The Goddess vs. the New Age: Singing the Sacred Land

This essay was first published in the Winter 2006 edition of 'Goddess Pages: a magazine of Goddess spirituality in the 21st Century'

                                                                                    'The Cailleach Bheure' by Jill Smith

 “Female spirit, the goddess in us, is not fragile or new; not an invention of privileged women or an escapist New Age elite. We are tough and ancient: tried by a million years of ice and fire. On enormous and minute wheels of pain and beauty we have turned…we return to tell and respell our story.”¹
 

So says Barbara Mor in the 1990 introduction to her powerful book ‘The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth”, written with Monica Sjöö. And so we return to respell our story and the female spirit, and the goddess in us begins to emerge from the mists of our forgetting after enduring and surviving several thousand years of patriarchy … or so we may tell ourselves. But there is a threat to our remembering, a threat from within what many would consider our own circle. It is the threat of the New Age and its writers and gurus who talk of ascension, of transcending human form, and of becoming one with our ‘light bodies’, and other similar concepts, and who are providing us with many of the contemporary ideas about, and images of, the Goddess. Theirs is not the language of the Earth, but of the dualism which has held us in chains for millennia. In our thirst for the rise of the Sacred Feminine, in our joy at sensing her return to human consciousness, many of us have ceased to consider the form in which She is being presented to us through the many New Age images and writings that grow in popularity by the day. Our connection to the Goddess is being subverted and torn from Her roots within the dark earth. She is being ‘intellectualised’, made all light and logic, and yet we are being encouraged not to think. 

Before I continue I will say that I have nothing against the New Age and acknowledge that the term means different things to different people, just as ‘Goddess’ does, but there is a huge groundswell within New Age thinking that places light above dark, or possibly even worse ignores the dark altogether, and which turns the Goddess, and therefore all women, into a stereotype of femininity. The Goddess is both light and dark, with no separation between the two, just as we are, and if we ignore one side of Her then we do nothing but damage to ourselves.

In 1992 the wonderful Goddess artist, researcher, writer and activist Monica Sjöö published her book, ‘New Age and Armageddon: The Goddess or the Gurus – Towards a Feminist Vision of the Future’ (now republished as ‘Return of the Dark/Light Mother’), in answer to what she saw as the dangers of the New Age movement. She saw the movement as paying lip service to the Goddess and to the Earth whilst, at the same time, stressing the need to become more ‘highly’ evolved and leave the Earth behind. This is the very antithesis of the message of the Goddess who asks us to rejoice in our physical form and in our incarnation on this beautiful planet. Monica noted that Sir George Trevelyan, considered by many to be the ‘Grandfather of the New Age Movement’, spoke about a battle between the forces of light and darkness on a cosmic and human level. He said that this battle was led by Christ and the Archangel Michael, the ‘Dragonslayer’; the ‘dragon’ being the dark, chthonic Earth Dragon energies of the Goddess.

The Goddess is linked to the serpent/dragon in many cultures and a battle of the masculine and the patriarchal ‘forces of light’ to gain supremacy over Her is echoed in stories such as Adam and Eve, in which Eve is ‘seduced’ by the serpent into eating the apple of wisdom, against the instructions of the male Father God (the apple, of course being yet another symbol of the Goddess), and in many others. We should also remember that Athena, said to have been born from the head of Zeus rather than from the womb of the Mother, was once one with the serpent-headed Medusa, rather than being her victor and wearing her screaming head on Her shield as a trophy; we are asked to murder a part of ourselves and to celebrate, rather than to grieve. In separation we are weakened; only in embracing all aspects of the Feminine and of the Goddess within ourselves can we be whole; when we can claim our Medusa coils and wear them proudly as a manifestation of all that it means to be a woman then, perhaps, the tide against the Feminine will truly have turned.

The taking over of the Earth Goddess Gaia’s oracle at Delphi by Apollo between the 11th and 9th centuries BCE is a powerful example of the battle between the Serpent and the patriarchal forces of light. According to myth, Apollo killed the Python which guarded Delphi and was Gaia’s daughter, or in some stories Her son, when He captured the oracle there; again St Michael/Apollo is seen slaying the dark Earth Dragon of the Goddess and Tim Ward, in his book ‘Savage Breast: A Man’s Search for the Goddess’, quotes The Hymn to Pythian Apollo, written around 650BCE, which says that Apollo boasted “Rot right there now, on the ground that feeds man … and the sacred power of the sun rotted her right there, which is why the place is called Pytho.” (which means ‘rot’).²

Here, ‘rot’ is seen as something to be defeated by “arrows and sunlight”³ and yet rot is all around us in the autumn and winter and is sacred to the Crone, the most vilified of all the Goddess’s aspects. Without rot there can be no rebirth; rot is transformation and is an example of the Earth working her magic. Fungus, which, in the right place, can make toxic earth healthy again, feeds on rotted organic material; rot is part of the cycle of nature. In turning away from rot and mud and shit and dirt we turn away from the wisdom of the Earth and from the Goddess. The monotheistic religions seek to banish rot and death and tell us that if we ‘behave’ we will have eternal life and ascend to ‘heaven’, or some other realm of light apart from the Earth, rather than to the dark Underworld of the ancestors. Apollo sought to find peace in the purity of the mind, and his slaying of Python and her rot was re-enacted and celebrated for more than a thousand years, but in intellectualising the Goddess and making Her all light we remove Her, and ourselves, from our roots in the soil.
                                       

