August 30, 2016October 2, 2019 Mago Work AdminLeave a comment

(Art) Listen… Nature Knows by Nicole Shaw

(Photo Essay 2) Grandmothers by Kaalii Cargill

The so called “Venus” figurines are figures from prehistory that I prefer to call “Grandmothers”. The figurines were carved from soft stone, bone or ivory, or formed of clay and fired. Over the last 5 years, I have been visiting with the Grandmothers. This series of posts includes images and impressions of those visits. Delphi, Greece When I think of standing in Delphi, I remember the mountains and the cicadas. Before the sanctuary at Delphi was dedicated to Apollo, the sibyls/ wisewomen resided in a cave high on the slopes of Mt Parnassus (2,457 m /8,061 ft above sea level). Temple of Apollo, Delphi I walked among the classical ruins – the temple, the sibyl rock, the tholos – and drank from the Castalian Spring. Tholos, Temple of Athena, Delphi Sitting in the shade of an olive tree, listening to the cicadas, I understood why the ancient Greeks represented music as a cicada sitting on a harp. Surely the people walking there thousands of years ago heard the same song . . . Olive trees on the path to the Tholos, Delphi The Corycian Cave sits high above the temple ruins. The landscape holds the memories and meaning of this place – the long, slow climb up the side of the mountain, the flickering shadows beneath the fir trees, the ever-present cicadas. I visited the cave alone, entering through the small opening, climbing down the rocky slope into a vast cavern (90m long, 60m wide, 50 m high). Entrance to Corycian Cave Main cavern, Corycian Cave In the half light, the huge stalagmites emerged from the shadows – Grandmothers waiting forever for us to remember them. Formed by Nature over millennia, these figures echo the shapes of prehistory Grandmother figurines. Grandmother stalagmite, Corycian Cave Water drops fell slowly from the roof of the cave, taking all the time in the world to form the next layer on the silent guardians of the cave. I listened for Her voice. Between the soft sound of dropping water there was only silence – a deep, eternal silence. Water drops, Corycian Cave Meet Mago Contributor KAALII CARGILL
(Prose) The Feast of the New Grain/Lammas: The Turning of the Wheel by Sara Wright

The Turning of the Wheel Today heavy mist shrouds the apple trees and rises like puffs of smoke over the mountains. Every twig is still covered with lush green leaves and every time I look out a window I feel that gratitude pulsing through me – the wonder of being alive. A brilliant green frog inhabits my toad pond. Last night a Datura blossom literally opened before my eyes etched with pale lavender – a moonflower of exquisite fragrance and beauty, and if anything, I appreciate these moon blossoms here more than I did in the desert.
(Photo Essay 9) Goddess Pilgrimage 2018

[Author’s Note: In May 2018, I set out on a 3 month pilgrimage to Greece, Turkey and the prehistory sites of “Old Europe”. Once again my main focus was “visiting with the Grandmothers”.] I went to Vienna to see the “Venus of Willendorf”, the iconic figure of Great Mother found in 1908 at a Paleolithic site in Lower Austria. She is carved from oolithic limestone tinted with red ochre, and is 11.1 centimetres tall (4.4 inches). Estimated to be about 30,000 years old, the sculpture is displayed in the Naturalhistoriches Museum in Vienna in a small, dark room much like a shrine. The terminology “Venus” would be laughable if it didn’t also reflect patriarchal assumptions about women, power, and so-called “primitive” people. I prefer to call her “Grandmother” as a term of respect. This beautiful sculpture is one of many figurines from Paleolithic Europe. In the Museum, the sculpture stands out against a black background, as if She is looking at us from 30,000 years ago. The prehistory section of the Naturalhistoriches Museum also displays bone beads and shell pendants from 30,000 years ago. Imagine people shaping, drilling, and wearing these . . . Meet Mago Contributor KAALII CARGILL
(Art and Prose) Mothers of Vibration by Claire Dorey

[Author’s Note: This post follows Understanding Tanit through Felt Experience, Visualising the Energy in Hathor’s Temple , Girls On Top , A Bun in the Oven and I Made an Aroma Cone.] Art by Claire Dorey I’m searching beneath the elaborate creation myths adorning the walls of Hathor’s temple for something more primal – energies aligned to the Divine Feminine that can empower today, after all the story of the Goddess is one of evolution. “I need a father, I need a mother, I need some old, wiser being to talk to. I talk to God but the sky is empty.” – Sylvia Plath. This is a lost world of hand gestures, Asanas, dance, body art, medicine, magic, mantra and lineage. Once dormant beneath the sand Hathor vibration rises like mist in the desert. Awakening feminine consciousness has the potential to heal past, present and future. Empires fall and rise. The Goddess fell. Hathor’s temple lay buried, holding it’s breath, resting and healing, yet the intention was always to rise again. We are a humanity adrift, battling apocalyptic tides of a patriarchy so toxic we struggle to tune in to the steady pulse of loving, healing and joyful Hathor energy our ancestors described as the Celestial Cow, who’s maternal legs were pillars of protection beneath which humanity could thrive in peace and stability. “The mission of the Seven Hathors is to bring a consciousness level to the people [ ] the sistrum is used to activate in ceremony through sound the vibration of the Pleiadies.” – Sonja Grace, author of Spirit Traveller – This Egyptian Temple Is Connected to the Pleiadians, Gaia. Hathor’s temple, homage to the Mothers of Vibration, including Naunet, Nut and Isis, is a soul sister temple. Construction, overseen in part by Cleopatra VII, was completed as Egypt became a province of the Roman Empire, a very turbulent time to be a woman. Soon a male dominated society would embark on the systematic eradication of the Sacred Feminine. Meanwhile patriarchal propaganda painted Cleopatra as a depraved temptress; sacred sex as debauched and the Hathor priestess as whores. Hathor asks us to ‘align our core vibration with source’ through sound, light, love and other energies we can’t see or hear – energies the existential sciences are starting to explore. Consciousness; the sacred trinity of sex, pregnancy and birth; herbalism and body autonomy; mirroring the divine within ourselves and in parallel worlds (Eugene Wigner proposed the existence of mirror worlds,1927) are prominent concepts in Hathor’s temple, as are EMOTION; vibration – the on/off binary code which weaves through the universe….and fractals. “…Fractal is [ ] the nesting of the Mother within the Grandmother, [ ] the Girl within the Mother, and the Baby within the Girl, an infinite process bridging the Macro to the Micro.” – Jain 108. Cult priestesses were tattooed with the mark of the Hathor Cow, Uraeus, Lotus and Protective Eye. Henna’d thighs and tattooed bellies could be the marks of the shaman, after all the Egyptian soul journeyed between realms and deities shape-shifted from human to power animal. Priestess Amunet bore elliptical tattoos on her root and sacral energy centres – a vesica piscis opening over her womb, possibly a form of apotropaic magic, or symbol of the ‘womb matrix’, an energy grid – matrix means ‘uterus’ – connecting Mothers of the Universe, past, present and future. Energetic dots and spirals decorate ancient temples and female icons, found all over the globe. “A woman who heals herself, heals her mother, heals her daughter, and every woman around her.” – source unknown. Gentle movement releases trauma and strengthens life-force. Hathor’s dancers raised vibration – said to protect women in labour, as did the Taweret amulet. We get so used to viewing dance as entertainment that we’ve removed from consciousness the ancestral memory of the female shaman rhythmically moving into intuition, ecstasy and healing. Trance wasn’t the only pathway to other dimensions. Festivals of drunkenness removed inhibitions and psychological blocks so the portals of mass consciousness open. “You are [ ] the Mistress of Dance The Lady of Unending Drunkenness.” – Hymn of the Seven Hathors, Dendera. Drunken gatherings of uninhibited, high status women ‘making love to source’ horrified the Roman patriarch, who themselves loved consuming to excess. For them this was male territory, their god of wine, ritual ecstasy and drunkenness was male and they preferred women temperate. In contrast, blood thirsty lion Goddess Sekhmet, ‘She who is powerful’, an aspect of Hathor when angry, was plied with alcohol during festivals to keep Her happy. “I am woman hear me roar.” – Helen Reddy. On the temple walls, etched in stone, representations of sound and vibration made visible, cascade into storage jars, as the Sistrum and Menit necklace are rattled. Remote healing can be directed to the past, present and future. The energy, intention and timing for healing can be stored in a container, so perhaps this is what these images describe. Did they raise and store vibration to activate ceremonial libations, spells, the latent power of hieroglyph (temple language) and statues? The temple was a birth house so they may have infused mother’s milk, used in spells, with the vibration of bovine ‘Mother of Mothers’ and Goddess of percussion, Hathor. Dr. Masaru Emoto’s experiments with water consciousness show how sound, thoughts and intention impact the molecular structure of water. Sound and intention can raise our vibration since our bodies are 50-60% water. Harmonics can levitate and alter the shape of water droplets. Art by Claire Dorey When harnessing universal energy a triadic flow is created between energy, agent and recipient making healing reciprocal, so perhaps hands held up to venerate deities, as seen in temple imagery, could be for energy channelling rather than solely for reverence – their palms do resemble the Reiki hand posture. Perhaps the story of the Dendera Zodiac is one of Karma, identifying past and future dates in need of healing, possibly problematic lunar or solar eclipses. “During the period 51 BCE – 30 BCE, the …
(Book Excerpt 4) Re-Membering with Goddess: Healing the Patriarchal Perpetuation of Trauma by Trista Hendren

