THE SACRED SORORITY
A hefty bitch slap from a divine force will knock the idea that Goddesses are simply archetypes right out of your skull.
PETER GREY
The Red Goddess
The Universe was serious about sending in reinforcements during this Touchy time in my life. But books and experts weren’t the only things lighting up my Red radar. Nope, the most brow-raising, heart-humping reinforcements were “the Sacred Sorority,” who validated my erotic experiences through their own personal stories. They reminded me that I wasn’t wrong or sinful or alone (or a slut). I was just Red.
Here’s a seductive sampler …
THE RED PILL
The beginning ritual at every Redvolution workshop involves ceremoniously taking “the Red pill” (a Red Hots candy) — like Neo does in The Matrix — while we set our intentions to wake up, see through illusions, and reignite our inner knowing. A few months into my adventures in the Red light district of divinity, I was giving my Redvolution workshop at The Omega Center in Rhinebeck, New York, when Eve suddenly showed up on my inner screen and excitedly whispered, “Yo, chica, guess who took the first Red pill?” and then proceeded to download a whole other kind of Genesis.
Imagine, if you will, one fair morning in the Garden of Eden. Eve is aimlessly meandering through organic rose bushes and fragrant sage grasses, when suddenly she encounters a truly tremendous tree:
“Holy Mother of Gawd!” she most likely gasps.
The tree glows with life. Its vibrant bark and dancing leaves positively shine with knowledge, consciousness, and what we today know as gold body glitter. Under the bright sun, the tree appears to wink at Eve, and the ripe Red fruit pulses to the rhythm of her fiercely beating heart.
Eve vaguely remembers some sort of lecture from The Father about “forbidden tree” or “forbidden fruit” or “forbidden knowledge” or “forbidden something or other,” but she’s so taken with this tree’s stunning beauty that she brushes that external, stern voice of warning away and allows her body to respond instinctually, naturally. In other words, she lets this numinous piece of Mother Nature totally rock her world.
Suddenly, a serpent sinuously reveals herself from behind the tree. She raises her elegant head, looks Eve straight in the eye, and seductively whispers:
Psssst, hey there, sssweet sssista. You have the right to Know your self, your divinity, your messssy mighty Feminine mojo. Not only the right, but you have the responsibility. And get this: you can only truly Know your self via lived experience, by bravely walking your unique path. But in order to start the journey, you gotta stop playing this whole infantile “spiritual” innocence game. Get out from under the tree of your Big Daddy and take the first steps toward becoming a spiritual adult.
In other words, take a bite of freedom, grab a fig leaf, and let’s blow this joint.
There’s a pregnant pause. A holy hush. An intuitive nod. And Eve, for the first time in her previously curtailed existence, gets a twinkle in her eye, a Red flush in her cheeks (both sets). She slowly reaches out, extends her left arm, plucks a bright Red apple from the tree, raises it to her moist and open mouth, and takes a huge, juicy, loud bite — the noise of which can be heard throughout all of existence, thoroughly and completely disturbing the Universe.
(Swallow.)
We all know that Eve does not exactly have the best reputation in Western culture. Her story is often interpreted as an example of what not to do, of a choice not to make, of a fruit not to bring to your parish priest. Specifically, Eve is believed to be the cause of original sin (according to popular Christian theologies), and therefore, we women have unconsciously inherited an archaic spiritual reputation of being sinful, disobedient, untrustworthy, dangerous, and sexual temptresses.
As scholar Elaine Pagels documented in her book Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, one early Church leader, Tertullian, told women: “You are the devil’s gateway…. You are she who persuaded him who the devil did not dare attack…. Did you not know that every one of you is an Eve? The sentence of God on your sex lives on…. The guilt, of necessity, lives on too.”1
Well, now we’re intelligent, liberated, modern women who might not think we need to take these creation stories or the early Church’s misguided misogynistic missions seriously (especially if we were raised in another religious tradition or have purposefully created a nonreligious household). But what I encourage you to take seriously are the effects those missions might still have on your body, your sexuality, your spirituality, and your psyche.
As Sue Monk Kidd states in Dance of the Dissident Daughter:
To understand why the Eden story is so important we have to remember the extraordinary way origin myths operate in our psyches. In a way humans are not made of skin and bones as much as we’re made of stories. The Eden myth perhaps more than any other floats in our cells, informing our vision of ourselves and the world.2
This brief interlude is not just about shaking a well-manicured Red fingernail at the early Church or giving you a slightly dry lecture on religious history or feminist theology; it’s intended to be an electric reminder that spiritual stories, characters, and symbols are fluid and open, and the Divine wisdom they carry is dynamic and interactive and is supposed to evolve through us. It’s our right — I would go so far as to say our duty — to bring forth new or alternative “truths” about old spiritual myths, symbols, texts, and especially the Divine Itself, even if these new truths don’t exactly reflect the religious culture at large.
