I woke up to a fight between the children erupting in the living room. Oh yes, the moon is still in Aries today shining light on Eris goddess of chaos and Mars the god of war and Black Moon Lilith the great black Void, Yoni, and Great Mother Goddess—all of this squaring Saturn and Pluto. So if you’re noticing some intensity it’s in the stars!
And still there is grace. (Do astrologers talk about that? I don’t know. I’m new at this, and I’m used to writing more theological prose. I’m reminded that the muses hold both astronomy and theology as high priestess arts, but rarely do we blend them together in modern times—this is something I feel called to change. As I also feel called to lift our spirituality into a more cosmic expanse, even as we knit ourselves at peace with these bodies on earth.)
Speaking of priestesses, I’ve been reading the ancient work of Enheduanna, one of the worlds first poets. She’s a Sumerian High Priestess, who was the daughter of Sargon I of Akkad. Her writings date back to 2600 B.C.E. Today I read the poem, The Exaltation of Inanna, from the book Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart: Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna by Betty De Shong Meador.
Queen of all given powers
unveiled clear light
unfailing woman wearing brilliance
cherished in heaven and earth […]
Your hands seize the seven fixed powers
my queen of fundamental forces
guardian of essential cosmic sources […]
You lift up the elements
bind them to your hands
gather in powers
press them to your breast
vicious dragon you spew
venom poisons the land
like the storm god you howl
grain wilts on the ground […]
the Queen alone lifts her feelings
the Queen alone gladdens her heart
She will not quiet her rage […]
[For] that man cast me among the dead
I am not allowed in my rooms
gloom falls on the day
light turns leaden
shadows close in
dreaded southstorm cloaks the sun
he wipes his spit-soaked hand
on my honey sweet mouth
my beautiful image
fades under dust
[And so] the woman no longer speaks sweetly to her husband
no longer tells secrets at midnight
does not disclose
the soft whispers in her heart
[But] the Woman is as great as he
she will break the city from him
may her heart grow soft for me […]
The tale of Enheduanna being removed from her office of high priestess by force is likely historical. It harkens to the tales of the raping of the well maidens by Agamemnon, a harsh and violent sacred boundary violation against the earth and her priestesses who honored the sacred elements of creation. She names Lugalanna as the man who took over her temple rooms, spit in her face, maybe raped her, and to add salt to the wound, made fun of her sacred poetry. He tormented her, telling her to turn her priestess knife upon herself and too harm her own sexuality as other eunics had. For Inanna was known for celebrating her sexuality, and with a shift in power, there was arising a new power apart from honoring the earth and the goddess. And to separate from the power of the Goddess, desecration of the sexual organs became more widespread, even to have sacred sexuality and the temple practices disappear from the biblical and historical orthodox religions and praxis. To be holy was to not be sexual. Or rather, the practices of learning sexual discipline, pleasure, were no longer shared with the broader public. Or, these were old ancient possibly higher consciousness beings who shared with us their DNA linking our imaginations to theirs, to carry us through humanity’s dark ages.
As Juno moved from it’s long transit in Libra into Scorpio, I found myself sitting outside near my medicine wheel. Actually inside my medicine wheel as I arranged a chair in each element and a table to bring them all back together. My husband was sitting in the Air sign and I in the Water, so I asked him if he would hand me the stone with Juno’s markings to me to move into Scorpio. I’m mindful of synchronicities when they happen and this one literally threw me on my butt, for as my husband handed me the stone, the seat in my chair ripped out and I fell hard on my a*s. Since there have been innumerable challenges rising in our home, as they are in many as we navigate the stress of 2020. Mercury is also conjunct Juno both are aspecting my natal uranus. I’m definitely getting an underworld initiation here. Like Persephone dragged off to marry Pluto, and with Pluto fixing to go direct on Sunday, we are all likely getting an underworld initiation.
In the ancient imagination, the underworld wasn’t like hell: a place you go to forever to be punished. It was instead a place that you went with eyes wide open to face a deep pain so that the miracle of resurrection and renewal could take place within your own body. The underworld was a place where death got transformed into life. Where egos and fantasies were slashed so that only what was beautiful and true remained.
