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 Posted: Wed Dec 09, 2009 4:25 pm
Well, yesterday (December 8th) was the feast of the immaculate conception, aka - the virgin mary, aka - the modern version of the goddess all sugar-coated and stamped with patriachical approval for the masses who could not, in the end, give her up. The liturgical feast day is all about how mary was born without sin, because a regular (read: sinful) woman could not possibly be the mother of god. nope, it had to be someone uber pure and holy. sort of like, uh, a goddess? (rofl)
(no, i didn't make this crap up. some bitter and sexually frustrated cleric did.)
The point is, she's still around, she just may not be immediately recognizable in her current innocuous form. But you know how it is with gods, right? They are protean... changeable, and they adapt from age to age. inanna becomes ishtar becomes isis becomes danu becomes diana becomes maria becomes... what? something for our age, for us... gaia perhaps (NO, not this site, you silly!)
So as the year nears its darkest day, and the air is laden with ice, light your candle in Her honor to ward off not just the physical darkness, but also the darkness of fear and ignorance. Remember that she is the sun, moon, stars, and earth, and she will outlive the foolishness of this present age...
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Posted: Thu Dec 10, 2009 5:08 pm
Your post reminded me of the end of 'Mists of Avalon': as Christianity supplanted the old ways in Britain about the time of Arthur women in service to the Goddess became devotees of Mary. The worship of the divine feminine continues under new management. Perhaps that is one of the main problems of Christianity: it fails to include acknowledgment of a Holy spark within half of humanity.
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Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2009 2:05 am
=3
thanks for responding!
Marion Zimmer Bradley is a favorite author of mine. I also loved Firebrand, which takes a new perspective on Cassandra and the amazons in Homer's Iliad.
when i was growing up (in my very strict catholic home D= ) they drilled into our heads the idea that Mary was positively not a god, but someone who was above the saints and angels. (never mind that fact that with a little research you could easily discover all of the "pagan" goddesses whose attributes and rituals she had "borrowed"!) so we prayed to her, not to be praying to her (because she wasn't a god and could not grant anything...} but so she would pass the word along to her kid, who listened to his mom (like a good son.) but hey, medieval literature is stuffed full of stories of the BVM turning up like someone's fairy godmother to fight off the devil or dragons, or whatever... =P makes you wonder about cinderella... )
you know that a lot of the stuff that the church claims is thousands of years old, is in reality, less than 500 years old. any competent historian could tell you this.
as late as the 1870s, rustic women were still doing the milk, honey, and beer (or wine) ritual to fertilize the soil and honor the goddess of the corn. cows and couples were jumping though fire on beltane in ireland. i, myself, saw the wickerman burned in spain when i was little. he was called judas there... and it happens around easter (surprise, surprise) so it has not been that long ago.
closer to home, my grandma's grandma was a midwife who had to know a lot of herbal lore because there was no other medicine around. that was in the late 1880s or so. and you'd be astonished by how many "tricks" are passed along from nurse to nurse, strictly word of mouth... like what "not" to eat if you "don't" want to lose a pregnancy, or how do do wound care without modern medicine, etc. it turns out that many of those vestigial "old wives' tales" are dead on.
btw, i walked out of the church one day in my surly teen-hood, and never looked back. they treated women like crap and i was sick of it.
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