Traditionally religion means doctrine and belief, leaders and worshippers, hierarchical control of the patriarchy. To create a new ecological story of how we can live peacefully together is the reason for Dr. Neutopia's formulation of the myth of the Gaia-Messiah [Earth Messiah].  The aim here is intuitive and conceptual evolution - mutual empowerment by sharing Wisdom , unfolding the expression of transformation.
 
 

The Gaia-Messiah theory incarnates a liberated version of Carl Jung's animus/anima theory of female/male relationships.
 
 

Humanity images the Divine, and because it was created in the dual order of male and female it cannot be redeemed by a male saviour alone. The Messiah must appear in female form  [The Feminine, really, rather than female] as well. The messianic community also must reflect this partite of male and female in its organization structure (Ruether 1983).
 
 

In Mary's Daly's book,"Beyond God the Father" she also understands the messianic role of feminism. She says that the role of the Antichrist and the Second Coming of Woman are synonymous. She writes, "This Second Coming is not a return of Christ but a new arrival of female Presence, one strong and powerful but enchained since the dawn of patriarchy." The Second Coming is, therefore, "the prophetic dimension in the symbol of the Great Goddess".  Daly believes that symbolically the Virgin must free and "save" the son.
 
 

In agreement with the above feminist thinkers, cultural historian, William Irwin Thompson, sees Eros as the mover behind the next great world epoch. He says the last one crucified Christ, nailing "consciousness down into matter". His death made Thanatos into a sacrament. Now what is required is the physical union of Aphrodite and Eros to give birth to the eternal on the physical plane liberating an epoch of love from the Christian death-trip. Thompson calls their embrace the touch of matter and antimatter (Thompson 1981, 252). Therefore, the Gaia-Messiah theory delineates a feminist partnership, the emancipator of the wo/man mind through their erotic mystical union.

As we start to write this final chapter, an image comes to mind: the gates of thousands upon thousands of sacred gardens are flung open from within, accompanied by laughter that cannot be contained. And with the laughter comes speech, because in our exuberance we are no longer able to silence ourselves. We remember how awesome and heavy the words "spiritual responsibility" felt to us as we began to write this book, like a weight, a duty. We intended of course to meet that responsibility ... manfully. (Manfully! lt just slipped out.)
 
 

That is how patriarchs would put it - spirituality as shouldering a responsibility. But as we write this now, there is another language and another set of images that come to us. The language, as the women tell their stories, does not depict a dutiful shouldering of burdens but a spontaneous and natural letting go, in the same way that apples fall from a tree when they're ripe and ready for eating. And the images are not only of women unlocking gates, opening doors, and emerging from their secret, sacred gardens, but of the new being birthed in a profusion of forms. Women are dreaming of being initiated, and they dream of new visions beginning to take shape in developer's fluid and computer tapes with images so new the computers are not yet able to process the information. The language and images are saying that the process of maturing that fulfills each one of us personally is also what the world most needs from us at this time.
 
 

A Native American teacher describes this as "an unveiling of what is already inside us". "We are trying to form a new world now," she says, "and what is really new lies in that great womb where all possibilities are. We need to go in and bring it forth." She speaks particularly to women: "If we who know what it is to bring forth the unknown from our own bodies can't be comfortable with this process, we'll just continue to perpetuate the old ways and we'll all be in trouble. Because, while it's scary for us women, it's far scarier for men who have never had the experience of giving birth and who must be very frightened."
 
 

But for all the force of this warning, it is not only stepping into the mystery that brings the fear. The fear comes when we sit down to breakfast. It leans over our shoulder and reads the statistics in the morning paper, numbing us so we don't feel the cold or hunger or terror beneath the abstractions. And often it walks beside us in the evening as we cross a dimly lit street, and whispers to us as we fall asleep at night. Is it now that we are to open the gates of the Sacred Garden? Now that our voices are to be heard? Are we to give birth to the new possibilities in times like these? "You could not be born at a better period than the present, when we have lost everything," the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil wrote in her journal as World War II was gathering. And her words continue to resonate powerfully through us today. For what we have lost is the certainty that our planet will continue to support life. We now know in a way that humans have never known before that our lives are permeable, fragile, and delicately interwoven with all other life on this planet.
 
