Internet Book of Shadows, (Various Authors), [1999], at sacred-texts.com
The Gaea Thesis IN order the understand the nature of the All-Mother, we must first understand our own origins. Each of began our individual life as a single, fertilized cell or zygote. In the processs of its innumerable divisions and multiplications, that cell kept dividing up and redistributing the very same protoplasm. That protoplasm which now courses through all of the several trillion cells of your adult body is the very same substance which once coursed through the bosy of that original zygote. For when a cell reproduces, the mother cell does not remain intact, but actually becomes the two new daughter cells. ANd this is why, no matter how many times a cell fissions in the process of embryological development, all the daughter cells collectively continue to compprise but one single organism. We may imagine that, should our cells have consciousness akin to our own, they may very well fancy themselves to be independent entities living and dying in a world that to them would seem to be merely an inanimate environ- ment. But we know them to be in fact minute components of the far vaster living beings that we ourselves are. Over four billion years ago, life on Earth bega, as do we all, with a single living cell containing a replicating molecule of DNA. From that point on that original cell, the first to develop the awesome capacity for reproduction, divided and redividied and subdivided its protoplasm into the myriads of plants and animals, including ourselvs, which now inhabit this third planet from the Sun. But no matter how many times a cell fissions in the process of embryolog- ical development, all the daughter cells collectively continue to comprise but one single organism. ALl life on Earth comprises the body of single vast living being -- Mother Earth Herself. The Moon is Her radiant heart, and in the tides beat the pulse of Her blood. That protoplasm which coursed through the body of that first primeval ancestral cell is the very protoplasm which now courses through every cell of every living organism, plant or animal,of our planet. And the soul of our planetary biosphere is She whom we call Goddess/ "First life on my sources First drifted and swam Out of me are the forces Which save it or damn Out of man and woman and wild-beast and bird BOOK OF SHADOWS VOLUME The SIXTH pp. 2400 -2856 RIDERS OF THE CRYSTAL WIND ............................................................................. 2400