Good Morning, Avalonian Sisters and Friends!
Crones, Mothers, Daughters and Sons!
This talk, my small contribution to this gorgeous conference, is dedicated to our Beloved Crone Sisters who have passed among our Ancestresses:
Mary Daly, Merlin Stone, Marija Gimbutas and Lydia Ruyle.
May they Be with us here and now
And bless our tongues, ears and souls
Quintessence. Realizing the Archaic Future, 1998, begins with these words:
“The writing of this book is a Desperate Act performed in a time of ultimate battles between principalities and powers. More than ever all sensate and spiritual life on this planet and anywhere within reach is threatened with extinction.”
Everywhere in our everyday experience we see, read or suffer from murdered women (in Italy we have a new word for it, femminicidio), lack of respect and recognition, rented wombs and temporary mothers, rapism, new burnings of women as well as of trees and forests. The Foreground is reduced to a Puppet stage of necrophiliac shows, while the Background is a fermenting lab but in-visible in mass-mediology. Too often our hearts are full of grief, pain and fiery rage.
But … Quintessence is a metamorphic book, that is, you are transformed while reading, and the Desperate Act changes into Hope, Hopping Hope, because our Crone Sister Mary pulls us directly into the Fifth Dimension, the Fifth Province, the Fifth Spiral. Here, we might say into the Reign of Nolava, who inhabits and rules the core of the Reign of Avalon.
The Fifth Essence, Quintessence, is the substance that vibrates in the centre of any Circle of Awakened Women, the centre which holds the four directions and the four elements together, allowing the living plan of ordinary time/space to shift into another dimension. In fact, every time you open a Circle, you create an extra-ordinary space/time, you do the magic of entering another dimension. Provided that this is your strong intention, your shared will.
As Sussistanako, the Spider Woman, the Creatrix of the Pueblo Nation, did at the Beginning, when She sat at the centre of the threads she had spun herself.
“In the beginning there was nothing but Spider Woman, She who was called Sussistanako, Thinking Woman, Thought Woman. No other living creature, no bird or animal or fish yet lived.
In the dark purple light that glowed at the Dawn of Being, Spider Woman spun a line from East to West. She spun a line from North to South, and then She sat by these threads that stretched to the four horizons, these strands that She had drawn across the universe, and sang in a voice that was exceptionally deep and sweet. As She sang, two daughters came forth: Ut Set, who became the mother of the Pueblo people, and Nau Ut Set, who became the mother of all others.
Following the directions of Spider Woman, these two daughters formed the sun from white shell, red rock, turquoise and pearly abalone shell. When it was ready, they carried the sun to the top of the highest mountain and dropped it into the sky so that it would give light. But when they saw that it was still dark at night, they then formed the moon, putting together pieces of dark black stone, yellow stone, red rock and turquoise. Still things were not quite right, for when the moon travelled far, there were many nights when they could not see. It was for this reason that with the help of Spider Woman, Ut Set and Nau Ut Set created the Star People, giving them sparkling clear crystal for eyes, so that there would never be complete darkness again” (Merlin Stone, Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood).
That’s why we must be deeply aware that every time we open a Circle, we become the Fifth Cause, that is the Cause of causes, the “rough, rowdy, untamed of Expanding Here that roves around subliminally in our intelligence”, carrying the Creation on, Here and Now. Pure concentrated Female energy.
Every time you guide a Circle of Women you have to be aware of the Task/ Charge you are invested by Quintessence, Sussistanako, Nolava, etc.
The historical time we are living in, after the re-emergence of the ancient goddesses of the Creation Time, displays in all its evidence that God is dead, Kings are naked and Male energy left alone is whirling in a desperate revelation of all its brute destructive quality.
In order to be strong enough in counterbalancing this spread of destruction, we need to form a shield of creative imagination, able to transform the power of destruction into useful strength.
Do you remember Goddessing, that fantastic review by Willow La Monte that I used to read – together with Daly’s book – in the end of the Nineties?
It was there that I first read about Glastonbury, the Goddess Conference, the women researching all over the world, the Quest expanding through the continents, of sisters becoming drummers, painters, ceramists, dreamers, dancers, priestesses, Untamed Women …. I had been a Feminist since the beginning of the Seventies, but at that point a new direction opened in my commitment to women.
Many years have passed. With Kathy Jones and her Avalonian sisters this Conference has grown to an attractive, magnetic pole, sharing and expanding quintessential qualities that, in this turning point year, materialize in Lady Nolava, mistress of radiating energies, pulling us into new action. For, if you change inside, heal yourself, transform your being, but everything around you remains the same or even worse, you can’t endure for long, nor give effective form to your vision. Personal transformation is necessary but we can do more in changing the outside world.
For this reason, we must hold clearly in our visions that in order to stop the winning destroying male energy on this planet we have to work primarily with quintessential energies, with the creative strength of imagination.
