Extracts from THE POLITICS OF FEMINIST SPIRITUALITY edited by Charlene Spretnak. Anchor Books, New York, and from OF WOMAN BORN, W. W. Norton & Company, New York.

In arguing that we have by no means explored or understood our biological grounding, the miracle and paradox of the female body and its spiritual and political meanings, I am really asking whether or not women cannot begin, at least, to think through the body, to connect what has been so cruelly dis organized — our great mental capacities, hardly used; our highly developed tactile sense; our genius for close observation; our complicated, pain-enduring, multi-pleasured physicality … there is for the first time today a possibility of converting our physicality into both knowledge and power.

In the earliest artifacts we know, we encounter the female as primal power.

She is beautiful in ways we have almost forgotten, or which have become defined as ugliness. Her body possesses mass, interior depth, inner rest, and balance. … the ancient Goddess is not beckoning to her worshipers. She exists, not to cajole or reassure men, but to assert herself.

The images of the pre-patriarchal goddess cults did one thing: they told women that power, awesomeness, and centrality were theirs by nature, not by privilege or miracle, the female was primary.

Patriarchal man created a system which turned against woman her own organic nature, the source of her awe and her original powers.