Here are 100 books that The Living Goddesses fans have personally recommended if you like
The Living Goddesses.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Born and raised in Greece, I have always been fascinated by the history and mythology of my homeland. My love for reading historical fiction and Greek myths has been drawing me into stories of ancient civilizations and their timeless tales. Visiting archaeological sites and museums, where history comes to life through the remnants of the past has been a lifelong passion and Is a source of inspiration. These experiences have shaped my love for storytelling and my desire to breathe new life into Greek myths and history. In my writing, I aim to bridge the gap between the ancient and the modern.
I loved this book for the way Madeline Miller creatively retells Greek myths with a female protagonist. As Circe grows up, she discovers her power of magic, which can transform enemies into monsters and even challenge the gods.
Bold and inspiring, Miller vividly strings together figures like Prometheus, Medea, Calypso, Odysseus, and the Minotaur in a feminist reimagining of Circe's life. I find it to be a thoughtful and well-crafted biography of a complex and engaging mythological character with both divine and human strengths and flaws. I have read it several times, and the story has maintained its appeal.
In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. Circe is a strange child - not powerful and terrible, like her father, nor gorgeous and mercenary like her mother. Scorned and rejected, Circe grows up in the shadows, at home in neither the world of gods or mortals. But Circe has a dark power of her own: witchcraft. When her gift threatens…
I daylight as a lawyer, moonlight as a stand-up comic and gaslight as a storyteller. A connoisseur of mythology and momos, I have often wondered how our ancient tales might have unfolded if narrated from women’s perspectives - a curiosity kindled since I listened to my grandmother’s grievances even as she regaled me with these stories. In the same breadth, I could not help but see how harmful and reductionist “evil” labels can be especially when history is chronicled only by victors. It is this quest of humanizing the vanquished and the vilified while honouring the essence of a timeless epic that led me to play a medieval matchmaker by wedding Indian Lore to Italian Renaissance.
Talking about Penelope brings me to the Penelopiad. This book could have been more accurately called the Trial of Odysseus.
Odysseus here feels like an ancient Andrew Tate. Picture the ancient soap opera: Penelope, the ever dutiful, saintly wife, is left holding the fort while Odysseus sails off on a ten-year vacation fighting the Trojan War, followed by another decade of epic escapades and sexscapades.
And meanwhile Penelope is using her twelve maids to let themselves be used and abused by her suitors to buy time till Odysseus returns. Well, the suitors are killed, naturally. But the maids…Honor killing is still an epidemic in parts of India, and to see it from the POVs of the maids, who have so far been overlooked as extras in a play, felt like redemption.
The best thing in the book that worked for me was the way it is structured as a conversation…
Penelope. Immortalised in legend and myth as the devoted wife of the glorious Odysseus, silently weaving and unpicking and weaving again as she waits for her husband's return.
Now Penelope wanders the underworld, spinning a different kind of thread: her own side of the story - a tale of lust, greed and murder.
The Myths series brings together some of the world's finest writers, each of whom has retold a myth in a contemporary and memorable way. Authors in the series include Karen Armstrong, Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, David Grossman, Natsuo Kirino, Alexander McCall Smith, Philip Pullman, Ali Smith and…
I've been interested in feminine figures since I was a small, Catholic child presented with the Virgin Mary! Further down the road in graduate school and in my teaching career as an English Professor at a small Liberal Arts college, I began to research comparative mythology and the study of archetypes with a particular emphasis on the female divine. Now, after publishing three books and several articles on the goddesses, I'm happy to help others in their journey of discovery. I believe a good way to approach that study today is to focus on how our contemporary women writers portray goddesses in their works of fiction and non-fiction.
The Horse Goddess is a novel for anyone who loves horses!
It is the story of the Indo-European migrations in prehistoric central Europe, specifically in what is now Switzerland, where the lover of Epona, a young and spirited goddess, sweeps her away to his home, which is the plains of Russia.
Here, very far from home and anything that she knows, Epona experiences taming horses, riding horses, going into battle on a horse, and anything equine that remotely would inspire her to return home with her knowledge and gifts for her people.
Her journey is one that we can all relate to whether we are horse-people or not. It’s about the gifts of knowledge and creativity that a woman who becomes a goddess brings to enlighten her people.
