Goddess Energy

1

The Goddess Is (Re)Awakening

The earth, alive. The Sun and Moon, shining, dancing, revealing. The way the birds sing. The way flesh on flesh feels in the early morning. Love, lust, magick, devotion, to all that is or was. The fierce protection of the heart, of the beloved. The cries of rage and passion, a holy sacrament. The desire to bleed until it's all gone. This is the Goddess, awakening, inspiring, calling. She is as old and wise as the earth, but Her myriad faces transcend age and time.

Welcome, beloved, to the wild world of Goddess energy. I am so glad you are here, ready to embody new expressions of yourself and your heart.

Unlike the religions many of us grew up with, the religion of the Goddess isn't one separated from nature, from the body, from the creative and life-giving energy of sexuality. Goddess is the earth. She is the body. She is transformative carnal power. Many of us were taught that the body is sinful and separate from "God," yet this is the antithesis of the Goddess religion, the oldest religion on earth. Instead of spending your life transcending, or working toward the goal of leaving your body behind on this earthly plane, the Goddess is about immanence; finding a direct connection to the Divine through the self and the physical world.

The Goddess isn't separation. She isn't some old judgmental woman up in the clouds. She is the sacred and the mundane, seen in piles of trash and in holy places. The Goddess is in everything.

The Goddess is everywhere, and She is constantly expressing Herself to you. The Goddess evolves, as you do. The Goddess is not static. She has not remained unchanged for the thousands of years She's been worshipped. The Goddess is reflected in the cultures that worship Her, in those who revere Her, in Her devotees who span age and time. She's definitely not human, and yet She evolves alongside us, often depicting Herself in a familiar light to those who honor Her so they more easily recognize Her.

The way you worship the Goddess will look different from the way your ancestors did, but isn't that the point? Don't you want to pray to a deity who accepts all your twenty-first-century magick? We may not have as many temples and sacred sites as we once did, but now you can worship with a coven that spans the globe. Surely, the Goddess must be here for the ease of honoring Her, no matter where or when you live.

So why the Goddess? Why now? And what or who is the Goddess, truly, anyway?

Like the gender binary, the definition of the Goddess is a bit blurry these days. Each practitioner will have their own definition of what the Goddess is. Your own understanding will allow you to relate to Her more intimately, too. The Goddess does not exist in black and white, and She is not solely expressed through gender or biology.

She is all-encompassing-a vibration,
a frequency that every person on Earth
has access to. This is Goddess energy,
and Goddess energy is for everyone.

More than anything, the Goddess is love. She is the living expression of the Divine Erotic, the potencies of sexuality, of death and rebirth, of destruction and creation. The Goddess is consciousness, immanence, intuition, and the cyclical. She is the love that links everything, that brings the whole world into creation. The Goddess is form; She is the alive-ness of the universe. She is best known and felt through the heart.

The Divine Feminine is the counterpart to the Divine Masculine, which sits as the center of all that is, the logical and chronological force of the universe. These two energies are opposites, which just means they are extremes of the same thing. As the pillars of this polarity, every sort of energetic configuration exists between them, and any divine expression may take form on the spectrum of these energies. What I'm saying is, you don't have to be a woman, or cisgender, or straight to work with the Goddess. The Goddess accepts all Her children, as they are all expressions of Her magick. You are welcome here. All you have to be is willing to begin the journey.

The Goddess doesn't adhere to the same structures or beliefs so many of us have thrown onto "God." The Goddess doesn't punish you for your imperfections, but rather celebrates self-expression, magick, creativity, sensuality, and ecstatic experiences. She is not trying to cut you off from yourself; instead, She is guiding you to your most abundant expression. The Goddess doesn't smite you to atone for "sins" or supposed wrongdoings, nor does She see sexuality or sexual energy as shameful or evil; all acts of love and pleasure are Her rituals.

To honor the Goddess means to live in a state of flow, of surrender. This requires a conscious reprogramming of our internalized capitalist mindsets. While the Divine Masculine is expansive, active, and outward facing, the Divine Feminine is the integration that happens after, that allows you time to process, absorb, and rest. The Goddess doesn't exist in a state of constant production to prove Her worthiness; She requires stillness and gestation, too. It's all about balance, baby. This can mean allowing yourself to rest and not to have to constantly be "on." It is a spiral dance, one that you will learn as you continue walking this path.

