A True Spring Story

I once lived on a street that ended in a cul-de-sac. (This “once” was in the previous century.) My home was in one of the brick colonials common to the area. In the brick colonial directly across the street was a family named Starling. They lived there for, oh, about 10 years before selling the house to a family with the last name Bird. The Birds lived there at least until I moved, near end of that century. I decided to move to get closer to work, but had trouble finding a buyer for the house (it was that kind of market). But just as the house I wanted in a new location became available, a member of the Starling family contacted me by phone and said she wanted to move back on the street and asked I knew of any available houses.

“Do I have the house for you!” I said, and asked her if she wanted to buy mine. Ms. Starling bought my house and that winter I happily moved to the state across the river, much closer to work. My new house was on a street name Byrd. (I am not making this up. Wait ‘til you read the rest!)

In early spring, in my new home, I heard a noise that seemed to be coming from my kitchen. When I got to the kitchen I followed the sound to my stove. The high-pitched racket seemed to be emanating from the fan above my stove—but it wasn’t the fan, which was turned off. I never had a stove fan before—it was one of the kitchen features that attracted me to the house—and I couldn’t guess what the noise could be. I asked a neighbor, who said, “probably small birds. We had them last year in our stove fan and put screening up to keep them out.”

I called a wildlife expert. He took a look and said, “Starlings.” After mating season was over. He cleaned out the fan area , and put up screening. “They’ll be happier outside anyway,” he said. “Sometimes they just make a mistake in where they choose to nest.”

Bird Goddess on my altar

So that is my true Spring story, written today as I listen to the birds of many types singing in my backyard, and remember one in particular who sang just at the right moment as I was recording my audiobook, Goddess Guided Meditations.

And oh, btw, did I mention that the first Goddess statue I ever bought (in the early’80s) was a bird Goddess? I’m posting her pic with this article.

Copyright© 2016 by Judith Laura

AAR Extends CFP Deadline for 2015 Regional Conference

The American Academy of Religion, Western Region, has extended to Oct. 5 the deadline of its Call for Papers.  The regional conference will be held in  Santa Clara CA on March 20-22. 2015. Among the many religions and traditions included in the Call is Goddess Studies, for which the Call includes:
"Whatever your methodology (archetypal, cultural studies, feminist, postcolonial theory, queer theory, race and ethnicity) or academic field (anthropology, archeology, literature, mythology, philosophy, psychology, religious studies), this panel seeks contributions to the importance of Goddess Studies within academia. From Egyptian goddesses to Catholic saints to the Haitian Vodou pantheon, we welcome a wide array of perspectives."

Among the other topics included in the CFP are Buddhism and Magick; Ecology and Religion; Ethics; Indigenous Religions; Pagan Studies; Philosophy of Religion; Queer Studies; Religion and Arts; Religion, Literature, and Film; Womanist/Pan African; and Women and Religion. 

Tomorrow's Vigil Responding to WV Chemical Spill

[second paragraph updated 11.40 a.m. Jan. 21]
In what started in West Virginia and is turning into a multistate event, "Honoring the Waters - Candlelight Vigil" is planned for tomorrow (Tuesday) evening near the West Virginia Capitol building and other sites in that state, and in North Carolina.  One location of what has been announced as a statewide event in West Virginia is near the Capitol building in Wheeling, near the river. Announced time of Gathering is at 5:45 p.m., with the event starting at 6 p.m. with an interfaith prayer. This will be followed by a Blackfoot nation ceremony called "Honoring the Waters," led by Kanawha Valley and Native American Elder Danny Two Eagles. Candle lighting will follow at 6:30 p.m, and be followed by several speakers and music presentations. For full schedule see Jan.18, 5:26 p.m. post at link above.  The Wheeling WVA event will take place at 6 p.m. at the Wheeling Jesuit University.

The North Carolina events will occur in Asheville NC, announced by Byron Ballard of the Mother Grove Goddess Temple, and at Lake Tomahawk in Black Mountain, announced by Sarah Vekasi. Both events start at 5:30 p.m.  As of 1/21, Mother Grove  Goddess Temple added a Facebook page, Ceremony of Grief and Empowerment for the Waters and People of West Virginia.  

We will try to keep you informed if other related events are announced. If you know of a public event on this issue being held concurrently, please leave a link to info in a Comment and I will add it.

