~Eye-Magi-Nations Creations~
...& The Infinite Exploration of Love, Life & Self
I am willing to be different and beautiful
I am willing to be different and free
I am willing to be different from patriarchy
For this difference
Is the Same
Sameness
With the Non-Linear
World of Magic
The Goddess
Her force
My dreams
The Moon
My feelings
My Creativity
My Passion
My Deep Love
Of All Creation
And the only con-forming
I need to do
Is forming Creation
For I am form
And I am forming
To Univeral Law
And therefore
Must survive...
And even though
I may at times
Feel alone
And misunderstood
I will remember
That I have sisters out there
Who are learning to be free
Like me
And that I am not alone
But All One
And One with The All...
And that once free women
Were respected
And Loved
And will be again
And will be again
And will Be
I WIll to Be
I Will It To Be...
And So Doth It Be.
From:
Ariadne's Thread
By Shekhinah Mountainwater
Greek-Roman Love Gods & Goddesses
Aphrodite (aka Venus)
Sexual Love/ Beauty....
.. ..
Cronus castrated his father, Uranus, and threw the severed genitals into the sea. From the aphros (sea foam) arose Aphrodite.....
She was married to Hephaestus, the god of technology, or simply put, blacksmiths. She also gave birth to Eros or…....
.. ..
.. ..
Cupid (aka Eros)
Erotic Love/ Passion/ Sex....
....
.. ..
Son of Aphrodite and Ares, he is one of the most recognized figures in popular culture. He
is instrumental in almost every love affair but is known for his
notoriety. Cupid and Psyche, one of the oldest love stories, is filled
with jealousy, love at first sight, kidnapping, forced sex, revenge and
forgiveness.....
.. ..
.. ..
.. ..
Anteros
..
..
As
far as I remember I have always seen a couple of cupids. If you have
failed to observe this, probably the blame has to go the current
economic slump for omitting one to save printing cost. Anteros is the other cupid.....
.. ..
.. ..
Hymen
Marriage/ First Love....
.. ..
He was the son of Dionysus (God of wine) and Aphrodite. He is supposed to attend every marriage. His absence meant the marriage would end up in divorce.
Kamdev
Love/ Passion/ Sex
Kamdev, son of Bhrama. A
youthful god, always represented holding a bow made of sugarcane, he
uses same combat strategies to make people fall in love as Cupid.
Rati
Love/ Passion/ Sex
Wife and sidekick of Kamdev, She is the most beautiful women in Hindu mythology. Or was it Laxmi?
Love
Benten
is the goddess of love, eloquence, wisdom, the arts, music, knowledge,
good fortune and water. She is the patron of geishas, dancers, and
musicians. She is the only goddess to reside in Shichifukujin, the
Mount Olympus of Japanese gods, along with the seven other gods.
P'an Chin Lien
Brothels/ Prostitution
She
was a widow, a very liberal and accessible one, who was killed by her
father-in-law. In death her more professional acquaintances honored her
and eventually became the goddess of whores.
Freya
Love/ Fertility
Freya is the counterpart of Aphrodite or Venus, however her conduct is not as mischievous as her Greek sister’s.
LofnIllicit Relations / Forbidden Love
Lofn, the head maiden of Freya is the goddess of forbidden love. She smiles upon illicit unions.
Hathor
Love/ Marriage/ Fertility
Hathor
is an Egyptian equivalent of Aphrodite and Venus. Portrayed as a cow,
she is also the physical embodiment of the Milky Way,
Qetesh
Beauty/ Love
Qetesh
combines the essence of BA and KA, something like Egyptian Ying-Yang,
together to form the perfect woman. She represented the more physical
aspects of love such as sex, along with a platonic form of wisdom.
Luamerava
Sexual Desire
....
..
..
She is the notorious African goddess of sexual desire.....
.. ..
.. ..Erzulie
Voodoo goddess of love, beauty and dance too.....
.. 
..Erzulie Dantor is the Voodoo goddess of love, romance, the arts, jealousy,passion, sex and lesbian women. She is a mulatto woman who is often portrayed as the 'Black Madonna.'Inanna
Erotic Love/ War....
.. ..
