Susan Moulton completed her master's degree in ancient and medieval art, has done extensive work in the field of modern art, and received her doctorate in Renaissance Art from Stanford University. Over the past twenty-six years she has taught more than 100 different studio and art history courses in the Art Department at Sonoma State University and was its chair for almost a decade.
; Susan is a mother and wife with two grown sons, a stepdaughter, daughter-in-law and a granddaughter. She lives on a small farm in Sebastopol with her husband and a variety of animals that have wandered onto her doorstep, including llamas, horses, a pig, parrots, dogs and cats.

Early in my teaching career I thought I was getting a broad base of educational experience. As a young instructor and the low person on the totem pole, I had to teach virtually every course in our art history program. Because of my background in painting, I also taught many studio art courses. Now I see that this valuable training gave me a wide exposure to different ways of looking at the world. I had come to Sonoma State because it was outside the academic mainstream, offering me the opportunity to be creative and wide-ranging in subject matter and in the approaches I could use. A single parent after my husband left, this environment allowed me to combine parenting with my career. 
 
I was looking for that primordial essence of life that reveals itself in art and cultural artifacts speaking to us across time. Today we think about our world in collapsed frames of reference; focused on the immediate here and now, we never step back to look at how things evolved on a grander scale. Having now looked at art from cultures ancient and modern, East and West, I feel fortunate that I was required to dedicate so much time looking in depth at different human traditions and expressions. It was serendipity or good fortune that led to finding a unifying thread that would link them. 

As my spiritual path is not defined by the goddess, I wasn't consciously looking for a goddess culture. However, gaps and questions in my research led me to continually question the traditional interpretations of human history. About five years ago, I heard the Lithuanian archaeomythologist Marija Gimbutas interviewed by Joan Marler on KPFA. For many years I had been interested in how women were depicted from one period to another in diverse cultures, but I had not heard about the "sacred feminine" apart from classical interpretations of ancient goddesses in Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, or Roman traditions. The academic world traditionally supports patriarchal systems, which for many women seem detached and unrelated to our experience of the world. The possibility of the existence of a matrifocal (mother-focused) culture that endured for tens of thousands of years was an exciting and intriguing possibility. For me, old intuitions began to find new resonances in Gimbutas' ideas. 
 

  Working on my doctorate in graduate school started me off on a long journey to find an identity for women in history and art. I began work on a traditional dissertation on Titian, a well-known Renaissance artist. In the process I began to discover related information about the massive persecutions and executions of thousands, if not millions, of women in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries in Europe. I was stunned by its exclusion, like that of other information about women, in the standard history books. Women, Jews, and pagans were tortured, tried and executed as heretics and witches during a time we consider the greatest flowering of culture in Europe. This early "holocaust" was rationalized largely because of the writings of Kramer and Sprenger, two Catholic priests, whose Malleus Maleficarum, known as the "Hammer of Witches," was supported by the Church. The phenomenon was not limited to the Catholic Church but occurred in Protestant countries as well. 

Witchcraft as we think of it today in connection with Halloween is very different from the reality of the Inquisition. Witches represented a long tradition of women working in what we would call pagan healing professions that included midwifery, natural healing and Earth-based spirituality. In the 15th through the 17th centuries, these were condemned by the Church for complex social and economic reasons. It is not a coincidence that the rise of the universities and medical profession in Europe occurred at precisely the same time as the witch-burnings, and that women and lay healers were forbidden to study and were persecuted for their knowledge. It is also ironic that Paracelsus, the founder of modern medicine, admitted on his deathbed that most of his knowledge had come from a pagan woman healer. 

My dissertation explored the representation of donors in religious paintings by Titian, probably the best known Renaissance painter of his time. In the 16th century, he was painter to Emperor Charles V and virtually all the kings of Europe and was knighted by the emperor in recognition of his artistic accomplishments. Subsequently his fame was eclipsed by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo. 

