Saturday, October 09, 2004

The Goddess is Back, and She's Horny

Waking the Moon, another unintentional Pagan classic, covers some of the same ground as Tartt's The Secret History. There is the university setting, the eccentric professor, the elite group of students, but then things take a different turn, down the road of conspiracy theory reaching back to the Bronze Age at the very least, whereas The Secret History is more about hubris and intellectual vanity.

Author Elizabeth Hand attended the Catholic University of America, where she "used to wonder what the priests were really into," recalls one of her college acquaintances.

I wonder why so many people assume that Goddess worship must necessarily involve human sacrifice. Waking the Moon is still a good read, although some readers have been thankful that it was never made into a cheap horror flick.

For all the cosmic battles, Hand is not a mastery of astronomy. At the beginning of Chapter 8, a character awakes at dawn, looks out her dormitory window and sees the new moon in the sky. (An uncritical plot summary-review here.)

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