In the first essay--the one which gave the book its title, the author, describes the developmental path our planet might have taken if the moon had not been present in orbit over the earth. He concludes that without the moon the tides on the earth's oceans would have been much lower, winds would have been far fiercer and more violent all across the face of the globe, days would have been significantly shorter, and while, even without a moon, life might well have evolved on this planet, it would have developed in response to far less hospitable conditions, and therefore might well have evolved quite differently. He concludes by suggesting that the debt we owe our silent satellite consists of more than romantic night-time skies, and easy rhymes for love songs.

As I thought about this, I found myself thinking that if the moon has played such a profound role in shaping a physical environment in which the human animal might evolve, what might have been its role in shaping the mental, the cultural,the religious environment in which the human soul might evolve. As I pondered that question, I found myself thinking of something I had read as I prepared for a seminar Beverly and I would lead at Chautauqua Institute in western New York. The author was describing a piece of bone which had been found near the head waters of the Nile. It was dated to between 30,000 and 40,000 years before the common era. On that piece of bone were found a series of small scratches. Archeologists were not certain whether those marks were the consequence of deliberate human activity, or simply the result of the piece of bone being dragged over gavel in the bed of a swiftly running stream. Nor were they certain whether those marks, if they were the result of human agency, had any significance.

Then in the ninteen-sixties, the bone was subjected to more careful and elaborate examination. The result of that study led some scholars to believe that the marks on the bone were deliberate, were the result of human activity, and what is more, that they were a kind of calendar, tracking the career of the moon in the night sky. Subsequent studies on other such artifacts from other places seemed to confirm the conclusion. Our ancient ancestors, as early as 40,000 bce, and perhaps as far back as Neanderthal, were using a complex system of notation to keep track of the moon.

As I reflected on this possibility, I remembered what I had read concerning the Goddess of Laussel, whose image adorns the cover of this morning's order of service. She is carved over a rock shelter in France, not far from the caves of Lascaux, a rock shelter which had housed our ancestors in the stone age. The little Goddess is only seventeen inches high. She was carved into the rock over twenty thousand years before the common era. Like many of the goddesses from that age, this one has no distinguishable facial features. She stands naked, with large hips, pendulous breasts, her left hand resting on her pregnant abdomen and holding in her right hand a crescent-shaped object which has been defined as a bison's horn. Her head is turned toward the crescent she is holding.

The careful, deliberate arrangement of the Goddess suggests to scholars that the artists who carved her there on solid rock, using pieces of bone and horn as their only tools, were seeking to convey an important message or insight. The nature of that message may be found in the fact that the crescent toward which her face is turned has carved on it thirteen notches, which some scholars suggest are a reference to the thirteen days of the waxing moon and the thirteen months of the lunar year. Nor is this the only such sculpture to be found. Indeed, the stone goddesses of the paleolithic are among the most enduring evidence of the sophistication of our stone-age ancestors. Most famous of these sculptures is, of course, the Goddess of Willendorf, a statue less that five inches tall. Like the Goddess of Laussel, Willendorf has no facial features. She is nude, big-hipped, with pendulous breasts and a swelling abdomen. Around her featureless head are seven concentric circles of carefully engraved notches. The scholars remind us that seven is the approximate number of nights in each phase of the moon.

Something was going on in the minds of our remote ancestors more than 40,000 years ago, and it is in that something that our artistic traditions, our cultural life, perhaps even our peculiar mental capacities may be rooted, and that something seems to have been related to the presence of the moon.

In a book entitled THE MYTH OF THE GODDESS: EVOLUTION OF AN IMAGE, Anne Baring and Jules Cashford speculate on what that something might have been. They ask us to imagine that we are living in the old stone age. They ask us also to disabuse ourselves of the notion that our ancestors lived lives that were brutish and fear-ridden and consumed by the incessant struggle to wrest something to eat from a hostile and reluctant environment. Indeed, recent analyses of hunter-gatherer cultures suggest that while their life-spans may have been somewhat shorter than ours, there is ample reason to believe that they lived in a world which supplied their needs with surprising abundance, that less of their time was spent in earning a living than is the case with us, their civilized descendants. What is more, there is no evidence that our early ancestors found themselves engaged in fierce and unremitting competition with each other for the resources of the earth.

