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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Soil Geology and Cosmology

A reader passed this article along because she thought I'd find it interesting ... and she was right.

The article (God and the Good Earth, Guardian Unlimited, George Monbiot, Tuesday March 22, 2005) is based on the findings of a soil geologist:

Professor Greg Retallack has spent much of the past few years taking soil samples from the sites of the temples of ancient Greece. He has stumbled on a remarkable phenomenon. There is a strong link, challenged by only a few exceptions, between the identity of the god worshipped at a particular temple and the temple's location. Where Artemis or Apollo were celebrated, the soil was of a kind called a lithic xerept, where montane scrub suitable only for nomadic herders grows. Nomads living on soils called xeralfs, by contrast, worshipped Hera and Hermes. Subsistence farmers cultivating soils called rendolls built temples to Demeter and Dionysus, while fluvent soils capable of supporting large farms lie beneath shrines to Hestia, Hephaestus and Ares. The gods of ancient Greece, Professor Retallack suggests, "came not from an imaginary poetic city on Mt Olympus, but personify ancient local lifestyles". The ancients were worshipping their own means of subsistence.

Now that's the bit I found most fascinating, though the article is mainly about another fascinating topic, how the idea of "progress" developed among the Abrahamic peoples after they transitioned from nomads to settled people.

The philosopher John Gray has pointed out that, while pagans typically see history as a cyclical process, Judaism, Christianity and Islam all claim to be working towards a denouement: "salvation is the culmination of history".

And what does this have to do with soil and soil geology?

If you are constantly subject to the whims of the environment, as hunters and gatherers, nomads and primitive farmers are, an awareness of the cyclical nature of history is forced upon you. Your fortunes change with the seasons, the patterns of rainfall, the happenstances of ecology. Glut is followed by famine, followed by glut, followed by famine. Nomas, the Greek word from which nomad comes, means "the search for pasture". The name recognises the fragility of the people's existence.

A belief in progress, by contrast, is surely possible only after you have developed secure means of storing crops for long periods, and a diversified - and therefore more robust - economy. It is possible, in other words, only if you live on rendoll or fluvent soils, and build cities there.

I haven't scooped the whole thing. There's Easter, ecology, the Fall from Eden, Cain and Able, and more therein. Food for thought. Happy crunching!

Permalink posted by Sage -- 9:15 AM.

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