Practicing the Presence of the Goddess

Lately I have found myself much engaged with Found Goddesses. Found Goddesses ¹ are the modern ones to whom we pray in situations never dreamt of by ancient peoples. Today, for example, we are Finding goddesses of computers and potluck, and I am, in fact, writing a book of Found Goddesses that includes goddesses of meetings, duct tape, air conditioning, apartment rental, and good hair cuts. We should, I believe, take the Goddess and our worship seriously, but we don’t have to abandon our sense of humor when we practice the presence of the Goddess. Finding a goddess is an act of creativity. It’s an act of noticing a need and meeting it. It’s an act of practicing the presence of the Goddess Whose aspects may be both traditional and modern.

Reader, take some time now to interact with these Found Goddesses: Serenissima, Theadonna, and Sancta Chrona. Invite them into your life and allow them to help you change your life.

Serenissima, Goddess of Taking Care of Yourself

It was true for Grandma and for Mom and it’s still true for us: woman’s work is never done. With economic conditions being what they are for us ordinary folks, we are working harder than ever, often holding down two jobs or working excessive overtime, plus trying to do our share of housework and childcare. On top of working too hard, we try to spend some time with our children, our partners, and our parents, not to mention keeping in touch with our friends. Some days it’s impossible to keep up. Some days we can’t even cope.

It’s time to get help. It’s time to call on the Goddess Serenissima, She Who holds our hands, rubs our shoulders, tempts us into a bubblebath, and teaches us the vital, life-preserving skills of self-love, self-care, and self-time.

Bringing Serenissima into Your Life

This is a two-part ritual whose intention is to bring the power and beauty of Serenissima into your life and relief into your schedule. Your intention is to create a whole day of self-time two weeks or one month from now. You are, therefore, asking Serenissima to intervene in your life in all Her ordinary, magical ways to reschedule your obligations and clear a day on your calendar.

For Part 1 of the ritual, decorate your altar with beautiful things you love. Put a calendar page or the pages of your daily organizer covering the next thirty days, starting today, on the altar (but out of the way of candle flames and dripping wax). Invoke Serenissima with these words:

Holy Goddess Serenissima,

touch my life

and give me the space and time

to nourish myself

to cherish myself.

Sovereign Serenissima

touch my life.

Show me the path to your peace.

Light the candles and visualize Her fingers moving across your organizer and making changes. See meetings being postponed, deadlines being rescheduled, the work being shared more equitably.

Understanding that Serenissima works in subtle ways, remain aware of possibilities during the next two weeks. Look for ways to facilitate the changes you invoked. You need to be alert. She may create the opportunities, but it’s your own action that will open up your self-time.

One of the lessons Serenissima may give you may be to learn to say no. Practice saying this powerful little word at appropriate times. Another lesson may be to learn to set priorities and delegate tasks, both at work and at home. In very practical terms, this may mean that you should stop trying to do it all yourself. You may have to learn to give up perfectionism; sometimes good enough really is good enough.

Work with Serenissima. Let Her guide you. And when your promised day shows up, seize it.

Do Part 2 of the ritual during the morning of your day. Your day.

Settle the logistics the day before, if not earlier: who does what, when and where, and to whom while you’re utterly unavailable. Tape notes for your family to every surface in the kitchen and bathroom if you have to. Tell them to do it themselves. Let them learn to be resourceful.

Decorate your room and your altar with your favorite colors. Spray your favorite scent into the air and open a new potpourri. Touch your favorite essential oil to your throat, wrists, and heart. Have your most beautiful chalice ready, half filled with water. Speak to the Goddess:

Most Serene Majestic Goddess,

I thank You for this day.

Tranquil One, o Easeful One,

I thank You for all my days.

Goddess of Harmony and Repose,

I celebrate all days as Your days.

As you light your candles, imagine that each tiny flame is a star that brings serenity into your life.

Beautiful and gracious Serenissima,

Show me Your paths of peace,

Show me Your ways of woven light and dark,

Show me Your threads of shining work and play,

and I will move with You,

and in You I will dance.

Take a sip of water from your chalice. Savor the way the water touches your lips and tongue; savor its taste. Consider the natural, unthinking way your mouth accepts the water, the way you swallow without thinking how to do it.

Know that this sip of water is a tiny gift from the Goddess, a single drop of the essence of the Most Serene One. Remember also that water makes up over ninety percent of our human body and that water also carved out the Grand Canyon. Remember the simple power of water, that water flows around all obstacles. Feel the water’s glowing, calming essence as it enters your body and remember that all nourishment — from your mother’s milk to whatever you plan to have for lunch today — enters your body and your being and becomes your body and your being.

Continue to sip water from your chalice and recall what the chalice is. It’s the true holy cup, the original Holy Grail. It’s your Mother’s breast.

Remember that as you accept Serenissima into your life, in sips and in seconds of time, She is always present. Like the water, She becomes part of you and you are thus gradually and imperceptibly transformed. As you move in the ways of Serenissima,you embody Her and become more serene.