https://thegirlgod.com/re-membering.php Finding Myself Caroline Selles I open the box of puzzle pieces that are my pain. As I sort through the jumble of jagged bleeding pieces, I notice My illusionsMy faultsMy failures My trauma. The edges form the suit of armor so familiar, comfortable, and suffocating.The colors are muted and faded.The design prescribed by others My familyMy peersMy rapistMy newsfeed. Edges no longer match.Pieces no longer fit.The picture on the box, so attractive and acceptable to others, The image I am told I should want to form seemsGrotesqueArtificialOffensiveUnacceptable to me. One by one, I lovingly scrape off the blood and reshape the pieces. I add vibrant colorsOf laughterOf tears Of dancing Of truth. The suit of armor is replaced by a blanket, warm, cozy, comforting and fluid.I allow the tenderness to mold, not an image, but a feeling. A feeling Of loveOf belonging Of connection Of safety. I am finding myself, one piece at a time. (To be continued) https://www.magoism.net/2013/08/meet-mago-contributor-trista-hendren/
(Essay) Battered, Bruised but Not Broken: The Ancient Goose Goddess by Jeri Studebaker

As amazing as it sounds, a bird we now call “silly” was once a goddess so powerful she could (and did) create the mighty sun in the sky. One way to drain power from transcendent symbols is to wage smear campaigns against them. In medieval Europe, the Church turned people against Pagan deities by erecting statues of them in town squares and paying people to hurl rocks at the statues. It seems obvious that if Europeans had not been vigorously insistent upon worshiping these deities it’s unlikely the Church would have gone to this kind of trouble to get rid of them.
(Book Review) Myths Shattered and Restored, editors Marion Dumont & Gayatri Devi, by Glenys Livingstone Ph.D.

What a pleasure to read this collection of diverse scholarly voices who speak of global mythological/spiritual traditions from within a Goddess frame: that is, from within a frame where She is understood as primal in an organic way, and without any apology. This is Volume 1 of proceedings from an annual conference of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology. It is a documentation of the papers from the 2014 gathering that many (who read this blog) would love to have been able to be present to: this book makes all this research and thoughtful presentation accessible, and expands the conversation that so many of us thirst for. On page 1 the editors describe: Mythology is the branch of knowledge or field of study of the important stories we tell ourselves that enable us to gather meaning in our daily lives … myths are cultural and spiritual stories that arise out of humanity’s experience of life on earth. Myths speak to a deep and real desire in us to understand our context here on earth while yearning to comprehend our connection to our ancestors and our roots, to share experiences that transcend binaries and boundaries, and to envision the future from a liminal present. Myths allow us to see ourselves as both timeless and historical beings. Through awakening belief, mythic stories afford us an opportunity to participate in a non-material realm, a realm of sacred, creative power, whose intimations we experience in our encounters with ourselves and with the world around us through a multitude of modalities, such as ritual, art, storytelling and dance. They are the threads that link our present with our past and serve to shape our future. As I began reading, I kept thinking of women who would like to read the specific essays, and of my own hunger for the integrity and wholeness of the female (my self and my kind) that set me on the Goddess path almost four decades ago, of my passion to know Her and express Her – in a world/context where She was silenced, always seen as a problem. Though I have done much research and practice in these past decades, I found that this volume fed and fired my ongoing hunger to know more of Her. In the first essay by Mara Lynn Keller, there is a very useful and succinct analysis of the unique contribution and significance of the work of Marija Gimbutas, to the fields of knowledge. A little further along Mara offers a wonderful explanation of the use of the term “Goddess”, quoting Charlene Spretnak; an explanation that is so much richer and Earth-based than much of current superficial use of the term. This essay offers a quote from Marija Gimbutas of the true nature of “civilization”, what it is not, and what it is; and discusses some of the resistance to the metanarrative of “a goddess-revering civilization at the root of European culture”[1]. The next essay by Joan M. Cichon[2]begins with a succinct appraisal of archaeomythology, which is Marija Gimbutas’s method, and the precise nature of the worldview developed by this methodology. This essay begins with the question of whether “a Goddess was worshipped in ancient Malta”, and in the answering of that question and a few related others, develops a useful comparison of previous archaeologists’ worldviews and theories with that of Marija Gimbutas: thus offering clarity about what that difference is. She also describes how unfamiliar the language of the Goddess has been to many archaeologists, how interpretations have been made from minds committed to defence and authority as essential to social structure, rather than ceremony and celebration of life cycles and being. In the process Joan Cichon refers to texts that would provide a rich resource for further independent study, if desired. She also uses Marija Gimbutas’s method to analyse the icon and worship of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa in Poland, and Her link “to Old Europe, to Isis, and to the ancient Great Mother Goddess”[3]. In “Honoring the Web: Indigenous Wisdom and the Power of Place”, which was the keynote address and dedicated to co-founder of ASWM Patricia Monaghan, Arieahn Matamonasa-Bennett discusses and expands the definition, use and implications of the term indigenous. She speaks of the “collective grief of humanity”[4], the legacy of colonization and that “all of our ancestors were from earth-based cultures”[5]. She refers to the importance of understanding our oldest mind, the “metaphoric mind”[6], and refers also to the work of Thomas Berry, Joanna Macy, Brian Swimme and other significant scientists and ecologists who contribute to the “understanding of life as a web of interconnected, interdependent relationships”[7]. Arieahn speaks of the shared values of indigenous peoples around the world, and a primary one being the preserving of their stories, languages, customs, songs and philosophies: she expands the concept of activism to include the remembering of the sacred, to using your breath to speak and educate, using your particular gifts as medicine for the world. “Ariadne, Mistress of the Labyrinth: Reclaiming Ariadnian Crete” by Alexandra K. Cichon was a wonderful read, of re-storying Ariadne’s “imperishable thread” and her labyrinth; experienced as uniting the visible and invisible worlds, embodying the goddess’s “vision of life as a living unity”[8]. I loved Mary Beth Moser’s “Wild Women of the Waters: Remembering the Anguane of the Italian Alps”; impressed yet again to see such scholarship dedicated to the female point of view, the studious regard for matrifocal priorities. We (globally) hardly have a language to speak of such priorities, because our minds in general have been formed by patrifocal and industrialised, mechanistic frames. This essay is such a beautiful placement of the female as agent, grounded in the traditions and folk stories of Mary Beth’s ancestral place of the Italian Alps. It deserves much contemplation, to re-invoke this authentic magic, manifest in the cycles of life, represented in the hag/witch; a wisdom that had almost disappeared over time largely due to christianisation. Reading the essay on “Artemis as Protectress of Female …
(Essay) Goddess as Love: From Experience To Thealogy by Carol P. Christ

