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The author states in this collection of her essays: ‘One must make incarnate in some form or other both the active sun and the passive earth of being’. For her this has involved ‘the discipline of the word’ and the creation of a mandala through the process of reflection, giving form to all the fragments of life. Born in 1904, she has clearly worked with amazing energy to this end over the last three decades, as a psychological counsellor, an avid explorer of literature and a co-participant in founding the Apple Tree Community, a retreat and study centre in Michigan.
How to reconcile the opposites, acknowledging and accepting differences between the sexes, is her central theme. Deeply in touch with spiritual thinking and the works of Jung, she does not resort to purely analytic or scientific concepts, but believes that ‘only the images by which we live can bring transformation.’ She writes in a way that is both lyrical for much of the time and also agreeably clear and succinct, creating memorable aphorisms that encapsulate in a nutshell quite obscure concepts.
The book is divided into three sections, the first of which is concerned with women's struggle to find their identity. Women are seen as having become increasingly powerful and aggressive during the last hundred years and in danger of losing their capacity for quiet response and sympathetic containment. Hence the importance of the Demeter-Kore myth and the need to realize the intense pain of separation that mother and daughter have to undergo during the whole process of change that leads to new knowledge and creativity - an eternal rebirth embodied in the mown ear of corn.
Other perhaps less familiar though fascinating myths concerning women's search for identity involve Eowyn in Tolkien's Lord of the Ringa and Orual in Till We Have Faces, by C.S. Lewis. For Eowyn, who has lacked a mother, ‘the springs of womanhood are frozen’, but a small hobbit comes to her aid at a crucial moment and after an heroic battle with