I'm not going to be able to get to any of these events, but will be joining in spirit by lighting a candle, meditating and praying between 6 and 6:30 p.m. ET  tomorrow evening.

Charlene Spretnak Wins ASWM Award

Charlene Spretnak will receive the Demeter Award for leadership in Women's Spirituality, the Association for the Study of Women & Mythology (ASWM) announced on its blog March 28. Spretnak will receive the award at the ASWM conference May 11-12 in San Francisco, where she will speak on "Modernity, Mythology, and the Elusive Gestalt." She is author of 8 books, including 3 on Goddess/women's spirituality and several on environmental issues.

(M)OTHERWORLD Conference Videos Online

All the presentations given at the (M)otherworld is Possible Conference in Toronto last October 23-25 are now on video posted to the conference website where they can be viewed FREE. The conference was sponsored by the Association for Research on Mothering (ARM), the International Academy Hagia, the Gift Economy Network International, and Feminists for a Gift Economy.

Presenters discussed a wide variety of topics related to mother-right societies, past and present, and economic, social, and political problems that can be traced to the religious dogma that underpins non-mother-right (aka patriarchal) societies. The presenters (followed by the countries where they live, in some cases preceded by their indigenous cultures), in order of appearance, are: Agnes Williams (Seneca-NY, US), Andrea O’Reilly (Canada), Genevieve Vaughn (US & Italy), Wahu Kaara (Kenya), Heide Goettner-Abendroth (Germany), Barbara Mann (Seneca-Ohio, US) Debbie Winegarten (US), Nané Jordan (US), Bernadette Muthien (South Africa), Mechthild Hart (US & Germany), Erella Shadmi (Israel), Malika Grasshoff (Berber, Kabyle), Gudrun Frank Wissman (Germany), Letecia Layon (US), Miriam Irene Tazi-Prere (Austria), Marguerite Rigoglioso (US), Kalli Rose Halverson (US), Nadine McNeil (Jamaica), Mary Louise Stone, (US), Pilwha Chang (Korea), Vicki Noble (US), Marina Meneses (Mexico), Valentina Pakyntein (Khasi, India), Lydia Ruyle (US), and Sobonfu Somé (Burkina Faso).

Following the individual presentations are videos of 2 Q & A sessions, a panel discussion of the "Political Significance of the Gift Paradigm for Feminist Transformation" with Angela Dolmetsch (Columbia), Linda Christiansen Ruffman (Canada), Kaarina Kailo (Finland), and Angela Miles (Canada), and a closing panel discussion on the conference title topic that includes all participants.

So far I’ve watched/listened to the invocation given by Agnes Williams, (who also gives another presentation later on), Vicki Noble’s presentation with a great deal of material on biology that may be new to many, and Lydia Ruyle’s presentation, which included a wonderful slide show about her Goddess icon banners which fly at many conferences and other events and museums. And yes, I will certainly go back to view more. The video and sound quality is excellent. Thanks to the sponsors of this conference for making this material available.

Green Goddess Conference Program

We are delighted to be able to share with you the program of the Green Goddess Conference, the first big event presented by Association for Study of Women and Mythology (ASWM) April 23- 25 in Pennsylvania near the Delaware Water Gap.

Two awards will be presented at this event: The Demeter Award for Leadership in Women's Spirituality and the Kore Award for Best Dissertation in Goddess Studies. Margot Adler will be recipient of the Demeter Award. The recipient of the Kore Award has not yet been announced.

Featured speakers include Cristina Biaggi, Cristina Eisenberg, Ann Filemyr, Max Dashú and Lydia Ruyle. Featured performers include Diane Wolkstein, Annie Finch, Elizabeth Cunningham, and Ruth Barrett.

Featured films include the world premiere of "Pink Smoke Over the Vatican," about ordination of women Catholic priests.

Yes, you can still register for the conference at womenandmythology.wordpress.com

Here's a more detailed schedule of events and workshops:
Friday April 23
1:30 p.m.
Welcome

2:30-3 p.m.
Plenary: Grandmother Stones of Megalithic Europe, Max Dashú.

