Happy Beltane!

Beltane aka May Day is upon us! Selena Fox tells you everything you've ever wanted to know about our sacred rebirth-of-the-earth celebration. Here's a bit about the maypole:

"Forms include pole, tree, bush, cross; communal or household; permanent or annual. * In Germany, fir tree was cut on May Eve by young unmarried men, branches removed, decorated, put up in village square, & guarded all night until dance occurred on May Day. * In England, permanent Maypoles were erected on village greens * In some villages, there also were smaller Maypoles in the yards of households. * Maypole ribbondances, with two circles interweaving; around decorated bush/tree, clockwise circle dances." MORE>>>

Poor Athena!

Good article on what the patriarchy did to the Greek Goddesses. Here's a snippet:

"In 458 BC, [Athena] blatently rejects her mother Metis in Aeschylus's Oresteia , as she also justifies the priority of men over women; 'It is my task to render final judgment here...There is no mother anywhere who gave me birth... I am always for the male with all my heart, and strongly on my father's side.'"

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Goddess COMMANDMENTS

Here for your viewing pleasure, are The Goddess Commandments, which came to me this morning, unbidden.

THE COMMANDMENTS OF THE GODDESS
Behave toward others as a healthy mother behaves toward her child:

As a mother teaches her child, so must you teach others.
As a mother does what is best for her child, so must you do for others.
As a mother feeds, clothes and shelters her child, so must you do for others.
As a mother entertains her child, so must you entertain others.
As a mother plays with her child, so must you play with others.
As a mother laughs with her child, so must you laugh with others.
As a mother is patient with her child, so must you be with others.
As a mother smiles with love upon her child, so must you smile upon others.
As a mother protects her child, so must you protect others.
As a mother heals her child from illness, so must you heal others.
As a mother hopes for her child, so must you hope for others.
As a mother worships her child, so must you worship others.
As a mother dies to protect her child, so must you die to protect others.

What do you think? Do any of these strike you as "wrong," and if so, why? DO YOU HAVE ANY OTHERS you think should be added? Of course these differ from the Flies Guys' Ten Commandments -- we're dealing with a Mother Goddess here. These are what I imagine were the Commandments people used before the Patriarchy galloped in and smashed our human wholeness.

Notice what's not included: Things like "Thou shalt not kill," "Thou shalt not steal," "Thou shalt not rape," etc. Those things wouldn't even have crossed anyone's mind in pre-patriarchal Mother-Goddess society. Only completely deranged peoples would need to use those as deified commandments.

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I shot the picture above with my digital camera, from a painting I have done by the remarkable Susan Sedon Boulet.

Mothers: READ THIS

If you're a mother, you must read an excellent post by Morgaine at The-Goddess. Here's a snippet:

"Western mothers who are taught to believe their uterus is a national asset, as they are taught to believe that the Muslim uterus is an international threat. They are educated not to cry out: `I gave him birth, breast-fed him, he is mine, and I will not let him be the one whose life is cheaper than oil, whose future is worth less than a piece of land.`

"All of us are terrorized by mind-infecting indoctrination, to believe all we can do is either pray for our sons to come back home, or be proud of their dead bodies.

"And all of us were brought up to bear all this silently, to contain our fear and frustration, to take Prozac for anxiety, but never hail Mama Courage in public. Never be real Jewish or Italian or Irish mothers.

"I am a victim of state violence. My natural and civil rights as a mother have been violated and are violated because I had to fear the day my son would reach his 18th birthday and be taken away from me to be the instrument of criminals such as Sharon, Bush, Blair and their clan of blood-thirsty, oil-thirsty, land thirsty generals...." MORE >>>

(Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan, mother of Smadar Elhanan, 13 years old when killed by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem in September 1997, made this speech in Strasbourg on International Women's Day 2006.)

Women -- and you men who support us -- we're so powerful! Last time I checked, we constituted a majority of the earth's population! Even more important -- we have what every demon on earth pants after: our children (fodder) to fight their oil wars! Mothers of the world unite! Let's take back our children. Train your daughters and sons to resist the war demons. Whisper in their ears from the moment of birth. Teach them to be be lovers not fighters!