The monotheistic patriarchal religions have always sought to destroy our link with the Earth and her cycles. They talk about the Earth as a machine and of human beings (men) as superior and removed from her processes. In Britain alone we have nine hundred stone circles and our footsteps fall on a landscape that has been shaped by our ancestors through millennia; a thread that connects us all to the sacred land of our birth and/or of our heart. And yet, for reasons of power, control and greed, patriarchy, often through the monotheistic religions, has sought to persuade us that there is no connection between us and the Earth; that she is our prison, rather than our Mother and protector. How else could we allow her to be destroyed and to contribute to that destruction ourselves? Smohalla, a Nez Perce Indian from the Western United States and quoted in ‘The Great Cosmic Mother’, says:

‘You ask me to plough the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear
my mother’s breast?’⁴

Have we in the West really become so far removed from the Earth that we no longer yearn for, or need, our Mother’s breast?

In 2002 I travelled to Goa and Karnataka in Southern India in search of the Goddess. I travelled in a mini bus with a guide and driver and, soon after I got there, we drove up into the mountains. We came across a roadside shrine that was visited by all the drivers who passed and stopped so that our driver could make offerings to the spirits. I got out of the mini bus to look out across the landscape and, in the distance, I could see a beautiful blue-green mountain range looking like a woman lying back on the land. It was then that I felt in my heart and belly the violence that must be used against a people in order to sever their connection to the earth on which they, and their ancestors, have lived and died. That violence may be physical or psychological, conscious or unconscious, or a combination of all those things, but it is still violence. To speak of transcending our human forms and leaving the Earth is just the next step in uprooting us from the planet that gave birth to us; it is a philosophy that does violence to us. By stressing the light, and a narrow definition of what is beautiful, in our interactions with the Goddess the New Age serves to keep us separated from the Earth and continues a process that was begun several thousand years ago.

There are many theories about what began this process of disconnection from the Goddess; some say that it was begun by powerful Indo-European warriors who swept westwards taking by force the gentle matriarchal cultures that came before them but even this theory reinforces dualism; matriarchy vs. patriarchy, feminine vs. masculine, and can be unhelpful when we try to move away from the separation in our own societies and psyches. What we do know, or may intuitively feel, is that the first cultures were matristic (centred in the feminine) and that, for reasons that are still becoming clear, a patriarchal system usurped that more holistic way of living. We also know that the monotheistic religions grew from, and were central to, that process and continue to reinforce it today; the New Age is, in many cases, doing the same.

The Goddess has not always been acknowledged by the New Age; perhaps She is just too bound to the Earth and to the cycles of life and death? In ‘New Age and Armageddon’, written fifteen years ago, Monica Sjöö bemoans the fact that when she attended ceremonies in places such as Glastonbury the Goddess was never mentioned. When she suggested that She was acknowledged the organisers, who were generally men, would dismiss her request as though they had never heard of the Goddess. But the Goddess has refused to be ignored. She has continued to rise and Her presence can no longer be denied by those who follow an alternative spiritual path. And yet, rather than embracing the Goddess in all Her aspects and allowing her to balance the light of the fiery dragonslayer, who also has a place in our universe, and his arrows, the New Age chooses to subvert both Her meaning and Her image, stressing Her energies of light and love (which seemingly can only be found in the light) over those of Her chthonic darkness. To me, this is worse than ignoring Her and is a continuation of the patriarchal religious beliefs which sought to oppress and control Her, and us through Her, in the first place. Those who set themselves up as an alternative and as a cure have become the poison.

The Crone (like the Whore) has retained much of Her primal power because She has been ignored by Christianity, who were able to ‘use’ and (temporarily) pacify the virgin/maiden and the mother but were unable to subsume the cackling Crone, who has continued to terrify through Her association with death and destruction. Instead She became the evil witch, or the wicked stepmother, of fairy tales but at least She retained Her power within Herself until we were ready to commune with her again … it is never the Goddess who is changed, but our understanding of, and connection to, Her. The New Age has been able to (literally) paint the Maiden as pert-breasted, innocent and yet ever available, the Mother as ever abundant and giving, and the Crone as either non-existent or as a kind and smiling old woman, with all their other powerful and transformative aspects ignored … and all are seen defined by their relationship to others; the Maiden, independent but waiting for a lover, the Mother sacrificing Herself to Her children, the Crone as wise and kindly grandmother. None are shown as powerful symbols of the Feminine in, and of, themselves. I recently went to a talk in London where the speaker described the Crone as “ever beautiful, with an indigo cloak filled with moonbeams and starlight”! Where is the rot and death, the fucking, the shit and the mud; where is the Earth in that vision of Her? Where is the power? How are we to understand our lives being torn apart and changed when we are shown a kindly old lady, rather than a powerful primal transforming force? How are we to find a connection to Her in our experience of growing older in a human body if She stays young and beautiful as we age? How are we to change a society that values only youth when, instead of accepting old age as powerful and beautiful, we continue to see the Crone as ever-young and only beautiful because of that youth? We may age but the Goddess remains ever-young they say; always separation. The Crone is indeed beautiful, but She is beautiful in old age. She is what She is.

