Staff of Laurel, Staff of Ash: Sacred Landscapes in Ancient Nature Myth - Paperback

by Dianna Rhyan (Author)

At the crossroads of nature and the human imagination, Earth is sentient, fertile, and eloquent. When ancient goddesses, outcasts, heroes, and poets speak, they speak on her behalf to reveal living myths that first enchanted sacred landscapes. Their primal stories emerge from wilderness and rise from buried libraries to jolt us awake. We meet a lone goddess battling fifty giants, a beguiling wife who is secretly a serpent, a radiant lyre about to sing her own poetry, and an ogre whose heart is his forest. When oaks and rivers call for justice, when furies and monsters counter king and plow, let us turn our ear to hear. As we listen, mythic fragments lead us from marble palaces to nymph-haunted gardens, on a quest that teems with strange immortals. Along the way, a goddess of desolation, a mistress of animals, ash tree spirits, and a trickster water god appear as guides. Primeval green wisdom emerges from abyss, forest, and borderland, hidden in myths we almost lost forever, in ancient images that say things we no longer can.

Author Biography

Dianna Rhyan is a mythologist and therapist whose work focuses on nature goddesses and the spirituality of sacred landscapes. She has a PhD in Ancient Greek and Latin, taught college for thirty years, and has been a visiting scholar for archaeological excavations in Greece and Cyprus. When not delving into archaic myth or studying Sumerian, she can be found exploring the Cuyahoga Valley trails of Northeast Ohio.