I finished the Descent of Alette today.

To Summarize:

Alette goes into the underground subway.
She sees many Dante-esque sights.
She sees many souls in Purgatory.
She sees snakes and a headless woman.
She helps the headless woman reattach her head
after the woman tells her that gurus and holy men
and saints and wise menand heroes and poets are
like simple drunks, are cruel and frivolous.
The woman's voice has power, as words do.
The woman's baby was taken from her
to be trained as a warrior.
Alette goes into a lake of seeming universal consciousness
and becomes an owl so that she can defeat the Tyrant,
who happens to be a mild-mannered man
who wants to keep her underground.
She pierces the Tyrant with her talons
and tears a various-leaved bush out of the ground
by its roots and then he dies an imaginary death.
Alette drags him up, out of the subway
and displays him before a crowd.
He symbolizes the city, modern society
and his death allows the possibilityto make something new.***