A few years after Eve shared her side of the story with me, I discovered that it wasn’t too far from certain Gnostic interpretations of the Genesis myth. Turns out some Gnostics viewed Eve not as some floozy floundering sinner, but as an illuminated liberator. As Elaine Pagels explains: “Whereas the orthodox [early Church] often blamed Eve for the fall and pointed to women’s submission as appropriate punishment, Gnostics often depicted Eve — or the feminine spiritual power she represented — as the source of spiritual awakening.”3
According to the Gnostic text Reality of the Rulers, when Adam first saw Eve: “He said, ‘It is you who have given me life: you shall be called Mother of the Living [Eve].’”4 And in the Gnostic text The Secret Book of John, Eve was written about as
An Awakener of the Soul,
and the “perfect primal intelligence” who, Pagels declares, called out to Adam (and to all of us) “to wake up, recognize her, and so receive spiritual illumination.”5
Wake Up!
Recognize Her!
And
Receive Spiritual Illumination!
Perhaps Eve knew that we can only grow so much in a perfect garden with way too many perfect fruit trees and that it’s our natural birthright and inspired impetus to trade our halos for hammers, hula hoops, and apple tattoos. In other words, perhaps Eve knew we were here not just to be something but also to become someone. Perhaps Eve was leading humanity away from an externalized, stagnant, subservient relationship with an overly masculine Divine and toward an internalized, evolutionary, and more co-creative relationship with the masculine and feminine Divine.
The point is, no matter how Eve’s been construed by Western religions, she’s still talking. We just hafta have the ears to hear. In the Gnostic text The Secret Book, Eve says, “Whoever hears … Arise and remember … and follow your root, which is I … and beware of the deep sleep.”6 What’s the “deep sleep,” you ask? Well, in my opinion, it’s a numbed-out and dumbed-out state of being that stifles your Divine Feminine Knowing. Some snooze-inducing culprits: the matrix, patriarchy, political propaganda, social climbing, spiritual subterfuge, too much white sugar, gossip mags, and certain reality TV shows. In Dance of the Dissident Daughter, Sue Monk Kidd offers her own definition of a woman in deep sleep:
A woman in Deep Sleep is one who goes about in an unconscious state. She seems unaware or unfazed by the truth of her own female life, the truth about women in general, the way women and the feminine have been wounded, devalued, and limited within culture, churches, and families. She cannot see the wound or feel the pain. She has never acknowledged, much less confronted, sexism…. The woman in Deep Sleep is oblivious to the psychological and spiritual impact this has had on her. Or maybe she has some awareness of it all but keeps it sequestered nicely in her head, rarely allowing it to move down into her heart or into the politics of her spirituality.7
Now that we are a bit clearer on the meaning behind Eve’s cryptic warning to us about the “deep sleep,” I really think that last part of her text deserves repeating and probably should be written in Red lipstick on your mirror or at least the side of a church:
“Arise and remember …
and follow your root, which is I (Eve) …
and beware of the deep sleep.”
P.S. Don’t hit the Snooze Button
IT’S GOOD TO BE ON TOP
When Eve’s chomping apples at our inner dinner party, Lilith should definitely not be left in the kitchen. Are you familiar with Lilith? According to some Hebrew texts (specifically The Alphabet of Ben Sira), she was Adam’s first wife. She was not created from Adam’s rib; in fact, in some Kabbalistic texts (mystical schools of Judaism), it’s indicated that she was already created, already alive and kickin’, when Adam came along. What’s the down low about Adam’s first lay?
Well, she didn’t like following directions and obeying orders from her man or The Man, and she refused to be “on the bottom” during sex (truly, this is in the texts). As Barbara Black Koltuv wrote in The Book of Lilith, “Lilith is that quality in a woman that refuses to be bound in a relationship. She wants not equality and sameness in the sense of identity or merging, but equal freedom to move, change, and be herself.”8 When a frustrated Adam tattled and asked his Divine Daddy to make his human wife obey him, I’m pretty sure Lilith responded with something like:
Fuck this! I’m outta here. You call this paradise? My ass (which you can’t even properly grope when we’re doing it missionary style). See you two on the other side. Don’t call, don’t write, don’t pretend to know who I truly am until you’re ready to embrace what you have so carefully and deliberately erased.