If theology is rooted in experience, how do we move from experience to theology? In my life there have been a number of key moments of “revelation” that have shaped my thealogy. One of these was the moment of my mother’s death. In 1991 my mother was diagnosed with cancer. While she was being treated, I realized that I had never loved anyone as much as I loved her. When I wrote that to her, she responded that “this was the nicest letter” she “had ever received” in her life and she invited me to come home to be with her and my Dad. My mother died only a few weeks after I arrived, in her own bed as she wished. She was on an oxygen machine, and I heard her call out in the dark of early morning. When my Dad got to the room, he tried to turn up the oxygen, but it didn’t help. Then he called the doctor who reminded him that my mother did not want to go to the hospital under any circumstances. My Dad then sat by my mother’s bed and held her hand. As my mother died, I felt that the room was” filled with love.” I sensed that my mother was “going to love.” Before that moment, I had often felt that I was not loved enough. These feelings intensified whenever my love affairs broke up. I would feel helpless and abandoned and could think only that “no one loves me, no one will ever love me, I might as well die.” Although my life continues to have its ups and downs, and I still have not found my “true love,” from the moment when the room filled with love as my mother died to this, I have never doubted I am loved. Prior to my mother’s death I was also unsure of who or what I thought the Goddess is. I was sure that God did not “act in history,” a view I had adopted from Gerhard Von Rad’s biblical theology while in college and abandoned while writing my dissertation on the holocaust. I had grown up with the notion that God is love, and I had also experienced the presence of God in nature, a view largely denied by my theology professors and theologians of the twentieth century. I turned to the Goddess because she is a woman like myself and also because she represented the life-force in nature and its seasons and cycles. But I was not sure if Goddess is a personal presence who loves and understands or the life force itself. Because of this uncertainty, I had been unable to complete my Goddess thealogy. After my mother died, I came to understand Goddess as “the intelligent embodied love that is the ground of all being.” The experience I had as my mother died did not come with any words except “filled with love” and “going to love.” I did not feel Goddess loves me or God loves me or that my mother was loved by Goddess or God. I also did not feel that my mother was entering into eternal life. I simply felt the palpable presence of love in the room as she died. Reflecting on this experience, I came to the conclusion that Goddess is love. This is not primarily an intellectual interpretation of my experience of my mother’s death, though it is that as well. Most importantly, it is a feeling that permeates my daily life which was made possible by the experience I had when my mother died. I feel the Goddess as a presence who understands and loves me and the whole world. I feel that love is everywhere and that, as Alice Walker’s Shug told Celie, everything wants to be loved. I recognize that the power I call Goddess may also be called God. However, the word God is too bound up with images of war, violence, and domination for me to feel comfortable using it in my prayers and meditations. I acknowledge that I have had troubled relationships with my father and fathers, while in contrast my relationships with my mother and grandmothers were full of love. This makes it easy for me to imagine the loving arms of Goddess embracing the world. This is an excerpt of a draft of a book I am writing with Judith Plaskow, tentatively titled Goddess and God After Feminism: Body, Nature, and Power. Carol P. Christ, a founding mother in the study of women and religion, feminist theology, women’s spirituality, and the Goddess movement, has been active in peace and justice movements all of her adult life. She teaches online courses in the Women’s Spirituality program at CIIS. Her books include She Who Changes and Rebirth of the Goddess and the widely used anthologies Womanspirit Rising and Weaving the Visions. One of her great joys is leading Goddess Pilgrimages to Crete through Ariadne Institute. (This was first published in: http://feminismandreligion.com/2012/09/24/goddess-as-love-from-experience-to-thealogy-by-carol-p-christ/)
(Tribute 2) Barbara Mor, “Relentless Love”: Letters 1988-2002 from a Writer’s Best Friend by Jack Dempsey

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPtU2Rxbsjc Here below is, to me, the core statement of what Barbara was hoping to help us recover in “GCM” and her poetry, the very center of Human Being which was both our original inheritance and is, hopefully, our evolutionary future—if we can remember our full demonstrable past, and so move beyond the adolescent wishes, limiting mirages, and biophobic delusions imposed by patriarchal power: what Frederick Turner in Beyond Geography called a “suicide note,” namely that prison of blind, dismal ontological assumptions, reductive mechanistic sciences and absurdly-linear political screed called His-Story. Few artists said it as succinctly as Barbara did, defining the essential, liberating (and so, outlawed) experience of ek-stasis or “standing beyond oneself,” beyond the limits of a regressive, isolating, disempowering fiction called the separate ego: What is ecstasy? It is our original state of being. It is the conscious expansion of the universe into a multitude of interconnected dimensions and forms. It is Her dance of being, from which all of us were born. Ecstasy is passion, self-expressed through form. In the case of Earth, human beings and all other creatures and biological and geological activities are the forms, cosmic energy is the passion…. In and with the whole world is where we are supposed to feel it. In and with and as the whole world is where our human ecstasy is born. It is the celebration of the recognition that our spirit and flesh are One. Who else, meanwhile, so efficiently summed up how actual human progress—for example, in The West’s first, longest, most relatively peaceful, creative and egalitarian period, in Minoan Crete—had become a nightmare called “progress” which, to this day, never defines the goal against which it might be measured, even as its ontology carries us blindly ever-deeper into outright fascism and ecological suicide? Because The West was arrogant enough, or insane enough, to believe its anal eye was truly the eye of God, its will to total dominance truly “God’s will”—its perpetual machinery of observation and control in fact “the machinery of God”—it made “progress.” Western leaders, the political, religious and economic elite, officially merged their profits with God’s profits; and the Western peoples were conditioned, consistently and grindingly from the 13th-century beginnings of the Christian Inquisition, to accept submission to this profitable machine as their “moral lot.” The patriarchal denial of the Mother becomes the political denial of the people; which becomes the total mechanization, via capitalization, of the human body. And as the body moves, so does God move: the Biblical capitalist West has created God as a prison-keeper, as a factory-boss, rather than as a living cosmos. God as an assembly-line rather than a dance…. As you can see from readers’ comments at Amazon.com, the reception of GCM ranged from raves of gratitude to a minority of critics who tried to dismiss it on familiar “utopian,” “angry” and “female-biased” grounds. GCM began to sell and have an impact, such that the U-Arizona Library purchased a copy. This in part led Barbara to apply for various jobs there, as lecturer, assistant to its press or library, or as cleaning lady. But her hopes vanished when she was caught simply trying to wash herself in a library rest-room with the luxuries of hot water and soap. And this (December 1st, 1988) was when Barbara somehow managed reply to a first letter of mine: …In the meantime, I had no income, no job, nada….I went from subsistence poverty to absolute zip…Was told by the managing editor of the U of A press that “Writers don’t make good editors.” Arizona is a very yahoo state, including the population of academics. Whatever. I’ve been living on the street, sleeping in abandoned houses in the barrios, hanging out over cups of 59-cent endlessly refillable coffee at Burger Kings and Carl Jr.’s, trying to avoid the tracer beams of Tucson’s police helicopter at night. Altogether, not exactly a book-signing party. But great experience of the wild west, public toilets, street trash, the crazies of the homeless night….So, I’ll read your work with what brains I have left…. So had “our old mama” entered “the junkyard,” her eyes and heart torn open wider than ever to the needlessly suffering and constantly terrorized people in the belly of the American Dream. My own turn had come in the spring of 1980 when, becoming a writer in New York City after a youth of nothing but under-appreciated blessings, I fell in love with a 20-year-old Jewish woman named Eve Helene Wilkowitz. Six weeks of new life ended when, in March, Eve was abducted during her late-night trip home to Long Island, held alive for three days, and then brutally murdered and her body dumped in the backyard of a house near her own. The case was never solved. Completely shattered, I vowed to understand and manifest why, as one detective told me, a murder like this was “an everyday event,” and I began to shake my education by the heels at the Public Library. That was where and when I found, like Barbara, that the vast majority of history—most centrally to me, the first, longest, most peaceful and progressive period of The West, in Minoan Crete—had been as buried by history books as it was by its “heroic” Mycenaean Greek conquerors. In a few years after multiple stays in Crete I had a 2,000-page manuscript of the future novel Ariadne’s Brother to show American publishers, and I quote one response as wholly typical: “We don’t even want to look at it, because of what it’s about.” I’d made the mistake of telling them that the actual first major life-loving phase of Western Civ, still going strong when it fell through natural disaster and invasion, had never been told from its own Minoan-Cretan point of view: all we had was a myth from their enemies describing doomed decadence, a nymphomaniacal queen with a naïve treasonous daughter, and a man-eating Minotaur, all of whom got what they deserved at the hands of a hero brought up on the religion …

