Soliphilia: On the Seeing of Stars

My beloved honeysuckle staff

“For Earth to survive, she needs your heart. The songbirds and the salmon need your heart too, no matter how weary, because even a broken heart is still made of love. They need your heart because they are disappearing, slipping into that longest night of extinction, and the resistance is nowhere in sight. We will have to build that resistance from whatever comes to hand: whispers and prayers, history and dreams, from our bravest words and braver actions. It will be hard, there will be a cost, and in too many implacable dawns it will seem impossible. But we will have to do it anyway. So gather your heart and join with every living being.”  (Deep Green Resistance)

Walking matters to me. There are days when I feel broken, when the sea monsters that move beneath the skin of my everyday rise with the tide and no number of pots of tea will soothe them. And, often, that is when I walk; to remind myself of what is solid, thriving, and bigger than just my own wobbly inner worlds, to feel the edge between me and the wild, and to know that that edge is nothing more than a width of a gossamer thread, to brush a nettle leaf to feel the sting, to drink in the vibrant green of moss in the frost-bright of winter. To breathe. And yet, just the other day, I went walking and returned with my heart broken. That matters too.

In recent days I have come to know and love the little wilding apple tree not far from my home. I always stop to say hello to her, touch her branches, marvel at the saffron and silver of her lichen, congratulate her on her crop of small apples, greet them as her children. On my last few walks I have plucked an apple with much reverence and gratitude, taken the sweet flesh into my body as a gift and a sacrament. And, in this way, I begin to build relationship. It is a blessing. When I stand with her I feel that there is no one but us in the world, such is our connection of heart. I don't see the road or the cars going by, the chainlink fence by her side. I barely notice if someone walks by, which they rarely do. I am caught up in ancient threads. I am in love. And yet when I drove by her for the first time since meeting of her I suddenly became aware of how small and vulnerable she is. How many would not see a wise, tenacious being with her golden apple children but, instead, an old, unimportant tree with 'blighted fruit' on a piece of waste ground that could be better used for something else. And part of me wanted to cut those ancient threads of connection before my heart gets broken. Only a few days later the wildly growing hawthorn hedge just around the curve of the road from her, and which had been laden with almost-ripe berries was cut back, made neat and tidy. The almost-ripe berries lost. I lamented their loss for their own sake and for the sake of the birds who have lost their autumn harvest, and for mine. And so, yes part of me wants to cut the ancient threads that have begun to bind me to the wilding tree, but I won't.

In his 'Duino Elegies', Rilke writes, “Yes, the springtime needed you. Often a star was waiting for you to notice it.”We cut the threads at a cost; to ourselves and to the 'stars' that are waiting for us to notice them. If we believe that we matter, that we are an integral part of this world, then we must notice and we must allow our hearts to be broken...often a star is waiting for us not just to notice it, but to cry over it.

Not long ago, in a little lane close by, I came across the body of a blackbird fledgling. I was in awe of her delicate beauty, I grieved softly for the loss of her life, I felt empathy for the mother and father who had hatched, protected, and fed her. I gave thanks that she might provide food for the babies of another mother. I imagined a fox taking her, being grateful for food without the hunt. I felt connected in that moment to the dreaming of life where threads weave and break and reweave in deep relationship, where one small death supports another life, where Life~Death~Life is all part of the same flow. Truly, there is such great beauty in that and I felt honoured to have become a small part of that tender happening which sang so deeply of the root of things. But I wanted Life to know that this almost-blackbird mattered to someone, and I wanted people who passed by to know that too. And so I picked some honeysuckle blossoms and placed them carefully on her small body, crooning softly to her spirit. The next day only a few honeysuckle flowers remained. I thought of the maybe-fox mother and was grateful.