Sumerians,
well ahead of their time, clubbed both war and erotic love together
under one beautiful woman and worshipped her as Inanna. She is also
famous for a striptease she performed while descending to the
underworlds. Probably the oldest s-trip in any mythology.
from: www.mensxp.com/..Article.aspx?id=1391
It's All Me
these things I see,
the Crystals, the Stars
the Man in the Tree.
It's All Me
that I know,
the judge, the jury,
and the Divine Inner Glow.
The shadows
The light
The love
The fright
The voices
The music
The day
and the night.
The writer
The dancer
The whore
The priest
The starving
The selfless
and the feast greedy beast.
It's All Me
within Me
from the He to the She.
It's All One
to whence I come,
to whence I go,
within the Divine Glow.
Infinite Love
Of The Goddess of Love
Of the Goddess of Love
The goddess of love was a moon goddess. In ancient times, in some of the locales where she was worshiped, the climate was hot and arid. The people presumed that as the torrid, blinding sun dried the land and destroyed the young green growth, it was the moon in her soft, shadowy illumination which offered life and abundance. The Moon and Her Goddess were the fertilizing powers. Hence the goddess wore the crescent moon as a headdress, just as Isis is often depicted with crescent-shaped cowhorns and is therefore associated with the cow., the source of the milk of human kindness. In special religious festivals to the moon goddess, small cakes in the form of a crescent moon were used.
But the Moon also had the power to bring lunacy. In the dark phase of the moon, the goddess was ominous in her boundless rage and ruthless destruction. Plutarch said her, “The waxing moon is of good intent, but the waning moon brings sickness and death.” As the moon, she was cyclic, following a rhythm of constant change.
Another common thread which is interwined in the myths of all the love goddesses is the eternal, yet the son-lover. The goddess herself is eternal, yet the son-lover is slain or sacrificed to be resurrected again. Inanna's young love was the shepard Dumuzi, who was sacrificed to the Nether World for six months every year, as was Ishtars son-lover. Tammuz. In Egypt, there were Isis and Osiris, in Lydia, Cybele and Attis. The theme is repeated as each young man meets an untimely, cruel death and eventually is brought to earth or life once again. It continues throughout the eras to the more familiar Greek mythology.
One Greek myth tells of Aphrodite and her beautiful Adonis (A name which means Lord and Master). Aphrodite finds Adonis at his birth out of a tree into which his mother has transformed herself. Aphrodite put the child in a coffer which she then entrusted to the goddess of the underworld, Persephone.
When later Aphrodite came to reclaim the coffer she found that Persephone had already opened it, beheld the great beauty of the child and refused to give him up. The dispute between the two goddesses was brought before Zeus, who resolved the conflict by deciding that Adonis should spend half the year on earth and half in the underworld.
During the part of the year he was with Aphrodite, she sought only to please him. Adonis had a passion for the chase, and even though Aphrodite feared some tragic fate would befall him, she could not discourage him.
One day, during a chase into the wild woods, Adonis was attacked and fatally goared by a boar. As Aphrodite rushed to him, she scratched her leg on a rose, which until that time had been white. The rose turned red from her blood. (The Red Rose, a symbol of Aphrodite, is still very much thought of as a Gift of Love) Aphrodited kissed Adonis as he died, and she felt herself suffer the same piercing pain.
“Loss and Death, unrequitted love and abandonment, are all part of Aphrodite's Realm. Indeed, only by these dark shadows does her golden brilliance become a complete creation, smiling its immortal smile as well as looking on death with immortal eyes. Permanence is of Hera's World, not Aphrodite's. What belongs to her is deep acceptance that passionate love does not last forever; and equally deep acceptance that man is made to love.”
This myth, like many others of the son-lover, may be interpreted simply as telling a metaphorical story about seasonal change---the dying of vegetation in winter months, followed by the renewal of green growth in spring. Such an interpretation, however, overlooks the goddess' involvement, the depth of her emotions. All the myths of these goddess' emphasize the pain, the grief and the mourning they experience over death of the son-lover. We know the range of this Goddesses Emotions---Joy and Pleasure, yet also Pain and Grief---to a greater extent than those of all other goddesses. Emotions engendered by Love's process are an integral part of Her Being.