(Special Post Isis 1) 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. Our heartfelt thanks go to the members who participated in this discussion with openness and courage.] Part 1 Is Isis White (European) or Black (African)? Harita Meenee What could Isis have to do with the political situation in Egypt? Read on to find out! Isis, Egypt and the Revolution For the past few years Egypt has felt like a second home to me. Some cherished friends and co-workers live there, to whom my thoughts often travel. Also, Isis, the Egyptian great goddess once worshiped all over the Mediterranean, has been an ever-present source of inspiration… By: Harita Meenee, Author https://www.facebook.com/notes/harita-meenee-author/isis-egypt-and-the-revolution/457348724361326 Rick Williams Isis and that picture for me is kind of offensive in 2013. KMT [Kemet, Egypt] and AUSET [Isis] “worship” is an oxymoron. Kahena Dorothea Can you explain, Rick Williams, how it is an oxymoron? I am curious. Rick Williams First, Auset as a deity was not a singularly honored symbolic personage. KMT taught principles of BALANCE and UNIVERSAL COSMOLOGICAL TRUTH. There are NO images from the dawn of that age depicting her as EUROPEAN. [Threads curtailed] Helen Hwang I would strongly suggest that Rick and others who see Rick’s point educate us in Mago Circle. I know this is very difficult but we are here to learn and express differences from each other. We are all centers and please share your perspective and knowledge so that others can learn. I am doing that with patience and tolerance as well. Thank you all! Rick Williams I try to be as honest and respectful when I can, Helen. I only personalize things when ONE person says something. Yet there are those who know that the people of that land now weren’t the same people who honored the deities of mythology and that image isn’t of Auset. When will folks stop promoting fictitious images and uneducated observations? I could have beat around the bush and politely asked about the statue, why that one isn’t truly the same of Auset’s time? Helen Hwang Okay, conflicts and contradictions are everywhere. Nonetheless, we can’t be beat by those. We are exploring ways to be empowered by addressing our differences in Mago Circle. We trust that we have good intentions and yet we are not perfect. I do Mago Circle and Return to Mago because I believe there is a way for us to meet and talk with our differences, I can’t let that hope go! Thank us for talking to each other. Naa Ayele Kumari I can see both points. Egypt has a long and ancient history… One filled with invaders.. wars.. people who stole the magic and manipulated it for their own purposes… Those invaders changed images to make them in their own reflections all the while slowly destroying the indigenous images of power and strength as well as the sacred tradition they were built on.. As a woman of African descent, it is sometimes difficult to see the Hellenistic images of our mother.. because her original images were a woman of color. Racism… whether we chose to admit it or not has played an immense part in our oppression as a people and that includes the struggle for Egypt today. It is especially a sensitive issue because those images play a role in how people see and view black women… even today. The dark goddess is stereotyped as being a part of our shadow while the white goddess is caste as being all that is good in the world. What black women struggle to tell the world is that those projections are simply racist projections… and so we reject them. Still, I recognize that people like to experience the divine in their own image and that our Mother has been taken around the world… and by extension absorbed many names and faces because after all, she is mother not to just Africans… but to the World. Right now, we have dominant tradition of Islam… that at its roots has a feminine basis… (Islam came from the word Isis) all the while oppressing women by its dogma. The indigenous people of Egypt, the Badarians and Nubians… are oppressed by Arab invaders who have taken control, projected their own religions all the while wanting to destroy the remainder of the images of the ancients. Injustice recognizes injustice… and all the ways that it shows up. At the root of Egypt…is Isis… called also Esi and Auset by the indigenous people. She has been oppressed by many layers of invaders… Her daughter’s voices have been muted… Timeless icon that she is, as the tides are turning, so are the heavy oppressions being lifted. Women are finding and re-remembering their power… and as they do… Mama Esi.. is taking back her throne. Naa Ayele Kumari This is the Isis on the walls and temples of Egypt. Harita Meenee Seeing the people of Egypt as all white or all Black means stereotyping them. In fact the inhabitants of Egypt are of different colors: some are white, others are Black and many others are something in-between. The same was true in antiquity and it’s reflected in Egyptian art. Rick Williams Harita, really? What does that have to do with your choice of misrepresentation of that image? Please enlighten me, thank you. Harita Meenee Τhere is no misrepresentation, dear Rick Williams. If you read my note carefully, you’ll see that it talks about Isis as a goddess who was worshiped all over the Mediterranean–I’m not referring to just her Egyptian manifestation. The statue depicted is in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece. I took this picture and processed it slightly so that it looks more like a painting than a sculpture. No change was made to the actual form or color of the statue. I’m attaching a photo of the museum label of this work of art. It may not be clearly visible, but it reads: Marble statue of the goddess Isis-Tyche-Pelagia. 1st-2nd century AD. The composite name means that, as was often the case in […]
(Special Post 8) Why Goddess Feminism, Activism, and Spirituality?

[Editor’s Note: This was first proposed in The Mago Circle, Facebook Group, on March 6, 2014. We have our voices together below and publish them in sequels. Special thanks to Trista Hendren, founder and author of The Girl God, who passionately and painstakingly promotes the message of each contributor via Facebook’s memes. Without Trista’s devotion to the advocacy, this collective effort would not have continued. It is an ongoing project and we encourage our reader to join us! Submit yours today to Helen Hwang (magoism@gmail.com). Or visit and contact someone in Return to Mago’s Partner Organizations.] Marija Krstic-Chin To remember who we really are (nature, cycles, network, creative force, one, infinite…) for the benefit of all of humanity and all living things; and to unite and unify as we broadcast, hand down, protect and defend this truth and each other against the oppressive intentions and actions of patriarchal perpetrators, puppets, and pawns who seek to enslave us by various old and new divide-and-conquer strategies.
(Special post) The Goddess Inanna: Her Allies and Opponents by Hearth Moon Rising

Inanna’s Descent to the Underworld is one of the most fascinating myths ever told. Not just because it is profound and enlightening, although it is certainly that. It’s an exciting journey that ignites the imagination, and female characters are at the hub of the action. This is a tale of power: power that is demanded, power that is won, power that is appropriated, and power that cannot be escaped. The story follows the fertility goddess Inanna, who brought civilization to Mesopotamia, as she seeks to expand her realm by venturing into the world below. Inanna’s experiences in the great below, her escape, and the wild events that unfold as a result of her caper are the focus of the tale.

(Video) Imbolc/Early Spring Goddess Slideshow by Glenys Livingstone Ph.D.

