SAMHUINN: Good FOR YOUR HEALTH

According to the Beltane Fire Society, the original reason for dressing up in masks and costumes at Samhuinn was “to disguise oneself against the unwanted attentions of spirits and faeries” who, along with Great Aunt Greselda and Grandpa Jehosaphat also take advantage of the thinning of the veil between the living and the dead at this time of the year.

After doing a lot of thinking , I’ve come to the conclusion that disguising oneself at Samhuinn is also wicked good medicine.

Why? Because we’re all boxed into our own little personas. We behave the way we do partly because people who know us expect us to behave that way.

Whenever we try to break free of our personas, people give us dozens of little subconscious kicks in the kahooties to make us crawl right back in. If you’re never funny and you tell a joke, people don’t laugh – they shrink away like you have lice or flies.

Or if you’re generally funny and you announce that Granny’s just died of a stroke, people laugh their fool heads off.

Anyhoo, becoming someone else at Samhuinn rewards us with the knowledge that we could indeed – if we really, really wanted to – break free of our persona cage and take on another one (persona that is).

Especially if your persona’s kind of thin and dry, this can be very good medicine.

So get out there tonight and become someone else! For the sake of your health!

Me, I’m going to spend the night as Maid Marian of Sherwood Forest, aka the Great Goddess of the ancient Celts of the British Isles.

However you spend the night, here’s to all of you having a fab and meaningful time.

And may only the spirits of your choice see through your disguises.

THE YEAR OF Living HELL

New book hitting the stands about a dude who crawls through a full year following every rule in the Bible religiously (pun intended):

"He hires an earnest New York shatnez tester to ensure that his garments don't mix wool and linen (Deut. 22:11).

"He can't utter the names of false gods (Exodus 23:13), which means that "I'll have lunch with you on Thursday" or "let's get the kids together for a play date on Wednesday" are flat out, since Thursday and Wednesday honor Thor and Woden, respectively.

"He won't touch his wife during and just after her period—or any woman, for that matter (Lev. 15:19). He can't even sit on a chair a menstruating woman has occupied, which makes navigating the Manhattan subway a bit tricky.

"He allows the sides of his hair to grow uncut (Lev. 19:27), and by the end of the year the fashion-challenged combination of his long earlocks and all-white garments (Eccl. 9:8) causes people to cross to the other side of the street rather than encounter him...."

The book is The Year of Living Biblically, and the dude is one A. J. Jacobs. Jacobs calls himself “a secular Jew” who never utters the world “Lord” unless it’s followed by “of the Rings.”

The snips above came from a review by Jana Riess. Go HERE for more of it.
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Thnx to scott ableman for the foto; go HERE to read more about it.

GODDESS Perpetuations

Goddess Perpetuations for Daily Living

1. I strive to be in service rather than in power. With service comes humility and care. With power comes corruption.
2. I strive to live in harmony with Nature.
3. I strive to employ kindness and compassion as well as ethics and integrity.
4. I strive to be strong, tenacious and assertive, using force as a last resort, and then only tempered by wisdom, care, and discernment.
5. I strive to be accountable and responsible for my actions and expect the same of others.
6. I strive to not be influenced by power and greed.
7. I strive to be generous, supportive and nurturing.
8. I strive to work in partnership with others to create mutually beneficial relationships and associations.
9. I strive to perpetuate positive thoughts and practice life-affirming actions, knowing that what I put forth will return to me.
10. I strive to be aware I am a thread in the web of life, a microcosm of the macrocosm, and as such I affect others.
11. I strive for equality and human rights for all, no matter one's sexual orientation, race, religion or gender.
12. I strive to seek the beauty, joy and pleasures of life.
13. I strive to be grateful and know abundance, with no fear of scarcity.
14. I strive to know myself.
15. I strive to embrace diversity and tolerance for in Goddess' many faces, skin colors, sizes and shapes I see richness and have no fear.
16. I strive to honor all living things, including myself, and seek to harm none.
17. I strive to see the Divine in myself and all things, including the mundane.
18. I strive to recognize there is no one way to define, embrace or worship the Divine.
19. I strive to seek my own best path to the Divine.
20. I strive to be one with the Divine.

