THE MYSTERIOUS dying GOD

"An inscription in the Vatican states plainly, 'He who will not eat of my body, nor drink of my blood, so that he may be one with me and I with him, shall not be saved.' This is not terribly surprising, unless you consider that this is inscribed on the remains of the temple the Vatican was built on -- one dedicated to the God Mithras. Mithras was a solar deity whose worshippers called him redeemer; his religion died out not long after the advent of Christianity."

"Such eerie parallels between the pronouncements of Jesus and Mithras are not the only similarities between the two religions. Mithras was known to his followers as "The light of the world," or "The Good Shepherd".... His preists were called "Father."

"Mithras was also born in a cave, with shepherds in attendance, on the twenty-fifth of December.

SNIP

"[S]everal other gods share the December birthday, and like Mithras, they are also solar deities, who are born in the winter solstices, often of virgin mothers, die, and are reborn. One of these, a pre-Christian deity called Attis, was called "The lamb of God," and his crucifixion and subsequent resurrection were celebrated annually, with ritual communions of bread and wine. His virgin mother, Cybele, was worshipped as "The Queen of Heaven." Go HERE for more.

Well, many of you knew already that there's nothing new in the Bible. It was all stolen from earlier religions. Some things were stolen and then tweaked: 13 was kicked out as the 'good' number, and 12 took its place; the loving Goddess Hel to whose warm womb we all return at death became a vast underground torture chamber hotter than -- well, you know. The list is endless.

My QUESTION today, though, is this: Does our new Goddess religion need a dying god? Does the dying god perform a needful service for us? Does someone need to die for our spirituality to work? Whaddya think?

_____________
Thnx to Susan Sedon Boulet for her image of the Mother Goddess Mary holding the dead Christ (from my own collection of her images)

Tracking DOWN A GOOD GODDESS GROUP

Carolina wants to know what to look for in choosing a Goddess group. This is an excellent question, and if any of you can chime in with ideas, please do. Morgaine’s already weighed in with some very sage advice (see her comments at the end of the Sept. 22 post).

Here are a few of my ideas on the ideal group (not always possible, but nice to shoot for):

I think it’s helpful if your group has some foundation in the past. That’s why I like Druidism, Wicca, the Minoan Goddess, Native American spirituality, or the Temple of Isis as bases. This way there’s always the chance that some of the lost wisdom of the past will find its way into your group.

The ideal would be a group begun by respected community leaders. The founders of my Druid group were active members of the Quaker church who’d worked with groups and social activism over their lifetimes -- and were good at it.

Ideally the entire group would consist of women who’ve had successful experience working in small groups. We had a counselor in our group trained in conflict resolution and mediation (she was one of the founders). She’s always coming up with solid ways of making group decisions (by taking however much time it takes to make certain everyone in the group has been heard on any and every issue, and by ensuring that the group comes to consensus).

The ideal group has leaders who are so strong, serious and fearless in their love of Goddess that you can’t help but be the same when you’re around them.

My view is that there should be no men in the group. Unless you are a very unusual woman and can lend a hand helping men form their own Goddess groups (which they need to do, of course) without any negative fallback onto you yourself, join a women-only group. Personally I feel that most women aren’t capable yet of getting what they need out of a spiritual group with men in it. At this point most women are too damaged to be in a group with men without wilting or spending energy being consciously or unconsciously angry, aggressive, or passive aggressive.

In the same vein, I think at this point we need to be in homogeneous groups. If you’re a right-wing Rep, don’t join up with left-wing Dems. If you’re married with children, join a group of marrieds with children. Etcetera. Don’t waste energy trying to do spiritual work with people you don’t understand. I know this isn’t PC, but let’s worry about understanding and working with differences later on, after we’ve gotten on our feet a little. You’re in this group to find Goddess. You want to use all your energy for that. The one exception: being in a group with wise older women is a good thing. They’ve been around longer. Chances are they know things you don’t. In my experience, they shine like diamonds.

I personally think that ten to twelve to thirteen people is an ideal group size. Both Christ and the covens knew/know this!

My former group was begun by a group of four women who’d had a long-term interest in the Goddess, and who’d invested much energy and time in Her. This group traveled to England to study OBOD (the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids) and came back with tons of knowledge, wisdom, and materials. We tweaked the materials here and there to suit our needs. Two of the women built a labyrinth at least ¼ an acre large. Later, at another member’s home, we built a ritual circle out of sand with upright logs as seats, and a fire pit.

