From Library Journal
In 1986, in the midst of a midlife crisis, Bolen (Ring of Power, HarperSanFrancisco, 1992) received an invitation to a pilgrimage to sacred sites in Europe. With three other women, she traveled to places such as Chartres Cathedral, Iona, and Glastonbury-where traditionally "one crossed the mists to Avalon, the realm of the Goddess." Bolen interweaves her personal spiritual journey and midlife passage with a discussion of the psychological significance of mythic quests and a reinterpretation of the Grail Legend that illuminates its feminine aspects. While lacking the storytelling immediacy of Clarissa Pinkola Estes's Women Who Run with the Wolves, Bolen's narrative has a sweetness that lingers with the reader. Many will respond to the author's hopes that her story will remind others of the importance of their own "soul journey." An essential purchase for public libraries; important also for academic libraries with popular psychology, women's, and religious studies collections.Carolynne Myall, Eastern Washington Univ. Libs., CheneyCopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
This compilation of experiences, thoughts, scholarly research, and, above all, the feelings of a woman at midlife amounts to a revelation. On pilgrimage to sacred sites including Chartres, Glastonbury, and Iona, Bolen, a physician, Jungian analyst, and professor of clinical psychiatry, traces their histories and significance. She relates these places' earliest uses by societies with earth-based belief systems to the concept of key energy centers all about the globe, and she links her inner journey of the spirit to her physical travels and the primal knowledge of the sacred that women have experienced for thousands of years without naming it. This quest for the holy grail involves more than a personal transformation; it is, she says, everywoman's secret, potential pathway to the roots of her strength and wisdom. An essential addition for collections concerned with women's spirituality and goddess worship. Whitney Scott


From Kirkus Reviews
A vivid account of one woman's pilgrimage to the shrines and sacred sites of the New Age quickly degenerates into pop psychology and pseudo-profundities. Bolen (Goddess in Everywoman, 1984), a Jungian psychoanalyst and a professor of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco, begins this spiritual memoir at a low point in her life. Nearing 50 and recently separated from her husband, she is searching for a new direction. Just at this midlife crossroads, an invitation arrives from a Netherlands foundation to undertake a journey. She is to visit many of the supposed holy places of Europe. Readily accepting this apparent godsend, she begins her quest for fulfillment with an arranged audience with the Dalai Lama. The spiritual and temporal leader of Tibetan Buddhism seems, by the author's own account, more bemused than captivated by her question about possible connections among Tibetans, the Hopi Indians, and the Oracle at Delphi. Her next stop is the great cathedral at Chartres, where she meditates on its relation to the Earth Goddess. A lengthy discussion of the legend of the Holy Grail and its psychological meaning precedes and follows her visit to Glastonbury, where the Grail was supposedly brought by Joseph of Arimathea. The book's title derives from the mystical island other world to which King Arthur sailed in death. Two places in Scotland- -Findhorn, a well-known New Age commune, and the Isle of Iona, an ancient Christian community--round out her personal quest. As she journeys, she picks up other spiritual vagabonds in the manner of Chaucer's travelers to Canterbury. Jungian psychological concepts form an overlay. Although the trip chronicled was undoubtedly meaningful for the author and will appeal to New Age seekers, it will leave others cold. ($50,000 ad/promo; author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.



"A fascinating, original, and significant contribution to psychology."


China Galland, author of Women in the Wilderness and Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna
Jean Bolen's Crossing to Avalon names what is sacred in women's experience.


Matthew Fox, author of The Reinvention of Work, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, and Original Blessing
By staying true to her experience as a woman, she gifts her readers -- women and men alike -- with soul food for our sacred pilgrimages.


Rollo May, author of Love and Will
A fascinating, original, and significant contribution to psychology.


Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D., author of Women Who Run With Wolves
In Crossing to Avalon, Jean Shinoda Bolen turns her acute and brilliant eye toward the interconnectedness of women's mysteries, sacredness of the body, the effect of pilgrimage on soul, and deep feminine friendships.


Isabel Allende, author of The House of the Spirits
This book is wonderful. I felt very moved and I am sure that it will help many women understand their own spiritual journey.


Book Description
Proving prayer to be as valid and vital a healing tool as drugs or surgery, the bestselling author of Meaning & Medicine and Recovering the Soul offers a bold integration of science and spirituality.