We are all, each of us and all of us, drops of Her gentle rain on a parched and thirsty land, and when we bring Her serenity into our lives, one day at a time, we are bringing Her back to all of Her children.

Leave a few drops of water in the bottom of your chalice and treasure all these things and ponder them in your heart.

Most Serene Majestic Goddess,

I accept this day.

Tranquil One, o Easeful One,

I accept all my days.

Goddess of Harmony and Repose,

I accept all days as Your days.

Remembering that the circle is open but never broken, spend the rest of your day doing whatever you want to do.

Theadonna, Goddess of Gratitude

The name of this Found Goddess is constructed from the Latin words for Goddess and gift. Although our lives often become so busy we forget Her and fail to notice Her gifts, She never forgets us. She is ever generous.

Reader, slow down a minute and look around. Can you identify Theadonna’s gifts in your life? Some may arrive in disguise, in plain brown wrappers or delivered by strange messengers. We need to train ourselves to be able to recognize them. That training has two phases: mindfulness and gratitude.

Mindfulness is paying attention, being vigilant. Every time you catch yourself being unreasonably angry, sinking into self-pity, focusing only on the negative in a person or a situation, becoming fearful of some invisible (and probably imaginary) menace — stop it! Pay attention. Ask yourself what’s really going on here. Take a deep breath. Recall Theadonna to your heart and mind. Look around and identify Her gifts to you.

For example, here’s a list of five of Her gifts that I identify today:

1.My son, his girlfriend, my two cats, and I are all healthy.

2.They have a clean, safe place to live; the cats and I have a clean, safe place to live.

3.Publishers send me review copies of books. Some are books I want to read. I get to keep them. (My friends get most of the rest. The dregs go to a used bookstore.)

4.My plants are all green and healthy. Some of them are blooming.

5.I have a good car that starts every morning and is comfortable to drive.

“Well, big deal,” I hear you say. “These are just ordinary, everyday things.”

“You’re right,” I reply. “Ordinary things, indeed.”

It’s their very ordinariness that makes them wonderful. Every ordinary day is a blessing of the Goddess.

Take time to identify five ordinary, everyday things for which you are grateful today. Make a little ritual of your list-making by lighting a candle, playing music, talking to the Goddess.

If it took you awhile to finish this little list, reflect on why this is so. Do you think you’re in charge? Do you expect impossible things to happen just at your say-so? Big miracles, the kind sometimes promised by the gurus, are not the point here.

Theadonna is the Goddess of gratitude for the little things that keep our lives moving along, day by day. How often do you say please and thank you, even to store clerks and busboys? How often do you thank the flowers for blooming (they would, anyway) or your email for actually working or your videos for coming out of the VCR? When you push the button on the soda or snack machine and your selection is what you actually get, do you say thank you?

Invite Theadonna into your life. The way I keep Her beside me is to write in my gratitude journal every night before bed. Some days, yes, all I can think to write are that I’m still breathing in and out (on stressful days, this is a big deal to an asthmatic) and that I have a warm bed to sleep in or that no one yelled at me today. Some days are not great, but every single day has some gift in it. Some days the gifts are exceedingly small. Occasionally, however, they may be major miracles.

Here’s a true story. For years, the left lens kept falling out of my glasses. It fell out while I was drumming; it fell out in my car; once it even fell out when I was standing in line at Disneyland. It got to the point where I was carrying a tiny screwdriver in my purse. One Monday last spring, I came home, took my glasses off, changed clothes, put my glasses back on, and walked into the living room. The lens fell out again. I heard it hit the floor. I got down on hands and knees and looked for it. As cats always do, Heisenberg helped me. We looked and looked, but that lens just wasn’t there. Fortunately, I had spare glasses. On Tuesday, I phoned around to find a new optometrist, as my old one had retired a few years ago. The optometrist I found was — aha, it’s a small world — a friend of my old one. I got my eye exam and ordered regular glasses and sunglasses. With nice frames and bifocals and tints and coatings, the price was nearly $400. Wednesday, I spent all day saying, “Goddess, I need $400 to pay for these glasses. I could take it out of savings, but that’s rent money.” Deciding not to worry, I just did my work. When I got home and opened the mail, there was a check for $500 from the publisher of Goddess Meditations. They’d sold the foreign rights.

A week later, Schroedinger, my calico cat, found the missing lens. It was under my bed. Now it’s on my altar.

Whether all these things were coincidence or whether they were the actions of the Goddess in my life doesn’t matter. I am grateful.

Reader, what is your story? How has the Goddess moved in your life? perhaps you can create an altar or ritual around your story.

Sancta Chrona, Goddess of Living in the Now

She is our Sacred Timekeeper, the One Who ticks off the seconds of our lives, the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years that we live in but seldom ever notice.

How does time move? You already know the two theories. One asserts that time is linear. Each tick of time is like each letter of each word of each sentence in a book. We read one word at a time, one sentence at a time, always in the same direction (except for those perverse people who read the end of mystery novels first). It’s very orderly: time past, time present, time future. Remember, however, that there’s a reason they call it “verb tense.” Living a linear life and focusing all the time on the past and the future are not always healthy ways to live.

