Overview: At the crossroads of nature and human imagination, ancient goddesses, outcasts, heroes, and poets reveal living myths in sacred landscapes here with author Dianna Rhyan’s new book Staff of Laurel, Staff of Ash: Sacred Landscapes in Ancient Nature Myth.

Verdict: Thus, at these very same crossroads, 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.

So what author Dianna Rhyan’s beautifully crafted, heartfelt, intriguing, informatively-sculpted and wholly impassioned new book Staff of Laurel, Staff of Ash: Sacred Landscapes in Ancient Nature Myth sets out to do is put on paper an unassembled form of sketches, fallen like samaras, whose order is ultimately undermined.

For example, the priestess of Apollo actually wrote her prophecies on leaves. When strong winds came, they scattered all over her cave. Did she mind? Amidst the leaves, voices of winds and voices of trees, lost and found, thread their way. Their tapestry of songs, weaving authentic life, is fading.

And so, and as that story is told more in the opening Prologue, Rhyan hopes you, the reader, find that these very same pages of newly-curated, newly-embodied prose, speak perilous bright adventure: part memoir of fertile forest floor, part mythic library found in fragments.

For, and in closing, I have myself now read it cover to cover three times in two weeks and have to say that each and every time I latch onto something different that sparks something within me. I hope it always manages to do that for you also, dear reader.

About the Author - 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.

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