Extracts from TARA AND THE BLACK MADONNA, Penguin, USA, and THE BOND BETWEEN WOMEN, Riverhead Books, New York.

… I realize how lonely I am for models of women who have stepped outside the traditional religions yet continue to draw on what underlies and unites them.

Have not the horrors of twentieth-century warfare made many think that whatever we had called God in the past had itself been defeated and fled the world, abandoning us to our own destruction?

[We need] the Mary we have not seen in the West… a fierce Mary, a terrific Mary, a fearsome Mary, a protectress who does not allow her children to be hunted, tortured, murdered, and devoured. We need a mother who protects us, who is like a lioness defending her young, is terrible when crossed. I began to imagine Mary differently. I imagined Mary as a fierce mother one morning in my prayers and meditation. I imagined her protecting Christ.

Perhaps Marian apparitions are a Western way of glimpsing what the world’s mystical traditions and the East have always known: Creation, nature, is the body of God. Not for our dominion but for our communion, our common union.

I think these reported appearances of the Divine Mother as holographic phenomena, interior images issuing forth, projected from the collective human psyche, archetypal code in iconographic form, showing us what we need to honor, to include, to bring home, in order to redeem the world: the sacred feminine.

What we imagine about God, Tara, the Buddha, Jesus, Durga — whatever or whomever it is we might call the divine — can be made up only of what we have seen people doing as they live out their lives.

… while God may be one, the faces and names of God are many.

May all the fierce forms of Tara come to the protection of children everywhere, may compassion burn a hole through the night. Dear Tara Buddha, dear Mary, Mother of God, dear God the Mother, Wisdom herself, may it be so.