Sancta Chrona reminds us that there’s another way to look at time. Time is Now. It is always Now, and Now is always cycling, always spiraling, ever turning and returning. It is always Now, because the past and the future are mental constructs. Right this minute, they’re not real. When the past was real, it was Now. When the future becomes real, it will be Now.

But you know that. I’m just reminding you.

Serenissima,Theadonna, and Sancta Chrona are sister Goddesses. First, they advise us to take better care of ourselves. Second, they tell us to become vigilant. We must pay attention to the gifts of the Goddess and give thanks for them. Third, they remind us that it’s time to give up regretting lousy things we once did and continually basking in good things we once did. Now is the time to stop worrying about future disasters or anticipating things that may never come to pass.²

Now is real. It’s all we’ve got.

Living in the now goes with being grateful. Listing things for which we’re grateful helps us focus our mind on where we are right now. When I’m feeling anxious (and that’s something I’m quite good at), therefore, I make another list. Here’s my Right This Minute list:

1. Right this minute, there’s food in the refrigerator.

2. Right this minute, there’s catfood in the cabinet.

3. Right this minute, there are clothes in the closet.

4. Right this minute, there are books on the shelves.

5. Right this minute, there’s money in the bank.

Basics again. But I’m not defensive about seeing basics. Basic things keep me from worrying. Basic things keep me living in the Now. Like Her Sisters, Sancta Chrona is a Goddess of basic things.

Stop reading and make your own Right This Minute list. Make a little ritual if you like. Light a candle; play music.

If you want to, create rituals around the goddesses or around your lists. A ritual of gratitude is always good, and rituals honoring basic, ordinary things keep our spirituality rooted right where it should be: here on our beautiful living earth.

Our Many-Splendored Goddess

When we decide to practice the presence of the Goddess, who are we talking about and just what on earth do we imagine we’re going to do? How are we going to spend our days, our nights? Will our life change, or what? When we create and enact a ritual, what kinds of energies are we invoking? What is their source? What is the return on our investment of thought, work, experience, and devotion?

When we declare that the Goddess is the source of our being and our energy, these are vital questions, for we’re changing our lives. We’re dreaming up an ancient deity and reinventing a religion. We’re creating a spirit-affirming way of life, not returning to the Neolithic, but bringing its peace and creativity to our modern world. We’re singing the Goddess into our lives. We’re dancing the Goddess out of Her five-thousand-year eclipse.

Her essence is many-splendored and many-layered. It’s complex and simple, abstract and concrete, spiritual and earthy, superhuman and human, transcendent and immanent — all at the same time. Examining the Goddess is like trying to get a soap bubble under a microscope. When we try to describe Her many-layered essence, therefore, we find ourselves taking refuge in paradox and extravagant language. That’s because we’re trying to explain the inexplicable, and words can get us only halfway there.

I find that it is figurative language that most successfully describes the holistic concept we call “Goddess.” When we talk about the Goddess of Ten Thousand Names, therefore, we may say she is like our physical mother or like falling rain returning to the ocean (similes). We can think of Her as the feminine principle (metonymy, in which a part stands for the whole), or we can see Her as the earth (both personification and metaphor). When we talk about Goddesses, we often use metaphor: She is the moon (and Her names are Ix Chel and Levanah), She is love (Radha and Freya), She is creation (Spider Grandmother and Ishtar).

But what do we mean when we speak in figurative language? As well as we can, in our halting, stumbling way, we’re stating our belief in an immanent, omnipresent Goddess.

The Goddess of the Spheres

To clarify my ideas about the Goddess, I turn to the most successful metaphor I can actually get my hands on, which is a set of wooden spheres. You’ve seen them in gift shops and catalogs: three, four, or five painted spheres, all nested one inside another. I have three or four sets of these spheres, one of which is actually egg-shaped, plus a couple of orphan spheres.

The outermost sphere is generally painted midnight blue and “is” (represents) the universe. On one of my sets, the heavenly constellations are painted in gold and the astrological sun sign symbols are red. The universe is the biggest, most abstract thing we think we can know; it’s the big picture. And here we are, holding it in the palm of one hand.

Split the painted universe along its equator, open it up, and discover its contents. The solar system lies nested tidily inside. In one of my sets, the solar system is deep blue-green, and the planets are circular splotches of color.

Open the solar system and the sun emerges, mirror halves with two painted faces and matching sets of golden rays. In another set the third sphere is not the sun but a two-inch earth, its oceans and continents apparently taken from Renaissance maps, with Latin names and vast empty space to designate territories unexplored by Europeans: Here Be Monsters.

