“Under the new rules set out by patriarchy, rape was seen as a good thing, so the spirit of the Sacred Feminine receded underground. Her only defence, as she retreated, was Medusa, with her halo – a writhing mass of my venomous sisters, turning men to stone. The Goddesses sought refuge in their antediluvian caves and subterranean temples, retreating back to their womb tombs and into the fissures and primordial streams, dormant but not defeated.”
“The Earth was thrown out of balance as patriarchy marshalled and took revenge against the matriarch. Meanwhile your sisters, who were left above ground, were forced to veil their beautiful faces, live in shame, or endure a schizophrenic existence as appendage to man.
You became demons with menstrual cycles. Unclean. Your life giving power was trivialised.
Your herbal knowledge was incinerated by fire and iron, in the battle for medicinal supremacy, as Animist wisdom and Shamanic knowing were crushed by patriarchal alchemy, that saw healing plants replaced with toxins such as mercury. As mining, to extract metals and chemicals, escalated to an industrial and unsustainable scale, children were exploited for labour and Mother Earth shook and rumbled. They blew up your caves and pretended it was by accident. They desecrated your temples, chiselled the faces off your Goddesses, rewrote your history and stole your creation myths.”
“The patriarch wrenched all the power away from Mother Earth and her Goddesses and put one single male god, sitting in judgement, in the sky. Hierarchy was established. Yet amidst all this turmoil the seed of the Divine Feminine remained underground, gathering strength.”
I watch, mesmerised, as Sophia spirals her ophidian tail around a plump, red cherry, plucking at the stalk. She offers it to me and I can’t help feeling this symbolic picking represents the ‘forbidden’ fruit from the Tree Of Knowledge.
“I want to know your story, the story of the Goddess,” I murmur, biting into succulent flesh.
“All you have to do is dig in the right place,” she answers. “Plunge your hands into the soil, deep into Mother Earth and dig up your ancestral mothers – there’s thousands of them. They take the form of seeds, primordial knowing and deities – voluptuous, corpulent, nourishing, self regenerating and soporific deities.
Always remember, She – the Goddess – is the progenitrix, the ultimate creator. Her history is buried beneath mosques and churches, hidden within legend, in rock art, in language, embedded in the walls of ancient civilisations.
“Women should realign with nature and rekindle their connection with the tides, to gather strength.
“Ritual, mantra, the moonlight, pulsating dance, music, drumming, trance and kindness will become your powerful tools, once more.
The Sacred Goddess is the cosmos, the Earth, all animals, the air we breathe. She is all elements, the things we say, the energy of thought.
She doesn’t need to conquer mountains, stick flags in the ground to gain approval – She is the mountain… and Everest isn’t called Everest, She is called Chomolangma – the Goddess Mother!”
“So what of the snake?” I ask. “Where did your pre-historic, silken, muscular, serpent wisdom go? Was it lost when Medusa was savagely beheaded? Did it happen when Eve was demonised and cast out of Eden? Or was it lost when Eve’s Wisdom Serpent was so brutally dislimbed?”
“There’s that wonderful word: chthonic inhabiting the underworld,” replies Sophia.
“Just like Pythia, who sat on her tripod over a fissure in the Earth, to tap into Earth Mother wisdom, we serpents are conduits to the wisdom of the underworld – we connect with the ancestors – call us sinewy, python-esque umbilical cords, stretching right into the heart of the Earth. Just like the Goddess and her cycles of birth, death and rebirth, we snakes regenerate. We shed our skins and each time we transform there are new possibilities. As the seed of the Goddess goes through its healing 4,000 year cycle, deep underground, our Grandmother Serpent is incubating Her agamogenesistic egg.”
“Agamogenesistic?” I quiz, raising one eyebrow.
“You know what I mean!” snaps Sophia, “self fertilising…..no need for sperm!”
“Ooo do you think that is why patriarchy invented snake envy?” I tease.
“Sssssnake envy is one of the most ridiculous concoctions of modern psychology,” Sophia hisses. “Women never, ever had snake envy. Men did!”
“On a more serious note, men are not the issue; it’s the patriarchal mindset and its wanton destruction of Mother Earth that is causing all our problems. Blame is not the solution, however, when tens of thousands of people are displaced, turned into refugees, as this pandemic rages and millions of children are protesting crimes against the biosphere, with banners that read, ‘’YOU’RE GONNA KILL US,” we know we have a big problem!”
“Here’s a thought,” adds Sophia, spiraling down the tree trunk, skin flashing like a nacreous mosaic. “Did you ever think that one of the amazing things about the energetic shift, that has already been set in motion, is that it could give rise to the Divine Masculine?”