I left this group because I couldn’t get along with one member. Although I loved the group, I think this other woman needs it more than I do. I think no matter how wonderful any group is, there’s always the chance that someone with deep issues is going to enter at some point, or that people are just going to have personality clashes. Ordinarily I would have asked the group to work with me and the woman, but I couldn’t have done that without violating her privacy. So instead, I dropped out quietly, but informed one of the group initiators of the problem I was having. I don’t think the woman I had the problems with is a Goddess honorer, but she is deeply in need of friends and a group that will love and support her. So I’m giving her my group, and I’m going to have to work harder to find a new one.

As some of you may have noticed, however, I’m not even blogging as much as I used to. I’ve been working on a book about the Goddess, and that’s been taking much of my spare time and energy.

If I knew how to find a good Goddess group, I’d be in one today. Let’s see. Hm. Here’s what you might do, Carolina: tack a notice on the local Quaker and Unitarian Universalist Church bulletin boards. “Looking for women over [age] to start a Goddess Spirituality group.” Add more info about what you want the group to be and do (eight ceremonies a year? Up to ten women? Based on ancient Druid or Wiccan spirituality? Meeting at members' homes?)

Might try that myself.

Good luck and Goddess Blessings to you, too.
_______________
The pic above is thought by archaeologists to be an ancient Minoan priestess. She was found on the wall outside the doorway of a room on an upper floor in a building at the archaelogical site of Akrotiri on the island of Santorini.
ADDENDUM: I've just discovered that this picture is not the original, but a reworking done by Sage Starwalker, publisher of Matrifocus eZine. [Athana, 10/8/06]

Goodbye CELTIC HERITAGE

Here's something I'll have to hear over and over again before it finally sinks in: We of British ancestry are *not* Celtic, and *not* Anglo-Saxon, but essentially Basque:

"The genetic evidence shows that three quarters of our ancestors came to this corner of Europe [i.e., Great Britain] as hunter-gatherers, between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago, after the melting of the ice caps but before the land broke away from the mainland and divided into islands. Our subsequent separation from Europe has preserved a genetic time capsule of southwestern Europe during the ice age, which we share most closely with the former ice-age refuge in the Basque country....

"Another wave of immigration arrived during the Neolithic period, when farming developed about 6,500 years ago. But the English still derive most of their current gene pool from the same early Basque source as the Irish, Welsh and Scots. These figures are at odds with the modern perceptions of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon ethnicity based on more recent invasions. There were many later invasions, as well as less violent immigrations, and each left a genetic signal, but no individual event contributed much more than 5 per cent to our modern genetic mix." MORE >>>

In my younger days, I hitchhiked around Europe and made a special foray into the mysterious Basque country of southern France. Unfortunately, the only thing I remember is a man in a bar balancing a spoon on his nose.
___________________
Thnx to the Basque Webpage for the foto

Happy DAY!

Happy Alban Elued, all! Had a glorious day yesterday! My friend Jan asked me to go to help with the Heifer International booth at the annual Maine Common Ground Fair (one of the main places Maine progressives go to find other Maine progessives).

Beautiful day! Sun shining! Beautiful people! Children sliding down a hill on pieces of cardboard and having a blast! Organic food everywhere! Radicals and progressives around every corner!

At the very last minute – right as the fair was closing for the day – someone informed me about the booth of the Temple of the Feminine Divine. “Go,” they said, “Before the fair closes for the day!” I went. The booth was swathed in red satin. The priestess attendant gave me a sheet to fill out. For people looking to join or form a Goddess group in the area in which they reside. Since I left my Druid group a few years ago, I’ve been looking for a new group to join. Maybe this will lead me to it! Have been too lazy to form one on my own. Will keep you posted re: how this works out.

MOTHER GODDESS Mary

"In the Catholic Church, the church of Jesus Christ, a disproportionate number of churches are named after Mary - vastly more than that after Jesus. Why is this? Since the Catholic Church took the Queen out of Heaven, Her followers have replaced Her with the image of Our Holy Mother. People long for their Celestial Mother. Whatever way they can get Her, they will have Her!...."

WE'RE SO Superior!

