"The re-emergence of the Divine Feminine — the Goddess — in the twentieth century has begun to break down the conceptual barriers erected by orthodox religion and social conservatism. For the first time in two millennia, the idea of a Goddess as the central pivot of creation is finding a welcome response. The reasons are not difficult to seek: our technological world with its pollution and imbalanced ecology has brought our planet face to face with its own mortality; our insistence on the transcendence of Deity and the desacralization of the body and the evidence of the senses threatens to exile us from our planet.

"The Goddess appears as a corrective to this world problem on many levels. In past ages she has been venerated as the World-Soul or spirit of the planet as well as Mother of the Earth. Her wisdom offers a better quality of life, based on balanced nurturing of both body and spirit, as well as satisfaction of the psyche. But we live in a world in which the Goddess does not exist, for a vast majority of people. They have no concept of a deity as feminine. As Bede Griffiths has recently written:

" 'The feminine aspect of God as imminent in creation, pervading and penetrating all things, though found in the book Wisdom, has almost been forgotten . . . The Asian religions with their clear recognition of the feminine aspect of God and of the power of God, the divine shakti permeating the universe, may help us to get a more balanced view of the created process. Today we are beginning to discover that the earth is a living being, a Mother who nourishes us and of whose body we are members.'

"While Asian metaphors of the Divine Feminine may be helpful to some, there are many similar metaphors lying neglected within our Western society. The Western world is full of people who are orphaned of the Goddess. In a court of law, loss of the mother is considered as mitigating evidence for diminished responsibility. Perhaps this may go some way to explain why the Western world has perpetrated so many evils, perhaps not."