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Siva: The Erotic Ascetic
Originally published under the title Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva, this book traces the development of an Indian approach to an enduring human dilemma: the conflict between spiritual aspirations and human desires. The work examines hundreds of related myths and a wide range of Indian texts--Vedic, Puranic, classical, modern, and tribal--centering on the stories of the great ascetic, Siva, and his erotic alter ego, Kama.
416 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1973
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August 8, 2025
Wendy Doniger’s Siva: The Erotic Ascetic struts into the sacred forest of Indian metaphysics wearing muddy Freudian boots, trampling through the foliage as if the whole place were an exotic playground for psychoanalytic tourism.
She arrives, clipboard in hand, convinced she’s about to “decode” the mystery of Shiva, as though millennia of Indian sages, poets, saints, and philosophers had somehow failed to notice the paradox of the ascetic who is also erotic.
The only mystery she truly solves is how one can spend decades with Sanskrit texts and still manage to miss their heart. This is a work less about Shiva and more about Wendy Doniger—her projections, her pet theories, and her compulsive need to read India through the warped spectacles of Western sexual neuroses.
In her telling, Shiva isn’t Mahādeva, the cosmic dancer, the still axis around which creation turns; he’s a confused man-child wrestling with his libido. This is not scholarship. This is mythological fanfiction filtered through Freud and Foucault, with the occasional Sanskrit citation dropped in like decorative parsley on an overcooked meal.
The tragedy here isn’t that she points out erotic elements in Shiva’s mythos — any literate child in India could tell you kāma is part of his līlā.
The tragedy is that she flattens the whole figure into that single register, stripping away the ascetic, the yogic, the cosmic, the metaphysical, the terrifying, and the compassionate until nothing remains but an oversexed cartoon deity.
Where the Vedas describe Rudra as the howler in the storm, she hears only the panting of a repressed lover. Where the Purāṇas explore the linga as the meeting of form and formlessness, she sees only a phallus. Where the Śaiva Āgamas describe Śiva as the union of śakti and śiva in the form of Ardhanārīśvara, she recasts it as a proto-gender studies lecture on androgyny. It is as if someone gazed upon the Mona Lisa and spent 400 pages speculating about whether she waxed her upper lip. The reduction is not just superficial — it is vandalism.
Shiva’s asceticism in Indian thought is not repression but transcendence. In the Nātha tradition, in Kashmir Śaivism, in Śaiva Siddhānta, desire is not the enemy but the raw material for liberation; it is transformed, not denied.
The Mahānirvāṇa Tantra does not celebrate lust in the modern libertine sense — it integrates erotic experience into a framework of dharma, artha, and mokṣa. The very term “erotic ascetic” makes perfect sense in Sanskrit cosmology because what is renounced is not the body but the illusion of separateness; what is embraced is not indulgence but the recognition of śakti as inseparable from śiva.
Doniger, however, is so steeped in post-Christian guilt psychology that she reads any restraint as repression and any release as rebellion. This is less an insight into Indian tradition and more a confession about the intellectual baggage she carries into it.
It would be almost forgivable if she admitted the limitations of her lens, but she postures instead as if revealing to the world a truth suppressed by the orthodox. This is a hollow claim. Indian traditions never denied the erotic side of Shiva — they celebrated it and wove it into metaphysics, art, ritual, and poetry.
The Kālidāsa who wrote Kumārasambhava did not need a Chicago professor to point out the sexual tension in the mountain god’s love for Pārvatī. Abhinavagupta, a millennium ago, wrote about the bliss of union in terms both erotic and transcendent, without ever collapsing one into the other.
To suggest that Doniger is “rescuing” these truths is like claiming to have discovered the ocean because you found a puddle after rain.
Her handling of symbols is the most glaring betrayal of intellectual discipline. The linga, perhaps the most misunderstood of Indian icons in the West, is in traditional thought the anādy-ananta tattva — that which is without beginning and without end, the formless within form, the axis of all being. It is not a mere phallic idol but a visual koan, a challenge to move past surface appearances into the depths of tattva-jñāna. Doniger, however, insists on reading it as a blunt sexual metaphor, as if all of Indian sacred art were the equivalent of an ancient Playboy centrefold.
This is not interpretation; it is fixation. And it tells us more about the interpreter’s obsessions than about the text or the deity.