Think of what we learn from another perspective, such as the Tibetan Chod practice to Throma, the Black Dakini, in the form transmitted by Tsultrim Allione and Vicki Noble: between Dharmakaya (which can be translated as formlessness, the world of pure spirit) and Nirmanakaya (the world of forms, the physical world), there is a plane called Sambhogakaya, the reign of “magical visualizations”.
What are these magical visualizations connected with both Dharmakaya and Nirmanakaya, a sort of bridge between them? What are these magical visualizations that shape-shift the physical world?
They are the thoughts, the imaginings, the constructions, the projects, all charged by our emotions, we can consciously create and expand on the ethereal/astral plane or quintessential world, which is stronger than any strength acting on the physical plane alone. This is magic, the capacity of inventing new forms, of making them exist, the power exerted by the Creatrix at every new beginning. The Fifth Sacred Thing, in the words of Starhawk.
So my Charge in this communication, in my coming here, in being physically present in Avalon after many years during which I’ve been here only through mind and heart, is probably simply this: to elicit/to show/to suggest and strongly underline these links, not necessarily self-evident to each of us.
That our work, that has been going on for more than 40 years now, in every part of this planet Gaia, is not only psychological, social, intellectual, politically involved, artistic, etc., but it has to be consciously “spiritual”, willingly “magic”, lovingly “quintessential” if we have to help Gaia and all Her sentient beings to recover and carry on the Cycles of Creation.
“Dream Time”, the English translated from an Aboriginal phrase for creation in Australia.
As Starhawk says, we have to form communities of women everywhere, where to practise our intuitions, where to nurture our resilience, where to get ready for the Quantum Leap into the Fifth Continent.
We have to become Bees, sheltered in Beehives, in our connected cells, expanding through the continents.
Two more metamorphic images I want to borrow from Mary Daly, beloved Foresister Mary: the image of Roots, Rootedness, Radicalness and that of Reawakening the X faculty, where X is the form of the Female Chromosome.
She writes: “Elemental Women surviving the apparent isolation inflicted upon us in the state of diaspora, commonly find that as we become more in Touch with our roots we are more profoundly Present to each other. Our Be-Witching powers of communication are enhanced by our connectedness with our roots. Many women express a sense of identity and/or communication with trees … That is, the trees, like Radical Women, are most strongly bonded to each other in their roots. They ‘hold on to each other by roots.’”
Our common roots, re-emerged through the Lost and Found Herstory of the long millennia of deep human past, are the Great Goddesses, the Great Mothers, the archetypal images of the positive feminine energies of the cosmos. Nolava is the cipher of the Awakened Creatrix Woman we honour, invoke and evoke here and now.
And this is the First Step. We can, we wish, we strongly will go farther.
As Goddess Movement we might be now at a new turning point: a cycle of rediscovering, of returning, of reclaiming what had been removed, is ending.
We have been able to reconnect what was severed and diasporized, that is the primal bond among women, women and animals, women and plants, women and earth, women and sky and galaxies.
If we have not yet succeeded in doing it materially, we hold it clearly in our minds, hearts and senses.
Now, what we are longing for is a concrete new balance with the Mother, Mother Gaia, opening labs and working in labs where to practise, achieve, allow Sambhogakaya manifest on Nirmanakaya.
We strongly need daring to Dream future worlds where the counterbalancing energies of the universe (the conservative, caring and in-oriented Female energy; the diverging, separating, out-oriented Male energy) learn to move in balance again.
The Future is nothing more than “Present in Magnetic Attraction”, than “Being” in a Cosmo-biological Vision. Where positive and negative polarities don’t oppose but nourish and strengthen each other.
The last image from Daly is Reawakening the X faculty, the feminine chromosome in all its power. You probably know that more than 90% of the cosmos is made by Dark Matter as well as a similar quantity of DNA being silent, even called Trash DNA by scientists. What does this mean? It simply means scientists do not know why there is so much unexpressed “matter” and what is its function. We could infer with our cosmo-biological wisdom of Crones that it is a tank, a cauldron, a source from where new creation can rise to induce a necessary Leap in human evolution.
And the X chromosome is the key: we are silenced quintessential matter to be turned on again, as in the Time/Space of the Beginnings.
And the Quantum Leap will probably happen all of a sudden, as a blow of wind that comes from nowhere and changes the direction, changes the orientation to all cellular tissues.
We must be ready for this.
Invocation (visualizing the Lady of Willendorf)
Goddess of the Ancient, Beloved Foresisters of the Past
Whose spirit is re-emerging in our time
Bless the Earth and bring Harmony to people.
As powerful symbols of life, nourishment and abundance
Inspire us and our Sisters of the Future
To Cosmic Quantum Leaps! Times are ripe
for another turning of the Wheel.
Goddess Conference Glastonbury 2016
Read Meet Mago Contributor Luciana Percovich.