Why this banned, beloved book still matters — especially for how we understand abortion, autonomy, and the sacred body.
When The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth first appeared in 1987, it was treated like heresy. Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor had spent years excavating the buried memory of matriarchal culture — a world where women, nature, and spirituality were not enemies but kin. They wrote in exile, in defiance, in the margins of academia. Their book was photocopied and passed hand to hand in feminist collectives, health centers, and early abortion rights circles.
Today, it reads less like “new age history” and more like a survival manual for the soul in late capitalism. Everything they warned about has come to pass — the mechanization of life, the digitization of care, the alienation of body from spirit. And nowhere is that more visible than in how the modern world talks about abortion.
The Machine and the Womb
In the chapter “The Machine,” Sjöö and Mor describe the birth of industrial civilization as a war against the living.
> “The machine needs no mother, for it reproduces itself endlessly. But to sustain its own life, it must devour the organic — the human, the animal, the Earth.”
— The Great Cosmic Mother, p. 381
They draw a straight line between the burning of midwives and the rise of factories; between the silencing of women’s embodied wisdom and the rise of mechanical progress.
> “The womb, once seen as the cosmic source, became an object to be managed, legislated, and eventually replaced.”
— p. 384
That’s abortion politics in one sentence. A system that pretends to debate “life” but is really debating ownership. Who owns the womb? Who defines creation? Who decides what counts as sacred?
Reclaiming the Original Religion
Before there were cathedrals or courts, there were caves. There were women painting spirals on stone, bleeding on the Earth in rhythm with the moon, honoring the same cycles that the Machine would later call “waste.”
Sjöö and Mor argued that this was the original religion — the cosmic understanding that death is part of life, that every ending feeds a beginning. In that lineage, abortion is not blasphemy; it is participation in the eternal cycle.
> “The death of a fetus, the death of a seed, the death of the sun at solstice — these were not tragedies, but holy transitions.”
— p. 392
This isn’t sentimental romanticism. It’s ecological consciousness. It’s the kind of spirituality that terrifies systems built on hierarchy, productivity, and profit.
Abortion as Sacred Refusal
In today’s world, abortion has been flattened into a moral referendum or a healthcare procedure. But The Great Cosmic Mother invites us to see it as something else entirely — a sacred refusal of the Machine’s ownership over the body.
When a person self-manages an abortion — with pills, herbs, prayer, silence, or song — they’re not just making a medical decision. They’re interrupting a centuries-long system of extraction. They are saying: my body is not your factory, not your battlefield, not your moral currency.
That’s why the Machine fears abortion so much. It’s not about the embryo; it’s about power. A person who can decide when to create or release life cannot be ruled.
The Book That Refused to Die
Like its message, The Great Cosmic Mother itself survived erasure. Sjöö’s paintings were censored; Mor died in poverty. Yet the book kept circulating. Feminist healers and abortion doulas still photocopy its pages. It’s found on the desks of anthropologists, witches, midwives, and — increasingly — reproductive justice organizers.
Its survival mirrors the very lineage it describes: suppressed, misunderstood, but unkillable. The Machine can’t metabolize something that refuses to produce for it.
Why It Matters Now
In 2025, we live inside the Machine’s most advanced form — digital capitalism dressed up as freedom. Our bodies are scanned, categorized, and optimized. Our grief is data. Our pleasure is monetized. Abortion has become both hyper-visible and deeply misunderstood: algorithmic, polarized, stripped of meaning.
This is why The Great Cosmic Mother matters. It re-teaches what the Machine made us forget: that the body is not an object, but an altar. That to bleed is not to fail. That abortion, miscarriage, menstruation, and birth are all portals in the same spiral of creation.
When we speak about self-guided abortion as sacred, we’re not inventing something new. We’re remembering something ancient.
Toward a Living Future
> “To resist the Machine is not to reject technology, but to re-align it with life.”
— The Great Cosmic Mother, p. 398
This is the task now — to build systems of care, technology, and storytelling that serve life instead of consuming it. Self-Guided Abortion is part of that work: restoring meaning where the Machine replaced it with management.
We are not trying to go back. We are trying to go forward differently — guided by memory, myth, and the unbroken pulse of the Great Mother that beats in every body that refuses to be silenced.
Read, Remember, Reclaim
If you’ve never read The Great Cosmic Mother, find a copy. Read it slowly. Let it rearrange how you think about your body, your choices, and your cosmology.
Then go live it — in how you speak about abortion, how you support others through it, how you make your spirituality embodied again.
Because the Machine may still be running — but the Mother was never gone.
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