Might we learn a few things from non-violent societies? I was reading the Peaceful Societies website today and ran across this:

"The Chewong have no violence in their mythology, and cannot conceive of murder. During her nearly two years of living with them, anthropologist Signe Howell witnessed almost no quarrels or angry Chewong, except for children’s temper tantrums. During one rare quarrel, a jealous woman got angry at her husband, who was apparently innocent of her accusations of adultery—she broke his best blowpipe in half and trampled on it. This highly antisocial act upset everyone; they tried to avoid her and several families moved away because of the incident. Howell could not learn of any crime more violent than that. Even outsiders who are not part of their social universe cannot be harmed, no matter what they [the outsiders] do to them [the Chewong]."

Wanna learn from non-violent societies? Get in line quick: we're killing them off faster than you can say "Praise the lord and pass the ammunition." Go HERE for more.

______
thnx, jynmeyer, for the foto

LET'S Fall ON OUR KNEES

I don’t know about you, but "worshipping" -- with your backside in the air or your neck craned to the floor -- just doesn’t fit in with my idea of democracy.

"Worshipping" demands twisting your body into peculiar and unpretty positions. It's for dictatorships. The war-god trio -- Yahweh, Allah and Jehovah -- teach us how to be good slaves to duckie dictators. Ya think it’s an accident that the first Fundie to foist himself off on our White House, is the first to try to twist America into a fascist state?

Democracy flowers under a Mother Goddess who loves Her children equally.

Whaddya think? Can democracy last if we hang on to primitive gods like Jehovah, Yahweh and Allah?
______
thnx to the Dowlings for sharing the foto of their adorable triplets

GODDESS: Not Just A FEMALE GOD

In a comment re: yesterday's post, paxton said:

"It's extremely important for little girls to know that their mothers and fathers absolutely adore them, and love them more than life. But when kids are revered instead of merely adored, I suspect that they would become spoiled, arrogant and bratty. Human-worship is not a healthy thing for the worshipers or the worshipee."

To which I reply,

paxton, you’ve painted a pretty picture of a giant difference between your war god Jehovah and our Great Mother Goddess.

Unlike your war gods Jehovah and Allah, the Goddess does not demand that we put Her on high, bow and scrape, and worship Her with our backsides in the air. We revere Her not because She demands it, but because She naturally draws reverence out of us. Your war gods, on the other hand, have to scream and holler to get you to "worship" them: "I AM A JEALOUS GOD! I WILL SEND 1000 PLAGUES AND 1000 HORDES OF LOCUSTS IF YOU DO NOT BOW DOWN AND WORSHIP ME!!!"

Now, some theAlogians believe women *are* the Mother Goddess. So it's only natural that we'd revere women -- and girls -- isn't it?

paxton, Goddess spirituality is not christianity with a female deity at the helm. It's an entirely different way of looking at existence.

Bless you, BTW, for returning here periodically to give us good grist for our thealogical meanderings.
_____
thnx to the Susan Seddon Boulet Foundation for the foto (which comes from a foto of a copy I own). Although this could be a picture of the Great Mother Goddess holding any of us, Boulet meant it to show the Greek Goddess of the Moon, Selene, holding the mortal man Endymion.

Prayer to Goddess

There’s direct archaeological evidence that the most revered people in the old Goddess world were older women and pre-teen girls. The well-known University of California archaeologist Marija Gimbutas found more than one archaeological site in Old Europe (ca 5000 – 3000 BC) in which the richest grave sites belonged to elderly women and young girls.

Imagine a world run by wise women. Women who’ve had time to witness the world, to let their gathering of experience simmer into wisdom. Women prized and pedestaled when young, awarded the kind of attention and respect it takes to grow women wise enough to keep the world brilliant, vibrant and sane.

Great Mother, help us recover the sanity of Your world.
_____
thnx to mygallery for the foto of the girl flying a kite

THE Nut DOESN'T FALL FAR FROM THE Bush

TRUE or FALSE: During WWII, The Bush family was part of an American faction of documented Nazi supporters.






_____
TRUE. Go HERE, to Counterpunch.org, to see how.
_______
thnx to briercrest and stock.xchng for the foto

JESUS NEEDS TO Smile MORE

Jesus is a cool dude. He’s kind. He’s generous. U feel u can trust him. He has a gorgeous head of hair (I love long hair on dudes) -- and he keeps it clean.

