The Goddess Path: Myths, Invocations & Rituals by Patricia Monaghan
For a brief preview of the book
About the Book
The author goes into briefly about the basics of Goddess spirituality and brings up topics that will get you thinking and developing on your own viewpoints like immanent vs. transcendent ideas (whether the goddess is within you or an outside, separate being), the four types of archetypes of the Goddess and addressing ritual.
The Goddess Path provides information on twenty goddesses from a variety of cultures. Each chapter has an invocation or prayer, a myth, and information about how she is usually interpreted. Then a section on symbolism so you can get ideas for creating altars, a list of the goddesses’ major feasts and how she was traditionally honored. After all of that, another section gives suggestions for rituals honoring the goddess. The author claims that most of the rituals are based off of actual rituals performed by that goddesses’ earliest worshipers while some of the other rituals are inspired by resonance between everyday life problems and the powers of the goddess.
The book went over these goddesses:
•Amaterasu for clarity
•Aphrodite for passion
•Artemis for protection
•Athena for strength
•Brigid for survival
•The Cailleach for power
•Demeter and Persephone for initiation
•Gaia for abundance
•Hathor for affection
•Hera for dignity
•Inanna for inner strength
•Isis for restorative love
•Kali for freedom
•Kuan-Yin for mercy
•The Maenads for ecstasy
•The Muses for inspiration
•Oshun for healing love
•Paivatar for release
•Pomona for joy
•Asule and Saules Meita for family health
What I got from the book:
I really liked how the author described each Goddess. She goes about it in a way where it’s really easy to relate to each of them and give insight into which personal situation you should call on them for. One of the major things I liked about the book were the rituals. They aren’t rigid, set rituals. A lot of them you can do on your own or they may give you ideas to develop your own and something to build off of.
If you’re looking for a step by step ritual, you’re not going to find it in this book. Most of the “rituals” are suggestions you can use to invoke the goddess. There’s a good mixture of suggestions that work for groups or individuals.
I’d say this was a perfect book for an introduction about Goddess Spirituality. It covers the basic questions one has when it comes to goddesses. I don’t know if someone would get that much out of this book if they have researched more about this subject other than maybe give a new perspective about the selected goddesses the author went over and give ideas for rituals.
I'd give this a 4 out of 5 stars.
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