April 26, 2022April 13, 2022 Mago Work AdminLeave a comment

(Book Excerpt 2) Willendorf’s Legacy: The Sacred Body edited by Trista Hendren, Tamara Albanna, and Pat Daly

“A Note from the Editors” by Trista Hendren Willendorf’s Legacy contains a variety of writing styles from women around the world. Various forms of English are included in this anthology and Read More …

Search for Mago Volunteers: Co-editors, Bloggers, and Promoters

We are very grateful that Return to Mago (RTM) E-Magazine (http://magoism.net) has grown to fruition for the last four years. We have now more than 110 contributors and world-wide readers from 160 countries. Meet who we are here. RTM is operated by the hand of volunteer co-editors and bloggers including Mary Saracino as Editor-in-Chief, Rosemary Mattingley as Co-editor, and Helen Hwang as Founding Director and Co-editor as well as present blogging volunteers, Spider Redgold and Alaya Dannu. As Rosemary Mattingley, currently Admin Editor, steps down from the task of Admin Editor as of July 15, 2016, we are seeking the following volunteer positions.
(Poem) Come Eat My Roses/ the Feminine Renewal Calls By Louisa Calio

I’ve seen the horrors of the wasteland yet to come
(Essay 2) Book of Veles: Storied Instructions by Danica Borkovich Anderson

I Julie Mertus wrote “The Suitcase Refugees,” and her study also outlines the invisible and most vulnerable targets, such as the daughters, mothers, and grandmothers. Mertus’ research estimates that 75% of global refugees are women and children, carrying little more than a single suitcase at best. The middle-aged and elderly women remained well below one percent in terms of receiving any funding for aid. No line item in any humanitarian aid agency was or is secured for middle-aged and elderly women or titled “small acts.” When I met with the Sarajevo Human Rights general undersecretary Zivica Abadic, now retired, she stated that illiteracy (with over thirty percent females described as illiterate) was rising in the aftermath of the 1990s Balkan war and that unreported domestic labor mostly done by middle-aged and elderly women do not have pensions and are at a slave labor rate of pay, if there were a salary. [i] Chain smoking and thin, short hair dyed black, Zivica Abadic spoke of the Bosnian South Slavic fathers living under an unemployment rate soaring past 80% in the aftermath of war twelve years later, who now refuse to pay school fees for their daughters. The range of education among women is staggeringly poor. The impact To the invisible and most vulnerable, the packing up of their hand-ground coffee and baked sweets to take to the meetings with both the Ahmica-Vitez and Srebrenica war crimes survivors was nothing more to them than simply sharing coffee and baklava, something they do at home as much as they can. In fact, drinking the small demitasse cups of thick Bosnian coffee numerous times during the day allowed the sharing of their blood and honey first-person stories. What is deceptive about their hand-wrapped packages of cakes and savory cheese pita packed in worn suitcases is that the Novi Travnik women war survivors are privy to war crimes stories not even whispered in any tribunal courts or international courts. The invisible and most vulnerable are those who bear witness and serve female justice to the most terribly wounded and traumatized women and children. But what took place are the first-person stories, their primary healing tools for trauma, and the actual Book of Veles—the real blood and honey stories. What I learned from these women is that what lives on long after we die are these narratives, the Book of Veles. The Book of Veles and Bogumiles do not reside only in the former Yugoslav region but also in Bulgaria. The Pavlikeni, Bulgarian heretics, maintained Bulgarian guardianship of the Book of Veles. The Bogomils (also Bogumiles) were a sect dating from 950 AD through the Middle Ages, which coincides with the Book of Veles dates. But the Book of Veles was not just known to the Balkan peoples and tribes. A Cyprian monastery is referred to as being pure Bogumiles. The Catholic Church in Rome hailed the Cyprian monastery as being promiscuous in its beliefs and practices. The church’s criticism most likely includes the divine feminine and the Lost Goddesses: Balkan Bird and Snake Goddesses of Regeneration, which the classically trained archeologist Marija Gimbutas called the zoomorphic artifacts. Mostly targeted and attacked by the educated clergy, the Book of Veles heightened hatred for the female narratives of their life experiences and capacity to heal their families and communities. It’s all in the twist of gender, that of the male gender in the Book of Veles. South Slavic female justice is an evolutionary process that occurs through small acts done consistently and with great love. Sweeping up after the wars and baking sweets while boiling thick coffee in a wide-based and narrow-necked pot called a djesva has been done silently for generations, behind the scenes of what was cited as momentous humanitarian aid and policies that did not support or recognize them. But the kolo (Slavic folk round dance or to enter into a circle) informed trauma format is performed by primarily illiterate, invisible females who are known to experience the most damage. The educated and humanitarian aid agencies know this and still do nothing. Of course, they are invisible to you and me as we ask, “How did this happen without the media making sure that we all knew about it?” Promiscuously in their healing tutelage, the Kolo Sumejja with the Kolo trauma format worked and played with those most targeted by educated humanitarian and ruling entities, which saw them as luscious victims justifying large grants for their pockets. Despite the lack of funding and their illiterate, invisible status, the women swung through Bosnia using their para-professional trauma skills with the Ahmica-Vitez women and the Srebrenica women, who lost thousands of their male relatives in one day. No humanitarian policy or justice system has a written procedure or a budget line for bakery items and thick Bosnian coffee specifically for the invisible and the most vulnerable targets. The grandmothers, the elderly women, are erased and ignored, not just in Bosnia’s humanitarian crisis but globally. Not a single grandmother, elderly widow, or the infirm, who are the invisible and most vulnerable, sit on councils, governing policy and decision concerns. Nor are they asked for their wise input or to express the reality and truth of their experiences by their courts and humanitarian agencies. It does not matter. The women have their Book of Veles, and now this chapter is for the educated who have not seen them until now. (End of the Essay) [i] July , 2005 meeting Sarajevo Helsinki Human Rights Office with the general undersecretary and Kolo Sumejja Novi Travnik, Bosnia https://www.magoism.net/2013/06/meet-mago-contributor-danica-borkovich-anderson/
(She Summons Excerpt) Why We Need the Goddess at the Time of Great Global Crisis: Evolving a New Feminist Sacred Activist Vision by Kavita Byrd

