This essay is an edited excerpt from Chapter 10 of the author’s new book A Poiesis of the Creative Cosmos: Celebrating Her within PaGaian Sacred Ceremony.
Southern Hemisphere – Feb. 1st/2nd,
Northern Hemisphere – August 1st/2nd
These dates are traditional, though the actual astronomical date varies. It is the meridian point or cross-quarter day between Summer Solstice and Autumn Equinox, thus actually a little later in early February for S.H., and early August for N.H., respectively.
The Old One, the Dark and Shining One, has been much maligned, so to celebrate Her can be more of a challenge in our present cultural context. Lammas may be an opportunity to re-aquaint ourselves with the Crone in her purity, to fall in love with Her again, to celebrate She Who creates the Space to Be.
Lammas is a welcoming of the Dark in all its complexity: and as with any funerary moment, there is celebration of the life lived (enjoyment of the harvest) – a “wake,” and there is grieving for the loss. One may fear it, which is good reason to make ceremony, to go deeper, to commit to the Mother, who is the Deep; to “make sacred” this emotion, as much as one may celebrate the hope and wonder of Spring, its opposite. If Imbolc/Early Spring is a nurturing of new young life, Lammas may be a nurturing/midwifing of death or dying to small self, the assent to larger self, an expansion or dissipation – further to the radiance of Summer Solstice. Whereas Imbolc is a Bridal commitment to being and form, where we are the Promise of Life; Lammas may be felt as a commitment marriage to the Dark within, as we accept the Harvest of that Promise, the cutting of it. We remember that the Promise is returned to Source. “The forces which began to rise out of the Earth at the festival of Bride now return at Lammas.”[i]
Creativity is called forth when an end (or impasse) is reached: we can no longer rely on our small self to carry it off. We may call Her forth, this Creative Wise Dark One – of the Ages, when our ways no longer work.
We are not individuals, though we often think we are. We are Larger Self, subjects within theSubject.[ii] And this is a joyful thing. We do experience ourselves as individuals and we celebrate that creativity at Imbolc. Lammas is the time for celebrating the fact that we are part of, in the context of, a Larger Organism, and expanding into that. Death will teach us that, but we don’t have to wait – it is happening around us all the time, we are constantly immersed in the process, and everyday creativity is sourced in this subjectivity.
As it is said, She is “that which is attained at the end of Desire:”[iii] the same Desire we celebrated at Beltaine, has peaked at Summer and is now dissolving form, returning to Source to nourish the Plenum, the manifesting – as all form does. This Seasonal Moment of Lammas/Late Summer celebrates the beginning of dismantling, de-structuring. Gaia-Universe has done a lot of this de-structuring – it is in Her nature to return all to the “Sentient Soup” … nothing is wasted. We recall the Dark Sentience, the “All-Nourishing Abyss”[iv] at the base of being, as we enter this dark part of the cycle of the year. This Dark/Deep at the base of being, to whom we are returned, may be understood as the Sentience within all – within the entire Universe. The dictionary definition of sentience is: “intelligence,” “feeling,” “the readiness to receive sensation, idea or image; unstructured available consciousness,” “a state of elementary or undifferentiated consciousness.”[v]
The Old Wise One is the aspect of the Cosmic Triplicity/Triple Goddess that returns us to this sentience, the Great Subject out of whom we arise. We are subjects within the Great Subject – the sentient Universe; we are not a collection of objects, as Thomas Berry has said.[vi] This sentience within, this “readiness-to-receive,” is a dark space, as all places of ending and beginning are. Mystics of all religious traditions have understood the quintessential darkness of the Divinity, known often as the Abyss. Goddesses such as Nammu and Tiamat, Aditi and Kali, are the anthropomorphic forms of this Abyss/Sea of Darkness that existed before creation. She is really the Matrix of the Universe. This sentience is ever present and dynamic. It could be understood as the dark matter that is now recognized to form most of the Universe. This may be recognized as Her “Cauldron of Creativity” and celebrated at this Lammas Moment. Her Cauldron of Creativity is the constant flux of all form in the Universe – all matter is constantly transforming. We are constantly transforming on every level.
These times that we find ourselves in have been storied as the Age of Kali, the Age of Caillaech – the Age of the Crone. There is much that is being turned over, much that will be dismantled. We are in the midst of the revealing of compost, and transformation – social, cultural, and geophysical. Kali is not a pretty one – but we trust She is transformer, and creative in the long term. She has a good track record. Our main problem is that we tend to take it personally.
The Crone – the Old Phase of the cycle, creates the Space to Be. Lammas is the particular celebration of the beauty of this awesome One. She is symbolized and expressed in the image of the waning moon, which is filling with darkness. She is the nurturant darkness that may fill your being, comfort the sentience in you, that will eventually allow new constellations to gestate in you, renew you. So the focus in ceremony may be to contemplate opening to Her, noticing our fears and our hopes involved in that. She is the Great Receiver – receives all, and as such She is the Great Compassionate One. Her Darkness may be understood as a Depth of Love. And She is Compassionate because of Her dismantling … where we may not have the will. We may want to be ever fresh, ever new, yet it is not possible without the Wise Old One, who will mercifully shake us loose from our tracks. Often we have only feared Her. Sometimes the changes that need to be made are awesome … we would not have chosen them, but they serve us deeply. The Zen Buddhist tradition speaks of the “tiger’s kindness,” that is, we want to change, but may not have the will. (The tiger fears the human heart, the human fears the tiger’s kindness).[vii]
This Seasonal Moment is about trusting and rejoicing in the kindness and Creativity of the Dark – knowing it is centrally part of us and we are part of it. Loren Eiseley describes his pulse as “a minute pulse like the eternal pulse that lifts Himalayas and which, in the following systole, will carry them away.”[viii] Our organisms are constantly a microcosm of the cataclysmic transformations of Gaia – transformations that allow the life of the organism to go on, be that our small self or that of the Large Self of Earth or the Universe.
NOTES:
[i] McLean, The Four Fire Festivals, 22.
[ii] As Thomas Berry has described the situation of being, in talks he has given.
[iii] Doreen Valiente, “The Charge of the Goddess” cited in Starhawk, The Spiral Dance, 103.
[iv] Swimme, The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos, Chapter 13.
[v] Webster’s Third International Dictionary of the English Language.
[vi] Berry, Evening Thoughts, 149.
[vii] Susan Murphy, upside-down zen: a direct path into reality (Melbourne: Lothian, 2004), 89-93.
[viii] Eiseley, The Immense Journey, 20.
References:
Berry, Thomas. Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community, edited by Mary Evelyn Tucker. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2006.
Eiseley, Loren. The Immense Journey. New York: Vintage Books, 1957.
Livingstone, Glenys. A Poiesis of the Creative Cosmos: Celebrating Her within PaGaian Sacred Ceremony. Girl God Books: Bergen, Norway, 2023.
McLean, Adam. The Four Fire Festivals. Edinburgh: Megalithic Research Publications, 1979.
Murphy, Susan. upside-down zen: a direct path into reality. Melbourne: Lothian, 2004.
Starhawk. The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. New York: Harper and Row, 1999.
Swimme, Brian. The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos. New York: Orbis, 1996.
Webster’s Third International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1986.