June 21, 2024June 18, 2024 Mago WorkLeave a comment

(Book Review) Marguerite Mary Rigoglioso’s The Secret Life of Mother Mary: Divine Feminine Power For Personal Healing and Planetary Awakening by Mary Saracino

The Secret Life of Mother Mary: Divine Feminine Power For Personal Healing and Planetary Awakening, Marguerite Mary Rigoglioso, PhD (Bear & Company, July 2024); https://www.innertraditions.com/books/the-secret-life-of-mother-mary Reviewed by Mary Saracino Marguerite Read More …

(Mosaic Art Essay) Mary Magdalene, from the Shadows and into the Light by Lilian Broca

This is my fourth series of art works based on myth and biblical stories that impart models of human behaviour. For many years I had been inspired by mythological stories, as they speak of, in the words of Mircea Eliade, the eminent Romanian scholar of religious studies, the eternal aspects of life such as love, beauty and heroism, all of them giving great value and profound meaning to life. Over the last two decades, as our society sees rapid technology advancement, a large number of artists have been turning to computers for inspiration creating mostly abstract art. However, after all this time of computer generated artworks I believe that now there is a need for the return to a more humanist approach to art and the artistic experience. This type of art satisfies our emotional and spiritual needs, a tradition that spans many centuries. Its insightful and invaluable aspects contributed immensely to the advancement of civilization. Today when we enter museums and view the art work, we imagine and appreciate those long gone artists painting, printing or carving, with diligence and with reverence. In creating mosaics with a humanist outlook, aside from the emotional and spiritual nourishment gained, I am also able to convey my respect for the preceding centuries of artistic output; moreover, the humanist approach provides another means of viewing narratives in art, another window into the soul without relying on the written word. A great deal of research was required in order to understand and execute mosaics for the present series highlighting the biblical figure, Mary Magdalene. As with the previous series, I did not consider the historicity of the biblical figures I chose to work with in the Mary Magdalene series. I regard biblical and apocryphal stories in my research as mythology; consequently, as mythological female figures, my protagonists become essential archetypes for the role models needed in maintaining a balanced and healthy society. In the last 2,000 years we have been offered almost exclusively masculine achievements immortalized in mosaics and other permanent materials as heroes and hence role models, an aspect totally detrimental to women. In order to render the female experience equal in cultural and perhaps even in religious value to that of the male, I offer the veneration and acceptability of Mary Magdalene equal to the profuse and extravagant representation of male heroes in mosaic art seen throughout the ages. This was achieved by using monumental sizes for my mosaic panels and costly material for their execution, such as hand-made Venetian glass, gold and semiprecious stones. Dr. Angela Clarke, the curator of this Mary Magdalene mosaic exhibition, writes in her essay “Breaking Down Barriers: Antiquity and Post Modernity:” In art history and literature discourse the work of women artists and women’s stories are always associated with the intimate and the small, as if they dare not take up valuable space and time. Broca expressly desires that these stories of women should take up space, time and even more room should be made for female achievement in future. By telling these stories of ancient heroic women in monumental media she demands space for diversity of opinion. Most importantly she wants to construct a history which reveals to future generations that the voice and face of history is not entirely a masculine one, even in the militarized world of antiquity.[1] In my previous narrative mosaic series on biblical Queen Esther and apocryphal Judith, I clearly depicted the tactics used by these two wise and courageous, young female heroines. Youth was the only window of opportunity for all women in ancient times if they were to use their feminine beauty to achieve a desired goal. During that strategic but narrow window, beautiful Esther and Judith employed the only weapon they possessed—female sexuality—in their fight for survival for themselves and for their community. Unlike them in many respects, yet equally courageous, loyal and determined, Mary Magdalene survived not only fierce enemies wishing her harm once Yeshua or Jesus died on the cross, but also the ensuing 2,000 years of denigration, defamation and vilification. I chose Mary Magdalene as the series’ protagonist because she qualifies for the courageous woman who left her sanctuary, her family home, to follow a single man without a fixed address or a permanent job, travelling the country accompanied by 12 other men, teaching God’s words. She joined Jesus and followed Him despite being a single female living in a patriarchal society when women were in general terms treated as lesser mortals with few of the privileges bestowed on men. By leaving behind her family and her comfort zone, Mary Magdalene showed a sense of independence and self-assurance rarely found in women of her time. At the start of this new Mary Magdalene mosaic series, as usual, extensive research came first. Eight months of reading on the subject even before I began sketching, provided me with one of several versions of this ancient story that I decided to explore. While the canonical Gospels portray Mary Magdalene as the repentant sinner who abandons her wicked ways to follow Yeshua, or Jesus, several Gnostic writings, usually dated to 2nd and 3rd centuries, paint a drastically different picture of her. These depict Mariam (Mary) as Yeshua’s most beloved disciple, as his rightful successor and even as a potential wife. In addition, it is written that she was endowed with knowledge, vision and insight far exceeding that of the Twelve Disciples. The Gnostic Gospel of Philip names Mary Magdalene as Jesus’ companion; Gnostic writings also describe tensions and jealousy between Peter and Mary Magdalene, as well as between her and the other disciples. Deciding on which scenes would best portray Mary Magdalene as the protagonist and the job of hiring live models, followed. At this point another very important aspect of a cohesive series of works had to be decided on, namely, the common motif which appears in every mosaic. This unifying motif acts as a visible continuity in all the panels, a consistency and connection of …
(Essay 1) Future of Identity: Reclaiming the Northern Pagan Tradition by Jillian Burnett

Art by Jillian Burnett A thousand years of cultural genocide has only ignitied the needs for self-actualization, personal mastery, community, acknowledgement of ancestry, and cultural identity. Born from the ashes of failed indoctrination by Christianity and dominant cultural hegemony, the sleepers are now awake. Today’s heathens look to the past to establish the present. The social, cultural and political realms inherited by today’s post-industrial economic sphere and monolithic modernism express that tradition is dead. Those linear thinking, empirically driven, state-sanctioned, quantifiably-standardized objective orthodoxy ways—are rejected. Today’s Northern pagan looks to reclaim all significance of their cultural ethos—shaping modern life. More than ever folk look to their past to establish the present. The first half of this literary endeavor will explore the aspects of causes and effects of the coming together of the Northern pagans. The second half will consider the societal repercussions. This awakening first affirms the need to regain what was lost. As pagans of today look around at their suburban lots with singularly isolating domiciles, the single most apparent thing is collective isolation; there is a stark lack of community. Continuing to perceive their immediate state they may also notice Christianity as the dominant religion and worldview. This is not just a matter of evangelism—the typical establishment of thought and social hierarchy comes with it; from capitalism to patriarchy. Everything from social policy, maternity leave and seniority in hirings are baked into the economic fabric of the workplace. Even though paganism can be seen as a ‘religion,’ it is a body politic. The individual members are a network—loosely connected. And though there commonly are no shrines nor temples as of yet, the days of church going society are over. The power of the Christian faith is waning. As such a new collective is needed for the gathering of those connected by ancestry, belief, and commonality in goal. The like-minded northern pagans may come together with at the very least a shared sense of identity which can translate into solidarity. For the northern tradition, there is a resurgence in the Anglo-Saxon tradition as well as Norse paganism. This connects people to their ancestral mythology, symbolism and traditions. That will include their ancient songs, clothing, recipes and beliefs from pre-Christian times. The exoteric culture that the folk can embody through living practices day-today. At the esoteric core of these practices is the engagement of the pantheon of the northern pagan cosmology and their gods, the Aesir and Vanir. As the folk bring their awareness and attention to their own culture and ways of seeing the world, the elements of their cosmology will feed into all systems, economic, social, and political; society will reshape. Northern pagans are everywhere; their borders are not just linguistic-economic domains. As history conveys, people will shift to their margin of comfort. As this movement grows, people will band together politically, voting in blocks, and making collective economic decisions. Along with revaluing cultural identity comes true connection with roots and ancestral ideas of what the world is, what phenomena signifies, and what traditions are meaningful and worth continuing. This heritage often aligns with political action to preserve and protect the customs that reflect their values. Not all pagans have precisely the same traditions; differences in views include schism along the topics of separatism, populism, globalism versus xenophobic regressive nationalism. The folk are diverse in their views but it is undeniable that in today’s global-macro monolithic culture, we have the rebirth of the tribe. Yet each tribe has the power to self-identify as well as preserve their own values and norms. Representing the small folk, or the common man, the political ideologies of populism can seem to support main street and not wall street, as is famously said. If northern pagans express their values politically and gain representation, there is a chance that global policies will become less expansionist and outwardly focused. Already there are plenty of protectionist laws surrounding immigration and visa requirements. Isolationism as a foreign policy can be seen as a way to avoid external conflict as well as focus domestically. Brexit is a great example of the conflicting virtues of balancing external and internal focus on governance, while considering trade, foreign policy and immigration. Every people and country face these questions of how much interaction they want with people who are not of their place or tribe. Looking at the Hávamál for advice, the Asgardians conquered the nine worlds with war. They made marriage and political alliances, but had hostages of family to keep peace. If the northern pagans follow the old ways, imperialism and the perpetual war fronts will continue. Some countries dollow that already. The Grimnismal and Voluspa speak of war victories, and further wars after that. Further into cosmology, Valhalla is the place where even the slain are chosen to fight again in the final battle of Ragnarok. The stories of Othinn conquering the nine worlds and of Viking expansion express one sort of solution. But also within the heart of the eddas are stories of Loki’s wiles, where he used cleverness rather than violence to solve problems. Loki’s solutions were often creative and tricky at once, finding an opening in places where things didn’t make sense or where an obvious solution wasn’t found. Northern pagans can embrace philosophies of peace and non-violence following the solutions that don’t involve a fight. Introspection and clever thinking are definitely part of conflict resolution needed in today’s times, contrasting the conquest through warfare also spoken of in the Eddas. An interesting equilibrium within the web of collective consciousness will have to be struck as the new northern pagan tribe moves to balance virtues old and new. The folk will move away from modern western thinking and come back to their own. Frustration due to lack of advocacy and representation of small groups can foment social disruptions, as was seen in the arab spring or occupy wall street or black lives matter movements. Populism has its imminent dangers, but there is no way for …
(Poem) A Prayer for Mother Earth by Mary Saracino

Red Buds in Bloom, by Mary Saracino Hail Mother full of grace The Earth is full of beauty Blessed art thou among all beings And beloved is the fruit of thy womb Holy Earth, Mother Planet Pray for us, your children Now, and at the hour of our forgetfulness So we may long remember to honor you Our home, our freedom, our glory Forever and ever Amen https://www.magoism.net/2013/05/meet-mago-contributor-mary-saracino
(She Summons Excerpt) The Seed Who Summons (Part 2) by Claire Dorey

Were Snake 2 by Claire Dorey “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 …
(Meet Mago Contributor) Annukina Warda

Annukina Warda tends to the flame of her ancestors in the dystopian wastelands of Western Sydney. She explores recollection, recovery and renewal for an Indigenous community facing mass displacement from their traditional homelands, and cultural and linguistic erasure. Using a new materialist feminist lens, Annukina Warda provokes a cultural re-emergence in a post-pandemic Anthropocene. Through the famous Assyrian myth, The Descent of Ishtar to the Underworld, Annukina grapples with the themes of memory, atra (mother-country) and loss. A long-time youth specialist, policy analyst and zine writer, Annukina uses techniques of collective storytelling, collage, and cut-and-paste decolonial map making to support a redefinition of Assyrian cultural identity on her own terms. Her passion project, the Assyrian Priestess can be found on Instagram @the_assyrian_priestess or on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/theassyrianpriestess Annukina Warda holds an Arts degree majoring in Gender and Politics and a Graduate Diploma in Education. She recently dropped out of Graduate School.
(Essay 2) Gift Giving and the Goddess, A philosophy for Social Change by Genevieve Vaughan

