Product Description
Product Description
In her introduction, Paula Marvelly offers a definition of mysticism, looks at its feminine aspects within each of the major world religions, discusses what it means to be a woman mystic, and explains why she has chosen the women in this anthology. Her selection features 32 women mystics from all ages and faiths, from Mary Magdalene to Evelyn Underhill. She explores their lives, their experiences and their teachings, and draws out the core underlying themes which relate to the concept of non-duality or "oneness".
From the Author
From the first native tribesman to Paleolithic and Neolithic man – all experienced life and the very universe itself as the personification of the great primordial mother goddess. Indeed, everything in creation was venerated as her immanent form. And as communities started to emerge around the world, she was deified into a pantheon of formidable goddesses: Inanna in Mesopotamia; Isis in Egypt; Aphrodite in Greece; Kali in India; Kuan Yin in China and Tara in Tibet. Unfortunately, however, as society progressively became more patriarchal, worship of the sacred feminine went underground. Thus, she re-emerged as a mythological woman as recorded in legend and literature –Diotima, Socrates’ teacher in The Symposium; Sophia in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy; Draupadi in the Indian epic, The Mahabharata; and Radha, the favourite lover of Krishna. More specifically, she spoke through the voices of individual women, in their hymns and letters, poetry and prose, in the quest to champion her cause: Enheduanna, temple priestess of Ur; Hatchepsut, female Egyptian pharaoh; Makeda, Queen of Sheba; Sappho, poetess of Lesbos; the Therigatha Nuns, contemporaries of the Buddha; Mary Magdalene, concubine of Jesus Christ; Rab’ia al-’Adawiyya, Sufi poetess and mystic; Yeshe Tsogyal, consort of Padmasambhava, father of Tibetan Buddhism; Teresa of Avila, abbess and companion to John of the Cross; Emily Dickinson, visionary poetess and recluse; Sharada Devi, wife of the great Indian sage, Ramakrishna . . . In our contemporary lives when antagonisms still prevail between the sexes and we all struggle to find some kind of meaning in the world, these wise women of the past can show us how to honour and celebrate the sacred feminine in all her mysterious and myriad ways, helping us reconnect, once again, with the whole. Paula Marvelly, November 2005
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