Even Mary Magdalene, who some of us have been able to look to as the untamed aspect of the Wild Feminine in Christianity, whatever the truth or not of her existence, has been turned into a dutiful consort and apparently tamed by Jesus and his light. Geraldine Charles in her article ‘Marrying Off the Goddess?’ says that the writings of Dan Brown and his ilk constitute “the co-option of the Goddess into a set of ideas that will serve only to uphold the status quo of patriarchal religion” and that, “the whore, redeemed or otherwise, is a powerful image; when we replace her with the dutiful wife we diminish ourselves and our culture. Risk is the new sin, after all, and so a little more wonderful wildness is gone; the safety of institutionalised religion shored up for a little longer”⁵ … and we accept it with open arms in our hunger to see the Goddess return. We think that we are shaking free of our chains when, in fact, they are twisting ever tighter around our throats, our wombs, and our hearts.

Tim Ward writes that:

“Jesus and Buddha, they urged me away from the world, taught me to resist the ways of the flesh and seek a Kingdom of God, heaven, nirvana, a higher consciousness. It’s different with her. It’s visceral, immediate, a matter of heart, balls and belly…"

Years ago I caught my first glimpse of her in India as Kali, the black Goddess who for hundreds of millions of Hindus is both Mother and Destroyer. Her statues there have four arms. The upper right is raised in blessing; the lower right is extended, palm out, as if offering a gift. But the upper left holds a bloody machete and the lower left a freshly severed human head. I once asked one of her devotees how one could get to the blessing and avoid the machete. “No, that’s not the point,” she replied fiercely. “The blessing is only won when you accept both sides of Kali, including pain, sorrow, loss and death. The real death is trying to hold your tiny ego safe from the pain caused by desire and love. Flee from the dangers of life, and you will miss her blessings too. But embrace Kali as she is, kiss her bloody tongue and feel all four arms around you, and then you have life, you have freedom…”⁶

We have to learn to accept the Goddess in all Her aspects before we can really receive Her blessings. If we pick and choose and only accept those parts of Her that we feel are ‘pretty’, or ‘easy’, or ‘acceptable’, if we attempt to tame Her wildness, then we will only ever know Her, and ourselves on a shallow level. As Clarissa Pinkola Estes says in ‘Women Who Run with the Wolves’, “Eventually, we all have to kiss the hag”.⁷

As an example of the fear of and subversion of the Goddess in the New Age I come to Doreen Virtue, who has previously concentrated on writings on angels but has begun to include the Goddess in her ‘Goddess Guidance Oracle Cards’ and her books ‘Archangels and Ascended Masters’ and, most recently, ‘Goddesses and Angels’. I particularly mention Ms Virtue because when I have gone into occult and witchcraft shops in recent years most of them have been filled with her books and oracle cards, with little alternative provided, and everywhere I go people seem to be talking about them. It’s clear that something in her work appeals to people and yet it seems to me that what she offers are comfort (“There are no frightening cards in this deck”⁸) and easy answers. Admittedly we all want those sometimes but do we really want our lives to be based on them, and do we believe that that is all that the Goddess has to offer us? It seems to me that once again this is an, either conscious or unconscious, attempt to remove us from our connection to the Earth, both by propagating shallow images of the Goddess, such as the ones found in this pack, and by suggesting that, in a perfect world, everything would be ‘nice’. Nature is not nice; it is “red in tooth and claw” and we are part of nature, not apart from it. It is what it is. There may be things that we would wish to change about our human behaviour but we can only do that by seeing ourselves as we really are and by being fully present, not by retreating into a world of ‘niceness’.

One of the things that most concern me is that, although Doreen Virtue is becoming more and more popular in Goddess circles, she seems to consider the Goddess to be easily slotted into monotheism. In ‘Archangels and Ascended Masters’ she writes:

“In ancient times, many of the deities listed in this book were worshipped in the way that many of us currently worship our Creator. Today we don’t worship deities – we appreciate them. They have small g’s in front of their god and goddess titles to show that they’re aspects of the God with a capital G …

"Just so there’s no misunderstanding, this isn’t a book promoting polytheism…the deities in this book are aspects or creations of the God…I’m not encouraging you to engage in worship of divinities, but to appreciate them as gifts our Creator has given us to help us love more, heal in all ways, and evolve on our spiritual path. When we accept their help we’re saying thank you to God.