>Titian and artists in Venice generally based their work on color and emotion. Reason, logic and careful draftsmanship, qualities celebrated in Florence and Rome and which we associate with masculine power, achieved greater recognition in the history books. Titian lived in Venice, a small independent city-state in northern Italy whose preeminence was based on a strong navy and worldwide trade. As a result, Venice had a multi-cultural population that tolerated people from the East, Asians, Jews, Germans, blacks and various other ethnic groups. It had tolerance for women and gave them some legitimacy. The courtesans in Venice were world-renowned for their education, courtly graces, beauty and prosperity. Many were accomplished poets, musicians and artists. In Renaissance paintings, images of women abound, but nobody was really researching this until the late 1960s, a period that allowed us to consider many aspects of culture and history we had not thought about before. Inspired by the women's movement, I found information that didn't fit the canon. My search to understand why depictions of strong women in Venice, for example, were so different from those elsewhere, took me in different directions. When I wanted to include "alternative" folk history and folk images in my dissertation, I was told this was inappropriate. I found support for some of my ideas outside my field, in the history of science. Thomas Kuhn's book, The Structure of Scientific Revolution, essentially said that most breakthroughs in understanding the natural world are based on intuition and accident. Artists, especially in Venice, gained insight through intuition and used color to represent emotion-what we would consider "feminine" qualities. This new information was relevant to me as a woman, but because the status quo of the academic world kept women invisible, I ran into resistance when I tried to include them. The women's movement gave many of us courage to look anew at the past, but for twenty years, amid fairly conservative academic colleagues, I felt I was working on my own. Marija's words were a catalyst to me. Marija Gimbutas, the Lithuanian archaeologist I heard on the radio, identified and defined the goddess culture as peaceful, collaborative, and egalitarian. Her publications and lectures gave the goddess culture prominence and visibility. She also met with great resistance from the professional academic world when her findings contradicted the prevailing canon. Marija was not a feminist and was not political. She had worked in isolation for so long without support that she was surprised when her work resonated with contemporary artists and feminists, many of whom used images in their work based on personal dreams and visions. They were excited to find the same images manifest in the Neolithic goddesses they saw published in Marija's books. Some local art images included in this issue of Sojourn were similarly intuited. 
 

In the 20th century most of us live in a metaphorical box on top or outside of nature. Society at large reinforces old stereotypes, and our educational reality is very different from the living reality. As women and mothers, some of us realize that our lives are microcosms for the larger process of cyclical life. Having a child awakened powerful maternal feelings, along with the ability to trust my instincts and the courage to follow what I knew was true. This sensitized me to look for images of the sacred feminine in art. 

Although sacrality is not gendered, excluding half the population in most religious traditions creates political and social problems that build up with time. In the Neolithic goddess cultures, women were not more powerful than men-as we define power in contemporary political terms. Archaeological evidence indicates their culture was egalitarian. The spiritual focus was on the woman's body as a metaphor for the life cycle of birth, death and regeneration. The hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pregnant Goddess images that survive represent woman's seemingly miraculous ability to bring forth life and to nurture it-she was the Great Mother, source of all life, which exists in continuous unbroken relationship. 

Marija Gimbutas, an archaeologist, linguist, and ethnologist, grew up in a culture rich in traditional folk mythology. She became multi-disciplinary because of the exigencies of war in Eastern Europe in the '40s. Joan Marler gives wonderful lectures and slide presentations on Marija's life and tells of Marija saving hundreds of Goddess figurines in digs in Eastern Europe-figures that were being thrown away or ignored by other archeologists because they didn't fit the prevailing evidence of Neolithic Europe. Because of her cross-disciplinary background and her family experience with the ancient folk traditions of Lithuania, Marija recognized that these figures were encoded sacred images. They took the form of a woman, sometimes in hybridized forms with animals such as the bird and snake. When I began to study these Neolithic figures, they fit with what I knew of Native American traditions where people's egos don't take them outside of nature but keep them in balance within it. So I began to research what happened to this very rich, egalitarian society that was gender respectful. I was curious whether traces of this culture had endured into later periods. 

