At the time I thought this was a rather bold suggestion.
Had I been asked why I thought the images were made by women, I might have said that people have understood caves to be the womb of the Great Mother, the Source of All Life, from time immemorial. I might have added that those who performed rituals in the caves cannot have been performing simple “hunting magic,” but must also have been thanking the Source of Life for making life possible for them and for the great beasts they hunted. Still I am not certain that I imagined women as the artists in the Paleolithic caves.
Mago is an East Asian/Korean word for the Cosmic Mother or the Creatrix. This piece is written as the first of a four-part essay. In this series I am surveying the past 9 years of The Mago Work (A collective effort to restore the consciousness of Mago, the Creatrix), which birthed the Movement of Goddess Feminist Activist Spirituality, while being shaped by the latter.
I was captivated by a bunch of wispy, weedy zinnia flowers on my dining-room table, with its bright blossoms sprinkled on the curling stems. The zinnias pulled me from my current obsession with sea goddesses into a different zone, into the Kingdom of Plants (Kingdom Plantae). The Plant Kingdom is an important part of Goddess manifest, having come into being long before the appearance of our human family. It’s no wonder that flowers and other members of the Plant Kingdom play an important part in the mythology of our ancestors worldwide.
The words we use affect our thinking. In the case of ancient Crete the repetition of the terms “Palace,” “Palace of Knossos,” “King Minos,” “Minoan,” “Priest-King,” and “Prince of the Lilies” shape the way we understand history–even when we ourselves know these terms are incorrect. We must engage in “new naming.”
Ariadne. May have been a name of the Goddess of pre-patriarchal Crete. The ending “ne” signifies that Ariadne is not of Greek or Indo-European origin and thus predates the later Greek myths.
Ariadnian. The name I have given to the Old European pre-patriarchal culture of Crete, from arrival of the Neolithic settlers from Anatolia c.7000 BCE to the Mycenaean invasion c.1450 BCE. Arthur Evans named the Bronze Age (c.3000-1450 BCE) culture of Crete “Minoan” after King Minos of Greek mythology, son of Zeus and Europa, husband of Pasiphae, father of Ariadne, whose gift of the secret of the labyrinth to Theseus led to the downfall of her culture. Evans assumed that Minoan Crete was ruled by a King.
This image I call “Ariadne Dancing” could become the new “icon” of Ariadnian Crete.
Recently I wrote about how the story of Cerridwen and Taliesin is not a muse and hero tale but a tale of stealing from the goddess. Violating her priestesses and exploiting the land.
That is one reading of it. There is another though, which may have some grounding in historical fact and may be a warning to a particular issue gaining prominence today; the rise of the psychedelic industry.
Although neo-Druids, for whom this tale forms part of their core mythology, interpret the awen that Cerridwen brews in her cauldron as the ‘flowing spirit of inspiration,’ the original text makes it clear it is a potion. Cerridwen gathers ‘every kind of charm-bearing herb’ for the potion. Three drops of it turn the boy Gwion Bach into the shaman-bard Taliesin, but the rest is poison.
Could it be that a relational God just isn’t powerful enough? Are some of us still hoping that an omnipotent God can and will intervene in history to set things right? Do we believe an omnipotent God can save us from death?
The concept of divine power as omnipotent (having all the power) leads to what Hartshorne called “the zero fallacy.” If God has all the power and can dominate in all situations, then the power of individuals* other than God is reduced to zero. In effect, this means that individuals other than God do not really exist, but at most are puppets whose strings are pulled by the divine power.
The story of how Cerridwen, the witch goddess, brews a magic potion full of awen (inspiration) which is then accidentally imbibed by the boy Gwion Bach, is well loved across the Western world, especially by neo-Druids. Gwion Bach is then reborn as Taliesin, the greatest bard in Britain. It is a typical heroes tale, with Cerridwen as the muse and initiatrix.
Or is it? This tale has always left a funny taste in my mouth, and when I recently read The Broken Cauldron by Lorna Smithers, I understood why. In the oldest version we have of this tale, Gwion Bach doesn’t accidentally taste the awen. He steals it.
This summer I had the opportunity to travel to Fire Island, New York, which is a long sand bar full of small beach towns with no cars. Fire Island’s been a haven not only for beachgoers but for queer folk for many decades. We stayed in the town of Cherry Grove with friends, and one night we went out to look at the supermoon/blue moon. The moon rose over the horizon, red and a little scary, a sight like none of us had ever seen. Not far from the moon was a star so bright it came out in the photographs. I wondered if that was the morning star. Venus, in our current understanding. Inanna or Ishtar, among some of the ancients. And that made me think of Istehar.
Istehar, in Jewish legend, is a maiden who became one of the Pleiades. Her legend is unusual among Jewish legends because it reads like a Greek myth. It takes place during the time when some angels had descended to earth because they desired human women. One of these angels, Shemhazai, noticed a certain woman named Istehar, and desired her and wanted to be intimate with her. Istehar wished to flee this angel, and so she said: “I won’t accept you as a lover until you give me your wings and teach me the Divine Name that allows you to fly to heaven.” The angel gave her his wings and taught her the Divine Name. Istehar immediately uttered the Name and flew up to the sky, thus escaping the angel. God was impressed by her virtue and decided that she would be placed among the seven stars, in the constellation of the Pleiades, “that humans might never forget her.” (Legends of the Jews I:4:11).
Modern science has proven what ancient myth has long told us about our Earth — billions of years ago our world was a water world. It’s not surprising then to find water-based creation stories and goddess mermaids in the myths of our ancient ancestors.
From the evening of the 14th through the day and night of the 15th of August, thousands of pilgrims ascended the Holy Rock of Petra to honor the Panagia—She Who Is All Holy.
There is “something really beautiful”* in being among them.
Six of us set out from Molivos at 7:30 on the 14th to meet in the square of Petra to ascend to the church. Petra was already full of so many pilgrims that police had forbidden traffic in the main square and were directing cars into a nearly full parking lot in a field. When we got out of the car, the two others who came with me and I had a perfect view of the steady stream of pilgrims climbing the rock, which was already lit up in the twilight.
Feminism and Religion 