Singing the small sacred in 

This reminded me of a time when I was on a retreat with a group of women. Our time was spent on a Somerset farm in a small valley and, whilst we were there, some of the cows were birthing their babies. It was Lammas, we were celebrating the Mother, and we were grateful for the new life coming into being all around us. But one young cow, pregnant with her first calf, could not give birth. Her baby became trapped and nothing could break him free. She died and her baby with her. The farmer took her up the track out of the valley and left her by the gate to be picked up by a van from the abattoir. And yet even in the midst of such tragedy there was magic. Without speaking to one another about it, without ceremony, over the next few hours and into the next morning, the women began to walk up the track in ones and twos, feeling deep connection to this mother who could not be. They began to sing to her, give blessings for her life and that of her baby, and to decorate her body with flowers. Someone who saw the men come for her with their van said that they could not have been gentler or more reverent. I believe that they saw and they felt that she had become holy. We might wish that her final journey had been a different one and yet it mattered that we didn't cut off from what was happening, that we sang the small sacred in in the only ways that we knew how. It mattered to us. It mattered to the spirit of the mother cow and her baby. And I like to believe that it mattered to the men who came to take her away. I do believe that it mattered to Life.

"There is sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are messengers of overwhelming grief and unspeakable love" (Rumi)

And so, just the other day, I went walking and returned with my heart broken. I am grateful that I have a heart to break. As I walk on from the wilding tree, I take a path through a small wood which leads into a lane behind some sprawling old houses overlooking the sea. 

A tree with cooking apples high above the sea

In this lane I have found a tree laden with cooking apples, have gathered blackberries, elderberries, and nettle seeds, basked in the presence of plantain, green alkanet, cuckoopint, and pendulous sedge, have sung love songs to bees. When I walk there I feel that I am walking with my Grandmothers. I forget cars and televisions and shops and money and all the things that take us out of ourselves and I am happy. Just after the apple tree there is a curve in the road and there I found the most lush and magical patch of wild medicine, for the body and for the spirit; a small bank green and growing with nettles, hedge woundwort, wild basil, thistles and, most recently, the first flowering of mullein, which to my delight I discovered is also known as hag's taper, hare's beard, and beggar's blanket for the downy softness of its large leaves. What wistful acknowledgement of the vulnerability of those pushed to the edges of our society can be found in the folknames of our wildflowers who know those edges so well. It is there that those of us who reject the centre of things, and who often feel that we don't belong, can find good company. 

Green alkanet

Hedge woundwort

Nettle seeds

 

Mullein ~ hag's taper, hare's beard, beggar's blanket

 And so I have woven a deep relationship with this wildly growing bank, have spent time there almost every day, delighted in it for its own sake, for the abundant bees and butterflies that gathered sweet pollen and nectar, and for the wild medicines that I have harvested, taking pleasure in the thought of maintaining my connection with that land through those medicines as winter unfolds. It has been one of my greatest joys since I moved here. It made me feel that I was home. I have come to see foraging as the ultimate in mindfulness, for me at least. It is a responsibility to take the fruit and seeds of a mother plant, to feel worthy of claiming some of her children as my own. It is not something that I take lightly. Glenn Albrecht, an Australian Professor of Sustainability, has coined the phrase 'soliphilia', which he describes as 'love and responsibility for a place, bioregion, planet, and the unity of interrelated interests within it', 'soli' coming from 'solidarity'; fellowship of responsibilities and interests, from the French solidarité, from solidaire, interdependent, from Old French, in common, from Latin solidus, solid, whole.' So it was and is with me and this little bank; I walked to get out of myself. I walked and this little bank of wild magic brought me home.

And now the green beings of that little bank are gone. Two days ago I walked around that curve in the road and all that was green and growing had been hacked down, just a few leaves strewn across the brown and dying grass, confused bees still searching for pollen where they had found it so often before and where there was now none. My first reaction was disbelief, shock, then realisation, the feeling that I had been kicked in the stomach, anger, grief. It was just a little bank in a world where so much is changing and dying, where so much is brutalised, and yet it had been so very ALIVE.

Glenn Albrecht also has another phrase, 'solastaligia', the feelings of grief, dislocation, and loss we experience when the environment where we live is damaged, changed, or taken from us. This can apply to the planet that we live on, or it can apply to a little bank of wildly growing things and happily foraging bees.

And the temptation is to disconnect, to switch off, harden our hearts, because what can we do to save the planet, or even a patch of wild just outside our front door. Why dare to love when we know that our hearts will be broken. Better to lose ourselves in the television, possessions, and addictions. Better not to care. Sylvia Linsteadt has written that, “the line between self and the world is very thin. Perhaps it is almost non-existent. And yet we are taught to stay far from that edge –for isn't it insanity to consider yourself fluid with columbine flowers?”And yet, we have to be brave enough to risk that edge, to dare being thought of as 'insane', the 'stars' are waiting for us to notice, without us perhaps they will be a little less alive. Without keeping our hearts open, without allowing them to break, we can so easily become lost in disconnection, hopelessness, and depression, collapsing into ourselves. We will no longer see the stars.

