The Moon and the Virgin - Softcover

Hall, Nor

4.06

77 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0704338629 ISBN 13: 9780704338623

Publisher: The Women's Press, 1991

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. 1980 light tanning to pages.

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From the Back Cover:

"A 'feminine mode of knowing' stressing awareness of the interdependence of all things underlies Hall's approach and makes her scholarly book a rewarding adventure." Publisher's Weekly

Nor Hall takes us on a joyful circular voyage of "excavation, reclamation of the denied, the buried, the scarcely known." She opens doors to the power of the imagination, the unconscious, to the richness within ourselves: "In order to become pregnant with the potential of realizing unknown faces - or facets - of one's self, one must be open to the strange fertilizing powers of the imagination."

Using the messages of symbol, myth, fairy tales, dreams, and stressing the links between individual and collective experience and consciousness, Nor Hall elucidates the feminine archetypes: "life energies and forms that structure psychic growth."

Nor Hall's words strongly persuade against women "imitating the masculine ignorance of the value of the feminine." Our "delight in being all things" can be realized only through a matriarchal multi-vision, opposing the patriarchy's "primary allegiance to the letter of the law . . . to words with restricted boundaries."

Access to the feminine multi-vision is available to women and men and Nor Hall quotes writers, poets, teachers of both sexes, among them James Joyce, Charles Olson, Rilke, Jung, Freud, Denise Levertov, Marie-Louise von Franz.

The Moon and the Virgin is a call to "encourage the uprising of . . . mothers and children, madmen, poets and any minority that remembers it roots in the unconscious."

From the Inside Flap:

Nor Hall writes with a strikingly original perspective on women in myth and literature, examining and giving new meaning to the underlying archetypes. She explores such principles as androgyny and virginity, freeing them from the limited social context in which we have trapped them, and argues the necessity of feminine rituals in history.

In her search for the original forms of the feminine, Hall has insisted that imagination is as valuable a tool as reason. She guides the reader on a journey through myths and symbols, confronting these not in the rational mode of the language itself, but on the deeper level of the unconscious life. Hall views the process as a modern form of the rites of passage, in which the initiate loses a part of herself, in groping through darkness toward this part acquaints herself with Mnemosyne, the memory of dreams, and thus is born a new way to the world.

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