Secret Garden of the Feminine

       Goddess as Earth, Nature, and Life

The Goddess is both the One and the Many. As the One, she is all of creation–the cosmos, the universe, and nature herself. As the Many, she manifests in myriad forms. From all over the world, she reveals herself to us by many different names. She is Isis, Aphrodite, Inanna, Pele, Yemaya, Shakti, Kali-Ma . . . literally "She of Ten Thousand Names." 

Many religious studies highlight the similarities of primordial creation legends: that a self-created Mother Goddess gives birth to all other life. In Greece, Gaia–known as the Primeval Prophetess–was ancient Earth, and from her came the universe, including all the gods and mankind. A priest of Egypt said, "It was Neith, the mighty mother, who gave birth to Ra; she was the first to give birth to anything, she did so when nothing else had been born, and she herself had never been born."  In India, Aditi was the self-created Mother of all mortals and immortals. To the Hopi, Spider-Woman spun creation out of herself. In Australia, the Aborigine goddess Yhi created her mate, Baiame, and together they created all the animals and humans. Across the globe, countless societies trace their ultimate roots to the Great Mother.

Gaia, the Goddess in one of her many ancient forms, is in essence, the planet Earth itself. Vice President Al Gore, in Earth in the Balance:  Ecology and the Human Spirit, says, The spiritual sense of our place in nature predates Native American cultures; increasingly it can be traced to the origins of human civilization. A growing number of anthropologists and archaeomythologists, such as Marija Gimbutas and Riane Eisler, argue that the prevailing ideology of belief in prehistoric Europe and much of the world was based on the worship of a single earth goddess, who was assumed to be the fount of all life and who radiated harmony among all living things.[1] Human consciousness is once again awakening to the Earth as a living entity. For eons the mythology of the Goddess has been identified with the Earth. The Goddess inspired reverence and honor for the planet from those who worshiped Her. "Even the male establishment must concede that the Goddess's life-affirming values of cooperation and creativity are key to human survival."[2]  As more and more people discover the mythology of the Goddess, we can create the great change needed to heal the Earth--the body of our Mother.

 In The Myth of the Goddess, Anne Baring and Jules Cashford take us on a fascinating journey of Goddess exploration. What they found in the course of their investigation is both astonishing and heartening. Their research showed "such surprising similarities and parallels in all the goddess myths of apparently unrelated cultures that we concluded that there had been a continuous transmission of images throughout history . . . the underlying vision expressed in all the variety of goddess images is constant: the vision of life as a living unity."[3]  These discoveries reinforce the connection drawn between the mythology of the Goddess and the Earth as a living entity.