The innermost sphere is usually the moon, with two graceful painted faces and silver rays. In my egg-shaped set of five spheres (the insides of which are painted dark blue with gold stars), however, the innermost sphere is a fiery red and gold egg, complete with a tiny phoenix rising from the painted flames. In any set, the smallest sphere is the only one that’s solid, the only one that doesn’t contain and conceal yet another visible level of the cosmos. (Unless, of course, we include the atomic and subatomic levels of reality, in which case we can start all over again.)

If, as many of us believe or intuitively know, the Goddess “is” the cosmos, let’s use our little set of painted spheres to discover Her layers.

The First Sphere: The Goddess of the Cosmos and Ancient Days

As the outermost sphere represents the Goddess, then, it shows Her universality, how She is the cosmos itself, the wholeness of creation. In the archaic creation myths, is it not the Goddess who gives birth to the stars, the suns, the moons, the planets and everything living on them? She forms everything out of Her own body and its fluids. She dances or sings or spins or weaves or shapes all things into being. In Her image are we made of clay, star stuff, pure energy. The Goddess is the Cosmic Mother; She’s the mother of the cosmos.

We can accept this as literal truth or we can understand it as figurative language; to those with faith, it makes no difference. Like the myths presented in the first and second chapters of Genesis, any creation story is a record of faith because no reporter was there to witness and report it. The main differences between the creation myths of the standard-brand religions and the Goddess religions, of course, are the emphasis on spiritual creation and the illusory nature of matter in the former and the reality of matter and mud in the latter.

If there’s a human culture in which the grandmother goddesses aren’t ages older than the upstart warrior gods, it hasn’t been unearthed yet. Goddesses were worshipped in Canaan long before the Hebrew tribes walked in, the sister-wives of Abraham and his sons and grandsons may have been priestesses of the indigenous Goddess religions, and goddesses were worshipped in the temple in Jerusalem from before the time of Solomon all the way up to the Babylonian Captivity. And before there was Allah, there was Al-Lat, whose name means simply “goddess.” One of a trinity of desert goddesses named in the Koran, She was the All-Powerful One, worshipped by Mohammed’s tribesmen, the Koreshites, as a giant uncut rock of white granite, which, it is said, is now hidden under the black curtains of the Kaaba in Mecca. The priests of the Kaaba are, in fact, still known as the Sons of the Old Woman.³

Here is a concrete way to look at the Ages of the Goddess. One of my teaching tools is a long paper timeline whose centuries are marked off in inches. On this timeline, the Protestant Reformation (1517 C.E.) is five inches from the present. The arrival of Buddhism in Tibet and the flight of the Prophet Mohammed from Mecca to Medina are fourteen inches back. The life of Jesus of Nazareth is twenty inches back, the arrival of Cybele in Rome two inches further back, the lives of Confucius, the Buddha, and Lao-Tsu (all of whom lived about 500 B. C. E.) another three inches back. The Exodus and the Trojan War are both at about thirty-two inches. The Rig Veda was composed about 1700 B.C.E. (thirty-seven inches). Abraham, father of the standard-brand religions and said by them to be the first man to talk to God, lived around 1900 B. C. E., (thirty-nine inches from the present). Stonehenge I is four feet two inches back, Avebury and the Malta temple complex (ca. 4000 B. C. E.) are at about five feet, and Catal Huyuk (ca. 8000 B. C. E.) is another forty inches back. The Neolithic ends about twelve feet from the present. At one inch per century, the Willendorf Goddess is more than thirty feet from the beginning of the timeline. When I lay it on the floor, the timeline extends from the middle of my kitchen, through my dining room and living room, almost to my front door. The Acheulian Goddess, a female figure found in the Near East, is now housed in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Institute of Archaeology. How old is She? They date her to between 800,000 and 230,000 B. C. E. If I were to add the age of the Acheulian Goddess to my timeline, it would stretch out into the street.

Wrap your mind around that. Make your own timeline. Look up dates of events you are interested in and write them on it. You’ll get a whole new outlook on history and so-called prehistory.

The ancient goddesses were cosmic grandmothers, and since we have names and artifacts of goddesses from all the lands of earth, we can say that, at least in this terrestrial sense, She is universal.

Her universality has led to diversification. That is, if there’s a human activity, there’s a goddess to sponsor, oversee, and protect it, from birth to death, before and beyond. There are goddesses of healing, wealth, scholarship, arts and crafts, manufacture, law and justice, history and poetry, domesticity, and war.

There are goddesses of the sun, moon, sky and stars, of weather, of night and day, of the four directions, of the four elements and the seasons, of time itself. There are goddesses of plantlife in general and plants in particular, likewise of the animal world and terrestrial features like mountains and springs.

There are creator goddesses, magical goddesses and shape-shifters, goddesses of all the aspects of love, ancestor goddesses and wise women, even one or two sewer goddesses.

A Ritual to Celebrate the Goddess of the Cosmos

Take some time now to do the following ritual to celebrate the cosmic Goddess. You’ll need something that represents the cosmos to you: your own set of nested spheres, a tektite or a meteorite, an egg or a seed, a star globe or a telescope. Think big (really big) and do this ritual outdoors if you can, in the quietest place you can find. Hold your symbol of the cosmos in both hands at your navel.

