I wonder what God must have thought then / When He saw the work of Cain's hand / That the first baby born on the planet / Grew up to kill the third man.

In the morning of the world," he said, "when the dew still lay upon the Garden, man was created so that there might be some one to enjoy it. In order that he might relish beauty, he was given a soul; and having a soul, he was given speech, since without speech, it is impossible to understand such abstractions as the soul. That was a mistake, but I do not see how it could have been avoided.

Though I’d proven to be a wretched, foolish woman, I knew deep in my broken heart that God was still just as good and loving as he’d been the moment he plucked a rib from Adam’s side and used that bone to give me life.

The land upon which the goddesses descended –the land that was the locus of the divine activity –came to be known as the Sacred Realm, which can be taken almost as the Zelda version of the Garden of Eden.

The Garden is a metaphor for the following: our minds, and our thinking in terms of pairs of opposites--man and woman, good and evil--are as holy as that of a god. (50)

The Shield was another of the Fear's names. According to Laughter, it means he shields the seed of Abraham the way a man starting a fire shields the flame. When Sarah was about to die childless, the Fear gave her a son. When Abraham was about to slaughter the son, the Fear gave him the ram. He is always shielding us like a guttering wick, Laughter said, because the fire he is trying to start with us is a fire that the whole world will live to warm its hands at. It is a fire in the dark that will light the whole world home.