From:
The Sacred Prostitute
Eternal Aspect of the Feminine
By Nancy Qualls-Corbett
Misery, Mystery, Logic or Fame
modern history and modern rhyme,
is a place within, with each, with all,
where Peace echos through every hall.
Love is The Eye,
Beheld by The Sky,
Musics Delight,
written in disguise.
Coded notes, pictures and scars,
scraped on the walls like graffiti in bars.
Misery, mystery, logic or fame...
It's All in the player of Your Own Game.
Infinite Love,
^-^*Lucy*^-^
The Stranger at The Gate
The Stranger at The Gate
One truly comes to discern the instinctive feminine nature, the sacred feminine incarnate in the feminine body, through intimate connection with others. As Esther Harding writes, “The spirituality of the woman must be distilled from concrete experience; it cannot be obtained directly.” The internal stranger animus may facilitate the woman's awareness of her sexuality, but it takes an actual man to concretize the experience of Love.
The strangers eyes penetrate the womans inner being: his very presence awakens the dormant sacred prostitute and the sensuous feminine nature contained therein. She may hide behind conventional standards, denying her rightful, innate relationship to the Goddess of Love, but such a screen only delays or aborts her psychic development. Erich Neumann writes: “The Moon turns towards the ego and reveals itself or turns away in darkness and disappears.”
The stranger comes as an emissary of the divine, the Moon Goddess, if he is not welcomed, the goddess too is slighted and turns her dark side toward the woman. The consequences is that the woman remains cut off from her spirituality, which would contain and enhance her sexual nature.
Often the human man who appears is literally a stranger. There is no romance or overt intention on his part to 'save the woman' from an empty existence. And there are no promises of an enduring relationship. Such a meeting cannot be planned, for that would be plotting, trying to manipulate fate. The woman waits, until one day the man is simply there and she is honestly surprised.
The woman who accepts her physical and psychological femininity lives in harmony with the sacred prostitute within. She serves the Goddess of Love by attending the Holy Fire of her inner feeling. This is the central warmth of her being, and care must be taken that it does not blaze up to consume, or flicker out. Only in freely chosen service to the Goddess is she released from the yoke of servitude to many masters. This enables her to sacrifice ego demands- the need to dominate, to possess, to find security in a mans devotion. The ego then acknowledges a Higher authority, The Self.
Women who are conscious of their true feminine being are attentive to the wisdom of the Heart; They do not allow this to be contaminated by the collective norms and ideals. This wisdom (in men as well as in women) resides in the body and is related to the principles of Eros. Through it women come to realize their true instinctive nature as it Unites with the Spirit, the male stranger.
The sacred feminine embodied the spiritual and erotic attributes of the divine feminine: Love and Joy, Sensuous Delight and also the Pain and Suffering associated with Love. She is not merely an abstract concept. As Jung writes, “ concepts are coined and negotiable values. Images are Life.” The sacred feminine image is one of passion for life, their dead anonymous stare, gimpse on a busy street or at a cocktail party or regrettably in our own mirrors. The loss of the image parallels the loss of joy and enthusiasm, leaving in the throes of dreadful lethargy. We endure only by refusing to admit to the emptiness of life even while we wish for something to save us.
In Peter Schaffer's highly successful drama, Equus, this feeling of sterility is expressed by the psychiatrist, Dr. Dysart:
“You see, I'm lost...The thing is, I'm desperate...I'm wearing that horses head myself. That's the feeling. All reined up in old language and old assumptions, straining to jump clean-hoofed on to a whole new track of being I only suspect is there. I can't see it because my educated average head is being held at the wrong angle. I can't jump because the bit forbids it and my own basic force---my horsepower, if you like---is too little.”
Dysart speaks for many individuals unhappy with prevailing Western values—technology as opposed to Nature, for instance, or thinking as opposed to feeling. Moreover, the “reins & bits” of patriarchal religious language and cultural assumptions reduce human-kinds “basic force” in life by diminishing and debasing the erotic image of the feminine, which in ancient times, supported the renewal of Life.
