THE MOON AND THE VIRGIN: Reflections on the Archetypal Feminine

by Nor Hall ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 28, 1980

Sensitive essays that meander through a wide intellectual landscape, occasionally drifting off into confusion. Hall, a young psychotherapist (Jungian), sees the various images of the Feminine as clustering around four poles: the Mother, the Amazon (Artemis), the Hetaira (Aphrodite), and the Medial Woman (sibyl, sage, poet). By retelling and analyzing stories--archaic myths in particular, but also fairy tales and bits of folklore, modern literature (Finnegans Wake), etc.--she wants to flesh out these four archetypes and in the process help people recover some of the meanings and modes of existence which have been suppressed by the patriarchy. This enterprise, of course, has kept a whole army of scholars busy, and so Hall in a way is only elaborating and illustrating ideas derived from Jung, Neumann, KerÉnyi, et al., but she does it gracefully, with a broad array of quotations and good literary sense. She speaks of Demeter's quest for Persephone, and the ""dark terrain of an unknown self where we still search for the lost daughter, the feminine source of life."" She writes of Artemis, friend to men and sister to women, who represents, among other things, the world of undomesticated freedom. And she rings the changes nicely on the Grimm brothers' tale of Mother Hulda, a powerful, wise, kindly-but-dangerous symbol of nature. For all its attractiveness, though, Hall's approach has some major problems. Her arguments are rambling and impressionistic, her etymologies (an important part of her case) usually imprecise. She eagerly anticipates getting rid of ""the old wiseman, the worn Patriarch""--but wouldn't complete banishment open the door to the tyranny of the ""Terrible Mother?"" She says there is no ""respected place"" for the feminine is patriarchal cultures, but what about the Eleusinian mysteries or the cult of Mary? Is the feminine principle, as Hall suggests at one point, the only barrier between humanity and Evil? Erratic, but stimulating.

Pub Date: May 28, 1980

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1980

Categories: NONFICTION