#barbara mor
“Night, to ancient people, was not an ‘absence of light’ or a negative darkness, but a powerful source of energy and inspiration. At night the cosmos reveals herself in her vastness, the earth opens to moisture and germination under moonlight, and the magnetic serpentine current stirs itself in the underground waters–just as the thick, snakey spray of stars, the Milky Way, winds across the night sky. Moon phases are a part of the great cosmic dance in which everything participates: the movement of the celestial bodies, the pulse of tides, the circulation of blood and sap in animals and plants. Observation of the night sky, of the stars, and especially of the moon, was the beginning of mathematics and science.”
— Monica Sjöö & Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother
“The witch-burnings did not take place during the ‘Dark Ages,’ as we commonly suppose. They occurred between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries– precisely during and following the Renaissance, that glorious period when, as we are taught, ‘men’s’ minds were being freed from bleakness and superstition. While Michelangelo was sculpting and Shakespeare writing, the witches were burning. The whole secular ‘Enlightenment,’ in fact, the male professions of doctor, lawyer, judge, artist, all rose from the ashes of the destroyed women’s culture. Renaissance men were celebrating naked female beauty in their art, while women’s bodies were being tortured and burned by the hundreds of thousands all around them.”
- Monica Sjöö & Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth (1987)
“The witch-burnings did not take place during the ‘Dark Ages,’ as we commonly suppose. They occurred between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries– precisely during and following the Renaissance, that glorious period when, as we are taught, ‘men’s’ minds were being freed from bleakness and superstition. While Michelangelo was sculpting and Shakespeare writing, the witches were burning. The whole secular ‘Enlightenment,’ in fact, the male professions of doctor, lawyer, judge, artist, all rose from the ashes of the destroyed women’s culture. Renaissance men were celebrating naked female beauty in their art, while women’s bodies were being tortured and burned by the hundreds of thousands all around them.”
- Monica Sjöö & Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth (1987)