Meet Mago Contributor, Genevieve Vaughan. Abstract reasoning has been influenced by exchange. It is not a sui generis activity but only a complication of giftgiving and language, which has left aside or cancelled the other oriented content in order to contend with cause and effect, quantification, self reflecting consciousness and supposedly value-free (not value- giving) ‘activity’. By abstracting from giftgiving we prepare ourselves for exchange. We eliminate meaningful human relations and bonding based on giving, and separate reason from the emotions which respond to needs. Our emotional responses create the map that tells us where and what gifts to give. Basing reason as we do on the equations and categories of exchange while discrediting emotions, we find our lives are no longer ‘meaningful’. That is because meaning – in life as in language – is formed by gift giving communication. We also forget that the truth is other oriented, that it satisfies the other’s need to know, while lying is constructed according to the model of exchange, satisfying only the speakers’ own need. Our lack of honesty is also a lack of altruism and gift giving is defeated once more. Many aspects of our lives are informed by the paradigm of exchange without our realizing it. For example, justice is constructed upon the exchange model. We quantify wrong doing and impose a payment. The feeling of guilt is a kind of personal readiness to pay. We need kindness instead, for-giveness and a concentration on the needs of all the parties involved. Profit, in Marx’s sense of surplus value, is an unpaid portion of the workers’ labor, which may be considered as a leveraged gift. The system of exchange depends upon this gift for its motivation and on the many free gifts that are given to it by women’s (and some men’s) nurturing work, the sometimes laborious activity of shopping, of child care and elder care, the ‘reproduction’ of the work force. Slavery of one kind or another throughout history has provided the forced unpaid ‘extra’ that was necessary for the growth of ‘just’ and equal exchange. Presently the cheap labor and natural resources of third world countries provide a flow of gifts to the market economies of the North.
(Essay 1) The Piggly Wiggly and the Black Madonna by Mary Saracino

“The sun spun in the sky,” my father told me. “It twirled in place for a second or two. Then it stopped.” He had witnessed this miraculous phenomenon outside the Piggly Wiggly supermarket a few blocks from his house in Seneca Falls, New York. “Herbie saw it, too,” Dad added, as if mentioning his stepson-in-law would dispel any doubts I might have had about his sanity. I sat across his kitchen table as he matter-of-factly related his tale. Calmly, with eyes as clear as sunlight, he sipped his afternoon coffee and nibbled a Stella Dora wafer cookie. I was visiting from Minneapolis, returning to my hometown for a short stay. I was not unaccustomed to my father’s supernatural stories. He often talked of the numinous powers of saints and angels. He had even sworn that, as a teenager, his Guardian Angel had mysteriously dislodged a murderous chunk of crusty bread from his clenched throat. But never before had he spoken of errant suns. It didn’t spin wildly, my father insisted. The sun didn’t cartwheel over the astonished horizon or bound over billowy puffs of clouds. It wiggled quietly, the way the tail of the grocery store’s giant icon, a butcher-hat-wearing-pig, might wag in a soft breeze. “I stared right at it and my eyes weren’t injured at all,” my father attested. Until that astonishing moment it had been an afternoon like countless others. My dad and Herbie had routinely exited through the Piggly Wiggly’s automatic sliding glass doors into the hot sunshine, arms full of grocery bags, heading home to their respective wives. “Phew, it’s a scorcher,” my father might have casually remarked as he glanced up at the sweltering orb, but on this day, that rascal sun was not content to merely beat down upon their sweating heads. It danced before their dumbfounded eyes. Heat stroke, one might be tempted to scoff. Every rational adult knows that the sun can’t spin in the sky. Laws of nature notwithstanding, Herbie corroborated my dad’s story after the two men rushed home to reveal the miracle to everybody who would listen. Those chosen for the initial telling were members of the family who lived in and around the small town my father had claimed as his home for nearly sixty years. His confessors included my stepmother, Rose, Herbie’s wife MaryAnn, my brothers and my father’s brothers and sisters. Eventually the news spread to an assortment of neighbors and the priest at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church. Some believed him. Some didn’t. My father had a reputation by then of being a self-styled, modern-day mystic. Several times he had traveled to Medugorje, in what was once Yugoslavia, to visit the holy site where the Blessed Virgin Mother is said to appear. The sun spins in the sky there, too, when She is present, and people are able to stare directly into it, without harming their eyes, without the aid of sunglasses or pinhole viewing devices. The Blessed Mother’s divine powers shield and protect the retinas of staunch believers.
(Pandemic Poem 11) Dreaming the New Dream by Jyoti Wind

Colorado Sunset, Boulder CO. Photo by Jyoti Wind The coloring has come outside the lines. Those hard line definitions are blurring, softening, making more room for new possibilities, new terms, new words. New pictures are forming on the inside. As they emerge, engaging the emotions, not just the mind, we move closer to wholeness, dreaming the new dream. https://www.magoism.net/2020/08/meet-mago-contributor-jyoti-wind/
(Art poem) In The Line Of Divinity by Kushal Poddar

Her eyes belong to the god of green, And every time she blinks the hue pinned Inside pierces her iris. Her hands, However, work for the god of metal. His ribcage slides ahead Down the assembly-line.
(Book Excerpt) Held in the Womb of the Wheel of the Year by Glenys Livingstone Ph.D.

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. Meditation cushion in circle of decorated stones My ancestors built great circles of stones that represented their perception of real time and space, and enabled them to tell time: the stone circles were cosmic calendars.[i] They went to great lengths and detail to get it right. It was obviously very important to them to have the stones of a particular kind, in the right positions according to position of the Sun at different times of the year, and then to celebrate ceremony within it. I have for decades had a much smaller circle of stones assembled. I have regarded this small circle of stones as a medicine wheel. It is a portable collection, that I can spread out in my living space, or let sit in a small circle on an altar, with a candle/candles in the middle. Each stone (or objects, as some are) represents a particular Seasonal Moment/transition and is placed in the corresponding direction. The small circle of eight stones represents the flow of the Solstices and Equinoxes and the cross-quarter Moments in between: that is, it represents the “Wheel of the Year” as it is commonly known in Pagan traditions. I have found this assembled circle to have been an important presence. It makes the year, my everyday sacred journey of Earth around Sun, tangible and visible as a circle, and has been a method of changing my mind, as I am placed in real space and time. My stone wheel has been a method of bringing me home to my indigenous sense of being. Each stone/object of my small wheel may be understood to represent a “moment of grace,” as Thomas Berry named the seasonal transitions – each is a threshold to the Centre, wherein I may now sit: I sense it as a powerful point. As I sit on the floor in the centre of my small circle of stones, I reflect on its significance as I have come to know the Seasonal transitions that it marks, over decades of celebrating them. I sense the aesthetics and poetry of each. I facilitated and was part of the celebration and contemplation of these Moments in my region for decades. It was always an open group that gathered, and so its participants changed over the years but it remained in form, like a live body which it was: a ceremonial body that conversed with the sacred Cosmos in my place. We spoke a year-long story and poetry of never-ending renewal – of the unfolding self, Earth and Cosmos. We danced and chanted our relationship with the Mother, opened ourselves to Her Creativity, and conversed with Her by this method. All participants in their own way within these ceremonies made meaning of their lives – which is what I understand relationship to be, in this context of Earth and Sun, our Place and Home in the Cosmos: that is, existence is innately meaningful when a being knows Who one is and Where one is. Barbara Walker notes that religions based on the Mother are free of the “neurotic” quest for indefinable meaning in life as such religions “never assumed that life would be required to justify itself.”[ii] I face the North stone, which in my hemisphere is where I place the Summer Solstice. From behind me and to my right is the light part of the cycle – representing manifest form, all that we see and touch. From behind me and to my left is the dark part of the cycle – representing the manifesting, the reality beneath the visible, which includes the non-visible. The Centre wherein I sit, represents the present. The wheel of stones has offered to me a way of experiencing the present as “presence,” as it recalls in an instant that, That which has been and that which is to come are not elsewhere – they are not autonomous dimensions independent of the encompassing present in which we dwell. They are, rather, the very depths of this living place – the hidden depth of its distances and the concealed depth on which we stand.[iii] This wheel of stones, which captures the Wheel of the Year in essence, locates me in the deep present, wherein the past and the future are contained – both always gestating in the dark, through the gateways. And all this has been continually enacted and expressed in the ceremonies of the Wheel of the Year, as the open, yet formal group has done them, mostly in the place of Blue Mountains, Australia. PaGaian Cosmology altar/mandala: a “Womb of Gaia” map Over the years of practice of ritually celebrating these eight Seasonal Moments – Earth’s whole annual journey around Sun, I have been held in this creative story, this Story of Creativity as it may be written – it is a sacred story. Her pattern of Creativity can be identified at all levels of reality – manifesting in seasonal cycles, moon cycles, body cycles – and to be aligned with it aligns a person’s core with the Creative Mother Universe. I have identified the placing of one’s self within this wheel through ceremonial practice of the whole year of creativity, as the placing of one’s self in Her Womb – Gaia’s Womb, a Place of Creativity. All that is necessary for Creativity is present in this Place. All may come forth from here/Here – and so it does, and so it has, and so it will. NOTES: [i] See Martin Brennan, The Stones of Time: Calendars, Sundials, and Stone Chambers of Ancient Ireland (Rochester Vermont, Inner Traditions, 1994). [ii] Barbara Walker, The Woman’s Encyclopaedia of Myths and Secrets (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983), 693. [iii] David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 216. REFERENCES: Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. Brennan, Martin. The Stones of Time: Calendars, Sundials, and Stone Chambers of Ancient Ireland.Rochester Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1994. Walker, Barbara. The Woman’s Encyclopaedia of Myths and Secrets. San Francisco: …
(Prose) Fire, Her Bright Spirit by Deanne Quarrie

In Celtic Tradition our world is composed of Three Realms, those of Land, Sea and Sky. In the midst of these Realms we find the Sacred Grove, the place of flowing together. There the Sacred Fire burns, by the Well of Wisdom, beneath the World Tree. Sacred Fire is that which weaves itself throughout the Three Realms. It connects us and all of life to the Realms as well as to our gods and goddesses. Fire is Sacred Spirit, Sacred Inspiration, without which life would have no meaning. And so we come to Fire. We have taken a look at Body/Earth, Breath/Air, Water/Sacred Source and now Fire/Sacred Inspiration. It is the spark, the flame, the heat of passion. It is what ignites our creativity, fuels our passion and fires our hearts to love. It is the Dance of Life, the joy found in movement, sexual energy and the warmth that germinates new life in seeds. It is the warmth of sunlight on our skin and the ecstatic pleasure of orgasm.
Star Beings? by Sara Wright

