Spretnak does perhaps the best job I have seen in explaining where the intellectual currents of the West have brought us in this small book. What a shame it is out of print! Maybe my only complaint is the way that she lumps all of deconstructionist philosophy together, drawing conclusions from the project that not even Derrida would recognize. Nevertheless, the beauty of the book lies in the way that she argues for a CONstructive theology and philosophy, using the category of creativity and and feminine aspects of God(dess) to explain how to heal our hurts. Do yourself a favor and read this book.

Although I can't totally get behind the author's Goddess philosophy, her point is well-argued. This is a very valuable book for anyone who wants a fresh look at modern ills.

Her recognition of our society's destructive "savvy detachment" is pure genius.

This book will be hated by deconstructionists, half my college professors, capitalists, communists, people who fear religion, and other sundry materialists who feed on apathy and who promote the destruction of the spiritual and the true. That should be enough reason to read this book!

As a Christian, a process theologian, a Green party member, and an all-round concerned guy, I ache to see what the faith has become in the hands of rampant modernity. Spretnak outlines modernity (where we are), deconstructive postmodernity (where we are told we have to go), and the third option that no one seems to have thought of, a constructive postmodernity that denies the disconnect that both Descartes and Derrida would have us embrace as best (or inevitable). This is one of those books that makes you immediately think of all the people you WANT to read this book (you know the kind of book I mean).

This little book has been around ten years now, and I wonder that is has not been lauded as THE manifesto of what we hope to become as a church, a faith community, as a world. I wish I had written every single word in it.

This is a comprehensive, accessible collection of articles on a range of aspects of women's spirituality. I have had it for years, keep dipping back into it regularly for inspiration and stimulation. It is a fabulous book.

There's some wonderful stuff here-esp. the material on William Morris and John Ruskin and the neo-Utopian view at the end. I've given the book to several friends, but always with this caveat: don't trust the material on witch burnings. She's bought into what are apparently terribly exaggerated figures on the numbers of victims, which are based on faulty research. Contemporary researchers put the number at 50,000 to 100K rather than the millions cited here. And one was too many, IMO. See WITCH: THE WILD RIDE FROM WICKED TO WICCA by Candace Savage for a more contemporary view.

In "Resurgence of the Real", Author Charlene Spretnak takes accurate aim at the pandemic, negative and deadening global aspects of the hyper-rationalized social, economic, and political environment of the postindustrial world, diagnosing its ills, and proposing a quite realistic, attainable, and more organic alternative to our misguided ways. In this elegantly written and argued neo-Luddite thesis, Spretnak passionately speaks on behalf of a more enlightened post modern ecology that actively eschews the deadening embrace of 20th century scientism and technological industrialism and recognizes the basic human connection to nature and the environment.

This is a book with a mission and a message. On the one hand, she offers an impressive critique of how our blind fascination with rationalism, science, and technological innovation has strangled out of consciousness any appreciation or awareness of the natural world around us, and has led us into a ritual denial of our fundamental connection to nature. On the other hand, showing how illusory and simplistic our intellectual categories seem to be, she argues for a recovery effort in order to actively regain our individual and collective awareness of our natural context, our relationships to other human beings, and to our basic grounding in the ecology of the real world around us.

But the leap toward such critical awareness eludes many of our contemporaries, who are locked into such a modernistic, mechanistic and rational worldview that they tend to view themselves as bio-machines requiring external interventions when malfunctioning. Every thing about our artificially created and sustained human environment holds us within this kind of faulty and dangerous world-view. Instead, she argues, we need to recognize that we are self-correcting energy systems operating within nature, which she defines as a dynamic and self-regulating cosmos. This is heady and quite intellectually stimulating stuff, and requires a close reading and a requisite ability to think, as they say, "outside the box" of conventional thought.

The author faces the issues of our time with eloquence, clarity, and a keen intellectual acumen. The book is obviously written with great care, passion, and unimpeachable intellectual clarity. Spretnak offers a stinging and accurate diagnosis of what has gone wrong in the post-modern world, and presents, with great lucidity and careful thought, a look at the emerging postmodern ecological world-view we need to overcome the ecological, social, and political problems confronting us. This is a very special, passionate, and wonderful book, and is one offering hope for the future. I hope you enjoy it.

Humanity is so ready for this groundbreaking book!

I heard Charlene Spretnak on the radio and rushed to buy this book.

Spretnak goes beyond our arbitrary ways of categorizing the world and its inhabitants, offers hope for the environment, for humankind, for our spirit. Forget right and left, modern and postmodern, communist and capitalist, all the usual labeling. Spretnak explores what's wrong with modernity, from its beginnings in the age of Renaissance humanism! She writes eloquently of the suicidal rush to embrace technology at all costs.

Excellent book for any environmentalist, anyone with a spiritual or religious inclination, any art history student, any political scientist.

....that might have been longer. After reading the introductory material I was surprised at the brevity of the chapters: a consequence, perhaps, of how much lore has been lost down the centuries.

This book broke new ground not only by celebrating the goddesses (and by implication women and femininity) but by pointing out that "the" Greek myths known far and wide were preceded by matriarchal traditions transmuted by incoming Dorian patriarchs (see also the work of Maria Gimbutis and Riane Eisler) and centuries of his-story. The author strives to recover something of the earlier traditions in her lively, and at times lyric, reconstruction of the pre-Olympian goddesses.