On February 3rd at 19:45 “Universal Time” (as it is named), Earth our Planet crosses the midpoint of Her orbit between Solstice and Equinox, though the exact time varies each year. In the Northern Hemisphere it is the Season of Imbolc – the welcoming of the Light, post-Winter Solstice, after the fullness of the dark of Winter. Imbolc, and all of the light part of the cycle, is particularly associated with the Young One/Virgin/Maiden aspect of Goddess – or Urge to Be as I have named this aspect. Imbolc may be understood as the quintessential celebration of the Virgin/Young One quality for the year – the rest of the light part of the cycle celebrates Her processes, but this Seasonal Moment is a celebration of Her … identifying with Her. She is the New Young One, the Promise of Life, the Urge to Be. Her purity is Her singularity of purpose. She is spiritual warrior. Her inviolability is Her determination to Be … nothing to do with unbroken hymens of the dualistic and patriarchal mind. The Virgin is the essential “yes” to Being – not the “no” She was turned into. This is some Poetry of the Season: This is the season of the waxing Light … the feast of the Young One – who is the Urge To Be within All. The New One born at the Winter Solstice now grows. This is the time of celebrating the small self – each one’s Gaian uniqueness and beauty. We meet to share the light of inspiration, to be midwifed, by She who tends the Flame of Being, deeply committed to Self, and Who is True. The choice of images is arbitrary … there are so many more, and also, most ancient images of Goddess are multivalent – She was/is One: that is, all Her aspects are not separate from each other. These selected images tell a story of certain qualities that may be contemplated at the Seasonal Moment of Imbolc/Early Spring. Remember that image communicates the unspeakable – that which can only be known in body – below rational mind. You may regard it as a transmission of Herself, insofar as you wish – and particular to you. I offer you these images for you to receive in your own way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUPTKMork9s Artemis 4th Century B.C.E. Greece. (p.52 Austen) – a classic “Virgin” image – wild and free, “Lady of the Beasts”, Goddess of untamed nature. As such, in the patriarchal stories She is often associated with harshness, orgiastic rituals but we may re-story “wildness” in our times as something “innocent”: that is, in direct relationship with the Mother. She is a hunter/archer, protector, midwife, nurturing the new and pure essence (the “wild”) – in earlier times these things were not contradictory. The hunter had an intimate relationship with the hunted, and deep reverence. Aphrodite (p.132 Austen) 300 B.C.E. – often diminished to a sex Goddess in patriarchal narrative, but in more ancient times, praised as She who holds all things in form, which may be comprehended as embodying cosmic power of allurement, which may be identified with what has been named as “gravity”. Re-storied as one who admires her own Beauty, and the Beauty of All. Aphrodite (plate 137 Neumann) an earlier image 600 B.C.E. Brigid/Brigantia (p. 38 Durdin-Robertson) 300 C.E. – Her spear may be understood as the spear of Goddess: that is, as spiritual warrior, or Boadicea-like. Brigid – a later image of Christian times … dressed nun-like. Eurynome (Austen p.8) 4000 B.C.E. Africa. This image is named as Bird-Headed Snake Goddess. Austen stories Her as an image of Eurynome, Goddess of All Things who danced upon the waves in the beginning and laid the Universal Egg. She appears very self-expressive: perhaps a great image of a self-expressive Universe. She integrates animal and human, earth and sky, before dualism existed. I choose her as a Virgin image because of this integrity, and her ecstatic expression. Diana (Neumann Plate 161) Rome. She carries the Flame – is classically Her own person. … not so much “independent” as it may be thought of culturally, as “self-knowing”. She came to be associated with the Greek Artemis: they are sister Goddesses. The Horned Goddess (p. 138 Austen) 6000 B.C.E. Africa – associated with dance and healthy life-force – rain and fertility. She is of the ancient Amazon tribes of what is now known as Algeria. Even today amongst these people, Austen says: “the Tauregs, the women are independent, while the men only appear in public veiled”. Vajravarahi (p.124 Austen) 1600’s C.E. Vajravarahi, show me how to be powerful and compassionate at the same time – let me know that these qualities are one force. Teach me to feel the beauty, power and eroticism of my own being. Show me that I am an exquisite part of the life force, dancing with all other forms of life. and OM! Veneration to you, noble Vajravarahi! OM! Veneration to you, noble and unconquered! Mother of the three worlds! Mistress of knowledge!… OM! Veneration to you, Vajravarahi! Great yogini! Mistress of love! She who moves through the air! TIBETAN TEXT Radha (in my ritual space) … seeing Who She really is. REFERENCES: Austen, Hallie Iglehart. The Heart of the Goddess. Berkeley:Wingbow, 1990. Durdin-Robertson, Lawrence. The Year of the Goddess. Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1990. Livingstone, Glenys. A Poiesis of the Creative Cosmos: Celebrating Her within PaGaian Sacred Ceremony. Bergen: Girl God Books, 2023. Neumann, Erich. The Great Mother. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974. The music is “Boadicea” by Enya.
(Video) Autumn Equinox/Mabon Poetry by Glenys Livingstone Ph.D.

The Autumnal Equinox occurs each year in the range of March 20-23 in the Southern Hemisphere, and in the range of September 20 -23 in the Northern Hemisphere. Autumn Equinox is a point of sacred balance: it is the point of balance in the dark part of Earth’s annual cycle. Sun is equidistant between North and South as it was/is at Spring Equinox, but in this dark phase of the cycle, the trend is toward increasing dark. Henceforth the dark part of the day will exceed the light part: thus it is a Moment of certain descent … and a sacred Moment for feeling and contemplating the grief and power of loss, for ceremoniously joining personal and collective grief and loss with the larger Self in whom we are. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcZflKLkvP8 Below is the text of the video. It is based on the traditional poetry for PaGaian Autumn Equinox/Mabon ceremony[i]. This is the Moment of the Autumnal Equinox in our Hemisphere – the moment of balance of light and dark in the dark part of the cycle. The light and dark parts of the day in the South and in the North of our planet, are of equal length at this time. We feel for the balance in this moment – Earth as She is poised in relationship with the Sun … breathing in the light, swelling with it, letting our breath go to the dark, staying with it. In our part of Earth, the balance is tipping into the dark. We remember the coolness of it. This is the time when we give thanks for our harvests – all that we have gained. And we remember too the sorrows, losses involved. The story of Old tells us that Persephone, Beloved Daughter, is given the wheat from Her Mother – the Mystery, knowledge of life and death. She receives it graciously. But she sets forth into the darkness – both Mother and Daughter grieve that it is so. Demeter, the Mother, says: “You are offered the wheat in every moment … I let you go as Child, most loved of Mine: you descend to Wisdom, to Sovereignty. You will return as Mother, co-Creator with me. You are the Seed in the Fruit, becoming the Fruit in the Seed. Inner Wisdom guides your path.” We give thanks for our harvests – our lives they are blessed. We are Daughters and Sons of the Mother. Yet we take our Wisdom and all that we have gained, and remember the sorrows – the losses involved. We remember the grief of the Mother, of mothers and lovers everywhere, our grief. Persephone descends. The Beloved One is lost. Persephone goes forth into the darkness to become Queen of that world. She tends the sorrows. The Seed represents our Persephones, who tends the sorrows – we are the Persephones, who may tend the sorrows. We go out into the night with Her and plant our seeds. Persephone blesses us with her fertile promise: “You have waxed into the fullness of life, And waned into darkness; May you be renewed in tranquility and wisdom[ii].” These represent our hope. The Seed of life never fades away. She is always present. Blessed be the Mother of all life. Blessed be the life that comes from Her and returns to Her. We tie red threads on each other: we participate in the Vision of the Seed – of the continuity of Life, that continues beneath the visible. The Mother knowledge grows within us. Our hope is in the Sacred Balance of the Cosmos – the Thread of Life, the Seed that never fades away: it is the Balance of Grief and Joy, the Care that we may feel in our Hearts. NOTES: [i] Glenys Livingstone, PaGaian Cosmology, p. 239-247. [ii] Charlene Spretrnak, Lost Goddesses of Early Greece, p. 116. REFERENCES: Livingstone, Glenys. PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion. NE: iUniverse, 2005. Spretnak, Charlene. Lost Goddesses of Early Greece: a Collection of Pre-Hellenic Myths. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992/1978.
Samhain: Stepping Wisely through the Open Door by Carolyn Lee Boyd

