The Crown of Age

We are each crowned twice in this lifetime, teaches the legendary Jungian analyst Marion Woodman. Much is written about the promise of the first crowning, at birth. But what of the second, which comes only after a lifetime of experience? This is the "crown of age," she says, a symbol for the culmination of our inner and outer development as human beings.

On The Crown of Age, Woodman examines what it means to pass through life's many crossroads and thresholds, emerging as an elder, the embodiment of wisdom, wholeness, and truth. Mining the riches of her own life, including a battle with cancer that nearly ended it, Woodman illustrates the paradox of growing old—that while our physical strength wanes, our spiritual strength blossoms, petal by petal.

With poetic insight she describes the archetypal passage in a woman's life from virgin to mother to crone, and the preparation of our souls for the great crown we receive only when life ends. The Crown of Age is a crowning achievement in Marion Woodman's long and celebrated career as a writer, teacher, analyst, and now, trusted elder.