Egypt fell. Greece fell. The Sibyl were the last remaining goddesses who drummed in the temple of Vesta before it fell to the Roman Catholic Church. The priestesses were allowed to stay if they renounced their sexuality and remained “virgin” and agreed to only channel male deities, and these eventually became the nuns. The ancient practice of channeling the earth was forbidden. As was any connection with the Pleiades, or Goddesses. One rebellious Sibyl hid in a cave and wrote oracles and left them outside. She was so highly regarded that her prophecies were taken to the king. What did the oracle want? Bags of gold (likely so she could survive outside of temple life). But the king refused. So the oracle burned the scrolls in his presence, as the people, horrified, begged the king to pay the cost. Much was lost, but what remained, and what he paid full price for, were oracles that did indeed predict the fate of Rome.
These stories awaken something ancient within me. I grew up in a church where male things were named divine, and female things were silent and taboo. Patriarchy indeed has a shadow, otherwise it wouldn’t be so threatened by the Goddess and her priestesses, or else her temples would still be around. But there was a time when it was understood that the Goddess was within the masculinity of the God and of men, and that the God was inextricably woven into the divinity of women.
“We who come of age within the basic assumptions of monotheism rarely think about how this paradigm infiltrates every corner of our psychological lives. It does not occur to us that our most entrenched values of good and evil, perfection and impurity, worthiness and corruption are strongly influenced by the splitting which male monotheism imposes on our socialization from birth. It takes a concentrated awareness to realize that this paradigm excludes all other possibilities, and to conceive that our most fundamental presumptions could be different.” Betty Shong Meador, Inanna Lady of Largest Heart
A guy friend who has worked in the church, and is spiritually deep in both his praxis and ideas recently confessed to me, “men don’t quite know what to do with female power.” As it may appear threatening, I mean Inanna herself was known to feast on the blood of her enemies—so were the Vikings, and the Old Testament God (and she’s like Old Old Old Goddess). This wildness of nature, this rage at boundary crossing we don’t always associate with what is holy, or with the sacred feminine. How the energy of Mary could be also seen in the expression of Durga or Kali.
Looking around it doesn’t take long to face that this is not the garden paradise planet this used to be. If we’ve been given a meek and mild picture of the Goddess for example in how Mary has been presented to us (more meek than lioness) then we’re missing an essential piece in our own healing—a conscious connection with our own instinctual rage at our own boundaries being crossed by modern day living on so many fronts, and likewise, the body of the earth being exploited, for we are made of earth, and intrinsically connected to the planet. If she is hurting, we are hurting.
Isis and Horus / Mary and Jesus. In the ancient world many saw the statues as interchangeable. They were likely of the same holy lineage, or Mary being a priestess of Isis, or an incarnation of Isis.
As a recovering pleaser and “fawner” to cope with trauma, I learned early on that though others could appease please the power structures and move up the ladder around me (father’s daughters and sons) I somehow kept getting thrown into the underworld. I was not a father’s daughter. I was strange and rebellious, and my mind wasn’t interested in machines or math, but beauty and art. And this felt taboo as one baptized into the Lutheran church. For Lutherans had overcorrected from the sin of catholic opulence and indulgence to the ideas that the divine was found in the “word alone.” Walls were left white and barren. Beauty was not included in worship. But even through the word alone, one can so easily speak from their disconnected head, without doing the lifelong work of speaking from the heart, or even deeper, the incarnational work that lights up from the sacral root to the rose flowering heart as the oracles did.
To try and “be right” is to be a liar. You can’t ever quite get it. You already are good. And this goodness circles around both the divine and human aspects of ourselves. Both our great moments and our failures. When the Bible says, “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God,” the spiritual principal at work here is humility. If you die justified in your ‘rightness’, you died defended and heart closed towards God. You die too closely connected to the idea of being God without relating to the human part. The real work is the work of the fool done in the darkness of human consciousness. Every move you make is a sin if you are not aware of how to have self control over every organ in your body, as a babe cannot help but use their diaper. Not one of us have the mind of God, though we have a part of it, not one of us knows everything. We are simply too young yet in our human consciousness journey. And yet pride arises. And many times, as I have experienced, pride comes to protect us. For the soul is divine. Yes there is a piece of us that is holy and innocent. And that part is married with decaying flesh—these earthy space suits we put on to experience walking on earth at this time. (What were we thinking?)
Carl Jung talked about overcoming this obstacle through the work of making a meaningful link between the (lower case) self and the numinous—the sychronistic moments when the divine breaks through the mundane linking the worlds. For often we think we are one with the divine, and we are actually only trapped in fantasy. Or we have become so deadened in the material world where the spirit that once used to entice us to wonder has long gone.