Imagine, say Baring and Cashford, that you are sitting at night at the mouth of the cave or shelter which is the home of your clan. You look out over the valley at a sky which is deeper and darker than anything we, in our light-littered world, can imagine. The stars glitter above us, and framed in the mouth of the cave is the moon, bright and clear and unmistakable, drawing every eye to it. It would not take long before even the most casual observer would realize several things about the moon. The first would be that the moon seems to have a face, although its features are never clear and evade precise delineation. The second would be that the moon is never the same. Each night it is a slightly different size and configuration. The third observation, following quickly on the second would be that though it is always changing, the moon proceeds through a regular and predictable pattern. It is born, it grows to maturity, it declines and it then disappears. For a week it is gone from sight. And then, a small sliver of light framed against the darkness at the mouth of the cave announces its return.

Baring and Cashford suggest that observing this pattern of the moon might explain the emergence of abstract thinking among early human beings. The dark of the moon led our ancestors, they suggest, to reflect on that which was not physically present, to call into mind that which could not be seen, to muse on the meaning of something which was present only in their minds. It was the moon, they suggest, which led early human beings to wonder about the intangible, the insensible, that which can not be seen but can only be imagined. It was the moon which lured the human race into a radical new capacity--the ability to deal with the world imaginatively and abstractly.

Early human beings observed one other important fact about the moon. There seemed to be a clear relation between the cycles of the moon and the human female's menstrual cycle. Something that was going on up there, was connected to something that was going on down here. And that something was involved with the most profound mystery of all--the birth of new life from the body of a woman. And it was in that moment, I would suggest to you, that religion emerged within the human community. Religion was the result of attempting to understand this mysterious connection between the human clan and the career of the moon as she passed nightly through the sky, waxing and waning, disappearing and returning.

As the ability to think abstractly grew, human beings saw in the journey of the moon through the sky a metaphor for their own journey through life. Like the moon, and in response to her rhythms, they were born small and weak and vulnerable; over time they grew into maturity, strong and full and competent; and then, as time passed, they declined into weakness and vulnerability and finally passed into the darkness. But, if the career of the moon is related to the human journey, is it not possible, they must have reasoned, that just as the moon is reborn after its time in the darkness, we too may be reborn when our time of darkness has passed.

Here, I submit, is the root of the religious impulse--a profound sense of connection and continuity between human beings and the world which nurtures them, a sense of being a home in that world, rooted in its cycles, and a profound trust that the process out of which they emerged and in terms of which they lived would not desert them at the moment of death. Even in death, they would remain part of the pattern, in the tender keeping of the sacred process.

Here, it is suggested, is the truth all those goddess images which have come down to us from our remote past are whispering to us. Here, it is suggested, is the meaning of the honor which is still paid to the Goddess in her guises as the Virgin, and the saints. In the presence of that which gives us birth, which nurtures and sustains us, and which receives us when life has used us up, we are in the presence of the truly sacred. It was in celebration of this relationship between human beings and their world that the Goddesses were conceived and the Gods were invented. It was in celebration of this relationship that rites and rituals of thanksgiving emerged. It was out of a sense of the fullness of being that religion evolved.

The religion engendered by the moon would have been rooted in a deep sense of participation in the world. It would have celebrated that relationship. It would have seen death not as punishment nor as defeat but as an inevitable consequence of being part of the rhythm of life. The religion engendered by the moon would have been a religion of gratitude for the gifts of life, including that which dies so that others might live. It would have been a religion of plenty and amplitude and thanksgiving. And it would have engendered a culture which reflected those fundamental attributes.

Now, I submit to you that this is quite a different story of the origin of religion than the one we have usually told ourselves. Religion, we have often been told, is rooted in ignorance and emerged out of the attempt of the human race to deal with danger, with uncertainty, with fear. Unable to understand their world, threatened at every moment by forces over which they had no control, facing disease and famine and death at every turn, people created gods and invented religion as a hedge against the dark powers which threatened to overwhelm the fragile human community. According to this conventional theory, religion was invented to supply answers to questions which seemed unanswerable, and to offer reassurance in the face of unbearable terror. Rituals were evolved to reassure us and to help us live with the inevitable pain and suffering of life. That is the understanding of religion which has shaped much of western culture.

