The Gaea Thesis

     IN order the understand the nature of the All-Mother, we must first
     understand our own origins.  Each of began our individual life as a single,
     fertilized cell or zygote.  In the processs of its innumerable divisions
     and multiplications, that cell kept dividing up and redistributing the very
     same protoplasm.  That protoplasm which now courses through all of the
     several trillion cells of your adult body is the very same substance which
     once coursed through the bosy of that original zygote.  For when a cell
     reproduces, the mother cell does not remain intact, but actually becomes
     the two new daughter cells.  ANd this is  why, no matter how many times a
     cell fissions in the process of embryological development, all the daughter
     cells collectively continue to compprise but one single organism.
     We may imagine that, should our cells have consciousness akin to our own,
     they may very well fancy themselves to be independent entities living and
     dying in a world that to them would seem to be merely an inanimate environ-
     ment.  But we know them to be in fact minute components of the far vaster
     living beings that we ourselves are.

     Over four billion years ago, life on Earth bega, as do we all, with a
     single living cell containing a replicating molecule of DNA.  From that
     point on that original cell, the first to develop the awesome capacity for
     reproduction, divided and redividied and subdivided its protoplasm into the
     myriads of plants and animals, including ourselvs, which now inhabit this
     third planet from the Sun.

     But no matter how many times a cell fissions in the process of embryolog-
     ical development, all the daughter cells collectively continue to comprise
     but one single organism.  ALl life on Earth comprises the body of single
     vast living being -- Mother Earth Herself.  The Moon is Her radiant heart,
     and in the tides beat the pulse of Her blood.  That protoplasm which
     coursed through the body of that first primeval ancestral cell is the very
     protoplasm which now courses through every cell of every living organism,
     plant or animal,of our planet. And the soul of our planetary biosphere is
     She whom we call Goddess/

             "First life on my sources
             First drifted and swam
             Out of me are the forces
             Which save it or damn
             Out of man and woman
                     and wild-beast and bird


                            BOOK OF SHADOWS 



                           VOLUME The SIXTH

                            pp. 2400 -2856



                      RIDERS OF THE CRYSTAL WIND 
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2400