A smack IN THE FACE

I'm asking this Goddess to appear on stage for a third post in a row. Why? First, because She's just blows me away. Second, because I want to point out that, this Goddess is one of the Egyptian Goddesses we all know and love. She is Isis, or Sekhmet, or Nut, or one of the others. It's just that archaeologists have not uncovered her name or identity. Nevertheless, She is Isis or Sekhmet or Nut -- before Their power was diluted by the patriarchy.

On the other hand, She may be a little too rich for our blood. Especially for the blood of our men. Why? Because we, my dear friends, ARE patriarchals. I hate to break it to ya, my fellow Americans, but unless you're 100% North American Indian, you are a patriarch. The American culture, way of life, is primarily patriarchal. Whether you're male or female, you possess certain deepset attitudes and beliefs about breasts, women who take power, about nudity, about female deity, about 'nice women' etc. Our beautiful Egyptian Goddess will therefore be a direct smack in the face for many of you.

6006 AHG (After Healthy Goddesses)

Hmmm. I’m thinking we should rearrange our time-counting system. Why not use 4000 BCE as year zero? That was roughly when the patriarchy first appeared, with the world's first war gods in tow -- the war gods who turned our formerly healthy Goddesses into puppet deities. It’s been downhill since then, and because of the coming of these war gods we’re about to slide off the earth into oblivion.

Anyway, instead of BC and AD, we’d use BWG ("Before War Gods") and AHG ("After Healthy Goddesses"). So at the moment, we’re living in the year 6006 AHG.

April 20, 6006 AHG. I like it! Kinda gives you a nice feel for how long we've been living in crap.
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The Goddess above comes from Egypt before Egypt was crushed by patriarchs and their war gods. The early patriarchs were about as refined as cockroaches standing on two legs, and did nothing all day but grunt and sit on their haunches sharpening war weapons -- unless of course they were out mowing down the civilized people on the planet, who spent at least part of their time doing civilized things, and were therefore not quite as polished with their war techniques as the grunt boys were.

IN THE TIME BEFORE THE gods

Yesterday, a reader made this comment about the previous post on this blog:

“Are you really putting down all the Goddesses except the Minoan? Do you not think the others may have been supplanted and used to promote patriarchy?”

To which I reply: Just because the Minoan Goddess(es) were the last free of patriarchal gods certainly doesn’t make them the only such Goddesses. According to our best evidence, much if not most of the world before 4000 BCE worshipped Goddesses free of the scourge of violent male deities. We have no evidence that these Goddesses were hurt in any way by any of the possible gods who might have resided in any pantheon with them. The pictures above show two of these pre-patriarchal Goddesses, the first from Mesopotamia (Ubaid period), the second from Predynastic Egypt.

I got these pictures from a fabulous book called Smithsonian Timelines of the Ancient World. I’m particularly studying the two pages that show the West in the millennia before 4000 BC, and the millennia after 4000 BC. You can see a complete absence of the Flies Guys (the first patriarchals; see previous posts on this blog) on the first page (5000-4000 BCE), and the beginnings of them on the second (4000 – 3000 BCE). The Goddesses above come from the first page, in the “Ritual” column.

There should be a Goddess shown for Southeast Europe, too, in this Ritual Column, since almost all the figurines there are female and most certainly deities. But because they have to sell this book to men (who still have all the bucks, remember), the Smithsonian couldn’t overdo it, so for southeastern Europe, they show one of the few male figurines found (“Baked clay figurines are one of the few sources of information about the beliefs … of eastern Europe. Most of the figurines are of the female form, but this striking figure .. is clearly male….”).

On more than one post on this site, we’ve discussed the fact that the historical Goddesses* are patriarchy-twisted forms of their original selves. We’ve emphasized the need to dig to determine what they really are/were, under all the baggage the Flies Guys piled on them when they took over.
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*By “historical Goddesses” I mean those who existed after writing was invented in whatever land the particular Goddess came from, so that we have a written record of the belief system centering around that particular deity.

Sorry, NO gods Allowed

I challenge you: name one Western or Middle Eastern Goddess not splattered in some way under the thumb of violent male gods. Hera, Ishtar, Hecate, Minerva, Diana, Demeter, Freya, Brighid, Cerridwen, the Morrigan, Kali, Aphrodite -- all of them existed in pantheons with brutal male gods hanging over their heads, raping them, tearing them to shreds, killing their beloveds, or otherwise beating them up in some way, shape or form.