I sought solace in the sea

And was gifted with a stone heart and the eyes of a bee

Ecopsychologist Mary Good has talked about 'earth grief', writing that these feelings are “intense, vast, and utterly overwhelming, The common response is....to shut down, avoid, deny”. In attending to her own earth grief, in staying open, she writes that she has “tapped into a vast reservoir of my own resilience. I have learned to withstand and open to my own pain, no longer turning away from it in fear that it will destroy me. This enables me to allow for, and hold, my own painful feelings, while at the same time remaining open to the rest of life and the joy available in every moment”. This is so important for those of us who understand that we were made for these times, that we are the ones who are here to remember what 'home' truly means, and find it in banks of wild medicine, in wilding trees, in family and community, in the weeds that grow in the cracks in the pavement, in the tiptoe of night foxes, and the scream of badgers, in the sting of nettles and the comfort of nettle tea, in the bitterness of elderberries and the sweetness of syrup, in the eyes of our loved ones, and the clear waters of chalk streams, even when we know that they all might be taken from us. Even though we know that they might break our hearts.

How can we learn to love through it all, to keep our hearts open, to be willing to cry tears that others refuse, our have forgotten how, to cry? Mary Good writes that, “whilst earth grief can be excruciating, it can also be medicinal...it can soften our hearts to the preciousness of life.” In staying connected, breathing through the pain, we gain so much, so much more than we lose. Lierre Keith in her challenging and thought-provoking book, 'The Vegetarian Myth' writes about the Mayan concept of kas-limaal, 'mutual indebtedness, mutual insparkedness', the knowledge that everything is connected to everything else. And I believe that that is how we can continue to love; not by disconnecting, by distancing ourselves from what pains us, but by going deeper, coming closer, becoming a part of; truly we are 'fluid with columbine flowers'.

I hope to write more about my own understanding of kas-limaal as the weeks go on, about how we are in deep co-operation with the dreamlines of bees and the memory of reindeer tracks, how we are in true relationship with the apple tree and the nettle people, not as a concept but as a reality. For now, it is enough to take in that we are in relationship. We are not alone, or separate. Recent studies have shown that if we can connect to that which gives us a sense of awe, be that almost too large or too small to contemplate; the birth of a star, the slow movement of a water bear, or a million other things both unusual and everyday, that it can lead us to be more generous towards others, be that human, plant, or animal community, towards all of life. We can begin to mend the disconnections and have the resilience and the courage to challenge the disconnection in others with respect and with love. These studies have found that our sense of awe, of feeling connected to something larger than ourselves, effects our behaviour more positively than even compassion or love (although we could argue that they are all so intimately connected that they cannot be separated). It is disconnection that breaks us and it is disconnection that is breaking the planet that is our home. It is disconnection that has brought us austerity, the badger cull, suspicion towards refugees, bee decline, deforestation. And it is disconnection that allowed someone to hack down the wildly growing beings on my beloved little bank. They will grow again and, in the meantime, I will hold the possibility and knowing of their return in my heart through the winter, do all that I can to stop it happening again, spread seeds, write letters, attend to the 'hedgetemple' in the inner and the outer worlds, grieve. What those who are disconnected perhaps don't know is that hearts that are broken only become bigger and wilder and they notice far, far more stars.

Further reading and links:

From Glenn Albrecht ~

http://healthearth.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/soliphilia-and-solistalgia-my-take-on.html

http://healthearth.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/soliphilia.html

http://healthearth.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/creating-language-for-our.html

Sylvia Lindsteadt: The Gleewoman's Notes ~

http://theindigovat.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/soliphilia-or-finding-light-green-heart.html

From Mary Good ~

https://marygood.wordpress.com/2013/06/07/field-notes-june-3-7/

https://marygood.wordpress.com/2013/01/04/when-a-curse-is-a-blessing-on-becoming-a-voice-for-the-other/

How Awe Makes Us Generous ~

UC Berkeley: http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_awe_makes_us_generous

From Lierre Keith ~

'The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability' Flashpoint Press, 2009

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.