Her treatment of Ardhanārīśvara — Shiva and Shakti in one body, the perfect image of non-duality — is equally impoverished. In Indian philosophy, this form is a meditation on the fact that male and female, puruṣa and prakṛti, consciousness and energy, are inseparable and co-arising.
Doniger collapses this into a kind of mythic gender-bending spectacle, a talking point for contemporary identity politics rather than a profound symbol of metaphysical unity. By doing so, she mistakes universality for coincidence and archetype for agenda.
Even her language betrays a kind of subtle condescension. The tone wavers between academic detachment and a smirking irreverence, as though she fears that treating Shiva as genuinely sacred might mark her as naïve among her peers.
This is perhaps the core problem: Doniger does not enter the world of these texts with śraddhā — the deep respect necessary to even begin to understand a tradition from within. She stands outside, notebook in hand, diagnosing and dissecting, never once kneeling at the threshold. And when you refuse to bow, you cannot see the deity; you see only a mirror of yourself.
The result is that her Shiva is not the Mahāyogī, the destroyer of ignorance, the eternal dancer of the tāṇḍava. Her Shiva is a case study for undergraduates in Jungian archetypes and sexual repression, a kind of cosmic patient on the Freudian couch. He is, in her hands, a “problem” to be solved rather than a mystery to be contemplated.
And here lies the final irony: Shiva, in Indian thought, is not an answer but the end of the need for answers. To truly engage with him is to let go of the compulsive urge to explain — especially through the narrow channels of imported theory. Doniger’s compulsion to decode him is precisely what blinds her to him.
There is also the quiet but persistent problem of cultural displacement. Indology, especially when practiced without deep immersion in the lived traditions of India, often slips into a kind of intellectual colonialism. It takes the symbols, the stories, and the rituals and reinterprets them to fit the frameworks familiar to Western academia — frameworks rooted in very different histories, psychologies, and metaphysics.
Doniger’s work is no exception. In reducing Shiva to a bundle of sexual anxieties and urges, she is effectively telling the tradition that it does not know its own god, that millennia of Indian thought have been blind to what she, in her enlightened modernity, can now reveal. This is not humility before the text; it is arrogance masquerading as scholarship.
If one wishes to approach Shiva with seriousness, there are countless other paths. Read Abhinavagupta’s Tantrāloka for a vision of eroticism integrated into the highest yoga. Read the Śiva Mahimna Stotra for the poetic awe of devotion. Read Stella Kramrisch’s The Presence of Śiva for a lifetime of scholarship that bows before the subject.
In these works, the erotic is never denied — but it is also never reduced to mere titillation or pathology. It is held, as Indian thought has always held it, as a facet of the jewel, refracting but never exhausting the light.
In the end, Siva: The Erotic Ascetic is a book that confuses provocation with insight. Doniger seems to believe that to unsettle the reader’s pieties is the same as to expand their understanding. But the unsettling here is shallow; it comes not from the vastness of the subject but from the narrowness of the gaze.
She has taken a god who dances the universe into being, who drinks the poison of the cosmos to save the world, who burns desire itself and yet embraces his consort with infinite tenderness — and she has reduced him to a kind of mythological case file, stamped “sexually conflicted” and shelved under “exotic religion.”
It is like reducing Beethoven’s Ninth to a catchy whistle or the Ganga to a municipal drain.
To behold Shiva merely as untempered eroticism is to think like a lust-fogged knave armed with footnotes but bereft of tapas. It is to confuse the spark for the fire, the shadow for the form, and the echo for the voice.
In trying to decode him, Doniger has missed the point entirely: Shiva is not a puzzle to be solved. He is the stillness in which all questions dissolve.
The proper response to him is not dissection but meditation, not projection but surrender.
And for that, one must do the one thing Doniger never quite manages — sit still and listen.
Rise and smell the coffee, Wendy. Not everything is as single-tracked as Abrahamic religion.
She arrives, clipboard in hand, convinced she’s about to “decode” the mystery of Shiva, as though millennia of Indian sages, poets, saints, and philosophers had somehow failed to notice the paradox of the ascetic who is also erotic.
The only mystery she truly solves is how one can spend decades with Sanskrit texts and still manage to miss their heart. This is a work less about Shiva and more about Wendy Doniger—her projections, her pet theories, and her compulsive need to read India through the warped spectacles of Western sexual neuroses.