Again, the Divine Masculine and the Divine Feminine are energies, and this isn't dictated by biology or the toxic binaries the patriarchy feeds us. God/dess expands past this.

The power of the Goddess doesn't come from anything external; not from a god or a man or a lover. It is Her consciousness, Her existence, that infuses the universe with life. To work with Goddess consciousness is to acknowledge the ecstasy of being. It is to find the vibration of the Divine in everyone and everything. It is to step onto the pathless path, the tantric path. Everything is an expression of the Goddess. Everything is sacred and profane. This dissolves the barrier of the self and others and invites in empathy. You are of the Goddess, and so is everyone else. Remembering this is heart changing.

This formulation of the Divine isn't new either. Before there was monotheism and patriarchy and war and genocide, there was Her. It's hard to imagine that there was a time before, but it wasn't until the Bronze Age, which began about 3500 BCE, that historians see evidence of war, so we're talking about a return. A return to Goddess means honoring the earth and all her children, not just Her human ones. It is a return to the corporeal, to the sacred and chaotic Feminine. It is a return to the most profound, creative, sexual, powerful, receptive, and inspired parts of yourself.

Magick and the Goddess have much in common, and if you are called to explore either one, that's reason enough to begin.

Are you ready?

A Short History of the Goddess

As humans who live in a paradigm of linear time, it can be hard to imagine that our ancestors weren't steeped in monotheism, or fearful of a faraway, punishing God. Weeks and months were tracked by the Sun and Moon. Sexuality was sacred in its own right, and rituals and celebrations of life and death were communal. Matriarchal societies meant that all people were equals, with property and the family name passed through the mother. Before there was monotheism, there was the Goddess.

Consider: instead of seeing your life as a straight line from birth to death, Goddess time means witnessing it as a spiral moving upward. When time is nonlinear, you reach the same point again and again, but each time, you arrive wiser, more present, more grounded. To live with the Goddess means recognizing that you can swing the pendulum from our unjust and poisonous patriarchy back to an existence based on community, perception, and the interconnectedness of death and life.

When I say that the Goddess religion is the first religion, that is a literal statement. There is evidence of worship of the Great Mother Goddess since the Paleolithic era, which lasted from about 35,000 to 10,000 BCE. The well-known handheld statues of Goddesses, exuberant in their curves, from France, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Spain date to this period-the most famous being the Venus or Goddess of Willendorf, from 20,000 to 18,000 BCE. These effigies, made from clay and often covered in red ochre (perhaps symbolizing the red blood of renewal) were likely used in ritual. They are mostly found in caves, representing the sacred womb of the Goddess and the entrance to the underworld.

More sacred symbols of the Goddess have emerged from Paleolithic time, especially surrounding Her association with birds and snakes. Through the bird, She is transcendent of this earthly reality, and the snake signifies life force and regeneration. Both symbols appear in many cosmologies: the snake being sacred to the Goddess of Crete, integral to the story of Adam and Eve, and represented in the East as sexual energy called Kundalini. In the cosmology of ancient Egypt, Osiris, Isis, and Thoth are associated with birds, including kites, falcons, and ibises.

The Neolithic era, or Middle Stone Age (8000-2700 BCE), generated a new relationship to the Goddess. As agriculture was invented, societies became anchored in specific places, different from the nomadic hunters and gatherers of the Paleolithic, who had to follow animals during their migrations. And when this happened, art was birthed. Spirals and labyrinths-symbols that represent, among other things, the curving, serpentine energy of the Goddess-began to show up on decorative and ritualistic objects like vases.

A society's relationship to a divine being, whether the Goddess, God, or a prophet like Jesus, is reflective of its circumstances. As the Neolithic people grew and harvested their own food, they began to worship a Goddess of Vegetation, who has since appeared in the Greek Goddess Demeter and the Egyptian Goddess Isis, among others. Here, She embodied fertility and self-renewal, and sculpted figures at the time include masculine and feminine elements (for example, a long, phallic neck on a vase).