Where the roots of this kind of religion are to be found, I am not quite certain. Maria Gimbutas suggested that it emerged about five or six thousand years ago. Whatever its source, its consequences are obvious. A religion rooted in fear and ignorance has a vested interest in keeping people fearful and ignorant. Such a religion must invent terrors against which it can offer protection--a world filled with traps and snares, vengeful gods who demand strict and unquestioning obedience and threaten eternities of punishment for those who offer affront to the gods or their surrogates on earth. Such a religion has a vested interest in a culture of scarcity and want, so that it can promise the faithful a better life, if not in this world, then in the next. Such a religion has a vested interest in a culture of ignorance lest increasing knowledge undermine the authority of the gods and their minions. A religion of fear engenders a hierarchal society in which a few people, with access to the gods, mediate to the rest of society who remain dependent upon them for their very existence. A religion of fear is also a religion of violence, in which the hostilities and the tensions engendered by fear and uncertainty are periodically unleashed on outsiders.

An inevitable corollary of this kind of religion is the assumption that as we come to understand the world and develop an ability to control it, our need for religion will decline. We will discover that nothing is sacred, except, perhaps, our own minds. When that religion of fear and oppression is rejected, we may reject with it all the limits it attempted to impose, keeping its patterns of oppression and violence and coercion. Indeed we may turn those energies upon ourselves, our fellows, the earth herself in an effort to gain the power we once ascribed to the gods. The religion of fear ultimately engenders a world in which nothing is sacred, nothing is unthinkable and everything is possible--a world very much like the one in which we now find ourselves.

The older I grow, the more implacable is my opposition to the religions of fear and guilt. They are, in my judgment, at the root of much of the human tragedy we observe from day to day, and I am increasingly convinced that they are beyond redemption. With every passing day, I find myself drawn to the old religion which is hinted at by the Goddess of Laussel, standing silent guard at the entrance to an ancient rock shelter in France. Her one hand holding the crescent marked with the symbols of the moon, her other hand resting on her swelling abdomen, she seems to whisper that there is a connection between the two, that there are hidden connections everywhere, that, indeed, all things are one thing and that there is nothing we need fear; for all--the light and the dark, the joy and the sorrow, the pain and the delight--is part of the same one pattern which is earth and sky and moon and stars and birth and death,that we are at home in this world, part of its larger pattern and that we can trust ourselves to its processes for we have within us the resources to appreciate and the strength to endure.

I hold in the palm of my hand a replica of the Goddess of Willendorf, a small, heavy gift from some unknown artisan. She is serene and silent, her hands resting on her breasts, her body full, graved. As I feel her weight in my hand, I sense that the religion which can speak to this age and to the times in which we live is a very ancient religion--one which calls us to rejoice in this world which is our home, to see that the pattern of our lives and the pattern that is written on the cosmos are the same pattern.

The ancients suspected that they were somehow part of the process which the moon enacted on the night sky. We know that the pattern is even larger--that the substances which make up this earth and our bodies were born in the heart of exploding stars, that we are children of the same enormous process which brought into being the earth, the moon, the solar system, the galaxies, the universe itself, that the patterns of the macrocosm are repeated in the microcosm. We know that we live in a reflexive universe in which there is ultimate congruence between heaven and earth, between us and our world.

I reject the religions of fear and guilt which set us against ourselves, each other, and the world. I reach out for that older faith which calls us to be at home in the world, to see in its rhythms and patterns the evidence of the holy, to know that we and all the children of this living planet are rooted in that sacred reality which we never fully comprehend but which whispers to us in the cycle of the seasons, in the journey of the moon across the night sky, in the story we tell each other of the emergence of life in the universe, in the birth of our children and the death of our elders and in our own journey through time.

It has been suggested that part of our dilemma as a civilization is that we have made enormous technological progress without a concomitant moral development, that we have placed sophisticated weapons in the hands of a creature with the mind of a cave man. I no longer believe that is true. I believe that our technology threatens lethal consequences precisely because we have embraced the religions of guilt and fear and have cut ourselves off from the truth which our stone-age ancestors may have grasped as they sat at the entrance of their caves, contemplating the journey of the moon through the skies. That truth is that there is a hidden unity in all existence, that we are all part of a vast pattern, that we are at home in this world and are a part of this world and therefore, nothing and no one can be foreign to us. What we need is to root ourselves once more in the sacred process of existence, to see ourselves as part of the fabric of existence, to embrace the faith of those ancient moon-gazers.

In a curious way, it may be that only when it is directed by the mind of the cave-dweller will our technology cease to be demonic. It may well be that only by recovering the mind of the cave-dweller may we cease to be a threat to ourselves and to the earth which is our home.