By: Rev. Karen Tate
Sacred Places of Goddess: 108 Destinations, available now,
and Walking An Ancient Path (due in bookstores Summer 2008)
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thnx to Rev. Karen Tate for the text gemstones.
thnx to seattletim for the foto.

AMERICA THE Christian NATION

Turns out some dude who wants to be Prez, John McCain of AZ, is tripping around town tooting about how America was “founded as a Christian nation.”

Somebody needs to clue this dude in before he makes a fatter fool outa himself! Any dudette or dude who squeaked through sixth-grade history knows that in the late 1700s Americans weren’t Christians.

First, Washington, Jefferson and the other dudes who stitched us together as a nation weren’t Christian:

“Legal scholar William Lee Miller writes that the chief founders of the nation were all Deists* -- he lists Washington, Franklin, John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and Paine, though many more leaders of the founding era could be added (Benjamin Rush, John Witherspoon, David Rittenhouse, Philip Freneau, Joel Barlow, Aaron Burr, James Wilson, Gouverneur Morris, Tench Coxe, to name some).

“The founders were of a ‘liberality of spirit which must forever and properly remain a scandal to the rank and file of professing American Christians.’"

Second, back then even the people weren’t Christian:

“… at the time of the founding [of the U.S.], historians estimate that only about 17% of Americans professed formal religious adherence, a historic low point.

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* Deists “believed in a divine providence knowable only through reason and experience and not prone to intervene in the affairs of men.”

**The quotes came from a review in the LA Times of the new book by Garry Wills, 'Head and Heart: American Christianities.' Go HERE for more of it.

Thnx to basicabe for the fine foto of Uncle Sam

AMERICA Cries OUT FOR GODDESS

In my teeny-tiny small-town library nestles a handful of books-on-tape. Last week I checked out one of two left: Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.

You’ve heard of Alexis – the French dude who shipped over in the 1830s to check us out here in Revolution Land?

About America Mr. de T. was all rosy smiles. Flatteringly, he fell madly in love with us. On the other hand he also said that, compared to Europeans, we are pinpointed on our own pleasure. Each American is like a little god, a dictator, he said.

He worried about the Tyranny of the Majority. In 1830s America, dudes who said Christianity was a buncha hooey got ridden outa town on rails. And in America, the Majority Opinion is the same as the European king or dictator.

But in de Tocqueville’s mind the only thing really, really wrong with America was this: we were doing genocide on one set of people, and treating another like they were cattle (buying, selling, trading them).

Hang your heads low, Americans -- really low.

On the other hand, what d’ya expect from a nation so Christian it squeaks? In what other book do you find more slavery and attempted genocide than in the Bible? The Bible is a guidebook from A to Z for how to stomp all over people you don’t like.

Americans, we need something new to form around. And what could be more dramatically new – not to mention perfect -- than the Guiding Mother Goddess?

Ever heard of a mother pushing genocide?
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thnx to cedar rose for the foto
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Thnx to DK50 for the foto.

BOO-BOO

Yesterday I announced that the Temple of the Goddess in Orange County CA was invited to appear in a TV series on religion. Not! The group that’s been invited is the Temple in Pasadena, not Orange Co. (how many Goddess temples are there in CA?!).

Click HERE to visit the Pasadena Temple. Do they look well organized or what? Anyhoo I’m going to drop down to yesterday’s post and pitch “Orange Co.” for “Pasadena.”

Meanwhile below is the latest email back-and-forth between Karen Tate and me on the TV deal:

ATHANA: Karen, makes all the sense in the world to check the situation out
> completely before committing to it. I'm keeping all my fingers crossed
> though that everything works out and you can get this to work for the
> Temple, the Goddess -- and the world. I hope the producers haven't been
> giving you any negative feedback because they don't understand Goddess
> spirituality?