Day of the Dead altar, via Wikimedia Commons According to Celtic tradition, on Samhain (October 31 for those in the north and April 30 for those in the south) the doors between the human and spirit worlds open. Faeries, demons, and spirits of the dead pour out of the Otherworld to walk the Earth. In the past, some would try to hurry ghosts past their houses or ward off evil spirits by setting jack o’lanterns in their windows. They avoided going outside, especially past cemeteries, lest they be snatched away to the Otherworld. In ancient times, some offered sacrifices to propitiate deities. However, others have invited in the souls of friends and family who have passed away. In Brittany, according to W.Y. Evans-Wentz’s Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, people would provide “a feast and entertainment for them of curded-milk, hot pancakes, and cider, served on the family table covered with a fresh white tablecloth, and to supply music” which “the dead come to enjoy with their friends” (p. 218). Other cultures also have such welcoming traditions. In Korea, as so beautifully described by Helen Hye-Sook Hwang in her posts about her family’s mourning for her father (Part I and Part II), in Mexico on the Day of the Dead, and elsewhere, food and flowers are brought to cemeteries to honor those no longer in the realm of the living. Many of us live in a society where death is pushed out of sight and Samhain’s sacred traditions have devolved into Halloween, a commercialized children’s holiday. Still, it seems to me that the pandemic, climate catastrophes, and war have made death much more present in our everyday thoughts over the past couple of years than before, so perhaps this year’s Samhain offers us the opportunity to re-examine Celtic and other practices of the past and present to see what insights and meaning they may have for us. Jack o lanterns: By Mihaela Bodlovic, via Wikimedia Commons All these ancient practices respect the spirit world and its power. Whether you believe that the Otherworld can wreak havoc on us at Samhain or not, the realm where spirits dwell clearly has power. Its allure can take us away from focusing on mundane, daily challenges or, more positively, open our eyes to the value of relating to forces that can give richness and meaning to our lives. At the same time, we must remember that each domain has its own power. We can use our physical bodies in beneficial ways that those in the Otherworld cannot. We must respect the power of the Otherworld as well as our own. Some kinds of healing are only possible when we welcome those from the Otherworld into our lives in a healthy way, whether through holiday visits or every day through remembrance, meditation, prayer, or other means. I’m of an age when many of my beloveds are in the Otherworld and so I am beginning to find that the idea of being able to sit with someone I have lost is cause not for fear, but rather joy and comfort. Perhaps those who have longstanding wounds from the past can heal by remembering those we have lost at Samhain and forgiving them or ourselves or realizing that we are no longer bound to those who have hurt us and are now gone. Samhain can also reassure us of the truth of our intuitive sense that our beloveds who we grieve are with us still, in some way, on this night and throughout the year. When we participate in the celebration of Samhain’s opening of doors to the Otherworld, if only for a day, we are honoring our own participation into the great cycle of life, death, and rebirth. We are expanding our vision of ourselves to be more than our bodies on the Earth and experiencing ourselves as connected to many realms, seen and unseen, spirit and human. We are accepting that at some time we will also become ancestors, with all the responsibility that entails and the fulfillment of taking our place in the complex matrix of being that is our universe. When we interact with the souls of those we have lost in ways that are healthy for us, however we may choose and believe that happens, we can also better celebrate the realm of the living. Just as we may listen in various ways for positive messages from those whom we have lost, we can ensure that we are expressing important guidance to those who will come after us by who we are and how we live our lives. We can express that life is worth living, even with all its traumas, and that we respect both the boundaries and the doors between the worlds so that we may continue living fully in our physical bodies on our beautiful, awe-inspiring Earth. I hope my message to my descendants will be: Love your lives. Build on what we have done and do better. Leave behind what we left you that no longer serves. If you feel alone, remember that you have thousands of generations of mothers sending you unconditional love and also generations of women coming after you eager to pick up where you left off. According to Mary Condren in The Serpent and the Goddess, in the most ancient times, “Samhain had been primarily a harvest feast celebrating the successful growth and gathering of the fruits of the past year” (p. 36). While we in the north are coming into the season of death, those in the south are experiencing Beltane, the first moments of spring when the doors between the worlds are also open. The eternal cycle of life, death, and regeneration turns again. Whether you are celebrating Samhain or Beltane, know that this holy time offers us all a chance to enter into the task of maintaining harmony with those we have loved before and for bringing balance between life and death, winter and summer, and the realm of the living and …
(Video) An Autumn Equinox Ceremony by Glenys Livingstone Ph.D.

Autumn Equinox/Mabon Northern Hemisphere – September 21-23 Southern Hemisphere – March 21-23 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRJNY1LSvIs&t=1175s …oOo… The purpose of this video is for ceremony, and I suggest pausing the video where it suits you, to add your own processing, embellishments and/or your own drum, percussion and voice wherever you please. I have made short spaces in the video where it could be paused. The script for this Autumn Equinox/Mabon ceremony is offered in Chapter 11 of my book A Poiesis of the Creative Cosmos: Celebrating Her within PaGaian Sacred Ceremony, with all acknowledgements and references there. In particular I mention here, credit for the story of Demeter and Persephone as told by Charlene Spretnak in her book Lost Goddesses of Early Greece. For more full participation in the ceremony, you could have one or more stalks of wheat or native grain tied with a red thread/ribbon, a garden pot with soil, a small garden trowel, a flower bulb (daffodil type), food and drink, that may represent your “harvest” – ready for eating and drinking. The elements of Water, Fire, Earth and Air on the altar in this video are placed in directions that are appropriate to my region in the Southern Hemisphere, and East Coast Australia: you may place yours differently, and transliterate when I mention the direction (which I do minimally). The images used are a collage of footage and photos from the 2024 Autumn Equinox ceremony at my place in Wakka Wakka country, South East Queensland Australia, and from previous Autumn Equinox ceremonies I facilitated over the decades in MoonCourt, Goddess ceremonial space in NSW Australia, Darug and Gundungurra country. My partner Robert (Taffy) Seaborne who has participated in all the Seasonal ceremonies since Samhain 2000, adds his voice to this video. Image credits: Demeter and Persephone (500 B.C.E. Greece). Hallie Iglehart Austen, The Heart of the Goddess, p.72. Art of Demeter and Persephone on MoonCourt wall: Cernak Herself Music credit: “Gentle Sorrow” by Sky: which he has previously allowed me to use in my work. This piece of music is also used in the Autumn Equinox meditation on my PaGaian Cosmology Meditations published 2015.
(Poem) Samhain by Annie Finch

In the season leaves should love, since it gives them leave to move through the wind, towards the ground they were watching while they hung, legend says there is a seam stitching darkness like a name. Now when dying grasses veil earth from the sky in one last pale wave, as autumn dies to bring winter back, and then the spring, we who die ourselves can peel back another kind of veil that hangs among us like thick smoke. Tonight at last I feel it shake. I feel the nights stretching away thousands long behind the days, till they reach the darkness where all of me is ancestor. I turn my hand and feel a touch move with me, and when I brush my young mind across another, I have met my mother’s mother. Sure as footsteps in my waiting self, I find her, and she brings arms that hold answers for me, intimate, waiting, bounty: “Carry me.” She leaves this trail through a shudder of the veil, and leaves, like amber where she stays, a gift for her perpetual gaze. From Eve (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2010) (Meet Mago Contributor) Annie Finch
(Essay) Contemplating How Her Creativity Proceeds by Glenys Livingstone Ph.D.

