Marianna Torgovnick presents a mesmerizing look at the love/hate relationship Western civilization has had with primitive cultures and their oceanic impulses. The author examines the spiritual odysseys of independent women such as Isak Dinesen and Diane Fossey who went to Africa and there discovered a kind of primal passion in their relationship with the land and its animals. She writes about D. H. Lawrence and Georgia O'Keeffe who both were awed by the landscape of New Mexico. Torgovnick finds in the experiences of these questers a yearning for the primitive or what she calls "a full and sated sense of the universe." She locates some of the same yearnings in the New Age, the mythopoetic men's movement, and the phenomenon of body piercing.

Torgovnick suggests that we in the West give up our efforts to obliterate the oceanic. Many spiritual paths, including those in the Western mystical tradition, involve a deeper engagement with the earth, the cosmos, and the human community.