Therese

“Feminist analysis that stops short of religion, stops prematurely. It is in religion that we find the central office – the sacred male precincts that have given that final touch of authority to the oppression of women.”
― Glenys Livingstone

“If the life source is female, then we as women partake of Her divinity. When that divinity is named and envisaged only in male terms, where does that leave women? On the outside, looking in. We women need our own expressions of deity, our own female explanations for the way of things.”
― Shekhinah Mountainwater, Ariadne's Thread: A Workbook of Goddess Magic

“Animals embody every quality found in the human personality. In the whole range of human temperament and character there is nothing unique, nothing not found as some aspect of another species. It is the only other place they are found. What men do that may be unique or is at least unusual is to know this. Man is capable, to a limited degree and with great effort, of stepping out of the stream of events for a moment, even of his skin, and looking at the whole fauna and flora as a composite of his own possibilities.

By "possibilities" is not meant another bouquet to humanistic autonomy or another claim that all things are possible and that man can be whatever he chooses. "Possibilities" is a reference to the total context of living phenomena within which the human species has its own forms and limitations. This is why recognition of limitations is the essential step in achieving the freedom implicit in intelligence; it increasingly identifies one's kind of being to one's self. It goes beyond this defining and narrowing of our species sense to a widening within that frame. The same faunal ream within which humanity is but one point among many provides a patterned model for discovering and allocating the positions and quality spaces within society.”
― Paul Shepard, Thinking Animals: Animals and the Development of Human Intelligence

“There is no doubt that the prehistoric veneration of Mother Earth survived intact up to the time of the worship of Demeter and Persephone in Greece, Ops Consiua in Rome, Nerthus in Germanic lands, Zemyna or Zemes in the Baltic area, Mother Moist Earth in Slavic lands, and elsewhere. Her power was too ancient and deep to be altogether destroyed by succeeding patriarchal religions, including Christianity. She was therefore absorbed, and became known in western Europe as various saints: Radegund, Macrine, Walpurga, Milburga, among others. In many other lands, especially eastern Europe, she fused with the Mother of God, Marija.

The Black Madonna is this same Earth Mother, whose blackness represents the color of earth's fertility. The yearly renewal of her fecundity is her fundamental miracle. Ancient mysteries, enacted through prehistoric and historic millennia- in caves, cemeteries, temples, and in the open fields- were for the purpose of expressing gratitude to the source of all life and nourishment, and to ritually participate in the secret of the earth's abundance.”
― Marija Gimbutas, The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe