This collection of accessible essays relates the stories of individual goddesses from around the world, exploring their roles in the cultures from which they came, their histories and status today, and the controversies surrounding them. Goddesses in World Culture brings readers the fascinating stories of close to 100 of the world's goddesses, ranging from the immediately recognizable to the obscure. These figures, many of whom derive from ancient cultures and civilizations, serve as points of departure for examining questions that go well beyond the role of women in religion and spirituality to include social organization, environmental awareness, historical developments, and psychological archetypes. Each volume of this groundbreaking set is composed of 20–25 previously unpublished articles written by expert contributors from diverse disciplines. Volume one covers Asia and Africa, volume two covers the Eastern Mediterranean and Europe, and volume three covers Australia and the Americas. Goddesses from cultures often overlooked in texts on religion, such as those of the Australian Aborigines, Korea, Nepal, and the Caribbean, are included here. In addition, the work offers new translations of ancient texts, introduces little-known folklore, and suggests new approaches to contemporary religious practices.

This collection of accessible essays relates the stories of individual goddesses from around the world, exploring their roles in the cultures from which they came, their histories and status today, and the controversies surrounding them.

This dictionary focuses on more than 9,500 goddesses from hundreds of cultures around the world.

This collection of accessible essays relates the stories of individual goddesses from around the world, exploring their roles in the cultures from which they came, their histories and status today, and the controversies surrounding them.

This book fills the very real need for an affordable, accessible, academic textbook featuring Goddesses from a wide range of world religious, cultural and mythological traditions. As a textbook, its primary audience is professors and students in university and college courses in Goddess Studies, Religious Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies. It will also be of interest to students and instructors in the many Goddess-themed courses outside the academy. The contributors to the textbook were selected for their scholarly expertise and qualifications in their respective areas of study, both established and emerging scholars from Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Scandinavia, and Australia. The Goddess traditions surveyed in the 23 chapters include the Female Divine in the major world religions-not only Hinduism and Buddhism, but also in the "Western Religions" of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, popularly regarded as impervious to the Goddess. The coverage ranges from ancient to contemporary, Mago to Mary Magdalene. As such, it is a unique and much-needed resource for students and faculty, as well as a treasury of Goddess scholarship. [Editorial Note: Regarding the Artworks by Sudie Rakusin and Deborah Jane Milton in Appendix, only e-book and the color print book include them. In order to save space for the book, the list of References is made available in the Mago Books website. (Free PDF download available in a page entitled Goddesses in Myth, History and Culture under the menu of Textbooks in http: //www.magobooks.com). In any case, all chapters are formatted so that full bibliographical information can be found in the footnotes.]

An extraordinary range of images, from prehistory to the 1990s, represents female deities of all types and temperaments from a worldwide array of cultures. "Goddesses in Art" offers an abundance of images of the goddess as the ultimate creator and destroyer of life, as fertility figure, and as ruler of love and war. 170 illustrations, 165 in full color.

Honorable Mention for the 2022 Elli Köngäs-Maranda Prize awarded by the Women's Section of the American Folklore Society Goddess characters are revered as feminist heroes in the popular media of many cultures. However, these goddess characters often prove to be less promising and more regressive than most people initially perceive. Goddesses in film, television, and fiction project worldviews and messages that reflect mostly patriarchal culture (included essentialized gender assumptions), in contrast to the feminist, empowering levels many fans and critics observe. Building on critiques of other skeptical scholars, this feminist, folkloristic approach deepens how our remythologizing of the ancient past reflects a contemporary worldview and rhetoric. Structures of contemporary goddess myths often fit typical extremes as either vilified, destructive, dark, and chaotic (typical in film or television); or romanticized, positive, even utopian (typical in women’s speculative fiction). This goddess spectrum persistently essentializes gender, stereotyping women as emotional, intuitive, sexual, motherly beings (good or bad), precluded from complex potential and fuller natures. Within apparent good-over-evil, pop-culture narrative frames, these goddesses all suffer significantly. However, a few recent intersectional writers, like N. K. Jemisin, break through these dark reflections of contemporary power dynamics to offer complex characters who evince “hopepunk.” They resist typical simplified, reductionist absolutes to offer messages that resonate with potential for today’s world. Mythic narratives featuring goddesses often do, but need not, serve merely as ideological mirrors of our culture’s still problematically reductionist approach to women and all humanity.

Presents brief entries describing the gods and goddesses from the mythology and religion of a wide variety of cultures throughout history.

Covering 3,000 years of goddess worship, and offering unprecedented access to information on more than 11,000 goddesses, nymphs, demons, and deified women, this fascinating book explores hundreds of cultures the world over that have worshipped female divinities. 100 illustrations.