In her telling, Shiva isn’t Mahādeva, the cosmic dancer, the still axis around which creation turns; he’s a confused man-child wrestling with his libido. This is not scholarship. This is mythological fanfiction filtered through Freud and Foucault, with the occasional Sanskrit citation dropped in like decorative parsley on an overcooked meal.
The tragedy here isn’t that she points out erotic elements in Shiva’s mythos — any literate child in India could tell you kāma is part of his līlā.
The tragedy is that she flattens the whole figure into that single register, stripping away the ascetic, the yogic, the cosmic, the metaphysical, the terrifying, and the compassionate until nothing remains but an oversexed cartoon deity.
Where the Vedas describe Rudra as the howler in the storm, she hears only the panting of a repressed lover. Where the Purāṇas explore the linga as the meeting of form and formlessness, she sees only a phallus. Where the Śaiva Āgamas describe Śiva as the union of śakti and śiva in the form of Ardhanārīśvara, she recasts it as a proto-gender studies lecture on androgyny. It is as if someone gazed upon the Mona Lisa and spent 400 pages speculating about whether she waxed her upper lip. The reduction is not just superficial — it is vandalism.
Shiva’s asceticism in Indian thought is not repression but transcendence. In the Nātha tradition, in Kashmir Śaivism, in Śaiva Siddhānta, desire is not the enemy but the raw material for liberation; it is transformed, not denied.
The Mahānirvāṇa Tantra does not celebrate lust in the modern libertine sense — it integrates erotic experience into a framework of dharma, artha, and mokṣa. The very term “erotic ascetic” makes perfect sense in Sanskrit cosmology because what is renounced is not the body but the illusion of separateness; what is embraced is not indulgence but the recognition of śakti as inseparable from śiva.
Doniger, however, is so steeped in post-Christian guilt psychology that she reads any restraint as repression and any release as rebellion. This is less an insight into Indian tradition and more a confession about the intellectual baggage she carries into it.
It would be almost forgivable if she admitted the limitations of her lens, but she postures instead as if revealing to the world a truth suppressed by the orthodox. This is a hollow claim. Indian traditions never denied the erotic side of Shiva — they celebrated it and wove it into metaphysics, art, ritual, and poetry.
The Kālidāsa who wrote Kumārasambhava did not need a Chicago professor to point out the sexual tension in the mountain god’s love for Pārvatī. Abhinavagupta, a millennium ago, wrote about the bliss of union in terms both erotic and transcendent, without ever collapsing one into the other.
To suggest that Doniger is “rescuing” these truths is like claiming to have discovered the ocean because you found a puddle after rain.
Her handling of symbols is the most glaring betrayal of intellectual discipline. The linga, perhaps the most misunderstood of Indian icons in the West, is in traditional thought the anādy-ananta tattva — that which is without beginning and without end, the formless within form, the axis of all being. It is not a mere phallic idol but a visual koan, a challenge to move past surface appearances into the depths of tattva-jñāna. Doniger, however, insists on reading it as a blunt sexual metaphor, as if all of Indian sacred art were the equivalent of an ancient Playboy centrefold.
This is not interpretation; it is fixation. And it tells us more about the interpreter’s obsessions than about the text or the deity.
Her treatment of Ardhanārīśvara — Shiva and Shakti in one body, the perfect image of non-duality — is equally impoverished. In Indian philosophy, this form is a meditation on the fact that male and female, puruṣa and prakṛti, consciousness and energy, are inseparable and co-arising.
Doniger collapses this into a kind of mythic gender-bending spectacle, a talking point for contemporary identity politics rather than a profound symbol of metaphysical unity. By doing so, she mistakes universality for coincidence and archetype for agenda.
Even her language betrays a kind of subtle condescension. The tone wavers between academic detachment and a smirking irreverence, as though she fears that treating Shiva as genuinely sacred might mark her as naïve among her peers.
This is perhaps the core problem: Doniger does not enter the world of these texts with śraddhā — the deep respect necessary to even begin to understand a tradition from within. She stands outside, notebook in hand, diagnosing and dissecting, never once kneeling at the threshold. And when you refuse to bow, you cannot see the deity; you see only a mirror of yourself.
The result is that her Shiva is not the Mahāyogī, the destroyer of ignorance, the eternal dancer of the tāṇḍava. Her Shiva is a case study for undergraduates in Jungian archetypes and sexual repression, a kind of cosmic patient on the Freudian couch. He is, in her hands, a “problem” to be solved rather than a mystery to be contemplated.