The book left me with an open reflection. To some extent the story of Ulysses has followed me for years (or I have followed it), and I've come to appreciate what I perceive as the feminine warrior protectiveness of Athena, one of my favorites of the Greek pantheon. As Minerva her visage adorns the Great Seal of my homeland, California. And yet according to this book, Athena was made into a soldier by bloodthirsty male barbarians. Although there can be little doubt about the patriarchal distortions of the Greek goddesses--how many positive stories do you hear about Hera?--I'm wondering if we lose something in relegating quite so much to these distortions. Athena "feels" fiercely protective (but not soldierly) to me in dreams, in active imagination, and in fantasy: is this her quality, an archetypal aspect of her being, or does it merely derive from my being a man raised in a patriarchy? Or a man with an assertive anima? I don't know.

In any case this book remains a nice counterbalance to the usual versions of Homeric and Olympian mythology we find even now in most books dealing with Greek deities. There is also a cutting criticism of Jungian conflations of goddess, femininity, and darkness that will delight readers tired of hearing about the passive, yin-like, and shadowy "archetypal feminine," a convenient category for shoring up unjust power relations.

Like Robert Graves, Spretnak has merged history and myth, using both to support the other. As such, she has left herself open to accusations of presenting bad history which leaves her poetry ignored. And, like the White Goddess, it is the poetry that is this book's strength and purpose. Unlike Graves, though, her scholarship is not all bad. She gives her interpretation of evidence, which she then references for anyone to see where she got her ideas. I would have liked to see her give an explanation for her interpretations, and I would also have liked for her introductions to each myth to have been more in depth; for this only four stars. However, her interpretations are in line with other authors who have looked at the Goddesses of Greece as more than background characters for the male actors. For more scholarly works on the subject of early Greek goddesse, I would recommend The Transformation of Hera by Joan O'Brien, and Foley's translation and commentaries on The Homeric Hymn to Demeter

Previous comments misrepresent this book as touchy-feely, matriarchal, rock worship. Such is not the case. Hellenic women were married at an early age in order to 'tame' them - an unmarried, post-pubescent girl was thought to be dangerous (compare with myths of male heroes taming the Amazons by sleeping with their Queen). This book, while growing out of feminist and earth-centered movements, is myth and history illuminating who these goddesses may have been before myth tamed them through marriage to gods.

Some of the reviews of this book I believe are misleading. Yes, Ms Spretnak is a feminist; yes, she can be political about it. But I don't think she was presenting an agenda with this book. She took fragments of pre-Hellenic myths, and fleshed them out so they'd make sense. And she did so in a beautiful lyric style!

"The goal of such work [extending the knowledge of pre-Hellenic culture] is not the reinstatement of prehistoric cultural structures, but rather the transmission of possibilities" As we know, history is written by the winners, and when the gods we now are most familiar with, the "classical" myths, were brought into the culture, the older myths which were more matrifocal largely vanished. Not to devalue Homer, but there is genuine value in these much older myths, just as we hold Virgil and Homer in high regard for their telling of newer gods.

The pre-Hellenic myths give us a glimpse into a culture where Hera (for instance) was powerful in her own right, not merely a consort and sister to Zeus. How can knowing two sides of a story be a bad thing? History may be written by the winners, but those who were conquered left traces of themselves behind, too, and you can read about some of it here.

This is another work by Charlene Spretnak, author of numerous books on Green ideology. Spretnak is one of the major ideologues of the Mystical Deep Ecology movement, which seeks to restore humanity to the old ways of goddess worship. Spretnak focuses on Ecofeminism, which posits a return to worship of female deities such as Gaia, or the "Mother Earth" goddess, and a society where women run the show. I know it sounds crazy, and it is, but this book is at least better then Spretnak's, "Lost Goddesses of Early Greece", which I also reviewed for Amazon.com. At least in this book we get an articulation of the philosophy behind the madness.

Spretnak trots out her same old tired arguments; mankind and its patriarchal society have subdued both nature and women, and has created unnatural roles for everyone to try and fulfill. Violence against women come from these forced roles. If society would only embrace the old "matrifocal" (read: women in charge) ways, we'd all be better off. Spretnak also makes some arguments that the Judeo-Christian religious structure is acting against nature, and that it should acknowledge its pagan foundations and work towards preserving nature.

The most interesting aspect of this book was Spretnak's examination of spirituality, hence the title of the book. She believes that society would be better off if everyday, people would engage in spiritual exercises and then try and live up to them the rest of the day. Spretnak says that once a week people would attend little meetings where kindness and love would be discussed. I'm amazed she doesn't mention somebody bringing a guitar to the meeting so everyone could break into song while they're holding hands. Another aspect of this spirituality is what Spretnak calls, "body parables". These parables occur when a person gets a sense of being one with the harmonic forces of the universe. She believes that childbirth and post-orgasmic sensations help women attain this oneness. She talks of the feeling of borders being crossed or broken down. This is the way it should be, Spretnak says, because boundaries are just arbitrary and relative anyway. Really. I guess she is right. Who needs boundaries on their behavior. If it feels good, just do it. No wonder our society is in such a mess.

I read this book after reading Kenn Kassman's, "Envisioning Ecotopia", which looked at the Green movement in some depth. Spretnak was used as source material for this book, so I wanted to get a closer look at the belly of the beast, so to speak. I found this book to be a sick fraud and unhealthy for society. It is only interesting as a look at what makes the far, far left tick. Charlene, you're very, very lucky I gave you three stars!