But the dude is wound so tight! He needs color in his wardrobe, needs to get out on the dance floor more, get down, boogie some.

And he could learn to smile. (Does Jesus have teeth? Who’d know?!?) The Goddess gave women men to make women happy and laugh. Men can be darned funny. Jesus needs to store a few good jokes in his back pocket, pull ‘em out every once in a while and wow us with ‘em.

And he needs to ditch that bogus, boogieman, son-butchering war-god Jehovah, and get back to The Great Mother -- the parent who *really* loves him.

HI! I AM THE Smasher!

Yesterday, Rapture-Rightie Bushie came clean and admitted he’s running “Black-Site” torture prisons outside the U.S.

So he can “do” things to people it’s against the law to do here.

So he can evade U.S. laws.

The President*.

Evading our law.

Wow! Now Republicans can go out campaigning and say, “Hi! I’m about restoring dignity to the U.S.! We’re better than these cretins we’re fighting!”**

Poor Bushlet. Can’t get anything right with his brain. So he tries to get things right by smashing -- smashing the Constitution, smashing the country, smashing people. Prolly smashes worms and ants on the sidewalk. Remember when your little brother tried to fix your dolly by bashing its head against the wall? Remember that, and you’ll know everything there is to know about poor Rapture-Rightie Bushie.

“Bush said the CIA had used an ‘alternative set of procedures’ to question the men because they were trained to resist interrogations, and that these procedures -- which he did not detail -- had borne fruit.

SNIP

“But an hour before Bush spoke ... Lt. Gen. John F. Kimmons, Army deputy chief of staff for intelligence, said … ‘no good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tell us that.’

“Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Charles ‘Cully’ Stimson said interrogators ‘tell you that the intelligence they get from detainees is best derived through a period of rapport-building, long-term.’" MORE>>>

Dear Bushlet: Go home. Rest. Prop your feet up. Quit bashing your brain against the wall; it’s not your fault it’s too small to be useful. Sincerely, Athana.
________
*Actually, our President is Al Gore. Bushlet hasn’t won any election. He sits in the White House because he smashed our election process and smashed his way in.

**Hafta give credit to Air America’s Rachel Madow for these last two lines.

GREAT MOTHER WHAT A Gorgeous WORLD!

Today I felt like a character in a “Murder She Wrote” movie. My friend J. threw a clamming birthday party for herself. About twenty of us dug clams, which we later boiled and ate.

Cast of Characters:

The physicist who specializes in black holes.

The physicist's Danish wife.

J’s son the carpenter and rock musician.

The ex-actress who’s now an interior decorator.

300+ Maine clams in blue, orange and cream shells.

The professional astrologer from Damariscotta, Maine.

The New York City Amish, gay professor of German literature.

The famous artist written up in a book with Desmond Tutu et al., about people who’ve made us look at the world with fresh eyes.

P. who books semi(?)-famous music groups around the world.

R. who travels the world booking rap groups like “50 cent” in Paris, London, Russia, Bulgaria, etc. (R. is one of P’s employees).

The Lebanese man who’s moving to the U.S. so his two tiny sons can be safe.

The Maine shoe buyer who travels to China every other month to buy shoes for the Easy Spirit Shoe Co.

The shoe buyer's gorgeous, adopted Chinese daughters, 4 and 6, with their beautiful Eskimo-like eyes.

Etcetera.

It’s not often that I enjoy such august and eclectic company. During tourist season, however, Maine does attract its fair share of the august.

Most of us dug clams with gusto. The physicist took pictures of us clamming, but didn’t get down on his knees and get dirty digging. Another guy didn’t dig either, but he pointed the rest of us to the little breathing holes that signaled a clam nest. The artist was the expert who taught us the art of clamming.

The NYC rapper-promoter was ecstatic. She’d yearned to get to Maine for ten years, she told me. She didn’t even mind when the tide came in and suddenly made an island of our clamming land, and we had to wade through rising water to get to safety.

I ruined the knees of my best pants and spent the rest of the day in wet sneakers and a heavy winter coat. It took me half an hour to tear the duct-tape (digging protection) off all ten of my fingers. I didn’t care. I looked at the blue ocean meeting the blue sky and thought, “Oh, Great Mother, what a gorgeous world you’ve given us.”
__________
Thnx to gizmo for the pic