Photo credit Mathew Nichols The well-known writer LESLIE MARMON SILKO has a very interesting idea – that star beings come to earth crossing over occasionally when the membranes of parallel worlds are more permeable than usual. She painted some star beings and they spoke to her without words…. Some were not friendly; most of hers lacked compassion and didn’t care much for human beings. This made me think about astrology, a very popular cultural belief system that has ancient origins involving divination and was once correlated with the stars in our galaxy and the patterns they created (the stories they might have been telling and others we told about them), but has since split away into a very fixed system that make little sense to me. However, since the 60’s popular astrology has become a kind of religion for some. Perhaps astrology is taking the place of religions of various kinds that are in a state of collapse? It seems to me that humans need STORY… the stories may change but the need to create them does not. We also apparently need access to divination to untangle mystery. Dreams and visions are one way divination operates. As a naturalist I was never able to make the jump from the awe I experienced gazing up into the stars at night to a rigid system of charts that told me a story of my life that had nothing to do with these beings – the whole thing was predicated on a few planets in our solar system… After all we live in an evolutionary universe – everything is a process, and changing all the time. With that much said I also believe that everything in the cosmos is connected and that we ARE influenced not just by what happens on earth but to some degree also by what happens in the cosmos beginning with the planets in our own solar system and the sun star. To complicate matters we also live in an evolutionary universe that appears to be patterned – judging from the stars we see overhead and the patterns that operate in the lives of all living beings. So an evolving universe that contains patterns suggests that there might be a relationship between the two and that divination might be the ability to access what I would call ‘the space in-between’. A kind of bridge. ‘As above, so below?’ Out of curiosity I would like to see what would happen if we re-united astrology with astronomy- the actual scientific study of the stars… Do star beings cross over from one dimension of reality to another? And who or what are star beings? Are they waves that manifest as discrete particles from time to time? (Quantum mechanics) And what do we mean about dimensions? Like modern astrology that has no basis in science the same is true of parallel universes… So? I don’t know the answers, but I have had so many relationships with non – human species here on earth (both positive and negative) and am witnessing so many destructive patterns of change that are associated with a climate in crisis that my mind remains quite open to the possibility that star beings may exist and even visit us from time to time. We could use their help right now. https://www.magoism.net/2014/12/meet-mago-contributor-sara-wright/
(Poem in Spanish & English) El rebozo de Adelita/The shawl of Adelita by Xánath Caraza

Telares de canela Con diseños de amaranto. Producción ancestral. Secuencias de colores, barro y miel. Noche estrellada. Fondo de mar. Suspiros tersos de algodón. “…y si Adelita se fuera con otro la seguiría por tierra y por mar…” La buscaría con su rebozo dorado De semillas de viento. A su paso los caracoles sonando Por esa cintura de copal. “…y si Adelita se fuera con otro la seguiría por tierra y por mar…” Que deje el rebozo Bajo el mar Entre lunas, corales Y cien caballitos de mar. Secuencia de colores, De trenes y revolución. Suavidad envolvente Alrededor del cuerpo. Cuerpo de mujer con cintura de copal. “…y si Adelita se fuera con otro La seguiría por tierra y por mar…” ◊ Loom of cinnamon With designs of amaranth Ancestral production Cadence of colors, clay and honey Starry night Ocean floor Green sighs of cotton “…y si Adelita se fuera con otro La seguiría por tierra y por mar…” I would look for her in her golden shawl With seeds of wind Underfoot the seashells sounding Owing to that waist of copal “…y si Adelita se fuera con otro La seguiría por tierra y por mar…” Have her leave the shawl Under the sea Between moons and corals And one hundred sea horses Cadence of colors Of trains and revolution Enveloping softness Around the body Of woman with a waist of copal “…y si Adelita se fuera con otro La seguiría por tierra y por mar…” From Corazón Pintado: Ekphrastic Poems (TL Press, 2012) Read Meet Mago Contributor, Xanath Caraza

(Special Post 3) Nine-Headed Dragon Slain by Patriarchal Heroes: A Cross-cultural Discussion by Mago Circle Members

[Editor’s Note: This and the ensuing sequels are a revised version of the discussion that […]
(Special Post Isis 2) Why the Color of Isis Matters by Mago Circle Members

[Editor’s note: The discussion took place in Mago Circle during the month of July, 2013. […]
(Special Post 4) Multi-Linguistic Resemblances of “Mago” by Mago Circle Members

[This is a summary of discussion that took place around 2014 in The Mago Circle, […]
(Special Post 6) Nine-Headed Dragon Slain by Patriarchal Heroes: A Cross-cultural Discussion by Mago Circle Members

[Editor’s Note: This and the ensuing sequels are a revised version of the discussion that […]
(Special Post) Discussion on Mother-Daughter Wound by Mago Circle Members

[Mago Circle members discussed and answered the question, “What do you think of this (the […]
(Special Post 1) Nine-Headed Dragon Slain by Patriarchal Heroes: A Cross-cultural Discussion by Mago Circle Members

[Editor’s Note: This and the ensuing eight sequels (all nine parts) are a revised version […]

(Essay) Ceremony as “Prayer” or Sacred Awareness By Glenys Livingstone Ph.D.

This essay is an excerpt from Chapter 3 of the author’s new book A Poiesis of the Creative Cosmos: Celebrating Her within PaGaian Sacred Ceremony. MoonCourt Ceremonial Space set for Autumn Equinox ceremony, 2013 Ritual/ceremony is often described as “sacred space.” I understand that to mean “awareness of the space as sacred”: all space is sacred, what shifts is our awareness – awareness of the depth of spacetime, and of the depth of all things and all beings. I understand “sacred awareness” as an awareness of deep relationship and identity with the very cosmic dynamics that create and sustain the Universe; or an awareness of what is involved in the depth of each moment, each thing, each being. Ceremony is a space and time given to expression, contemplation and nurturance of that depth … at least to something of it. Ceremony may be both an expression of deep inner truths – perceived relationship to self, Earth and Cosmos, as well as being a mode of teaching and drawing forth deeper participation. Essentially, ceremony is a way of entering into the depth of the present moment … what is deeply present right here and now, a way of entering deep space and deep time, which is not somewhere else but is right here. Every-thing, and every moment, has Depth – more depth than we usually allow ourselves to contemplate, let alone comprehend. This book, this paper, this ink, the chair, the floor – each has a history and connections that go back, all the way back to Origins. This moment you experience now, in its particular configuration, place, people present, subtle feelings, thoughts, and propensity towards certain directions or outcomes, has a depth – many histories and choices that go back … ultimately all the way back to the beginning. Great Origin is present at every point of space and time – right here. In ceremony we are plugging our awareness into something of that. In this holy context then – in this mindframe of knowing connection, everything one does is a participation in the creation of the Cosmos: for the tribal indigenous woman, perhaps the weaving of a basket; for another, perhaps preparing a meal; for you, perhaps getting on the train to go to a workplace. It is possible to regain this sense, to come to feel that the way one breathes makes a difference – that with it, you co-create the present and the future, and you may even be a blessing on the past. In every moment we receive the co-creation, the work, of innumerable beings, of innumerable moments, and innumerable interactions of the elements, in everything we touch … and so are we touched by them. The local is our touchstone to the Cosmos – it is not separate. Ceremony may be a way into this awareness, into strengthening it. Ceremony is actually ‘doing,’ not just theorizing. We can talk about our personal and cultural disconnection endlessly, but we need to actually change our minds. Ceremony can be an enabling practice – a catalyst/practice for personal and cultural change. It is not just talking about eating the pear, it is eating the pear; it is not just talking about sitting on the cushion (meditating), it is sittingon the cushion. It is a cultural practice wherein we tell a story/stories about what we believe to be so most deeply, about who and what we are. Ceremony can be a place for practicing a new language, a new way of speaking, or spelling – a place for practicing “matristic storytelling”[i] if you like: that is, for telling stories of the Mother, of Earth and Cosmos as if She were alive and sentient. We can “play like we know it,” so that we may come to know it.[ii] Ceremony then is a form of social action. I have found it useful to describe ceremony using and extending words used by Ken Wilber to describe a “transpersonal practice,” which is needed for real change: he said it was a practice that discloses “a deeper self (I or Buddha) in a deeper community (We or Sangha) expressing a deeper truth (It or Dharma).”[iii] My extension of that is: ceremony may disclose a deeper beautiful self (the I/Virgin/Urge to Be/Buddha), in a deeper relational community (the We/Mother/Place of Being/Sangha), expressing a deeper transformative truth (the It/Old One/Space to Be/Dharma). This is the “unitive body,” the “microcosmos” that Charlene Spretnak refers to in States of Grace.[iv] Since ceremony is an opportunity to give voice to deeper places in ourselves, forms of communication are used that the dreamer, the emotional, the body, can comprehend, such as music, drama, simulation, dance, chanting, singing.[v] These forms enable the entering of a level of consciousness that is there all the time, but that is not usually expressed or acknowledged. We enter a realm that is ‘out of time,’ which is commonly said to be not the “real” world, but it is more organic/indigenous to all being and at least as real as the tick-tock world. It is a place “between the worlds,” wherein we may put our hands on the very core of our lives, touch whatever it is that we feel our existence is about, and thus touch the possibility of re-creating and renewing ourselves. NOTES: [i] A term used by Gloria Feman Orenstein in The Reflowering of the Goddess (New York: Pergamon Press, 1990), 147. [ii] As my doctoral thesis supervisor Dr. Susan Murphy once described it to me in conversation. [iii] Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything (Massachusetts: Shambhala, 1996), 306-307. [iv] 145. [v] As Starhawk notes, The Spiral Dance, 45. REFERENCES: Livingstone, Glenys. A Poiesis of the Creative Cosmos: Celebrating Her within PaGaian Sacred Ceremony. Girl God Books: Bergen, Norway, 2023. Orenstein, Gloria Feman. The Reflowering of the Goddess. New York: Pergamon Press, 1990. Starhawk. The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. New York: Harper and Row, 1999. Wilber, Ken. A Brief History of Everything. Massachusetts: Shambhala, 1996.
Lammas/Late Summer in PaGaian tradition By Glenys Livingstone Ph.D.