[Editor’s Note: This essay was included in She Summons: Why Goddess Feminist Activist Spirituality? Volume 1, coedited by Kaalii Cargill and Helen Hye-Sook Hwang (Mago Books, 2021).] Given that the loss of the sense of the sacred in our lives – our relationship with the Earth as well as our values, our world-view, our systems – is clearly destroying the Earth and driving us to extinction – one would think that religions and spiritual paths would be the first to respond, to restore the sacred in our lives, to be on the front- lines in regenerating our planet and society. Yet both the traditional religions and New Age, post-modern spiritual approaches have failed to respond effectively to the global crises. Instead of challenging and transforming patriarchy, materialism and capitalism, the sources of the crises, they have often become complicit with them, both directly entwined with them and complacent about changing them. How can we bring spirituality, then, into a direct and powerful response to the existential crises we face, rather than simply serving the forces ofescapism, fatalism, elitism and complacency? In light of the ways our present forms of spirituality have fallen short of, even impeded, the robust response to the crises so much needed today, how we can create a new spiritual activist paradigm that can truly rise instead to the challenges of these times – the clarion call from nature herself and our own evolutionary imperative for radical transformation, both of our consciousness and our systems – in a fresh and effective way? Today the climate emergency, and impending social and ecological collapses it augurs, can no longer be ignored. Even the schoolchildren are rising up for their survival; it is a sacrilege to pretend not to hear their cries. If our spiritual orientations have been too weak or obsolete to defend them and our Earth, it is clear we need new visions. So what would a new sacred vision look like that supports and guides with its wisdom heartful, impassioned and clear-sighted action, reversing and healing the effects we have caused by the de-sacralization of our world? First of all, we need to know that going beyond our ego is not about disappearing into a void, a detached transcendence from the world, but going beyond the illusion of separation between ourselves and the world; and further, that that illusion itself is built upon a still deeper illusion that either are ever separate from their own eternal Source. What does this mean? That both we and the world (we and “the Earth”, we and the “other”, human or non-human) are held in an infinite space of light, peace and joy that, as we evolve, flows powerfully through both, healing the illusory rift between them. This evolutionary unfolding from the depths of our own true being lifts the veil not only between ourselves and the “other” but also between the present moment and the eternal Presence in which it is appearing, the here and now of our crisis-torn world and the infinite light of healing and guidance that bathes it, washes through it. A true non-dual realization does not pit our own liberation against compassionate action or caring for our world. It suffuses us with the love and wisdom to heal our ravaged planet, and also breaks open the time-space matrix and delivers us to our true nature, which is boundless, endless and whole. Taken in this way, our crises themselves are transmuted into an extraordinary stroke of grace, a source of salvation on both counts, worldly and eternal, of this world and beyond it. The seeming curse of destruction that has fallen upon us becomes a portal of blessing, redemption, an opening into the deathless. I said “first of all”, but really, if we begin to see this, we have the key to all: both healing our crises, planetary transformation, and a true spiritual awakening – the key that can crack open the illusory divisions that separate us from each other, our precious Earth, and, in the same stroke, our own infinite Source; the stroke of grace that can break open the grid of illusion, the prison bars of time and space, that keep us separated from our own limitless true nature, both in its formless Essence and all its myriad forms. In this most portentous of crises, we are being handed the master-key to the mystery of who we really are. There is a mercy in this crisis, unfathomable to our minds, but which if we meet it empty-handed, showers us with its light. When we can see through our chattering, self-identified thoughts, the prison of our own story and mind, and drop deep into our heart, we come to know ourselves as nothing, and everything at the same time; we come to know who we are really are; the infinite, deathless space that contains the whole of creation. This is the key, and power, to healing our own suffering and the rifts between us, the rifts between us and our Earth, the key to our transformation and ultimate liberation. Our liberation is not from life on this Earth, but from the illusion of separation between us and all of existence, in this world and beyond it. When the veil of mind is lifted, even the seeming separation between life and death dissolves. This is the true birth that beckons us, to Heaven here on this Earth and at the same time eternal. For those of us especially who have practiced Eastern spiritual traditions, we need a more profound and relevant understanding of their true import than we have needed before, a truly non-dual understanding that overcomes the seeming division between spirit and matter, the transcendent and immanent, our infinite true nature and its manifest forms. We are called now to go beyond the illusion of separation itself, from our own formless Essence and also all its forms, here on Earth, in the present. Spirit is not somewhere else, someplace we need to transcend to: it …
(Meet Mago Contributor) Jyoti Wind

