We gave Sharon Blackie’s previous book one of our “Best Books of the Year” awards in 2022. This one is exceptional too.
Blackie offers an array of stories from continents in the northern hemisphere revealing the traditional wisdom possessed by women across cultures and time. Stories from England, Scotland, Germany, Siberia, Wales, Greece, Ireland, Russia, Italy, France, Moravia, Isle of Man, the Orkney Islands, and Russia are included here. Indigenous spirituality and Celtic spirituality abound.
The stories are grouped in eight sections, including witches and hags, women of the Earth, and stories of earned wisdom intended for the young. Revaluing witches, Blackie writes in one of the section introductions: “Over the past century … we’ve come to think of the Witch archetype more as something that we might aspire to, that will teach us, and maybe even save us.”
Each section has a short introduction, and the last one, “Death and Rebirth,” includes these sentences: “In the oldest European mythic traditions, the archetypal energies of life and death almost always go together — and in combination they are almost always associated with women…. Death is always in the business of incubating new life.” The stories that follow in this section are at times humorous and poignant, revealing the wisdom of women across cultures and eras as harbingers of death and bringers of life.
This is an important handbook of 300-plus pages reminding us of the sacred feminine, and it’s a beautiful book too, with black-and-white illustrations that look like woodcuts.
