Once upon a time in the West, the focal figure of all mythology and worship was the bountiful goddess Earth. She reigned supreme as the mother and nourisher of life and as the receiver of the dead for rebirth. As Joseph Campbell here elucidates, she was more than a symbol of fertility; she was “a metaphysical symbol: the arch personification of the power of Space, Time, and Matter, within whose bound all beings arise and die.”
