Review: Dark Goddess Craft by Stephanie Woodfield

Title: Dark Goddess Craft: A Journey Through the Heart of Transformation
Author: Stephanie Woodfield
Format: egalley
Pub. Date: November 8th 2017
Source: Llewellyn Publications


Book Description:

Discover how to use the many faces of the dark goddess to navigate the process of deep and rewarding change. This practical guide looks at the misconceptions surrounding dark deities and encourages you to draw on the power of the dark goddesses to work through aspects of yourself or your life that you wish to change.

Organized into three sections--the descent, challenge, and rebirth--Dark Goddess Craft guides you into your own darkness and helps you emerge renewed. Stephanie Woodfield presents the goddesses you will meet along your path of transformation and explains each one's role in helping you. This book will light your way through the shadows and show you how to become the best version of yourself.

Review:

★★★★★

This book is fascinating from cover to cover. It's interesting and soothing, enlightening and thought provoking. This is a Llewellyn Publication that I would happily place on my spirituality/pagan shelf, and it is a book that I will almost certainly read again.

The book is divided into four sections, not counting the expansive bibliography and index at the end of the book. These sections are: Who is the Dark Goddess?, The Descent, Challenge, and Rebirth.

Part one of this book covers a sort of background information chapter. There's information about the concept of what it means to be "dark" and how goddesses are looked at both in the past and the present. There's a lot of clearing up of misconceptions that arise when the phrase "dark goddess" is heard, such as the lack of evil intentions or the devil, things like that. In short, it's like a nice little intro course. Dark Goddesses 101. It's what you need to know about the subject, and the deities, before you continue onward down the path of this book. If you're pretty well versed in the subject, it serves as a nice refresher course.

Part two, The Descent, covers goddesses that are associated with the afterlife. Or more specifically, as you might have gathered from the title (of both the book and the chapter), goddesses that are associated with the underworld.

Part three, Challenge, covers more of the goddesses. But this time around, it is the ones that are associated with overcoming obstacles and getting ahead in life.

The final part, Rebirth, covers more goddesses still. Though in this part, they are the ones who are most commonly associated with the ideas of both transformation and independence.

This book contains so much information and celebration. There are rituals and prayers, there are devotionals. There are stories/myths for each and every goddess that is mentioned throughout the course of the book. I was very pleasantly surprised by the wide variety of goddesses that are in here. Generally speaking, most books I pick up deal mainly with the Roman and Greek pantheons. Especially when it comes to the underworld. I was expecting a ton of Persephone with maybe a bit of Hecate thrown in (sigh, my poor underrated Hecate). But these are global representations. Admittedly, I hadn't even heard of some of them before.

The cited works section alone is worth a look at, it's clear that the author did her research and feels strongly about the topic.

This is part history book, part religious book, part motivational book, and wholly full of engagement and interest. If you are of this spiritual/religious/pagan path, and especially if you walk the nocturnal path, this is a book I think that you'll enjoy.

I received a copy in exchange for my honest review.