Read the following words or tape them beforehand and listen to them or use them as a model to write your own words.

She is the cosmos itself, the womb of starry seas,

for She contains all things and bears all things.

Inspiring and expiring, She breathes,

dancing on the golden solar wind,

broadcasting her star stuff—

She is the black hole and the kitchen pantry.

She is the heartbeat of labor and love.

She is the space between the stars and atoms.

She is.

She simply is,

She is whatever is,

She is What She Is,

She Is.

And I am part of Her.

I Am.

Close your eyes, take several deep, easy breaths, and imagine your cosmic symbol expanding. See and feel it grow so big it holds you in its hands at its navel. See and feel it grow so immeasurably big that you are a speck floating inside it. Now look back at your own body and see it begin to whirl and twirl, to shine and sparkle. Watch your shining, swirling self grow and grow and grow. Inhale the scent of sweet, clean solar wind, hear the sounds of thunder and the hatching of an egg, listen to the beat of a baby’s rattle and the roar of the tides. See yourself grow and glow until you fill the darkness of the cosmos, until you envelop and become its emptiness, its vastness, its darkness, and its light. Dark and light are in balance now, you and the cosmos are in balance, and now the balance explodes into a fountain of rainbow fireworks, a waterfall of words and sounds, a volcanic dance of living … and then, here you are again, plain old ordinary regular you, the best beloved child of the cosmos.

When you’re ready, open your eyes and spend as much time as you want examining your cosmic symbol, the earth beneath you, the sky above you.

The Goddess is at the same time both the cosmic creator and the created cosmos. She brings all things, visible and invisible, into existence, perhaps at the famous Big Bang or, more likely, in every instant of every day of every millennium. She destroys and recycles all that She creates, including Herself. We are part of Her cosmic, universal body, we are Her thoughts made flesh. We are Her songs, Her artwork, Her psychological projection. We are Her babies.

The Second Sphere: The Triple Goddess

The second sphere of our little painted set represents the solar system. It’s our own neighborhood, our home, then the heart of a home is the mother. Let’s use the second layer of our metaphor, therefore, to consider the Mother Goddess and Her two other aspects, the Maiden and the Crone. Together, Maiden, Mother, and Crone are the ancient Triple Goddess, which is the elder trinity. This is the trinity that represents the major stages of life itself as well as the stages of a woman’s life.

Ever since the Greek dramatist Aeschylus made Athena say that a mother is just a sort of holding tank and hatchery for a man’s sperm, making the father the real and only parent, mothers have been getting a bad rap. No matter what her failings, however, our mother is our door into this world. It was through her body that we came back to earth for another opportunity to work and play. That is surely worth honor and celebration.

To a baby, her mother (or grandmother, aunt, nurse, daycare teacher or aide, elementary school teacher, Brownie or Campfire leader) is her first goddess. To an infant, the woman who feeds and changes her, who keeps her warm and comfortable is, in fact, the whole world. To bigger, more independent kids, Mommy is still the main source of comfort and nourishment.

As our mother is in some way our own original goddess, so were humankind’s original goddesses their mothers and grandmothers. Perhaps they were the literal mothers and grandmothers of the clans and tribes, perhaps they were the tough old women who did the healing, counseling, and judging, the ones who knew where to find food, how to build shelters, how to make useful things. Their power grew with the stories told about them until they took on superhuman dimensions and people eventually began to address prayers and petitions to them.

The oldest human figures are the Neolithic mothers — the fat, fecund Ladies of Willendorf and Laussel. They’re perhaps the original earth mothers, and they represent the female principle of creating, procreating, mothering, nourishing, comforting, bringing rain, making the animals plentiful, both shining down and pushing up to make the crops grow. Although the people who carved and molded these figures of women with wide hips, generous stomachs, and pendulous breasts are officially termed “prehistoric” and “primitive,” they were in fact highly civilized and had long-lived oral and artistic traditions and a symbolic “language of the Goddess.”

Reproductions of the Willendorf Mother and the other Ur-Mothers are available from many sources, and I think it’s helpful for us modern people to own at least one. You may also learn something about creation by making your own earth mama from clay, acrylic modeling compound, or mud.

Broadly speaking, there seem to be at least three kinds of mother goddesses:

• The queen mother, like Hera and Inanna, who may or may not actually bear children but who is sexual and fertile

• The good mother, like Demeter, Isis, and Mary, who is nearly always associated in myth or art with her daughter or son

• The terrible mother, like Kali and the grim, wicked stepmothers of all the fairy tales

We need to be careful, however, not to let our thinking get booby-trapped by the modern scientific processes of separation and classification. If we divide and subdivide and pigeonhole the mother goddesses, we end up with a multitude of trivialized mommies that pack none of the old power. We need to hold and contemplate a Willendorf Mother to rediscover what our old power may have felt like.

