Recovering the Goddess

The gods and goddesses we believe we worship are in essential ways imaginary, and yet they have a huge impact on our lives.

What do I mean by imaginary?  Consider the opening chapter of the Tao Te Ching:
The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal name
The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth
The named is the mother of myriad things
Thus, constantly without desire, one observes its essence
Constantly with desire, one observes its manifestations
These two emerge together but differ in name
The unity is said to be the mystery
Mystery of mysteries, the door to all wonders

Both the nameless and the named are concepts of our minds, and if there is an ultimate reality, it is beyond the ability of the naming and categorising mind to conceptualise.  It is something which we may experience a little of, and only if we can silence the mind for a while, and experience ourselves on a level both quieter and more fundamental.  This is why Buddhists, Taoists and some Western mystics avoid concepts like “the name of God”.  It is not that God is so special that he or she cannot be named; it is that the act of naming creates a concept in the mind.  And all concepts distance us from that experience of reality.  Whether you think about Santa Claus, or Jesus, or abiding non-dual awareness, you are thinking about something, not experiencing it.

That isn’t terribly useful when he have to live in the universe of the myriad things though.  Where it is important, is to understand that our gods, our religions, our codes of supposed morality, all have the same origin: someone, somewhere, experienced something close to this essence, something tranquil, vast and impersonal which takes away human cares, the peace of god which surpasses human understanding, if you like.  Then that someone tried to tell others about their experience, and they tried to understand it by thinking about it, then they conceptualised it, wrote books about it, made laws about it, set up holy places where it was supposed to have happened, turned it into a publishing and trinket industry, and before you know it you have religion, and look at the trouble that’s caused!  The difference is like eating a banana – experiencing a banana – versus thinking about eating one.  You go to church or synagogue or Mosque, on a Sunday or Saturday or Friday, to talk about thinking about eating a banana, or worse, to listen to someone else talking about thinking about eating a banana.  That’s the nonsensical level that most religion has descended to.

Here is a little myth that makes it easier to understand what has happened.  It’s called: the Story of the Container and the Contained.

Once upon a time there was a poor, lame woodcutter who got lost in the forest.  He stumbled around looking for the path home for the best part of the day, but he just couldn’t find it.  He was completely and utterly lost.  As the light began to fade, he stumbled down yet another path taking him in the wrong direction, hungry, thirsty, tired, afraid.  Suddenly he heard water flowing, and turning aside from the path for a moment, he passed between the trees and came upon a small spring, flowing strongly with a cheerful bubbling sound, and with the clearest water he had ever seen.  He had thought he knew every square inch of the forest, but today he had been lost for hours, and he knew he had never seen this spring before.  He bent down, washed his face and drank deeply.  The water was the sweetest and purest water he had ever tasted and he knew at once that it was holy.  His hunger, thirst and tiredness fell away; so did his fear, and he was filled with an abiding peace and clarity of mind.  He lay down beside the spring and slept deeply.  The next morning he awoke refreshed, drank once more from the spring, filled his water bottle from it, and went straight home with a spring in his step.  His lameness was healed.

He gave a few drops of the water to his wife and children, and they, too, were filled with peace and joy.  He went back to look for the spring, but he was never able to find it again.
The local priest came to taste the water, and he too was filled with peace and joy, and called the bishop.  The bishop tasted the water, and declared that it was indeed holy water, and that the woodcutter was a saint, and that his house was holy ground.  The bishop ordered a beautiful silver reliquary to be made to hold the woodcutter’s water bottle, with the last few drops of the water from the spring in it, and the house to be beautifully decorated and made into a shrine, and people began to come to it from all the four corners of the world, to worship the reliquary.  The house became more elaborately decorated and rich people made gifts of gold and jewels to adorn it.  Someone donated a solid gold cupboard to put the reliquary in, and as the years went by and the woodcutter died, the house became a place of pilgrimage and worship.

After a hundred years had gone by, a huge cathedral stood on the spot.  Priests came to give their sermons there, pilgrims came to see the reliquary, and everyone donated richly to the upkeep of the place, which was looked after by the woodcutter’s youngest grandson, now an old man himself.