This essay is an edited excerpt from Chapter 5 of the author’s book PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion. Traditionally the dates for this Seasonal Moment are: Southern Hemisphere – Feb. 1st/2nd Northern Hemisphere – August 1st/2nd however the actual astronomical date varies. See archaeoastronomy.com for the actual moment. Lammas table/altar Lammas, as it is often called[1], is the meridian point of the first dark quarter of the year, between Summer Solstice and Autumn Equinox; it is after the light phase has peaked and is complete, and as such, I choose it as a special celebration of the Crone/Old One. Within the Celtic tradition, it is the wake of Lugh, the Sun King, and it is the Crone that reaps him. But within earlier Goddess traditions, all the transformations were Hers[2]; and the community reflected on the reality that the Mother aspect of the Goddess, having come to fruition, from Lammas on would enter the Earth and slowly become transformed into the Old Woman-Hecate-Cailleach aspect …[3] I dedicate Lammas to the face of the Old One, just as Imbolc, its polar opposite on the Wheel in Old European tradition, is dedicated to the Virgin/Maiden face. 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. I state the purpose of the seasonal gathering thus: This is the season of the waxing dark. The seed of darkness born at the Summer Solstice now grows … the dark part of the days grows visibly longer. Earth’s tilt is taking us back away from the Sun. This is the time when we celebrate dissolution; each unique self lets go, to the Darkness. It is the time of ending, when the grain, the fruit, is harvested. We meet to remember the Dark Sentience, the All-Nourishing Abyss, She from whom we arise, in whom we are immersed, and to whom we return. This is the time of the Crone, the Wise Dark One, who accepts and receives our harvest, who grinds the grain, who dismantles what has gone before. She is Hecate, Lillith, Medusa, Kali, Erishkagel,Chamunda, Coatlique – Divine Compassionate One, She Who Creates the Space to Be. We meet to accept Her transformative embrace, trusting Her knowing, which is beyond all knowledge. Lammas is the seasonal moment for recognizing that we dissolve into the “night” of the Larger Organism of whom we are part – Gaia. It is She who is immortal, from whom we arise, and into whom we dissolve. This celebration is a development of what was born in the transition of Summer Solstice; the dark sentient Source of Creativity is honoured. The autopoietic space in us recognizes Her, is comforted by Her, desires Her self-transcendence and self-dissolution; Lammas is an opportunity to be with our organism’s love of Larger Self – this Native Place. We have been taught to fear Her, but at this Seasonal Moment we may remember that She is the compassionate One, deeply committed to transformation, which is actually innate to us. Whereas at Imbolc/Early Spring, we shone forth as individual, multiforms of Her; at Lammas, we small individual selves remember that we are She and dissolve back into Her. We are the Promise of Lifeas was affirmed at Imbolc, but we are the Promise of Her- it is not ours to hold. We identify as the sacred Harvest at Lammas; our individual harvest isHer Harvest. We are the process itself – we are Gaia’s Process. Wedo not breathe (though of course we do), we borrow the breath, for a while. It is like a relay: we pick the breath up, create what we do during our time with it, and pass it on. The harvest we reap in our individual lives is important, andit is for us only short term; it belongs to the Cosmos in the long term. Lammas is a time for “making sacred” – as “sacrifice” may be understood; we may “make sacred” ourselves. As Imbolc was a time for dedication, so is Lammas. This is the wisdom of the phase of the Old One. She is the aspect that finds the “yes” to letting go, to loving the Larger Self, beyond all knowledge, and steps into the power of the Abyss; encouraged and nourished by the harvest, She will gradually move into the balance of Autumn Equinox/Mabon, the next Sesaonal Moment on the year’s cycle. References: Durdin-Robertson, Lawrence. The Year of the Goddess.Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1990. Gray, Susan. The Woman’s Book of Runes.New York: Barnes and Noble, 1999. Livingstone, Glenys. PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion. NE: iUniverse, 2005. McLean, Adam. The Four Fire Festivals. Edinburgh: Megalithic Research Publications, 1979. Notes: [1]See note 3. [2]Susan Gray, The Woman’s Book of Runes,p. 18. This is also to say that the transformations are within each being, not elsewhere, that is the “sacrifice” is not carried out by another external to the self, as could be and have been interpreted from stories of Lugh or Jesus. [3]Lawrence Durdin-Robertson, The Year of the Goddess, p.143, quoting Adam McLean, Fire Festivals,p.20-22. Another indication of the earlier tradition beneath “Lughnasad” is the other name for it in Ireland of “Tailltean Games”. Taillte was said to be Lugh’s foster-mother, and it was her death that was being commemmorated (Mike Nichols, “The First Harvest”, Pagan Alliance Newsletter NSW Australia). The name “Tailtunasad” has been suggested for this Seasonal Moment, by Cheryl Straffon editor of Goddess Alive! I prefer the name of Lammas, although some think it is a Christian term: however some sources say that Lammas means “feast of the bread” which is how I have understood it, and surely such a feast pre-dates Christianity. It is my opinion that the incoming Christians preferred “Lammas” to “Lughnasad”: the term itself is not Christian in origin. The evolution of all these things is complex, and we may evolve them further with our careful thoughts and experience.
Happy New Year, Year 2/5916 Magoma Era! by Helen Hye-Sook Hwang

“The Bell of King Seongdeok, known as the Emille Bell, a massive bronze bell at 19 tons is the largest in Korea.” Wikimedia Commons. Cast in 771, the bell reenacts the music of whales to remind people of the Female Beginning, the self-creative power innate all beings. Today is Day 2 of the New Year in the reconstructed Magoist Calendar characterized by 13 months per year and 28 days per month. We are heading toward the Solstice that falls on Dec. 21/22 (Day 5 of the first month in the Magoist Calendar), which happens to be the day of the first full moon of Year 2. Below is the details about the Magoist Calendar. https://www.magoacademy.org/2018/03/27/magoist-calendar-13-month-28-day-year-1-5915-me-2018-gregorian-year/ The Gregorian year 2018 marks a watershed in that we began to implement the Magoist Calendar. The Magoma Era is based on the onset of the nine-state confederacy of Danguk (State of Dan, the Birth Tree) traditinally dated 3898 BCE-2333 BCE. We just passed Year 1 or 5915 Magoma Era (the Gregorian 2018). For Year 1, we had the New Year Day on December 18 of 2017, the first new moon day before the December Solstice. That makes December 18 of 2017 our lunation 1, the first lunar year that the reconstructed Magoist Calendar determines its first day of the Year 1! Although relatively short in history, the Mago Work began to celebrate the Nine Day Mago Celebration on the day of December Solstice annually since 2015. With the reconstructed Magoist Calendar, we placed it in its due timeframe, the Ninth Month and the Ninth Day, which fell on August 8, 2018 (US PST) and celebrated it for the first time according to the Magoist Calendar. Apparently, this had to be a mid-Summer event. This left us with another seasonal event, the New Year/Solstice Celebration. For Year 2, we hold the 3 Day New Year/Solstice Celebration on December 20, 21, and 22 (December 22 to be the Solstice Dat in PST) and the Virtual Midnight Vigil as a precussor to the New Year Day. http://www.magoacademy.org/2018/07/17/2018-5915-magoma-era-year-1-nine-day-mago-celebration/ https://www.magoacademy.org/home-2/new-year-solstice-celebrations/ We just greeted the Year 2 by holding the event called Virtual Midnight Vigil during which we sounded the Korean temple bell, in particular the Emile Bell or the Divine Bell of King Seongdeok the Great, to the world. A few from around the globe (Germany, Korea, Italy and the US) participated in it or hosted their own local vigils. The Korean temple bell is the key symbol for the Magoist Calendar as well as the Magoist Cosmogony. It is not a coincidence that it is struck on the midnight of the New Year’s Eve. It is Korean tradition that even modern Koreans gather at the bell tower in Seoul to hear the sound of the bell at midnight. And these bells are gigantic weighing 19 tons in the case of the Emile Bell. That this convention has an ancient Magoist root remains esoteric. For not only they strike the bell 28 times in the evening indicating the 28 lunar stations that the Moon stops by in the sky throughout the year (please read below what the 28 day lunar journey means and how it is represented by women). But also the Korean temple bell is no mere acoustic device to play the beautiful sound only. It is designed to reenact the Magoist Cosmogony. https://www.magoacademy.org/2018/12/14/virtual-midnight-vigil-dec-17-2018-to-new-year-year-2-5916-magoma-era/ That said, that is not what’s all about the Korean Magoist convention of welcoming the New Year by sounding the temple bell, however. That the bell sound is a mimicry of the music of whales has been in the hand of wisdom seekers! Ancient Korean bells testify that whales are with us in the journey of the Moon and her terrestrial dependents headed by women. You may like to hear the sound of the Magoist Korean whale bell included in the Participation Manual for Virtual Midnight Vigil below. Happy New Year to all terrestrial beings in WE/HERE/NOW! https://www.magoacademy.org/2018/12/16/participation-manual-for-virtual-midnight-vigil-year-2/
(Prose & Photography) Equinox Reflection by Sara Wright

Photography by Sara Wright I gaze out my bedroom window and hear yet another golden apple hit the ground. The vines that hug the cabin and climb up the screens are heavy with unripe grapes and the light that is filtered through the trees in front of the brook is luminous – lime green tipped in gold – My too sensitive eyes are blessedly well protected by this canopy of late summer leaves. The maples on the hill are losing chlorophyll and are painting the hollow with splashes of bittersweet orange and red. The dead spruces by the brook will probably collapse this winter providing Black bears with even more precious ants and larvae to eat in early spring. I only hope that some bears will survive the fall slaughter to return to this black bear sanctuary; in particular two beloved young ones… Mushrooms abound, amanitas, boletes morels, puff balls, the latter two finding their way into my salads. The forest around my house is in an active state of becoming with downed limbs and sprouting fungi becoming next year’s soil. The forest floor smells so sweet that all I can imagine is laying myself down on a bed of mosses to sleep and dream. The garden looks as tired as I am; lily fronds droop, yellowing leaves betraying the season at hand. Bright green pods provide a startling contrast to fading scarlet bee balm. Wild asters are abundant and goldenrod covers the fields with a bright yellow garment. Every wild bush has sprays of berries. My crabapple trees are bowed, each twig heavy with winter fruit. Most of the birds have absconded to the fields that are ripe with the seeds of wild grasses. The mourning doves are an exception – they gather together each dawn waiting patiently for me to fill the feeder. In the evening I am serenaded by soft cooing. One chicken hawk hides in the pine, lying in wait for the unwary…Just a few hummingbirds remain…whirring wings and twittering alert me to continued presence as they settle into the cherry tree to sleep, slipping into a light torpor with these cool September nights… Spiders are spinning their egg cases, even as they prepare to die. I can still find toads hopping around the house during the warmest hours of the day. Although the grass is long I will not mow it for fear of killing these most precious and threatened of species. I am heavily invested in seeing these toads burrow in to see another spring. My little frogs sit on their lily pads seeking the warmth of a dimming afternoon sun. Soon they too will slumber below fallen leaves or mud. I am surrounded by such beauty, and so much harvest bounty that even though I am exhausted I take deep pleasure out of each passing day of this glorious month of September, the month of my birth. Unlike many folks, for me, moving into the dark of the year feels like a blessing. Another leave -taking is almost upon me, and I am having trouble letting go of this small oasis that I have tended with such care for more than thirty years… I don’t know what this winter will bring to my modest cabin whose foundation is crumbling under too much moisture and too many years of heavy snow. In the spring extensive excavation will begin. A new foundation must be poured and this work will destroy the gardens I have loved, the mossy grounds around the south end of the house that I have nurtured for so long. In this season of letting go I must find a way to lay down my fears, and release that which I am powerless to change. Somehow… I have no idea what I will return to except that I have made it clear that none of my beloved trees be harmed. I am grateful that Nature is mirroring back to me so poignantly that letting go is the way through: That this dying can provide a bedrock foundation for another spring birth. As a Daughter of the Earth I lean into ancient wisdom, praying that this exhausted mind and body will be able to follow suit. (Meet Mago Contributor) Sara Wright.
(Book Excerpt) Held in the Womb of the Wheel of the Year by Glenys Livingstone Ph.D.