KAREN: Nothing negative yet. We're just making sure of the ground rules - namely if there will be censorship.
>
> ATHANA: I was wondering: if you
> sign a deal with Charter Media will it be for a one-time appearance
> only, or for regular appearances on a regular basis?

KAREN: It would be on a monthly basis, playing 24/7, and we can change the video we submit as often during the month as we like.

THE GODDESS on TV?!?

HOT tingling tamales! I think we're building up some steam! The Goddess may be on the brink of catching some big-time media attention: a California cable TV network has invited the Temple of the Goddess in Pasadena to take part in a new TV series: “Faith.” Karen Tate just emailed me the following to post here on RGT:

Priestessing Goddess Onto the World Stage;
We Can No Longer Afford to be Invisible

by: Rev. Karen Tate, Media Director
Temple of the Goddess

As the Media Director of Temple of the Goddess, I recently accompanied its Foundress and Director, Xia, to a presentation hosted by a cable television network, Charter Media. Charter had put out a call to a diverse range of religious organizations in the city to invite them to participate in a new cable program they were initiating called Faith. As we sat there listening to the intention of Charter, to bring spiritually uplifting messages to the airwaves, from all religious corners of southern California, we realized our dream and vision, years in the making, might soon be a reality. But were we really ready to fully step into the public spotlight?

Some in the women’s community snickered and others were fearful for me when I first named my ministerial path as Emissary Priestess of Isis. Yet I sensed, even in those early days, that it was up to us, individually and collectively, to priestess Goddess back onto the world stage. I believe we could no longer afford to be invisible. We had to share our spirituality with the rest of the world and reclaim our rightful place alongside the recognized traditional religions on the globe. Having discovered the importance and empowerment for both women and men obtained through knowledge of Goddess, spiritually, politically and culturally, I wanted to be one of the many needed ambassadors in her rebirthing into the mainstream world.

I truly believed the Sacred Feminine, long-missing in the spiritual and political equation, caused our world to sink to the low point we now experience everyday. Fortunately there were others that supported my vision. In those early days, Lady Olivia Robertson, one of the founders of the international Fellowship of Isis, invited me to Clonegal Castle in Ireland to be ordained. In the ensuing years, myself and Xia, continually visioned and dreamed of temples of Goddess in our neighborhoods across the country. We both felt called to do what we could in our lifetime to make that a reality. We could no longer be content to practice our spirituality just underground. That inner voice was loud and pushed us forward to dare to be visible. Xia calls it, “following the sacred breadcrumbs.” As the years passed, the urgency felt all the more great.

Mostly our paths overlapped. When I founded The Isis Ancient Cultures Society, a non-profit educational organization, built on partnership ideals espoused by Riane Eisler, Xia was a facilitator and on the Advisory Board. I went on to write Sacred Places of Goddess: 108 Destinations, a book that has provided me with a vehicle to teach and lecture about Goddess in the mainstream world, opening doors to radio, television and in print media that might otherwise may have remained closed tight. My second book, Walking An Ancient Path, a guide for the mainstream novice to incorporate Goddess Spirituality into their spiritual paradigm, will be in bookstores the summer of 2008. During this time, I co-founded Sacred Sundays, inter-faith services rooted in the Sacred Feminine and complemented by the Divine Masculine.

In the last several years, under Xia’s’s careful vision and tutelage, Temple of the Goddess, one of the few legally recognized Goddess churches in existence today, has grown and thrived. Today, I serve Goddess and community there as a facilitator and as the Media Director of Temple of Goddess. With TOG as a vehicle, Xia and I both have come to understand we have the opportunity to do what we have believed for years must be done.

Not only would TOG provide a bridge where our beloved sisters and brothers with their covens and pointed hats can find common ground with new Goddess Advocates, bit it is also providing a safe haven where, through sacred liturgy and ritual theater, those of more traditional faiths might come to understand and embrace the importance and relevance of earth-based spirituality.