To find Goddesses free of this tripe, how far back do we need to go? The answer: To 1450 BCE and the ancient Minoans:

"… The most apparent characteristic of Minoan religion was that it was polytheistic and matriarchal, that is, a goddess religion; the gods were all female, not a single male god has been identified until later periods.

"Many religious and cultural scholars now believe that almost all religions began as matriarchal religions, even the Hebrew religion (where Yahweh is frequently referred to as physically female), but adopted patriarchal models in later incarnations.

"… The Cretans … do not seem to have evolved either gender inequality nor adapted their religion to a male-centered universe. The legacy of the goddess religion seems to still be alive today. Both Greece and Crete are Greek Orthodox Christian. In Greece, however, only women regularly swear by the name of the Virgin Mary, while in Crete both men and women swear by her name, particularly the epithet, "Panagia," or "All-Holy."

"The head of the Minoan pantheon seems to have been an all-powerful goddess which ruled everything in the universe. This deity was a mother deity, that is, her relationship to the world was as mother to offspring, which is a fundamentally different relation than the relationship of the father to his offspring.

"This is an impossibly difficult difference to really understand, but Sigmund Freud in Moses and Monotheism hints at its fundamental aspect. The relationship between a mother and offspring is a real, biological relationship that can be concretely demonstrated (the child comes from the mother).

"The relationship to the father is also a biological relationship, but it can only be inferred (because the child doesn't come directly from the father's body). It is inferred symbolically, that is, the child looks like the father. One aspect of goddess religion, then, is a fundamentally closer relationship, kinship and otherwise, to the deity, whereas god religions tend to stress distance. These, however, are only guesses because so little comes down to us about goddess religions of antiquity.

"… There are numerous representations of goddesses, which leads to the conclusion that the Cretans were polytheistic, while others argue that these represent manifestations of the one goddess. There are several goddesses we can distinguish, though. The first one we call "The Lady of the Beasts," or the "Huntress"; this goddess is represented as mastering or overcoming animals.

"In a later incarnation, she becomes "The Mountain Mother," who is standing on a mountain and apparently protects the animals and the natural world. … Most scholars believe that the principle female goddesses of Greek religions, such as Hera, Artemis, and so on, ultimately derive from the Minoan goddesses. …"

From a learning module at Washington State University
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The above is one of the best images we have of the/an ancient Minoan Goddess. This is a 15th-century BC wall painting from the island of Santorini. Interestingly, even books on the Minoan culture on Santorini often do not show this fabulous piece of art. Why do you think that might be the case, hmmmmm?

Goddess ALIVE!

For those of you who haven't seen it yet, a new Goddess magazine has been born: "Goddess Alive!". Click HERE to see it.

The editors inform us that this is ...

"A magazine of Goddess celebration with news, research, artwork, photos, personal experiences and ritual, that aims to reflect the diverse community of Goddess spirituality reclaimed from the past and alive in the world today. The magazine is primarily British-oriented, but also aims to include Goddess articles, news and events from around the world. The Editor invites news items, letters and articles which are Goddess-focused. If you would like to contribute an article to GA! please write or email first with details.

"The deadline for the next issue is 1 July 2006"

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Jorn Olsen took this photo in Hastings, Nebraska. These rare and beautiful "Mammatus clouds" (need we say where the name came from?) are formed when the air is saturated with rain droplets and/or ice crystals and begins to sink.

JEHOVAH THE Schizo

The primitive war god now worshipped by the majority of people on this planet, is a schizoid:

"...[W]hy did Yahweh, the god of the Hebrews later inherited by Christians and Muslims, decree that murder was wrong? Why, if murder is wrong, was the belligerent slaying of neighboring tribes ... divinely ordained? Why did this same god command his creatures to be fruitful and multiply when doing so must eventually involve the killing, and often murder, of other creatures in a finite world with finite resources? Why was the murder of certain tribe members, such as gays and 'witches,' also commanded?" MORE >>>

From an April 12 article by Sankara Saranam, author of God Without Religion: Questioning Centuries of Accepted Truths.

