This essay is an edited excerpt from Chapter 4 of the author’s book PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion.
The Moon was a sliver of light when She first appeared out of darkness, She waxed from there into fullness, and then waned to a sliver in the opposite direction, before disappearing into the darkness from whence She came. It was noticed by the women and perhaps some of the men, that the female body cycled with the Moon, waxing into desire and fertility, and waning into menstrual loss. All the body cycles repeated these faces: there was hunger, there was satiation, there was elimination. There was the urge to breathe, it waxed into fullness, there was the need to release – back into the emptiness from whence another could arise. The buds of flowers blossomed into fullness, then lost their petals, revealing seed pods from whence to begin again. The buds of leaves burgeoned out of dead looking branches, unfurled into greenery, then dropped away. Everywhere on the globe, on a daily basis, light emerged out of darkness at dawn, waxed into the fullness of noon, then declined back into darkness. On an annual basis, the Sun’s light emerged out of the darkness of Winter, waxed into fullness at Summer, then declined back into darkness.
The darkness itself each day, was understood as an equal part the “day” – a “day” was not only the light part. We have to speak of it today as the “diurnal” day, to recall the sense that the dark part was included. It may have even been the main part – the basis of measuring time: as in the expression ‘fortnight’. The darkness was a time for rest, perhaps relief from the heat, perhaps a time to seek comfort from the cold – but almost always felt keenly as a time of dreams, perception of subtleties not so noticeable in the world of light. And the darkness of the sky was sprinkled with pinpoints of light in which the ancients could imagine their own forms and those of creatures: the night sky told stories. When the ancients created their own pinpoints of light – made fire, they told their own stories as well. This darkness of the diurnal day was fertile with life, a different kind of life. So too then, the death of the human must be a journey, like a long sleep, or an entry into a different kind of life. The plants grew above the Earth in the light, but the seeds sprouted in the dark, and emerged from there, and remained rooted in the dark to whence the plants would return. The darkness was understood to be the place of beginning – all things appeared to begin there – the womb, the Earth, the dead looking branch, the emptiness before a breath. Today Western science also suggests that the Universe itself seems to be mostly a sea of Dark Matter, out of which all emerges.
The triple dynamic of beginning, fullness and dissolution, complexifies in the web of life; the Universe itself is a display of these “primordial orderings” as Swimme and Berry describe them – and “the very existence of the universe rests on the power of these orderings”, which govern the universe’s arising “spontaneities”[i]. Swimme and Berry state that “enshrined in the Cosmogenetic Principle, is that in this universe there are entirely natural powers of form production that, when given the proper conditions, will create galaxies”[ii]. Swimme and Berry name the three aspects/themes of Cosmogenesis as differentiation, communion and autopoeisis, yet with the understanding that each face/feature really defies pinning down to “any simple one-line univocal definition”[iii]. Swimme and Berry supply a list of perceived synonyms for each, that do indeed overlap in their definitions, though each remains a distinguishable dynamic of cosmic evolution. Those synonyms are: for differentiation – “diversity, complexity, variation, disparity, multiform nature, heterogeneity, articulation”; for communion – “interrelatedness, interdependence, kinship, mutuality, internal relatedness, reciprocity, complementarity, interconnectivity and affiliation”; and for autopoeisis – “subjectivity, self-manifestation, sentience, self-organization, dynamic centres of experience, presence, identity, inner principle of being, voice, interiority”[iv]. Swimme and Berry assume that “these three will undoubtedly be deepened and altered in the next era as future experience expands our present understanding”[v].
This complexity and “fuzziness” of the terms for the evolutionary cosmic dynamics is mirrored in the metaphor of the Triple Goddess. “Fuzziness” is a term used by scientist and philosopher Vladimir Dimitrov, who describes that:
According to fuzzy set theory, the meaning of words cannot be precisely defined – each linguistic construct in use can be described by a set of ‘degrees of freedom’, i.e. ways of understanding (interpretation, transformation into actions) by individuals or groups.[vi]
And so it is for these names of the faces of the Female Metaphor. Each face has a name and distinguishable qualities, and each face can be so suitably simplified, celebrated, mythologized and embodied – absorbed and understood in a Poetic way – enabling a creative alignment of the self and/or the collective, with this Gaian Power; yet each face is “impregnated with virtual meaning that provide space for extension, elaboration and negotiation …” as Dimitrov describes in reference to “fuzzy concepts”[vii]. Just so, is each embodied face of the Female Metaphor – a deep dynamic, a “primordial ordering” of being.
As Charlene Spretnak affirms in States of Grace,
we exist as participants in the greatest ritual: the cosmic ceremony of seasonal and diurnal rhythms framing epochal dramas of becoming …
and further,
When people gather in a group to create ritual, they form a unitive body, a microcosmos of differentiation, subjectivity and deep communion[viii].
We may with practice – of a religious kind, as in a connecting kind – embody consciously, and grow into, our Earthly and Cosmic nature. This microcosmos – that we each are and that we may collectively express – of differentiation, subjectivity[ix] and communion are three faces of Gaia’s Cosmic method of Creativity, used everyday on planet Earth and throughout time and space in Her ever-transforming Cosmogenesis. In my Poetic Search, I have associated these three faces of Cosmogenesis with the three faces of the Female Metaphor – the three faces that the ancients noticed reiterated all around them. The dynamic was everywhere and the ancients – scientists in their observation of the world, of which they felt a part, noticed its dimensions.
NOTES:
[i] Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story, p.72.
[ii] Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story, p.70.
[iii] Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story, p.70.
[iv] Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story, p.71-72.
[v] Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story, p.72.
[vi] Vladimir Dimitrov, “Fuzzy Logic in Service to a Better World: the Social Dimensions of Fuzzy Sets”, in Complexity, Organisations, Fuzziness, p.3. Also see Introduction to Fuzziology
[vii] Vladimir Dimitrov, “Fuzzy Logic in Service to a Better World: the Social Dimensions of Fuzzy Sets”, in Complexity, Organisations, Fuzziness, p.5
[viii] Charlene Spretnak, States of Grace, p.145.
[ix] Swimme and Berry have at an earlier time, named the “autopoeisis” face of Cosmogenesis as “subjectivity”. By time they wrote The Universe Story they had changed the name to “autopoeisis”.
References:
Dimitrov, Vladimir. Introduction to Fuzziology. Lulu.com, 2005.
Dimitrov, Vladimir and Hodge, Bob. Social Fuzziology: Study of Fuizziness of Social Complexity. Physica-Verlag, 2005.
Getty, Adele. Goddess: Mother of Living Nature. London: Thames and Hudson, 1990.
Spretnak, Charlene. States of Grace: The Recovery of Meaning in the Postmodern Age. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993.
Swimme, Brian and Berry, Thomas. The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.