A Single Comprehensive History the Field Did Not Possess

When Anne Baring and Jules Cashford published The Myth of the Goddess in 1991, the depth-psychological literature on feminine archetypal material had been accumulating for decades — Erich Neumann’s The Great Mother (1955), Esther Harding’s Woman’s Mysteries (rev. 1971), Marie-Louise von Franz’s long career of fairy-tale interpretation, the Jungian feminist work of Toni Wolff, June Singer, and Marion Woodman. The archaeological literature on prehistoric goddess imagery had been transformed by Marija Gimbutas’s The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974) and the subsequent Language of the Goddess (1989). Joseph Campbell’s late lectures, posthumously published, were laying out the comparative-mythological scope. What no single book yet possessed was a comprehensive integrated history — archaeologically grounded, philologically careful, depth-psychologically informed, and culturally specific — of the goddess image from its Palaeolithic origins through to the contemporary recovery. Baring, a Jungian analyst, and Cashford, a classicist and mythographer, wrote that book. The Myth of the Goddess runs to nearly eight hundred pages and treats, in sequence: the Palaeolithic mother goddess as evidenced by the Venus figurines and the cave-art iconography; the Neolithic agricultural goddess; the Bronze Age city-state goddesses (Inanna, Ishtar, Isis); the Iron Age suppression and the long Mediterranean transition to patriarchal cosmology; the survival of the goddess image under monotheistic auspices (Mary, Shekhinah, Sophia); and the late-twentieth-century re-emergence of the goddess in feminist spirituality, ecological consciousness, and depth-psychological practice. The book is the integration the field had been working toward for forty years.

Cultural Cosmologies Organized Around the Maternal-Divine Principle

The book’s central historical thesis refuses two opposing temptations. The first temptation — common among nineteenth- and early twentieth-century evolutionary anthropologists — is to read the goddess cosmologies as primitive precursors to a more developed monotheistic-paternal religious imagination, with the implication that their disappearance was developmental progress. Baring and Cashford reject this. The second temptation — common among some 1970s and 1980s second-wave feminist mytho-historical writing — is to treat the goddess cosmologies as a lost matriarchal utopia whose restoration would solve the contemporary world’s ills. Baring and Cashford do not endorse this either. Their position is more careful. The goddess cosmologies were distinct working ontologies in which immanence rather than transcendence was the organizing principle, in which time was understood cyclically rather than linearly, in which biological generativity was sacred rather than instrumentalized, and in which the natural order was the ground of religious meaning rather than its degradation. These were coherent pictures of reality, not stages on the way to a better cosmology and not utopias to be politically restored. The contemporary recovery of the goddess image is therefore not nostalgia and not utopia but the retrieval of resources — for ecological consciousness, for feminist theology, for depth-psychological practice — that the West had developed and then suppressed.

The Particularities: Inanna, Isis, Demeter, Mary, Sophia

The book’s middle chapters treat specific goddesses with the philological and iconographic specificity that depth-psychological writing on the feminine archetype had often lacked. The chapter on Sumerian Inanna draws on Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer’s translations of Inanna’s Descent and the Bridal Songs of Dumuzi to reconstruct the cosmology in which the goddess of love and war is also the queen who descends into and returns from the underworld. The chapter on Egyptian Isis traces the goddess from the Pyramid Texts through her Hellenistic appropriation in the Isis Aretalogies, her Roman cult, and her medieval European survival. The chapter on Greek Demeter and Persephone reads the Eleusinian Mysteries with attention to the psychological register that the Mysteries themselves seem to have invited — the grief of the mother for the daughter taken to the underworld, the recognition that the daughter’s descent is not destruction but the necessary condition of the cyclic return. The chapter on Mary traces the gradual elevation of the Theotokos from the apocryphal Protoevangelium of James through the Byzantine and medieval Latin devotional literatures, with the recognition that the medieval Marian cult constitutes a partial recovery, within Christianity, of what the suppression of the goddess had displaced. The Shekhinah and Sophia chapters extend this analysis into Jewish mystical and Russian Orthodox theological territory. The cumulative effect is a body of close-textual and iconographic readings that any subsequent depth-psychological work on the feminine archetype must reckon with.

The Contemporary Recovery: Ecology, Feminism, and Depth Psychology

The book’s final chapters — written in 1990, on the cusp of what would become a substantial late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century literature on goddess spirituality, ecofeminism, and the planetary crisis — argue that the recovery of the goddess image is not a stylistic or therapeutic preference but a cultural necessity. If the suppression of the goddess accompanied the development of an instrumental relation to nature, an exploitative relation to the maternal, and a flattening of cyclic time into linear progress, then the recovery of the goddess image carries resources for the cultural work that ecological consciousness, second- and third-wave feminism, and depth psychology must each do. Baring and Cashford do not collapse these projects into one another; they argue that each requires the goddess image without exhausting it. The depth-psychological reader will find in the closing chapters the framework within which Marion Woodman’s clinical work on the conscious feminine, Linda Schierse Leonard’s work on the wounded feminine, and Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s Women Who Run with the Wolves can each be located, and the philological-historical substrate that these clinical and literary works had been drawing on without always making explicit. The implication is that depth psychology’s engagement with feminine archetypal material is not a sectoral application of Jungian theory; it is the contemporary form of a contemplative-cultural recovery whose reach is much broader than analytic practice.

For any reader of depth psychology engaging the goddess image, The Myth of the Goddess remains the standard reference. To read it is to inherit a working historical and iconographic apparatus that no later book has matched in scope, and to discover that the depth-psychological tradition’s feminine archetypal material is the recent expression of a deep cultural inheritance the West suppressed and is only now beginning to recover. After Baring and Cashford, the analyst’s work with feminine archetypal material proceeds with a historical-iconographic specificity that the earlier literature had to invent on the fly.