Whatever happened to our gutsy first lady who scared the rib outta Adam? Well, Lilith set up camp on the shores of the Red Sea, and she was labeled evil, just as so many spiritually and sexually liberating feminine characters are. In fact, she was linked to Lilitu and Lilu, demons of ancient Near Eastern cultures. (She was also referred to as the goddess Inanna’s priestess and sexual prostitute.) In popular Jewish folklore, she is described as a witch, a sexual temptress who makes men have wet dreams and a barren woman who delights in stealing little children. Most ancient depictions of Lilith were carved in stone and painted Red.
After Lilith “flew” out of Eden, a disgruntled, confused, somewhat puerile Adam asked for another companion. So God created Eve from Adam’s rib, with the hopes that the second attempt would produce a more submissive and proper wife. Yeah, we’ve all heard how that one turned out. As for the Divine’s third attempt at creating the “ideal” woman …
You’re up.
Look in the mirror.
Smash external projections.
Will you take a juicy Red bite?
Let us hear you.
THE HOLY WHORE
During this Red Lighted time in my life, I interviewed Princeton University professor of religion Elaine Pagels for my Redvolution film. As we were setting up the camera, I noticed an illustration hanging on her office wall of a woman dressed in Red and riding a strange-looking Red beast. When I inquired, Pagels excitedly reintroduced me to the Whore of Babylon, who is described in the Hebrew bible’s Book of Revelations like this:
And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication. And upon her forehead was written: MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT. THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.9
How picturesque.
Pagels told me that this scarlet depiction of the Whore of Babylon represented pleasure, sensuality, and luxury, and became the image the early Church used to represent evil and heresy, not to mention the coming apocalypse. But as Peter Grey, occultist and author of The Red Goddess, warns, “Reading Revelations to get a clear idea of Babalon is like reading Mein Kampf to get a good idea of what Jews are.”10 An interesting side note: apocalypse in Greek means revealing the truth or lifting the veil — a disclosure of something hidden from humanity during a time of falsehood. So, a bright Red way to read the Holy Whore’s description is that
She is a truth that has been hidden from us.
In Conscious Femininity, Marion Woodman tells us, “The feminine, however disguised, is always naked, in the sense of ‘seeing through’ in order to reveal. Apocalypse means unveiling.”11 In other words, you gotta take it all off (all external ideas, stories, and beliefs about Her) in order to truly see Her. BTW, guess what my next book is titled? You know it … Redvelations.
Although Babalon reemerged in infamous occultist Aleister Crowley’s Book of Law in 1904, Grey says She originally derived from our now-familiar ancient Near Eastern Love goddesses Inanna and Astarte, who were worshipped in ancient Babylon. The essentials: Babalon Makes Love for a Living. Babalon denies no one. She Knows All. According to Grey,
Babalon has attained Her exulted state by giving Herself to every living thing. This is what is meant by Her title as Holy Whore. She cannot rest until the blood of all living things has been poured into her chalice because this is how the universe functions. It is an unending rapture of Love, of union and division. Babalon is described as Understanding because she has known everything — in a biblical sense.12
Grey says this Red Goddess often “comes through” human women, priestesses who are thereafter sexually liberated and referred to as “Scarlet Women” in the occult world. Babalon represents what Margaret Starbird calls the bridal element of the Divine Feminine. She is not the Mother Goddess; instead, She is the Lover Goddess, and a fierce lover at that. As Grey warns,
There is a temptation to view Love goddesses in a benign soft-focus, the kind of Vaseline smeared lens effect of 1970s porno pics. Nothing could be further from the truth. Love is an emotion with destroying power, careless of human happiness, social constraints, and rational analysis. Without this bitter-sweet sting, the image of the Goddess would lose all power. Goddesses are as fully rounded and complex as humans, if not more so.13
The Love Goddess can growl, slap, and be merciless. Aphrodite can morph into Kali in an instant. Sometimes the only way to open our hearts is to chop off our heads. Grey says it’s this type of unadulterated Love that threatens patriarchy more than any other; he bemoans, “Love has been bled almost to death, drained to an insipid pink when it should be a shameless scarlet.”14
To end our brief reintroduction to this particular Goddess, I thought it best we should hear Her words and let them run naked through our veins:
Yea, it is I, BABALON….