"The world’s three major religions are monotheistic … Christianity divides God into three aspects: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit but emphasizes that these are all aspects of one single Creator. In the same way the angels, archangels, and ascended masters are one with God and fit into a monotheistic system.”⁹

I am not suggesting that there is no place for the Goddess in monotheism; indeed She has always been there for those with eyes to see, but it must be the Goddess in all Her aspects, light and dark, and accepted as the Creatrix of the Universe, not as a shadow of Herself, designed to fool us into thinking that the Sacred Feminine has truly returned when all we are seeing is a phantom.

We are visual creatures and to find our connection to the Goddess in an image or a symbol is a powerful experience and one that can change us forever. Barbara Mor notes that:

“Ancient people believed that power resided in images themselves – or rather in the resonance between an image and the thing imaged – and this belief still lives in all of us; symbols continue to have great power over the human mind and heart”.¹⁰

It’s interesting that in the British Isles we have very few anthropomorphic representations of our deities prior to the Roman Invasion in 43CE, when some, such as Sulis Minerva in Bath, became linked to Roman deities and were imaged in human form. Cheryl Straffon in ‘The Earth Goddess’ suggests that this was because the Celtic and pre-Celtic tribes expressed deity through the land itself, rather than seeing them as ‘human’ figures.¹¹ This is similar to the West African Orishas, who are seen as forces of nature, and to the Indigenous Australian beliefs in the Ancestors of the Dreamtime, who are often visualized as animal spirits, as well as humans. I believe that the beliefs of our pre-Celtic ancestors, as far as we can imagine them, had much in common with the beliefs of these ancient cultures.

Indeed, just as indigenous Australian belief speaks of the first Ancestors creating the land and then becoming part of it, so we have similar legends about the creation of our own sacred landscape in the British Isles, which is often said to have been formed by “The Old Woman of the Mountains”, or the Cailleach, who can be found in the folklore of Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales. She is imaged as a terrifying giantess who dances across the land dropping rocks from Her apron and is often described as “blue faced” and “one eyed”, with red teeth and matted hair. She isn’t ‘pretty’ or ‘nice’. She is what She is.

Today we can still find ‘Landscape Goddesses’ who appear to be sleeping on the Earth. One is the Sleeping Beauty Mountain on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, which is believed to be a representation of the Maiden Goddess Brigit. Once every 18.67 years she is awakened by the moon, which is viewed as rising to sit at her brow, turning the surface of the mountain silver and refreshing the fertility of the land. The most recent example of this was in July 2006 when hundreds of people travelled to the Hebrides to connect with Her energy. Another can be found in Glastonbury, where the hills that create the town and its surroundings take the form of a woman lying in the landscape and also of a swan flying to the South West.¹² The shape of the Goddess Rhiannon can be found in the rocks of Carn Ingli in the Preseli Mountains of West Wales, and it’s said that if you sleep on Her belly you will be sent prophetic dreams. Everywhere we find tales of an Ancestor/Goddess creating the sacred land and forming a relationship with these landscape Goddesses can help us to attune to the Earth Goddess as She manifests wherever we are. As the Goddess Holda once said (to Her Priest, and my dear friend, Jack Gale), “All Goddesses are the land”.

Just as the Cailleach is seen as ‘monstrous’ so we have our terrifying Sea Goddess in Domnu; said to have been the Goddess of the Formorians, the first tribal ancestors of Ireland. They were the offspring of Chaos and Old Night and were described as ‘ugly and monstrous’, often with one leg and living by the sea, or on islands, where they could swim daily in the ocean. Domnu’s name has been translated as ‘abyss’ or ‘deep sea’ and She is one of many monstrous Sea Goddesses throughout world culture, such as Tiamat of Sumer, or Sedna of the Inuit. Yet even a monster can be ‘prettified’ by the New Age; Sedna is the powerful Goddess who the Inuit shamans petition for a good hunt, diving to Her realm on the sea bed to massage the bloody stumps of Her fingers, which were chopped off by her father in an attempt to save his own skin and became all the creatures of the ocean. Doreen Virtue says in her 'Goddess Guidance Oracle Cards that they were ‘severed in a tragic boating accident’!¹³ Just as the Earth Goddesses connect us to the land, the Sea Goddesses are primal forces that sing to us of our origin in the sea and our deep unconscious; our task is to understand the meaning of their image, not to turn them into ‘pretty mermaids’. Why paddle in the shallows when we can have the depths?

Which brings me to New Age images of the Goddess; how is this primal power of the Goddess depicted? When looking at Doreen Virtue’s ‘Goddess Guidance Oracle Cards' the first thing we might notice is that there are no Crones, but there are other omissions: no big women, no old women, no ‘ugly’ women, no challenges, no real power. Even the African Goddesses have honey-coloured skin and Western features. This is cultural appropriation of the worst kind, where we take an image that we find powerful but unacceptable in some way and change it to make it more palatable to our own eyes, rather than examining in ourselves what it is in that image that moves us to fear, or anger, or repulsion. I have always considered it a great mistake to over- anthropomorphise the Goddess, to see Her in purely ‘human’ form, and yet we do experience Her through our bodies and She is inside all of us, with all our frailties and weaknesses. If the images we have of Her become too distant from our own experience of our bodies we may no longer be able to find Her in our own reflections and become separated from Her. We have been separated from her for too long as it is! When we reject the Venus of Willendorf, that powerful creation of our far off ancestors, as a ‘negative’ depiction of the feminine, when we reject Medusa’s snake-headed anger, or Blodeuwedd’s screeching owl-self, when we begin to only see the Goddess in paintings of pneumatic-breasted women wearing diaphanous clothes, we lose something of ourselves; we make ourselves ‘less’ than Her and we lose Her in the process.

