In the beginning there was only aluna, the amniotic sea, the Cosmic principle: the Mother. The Mother concentrated, the nothingness which was the original sea of thought, spirit and fertility pondered and conceived the idea of the world. It began with a womb, a world-house, which was a cosmos. This was the great egg of the universe.

In aluna, she then conceived nine levels, nine worlds, within this womb. They were her daughters. Each world has its own character, its own colour, its own soil: her Children had their own personalities. The mysteries of Creation and fertility are to be understood as a process of aluna dividing, by an effort of concentration, into separate spiritual bodies. She also conceived of sons, among them Serankua. The Dawning began with the definition of these powerful beings, whose existence defines the Mother as a being too.

The Concept of femininity begins here; by embodying sons, by conceiving masculinity and separating it from herself, the Mother is also defined as female. Aluna constantly requires balance, harmony, and give and take of parts which are distinct, but which have to be in accord with one another. Sexuality and gender are part of that.

She and her sons then addressed themselves to the problem of fertility. 'How will we create a living thing?' Through eight of the nine worlds the soil was infertile; eight of her nine daughters Could not conceive. Life could not begin there. It had not been properly thought through. Only in the ninth world, the world of black earth, had the Mother conceived a daughter capable of fecundity.

Here her son Serankua fertilized the world. The details are, I was told, unimportant. What matters is how hard the Mother had to think - hardest of all to make the first man. How does an eye work? How should it be made? The foot, what should it be like? Creatures were conceived with eyes and feet wrongly made, then finally success, and a history began, an epic sweep of rising and falling peoples of different kinds and different colours, until finally the nature of mankind was settled, stabilized. And then the punch line.

There were still no people. There were no plants, no animals, no sun, no moon. Only the Mother. Only aluna.

The Mother had conceived the world in aluna, shaping possibilities. There were nine worlds, and life and history existed only in aluna. Now it could be made flesh. Now the Mother made the physical world, the world we inhabit. This is the place of the second word I was taught, 'Gonavindua'.

Go means 'something being born' or 'birth'. Na means 'something coming' (it is the word for the first light before dawn) and vi means 'something moving in the stomach', like something moves in the stomach when a woman is four months pregnant. Du means 'all things that have life'; duas means sperm.

It is the word for the quickening of the world.

It also means 'the mountain where the world began, the lawbringer'. The mountain where the world began is, of course, the Sierra, and the Sierra is the Heart of the World. Here the Mother stuck her spindle and spun it, turning the world on its axis, spinning out the thread which is time as well as space, and which heaps up in the cone of the Sierra, and which then develops, in an ever-widening spiral, into the whole of the world.

All things have a hidden connection, linking traces deriving from their common creation at the time of the Dawning, Gonavindua. The cosmos is a womb, a nuhue, a world-house, with worlds at different levels. The mountains are world-houses; the Sierra contains the cosmos within it. The links have to be constantly reaffirmed. Maintaining reality is a difficult balancing act; ensuring stability in the dynamic flux of aluna requires deep thought, profound understanding. I had to learn this, I was told.