"This book is about taking the head off an evil witch."

With these words, Marion Woodman begins her spiral journey, a powerful and authoritative look at the psychology and attitudes of modern woman.

The witch is a Medusa or a Lady Macbeth, an archetypal pattern functioning autonomously in women, petrifying their spirit and inhibiting their development as free and creatively receptive individuals. Much of this, according to the author, is due to a cultural one-sidedness that favors patriarchal values—productivity, goal orientation, intellectual excellence, spiritual perfection—at the expense of more earthy, interpersonal values traditionally recognized as the heart of the feminine.

Marion Woodman's first book, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa, and the Repressed Feminine, focused on the psychology of eating disorders and weight disturbances. It has been critically acclaimed for its "sense of the Earth Mother and its recognition of the feminine principle in the Holy Spirit" (Margaret Laurence, author of The Stone Angel), and for its "eye-opening insights into the relationship between the individuation process of a woman and the state of her body" (Werner Engel, psychiatrist and medical director of the C.G. Jung Training Center Clinic, New York).

Here, with a broader perspective on the same general themes, Marion Woodman continues her remarkable exploration of women's mysteries through case material, dreams, literature, mythology, food rituals, rape symbolism, Christianity, imagery in the body, sexuality, creativity, and relationships. The final chapter, a discussion of the psychological meaning of ravishment (as opposed to rape), celebrates the integration of body and spirit, showing what this can mean to a woman.