Part 6 (1/2)
Earth-centered spirituality honors as sacred this circular pattern of death to life to death and life again. Death is not a punishment from the G.o.ddess: it is instead the culmination of a process that endlessly repeats itself on the smallest and largest scales. Paradoxically, the power of the universe that is essentially being is also in constant flux. Her patterns of light are born and disappear over the course of a day; She moves from evening to night, from dawn to morning. The baby becomes a boy; the girl begins to menstruate; the friend does not come through; the career s.h.i.+ft is made; we lose the fantasy and adapt to the reality.
The G.o.ddess's one constant is change. Her lore mythologizes Her perennial shape s.h.i.+fting in wonderful ways. When She is portrayed as the Sun, Her changes can be understood as the yearly changes that send us deep into winter caves and find us dancing on summer mountains. When She is the Moon, she is understood as continuously merging into different phases of Herself: She is New and Waxing large; She is Full; and She is Waning and Dark. As the Moon, She has three faces: Maiden, Mother, Crone.
As the New and Waxing Moon, She is Maiden or Virgin. Her territory is Herself. She strides the night of Her soul free and clear of other than self-commitment. Even when She is relational and s.e.xual with others, Her knowing comes from the pool She gazes into alone. The Virgin turns corners and travels new paths. She fiercely protects the child. The Virgin is Creator. Out of nothingness, She brings forth Herself. This is the time for wishes to take the form of affirmations and for affirmations to take action.
As the Full Moon, She is Mother, Preserver, Realizer; Her territory is transition. She is Keeper of the Mundane. Unlike the focused attention of the Virgin, the Mother's attention is diffuse and contains the whole picture. She is knitting, laughing, talking, and baking all at once. She is abundance. She is the luminous center of the Cycle that has begun in nothing and will end in darkness. This is the time for stock taking, stock making, for rejoicing, feasting, and being in the complexity of the webs of our lives.
As the Old One, as the Waning Moon, She is the Crone, the Ancient Ender. She has birthed and buried the loves of Her heart; She has killed what needed killing. She has sat with the doomed and the usual and can let the child sob on Her lap. She tells the truth; She is the Undertaker of Dreams; disillusion is Her realm. Now is the time to let it come apart, to let go of what we once were sure we could not live without.
Everything on Earth instructs us about Her everlasting, cyclical change. We take in through our mouths and let go through our a.n.u.ses, over and over again. Our hormones peak and drop daily and monthly, manifesting energy levels and moods. Our relations.h.i.+ps ebb and flow.
Sometimes we are productive and inspired; sometimes we lie tiny and fallow. Our gardens poke up enchantingly; they fill rebelliously with weeds;
they fas.h.i.+on full plants for our tables; they lie rotting and dense until we begin again. Days pa.s.s in sets of seven; months curve around us and turn into years. Workplaces s.h.i.+ft personnel, customers, products; establishments become memories and certainties only photographs. The once young are now elders; the once little are now feeding and diapering their own. Waves of politics come and go.
Departures, tornadoes, thefts, and divorces smash our hopes, undo our routines, leave us stunned, panting, and simple to begin again.
Anyone who has chanted knows that chanting past the point of boredom deepens the imprint and power of this kind of music making. Anyone who has stared from the edge of a cliff at the waves below knows the peace that comes with endless cras.h.i.+ngs and silences. How comforted we humans are with the table set the same way for the holiday, the story told for the twentieth time, the line quadrupled in the poem. Our deepest rhythms are cyclical and repet.i.tive. In G.o.ddess spirituality, we view these returns as rhythms of the G.o.ddess. We call the Cycle sacred. Although our culture has great difficulty honoring death, depression, and despair, we humans pa.s.s our lives unable to avoid the endings that make way for beginnings. As we mature and deepen, we learn to hold the completions as sacred as the starts.
We humans are able finally to accept the endings in the context of the Cycle. Our rituals therefore are circular: we sit in circles, we create beginnings, middles, and ends, and we promise each other we will meet again. Like the ancients, we set our rituals in the context of the cyclical year. As far away as we live from the beat of agricultural life, G.o.ddess wors.h.i.+pers can still comprehend at least eight points in the turning of the Great Wheel of Life. Outside and inside, our year begins, like Life itself, in the dark. In the northern hemisphere, Halloween (October 31/November 1) is our New Year.
Like a seed in the ground or a fetus in the womb, our hope and joy are born of the dark. At New Year the veil is very thin between what has been and what will be in our lives. Winter Solstice (December 21) heralds light's birth; inside our caves we nurture ourselves. At Candlemas (February 1), we emerge from our caves carrying the lights of the early blossoms and the plans we are making. Spring Equinox (March 21) honors the sa.s.sy and confusing p.u.b.erties of our projects and ourselves. Beltaine (May 1) couples us and all things with the force of Life. At Summer Solstice (June 21), the longest and the strongest of the light, we are overflowing with concerted effort. On Lammas Day (August 1), even we supermarket customers take the time to honor the abundant fruits of the farmer's labor and our own. At Fall Equinox (September 21), we watch the yellow ness of the light turn milky in the cooling air. It is time for self-a.s.sessment. We are beginning to move into the dark that will start the Cycle once more.