Jyoti Wind is a dreamer of larger possibilities, a watcher of human behavior, and a listener to the Divine and the Nature Spirits who guide us all. She records what comes to her, a scholar of life and living in these times. By day, she’s worked with Astrology for over 50 years. By night, she uses Shamanic ways of seeing to help restore the balance. She is a mother, grandmother, and great grandmother, a lover of life and of people’s hearts. She is a gate keeper and a releaser of words. Her writings are found here: https://www.jyotiwindastrology.com/blog-2
(Prose) Wild Politics and Mother Trees by Susan Hawthorne

In 1994, I attended a conference in Bangladesh organised by Farida Akhter on People’s Perspectives on Population. Sixty-four women from around the world discussed the exploitative nature of Population Control policies internationally. The worst example for me was the lit-up billboard in the middle of Dhaka continuously counting the number of births. This was used as a scare-mongering tactic. Farida’s book, Depopulating Bangladesh (1992) was also a huge eye opener. Farida had also published an earlier book, Women and Trees: Trees in the Life of Women in Kajuri Village (1990). I grew up on a farm on the Western Slopes of New South Wales and my mother was a great fan of trees. She ensured that there were trees in the paddocks to provide shade for sheep during the hot summers; she planted trees and watered them endlessly. But until I read Farida’s book I had not thought about the politics of trees. This conference changed me and set me on the path of doing a PhD and later publishing my book, Wild Politics: Feminism, Globalisation and Biodiversity (2002). Part of my research focused on the practice of forestry. The destruction of forests in many places has accompanied colonisation, war, industrialisation, export, and globalisation. Biodiversity has been a casualty, as have many important roles women have played as minders of culture. I have continued this research in my recent book Vortex: The Crisis of Patriarchy (2020). While I was doing my research into trees and forests, in Canada Suzanne Simard, a forester, was studying the ways in which mycorrhizal pathways were created by the roots of trees and the mycelium of fungi. I had read about Suzanne Simard’s research but until reading her book Finding the Mother Tree: Uncovering the Wisdom and Intelligence of the Forest (2021) I did not know the full story of the battles within the forestry industry she undertook in the 1990s and her incredible research findings. One important point she makes is about the centrality of ‘dominance’ in the forestry industry. This has been going on a long time and was expressed by Julius von Brinken a forester who visited Bialowieza, Lithuania in 1820 and said that what was needed were “tidy battalions ready for their marching orders” (cited in Wild Politics, p. 226, my italics). Simard in her book writes: “In forestry, the theory of dominance is put into practice through weeding, spacing, thinning, and other methods that promote growth of the prized individuals” (Finding the Mother Tree, p. 140). In a challenge to the ‘tidy battalions’, Simard discovered that “the biggest and oldest trees were connected to almost all the younger ones in their neighborhood … the whole forest was connected—by Rhizopogon alone (Finding the Mother Tree, p. 221). Simard and Akhter draw the same conclusion. Farida Akhter writes about the importance of ‘uncultivated plants’, the sovereignty of food. Akhter writes: “Land that is “used to grow ‘occupying rice’ cannot be