All was good and swell for the Goddess and her devotees in Old Europe for two thousand years, until invaders known as the Indo-European (or Kurgan) people brought their Gods of the heavens and skies and settled where the Goddess was being worshipped. They married their Gods to local Goddesses, which marked the beginning of the end. Slowly but surely, those Gods came to adopt the features the Great Goddess was known for, and She fractured into many more faces.

With more permanent settlements came the need to protect and defend them, which morphed into violence and war. The Great Goddess became the Great Protector, seen in such examples as Inanna/Ishtar in Mesopotamia and Athena in Greece. Blood sacrifice, animal and human, also became part of certain religious practices.

By the Iron Age (about 1200 BCE), the Goddess had again mutated, now into the dragon or darkness to be slain, as exemplified in Goddess Tiamat of Babylon, who represented the creative potencies of chaos and needed to be killed to keep order in the world. As we learned to dominate nature, we also felt the need to control the divine disorder of the Goddess. And as that was rejected, so was Her totality. With the transfer of power to one Supreme God came a corresponding shift from matrilineal to patrilineal descent, or from the partnership to the dominator model. (In mainstream Abrahamic practice, God seems to exist perfectly fine without a Goddess. Yet mysticism tells another tale. Jewish Kabbalah holds up the Shekinah, or the feminine form of the God Yahweh/YHVH. In gnostic Christianity, Sophia is the wisdom Goddess and feminine creatrix. And in Islam, the "three daughters of Allah" exist in Al-Lat, Al-Uzza, and Manah.) A partnership model rejects hierarchy. There's no king or ruler with more power than everyone else; equitability and community reign supreme. Meanwhile, in a dominator paradigm, there is a nonconsensual established power dynamic and a constant tug-of-war of resources. It's the difference between a pyramid and a circle.

But don't forget, to work with the Goddess is not to separate yourself from the Divine Masculine, but to bring back a sense of balance to the way you see the world. We couldn't survive without the Sun or the Moon, and to work with the Goddess is not to abandon the God. Every Goddess-based religion also includes a God. To return to a place of divine order and justice, the pendulum must swing from the side of oppression of the feminine and those who exist outside the male/female binary. When you commit to exploring the Goddess within, you are committing to honoring the whole of life that is expressed through Her creation.

∂

Before we dive in, there are a few things to keep in mind to help initiate your relationship to the Goddess.

The purpose of this book is not to provide an all-encompassing history of the Goddess nor to tell you about all the Goddesses in every pantheon ever. (Many of the books in the Bibliography at the back of the book are more thorough and specific.) My goal is to help you understand, embody, and activate the Divine Feminine within; this book is a catalyst in your relationship with the Goddess, in reframing what it means to be Her devotee, and in beginning on this path with an open heart.

I'm especially interested in sharing the importance of the Goddess here and now, in this new millennium, and how you can weave Her magick into your day-to-day life through ritual, meditation, and spellwork. I want to remind you of your unending capability to turn your life into a magnificent offering to Her.

I'm not here to convince you the Goddess is real; She can do that on Her own. What I hope, however, is that by coming to this book with honesty and vulnerability, you feel Her intensity, love, splendor, vision, creativity, and eros for yourself. The practices here are offerings from my heart to help you do just that. These rituals have deepened my relationship to the Goddess and have supported the creative, erotic, magical life I have always dreamed of.

We need the Goddess; we need the numinous and sacred; we need to remember the life-giving force we all carry. As we continue moving through this period of patriarchal oppression, we each can play a part in the return of partnership and matriarchy. When we move back to the Sacred Feminine, we return to the understanding that the individual experience is fractals of the collective. The Goddess religion is based on the idea that every human, plant, and animal is a separate piece of one Divine entity. We have lost our sense of community, reverence, and relationship, both in the ways in which we dominate the land and one another. To return to equilibrium, the pendulum must swing to the side of the Goddess before it can return to the holiest of truths, that life is an endless cycle of the God and Goddess, Sun and Moon, death and rebirth.