And here lies the final irony: Shiva, in Indian thought, is not an answer but the end of the need for answers. To truly engage with him is to let go of the compulsive urge to explain — especially through the narrow channels of imported theory. Doniger’s compulsion to decode him is precisely what blinds her to him.
There is also the quiet but persistent problem of cultural displacement. Indology, especially when practiced without deep immersion in the lived traditions of India, often slips into a kind of intellectual colonialism. It takes the symbols, the stories, and the rituals and reinterprets them to fit the frameworks familiar to Western academia — frameworks rooted in very different histories, psychologies, and metaphysics.
Doniger’s work is no exception. In reducing Shiva to a bundle of sexual anxieties and urges, she is effectively telling the tradition that it does not know its own god, that millennia of Indian thought have been blind to what she, in her enlightened modernity, can now reveal. This is not humility before the text; it is arrogance masquerading as scholarship.
If one wishes to approach Shiva with seriousness, there are countless other paths. Read Abhinavagupta’s Tantrāloka for a vision of eroticism integrated into the highest yoga. Read the Śiva Mahimna Stotra for the poetic awe of devotion. Read Stella Kramrisch’s The Presence of Śiva for a lifetime of scholarship that bows before the subject.
In these works, the erotic is never denied — but it is also never reduced to mere titillation or pathology. It is held, as Indian thought has always held it, as a facet of the jewel, refracting but never exhausting the light.
In the end, Siva: The Erotic Ascetic is a book that confuses provocation with insight. Doniger seems to believe that to unsettle the reader’s pieties is the same as to expand their understanding. But the unsettling here is shallow; it comes not from the vastness of the subject but from the narrowness of the gaze.
She has taken a god who dances the universe into being, who drinks the poison of the cosmos to save the world, who burns desire itself and yet embraces his consort with infinite tenderness — and she has reduced him to a kind of mythological case file, stamped “sexually conflicted” and shelved under “exotic religion.”
It is like reducing Beethoven’s Ninth to a catchy whistle or the Ganga to a municipal drain.
To behold Shiva merely as untempered eroticism is to think like a lust-fogged knave armed with footnotes but bereft of tapas. It is to confuse the spark for the fire, the shadow for the form, and the echo for the voice.
In trying to decode him, Doniger has missed the point entirely: Shiva is not a puzzle to be solved. He is the stillness in which all questions dissolve.
The proper response to him is not dissection but meditation, not projection but surrender.
And for that, one must do the one thing Doniger never quite manages — sit still and listen.
Rise and smell the coffee, Wendy. Not everything is as single-tracked as Abrahamic religion.
August 2, 2019
I think Wendy is the only woman with the third eye. Her rendition and interpretation of various Saiva myths and her mastery over a vast compendium of Sanskrit literature are outstanding and impressive.
The book includes episodes from Puranas and Vedas, where Siva (sometimes even Bharma and Vishnu) lasciviously indulge in erotic acts of sex and masquerade; bringing upon themselves the wrath of Gods and Sages, routing means through which they achieve release or make an atonement for the excessive and lecherous acts.
But Shiva, in particular, indulges in long periods of an excess of both eroticism and asceticism. Reaching a point of overindulgence. The gods fear both his erotic and ascetic feats and devise means to interrupt his extremities for the sake of the Human world or for the sake of the Gods themselves.
Shiva, an eternal ascetic, who is without desire and fear - forever meditates and will burn anyone who disturbs his tapas (meditation). For he is the enemy of Kama and the pillar of chastity and creative ascetic powers. The Gods constantly remind him of his duties when he is in deep meditation or deep inside Parvati.
The author has a far more enlightened view on the polarities of both asceticism and eroticism; pointing out that both have roots in each other. Siva's ascetic powers are drawn from his inherent erotic nature and his fascinating erotic feats are a result of his ascetic character.
The unmatched ascetic supremacy of Siva is a result of his erotic desires and his very nature being, to gather tapas (inner heat) through asceticism and use it to kill demons or drain it by making love to Parvati for thousands of years without spelling his seed. This sexual feat is made possible by his yogic powers of chastity.
But the Gods fearing Siva's inactivity as an ascetic for long periods or unceasingly making love to Parvati for longer periods, interrupt his act (meditation or sex) and remind him of his duties as creator (and destroyer) pointing his attributes of both a yogi and a householder. The Puranas through Siva attempt to unite the polarities of the ascetic and the erotic householder.