3:30-5:00 pm
Panel: Environmental Messages in Goddess Spirituality, (1) Impermanent and Continuous Labyrinths: Sustainable eco-practices in Kolam designs in South India; (2) The Mythology and Iconography of the West African Water Goddesses; (3) Xi Wang Mu: Nature as Divine Matrix
Workshop: Inner Pilgrimage: Trance Postures and the Sacred Landscape
Workshop: Her Terrible Creativity: The Divine Feminine as Vortex
Workshop: Divinities of a Matri-Centered Earth Consciousness

6-7 p.m.
Dinner

7:30-8:15
Plenary: Women and Wildness, Cristina Eisenberg

8:15-8:45
Poetry Reading: Annie Finch

9:00
Movie premiere: Pink Smoke Over the Vatican, with filmmaker Jules Hart.

10:00
Performance (with audience participation): Tarantella, Women’s Ritual Dance

Saturday, April 24
7:30 am
Seneca Grandmothers Dance: The Seven Directions Movement Meditation.

8:30-10:00 a.m.
Panel: Goddess Studies: Methods, Approaches, Controversies, (1) Forever Cycling: The Heroine’s Journey and the Cycle of Nature, (2) Deity in Sisterhood: The Collective Sacred Female, (3) The Stuff of Life: Clay, Figurines, Women, and Shamanism in Mesoamerica, (4) Conceptualizing Paganism as a World Religion: Who gains? Who loses?
Panel: Approaches to Goddess Studies: (1) Lilith, the Primordial Feminine, (2) Archaeomythology of Religion in the Sesklo culture, (3) The Body of Woman as Sacred Metaphor
Workshop: Frog Mysteries
Film Festival

10:30-12 noon
Panel: Lady of the Beasts and Bees: (1) Golden Glimpses of the Bee Goddess: Her Evolution in Ancient Crete, (2) The Deer Mother: Earth’s Nurturing Epicenter of Life and Death, (3) The Wolf’s Tooth (4) Snakes, Tigers, and Other Animal Spirits
Workshop: The Female Body as the Foundation for Religion: mythological, historical and contemporary
Workshop: World Icons & Herstories of Mother Earth
Film Festival

12:00-1:00
Lunch

1:30-3:00
Panel: Holy Wind: Mythic Inspiration in the Visual Arts
Panel: The Experience of Goddess: (1) The Hem of Her Cloak: How Modern Brigid Worship Spread into the Southern Highlands of Appalachia, (2) Pilgrimage to Éire, (3) The Creative Experience of Goddess
Workshop: The Sanctified Womb Ceremony
Film Festival

3:30-5:00
Panel: Goddesses in Contemporary Literature: (1) Salvation and Survival in the Works of Margaret Atwood, (2) Reclaiming their Inheritance: Ecofeminism and Black Women’s Writings, (3) The maternal maize fields of Deep Rivers by José María Arguedas
Workshop: Finding your Sacred Language
Workshop: Womb Workshop continues
Activity (depending upon weather): Walking the Labyrinth
Film Festival

6-7 p.m.
Dinner

7:30-8:15
Plenary: The Goddess as the Original Environmentalist: A Historic and Artistic Examination of the Great Goddess as a Green Goddess, Cristina Biaggi

8:15-9
Performance: Quanyin by Diane Wolkstein

9:00 pm:
Presentation of Demeter and Kore Awards.

9:15-10:30
Concert/performance: Dramatic Monologue, Elizabeth Cunningham; Concert for Gaia: Ruth Barrett

Sunday, April 25
7 am
Seneca Grandmothers Dance/Qigong

8 am
Breakfast

9:00-10:30 am
Panel: Mythic Images of Nurturance: (1) Visualizing Emptiness: Exploring the Transformative Power of Green Tara, (2) The Eternal Return: The Myth of Demeter and Persephone in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, (3) Demeter Stories in Sicily
Panel: Publishing Goddess Scholarship: Editors Speak
Workshop: The Wheel of the Year as a Spiritual Psychology for Women
Film Festival

11:00-Noon
Plenary: Above, Below, Around, Between and Within All: A Woman's Journey Following the Path of the Sacred: Ann Filemyr

12-1
Lunch

1 pm
Formal Closing.

Thanks to Patricia Monaghan, one of the program's planners, for supplying this information.

