Welcome to Gaia! ::

Alright, Chapter 6. I'm falling behind sweatdrop WARNING: the more I read this book, the more I hate it and this woman with a fiery passion. Expect more and more swearing as the book progresses.

Her whole thing on the 10 year notes for the beginning of the chapter is insane. If a god concept is different from hers, it's "severely distorted by patriarchal culture"? I don't even understand HOW it's been distorted. I get that she doesn't understand Abrahamic religion, but does she have to be such a b***h about it? This is all totally unnecessary. Talk about YOUR religion and YOUR god without being a 13 year old fluffy bigot and bitching on about religions that have nothing to do with you.

BLAH BLAH BLAH TEH EVIL CHURCH BLAH BLAH WE DON'T WORSHIP THE DEBIL BLAH. Blah blah ANCIENT WITCHCRAFT omg TEH CHURCH BURNED US blah.

I will BURN THIS BOOK when I'm finished with it. It is SO FULL of damn blind ignorance.

Oh my GOD the bottom of page 121 and top of page 122 make me want to vomit and punch her by turns. I'm also not sure whether she is being vaguely snarky about various gods that are violent or coercive. If she goes on to equate, say, Odin or Zeus with her god (did she not do that in the ritual thing at the beginning?), is she just ignoring massive aspects of their personalities and ripping off strips of them to fit them to her personal ideal of what her god is like? "I know you are a coercive and violent deity when you want to be, but I don't care, I am chopping off those parts of your personality because I can't be bothered to learn anything about you/because I think those are inventions of TEH PATRIARCHY/because I am an ignorant whorecunt, and then I am using your name in my rituals. LOL BECAUSE I CAN. And I will teach others to do so also! LOOK I AM SO FAMOUS AND MY BOOKS ARE SO POPULAR!"

Jesus Christ, if all this gender wankery crap was actually what the 70s was like I am SO ******** GLAD I wasn't born until the 80s. What a horrible time to have to suffer through.

BLAH BLAH BLAH WHAT THE ******** DOES ALL THIS EVEN HAVE TO DO WITH THE GOD ANYWAY. I did not buy this book so I could hear you bitching about how you are a powerless womyn in the face of the Ebil Patriarchy, or about how evil Christianity has blighted our cultures. I bought this book so I could read about YOUR RELIGION. ******** MOVE ON okay?

10 year notes: To become truly wild, we need to CONTROL THE ******** OUTTA OUR ACTIONS. Also Domination, bondage and S&M are clearly not expressions of love and trust of any kind! HOW DARE YOU ENJOY A GOOD HARD VIOLENT ******** also lol'ed at this passage: "Men in patriarchal cultures are taught to worship an erect phallus."
LAWL. Okay, so, question, do you have a culture in mind that was NOT patriarchal? Any at all? Oh, Catal Huyuck, you say? Sorry old girl, they weren't. Any more then? You see, you've been equating "patriarchal" with "Christian" all the way through this chapter. I was getting pretty confused, given the Pagan religions that are all about the hard c**k.

I'm no longer reading it. I am skimming through the bullshittery until she stops talking about awful awful irrelevant 1970s politics and gets BACK. ON. TOPIC. She'll say like, a sentence, that has to do with her actual god and use it as a platform to b***h about society again. For ******** sake, woman, give your deity and your reader a little more ******** credit.

I am getting in touch with my Inner Maleness by reading this book. That is to say, my inner anger and violence. That I want to visit upon its author. I'm thinking baseball bat to the skull.

You don't "lance the wounds", lady. You lance boils and infections. You stitch wounds. Lancing is how you get a wound in the first place.

We finally get onto the actual subject around page 125 but I am now fed up enough that I'm not paying proper attention. I suppose it doesn't help that I've read this whole thing regurgitated by enough 101 books by now that it's boring.

More sexual judgement on page 126, along with a sentence that seems a bit ironic given the beauty and pride of place of the Legend of the Descent of the Goddess even in witchcraft religions besides Wicca. Also a bit bizarrely sexist... so men have to surrender emotionally, but women aren't meant to? Men bow at the altar of the pudenda (I was going to say "c**t" but it came off sounding a bit wrong), and women can't enjoy a little whipping if that's what they like because it's COUNTER TO THE LAWS OF LOVE or some s**t?

Hey, here's a wacky concept! What if all the various genders were treated equally?

She shits all over other religions at the bottom of page 127 yet again. It's bizarre because I don't think the Buddha ever DID promise all the answers, especially not in exchange for personal autonomy. So is she just bagging on religions she knows nothing about because she's an ignorant bigot, or what?

Well! That was an hour or so of my life I'll never get back. Who wants a drink?

