Description
For people who have had to do battle with their own addictions or with those of their loved ones or clients, Celtic Queen Maeve and Addiction offers the promise of understanding how that battle is suffered, fought, and won.
Drawing on twenty-six years of experience as a Jungian analyst, the author shows how the stories and images of ancient mythology can illuminate the depths of the psyche. In particular she shows how those in the grip of addiction confront the great Irish goddess Maeve, whose name means ‘the inebriating one’ and whose drink was the sacred mead. Maeve represents the profoundly human and archetypal need for experiences of ecstasy and sovereignty.
Sylvia Brinton Perera retrieves the pattern of Maeve’s wholeness, to understand better what we need for healing our addictive behaviors. When in the grip of addiction, we meet the great Irish goddess in the guise of the inebriating one, the loathsome hag, the devouring maw, and the starving Sheela-na-gig. But Maeve is also a battling goddess, the maternal queen, and the land itself, and represents the principle of process, the sacred vessel, and the mother of early infancy who mirrors, holds and contains our raw, unmediated desires.