Moina MacGregor Mathers on "Woman's Role in Religion" -

In 1899 Moina Mathers, as the High Priestess Anari, was interviewed for an article on "Isis Worship in Paris." She said:

"The idea of the priestess is at the root of all ancient beliefs. Only in our ephemeral time has it been neglected. What do we find in the modern development of religion to replace the feminine idea, and consequently the Priestess? When a religion symbolizes the universe by a Divine Being, is it not illogical to omit woman, who is the principle half of it, since she is the principle creator of the other half--that is, man? How can we hope that the world will become purer and less material when one excludes from the Divine that part of its nature which represents at one and the same time the faculty of receiving and that of giving--that is to say, love itself and its highest form--love the symbol of universal sympathy? That is where the magical power of woman is found. She finds her force in her alliance with the sympathetic energies of Nature. And what is Nature if it is not an assemblage of thought clothed with matter and ideas which seek to materialize themselves? What is this eternal attraction between ideas and matter? Is it the secret of life. Have you ever realized that there does not exist a single flame without a special intelligence which animates it, or a single grain of sand to which an idea is not attached, the idea which formed it? It is these intelligent ideas which are the elementals, or spirits of Nature. Woman is the magician born of Nature by reason of her great natural sensibility, and of her instructive sympathy with such subtle energies as these intelligent inhabitants of the air, the earth, fire, and water."