The dominant images in the Western world are gods of power, wealth and technical knowledge---these are the 'gods' we currently honor. We no longer worship the goddess of ove: consequently we have no container for sexual ecstasy, the numinous state where the inner core of the individual is awakened and revealed to Self and Other. Paper hearts and baby cupids hardly suffice: They are symbols of a sentimental romanticism which merely fulfills ego desires. Cupid, the Roman counterpart of the Greek Phallic God Eros, has been reduced to a roly-poly, cute cherub with an infantile penis—an image far removed from the potent God who was the consort of the Goddess of Love.
As the potency ascribed to the Phallic God has been reduced or negated, so has the image of the Goddess of Love fallen into limbo. How can we restore her to life?
Contemporary Western culture, although recently changing, has been based for centuries on white, patriarchal values. Christian mythology, regardless of one's religion preference or heritage, has for two millenniums influenced our attitudes towards the feminine, directly and indirectly. In the patriarchy, the feminine is split-off.
“Where the god is male and father only and...is associated with law, order, civilization, logos and super-ego, religion---and the pattern of life which it encourages—tends to become a matter of these only, to the neglect of nature, instinct...feeling, eros, and what Freud called the “id”. Such a religion, so far from “binding together” and integrating, may all too easily become an instrument of repression, and so of individual and social disintegration.”
The patriarchal attitude, intertwined in the image of a masculine God, in the neglect of the feminine and of the instinct an feeling, is apparent in the hierarchical structure, words and tenets of Christian mythology. It is also apparent in unconscious material, as seen below in a priest dream---which can also be interpreted as a description of the pathology of the Church.
The priest came into analysis because of anxiety attacks. His heart would beat quite rapidly and he would experience a shortness of breath. A medical examination revealed no physical problem. He was most aware of the anxiety when celebrating the Holy Eucharist; in fact, when it was time to elevate the Holy Elements, he frequently wondered of he could continue. Here is his dream:
“I am assisting in surgery. The head surgeon is on the other side of the operating table. The operation has to do with a malfunction of the heart. We remove the heart and lift it out of the chest cavity, holding it at arms length above our heads. The heart is much larger than usual and as we lift it, it fills with blood. Then I notice on the back side of the heart, there is a tear, a small hole where the blood leaks out. I am given the job of suturing the hole. At one point I grow afraid. I look at the chief and he nods that everything is all right. As I am suturing the heart it begins to pulsate.”
The Heart is the Seat of Love and Wisdom (“So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom”) The wounded and malfunctioning heart is symbolic of the impaired feeling function within the Church. Blood, The Life Force, is leaking away. Raising the Heart in the Dream is like elevating the Elements of the Eucharist, an act of veneration. Only in the act of “lifting up”, of reverence, can the wounded heart be recognized and mended.
In order to restore the image of the feminine to health, we must first become aware that existing images are inadequate to contain the fullness of life's passion force.
From:
The Sacred Prostitute
By Nancy Qualls-Corbett
Womb of Love
a gift from above,
below all troubles
when push comes to shove.
Cold, dank, shallow entrance,
The Mothers Womb,
Where I began My Dance.
Sheltered by Earth,
surrounded by walls,
Song from above,
where Birth first hears It's Call.
The Womb of Love,
where mysteries are found,
created from nothing,
beneath hallowed ground.
Mothers Love,
Fathers Eye,
Creations Mystery,
Begins to Fly.
Infinite Love,
^-^*Lucy*^-^
The Black Madonna
The Black Madonna
From prehistoric times, as early as thirty thousand years before the beginning of the Christian era, comes the Black Venus of Lespugue, carved from mammoth tusk, now preserved in the Musee de I'Homme in Paris. As she predates a time when any knowledge of agriculture existed, she is more than Earth: She is Life ItSelf. Other black feminine images, symbolic of the chthonic life force, have been worshiped throughout the ages.
In Tindari, on the coast of the Mediterranean in easter Sicily, a black statue of the madonna bears the inscription, “nigra sum sed formosa---”...”I am black, but comely”--from the Song of Solomon 1:5. Christian scholars interpret this passage as referring to a bride, the Virgin Mary as Ecclesia, uniting in marriage with the bridegroom., her son Christ. It appears to be founded in the sacred marriage rite of Ishtar and Tammus, since there are many parallels between the ancient cuneiform tablets and this Old Testament text. Could not this 'black and comely” madonna be a product of the far more ancient image of the goddess?