used for growing the many varieties of native rice” (Vortex, p. 252). Akhter intuited that the uncultivated plants are in communication with other plants around them. Simard also found out that on farms “the vegetation becomes very quiet. Thanks to selective breeding, our cultivated plants have, for the most part, lost their ability to communicate above or below ground” (cited in Vortex, pp. 253-254). In Australia, there have been battles over the grandmother trees which are deemed sacred by the Djab Wurrung peoples in Victoria who believe that the roots of grandmother trees, birthing trees, grandfather trees and direction trees are linked. They have been trying to prevent the killing of these trees for a government-proposed widened highway. The protection of established trees is one that many activists have fought for. What becomes clear in Simard’s research is that the old trees not only protect the young trees, but because they are so richly linked with the trees around them they provide a great deal more to biodiversity and the overall health of the local ecology. Simard writes: “Maybe society should keep old Mother Trees around—instead of cutting most of them down—so they can naturally shed their seed and nurture their own seedlings. Maybe clear-cutting the old, even if they’re not well, wasn’t such a good idea. The dying still have so much to give” (Finding the Mother Tree p. 271). Respect for the old, connection, and local knowledge are all key to living in keeping with the limits and possibilities of nature. The global winners-take-all attitude is destroying the earth, creating wildfires, floods, storms and more. What point is profit on a dead and silent planet? References Akhter, Farida. 1990. Women and Trees: Trees in the Life of women in Kaijuri Village. Dhaka: Narigrantha Prabartana. Akhter, Farida. 1992. Depopulating Bangladesh: Essays on the Politics of Fertility. Dhaka: Narigrantha Prabartana. Hawthorne, Susan. 2002. Wild Politics: Feminism, Globalisation and Biodiversity. Melbourne: Spinifex Press. Hawthorne, Susan. 2020. Vortex: The Crisis of Patriarchy. Mission Beach: Spinifex Press. Simard, Suzanne. 2021. Finding the Mother Tree: Uncovering the Wisdom and Intelligence of the Forest. Melbourne: Penguin Random House. Wild Politics: https://www.spinifexpress.com.au/shop/p/9781876756246 Vortex: https://www.spinifexpress.com.au/shop/p/9781925950168 (Meet Mago Contributor) Susan Hawthorne https://www.magoism.net/2013/12/meet-mago-contributor-susan-hawthone/
The Gospel of Dorothy by Jen Taylor

Minoan Snake Goddess or her devotee with bird’s beak – Phaistos, Proto-palatial period, early second millennium BCE (reproduction: linoleum carving ink print / Jen Taylor) The Power of the Word Try to feel your mouth from the inside – a locked box of mandables attached to bone. All sorts of magic starts here, a serpent tongue spilling seed syllables, cursed brews of hate, potions of love & forgiveness. The world is full of lost magicians – you & you & you. If you want to come home, Tell the witch you love her. After she melts, a path so well-known that it is secret will be revealed again. Follow it, a gilded road through your ears, past the canal of flying monkeys to your brain – A wizard lives here. Tell him you don’t believe him anymore. Oct. 8, 2019 Young girls in walking labyrinth full of goldenrod / The Sanctuary, East Haddam, CT (August 2019) Photos copyrighted by Jen Taylor https://www.magoism.net/2021/10/meet-mago-contributor-jen-taylor/
(Prose & Poetry) A Matter of Beauty & Jeanne d’Arc Turning by Harriet Ann Ellenberger

