Description
We think of God as male, but the most common representation of the divine through our history has been female, as the Goddess. When did this major change happen, and why? More importantly, what did it do to our psyches, and what does it mean for present day relationships between men and women?
Maybe, in turning our worship from the female to the male, we lost an essential part of ourselves? Could it be the reason why relationships between men and women so often end in disaster?
Tim Ward decided to seek out the Goddess in order to answer these questions, with his own demons in tow. Savage Breast is the intimate tale of one man's discovery of the feminine divine through myth, art, archaeology, and personal encounter. Over a period of seven years he travelled to the ruined temples and shrines of the goddess in the cradles of Western Civilization. At each he encountered one aspect of the many faces of the Goddess. He vividly recreates the experience of ancient believers: the Eleusinian Mysteries of Demeter, the sexual rites of the priestesses of Aphrodite, and a human sacrifice on a mountaintop shrine in Crete. And in Turkey he sits at the feet of the many- breasted Artemis of Ephesus, whose rioting followers once threatened to kill the Apostle Paul.
Facing the Goddess unleashes turbulent emotions for Ward. With frank honesty he describes the traumas that erupt in his relationship with the woman he loves, who accompanied him on many of his journeys. He weaves travelogue, archaeology, history, art, autobiography into a fascinating and gripping journey through the depths of our history and minds.
Review
Before he began writing this book Tim Ward had been through four long- term relationships. All had ended, as he says, `not just badly but wretchedly.' He had wandered the East, experiencing not just the male Buddha, but also the statues of Kali in India as well as other goddess figures.
It was in meeting the statue of Kali that the nature of his problem became clear tohim. It will be recalled that Kali has four arms: the upper right raised as if in blessing, the lower right extended as if offering a gift, the upper left wielding a bloody machete and the lower left holding a freshly severed human head. Tim asked one of her devotees how to get the blessing and escape the machete; she replied: `.....the blessing is only won when you accept both sides of Kali, including pain, sorrow, loss and death. The real death is trying to hold your tiny ego safe from the pain caused by desire and love. Flee from the dangers of life and you will miss her blessings too. But embrace Kali as she is, kiss her bloody tongue and feel all four arms around you, and then you have life, you have freedom.'
Ward's feelings about women were double-edged: the ecstasy of falling in love and the dread and loathing later, as he got to know them better. Ward claims that this is a problem for men generally, a claim that Robert Graves also makes:
'It will be objected that man has as valid a claim to divinity as woman. That is true only in a sense; he is divine not in his single person, but only in his twinhood. As Osiris, the Spirit of the Waxing Year he is always jealous of his weird, Set, the Spirit of the Waning Year, and vice versa; he cannot be both of them at once except by an intellectual effort that destroys his humanity, and this is the fundamental defect of the Apollonian or Jehovistic cult. Man is a demi-god: he always has one foot or the other in the grave; woman is divine because she can keep both her feet always in the same place, whether in the sky, in the underworld or on this earth. Man envies her and tells himself lies about his own completeness, and thereby makes himself miserable; because if he is divine she is not even a demi-goddess - she is a mere nymph and his love for her turns to scorn and hate.' (The White Goddess, 4th edn. Edited by Grevel Lindop, Faber paperback 1999, p.476)
When the book opens Ward, a Canadian domiciled in the USA, has been with Teresa for three years. Teresa accompanied him on many of his visits to goddess sites in Europe and Turkey, thirteen times spread over three years. His travels in the East had taught him it was more effectual to see statues of figures, reflecting on his feelings on looking at them, than to read about them. The purpose of these trips was to try to come to grips with his two-edged feelings about women, and specifically about Teresa to whom, incidentally, the book is dedicated. Before he met Teresa he was very much a womanizer, and the central interest of the book is in how Ward describes, very much with Teresa's help, how his relationship with her changed in the course of these visits.
A subsidiary interest of the book is in his descriptions, illustrated with many photographs, of the various goddess sites he visited. They often include discussions
with the archaeologist in charge of each site, and it is worth mentioning some of these sites to show their wide variety: for Gaia, Delphi; for Demeter and Persephone, Eleusis, just north of Athens, and Malta; for Athena, the Parthenon in Athens (where else?); for Hekate, Catalhöyuk in Turkey. Sensing that there were long stories behind these figures he went to some Neolithic sites in the Balkans and Ukraine. The figures he saw there were nearly all feminine and may have been ancestors of the Greek goddess Hestia, goddess of the hearth. These are the flesh and bones of the story, the framework and material for the development of Tim's and Teresa's relations.
There is naturally an overlap between the two aspects of the book. Ward describes very honestly his emotions on visiting these sites; the ups and downs in his relations with Teresa include a crisis, which nearly led to complete rupture in, of all places, Cyprus, birthplace of Aphrodite. But he persisted in his search, which was at least to some extent fruitful. It ended, in the book, with their voodoo wedding in New Orleans, where years before Teresa had teased and challenged Tim to marry her. This was in 2002, before Hurricane Katrina. How many couples have had a live boa constrictor, a symbol of wisdom, draped across their shoulders during their wedding?
Miriam, the priest who conducted the ceremony, said at the end: `In the serpent is wisdom, the wisdom of the ground, the stillness within itself. This is the wisdom we need to heed within ourselves, the wisdom that comes from being quiet within ourselves, so we can listen to what is being said in the silence.'
This is a courageous and beautiful book which will touch readers in different ways. It is very well illustrated with many photographs, most of them unacknowledged; so presumably they are by the author.
Philip Dymond
London, September 2006
Paperback 280 pages
Publisher: O Books (30 April 2006)
ISBN: 1905047584
