THE GODDESS tells THE STORY OF ADAM & EVE

The fairy tale "The White Snake" (from the Brothers Grimm) is obviously a pre-patriarchal version of the Adam-and-Eve myth.

In many respects the two tales are identical.  Both involve a pair of lovers, a snake, the Tree of Life, the Apple of Life, and a garden.  What’s more, in both tales the snake and the eating of the apple lead to the outcome of the story.

Here, however, the similarities end.  For starters, in “The White Snake” the woman doesn’t hog the apple all to herself; she shares it with the man.  

And it’s this sharing of Aphrodite’s “apple of love” that triggers the White-Snake woman's love for the man in the first place, and is partly responsible for the tale’s happy ending: “They cut the Apple of Life in two and ate it together; and then her heart became full of love for him, and they lived in undisturbed happiness to a great age.”   

As we all know, for eating that same apple Adam and Eve were consigned to the opposite fate: living in sorrow forever outside the Garden of Bliss. 

The other main difference between the two tales has to do with the snake.  In the Christian Bible, the snake deals never with Adam, but only with Eve.  As a matter of fact, throughout the Christian story Adam is a passive, do-nothing kind of dude.  

Not so with the hero in “The White Snake.”  In this story, the snake teaches the man how to talk to animals, and it’s this skill that lets him play a large part in helping the story waltz to a happy ending.  

In short, the Goddess version of the story shows men and women being strong, active and equal.  It's about men and women working together -- with animals -- to ensure elegant life outcomes.  

In contrast, the Christian story is the opposite: passive males are burned by demonic women who listen to “dumb” animals.  The outcome?  Pure misery. 

HERE comes THE LIGHT!

How could anyone truly respect a religion that sets its major holy day four days past the winter solstice?!   It’s like someone threw a dart and missed the entire dart board!

Anyway, I’m tickled pink so many of you know that the sacred actually resides deep inside the earth’s cycles, secrets and mysteries.  

May Gaia smile upon you all on this most holy of days, and may you all bask in the coming light!

Love,

Athana

SUMMER solstice 2013

A Blessed Summer Solstice to All, from Maine

WHY YOUR PARENTS hate YOU

Do our parents and grandparents hate Pagans because Hitler loved them??

You bet, says historian Malcolm Gaskill:  

"…the Nazis … endorsed Pagan ideals to highlight the church’s oppression of authentic volkish [folk] culture.”

All of which, says Malcolm, soured the postwar generation on all things Pagan -- including the notion that witches might have been benign people smacked with a smear campaign.

The idea that witches might have been cool dudettes and dudes was actually popular in the 19^th century.  For example, the French historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874)  “repackaged” witches “as protorevolutionary heroines battling feudal oppression.”

However, warns Gaskill, scholars who think everyone tried for witchcraft was innocent of wrongdoing, are currently way out of style.


(from Witchcraft:  A Short Introduction.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.  Gaskill, Malcolm.  2010, pp. 101; 116).
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This radically fab image was done by Susan Sedon Boulet.  Bless you for all you've done for us, Susan.

terror at THE BOSTON MARATHON 2

Hmm.  Let’s see.  

Let’s count on one hand the number of religions that strut around town trumpeting, “Do religion our way, or we’ll cut you off at the knees”:

1. Christianity

2. Islam

3. ???

4. ????

5. ??

terror at THE BOSTON MARATHON

As long as we allow bloody and violent religions space for dancing on the planet, the world will be bathed in blood. 

Christians and Muslims alike praise their faiths as being stuffed full of love, peace and understanding -- despite eons of evidence to the contrary.

JUST FOR laughs

Question of the day: Why would any healthy human being dance with deities so dippity they can’t even laugh?

“In Christianity it is death that laughs, the devil laughs, and mermaids laugh; the Christian God never laughs. ‘Christ never laughed,’ the artist A.A. Ivanov remarked to Turgenev, while painting his Christ….” (from  Theory and History of Folklore, by the great Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp, 1984, p. 137). 

I mean, we all could be rock ‘n rolling with deities who understand that laughter rules:

“...In life, [according to ancient Pagan religion], we observe the command to laugh….  The thought goes still further: laughter is endowed not only with the power to accompany life but also with the power to call it forth” (Propp, p. 131). 

Case in point: the earth blooms in spring only because someone coaxed the Great Goddess Demeter into hanging up her troubles and laughing again!

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dissing THE "CHRISTIAN" EASTER BUNNY

A few days ago, Quigley the cartoonist caught Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly crying in his soup again.   This time it was about how Americans are dissing his beloved “Christian” Easter Bunny. 

My favorite line in Quigley’s little article: “OMG the Easter egg is all about sexy Pagan goddesses, and we are forcing it on children, Bill!” 

Go HERE to read the article. 

Keep THIS ALWAYS IN YOUR HEART:

To the Mother you are the most perfect entity ever created. 

No one can hurt you but you yourself.

Even if someone should spit in your eye,

this action comes first and foremost

from a place inside

them, not you.