Myth and Sexuality

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

``Our bodies are the cosmos,'' asserts Highwater; each society's fundamental values and myths predetermine its conception of the human body and sexuality. To classical Greeks, the body was an idealized locus of beauty; to pioneer sexologists influenced by the mechanistic worldview of science, the body was a pleasure-pain machine; in our own era of consumer capitalism, the body is a sexualized commodity. Author of many books on Native American culture, Highwater attempts to map a mythic history of the body in this ambitious, imaginative essay. From egalitarian Neolithic worshippers of the Great Mother through the Greeks' dethroning of women, to the pervasive ``sex-negative'' attitudes said to stem from Jewish, Christian and Zoroastrian beliefs, we have lost any sense of the body as spiritual, the author provocatively suggests, in a book that will appeal to fans of Joseph Campbell. (Feb.)

Library Journal

Highwater outlines a brief social history of sex in the West in order to illustrate his thesis that a society's mythology derives largely from its view of the human body and sexuality. Beginning with the earliest peoples (for whom the body and all nature were essentially female), he traces the rise of patriarchy, with its glorification of male sexuality; and goes on to explain how, among Christians, the body became the locus of original sin. Later on, the Romantics produced a still different view of sex as (ultimately doomed) pleasure, which was superceded by the Enlightenment notion of the body (and the universe) as machine. Particularly compelling is his discussion of capitalism's belief in the body as a product from which profits can be made. Anthropologist Highwater (author of 20 books) relies heavily on the work of Joseph Campbell and Elaine Pagels; however, this synthesis would have benefited from a few footnotes. Nevertheless, it is beautifully written, provocative, and highly recommended.-- Beverly Miller, Boise State Univ. Lib., Id.