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.
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
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)
See also:
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
In the News: Witches and Amazons
Medieval mural's tales of sorceryDec.28.2004, Guardian Unlimited
Link via Mirabilis.ca
A mural which has come to light in Tuscany has been identified by a British university lecturer as the earliest surviving representation of witchcraft in Christian Europe.
Everything is peculiar about this article. Everything. Start with the opening sentence. When you read more, you'll discover that what is represented is not so much a case of "witchraft in Christian Europe" as it is a scene of "medieval Christian Europe's fears and frustrations projected onto women." I guess that is what's so bizarre about this article -- the sets of assumptions and biases worked into the artefact.
Women warriors from Amazon fought for Britain's Roman armyDec.22.2004, Times Online
Link via Archaeology in Europe
The women are thought to have come from the Danube region of Eastern Europe, which was where the Ancient Greeks said the fearsome Amazon warriors could be found.
A must read. The burial, funeral, and military details are fascinating. And then there's the A-word: Amazon. In this case, they've found some graves of high status women warriors working as part of an "irregular" Roman army unit, raised in the Danube and attached to a legion sent to Britain. Hmmm. If they keep coming up with evidence that Amazons really existed, we might just have to start believing in their existence. Radical.
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Monday, December 27, 2004
Of Magic
The first thing a student of magic learns is that there are books about magic and books of magic. And the second thing he learns is that a perfectly respectable example of the former may be had for two or three guineas at a good bookseller, and that the value of the latter is above rubies. (Susanna Clarke's Johnathon Strange and Mr. Norrell)
I'm reading one of my holiday gifts from my beloved, a historical novel about magicians, magic, and practical vs. theoretical magic, set in England (and eventually other parts of Europe, according to the dust jacket) in the early 1800s.
The answer already seems to be
yes to the inevitable question: Is the author writing about the 19th century or the 20th?
In the early pages of the book, the reader is given to believe that by the 1800s there have been no practicing magicians in England for several centuries. The "gentleman-magicians" meeting to discuss magic in the opening pages of this promising book are men who have never "cast the smallest spell, nor by magic caused one leaf to tremble upon a tree." Historians of magic, yes, theoretical magicians, some of them, but practicing magicians? No, the belief
du jour is that practical magic is dead in England.
Indeed, from the footnote accompanying the above quote:
Magicians only applied themselves to writing books when magic was already in decline. Darkness was already approaching to quench the glory of English magic. Those men we call the Silver Age or Argentine magicians (Thomas Lanchester, 1518-1590; Jacques Belasis, 1526-1604; Nicholas Goubert, 1535-78; Gregory Absalom, 1507-99) were flickering candles in the twilight; they were scholars first and magicians second. Certainly they claimed to do magic; some even had a fairy-servant or two, but they seem to have accomplished very little in this way and some modern scholars have doubted whether they could do magic at all. (ibid.)
We've had a very rare four-day weekend here with no meetings or classes or social events big or small. Just the two of us, family phone calls, a brief Christmas Day visit, and some hearth magic of our own, very practical with very little ceremony and no awareness of the involvement of fairy-servants.
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Saturday, December 25, 2004
White Christmas
Since the middle of the night, fat fluffs of powdered precipitation have been falling, and the forecast is for snow all day.
It's a White Christmas, unlike the ones I used to know in Texas.
We bought catnip toys for the cats and they have had a very merry christmas. As for the humans, on the roster for today's celebrations: eating well, watching snow fall, reading, napping, canoodling, playing cards, and a visit from
K.. and J..May your days be merry and bright!
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Thursday, December 23, 2004
Grateful Time
Today is Cobi's 19th birthday. My sister and I just had a wonderful phone conversation, remembering so many good times and so many wonderful things about him.
Here he is just after his first birthday, with my Christmas gift to him:
He was passionate about music (can you tell?) and left behind lots of lyrics. My sister found some of the tapes he made of his music (when we thought they had all been lost). There's one long technolyrical piece called Meditation that expresses his mystical side.
The following lyrics express that, and his poetry, and his sense of things to come:
Grateful Time
Lyrics © 2004 Cobi FelicianoChorus
Grateful time for the end of the earth
askin mad questions to God what it's worth.
Bowls of incense spread in thru heaven
that's the shit, earth is just resin
Things change gottta face the inevitable,
not everything on ya plate is edible.