The holistic essence of the mother goddess is that She is fertile. She bears children and raises them, giving rewards and punishments as deserved. And she may not have only physical offspring; she can be the mother of art, music, literature, technology, discovery, industry, culture, charity, business, and anything else we can think of.

The youthful aspect of the Triple Goddess is the Mother’s Daughter. Also called the Maiden or the Virgin, she is often portrayed as a little girl. She is pre-fertile, but she’s fertile in her own way — as potentiality. Put it this way: the Maiden is the seed to her Mother’s flower and her grandmother Crone’s fruit.

The Maiden can represent the time of our life before we assume our adult responsibilities. She is beginnings, wildness, the wilderness. She is untouched. She is the young girl before menarche, as the Mother menstruates every month, and the post-menopausal Crone retains her “wise blood” to bear not children but power.

The Virgin aspect can also be hard to pin down. Although sometimes she’s a virgin in the physical sense, the word “virgin” refers to more than sexual chastity and the intactness of the hymen. Its true meaning is independence, self-determination, freedom from external ownership and control. In this sense, it’s possible for a Crone to be a Virgin, and, indeed, as the wheel of existence turns and life recycles, the Crone is reborn with the springtime as the Virgin.

The Maiden is elusive. Kore is the young daughter of Demeter, drawn by love from the meadow to the Underworld.⁴ After Her marriage to Hades/Plouton, Kore, renamed Persephone, becomes the awesome Queen of the Underworld. Artemis (Diana) is the huntress, untouched by human (at least male) hands. She’s also the matron of childbirth (a maternal duty), the Queen of Heaven and Witches (whence Dianic Wicca), and her many-breasted statue in Ephesus was one of the Wonders of the Ancient World. Are these all the same Artemis? Yes, they are; they show the all-encompassing generative power of the eldest goddess Who was from time out of mind and Who was before names were given.

Persephone and Artemis are examples not only of the diversity of the Goddess but also of the need to keep a holistic picture in mind when we talk about the Goddess. We can focus on specific aspects or goddesses for specific rituals, but realism (whatever that is) demands that we remember that She is not to be fragmented or made frivolous.

The Crone is the scariest aspect of the Triple Goddess, at least to men and in modern times when all women are desired to be forever age 19, size 2. If the Maiden is the daughter, the Crone is the grandmother, and occasionally the chaperone and baby-sitter. She’s the old woman, and She’s usually a widow, so She’s the Virgin all over again. Because She destroys life so it can be recycled, She is sometimes called the Terrible Mother. She is the Dark Mother and She is Grandmother Death, and one of Her names is Hel. She’s all the ugly old ones that bring justice and nightmares and doom. She’s the Halloween witch. She’s the Grandmother of God.

We’re all going to grow old. Sooner or later, we’ll all be Crones. We need, therefore, to consider the powers we can regain and use. We can have the wisdom based on the learning and experience of a long life; we can always learn a little more. We can find new ways to solve “mankind’s” problems. The Crone may be our only hope.

The Triple Goddess is the center point of our neighborhood. She’s the little girl, a tomboy on her bike or up in a tree, a child-mother taking over the care of her siblings, a teenager in school, at the mall, or out on the streets. She’s the grown woman, working hard at home or in an office or plant, most likely doing two or more jobs and trying to raise her kids right and contribute something to the world in her spare time. She’s the old woman — a widow in a retirement home or the neighborhood busybody keeping an eye on everything and expressing her opinions on it all. The Triple Goddess has charge of our everyday lives.

Although I still like this description of the Triple Goddess (that I wrote ten years ago), during the past decade I have begun to wonder if this configuration is sufficient to describe the lives of the women I know. Until the late twentieth century, most women did not survive to become Crones.⁵ They died young, worn-out from too much childbearing and manual labor, from too little rest and nutrition. Today, as we live longer, we’re coming to realize that women who used to be “old” are now “of a certain age.” For several years, therefore, it has seemed to me that we need something between Mother and Crone. One of my friends uses the term “Queen.” The Queen is the Mother whose children have grown up. While she’s an empty-nester, she’s hardly ready to retire. She still has enormous energy and she’s got a lot to do. (Most of it seems to be questioning authority and raising hell.)

Elizabeth Davis and Carol Leonard have also addressed this issue, and their solution is to identify four seasons of life — Innocence, Nurturing, Power, and Wisdom — each of which contains a trinity of aspects: Initiation, Integration, and Transformation. These seasons and stages make a circle, which they call the women’s wheel of life. Here we find not three but twelve stages: Daughter, Maiden, Blood Sister, Lover, Mother, Midwife, Amazon, Matriarch, Priestess, Sorceress, Crone, and Dark Mother. The thirteenth stage —Transformer — ties them all together.⁶

The Third Sphere: Mother Earth

The third sphere in one of our little nested sets is the sun. In our metaphor, this little painted sun can speak to us of warmth, nourishment, heat, and growth. It can remind us that the sun (and what it stands for: positive, projective energy, intellect, light) is not inevitably masculine, that women are smart and powerful and hot. It can also remind us that we know four-dozen goddesses of the sun, from the Japanese Amaterasu and the Baltic Saule to the Cherokee Unelanuhi and Rome’s Juno Lucina. Most of the sun goddesses are older than Apollo (who was once a Mouse God), and it’s also true that there are numerous moon gods, including Sin, upon whose holy mountain the Ten Commandments were carved into stone.⁷

Our little sun can thus nudge us past that tired cliché that confines women to lunar (reflective) energy and men to solar (projective) energy. It’s time, in fact, to question not only “their” but also our own received wisdom. In creating modern feminist spirituality we created our own myths (“herstory”) to counterbalance their “history.” Twenty-five years later, perhaps we can put our elementary stories in their proper place and act like a grown-up religion.