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. Meditation cushion in circle of decorated stones My ancestors built great circles of stones that represented their perception of real time and space, and enabled them to tell time: the stone circles were cosmic calendars.[i] They went to great lengths and detail to get it right. It was obviously very important to them to have the stones of a particular kind, in the right positions according to position of the Sun at different times of the year, and then to celebrate ceremony within it. I have for decades had a much smaller circle of stones assembled. I have regarded this small circle of stones as a medicine wheel. It is a portable collection, that I can spread out in my living space, or let sit in a small circle on an altar, with a candle/candles in the middle. Each stone (or objects, as some are) represents a particular Seasonal Moment/transition and is placed in the corresponding direction. The small circle of eight stones represents the flow of the Solstices and Equinoxes and the cross-quarter Moments in between: that is, it represents the “Wheel of the Year” as it is commonly known in Pagan traditions. I have found this assembled circle to have been an important presence. It makes the year, my everyday sacred journey of Earth around Sun, tangible and visible as a circle, and has been a method of changing my mind, as I am placed in real space and time. My stone wheel has been a method of bringing me home to my indigenous sense of being. Each stone/object of my small wheel may be understood to represent a “moment of grace,” as Thomas Berry named the seasonal transitions – each is a threshold to the Centre, wherein I may now sit: I sense it as a powerful point. As I sit on the floor in the centre of my small circle of stones, I reflect on its significance as I have come to know the Seasonal transitions that it marks, over decades of celebrating them. I sense the aesthetics and poetry of each. I facilitated and was part of the celebration and contemplation of these Moments in my region for decades. It was always an open group that gathered, and so its participants changed over the years but it remained in form, like a live body which it was: a ceremonial body that conversed with the sacred Cosmos in my place. We spoke a year-long story and poetry of never-ending renewal – of the unfolding self, Earth and Cosmos. We danced and chanted our relationship with the Mother, opened ourselves to Her Creativity, and conversed with Her by this method. All participants in their own way within these ceremonies made meaning of their lives – which is what I understand relationship to be, in this context of Earth and Sun, our Place and Home in the Cosmos: that is, existence is innately meaningful when a being knows Who one is and Where one is. Barbara Walker notes that religions based on the Mother are free of the “neurotic” quest for indefinable meaning in life as such religions “never assumed that life would be required to justify itself.”[ii] I face the North stone, which in my hemisphere is where I place the Summer Solstice. From behind me and to my right is the light part of the cycle – representing manifest form, all that we see and touch. From behind me and to my left is the dark part of the cycle – representing the manifesting, the reality beneath the visible, which includes the non-visible. The Centre wherein I sit, represents the present. The wheel of stones has offered to me a way of experiencing the present as “presence,” as it recalls in an instant that, That which has been and that which is to come are not elsewhere – they are not autonomous dimensions independent of the encompassing present in which we dwell. They are, rather, the very depths of this living place – the hidden depth of its distances and the concealed depth on which we stand.[iii] This wheel of stones, which captures the Wheel of the Year in essence, locates me in the deep present, wherein the past and the future are contained – both always gestating in the dark, through the gateways. And all this has been continually enacted and expressed in the ceremonies of the Wheel of the Year, as the open, yet formal group has done them, mostly in the place of Blue Mountains, Australia. PaGaian Cosmology altar/mandala: a “Womb of Gaia” map Over the years of practice of ritually celebrating these eight Seasonal Moments – Earth’s whole annual journey around Sun, I have been held in this creative story, this Story of Creativity as it may be written – it is a sacred story. Her pattern of Creativity can be identified at all levels of reality – manifesting in seasonal cycles, moon cycles, body cycles – and to be aligned with it aligns a person’s core with the Creative Mother Universe. I have identified the placing of one’s self within this wheel through ceremonial practice of the whole year of creativity, as the placing of one’s self in Her Womb – Gaia’s Womb, a Place of Creativity. All that is necessary for Creativity is present in this Place. All may come forth from here/Here – and so it does, and so it has, and so it will. NOTES: [i] See Martin Brennan, The Stones of Time: Calendars, Sundials, and Stone Chambers of Ancient Ireland (Rochester Vermont, Inner Traditions, 1994). [ii] Barbara Walker, The Woman’s Encyclopaedia of Myths and Secrets (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983), 693. [iii] David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 216. REFERENCES: Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. Brennan, Martin. The Stones of Time: Calendars, Sundials, and Stone Chambers of Ancient Ireland.Rochester Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1994. Walker, Barbara. The Woman’s Encyclopaedia of Myths and Secrets. San Francisco: …
Artful Ceremonial Expression by Glenys Livingstone Ph.D.

This article is an edited excerpt from Chapter 7 of the author’s book PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion. I always wore a special headpiece for the Seasonal ceremonies when I facilitated them over the years, and I feel that any participant may do so, not just the main celebrant. My ceremonial headpiece with its changing and continuous Seasonal decoration took on increasing significance over the years; it became a personal central representation of the year-long ceremonial art process of creating, destroying and re-creating. For the research period of my doctoral studies particularly, when I was documenting the process, I realised that this headpiece came to represent for me the essence of “She” – as Changing One, yet ever as Presence – as I was coming to know Her. In my journal for the Mabon/Autumn Equinox process notes one year I wrote: As I pace the circle with the Mabon headpiece in the centre, I see “Her” as She has been through the Seasons … the black and gold of Samhain, the deep red, white and evergreen of Winter, the white and blue of Imbolc, the flowers of Eostar, the rainbow ribbons of Beltane, the roses of Summer, the seed pods and wheat of Lammas, and now the Autumn leaves. I see in my mind’s eye, and feel, Her changes. I am learning … The Mother knowledge grows within me. The headpiece, the wreath, the altar, the house decorations, all participate in the ceremony: they are part of the learning, the method, the relationship – similar to how one might bring flowers and gifts of significance to a loved one at special moments. Then further, the removal and re-creation of the decorations are part of the learning – an active witness to transformation through time.
The Ceremonial Creative Cosmos by Glenys Livingstone Ph.D.

This essay is an excerpt from Chapter 3 of the author’s new book A Poiesis of the Creative Cosmos: Celebrating Her within PaGaian Sacred Ceremony. The Cosmos is a ceremony, a ritual. Dawn and dusk, seasons, supernovas – it is an ongoing Event of coming into being and passing away. The Cosmos is always in flux, and we exist as participants in this great ritual event, this “cosmic ceremony of seasonal and diurnal rhythms” which frame “epochal dramas of becoming,” as Charlene Spretnak describes it.[i] Swimme and Berry describe the universe as a dramatic reality, a Great Conversation of announcement and response.[ii]Ritual/ceremony[iii] may be the human conscious response to the announcements of the Universe – an act of conscious participation. Ceremony then may be understood as a microcosmos[iv] – a human-sized replication of the Drama, the Dynamic we find ourselves in. Swimme and Berry describe ritual as an ancient response humans have to the awesome experience of witnessing the coming to be and the passing away of things; they say that a “ritual mode of expression” is from its beginning “the manner in which humans respond to the universe, just as birds respond by flying or as fish respond by swimming.”[v] It is the way in which we as humans, as a species, may respond to this awesome experience of being and becoming, how we may hold the beauty and the terror. Humans have exhibited this tendency to ritualize since the earliest times of our unfolding: evidence so far reveals burial sites dating back one hundred thousand years, as mentioned in the previous chapter. We often went to huge effort in these matters, that is almost incomprehensible to the modern industrialised econocentric mind: the precise placing of huge stones in circles such as found at Stonehenge and the creation of complex sites such as Silbury Hill may be expressions of some priority, indicating that econocentric thinking – such as tool making, finding shelter and food, was not enough or not separate from the participation in Cosmic events. Ritual seems to have expressed, and still does actively express for some peoples, something essential to the human – a way of being integral with our Cosmic Place, which was not perceived as separate from material sustenance, the Source of existence: thus it was a way perhaps of sensing “meaning” as it might be termed these days – or “relationship.” Swimme and Berry note that the order of the Universe has been experienced especially in the seasonal sequence of dissolution and renewal; this most basic pattern has been an ultimate referent for existence.[vi] The seasonal pattern contains within it the most basic dynamics of the Cosmos – desire, fullfilment, loss, transformation, creation, growth, and more. The annual ceremonial celebration of the seasonal wheel – the Earth-Sun sacred site within which we tour – can be a pathway to the Centre of these dynamics, a way of making sense of the pattern, a way of sensing it. One enters the Universe’s story. The Seasonal Moments when marked and celebrated in the art form of ceremony may be sens-ible ‘gateways’ through the flesh of the world[vii] to the Centre – which is omnipresent Creativity. Humans do ritual everyday – we really can’t help ourselves. It is simply a question of what rituals we do, what story we are telling ourselves, what we are “spelling”[viii] ourselves with – individually and collectively. Ceremony is actually ‘doing,’ not just theorizing. We can talk about our personal and cultural disconnection endlessly, but we need to actually change our minds. Ceremony can be an enabling practice – a catalyst/practice for personal and cultural change. It is not just talking about eating the pear, it is eating the pear; it is not just talking about sitting on the cushion (meditating), it is sittingon the cushion. It is a cultural practice wherein we tell a story/stories about what we believe to be so most deeply, about who and what we are. Ceremony can be a place for practicing a new language, a new way of speaking, or spelling – a place for practicing “matristic storytelling”[ix] if you like: that is, for telling stories of the Mother, of Earth and Cosmos as if She were alive and sentient. We can “play like we know it,” so that we may come to know it.[x] Ceremony then is a form of social action. NOTES: [i] Spretnak, States of Grace, 145. [ii] Swimme and Berry, The Universe Story, 153. [iii] I will use either or both of these terms at different times: I generally prefer “ceremony” as Kathy Jones defines it in Priestess of Avalon, Priestess of the Goddess, 319. She says that ritual involves a repeated set of actions which may contain spiritual or “mundane” elements (such as a daily ritual of brushing one’s teeth), “whereas ceremony is always a spiritual practice and may or may not include ritual elements.” The PaGaian seasonal celebrations/events are thus most kin to “ceremony,” although I do not perceive any action as “mundane.” However, “ritual” is more commonly used to speak of how humans have conversed with cosmos/Earth. [iv] Spretnak, States of Grace, 145. [v] Swimme and Berry, The Universe Story, 152-153. [vi] Ibid. [vii] Abram speaks of “matter as flesh” in The Spell of the Sensuous, 66, citing Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Invisible and the Invisible (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1968). [viii] Starhawk used this term on her email list in 2004 to describe the story-telling we might do to bring forth the changes we desire. [ix] A term used by Gloria Feman Orenstein in The Reflowering of the Goddess (New York: Pergamon Press, 1990), 147. [x] As my doctoral thesis supervisor Dr. Susan Murphy once described it to me in conversation REFERENCES: Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. Jones, Kathy. Priestess of Avalon, Priestess of the Goddess. Glastonbury: Ariadne Publications, 2006. Orenstein, Gloria Feman. The Reflowering of the Goddess. New York: Pergamon Press, 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.
(Essay) Walking with Bb by Sara Wright