Is it difficult, between matter and spirit? For me it is ecstasy and agony untellable. But I am with thee. I have large strength, have thou likewise….
Let her prepare her work according to my voice in her heart….
But let her think on this: my way is not in the solemn ways, or in the reasoned ways, but in the wild free way of the eagle, and the devious way of the serpent, and the oblique way of the factor unknown and unnumbered.
For I am BABALON, and she my daughter, unique….
Though they call thee harlot and whore, shameless, false, evil, these words shall be blood in their mouths, and dust thereafter…. But my children will know thee and love thee, and this will make them free….
My joy is the joy of eternity, and my laughter is the drunken laughter of a harlot in the house of ecstasy.15
THE RED STAIN
Another lady who arrived during this time in a rush of loving Redness was Mary Magdalene. I was certainly aware of Magdalene’s makeover from Catholic castaway to pop culture superstar. But let’s skirt The Da Vinci Code craze and slide headfirst into the academic realm: Magdalene was written about in several Gnostic gospels (including her own, The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, which was found in Cairo, Egypt, in 1896) as “the Woman Who Knows All,” one of Jesus’s most beloved companions and top disciples, and a powerful spiritual leader and teacher in her own right.
In 591 CE, Pope Gregory the Great declared Magdalene a whore. Why? Well, Magdalene was a strong, independent, highly gifted, female spiritual leader who traveled alone and hung out with men, which was very unusual for a woman in Palestinian culture at that time. Some feminist scholars believe this “prostitute” label was used because Magdalene was an anomaly, a threat to the early Church’s growing hierarchical and patriarchal agenda.
In The Meaning of Mary Magdalene, Cynthia Bourgeault believes that turning M.M. into a penitent whore was also due to the early Church’s “collective unconscious, the inevitable shadow side of its increasing obsession with celibacy and sexual purity.”16 What were the perfect images for projecting this split between spirit and sex? The two Marys closest to Jesus: his mother, the Virgin Mary, aka “the good girl,” and his beloved companion, the Whore Mary, aka “the bad girl.” Rumor has it, the Virgin Mary used to dress in Red until it became too representative of The Magdalene. As Margaret Starbird tells us in The Woman with the Alabaster Jar:
The Inquisition became so upset with pictures of the Madonna dressed in red that its art censor finally decreed in 1649 that all paintings of the Virgin Mary would be rendered blue and white, acknowledging the sister and mother aspects of the eternal feminine, by denying the bridal or flesh-and-blood sexual aspect. Paintings of Madonnas wearing red were strictly forbidden, and the “woman in red” became synonymous with a woman of the street.17
Although scholarship has proven that Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute, some historians and many laypeople wonder whether Mary Magdalene was a sacred prostitute who practiced a form of sacred sexuality (possibly with J.C.), or was a woman who simply owned her erotic nature (thereby integrating the sacred-prostitute archetype). One of my favorite modern Redvisions of Magdalene is in Elizabeth Cunningham’s hilarious and moving historical novel The Passion of Mary Magdalen, where Magdalene is depicted as a feisty, salt-of-the-earth, uber-wise Red-haired prostitute nicknamed “Red” by her friends. Here’s what Magdalen, aka Red, has to say about being a sacred prostitute:
I want to tell you: being a healer is no different from being a whore, a paradoxical mix of the intimate and impersonal, the receiving of another human being without judgment, the bone-deep knowing that you are not separate from this other. You recognize the river flowing under all skin, the tidal rhythms of the breath, the darkness of earth giving rise to and claiming all flesh. I was known as the Red One, and if you are wondering if I was enjoying my fame or being seduced by its power, the answer is no. Perhaps you are disappointed. Perhaps you were hoping that I would be faced with the temptations of pride and succumb (later to be redeemed, of course). That’s a classic plotline, but it’s not the one I’m working with here. On the other hand, if you’re concerned that I’m about to turn self-effacing and saintly, relax. That’s just the reverse side of the pride story. I’m not interested.18
When I interviewed Nancy Qualls-Corbett for my Redvolution film, she claimed Magdalene as a fundamental part of our psychic life, the closest thing in our Christian culture to a Love Goddess. But as with most eros-fueled feminine archetypes, we rejected her and are suffering as a result. As Margaret Starbird so eloquently wrote in Mary Magdalene, Bride in Exile:
What did we lose when we lost the Mary whom the scripture calls the Magdalene? Simply stated, we lost the color red — the deep crimson of passion, the blood mysteries, of compassion and Eros in the Jungian sense of relatedness…. We were tragically cut off from the irrigating waters of intuition and mysticism, from feminine ways of knowing, from the deep wisdom of the body and its senses, and from our intimate kinship with all that lives.19
Looks like we can’t suppress an innately horny Universe for too long, no matter how many people we punish or how many strong women we banish or how many purity rings we sell. Magdalene is like a Red wine stain on Christianity’s white sheets that the Church has tried to rub out, unsuccessfully. But Magdalene doesn’t need the Church to reveal herself. She’s chosen a much more effective route to reannounce her presence: Us. She’s erupting out of all of us in unique and important ways, via dreams, visitations, art, songs, movies, books.