Another image is found in a monastery in the center of Switzerland—the black madonna of Einsiedeln. Her original color was not black, but the flesh color of the Europeans. Though the centuries however, due to smoke from the large votive candles which surrounded her, she became black. About two centuries ago an artist restored her to her original color, but the people expressed doubts concerning the genuiness of the renewed image, since miracles had previously been attributed to her blackness. The artist was then asked to paint her black again. Those who worshiped her “wanted her to be black because she is a religious expression with archetypal grounding.”
Perhaps the most celebrated black madonna is called Our Lady Under The Earth found in the cathedral of Chartres, south of Paris. The actual statue replaces a much older one with according to legend was venerated by the Druid priests long before Christ's birth. In fact, the church today stands on the very foundations of an ancient Gallo-Roman sanctuary.
In the Old World, the custom of rebuilding the churches on the original site of the temple to the goddess, or even resanctifying the existing structure, was quite common. In Ephesus and Baalbeck, the Christian churches were originally shrines to Aphrodite. Santa Maria Maggiore, in Rome, was built over the sacred cave of the Magna Mater.
In Crete, the main sanctuary in Kritiza was dedicated to Mary as the Pankagia Kjore, The Most Holy Land. This was the same title given to Ariadne, a princess of Crete, who was associated with Aphrodite.
It was the Black Madonna of Monteserrat who inspired Goethe to write the closing lines of Faust, where Mary herself appears and saves Dr. Faustus. The eternally feminine elevates Us to HerSelf.” This phrase speaks to the woman eternal. “It is not the divine element in woman, but the divine as woman.” Scholarly commentaries on Goethes work acknowledges the influence of the Montserrat madonna, yet they fail to mention that she is black.
When woman adapted to the religious tenets of the patriarchy, they also accepted man's image of his anima as an accurate reflection of feminine nature. They thereby lost their connection to the genuine feminine, including the chthonic aspect represented by the black madonna.
Many Black Madonnas are currently valued as religious symbols, but far more numerous are images of the conventional “blue” madonna. The latter, as anima, inspired men to build impressive cathedrals and create beautiful works of art, but she lacks a crucial dimension of feminine nature.
The Black Madonna, associated with both the Earth and Fertility, is an image of the Divine Feminine reflecting the ancient connection between womens nature and The Goddess of Love. Through Her, the Great Goddess still lives.
From:
The Sacred Prostitute
By Nancy Qualls-Corbett
Luna
Luna
Since the beginning of civilization, and before, the moon and her energies have been associated with woman. The moon is mysterious, for she appears and disappears, as if by magic. She is the maiden, the mother, and the crone, as she cycles through crescent, full, and waning phases. She pulls the tides of the earth and the blood tides within us. She teaches us the phases of our own personalities, as we cycle from inward-turning aloneness to outward-moving accessibilty. The moon is the Sun of the Night, the Eye of the Goddess that opens and shuts throughout the month. She is One of Our most visible signs of the passage of time, and one of the best guides for keeping our calenders. Her energies are deep, moving into psychic and unconscious realms.
Luna, Selene, Shing-Moo, Fleachta of Meath, Brizo, Brigit, Mona, Arma, Aphrodite, Hecate, Eurynome, Doris, Lucretia and Diana are some of the many names given to th goddess of the moon. In many cultures Moon and Goddess were synonymous, representing the feminine principle, the source of life, woman, instinct, and the great round of birth, life and death. The attitude of a culture toward the moon is usually an indicator of that culture's attitude toward woman. In patriarchy we have moved from a lunar approach to a soar approach to reality. Time, once measured by Moon cycles, is now measured by the path of the earth around the sun. The moon, representing the unconscious, Eros (or Aphrodite), the intuitive mind, emotional and psychic energies, has taken a back seat to the sun, which has come to represent the everyday, rational thought, the practical world, and male logos. A cosmology has resulted that places sun and moon as opposites, and male and female gods as opposites, mutually completing the Universe. Since the male is seen as dominant, the sun has gradually ascended to power, and the moon has been placed in the background.
