This essay is an excerpt from the Introduction of the author’s new book A Poiesis of the Creative Cosmos: Celebrating Her within PaGaian Sacred Ceremony.
At the heart of PaGaian Cosmology is the re-storying and expression of Goddess metaphor for the sacred: it was She who called me – into Her, to learn of Her, to find a way to speak of Her. This cosmology is originally a study and embodiment of Goddess in three qualities – often known commonly as “Virgin, Mother and Crone,” but globally She has been named and praised in various terms: such as possessing the three qualities of ‘preserver/protector,’ ‘creative power,’ and ‘destructive power’ (Kali in India); or in other ancient depictions the three qualities are represented perhaps with grain, sword and snake (Hecate in Greece); perhaps with grain, throne and scorpion (Anatha of Egypt); perhaps as poet, physician and smith-artisan as in the case of Celtic Brigid. Sometimes She has been represented as three matrons (Germany and Italy). In East Asia, there are many triplicities and triads: in Korea Mago, the Creatrix, is identified with Samsin (Triad Deity) and also Goma is referred to as one of the “Three Sages.”[i] In South America, the Goddess Chia is known as a triple goddess.
In our times She and Her multivalent dimensions have rarely been understood, and frequently Her triplicity has been re-configured as three sages or kings; and in some religions She has been replaced with an all-male trinity. Yet many continued to seek Her.
The Form and the Shape that they sought
was not in any Atlas.
Her gaps had been covered up,
Her hollows filled in,
Her name blanked out.
She lay buried beneath things, silent,
but with a detectable visceral pulse.[ii]
Re-Storying Goddess for me has meant re-storing a sense of She to the Cosmos, restoring female sacrality – to the small particular self to begin with, and to other, and to all-that-is: re-storingHer as Language, as sacred language – image and word – for the Creative Dynamic that unfolds the Universe. Why not? She has been absent for so long. And what might happen then? What difference might it make to the world we live in?
The primary Place that She, Mother-Universe, may be sensed as present, is in one’s own bodymind, the breath, the whole phenomena of its ebbs and flows: and the breath may be the primary place for contemplating Her three aspects of waxing, peaking and waning – out of the void and back into it, over and over. A lot of inhabitants of Western industrialised culture have been turned into outsiders in our own land[iii] – and I mean primarily the ‘land’ of our own bodyminds, but it is also and inseparably true of the Earth land/country in which we dwell. In the patriarchal context, which dominates most present global cultures, this is particularly true for women. We are often (or have been) outsiders in our own land – the Land of our own bodyminds: the female in particular, by and large, at some point in the story, lost native title to her land. Most of us – female and male and all variations, have learned well how to think from outside ourselves: and with a consciousness that treats ourselves personally and thus usually also others, as less than worthy of reverence. Women particularly have been and are a colonized people: that is, female embodiment has become the unknown, unspoken, clouded continent in most present global cultures. An overwhelming majority of females on the planet are engaged in a daily claiming or re-claiming of our native en-titlement to our land, our bodymind: the details vary from culture to culture, and situation, and is more extreme/blatant in some contexts, but the overall effect is common, and ultimately shared.
As Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, in the late nineteenth century, it is not female biology that has betrayed us, but the beliefs and the stories we have about ourselves. Most of the religious stories that most on the globe grew up with at this time, did not have the female in care-ful mind. Most world religions at this point in time still specifically story the female as problematic to creation or enlightenment or whatever, or at least secondary: though some are clever enough to attempt to disguise it. The term ‘God’ still commonly invokes the ‘Face of Ultimate Reality,’ the Absolute, and the term ‘Goddess’ still overwhelmingly invokes a mere mythological entity.
‘Goddess,’ or ‘God,’ is metaphor, a poetic image – suggesting a likeness of femaleness or maleness in the Sacred/Deity. According to the Webster’s Dictionary, a metaphor is a word or phrase used to suggest a likeness. ‘Goddess’ is a figure of speech suggesting a likeness of femaleness in the Deity – few would argue with that: though many do argue that ‘God’ does not suggest a likeness of maleness in the Deity, that it/He is neutral or may represent both, whereas Goddess may not. Some cultures don’t need the word ‘God’ nor do some need the word ‘Goddess’ because female sacrality is not a problem – femaleness in such cultures, is understood to embody transformatory powers[iv] – and replicates the very nature/essence of the Cosmos: birthing, lactating, conceiving, gestating are understood as cosmic transformatory, regenerative powers. And all genders in such cultures find purpose in supporting regenerative capacities.
The texts we choose for our lives create the texture, the context – when we choose a story for our lives, or accept a pre-scribed one, it lives us. There is a cosmology in our everyday speech and action. Re-storying Goddess, and celebrating Her in Seasonal Moments however they manifest in your region, may participate in the process of scribing one’s self, authoring one’s self, at the deepest level, and re-storying the regenerative Universe as She.
When I speak of ‘Goddess,’ I mean Her as a totality – not a ‘Feminine’ PART of the Sacred. ‘Goddess’ may be metaphor for Ultimate Creativity – the Sacred Cosmos … and in three qualities of Her Unfolding, in Her Cosmogenesis: that is,
- as ever-new differentiated being
- in infinite full communion/relatedness
- and with constant transformation within Her sentient Self.
… three qualities that may be sensed multivalently, a triplicity implicit within the creative Cosmos.[v] Brian Swimme named the three qualities of Cosmogenesis,[vi] as “cosmic grammar:”[vii] that is, as I might say it, “this is how She speaks.” The whole Cosmos is Her expression, Her unfolding Body, in never-ending renewal.
She may be re-storied to that integrity in our hearts and minds. Then one Enters (becomes en-tranced with) the richness and magic of this Cosmic Dynamic of Creativity, who is embodied and embedded in all being. She is the seamless sacred Matter, Mother, Materia, Madre, whom we are.
NOTES:
[i] Helen Hye-Sook Hwang is doing much original research of the Magoist Cosmogony. According to Hwang, the number three is an epitome of musically charged nine numbers (3×3). Thus, the triad symbol encoded the metamorphic force of the universe or matriverse, a term coined by Hwang. See The Mago Way: Re-discovering Mago, the Great Goddess from East Asia, Volume 1 (Mago Books, 2015), particularly chapters 6, 7, and 8. See also “Unveiling an Ancient Sill Korean Testimony to the Mother World: An Introductory Discussion of the Budoji (Epic of the Emblem Capital City), the Principal Text of Magoism” in S/HE: An International Journal of Goddess Studies 1 (2, 2022): 22-50. For the three sages, see “Goma, the Shaman Ruler of Old Magoist East Asia/Korea, and Her Mythology”, in Goddesses in Myth, History, and Culture (Lytle Creek: Mago Books, 2018), 257-270.
[ii] Poem by Glenys Livingstone, 1998.
[iii] I will speak primarily out of my own cultural context, though dualism and alienation from bodymind may be identified cross-culturally.
[iv] This is a term used by Melissa Raphael, in Thealogy and Embodiment: the Post-Patriarchal Reconstruction of Female Sexuality (Sheffield: Sheffield Press, 1996).
[v] Caitlin Matthews refers to this “innate triplicity” in “The Triskele of Energy,” The Celtic Spirit (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2000), 366, and to its essential nature in “The Threefold,” The Celtic Spirit, 138.
[vi] Swimme and Berry describe these qualities in The Universe Story (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 66-79. I develop these qualities later.
[vii] Swimme, Canticle to the Cosmos (DVD series, CA: Tides Foundation,1990), program 4, “The Fundamental Order of the Universe.”