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THE GODDESS,
ONE WOMAN’S WALK ON A PAGAN PATH
~by Shalimar
The Goddess. Who is she? Many
of us have felt that first tug at the name Goddess. It could have come when you
saw that workout magazine, using Goddess to describe a woman, beautifully in
shape. It could have come when someone made the statement about the Goddess
within us. Somewhere was that little voice, telling you to have the courage…to reach for her.
Getting to know the Goddess is
not an easy thing. It’s not a thing widely accepted
by society, and there are all these stories, designed to make you afraid to
study about her.. I remember how I started my path on a bit of a tremble.
Something inside of me wanted…needed to know her. Yet, all
the things that I had been told, in my strict Christian upbringing, had me
fearful that I was doing something very wrong. Then one day I read the book, “In the Shadow of the Shaman”, and one of the first things she said was this. We all
have this innate sense of when we hear a truth, and when we hear a lie. Tell yourself
a truth and feel how that vibrates within you. Next, tell yourself a lie. How
does a lie feel within you? Now, read on, and if it feels like a lie, stop
reading at once. But, if it feels like truth, try to set aside your fears and
keep studying. Fear stops the flow within us. Fear keeps us from finding our
own truth, our own path. Fear has its place, when we are in danger, yet we can
allow fear to keep us stuck.
Well, I put this to the test,
and I soon found myself doing some serious studying about the Goddess.
One of the first paradigms I
encountered, which changed the course of my life, was when I was working at a
college in Barrow, Alaska. I was attending some kind of meeting, when someone
started talking about the box of which we grow up in. When we grow up, we are
taught, all through our childhood, a set of beliefs. We grow up believing that
certain things are right, and certain things are wrong. We accept these as
truth. We incorporate them as our values.
Often times, though, as we get older, it starts to dawn on us, that this is
something we have been taught to see
as truth. But is this our truth?
Agnes, in one of Lynn V.
Andrews books, said, we cannot wear someone else’s cloak. When we are raised in a belief system, and told
what to believe and what not to believe, we are trying to force ourselves to
wear a cloak that may not fit us at all. If we continue our lives, trying to
force ourselves to wear someone else’s cloak, sooner or later, we
begin to rebel against it. We start to feel, confined, trapped. We start to
feel as if our life does not have meaning, and we begin to question what is true that meaning. We start to ask what our purpose is in this.
There are many great books out
there for finding your way to your most fulfilling job, walking within your
true self, etc. Yet, is there something more inside of you? Have you had
feelings about the Fey which you thought your friends would laugh at? Have you
felt a need to be close to the Goddess but felt that you would be ridiculed?
There is a reason you are searching. The Goddess calls you.
Gateways to the Goddess
I was raised a Jehovah’s Witness. My father was and elder. My mother an elder’s wife, and my sister and I were elder’s daughters. We went to the meetings two nights and one
morning a week. We went out in field service every week. We went to three
assemblies a year. Mine was a disciplined environment. There were many
expectations of an elder’s daughter. And yet, I found
myself continuously trying to tamp down the things I knew deep inside.
At three years old, I can remember having such
a close contact with animals that I knew what they thought. Not that they
thought in a language, but…I knew what they thought. My
dad was a bit of a horse whisperer, and I can remember him working with a horse
named Cindy. She was upset with him, and I remember that there were little
beings around me, but I can’t remember them clearly. I
know I wasn’t afraid of them. They were my
friends. I can remember knowing, as my dad putting the saddle on Cindy, that she
was mad and getting ready. My dad would have known better if he had not been
being stubborn at the moment. I knew she was going to buck him off the moment
he stepped into the saddle, and she did. My little friends and I were quite
amused.
By the time I was a little
older, however, I had blocked out my ability to see the others. This type of
seeing was not allowed in our belief system. It was considered to be the powers
of the devil. The few times I ever brought up psychic gifts and
synchronization, I was told…where do you think that kind
of power comes from? Who do you think would want you to have that kind of
power? So he can sway your mind!
At thirteen, however, I
remember this new couple to the hall started having “demon problems”. Things were moving around on
them, and they were having a lot of family problems. I was at their house,
walking down the hall when I felt him. He had a terrible feel to him. This
time, when I told my family, and they contacted the rest of the brothers, they
did not have any problems believing me. They destroyed a bunch of things that
belonged to this couple. It finally came down to a little picture of Jesus in
the man’s wallet. They tried to burn
it, but it wouldn’t burn. So they wrapped in
stuff and threw it into the ocean.
I began having difficulty when
I turned sixteen. I was rebelling, but I didn’t know what I was rebelling against. I slept with a boy,
and I ended up in a series of elder’s meetings that lasted for
months. There were a lot of things said to me. Some of those things were not at
all appropriate. My parents were not allowed at these meetings, and I was not
supposed to be sharing what was said with anyone. I did, however, share with my
grandmother. We discussed ways of sneaking in a tape recorder in my book bag. (They
didn’t have the mini taper
recorders back then). But we never did, do this. It would have felt too
deceitful.
