[Author of various critical essays on such Native American writers as John Milton Oskison and Leslie Marmon Silko, Ronnow has served as vice-president of the Association for the Study of Native American Literatures. In the following, she offers a mixed assessment of Grandmothers of the Light.]

In the introductory essay, "The Living Reality of the Medicine World," Allen assures us that "an apprentice medicine person becomes familiar with a number of these stories because they act as general guides" to the universe of power, hence she implicitly identifies her audience as those would-be apprentice medicine women. These stories, according to Allen, "enable practitioners of the sacred to recognize where they are and how to function, the entities they might encounter, their names, personalities, and likely disposition toward them, the kinds of instruction they might gain from them, and how to explore the universe of power to gain greater paranormal knowledge and ability." Allen is convinced that walking the path of power is "not the same as therapy, university studies, or activities such as drumming, chanting, dancing, or pointing magic wands. To walk the medicine path is to live and think in ways that are almost but not quite entirely unlike our usual ways of living and thinking, and the stories show the right and wrong ways to proceed."

Allen performs a kind of sorcery of her own upon certain key etymologies. For "myth" she branches from the Indo-Germanic root MU to produce derivatives meaning "a mystery, a secret, a thing muttered," or "ritual verbalization," or "a slight sound," or "a mother"—although she does admit that muttering "is an activity presently ascribed to the mad, the elderly, the female, and the powerless." MA can be "discerned in words such as mother, mom, mammary, mutter, immic, and om" and in related concepts such as sea (French mer), evil (Spanish mal), and lord (Arabic mar). She likes the fragment GE in "geology, geomancy, geas, geometry, geophysics, and geopolitics"—all from GAIA, "the Great Goddesses' powers that emanate from her [sic] planetary body [sic]." Allen's discussion of etymological fragments eventually produces the shaman's ma-ge-[c] which has been her point all along.

In the same way that she likes language sources to run together, she likes to find affinities in objects: "the ritual dancer with the power to transform dry air into rain bearing clouds is similar to the card called 'the World' in the Tarot deck, to Shiva of the Hindu Way, to the Dancer of the African mysteries. Rain Dancer is a key, a point of entry into the mystery, the myth-matter-mother of arcane reality." And she delineates seven ways one is/becomes a medicine woman: the ways of the daughter, the Householder, the Mother, the Gatherer, the Ritualist, the Teacher, and the Wise Woman. Allen discourses at length on each of these apparently sequential phases of a woman's life, yet none of her discussion is documented in any way except a reference or two to her dictionary and short, general acknowledgements of the tribal tradition behind each story. We must take only her word for the validity of her research and self-confident conclusions. For example, Allen proclaims that during the "Gatherer" stage the woman/shaman goes forth to harvest from the earth, "armed only with a digging stick (which is the mother of tools), knowledge, intuition (inner knowledge), and prayer." Yet unanswered is the obvious question, why is the digging stick the "mother of tools"? Why not a basket or other similar vessel, which seems more appropriately female and also much more practical for gathering? Actually Allen never mentions baskets or containers at all in her discussion of gatherers. Finally, she advises the apprentice shaman that "travel to and in the universe of power thus is more a matter of psychic travel than of physical movement." Although she uses the word "advisedly," she proposes "'dialing' different gestalts" (a procedure "analogous to selecting a television channel") to become conscious in other worlds.

She writes that she is devoting her volume to "an investigation of myths from the women's shamanic tradition" in order to introduce a number of female entities ranging in order of being from goddess to medicine woman. It is obvious that this book will appeal mainly to a naive or popular audience, especially to readers interested in the romanticization of Native American spirituality and easy access to it, and to readers who do not care about documentation of sources, differentiation between tribes, or original texts and original languages. Questions of translation, transmission, privacy (even secrecy), appropriation by outsiders, or appropriateness of place and time of the telling/retelling are not raised, and by implication are not expected to be asked.

The best parts of Allen's volume are the stories themselves, thanks to Allen's literary and imaginative skills. The very flaw mentioned above—the lack of any sense of the presence of the myth's original time and place—becomes here an advantage to the reader who wants a lovely, graceful, easy-to-read story in English. Allen writes that she presents the myths "not necessarily as recorded or told, but as [she] understands them. Rendering works from the tribal ritual tradition aims to enable readers unfamiliar with those traditions to comprehend implicit as well as explicit meanings of the myth." Allen insists that a "story must remain a story and such apparatus as glossaries, cultural notes, and alternate texts can become so cumbersome that readers may well find themselves lost in an intellectual wilderness, unable to discover the central point." In this book, the central issue as defined by Allen is "to enable women to recover our path to the gynocosmos that is our spiritual home." Thus Allen's serious readers are, tacitly, her acolytes.

Allen does include myths from a variety of tribal traditions: the Navajo, the Pueblo, the Cherokee, the Haudinashone, the Chippewa, the Lakota, and the Mayan. She asks us to notice the "complexity of the weave of the goddesses in these stories"; certainly what we notice is the complexity that Allen has found in her own project and that she writes into the stories for us. Allen's versions of the myths have much philosophical explanation. For instance, in one of the creation stories of the Pueblo we find this explanation, unusual for a myth: Spider is

a great wise woman, whose powers are beyond imagining. No medicine person, no conjurer or shaman, no witch or sorcerer, no scientist or inventor can imagine how great her power is. Her power is complete and total. It is pure, and cleaner than the void. It is the power of thought…. It's like the power of dream, but more pure. Like the spirit of vision, but more clear. It has no shape or movement, because it just is. It is the power that creates all that is, and it is the power of all that is.

This kind of lengthy explanation is common in Allen's texts. She also embellishes the stories with modern phrasing and philosophy. In an origin story from the Haudinashone Allen writes:

Seven Waterfowl moved through the emptiness and came together, forming a firm nexus of energy, a tidal whorl, a security. So arranged, they moved their thought wings, their intelligencenet beneath her, and her fall came to rest in their arms. Not that her motion ended; they all moved together in harmony. The directionless movement, the endless drift through the nothing she had entered when the other world ended and she fell beneath the tree of light took on a coherence, a form, that connected her within the order of all that is…. They knew as they contemplated a time that she should enter another kind of motion, one that spun slowly, slowly, one as ordered and serene as the dancing of human women as it would arise out of the same pattern, the same knowing in another loop of the endless coil of creation.

Yet this writing is also beautiful, embellished with Allen's poetic rhythms and sense of language. Perhaps for some readers Allen's beautiful, heartfelt writing is reason enough to read.