"Myths are like mushrooms", the writer Sophie Strand has said: from the surface, they looks like individuals, with a little stem and curved top poking out from the dirt, all alone. But if you dig a little deeper, you will see a network of root-like threads called mycelium connecting each single mushroom to all kinds of other mushrooms and non-mushroom beings, extending across a wide swath of land. Each of the divine feminine figures we meet in this book have roots like that, oral and written roots that traversed people, lands, and cultures for centuries, even millennia. Some of these roots have been forgotten, but still they reach up through the dirt to the light, demanding to be remembered. Once, there were deities of storms, the wild wood, healing herbs, wolves, the ocean, fertility, wisdom, and everything else. The divine world was filled with color and flavor, and it taught us precious secrets about how to survive and thrive on the land. Modern life is busy and technologized, thoroughly separated from ancient lessons about which berries are safe to eat and the rhythms of the wolves in the wintertime. If we can "re-root" these mythologies, as Sophie Strand suggests, we can reorient them to the lands they came from, remembering how they once helped us to live with the plants and animals with whom we shared our space.

I live in a place known in Cree as amiskwaciy-w'skahikan, Beaver Hills House, a place where many indigenous bands would gather to rest, trade, connect, and enjoy the many resources of this land. In English, this is Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, a city designed so you never really have to get out of your car and face the extreme cold or blistering heat of the seasons here. I grew up as a (lazy) Christian with English and Irish roots, and while I loved the rituals of church, the spicy smell of incense smoke, the cool hard pews and the thin powdery pages of the Bibles held behind each one, something was missing. I turned to witchcraft as a teen, casting love spells and burying my hair clippings in the garden. I studied literature and world religions at school, fascinated by stories of gods and goddesses that were so different from what I'd learned at church. I became a yoga teacher, and sat rapt at the feet of anyone who would tell me a story about the Goddess in her fierce and powerful forms. Now, as a therapist, I listen deeply to the intimate narratives of my clients' lives, and work to help them re-story their inner worlds, to create new narratives of healing and change. As in my previous book Maiden, Warrior, Mother, Crone, I have dug deep into the rich loam of oral history and written word to find the stories that follow.