Reviews for The Faces of the Goddess

The average rating for The Faces of the Goddess based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-10-03 00:00:00 John Resto More useful as an encyclopedic reference of a handful of goddessdoms and more annoying as an attempt at academic polemics. Motz went out of her way to try and deride, denigrate and disprove the theories of others (primarily the archaeologist Gimbutas and the scholar Neumann) about a pre-Christian Great Mother cult that supposedly once-encompassed much of what would become Christian Eurasia. She isn't very successful at debunking this idea because if she isn't backwards-projecting contemporary anthropological evidence she is openly contradicting herself! She tries to make a distinction between various goddesses worshipped for reasons of fertility and abundance and the idea of a nurturing, overarching Mother figure. For example, she avers that the title "mother" need not describe the goddess in question as a biological procreator. Fine. Too bad the goddesses she invokes have everything to do with birth, fertility, and procreation to the point where in one paragraph she quotes the myth of the "Water Mother [who] brings the babies" and then on the next page dismisses that as having anything to do with maternity or provision! Whatever. The book is still useful as a one-stop catalogue for some particular pantheons, including Latvia, Mexico, and Japan, the latter two hardly fitting into Great Mother theses at large except maybe in her imagination...

Review # 2 was written on 2015-06-10 00:00:00 Michael Swearingen This book should not be read by devout believers in the universal Goddess or Earth Mother. It attacks that religion's center as a modern theology, one that 'flattens' the diversity of form, purpose and personality of archaic goddesses, and overstates the independence of pre-modern women in conception and safe child birthing. The evidence for the archaic diversity, and its relation to the concerns and lives of pre-modern women is well sampled: chapters cover northern Eurasia, northern North America, Latvia, old Mesopotamia, old Anatolia, pre-classical/ classical Greece, pre-Columbian México and Japan. The text proper is supplemented by numerous footnotes, which often go beyond sourcing. (In some cases opinion that does not support the chapter's themes is relegated to these footnotes; for example, Footnote 76 to Chapter 10. So the reader is advised not to skip them.) There is an absence of similar depth of research in the assertions of the development of the Great Mother religion starting with 18th century scholars, or of the Goddess religion as supported by (re-)interpreted myths written by 20th century feminists. That is, the modern religion's statements about the past are well refuted by Lotte Motz, but the development of that modern religion is only sketched. This is disappointing.