“WOAH!” I’m stunned into silence – quite blown away. I’d been so wrapped up in thoughts of the Divine Feminine I had completely overlooked the possibility there could be a Divine Masculine.
“By Divine Masculine I don’t mean a repeat of the Old and New Biblical millennia. This will be something quite different.”
“You mean like men who weep when trees are cut down.” I say.
“Weeeell, yeeees and noooo,” fizzes Sophia, shedding her skin, sloughing it on the bark with each rotation, as she zigzags down the cherry tree. As her skin detaches she is growing in size and stature.
“As the Earth falls victim to man made chaos, waste, poison and mass extinctions, as he encroaches into sacred territories, battling with indigenous peoples – Earth protectors – people who have always lived in harmony with their environment – zoonotic diseases will be liberated.”
“Humanity needs to learn that money will be of no use when the last tree has died and the last fish is gone. Even as the clock ticks to midnight, new beginnings are about to bud – made all the more possible when the seeds of transformation are watered with resistance.”
(To be continued)
Part 3
Sophia has metamorphosised, from a slip of a viper, into a full grown python, patterned like a jaguar, coiling her visceral snake body around my ankle. She is immensely strong and I can feel her grip tighten.
“Come down into the underworld with me,” she purrs, flipping me over as her sinews flex. She pulls me, head first, into a cavern beneath the roots of the cherry tree.
The earth smells of petrichor – organic and fertile – and even though I’m plunging through the top soil, I feel weightless. I sense this is a sacred journey and I’m following in the footsteps of the enlightened.
Inanna made this journey, so did Persephone. Dante wrote an epic poem about it. The game Snakes and Ladders is about it, and countless Romans descended into rock carved warrens to consult with priestesses – conduits to underworld consciousness – who sat over vents, breathing in the Earth’s vapours.
“Even Alice went down a rabbit h-o-l-e,” I shriek, as we descend through the sub strata; past tree roots and rabbit warrens; past dormant seeds; past remnants of lost civilisations. We pass forgotten knowledge waiting to be rediscovered and stored up energy waiting to be released. I can feel the pulse of the Earth strengthen the deeper we go. As we descend I become unburdened – unlearning lifetimes of conditioning, stripping back to the essential essence of who I am and how I’m supposed to feel – light and free.
We arrive at the agamogenesistic egg (there’s that word again!) – the divine consciousness – the transcendent heart of the Goddess – the primordial seed of knowing, at the Earth’s core. It is iridescent like an opal, spherical like the moon and although it has no density you can’t pass through it. Probably the best description I can give is to say it is like infinity; a ball of nacreous consciousness; a living, regenerative, breathing, crystal super brain, programmed with awareness; a matrix pulse of past, present and future nothingness; but it really is much more than that. If singing had density it would be like this.
Sophia introduces me to the Grandmother Serpent, a sixty metre long, guardian, boa-constrictor who is coiled around the primordial egg. I am dumbstruck.
“This is….” Sophia pauses, apologetic as she introduces me, “you know what, in all of this, I forgot to ask your name!”
In this moment I also forget my name. I open my mouth but nothing comes out.
“Can we give you a name then?” asks Grandmother Serpent.
I move my lips and still no words come out.
“Let’s call her Hekate,” says the Grandmother as she nudges me towards the seed of all creation. “Go on Hekate. Lie on it.”
I lean my forehead on the giant ball of infinite knowingness and experience peace and connection like I’d never known before. There is an exchange of joy, so simple in its purity. Gone are any clouds of negative emotion – there is just joy…. yes joy is what this feeling is – ecstasy – probably what the vedic sages would describe as Bliss.
So I’m leaning on the primordial egg in a state of Bliss when I become aware that a masculine entity has arrived. He wants a piece of the action and starts to lean into the egg. I recognise him as the menacing and brutish Hades, god of the underworld and rapist who abducted Persephone. I resent his presence, all the more because this rapist was immortalised by patriarchy. He has gnarled old horns, leathery hooves in place of feet, a vestigal tail, and his beard is charred and black and emits a pulse like a geiger counter, programmed to seek out victims.
He grabs my fingers and we are locked in a battle of wills, knuckle to knuckle, across the surface of the primordial knowingness, until a crack appears.
Eventually my flame-thrower will, which is stronger than his, shatters the egg and it breaks in two. As we cling to separate halves, the egg sheds a tear and the Bliss is gone. The tear becomes a gushing torrent, sweeping us up as supernatural forces turn us into water. The battle of wills has left us exhausted – dehydrated too – and in the confusion we drink ourselves until our egos fade away and then we find we are whole and pure again.