When you are looking for something, it often tends to fall into your lap. I feel very fortunate and honored to have met Joan Marler and to have begun an intellectual collaboration and personal friendship with her. As Marija's protégé for many years, Joan traveled with her, edited her books and became her authorized biographer. When Joan needed help transcribing Marija's talks, we got a group of university students together to help with the project. 

Joan and Marija inspired me to look at traditional art historical and cultural materials in an entirely different way. Like a pregnant woman who suddenly notices other pregnant women everywhere, I started seeing the Goddess encoded in classical, medieval and Renaissance imagery. I started to methodically document her appearance, and found that Marija was absolutely right. Folk traditions endure despite conquests by alien peoples. The rites, rituals and symbols embedded in a place cannot be uprooted easily. The ancient goddess cultures used figurines to symbolize processes and cycles of nature and human interaction within them. Nature helps us reflect on our condition, not in linear time, but within a greater living, enduring, interrelated context. When you live in nature and experience transformation in birth and death, you participate in a mystical spiritual process. When I gave birth to my second son at home, I experienced the power of primordial nature within my own body and the animal aspects of being human-I transcended my intellectual approach to the world and became one with a power much larger than myself. 

Ancient goddess images are very powerful. Traditionally they were called Venus images, although Venus wasn't created until the time of the Greeks, and these goddesses existed millennia before that-some say for at least 25,000 years. In ancient Minoan Crete, a pre-Greek island civilization that represents perhaps the last remnant of the goddess culture, women were oracles, seers, and prophetesses. As with some of our Native American traditions, old women were not only entrusted with the oral histories of their people but tuned into the whole confluence of being. They saw the present moment from a broader context of past and future. 

The question becomes, what happened to this ancient image of fertile woman as living nature? Why did the pantheons of warlike male sun gods replace her around 4500 BC? Marija explained this "paradigm shift" with her Kurgan hypothesis, which states that in about 4500 BC, nomadic pastoralists from the Russian steppe region began to invade Europe. As a result, a conflation or a merging of traditions took place. These nomads brought with them sky gods, social hierarchy, animal husbandry and a sense of linear time-very different from the experience of cyclic continuity. A dramatic cultural shift took place. 

Women had been priestesses-conduits for sacred knowledge because of their spiritual connection to nature through childbirth, menses, gathering crops and roots and a cyclical sense of time based on the phases of the moon. They had a deep understanding and connection to place. They had intimate knowledge of herbs and local plants for food and healing, and they respected and nurtured these plants. 

The pastoralists raised sheep and cattle and viewed animals (and women) as possessions. Moreover, with overgrazing, and some authorities say that because of a major drought that lasted for years, nomadic tribes may have had to move into fertile grazing areas occupied by peaceful indigenous peoples. Whatever the causes, the nomadic Kurgans brought with them a very different way of life and belief system. Over time, a dramatic philosophical shift occurred as these nomads who worshipped warlike gods infiltrated lands occupied by peaceful, collaborative, matrifocal peoples where archaeological evidence reveals there was no prior evidence of war. A unified, peaceful matrifocal worldview gave way to a dualistic, patriarchal system centered around war and conquest. 

Fear is key to the concept of ownership and war. Prior to the invasion by Kurgan warriors, the fear of death and the concept of ownership didn't appear to control people. This is evident in the various types of gravesites of old Neolithic cultures. During the Neolithic, people of Çatal Hüyük (now modern Turkey) kept the bones of their ancestors under their beds. After the bones were excarnated (put out for the vultures to deflesh), they were then honored by inclusion in the home. In this ancient Neolithic site, continuously occupied for more than 1000 years, the concept of cyclical material endured. A well-known sacred figurine of the enthroned Goddess with her leopards-possibly giving birth-has been found in a household shrine in Çatal Hüyük. Marija Gimbutas and others interested in understanding the roots of human existence found these facts fascinating. Equivalent remnants of Goddess culture have been uncovered in other sites throughout old Europe. It is tragic and ironic that Neolithic sites in Bosnia, Serbia, Yugoslavia and other parts of the world are being destroyed by fighting today. 