I haven't read The Spiral Dance, but I wanna reassure you guys that in her later book The Earth Path she says that she's learned since writing Spiral Dance and she regrets a lot of stuff she said in it. Just thought it might bring you to give her a little mercy while reading smile The Earth Path is more about environmental activism than spirituality, but she does include a little bit of information on it. Not anywhere near my favorite book, as she's still pretty self-centered and egotistical.

Reflections on reading with her 10 year commentary:
Chapter One:
-pgs. 27-32: Well you're a "Wannabee" perfect know-it all witch
-pg. 30: "Actually estimates range between 100k and 9 million" Nine million is the whole population of Victoria and Queensland put togther
-pg. 38: Oh good, she acknowledges us solitaries, wrong part of the book to acknowledge us but all the same, I retract my earlier argument.

Chapter Two:
-pgs. She starts talking about the "creation myth" and then yaks on about polarity
-pgs. 52-56: Her meditation on the Wheel of the Year may be her own interpratation of it, but I cannot made head or tail of it.

Chapter Three:
-pg. 65: "Don't write to Reclaiming...Please don't call my ex-husband..." Looks like she really doesn't want people to contact her...good mentor she is...
-pgs. 78-79: Ahahaha, she didn't always do her daily disciplines, and yet she tells everyone to continue doing them even though she's not.

Chapter Four:
-pg. 86: "Correspondances differ..." all throughout the Northern Hemisphere, and yet still no mention of us down here in the Southern Hemisphere where our correspondancesare completely different.

Chapter Six:
-Her notes on the god are really quite haphazard and they don't address the issue fully, instead she bangs on about the goddess and the trickster and male power.

Chapter Seven:
-See this is what happens when you try to make things into what you want them to be. If you had kept the name St. John's Wort then a) people would know what you were talking about and b) you wouldn't have offended people by changing it around. Reseach is a wonderful thing and yet you abuse it.

Chapter Nine:
-pgs. 172-173: I don't understand why she is breaking down the scientific mind into different personalities to suit why she thinks people have these problems. It just confuses me
-pg. 176: But it is dangerous for those people who don't know what they're doing. It's alright if you're the one leading the people, because you seem to know what you're doing, but when a couple of people who get together to try this when they have no idea what they're doing and something bad happens, they won't know what to do.

Chapter Twelve:
-"The myth would be different in Minnesota, or Alabama..." Or half a world away in Australia and New Zealand...the timing would be very different that's for sure. I don't know whether this happens in New Zealand, but there are quite a few communites here in Australia that blend the Wheel of the Year with Dreamtime stories from their area so that they become more relevant to them and the spirits of the land (there are no gods or goddesses, there are only spirits that inhabit the land - I guess they are like gods, but not quite).

Well that was a task...onto the 20 year commentary...

You could just ask, if something seems a bit off to you. Your insight is interesting because you're coming at the book from a different place, so I for one would still be interested in what you liked and disliked about the book. biggrin

I just so happened to be reading the Spiral Dance lately. I'm about halfway through chapter 9, and I have a lot of mixed feelings about the work.

I read through much of the thread and noted a lot of anger over her false scholarship. I personally had to fight myself from raging when I was reading her estimate that 9 million people died during the Burning Times. However, a question that I began to consider as I was reading: how much of the current scholarship that we use today was available when she wrote her initial version of the book? I'd like to hope that the book would have vastly better scholarship at least if it was written today instead of in 1979.

The other thing in this work which made me vastly more angry was the sexism I noticed. In particular in Chapter 5 entitled "The Goddess", she wrote that a man "may chase Her forever, and She will elude him, but through the attempt he will grow, until he too learns to find Her within." Insinuating that men have an inherently harder time coming to the goddess and her continual evasion of him made me insanely angry.

I've found out parts of the book somewhat inspiring. I don't mind her style and find it to be somewhat poetric in a way that makes me feel spiritual. How much of this I can attribute to me being relatively new to a pagan path, I'm not sure though.

My main problem with her scholarship really is the fact that in her ten and twenty year notes she basically says that it's fine even though she made a bunch of it up and that historians and archaeologists should stop being so critical.

And yes her sexism is rampant. As I mentioned in my notes on chapter 7, count the times she mentions patriarchy vs. how many times she mentions her God and see which one seems to be the subject of the chapter.

As to the inspirational bits, I have a friend who read it recently who also found a number of things to be inspired by. For myself however, the language just doesn't mesh. Her style just doesn't appeal to everyone and on top of that, her path isn't the least bit interesting to me so it's an entirely different experience for me than it is for you or my friend.

Yeah, I was ignoring this book for the last two weeks. I didn't feel like dealing with it the same time I was dealing with my gall bladder problems. I should probably get back at it.