This symbolic set-up, results in the subjection f woman and of the female energies in general, including those present in men. Both men and women in patriarchy have learned to cultivate the “solar” qualities and to repress those associated with the moon. Thus much of our healing lies in the cultivation and acceptance of these dark “feminine” forces. The call to attend these qualities in ourselves and the universe is one of the most essential messages of the current feminine. In many ways we have come to know this through our reflections on the Crone and the Dark Maiden. The more we have suppressed these aspects of ourselves, the more dangerous and troublesome they have become. Patriarchy is actually built on this suppression, naming the male” solar force as good and the “female” lunar forces as evil. The result becomes the projection of “the shadow” or destructive expression of the psyche. Much suffering is caused by this artificial division in our personalities, for the depths of the psyche are the source of passion and dreams and forces of Life that are essential to our well-being.
In theory, this polarization of male and female forces has led to the dilemma we find ourselves today---a universe composed of opposing energies, one of which must dominate and conquer the other. Oppositions are linear, leading to either/or thinking. Thus first hierarchy—male over female: From this follow all other oppositions and hierarchies of our society, such as race, class, us versus them, god versus the devil and so on. For a man the healing comes in embracing and accepting both ends of this opposition and learning to move through them cyclically. This is his union or immortality—the perfection of Self. Hence the myriad fairytale endings where prince and princess or god and goddess—the symbol of these inner opposites---Unite.
For a whole society however, it is necessary to go a step further. Magic, when it is Truly powerful, grows out of deep connection to the feminine principle, not as one end of a pole with a maleness on the other end, but as All encompassing, Self Creating woman/goddess/ birthing All that Is.
This is NOT a rejection of men. ALL Life is Sacred: The Goddess Loves ALL of Her Children. But woman and the world are starving and dying for the loss of our particular mysteries. We are the roots of humanity and affirming this is an essential reclamation. When Womans Mysteries are celebrated widely again it will be a Great Healing for the Planet and everyOne on it.
In learning to view ourselves in this autonomous way, it is very helpful to learn about the suns female mythology. There are many sun goddesses, some still worshippd today! Amaterasu of Japan is honored by followers of the Shinto religion, for example. At certain times they set up mirrors to catch her reflection, as part of thir ritual of sun worship. In one legend it is said that she retreated into a cave at wintertime, and was enticed out by one of her priestesses dancing before the open cave mouth with a mirror. When Amaterasu caught site of her own reflection, she was so dazzled that forgot to hide, and so brought the return of spring.
Actually, if you think about it, the sun and moon both have their tides or phases. The sun has both a shorter and a longer cycle—the daily round and the yearly. She has times when she is closer to us and times when she is farther away, just as the moon does, and thus creates our seasons. She has her hidden periods of night and her accessible periods of day. And so a complete consciousness of time and energy cycles must include awareness and appreciation for the sun and the moon, as well as the earth and stars. Stonehenge and other circles of standing stones in Europe have been found to work with both sun and moon cycles.
There are cosmologies in both science and myth that propose the moon's birth as an emergence from the Earth, and the Earths beginning as emergence from the sun. This suggest a family of Mothers, moving from grandmother, to mother, to daughter and is concordant with the intimate triad of energy pulsating between Earth, Moon and Woman. In this cosmology the sun can be seen as the heart of the solar system around which all her planet-children revolve, receiving nourishment and light. The Moon becomes the Earths daughter/sister, bringing specialized energies that have been altered by reflections from the sun. Each has its place and function in the whole, not opposition but mutual cooperation.
Mello Rye, a well known shaman crone and priestess who has combined Celtic with Native American consciousness, also proposes such a cosmology. In hr view, the earth corresponds to our physical bodies, the sun to our fires or spirit, and the moon to our minds. This is very interesting alternative t the “logos versus eros”, approach to the sun and moon., which divides the mind in half. Giving our minds entirely to the moon opens up a ream of wonderful possibilities, for now we can unite all the layers of consciousness, sub-consciousness, intuition, drams, alpha, beta and delta minds, etc. We might say that the crescent or maiden moon is instinct/intuition, the conscious and psychic states. We can freely move or cycle through these layers of the mind as our lives unfold, all equally.