During the millennia of patriarchal rule that have intervened, an entirely different way of being evolved. Yet, ancient truths are important for our survival. Understanding a time when people lived in harmony, balance and peace may help us to find alternatives to what we are doing today. In From The Realm of the Ancestors, a book of essays edited by Joan Marler, people from around the world have contributed their understanding based on Marija's work. While reading these articles I began to see a bigger picture emerge that helps explain the evolution of our contemporary values through time. Taken as a whole, these essays describe a multifaceted phenomenon and indicate that our human history is much deeper and richer than we could ever have imagined. 

Anne Baring and Jules Cashford wrote a book called The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, based on Marija's work. In one section they discuss how, when a young woman in the Neolithic period reached puberty, she was educated into the mysteries of nature and its cycles. Sexuality was a sacred part of the young woman's training. These "virgins" were honored not because they were untouched by a man, but because they did not need a man to be complete. The concept of biological fatherhood undoubtedly came after the Neolithic period. Women giving birth were considered "life-givers"-representative of fertile nature. They were not necessarily married in the way we think of matrimony today. So "virgin" would refer to an "unmarried woman" who in the sacred precinct might also be called a "priestess" and who might bear children. Later interpretations referred to "virgins" as women who were "self-knowing," fully empowered by their womanhood. 

This practice was carried on into Babylonian, early Hebrew and probably Canaanite custom where a young woman would offer her virginity to the Goddess before marriage. She was called a "sacred prostitute." Later patriarchal cultures transformed this practice into something negative. By serving the king rather than the Goddess, the young women were subordinated to a power structure of authority that had not existed before, and were viewed as possessions of men. Temple women became identified through time, and certainly into the classical period that forms the basis for our Eurocentric values today, as prostitutes and courtesans at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Their sexuality was defined and exploited by a ruling male population. 

The Goddess had a number of faces-she was life-giver and life-taker. What she created she would eventually take back into herself. By the time of the Iron Age, her image had become fragmented, changing from a unified representation of Mother Earth whose power was imminent in nature into individual goddesses like Cybele, Persephone, Athena, Hera, etc. For the invading nomads to conquer they had to divide. Aspects embodied by a pregnant female deity as metaphors for the whole of nature became isolated and emerged as the more abstract gods and goddesses whose eminence existed outside or above the earthly world. In northern Europe, Teutonic gods whose power derived from ownership, dominance and war almost completely eclipsed the older Earth Mother traits. Our Western culture today has been described as lacking a unifying spiritual tradition that would help us understand ourselves. I see us as a body with the arms, legs and head separated and floating around, unable to put itself back together. 

The concept of the deities had changed, but the intrinsic meaning and natural association with the Goddess never died out completely. Though Zeus, Thor, Marduk and Yahweh dominated in the Iron Age, older "pagan" ideologies rooted in the land, the soil, food, reproduction in what make people and living beings-sentient and interdependent-also prevailed. The sky gods took over the garden and created man, and out of him, woman. This occurred at the same time as society was separating itself from nature, but beneath the surface the nurturing Mother is there. She reminds us of her power with storms, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions. Before Marija Gimbutas, this Neolithic world remained an uncharted, sleeping landscape. The sacred feminine represented by the Goddess is really an ideology that advocates respect for ourselves and the living context of our natural world-an ideology in alignment with ecological advocacy today. 
 

