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When Yahweh creates, he creates man of the earth and breathes life into the formed body. He’s not himself there present in that form. But the Goddess is within as well as without. Your body is of her body. There is in these mythologies a recognition of that kind of universal identity.
Originally Artemis herself was a deer, and she is the goddess who kills deer; the two are dual aspects of the same being. Life is killing life all the time, and so the goddess kills herself in the sacrifice of her own animal. Each life is its own death, and he who kills you is somehow a messenger of the destiny that was yours from the start.
Going back at least nine thousand years to the early agriculture of the Near East and Old Europe, we have a tradition of the power of the Goddess and of her child who dies and is resurrected—namely, it is we who come from her, go back to her, and rest well in her. This tradition was carried through the cults of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and down into the Classical world, before finally delivering the message into Christian teaching
I work out on a veranda––they call it a "lanai" out there––with my back to the ocean and to what's going on. What's going on is usually a startling bikini walking past. I couldn't write about anything but the Goddess if I were looking in the other direction. So mine is a nice sort of forest to retire to.
On the simplest level, then, the Goddess is the Earth. On the next, archaic level, She is the surrounding sky. On the philosophic level, She is Maya, the forms of sensibility, the limitations of the senses that enclose us so that all of our thinking takes place within her bounds—She is IT. The Goddess is the ultimate boundary of consciousness in the world of time and space.
The fairy world is just one small dimension deeper than the visible world; it’s everywhere. The fairies are the inhabiting nature powers, and the reason they are so fascinating and enchanting is that their nature and your unconscious nature, your deep nature, are the same. The fairies are representatives of that permanent energy consciousness that underlies all the phenomenal forms of life. This is Mother Goddess stuff.
The goddess is red with the fire of life; the earth, the solar system, the galaxies of far-extending space all swell within her womb. For she is the world creatrix, ever mother, ever virgin. She encompasses the encompassing, nourishes the nourishing, and is the life of everything that lives. She is also the death of everything that dies. The whole round of existence is accomplished within her sway, from birth, through adolescence, maturity, and senescence, to the grave. She is the womb and the tomb: the sow that eats her farrow. Thus she unites the "good" and the "bad," exhibiting the two modes of the remembered mother. The devotee is expected to contemplate the two with equal equanimity.
From the Pyrenees to Lake Baikal, the evidence now is before us of a Late Stone Age mythology in which the outstanding figure was the Naked Goddess. And she can already be recognized in a number of her better-known later roles: as Lady of the Wild Things, Protectress of the Hearth, Consort of the Moon-bull, who dies to be resurrected––with herself thereby a personification of the mystery of the moon, which has the power to shed its shadow (as the serpent sloughs its skin) to appear reborn. Not a few of her images suggest pregnancy: she was almost certainly a patroness of childbirth and fecundity.
The spirit is really the bouquet of life. It is not something breathed into life, it comes out of life. This is one of the glorious things about the mother-goddess religions, where the world is the body of the Goddess, divine in itself, and divinity isn't something ruling over and above a fallen nature....

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