"In 1975 I was invited to give a talk about the Goddess at a WEA class in Birmingham, run by Keith Paton of Alternative Socialism. Since I wasn't sure what I did think I spent a month, very inspired, looking through the vast notes I had accumulated from many years of reading and wrote 30 packed A3 pages. I didn't know at the time what a paragraph was and it came out like a "stream of consciousness". No way could I go through all that material during a short class. I did read a bit and afterwards was asked by several of the women if they could type out the article to be run off on stencils so they could all have a copy to read. They ran off 500 ex. and that was the beginning of "The Great cosmic Mother" book!"

"In 1975 there was a Womanspirit conference at Wick court outside of Bristol organised by the Student Christian movement which was radical at the time. I was invited as one of its main speakers although I am  not a Christian. I extended the Cosmic Mother pamphlet in time for the conference and gave a talk abut the Goddess as sacred Serpent which shocked many women there, especially the brilliant Mary Condren, who is an Irish Catholic and had been a nun when still a child. She had been the first speaker and we clashed but then became friends.
Years later Mary went to USA, studied under Mary Daly and wrote a scathing criticism of the misogyny of the Catholic Church in a book called "The Serpent and the Goddess".("The Serpent and the Goddess,Women, Religion, and Power in Celtic Ireland").

"I stayed in Paris with Maj Skadegaard, a Danish artist and filmmaker and her then lover, Renate Stendhal, a poet and through the lesbian community there I got contact with Jean and Ruth Mountaingrove, publishers of the "Womanspirit" journal in Oregon. I sent the Cosmic Mother pamphlet to them and they were interested. They put me in contact with Barbara Mor, a passionate poet who then lived in Taosin, New Mexico. They wanted her to edit my text but being involved herself in the study of Goddess cultures and having great knowledge, she got inspired and extended the text to twice its length. For the next number of years we sent the manuscript forth and back across the ocean writing and rewriting the text but never meeting. Barbara lived in great poverty with a number of children, an unsupported mother and was/is politically very radical. There were many similarities between us."

Foreword Note from the 1981 edition:
Monica Sjöö wrote her originalThe Ancient Religion of the Great Cosmic Mother of All (Bristol, December 1975) which was distributed in pamphlet form in Britain. It was translated to Norwegian and published in book form (Den Store Kosmiske Mor - Regnbuetrykk) in 1977. There has since been a joint labour of love between Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor, an American poet, in extending and reworking the original material. Barbara Mor has edited the work, added new material and partly rewritten the text; she has also added sections and titles.

Dedication of the book:
"This book is dedicated to the women who were burned as Witches in Europe during three centuries of the most terrible persecution of women.
They were the suffering Sainthood of Herstory."

The book also has a quote on the title page:
"Tell them as I dying live,
so they dying will live again".

It is typical of Westeners to see all Eastern religions, especially Buddhism as nihilistic. or life-negating - while flattering ourselves that the Western Christian worldview is positive and life-affirming. In fact, both Christianity and Judaism, as well as Islam, are Oriental religions: they swept from the East and stamped out the truly Western, indigenous  Pagan religion of all Europe. And whether of East or West, all patriarchal religions are inherently nihilistic (and fascistic).
They condemn the Earth as the source of material life, and seek abstract 'Spirit' somewhere in the Sky. They seek 'illumination' or 'salvation' not within the on-going, life-death process, but by denying it, escaping it, or being 'redeemed' from it through a male godhead who acts as the Ersatz (fake or displaced) Mother, in its concepts of Original Sin and the need for 'salvation' from fleshly life - and in its strange belief that only One Man has been of divine birth  Christianity is perhaps the most nihilistic religion yet to appear on Earth."

Life was corruption and evil; life was to be lived merely as an expiation for being born. Death was the only hope of salvation. Beyond Death lay the Hereafter: unspoiled by suffering and sin, unlimited by time, space and flesh, pure heavenly bliss. This life on Earth was but a passing moment of pain on the threshold of Angels  not to be celebrated but to be despised. [Much of the Western world's secular rip-off of the Earth's people and natural resources has been inspired and justified by this 'religious' attitude: that earthly life is debased and unreal anyway, and Earth exists merely to be used  with appropriate contempt  by spiritually ambitious men. In fact, throughout the European Middle Ages, the world was pictured literally as the Devil's Excrement; Christian paintings and drawings of the time show cities, fields, animals, humans  all fallen, like masses of shit, from the Ass of Satan, who squats above us all grinning.]

