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In this small but powerful group of essays, which are interlaced with Meador's translations of poetry from Sumer, the author gives us an elegant invitation to share in her search for re-orientation and change in our attitude to the descent myths. In this task she has engaged with the myths and changes in the history of religion and the shift from a matriarchal to a patriarchal culture. She is intent on giving value to women's full creative power and on placing women firmly in their own reality. Meador is particularly sensitive to the constellation of the instinctual feminine, and sees Jung's psychology as a key, with which, through analysis, women can explore the far reaches of the psyche. We can step through the gates of the unconscious, as she puts it, ‘to shed our old adaptations and to face the psychic injuries of the past’, which have served to separate us from our natural being. Although Meador offers us the archetypal backdrop of the descent myth of Inanna and the ritual of Thesmophoria, she is emphatic that these alone cannot serve in place of clinical expertise. Indeed I was interested that she referred to the work of Thomas Ogden in his book The Primitive Edge of Experience in her response to a paper in Chicago last year, which shows how acutely informed and up-to-date is her clinical backdrop.
The combination of the personal, mythological, psychological, and poetic gives these essays, written over a period of twenty years, an intense quality. Each essay is, in its own way, an attempt to give expression to the feminine, those innate patterns, any one of which may constellate archetypes in our psyche and powerfully shape our way of being and perceiving the world. Meador writes of her own childhood experience of the introduction, through her nurse/girl, to age-old games, and describes how later in her life she goes at a friend's invitation to attend a Navaho Blessingway Sing. The Blessingway ritual is addressed to the universe and invokes the powers of the un