From primitive European and African carvings and cave drawings to the classical poetry, pottery, and sculpture of Attic Greece, from mysterious and disturbing female shapes on the facades of certain gothic Christian churches to startling and instructive examples of contemporary myths in the making, Winifred Milius Lubell tracks a vast resource of visual and textual evidence in this first book-length study of Baubo. Lubell's artistic and literary sources support the argument that from the earliest moments of civilization, humans have respected and revered female sexual energy, graphically symbolized in the vulva, as an indispensable force in the balance of nature. Over the ages, the images of Baubo and her sisters assumed deviant and disturbing forms, but the basic lines of her legend and its visual manifestations were not completely obscured. Nor, as this book will show, has Baubo's essential power been destroyed even in our own age.