As in the "Marseillaise":
si'ls tombent, nos jeunes heros,"Ma mere, c'est la Republique," says a character in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables; a motto for Swinburne, in one song to the Earth Mother, who is
la terre en produit de nouveaux-
Maiden most beautiful, mother most bountiful, lady of lands,
Queen and republican-She is our real mother:
Hast thou known how I fashioned thee,
Child, underground?
All of human culture is our alma mater; every polis a metropolis. What we enter in our initiation is a womb; and stay there (no exit). It is the birth trauma: trauma or separation not accepted, and the mind regresses to the time before the separation took place. It is as though we had never been born.
The world is our mother: The outside world is "the mother's body in an extended sense." If you have chanced to wonder at the frequency with which landscapes are used in dreams to symbolize the female sexual organs, you may learn from mythologists how large a part has been played in the ideas and cults of ancient times by 'Mother Earth' and how the whole conception of agriculture was determined by this symbolism." "From mythology and poetry we may take towns, citadels, castles and fortresses to be further symbols for women." Jerusalem, "a City, yet a Woman."