On a personal note, the story is one that inspired me to the epiphany that being part of a culture and gifting…
The adventures and exploits of Epona--who flees her Celtic trible with the Scythian warrior, Kazhak, and battles the menacing Shapechanger--shape the legends that make her a goddess
After “the environmental crisis” came to popular attention in the 1960s, American Indians were portrayed as having a legacy of traditional environmental ethics. We wanted to know if this were true. But how to gain access to ideas of which there is no written record? Answer: analyze stories, which have a life of their own, handed down from one generation to the next going all the way back to a time before European contact, colonization, and cultural, as well as murderous, genocide. And the stories do reveal indigenous North American environmental ethics (plural). That’s what American Indian Environmental Ethics: An Ojibwa Case Study demonstrates.
The spiritual worldview so beautifully rendered in Black Elk Speaks reflects the landscape of the North American Great Plains.
The Four Winds emanate from the cardinal points of the compass, and above is Father Sky and below is Mother Earth all united in one Great Spirit. The spiritual worldview of the Ojibwa reflects the landscape of the woodlands surrounding the Great Lakes. It’s an animate, shape-shifting world of the Trickster/Culture Hero Nanabushu and Wendigo, the cannibal spirit of the hard and lean winter months.
In this magical-realist novel, Louise Erdrich, a writer of Ojibwa ancestry, weaves together the star-crossed lives of her fictional characters with the fluid human and animal (and animal-human) characters of the traditional Ojibwa worldview. Erdrich thus breathes new life into the Old World of the North Woods and brings that Old World to bear on the New.
Past and present combine in a contemporary tale of love and betrayal from Louise Erdrich, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, 2012
'Everything is all knotted up in a tangle. Pull one string of this family and the whole web will tremble.'
Rozin and Richard, living in Minneapolis with their two young daughters, seem a long way from the traditions of their Native American ancestors. But when one of their acquaintances kidnaps a strange and silent young woman from a Native American camp and brings her back to live with him as his wife, the connections they all…
"Ut pictura poesis", as goes painting so goes poetry is a pithy phrase that sums up the truth that a picture is mute poetry and poetry is a speaking picture. I have studied the history of this tradition from many angles and I have derived from it the term “lyrical naturalism” which I use to discover what is charming or captivating in the world of plants. As an art historian, well-read in European literature, I regard myself as a member of the environmental humanities which increasingly is the home of many academics eager to participate in the great debate on how to honor the natural world in literature and art before it is too late.
This is another book that permanently perches on my shoulder. It is a masterpiece by a visionary author that helped me to explore the mythic origins of shrubs and trees in early societies. The book inspired me to write essays on the hazel and the hawthorn, their early blossoms as manifestations of the power of the mysterious white mantle spread by the White Goddess in Celtic lands, in contradistinction to the Aphrodite as the goddess of all that is green in the Mediterranean.
The definitive edition of one of the more extraordinary and influential books of our time
This labyrinthine and extraordinary book, first published more than sixty years ago, was the outcome of Robert Graves's vast reading and curious research into strange territories of folklore, mythology, religion, and magic. Erudite and impassioned, it is a scholar-poet's quest for the meaning of European myths, a polemic about the relations between man and woman, and also an intensely personal document in which Graves explores the sources of his own inspiration and, as he believed, all true poetry. Incorporating all of Graves's final revisions, his…
I’ve been intrigued by the Hindu goddess traditions since I first read Is the Goddess a Feminist as an undergraduate student. After reading this book, I changed my course of study and life, writing my Ph.D. dissertation and my first few books on Indian goddess traditions. Now, I continue to share my passion for Indian goddesses as a professor of Religious Studies at the University of Arizona.
This book served as my entry point to Indian goddess traditions. It examines a millennia-old tradition alongside the modern concept of feminism. What emerges is a nuanced and complicated set of essays that challenges my understanding of goddesses and their relation to women and men. At the end of the day, I walk away with a greater appreciation for both goddesses and feminism.
In India, God can be female. The goddesses of Hinduism and Buddhism represent the largest extant collection of living goddesses anywhere on the planet. Feminists in the West often draw upon South Asian goddesses as theological resources in the contemporary rediscovery of the Goddess. Yet, these goddesses are products of a male supremacist society. What is the impact of powerful female deities--their images, projections, textuality, and history--on the social standing and psychological health of women? Do they empower women, or serve the interests of patriarchal culture? Is the Goddess a Feminist? looks at the goddesses of South Asia to address…
I have always been interested in cultural history. In my early 30s, I realized that Greek mythology was a late, patriarchal revision of the earlier Goddess-centric myths. After much research, I reconstructed several pre-Olympian myths in my book Lost Goddesses of Early Greece. This was one of the first books of the Women’s Spirituality movement, which began in the 1970s and is still going strong. A few years later, I edited an anthology of 50 voices, The Politics of Women’s Spirituality. Thus I am a foremother of that movement, which is a bountiful exploration of authentic spiritual experience in women’s lives.