I ask you: why bother having a Department of Peace when we have this dude running the planet?
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Thnx to Jay Avery from Anti-Thesisofreason for the link to this.
Thnx to qute for the foto

JESUS: SON OF Goddess NOT GOD?!?

Aha! I knew it! Jesus was not the son of the primitive scourge Yahweh -- he was the son of the Goddess:

"The true mystery, as Jesus unveils it, is that, out beyond the stars, there exists a divine, blessed realm.... This is the realm of Barbelo, a name that gnostics gave the celestial Mother, who lives there with, among others, her progeny, a good God awkwardly called the Self-Generated One. Jesus, it turns out, is not the son of the Old Testament God, ... but an avatar of Adam’s third son, Seth. His mission is to show those lucky members of mankind who still have a “Sethian” spark the way back to the blessed realm. Jesus, we learn, was laughing at the disciples’ prayer because it was directed at their God, the Old Testament God, who is really no friend of mankind but, rather, the cause of its suffering."

Click HERE to read more.

From The New Yorker, 2006-04-17 issue, review of the new book The Gospel of Judas (National Geographic; $22).

who's LEFT?!?

You're penning a novel about saving the world from looming disaster. You want to send your characters to a world power they can trust. Who do you send them to?

George Bush? BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Tony Blair? Hahahahahahah

The Secretary-General of the U.N.?

The Prime Minister of Canada?

Al Franken?

Amy Goodman?

SpongeBob SquarePants?

I'm serious, people! I don't know where good people go anymore! Do you have any ideas?

Give the U.N.'s Reins to a Woman

"The United Nations is lagging. The premier world organization is still missing the point that many have grasped in countries such as Germany, Jamaica, Liberia, Chile and New Zealand: that women, too, can serve as leaders at the highest level."

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2-Week VACATION

For the past few days Dear Readers, I’ve been following your comments with great interest, but haven’t responded much. In a few days I’m starting an online writing course, and I've been spending concentrated time prepping for it.

The upshot of this is, I may not post for a week or two. And (knowing me) if I do post, I’m likely to be distracted.

After reading your comments, however, I can’t wait to read THE DARK MATERIALS. Also, I so agree that Harry Potter falls far short of perfection. On the other hand, he’s not bad in the way in which he reaches a world-wide audience. And a big deal is made of his mother's love giving him his magical powers.

I like that part.

Love,
Athana

Harry Potter & THE GODDESS

In the film “Inside Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” Harry and his friends have become teens. They’re suddenly sexually aware, sexually potent, magically sexual beings. This latest movie focuses on a fabulous maturing of characters beloved by the world.

Why the magnificent popularity of Harry Potter? The answer is simple: Harry is a product of the Goddess world, a world of magic, mother love, sensuality and the honest, pure sexual attraction between people that is a gift from the Goddess and an integral part of human life -- despite the protests of the war-god* worshipers, who’ve been forcibly stripped of their very bodies and senses. The war-god peoples are terrified of anything smacking of the Goddess, beauty, and the body. Ergo, they condemn Harry and his films, skittering away from honest sensuality as if burned by fire.
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*The war gods are those who consistently and on a regular basis call their followers to problem-solve via full-scale warfare. They instruct worshipers not just to conquer others, but to utterly destroy them. They include Jehovah, Yahweh, Allah, Vishnu and other Hindu gods.

Awesome GODDESS

Most call this “sunset at the North Pole.” Goddess worshippers call it “The Living, Breathing, Magnificent Goddess.”

A major difference between the Goddess and war gods* is the Goddess’s emphasis on beauty, the senses, humor and pleasure. Goddess admonishes us to seek out things funny, beautiful, pleasurable and sensual. Sexuality is sacred to Her. (Most of the war gods pooh-pooh all of the above, contending that they are pitiful, sinful, ugly and pathetic.)

In fact, any degree in Goddess studies should begin with Goddess 101: “Beauty, Humor and Sensuality Appreciation.”
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*The war gods are those who consistently and on a regular basis call their followers to problem-solve via full-scale warfare. They instruct worshipers not just to conquer others, but to utterly destroy them. They include Jehovah, Yahweh, Allah, Vishnu and other Hindu gods.