Again, Monica Sjöö says that: “ … to my dismay, I find that images of women and of the Goddess that are popular and acceptable in the New Age movement are the very sentimentalised and sickly sweet ones that I had rejected years ago as sexist, racist and heterosexist … I find that what passes for ‘art’ and ‘music’ in the New Age is uninspired, lacking in honesty and passion and is primarily meant to soothe and please…they want docile and non-threatening Virgin Marys, sweetly smiling while the earth burns”.¹⁴

Whenever we attempt to define the Goddess in prose then we perhaps distance ourselves from our personal experience of Her but an image, like a poem, can speak directly to a part of us that can never be found through intellect, or logic, or through being ‘nice’. We may see an insistence to connect the Goddess with the Earth as a negative thing, limiting Her and us and playing into the hands of patriarchy, rather than freeing us from it. After all, the Earth and women are equated one with the other in patriarchy and both are seen as ‘less’. Of course She is more than that. She is everything; the stars, the earth, the waters and the depths of our souls, but when there is such a fight, through millennia, to remove Her from consciousness and to sever our connection to the Earth we have to wonder why and to think that perhaps that is where our power is to be found. I gave the Goddess my darkness and She showed me my deepest magic. She stripped away my skin and showed me the power in my bones. I looked into Her eyes and She reflected all that I am back to me and I fell in love with what I saw there. That is what we are being asked to sacrifice to the sword of the dragon slayer and the New Age is pressing it to our hearts with a comforting smile.

We have come so far, and She is within our reach, but we must not forget how hard the journey has been, nor how much we have to lose in allowing Her image and nature to be subverted by the New Age. We must continue to examine and question the forms in which the Goddess is shown to us and, as we do so, remember Her roots within the dark soil, that aspect of Her that is most rejected and most feared. She is in everything, not just in those things that we find ‘acceptable’. We must embrace the rot that we find there as a symbol of our own transformation, which is to be found not only in the light of the intellect but in the wisdom of the body and its changes, and we must challenge the New Age that only accepts one side of Her, and our, nature. They are the shadow but She is the darkness and the light undivided.

‘On enormous and minute wheels of pain and beauty we have turned…we return to tell and respell our story...’

©October 2006, Jacqueline Woodward-Smith

References

1. Barbara Mor and Monica Sjöö, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth, (Harper Collins, 1991), xvi.
2. Tim Ward, Savage Breast: A Man’s Search for the Goddess, (O Books, 2006), 6.
3. Ibid, 6
4. Quoted in Barbara Mor and Monica Sjöö, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth, (Harper Collins, 1991), 86.
5. Geraldine Charles, Marrying off the Goddess?, in Awakened Woman Magazine (Summer 2006 Edition)
6. Tim Ward, Savage Breast: A Man’s Search for the Goddess, (O Books, 2006), xi.
7. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves, (Rider Books), 141.
8. Doreen Virtue, Goddess Guidance Oracle Cards (Guidebook) , (Hay House, 2004), 7.
9. Doreen Virtue, Archangels and Ascended Masters, (Hay House, 2003), xvii.
10. Barbara Mor and Monica Sjöö, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth, (Harper Collins, 1991), 76.
11. Cheryl Straffon, The Earth Goddess: Celtic and Pagan Legacy of the Landscape, (Cassell Illustrated, 1997).
12. Kathy Jones, The Ancient British Goddess, (Ariadne Publications 2001), 48.
13. Doreen Virtue, Goddess Guidance Oracle Cards (Guidebook), (Hay House, 2004), 98.
14. Monica Sjöö, New Age & Armageddon: The Goddess or the gurus – towards a Feminist Vision of the Future (The Women’s Press, 1992), 85.

I Stand With the Badger People…

                                               

                                                 (Photo by Richard Bowler, used with permission)

                                

Wild wood wanderer,

Druid of old Albion,

Blessings on the Brock.

May our most ancient Briton,

Ever walk our old straight tracks.

(Martin Pallot)

Badgers have been present in the British Isles for at least 300,000 years, since before the time of the Neanderthals. Modern humans arrived here only 33,000 years ago.