When you fully face the inevitable human predicament of folly, it is in humility that the soul can now be twined with the divine, and that is the secret of the true heiros gamos, sacred marriage. It is a marriage of divine and human within each of us.
I have had my own wrestling’s with death. A few times in moments overcome with heart pain, but no way to express it, I had taken a knife to my arm. This happened twice: once after I was raped in junior high. And another time just after I had my third baby and post partum depression symptoms were worsened by the fact that my husband at the time left me for a two week trip to Nicaragua. It was like those moments revealed the true weakness of the “Amazon Goddess” who lost from her tribe of women helpers, lost from the temple arts, grandmothers and aunties around to help support the gift of new life in the community, lost from a protector and guardian at a time when I was the most vulnerable I looked full into the depth of the fall of the goddess, and I didn’t think I could go on. As I read Enheduannas words these memories flooded back to me and I wondered: how long has this impending threat or “spirit” been pressed upon the priestesses of the Goddess to turn their sacred knives on themselves?
Something unlocked for me today. As the Moon is crossing Mars, and I’m having a Black Moon Lilith return, this ancient wound of the loss of respect, the loss of sacred space, the loss of sacred guardianship, and the repercussions of rape and how the Goddess energies we long for, just cannot be anchored in those conditions. How foolish it is to believe something like racism has ended with it’s history so close at our heels, so also that the sexes are valued equally, is only to be blind to the long battle. If you long for the Goddess’ soft beauty, and her secret heart whispers, but do not respect the elements of the earth and her sacred boundaries, then you cannot have the meek mild face you want. Instead the battle goddess shall set her face against you, and you will be locked out of the mysteries of her heart for you were found without honor. If however you are humble in this moment, then there is hope for further learning and redemption of the whole earth. Priestesses are rising again, and taking up the sword of discernment, of focus, and reuniting the Goddess Wisdom with the Lord’s will.
Many have learned to wear the mask of compliance—to please at all costs because we don’t like conflict, or we don’t know how to stand in our own power, or because we have truly lost ourselves and our souls on this long journey of waking up. I used to be afraid of my own anger. I used to feel so disconnected. Or when it would appear, I would use it to harm myself. Now I have learned to roar like a lion. I am very mindful of when my boundaries are being crossed. I am also very mindful of how common it is to still disrespect a woman’s boundaries and how even within the highest courts of law, balance is still being fought for.
I’m encouraged by the stories of Paul and early disciples singing in jails until angels broke them free, or of Buddhas meditating under intense torture of the state. All of the places where the divine power has gone to break the chains for us, to show us that there is no place on earth where we cannot be truly free within.
Historically it has been quite a long journey out of human slavery. While at the same time, quite a long journey out of the morning of human consciousness into the full light of awareness and the responsibility of owning our shadows, making space for our foolishness, and offering grace to one another for simply learning how to live with so much power as a young race.
The work of joining the sisters, as Inanna joined Ereshkigal and allowed her sister’s grief to kill her, and as Osiris also allowed himself to be cut into pieces by his brother Set, and his fragments spread out over earth, is also our consciousness work to join the above and below, the light and the shadow, the queen and the killer, the king and the killer. To be fully divine and fully human means awakening to this strange marriage before one is possessed by either pole: believing oneself to be too divine or too human. The sweet spot is in the heart of compassion, which you can’t get around without passing the Hathor Goddesses sacred cows on your soul’s return to the starry heavens.
In these times where we may see dying kings and their last grasps and manipulations for power, I am encouraged by the wisdom of the psalms: do not put your hope in princes or humans who cannot save. Or in the idea that if you see the Buddha walking on the street: kill him (or kill the illusion that the buddah is outside of you!) It is only by awakening to the truth of the divine and human co-mingling within our own bodies that any of us can find salvation. That, and also my teachers say: by the grace of a woman’s true love. If you have won one woman’s heart by your true love in this lifetime you’ll be in good shape when you cross over.
I love how in the poem above only the Queen can lift her own feelings. For this is a woman who is completely self-sourced. She need not some fleeting distraction or passing pleasure, or external savior. Her true life and joy come from the depths of her underworld journeys in which she has hashed out and experienced the mysteries of death and resurrection. Her magic comes from a place deep behind the veil that no man has lifted.
Inanna, lady of largest heart, may your fires of rage be soothed. May the injustices done against you be remedied. May you restore the people of earth and the communities of earth to your joy again. Blessed be.