...more recent posts
A Couple of Early Bloomers
A Word About the Goddess
This is Her season; Persephone emerging from the Underworld. But who exactly is She? I've mentioned the Goddess a couple of times in passing, but I haven't tried to define the usage. I've spent more time explaining my use of the term "God", so perhaps you can see that I'm not treating these as equal concepts. Most mature spiritual speculation concludes that God represents the limit of such conceiving. Beyond sexual manifestation, even beyond living and unliving, It is the context of creation. Within that context, we can approach the boundary only through metaphor, or through the kind of ecstatic experience that enlightens, but leaves us hard put to say how.Perhaps this sort of God is too impersonal for the popular consciousness. Always we personify; no doubt because we are people. These personifications are legion, and like us, they are sexed. One way of looking at it might be to say that God is like cosmology, while the gods and goddesses of legend are more a form of psychology. This, however, is a reductive notion, and the antithesis of Mystery.
The Tradition which I pursue insists upon the reality of the divine, and approaches its manifestations as genuine beings. To do so requires Faith; the probe of Mystery. Engaging Faith is not a matter of blind trust, but rather a declension of the self, allowing the stream of Tradition to flow through, submerging the ego. Traditional pantheons may represent a form of psychology, but they do not separate theory and practice, as does the modern discipline. Initiation into the Mysteries of a particular deity constitutes "treatment" as such: to know a god or goddess is to recognize their "psychological" principle within yourself, and to better understand thereby your place within the Tradition.
A typical course of Traditional "treatment" involves a psychic, or rather spiritual, joining of male and female qualities. Often represented as a marriage, this melding, or balancing, of sexual polarities is considered a prerequisite for spiritual attainment. That the male principle exerts undo dominance in our culture is by now a New Age, as well as a feminist, truism, with political implications which I will not treat here (except to note that politics and spirituality are ever interwoven.)
If the female has been repressed, it has never been extinguished. The renewal of Spring has always been seen as a manifestation of the reproductive capacity of a feminine Earth. Mainstream Western religion has failed to accord equal status to the distaff, but that voice has not gone unheard; poets, mystics, and anyone who walks in the woods can quote Her. Nor is it any mistake that the apex of Christianity, in the late Middle Ages, was reached under Her auspices. Though excluded from the Trinity, Mary was the people's choice; Her cult, more than any other, moved the troubadours, and raised the vaults of the cathedrals.
The Reformation, and the rationalism that followed, have held Her to a whisper. Even so, we need Her all the more, and She emerges, if not from the Earth itself, then from within us. Beyond theory, beyond doctrine, we each, alone, confront the Mystery of Being. Turning within is turning towards Her. Since we are not self-sufficient, our aloneness implies an Other. And since we live so much at odds with the male god-king we claim as deity, we should not wonder that it is Her voice that offers comfort: when Father beats you, run to Mother.
Faith is a chance worth taking. A chance to find what we need, whether in fact, or in the mind. For my part, I've learned to seek Her whisper there, or at the boundary where mind meets with Tradition. It is to Her that I address my private musings, partner in the inner dialogue. To Her I put the question; to Her I credit the reply. To thus conceive Her constitutes the worship of Her. To worship Her is to receive Her.
She asks for little, and gives us Springtime. I can muster only a lesser gesture, from the border of Spring and Winter: the flowers, once again, of the Red Maple. This time they are female. The tree in the Wildflower Meadow, with its fuzzy globes, is male, but here we see the more pendulous pistils, ovaries already fertilized. The red, winged seeds will soon be discernible. The Maples are a curious lot, not bound by human notions of sexuality. Their flowers are separate, male and female. A tree may be all of one sex, or bear both types: polygamo-dioecious. It's even said that some trees change back and forth. It's all rather confusing. I think the big one in the Meadow is consistently male, but I'll keep watching. Botanists call the type of flower which combines the male and female organs the perfect flower. If that name agrees more with esoteric spirituality than with mainstream sexuality, it just goes to show that, if you spend enough time with plants, you're bound to learn a thing or two in the process.
Plants are properly the province of the Goddess, and true to Her humility, they teach a truth bigger than She is; that sex is but a convenience of deity, necessitated by our fractured state. It is Her way to point beyond Herself. She points to what I have called "God".
I suppose that should leave me with a small "g" god and goddess, subordinate to God, whatever that is. The language is a mess here, and I'm open to revision, but it seems to me that I will continue to refer, as necessary, to God, but not so much to god, or gods, and if I do, I'll try to name them. The Goddess, though, deserves a place of honor here, and warrants capitalization. That's my kind of affirmative action. I've been remiss; distracted by the Winter: this page should long since have been dedicated to Her. I do so now, in this, Her season. As for Her myriad specific faces, if one should turn to me, I'll try to get a picture.