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In the central metaphor of The Emerging Goddess, the birth of the Goddess of Wisdom is compared to the processes which underlie all human creative endeavor. The finest products of this enterprise, be they in the physical or mental sciences, philosophy and the humanities, or the arts, are endowed with an integrated wholeness that fosters the illusion that just as Athene was born from the brow of Zeus, they have sprung forth fully integrated from the minds of their creators. Like the goddess in all her metaphorical splendor, the creation is both new and valued, the basis upon which an esthetic point of view is formed. The task which the author has set himself in this volume is to illuminate the act of creation—to describe it, to delineate the processes involved, to photograph the birth of the goddess emerging. A task so comprehensive in scope courts failure by its very magnitude. Nevertheless, although inevitable shortcomings are perceivable in the book, Rothenberg has made a unique contribution to a field whose literature is, to say the least, uneven.
Form follows function as the author, himself no mean exponent of the creative process, develops his central ideas in a highly elaborated fashion and in such a way as to engender their "emergence" over the course of the entire work. They do not lend themselves readily to pithy formulation, and the author takes pains to return to them again and again, elucidating one or another feature within different creative contexts. He does this in the manner of a teacher