Makes ya wonder: what would Magdalene do?
THE VAGINA VIRGIN
Mary Magdalene wasn’t the only sexually empowered Mary trying to get my attention during this ripe time in my life. Nope. One fine day when I was lying on my living room floor in supta baddha konasana (a meditative yoga pose where you lay on your back, legs bent, thighs open, soles of feet touching), I looked up at an image I have resting on a shelf — a colorful, kitschy two-foot-by-two-foot poster of the Virgin of Guadalupe. And that’s when it happened.
But before I go on, I’ll give you the “deets” on the Virgin of Guadalupe: Way back on December 9, 1531, a Goddess floating on a moon with stars in her hair appeared to a Mexican Indian, Juan Diego, on Tepeyac Hill, which used to be a sacred site of the Aztec moon goddess, Tonantzin. The floating Goddess asked Juan to build a sacred shrine to Her on the hill. Juan excitedly ran to the local bishop. But the big guy in charge told Juan he needed proof of this supposed miracle. So Juan went back to the hill and explained the deal to the Goddess, who most likely sighed and rolled her stars, and then told him to gather the nearby roses and carry them back to the bishop in his cloak. When Juan returned to the Bishop and opened his cloak, roses tumbled out, revealing an image of the Goddess. The bishop, using the only spiritual lens he had (Catholicism), declared that the image was the Virgin Mary. And that’s how an Aztec moon Goddess morphed into the Virgin Mary. (Boop!)
Okay, back to my living room floor. You know how people occasionally “see” the Virgin Mary in their mashed potatoes or in oil spills or in water stains on the side of a house or in rose-smattered robes? Well, I saw something truly holy and miraculous in my particular image of the Virgin Mary of Guadalupe.
I
Saw
a
Vagina!
Truly. I still do when I look at this poster. In fact, I think I will forevermore see a vagina when I look at a similar iconographic representation of the Virgin. Go ahead, Google “The Virgin of Guadalupe.” Relax your gaze, open your mind (and possibly your thighs), let loose your preconceived ideas, and take a gentle gander at Our Fair Lady. Not to get too gynecological on you, but what the hell: the Reddish halo with the yellow flaming spikes around her — the Labia Majora; Her darker folded robes — the Labia Minora; and her crowned head — the clitoris.
This is so clear to me that I’m still in shock. Of course, of course, of course, I realize this spontaneous “vision” is due to me using my Red “lens,” just like that Mexican bishop used his Catholic lens. But, damn, in my maybe-delusional, definitely devious Red universe, this could also be one of the biggest and best cosmic jokes the Goddess has played on the Catholic Church. I mean, millions of people pray to this Holy Vagina every day! As they should.
Truth is, Mary and Mary are not quite so contrary. Through a Jungian lens, the Virgin and Sacred Whore are much more similar than they are different, and we modern women have a lot to learn from them both. Virgin, according to many Greek translations and interpretations, means “one unto herself.” In Dancing in the Flames, Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickinson wrote, “The initiated virgin is the feminine who is who she is because that’s who she is. Like the virgin forest she is full of her own life force, full of potential, pregnant.”20 Qualls-Corbett says to truly own the sacred-prostitute archetype, you need to be virgin — that is, untampered by other’s perceptions or ideas about you. Likewise, you gotta be virgin in order to properly know yourself; as Bourgeault finishes, “the journey towards real self-knowledge (or gnosis), toward ‘restoration to fullness of being’ is at the same time the painstaking reclaiming of our own virginity, which in the teaching bears the sense of ‘free, simple, and inwardly whole.’”21
That’s why these archetypes of the Virgin and the Whore have bubbled back up in our collective conscious. They are looking to be reunited and reintegrated by us.