Sensing what's gonna happen any minute,
so repent, pray, loosen up & get w/it.
Here he is again at a keyboard, when he was 14:
Today, grief gives way to gratitude for time with him. I remember his incredible energy and his insistent creativity. Today, I'm exquisitely aware of how grateful I am to have known and loved him. He enriched my life, and enriches it still.
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Wednesday, December 22, 2004
A Gift of Space and Time
From my friend
M.. who spends most of her time, energy, and money taking care of people and the planet in social justice and sustainability work, came these:
A Gift of Space: A series of 42 images w/text, ranging from the three quarks within a proton within a carbon atom within a virus on a bacterium on a pollen grain on the eye of a bee collecting pollen from a lily in San Francisco's Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park ... through the Milky Way Galaxy, "an average galaxy within the Virgo Cluster" ... and out into deep space.
From our vantage point 20 light years from home, I hope you can appreciate how truly alone we are. At this time we have no way of knowing how common life is among the stars. For the 99.999 999% of us who will never leave the surface of our planet, Earth is the only home we will ever know. Earth is unique -- and will continue to be unique even if we find that life is a common result of the formation of stars and planets.
(A Question of Scale): A series of 80 images w/text that explores life from the formation of the sun and earth 4600 million years ago up to the present, with a glimpse into the future. For a sense of perspective, think about this: humans show up at image #77 where we learn that "The entire history of man makes up just one percent of the history of life on Earth." The series concludes with an excerpt from the
Earth Charter:
We stand at a critical moment in Earth's history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and great promise. To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny.
(A Walk Through Time)
Tuesday, December 21, 2004
Solstice Tidings
My gift to myself this year, a birthday/solstice gift, was the gift of time -- time to redesign my blog. What do you think?
In the
Markova system of Perceptual Patterns, I'm visual in my deep mind. The former pistachio-raspberry color scheme became unbearably unappetizing to me, and I've picked up enough CSS and blog-coding skills since I started this blog to move beyond a tweaked Blogger template.
It's a work-in-progress (isn't it always?), but I'm delighted to be far enough along to celebrate Yule with this new look.
My favorite way to observe the season is to sit in silence in late afternoon until the sun has set, to sit and contemplate the dark and all that comes with that. After a long while, I light candles and celebrate the promise of the sun's return. This year, I'll be doing that a day late -- this evening, I'll be leaving the house at sunset for choir practice.
I'm guessing I'll spend some time thinking about entanglement (or nonseparability) tomorrow evening, after reading recently about "the greatest religious discovery of the 20th century":
Physicists call it entanglement, and it describes the state of two or more particles once they have interacted with one another. From then on, irrespective of time and space, a correlation will always exist between them. What happens to one will affect the other - even if they are now at opposite ends of the universe.
(Physics and metaphysics)The article has a decided Christian bent to it, but the essential information is thought-provoking and beyond-denominational.
Blessed Yule!
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Saturday, December 18, 2004
Birthdays
It's snowing! Small flakes but lots of them. It looks now like someone sprinkled salt on the ground. It probably won't last long. The temperature will drop into the high teens a few hours after dark.
We're all warm in the house, cats and humans staying warm and taking it easy.
It's birthday season for my family. Mine was the 16th, my nephew's is the 23rd. He would have been 19. His mom will be at a Survivors of Suicide meeting on the night of his birthday. I'm not sure yet how I'll observe the day. If I can make myself listen to some rap music, I may do that. He loved it, and rapped himself.
We went to a pagan caroling party last night.
We Three Kings became
Maiden, Mother, Ancient Crone. The first verse of
White Christmas, pagan-style, became:
I'm dreaming of a real Solstice,
Just like the ones I used to know.
It would be so pleasing
To stand there freezing
At Stonehenge in the sleet and snow!
My favorite, though, was the first lines of Creedence Clearwater Revival's
Jeremiah was a bullfrog sung to
Joy to the World -- a cultural leap that made us all laugh.
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Thursday, December 09, 2004
20 Amazing Facts About Voting in the USA
An interesting read from
Angry Girl at Nightweed.com. Here are numbers 9 and 10 on her list:
Oh, gosh, why not throw in one more while I'm at it:
Just three of many reasons why my blog wears a
black armband.
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Wednesday, December 08, 2004
Sexism, DNA, and Iranian Women Warriors
First off, let me say it's not just men, or male academics, or anthropologists and archaeologists who are sexist. We're all sexist -- we were born into a world rampant with sexism. We can, if we choose, unlearn some of it, and that requires being conscious about sexism around us and within us.
