Western religious and philosophical traditions have recognized the context of Earth and universe in providing spiritual guidance as well. From the Neolithic through the Bronze ages, the societies of "Old Europe" revered numerous female deities as incarnations of Mother Earth. In early Greece, the earth goddess Gaia was worshipped as a supreme deity. In the Philebus and Timaeus, Plato asserted that the "world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence (...) a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related". Medieval theologian St. Thomas Aquinas later wrote of the place of humans, not at the center of being, but as one part of an integrated whole with the universe as primary, stating that “The order of the universe is the ultimate and noblest perfection in things."
