The Moon and the Virgin

Review
"The Moon and the Virgin . . . is an inspiration to pursue psychological reflections on the feminine . . . The psychic seeds planted by this book should be widely attended to in honor of the goddess so newly returned to our imaginations." - Kathleen Odean, Anima 8(1), Fall 1981
"Nor Hall presents a fourfold structure of the feminine principle . . . This book takes away many clouds of ignorance enshrouding the feminine and allows woman to behold and contemplate reflections of herself." - John Costello
"Hall's writing is poetic; it has a hypnotic rhythm and feel about it. Inevitably, the reader is drawn further into the dream-like state which she describes, until it becomes an effort to hold onto reason and to question the message in print . . . It is an evocative language . . ." - Joan Freeman, The Literary Review 12/1980
"This book demonstrates how the quest for wholeness is only romantic wish-fulfillment unless it includes the willingness to break down as well as to build up . . . As a greedy woman who wants a lot of everything, I loved Nor Hall's ideas: they have churned me up and made me rethink my nice, neat, tidy feminism." Michele Roberts, Gay News
"A timely warning indeed in an age barren of mysteries, where science explains and controls while leaving individuals in a spiritual void. Perhaps Nor Hall's exhortation to 'rediscover the feminine principle' is in fact to rediscover the 'woman principle' and all that that means . . ." - Marie Louise, WRRC Newsletter 01/1981
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."