One day a young woman, an artist and a seeker, simply dressed and with dust on her feet, arrived at the cathedral, and asked if she could see the reliquary.  The woodcutter’s grandson reverently took it out of the gold cupboard, now kept behind red velvet ropes.  Might she touch it, she asked, so he gave it into her hands.  She opened the reliquary and took out the container, the woodcutter’s old bottle, which no one had seen for a hundred years.  She turned it upside down and shook it, but it was as dry as dust on the inside, and only a few bits of dessicated insect fell out.

“There is nothing here,” she said angrily, and threw the bottle on the ground, where it shattered.  And she turned and walked out of the empty cathedral.

And that is religion.

Another way of thinking about this is to think of this ultimate, indescribable essence as a multi-faceted diamond, very bright.  If we look into the glowing heart of the diamond, we might see something of the truth; but what usually happens is that we see a little bit of the truth, but distorted by our own reflection in the shining diamond, and we come away believing that the reflection is the truth, when there is just a tiny bit of truth in it.  And so christians, jews, muslims, hindus all believe that they have the truth, when they have just a little shard of truth and a lot of cultural baggage.

There was once a Sufi mystic who put this very well.  His name was Gibrail Kham.  “Truth,” he said, “is like a mirror which was shattered by time into a hundred thousand pieces, so that everyone who finds one can say: my religion is the true religion.”

Now in our world, it has been this way for five thousand years: we have an excess of male gods.  All our gods and goddesses live within the mother of the myriad things, but the worshippers of these male gods all believe that their god is the only one, and that he is beyond the cosmos, and the first cause.

Needless to say, this is nonsense.  Yahweh, Allah, Baal, Molech are all variations on the same Near-Eastern deities who came to prominence when archaic states were starting to form after the Indo-European invasions.  And this was the point in history when men began to control women, our bodies, our ability to bear children, probably because they had recognised their role in reproduction, and because increasing their property and their populations was vital to stabilising those early states.  It is no coincidence that the various legal codes from the period all have remarkably strictures on women’s conduct, treasuring chastity, institutionalising marriage, making it difficult then, as it is now, for women to live single and autonomous lives without being under the control of a man, and without being answerable to anyone for when and with whom they choose to have children.

And what has this led to?  They fear us, they hate us, they know us to be one with rebellious wild nature; and they need us desperately.  They cannot plant their feet in sacred soil and grow strong as a tree without our care.  And we cannot be free to grow and tend them while they are our jailers.

Before the arrival of the male deities, we believe from evidence from Neolithic sites that people in Old Europe and the Near East worshipped female deities.  On archaeological evidence we find what seem to be peaceful agricultural settlements, where females have high-status graves, where statuettes and images of a fertile woman crop up everywhere as an object of veneration, and where there are few, if any, signs of the worship of male gods.

Anthropologists may tell us that there has never been a true matriarchy, that even where men moved to their wives’ clan and inheritance was via the female line, women were exchanged by men and not vice versa.  We will not prove this one way or the other from the available evidence.  But some of us know better.

Let us say merely this for now: we need to imagine different gods, and imagine our gods differently.  The old goddess has been in chains for a long time and it is time to release her.  Nature, her body, the Earth, is dying from continual rape and poison, and she must purge herself.

We cannot afford anachronistic nonsense from old books that tell us that men should continue to rape this planet to death because their sky god has given them violence and death as his gift.  And men will not allow us to be equal in power.  So we must free the goddess of war and floods and destruction, and let the old hag clean house; otherwise we will not continue to live.  Only natural women – witches – can do this; we are the thoughts in the mind of the goddess, we are the leaves on the trees, the pollen on the bee’s wing, the black bird against the pale sky, the dark soil and the green shoot.  We are the ones who know in the bones of our bones that it is Life Herself Who is sacred, not the individual forms She takes. We know that we have soiled ourselves and our world, and if life is to survive then we must strip away to the bones the mess we have made, and grow ourselves and the world back into springing green ecstasy.  Everything man has built over all these tired generations, every building, every road, every city, every army, is as nothing next to one bird singing in a tree.  One blade of grass, one clear stream, one faintly fluttering breath of a breeze.  One wild blue flower, one ear of corn.  This is what we must protect, as the wolf bitch protects her young.  Ferocious we must be.