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:
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Ecstasy
"...mysticism is not a way of knowing, but a way of being...."
(Ira Progoff, "Foreword" to Evelyn Underhill's Mysticism, quoted below)
Physically considered, ecstasy is trance; more or less deep, more or less prolonged. The subject may slide into it gradually from a period of absorption in, or contemplation of, some idea which has filled the field of consciousness: or, it may come on suddenly, the appearance of the idea — or even some word or symbol suggesting the idea — abruptly throwing the subject into an entranced condition.
...the extreme form of a state which must be classed amongst the ordinary accidents of conscious life...
...(distinguished by) its inward grace, its after-value...
...supreme instances of the close connection between body and soul...
...an exalted form of contemplation...
"A simple difference of degree separates ecstasy from the action of forcibly fixing an idea in the mind. Contemplation implies exercise of will, and the power of interrupting the extreme tension of the mind. In ecstasy, which is contemplation carried to its highest pitch, the will, although in the strictest sense able to provoke the state, is nevertheless unable to suspend it."
(quoted from A. Maury, "Le Sommeil et les Reves")...deeper layers of personality which normal life keeps below the threshold are active in it...
...whilst on its physical side ecstasy is an entrancement, on its mental side a complete unification of consciousness, on its mystical side it is an exalted act of perception...
...(perception) by contact, not by vision...
...an exultant certainty (that one) has known for once the Reality which has no image, and solved the paradox of life...
...rapture or ecstasy includes a moment — often a very short, and always an indescribable moment — in which (the mystic) enjoys a supreme knowledge of or participation in Divine Reality...
(Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: The Preeminent Study of the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness)Plotinus, a "hard-headed Pagan philosopher" and "greatest of the Pagan ecstatics," according to Underhill, is certain that ecstatic union with the Absolute (God/Goddess) is a union of hearts. Quoting Plotinus: "by love He may be gotten and holden, but by thought never."
The whole Christian doctrine of ecstasy, on its metaphysical side, really descends from that great practical transcendentalist Plotinus: who is known to have been an ecstatic, and has left in his Sixth Ennead a description of the mystical trance obviously based upon his own experiences. "Then," he says, "the soul neither sees, nor distinguishes by seeing, nor imagines that there are two things; but becomes as it were another thing, ceases to be itself and belong to itself. It belongs to God and is one with Him, like two concentric circles: concurring they are One; but when they separate, they are two. ...in this conjunction with Deity...the perceiver was one with the thing perceived...." Ecstasy, says Plotinus in another part of the same treatise, is "another mode of seeing, a simplification and abandonment of oneself, a desire of contact, rest, and a striving after union." All the phases of the contemplative experience seem to be summed up in this phrase.
Ecstasy, virtual oil on canvas © 2005 Sage Starwalker
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Saturday, May 28, 2005
Women's Mysteries: Menopause
Menopause marks the end of menstruation. For most women this "change of life" begins around the age of fifty, and due to increasing longevity, women can expect to live another twenty-five years — almost one-third of their lives. Just as menarche marks the transition from new moon maiden into the full moon mother phase of a woman's life, menopause signals her movement out of motherhood and into the crone stage of the dark moon...
In earlier cultures this rite of passage initiated women into their role as community elders, the keepers of knowledge, prophecy, and ritual. People believed that the retention of the powerful menstrual elixir was the source of the crone's wisdom. Having fulfilled her worldly responsibilities to her family, the dark moon crone could once again live for herself and pursue her spiritual path. A span of her life opened whereby she could now devote herself exclusively to fashioning her retained blood of life into mental and spiritual rather than physical children...
Menopause is a crucial stage in a woman's psychic maturation.
("The Dark Moon Goddess as the Muse of Menopause," ch. 7, Demetra George's Mysteries of the Dark Moon)Menopausal Woman, digital sketch/collage © 2005 Sage Starwalker
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Friday, May 27, 2005
Goddess Mu: Giant Blue Butterfly Lady
Deep in the sacred caves of the mountain Tarcarcuna, overlooking the deep waters of the Gulf of Darien, the spirit of the Goddess Mu, Giant Blue Butterfly Lady, still lingers lovingly, protecting the women of the Cuna tribe.
...the Cuna people remember that Mu Olokukurtilisop gave birth to the universe — created all that exists.
Close to the caves of Tarcarcuna, stands the sacred grove of saptur, trees whose fruit contains the juice of the menstrual blood of Mu. And close to the grove is the sacred hut of Inna, the shrine of female puberty that each young woman enters at the time of her new womanhood, the time she celebrates the ceremonies of the Inna. (Mu Olokukurtilisop, from Merlin Stone's When God Was a Woman)
Goddess Mu with Saptur Trunk and Fruit, digital collage © 2005 Sage Starwalker
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Sunday, May 22, 2005
Feminism Can't Possibly Be Dead
Despite news to the contrary, feminism can't possibly be dead. If feminism were dead, its opponents would quit beating it and move on. Clearly, this hasn't happend.