I did not want to rebel
against Jehovah. So, for the next several years, I tried my best to be a good
witness. I got married and raised four children. Time and again, I tried to go
to the hall. I tried to take my kids to the hall, but I would often leave,
crying and shaking. I couldn’t put this on my kids. I felt
guilty for teaching them the same stuff that had nearly destroyed me, and I
felt guilty because I knew that I was supposed to be bringing them up in the
way of Jehovah.
I left my husband and took two
of my children with me. Later on, my children went back and forth between their
father, in Alaska, and me, in Colorado. It was here that I broke free. I did
not know how it would be possible for me to have a spirituality without being a
witness. All my life, I had been taught that there was one true religion, and
that this was it. But I was deeply spiritual, and the idea of being cut off from
being spiritual tore me apart. Yet, I could not get past the idea that God, the
only God I knew, was Jehovah, and he was apart of being a witness. I had no
idea how to separate the two. I was in torment. I was being split in two.
Over the next few years, I
pretty much took myself apart and put myself back together again. I had to
figure out what I believed, not what
I had been taught. I had to figure
out what I found to be wrong, and
what I was merely afraid of because
of those past teachings.
A Shamanic Death
As soon as I had given myself
the go-ahead to move forward, that I was really going to do this, that I was
really going to go after the things I knew to be true deep inside, I went
looking for the oldest stuff that I could find at the local library. I was
afraid of the word new age. I didn’t understand the concept of
all of these people believing in some new-age beliefs, but I was starting to
realize that there were many things that I did know, despite all the pushing
down, and tamping into the farthest recesses of my mind, I had done to myself.
The first thing I realized was, in spite of everything that I had been taught,
I knew there were ghosts. And I knew
how they moved around on our plane. I couldn’t get past the notion that science itself should understand
this. Science was the one that explained how the molecules came together to
form a bat, to form everything around us. Science explained, the more
molecules, the denser the object. Head knock. Now, maybe this is an over
simplification, and maybe I don’t understand science at all,
but it seems to me if the denser the molecules, the opposite could also be
true, and if you could move around molecules, or displace molecules, perhaps it
would explain how one could pass through the other. But maybe that is just me
talking.
I then started thinking about
all the things that I had not wanted to see while I was trying so hard to be a
good witness. My middle son could see and hear ghosts. My kids and I were very
close, but I hadn’t been there for him on this
one. It was too close to what I was trying very hard to control in my own life.
We had moved into this old school house when he as around five years old. All
the neighbors had told us it was haunted, but we didn’t believe in ghosts, right. My son had a terrible time. He
would often come to me crying and terrified. He could see them, and he could
hear them.
Now, years later, when I was
ready to hear him, he told me what he had seen. There had been an older man,
wearing a tweed hat and coat. He always had a curved pipe with him, and he
always folded his arms in front of him. He was accompanied by a young boy. My
son would often awake to have them looking down on him, talking to each other
about him.
Later on, my son saw many
other forms like this. He would always go to his oldest brother, who had never
told me, but he had never believed anything that he had been taught by the
Witnesses. Now that I was studying the shamanic ways, my oldest son and I had a
lot of interesting conversations. I had always thought of him as an old soul,
but this amazed me. How he could possibly know the things that he knew. I was
studying these ancient teachings, and he could sit and talk to me about them
with full understanding of them, without ever having studied them at all. It
was to him, my middle son had always gone when he was terrified. And my middle
son quickly came to realize that as long as he was around his oldest brother,
none of these beings came around him.
Now that I was studying what I wanted to study, and figuring out what
I found to be true, I found many
issues that I needed to work through, along the way. All of my life, I had been
taught about the word truth. As a
witness, we were “in the truth”. We went from door-to-door and “brought people into
the truth”. And now, I realized, that
maybe not for many of them, but for me, everything that I had been taught to be
truth, had been a lie.
I had been taught about truth and found a lie. Now, I was looking at the things that I had been taught all of
my life to be the lie…and I was finding the truth.
During this transition of my
life, I died many deaths and was reborn. These transitions were not easy, far
from it. It was akin to walking myself through fire. I welcomed visions of
myself flesh being eaten away by ravens, and my self being reformed from ashes and water. I often saw myself
sitting in the middle of purple, red or white flames. It was the only at peace
I was to find in all of this. Nothing could reach me there. I was being taken apart, and I was being put back together. And each time,
I was reborn.
The Goddess Calls
When I was thirteen, we had
moved to Haines, Alaska. There were a great deal many ravens there. Somehow,
because this would probably not have been allowed if my parents had known, I
had attended a ceremony to bring a totem pole back to the school grounds, where
it belonged. This ceremony was profound to me. It moved me beyond
comprehension. I could not figure out why anyone would think they had the right
to desecrate these people’s burial grounds and move
their totem poles around, and I was deeply happy that these adults had come to
their senses, were honoring the wishes of these people, and putting this totem
pole back. (Years later, when I attended the University of Northern Colorado, I
was again deeply moved when this school realized that they, too, had a true and
sacred totem pole and had it returned to its rightful place with the Tlingit).
