Goddess
The Great Goddess, perhaps the most ancient of Humanity's deities. Possibly going far back into the Ice Age, images come down to us of female figures that imply fecundity, fertility and birth. Obviously, since this is at heart an astrology blog, we will discuss Venus a lot in the posts linked through this page, but she will certainly not be the only goddess or astrological force we will be looking at in relation to the archetype of the Goddess.
On this page I will link all my articles dealing with the Goddess in her many forms. I want to be clear here that I am not claiming that there has been one unbroken line of goddess worship of one particular goddess throughout time. Different cultures have viewed her, and her position in their pantheons, in different ways. Some cultures worshipped one goddess while other cultures worshipped many goddesses, and some worshipped no goddesses at all (the rarest case, though). I do suspect that all the goddesses derive from one archetypal origin, and all the manifestations of goddesses, no matter how different or how separate any given culture saw any given goddesses, are all manifestations of the one Goddess, which is all things, all the goddesses... and really, all the gods too.
So, to me, the One Great Goddess manifests as many goddesses, serving many different purposes and ruling many different aspects of life. But on a deeper level, I see Her as all things. To be clear, I do not worship the Great Goddess as a living, individuated entity. In religious terms I am agnostic and I don't think any deities exist as beings sitting out there somewhere in the heavens or in the center of the earth, or in some alternate reality observing and judging. I see the Great Goddess as the force of the Big Bang, the thing (or no thing) that existed before the Big Bang, the Universes that formed out of the Big Bang, and the consciousness that permeates all of existence. I don't know what that is. I don't think anyone does, or can. I think, in the end, the Great Goddess is the Unknowable, as well as the knowable and the known.
So why do I refer to something I believe to be beyond form or description in feminine descriptive terms? Because that is how it interfaces with me, and has from my earliest memories in childhood. Whatever this energy is, it is the totality of the manifest Universe, and that which is beyond the Universe, Beyond the Beyond, and it views itself as the thing which gave birth to all. It views itself as the life-giver, the giver-of-birth and so to us, it often takes the form of 'Mother', when it takes form at all. Sometimes it is the Void, a dazzling darkness, black with bright blue-purple highlights. Sometimes it is a radiant light, white and golden yellow. Sometimes it is just a whispered voice, or a knowing. Sometimes it takes animal forms, and other times it take male forms. It will take the form you want to see it in, and maybe all its forms are our projections.
It doesn't want or require your worship. It doesn't want to give rules or laws. It simply wants your attention, and all it seems to seek is your experience. It doesn't seem to differentiate between "good" experience or "bad" experience, and since it is all things - the deer and the wolf - how could it? It sees nothing as imperfect, nothing as 'gone wrong', nothing as anything other than the experience of the moment, and it finds it all interesting. It will tell you how to make the changes you want to make, but it is content for you to be right where you are and not change, because all experience is valued. It has always been, and it was always available to our ancestors since far before we were humans, or even hominids, or even mammals. Our human ancestors heard Her voice, and I believe it is this force that our earliest religions were based around, which is why I believe that goddess religion was the original religion of mankind, even if that thought can't be proven or is unpopular with the current crop of academics (predominantly straight, white, Western men...)
By the end of the Ice Age, the Great Goddess had been fractured into many forms and deities, male and female, and by the beginning of written human records, the patriarchal reign of the gods had begun, and so our 'records' all reflect gods as preeminent. It is interesting though that the six-thousand years of recorded human culture occurs during the lowest point in the precessional/Yuga cycle (the descending bronze, descending iron and ascending iron ages), so our notions of what is "natural" and "the normal order" is skewed by the mindset/energies of those ages, as we have no records from the other parts of the cycle further back in history. Thus academics can rightly claim that we have "no evidence" of anything other than the predominance of men and male gods and look askance and disapprovingly at other researchers, such as Marija Gimbutas, who have postulated a Goddess culture in prehistory, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence...
Though splintered into many goddesses, She remained, and remains, waiting for humanity to remember Her. We will look at Her through archeological relics, written records, myths and astrology, her priest(ess)hoods and those who manifest her energies in the modern world. We will consider who She is now, and how we can reconnect with Her. I also want to stress that regardless of whether there were a Great Goddess in prehistory or not, is actually irrelevant to me. If there were not one shred of evidence for any goddesses, or there had never been anything other than "male gods", and all the goddess images of the past were just 'some women' or 'paleolithic porn', I would still proclaim the Great Goddess! Having received the interactions that I have experienced throughout my life, I don't need the provenance of ancient history or tradition to validate my experience. So whether she has any reality in the past (She does...) or is a new revelation (She isn't...), I don't really care.
I am not trying to revive some ancient cult, nor am I interested in repeating the experiences and cultures of others (because tradition is just peer pressure from dead people, after all...) I am not trying to carry on some musty, stale set of rituals of the long-dead. I look to the past just to know who came before, what they believed and did, and to see that humans are humans, regardless of time and space, and that we experience the same basic archetypes regardless of ages or cultural forces. I am interested in my lived experience, the now, this moment and the living interface with the awareness of the Universe that comes to me as the Great Goddess. I am interested in creating a new culture, a new reverence for the Earth and all life, as we move forward into an uncertain future. I am interested in a new culture for the age that is being born. So I am here, a Voice from the Void, to proclaim that the Great Goddess is come (returned? just arrived? who cares?) and to show you where to look to find her many faces sprinkled throughout the past and where to look to find her living, invisible face, in the now! She is within you. She is you, and you are Her. Enjoy the posts about many subjects revolving around Her linked below.
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