Tree+Snow=Goddess Symbol

As you probably know, during the first two weeks of February, the U.S. Middle Atlantic states had two big snowstorms, the first leaving in some places totals of snow close to 3 feet and both qualifying in some point as blizzards (meaning high winds). During the height of the first storm, looking out the window of my house I took this pic (with camera gizmo on my wireless phone) of two forked tree limbs holding snow, forming a yoni symbol. The "symbol" stayed in the tree for about 24 hours before a combination of wind and sun vanished it.

Green Goddess Conference

February 15 is the deadline for presentation proposals for the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology's conference, "The Green Goddess: Ecofeminism and Women's Spirituality." The conference will be held April 23-25 in Bangor, PA, near the Delaware Water Gap and will include "Pink Smoke Over the Vatican," a film about the ordination of Roman Catholic women priests, and films on Mammywata by Sabine Jell-Bahlson. Panels and workshop topics include publishing Goddess scholarship. Already-scheduled speakers include Cristina Biaggi, Cristina Eisenberg, Ann Filemyr, Lydia Ruyle, and Max Dashu. More info about the conference is here.

February 15 is also the deadline for entering the competition for ASWM's biannual Kore Award for best dissertation in Goddess Studies, which we first posted about last November.

Scholarly 'Avatar' Papers Sought

Spurred on by the various reactions to the film Avatar, the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, is seeking proposals for papers for an issue discussing Avatar and nature spirituality. For more info, including how to submit proposal, go here.

'Save The Moon'

As you may know, NASA is planning to send missiles to the Moon THIS FRIDAY. Why? They want to find out if there's water below the surface. Besides the symbolism (!) there are other issues, which Amy Ephron sums up in her excellent article in The Huffington Post. And also thanks to Amy, here is a link to a Twitter page about it:
http://twitter.com/helpsavethemoon

UPDATE Oct.8 2:09 p.m.: And in the interest of equal time (or something) here is the Twitter url for something or someone pretending to be the LCross spacecraft involved in the Moon crash:
http://twitter.com/Lcross_Nasa

REVIEW: Church of the Old Mermaids

Church of the Old Mermaids, a novel by Kim Antieau (Ruby Rose’s Fairy Tale Emporium, 2009), trade paperback, Kindle

This is a delightfully buoyant novel filled with humor and magic, yet grounded by serious themes. Even the cover is clever: A mermaid statue with a placard hanging from her neck to her waist with this information:

Church of the Old Mermaids
Kim Antieau, novice

The Church of the Old Mermaids is "not a real church..." protagonist Myla Alverez tells us as the novel opens. It’s what she calls her space in an outdoor market in Arizona where she puts her table, chair and wares on Saturdays. She calls it the Church of the Old Mermaids because "her mother told her when she was a child that the desert had been a vast sea." It seems that Myla inhabits a magical world in which, for example, a "wash" continuing across the road by itself toward the desert moves "like a glacier" or "a slow dance troupe." She likes to imagine "that the mermaids had not dried up when the sea did; they merely changed their attitudes." Some of these attitudes are demonstrated by the Old Mermaids’ quotes that begin each of the 13 chapters. For example, at the head of the first chapter we read:

Get the starfish outta your eyes, sister.
–Sister Sheila Na Giggles Mermaid

Myla retrieves from the wash the items she brings to the Church to sell each Saturday. Each of them has a story that either she, or the people buying the items, tell. Here are short versions of some of the stories: Small colored bottles were once filled with a "precious liquid" by Bridget Mermaid later aided by Ruby Rosarita Mermaid who cooked a certain delicacy with it; A broken tile with a peach on it played a role in a romance between Sister Magdalene Mermaid, aka Sissy Maggie Mermaid, and an attractive younger man the Mermaids hired to help them tile their kitchen; An old ticket to a Mariners’ baseball game is connected to the relationship between one of the customers and his college roommate.

These wonder-filled colorfully-written stories would have been enough to keep me engrossed, yet I was lured in further by weightier plots through which Myla encounters more practical issues, such as her role as the caretaker of The Old Mermaid Sanctuary, a group of five houses whose owners are away and where she stashes people who need temporary homes after crossing the border from Mexico; her relationships with three men with whom she has been or is involved; and a crisis of faith brought on by a declaration of love.

In fact, the stories themselves are not always light fluff. They can be profound. For example, the very moving story about "Gifting," reveals that the true essence of all the Mermaid stories is healing love.

