Goddesses are possible again — the word is spreading even to those who aren’t paying attention. The new dream is all about shapes arising where before we thought there was only darkness pooling around our fears and our faces. The old forms aren’t always the ones the goddesses are re-animating. It’s also something new this time, answer to the severity of our need. Need more, and the Goddess answers. How much we need. It’s called her forth.
Who is she? an old man asks. He’s never had truck with goddesses before. I don’t know anything about ’em. You can see it in his face, in his posture. He holds himself like a piece of cloth, something that can spread or crumple easily, at will or whim. But then who has dealt with goddesses recently? Ask around and what answer do you probably get? Yes, a good Catholic says the Rosary, prays to Mary because she’s vastly more approachable than that God made in the image of the old men of the Magisterium. Goddesses are possible, the old man says, doubting his own words, indicted along with the pedophile priests because we can no longer distinguish truth from truthiness, what is from what we wish to exist, to serve our weakness as a shield, so that we needn’t change. The Goddess opens one door after another, doors rusty on their hinges. You can hear them squeaking, maybe late at night when the only other sound is the breathing of sleepers near you in the dark. Who has dealt with goddesses before? We all have.
To breathe in the dark, awake. There you can feel the Goddess. It’s a start, a beginning like the edge of a blade, something sharp you can sense without trying. She is more than possible, more than a shape companionable in the darkness, one that doesn’t move and so isn’t a threat, isn’t alive, but rather a piece of furniture, something you can count on to stay the same as you make your way around in the dark. God the Father, in whom there is no variableness or shadow of turning, the Bible says. Everything she touches changes, say those who have encountered the Goddess. And she touches everything. So how can these two co-exist without canceling each other out, matter and anti-matter colliding and releasing some intense humongous cosmic energy to rival the Big Bang.
And the Cosmic Trickster lounging somewhere near the back door of our brains says That’s it exactly. Put God and Goddess together and you get the Big Bang, the ecstatic copulation, the first orgasm that even now continues, sustaining all that is, energy streaming out from both of them, because we need both. God without Goddess turns out to be a dry old stick, a petty tyrant peering in people’s windows and clicking his tongue at s s s i n. But ignore him long enough and he sends his grunts and heavies to round you up, to snatch you out and shove you up against a wall and shoot you, because you’re not holy enough, because you doubted, because you’re too real for the god-museum image that everybody worships and nobody lives. And tell the truth and it’s only a toss-up whether you’re on the shooting side, or the shot side. Not much difference in the end, it’s you or your best friend, opposite sides. Then neither side is worth the game.
But the Goddess alone is no better. It’s not the Fear of Feminism you see among some men, as if the ladies will replace us gentlemen in the fine art of hypocrisy and murder. Those men, they’re afraid they’ll get what’s coming to them, because they know deep down what goes around really does come around. But it won’t be like that. Instead, it all collapses into orgy, and everything comes. The definition of a puritan, remember, is a person with the horrible fear that somebody somewhere is actually having fun. God without Goddess is a stick, but Goddess without God is a soft gooey center that melts in your hands, not in your mouth.
Goddesses are possible again because we’ve earned them. We’re opening the door we’re petrified to open, terrified to walk through, but we can’t help it because the imperative we all follow eventually is growth, and if Goddess will give when God holds back, then we need to meet and embody the divine as Goddess in order to live at all. The prod of the god/dess is love for all existence, and we cannot both love and fear. So much fear nowadays, you can smell it.
And love? The Charge of the Goddess reminds us that all acts of love and pleasure are Her rituals. This life is sacrament. Priestess and Priest, be welcome to the rite. Come before the Lord and Lady with gladness and thanksgiving. Not in obedience, but in desire to celebrate what you know to be true, that each day is a gift, that this incarnation, in spite of all its troubles, is a blessing and worth that trouble. Potest Dea. The Goddess is potent, the Goddess can. Praise God, the Goddess is.
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Blue Madonna by Carlo Dolci, Ringling Museum, Sarasota, Florida.
Labyrinth at Hagal’s Farm.
Edited for spelling and grammar 5 Oct 2013
A Druid Way 