A symphony of voices is arising now at the time of our mother planet’s greatest peril. We remember and we awaken. We are powerful now because we are remembering.
One story we can re-myth is the story of the summer solstice. In the modern west, that solstice is traditionally the time of the sun deity, when the days are at their longest and the sun is at its zenith. While the sun deity has been imagined differently by different cultures, as female in nature by the early Egyptians, the Germans and the Norse, the story we tell in the modern English speaking world is that the sun is male in aspect, and embodies the energy of the male. At the time of the solstice, the sun sits still for three days, high in the sky as it appears not to change position around the 21st of June in the northern hemisphere. Sol is the sun, and solstice means stand-still. The Earth stands still in the circle of the sun, pausing before its shift to shorter days.
The sun represents powerful masculine energy to those in the modern west, and the old destructive stories result from too much of this strong energy overwhelming the quieter nurturing feminine energy represented by the moon. This tips the balance towards violence and dysfunction. The litany of chaos in the daily news is the result of this imbalance, and a result of our having forgotten our connection back to the energy and to each other.
That is the old story, which underpins the structures destroying our planet. When we re-myth the story, we find the answer contained within the problem as we restore the balance by remembering the feminine aspect to the story. We can re-myth the sun so it serves us in new ways. We can restore balance by remembering the feminine aspect in the sun and by adding the feminine aspect of the moon as the solstice progresses.
As the sun pauses in its strength at the summer solstice, it readies to turn from the height of its power, its longest days, to the gradual waning of its strength. After the summer solstice, the days will slowly grow shorter, and to conclude the solstice, the sun must enter the astrological sign of Cancer in the northern hemisphere. Cancer sits within the realm of the moon, the territory of the goddess, and this filters the masculine powers at their peak through the feminine moon energy, making a symbolic marriage. The overwhelming masculine energy is tempered with the simple the nurturing love of the divine feminine and the raging storm is soothed.
We can re-myth ourselves the same way as we remember and recreate the June solstice to include the divine feminine. Re-myth yourself, you embody the divine feminine, she resides within you, and links you to each other, and to all the women who have come before us and to those who will come after. She is nature, she nurture, she is birth, she is creation. She has many names and takes many forms to appear as and when we need her. She is Isis, she is Inanna, Hathor, Ceres, Ishtar, Lakshmi, Minerva, Sophia and Mary. She is the Magna Mater, and she goes straight back to the cave, where she appears as the great mother in Neolithic sculpture.
She is triple in nature, and she is represented by the moon. She is the maiden, the mother and the crone, symbolized in the waxing, full and waning moon. At the summer solstice she is the maiden about to reach fullness and become the mother. That is the time to honor our creativity, because even if we have not given physical birth, we are mothering. We mother every time we nurture life, and we mother constantly through our creativity. We are giving birth all the time through our thoughts, our words and our deeds. We are creating it as we go, and consciousness of that makes us very powerful.
We are powerful now because we are remembering. We can access the balance of that ancient time if we look deep enough within and bring it forward into our daily lives, weaving it through new stories we can carry forward. We can start to restore the balance on an individual level. And if we do, we will simply create more balance, and our responses to situations will change, and we will revere ourselves, our loved ones, our communities and our planet. We will once more revere nature, which is, after all the goddess manifest, just as we are the goddess manifest. And if enough of us can do this, real change can be affected.
A symphony of voices is arising now at the time of our mother planet’s greatest peril. We remember and we awaken. Now is a time of ferment and change, and the response is growing. We need to awaken the feminine energy to balance the masculine, to balance our own lives, and the wider community. As we cease to participate in the old structures, they will cease to have meaning, until one day they are rendered obsolete. We must re-myth ourselves into the future.
Read Part 1.
Read Meet Mago Contributor Mary Petiet.