After a thoughtful and interesting comment on yesterday's post on our Facebook page, we asked Madonna-chei to comment: It is a good essay, but it should be longer, in my opinion. For instance, it doesn't explore why fairy tales are 'naturally' feminine-because they're so old they were constructed under matriarchy? Most were written in patriarchial societies, so why are they 'naturally' feminine? Wouldn't the opposite be true if they were written by patriarchial peoples? Actually it wasn't an essay - just a comment on a comment on a Heartbook blog post. But the points you raise are valid and well worth considering. I should probably have been clearer about what I meant by "natural". Of course we can call patriarchal interpretations "natural to patriarchy", but my view was that feminine religion is natural in a much deeper sense than that. Not natural to one system or another, but natural to humanity. Or to put it another way, simply True. Patriarchal societies and religions have done a huge job of upending the first faith of humanity. Male-modelled "god forms" appear all over the world following "patriarchal revolutions". What I was saying was that, as soon as there is no patriarchal vested interest in keeping the iconography patriarchal (when, for example, folk-tales are considered unimportant) it naturally reverts to its original feminine form. Naturally because that is its true form. In a sense the stories go back to matriarchal times - but only in the sense that all fundamental archetypes are eternal and not the product of any human society. But I certainly would not put forward any literal, historical "matriarchal origin" claim, not only because it is dubiously historical, but also because the claim I would make is much deeper and more fundamental. Feminine religion is not the product of any form of society (unlike masculine religion, which is a product of patriarchy). It is religion in its fundamental, true form.