If you try to learn about the cultural history of the sacred female cross-culturally, you are likely to encounter the attitude in our patriarchal society that Goddesses couldn’t really have been widespread or ever been very important. A handy refutation can be found in this book, which contains information on over 11,000 Goddesses, nymphs, spirits, and deified women around the world. Grouped according to geographic regions, each entry gives you not only the translation of the Goddess’s name but also her story. That is, it’s a biographical dictionary because it gives the characteristics and the mythology associated with each Goddess. If you read through the entries for any one region, you will become immersed in a deeply poetic sense of the resonant cultural history underlying later developments.
This biographical dictionary contains 11,500 entries for goddesses from around the world and throughout time. Each entry contains area location, associated attributes, and a brief description. Many entries also contain brief retellings of the main myth pertaining to that goddess. This book is intended for religion students and scholars; those interested in New Age.
I have always been interested in cultural history. In my early 30s, I realized that Greek mythology was a late, patriarchal revision of the earlier Goddess-centric myths. After much research, I reconstructed several pre-Olympian myths in my book Lost Goddesses of Early Greece. This was one of the first books of the Women’s Spirituality movement, which began in the 1970s and is still going strong. A few years later, I edited an anthology of 50 voices, The Politics of Women’s Spirituality. Thus I am a foremother of that movement, which is a bountiful exploration of authentic spiritual experience in women’s lives.
With The Goddess Path the late Patricia Monaghan, author of The New Book of Goddesses and Heroines, bequeathed a well-designed and deeply wise pathway into spiritual engagement. She begins in “Basics of Goddess Spirituality” by answering commonly heard questions, then presents “Frameworks for Goddess Imagery” and “The Goddess Year” of rituals. The rest of the book is “The Goddess Revealed”: a chapter on each of twenty Goddesses, presenting her historical or traditional invocation, her myth and meaning, her symbols, and her feasts. At that point, Patricia Monaghan presents suggestions for invoking each Goddess through the reader’s personal ritual. Here she wisely speaks of the dynamics of women’s lives in modern culture and the power of this spiritual practice, flowing from extremely ancient roots into the presence of 21st-century women.
In this text, Patricia Monaghan, offers a creative approach to worship, one in which the reader can develop and ritualize their own connection to the goddess' manifestations around the world.
I grew up in Sweden surrounded by archaeology steeped in Viking history, which fueled my interest in Norse mythology. For example, Uppåkra, the largest and richest Iron Age settlement in Scandinavia, is only a few miles from my childhood home. When my seventh-grade history teacher noticed my fascination with the Viking myths, he started recommending me books. Ever since, I’ve read extensively about the Norse pantheon, and its stories inspire my own writing. I’ve also taken several research trips to historical Viking settlements in Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland.
Dr. Davidson has written extensively about Norse mythology, both books and articles. Her scholarship is terrific, and I have three of her books in my research library. What makes this book so unique, though, is that she concentrates on the goddesses of the Norse pantheon and women’s roles in the Viking world in general, of which not much is written. Reading this book is like taking a master class in Norse women’s studies, and I had to replace my print copy because I’d scribbled so many notes in it that it became impossible to read.
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…
I have been a spiritual seeker my entire life, drawn to the mysteries of life, the nature of the soul, the afterlife, intuitive knowing, higher consciousness, and psycho-spiritual transformation. Besides the numerous personal teachers who have enriched my path, personal/ spiritual growth books have been a powerful guide and inspiration. In my coaching practice “Touch The Soul”, I continually draw on my own 70 plus years of acquired elder wisdom as well as the wisdom of so many who have come before me, writers and wayshowers of expansive spirituality.I am grateful to share a few books which may enlighten and deepen your own spiritual journey.
What does it mean to become “a juicy crone”? Expanded mystical, intellectual, intuitive, and meditative wisdom as well as healing laughter, outrage, and compassion are all available to the elder woman in the goddess archetypes present in her psyche. I love the comprehensive and empowering recognition of the beautiful, priceless inner gifts possible in a woman's rebirthing after the age of 50.
From the bestselling author of Goddesses in Everywoman comes a celebration of life past fifty.
At some point after fifty, every woman crosses a threshold into the third phase of her life. As she enters this uncharted territory she can choose to mourn what has gone before, or she can embrace the juicy-crone years.
In this celebration of Act Three, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Jungian analyst and bestselling author of Goddesses in Everywoman, names the powerful new energies and goddess archetypes of compassion, outrage, healing laughter, and new layers of wisdom that come into the psyche at this momentous time. Bolen…