Is it a stretch to see the Old Mermaids’ continued existence as a metaphor for survival of Goddess myths in the "desert" of patriarchal religion? After all, some of the 13 Old Mermaids bear Goddess or Goddess-like names: Grand Mother Yemaya Mermaid, Sister Sheila Na Giggles Mermaid, Sister Bridget Mermaid, Sister Sophia Mermaid.... Or maybe we should see the stories of the Old Mermaids as a display of how our culture would be if it revered old women? I’m not sure. Neither of these interpretations are necessary to enjoy the book; as with much good literature, the novel can be understood and appreciated on a number of different levels.

Antieau has written 6 other novels, which brings me to my confession: This is the first I’ve read. I guess that makes me a Kim Antieau novice. But not for long. I’ve taken a vow to read another of her books as soon as possible and look forward to becoming an Antieau postulant. As part of this spiritual path, let me leave you with a memento from the Old Mermaids -- the song they sang while healing a crow:

"The Old Sea rolls in and washes away the pain. The Old Sea rolls in and washes away infection and inflammation. The Old Sea rolls out and washes away all disease. So say the Old Mermaids. Blessed sea."

TAGS:news book reviews spiritual feminism Goddess fiction Mexico-US border crossings

REVIEW: Signs Out of Time

Signs Out Of Time: the story of archeologist Marija Gimbutas (DVD)
Narrated by Olympia Dukakis; directed & edited by Donna Read; written by Starhawk; music by Stellamara with Sonja Drakulich. Belili Productions. 60 minutes.

The combination of inspiration and scholarship that many of us have come to know through the previous Read/Starhawk collaboration, Women and Spirituality:The Goddess Trilogy, continues in the 2008 DVD version of the 2003 film/video Signs Out of Time.

Signs Out of Time focuses on the work and life of Lithuanian-born archeologist Marija Gimbutas (pron. Mar-i-a Gim-boo-tas), perhaps best known among non-academics and Goddessians for her 1989 book, The Language of the Goddess, in which a mythology emerges from her decoding of the repetition of symbols in Neolithic artifacts unearthed from Old Europe.

The first thing that grabbed me watching the DVD was the opening music. Though Lithuanian, it is close in style – especially the strong-throated women’s singing – to music I’m very familiar with from more than 40 years of dancing folk dances from Eastern Europe – for instance, from Bulgaria, Hungary, Greece and countries and areas (such as Serbia and Macedonia) of the former Yugoslavia. This is essentially the same area Gimbutas refers to as "Old Europe." I love this music, love the dances from these regions, some of which are very ancient women’s dances, and wonder if dancing the older dances for so many years (and from a young age) unaware of their relationship to Goddess traditions helped bring me to Goddess.

Visually, Signs Out of Time opens with dancing similar to dances I've danced. The film then intersperses footage from a 1989 interview of Gimbutas conducted by Riane Eisler (whose 1988 book, The Chalice and the Blade, applies Gimbutas’s archeological findings to anthropology and other social sciences) with both still and film footage of Neolithic Goddess artifacts going back to 21,000-24,000 BCE, and quotes from well-known scholars. For example, Prehistorian James Harrod says, "She [Gimbutas] opened up the diversity of Neolithic religious imagery...probably as old as human evolution."

In the Eisler interview, Gimbutas points out that the 3 great inventions of the Neolithic – agriculture, weaving, and pottery – are inventions of women. She tells how her research led her to conclude that "Old Europe is a peaceful culture, without weapons." Brian Swimme, mathematical cosmologist, tells how at first he thought that Gimbutas’ conclusions were "all fantasy," because he couldn’t imagine a time that was free from war. Upon reflection and closer investigation, Swimme came to understand that Gimbutas was onto something valid. Naming the places Gimbutas’ work focused on, narrator and well-known actress Olympia Dukakis observes, "our history books never told us these names."

Colin Renfrew of Cambridge University, who supported Gimbutas' earlier work involving the Bronze Age, became a critic of her Goddess work. He appears in this film criticizing Gimbutas’ work from what I suppose is a strict academic point of view. But I didn’t find his arguments particularly convincing.

Also appearing in the film are Joan Marler, Carol Christ, Patricia Reis, Miriam Robbins Dexter, Vicki Noble, Elinor Gadon, and others. The credits at the DVD’s end list loads of other people and organizations who participated in making the film. If you’re like me, you may recognize there names of Internet friends.

