RED MOON PASSAGE

Articulate feminists of diverse backgrounds share their similar thoughts about menopause as a transforming spiritual experience. Horrigan, publisher of the journal Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, sought out eight women whose work she admires- -a healer, an English professor who is also a shaman, an anthropologist, a Jungian psychoanalyst and performance artist, an Apache medicine woman, a college dean, a part-Cherokee, part-Seneca songwriter, and a feminist writer—and interviewed them for their views on menopause. Every interview is accompanied by a glowing tribute from the author, who presents her interviewees as remarkable, wise, and deeply spiritual and insightful women, and herself as the novice who gains in wisdom as she listens to them. The women explore the female psyche through visions, parables, ancient myths and legends, and tales of goddesses, archetypes, and matriarchies. The book's title has a mythic ring, but it is a phrase Horrigan devised to evoke a positive image of menopause as a transforming journey out of a time of monthly bleeding into a time of creativity not based on reproduction. Menopause, the reader is reminded often, is to be viewed not as an ending but as a beginning. For women in touch with their spirits, as the author and her interviewees presumably are, menopause is a time not simply of biological change, but of spiritual transformation marking the beginning of the most powerful years of a woman's life. Devotees of Joseph Campbell will find much that is familiar here, and the author's advice to follow one's heart echoes Campbell's counsel to follow one's bliss. Inspirational reading for New Age feminists, especially comforting to those approaching menopause.