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Blog posts tagged in Goddess
For a long time, I wondered what on Earth possessed the Minoans to paint women as white (not Caucasian-toned, but the color of a sheet of paper) and men as dark-dark red. After all, DNA evidence shows that, like their ancestors in Neolithic Anatolia, the Minoans all had skin in various shades of brown. So why the weirdness in the art, like the Bull Leaper fresco above?
Then I began to learn about Mediterranean folk dance. Dance ethnography isn't a subject I ever really thought about before, to be honest. Then a talented dance ethnographer began to share her insights with us, and a lot of things began to make sense. (Check out her book The Ancient and Martial Dances for some fascinating info.)
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My copy of "The Ancient & Martial Dances" arrived in the mail today. It looks intriguing. Thank you for mentioning it.
Whenever I check on my blog statistics, I always find that the post I wrote about topless Minoan women is the number one in terms of hits. The female breast is such a source of titillation (ha!) in modern society, it's hard to wrap our minds around the idea that exposed breasts might have represented something other than sexual innuendo to the ancient Minoans. But we're pretty sure they did.
In addition to the frescoes and figurines that show women with exposed breasts, Minoan art also includes quite a few representations of animals suckling their young. The image at the top of this blog is a drawing of a faience plaque found at Knossos. It shows a mama goat suckling a kid. There's a similar plaque with a cow and her calf. Images of mother animals suckling their young - cattle, goats, sheep, even deer - appear on a number of Minoan seals.
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A worldly empire does not provide safety. There is only the Great Void. It is my safety. It is the Goddess’ nurturing and loving Self.
A possible problem when pursuing success, in business or your personal life, is a false sense that you’re building an empire in which you will find safety. There is no secure empire, there is only the Great Void. And it is the one secure Empire.
Strike a pose! Ecstatic postures have been a part of human religious practice for millennia, possibly going back as far as the Paleolithic. I've explored ecstatic postures and their place in Modern Minoan Paganism before. They're a kind of spiritual "tech" - like yoga and tai chi, ecstatic postures make energy move via the mechanism of holding the body in particular ways. We find examples of these postures in the form of votive figurines from Minoan sacred sites such as cave shrines and peak sanctuaries. The best-known of these postures is probably the famed Minoan salute.
Most ecstatic postures appear to have been used by spiritworkers and worshipers to journey to specific places in the Otherworld or to connect with particular deities or spirits. In that sense, the usual museum label of "worshiper figurine" is accurate.
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I’ve been sober for 16 years today and tomorrow is the sixth birthday of my firstborn child, the magical synchronicity of the timing of that birth never leave me, as each year for the past six now the focus has shifted from self to her.. I feel ridiculously blessed to have a family who have only known me as a sober wife and mother. The woman I have grown into is one that I am proud to be, my priestessing path is serious and real and a precious practice has grown around all that I offer the world as priestess. Being a wife is a challenging and fulfilling spiritual path and one that I longed for for many moons before meeting my Beloved. Motherhood has knocked my socks off, finally I found a space to put the depth of passion, devotion, loyalty and I'll-die-for-you offering that this scorpio soul always searched for. Life is sweet, it is content, it is peaceful for the most part, it is a warm little dream. And so, at 16 years sober, spiritually fit with a loving and full home I took notice when I felt a stirring within the pit of my stomach, a hungry, growling, dangerous, enlivening stir.
I sat with that growl and reflected upon my sobriety and upon the stories that I have heard other sober sisters and brothers share about a beast that some alcoholics claim still lives within them, a beast that always want to drink a beast that will always be there to tear their life down if they feed it. As I reflected upon this beast and felt into my own inner stirrings of wildness I began to hypothesize that perhaps there's no alcoholic beast thirsting for a drink within us sober recovering souls at all, perhaps this sensation, this wildness in my gut was really a thirst for wildness and perhaps this hunger and thirst isn't specific to alcoholics only.
The world tries to tame the wildness out of us, I see it every day as people wrinkle their noses at my wild maiden's unconstrained expression of emotions, it tries to box us in, to conform us, to quiet us and to dull us. When I think about my years before sobriety I remember the wildness that reigned untamed, complete destruction was the guiding force of my life and there was a thrilling sense of liberation in the lack of utter caring about how I appeared, how I hurt myself, what I did and who knew that I was doing it, all that mattered in those years was my quest for complete and utter annihilation and in those destructive years nothing and no-one could box me in. That was the only taste of freedom that I knew. To this day I make no bones about the fact that destruction is wildness, yet my soul will not be tamed it seems and so with destruction being wildness I have often wondered, on days like today when I feel that hunger stir, if destruction is wild why am I longing for it? Are there other forms of wildness beyond destruction? Can destruction be channeled in a manner that serves through what it destroys rather than ruins all that it touches? Is freedom and wildness synonymous?
These questions are quests in and of themselves, at the core of this quest I believe is a universal need, we all need to be wild and free, we need to be in order to fully merge into our Source selves. The role of the priestess after all is to merge this human experience with the experience of divinity, perhaps reconnecting to my wild self is the bridge that meets human with divine and this is why my soul will not slumber and my thirst remains unquenched.
On my priestess path I have come to the conclusion that yes, destruction can serve, in fact, the Destroyer is an archetypal expression of the Goddess, one that I know intimately as a continuously transmuting scorpio soul. When called upon in sovereignty the Destroyer sweeps in and destroys all that does not serve, rather than being out of my mind unconscious, under the spell of chemicals that my human vessel cannot safely ingest and haphazardly wielding around destructive spells that harm me and all those that I come into contact with, now I can channel the Destroyer within me and direct that energy towards all that stands between my Source self and I. There is freedom in this kind of destruction as it ensures that this world does not wear to closely on me and this destructive force challenges me to evaluate all that I have attachments to. There are other forms of wildness I have found in these past 16 years as well, the wildness of love, the wildness of birth, the wildness of untouched nature, the wildness of authenticity, yes there are many forms of wildness that I have discovered in consciousness and now it is my duty to keep my wildness alive and thriving and to do so in a way that serves humanity rather than adds to it's destruction.
16 years of sobriety and 6 years of motherhood is challenging me to stay wild, to stay authentic and to remain free. There are no social constructs of domesticity, age or gender that will hold my spirit back, when I feel that growl from within the pit of my stomach I welcome it and feed it with a healthy dose of freedom as I call upon the Destroyer archetype that is a part of my Goddess self to burn my attachments away and return to the nature of who I am in the regions of consciousness that remain pure, untouched and uninfluenced by the 3D matrix I have chosen to dive into for the time being.
I will not allow the constructs that the patriarchy attempts to weave box me in.
I will not allow my wild nature to be tamed.
I will not slumber into unconsciousness..
I will not allow words such as 'sobriety', 'marriage' or 'motherhood' to dull my spark, rather will they be initiatory frequencies that I expand from.
I will remain wild.
I will remain free.
I will remain untamed.
I will remain sovereign.
I will remain priestess.
While we are on this embodied journey together, I hope to run into you, sister, brother, running, soaring, diving deeply around the spiral wheel, free, unfettered and utterly wild.
Cheers to 16 years!
Grace Be With You,
Priestess of Grace,
Candise Soaring Butterfly
Image taken from http://www.reikilorient.com/2017/03/le-sacre-feminin.html
When I mention "Minoan," most people think of the famous Snake Goddess figurines. And many people think those figurines represent "the Minoan goddess," as if there were only one of them. But there are many Minoan goddesses, not just one.
In fact, there's a whole pantheon.
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