The second half of the film gives us a closer look at Gimbutas’ personal life. She and her family hid from and fled from both the Nazis and the Soviets. She married, gave birth to 3 daughters, and attended university. She was deeply involved in collecting Lithuanian folk songs. She and her family emigrated to the U.S. in 1949 and she found a non-paying position at Harvard University, which allowed her to do research. She tells of the discrimination she faced at Harvard, which at that time admitted only men as undergraduates and apparently also had restrictions on hiring women instructors. In 1963 she found a post at UCLA, ended her marriage, and began what she describes as a happier time in her life. She tells how at the beginning of her academic career as an archeologist she had no trouble getting grants and other funding. But once she started specializing in archeology related to Goddess, she was unable to get funding.

The film then comes what might be called full circle, as we learn about Gimbutas’ excavating of Kilian in Greece and how she came to decode the symbols she found on the artifacts there. And we are treated to more pictures of artifacts.

Marija Gimbutas died on February 2, 1994, in Los Angeles. At her request, her ashes were taken back to Lithuania.

Reis sees the the "backlash" again Gimbutas’ work as "part of the backlash against feminism."

A quote I found on the Gimbutas/Belili website demonstrates dramatically the need for us to take seriously Gimbutas' findings:

Starhawk and Donna were together, editing and writing commentary, on September 11, 2001. Starhawk has vivid memories of playing bits of the film on Donna’s VCR, which would revert back to the news every time she paused too long to think. The Goddess images and beautiful scenes of life in the film were constantly interrupted by scenes of the twin towers falling, the airplanes crashing and the anguish of survivors and relatives. The juxtaposition of the ancient images of peace and regeneration with the current reality of war and destruction deepened our commitment to get this information out to the world.

What I’m hoping is that with the new Administration in the US and possibly with other worldwide changes, the years of trouncing on feminism, both political and spiritual, as well as the disregard for environmental concerns, will end. For it is clear to me that the knowledge revealed by Gimbutas’ work — that human history is not just a saga of wars, that in fact the warring times are far shorter than the times preceding it in which peace and social equality were accompanied by honoring the Earth and females, both human and divine — can give us the courage to reinstitute peaceful, equitable sociopolitical systems as our true heritage, and to do the work necessary to save our planet both from war and from environmental threats such as global warming. Yes, this DVD clearly shows through its exploration of Gimbutas’ work, these things are all interwoven.

TAGS:life DVD reviews spiritual feminism Goddess archeology Marija Gimbutas

Summer Solstice in Australia

Thanks to Glenys Livingstone for pointing us to this beautiful visual and audio experience of Summer Solstice earlier this week at Brun-Na-Big Tree, PaGaian Moon Court, Blue Mountains, Australia.

A Gift from Australia

Thanks to Glenys Livingstone and others at PaGaian' Cosmology's Moon Court in Australia for sharing this video on You Tube of their Winter Solstice Celebration, "Triple Spiral@ Bru-na-BigTree," as it occurred on June 21, 2008. Don't miss Glenys' beautiful words, and the lovely camera work by Taffy Seaborne. If the pic doesn't show up on your screen, go to
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Di7j1E2Z3Mo

GUEST BLOG: The Southern Hemisphere is on the Same Planet and it's Autumn!

by Glenys Livingstone

Earth is perfectly poised in balance for a Moment – it is a Moment of Equinox @ EarthGaia. The light and dark parts of the day in the South and in the North of our planet, are of equal length at this time. In the Southern Hemisphere it is Autumn –yes! … and - no matter where you are - we all know what season it is in the Northern Hemisphere: Spring. In the Christian calendar, which dominates the consumer faith of the globe, Easter is being celebrated - no matter where you are – in Spring or in Autumn. Who cares? It seems sometimes not even Pagans – especially Pagans in the North of the Planet. Most Pagans in Australia do now celebrate the Autumn Equinox by the name of Mabon when it is actually Autumn, though there are still some recalcitrant ones that stick to the Northern Hemisphere dates regardless of what their Land is doing (I find it hard to believe but it is so!). However, for most Pagans in the North of the Planet, it is yet to dawn on them that the opposite Season is happening at the same time, on the same Planet. And even for those from the North who do know, who have been here to the South (the South is here not just there), and felt it, they have gone home glad to re-adjust their brains to the familiar half-Planet they inhabit. Southern Hemisphere Pagans continue to receive their unseasonal greetings in emails, on lists where one would think the author knows they are talking to a global community - authors who expect Southern Hemisphere people to simply comply to their unseasonal writings, or sit in their unseasonal virtual classroom unaddressed. I find this particularly bewildering (en-wilding) coming from feminist Goddess women who have a history and understanding of being “othered”, who blithely continue it in this form, despite attempts to alert them to the reality of the other half-Planet.

