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21st September 1997 5pm-8pm

The session opened with everybody forming a circle and performing the breathing exercises from Session 1 and then linking hands, left hand palm up, right hand palm down, and we passed energy from our left side as we breathed in to our right side as we breathed out. Finally we practised the hand squeeze in an anti-clockwise (deosil or sunwise) direction around the circle several times before finishing with breathing exercises once more and then the Circle Guardians were formally invoked.

The talk was on The Nature of the God and the Goddess and began with a summary of the history of the replacement of the Goddess by a monotheistic God and then the return of the Goddess into modern religious life and in today's wider society. The nature of polarity, archetypes, and the triple nature of the Goddess and God was discussed. The essay is published separately.

Following a communal supper we then resumed the practical side of the session. This consisted of preliminary meditation exercises with emphasis on sitting comfortably in a straight backed chair, commencing with deep breathing and then trying to focus on a single object. The object for this exercise was a Tarot Card. Halfway through the meditation we then focussed our thoughts on one single area of the card and at the end of 25 minutes we gently came out of the meditation with further deep breathing and then relayed our thoughts about the process.

Everybody had difficulty with focussing their thoughts for the whole 25 minutes. We all had thoughts and ideas came to us when we saw the card, some of which spoke to us personally and some of which were fairly abstract.

Lilla then showed us how to safely send back negative feelings or experiences that we feel come from outside. She pointed out the danger (because of the Law of Return), as well as the unfairness of sending negativeness back to a specific individual who may not in fact be the origin of the negativity, or if so, then not consciously. She said to visualise the negative feelings around us and then to walk in a circle, faster and faster, eventually, flicking away the negativity with our hands, and saying, "I send it from me", over and over, until you fall down dizzy.

This is a simple but very powerful spell, that utilizes the Universe's cleansing power to dissipate the negative energy without it harming anyone.
Thank you, Lilla.

We finished the session with two songs, Stand Up for the Earth and We All Come From the Goddess (words below). This session was completed then by listening to When God Was A Woman sung by the Lunacy Male Band which summarised well the story of the Goddess history

The homework for the next fortnight is to practice the meditation exercise with focussing on a Tarot Card or Crystal for 25 minutes at least twice a week and to continue with the breathing exercises.

In addition the notes that were handed out were to be read; these included a synopsis of Session I, the essay on the Nature of Divinity arising from that session and notes on meditation as preliminary to next session's topic of meditation and the Chakras.

Next session: Sunday 5 October 1997 5pm

GOD AND GODDESS

"The old gods are dead and dying, and people everywhere are searching asking: What is the New Mythology to be, the Mythology of this Unified Earth as of one Harmonious Being?" Joseph Campbell

Our ideas of deity have evolved over the millennia. It therefore behooves us to look carefully at our concept of what the God and Goddess are if we are to honour the Gods in our lives meaningfully. To do so, the Gods must be relevant to the needs of people in the modern world.

Pagans worship both God and Goddess, although Goddess receives greater emphasis than in most religions - some even worship Her alone. In rediscovering the Goddess we are returning to the worship of the Great Goddess Mother, one of the earliest forms of religious expression. Many Pagans regard the ultimate principle of the universe as feminine. ¹

The image of a witch, which is closely aligned to that of Shaman, offers women the possibility of harnessing this power and using it in positive ways which benefit humankind - to heal and change that which should be changed. ¹

This speaks not only of the Goddess but of our own inner powers.

Images of women as Priestess and Witch are important and empowering, especially for women. Recent societies have taught that woman is passive, a womb to bear children, a field that awaits the plough, that which is to be impregnated and controlled by men and male society. The Goddess images in western society have also taken on these attributes - the Virgin Mary is "handmaid of the Lord", and women's religious role has been for centuries that of follower and subordinate to the male Priest. ¹

Yet this was not always so.

In early Paleolithic times, the Great Mother Goddess alone gives birth to the world after herself, so that all creatures including the Gods are her children, part of her divine substance. Everything is living, animated - with soul - and sacred. Today's distinctions between "Spirit" and "Nature", mind and matter, soul and body had no place, because then humanity and nature shared a common identity. This was the mode that prevailed in the Paleolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age Crete. It is still found in what are called "primitive" societies and in poetry. ³

Thereafter the Mother Goddess unites with the God - once her son, now her consort - to give birth to the world. Here the distinction is made between the eternal womb and its temporal phases (moon, seasonal cycles of vegetation) and the focus of the myth is on the relationship between Mother Goddess and her son/lover. Everything is still alive and sacred, but the duality of that which endures and that which changes prepares the way for the distinction between energy and form later to become that between nature and spirit. This is the myth of Inanna and Demuzi in Sumer, Ishtar and Tammuz in Babylonia, Isis and Osiris in Egypt, Aphrodite and Adonis in Greece and Cybele and Attis in Anatolia. ³ This was still complementary dualism.

In the next stage, the stage where the Nomadic tribes of the North conquered and pillaged the agricultural South and Europe, the patriarchal Sky and War Gods killed the Mother Goddess and used her body to make the world and her blood to make the human race. This was Iron Age Babylon myth of Tiamat (the original Mother Goddess transformed into a mighty Dragon) and the Sun God Marduk. Creation is now dissociated from the Creative Source and the World is no longer a living being and sacred entity; on the contrary it is seen from Marduk's perspective as the inert and inanimate substance that we call matter which can be shaped and ordered only by spirit. The considerable implication here - which mythically underlies much destruction of the Earth as well as the Holy Wars against other human beings - is that the conquest of matter releases Spirit. ³

Finally the God creates the World alone without reference to the Mother Goddess, either through self copulation (Akhenaton's Aten) or through the power of the word of Yahweh (still breathing over Tehom - Tiamat - the lifeless but co-eternal ocean that was once was the Goddess). So perhaps truly

Here the world is set still further apart from its creator and cannot share in the sanctity of the original source. The creator is now only transcendent to creation, not immanent in creation as well, as was the Mother Goddess before him. The transcendent God - Pure Spirit - creates nature and then, in addition, transfers some of this spirit into the body of the human beings but not into the bodies of animals, plants, soil and stones. After the Expulsion, when the Earth is cursed to dust and thistles, nature itself (not Herself) becomes a punishment for the inevitably inferior spiritual "nature" of humanity. In the Hebrew creation myth, inherited by the Islamic and Christian traditions, there is no reference whatever to the Mother Goddess, who is no longer even an enemy and has disappeared from view, ³ to the "deep" - Tehom - in the Genesis version:

"And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."

The dualism of the Bronze Age, a complementary partnership between nature and spirit, male and female, Goddess and God, is now replaced by an eternal war between opposites - good or evil - only one can be allowed to exist and thus the nature of intolerance is born.

One way of understanding the long historical process of the replacing of the myth of the Goddess by the myth of the God is to view it as a gradual withdrawal of humanity's participation with nature. This process brings with it the corresponding emptying of animate life from nature and the transference of that life into humanity, which is then cast in relation of opposition to nature. If the relationship to nature as the Mother is one of identity, and the relation to nature from the Father is one of dissociation, then the movement from Mother to Father symbolizes an ever increasing separation from a state of containment in nature, experience no longer is nurturing to life but is stifling to growth. Historically, this process can be described as one in which humanity has discovered itself to be progressively independent of the natural phenomena among which it lives, increasingly capable of differentiation and selection, and so, in theory, more and more able to shape and order the world to its own ideas. From the perspective of the God myth then, the perception of differences that lead to the setting apart for pairs of opposites, spirit and nature, mind and matter, transcendence and immanence, reason and instinct, good and evil, life and death, male and female - is an obviously life enhancing activity without which, to think again in opposites, life would fall into inchoate chaos. ³

It is often assumed that the next stage of evolution will take the form of the last one, and achieve an even greater freedom from the given conditions of life in order to transfer them still further. However three major discoveries have undermined the value of continuing the direction of the last four thousand years and it is significant that they all point to the same conclusion; the need to comprehend the world as one whole. The most obvious is the splitting of the atom, whereby humanity has achieved sufficient distance from the substance and the structure of the material world to restructure it so that it, and the human race along with it, no longer exists. Einstein stated "with the splitting of the atom everything has changed save our mode of thinking and thus we drift towards unparalleled disaster". ³

The second discovery from archaeology, anthropology, comparative mythology and archetypal psychology show humanity as sharing in the common human condition of how to understand life and doing so in similar ways. We have previously been ignorant of the myths and legends of different cultures being so similar. We now understand the common bond between widely differing cultures and times that call for a fundamentally new image of the human race as unity however much we appear to differ in secular detail. Is this why the fundamentalist religions have so much to fear from the Internet and its easy access to a vast mine of information that shows the essential unity of all mythology, religion and symbolism?³

The third discovery is that the early scientific model of consciousness is independent of what it sees and does is now found to be false. Participation cannot be finally eradicated. In quantum mechanics, the absolute distinction between mind and matter, which implies the distinction between the observer and the observed, cannot be sustained. Thus in the end we can never speak about nature without at the same time speaking about ourselves. The frame of mind of any investigator is not just an essential component of what is discovered, but actually creates dynamically what happens in ways yet to be fully understood. The same conclusion follows from studies of the unconscious mind, particularly Jungian Psychology, in which the conscious mind is not only answerable to other levels in the psyche, but actually is dependent for its finest expression upon these deeper levels (or at least a harmonious relationship with them). Add to this the common knowledge that unconscious thoughts are registered in the body, that we cannot think straight when we are sick or tired and that bad thoughts lead to physical disease and Psyche and Soma emerge as ultimately one. In the language of mythology, the myth of the Goddess is not absent from the collective psyche just because it is disregarded. In fact it is exactly where we might expect to find it - in the collective unconscious of the race.³

These discoveries, separately and together, point to the need for the new mode of thinking for which Einstein calls, where life is experienced as a living whole, in which humanity participates in a relation of mutual dependence along with all other creatures of the earth. This, ironically is precisely the genius of the old Goddess myth, now transformed into viewing the Earth as one harmonious being in which the human race is experienced as one whole and consciousness belongs to all life whatever forms it takes. In the literal language of the old myth, the union between immanence and transcendence, and complementary opposites is the Sacred Marriage of the Goddess and God; in modern terms the reunion of transcendence and immanence, spirit and nature, soul and body makes possible a new mythic vision - the Child of the New Aquarian Age. ³

Ultimately consciousness as it has evolved through the God Myth has become confused with tribal consciousness which tends to demand an opposite to secure its own identity and to project the unresolved conflicts of its own tribe on to "the other". This other, the alien, then becomes the "enemy" to be sacrificed - the "evil" to be cast out for the "good" of the tribe. ³

By contrast we see that mythic themes are not confined within tribal and cultural boundaries but cross all the borders of both the ancient and modern world. The sacred is not a stage in history of consciousness that people grow out of or in to, but it is an element in the structure of consciousness belonging to all people at all times. Mythic images are the fundamental inspiration for the evolution of consciousness. It becomes a matter of supreme importance that mythic images achieve their most complete expression for they serve as guides for the evolution of the species. Looking back over the millennia it seems that in the Goddess cultures, the image of the Gods is of trying to break free from the totality of Mother Goddess - in the person of the son who grew to become her consort - just as in the God cultures, the image of the Goddess was trying to reassert its claim to ruling consort with the Father God. How else to explain this persistence of Sophia in the Old Testament and in the Gnostic Heritage and in the hidden Goddess worship of the Hebrews that would not answer to the law of the one God? Or the irresistible rise of Mary to de-facto Goddess status so many years after the book was as it were closed? It is as if both images are required to do justice to the fullness of life, as though without the archetypal balance of feminine and masculine images the evolution of consciousness would eventually become one sided and so distorted. The physicist, David Bohm offers a critique of what he calls "the fragmentation of consciousness" discussing how the way that we think about things, where we assume that we are separate from them, creates a fragmentary world: ³

"The widespread and pervasive distinctions between people which are now preventing mankind from working together for the common good, and indeed, even for survival, have one of the key factors of their origin in the kind of thought that treats things as inherently divided, disconnected and "broken up" into yet smaller constituent parts. Each part is considered to be essentially independent and self existent. When man thinks of himself in this way, he will inevitably tend to defend the needs of his own "ego" against those of the others; or, if he identifies with a group of people of the same kind, he will identify this group in a similar way. He cannot seriously think of mankind as the basic reality, his claims come first. Even if he does try to consider the needs of mankind he tends to regard humanity as separate from nature, and so on. What I am proposing is that man's general way of thinking of the totality is crucial for overall order of the human mind itself. If he thinks of the totality as constituted as independent fragments then that is how his mind will tend to operate but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in overall whole that is undivided, unbroken and without a border then his mind will tend to move in a similar way and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole."

Just as the science of biology has shown all parts of the human body to be interconnected and essential for the good functioning of the body, just as ecology has shown that all parts of life are intertwined into a fragile web of life and that all parts are essential for the harmonious operation of the whole ecology, so we see that a mind divided against itself is unhealthy and that the grasping of the masculine and feminine, and all other dualistic opposites must be blended into a complementary synthesis that leads to a holistic viewpoint of ourselves, our society, our relationship with all the rest of life, and our relationship of life to "inanimate" earth and the role of all in the functioning of the universe. Ironically much of contemporary psychology - the discipline that might have been expected to contribute most to a new understanding - is itself structured on divisive language and so falls into divisive thinking: the conscious and the unconscious, life instinct and death instinct, good breast and bad breast, the shadow and the self, the id, ego and super ego.

Similarly it needs to be continually restated that feminine and masculine are not things in themselves, not archetypal figures of an absolute differentiation with fixed and predetermined fields of applications. They are terms in continual relationship which take their meaning from each other: for example containing and emerging, receptive and active, conserving and dynamic, the whole and the part. But while their apparent opposition exists only at the extremes of the polarity, it is these extremes that are recorded in language as definitions. The archetypal masculine mode of consciousness has come historically to be associated with linear thinking, intellect, reason, Logos; the archetypal feminine mode of consciousness with analogical thinking, intuition, feeling, Eros. Each needs the other to be whole and while either predominates both are thrown out of balance; "thoughts without contents are empty; and intuitions without concepts blind" (Kant).

Perhaps the best model for understanding how opposites such as feminine and masculine interrelate is offered by the Yin and Yang symbol of Taoist philosophy. Here dark (Yin, feminine) and light (Yang, masculine) are equally contained within a circle, divided by an S shape, each half containing a spot of the other's colour and nature. What is immediately apparent is that the black and white are not divided down the middle with a straight line, so creating opposites which are clearly delineated and absolute, but instead the distinction is provisional, alternating, continually in play. Each contains the other in embryo and the force of the curve is to send the mind around the circle and not to allow it to become fixed in one part or another, nor to begin at any particular place. Consequently we are directed to understanding Yin and Yang not in terms of opposition but in terms of complementarity, where the separation of each from the other makes possible the perception of both at once. In so far as there is difference, there is mutual dependence: the sense of movement created by the alternations of colour and shape and further, the way that the movement changes the more intensely it is contemplated suggest that here we are in the presence of principles or realities that escape precise definition and exact application. This is the symbol of the New Science of Quantum Mechanics; this is the symbol of the God and Goddess as equal and necessary to the functioning of the other, this is the symbol of the New Mythology that humanity must adopt to save itself and all life. The world will go on without us but it is not clear that we will go on if the world changes dramatically. The Gaia Hypothesis of both Lovelock and Zell combine to re-form a scientific and theological explanation for the unity of this planet as one super organism, one divine, self regulating, entity that we have an important but not necessarily superior role to play. ³

The perils of polarity.

The traditional Pagan way is to regard life as complementary polarity and the use of the Ying/Yang symbol is widespread. However even this has its risks. One colour is black, the other is white. There is an emphasis on the extremes of the opposites required to complement each other. It is important to realize that the line between the two is fuzzy and furthermore there are more than two poles, there can be three, or four, or five poles, we don't only have the mother and father but we have the son and the daughter. In addition, by letting go of the either/or we can obtain the so called tertiary state. The Yin/Yang is Tao, the positive/negative of definition, the past and future result in now, time and cycles, male and female are all people, etc. ⁶

It seems clear therefore that a new poetic language has to develop to allow back into consciousness a sensibility that is holistic, animistic, lunar in origin, one that explores flux, continuity and phases of alternation, offering an image, not of exclusive realities, nor final beginnings and endings, but of infinite cycles of transformation. ³

Once a vision of life as an organic whole is accepted in principle, humanity becomes in one sense a co-creator with nature, that is, we are all God, we are all Goddess. This is a restatement of the old symbolic myths involving participating consciousness in which the rising of the sun and the coming of the rain were believed to require the assistance of human rituals. As Jung writes:

"As a matter of fact we have actually known everything all along; For all these things are always there, and we are not there for them. The possibility of the deepest insight existed at all times, but we were always too far away from it. What we call developmental progress is going round and round a central point in order to get gradually closer to it. Reality will always remain on the same spot, just a little nearer or further from the centre. Originally we are all born out of a world of wholeness and the first years of life are still completely contained in it. There we have all knowledge without knowing it. Later we lose it and call it progress when we remember it."

Chief Seattle's words may perhaps be understood symbolically in relation to the opportunity of our New Age and the final harmonious union of God with Goddess to produce the New Child of the Age:

"Will you teach your children what we have taught our children?
That the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth, befalls all the sons of the earth.
This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth.
All things are connected like the blood which unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself."

The song God Was a Woman written and sung by the Lunacy Band, a homosexual Pagan group, is a very good summary of the role of the Goddess throughout history, the words follow.

A very old concept, now used by Paganism, is that of polarity. Not the opposing duality of Christianity but the complementary duality of Nature. And this polarity extends to our concepts of the divine powers, both within (each woman contains a seed of mal Animus, each man the female Anima) and without (God and Goddess). Therefore, Paganism honours the God and Goddess as dual polarities complementary to each other and having their counterpart in everyone, male or female. They are the archetypal "masculine" and "feminine" and can be seen as various archetypal images, for example Mother - Wise Woman - Lover; Father - Warrior - King.

If the divine is within us, is it merely psychological, an imaginary construct? Are the outer forms of the Gods real? Do they have meaning? Jung wrote:

"Symbols are not allegories and not science; they are images of content which for the most part transcend consciousness. We have still to discover that such contents are real, that they are agents with which it is not only possible but absolutely necessary for us to come to terms".

The ancient images of the Gods are not random creations but true expressions of the nature of the Divine translated into human terms. They have evolved over the religious experience and wisdom of generations over many millennia. The newer religions of the Book, Judaism, Christianity and Islam were created by men; men who made their God in their own image. Paganism sees this as fundamental error. Divine is both male and female, imminent and transcendent, manifesting through different images and symbols so that we can come to a true understanding of its nature, an understanding that stretches far beyond the understanding of our conscious minds. The full nature of the Divine Reality is as yet beyond our human understanding and we therefore clothe this multifaceted reality in archetypal images that are an expression of the truth but not the full truth. However a non-religious psychologist would probably answer 'no' to the question "are the Gods real"? He would maintain that the archetypes thought vital to man's psychic health are merely elements in the human collective unconscious and not in a religious sense, cosmic in nature. Pagans stick to the religious view of the cosmos in general, although some regard the archetypes as poetical myths only. But from the view of the psychic value of myth, ritual and symbolism, the somewhat surprising answer is, it doesn't matter. Everyone can work out for themselves whether archetypal God forms were born in the human collective unconscious, or took up residence there from a cosmic home. Their importance to the human psyche is beyond doubt in either case. The techniques for coming to healthy and fruitful terms with them can be used by believers and non-believers alike.⁵

THE GODDESS

There are three aspects of the Goddess that are in general use in Pagandom which we inherit from Celtic lore: Maid (or Virgin but meaning one who is not owned by or needing a man, one who is not married or committed to a specific relationship); Mother; and Crone, who is the mother of mystery, the wise woman, the matriarch, the harbinger of death and change. The imagery for each archetype can be very varied, and properly so, to meet the needs of each individual, yet still the Goddess remais the Great Goddess, either as a Maid-Mother-Crone, with a particular vision as seen by Vivianne Crowley below, or as a multitude of Goddesses, each with important attributes, as is seen in the Greek example of Hera the Queen, Athena the Warrior, Artemis the wild one, Demeter the Mother, Hecate the Crone, Aphrodite the Lover etc. All in the end are the Great Goddess of Paleolithic times, that has remained in our Collective Unconscious for millennia.

Here the Goddess speaks as the creatrix of the Earth, as the inspirer, as birth and death, the beginning and the end, the first and the last of the Gods in this world. For a woman the Maid is the creatrix. She has need of no man; for man the maid is also the creatrix and the man has need of Her. Society teaches woman dependence and man independence. To know wholeness we must each learn its opposite. For man the Goddess is the Anima, that all powerful, frightening and beautiful figure who beckons him from the portals of his unconscious to make the heroic journey into the psyche to find the Grail, the divine essence of himself. We tend first to love what is most beautiful and on the surface this is always the young woman in the flower of her womanhood. She is the young woman who is not possessed by man, but who lures him to pursue her, to hunt her down, to make her his. For some men the lure of the chase and the brief moment of conquest are the end. It is the unattainable he desires - puer aeternus or Eternal Youth. He is a Peter Pan who has decided never to grow up and never to face the consequences of his own sexuality, the Don Juan syndrome where a man cannot mate with a real woman; for as soon as he possesses her, he despises her. It is the promise of the Goddess he seeks and not its fulfillment. The man must define his own divinity; he must cease to be the son and become the husband and father, not Peter Pan but Pan the Phallic Lord. 2

Here the Goddess glimpses a self that is outside time and matter, although she still defines herself by the qualities of others, compared with whom she is stronger, deeper, wider, more mysterious and older; she is no longer the unattainable virgin but woman; she truly is, a queen in touch with her own physical and sexual desire. This is not the Goddess who flees a man, but the Goddess who summons him to Her bed to serve and impregnate Her. What the Goddess seeks is a whole man, not a son/lover, not a distant adorer, but one who has come to terms with the demands of the outer world. The mate of the Earth Mother is the Phallic God. In Paganism, women learn to value the feminine and where necessary to grow and nurture the ego which has not been taught to value itself. It teaches a woman a sense of control over her own destiny. In taking on the role of Priestess, a woman demonstrates for herself her own inner power, and for other women, provides a much needed role of strong womanhood to which they can aspire. This is an image of wholeness and strength. ²

For a man, mating with the lover/mother represents a transition to manhood. Here a man finds his own sexuality and becomes a sun/king and father. The hero often fears this transformation for he does not know what the consequences will be. We do not wish to sacrifice our youthful freedom and we fear to take the kingship with its responsibilities seeing darkness and pain and the shadow of our death. The Goddess/Mother asks men, the Phallic Lord, to embrace the destiny of death for out of death comes new life. The Anima asks for the hero's Ego death, for only through this sacrifice of the image of ourselves as we think we are, can we find the Self we truly are. ²

The embrace of the Dark Goddess is death. Sometimes the death of the Ego is violent and we succumb struggling, sometimes the old life slips away quietly and we find that we have entered a new kingdom of untold expansion of consciousness, nevermore to return. This is the most difficult aspect of the Goddess for both men and women to understand. It is easy to love what is beautiful like the Maid. It is easy to love what is powerful and strong like the Mother. It is not so easy to love what is old and weak, a woman no longer fertile, who has given over her worldly dominance to others. The Crone teaches us an important lesson, that the feminine should be valued for itself. This is not because it brings sexuality or power, but because deep within the feminine there is an eternal wisdom; for the Goddess is here the High Priestess, the keeper of the mysteries. ²

The Crone Goddess is not the Priestess whose quest is in her knowledge, but the High Priestess who has found it and imparts it to others. For a man, the virgin aspect of the Goddess is an initiatory Priestess who brings him across the threshold of the psyche into the world of the unconscious. However it is the Dark Goddess who sits enthroned before the Veil of the Temple as the High Priestess, the card in the Tarot which is ruled by the Moon. To reach daylight on the other side of the Veil we must all become at one with the Dark Mother of Night. Other transformations are less pleasing; for this third aspect of the Goddess is feared by man. "Sacrifice yourself for me" says the Goddess but it is she who is the sacrifice. This is the Hag, the wielder of the sickle, the destroyer. The man's Anima knows that the Goddess leads him to his death; but only through death can life be renewed; only through death comes rebirth. ²

The Goddess can be seen as Gaia the Earth Mother on the temporal plane; the Moon, the Triple Goddess, Isis, with its phases in the Celestial Plane, and Sophia, Goddess of Wisdom, the Crone, on the cosmic plane. She is seen and honoured through the phases of the moon; Virgin at new moon, Mother at full moon, and Crone at waning moon. She is seen as the original Venus Goddess figure of the Paleolithic Age, with prominent breasts, prominent womb and genitalia.

In the figure of the Sheela Na Gig of Irish culture, we have the Triple Goddess in terrifying form. The Dark Goddess features of the face, the pert breasts of the Virgin, and the vulva held gaping open to bring forth both new life and welcoming all in to the Cave of Darkness and Transformation.

And the Lady is honoured throughout the phases of the moon, the month being sacred to the female with the cycle of menstruation and reproduction and creating, continuation of life. Each month the moon rises, it is the virgin, the ovum is merely developing but remains infertile. Man's seed cannot touch it. At mid cycle the moon is full, the egg has developed, it is round, full and pregnant. It requires the seed of man to become complete. It is the potential new life. And at the fading moon the asexual, weakened, but ultimately wise Goddess is seen as the corpus luteum, is created and finally discarded for the cycle to renew itself again.

Yet another vision of the Triple Goddess is offered by Shekinah Mountainwater in diagrammatic form. ⁷We encourage all Pagans to draw such diagrams for themselves.

These are just some of the possible correspondences we can align with the aspects of Goddess. Try making up some of your own. Remember, they are not rigid dogma, simply useful, flexible tools.

The ultimate image of the Goddess is therefore the Triple Mother whose aspects are reconciled in One. She is the Moon who is ever changing but ever the same. Here the Goddess is Earth, Moon and Sun. In the triple Goddess a woman finds the reflection of her true self and the man the true image of his inner feminine. The Goddess is complete. She is no longer the Unattainable Moon, or the Queen Who Dominates, or the Great Earth Mother who devours but all these and more. She is the Triple Mother seen first in the Outer World and the, when that has been stripped from us, we find her in her true home, the inner world of a man's soul. ²

THE GOD

In the same way that the Goddess and the archetypal feminine has various archetypal images, so too has the God. He too can be regarded as a triple God, Son, Lover, Sacrifice or Father.

He is however more commonly seen in dual form, that of the God of Light, the Sun, Love and Lust filled with positive energy; and the God of the Dark, the Ruler of the Underworld, the Gateway to Transformation, the Sacrifice, the one who lays down his essence for our growth. This is the age old legend of the dying and rising God, the Holy King and the Oak King, the Robin and the Wren, the Light Twin and the Dark Twin, however unlike the dualistic opposites in other religions (Yahweh and Satan) these aspects of the God are seen as complementary opposites or aspects of the One God.

The original God was represented as the Horned God with horns on his head indicative of the God who was both hunter and hunted, the God who could cause death and who by his death provided life for the tribe. His phallus is also very prominent, this was seen as the positive burst of life, a lust for living, the organ for reproduction. Note that horns here are seen as a sign of divinity so most horned animals are regarded as sacred in various cultures - the cow (Hindu), the stag, the ram. The horned moon was often seen as male. He represents the unconscious Dionysian desire to return to the ways of the wild, to shed the burden and loneliness of individuality by returning to oneness of the group mind. He is sexual, he is the Lord of the Dance, the ever renewing, ever growing force of life itself, he is energy and change, truth and paradox, hunter and warrior, father and carer, servant of the Goddess and King of the Land. Pan the goat footed God perhaps best represents the unity of the male God in all his aspects. There is the animal, wild aspect with his cloven feet in touch with the Earth and part of nature; there is the manly body and prominent phallus filled with zest for life and physical strength and awareness of himself as an individual; the pipes ever present at his mouth creating music, beauty and evoking in us wild awe; and his horns sweeping up to the heavens above, uniting with the crescent moon of the Mother.

"The God without has, for about 2,500 years been somewhat severely limited to a monosexual and imbalanced image, "the demon Jehovah", the wrathful father, the creator of pain, suffering inequality, restriction, elitism, misery and so forth. This terrible image has been mitigated slightly by that of Jesus, but suffering and pain are also features of this Divine Son in most orthodox Christian cults or religious churches. The problem of rivalry and pain between father and son, or older and younger male, seems epitomised in the formal religions, particularly those of near Eastern origin, such as Christianity". ⁴

Starhawk writes:

"The image of the horned God in witchcraft is radically different from any other image of masculinity in our culture. He is difficult to understand, because he does not fit into any of the expected stereotypes, neither those of the "macho male" nor the reverse images of those who deliberately seek effeminacy. He is gentle, tender and comforting, but he is also the hunter. He is the dying God - but his death is always in the service of the life-force. He is the power of feeling, and the image of what men could be, if they were liberated from the constraints of patriarchal culture."

The journey of the God is through the freedom and natural animalism of youth, through to love, humanity, kinship, parenthood, death and sacrifice and finally rebirth. This comes about through interaction with the feminine, the Goddess and also through his acceptance for the passage of time and inevitability of change. He is seen and honoured therefore in the phases of the sun, and in the cycle of the Sabbaths, beginning at Yule with the birth from the Goddess proceeding to Imbolc, the youthful childhood and Age of Innocence where all is beginning, all is new, all is exciting; Ostara, the spring and initiation, the giving of a name, the founding of purpose; the Beltane, the finding of his sexuality, the mating with the Goddess, the partnership of committed love, the full flowering of manhood, zest and rejoicing in the vitality of the Living World. At Litha he reaches his glory, King of the Land, the caring lord of his charges, the proud consort of the Queen Mother. At Lughnassadh the cycle turns, he is aging, he is sacrificed as the harvest to provide life for his tribe in the coming months of famine. In Jungian terms the sacrifice we must make to evolve to our true destiny is the sacrifice of the Ego. It is the Ego that stands in the way of finding the God Head within us. It is the bar to further self discovery and the journey towards individual realization. Mabon, the autumn equinox, represents the journey that is taken after this death of the Ego toward a new expanded consciousness. It is the quest of connecting with the underworld, the unconscious, the divine within. It is also the quest to recognize the feminine Anima within man if he is to be whole. Samhain is the withdrawal of both God and Goddess from the outer world and the exploration of both of the divine unconscious, the realization that death is but the gateway. It is the death of the old but the promise that new awareness will come. It is the reconciliation with our dark side. And once more we come again to Yule, the Christmas feast of joy for the new life that has manifested with a promise that will be fulfilled in the year to come. Thus the cycle of the year reminds us of the journey of the Archetypal God and the masculine within us all. It is the story of the hero on his quest. We can resist the sacrifice and therefore miss out on the transformation or we can be willing to leave behind the selfish Ego and explore union with others and ultimately with Earth and the Universe itself. Once more we come to the mystery that all is one and the one is all.

It is for these reasons that Pagans all over celebrate both the eight Sabbaths throughout the cycle of the year and the thirteen moons, usually at full moon, but often at new moon or fading moon, to honour the traditional three aspects of the Goddess. References

1. Phoenix From the Flame - Pagan Spirituality In The Western World. Vivienne Crowley, published Aquarian Press 1994.
2. Wicca: The Old Religion in the New Millennium, (Revised and updated). Vivienne Crowley, published Thorsons 1996.
3. Myth of the Goddess, Evolution of an Image. Anne Bearing and Jules Cashford, published Viking 1991.
4. Choirs of the God: Revisioning Masculinity. R.Stewart.
5. Witches Bible Compleat. J & S Farrar.
6. The Tertiary State: The Perils of Polarity by Anodea Judith and Richard Ely; Green Egg Volume 21 No 82 1988
7. Ariadne's Thread: A Workbook of Goddess Magic. S Mountainwater, pub Crossing Press, 1991

Exercises

A. Pagan Banishing Rite Of The Pentagram. (PBRP)

1. Stand in the centre facing the appropriate direction, preferably facing east which is the direction of the beginning and dawn and the direction of air.
2. Perform the Pagan Cross

   I am one (right thumb on forehead)
   With the heavens above (right hand raised above head)
   And the earth below (Right hand down in front of groin)
   The sun on the left (outstretched left arm)
   The moon on the right (outstretched right arm)
   And with all that will be (cross both hands over chest)
   So mote it be (bow head)

3. Go to the east quarter, draw a banishing pentagram starting with your right hand at your left hip, raising it up into the air above your head, bringing it down to your right hip, raising your hand up to your left shoulder, across to your right shoulder and down to your left hip again. This should be performed drawing the pentagram in front of you with your hand outstretched and visualising a fiery blue pentagram as you draw it.
4. Bring your hand up to your mouth, kiss it and then lunge out with both hands into the centre of the pentagram with both thumbs and left index finger pointing, and at the same time step forward with your left foot and call out "Great ones before time".
5. Then draw with your right hand an imaginary electric blue flame boundary in a circular fashion to go counterclockwise (deosil/ sunrise in the southern hemisphere) to the north.
6. Face the north and draw another banishing pentagram.
7. Kiss your right hand and lunge foreward with your left foot, both hands to the centre of the pentagram and cry out "Lady and Lord".
8. Continue circling deosil to the west quarter draw a banishing pentagram.
9. Lunge foreward with the left foot, both hands into the centre of the pentagram and cry out "Gaia and Pan".
10. Continue circling, visualising the electric blue flames circle as you go joining the pentagrams till you reach the south quarter.
11. Once more invoke a banishing pentagram and kiss your right hand.
12. Lunge forward with your left foot with both hands into the centre and cry out "Goddess and God Eternal".
13. Continue your final circling until you reach the east again.
14. Go to the centre and face east once more.
15. Stand in a pentagram position i.e. with feet apart and arms outstretched above your head in the form of a V and call out:

    "Father of the winds before,
    Mother of the earth behind.
    Lord of the fiery sword on the left,
    Lady of the oceans on the right.
    Above shines a six rayed star below tolls the bell of ages.
    And about and within flames the sacred pentagram."

16. Take three deep breaths and then repeat the Pagan cross.
17. End the ritual by falling to the ground on your knees with head down and hands outstretched on the ground to ground yourself fully.
18. Rise and quietly leave the area.

This area has now been cleansed of all painful influences. It should especially be done in an area that you may wish to set aside as your own personal shrine or sanctuary several times before setting it up.

Vibrating Words

There are two methods of vibrating words:

1. An internal invocatory formula where you cause your astral and physical body to vibrate. To do this you fully inhale and then use the entire exhalation to vibrate the work, thus elongating the word. It should be vibrated loudly in an almost chant-like tone of voice and you should feel it vibrate or resonate within your head or relevant area (for example the earth below should be felt in the groin, the sun on your left should be felt in your left shoulder and arm, the moon on the right should be felt in the right shoulder and arm etc.) e.g. I-I-I-I-I-I A-A-A-A-M-M-M-M-M W-W-W-W-W-U-U-U-U-U-N-N-N (for I am one)
2. External (evocatory) formula to excite the atmosphere around you. Again you inhale fully and as you exhale, you loudly vibrate the appropriate words. However here you should sense the entire universe in front of you resonating in harmony with your vibration.

Those who do not have the luxury of a place where they can loudly and authoritatively vibrate the words may do so at the level of a whisper or even silently. This is more difficult and will take more practice.

Blessed be and Never Thirst from Kim and Quenten.

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