Miriam MacGillis and Cosmology Revisited, part 1 by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

Author’s Note: When my mother died in 2018, I became the custodian of her voluminous files. I found some gems inside them. My mother lived in NJ not too far from a place called Genesis Farms and its founder and proprietress was/is Sister Miriam MacGillis. There was a whole file on the farms.

Included in these files was a binder of cassette tapes from a workshop Miriam MacGillis gave in 1986 called “Education for a Small Planet.” There are 4 double-sided cassettes.  When I first saw them, I was afraid to even touch them as 40-year-old cassette tapes are not known for their sturdiness. A friend helped me find an agency that agreed to digitize them. Since then, I have had the great honor of transcribing the tapes. It took me several months, but I have now completed the transcription. (They are a little rough as I added punctuation as I went.) I have been in touch with Miriam about them and she agrees that the message from 1986 is still important, in fact, likely more important now and they should have as wide an audience as possible. 

Miriam MacGillis is a modern-day prophet who not only holds a broad understanding of cosmology but brilliantly expresses it. She was an early colleague of Thomas Berry, introducing many people to the Story of the Universe.

I believe these tapes need to be studied and shared and I am happy to make them available to anyone who is interested.  Below is a taste of their wisdom. It is from Tape #1A (first tape, first side), lightly edited. This is really just an introduction and it will be in two parts.

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“[Thomas] Berry says that if we’re really going to go deep enough into what’s happening historically, we’re really going to have to go past looking at the crises that we are experiencing today. Whether it is hopelessness among the young, or the breakdown of families, the ecological crises, the threat of nuclear war, whatever.

“We’re going to have to go deeper than some of the places we would ordinarily start like our religious beliefs because so many people, esp. today are retreating into a religious dimension to read the signs of the times and out of that to read the end times. And Berry would suggest that we are not going deep enough if that’s where we start.

“That may sound strange. But he would suggest that where we have to go is to our basic cosmology. Now what do we mean by cosmology. It means simply the story of the universe that we have received as a people, as a whole people, as a civilization. Because that is the primary structure of thought that a people evolve and is their most ancient view of things. And it is so inherently intrinsic to the way they view reality, that it’s out of that basic story and framework, that they shape everything else by way of meaning.

“Once a people have figured out where the world came from, at least out of their realm of experience, and once they figure out what it’s made of, that’s where they begin to devise their meaning systems, their religion, is out of that basic understanding that they develop culture, education, law, healing, economics, politics. And because that is so primary, once that’s been established and understood, it gives a context for ordering the universe that it rarely ever becomes questioned. It’s that given set of assumptions that never surfaces back into consciousness. It’s an unquestioned set of beliefs. And it’s older than any other beliefs.

“I’d like to look at cosmology for just a moment. We in the west regardless of what ethic, religious, economic background we come from do hold a common set of assumptions that flow out of the cosmology that was at the very root of western civilization, thousands of years ago. Again it has remained unquestioned until this century.

“Every people has a cosmology. Where I live in the northwestern part of NJ, prior to our European ancestors coming there, there were tribal peoples of the Delaware Nation, the Leni Lenape. They had a cosmology too that is radically different from anything that western peoples had. But in their cosmology, they believed that the divine, the great spirit, the cause of the universe lived inside the earth, was totally present as a living spirit, the Great Spirit inside the earth.  And that was their science, as they observed the natural world, they constructed a meaning system that saw the earth as this great mother womb which bore the seeds that the Great Spirit created. And because their story was that the spirit lived inside the earth, then they concluded that all of the living creatures on the planet were relatives to the spirit. The elk could breathe, because the breath of the elk was the Great Spirit breathing through the elk. And if they wanted to make contact with the Great Spirit, they would do it through the elk. If they wanted to possess attributes and characteristics of the Great Spirit such as what the elk manifested, whether that was majesty or strength or durability or speed, those were qualities of the spirit and if they could wear or they could use some of the spiritual energy of the elk, then they could acquire that power of the Great Spirit that the elk had.

“Or the eagle. It was their science that saw the elk as a sacred reflection of spirit.  So out of that science they lived where I lived for somewhere between 7 to 10 thousand years in that same area and barely altered what that land looked like for the whole duration. Because they thought the earth was alive and the dwelling place of the spirit, it was a totally irrational thing for them to have seen development and history and progress as developing the mother. So they concentrated I their understandings of development, not on developing the world, but on developing the person.

“The more they could possess these great powers that the natural world shared from the spirit, that was progress. That was what was the meaning of ones life and the history of the people.

“It was impossible for them ever to have conjured up such a concept as private property in their economic history. Their dealings were not based on buying and selling land. It never would have occurred to them, that was not even a perception. And its why when European ancestors came over and they talked using the same words and the same language, the meanings just went right through each other’s ears.

“It was because of their cosmology not necessarily because there were any ethically purer or morally greater. I’d like to look at some of the implications of the cosmology which have shaped western thinking because here’s where we are going to see some of the real roots of why we’re in situations that we’re in.

“In our basic science and story of the origin of the world, even though there were variations on the theme, there were some very basic common assumptions that came out of the stories. And the first was that however the divine was imaged, and that was in different ways, the divine was always seen as being totally transcendent of the world, living outside world in the realm of spirit, over the world, apart from the world. And the human was understood as having, because the human was intelligent and spirit was seen as having a very significant role in relationship to the divine. But in order for that significant union to occur, the human also had to transcend the world. And because that relationship happened in the world of spirit, that left the perception of the world as being completely material, having no inner dimension, no inner psychic or spiritual dimension.

“And lastly because the human was spirit, there was some great destiny to be unfolded. And somehow it was to bring about into time and place a perfection of what was obviously not perfect. So the great quest was to bring about the garden, the kingdom, the grail, the golden fleece, these levels of perfection over what was perceived as total materiality.”

Part 2 tomorrow

Two notes:

A partial transcription of the tapes appeared in a magazine called The Ecozoic Times. You can read them here.

Miriam recently sent around an email with info for a Sierra Club zoom meeting tonight:

Why Are Our Electric Rates So High? And What Can We Do About It?
Thurs, May 21, 2026, 7 PM to 8 PM (Eastern)
We have all seen our electric rates reach all-time highs. The primary cause is a spike in energy demand that our electricity supply cannot meet: HYPERSCALER DATA CENTERSARE A MAJOR CAUSE. Electric supply limitations are mainly due to administrative bottlenecks in grid operators, utilities and government.
WHAT CAN WE DO that helps both us and our environment? Pat and Steve Miller describe current initiatives to 1) advocate for regulation of data centers 2) grow clean energy supplies, and 3) use of developing new technologies.
REGISTER HERE FOR ZOOM LINK; May 21, AT 7PM

Miriam included this note: Please be aware that this is going on all over our planet.  Like the cosmology of the ‘old story’ the foundations of our old beliefs are unraveling by the day. Please share this as widely as you can.