EarthGaia has a Solstice Moment twice a year - yet She actually does Winter twice and Summer twice within that. And there is a symmetry in their significance Poetically – which is quite lovely and profound to contemplate. EarthGaia has Equinox Moments twice a year – yet Autumn and Spring twice each within that: and there is an awesome symmetry in the Poetic significance that us humans may make of its simultaneous occurrence. Our ancestors had commonly connected them … the Greater and the Lesser Eleusinian Mysteries being an example. The cross-quarter Moments have a special relationship as they occur co-incidentally in the different hemispheres, when one understands that the one is reflected in the other … present deep within – one aspect manifest in the light part of the cycle and the other aspect manifesting in the dark part of the cycle, a reflection in the mirror. Then, one is comprehending a Wholeness of being that is actually true of every moment – a connection enabled by the Gestalt of a spherical whole Planet.

This issue is one of my “things”. I grew up under Southern skies – the Southern Cross constellation of the night sky in my childhood eyes. I was a country girl in Australia … of European descent and heritage, and as I say in the Introduction to my book, PaGaian Cosmology:

Most of the texts and graphics explaining the Cosmos to an Australian and white child were (and still often are) drawn from the Northern Hemisphere perspective. The Moon’s phases were “backwards”; Sun’s daily movement from East to West was described as being “clockwise” (and it wasn’t); the seasons in the stories were always at odds with real experience. This was never regarded as important enough to mention, yet deep within me from the beginning there was scribed the cosmic essence of disregarding one’s senses.

Northern Hemispheric practitioners of the Old European Earth-based religious tradition, are generally less aware of the significance of the site of seasonal ritual – where we are in the Cosmos, than those of the South of the Planet. Yet in the times of global transformation and consciousness that we are entering, such an awareness seems a very positive attribute. Whereas in the past, for me personally and others, the fact of the context being thus – Southern Hemispheric, was initially a confusion, contributing to a deep internalised sense of being “Other”. It is now a clarity about the actual Planet and Cosmic situation. The PaGaian reality is that the whole Creative Dynamic happens all the time, all at once. The “Other”, the opposite, is always present – underneath and within the Moment: the Seasonal Moment, or indeed any moment. Practice of celebrating the Seasonal Wheel in the Southern Hemisphere seems to contribute certain identifiable qualities to one’s frame of perspective and flexibility of mind: we even joke about it “down” here. There is an identifiable rigidity of mind that is the usual fare of a “Northern” mind.

Like any “underdog”, us Southern Hemispheric PaGaians (Pagans with global perspective) can tend to be a bit smug about our larger perspective, or sometimes quite irrational and emotional. But in all truth, we must realize that the colonisation of the South of the Planet is a very recent event in the history of Gaia – our minds and our religious rituals are still catching up.
© Glenys Livingstone 2008

Australian Glenys Livingstone is author of Pagaian Cosmology and holds a Ph.D. in Social Ecology from the University of Western Sydney, Australia. For more about her and her work, visit http://pagaian.org/ For a taste of the "anti-clockwork" experience, visit Glenys' YouTube offerings celebrating the light part and the dark part of Earth's annual orbit around the Sun. Glenys and her partner hold sacred space for the celebration of Earth’s holy-days with a small open community, according to their place on the planet.

TAGS: life Southern Hemisphere Pagan holidays Goddess spirituality geography Gaia consciousness

Gore Wins Nobel

Al Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change received the Nobel Peace Prize today. Gore also recently won an Oscar for his movie on global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth." His earlier book, Earth in Balance (1993) refers to the works of Marija Gimbutas and Riane Eisler (p. 260 and Bibliography).

TAGS:life news Al Gore Nobel Prize environment Marija Gimbutas Riane Eisler