The Concept of the Goddess.

Bailey, Douglass W.

This is the third volume to emerge from the biennial conferences of the Katharine Briggs Club which Hilda Ellis Davidson founded in 1987 in order to provide a focus for folklore discussions. The volume is dedicated to Davidson as testament to her contributions to the study of folklore. In the book's preface, Sandra Billington pays tribute to Davidson, noting her role as a major force in the modernization of the Folklore Society (of which Davidson was President in the early 1970s) and reiterating Davidson's warnings against both the reductive, motif-collecting attitude in folklore studies and the dangers inherent in pursuing archetype figures and tales. It is perhaps a shame that the volume lives up neither as a tribute to its honourand nor to its title.

The book takes as its subject the nature of the goddess, images and personalities associated with Goddesses in the European tradition and beyond and the feminine aspects of the divine. In the book's introduction, Miranda [Aldhouse]-Green highlights two important general points which emerge from the diversity of the book's approach: 'the enormous powers and wide-ranging responsibilities of the goddesses . . . and . . . the inadvisability of making inferences from the status of female divinities about the status of women in society' (p. 1).

Contents of the volume's 15 contributions range across time, from references to Neolithic megaliths to current and recent conceptions of hunting cosmology. Female divinities observed include those from the Celtic, Roman, Norse and Caucasian worlds. The breadth of approaches to the material is perhaps less marked, with most contributors writing from the historical-archaeological disciplines or from the field of folklore itself. This is in keeping with a stated aim of the volume: to illuminate the contributions which folklore can make to the debate on the concept of the goddess.

An initial disappointment is that the concept of the goddess is not seriously addressed by any of the contributors (including Juliette Wood's chapter entitled 'The Concept of the Goddess'). If Wood's remit was to produce a review and assessment of the use of the term goddess in folklore studies, then the result is patchy at best. Wood does offer useful comment on the roles of some modern figures (e.g. Marija Gimbutas and Robert Graves) in goddess studies but provides much less of interest on the historiography of goddess-study within the discipline of folklore. Most other contributors avoid discussion of what the term goddess means (or even in what capacity they are using it). In her discussion of belief, Catharina Raudvere makes perhaps the most illuminating observation by suggesting that goddesses are best defined as statements of beliefs and as such need not be the centre of debates over whether they were actually believed. Most contributors fail to tackle the concept of the goddess in any rigorous manner.

Several of the chapters amount to little more than rambling catalogues of the sightings of particular deities in text, inscription or legend (e.g. Davidson on iconographic and mythological representations of dairying; Lloyd-Morgan on the goddesses Nemesis and Bellona). The reader is left unsure how these descriptive contributions fit into the rigorous academic study of the goddess which Wood calls for in her opening words.

In several chapters there appears a worrying tendency to consider deities without in-depth consideration of their relevant contemporary contexts. Miranda [Aldhouse]-Green lists Celtic goddesses as healers without offering any substantial comment on the social or political contexts of their worship or why the feminine aspect of divinity was appropriate with respect to health.

In those chapters where attention is granted to the context of a divinity or a belief the result is much more exciting. Raudvere and Billington both wrestle with the topic of the contemporary beliefs of deities. Billington provides perceptive contextual evidence about the changing Roman perspectives on Fors fortuna. She also offers a historiography of the study of Fors fortuna and recounts the modern development of the conceptions of ancient and historic beliefs of her subject. Equally instructive is Herbert's discussion of the refractive nature of literature and its effects on representation in the Irish mythic universe. Allason-Jones provides similar insight by suggesting that the 19th- and 20th-century interpretations of Coventina's Well were more similar to moral tales and less to critical understandings of the deity. In considering Irish mythology, Patricia Lysaght links the activities of the female death messenger, the banshee, to particular families (those of noble descent) and reveals contemporary indigenous peoples' perceptions of the new, largely merchant-class intruders of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Perhaps the source of the difficulty in addressing the concept of the goddess which the majority of contributors suffers lies in the one coherent theme which runs through the volume: the identity, form and meaning of a deity changes over time and space and amongst different social, political and economic contexts. Thus Raudvere focuses on the multiple meanings and the temporary nature of the identities of Norse divinities in pre-Christian texts. Billington traces the transitions of Fors fortuna from an early non-indigenous entity related to fertility to a later Roman character embodying transience. Herbert, focusing on the metamorphosis of Morrigan between female and animal forms in Irish mythic literature, concludes that Morrigan is best described as a 'multi-aspected' deity. Likewise, Anna Chaudri describes the morphological transition embodied within the Caucasian hunting divinity Dali.

Perhaps it is in this multiplicity and flexibility of identity and morphology that one finds the reason why a concept of the goddess proves so elusive. It appears that for the majority of contributors, the goddess as an entity, let alone as a concept, never maintains a stable form or meaning long enough for one to draw a satisfactory definition. But perhaps in this realization also rests the ultimate fallacy of much of the goddess industry (which this book is evidently marketed to join): if the form and appearance of the divinities tend towards transformation and shape-shifting, then how can one ever assume that the female (or any other) form is the definitive shape of the deity? Carmen Blacker, in her contribution on Yamanokami, the Japanese mistress and protectress of animals and the wild, draws the reader's attention to two different realms of divine identity. The first concerns the goddess' appearance to the human eye (this is referred to as the shotai, or true form). The second realm of identity, the goddess' keskin, refers to a number of temporary transformations or disguises. For Yamanokami, transformation may manifest itself in animal or human form, in the beautiful or the ugly, in youth or in old age. How does one know which is the true form? How does one know that the manifestations of the 'feminine aspect of sacred' (p. 8) is a manifestation of primary importance to either believer or interpreter?

There is significance here for archaeologists, anthropologists and others engaged in the study of human belief and spirit representation. The recognition of shape-shifting, transformation and the reality of multiple identities of deities poses questions for attributions of single function and identity to any divine representation (textual, mythic or material). The reality of multiple identities and forms which this volume valuably documents should thaw many of the existing interpretations of divine, and human, identities which many scholars are satisfied to freeze in a single aspect of sexual or functional attribution. There is not a single goddess (mother- or otherwise). Such an argument against the pursuit of the archetype is clearly one which Davidson would support (p. xi).

The volume contains other pockets of information for a range of interests: Menefee offers details for the scholar of British ordnance (i.e. cannons); Grundy and Nasstrom's chapters will attract scholars drawn to the particularities of Scandinavian mythology; Billington's discussion will have a broader appeal to students of religion and ancient history.

The volume is attractively produced, if one excuses the rather garish gold lettering on the dust-sheet cover as well as the cover's out-of-focus image of a 1st-century bronze statuette of Sequana (a more drastic focusing problem removes any detail from the reverse of a gold starer in figure 11.2). For a book which is intended for readership from a diversity of disciplines, the index is poor, with no references to either Gimbutas or Graves despite their places in substantial discussions in Wood's chapter. In all, this volume is true to its source as a conference proceedings: though disjointed at many points, it contains profit for those willing to make the effort to pull the diverse contributions together, efforts which a good editor could have made in a concluding chapter.

DOUGLASS W. BAILEY School of History & Archaeology University of Wales, Cardiff