This essay is an edited excerpt from the conclusion of chapter 5 of the author’s book, PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion. It is a chapter on the process of the Wheel of the Year. for the Northern Hemisphere version: https://pagaian.org/pagaian-wheel-of-the-year/ It seems to me that the main agenda of the Cosmos is ongoing Creativity, “never-ending renewal” it may be termed, and that this is expressed in Earth’s Seasonal Wheel through the transitions of Autumn,Winter, Spring, Summer; and in the ubiquitous process of a Cosmic Triplicity of Space to Be, Urge to Be and this Place of Being, a dynamic that has often been imagined as the Triple Goddess. In the flow of the PaGaian Wheel of the Year, the Seasonal transitions of the Wheel and the Triplicity of the Cosmos come together. There are two celebrations of the Old One/Crone or the Cosmogenetic quality of autopoiesis creating the Space to Be; and they are Lammas/Late Summer and Samhain/Deep Autumn, which are the meridian points of the two quarters of the waxing dark phase. At Lammas, the first in the dark phase, we may identify with the dark and ancient Wise One – dissolve into Her; at Samhain, we may consciously participate in Her process of the transformation of death/the passing of all. The whole dark part of the cycle is about dissolving/dying/letting go of being – becoming – nurturing it (the midwifing of Lammas/Late Summer), stepping into the power of it (the certain departure of Autumn Equinox/Mabon), the fertility (of Samhain/Deep Autumn), the peaking of it (at Winter Solstice). The meridian points of the two quarters of the waxing light phase then are celebrations of the Young One/Virgin or the Cosmogenetic quality of differentiation, the new continually emerging, the Urge to Be; and they are Imbolc/Early Spring and Beltaine/High Spring. At Imbolc, the first in the light phase, we may identify with She who is shining and new – as we take her form; at Beltaine, we may consciously participate in Her process of the dance of life. The whole light part of the cycle is about coming into being: nurturing it (the midwifing of Imbolc/Early Spring), stepping into the power of it (the certain return of Spring Equinox/Eostar), the fertility (of Beltaine/High Spring), the peaking of it (at Summer Solstice). In the PaGaian wheel of ceremony there are two particular celebrations of the Mother, the Cosmogenetic quality of communion; and they are the Solstices. If one imagines the light part of the cycle as a celebration of the ‘Productions of Time’, and the dark part of the cycle as a celebration of ‘Eternity’, the Solstices then are meeting points, points of interchange, and are celebrations of the communion/relational field of Eternity with the Productions of Time. This is a relationship which does happen in this Place, in this Web. This Place of Being, this Web, is a Communion – it is the Mother; the Solstices mark Her birthings, Her gateways. The Equinoxes then – both Spring and Autumn – are two celebrations wherein the balance of all three Faces/Creative qualities is particularly present: in the PaGaian wheel, the Equinoxes have been special celebrations of Demeter and Persephone – echoing the ancient tradition of Mother-Daughter Mysteries that celebrate the awesomeness of the continuity of life, its creative tension/balance. Both Equinoxes then are celebrations and contemplations of empowerment through deep Wisdom – one contemplation during the dark phase and one during the light phase. The Autumn Equinox is a descent to Wisdom, the Spring Equinox is an emergence with Wisdom gained. I like to think of the Equinoxes, and of the ancient icons of Demeter and Persephone, as celebrations of the delicate ‘curvature of space-time’, the fertile balance of tensions which enables it all. Her Creative Place The Mother aspect then may be understood to be particularly present at four of the Seasonal Moments, which are also regarded traditionally as the Solar festivals; and in this cosmology Sun is felt as Mother. I recognize these four as points of interchange: at Autumn Equinox, Mother is present primarily as Giver – She is letting Persephone go, at Spring Equinox, She is present primarily as Receiver – welcoming the Daughter back, at Winter Solstice the Mother gives birth, creates form, at Summer Solstice, She opens again full of radiance, and disperses form. The Mother is Agent/Actor at the Solstices. She is Participant/Witness at the Equinoxes, where it is then really Persephone who is Agent/Actor, embodying an inseparable Young One and Old One. The Old One is often named as Hecate, who completes the Trio – all seamlessly within each other. Another possible way to visual it, or to tell the story, is this: The Mother – Demeter – is always there, at the Centre if you like. Persephone cycles around. She is the Daughter who returns in the Spring as flower, who will become fruit/grain of the Summer, who at Lammas assents to the dissolution – the consumption. At Autumn Equinox She returns to the underworld as seed – Her harvest is rejoiced in, Her loss is grieved, as She becomes Sovereign of the Underworld – Her face changes to the Dark One, Crone (Hecate). As the wheel turns into the light part of the cycle She becomes Young One/Virgin again. Persephone (as Seed) is that part of Demeter that can be all three aspects – can move through the complete cycle. The Mother and Daughter are really One, and embody the immortal process of creation and destruction. Demeter hands Persephone the wheat, the Mystery, and the thread of life is unbroken – it goes on forever. It is immortal, it is eternal. Even though it is true that all will be lost, and all is lost – Being always arises again: within this field of time there is never-ending renewal, eternity. This is what is revealed in the ubiquitous three faces of the Creative Dynamic/ She of Old, the Triplicity that runs through the Cosmos. The Seed of Life never …

(Bell Essay 7) The Magoist Whale Bell: Decoding the Cetacean Code of Korean Temple Bells by Helen Hye-Sook Hwang, Ph.D.

[Author’s Note: This and ensuing sequels are excerpts of a new development from the original essay sequels on Korean Temple Bells and Magoism that first published January 11, 2013 in this current magazine. See (Bell Essay 1) Ancient Korean Bells and Magoism by Helen Hye-Sook Hwang.] Whale Mallet, Temple Bell in Sudeok-sa, Chungnam Korea Sources and Methods of Studying the Magoist Whale Bell It is not possible to present the topic in any comprehensive manner due to its complex and outlandish nature. As a whole, its elusive manifestations makes some of this essay’s premises provisional, leaving room for definite conclusions. I suggest that this essay be read as a primer to the large topic, Korean Magoist cetaceanism. I have built this essay on my previously published essay sequels on the Korean temple bell as well as my book, The Mago Way: Re-discovering the Great Goddess Mago from East Asia, on the Magoist Cosmogony.[1] It also draws from my forthcoming essay on Korean Magoist cetacean culture. Importantly, I am indebted to the work of Sungkyu Kim, advocate of Korean cetaceanism, for his valuable insights on the Korean temple bell and Korean cetaceanism in general. While his cross-cultural assessments of ancient Korean cetacean customs are often compelling, his cetacean hermeneutic on the pacifying flute story is in particular indispensable in securing the evidence of Sillan cetacean worship by the generations of Sillan rulers. That said, however, what distinguishes this essay from his work lies in the recognition that Korean cetaceanism is not monolithic totem worship. I hold that Korean cetaceanism was born and flowered within the context of Old Magoism. Here Old Magoism refers to the pre-patriarchal (read pre-Chinese) tradition of East Asia that venerates the Great Goddess, Mago.[2] In turn, the cetacean consciousness of ancient East Asian Magoists enabled a revelation of the Magoist Cosmogony. Thus, Korean cetaceanism is inextricably intertwined with the mytho-history of Magoism. It went underground, as the symbolic power of women inscribed in Magoism was removed from the public space in the course of history. In this light, Kim’s cetacean thought remains revisionist rather than reconstructionist, meaning not radical enough, unable to ask such critical questions as how the Sinocentric mytho-history of Korea or the Buddhist historiography has rendered Korean cetaceanism invisible and what that means to Koreans and the world. Most critically, Kim’s discussion of the Sillan whale bell and the pacifying flute underestimates their musical (read cosmogonic) implications. They are not of a mere musical instrument to call the whale to dance. True that the concept of music is much underestimated outside the context of the Magoist Cosmogony as a whole. The whale bell as well as the pacifying flute represents the regalia of Sillan Magoist rulers who undertook the Magoist mandate of bringing the terrestrial sonic resonance to harmonize the cosmic music of Yulryeo. The whale bell marks a new watershed wherein Sillan rulers successfully reinvented the legacy of Magoist shaman rulers of Old Magoism from the ancient inland mountain culture into the maritime culture of Silla. Stories on the pacifying flute and Manbulsan (Mountain of Ten Thousand Buddhas), the two major myths directly concerning the cetacean code of Korean temple bells, are drawn from the Samguk Yusa (Memorabilia of the Three States), the 13th century text that recounts myths, legends, and historical events of ancient Korean States including Silla (57 BCE-935), Goguryeo (37 BCE-668), Baekje (18 BCE-660), and Gaya (42-562) from an orthodox Buddhist perspective.[3] To be noted is that the Samguk Yusa (1281), together with another official historical text of Korea, the Samguk Sagi (1145), is a Sinocentric text that tailors ancient Korean history and territory to fit the historical framework of China. As a Sinocentric text, the Samguk Yusa takes a pro-Chinese perspective and presents ancient Korea as a humble little brother who owes Imperial China for his civilized culture. In it, Korean history and territory are curtailed to fit those of Imperial China. Put differently, the Samguk Yusa is a product of a Buddhist evangelist author, Ilyeon (1206-1289), whose interest was in establishing Buddhism of China and India at the cost of traditional Korean Magoism. Among modern Korean historians who are critical of Sinocentric Korean historiography is Sin Chaeho (1880-1936). As Sin’s advocacy of Korean ethnic historiography is largely aligned with the mytho-historical reconstruction of Magoism, I borrow his assessments of the Samguk Yusa and the Samguk Sagi here. Sin maintains that the loss of pre-Chinese Korean history primarily owes to the two survived Korean history books, the Samguk Yusa and the Samguk Sagi, that reduce and distort ancient Korean history. Precisely because of the Sinocentric (read patriarchal and imperialist) take, these two books have survived the persecution of pre-Chinese Korean Magoist historical books. Sin’s poignant criticism goes on to say that the Samguk Yusa employs the Sanskrit words for the names of people and places from the pre-Buddhist period of Wanggeom Joseon and that the Samguk Sagi ascribes Confucian phrases to the speech of Korean warriors who dismiss Confucius thought.[4] What Sin does not see is, however, that the authors of both books chose to be pro-Chinese or pro-Indian to subvert the female-centered tradition of Old Korea, Magoism. In short, they resort to Buddhism and Confucianism, the two major patriarchal religions of East Asia, respectively over against indigenous Magoism. The patriarchal time was waging a war against Magoists and life in general. I hold that both texts mark the milestones that escalated the process of patriarchalization in Korea, which took place much slowerly and later than in China. Damage is not done to Korean history only. A lie brings more lies. In the case of the Samguk Yusa, the portrayal of Sillan Buddhism is distorted. On the surface, the Samguk Yusa treats Esoteric Buddhism as a reservoir of miraculous legendary stories that fertilized orthodox Buddhism. On a deeper level, it dismantles a tie between Magoist cetacean worship and Esoteric Buddhism. The Samguk Yusa’s Buddhist perspective aligned with the Sinocentric historical framework is inherently inadequate in defining Sillan Esoteric …
(Essay 2) The Magoist Calendar: Mago Time inscribed in Sonic Numerology by Helen Hye-Sook Hwang

