Category: issue13

I grew up almost in the shadow of Pendle Hill, so stories of the seventeenth-century witch-hunt are familiar and haunting.  I remember pinching my mother’s copy of Robert Neill’s Mist over Pendle to read by torchlight under the bedclothes, and later finding Harrison Ainsworth’s rather Gothic Lancashire Witches interesting but ultimately unsatisfactory.

It was back in 1986 when, grappling with lack of sense of myself as feminine, that I first visited Crete. I barely knew the word Goddess, but as I stepped from the aeroplane She swept me up with loving warmth and into a journey of discovery and profound past connection with Her. If you want to experience Goddess culture you cannot do better than Minoan Crete.

I enjoyed this book more than I expected to, for I can’t remember the last time I teetered around on high heels but it was probably some time in the early 1970s – and yet I do relate in many ways to the seekers whom Alice describes – modern women who are just ridiculously busy and for whom “….any attempt at meditation has ended in a mental mediation between plans for supper … or fretting over the bills..”.  How well many of us will know that feeling!