Walking with Bb: a story exploring the psychic connection between one woman and her bear. Preface: The black bear – hunting season in Maine is brutal – four months of bear hell – five if one includes the month where hunters can track bears for “practice” with hounds – separate mothers and cubs, terrorize them, tree them and do anything but legally kill them. During the legal slaughter, Hunters bait bears with junk food by putting old donuts etc. in cans and shoot the bear while he or she is eating. Most bears (82 percent) are slaughtered in this manner, the rest are killed by hounding and trapping. The season begins in August and lasts through December. Trapping, by the way, is illegal in every state but Maine. Black bears are hated, and that hatred will, of course, eventually result in their extirpation. I had a shy (male) year old black bear visiting my house this past summer with whom I developed a friendship, and what follows is part of our story: Last Saturday I was walking down the road when I remembered that I had not done my daily “circle of protection” imaging for Bb (standing as he was the day he visited me at the window early in August). When I began to do this another picture of Bb moving on all four feet with his face turned towards mine super-imposed itself over his standing image. I could almost see his expression, but not quite. I didn’t know what this imaging meant beyond that we were communicating in some unknown way, and he was in the area (not a good thing on hunting Saturdays). He had not been coming in most nights and I was worried… That night he came. He is still making nightly visits five days later, the most sequentially consistent visits since September 15th, the day I believed that he had been shot. This experience prompted me to write about telepathy and precognition. It is close to All Hallows and the full Hunter’s moon (Nov 3). I keep listening to Charlie Russell’ story which reminds me that loving bears (especially male bears) is hard, almost a sure recipe for disaster, and that I was not alone in this deep concern for and fear of losing Bb. I can barely stand to remember my other bear losses and I can’t stand feeling them. Even after I wrote about the incident with Bb, the experience seemed to carry a charge that didn’t dissipate. Had I missed something? Next I wrote “Root Healer,” exploring the possibility that as I continued to act as Bb’s “little bear mother” now employing psychic techniques to keep him safe (in some desperation as it was the only means left open to me to protect this very vulnerable yearling), that Bb’s presence might also include a gift for me and that it might involve some kind of root healing for my body because Nature thrives on reciprocity. One idea I missed completely, for it was so obvious. Bb’s image was communicating to me that we were having a psychic conversation in that very moment. It was the first time in three months of imaging protective circles that moved with him that I had confirmation from him that we were communicating effectively in this unknown way. This rarely happens. Normally when I do this kind of work, I just do it. I don’t get direct confirmation that it’s working from the animal itself (except with Lily b). Knowing this helped me make another decision I might not have made so intentionally. The hunting season will last into mid December, and I will be traveling during that last month. I keep thinking that putting actual physical distance between Bb and I might pose more of a threat for his life and I have to remind myself that psychic phenomena are not distance dependent. I should be able to image that protective circle every day and feel that it is working. Bb has already shown me that it can but I fear adding distance because I don’t completely trust my own perceptions.* I suspect believing might be an additional dimension of ensuring success when it comes to psychic protection for this bear. But how do I incorporate belief into a picture that is so clouded with personal/cultural doubt? Half the time I don’t believe myself and virtually no one except Rupert Sheldrake, Iren and Harriet have ever taken my experiences seriously. I have to remind myself that I have done this work many times dealing with doubt and it worked anyway. The point of writing this reflection might be to put me on a new edge of increasing Bb’s odds of survival. If it’s possible that an attitude that embraces believing in what I do could help me protect Bb more effectively until hunting is over and its time for him to den in peace I want to claim it. The question I need to answer now is how to go about moving into a more trusting self as a woman who continues to walk with a bear at her side? The night after I wrote the above paragraph I dream of the doubters in the roles of my parents, and in a friend. I take these dreams seriously as doubters inside me and out. These dreams may be telling me that it is unreasonable to expect me to believe that what I do works when no one else does? The problem with this idea is that on some level I do believe. I feel as if I am walking with this bear, every single day. I think about him constantly. The only thing that got me out of the house yesterday was that he was out of chocolate donuts. Something is intensifying my relationship with Bb although I never see him. I am caught in a field of bear energy and information, perhaps through some version of beauty and the beast. That an archetype is …
(Essay) Winter Solstice/Yule within the Creative Cosmos by Glenys Livingstone Ph.D.

This essay is an edited excerpt from Chapter 5 of the author’s book A Poiesis of the Creative Cosmos: Celebrating Her within PaGaian Sacred Ceremony. Dates for Winter Solstice/Yule Southern Hemisphere – June 20 – 23. Northern Hemisphere – December 20 – 23 This Seasonal Moment is the ripe fullness of the Dark Womb and it is a gateway between dark and light. It is a Birthing Place – into differentiated being. Whereas Samhain/Deep Autumn is a dark conceiving Space, it flows into the Winter Solstice dark birthing Place – a dynamic Place of Being, a Sacred Interchange. This Seasonal Moment of Winter Solstice is the peaking of the dark space – the fullness of the dark, within which being and action arise. It is the peaking of emptiness, which is a fullness. As cosmologist Brian Swimme describes: the empty “ground of being … retains no thing.” It is “Ultimate Generosity.”[i] In Vajrayana Buddhism, Space is associated with Prajna/wisdom – out of which Upaya/compassionate action arises. Space is highly positive – something to be developed, so appropriate action may develop spontaneously and blissfully.[ii] In Old European Indigenous understandings, the dark and the night were valued at least as much as light, if not more so: time was counted by the number of nights, as in ‘fortnights,’ and a ‘day’ included both dark and light parts … it was ‘di-urnal’. I have been careful with my language about that inclusion in the ceremonial ‘Statement of Purpose’ for each Seasonal Moment. This awareness is resonant with modern Western scientific perceptions about the nature of the Universe: that it is seventy-three percent “dark energy,” twenty-three precent “dark matter,” four percent “ordinary matter.”[iii] The truth is that we live within this darkness: it is the Ground of all Being. In Pagan traditions since Celtic times, and in many other cultural traditions, Winter Solstice has been celebrated as the birth of the God; and in Christian tradition since about the fourth century C.E., as the birth of the saviour. But there are deeper ways of understanding what is being born: that is, who or what the “saviour” is. In the Gospel of Thomas, which was not selected for biblical canon, it says: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.”[iv] This then may be the Divine Child, the “Saviour”: it may be expressed as the new Being forming in the Cosmogonic Womb,[v] who will be born. We may celebrate the birth of the new Being, which /who is always beyond us, beyond our knowing … yet is within us, burgeoning within us – and within Gaia. What will save us is already present within – forming within us. The Winter Solstice story may emphasize that what is born, is within each one – the “Divine” is not “out there”: it may be said, and expressed ceremoniously, that we are each Creator and Created. We may imagine ourselves as the in-utero foetus – an image we might have access to these days from a sonar-scan during pregnancy. This image presents a truth about Being: we are this, and it is within us, within this moment. Every moment is pregnant with the new. It will be birthed when holy darkness is full. Part of what is required is having the eyes to see the “new bone forming in flesh,” scraping our eyes “clear of learned cataracts,”[vi] seeing with fresh eyes. That is what the fullness of the Dark offers – a freshening of our eyes to see the new. And the process of Creation is always reciprocal: we are Creator and Created simultaneously, in a “ngapartji-ngapartji”[vii] way. We are in-formed by that which we form. In Earth-based religious practice, the ubiquitous icon of Mother and Child – Creator and Created – expresses something essential about the Universe itself … the “motherhood” we are all born within. It expresses the essential communion experience that this Cosmos is, the innate and holy Care that it takes, and the reciprocal nature of it. We cannot touch without being touched at the same time.[viii] We may realize that Cosmogenesis – the entire Unfolding of the Cosmos – is essentially relational: our experience tells us this is so. The image of The Birth of the Goddess on the front cover of my book PaGaian Cosmology expresses that reciprocity for me, how we may birth each other and the healing/wholing in that exchange. It is a Sacred Interchange. And it is what this Event of existence seems to be about – deep communion, which both Solstices express. Babylonian Goddess, Ur 4000-3500 BCE. Adele Getty, Goddess, 33. Birthing is not often an easy process – for the birthgiver nor for the birthed one: it is a shamanic act requiring strength of bodymind, attention, courage, and focus of the mother, and resilience and courage to be of the new young one. Birthgiving is the original place of ‘heroics,’ which many cultures of the world have never forgotten, perhaps therefore better termed as “heraics.” Patriarchal adaptations of the story of this Seasonal Moment usually miss the Creative Act of birthgiving completely, usually being pre-occupied with the “virgin” nature of the Mother which is interpreted as having an “intact hymen.” The focus of the patriarchal adaptation of the Winter Solstice story is the Child as “saviour”: even the Mother gazes at the Child in most Christian icons, while in more ancient images Her eyes are direct and expressive of Her integrity as Creator. NOTES: [i] Swimme, The Universe is a Green Dragon, 146. [ii] See Rita Gross, “The Feminine Principle in Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism.” The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 179-192. [iii] These figures as told by cosmologist Paul Davies with Macquarie University’s Centre for Astrobiology, Australia. [iv] Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief: the Secret Gospel of Thomas, saying number 70. See https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/story/thomas.html . [v] Melissa Raphael’s term, Thealogy and Embodiment, 262. [vi] The quotes come from a poem by Cynthia Cook, “Refractions,” Womanspirit (Oregan USA, issue 23, March 1980), 59. [vii] This is an Indigenous Australian term for reciprocity – giving and receiving at the same time. I explain it a bit further in PaGaian Cosmology, 256-257. [viii] An expression from Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 68. REFERENCES: Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. Getty, Adele. Goddess: Mother of Living …
(Mago Almanac Excerpt 5) Introducing the Magoist Calendar by Helen Hye-Sook Hwang

Mago Almanac: 13 Month 28 Day Calendar (Book A) Free PDF available at Mago Bookstore. THE 28-13-7 INTERPLAY How does the number, 28 (days), for the lunar cycle come about? Why is it 28 days and not 29 or 30, the latter implicated in the traditional lunar calendar of East Asia? It appears that 28 days is a value closer to the moon’s sidereal period (about 27.3 days) than the synodic period (about 29.5 days). Or is it that 28 days points to the median between the synodic lunar cycle and the sidereal lunar cycle? To answer these questions, it is important to note that a value in the Mago Time captures an inter-cosmic biological cusp/juncture derived from the matrix of sonic numerology. Distinguished from the patriarchal measure of time fixated into a solipsistic space, it makes visible the interconnectedness of all bodies. It never stands as an isolated single occasion. The 28 day, 13 month calendar has to do with how we perceive the moon. There are two ways of understanding the lunar cycle; the sidereal period and the synodic period (see Figure 2). The synodic period refers to the time, about 29.5 days, that we on earth see the moon complete one round of revolution, e.g. from the full moon to the full moon. In contrast, the sidereal period refers to the actual time, about 27.3 days, that the moon takes to complete one round of revolution. While the synodic time is measured relative to the Earth (the observer’s position is on earth), the sidereal time is measured relative to the distant “fixed” stars (the observer’s position is far out at the distant stars). Since the distant stars are considered at rest, the sidereal period is taken as a universal value, not affected by the location of the viewer, we on earth. There is, apparently, a discrepancy between the lunar cycle that we on earth see the moon return to the same phase and the lunar cycle that the moon actually completes a revolution. The former is based on our observation of the moon’s phases, whereas the latter is based on the moon’s actual orbital motions. The two differs basically because all celestial bodies, the moon, earth, and sun, in the solar system are in motion. It is not just the moon that we watch revolving but Earth also revolves around the sun. We are watching the movement of the moon on a moving vehicle, earth, so to speak. Therefore, the moon has to travel about 2 more days in order for us on earth to see it in the same phase (see the green portion in Figure 2 part). At the position A of the moon in Figure 2, the moon is in line with the sun and the distant stars, which is a new moon. In the position of B (the new moon), the moon is in line with the sun but not with the distant stars. The right hand line of the green portion in line with the distant stars is where the moon started as a new moon. The moon has traveled about 2 more days to be in line with the sun. That is why the synodic period is about 2 days longer than the sidereal period. When it comes to “the lunar calendar”, moderns tend to think of it as the waxing and waning phases of the moon (29.5 days, the synodic period). The problem lies in that, following the synodic period, people see nothing beyond the moon’s phases. They overlook the fact that the moon rotates and revolves on its own axis and around the earth approximately 13 degrees every day. The synodic lunisolar calendar is a navel-gazing vision. Attending to the moon’s phases may seem benign. However, that is a planned pitfall; the synodic lunisolar calendar with 12 months in a year is here to supersede the 28 day, 13 month gynocentric calendar. Its irregularity with the number of days in a month (29 or 30 days with about 11 extra days for intercalation) is an inherently critical flaw. Its inaccuracy when incorporated within the solar annual calendar (approximately 365.25 days) stands out. Seen below in the table, the synodic lunar track results in as many leap days as a total of 44 days for 4 years, whereas the sidereal lunar track has 2 days for 4 years. The synodic lunisolar calendar undercuts the moon’s given capacity – guiding earthly beings into the intergalactic voyage of WE/HERE/NOW. In it, both the moon and women are, glorified and objectified by the viewer, cast under the male voyeuristic eye. On the contrary, the sidereal lunisolar calendar, based on the cyclic synchrony between the moon and women, offers the lens to the interconnectedness of all bodies in the universe. Synodic Lunar Track (Patriarchal) Sidereal Lunar Track (Magoist) Focus Moon’s phases Moon’s motions Days of month 29 or 30 (irregular) 28 (regular) No. of months in a year 12 13 Women’s menstrual cycle Assumed sync Synced Luni-centric Astolonomy Unknown 28 Constellations Intercalations 11 days annually, a total of 44 days for 4 years 1 day annually & 1 day every 4 years, a total of 2 days for 4 years Sources prove that the sidereal lunation is, albeit esoterically, known across cultures to this day. Through the comparative study of ancient cultures of Babylon, Arabia, India and China, W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) observes the substantive difference in dynamic between the two lunation tracks, the synodic and the sidereal. He notes that the moon’s orbital motion, apart from the sun’s, charts out the celestial sphere as the 28 Mansions. I have learned that the 28 Mansions or 28 Constellations of the Moon is a popular form of the 28 day and 13 month Magoist calendar, widely circulated among East Asians especially Koreans from the ancient time. Yeats’ following insights corroborate the Budoji’s explication of the Magoist Calendar in general and the faulty nature of the patriarchal (ancient Chinese) calendar in …
(Essay) The Emergence celebrated at Spring Equinox by Glenys Livingstone Ph.D.