When I did research on "Celtic" women, I learned of a significant sex bias: if a grave has weapons in it, the skeleton will be listed as male, even if there are indications to the contrary. Indications to the contrary are usually considered anomalies and not, well, indicators to the contrary (one academic went so far as to suggest the male warrior was perhaps a transvestite, given the anomalous artefacts found in "his" grave, when in fact the warrior in question was female).
Very often, in the case of Iron Age Europe, it is not the skeleton at all that is sexed. The associated goods are still considered diagnostic, and even in cases where a skeleton is preserved, it is often not studied by physical or forensic anthropologists.
It is painful to acknowledge that Hochdorf and Vix are the only properly studied and published elite "Celtic" skeletons of around 500 BCE of which I am aware. This is not an adequate database on which the build a model of "Celtic" dimorphism. Even if more skeletons were preserved, it is particularly disheartening to read in Brothwell that "there is a constant danger of incorrect sexing, and indeed ... there is a 12 per cent bias in favour of males" (1981, 59). We may add that, in the case of Iron Age Europe, there is an almost overwhelming bias in favor of the particular scholar's list artifactually-based criteria. This leads to such bizarre phenomena as the resexing of skeletons from female to male based solely on the presence of weapons in the tomb. (
Sex and Gender)
Enter genetic testing and the wonders of DNA. Diagnosis by artefact is subject to sexist worldview bias, but diagnosis by DNA, well, that's harder to get confused about. Blood just doesn't lie!
And so I read with interest the recent report from Reuters Tehran:
These days Iranian women are not even allowed to watch men compete on the football field, but 2,000 years ago they could have been carving the boys to pieces on the battlefield.
DNA tests on the 2,000-year-old bones of a sword-wielding Iranian warrior have revealed the broad-framed skeleton belonged to woman, an archaeologist working in the northwestern city of Tabriz said on Saturday.
"Despite earlier comments that the warrior was a man because of the metal sword, DNA tests showed the skeleton inside the tomb belonged to a female warrior," Alireza Hojabri-Nobari told the Hambastegi newspaper.
He added that the tomb, which had all the trappings of a warrior's final resting place, was one of 109 and that DNA tests were being carried out on the other skeletons.
Hambastegi said other ancient tombs believed to belong to women warriors have been unearthed close to the Caspian Sea. (
Bones Suggest Women Went to War in Ancient Iran)
Friday, December 03, 2004
Let it Snow
R.. and E.. were up Wednesday from Beloit and brought with them a few inches of snow on the roof of their truck. It was clear here, and 10 degrees warmer, and I'm just 45 miles north of them!
Today, though, I awoke to what locals call a "sugar snow." It's just a light dusting of snow that looks a lot like confectioner's sugar sprinkled over a cake. Yummy. Beautiful and not a mess to walk or drive in.
I went to Madison this morning -- 20 miles west of me -- and there's no snow there. The snow gods must be crazy!
We burned the last of the fallen leaves on Wednesday -- well, mainly
E.. was doing that. It was freezing outside, though not around the fire, he said. That's a big accomplishment. Some falls we don't get them all burned before the snows start, and that means waiting to deal with them in late spring, when they're heavy, wet, and compacted from the weight of the snow. That's such a nasty job that we're willing to be out in freezing weather burning leaves (and lucky enough, occasionally, to have a young friend doing that for us).
My sister's back in Houston, and our scrapbooking project is put away in a box, to be resumed on her next visit. We made a good start at it, but the first day was emotionally exhausting. Going through all of
Cobi's pictures, remembering and wanting fiercely to have him with us, brought several sessions of deep tears, sister-talk, and soul-searching. We miss him. Simple words, deep feelings.
As for NaNoWriMo, well 1471 words is a long way from 50K words, but hey, I gave it a go. I suppose if I had been in my right mind I would have known that now is not the right time in my life for novel-writing. The thought of it, though, and the few writing sessions I managed, fed my need for meaning and gave some right-brain relief from all the left-brain organizing I was doing. Despite my pitifully small output, I'm not convinced I don't have novel writing in me. I hope I'll continue writing throughout the year, and I'm going to leave the NaNoWriMo icon up to remind me (if it moves to tormenting me, it's out of here).
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