Hail Marys
Full of Grace and Growls,
The Lord and The Lady are with thee.
Blessed art thou in women,
and blessed is the Red fruit
of thy womb, juicy.
Holy Marys,
Mother and Lover of God,
pray for those who call us sinners
now,
and at the hours of our death and rebirth.
Awomen.
STEAL BACK HER THUNDER
I think it’s appropriate to end this panoply of Her presence with The Thunder: Perfect Mind, a piece dated around 300 CE and written in a voice of the Feminine Divine. It was found in that buried Red jar of Gnostic gospels in 1945. There really is no better way to say what She is and who you are than to have Her tell us straight up.
I am the first and the last…
I am the whore and the holy woman
I am the wife and the virgin
I am the mother and the daughter
I am a sterile woman and she who has many children
I am she whose wedding is extravagant and I didn’t have a husband…
Pay attention to me…
Whenever you hide yourselves, I myself will appear.22
STAYING PRESENT
These ancient ladies linger. They are here if you want to know them, if you are willing to strip them of antiquated beliefs and welcome them into your modern life. You don’t need to read a ton of books or perform a ton of rituals or travel around the world to find them; you just need to open your heart and invite them out to play.
I need to admit something: When I was in graduate school, all hell-bent on uncovering the lost, missing pieces of the Divine Feminine that I felt sure were buried deep inside our religious traditions, I was sorely disappointed … over and over and over again. Sure, there are abundant artifacts of the Goddess and tantalizing feminine metaphors, images, and threads interwoven into our religious traditions (especially the mystical sects of these traditions, such as Kabbalah and Shakta Tantrism). But whenever I got up real close, what I always witnessed (at least through the academic lens) was a big ol’ penis. Patriarchy pressed into and out from everything I studied. I finally left academia because I felt too much heartache in trying to revive something from the religious or spiritual past that didn’t actually exist the way my Red heart knows She exists.
But ironically, during this hot-and-heavy time in my life, I found myself desperately wanting to anchor the Red Lady in a tradition or to locate Her in a myth, give Her a recognizable name, a legit label, a solid practice, a respected theology or cosmology. I thought this would help validate Her.
My studies at the energy school and my weekly work with my energy teacher made me wonder whether the Red Lady was a spirit guide or an ascended master or a goddess from another dimension. My occult studies made me question whether She was my guardian angel. My Jungian studies led me to assume She was a repressed archetype. My women’s spirituality studies led me to suppose She was a Red facet of The Goddess. And, of course, as each of the above ladies made herself known in my inner and outer realities, I wondered whether she was my Red Lady. None of these possibilities felt entirely wrong, but then, none of them felt entirely right, either.
This inability to accurately define who She was for others and myself was maddening, because at that time in my life, She had become an undeniable Sacred Intimate, a palpable Presence I couldn’t keep out of my public career, a personal pronoun I couldn’t keep out of my sentences. Every time I opened my mouth to speak, I drooled Her like a drunkard drools Red wine. My friends totally accepted “Her” (bless their red hearts), and when I was stressed or confused, they would remind me to ask the Red Lady for guidance. But as my Red Lady’s presence grew more and more solidly into my life, so did Her mystery.
Even though the ladies I’ve mentioned in this chapter weren’t exactly Her, they did inspire and support me during my search for Her. They reawakened parts of me that had been hidden in the shadows. They helped me trust my personal forays into the Red light district of divinity. Their very real presences reminded me that my female body was created to be erotic, ecstatic, and totally Goddess. They helped me act bolder and blush harder, and they still make me laugh. Out loud.
In other words, these ladies are friends. They’re a Slinky Sisterhood. A Goddess Gang. A Cosmic Club. A Sacred Sorority devoid of elitism and catfights, whose service is available to all, but is especially geared toward reminding us just how jam-packed with feminine divinity we are and what a profound responsibility and honor it is to be a woman. These ladies are not interested in being “worshipped” (if they demand worship, they are probably a spiritual poser). But they are eager to be respected, given some major spiritual cred, and known … personally. And then, released … collectively. As Grey reminds us, “It is not just humans that change, Goddesses change too. They do not remain as they were…. You cannot forge a relationship with the living Goddess by living in the past. Be with Her now.”23
Be with Her now.
She’s not “out there” nor back there. She is right …
Here
Slow dancing between each sentence, holding a glass of Red wine in one hand and your Red heart in the other. Dare to see through the veils. Her True Form reveals Itself in and as your own naked Body. She is our Apocalypse.