Badgers live in complex underground burrow systems, known as ‘setts’. Some setts can be centuries old, as can the paths that the badgers follow above ground. Their tunnels and ways thread and weave their way across the land like memory…

Much has been written about the cull of our badgers; a Government led attack which began in the summer of 2013 and is continuing in 2014. Licenses have been issued in spite of an independent panel reporting that, “controlled shooting – shooting of free-running badgers – could not deliver the level of culling needed to bring about a reduction in TB in cattle and was not humane”. In spite of the cull's massive unpopularity with the public (more than 304,000 people signed a petition against it). In spite of Parliament voting against the cull. In spite of evidence that the method of culling used was not only cruel but that it could only serve to spread bovine TB further as badgers, no longer connected to their family clans and ancient landscapes, fled for their lives. In spite of the fact that badgers are protected in the British Isles under the Protection of Badgers Act 1992 and schedule 6 of the Wildlife & Countryside Act, 1981. In spite of the fact that badgers were declared a ‘species of conservation concern’ in the UK Biodiversity Action Plan and are listed under appendix III of the Bern Convention. Moreover, the cull itself cost £7.3 million to organise and to police, a cost of £4,100 per badger. This cost was considered reasonable in spite of the fact that large numbers of vulnerable people are having their benefits cut and some families are surviving only by relying on food banks.

At the Conservative Party Conference in September 2014, the chancellor, George Osborne, stated that, if re-elected, a new Tory Government would cut benefits by a further £12 billion and freeze benefits for 10 million households. None of this seems to make any sense and yet, for me, these attacks on our badgers and on the poor amongst us are not unrelated. In the way of radical honey, I am drawn to the root, to the ideology that lurks beneath so many of our Governments decisions. Badgers are dying. People are dying. The wild, in human and non-human animal, is under attack. One of this Government’s very first acts was an attempt to sell off our forests. The Infrastructure Bill, which exempts fracking companies from trespass laws, also contains a proposal that “any animal species that "is not ordinarily resident in, or a regular visitor to, Great Britain in a wild state" will be classified as non-native and subject to potential "eradication or control", therefore preventing the re-introduction of extinct native species. George Monbiot comments that, “this a deliberate attempt to pre-empt democratic choice, in the face of rising public enthusiasm for the return of our lost and enchanting wildlife~. As Baroness Parminter, who argued unsuccessfully for changes to the bill, pointed out, “it currently creates a one-way system for biodiversity loss, as once an animal ceases to appear in the wild, it ceases to be native.” (quoted in The Guardian, 21^st July 2014). All that is wild, untamed, labelled ‘unproductive’, and vulnerable is being attacked. The poor, the people of the soil, like the badger people, have always been outcast, painted as the villain; we have much in common.

Badgers will eat several hundred earthworms every night but also love to feast on insects, bluebell bulbs, and elderberries.

The name ‘badger’ is thought to derive from the French, ‘bêcheur’ meaning ‘digger’. In Welsh badgers are known as ‘Moch Daear’ or ‘Earth Pig’. Until the 18^th Century badgers were known as‘brock’ in England; names that smell of earth.

Badgers are an inconvenience to many landowners. Since its election in 2010, the ConDem Government has again and again brought in laws, or done away with old ones, which protect the land. The presence of badgers, a protected species, holds up planning applications, and badgers interfere with the gaming industry by eating grouse eggs which are being ‘lovingly’ raised for shooting. A lot of money is at stake. The only instance when a badger can be legally ‘removed’ is if it is vital in order to control the spread of disease. With bTB there is evidence that better dairy farming practices, which would lead to stronger, healthier cows, lessens the impact of bTB on dairy herds. Just as the much vilified urban fox comes to show us how much we throw away and waste, so the badger has come to teach us about our unsustainable farming practices. Instead of listening, we attack. There is also evidence that badger vaccination has a vital role to play and does not lead to family groups scattering to other areas. And yet, in its supposed aim to eradicate bTB, the Government continues to insist that culling is the only answer. Of course, were bTB to be truly eradicated, there would be no excuse to legally remove badgers from land when planning permission was being sought and that would indeed be inconvenient.

                                                                  (Photo by Richard Bowler, used with permission)

Badgers are incredibly clean and tidy their sleeping chambers by dragging old hay, grass, and bracken outside tucked under their chins.

Badger cubs are born in February, with two to three cubs per litter. By March and early April they are exploring the tunnels and chambers in their family setts and, by mid to late April, they are making their first visits to the outside world. By twelve weeks old, they are being weaned and begin to forage outside with their mother. By fifteen weeks, they are brave enough to forage alone. By the time that autumn comes they are almost the same size as adults and are enthusiastically building up body fat which will enable them to survive the winter.

There is something very inconvenient about our poor and vulnerable too, with our (much eroded) right to healthcare and support and with our calls for hearth and home and family. In a recent survey of 2000 mothers it was found that “1 in 5 regularly go without meals to feed their children, 16% are being treated for stress-related illnesses and one third are borrowing money from friends and family to stay afloat. Teachers have reported that thousands of children are going to school hungry, exhausted and poorly clothed. A study by Tesco estimated that one in five people was going hungry.” (quoted by Nick Cohen in ‘The Spectator’, January 2014) Only those in work, and even moreso ‘hard working’, are considered productive enough to be worthy of support and respect, and only then if we keep quiet. Like the badgers, we get in the way. I am lifting a prayer that we always will.  Like the badgers, we smell too much of earth and what is real. Like the badgers, we remember. Like the badgers, we are not broken and we have a long history of survival.