The Spring Equinox Moment occurs September 21-23 Southern Hemisphere, March 21-23 Northern Hemisphere. The full story of Spring Equinox is expressed in the full flower connected to the seed fresh from the earth; that is, it is a story of emergence from the dark, from a journey, perhaps long, perhaps short, through challenging places. The joy of the blossoming is rooted in the journey through the dark, and an acknowledgement of the dark’s fertile gift, as well as of great achievement in having made it, of having returned. Both Equinoxes, Spring and Autumn, celebrate this sacred balance of grief and joy, light and dark, and they are both celebrations of the mystery of the seed. The seed is essentially the deep Creativity within – that manifests in the Spring as flower, or green emerged One. the full story: the root and the flower As the new young light continues to grow at this time of Spring, it comes into balance with the dark at Spring Equinox, or ‘Eostar’ as it may be named; about to tip further into light when light will dominate the day. The trend at this Equinox is toward increasing hours of light: and thus it is about the power of being – life is stepping into it. Earth in this region is tilting further toward the Sun. Traditionally it may be storied as the joyful celebration of a Lost Beloved One, who may be represented by the Persephone story: She is a shamanic figure who is known for Her journey to the Underworld, and who at this time of Spring Equinox returns. Her Mother Demeter who has waited and longed for Her in deep grief, rejoices and so do all: warmth and growth return to the land. Persephone, the Beloved Daughter, the Seed, has navigated the darkness successfully, has enriched it with Her presence and also gained its riches. Eostar/Spring Equinox is the magic of the unexpected, yet long awaited, green emergence from under the ground, and then the flower: this emergence is especially profound as it is from a seed that has lain dormant for months or longer – much like the magic of desert blooms after long periods of drought. The name of “Eostar” comes from the Saxon Goddess Eostre/Ostara, the northern form of the Sumerian Astarte[i]. The Christian festival in the Spring, was named “Easter” as of the Middle Ages, appropriating Goddess/Earth tradition. The date of Easter, which is set for Northern Hemispheric seasons, is still based on the lunar/menstrual calendar; that is, the 1st Sunday after the first full Moon after Spring Equinox. In Australia where I am, “Easter” is celebrated in Autumn (!) by mainstream culture, so we have the spectacle of fluffy chickens, chocolate eggs and rabbits in the shops at that time. There are other names for “Eostar” in other places …the Welsh name for the Spring Equinox celebration is Eilir, meaning ‘regeneration’ or ‘spring’ – or ‘earth’[ii]. In my own PaGaian tradition, the Spring Equinox celebration is based on the Demeter and Persephone story, the version that is understand as pre-patriarchal, from Old Europe. In the oldest stories, Persephone has agency in Her descent: She descends to the underworld voluntarily as a courageous seeker of wisdom, and a compassionate receiver of the dead. She represents, and IS, the Seed of Life that never fades away. Spring Equinox is a celebration of Her return, Life’s continual return, and thus also our personal and collective emergences/returns.We may contemplate the collective emergence/returns especially in our times. I describe Persephone as a “hera”, which of old was a term for any courageous One. “Hera” was a pre-Hellenic name for the Goddess in general[iii]. “Hera” was the indigenous Queen Goddess of pre-Olympic Greece, before She was married off to Zeus. “Hero” was a term for the brave male Heracles who carried out tasks for his Goddess Hera: “The derivative form ‘heroine’ is therefore completely unnecessary”[iv]. “Hera” may be used as a term for any courageous individual: and participants in PaGaian Spring Equinox ceremony have named themselves this way. The pre-“Olympic” games of Greece were Hera’s games, held at Her Heraion/temple[v]. The winners were “heras” – gaining the status of being like Her[vi]. At the time of Spring Equinox, we may celebrate the Persephone, the Hera, the Courageous One, who steps with new wisdom, into power of being: the organic power that all beings must have, Gaian power, the power of the Cosmos. This Seasonal ceremony may be a rejoicing in how we have made it through great challenges and loss, faced our fears and our demise (in its various forms), had ‘close shaves’ – perhaps physically as well as psychicly and emotionally. It is a time to welcome back that which was lost, and step into the strength of being. Spring Equinox/Eostar is the time for enjoying the fruits of the descent, of the journey taken into the darkness: return is now certain, not tentative as it was in the Early Spring/Imbolc. Demeter, the Mother, receives the Persephones, Lost Beloved Ones, joyously. This may be understood as an individual experience, but also as a collective experience – as we emerge into a new Era as a species. Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme speak of the ending of the sixty-five million year geological Era – the Cenozoic Era – in our times, and our possible emergence into an Ecozoic Era. They describe the Ecozoic Era as a time when “the curvature of the universe, the curvature of the earth, and the curvature of the human are once more in their proper relation”[vii]. Joanna Macy speaks of the “Great Turning” of our times[viii]. Collectively we have been away from the Mother for some time and there is a lot of pain. At this time we may contemplate not only our own individual lost wanderings, but also that of the human species. We are part of a much bigger Return that is happening. The Beloved One may be understood as returning on a collective level: …

(Photo Essay 4) ‘Gaeyang Halmi, the Sea Goddess of Korea’ by Helen Hwang

Part IV: Revival of the Gurang (Nine Maidens) Gaeyang Halmi There is more to reveal. As I write this part of the photo essay, I have encountered new information, previously made available online by individuals and organizations. It is reported that the “Suseong-dang” (水聖堂, Sea Saint Shrine) was once called the “Gurang-sa” (九娘祠, Nine Maidens Shine), of which I never heard before.[i] That Suseong-dang is a fake name blew my mind! Note the difference of gender between “the Nine Maidens Shrine” and “the Sea Saint Shrine”! The female-connoted term was stolen just like that! “Gurang-sa,” a female-referenced term as the character “rang” means a maiden, had to go due to its overt female representation. It is not without grounds that I was taken aback to see its present logography, “the Sea Saint Shrine,” on the information board.[ii] I almost heard a voice warning me, “This is not the place that you think it is!” That voice attempted to force me to leave the place without further investigation. However, I intuitively took a mental note, “Something is not correct here.” And I was right! Its name change sheds a consistent light on the meddling of patriarchal distortion/deception done to the tradition of Gaeyang Halmi. Readers are reminded of the lost painting of Gaeyang Halmi, which was replaced by that of the Sea God explicated in Part 2 of this photo essay (also Part 3). Like “the Sea God,” “the Suseong-dang” constitutes no reality. It is not only a conceptual deception but also a theft of the intangible cultural heritage, righteously committed by faceless patriarchal men disappeared into the lapse of time. It is clear that systematic erasure of the Female/Goddess has been in operation. Female power embodied whether in the name of the shrine or in the iconography was stripped away. However, it is proven once again that the Female is immortal because it constitutes the root of patriarchy. People smuggled the forbidden knowledge of the Female to later generations through oral stories. Thus, we find the folklore of the Female subversive.
(Book Excerpt 1) Mago Almanac Planner for Personal Journey by Helen Hye-Sook Hwang, Ph.D.

[Author’s Note: Year 4’s Mago Almanac celebrates the birth of Mago Almanac Planner for Personal Journey. The Magoist 13 month 28 day calendric movement has grown steadily and we welcome the public as well!] PREFACE: What Mago Almanac Planner Offers The Mago Almanac Planner for Personal Journey enchants people and our societies to live with a sense of the natural timespace patterned by the luni-menstrual rhythm in company with the earth’s song and dance. This is not a statement of poetic fancy unsupported by science or mathematics. We are invited to walk through the matrix of Sonic Numerology, the organizing force of Life. The 13 month 28 day Magoist Calendar returns calendric regularity to us. Calendric regularity is the very vision that unfolds the metamorphic reality of WE/HERE/NOW. Unlike the 12 month irregular day calendar that modifies the natural rhythm to serve the purpose of controlling people, the Magoist Calendar guides human activities within the natural rhythm to harmonize the human world with the natural world. The Mago Almanac Planner is built to provide flesh to the bones of the Mago Almanac. Taking the latter as foundation, Mago Almanac Planner partitions a year into the units of weeks and days. The regularity of 28 days makes it possible to lay out 52 weeks and 364 days with one or two extra days seamlessly. The rhythm of nine numbers becomes transparent. Each day of a year is named accumulatively in order i.e. the first to 364th. Likewise, each week of a year is named accumulatively in order i.e. Week 1 to Week 52. Each day is given the daily number, the moon phase, and/or 24 Seasonal Marks. Special days include such double dates as New Year (1st Moon 1st Day), double second (2nd Moon 2nd Day), double third (3rd Moon 3rd Day), and so forth. By writing the Mago Almanac Planner, I have observed that Double Ninth (9th Moon 9th day) overlaps with the 16th mark of 24 Seasonal Marks, Ipchu (立秋 Entering Fall) or Lammas in the Northern Hemisphere. The day of Double Ninth is indeed the center point of a year! Also the interval of 24 Seasonal Marks is about every 15 days, whereas that of 8 Seasonal Marks is about every 45 days. In three Appendixes, I have provided a traditional style of one year calendar, Year 4’s 364 Days (52 Weeks) with 2 Extra Days and their Gregorian Dates or the conversion chart, Large Calendar 1 (Years 1-4) marked in Gregorian C. Dates, and Year 4 Lunar-Menstrual Chart in which one can add their menstrual dates in relation to the moon phases and seasonal marks. As a whole, the Mago Almanac Planner is designed to personalize one’s own celebratory or commemorative days in tune with nature’s rhythm. This Planner marks the 4th year (Volume 4) of the revived Magoist Calendar, Mago Almanac: 13 Month 28 Day Calendar. We are about to complete the first Large Calendar, which refers to the first four years (Years 1-4). We set the new moon date (December 18) before Winter Solstice in 2018 in the Northern Hemisphere as the first lunation of the revived Magoist Calendar. If we count the year from the onset of the nine-state Danguk confederacy (3898 BCE-2333 BCE) founded by Goma, Magoist Shaman Queen Mother, our Year 1 would be 5916 ME (Magoma Era). Technically speaking, the Magoist Calendar formed at the time of our beginning came to be reincarnated on December 18, 2018 in the Northern Hemisphere (hereafter it implies the Northern Hemisphere otherwise indicated.) The year 2018 for the rebirth of the revived Magoist Calendar was arbitrary in that it could have been in 2017 or 2019. In retrospect, I must say that we are lucky to set the time of our first lunation on December 18 2018 because it makes the calendric migration process the smoothest. This means that our Magoist Calendar runs as less as 13 days behind the Gregorian Calendar. If we had begun in 2017, our New Year would have been December 17. Only one day difference. However, if we had begun in 2016, our New Year would have been on November 29. Likewise, if we had begun in 2019, our New Year would have been on November 26. These dates are the new moon date before Winter Solstice, the New Year day. The Magoist Calendar charts the human world into the Reality of WE/HERE/NOW. The Magoist Calendar needs to be in use today, which means that it has to be translated into the language of the Gregorian Calendar. For we have lost the actual counting of the Magoist Calendar into our days in the course of patriarchal history. Mago Almanac serves the purpose of making our calendric migration possible from the 12 month Gregorian Calendar to the 13 month Magoist Calendar. It guides our collective journey in the Mother TimeSpace interwoven by the cosmogonic force of Sonic Numerology, the musical interplay of nine numbers, which gives birth, nurtures, and transforms all beings in the cosmos. Intriguingly, I have realized only last year that the Magoist Calendar is identical with “the 13 Moon Turtle Calendar,” the calendar of North American indigenous peoples, which adopts the turtle shell that has 13 inner sections and 28 outer sections for the calendar of 13 moons and 28 days (see figure). This speaks volumes that the 13 month 28 day calendar was once widely known among peoples of the ancient world. The Magoist Calendar restores the link between lunation and menstruation as a 28 day monthly cycle, a topic that I have discussed in my essay, “Introducing the Magoist Calendar: Original Blessing of the Womb Time,” included in this planner. Why do we need to reinstate the calendar that is based on the luni-menstruation rhythm? That is because the Magoist Calendar is in accordance with Sonic Numerology. Put differently, the moon-women duet inscribed in the 13 month 28 day calendar is given by the Natural World. In fact, the Magoist Calendar is the first and …
(Essay 1) How Did I Fall In Love with Korean Historical Drama? by Anna Tzanova, M.A.