[Author’s Note: This is my latest research that has led me to restore the 13-month, 28-day Mago Calendar, which will be included at the end of its sequels. See Mago Almanac: 13 Month 28 Day Calendar (Book A), published in 2017.] CALENDARICS AND THE MAGOIST COSMOGONY Calendar is the harmonic numerological chart that indicates specifics of the terrestrial time/space relative to the extrasolar universe. As a cosmic almanac of our terrestrial home, calendar teaches the human world to do the right thing at the right timing, determined by the song/dance of the universe. We humans, part of the calendar, are the guardian of the calendar. Calendar is not and should not be an arbitrary arrangement invented to serve the purpose of a particular group of people, the Budoji says. It is
(Mago Pilgrimage 3) Seonam-sa (Seonam Temple), Suncheon, South Jeolla Korea by Helen Hye-Sook Hwang

Seonsam-sa, located in Suncheon City, South Jeolla Province, is one of many ancient Buddhist temples in Korea. It is among the seven Korean Buddhist temples designated as UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Sites this year. I visited Seonam-sa during the Mago Pilgrimage to Korea in 2014. The name, Seonsam-sa (仙巖寺 Seonam Temple), drew my attention immediately for the first two characters “seon (read sun)” and “am (read ahm)” of its title convey Magoism. It remains esoteric that Seon-am (仙巖 Precipice of Seon) is an alternative of Mago-am (Precipice of Mago) also known as Nogo-am (Precipice of Nogo). “Nogo” (老姑 Primordial Goddess) is a popular epithet, which is often interchangeably used with “Mago” in place-names and folktales. That said, the character “seon or xian (仙)” refers to Magoists rather than Daoist Immortals, a topic that requires another space to explicate. Fork traditions have preserved its Magoist meaning (Mago or Magoist) in place-names and stories. One prominent exmaple is “Mago Seonnyeo” to convey a Maogist Female Seon. Below I use it as Seon without transliteration. It is rarely recognized by the public that Seonam-sa is imbued with Magoist mytho-historical-cultural memories. This is not to say that Korean Buddhist temples are as a whole independent of Magoism. I have discussed, among others, that the main hall (Daeung-jeon) of many Korean Buddhist temples is dedicated to Goma, the Magoist shaman queen founder of Danguk (3898-2333 BCE), also known as Daeung (Great Hero), as follows: Korean Buddhism is characterized by its idiosyncratic feature of Daeung-jeon (Hall of the Great Hero), its main building, in most Buddhist temples. That Goma is enshrined in Daeung-jeon accounts for the Magoist root of Korean Buddhism.[1] Seonsam-sa has some intriguing unorthodox Buddhist characters. While its foundation is debated to be in the mid 6th century by Ado Hwasang in 592 or the second half of the 9th century by Monk Doseon (827-898), we have stories about Monk Doseon , the alleged founder. Monk Doseon, according to the story, had a revelation from the Heavenly Ruler of the Holy Mother (聖母天王) of Mt. Jiri who told him “If you establish three Amsas (Precipice Temples), Three Hans will unite and there will be no wars.” Doseon founded the three precipice temples known as Seonam (Seon Precipice), Unam (Cloud Precipice), and Yongam (Drago Precipice).[2] Three Hans (Samhan) refers to the descendants of Old Joseon (ca. 2333-232 BCE), the Magoist people of ancient Korean states including Goguryeo, Baekje, Silla, Gaya and their remnants who sought to restore the bygone rule of Magoist confederacies.[3] In short, the foundation story of Seonamsa reflects the mytho-history of Magoism. Also intriguing is the fact that Seonam-sa has Seungseon-gyo (Bridge of the Ascended Seon) and Gangseon-ru (Pavilion of the Descended Seon), which are evocative of such Magoist place-names as Mangsoen-gyo (Bridge of Anticipated Seon) and Biseon-dae (Point of Ascending Seon), to name a few. In addition, Seonam-sa is, among numerous halls and shrines, noted for Sansin-gak (Mountain Deity Pavilion) and Samseong-gak (Three Sages Pavilion), the indigenous faith practices that are incorporated in a Buddhist temple. We were enrolled in Seonam-sa’s Temple Stay. Later I detected that the monk who guided us was unenthused about our interests in indigenous elements of Seonam-sa. Out of honesty, he mentioned that Seonam-sa needed to purge itself of indigenous shrines. It was sad to hear that but I could see where he was coming from. It appeared that monks were not all in agreement with him, however. Our visit to Seonsam-sa seemed to end with a somewhat uneasy stroll with the monk. Lo and behold! As we were about to leave the temple, we ran into a female Buddhist novice who took interest in our queries. Together with her, we hurriedly payed visit to Sansin-gak and a couple of indigenous shines located in the backside of the main sectors. While on a brief leisurely stroll with our new guide, she finally led us to an unlikely place, the unseen heart of Seanam-sa by the public. She showed us the place wherein monks gather to begin Dong-angeo (Winter Retreat), an annual three-month-long winter medication practice. Inside this ordinary-looking Korean traditional house was a traditional style kitchen stove. Above the big iron cast cooking pot was hung a tablet that reads “Nammu Jowangsinwi,” which means “Take refuge in Jowang Deity who is present here.” Faith in Jowang Deity was still alive among Buddhist monks!!! Jowang-sin or Jowang Halmi, the Kitchen Goddess or the Hearth Goddess, is one of the many indigenous Goddesses of Korea. It is known today that she was enshrined in the kitchen and widely venerated by women in the past. Today, She is still worshipped in Muism (Korean Shamanism) as the deity of fire, children, and wealth of the household. (Meet Mago Contributor) Helen Hye-Sook Hwang. Notes [1] Helen Hye-Sook Hwang, “Goma, the Shaman Ruler of Old Magoist East Asia/Korea, and Her Mythology” in Goddesses in Myth, History and Culture (Lytle Creek, CA: Mago Books), 293. [2] Sanghyeon Kim, “Suncheon Seonam-sa,” in Hanguk Daebaekgwa Sajeon (Encyclopedia of Korean Culture). http://encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Contents/Item/E0028783/. August 12, 2018. [3] Helen Hye-Sook Hwang, “Mago, the Creatrix from East Asia, and the Mytho-History of Magoism” in Goddesses in Myth, History and Culture (Lytle Creek, CA: Mago Books), 29-34.