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Books on Mythology, Symbols & Women’s Inner Worlds
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items A little bookshelf of myths, symbols and women’s voices—where ancient stories meet our inner worlds, and strength takes many forms. Books to linger with, question with, and return to ourselves through
In The Odyssey, Circe gets a few pages and a bad reputation. Here she gets the whole story. Madeline Miller follows her from a lonely childhood in the hall of her father, the sun god Helios, to exile on her own island, where she learns witchcraft and...
Circe
A small one, and that's part of its charm. Galatea is a single short story, about 64 pages in a pocket-size hardcover, not a novel. Miller picks up the Pygmalion myth after the statue comes to life and lets Galatea tell what that “happy ending” was l...
Galatea
India’s Mahabharata retold by Draupadi, a woman the epic mostly speaks about rather than through. Like Circe and The Penelopiad, it gives an ancient story back to the woman at its center, this time from another great tradition.
The Palace of Illusions
Pandora, Medusa, Jocasta, Penelope: most of us know these women from a line or two, often a line of blame. Classicist and comedian Natalie Haynes goes back to the ancient sources and shows how much richer and stranger their stories are. This is nonfi...
Pandora's Jar
The Sumerian goddess of love and war in hymns and myths more than 4,000 years old, including her descent to the underworld and her return. Diane Wolkstein’s retelling, made with Assyriologist Samuel Noah Kramer, adds one of the oldest stories of a wo...
Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth
This one sits on my shelf in Turkish, and it's a big book, more than 500 pages, best taken slowly. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, a Jungian analyst and storyteller, retells old tales such as Bluebeard, Vasalisa and La Loba, then reads each one as a story ab...
Women Who Run with the Wolves
Laguna Pueblo poet and scholar Paula Gunn Allen on the central place of women and female creator figures in many American Indian traditions, and on how that place was obscured. Essays that widen the meaning of “women in myth” well beyond the European...
The Sacred Hoop
Why do the same images keep showing up in dreams, fairy tales and old religions? This was the one book Carl Jung planned for general readers, written together with four of his colleagues. It explains his ideas about the unconscious, archetypes and sy...
Man and His Symbols
From the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism: hundreds of short essays, each paired with images from many cultures and eras, on what a symbol has meant to people over time. A visual companion to Man and His Symbols, built around images rathe...
The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images
Not a mythology book, but it belongs on the women's-stories side of this list. Virginia Woolf starts with a simple question, what does a woman need in order to write, and lands on money and a room of her own. From there the essay wanders through hist...
A Room Of One's Own (annotated)
A young Irish woman wants to learn magic, and she finds two very different teachers: one who lives alone in a forest and one who works with the cycles of the moon. Paulo Coelho tells it in his simple, fable-like style, with rituals, symbols and talk ...
Brida
A 12th-century Persian Sufi poem in which the birds set out to find their king, the Simorgh, and arrive at a mirror of themselves. A journey told almost entirely in symbols, about the inner work of seeing clearly; this Penguin Classics edition is tra...
The Conference of the Birds
Artemis, Athena, Hestia, Hera, Demeter, Persephone and Aphrodite: Jean Shinoda Bolen, a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst, reads these seven Greek goddesses as patterns that can show up in women's lives, work and relationships. It's nonfiction, first ...
Goddesses in Everywoman: Thirtieth Anniversary Edition
Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas’s final book, edited and supplemented by Miriam Robbins Dexter, on goddess figures and symbols in prehistoric Europe and their traces in later Greek, Celtic, Baltic and Basque traditions. Her conclusions are still debate...
The Living Goddesses
Penelope is famous for waiting. Margaret Atwood finally lets her talk. In this short novel, written for the Canongate Myths series, Penelope looks back on her life with Odysseus from the afterlife, while her twelve maids answer between chapters like ...
The Penelopiad