If sex and human biology were good, then women were good. And ecstacy can only be initiated by women who are equal and free partners  daughters of the Cosmic Mother. This utterly contradicts Yahweh's wrathful theology, where women, as the carriers of sexuality, are the Cause of the Fall and Original Sin. Hebrew and Christian priests saw physical love as the arch-enemy of the Spirit; it was Anti-Christ, it was Satan  female snares lining their male path to the disembodied Hereafter. Long before Freud, the Cosmic Serpent was reified into a 'bestial' symbol of sexual love. Counseled that women are the 'tempters'  unclean deceivers of the male soul  young boys were trained to be constantly on guard, even in dreams, against 'female wiles'. Until the trumpet announced Judgment Day, and the male spirit would be transported to a Heaven in which women were safely unsexed. Eating of the Paradise  Fruit of sexual consciousness is forbidden by Yahweh.

'Original Sin' adhered intrinsically to 
Orgasmic Experience.

Love to be made pious and useful, had to be sanctioned by the Lord, blessed by a male priest  and then it was to be practiced only for the purpose of procreation. Soberly, not ecstatically. Men should use women for the Lord: to be fruit­ful and multiply His followers. El Shaddai, God of the early Hebrews, was a relentless punisher of 'sexual deviation'  and 'deviation' was any sexual activity not directed toward making children. Non-reproductive sex was a capitulation to 'bestiality'  [another error, since 'beasts' copulate only to reproduce]  and he who wasted his semen was a murderer, to be punished accordingly. Onan was slain for spilling his seed on the ground to prevent conception. This command of the Hebrew tribal god against waste of male seed is the source of all Western laws against: abortion, contraception, masturbation, homosexuality, oral sex, etc. To 'waste' the semen was to waste the life-seed, or life-blood, of the Father, diminishing His essence. [It was also to 'use' women as something other than seed-ovens.] Hindu religion is also obsessed with semen, seeing it as 'Atman', the Cosmic Seed. 
Above all, the woman was not to enjoy the sexual act. The husband's orgasm was allowable as he 'worked for the Lord'. But to give woman pleasure was to give flesh its due  tantamount to working for the Devil. If a woman enjoyed sex, she might seek it outside the patriarchal household; the man's property might pass to a child not his own. Most of all, the mutual ecstacy of both partners would be Cosmic Union with the Goddess  they would then 'backslide' into the ancient matriarchal religions and social ways. Patriarchal dogmas of fleshly sin and corruption are always threatened by the imminent Fact of earthly ecstacy.
[Patriarchy will go to hideous lengths to keep women from experiencing their sexuality. In Islamic countries today ~ in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Egypt, Iraq, Somaliland, Ethiopia, Kenya, Togo  infibulation and cliterectomy are still practiced on 7-12 year old girls. In the guise of 'initiation rites'  and 'in the name of God'  the child's labia minora are sliced off, the clitoris cut out, and the vagina sewn up (leaving a straw for urination). [This most extreme form of sexual mutilation is practiced in Sudan.] This prevents intercourse until her wedding night, when she is sliced open to fit the size of her husband's penis; for childbirth she is sliced open further, and then resewn again. Reasons given for this 'operation' are: hygiene, beauty (women's natural organs are seen as very ugly), and 'prevention of prostitution'. Girls who have not been 'purified' will go with many men, or they might experience sexual love with other women. Protests against this female mutilation have been brought before the U.N. and repeatedly tabled  the General Assembly calling it a 'cultural custom' of these countries which it has 'no right' to interfere with.]
The Christian Church combined Old Testament insistence on sex-for-procreation with the Greco-Indian ideal of sexual abstinence, or homosexual misogyny. The result was a form of marriage involving the greatest possible restriction of sexual feeling. The doctrinal union of "Male Spirit" with "Female Dumb Matter"  seen as a legal union under God's Will of two incompatible opposites  was of course not a union at all, but a cultural and physical enslavement of one sex by the other.
In patriarchy concepts of 'self and property are linked  while ek-stasis means "standing outside one's Self".

And so there is a very deep repression of ecstasy
in patriarchal society

Men fear leaving their social status as master or husband, and returning as a son to the Cosmic Mother. Men fear the No-Mind (Cosmic Mind) center of orgasm, its similarity to Death-experience (ego-loss) and to Madness (Lunacy Moon-surrender). And so men, having divided mind from body, then manipulate the body (or penis) as an instrument of 'uninvolved' experience, debasing sexuality to ward off the challenge of love. The deepest I-Thou among humans cannot exist under patriarchy  the almost Death-Orgasmic experience where the Ego surrenders its defenses and becomes one with the Cosmic Self  because the God of patriarchy condemns and rejects such ecstasy in His creatures. Instead, the man maintains his self-enclosed ego, while the female is depersonalized into a flesh-object. Further, women are defined as 'sexually passive' and 'naturally masochistic'  all of this for highly political reasons: depersonalized sex allows the man to keep his Ego, i.e. his property. And no strong and healthy woman is there to challenge him in the name of a higher transcendence. Beyond the wastelands of despair, suffering and alienation are Goddess Realms of intense joy and illumination  but the War-God stands at the border and will not allow the male-ego to cross over.