Nothing we plan, say, or do has any effect on these great changes.
Earth turns always, travels Her orbit, and carries us with Her. Perhaps we singing, moving, meditating creatures are Earth's consciousness.
Perhaps it is through the emotional perceptions and expression of Her humans that She registers Her awesome wonder and sorrow. As keeper of Her sacredness, we wors.h.i.+p Her great process out of which we come and to which always we return.
Danu (DAN-oo) The Earth (Ireland) Introduction
Despite increasing industrialization, today's Ireland is famed for her still-told stories of fairy mounds and little people in the gra.s.s.
Today's tales are Earth-respecting remnants of the sagas of human-sized, magically powered queens, kings, heroes, and heroines that preceded them. These stories, in turn, recapitulate the even older tales when G.o.ddesses and G.o.ds, representing the powers of Earth, Water, Fire, and Air, peopled the world. The tellers of those ancient stories called themselves the Tuatha De Danaan, or the ”Tribe of the G.o.ddess Danu.” The Irish Danu, Danuna, or Dana shared Her name with forms of the Great Mother in cultures around the world, such as the Danes and the biblical Danites (called ”serpents” by writers of the Old Testament). The Russians called Her Dennitsa (see the story of the Zoryas); the cla.s.sical Greeks named Her Danae; the Hebrews Dinah; and the Babylonians called Her Danu or Dunnu.
Although the ancient Tuatha De Danaan named the Earth G.o.ddess as the very source of their lives, Danu is rarely mentioned by today's authors trying to piece together the myths from that time. Instead, most stories told today emphasize the role of Dagdu, the Sun G.o.d. A traveler to County Meath in Ireland can, for example, visit Newgrange, a beautifully preserved tomb built in the form of an underground temple in 3000 B.C.E. or five hundred years before the erection of the pyramids. The entrance stones are inscribed with giant spirals, and the damp, cool pa.s.sageway to the center is now rigged electrically to expose spirals and inverted triangles etched on the inner walls. The guide also uses an electric light to reenact the nearly miraculous once-a-year flooding of the dark center (through the window in the roof) with the light of the rising Sun on the morning of the Winter Solstice. The sense of being in a womb-like place is overwhelming. The literature provided to Newgrange visitors, however, fails to note this obvious reality. Instead, it first praises the high degree of architectural, engineering, and artistic skill displayed by this ancient crop-raising people and carefully notes the measurements and placement of roof box chambers, great circle, and surrounding standing stones of the Great Mound. The pamphlet's author then declares that Newgrange is a monument to ”no less a personage than the chief of all the G.o.ds,” Dagdu the Sun.
I wrote the story of Danu the Earth after a moving visit to this underground temple. Unlike the pamphlet's author, I had to ask myself why a people would build a monument to the Sun inside the Earth in such a way as to take the light of the Sun into its depths for only minutes each year.
I was further inspired by my visit to the bowels of Dublin's museum in which are gathered a dozen or so of what curators call ”sheila-na-gigs.” Sheila-na-gigs are stone figures of squatting women displaying their sometimes red-stained v.u.l.v.as. As late as the Middle Ages, these figures were carved above church entry ways Both the churches and their startling guardians were built by medieval G.o.ddess-wors.h.i.+ping villagers in the process of capitulating to the Christian religion.
Danu, I have no doubt, was a figure much like the far more modern sheila-na-gigs, who almost certainly represented the womb and tomb as the single point at which meet life and death in the Cycle of the Great Mother.
In Danu's story, I hope to spiral through time to the very center of our own stories. It is the story of Danu's rilling the world with Her rhythm, that She might surge always in the blood tides of our bodies and hearts.
The Gift of Rhythm and Blood At the beginning of the beginning, the G.o.ddess Danu glittered tiny as a fairy in the mists. You'd scarce have seen Her, even had you been there, for the swirl of milky gray about Her gossamer self. But Danu was there, sure as we're here: a glistening globe of possibility at the start of it all.
It was Danu's dream time then. Asleep, Her thoughts quivered and swelled. Awake, She held Her face in Her hands, wondering and humming, lost in Her own stillness. It may well have been the dreams that caused the growing. The dreams trickled at first and then flooded in the pearly dark place between sleeping and waking, where time is like water and nothing is impossible. But whether it came from the dreaming or something else, Danu the G.o.ddess grew. Oh, it surprised Her how She grew!
It was Her legs at first. She extended them to relieve their aching and splayed Her toes. Somehow those spread toes came to hold whole bays between their peninsular lengths, and Her limbs stretched lopingly long. Hard and round and luscious they'd become with knees and thighs fair like mountains, they were so huge. Her arms shot from their sockets and came to end in gigantic slender-fingered hands in which She could suddenly see the streams and creeks of veins. The once plump little wrists took on the definition of hills and, oh! the down of Her forearms resembled meadows more than anything. Her neck, too, had lost its cus.h.i.+on and got a swivel to match the capacity of Her stride.
How shy this Danu, how astounded! How full of Her change She was, once wee as an idea and now enormous as the world. She had flitted once, effortlessly. Now Her movements felt tremendous and heavy. Danu mused, twirling absently a tuft of hair behind Her ear. Then She heaved Herself into the sleep of exhaustion, only to wake to even more growing.