From the Inside Flap
Dr. Jean Shinoda Bolen's magnificent spiritual autobiography is the story of a call to adventure, the mystery of the feminine, and the extraordinary pilgrimage that marked her mid-life passage. Bolen frames the search for meaning at mid-life as a quest for the mysterious lost Grail of the Arthurian legend. For Bolen, the Grail represents the elusive object of a lifelong search for what is missing from our lives as well as from our culture. Bolen's pursuit takes her on an incredible journey to Europe that leads her to discover the importance of her own history, the changes and challenges at mid-life, and the meaning of the goddess in the lives of women. During a particularly difficult time in her life, Jean Bolen quite unexpectedly received a package in the mail from England. Inside was a beautiful gold pendant in the shape of an ancient archetypal image along with an invitation to make a pilgrimage to Chartres, Glastonbury, Iona and other sacred sites in Europe. It was sent by a total stranger, a woman who had come across one of the first copies of Goddesses in Everywoman, Bolen's ground-breaking work on women and archetypal myth. The synchronicity of the invitation was astonishing to Bolen, and she knew instinctively that she had been invited to embark on a quest that would change her life. So began the extraordinary pilgrimage that heralded Bolen's mid-life passage. Inspired by The Mists of Avalon, this tale of her European adventure is interwoven with penetrating psychological and spiritual insights as well as lore from Europe's sacred sites. While on her pilgrimage, Bolen reflects on the mystical experience that brought her into medicine, her awakening to the archetypal feminine through the experience of childbirth, the personal transformations that occurred after her divorce, the sources and significance of mid-life depression, and the importance of female friendship. This multilayered account journeys through and beyond the personal to reflect the mythological significance of the mid-life search for meaning and renewal.


From the Back Cover
A MIDLIFE QUEST FOR THE GRAIL AND THE GODDESS Dr. Jean Shinoda Bolen's extraordinary memoir celebrates the pilgrimmage that heralded her spiritual awakening and leads readers down the path of self-discovery. In this account of her journey to Europe in search of the sacred feminine, she unveils the mythological significance of the midlife search for meaning and renewal. "[Bolen] charts a path that will lead many readers to the heart of their own emotional and spiritual pilgrimmages."--San Francisco Chronicle Book Review "This wise and challenging work, the most personal of Jean Shinoda Bolen's books, is an absorbing, often uncannily perceptive, and useful companion for the soul journeys of our time, which is The Time of the Goddess Returning."--Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple "In Crossing to Avalon, Jean Shinoda Bolen turns her acute and brilliant eye toward the interconnectedness of women's mysteries, sacredness of the body, the effect of pilgrimage on soul, and deep feminine friendships."--Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D., author of Women Who Run with the Wolves


About the Author
Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D., is an internationally known Jungian analyst, clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco, and a former member of the board of the Ms. Foundation for Women. She lives in Mill Valley, California.


Excerpted from Crossing to Avalon : A Woman's Midlife Pilgrimage by Jean Shinoda Bolen. Copyright © 1995. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
From Preface: "We usually imagine the Grail as a chalice, most often as the chalice filled with wine that Jesus held aloft at the Last Supper, saying to his disciples as he did so, "This is my blood...." His words and motions became ritualized in the Christian communion. When we consider that as a rounded container a chalice is a feminine symbol, the idea of a vessel filled with blood becomes an image-metaphor for a woman's womb, and the Grail then takes on the possibility of another meaning -- that of a numinous or mysterious feminine symbol, something transformative and healing, with a sacred or divine dimension of the feminine. In the most famous of the Grail Legends, there is a wounded king whose kingdom is a wasteland. His wound can only be healed by the Grail, and until his wound is healed, his kingdom remains devastated. Substituting patriarchy for "kingdom," this myth has considerable relevance today. Deforestation, famine, and armed hostilities, bad as they are, pale in comparison to the ultimate fate of an earth facing potential nuclear or ecological disasters that could turn the entire earth into a wasteland. The legend of the Grail also has considerable psychological relevance. If we are living in a spiritual wasteland of depression, despair, fears, anger, meaninglessness, emptiness or addictions, an understanding of the legend can teach us something about what ails us and what can heal us. On the eve of a new millennium, something momentous is happening. We can see "the Goddess" re-emerging everywhere -- as concern for and the resacralization of the planet, as a new appreciation for the feminine aspect of the divinity, as an awareness of the sacredness and wisdom of the body. Images of goddesses are coming forth in dreams, in art, and in poetry. Once again, the Earth is seen as a living organism, as Gaia, the Greek goddess of the Earth. I see the emergence of goddess consciousness as a return of the Grail into the world, a return that is for now liminal; that is, on the threshold, still between the worlds, emerging out of the mist, perceived by many and yet not fully present in the culture. The Goddess becomes known in embodied sacred moments. In order for her to emerge into the culture and change it, enough individuals must become aware of those deep and sacred moments in which a woman and the Goddess are one in the same -- when Earth and Goddess and Mother and Woman partake of divinity. The need for return of the Grail and the Goddess is as I have experienced its meaning, a personal and planetary story about wounds and healing, about hope and wholeness."