The Savage and Beautiful Country, as described by Alan McGlashan, an English psychiatrist of Jungian orientation, is a kind of terra incognita, hard to locate and difficult to describe. Like many voyages through the terrain of analytic psychology, the reader is led into the borderlands of reality. True clarity and vision are paradoxically attained through examining the obscurities of mysticism, parapsychology, and religiophilosophical abstractions.
Our author acknowledges that "what the book is precisely about is hard to define." His method of exposition is to give us many glimpses in a meandering, free-association style that is literary, poetic, and elegant. Too bad, however, that clarity often gives way to vagueness and obfuscation, but perhaps that is inherent in describing the obscure and the nonrational. The author's scholarship is obvious in the broad sweep of his citations from writers of ancient tracts to contemporary thinkers and from fields as diverse as alchemy,