Before she died, Marija was interested in what happened to the image of the sacred feminine after the Neolithic Era. In my article for the anthology honoring Marija, I traced the development of the Goddess from the time of Solomon, around 1000 BC, through the Renaissance, with particular emphasis on the image and story of the two main female figures in Christian tradition, the Magdalen and the Virgin Mary. Since there is scant scriptural information about the lives of these important women, it was necessary to look at apocryphal texts, some of which were only found in 1945 and released to the public in the last few years. These include the Nag Hammadi gospels, and those found at Kumran near the Dead Sea. These noncanonical documents are very controversial today and have stimulated much argument, intrigue and disagreement. They will surely change the face of Christian history as they are examined during the next century. Barbara Thiering, an Old Testament scholar from Australia, wrote a book called Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1992, which proposed a radical revision of the life of Jesus, his relationship with Mary Magdalen, and events from early Christian history she based on translations of these newly found gospels. Between the time of Christ and the rule of Emperor Constantine, many gospels written around Christ's lifetime were ordered destroyed. The documents found in northern Egypt and  near the Dead Sea are invaluable in offering new information about the life and time of Jesus. 

In the Old Testament, The Song of Songs or Canticles may be the only holdover from the ancient goddess culture. Supposedly written at the time of King Solomon, this love poetry may be a fading glimpse of a culture based on love that was to change dramatically. This is the only extant love poetry in all of the authorized scriptures. From the 1st century AD on, the scriptures were subject to numerous translations, rewriting and editing, for political or other reasons. There is no reference to the life of the Virgin or the Magdalen before the birth of Christ in the New Testament. By studying apocryphal gospels like The Gospel of Mary, I found that both the Virgin Mary and the Magdalen were part of old families whose lineage can be traced to the sacred tradition of priestesses-the oracles, crones and sibyls who were the conduits for higher truth and knowledge-in the ancient world. In Egyptian and Greek tradition, for example, these sacred women sat in meditation in grottoes and caves, and the voice of the higher power spoke through them in parables and metaphors. 

In some of the apocryphal gospels the Magdalen is mentioned as the wife of Christ and his chosen spiritual successor. The lineages of ancient Hebrew families were brought together at a time of Roman occupation in what is now Israel to consolidate the local tribal power against external threat. According to a book by Susan Haskins called Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor, Mary was the primary disciple of Christ to whom he told things that he would tell no one else. She was one of the few he would kiss on the mouth, and some of the other apostles, like Peter, were terribly jealous of her. The dating of the apocryphal material Haskins referenced is likely closer to the time of Christ than that of the standard gospels. Many of these texts have a different perception of what was going on at that time than texts written decades to hundreds of years later by people looking back and trying to recreate the time or who were told to edit out references that would empower women. 

So, the Magdalen turns out to be a very important person, and her status is indicated by some of the symbols we associate with her. She anoints Christ's feet with an alabaster jar; this indicates she is a person of high standing, since alabaster is a very precious stone. It is an indication of her special function as priestess. Haskins also points out that no scriptural reference indicates the Magdalen was a prostitute. This was a later characterization. 

The apocryphal gospels also speculate about the miracles of the Bible and what happened to Jesus. Some scholars have found documents that say that he didn't die on the cross but went on to continue his mission, preaching in Greece. This is a seemingly heretical idea. Barbara Thiering makes the case that the Virgin Mary, the Magdalen and Joseph of Aramathea, a wealthy landowner and member of a radical Jewish sect to which Jesus belonged, went to the south of France after the crucifixion. Mary Magdalen, who was pregnant with Christ's child at the time, was literally and metaphorically "the container for the blood of Christ" or the Holy Grail. This relates to the tradition of the Black Madonna since the Virgin Mary and the Magdalen were probably Aramaic or North African and, therefore, dark-skinned. Our Eurocentric tradition has fashioned the Virgin Mary and Magdalen into images we can relate to. The Black Madonna, however, has an ancient lineage as the pagan Madonna, the Earth Madonna, the Madonna that lives in nature. She is derived from the Goddess whose spirituality derives from living in harmony with all life on Earth, an Earth-based spirituality. The Virgin of Guadalupe is a more recent example we're familiar with in California. 