In other sets of spheres, the third sphere is the planet earth, and this is my primary emphasis here: the earthiness of the Goddess. A few earth scientists and the earth-based religions tell us that the earth is really a living organism.⁸ Her name is Gaia, which is a variant of the old Greek name for earth, Ge, from which we also get geography, geology, and the other earthwords. Gaia, the planet, is a sentient being. The rocks and mountains are her skeleton (although some mountains, like the Paps of Anu in Ireland, are her breasts), the oceans and rivers are her blood, green plants and the atmosphere are her respiratory system, either people or whales and dolphins are her brain and nervous system, and caves are her vagina and womb. We have evidence of the womblike nature of sacred caves all over the world.

Gaia used to be able to take care of herself, adjusting her respiratory rate and temperature, for example, to bring herself back into balance in spite of her children’s activities. She could keep herself clean. With the indignities and overwhelming greed of the Industrial Revolution and mankind that made it, however, she’s been under constant attack. She suffers from being paved over, deep-mined and strip-mined, having bombs exploded inside her body, having her forests burned and clear-cut, and from every kind of pollution people can create. Do droughts and poisoned oceans show us that she’s getting weaker? Do earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and famine indicate that she’s fighting back?Will she at last become so disgusted that she shrugs us off and starts all over again with new species?

Whether we take it literally or consider it to be a beautiful metaphor, the Gaia Thesis leads to ecofeminism,⁹ which asserts that as the planet is sacred per se, so are all things living in and on it/her sacred, from mud to mountain peaks and from moose to mosquitoes. In practice, this means honoring so-called “primitive” and foreign people and not developing (i.e., destroying) their homelands. It means working actively to make sure everyone has a place to live and enough to eat every day. It means understanding that corporate culture often values profit over any human value. It means living a kinder life, shopping cautiously, not wasting resources and energy, and recycling, repairing, and reusing. Ecofeminism can lead to changes in life on earth — a change from the usual emphasis on having power over other people and animals and plants and the ground to sharing power with them — moving from dominion over the earth to partnership with it. It can mean thinking and living not in power-over hierarchies but in equal-opportunity circles.

Who is likely to initiate and work hardest to carry through such a revolution? You can bet it’s not the haves and the wannabes. The revolutionaries are the intelligent women and men who bring the Goddess down from being an abstract concept into real, live action. That’s us.

The third sphere, our little painted earth, also represents the diversity and pluralism of our goddesses. The standard-brand religions are ferociously monotheistic: Thou shalt have no other gods — and especially no goddesses — except Me. Notice, however, that the First Commandment does not say, “there are no other gods but me.” It says, “Don’t worship them. Worship no one but me.”

Some Goddess worshippers are also monotheistic: there’s one titanic Goddess, and although She may have ten thousand names, She is unitary and unified. Some of us are pantheistic: the Goddess or goddesses or both manifest everywhere and in everything, which makes everywhere and everything holy, individually and collectively. Some of us are polytheistic: there really are all those goddesses, and they’re important not only to the elder cultures that named them but also to us modern societies. Yes, aspects and duties of the goddesses overlap, so we know forty or fifty moon goddesses, three-dozen goddesses of beauty, and goddesses with names from A to Z. Not only that — we have a multitude of gods, too, all with their own names, attributes and associations, duties, and characters.

No matter what kind of ritual or spell we want to do, no matter what kind of energy we want to embody or stir into action, there’s an appropriate goddess or god to invoke. Like the words in the thesaurus, however, the multitudinous deities may be similar but none is precisely synonymous with any other. That’s part of the joy of a way of life in the Goddess or goddesses — we have so much to play with, so many energies to work with, so much to explore.

At the same time, however, we need to consider the issue of cultural imperialism (which is really piracy). Like mainstream metaphysicians, we are great borrowers. But how do the people whose goddesses and gods we borrow feel about it? There have been loud and unresolved discussions (well, arguments) about WASP women setting up altars to African, Native American, and Asian goddesses or proclaiming themselves priestesses of goddesses whose traditions don’t even have priestesses. “But the Goddess is universal,” they protest, or, “we’re entitled.” Oh yeah? Of what does our entitlement consist?

