Goddesses

So this Indian thing was becoming a smash. And what was it? It was the religion of putting yourself back in accord with nature in all of its aspects.

Once you get it, the whole thing begins to talk, and when you haven’t got it, it links you into historical exercises that sometimes drive you crazy.

Shakespeare says that art “holds as ’twere a mirror up to nature”;

The Goddess-centered art with its striking absence of images of warfare and male domination, reflects a social order in which women as heads of clans or queen-priestesses played a central part. Old Europe and Anatolia, as well as Minoan Crete, were a gylany.14 A balanced, non-patriarchal and non-matriachal social system is reflected by religion, my

powers of women in that biological sense give them a magical power that makes it particularly possible for them to activate and be in accord with these powers.

On the simplest level, then, the Goddess is the Earth. On the next, archaic, level she is the surrounding sky. On the philosophical level, she is Māyā, the forms of sensibility, the limitations of the senses that enclose us so that all of our thinking takes place within Her bounds—she is IT. The Goddess is the ultimate boundary of consciousness in

The function of myth is to put us in sync—with ourselves, with our social group, and with the environment in which we live.

The three great crimes in India are killing a cow, killing a brahmin, and killing a woman, because they all represent the sacred powers.

One of the worst things Protestants say about Catholics is that they worship the Virgin. Catholics are very sure to make clear they don’t worship the Virgin—they venerate the Virgin. There’s a difference. When you recite the litany, you ask the Virgin, “Have mercy on us,” you say, “Pray for us.” So she is an intermediary; we’re keeping women in the