Goddessing: A Goddess / Pagan Blog

cosmology, consciousness, contrariness: the down to earth musings of a Goddess Mystic

If you landed here while looking for the international goddess research newspaper, Goddessing aka Goddessing Regenerated and Goddess Network News), please let me direct you to it. My blog has no affiliation, other than affinity, with this fabulous publication.

About Me

I have come to call myself Sage Starwalker, a name that's both a mouthful and a challenge to live up to, but when you ask for a name, and the Goddess gives you one .... I started the Goddess Mystic web site as a record of my early priestess studies. I'm in my last year of Temple of Diana's Spiral Door program. I'm an eternal student and have no plans to change that. I've accepted the identifier "disabled," but fibromyalgia and osteoarthritis haven't completely stopped me. I have a home-based web design business. My ministry consists of publishing MatriFocus Cross-Quarterly (a zine); developing Matrifocus [dot] Net to bring voices of the Goddess Movement to the blogosphere; teaching; peer counseling; dream interpretation; performing rites of passage and doing divination work for community members; Saturn and Chiron Return chart casting and interpretation; and web activism. My personal practice consists of contemplative arts and natural magic within Goddess, Pagan, Women's Mysteries, and Dianic Wiccan frameworks. I'm a member of the Goddess Scholars Group, the Conflict Transformation Group, and Womonsong. I'm looking to find more time for crochet, beading, and other art-making. Want to know more? Read 100 Things About Me

What is Goddessing?

Goddessing is a recent contribution to Goddess vocabulary, following on from Mary Daly's suggestion that Deity is too dynamic, too much in process, changing continually, to be a noun, and should better be spoken as a Verb (following Buckminster Fuller's "God is a verb"). We can refer to goddessing meaning Goddess culture, Goddess way of life, Goddess practice, or 'my goddessing' as in my individual interpretation and experience of Goddess. (Wikipedia)
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Inanna

Inanna was not one of the 30 goddesses I studied/worked with in my priestess training. However,

I'm an information sponge.

I have a huge book collection (as one of my young friends said: She has books on Goddesses I've never even heard of!).

I'm on my third copy of Barbara Walker's The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. The first two fell apart from (over-)use -- I read the second of them from cover-to-cover before I let it go ... in sacred ceremony ... and that's 1,136 pages!

Same goes for multiple readings and copies of Patricia Monaghan's Goddesses and Heroines and Merlin Stone's Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood.

I'm a sought-after team member when it comes time to play a "name-that-goddess" game.

In short, I'm a Goddess Geek.

So, it doesn't necessarily surprise me that a goddess with whom I haven't worked came to me when I was meditating on the Venus transit, but what I'm curious about is why. Why Inanna?

To start finding answers to this question, I pulled a few of my favorite reference books from my shelves and opened Baring and Cashford's The Myth of the Goddess, Evolution of an Image.

Their Chapter Five -- Inanna-Ishtar: Mesopotamian Goddess of the Great Above and the Great Below is a treasure-trove. First paragraph, second sentence:

(In a cylinder seal dating from 2334-2154 BCE) An eight-rayed star is near her, the image of the planet we now call Venus; for in the mythology of this goddess the crescent moon and the evening star, as the 'daughter' of the moon, belonged together.

And from the section, 24 pages later, titled Inanna as Queen of Heaven:

The Sumerians and Babylonians were fascinated by the stars, in the way, perhaps, that we now respond to the idea of exploring the universe. Nightly from the roof terraces of their houses they must have watched the great constellations wheeling around them, as they came to identify the most brilliant stars and gave the zodiacal belt the names and images that have endured to this day. Both Inanna and Ishtar were worshipped as Queen of Heaven. Their principal images were the moon and Venus, the morning and evening star, which may have given rise to the image of the eight-pointed star as well as the stylized rosette with eight petals as symbolic of their presence. Eight was the number sacred to the morning and evening star, addressed as the 'Radiant Star', 'The Great Light' in a Sumerian poem. Eight was the number of years it took for the planet to return to the same point of the zodiac while at greatest brilliancy. It is also the number of the sacred year, celebrated not only in Sumeria but in Egypt, Crete and Greece, when the full moon coincided exactly with the longest or shortest day, so reconciling lunar and solar time.

Well, that certainly gives food for thought ... which I'll most likely be serving up here, for awhile.

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Tonight, I pick my sister up at the airport. She's here for a two-week visit. She says she's been crying every day since school let out, and I'm probably going to be doing a lot of that with her. She's bringing recent pictures of my nephew, and some of his writings and journal entries. Yesterday, my partner picked up a book from the library that my sister just heard about -- His Bright Light, the Story of Nick Traina -- about a young man with ADHD and Bipolar diagnoses who committed suicide when he was 19. The book states that a third of those with bipolar disorder commit suicide. My gosh, why didn't anyone tell us how lethal this illness is? Suicide outnumbers death by homicide, 5 to 3, and AIDS/HIV deaths, 2 to 1. In 1999, suicide was the 3rd leading cause of death among young people 15 to 24 years of age, following unintentional injuries and homicide. Almost 10% of the adult US population suffers from a depressive disorder each year.

Sunday, we're having a memorial for Cobi here, seven weeks after his funeral in Texas. He spent eight summers here with me, so he's got a few close friends, young people and adults, and we've waited for my sister's visit to come together to memorialize him.

Permalink posted by Sage -- 10:29 AM.

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