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

our bodies are born naturally, but at a certain time there awakens in us our spiritual nature, which is the higher human nature, not that which simply duplicates the world of the animal urges, of erotic and power drives and sleep. Instead, there awakens in us the notion of a spiritual aim, a spiritual life: an essentially human, mystical life to be

Earth’s magic and women’s are the same—giving

She gives birth to us physically, but She is the mother too of our second birth—our birth as spiritual entities.

Like an electric circuit with a fuse that isn’t able to carry the charge, if the power is too great for the individual’s capacity, he blows. So before approaching a goddess or god, there are manners of preparing oneself, of insulating oneself, as it were, to meet, receive, and subdue the power of the deity.

This is a basic point in mythology: that the individual is performing an act not out of his own impulse, but in accord with the order of the universe.

“God is an intelligible sphere known to the mind whose center is everywhere and circumference

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,

In these caves where the boys went to be initiated, to be transformed from the children of their physical mothers into the children of the cosmic Mother, in the womb of the Earth, they experienced symbolic rebirth.