Grandmothers of the Light :
A Medicine Woman's Sourcebook
by Paula Gunn Allen
Paperback
Published by Beacon Pr
Publication date: September 1, 1992
ISBN: 0807081035
Synopsis:
In Grandmothers of the Light, a collection of goddess stories gleaned from
the vast oral tradition of Native America, the author evokes a world of
personal freedom and communal harmony, of free communication among people,
animals, and spirits, of magic and its discipline, of balance between the
scared and the mundane.
Reviews:
From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Jesse
Larsen:
Through her introductory essays to sections entitled "The Living Reality
of the Medicine World," "Ritual Magic and Aspects of the Goddesses,"
and "Myth, Magic, and Medicine in the Modern World," Paula Gunn
Allen dissects modern "monotheistic" English understandings of
ancient new-world goddess cultures. Each of these scholarly essays is followed
by stories she learned from family and friends that show "how the disciplines
of the medicine woman - including the way of the daughter, the way of the
mother, and the way of the wise woman - are open to all women, and how the
commitment to 'walk in a sacred manner' can yield increasing spiritual power
throughout one's life." These stories hold the kind of magic in their
telling that makes flying, transforming, and disappearing humans completely
believable, and the kind of power that makes us feel our kinship to Grandmothers
of the Light.