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Rendered in breathtaking poetry, Betty De Shong Meador begins her exploration with the myth of Inanna's descent to the underworld. She presents this dark, psychological journey of feminine enlightenment as a positive and necessary gift of one's full individuality and creative nature.

Her description of a Blessingway Sing reveals the balance of feminine and masculine achieved in the Navajo culture. A critique of Doris Lessing's novels captures the felt sense of descent and discovery. Research on a Greek women's ritual-the Thesmophoria- and a survey of recent archeological findings from the ancient goddess cultures add history and substance to the ideas of the feminine. A clinical study of the relationship between female therapist and female client demonstrate one contemporary mode for such exploration.

Thus we learn that there are many routes for exploring the lost initiations of women into the progress of their souls and the ways of the Goddess.

While women adapted to a patriarchal culture over the past three thousand years or more, the essential female element has been repressed. Consequently, women have experienced themselves as less than whole. Meador delves deep into the unconscious, into the underworld, to a time and place when women knew and experienced the fullness of their female bodies in all their bloodiness and sexuality. One almost feels that men should not be allowed to read this book, for it leaves the feminine psyche raw and vulnerable, but intensely real.

-June Singer, author of Boundaries of the Soul and A Gnostic Book of Hours

A beautifully written book that goes deep into the dark side of the feminine journey to find roots for feminine wholeness, apart from the patriarchy. I especially liked the combination of the poetic, the mythological, personal and psychological elements.

-Linda Schierse Leonard, author of The Wounded Woman and Meeting the Mad Woman: An Inner Challenge for Feminine Spirit