One of my favorite authors in all the world – Karen Armstrong – does not write fiction or mysteries, yet many of her books become bestsellers.
What does she write? About God, about the Abrahamic religions, mostly: the religions descended from Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, Islam. Amazing how they don’t get along, since they are all children of the same root.
She’s written a book titled simple ‘Buddha’, which is Gautama Siddharta’s life story, told from scraps of the little we know about the Buddha, his life and his times. He lives in her book.
This book, A Short History of Myth, I agree with much less than any of her others. Still, it is an excellent work.
She reviews the stories that have shaped our cultures from our days as hunters to our days as farmers to early civilizations through to our time.
From my point of view all this work is from the point of view of the patriarchy which subsumed the Goddess cultures 6 to 8,000 years ago. I see the older roots of many of the stories she tells, the stories before the Goddesses were broken into their components parts.
I’m going to loan this book to a great friend so that I can get some distance from it – and then will mark all over it and write, I’m sure, much more when I get it back!
Stay tuned!