I'm editing
Quacktrack's index of Religion blogs, and in the Apologetics category I came across
Amy's Humble Musings, the blog of a "Radically biblical ... thoroughly deliberate ... totally woman ..." mother of four. Amy reviews Mary Kassian's anti-feminist
The Feminine Mistake (a play on the title of Betty Friedan's 1963 ground-breaking work,
The Feminine Mystique), and concludes:
The modern feminist movement is not extinct; it has just so well infiltrated the culture that we don’t recognize (it) for what it is: an assault on Biblical, God-defined gender roles.
So there you have it. Feminism is alive and still irritating those who believe in such things as "God-defined" gender roles.
Vive le feminisme!
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Saturday, May 21, 2005
Tiamat: Primordial Goddess
After the god Marduk killed his grandmother, the primordial goddess Tiamat, he decided to create the universe from her body. He split her dead body in two halves. From the top half, he created the sky and made arrangements for sun, moon, and seasons. From the bottom half of the goddess' body, he created earth: streams flowing from her eyes became the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, her head became the mountains, and her "udder" formed the foothills, all geographical features familiar to the ancient Mesopotamians.
When the plot is stripped of all its convoluted detail, the story told in the Akkadian (Sumerian) Creation Epic is basically about a rebellion in the divine world against the primordial mother goddess, Tiamat. In the beginning, Tiamat is portrayed in a position of authority over all the divine population, including her consort. It is noticeable that she is represented as having a monstrous aspect to her character, giving birth to dragons and vipers, only after she has declared her intentions to take retaliatory action against the young rebel gods: before that point in the narrative, she appears as a compassionate and tolerant ruler, commanding the love and loyalty of her subjects. When a faction of the gods rose in revolt against her, others flocked to her side in support of her cause. The prospect of a new, alternative power-structure under the rebel gods was not, it would seem, welcomed by all, and there were many who were prepared to fight for the status quo...
The Akkadian Epic clearly makes use of traditional Sumerian stories, since so many of the characters who take an active part in the anti-Tiamat revolt are Sumerian gods. Which of the Sumerian gods had been the first to challenge the authority of the old goddess cannot be determined... It is probable that the author of the Akkadian poem drew on a number of original Sumerian sources, each featuring a different god in the role of rebel, hero, and creator god, all of which were almalgamated in the poem as we know it.
What can be said, however, is that, on the basis of the evidence of the Babylonian and Assyrian version of The Creation Epic, Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians alike visualized the pre-creative state as originally comprising a divine population living under the matriarchal rule of the primordial goddess, Tiamat. (The Creation Epic, from Iris Furlong's "The Mythology of the Ancient Near East" in The Feminist Companion to Mythology, ed. Carolyne Larrington)
The mythology of ancient Mesopotamia, revealed through hymns, songs, and literary compositions recorded on clay tablets and deciphered in the 20th century, reveals "a system of cosmological belief that was formulated in the preliterate period by the peoples of Sumer and which survived, with adaptations and modifications, for well over two thousand years."
(Carolyne Larrington's "Introduction," ibid.)Tiamat, digital collage © 2005 Sage Starwalker
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Friday, May 20, 2005
Metis: Wisdom and Intuition
Metis is the name the Greeks gave to an intuitive intelligence often attributed to women. A statement like "there's no understanding women" reflects an ignorance of metis, for the path of metis is sinuous, unpredictable, and unsettling for those who have none of it in themselves. Synonymous with prudence, reflection and wisdom, metis is the opposite of deductive knowledge and is contrary to the linear logic of Apollo. Essentially an intuitive quality, it is what we might call today "situational intelligence." Rooted in an inner knowledge, an intuitive perception of contexts, and a sense of intimacy with all of nature's ways, it belongs to mythic thought, where logic does not apply....
Metis, Goddess of wisdom, who according to Hesiod "knew more than all the gods and men put together," was Zeus's first wife. Now Zeus, warned that his wife's intelligence could be passed on to their offspring, thereby producing children superior to himself, decided not to risk being dethroned. He swallowed Metis before she could give birth to the formidable Athena so that the royal power would never belong to anyone other than Zeus among the living Gods. Here is a myth typical of the patriarchal turn of mind. Zeus swallows his wife because she is too strong, and feminine intelligence, from then on called intuition, is imprisoned in the belly of Zeus. A shadow was cast on the notion of intuition that persists to this day because it is a kind of "gut" intelligence which, although not exclusively, tends to characterize women.... (from "The Feminine Intelligence of Hermes" in Ginette Paris' Pagan Grace)
Metis was an
Okeanis (Goddess of clouds and rain) and
Titaness (daughter of Gaia). She personified "wisdom, good counsel, cunning and prudence."
