The Goddess is the most ancient manifestation of the deeply rooted human urge to project its inner sense of the sacred onto a supreme deity. That such a powerful creator/protector should have been universally concieved of as female is hardly surprising: in prehistoric times, women's apparently awesome powers over life--of spontaneously generating children, sustaining their offspring with breast milk, and surviving the menstrual blood loss which surely should have killed them--were regarded as supernatural; the masculine role in procreation was unknown. Thus, early societies were matriarchal, venerating the female as all-important.
-Clare Gibson, From Goddess Symbols
