Since childhood, I have loved archaeology.  That love went underground in my teens but finally found expression in a slightly different form—a Master of Arts in History. My fondness for reading and research led me to pursue a Master of Arts in Library Science and finally a career as both a reference librarian and history professor. Since my mid-thirties I have been deeply engaged in following a spiritual path, and in finding and honoring what had been the missing piece in my spiritual life: the Goddess. The combination of these passions brought me to the California Institute of Integral Studies and a PhD in Women’s Spirituality.

Matriarchy in Bronze Age Crete is the culmination of my lifelong loves and passions—archaeology, history, research, and the pursuit of the spiritual life. Thus, in this work, I have sought not only to present my argument that Bronze Age Crete was a Goddess-centered, woman-centered, matriarchal society based on rigorous academic research, but to ground the work in my lived spiritual experience, in my forty years of being a spiritual quester. That quest has taken me not only to CIIS, but to sites sacred to the Female Divine all over the world; to Crete where for the last thirty-five years I have spent months each year visiting museums, and archaeological sites, and exploring the sacred landscape; to Glastonbury, England to study with Kathy Jones to become a Priestess of Avalon; and to celebrations in honor of the Goddess with women’s groups all over the world. 

I have attempted in this work of embodied Women’s Spirituality Studies to, in the words of Dr. Mara Lynn Keller, “respect and combine the relatively subjective dimensions of my spiritual experiences with the relatively objective empirical data of the social and physical sciences.” I believe that I have integrated the spiritual and the academic in this work in such a way that those looking for academic grounding for their Goddess spirituality, as well as those searching for the spiritual and personal in the academic, will find this book a source of great value.