Luna is also linked with the feeling aspect of our emotions. These rise and fall in waves much like the other natural tides, and come from an instinctive, unconscious source. The more polarized, male and solar we have become, the more science oriented. Unfeeling approaches to the cosmos predominate in our thinking. Science, ruled by objective perception, is our god. The deeper and emotional levels of perception are often repressed. The intelligent aliveness of the universe and everything relegated to the world of non-sense. because of this we often become alienated from th Light of everyday world, ruled by sterile objectivity. When we begin to discover the moon, we find a world we have longed for, that validates many parts of ourselves that we may have been afraid or ashamed of. In quantum physics it has been found that there really is no such thing as objectivity, because any observed phenomenon is always affected by the observer, even a mechanical one. Subjective reality is no longer at odds with objective reality. All the stuff of matter is alive and feeling and intelligent.
In hr book “Womans Mysteries”, Esther Harding points out that we are sorely lacking in emotional education. We are not taught how to death with our feelings, particularly the more intense ones that emerge with birth, death, passion and separation. While Ancient Cultures develop ritual for this purpose, our own teaches repression and avoidance of most deep-feeling states. We therefore never know the release or epiphany that ancient rituals afforded our wise predecessors. Instead, we become intellectual robots, brilliantly computing data for the reproduction line and never feeling or experiencing our deeper selves. typically, in modern society, th results are cancer, heart-attacks, high blood pressure and so on.
People who could be called “Lunar” are deep-thinking, vulnerable, emotional, passionate, sensitive, psychic, highly-intuitive, sensual, dreamy, passive, soft, instinctual, spontaneous, wild...All qualities associated with the female, all repressed to some degree in patriarchy. to the extent that a culture is in touch with the moon it will generally be supportive toward these qualities. In our culture, 'male' qualities often called 'solar', are considered desirable: aggressiveness, action, courage, effort, competition, pushiness, conquest, heroism, mastery, physical strength, pragmatism, materialism and so on.
We are a society with its psyche severed neatly down the middle. Men and woman take up their positions on either side of the split, with occasional cross-overs like macho woman and wimpy men. Everyone suffers because only Union can bring wholeness and peace. Men are taught to be tough, “go-get-em”, and make it to the “top”. Women either support them on their way or climb on the 'go get em” bandwagon themselves. Those who remain on the lunar side are victims of the brutish solar house closeted, afraid to risk, obedient or underground, tending to be powerless in the everyday world.
Harding validates the cyclic nature of our personalities. She suggest that we attune ourselves to our tides or inner season of light, full and dark and learn to organize our lives accordingly. Nor Hall in her book “The Moon and The Virgin”, also goes into the subject in depth, describing the female personality in relation to the phases of the moon. Both Hall and Harding are Jungians and therefore somewhat limited by their male/female perspective, but their research into the dark side of self is invaluable.
The Dark Moon of the Self is a period of withdrawal from the everyday world. It offers an opportunity to commune with ourselves and tap the creative potential therein. To return to this way of life necessitates leaving the 'rat race' approach and validating slowness, inwardness, and Being Here Now.
In “primitive” cultures women withdrew from society during the time of their blood flow. This was the origin of the concept of “taboo” which meant something set apart because it was numinous and sacred. Later it came to mean something dangerous or accursed. Menstruation is a vulnerable and very psychic period for us and much can be regained by honoring it. Before industry and electricity, woman would usually bleed in unison at that of the dark moon. Withdrawal was a ritual—a communal event among sisters, when they would bleed into the earth, catch their blood for the ceremonies, exchange mysteries and mutual support.
The concept of Lunaception, as developed by Louise Lacey, stems from the discovery that light effects our fertility cycles directly. It was found that when women slept in total darkness, having a soft light only three nights of the month, they could control ovulation and bleeding time. Apparently, when we had natural moonlight and no interfering artificial light, the time of full moon was the time of ovulation and the time of dark moon was blood-time.
Because of the periodicity of womans blood, the earliest calendars were kept by observing its ebb and flow. Animal horns found in Paleolithic digs had moons carved into them in series from crescent to full to dark. These rhythms were our first method of measuring, which led to myriad sciences we benefit from today. Thus true magic and true science are one. Moonflow is the root of every cultural advance.
From:
Ariadne's Thread
By Shekhinah Mountainwater