairy tales. Between them they have researched and photographed hundreds of sites.

While much work has been done on goddesses of the ancient world and the male gods of pre-Christian Scandinavia, the northern goddesses have been largely neglected. Roles of the Northern Goddess presents a highly readable study of the worship of these goddesses by men and women. With its use of evidence from early literature, popular tradition, legend and archaeology, this book investigates the role of the early hunting goddess and the local goddesses who were involved in all aspects of the household and the farm. What emerges is that the goddess was both benevolent and destructive, a powerful figure closely concerned with birth and death and with destiny of individuals.

Throughout the literature of the Middle Ages, references are made to mysterious folk-traditions, concerning night-travels and pagan goddesses. These accounts are so uniform, so cross-referential, so widely dispersed over region and time, they cannot possibly be accidental or anomalous. They must indicate a wide-spread, well-fixed mythology. The origins of this belief-system clearly lie in a pre-Christian, pagan world-view.A great goddess sits at the head of this immense nexus of beliefs. She is given a bewildering number of names, but remains essentially the same wherever she is found. This goddess is a combination of the old mother-goddesses of Europe, who were not forgotten by fickle worshippers after the introduction of Christianity, but who continued to be remembered and worshipped by the women of Europe for centuries after, and who, in return, continued to participate in her followers? lives.

Contrary to popular belief, the medieval religious imagination did not restrict itself to masculine images of God but envisaged the divine in multiple forms. In fact, the God of medieval Christendom was the Father of only one Son but many daughters—including Lady Philosophy, Lady Love, Dame Nature, and Eternal Wisdom. God and the Goddesses is a study in medieval imaginative theology, examining the numerous daughters of God who appear in allegorical poems, theological fictions, and the visions of holy women. We have tended to understand these deities as mere personifications and poetic figures, but that, Barbara Newman contends, is a mistake. These goddesses are neither pagan survivals nor versions of the Great Goddess constructed in archetypal psychology, but distinctive creations of the Christian imagination. As emanations of the Divine, mediators between God and the cosmos, embodied universals, and ravishing objects of identification and desire, medieval goddesses transformed and deepened Christendom's concept of God, introducing religious possibilities beyond the ambit of scholastic theology and bringing them to vibrant imaginative life. Building a bridge between secular and religious conceptions of allegorized female power, Newman advances such questions as whether medieval writers believed in their goddesses and, if so, in what manner. She investigates whether the personifications encountered in poetic fictions can be distinguished from those that appear in religious visions and questions how medieval writers reconcile their statements about the multiple daughters of God with orthodox devotion to the Son of God. Furthermore, she examines why forms of feminine God-talk that strike many Christians today as subversive or heretical did not threaten medieval churchmen. Weaving together such disparate texts as the writings of Latin and vernacular poets, medieval schoolmen, liturgists, and male and female mystics and visionaries, God and the Goddesses is a direct challenge to modern theologians to reconsider the role of goddesses in the Christian tradition.

European civilization between 6500 and 3500 BC long before Greek or Judaeo-Christian civilizations flourished had a distinct culture with its own unique identity. The mythical imagery of this era tells us much about early humanitys concept of the cosmos, of human relations with nature, of the complementary roles of male and female. Through study of sculpture, vases and other cult objects, Gimbutas sketches the village culture that evolved there before it was overwhelmed by the patriarchal Indo-Europeans. The Goddess incarnating the creative principle as Source and Giver of All, fertility images, mythical animals and other artifacts are analysed for their mythic and social significance in this beautifully illustrated study.

Crowning a lifetime of innovative, influential work by one of the twentieth-century's most remarkable scholars, this book contains the distillation of Dextor's studies, combined with new discoveries. Map.