Taken as separate issues, it is easy to become overwhelmed. Everywhere we look there is something that we find impossible to stomach or to believe. Many of us, understandably, turn away. I believe that if we are able to dig underneath each issue to the radical roots, if we can claw at the bark until we find the rot below, we will find that, rather than being separate, these attacks on badger and human have the same source; a wish to control and to possess, and a belief that what is vulnerable has no value. We have something valuable that those who think only of money and power can never have; “like the badgers, we smell too much of earth and what is real". If we look for the kinship and the connections between us; between badger and farmer, cow and human, we will see that we are not alone in this fierce fight. We can call upon the spirit of the badger people in our own struggle against draconian moves to sell off the NHS and to withdraw benefits, just as they should be able to call on us in stand up against their murderers. No matter which thread of protest and action we might choose we are fighting against the same belief and declaring that we are of value to life. Badgers are fierce in defending their homes and their clans. In fighting for them, we are also reclaiming our right to be heard. We can stand with the badger people in reclaiming the land that was always ours.

In the badger spirit I find…

Ancient digger, old tunneler, keeper of the deep earth songlines, wild forager, quiet earth hunter, Brother Night, Sister Night, dark earth belly, beloved of the Elder Mother, lover of the soil, warrior spirit, carrier of the earth scars, watcher of time, guardian of the land, mapper of memory, protected by nettle, thorn, and rose, by holly and bramble, beating earth heart, honour in connection, power in belonging, breathing earth moving, snuffling the pathways, digging the songlines, earth mover, earth turner, deep heart holder, earth heart holder, wisdom of home and hearth and clan, keeper of the ancient tales of land and tribe, enduring memory of what has been, of what was, unseen warrior, fierce and peaceful deep earth ancestor…

I stand with the badger people…

                      (Photo: Jacqueline Woodward-Smith, taken at the march against the badger cull, June 2013)

On Small Beauties...

Every day, or almost every day, I post my ‘small beauties’ on Facebook. Often these are small, intimate moments of connection to nature and the wild; the light hitting a crow’s wing at just the right second to glimpse the iridescent blue of its feathers, a drift of burnt-toffee coloured autumn leaves, feeling the sun on my face on a cold day, the taste of snow, but they can also be much more human; a smile from a bus driver, a phone call from a friend, the warmth of my beloved’s skin when we hold hands, the taste of proper pie and mash, a song on the radio just when I needed it. In some ways, what the daily small beauties might be doesn’t really matter, and they will be different for each one of us. What does matter is that they are always there.

There are days when I really don’t feel like writing my small beauties; days when I feel heavy or cracked open, days when I am angry with myself and with life, days when I am feeling hurt and lost, lonely and confused, days when a deep depression hits, or days when I am just too, too tired. And yet these are the days when small beauties matter the most of all and, when I do sit and think of everything that I have seen and experienced over the course of a day, often the balance tips and I find that the day was sweet after all. It is all about where I choose to put my attention. Some people have assumed that I can find an ever-growing list of beauties because my life is simple or easy or unusually blessed and, although I do feel that I am unusually blessed in all sorts of ways, that is not where the beauties come from. They are not the words of a simple, unaware heart without a care, nor of one that turns away from what is ugly. Underneath the beauty there is a fierce rage and a determination to draw what is sweet from a life that we are so often encouraged to believe is harsh and uncompromising, a life that means nothing more than when we are next going to ‘escape’ from it all on holiday. I do not want to escape from my life; I want to inhabit it ~ every cell, every tear, every breath, every heartbeat ~ and a part of that is seeing the beauty in spite of, or because of, it all.

                                                   (the light on a winter swan's back, Kennet & Avon Canal, January 2013)

And what I have found is that, the more often I think about and write my small beauties, the more small beauties I see. Where I choose to place my focus is like a muscle that needs to be exercised and, quite soon after I began, it started to crave beauty and to notice it wherever I went. Now, on most days, it just feels easy. I know that for many it really doesn’t feel that way but, believe me, it gets better. Once a ‘giant positivity engine’ starts running there’s not much that can stop it!

                                    (My first ever taste of proper pie and mash from a proper pie and mash shop, Greenwich, May 2012)

But why did I start in the first place? Again, I think that it began on Facebook, where there was an idea of writing ’90 Days of Gratitude’.  It seemed like a nice thing to do so I began and, although it was quite nice, it felt like a pressure and, being a natural rebel ~ or naturally contrary, as some have put it ~ I came to resent it. I felt pressure to do it every day, I couldn’t remember how many days I had done and had to keep backtracking to work it out, I didn’t like feeling that I had been told what to do and then I realised that I wasn’t grateful at all! Often people suggest that I should record my small beauties every day and collect them together in a book or on a website.  Whilst feeling flattered, I have always resisted that and only recently I have worked out why. It is for the same reason that I’m not grateful. I am not grateful because, as a living, heart-beating member of the community of all beings on this amazing planet, I absolutely EXPECT there to be beauties every day and I have genuinely never come across a day without them. My job is only to notice and for that ability to notice I am grateful. Beauties are not something that we need to be grateful for, they just ‘are’, and I don’t record them because, in letting them fade, I am trusting that there will always be more.