(Metis) The Greek word
metis is translated/interpreted to mean "the most knowing" and "of many counsels" (in the sense of the Homeric epithet
polymetis).
(The Goddess Athena)Metis, digital collage © 2005 Sage Starwalker
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Thursday, May 19, 2005
Wisdom: From Hochma to Torah
...the problem of female Wisdom was solved by the thinkers in Judaism at the end of the biblical period. The problem centered around two issues. Not only was Wisdom female but she appeared to be separate from God, and this challenged the monotheism that was so important in the religion. By making the Books of the Law most holy, in which all Wisdom was to be found, the solution seemed to have been found. Enoch's book described how the Lady Wisdom retired to heaven, and the seeker after her followed her and came back to earth with a written text of commands, punishments and rewards. These became the Torah and replaced the earlier universal nature-centered Wisdom. (ch. 9, "The Mother of God, God the Mother and the Shekinah," from Asphodel P. Long's In a Chariot Drawn by Lions)
Hochma, digital collage © 2005 Sage Starwalker
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Tuesday, May 17, 2005
50 Books: Painted Shadow
Superbly well researched.... A moving, powerful, and sympathetic biography of a talented, frail woman who deserves to be rescued from the obscurity to which she was condemned. (— The Spectator, inside front cover)
My beloved and I discovered the movie,
Tom & Viv, this spring. It's a good movie, if sometimes confusing, about the "little-known" first marriage of T.S. Eliot and Vivienne Haigh-Wood. It stars two of my favorite actors: Willem Dafoe and Miranda Richardson. After our second viewing, I wondered what would be the modern equivalent of the "moral insanity" diagnosis the docs assigned to Viv, so my beloved went to do a web search:
Her symptoms were all psychosomatic, but doctors variously guessed at anorexia, constipation, neuralgia, enteritis and 'catarrh of the intestines'. They blamed her glands, or her womb: she was thought to suffer from that Freudian affliction misogynistically known as hysteria. Beneath all the diagnoses lay the suspicion of 'moral insanity', which meant nothing more than that she possessed a normal curiosity about sex and a normal need for love. Repressive quacks stupefied her with bromides and chloral sleeping draughts.
(His trouble and strife)On her death in 1947 (after nine years in an asylum, where she was committed by Eliot and her brother), Vivienne's papers went to the Bodleian Library, Oxford University, to which she had bequeathed them. In 1984, the second Mrs. Eliot, executor of the TS Eliot estate, claimed the copyright to Vivienne's papers:
From that date the second wife was, in effect, able to silence the first. Legal opinion remains divided on the matter of ownership of the copyright. (Authors's Preface, Painted Shadow)
Carole Seymour-Jones became first curious, then sympathetic, and finally angry about the silencing and malignment and obscuring of Vivienne's role as muse and partner to T.S. Eliot. Five biographers had attempted without success to do research and write a balanced biography of Vivienne and her life with and role in Eliot's poetry. Obstacles abounded. Many told Seymour-Jones that the task was impossible. Somehow, however, she succeeded:
I became determined to discover the truth that lay behind her incarceration, to rescue her from from ignominy and disgrace, and to restore her to her rightful place in the historical record. For the next five years I would be hostage to Vivienne and her story.(ibid.)
Well written. Highly recommended.
Carole Seymour-Jones
Anchor Books. 2001.
Genre: Biography.
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House Cleaning
I'm doing a bit of house cleaning today. Pardon the mess!
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Monday, May 02, 2005
Colors of Beltane
Yesterday was a beautiful day for a long rural drive, which we had twice going to and from a party about 36 miles from where we live. I realized, on the drive, that I had captured the colors of Beltane in the eponymous Issue of
MatriFocus, published yesterday. The colors of the landscape, from the new yellows and greens to the steel blue of the rain clouds, matched perfectly the color scheme of the zine, seen in the borders of the sketch of a Keftiu (Minoan) Goddess I did for one of the articles (the sketch is based on a Theran fresco/wall painting).
It was a great party, a birthday party, with folks of several generations, races, and sexual identities, and with great food, two sugarless cakes (the honoree is diabetic), fun storytelling, and a beautiful young woman who is on her way to a boxing career! In the middle of it all, we were treated to five minutes of huge snowflakes being driven from the sky as a snow cloud raced by. Not enough to stick on the ground (or even show there), but a Beltane snow nonetheless. Wisconsin is wonderful!
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