Taking things a step farther, Temple of the Goddess now has the opportunity to have a public platform - with a microphone to the world! The Temple has been invited to bring our spirituality to cable television where we might once and for all dispel the propaganda and myths instilled within mainstream psyches about the Sacred Feminine. We have the chance to define ourselves and our beliefs, rather than let those who would demean and dismiss the Divine Feminine set the agenda and the tone as they continue to mass produce fear and misinformation, whether through intent or ignorance.

Yes, Charter Media, with its newly forming Faith program has invited Temple of the Goddess to participate, along with other traditional and non-traditional faiths, to have their voices heard across the airwaves. And Xia and I believe it is time for us to step up, be heard, and cast aside fear. We must step up and shout to the world, our principles are as valid and credible as any commandments. Our liturgy and myths are as uplifting, substantial and as much a roadmap for living as any other religion. Perhaps even more, because we seek the balance of the feminine alongside the masculine. We no longer want to be children of divorce where the Mother has been cast out of the garden, pulled away from her children and husband, by man-made dogma. We must certainly use this opportunity to re-educate those who have been spoon-fed lies. We can no longer let patriarchal religions that worked so feverishly for thousands of years to remove Goddess from the world stage continue to publicly define who we are.

As I am out giving lectures about the Sacred Feminine, I continually come up against this toxic propaganda and have to encourage a rethinking of the Divine; the Sacred Feminine alongside the Divine Masculine. Men come to understand embracing Goddess does not mean women want to take over the world. Both genders realize feminism is not a dirty word, but a vehicle for equality and it will not unravel societies if both wings of the bird are equal in strength. I have to constantly remind people that Satan and the Devil are not creations of Pagans. Imagine a world where these are no longer even talking points or wedge issues. Mother and Father together again feels pretty natural and right to most people when they take a moment to think and challenge the programming.

What I do see out there in the mainstream world are people who, when hearing what a world embracing the Feminine would look like, they say, “Yes, I could do that! I want that! Tell me more! What books do I read? Similarly, when Xia penned an article, “Out of the Closet and Into the Fire,” it was met with overwhelmingly positive response as people came up to her later and said they did not know before reading her article that they were pagan! Yes, people are starved to restore the sacred within their lives - and that sacred must be about balance, harmony, compassion and wisdom. Sacred Sunday services grew from a handful of people to standing room only in a few short months. Likewise for Temple of the Goddess rituals held four times a year. Mainstream people are responding to the message of the Mother. The days for domination, power over, and control are coming to an end.

Yes, in the long ago past, we could be killed for our beliefs. I know women who still hoard books for fear one day there will again be book burnings. Yes, many of us have had to hide who we were for the sake of keeping custody of our kids or keeping a job to pay the bills. But if not us, then who, and if not now, then when? Time is running short. More than ever, the religion of environmentalism needs to be a top priority. Liberty, equality, integrity and love must be what our leaders walk and talk. That along with tolerance, diversity, wisdom, compassion and strength, just some of the fundamentals and ideals of the Sacred Feminine, must be learned and taught. to our sons and daughters. Over the next few decades we must educate and inspire a shift from a dominator culture to one where we all strive for partnership and we measure ourselves not by our bank balance but by how we serve humanity.

It bears repeating, people today are literally starving for the sacred. Traditional religion alone no longer works for the masses. Humanity needs to once again be held in the embrace of the Mother and know her love, strength and acceptance. Let those of us who know her best, our beloved sisters and brothers who wear the pointed hats and black robes, stand shoulder to shoulder with those new Goddess advocates and together help rebirth her onto the world stage. It is time for us to set the agenda. It is time for our voices to be heard. It is time for us to make a difference in the world, not just for ourselves and for our children, but for our beloved Mother who has been patiently waiting for us to return to our sanity!

To conclude, yes, it is true. We are in the process of dialoging with Charter Media about Temple of the Goddess’ participating in their Faith program. We hope you are excited about this potential opportunity as we are!

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Thnx to kahunapulej for the foto of the volcano