Persephone Unveiled: Seeing the Goddess and Freeing Your Soul

(Paperback)

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Persephone Unveiled reveals the goddess in all her guises, as the daughter of Demeter; the Queen of the Underworld; the archetypal female healer; and as a central figure in the Eleusinian Mysteries, where celebrants experienced sacred visions through secret rituals fueled by an LSD-like substance. The author examines the known details about the psychoactive agent and explores the Mysteries' influence on, and relationship to, early Christianity. Guided meditations, using active imagination techniques, help readers summon an experience with the goddess.

Reviews

"Stein has created the most powerful and authoritative book I have ever read on the nature and consequence of divine revelation."
-Peter Manchester, associate professor of philosophy at Stony Brook University and author of The Syntax of Time

"Beginning where other scholars leave off, Charles Stein crosses the radiant field of the Goddesses to touch the lip of the ineffable. Instead of being silenced, he elucidatesquietly at first, ecstatically later, bearing witness to the timeless visionary core of the ancient Mysteries in what, in fact, is a profoundly reasoned approach that resonates Now."
-Nor Hall, author of The Moon and the Virgin, Those Women, and Irons in the Fire

"In Charles Stein the Mysteries have found their true Speaker. They have always needed a scholar who was a philosopher, a philosopher who was a poet, and Stein is all three, in generous measure. Stein understands being and Being, and how the Mysteries' great gfit is the ability to leap the gap between them."
-Rached Pollack, author of The Body of the Goddess

Author Bio

Poet and independent scholar Charles Stein is the author of eleven books of poetry including The Hat Rack Tree (Station Hill Press) and the forthcoming From Mimir's Head. His examination of the poet Charles Olson's use of C.G. Jung, The Secret of Black Chrysanthemum, is a classical study of that poet's work. Stein edited Being = Space x Action- Searches for Freedom of Mind in Art and Mathematics and Mysticism for North Atlantic Books. He holds a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Connecticut and a B.A. in ancient Greek from Columbia University. He lives in Barrytown, New York, with classical guitarist Megan Hastie.