North Africa was a place of asylum for Jews, the place they went to escape from the Romans. It is here that Mary and Joseph fled to escape the "massacre of the innocents." Our 20th century Eurocentric stereotypes have made it difficult for us to see how a dark-skinned Virgin could be possible. Christ could well have been dark himself. We find this hard to believe. Yet the earliest images we have of the Madonna depict a dark-skinned woman. These Byzantine images are found in numerous churches, many among the oldest in the Christian world. There are at least two of them, for instance, in Venice. Ean Begg has written an interesting book called The Cult of the Black Virgin, and one of the contributors to the anthology, Lucia Chiavola-Birnbaum, has written extensively on the Black Madonna in Italy. During the civil rights movement of the 1960s we began to look at the contributions of people of color to our history in the same way that we have been reconsidering women. In the Black Madonna, these two themes converge. 

History recreates its past to serve its present needs. This is certainly the basis of our academic understanding. With religion, the evolving politics of the Church through the centuries-which included imperial protocol when Constantine converted to Christianity-has figured prominently into the mix. Although all of this may sound heretical, the basic spiritual message has remained the same from East to West, Neolithic to contemporary, although in our modern technological world, with its emphasis on the material, it sometimes seems hard to find. 
 

As I traced the Goddess into the Renaissance, I found her veiled in images of the Virgin and the Magdalen throughout Europe. In Venice, she had a distinction that I did not find elsewhere. Venice, a multi-cultural island city-state whose prosperity was dependent upon international trading communities, was dedicated to the Virgin as Stella Maris or Star of the Sea-a name also given to Isis, Venus, Aphrodite and Ishtar who were associated with the ocean. Because Venice respected diversity, it was a safehaven for non-Venetians, Jews (Venice is the site of the oldest Jewish ghetto in Europe), pagans, and women. Venice also developed the first poor laws or "social welfare system" in Europe. When massive witch burnings were taking place in Europe, women went to Venice and Amsterdam for refuge. Women were not killed as witches in Venice. 

The Renaissance was a time for rediscovering classical Greek and Roman knowledge. Egypt was also very popular. The goddess culture was alive in the symbolism of Egypt, and Isis was one of the most popular sacred female images in Europe. There were very powerful cults dedicated to her in Europe in the Middle Ages and on into the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. Isis, like other pagan goddess figures, was subsumed by the person of the Virgin Mary, as in Titian's depiction of the bodily assumption of the Virgin into Heaven, called the Assunta. To appeal to a wide audience and to avoid censorship by the Church, artists often incorporated disguised symbols, recognizable only to a viewer who knew how to decode the image. Thus, the objects depicted in a painting can be read on many levels. For example, in Titian's painting The Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, the Virgin Mary is seen as a young girl, climbing a stone staircase to the temple where she is received by the Jewish patriarch. In the back is an obelisk and at the bottom is an old crone, the largest figure in the picture, in the guise of an old beggar woman seated on the ground with baskets, eggs and a dead black lamb. The crone is a self aware, powerful woman who represents the fusion of the old pagan way with the new Christian world. In the crowd women are  begging alms from very wealthy Venetian senators who are sponsors of this "school of charity." The painting includes portraits of well-known Venetians, of Titian's family and friends and an incredible socio-political subtext. 

Every detail of Titian's paintings was carefully planned. The details are often symbols that contain moral or social messages as a commentary on his times. As people moved farther and farther away from reverencing the natural world and into a world of power and material wealth, culture and religion slipped more and more out of balance. Costly temples and tombs were being built by the Church at the expense of the poor people who were being taxed to a point where they couldn't survive. Popes like Alexander VI and Julius II spent enormous fortunes, not only on the rebuilding of the Vatican, but also on expensive wars and power struggles with the other crowned heads of Europe. Many accused them of putting their personal power and family name before their sacred responsibilities to the Christian faith. History views this time as the great efflorescence of the Renaissance in art and culture, but it was a time of struggle and poverty for women, pagans and simple people whose resistance helped fuel the Reformation. Many could not relate to the rich, worldly clergy and wanted a return to their simpler, nature-based spirituality of quiet tradition. 

