The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley

The Forgotten Goddess, Blue Morgana

(February 19) This took months to read -- it’s an enormous book and I had to put it down several times to read other books that were on tighter deadlines at the library, but I kept on coming back to it enthusiastically.

What a saga -- not just because it’s long and has two or three perspectives (two major, one minor), but because Zimmer Bradley has incorporated all the old sagas known to English lit into one big ball of cohesive saga-material. I was really impressed by how she endeavoured to “make sense” of the many contradictions in Arthurian legends.

She tries to do the same with all Western religions while she’s at it.

I was also impressed by Zimmer Bradley’s ability to capture the “feel” of Old English narratives in speech and dialogue -- there was enough OE vocabulary and sentence structure to sound “right” but not so much as to become unintelligible or twee or ridiculous.

I called it “The Mists of Estrogen” in my head because it was dripping with '70s - '80s feminism -- the idea that women are run by (and have power because of) their menstrual cycles and birthing and breastfeeding and being receptacles of the creation of life -- the Gaia-Goddess-Fecundity-Vegetation Mystery Tour. From reading just a little background, I think she may in fact have had a big hand in creating that gestalt.

Anatomy of the Spirit, Caroline Myss

Fernando Vicente, Deslenguado, 2008

(January 19) This book was a roller-coaster ride, if a roller-coaster ride can be thought of as starting off in a mildly exciting way, then becoming totally disappointing, and then turning out OK.

A Greener Tea recommended this, and it sounded vaguely interesting (spiritual, in an Eat, Love, Pray kind of way), but when I got it home, it turned out Myss is an amazing mystic intuitive, able to diagnose illnesses and physical problems simply by meeting a person and even by just hearing about a person through a certain person. And she said that this book would teach you how to become one yourself!

But after a few amazing stories of her diagnoses and cures of various people, the book got severely disappointing. It suddenly appeared that she wanted to do an exercise in comparative religions -- she was going to show us how the seven Christian sacraments, the ten Jewish sefirot and the seven Hindu chakras were all the same thing. (She didn’t add in Islam because she doesn’t know anything about it. :/)

So she goes through all these moral truths and shows how they relate to the sacraments and the sefirot, etc., but she really isn’t teaching us to be medical intuitives! And some of the so-called parallelisms between the three religions were pretty forced. And what about those of us who don’t need to have ideas legitimized by Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism?

It was very strange. It was a sudden shift and a kind of incoherent one.

But then about two-thirds through, the stories about people who were sick or in trouble because of something they screwed up in their chakras seemed to become more interesting. So... OK.