Now, this had opened something
within my thirteen year old mind. I learned that the ravens were considered to
be these people’s ancestors. This, too, was
profound to me. I remember coming outside one day, to this old raven mimicking
a cat to perfection. These ravens, in Haines, Alaska, were quite large. He eyed
me with an intelligence that left me humbled. I never forgot it. I watched him
for some time, it may have been hours, and I realize now, that these two
experiences had forever changed my life and altered the course of events that
would take place. I had been called by the Goddess, but I wouldn’t understand this for many more years.
The Gateway of the Triquerta
I have learned that the
experience of the triquerta is not unique to me. I am not the only one
enthralled with the TV show Charmed. I watched it endlessly, once I was not a
witness. I watched it some as a witness, too. But this was frowned upon, and it
brought up too many things in me, at the time, that I was not ready to answer
to, or deal with.
Now, however, I stared
watching endless episodes, staring at the triquerta at the beginning of the show,
and I would strain to catch glimpses of it on the Book of Shadows at the end,
too. And once I had a DVR, or well, now….now I could stop the picture
right on the triquerta, and slowly advance the frames to see every bit of what
reminded me of the ancients. Seems silly huh. But you will be amazed at the
things that will echo a deep response within you and call to you, your higher
self, with the echo of the ancients.
The triquerta is an ancient
triple symbol. It stands for as many triples as you can imagine. The maiden,
mother and the crone. The three fates. Several sets of triple Goddesses, etc.
It was also taken over by the Christian church to represent their triad, the
father, the son and the holy ghost, or holy spirit. Many of your writings on
the triquerta, will tell you that history cannot tell who had this symbol
first, the pagans, or the Christians. Yet, common sense tells me the pagans
were around long before Christianity, and it’s therefore pretty obvious to me, where the history of this
ancient symbol lies.
I began having light
meditations on this symbol, although I really didn’t realize it. At the time, I was just fascinated. Later, I
started a fantasy novel, called Spirit Lighter, the first of which is called The Gateway of the Triquerta. In the writing
of this book, I took the woman through a journey. At the first gate, she came
across this dragon. The guardian of the gate. Fairly new to journeying, I had
been studying meditation for some time and easily slipped into a light trance
while writing about this journey, in which she met this guardian. I immediately
realized that my hunch had been right, and the triquerta really was a doorway
or a gateway.
I imagine that one of the
writer’s of Charmed, perhaps as
unconsciously as it was, had picked up on this thread of truth too, since they
used it as a doorway to the other-side, or to another dimension. This was
something that had rung true to me, watching the episode. Although they had
used it, as predicted, to further their objectives for the episode, it had
affected me deeply, and it was something I had not forgotten.
I had been working with Isis
for sometime, although I had not formally acknowledged this. I had not, yet,
worked past the notion of worshiping idols or false gods, since I had always been
taught that Jehovah was a jealous God who forbids the worship of other false
gods. But my longing for the mother Goddess was deep.
Sylvia Brown was the first to
provide me with a way in which I could begin to let the Goddess fully into my
life, with the idea of Mother God. I began to realize that, in the first place,
paganism was not worshiping idols. This was a misconception. Pagans did not bow
down to the representation of the idol being their god. They found their Gods
and Goddesses in everything, and all
of these things were aspects of the
God and the Goddess. As Marion Zimmer Bradley best put it in her book Mists of Avalon, She has no face, and
yet, as the face of many. She has no form, and yet, has the form of many.
Much later, I was to learn,
that nearly every story in the bible had first been written about pagan Gods,
from Moses, to Jesus and had identical stories to those found in the bible.
I had fully realized that the
bible was a beautifully written history book some time before that. I came to
realize, first in college, that Apostle Paul was the one who had introduced the
notion of women having a place within the church and turned the whole tide of
Christianity towards a patriarchal one. I also learned in college, that the
bible had been in the hands of the Catholics, and they were the first to choose
which scrolls were to be considered for the bible, and which were not. They
chose not to include the scrolls
about Mary Magdalene.
Both of
these relizations had a profound impact on me. I began to realize that if these
things were true, than perhaps the ideas of there being a bunch of false Gods,
and one true God, were also suspect. I had been taught all of my life that
paganism was wrong and full of terrible things. All of the things that Christianity
had expounded upon, as a means to turn people from paganism, were listed to me
as a child. I was taught that paganism was full of idolatry. I was taught that
pagans had done all of these horrific things. But now, as I studied paganism,
and I found holes in the notions of idolatry. I also found huge holes in other
notions about paganism. For with the Goddess, I found breathtaking love.
Growing up, I had been taught about brotherly love, and now, on this path that
I had been warned about, had been taught to fear, I found the most profound
love I had ever encountered. Here was true sisterly love.
The Mother
is full of love. Her path…is one of love.
Now that I
was working through some of the darkest past teachings of my childhood, I was
free to embrace the Goddess fully and with joy. The first thing I realized was
that one Goddess, in particular, had been with me from the time I was thirteen
years old. Quite obviously sooner, but this is where I could point exactly to
when she had showed herself in my life.
She had come to me in the
raven.