Titian grew up in a very beautiful and natural sub-Alpine region. Pagan, nature-based belief systems continued to exist in the mountainous regions of Europe into the Renaissance, and many of these poor peasants were considered heretics and witches. The power of these pagan traditions is seen even today in contemporary practices throughout the Western world. An example would be the Christmas tree, which is really a pagan custom that celebrates the winter solstice, as is the burning of a Yule log, or the lighting of Christmas candles. These traditions have been assimilated into our Judeo-Christian culture and are identified with the Christian tradition now. 

The arcane Neolithic belief in direct spiritual knowledge of God/dess through personal experience had never died out. One line of continuity through ancient Egypt was to be found in the ipopti, who spent some twenty years training in meditation to perfect the knowledge of transcendence and detachment from the material world. The experience of personal gnosis or union with the divine had been forced underground in many places, but interest in such a "universal" doctrine re-emerged enthusiastically during the 15th and 16th centuries in Europe. 

By the middle of the 16th century, the Church was profoundly threatened by anything that contradicted its scriptures, hierarchy, or power. Many people who studied these arcane traditions were convicted of heresy and burned to death or threatened with execution. Two well-known opponents of Church orthodoxy were Galileo, sentenced to house arrest for life instead of death after he recanted his scientific writings that contradicted the scriptural accounts of the heavens, and the other was Giordano Bruno. Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy for his equation of the material world with the sacred feminine. 
 
Because of political boons and her extraordinary naval power, Venice remained independent from Papal authority and sanctions. It was the only state allowed to appoint its own Bishop. Moreover, it had the largest Greek library in the world and one of the first printing houses in Europe. Artists and writers had more latitude than elsewhere in Europe, and arcane, non-Christian themes found greater opportunities for speculative investigations . 

Titian would certainly have known about  esoteric traditions, including the sacred feminine. His house was located in the midst of the Jewish ghetto where lived many wealthy and radical Jewish thinkers. Venetian women were among some of the most powerful in the world. And Titian executed some of the most sensuous, mythological paintings of goddesses ever done for famous Renaissance courts, including that of Isabella d'Este. He knew other well-known artists who celebrated the sacred feminine, including Leonardo da Vinci, also a master at synthesizing the Christian with the pagan. In his notebooks, Loenardo stated, "What is all this talk of the Son when all the churches are dedicated to the Mother?" His famous drawings and paintings celebrate self-contained women like the famous Mona Lisa, and the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and John the Baptist, now in London. 
 

What is sacred in one culture often becomes sinful or taboo for another. The dominating Indo-European culture had to erase the prevailing spiritual Neolithic goddess practices it overran. In our own Judeo-Christian tradition we can see this, for instance, in attitudes toward the snake-one of the oldest sacred symbols of life, death and regeneration in the Neolithic era. The snake comes up out of the earth. It sheds its skin. Most reproduce by laying eggs. It is one of the primary symbols for the mediation between life and death, the earth and the sky. Snakes were consulted as oracles and were kept by priestesses in sacred precincts. More cults were dedicated to snakes than any other natural creature. They were revered in Old Europe, ancient Middle East, India, China, and the Americas. They were supposedly very wise, and their unblinking eyes were believed to see everything. The earliest Egyptian symbol for the Goddess was a cobra. Egyptians, Greeks and Romans believed snakes protected their houses and brought them good luck. A spiraled snake biting its tail to form a circle symbolizing eternity-the endless cycle of annihilation and creation-was called a uroboros. In many creation myths a snake created the universe. Christians, Jews, and Muslims made the snake responsible for the "Fall of Man." Why is woman blamed for the expulsion from the Garden of Eden? Her garden? Eve was said to have collaborated with the snake. (Her name in Hebrew is similar to the word for snake.) How could such a positive symbol in matrifocal cultures become so negative? Obviously, this primordial symbol had to be redefined to strip it of its power. So the fathers of the early Church blamed the snake for bringing death and evil into the world. After the Indo-European invasion and the advent of linear calendars, people began to look at existence as finite and nature as a resource from which they were now separate. They began to live in their minds instead of experiencing a natural synthetic blend of the tactile, intuitive and intellectual. Life became more idea-based, defining the natural world and everyone else as "other." Alterity, or viewing the rest of the world as "outside" or "other," indicates a lack of understanding. Once outside our natural cycles and context we feel disconnection and fear. A fragmented, separate world becomes unpredictable and threatening. In an ideal world, a mother bonds with her child, and the child becomes an extension of herself. She feels what her child feels. There is no sense of alterity or separateness. In fact, many women "know" when their children-or perhaps those to whom they are very close-are in danger, even when they are not with them, because of this instinctive connection. Alterity is a metaphor for the expulsion from the garden. With fear comes blame, loss, isolation; they follow one another like dominoes. So the Church fathers blamed Eve and expelled the Goddess from her own garden along with everyone else. 
 