The Grandmother Serpent spirals back around the primordial egg, like a giant bandage.
“I will hold the two halves together until they heal,” she says.
“You’ve done good Hekate.” Sophia is praising me. “You have transformed Hades into the Divine Masculine, Shiva’s spark, by disabling his reptilian brain, where the primitive and aggressive reflexes are. Now you can both rise to the surface.”
“How do we do that?” we ask.
“It’s simple,” replies Sophia, “Just strap on what we call the Isis jet pack.”
I raise one eyebrow quizzically.
“You must have heard of Isis,” thunders the Grandmother, “the Egyptian Moon Goddess who is depicted as a cobra or as a divine winged creature. Wings and Snake. What does this combination remind you of? Come on, its obvious!”.
“She is what the vedic sages would call a Kundalini Goddess,” Sophia butts in.
“To rise to the surface: release the three and a half coils of serpent power that resides in the base of your spine. Let this Sacred Feminine energy – primordial life force – rise through your chakras, then let the rising Kundalini propel you upwards.”
We are back on terra firma, and I’m amazed I have been instrumental in bringing the Divine Masculine – a defeated, rinsed and purified Hades – back to the surface of the Earth. And here we both stand under my cherry tree – the carmine temple to fertility and disintegration and regeneration, that I planted forty years ago.
“Would you Adam and Eve it!”
(Cockney English Rhyming Slang for “would you believe it!”)
How the story of the epoque of the Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine unfolds is yet to be seen. All we know is that patriarchy has left the planet in such a mess that it is going to take a joining of forces to remedy the chaos they have created.
And what about me? After Hades lost his horns and seeped away from the cherry tree in the form of mist, I became immortalised in chalk.
I earned my place on the facade of Chalk Horse Hill, in the form of a calciferous pebble, that I placed on what most people refer to as the White Horse – a giant stylised creature, standing out white against the grass, that can be seen from miles away. Just to let you know, it isn’t a horse, it’s a Were-Serpent – a shape shifter – disguised as a SHE horse, carved into the chalk by neolithic women, to celebrate their relationship with the wise, chthonic serpent.
Like me, these hot, truth seeking, dragon women had sought wisdom by incinerating their way through illusion, with flashes of heat. They too had been through the portal and met the Divine Feminine. These shakti women have been gathering for ceremony and ritual near the Were-Snake for over 5,000 years. Sometime in the Middle Ages the patriarch deemed the warrior spirit and sagacity of these flame thrower women to be troublesome, so they hired a band of mercenaries to murder them and level their mound of Earth secrets.
The scribes wrote it into legend that it was a dangerous dragon they had killed. It wasn’t. It was menopausal women. In the words of Mark Twain, ‘The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.’ This scenario has replayed throughout history as maiden, mother and crone, but mostly crone, were murdered under the pretext of the witch hunts.
The chalk Were-Snake, with legs, which is mistaken for a horse, has a wavy serpentine body, a forked tongue and a viper’s head. The V behind the head is symbolic of both the Viper and the Vulva. The Vulva sign means this serpent is female, V being symbolic of the Divine Feminine and Her cosmic energy which manifests as it spirals downwards.
We dragon women don’t mind if the Were-Serpent is mistaken for a horse as it means the Divine Feminine survived patriarchy, because she was in disguise, hiding in plain sight. She can always be found if you know where to look. The Divine Feminine never went away, She merely receded into nature and just like the a seed, is poised to germinate.
Declaration. This story is fictitious and any similarities to any actual persons, monuments and legends is purely coincidental.
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About Claire Dorey
Published in, Warrior Queen; Answering The Call Of The Morrigan – The Girl God Books, 2021: A Shriek Goddessy and Eel Kundalini, St Patriarch and the Wide Sargasso Sea – words and images
Published in, She Who Summons – Mago Books, 2021: The Seed Who Summons – words and images
Published in, In Defiance of Oppression – The Legacy of Boudicea – The Girl God Books: When The Colour Of Emotion Floods The Nervous System. Earth Mothers and daughters surviving invasion and the stereotypes of misogyny.
Accepted for publication in, Re-Membering with Goddess: Healing the Patriarchal Perpetuation of Trauma – The Girl God Books: Revolutions Of Defiant Ecstasy: Stealing Kali And Goddess Wisdom From The Primordial Wave Of Feminism.
Accepted for publication in, The Crone Initiation and Invitation: Women speak on the Menopause Journey – The Girl God Books: Fat is a Goddess Issue – Gateway to Khaos and Reframing the Menopause.
[Editor’s Note: This piece is included in She Summons: Why… Goddess Feminism, Activism and Spirituality?” Volume 1 (Mago Books, 2021).]