This is not an easily resolvable issue. What I urge are caution and courtesy. If you’re drawn to a goddess of different ethnicity than yours, examine your feelings carefully, do painstaking research, and approach Her and Her people with enormous respect. If they tell you to stop it and go away, do so. “But I mean well” is a lame excuse for cultural piracy.

The Innermost Sphere: The Dark Goddess

The innermost sphere of our nested set is sometimes the moon, sometimes the center of the earth. I see this center as both the fiery core of our planet and as the darkness under the ground. It’s a dark fire. It’s the darkness inside a seed or an egg, where something is germinating, waiting to be born. It’s also the darkness of a warm bed where we get a good night’s sleep and the grave where we dissolve into an elemental presence and wait for rebirth. Many ancient burial sites, in fact, reveal people curled up in fetal positions and painted with red ochre, which symbolizes menstrual blood.

At Her most basic, most elemental level, the Goddess is dark. She is black fire (another metaphor), a concrete abstraction, the bright light of the dark moon. It is time therefore to reconsider the darkness, the old dark ones, the old dark ways. Our society fears and is thus prejudiced against darkness. We need to balance light and dark, spirit and earth, male and female. We need to remember the forgotten old ones, the forgotten histories.

It is the result of five thousand or more years of persistent racism and sexism, plus a long tradition of scholarly racism that makes us believe that the white male is the norm in all things. As far as we know, humankind first arose in Africa (long called the “Dark Continent”) to walk on two feet and create civilization. All the earliest peoples were small and dark. It is racism that makes us think the tall blond people are the founders of civilization, when actually they wiped out (or married) the people who had lived in the lands they now occupy. Much of what we know as occult wisdom and magic was being written at the time the countries of Western Europe were creating their empires. Soldiers, explorers, and gentleman archaeologists plundered the rest of the world, stealing statues and other artifacts and bringing them home to put in museums. That these items were sacred meant nothing; they were trophies. Ruling the native people became the “white man’s burden.”

It is racism that made the dichotomies of white = good / black = bad, or spirit = light = good / earth = flesh = darkness = the devil = bad. Wrapping things or people in white light to purify and protect them is racist, sexist, and imperialist.

My goddess is the cosmic mother who enfolds and embodies the universe, the ordinary woman, and the quiet dark fire at the center of the holy planet we live on — all at the same time. In one of my novels, I describe Her:

She stood before them, as tall and deep and black as boundless space, as calm and wise and dark as the fertile earth. Her skin shone with purple and green and golden lights. She wore a crescent moon upon Her forehead, or perhaps it was two horns around which Her hair seemed to writhe. Around Her broad, muscular body lay the double helix of two vast serpents, their heads resting just above Her full breasts…. They saw the stars in Her skin.

Reader, I have actually seen this goddess. In 1992, when I suffered a severe asthma attack and was rushed to the emergency room by two of my circle sisters, I lost consciousness at the door and was “gone” for twenty minutes. She was with me then. Although I later created a collage in which I tried to illustrate Her, it hardly comes close. Nor do my feeble words adequately describe Her.

Beneath the Spheres: The Quantum Goddess

And, finally, there’s one last layer of the Goddess, the one that slips right through metaphors. Some call her Eris and make her the “patron saint” of chaos theory. I call her the Goddess Gotcha. Gotcha is one of my Found Goddesses, and Her kid brother is Coyote the Trickster. Gotcha has the strong sense of humor we all need to survive in this ridiculous civilization, and she has scant patience with pomposity and pride. She’s the one who sends the cats in with their jingle toys when you’re doing a high, holy ritual and everyone’s taking themselves entirely too seriously. Gotcha makes you have to light a candle three times before it stays lit. She makes you tongue-tangled when your invocation goes on too long, and she plants puns and double-entendres in your reading and typos in your writing. The only thing to do when she appears is to greet her: Hail, Gotcha, Fulla Fun and Outa Sight.

A Ritual to Celebrate the Goddess in Women

For this ritual, you need your usual private space and something to make noise with — a doumbek or frame drum, a rattle, two sticks you can beat together, or your own hands to clap. Beat or clap as long as you want to whenever you come to the cue [Sound].

Before you begin the chant, imagine a bright, pulsing stream of spring-green light moving in a clockwise direction around your body. See and feel it start in the area of your heart and just let it go round and round for a few minutes. Don’t force the light, and don’t hurry this part of the ritual.

After a few minutes, let the light become strong enough to make you sway in tiny circles with it. When this circling is well established, turn the light into a green helix that spirals around your whole body, round and round from the top of your head to the base of your spine (if you’re sitting) or your heels (if you’re standing). Really feel this energy, feel its warmth and strength, let your body sway in its wind. Take as long as necessary to get the helix established so it can run on automatic while you do the chant. (If you’re new at this, yes, it is real energy and, yes, it will keep going while you concentrate on the words.)

Read the following words or record them beforehand and listen to them or use them as a pattern to make up your own words. Women should say I am and men should say She is (or whatever the appropriate verb is) throughout this chant.

I am/She is the powerful one. [Sound]