We now see that a paradigm shift occurred at the beginning of traditional Western history, and that this history is much older and very different from the prevailing patriarchal depictions. Current reconstructions of our past allow for a broader, more inclusive picture. Revisioning ourselves can lead to equally profound future paradigm shifts. Awareness of multi-ethnic contributions to human understanding are emerging in school curricula and in mainstream conversation. In my own work I am reassessing American history and art in order to balance traditional views with gender and ethnic contributions over the past 600 years. This attempt to "humanize" our naturally diverse history by inclusion represents many of the same values of tolerance and unity found in the Neolithic world. A dedicated core of people including Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States, are revising our history. Some others are moving more reluctantly in this direction. I am fortunate to have the opportunity and commitment to undertake this challenge in my courses at an institution that allows for innovation. 

Technology is rapidly changing the face of our world culture. My students must know how to work with computers and incorporate the realities of the Internet. Deciding to view the new technological developments as opportunities to expand our communication, Joan Marler and I are setting up an international Archaeomythological Institute on the Web to facilitate worldwide discussion stimulated by Marija's ideas. Consequently, my focus has expanded to include training students to use technology to build community and reinforce the kind of values we need to revitalize our world; and to stress the ancient values and concepts that celebrate, nurture and support all of life on the planet. I believe it is possible to reestablish a balance and to realign ourselves with the rhythms and cycles of the natural world, and that technology will help us cast our nets across broader waters. At the moment, Mother Nature is reminding us that we really don't control things. The earthquakes and flooding in California are examples of natural circumstances that forced us to come together as people, regardless of backgrounds, to work together for mutual survival. Having a common focus inspired by Nature helps us realize that we are part of a transient web of interconnected life. 

Unfortunately, in this time of Promethean greed, ecological and psychological damage threatens not only Homo sapiens but the entirety of nature. Paleontologists view the world from the telescope of millions of years, and see that the Earth will abide despite our ignorance and disregard. With the help of the contemporary goddess movement, women and men are recognizing that nurturing, supporting, caring and loving one another and the natural world offers an alternative to sporting the latest consumer fad. 
 
As an optimist with an enduring faith, I believe that each of us is here for a reason and can make a difference. Now, an official "crone," with less emotional baggage and some of the wisdom that comes with age, I can consider what will bring personal fulfillment and benefit to other life at the same time. My generation--the baby boomers--are reflecting on our lives and the limitless ways we can manifest joy. I believe that by embracing the essence of life, when our time comes, today or tomorrow, we can leave happily. 

From the most ancient of traditions comes the reassurance that love is the overriding principle of creation. In our personal expressions and actions each one of us has the mandate and responsibility to do our best to live our truth. A saint once said that when something feels loving and in harmony within and without, then it is true. So my prayer for us now is that the sacred self and the natural essence of all things come full circle again, animating our snakey-tailed uroboros to celebrate the cosmic unity of being. May we all blessed be.