For as long as humans have sought god, we have found the goddess. Ruling over the imaginations of our earliest civilizations, she played a critical spiritual role as a keeper of nature’s fertile powers and an assurance of the next sustaining harvest. As people began to migrate across the world, the faces of the goddess and the roles she played were forever changed. The Goddess takes us back into prehistory, tracing the evolution of the goddess across vast spans of time to trace the transformation of belief and what it says about who we are.The metamorphoses of goddess figures that have taken place and the patterns we may discern in these changes, which span the millennia and a wide spectrum of cultures, have much to teach us about the development of human societies and values. This book shows us that the faces of gods and goddesses reflect the lives and souls of the peoples who worship them. It charts the development of traditional Western gender roles through an understanding of the shifting concepts of the goddess, from her earliest roots in India and Iran to her more familiar faces in Ireland and Iceland, and analyses the eventual subordination of goddesses to gods.From Demeter to Kali and Guanyin to Gaia, and from mother goddesses to warriors, virgins and destroyers, powerful female figures of worship continue to play a crucial role in belief systems today. The Goddess reveals how spiritual thought ties humanity to its ancient origins and shows us that the story of the goddess is also the story of ourselves.

For as long as we have sought god, we have found the goddess. Ruling over the imaginations of humankind's earliest agricultural civilizations, she played a critical spiritual role as a keeper of nature's fertile powers and an assurance of the next sustaining harvest. In The Goddess, David Leeming and Christopher Fee take us all the way back into prehistory, tracing the goddess across vast spans of time to tell the epic story of the transformation of belief and what it says about who we are. Leeming and Fee use the goddess to gaze into the lives and souls of the people who worshipped her. They chart the development of traditional Western gender roles through an understanding of the transformation of concepts of the Goddess from her earliest roots in India and Iran to her more familiar faces in Ireland and Iceland. They examine the subordination of the goddess to the god as human civilizations became mobile and began to look upon masculine deities for assurances of survival in movement and battle. And they show how, despite this history, the goddess has remained alive in our spiritual imaginations, in figures such as the Christian Virgin Mother and, in contemporary times, the new-age resurrection of figures such as Gaia. The Goddess explores this central aspect of ancient spiritual thought as a window into human history and the deepest roots of our beliefs.