From Publishers Weekly
Part travelogue, part self-congratulatory memoir and mostly insecure ramblings, Ward's journey to discover the goddess principle is a thinly veiled attempt to find himself. Since Western religion eliminated goddess worship from its rituals long ago, he observes, young males lack healthy role models for understanding their feminine side. He reveals how such a lack affected his own life in multiple stories about his difficult and failed relationships with women. Taking a page from Bruce Feiler's walks in the footsteps of biblical figures, Ward travels the globe to trace various goddesses and connect with their primal power. His travels take him to Crete, Greece, Turkey, Romania and Cyprus, where he comes face-to-face with the ancient traditions and rituals surrounding the cults of goddesses as diverse as Ariadne, Hera, Athena, Hekate and Artemis. He weaves the story of his relationship with his wife into the travelogues about goddess sites as a way of demonstrating how successfully he believes he has come to terms with the divine feminine. This book is not so much about goddesses as it is about Ward's sexual insecurities and his need to psychoanalyze himself.
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Book Description
Acutely aware that his own relationships with women always ended in disaster, Tim Ward decided to seek out the Goddess to find out whether she could change his life for the better; both his spiritual life and his relationship.
His quest took him to the ruined temples and shrines of the goddess in the cradles of Western Civilization – to Greece, Turkey, Israel, Malta, Cyprus, France and the Balkans. In Savage Breast he recreates the experiences of ancient believers: the Eleusinian Mysteries of Demeter, the sexual rites of the priestesses of Aphrodite, and a human sacrifice on a mountaintop shrine in Crete. And in Turkey he sits at the feet of the many-breasted Artemis of Ephesus, whose rioting followers once threatened to kill the Apostle Paul.
Facing the Goddess unleashes turbulent emotions for Ward. With brutal honesty he describes the traumas that erupt in his relationship with the woman he loves, who accompanied him on many of his journeys. He discovers what drove him to sabotage all his previous relationships, and has a spiritual revelation that blindsides him.
Ward’s story weaves travelogue, archaeology, myth, history, art and autobiography into a fascinating and gripping journey through the depths of our history and minds. His work will help men give up their delusions about women and learn to see them for who they really are, and will help women better understand what it is that men are really afraid of.