Go to online class, Korean Historical Dramas. “To become a kairomancer¹, you need to learn to trust your feelings as you walk the roads of this world, to develop your personal science of shivers, to recognize in your gut and your skin and in free-floating impressions that you know far more than you hold on the surface of consciousness. You need to take care of your poetic health, reading what rhymes in a day or a season. You want to expect the unexpected, to make friends with surprises, and never miss that special moment.” ~ Robert Moss² After a year and a half of work without a day off; driving 100-150 miles every other day; writing past midnight every night; at the end of July 2011, overwhelmed by fatigue, I finally decided to take a weekend off. Little did I know, that time off would last over seven months, during which I would not only change my job, but also acquire a new passion.
Mago, the First Mother from East Asia by Helen Hye-Sook Hwang

[Excerpts from “Mago, the First Mother from East Asia,” Creatrix Media Live (CML) Roundtable Radio Talk with Dr. Helen Hye-Sook Hwang. May 23, 2011] Jayne DeMente: Welcome Helen, I was fortunate to read some of your research and I applaud you because, we in the Western WSE movement have long needed to hear more from Asian women spiritual leaders and feminists and your reference to the Neolithic timeline… For our listeners and participants online, let’s lead with the question of who is Mago, was she a mother figure, what is Magoism, does any other deity pre-date her? Helen Hye-Sook Hwang: *Mago is the great goddess known to East Asians throughout history. She is the first mother of all, cosmogonist, and ultimate sovereign/ruler. She has many names. Among them are Triad Deity (Samsin), Grandmother (halmi), Auspicious Goddess (Seogo), Evil (Magui), and Old Goddess (Nogo). She is also known as the Giantess who shaped the natural and cultural landscape. Her manifestations are so multivalent that one may think they do not refer to the same goddess. She was well loved, given high esteem, celebrated by East Asians in the past. She was almost completely forgotten, however in modern times, up until the 1980s in Korea, when the principle text of Magoism, the Budoji, re-emerged. *Mago is a mother figure in the sense that she bore two daughters, Kunghee and Sohee, and managed her household called the Castle of Mago, the primordial paradise of humanity. She is the ancestor of all races. She takes care of everything on earth via the equilibrium of cosmic music/sound/vibration. *Magoism is the term that refers to the totality of culture/civilization venerating Mago as the great goddess. It is a tradition largely unnoted but co-opted and distorted in major East Asian religions. The concept of Magoism helps one identify and understand Mago’s multivalent manifestations that are found trans-nationally. It also makes possible to name the female-centered original/primal civilization that gave birth to the forthcoming East Asian civilizations and religions. *Whether Mago is the earliest deity known to East Asia is unknown. In fact, there are goddesses unearthed from “pre-historic” archaeological sites without their names. The life-sized goddess statue was unearthed in the site of Hongshan Culture, northeastern region of present China dating from 4,700 to 2,900 BCE. The heavy use of jade along with the partly bear-figured female icon is congruent with the account of Magoism in the Budoji. Also, of course, there are numerous female figurines called dogu excavated in Japan’s “pre-historic” times. The ancient origin of Mago or Magoism has a merit to explain some facts that remain a mystery, so to speak. Korea is also known as the land of dolmens. Half of the world megaliths are populated in the Korean peninsula. There are numerous pyramids found in mainland China. There is a documentary film about the sunken temple beneath the sea of Okinawa Japan, etc. dating to 10,000 years ago. *Then, how early does Mago date to? It is difficult to date the earliest evidence of Mago or Magoism simply because written history does not exist in pre-patriarchal times. As you see here, when we talk about the earliest of something, everyone assumes it is of Chinese. So let me follow this line of thought: Ge Hong’s record on Magu from China dates to the early fourth century CE (Ge Hong 283—343 CE). However, Daoist scholar Robert Ford Campany states that the cult of Mago dates back to the Stone Age. It is more difficult to date Mago in Korean records simply because ancient written records did not survive. Two books, the Budoji and the Handan Gogi, alleged to have been written in the late 4th or early 5th century and subsequent later times, which refer to Mago otherwise known as Samsin (Triad Deity) remain controversial. Considering that the name Mago is embedded in Korean language as in “gom,” “geum,” and “gam,” whose meaning indicates ruler, sovereign, and head, the origin of Mago is as old as these words. Likewise, most materials that recount Mago as cosmogonist are of folklore, place names, literature, arts, and debris of historical and religious records, most of which are difficult to date for its origin. Anniitra Ravenmoon: Thank you Helen, you have done much academic research and hold several degrees, can you explain to us how your education or experience informed you regarding Mago? Helen: *I would say that encountering Mago as a doctoral research topic is ultimately prompted by my intellectual quest as a Korean feminist. Following radical feminism of Mary Daly, I wanted to seek spirituality that is not only non-patriarchal but also East Asian and Korean. This made me study feminism and East Asian religions, histories, and cultures, etc. I end up with so much to study over the past decade and a half. I did not take up graduate studies as a means to develop an academic career. I loved reading and studies from youth. This kind of attitude is not that practical in the job market. However, I believe this is the right path for me. To look back, I did not follow the ready-made conventional path of life. I was a dreamer and idealist. I still value those qualities in myself and others. I used to think to myself, if I had remained a Christian, I would not have sought Mago. How could I? Likewise if I had resorted to Buddhism, I would not have encountered Mago. Because I wanted to carve out my own spiritual path as a Korean feminist, I was able to encounter Mago. Another factor at work in my study of Mago is the cultural or spiritual tradition of cultivating the Dao, the Way, in East Asia. I wanted to find out what the truth was, how I could make the most out of my life and etc. So I tried the shoes of a Catholic overseas missionary for a while. Leaving Christianity behind, however, helped me realize the cultural heritage that I have within. It was …
(Essay 2) Why Reenact the Nine-Mago Movement? by Helen Hye-Sook Hwang

[Author’s Note: The sequel of this essay is released in preparation for 2015 Nine-Day Solstice Celebration Project.] Part 2 Goddess Goma, the Magoist Shaman Ruler, and Her Nona-Mago Tradition Not until the autumn of 2012 did the pervasive manifestation of the number nine symbolism in Magoism surface in my consciousness. The information that the shrine of Gaeyang Halmi (Gaeyang Grandmother/Goddess), the Sea Goddess of Korea, was once called the Temple of Gurang (Nine Goddesses 九嫏祠) awakened a deep memory in me. It was a revelation to me and I began to connect the dots! That summer, I had joined the field research team of Konkuk University’s Korean Oral Literature graduate program. With them I visited the Shrine of the Sea Saint (Suseong-dang 水聖堂) in Buan, North Jeolla, S. Korea to collect folklore from the locals. Only when I was processing the data that the team gathered to write a report, did I come across the original name of the shrine, the Temple of the Nine Goddesses. And the Nine Goddesses refer to Gaeyang Halmi and her eight daughters. It is unknown how and when it was replaced by the current name, the Shrine of the Sea Saint. It is evident, however, that a linguistic femicide took place; the female-connoted term, the Nine Goddesses, was replaced by the sex/gender neutral term, the Sea Saint.
(Essay 3) Making the Gynocentric Case: Mago, the Great Goddess of East Asia, and Her Tradition Magoism by Helen Hwang

[Editor’s note: Numbers of endnotes differ from the original ones in the article] Claiming the Budoji (Epic of the Emblem City) as a Principal Text of Magoism The Budoji (Epic of the Emblem City) stands out from other sources for its systemic and refined mytho-historical account of Old Magoism. Alleged to have been written in between the late fourth and early fifth century of Silla Korea (57 BCE-918 CE), the Budoji is the Sillan testimony to the history of Budo (Emblem City), a replica of Mago’s Citadel. It is a book that summons ancient Koreans to remember the glorious history of their Magoist ancestors particularly Budo, better known as Dangun Choson Korea (2333 BEC-232 BEC). Budo’s construction and administration in East Asia for nearly two millennia are attributed to the leadership of Imgeom or Dangun. She is the third of the triad sovereigns of Old Magoism after Hanin and Hanung. Designating the civilization of Budo as a direct successor of its previous civilization Sinsi (Divine Market) attributed to the leadership of Hanung, the Budoji traces the Magoist pedigree of pre-patriarchal civilizations ultimately back to Mago and her paradisiacal community, Mago’s Citadel.[i] Composed of thirty-three chapters, its epical narrative is replete with unheard but resonant concepts and symbols such as cosmic music, triad, parthenogenesis, mountain paradisiacal community, genealogy, and so on. Among others, the Budoji unleashes one most fascinating cosmogonic account yet-to-be-known, the story of Mago’s beginning.[ii] Mago, emerged by the cosmic music alongside the stars in the primordial time, began her procreation. Then she initiates the natural process of self-creation. She had her offspring to procreate and asked them to administer the paradisiacal community in Mago’s Citadel. She is the cosmic being who listens to the rise and fall of the cosmic music. The primary task of Mago’s community was to produce Earthly musical resonance that corresponds with the music of the universe. The sonic balance between the universe and the Earth is absolutely essential to the survival and prosperity of the earthly community.[iii] The Budoji not only makes it possible to recognize a large corpus of transnational primary sources as coherent within the context of Magoism but also enables the researcher to understand erosion, variation, and mutation wrought on individual data in the course of history. Budoji’s mytho-historical framework is particularly crucial in assessing the large number of folkloric and topological data that are otherwise seen anomalous or corrupted. For example, the stories that Mago lived in a rock or Mago carried large boulders on her limbs and built megalithic structures find resonance in Budoji’s narratives. Its accounts concerning rocks and landmasses are too complex to present here. Some examples are: Mago began her act of creation by moving and dropping a heavenly landmass and into heavenly water; Magoist sovereigns became rocks that made resonating sounds upon death. In short, Magoism animates pre-Chinese history of East Asia otherwise labeled as “primitive societies.” It entertains the idea that animism and shamanism are not isolated practices but the older religious forms of Magoism.