The book includes episodes from Puranas and Vedas, where Siva (sometimes even Bharma and Vishnu) lasciviously indulge in erotic acts of sex and masquerade; bringing upon themselves the wrath of Gods and Sages, routing means through which they achieve release or make an atonement for the excessive and lecherous acts.
But Shiva, in particular, indulges in long periods of an excess of both eroticism and asceticism. Reaching a point of overindulgence. The gods fear both his erotic and ascetic feats and devise means to interrupt his extremities for the sake of the Human world or for the sake of the Gods themselves.
Shiva, an eternal ascetic, who is without desire and fear - forever meditates and will burn anyone who disturbs his tapas (meditation). For he is the enemy of Kama and the pillar of chastity and creative ascetic powers. The Gods constantly remind him of his duties when he is in deep meditation or deep inside Parvati.
The author has a far more enlightened view on the polarities of both asceticism and eroticism; pointing out that both have roots in each other. Siva's ascetic powers are drawn from his inherent erotic nature and his fascinating erotic feats are a result of his ascetic character.
The unmatched ascetic supremacy of Siva is a result of his erotic desires and his very nature being, to gather tapas (inner heat) through asceticism and use it to kill demons or drain it by making love to Parvati for thousands of years without spelling his seed. This sexual feat is made possible by his yogic powers of chastity.
But the Gods fearing Siva's inactivity as an ascetic for long periods or unceasingly making love to Parvati for longer periods, interrupt his act (meditation or sex) and remind him of his duties as creator (and destroyer) pointing his attributes of both a yogi and a householder. The Puranas through Siva attempt to unite the polarities of the ascetic and the erotic householder.
October 8, 2024
How depraved were the dudes (and I'm pretty sure they were dudes) who wrote these Puranas? Do you really want to waste your time reading densely written tales of incest, semen-swallowing gods, and lustful sages? Don't you want to invest your precious time in something far far superior by Wendy Doniger entitled The Hindus?
June 4, 2022
A pendulum of extremes, forever in one form or another, that never attains a perfect balance because the universe is never in a perfect balance. It is a constant motion of forces, that exist in opposition to each other. One lets the rise of the second while keeping it always in control.
Siva is two things - a creator and a destroyer. Siva is an ascetic and he is erotic. He claims sainthood while he tries to woo the wives of the sages. He talks of brahmacharya while he marries Parvati. He is childless and still has sons. He is full of tejas and tapas and kama, all at the same time, and yet they never co-exist. His tapas leads to extreme kama, which in turn leads to more tapas for the energy has now been expended. For Siva, tejas and kama happen one after another in a cyclic motion, and yet they never come together and intermingle. He smears himself with ashes and then goes in to Parvati. While he is the god of the ascetics, his linga is worshipped in the yoni of the Devi. He ridicules other Gods for their households and still runs after Parvati when desire conquers him and yet he burns kama only to revive him when his wife asks him to.
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty has successfully drawn the beauties and treasures of Indian mythology. She starts with a simple argument that in Indian myth the divine intermingles with the mundane. The problems of everyday life are the problems of the Gods, they too struggle like humans. However, the solutions differ in the cosmic world and in human. While a man when conquered with desire would become a householder, Siva can constantly keep moving between the cycles of a householder and an ascetic. For him, the two phases never co-exist, one does not create an obstacle in the path of the other but instead one leads to another. Indian Hindu myth does not neglect the mundane everyday problems but instead tackles them in the mythical world. The myth-maker makes it possible for the solutions to happen in as logical a manner as can be imagined.
Flaherty studies a vast corpus of literature to write this text. It is a magnificent research work, with details, references, and cross-notes. Never have the myths been studied in such a coherent and logical fashion to draw meaning out of them. Flaherty not only tried to establish Siva as an erotic ascetic, no matter an oxymoron, but proves how it can be possible only in the Hindu myth, just so that she can draw from it how beautiful and magnificent is the literature of the Puranas with its formlessness, vagueness, repetition and recurrent symbols. She implies that how by not providing a solution of balance the myth provides the solution to Siva's extreme forms and nature. After all, there is no need of a balance or a synthesis for change itself is the law of the nature.
