Gods and Goddesses that Remain: Deities, Spirits and Liminal Beings (Deities and Kindred Beings)

The gods and goddesses of the ancient world did not simply disappear. Their names, images, stories, and powers endured-sometimes openly, sometimes concealed within folklore, ritual, art, literature, and the living customs of later cultures.

In Gods and Goddesses That Remain, Randy P. Conner explores the survival and transformation of pagan deities, spirits, and liminal beings from antiquity to the present. Moving across mythology, religious history, popular tradition, and embodied practice, he traces the many ways in which ancient sacred presences have persisted within the cultural imagination of the West.

Rather than treating paganism as a vanished religion preserved only in ruins and texts, Conner reveals a continuing current of belief and experience: gods remembered under new names, spirits inhabiting the borders between worlds, and older sacred patterns resurfacing in changing historical forms.

Scholarly in scope yet attentive to lived spirituality, this book offers a wide-ranging study of the divine and other-than-human beings that have shaped Western religious and cultural life-and continue to remain among us.

Drawn from Randy P. Conner's landmark study,

The Pagan Heart of the West.

pagan/paganism

indigenous

gods

goddess

subjugated knowledges

earth-centered

Isis

Thor

ritual specialist

fairies