retail therapy: of goddesses and queens

I haven’t done a Retail Therapy post in a while. Now that autumn is edging in, I thought it might be fun to write one. As well, I think that Lisa, Karen and Elizabeth’s recent guest blogs have inspired me anew to feature the artistry of other women here.

I’ve been reading a lot these days, mainly because of the New Book. So far, this book is far more research-intensive than some of my other books — the focus here is on my writing rather than my art. One benefit is that I’m rediscovering how much I love to immerse myself in research. Generally speaking, most of my time in the studio is spent writing, painting and designing. (Well, that is how you make a book.) Though I often read for work-related reasons, it’s rare for me to believe that hours of time spent with a book are equally as important as making the book itself. Which is silly — after all, research provides the backbone of what I write about — but it’s easy to discount this when choruses of “I must meet my deadline” are dancing through my brain.

That written, while I was on vacation I was able to indulge in some recreational reading semi-related to my work at hand. Here are a few books that I think you, Dear Reader, might find of interest.

Charlene Proctor, PhD is the creatrix behind The Goddess Network, an online community dedicated to educating women about the Divine Feminine. She’s also the author of Let Your Goddess Grow! and The Women’s Book of Empowerment.

What I like about these books is their message of hope for women who feel trapped by patterns of low self worth, or victimized by cultural messages. For myself, I know that since I became a mother, it’s too easy to feel less than adequate — you haven’t lived until you’ve had some stranger on the street snap at you because your child isn’t wearing a wool hat on a sunny spring day. So these books came to me at a moment when I needed to be reminded that I am more than the sum of others’ criticisms.

These books aren’t specifically about goddesses — rather, they are about how to embrace your native divinity. They would make a welcome gift for someone you know who is on the fence about the Divine Feminine, but needs to be eased into reading about Athena, Isis, Sarasvati and the rest of the pantheon. While many of the tools Dr. Proctor offers in these books may feel somewhat familiar to anyone into self help, she presents them in a gently subversive package that I applaud; these ideas could extend beyond transforming the self into transforming society itself, if enough women embraced them. In Let Your Goddess Grow!, Dr. Proctor’s chapter on the Divine Feminine is nothing short of a rallying cry for women to reclaim their sacred past.

The Women’s Book of Empowerment presents 323 affirmations that are specific to women’s lives. They’re logically organized according to subject matter. This is the book designer in me coming through here, but the packaging of the books is very appealing, especially for The Women’s Book of Empowerment. The interior of TWBoE is printed in an ethereal midnight blue as soothing as its subject matter, with lovely halftone art backgrounds. The small trim size makes it handy to tuck into a bag or on a nightstand for when you need a quick dose of inspiration.

Margaret George’s The Memoirs of Cleopatra recently came to my attention because of the New Book. (Yup, I’m writing about Cleopatra and her family these days.) Though a novel can hardly be counted as research, it did list many helpful primary and secondary sources for me to peruse. </rationalization>

Now here is a woman who had no doubt she was divine — Cleopatra’s Egyptian subjects considered the queen to be the living embodiment of Isis, though she had not a drop of Egyptian blood in her veins. (Fun fact: her Ptolemaic dynasty hailed from Macedonia and took over Egypt after Alexander the Great’s demise.) She also used this mythic awareness to manipulate her enemies and allies in a surprisingly modern public relations war. It also helped that her lovers, Caesar and Marc Antony, considered themselves to be of sacred origin; for example, Antony traced his family lineage all the way back to Hercules.

This massive 900 page-plus novel is a fun, voluptuous read presenting the queen’s life in first person narrative form. Though some of the language veers dangerously close to romance novel euphoric — I could have done without some of the sexual encounters between Cleopatra and Caesar, which were a bit too Heathcliff-the-brute for my taste — the last chapters are very moving. The descriptions of Cleopatra’s preparations for her demise are especially haunting. By this point, you sense that she has transcended her Greek origins in life to become genuinely Egyptian in death.

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