Siva is two things - a creator and a destroyer. Siva is an ascetic and he is erotic. He claims sainthood while he tries to woo the wives of the sages. He talks of brahmacharya while he marries Parvati. He is childless and still has sons. He is full of tejas and tapas and kama, all at the same time, and yet they never co-exist. His tapas leads to extreme kama, which in turn leads to more tapas for the energy has now been expended. For Siva, tejas and kama happen one after another in a cyclic motion, and yet they never come together and intermingle. He smears himself with ashes and then goes in to Parvati. While he is the god of the ascetics, his linga is worshipped in the yoni of the Devi. He ridicules other Gods for their households and still runs after Parvati when desire conquers him and yet he burns kama only to revive him when his wife asks him to.
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty has successfully drawn the beauties and treasures of Indian mythology. She starts with a simple argument that in Indian myth the divine intermingles with the mundane. The problems of everyday life are the problems of the Gods, they too struggle like humans. However, the solutions differ in the cosmic world and in human. While a man when conquered with desire would become a householder, Siva can constantly keep moving between the cycles of a householder and an ascetic. For him, the two phases never co-exist, one does not create an obstacle in the path of the other but instead one leads to another. Indian Hindu myth does not neglect the mundane everyday problems but instead tackles them in the mythical world. The myth-maker makes it possible for the solutions to happen in as logical a manner as can be imagined.
Flaherty studies a vast corpus of literature to write this text. It is a magnificent research work, with details, references, and cross-notes. Never have the myths been studied in such a coherent and logical fashion to draw meaning out of them. Flaherty not only tried to establish Siva as an erotic ascetic, no matter an oxymoron, but proves how it can be possible only in the Hindu myth, just so that she can draw from it how beautiful and magnificent is the literature of the Puranas with its formlessness, vagueness, repetition and recurrent symbols. She implies that how by not providing a solution of balance the myth provides the solution to Siva's extreme forms and nature. After all, there is no need of a balance or a synthesis for change itself is the law of the nature.
April 8, 2024
When the attention of a yogi passes through the golden celestial realms and transcends, the devas (gods) become jealous, it is said, because they are enjoying their world of light so fully, their attention cannot go beyond it. Being jealous of the yogi, the gods send down to Earth celestial nymphs, to entice him from his meditation. This usually works. There are countless stories of such incontinence in the literature of the subcontinent. This is a Western, structuralist approach to the story in all its many forms. A structuralist approach teases out the binary opposites in a myth and also the factor that mediates between them. In this genre of Indian myth, the binary opposite is asceticism : eroticism. And the mythic personality who mediates between the two is Shiva, who is both and neither.
The maestro of its approach was the anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss, whose masterful Mythologiques, which follows the variants of a myth all the way from the southern tip of the Americas to the northernmost top. Although fascinating, this method has been criticized for being too reliant on the subjectivity of the mythologist. Also, many in India who do not consider these myths to be unreal, write off such Western efforts as misinterpretations. Edward Said, in Orientalism, labels Western scholars studying the Orient as Orientalists, which is not a flattering term.
The maestro of its approach was the anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss, whose masterful Mythologiques, which follows the variants of a myth all the way from the southern tip of the Americas to the northernmost top. Although fascinating, this method has been criticized for being too reliant on the subjectivity of the mythologist. Also, many in India who do not consider these myths to be unreal, write off such Western efforts as misinterpretations. Edward Said, in Orientalism, labels Western scholars studying the Orient as Orientalists, which is not a flattering term.
May 27, 2012
Il problema di questo come di altri (ma soprattutto di questo!) libri della Doniger?
In mezzo a un'introduzione e una conclusione esili si trovano centinaia di pagine che raccolgono miti d'ogni sorta senza che venga posta tra questi alcuna minima relazione.
L'impressione è quella di una serie enorme di documenti catalogicamente allineati in sequenza, privi di una qualunque guida per districarvisi.
L'impressione è quasi quella che la Doniger, più che libri, scriva delle enciclopedie mancate...
In mezzo a un'introduzione e una conclusione esili si trovano centinaia di pagine che raccolgono miti d'ogni sorta senza che venga posta tra questi alcuna minima relazione.
L'impressione è quella di una serie enorme di documenti catalogicamente allineati in sequenza, privi di una qualunque guida per districarvisi.
L'impressione è quasi quella che la Doniger, più che libri, scriva delle enciclopedie mancate...
April 3, 2010
Riveting, yet hilarious: Classic Wendy Doniger.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews