How to Talk to a War Goddess: A Poetic Lesson From Sekhmet by Annie Finch

Consensus decision making, according to the mother of matriarchal studies Heidi Goettner-Abendroth, is woven into the definition of matriarchal societies. In these cultures, the respect, empathy, kindness, maturity, and belief in sustainable relationships that consensus implies are foundational.  War, as the inimitable Yael Deckelberg sings to us, is “not a woman’s game”; any society that truly hears women will not play it.  Overseen through the caring wisdom of circles of elder women in what Genevieve Vaughan calls the Maternal Gift Economy, matriarchal societies have less than no use for such a cruel, stupid, wasteful custom.  As my great-aunt Jessie Wallace Hughan, founder of the War Resisters League, used to say, someday humanity will consider war as absurd as we now consider the custom of dueling. But we won’t see the end of this integral outrage in our lifetimes; that day will likely arrive only after we’ve all come to our matriarchal senses.

Meanwhile, here we are again.

We speak out, and rage, and mourn, while millenium after millenium, century after century, government after government, men keep emerging who are sick and selfish and powerful enough to play the game over again—and women who are weakened and confused enough to enable them.

  The inner work all this demands of us is at least as important as the outer work.  How can we cope with the agonized frustrations of the present while helping clear the path to our loving, kind and essentially matriarchal species’ inevitable, eventual return to sanity? As an art that our society tends to associate automatically with humanity’s highest values, poetry can seem a natural place to turn in such moments.

But not, as it turns out, where war is concerned. The Kadesh Poem. The Iliad. The Mahabharata. The Aeneid. Beowulf. Lugalbanda. The Poetic Edda. The Shahnameh. The Mabinogion. Paradise Lost. These war-drunk works are the poetic foundations of patriarchal culture. On their epic mass rest tens of thousands of subsequent bloody paeans, elegies, and panegyrics buttressing the religion of “ultimate sacrifice,” sanctifying with poignant self-righteousness a tiny fraction of male warriors among the immeasurable multitudes of lives war has destroyed. 

What is a Goddess-loving matriarchal poet to do, then, in a time of war? Pondering this question, I wondered if War Goddesses could help. They are inspiring and exhilarating and invincible. And they are Goddesses! I imagined lioness Sekhmet drinking the bloodthirsty blood of our current boys’ club  of global warlords. I admit it was a satisfying vision.  I imagined Durga descending on them atop a lion, with ten arms—or more! —, carrying an axe, sword, mace, bow, dagger, discus, trident (just like Poseidon!) thunderbolt (just like Zeus!), conch shell for her battlecry. And sometimes, in Her tenth hand, a twisting snake . . .

But wait! That snake evokes the ancient snake Goddess Manasa. That pulls me up short. Have we taken a good look at those incarnations of the Divine Feminine whom we generally accept as “Goddesses of war”?  Surely Goddessery is by definition rooted, once we dig down through to the nourishing ground, in sustainable matriarchal cultures where war is recognized for what it truly is?

True enough, it turns out that Durga was originally a protective mother fertility Goddess of the mountain people. Yanked from her ancient roots by the Indo-Aryan patriarchy, she was given a new origin story in which she was “created” only to do a supreme male god’s dirty work: to fight Mahishasura, a demon who couldn’t be killed by man or god. The face that Mahishasura is associated with the buffalo, an ancient animal deity embodying fertility in Goddess traditions of India, makes the real story clear. This indigenous Goddess was forcefully reborn as an agent of the occupying patriarchal religion, her power exploited to kill off the “demons” of her own older matriarchal religions.

Athena’s trajectory is similar. The story of her birth from Zeus’s forehead eclipses her earlier life among the chthonic snake Goddesses, commemorated with the Medusa head on her shield. But the male-born “War Goddess” version of Athena does more than forget her matriarchal origins. She betrays them. At the end of The Eumenides, she says she has no mother and values male life more than female. She casts the tiebreaking vote to acquit Orestes of the crime of killing his mother to avenge her killing his father. And most importantly, she completes the conversion of Athenian civilization to patriarchy by neutralizing the righteous rage of the old Goddesses, the Furies. Like Durga, rather than a righteous fighter for values she believes in, Athena as war goddess turns out to be a creature engineered by the religious-nationalist-economic-patriarchal complex.

And the bloodthirsty Sekhmet, whose rage is so great that she has to be tricked into drinking beer dyed red as blood to calm her down? She, too, is a fake. Like Athena and Durga, Sekhmet was originally an ancient matriarchal Goddess— a mighty lioness from the south of Egypt. And like them, she becomes a “War Goddess” after a male-centered rebirth for a patriarchal purpose. She is born from her father’s eye in order to punish those who disobey him!  If it weren’t obvious that no true Goddess could ever arise in those conditions (consensus decision-making and matrilineal family being two of Goettner-Abendroth’s defining characteristics of matriarchy), here’s another tip-off.  Sekhmet’s father Ra is a sun god. This means that the war-goddess’s birth happens after the patriarchal transition from Sun Goddess to sun god traced so well in Egypt and worldwide in Patricia Monaghan’s O Mother Sun: A New View of the Cosmic Feminine.

 To quote Audre Lorde, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Given the true natures of such war goddesses, we can’t expect them to help us move beyond the atrocious games of contemporary war.  Here in the heart of the heart, the belly of the belly, of the gigantic change coming now to this world—the rebirthing of the Sacred Feminine that defines our era and our lives—we need Goddesses at their most sacred and their most feminine to guide us through the wreckage of the dying patriarchy.

And we have them. If we will listen.

Although Sekhmet, Durga, Athena and their sisters—along with Poetry and all her Sacred Feminine sister arts—were brutally appropriated and misused under patriarchy, that doesn’t make them lost to us.  On the contrary.  When we do our part—our sacred calling that makes it such an honor and privilege to be alive right now on Planet Gaia, Asase Ya, Mago, Nerthus, Pacha Mama, and all Her other thousands of names—we change everything .When we do our part, these Goddesses are as mighty as ever, as matriarchal as ever, as sacred as ever   Our part is to follow the Goddesses within ourselves down to their cores. This following may involve redefinition, reframing, reconstituting, reweaving, rebuilding (as I am doing with the poetic meters of English).  Whatever it takes. We are ready.

While meditating at the Temple of the Divine Feminine in Nevada, I was inspired to address this prayer to Sekhmet. It redefines her from “War Goddess” fighting for patriarchal domination and control to “Will Goddess” fighting for Divine Feminine authenticity and freedom—as mighty, courageous, and determined as ever.

IN SEKHMET’S NEW TEMPLE

Indian Springs,Nevada

You’ve guided me, Sekhmet— there’s no turning back —
The desert is blooming — and so is my heart —
its —ripe inner — channels —are blossoming black

with their lioness beauty till there is no lack.
The moon on your temple floor loves— me —apart—
You’re guiding me, Sekhmet — there’s no turning back

The push of — your will — at the small of my back —
Which guides me —now —Sekhmet — (there’s no turning — back —
Your fierce eyes are open) — Your peace will enact

its all-needing flames, unrelenting, to track
and turn me — and toss me — until our Will — starts —
You’ve guided me, Sekhmet. There’s no turning back

the touch of — your voice — in this close — sudden crack —
The desert is blooming — and so is my heart —
The matrix — home — center, Your temple, is — back —