About the Book
This book describes an encounter of the author with the Goddess. The author also tells of some of the events that preceded and followed it. In particular, he tells of his changed perception of the world. He could see then, and sometimes can still see, the divinity of women. (They are divine because they are like the Goddess). He knows with a intuitive certainty that the Goddess is about to make her advent once again, and that when that happens, the establishment of a uviversal matriarchy will be the inevitable result.
This book is about a goddess of sublime beauty and power, and not about the God of our fathers. It is about the Goddess the human race first knew, the Great Goddess who was worshipped so ardently and for so long by our forebears. Now at long last is returning to walk among her children again. The signs of her coming are manifold, clear as the sun to see for all whose eyes have been opened.
Our ancestors knew Her intimately. She was loved and adored by countless millions of people: whole nations worshipped Her; vast empires trembled in fear and joy at the slightest manifestation of Her unspeakable potency and magnificence. Yet few in these darker ages know anything about Her. She is thought to have vanished forever, leaving nothing of Her former cult behind, save a few references scattered in ancient authors, a few statues hidden in museums
"In all, the book possesses great possibilities. It's unique, and possibly the first to recount a personal experience with the Goddess by a man, throughout an entire book. The Goddess experience has been alluded to previously by men but not in a whole book, and not with the slant provided by Alex MacLeod."
Rita Robinson, Exploring Native American Wisdom (New Page Books)
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I did not know what to expect when Alex MacLeod, whom I knew as a quiet-spoken memeber of the C.G. Jung Society of Montreal and a frequent attendee at our lectures, put a copy of his book into my hands. Reading it turned out to be a rare privilege and a disturbing challenge.
It is a bit jarring in this rationalistic age to read an account of what its author considers to be direct divine revelation, but MacLeod claims nothing less. He relates several encounters with the Goddess that he experienced in the early 1980s, one mystical experience he regards as primary and several others. In 282 pages, he shares the results of his struggle over more than 15 years to comprehend these experiences and their meaning. This endeavour is informed by wide readings in the works on psychology, especially Jungian, in the writings of Robert Graves and others on mythology, in philosophy, in radical feminst theology (thealogy, if you prefer) and in other subjects.
MacLeod, a retired computer programmer who taught computer science for 25 years, demonstrates the skill at close reasoning and the meticulous care in the use of language you might expect in someone of such a background. But nothwithstanding this and notwithstanding the book's psychological elegance, MacLeod's belief in the Goddess is quite literal.
I saw the Goddess ... with the eyes of my mind, but what I saw was more real than anything I can see with the eyes of my body. She was as external to me as a physical object that I can touch with my fingers, yet I do not doubt that she was an emanation from my Unconscious...
I say that I saw a vision, but that word is inadequate. It suggests that everything was subjective, a production of my mind and nothing more. I assert on the contrary that what I saw was also objective, independent of me and of the whole human race. I saw the living Goddess, distorted to be sure by the defects of my perception but a genuine and true heirophany that was not just a personal hallucination.
With comparable certainty, he affirms that the Goddess is about to "step forth once more into the light of History" on a day when the darkness will vanish and the primal basic state of humanity will be restored at last, replacing patriarchy with a system in which the feminine and women have all power and males live in willing slavery.
I do not expect him to rally many people to his views. He has not rallied me. However, there is much in this book to stimulate and challenge a critical reader. Some readers may find the book a gripping psychological and spiritual case study, so to speak. While the core of MacLeod's convictions comes from the unconcious and from direct experience, he is a skilled advocate for them (or apologist, in the technical sense of the word) in the rational world of consciousness and his grasp of epistemological issues (having to do with the grounds and validity of knowledge) may provoke some readers to take another look at their own ideas. His defences against the personal pyschological attacks he anticipates (alleging that MacLeod is crazy, must have had issues involving his personal mother and so on) are particularly stimulating. MacLeod sometimes gives Jungian concepts a literalist, almost fundamentalist spin, in a quite deliberate way. For example, he writes this of one of his mystical experiences:
The late Marie-Louise von Franz, an eminent Jungian psychologist, once wrote that in a moments of religious exaltation, whereas men can be possessed by god, women become the Goddess- an observation that is literally true, however figuratively its author may have intended it. It follows that, since I am a man I could not become a Goddess. Rather, for a short time, the Goddess or her bird-woman possessed me, even though I am male.
In another passage he writes:
We do have an inherited memory of the Goddess buried somewhere in our Unconscious. Jungian psychologists generally call it the Archetype of the Great Mother. This archetype is the idea of the Goddess and not the Goddess Herself, and it requires experience of the Goddess to actualize it.
I have to admire MacLeod's courage in writing and publishing this book, which, as he is well aware, could make him the butt of ridicule. In daring to put forward his spiritual visions and unorthodox views, MacLeod is rendering a service to the cause of freedom of expression, daring to break one of the great taboos of our time.
Harvey L. Shepherd for The C.G. Jung Society of Montreal
What a read. And what wonders this book will do for my Christmas shopping list. Alex MacLeod's self-published The Splendor of the Goddess has had more impact on me than any book I've read in years, perhaps the last decade.
After first cracking the cover on Goddess, I felt compelled to keep reading till my eyes gave out. Margerie Kaminesky, a member who won a copy as a WARM door prize, concurs: "Every woman should read this book." For the record, she also added, "So should every man, for that matter, but they probably won't." That it is written by a man didn't escape either of us.
The divine spark for this book was a brief "apparition" that visited Alex many years ago. His description of the experience, and of his feelings about it, then and afterward, is rivetting. Though it wasn't evident to him at the time, subsequent reflection, research and spiritual growth convinced Alex, to the depth of his soul, that he had glimpsed the Goddess.
That is to say, God, manifested as a woman.
This incident changed Alex's life. He recounts, in passages that will make you smile, how he was once a typical, insenstive guy when it came to respect of the opposite sex. He then evolved into a man who no longer sees women's breasts, for instance, as mere playthings to joke about and fool with, but as sacred founts of sustenance and life.
Alex now believes that the era of the rule of the world by women is upon us, and after a not-so-good couple thousand of years of patriarchy, it's about time. While he holds that the matriarchal cycle will arrive in due course, no matter our resistance, his book, at the same time, exhorts women to go ahead and take the reins.
I actually found some of this a bit scary. And the assertion that women should begin meeting to plan their take-over seemed a rather foreign-speaking as a woman- concept. Footballish. Alex does point out that women often think they need a man to tell them what to do, and if so, he has included a passage not lacking in humorous overtone, that obliges.
You don't have to agree with what Alex proposes in order to find his book fascinating. He has an uncanny ability to explain, investigate, and articulate thoughts and beliefs that in others go unspoken. A former college professor of computer science, his clarity of explanation must have enlightened more than one young mind.
Alex was not in a hurry to write Goddess. He worked on it, off and on, for about ten years, mostly, he says "accumulating stuff" for it. Then he gave the big writing-push part after retiring in 1999. His first copies began roling off the presses in 2004.
"What most people tell me is that it's extremely readable," he says, while at the same time acknowledging that a few have referred to the book as "academic." True, Goddess is certainly more cerebral than your average soap opera. Granted, those long sentences are not for the literary-challenged. But the author possesses good command of grammatical structure, so the writing, while complex, flows.
The Splendor of the Goddess is also among the few self published books I've read in which one (who has done professional proofreading) can find nary a typo. As well, Alex insisted on a fair size font, which made his print-on-demand publication pagier (282 of them) and therefore pricier, that could have been.
Jeannette Paul for the Writer's Assosciation of Resourceful Minds (WARM)