                                                            (Lock gate heart, Kennet & Avon Canal, October 2012)

One of my favourite anecdotes is of Desmond Morris, I think, who was doing a study of a group of children from their birth until the age of twenty-one.  When the children were seven, it was decided to explore happiness so each was sent out with a single use camera and asked to take photographs of the things that made them happy. Most of the children took photos of their house, their family, their dog, their school, a favourite park, but the child who was the most naturally happy did something quite different. Instead of her house, she took a photo of her front door, right up close; she liked the brightness of the red paint and the way it shone in the sunshine. Instead of her dog, she took a close up of her dog’s nose; she liked how it sniffed and snuffled, she liked how cold it was to the touch, and how the wetness of it made her squirm. She took a picture of a reflection in a puddle, her shoe buckle, her dad’s ear. I may have made all of this up but, in the telling of tales, that really doesn’t matter. Here are small beauties. When we look at the vast expanse of our lives there may be things that break our hearts or make us afraid but, if we get in close so that those things become too huge to see just for a moment, we might notice the light through a bumblebee’s wing, or the laughter lines by an old ladies’ eye, and we will know that, no matter what comes, life is sweet and there will always be honey for the soul.

                               

                                                      (A tempting badger hole, Glastonbury Abbey, April 2013)

                                                             (Into the world of small and furry leaves, June 2013)

             

                                        (Bees, fungi, and primroses in a stained glass window, Nevern, Pembrokeshire, May 2012)

                                                                         (A spider's nest filled with eggs, Caversham Lock, Reading, July 2012)

                                                                                 (Tiny mushrooms in the Beech woods, Hampshire, February 2010)

Welcome to Radical Honey...

Welcome to Radical Honey, where in future months you might find all manner of things grounded in a call for sacred activism through connection, community, creativity, cultivating wonder, reclaiming, snuffling out the truth beneath the obvious, small beauties, dancing bravely in the edge places, foraging, mindfulness, seeing what is real, acknowledging what is broken and calls for mending, open hearts and soft bellies, kindness, the power of vulnerability, everyday acts of small subversion, wild acts of fierce courage, and the quiet magic of a whistling kettle and a nice cup of tea. It had not been my intention to begin sharing these writings on the autumn equinox and yet, as is so often the case when we just let things happen, it does feel perfect to let them go as we begin our turning towards the dreaming dark. Who knows what spells we will spin, and what wonders we might catch sight of in the autumnal mist?

'Radical' is such a maligned word and many of us have been taught to be afraid of it, carrying as it does within its few letters a whiff of what we have come to think of as harsh, strident, confrontational, and aggressive. And yet, when we look beyond these learned fears, we find that radical is a deep and beautiful word, meaning 'of, or related to, the root', or going to the origin and fundamental nature of something. It is all about digging deep and seeing beneath what we might see at first or have been told. It means asking 'why?' When I feel out what the word 'radical' means, I imagine curling into myself like a fox, snuffling through layers until I find what smells like good earth, and I sense the power of connection and community underneath all those things which seek to divide us. When we are radicalised, brought back to our roots, there is no hope of dividing us and this seems to me to be a powerful standpoint from which to challenge all that we wish to change. 

 

And what of honey? For me honey symbolises creativity, the gathering of beauty to nourish our spirits, to sustain us through times where we feel a lack of what is good and sweet, and to help us trust in healing and abundance. And the sister bees are dripping with the magic of community, connection with the song of the land, the value of the individual woven into the collective, and the rightness of placing what, and who, is the most vulnerable in the centre of all that we do in an ever-changing, ever-flowing movement of love and care. In bees I find She~Who~Is and the Source. It is significant that they are struggling in the world, just as many of us are. Our relationship is old and there are many threads of kinship woven between us.

                                             
                                                                                                                               
 And so Radical Honey is to call for sacred activism and change, through connecting to our roots and drawing on deep wells of creative and joyful honey. In a world like this one, any act of connection or happiness is a radical act, and a rebellious one. I encourage each one of us to acknowledge our rebellion, from standing in front of line of riot police on a fracking protest, to speaking out for those who have no voices, from joining a march, to seeing the beauty in a magpie's wing. And, after it all, knowing that often we all just need some kindness and a hot cup of tea in order to stir up something that might change the world. This is Radical Honey; nothing, and no one, is insignificant. Everything matters.

In the next few weeks, I hope to write about my own small acts of rebellion and the ways in which I support myself in community with all beings. In my own small community in London this might mean introducing fly agaric mushrooms and harebells, blue alkhanet and the local squirrels, ashy mining and hairy flower-footed bees, the man from the kebab shop, foxes and cats, my human neighbours, soil microbes, moss, the crows on the Heath, the pigeons on the Green, hidden rivers and wildly growing weeds, and, moving further afield, the Kent sea, and Sandstone Hill Woman and Silver Spring Valley Woman; spirits of the land where I spend my free days wrapped up in love. All are part of the community that sustains me. This is where I find my radical honey and from that ground there shall be adventures. Who knows what the autumn will bring...