She is Goddess. She is the moon overhead, full and ripe in the sky. She is the ground under our feet, pungent and ripe with promise. She is the huntress in the woods, fleet of foot, and the washerwoman at the stream, washing bloody garments predicting deaths to come. She wears a triple face: Maiden, Mother, Crone. She is gigantic—the 24,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf, and she is lithe—Eos, the goddess of dawn. She is Kali, she is Artemis and Athena and the Morrigan. As Gaia, the planet, she provides the sustenance that keeps us alive. As Hel, she walks us into the Underworld at our death. Eternal and cyclic, she is Goddess, the primal source of life and death.

Throughout history, the divine feminine has been worshiped and loved, reviled and vilified, adored and feared. She has been exalted, and she has been defiled. As the patriarchal religions rose, the Goddess went from being the soul of the world on which we walked to wearing the face of Eve, who fell from grace and brought down mankind. She began as Lilitu, an ancient and powerful goddess, and was disempowered and twisted into Lilith, a demoness devouring children.

She is every color. She is every size. She is every age. She is life, and she is death. She is also vast—so enormous that no single essay can ever hope to encapsulate her history.

The subject of the Goddess and her worship is so large that, in this essay, I’m going to attempt to narrow down the topic to focus on how P.C. and Kristin Cast have used aspects of  …