“Many questions come to mind. How influenced by contemporary religions were many of the scholars who wrote the texts available today? How many scholars have simply assumed that males have always played the dominant role in leadership and creative invention and projected this assumption into their analysis of ancient cultures? Why do so many people educated in this century think of classical Greece as the first major culture when written language was in use and great cities built at least twenty-five centuries before that time? And perhaps most important, why is it continually inferred that the age of the "pagan" religions, the time of the worship of female deities (if mentioned at all), was dark and chaotic, mysterious and evil, without the light of order and reason that supposedly accompanied the later male religions, when it has been archaeologically confirmed that the earliest law, government, medicine, agriculture, architecture, metallurgy, wheeled vehicles, ceramics, textiles and written language were initially developed in societies that worshiped the Goddess? We may find ourselves wondering about the reasons for the lack of easily available information on societies who, for thousands of years, worshiped the ancient Creatress of the Universe.”
“Ancient astrology, and, to some degree,its modern descendant, are compelling mixtures of science (or pseudo-science) and classical myth.Jung interpreted astrology as the psychology of antiquity.The stars and planets, he suggested, are ‘archetypal images’: manifestations of the collective unconscious. Jung’s student, Erich Neumann, developed his ideas on archetypes, especially in relation to the archetype of the nurturing Goddess. His ideas were influential upon those who later promoted goddess worship, a central element in most (though not all) New Age practice. New Agers believe that the energy of the cosmos flows from one single source (monism), and that what we call ‘god’or ‘goddess’ is a principle identified with the cosmos. New Age philosophy has embraced the idea that goddess worship originated in prehistoric times, when, broadly speaking, matriarchal society preceded the patriarchal order, and people worshipped the ‘Great Goddess’.”
“... researchers argue that it's of utmost importance to unravel the nature of black holes, lest we someday begin to worship them. Sounds ridiculous, but whole segments of humankind have often revered the unknowable, venerating that which cannot be tested experimentally. Come to think of it, many still do in twenty-first-century society.”
“Eldest taught me about ancient religions that worshiped the sun. I never understood why- it's just a ball of light and heat. But if the sun of Sol-Earth swirls in colors and lights like that girl's hair, well, I can see why the ancients would worship that.”
“When they realized they were in the desert, they built a religion to worship thirstiness.”
“The classical heritage as shaped by and filtered through Roman culture had two great flaws. First, it prevented the very rich oral cultures of the ancient Mediterranean from surviving from antiquity into later times. All that was left as creative forces were Greek philosophy and Roman law. These were very substantial cultures but they represented a great narrowing of what could be passed on from antiquity to later centuries..."Second, another deficiency of classical culture was its lack of social conscience, its obliviousness to the slavery, poverty, disease, and everyday cruelty endured by more than half of the fifty million people who inhabited the empire. The classical heritage represented a narrow and insensitive social and political theory reinforcing a miserably class-ridden and technologically stagnant society.”