Based upon the old tale of "The Marriage of Sir Gawain", "Kissing the Hag" brings us face to face with the nauseating horror of the hag - the raw side, the dark side, the inside of a woman's essential nature. Here we find the untamed soul, the wild, angry, selfish, lustful, manipulative and incomprehensible elements of woman: all that makes us unacceptable and badly behaved. Too often we have been guided to point a finger of blame, accusing our parents, society, our partners of being dysfunctional. Here Emma Restall Orr doesn't allow us that option. As a Druid and animist, she takes the negative stereotypes of the irrational, emotional woman - feisty bitch to shameless whore, smothering mother to grumpy old bag - and finds the archetypes behind them, the faces and forms of the dark goddess.Instead of dismissing these as unacceptable, she encourages us to ride their wild emotional currents, surfing the awesome tides that threaten to overwhelm us. In "Kissing the Hag", we come to accept the fullness of our nature, celebrating the deep mystery, the magic and power of all we are. "Kissing the Hag" is a book written for women who long to loose the chains of insecurity, convention, guilt and self-negation, and rediscover the freedom and creativity of their true nature. It is also a book written for men fascinated but infuriated by the women they love.

Theosophy is a key work for anyone seeking a solid grounding in spiritual reality as described by Rudolf Steiner. The book is organized in four parts. First, Steiner builds up a comprehensive understanding of human nature, beginning with the physical bodily nature and moving up through the soul nature to our spiritual being: the I and the higher spiritual aspects of our being.This then leads to the experience of the human being as a sevenfold interpenetrated being of body, soul, and spirit. In the next section Steiner gives an extraordinary overview of the laws of reincarnation and the workings of karma as we pass from one life to the next. This prepares us for the third section where Steiner shows the different ways in which we live, during this life on earth and after death, in the three worlds of body, soul, and spirit, as well as the ways in which these worlds in turn live into us.Finally, a succinct description is given of the path of knowledge by which each one of us can begin to understand the marvelous and harmonious complexity of the psycho-spiritual worlds in their fullness.