 

We know in the most down-to-earth ways possible that what we humans do affect not only other humans around the world, but oceans, atmospheres, wildlife, trees, and our children's children's children.

Clearly, it is time to ask ourselves where we are going. And as every woman we interviewed agreed, where we are going, where we must go, is back into daily life. They speak not only of the need to slow down and create an opening for awareness of the sacred in our daily lives, but of the need to embody, to enact, to be a vessel for that awareness so that it flows into all our relationships. Anna Douglas, a Buddhist meditation teacher, said simply: "Our work as women is not to create new spiritual empires, but to bring what we've learned from our practices back home."
 
 

Brooke Medicine Eagle told us that a male friend came to visit her one day and spoke for some time about the dangers and crises facing the planet. It is a time, he said, when the deepest kind of spiritual work is needed. Brooke agreed. And then he confided, "Some of us are building pillars of light now to hold up the sky, and you are one of us." "I think it's quite different than that," Brooke replied. "We don't need to build pillars of light! By being willing to receive, we draw down the light. It pours through us continually wherever we stand. We need to share it with our community - to talk about it, to live it out and hook it into the earth."
 

She paused for a moment, reflecting. "That's the challenge for me now," she said. "To be able to stand and hold open a space for Spirit to come into all my relationships. My spiritual name is Chalise, and I feel I need to be what that name says - a chalice, an active, receptive, open space for the Great Mystery. On the other hand, I also need to be a Medicine Eagle who embodies Spirit and brings it into daily life. The challenge," she concluded with the smile of a warrior spreading across her face, "is not just to have visions and dreams, but to make them real."
 

To embody the Sacred so deeply that it flows into all our relationships - this, the women say, is where we are going now. It is where we need to go. And, not incidentally, it is where we have come from. "I am born connected," the artist Meinrad Craighead writes. "I am born remembering rivers flowing from my mother's body into my body." Connected in childhood, we blend with the flow of life. As we mature, the boundaries of self emerge to make their separations between "me" and "you" and "others". This, of course, is essential so that the "child" can become an individual. But to become an individual is not yet to become mature.
 

Maturing calls for "a stride of soul" in which the experience and discernment of the individual and the connected awareness of the child come together in the responsive, responsible consciousness of the adult who can then take the next developmental step: to be in good relationship with all of life. The awesome planetary crisis in which we are now living is literally flinging us toward this. And the women we've interviewed are telling us that it is time to take this step, time for the home-leavers to become homemakers, and time for those who have been exiles from the Sacred Garden to become its gardeners. We want to emphasize that this new step is not mysticism. Mysticism - direct knowing of the ineffable mystery - is only knowing.
 

Some might say that this new step is Christianity, the Christianity of the gospels in which Jesus lives the Word, rather than having mystical visions or experiences. Others might say that it is the realized consciousness of the Maitreya, the Buddha of the future. Still others will see it as the emergence of the Goddess in our own time. And we would not disagree at all. But what seems new to us, and particularly womanly, is that there is no single Saviour being awaited. Rather, the Saviour is spread out among us, emerging from each of us as we bring the fruits from our Sacred Garden into our daily lives. It is we who must save us.

 

For every woman we have named, there are a hundred who speak; for every hundred who speak, there are a thousand who know; for every thousand who know, there are ten thousand who do not yet know because their truth lies still deeper than all the ones who speak and know and can be named. And every one of us is needed now. To do whatever we can do: to be named, to speak, to know, to not know. And everyone, the one who can be named, the one who can speak, the one who knows, and the one who does not yet know, is within each of us.