Artwork by Adolf Schaller, Space Telescope Science Institute A Matter of Beauty On the afternoon of 15 April 2019, I was playing with ideas of what to do with my piles of writing fragments. I wrote down “finish that old Jeanne d’Arc poem,” and then Mr. Bear came downstairs to tell me that Notre Dame was burning. When I had impulsively walked alone into Notre Dame de Paris one April afternoon in 1985, I walked in saturated with the radical feminist critique of patriarchal religion. I knew what the Holy Roman Empire had done to the tribes of Europe, and I knew how the Inquisition centuries later had broken the country peoples. I knew details of the Church’s torture methods, and I was a good candidate neither for piety nor for awe when it came to cathedrals. But Notre Dame de Paris had been built by pre-Inquisition Europeans who could still see the Milky Way arching over a Paris with no electric lights, who may still have been carrying a cultural memory of the ancient Queen of Heaven. Whatever they were thinking consciously, they created an exaltation of stone and the old forest of Paris, earth reaching toward sky, that sent me spiraling upward. Beauty matters. By the morning following the fire, a billion dollars in unsolicited donations to rebuild Notre Dame had poured into the French government, and that was counting only the large contributions. Smaller gifts of money flooded in too, from everywhere. I didn’t send money, but I did finish that old Jeanne d’Arc poem, and now I send it winging eastward across the Atlantic, along with the wish that something beautiful and new, a renaissance, begin soon for the people of France. Jeanne d’Arc Turning Jeanne d’Arc turned her back on the wars. She said, there is nothing more addicting than fighting. Jeanne d’Arc turned her back on resistance. She said, the trouble with struggle is that it wears you down and then you are too ready to die. Jeanne d’Arc turned her back on battle. She said, Paris will come to me when I dream the full flower of France. Jeanne d’Arc turned. She turned and came full into the arms of love. [Author’s Note: The featured image is an artist’s rendering of stars forming in the early universe (Adolf Schaller, Space Telescope Science Institute). “A Matter of Beauty” first appeared in “Riversong: Poems and More,” 24 April 2019, https://harrietannellenberger.com.] (Meet Mago Contributor) Harriet Ann Ellenberger.
(Commemorating Mary Daly) The wiser, the waywarder: Mary Daly and the power of renegade Catholic Women by Theresa Krier

It includes a labrys, the cosmos, and loads of Mycenean women (possibly priestesses). The heading, translated by the author from the German, says “Drawing of the motif of a gold ring from Mycenae depicting a goddess with three poppy capsules, in the background a labrys (double axe), Greece.” Source: Wikimedia Commons. Mary Daly’s work first saved my life decades ago, when I was teaching at a Catholic university entirely clueless about justice for women faculty, staff, and students. I was suffering without the conceptual wherewithal to make sense of this problem, still without resources to think my way through it. I was already a lapsed Catholic, already a feminist but not widely read in feminist conceptual work. Pure Lust, my first encounter with Daly, gave me hope, energy, strength, and laughter. It focused my rage. I was in the middle of life’s journey, like Dante wandering in a dark wood, and Daly didn’t exactly lead me through hell, purgatory, and paradise; rather she smashed that cosmos all to pieces, with rage, comedy, generativity, and sheer brains. Then she created new worlds welcoming of the realms of mythic life forms—nymphs, Amazons, Norns, Nymphs, and all the rest. She understood from the get-go that myth is good to think with. (More on this below.) I had been feeling, during my years in that dark wood, that all expectations, hopes, projects, efforts had turned to ashes around me. I had come to a sort of grim acceptance of that, in the conviction that the truth is always better to live with than fantasies, no matter how bleak the truth. This is still my conviction. But Daly came along with not only with rage and suffering, but also with high spirits and creativity. While reading Pure Lust, I had two of the very few dreams I’ve had that could be called archetypal. In one, I was standing on the edge of a tropical pool, and dove in (though in waking life I don’t like watery depths), and startlingly emerged on the other side as a very large tiger. I still talk to that tiger in my contemplation times. In the second, I was in my little red Prius, when a vigorous woman with blue spiky hair, glasses, pedal pushers, and one eye came running up to the car, hijacked it with me in it, and drove wildly through city streets. She took me to a place like an underground parking structure, filled with water, and with great sleeping, breathing creatures whose heads looked round, as if they were all dolphins. It was very peaceful. That woman, I came to think, is Sophia—the Wisdom of the biblical books—and she is now my constant companion. Sometimes she’s in her form as Isis, sometimes as the Greek Sophia figure, sometimes Baba Yaga, sometimes the one-eyed woman in pedal pushers: a whole panoply of Wisdom figures, avatars of the Great Goddess. I think Mary Daly knew all of them. I want to go back to myth, understood here as the vast multiplicity of gods and spirits and daemons… the personages in Greek, Roman, Celtic, continental European and north-African traditions (i.e., those most central to my research and writing in the last 40 years, and central to Daly’s too). Myth in this sense poses multiplicity itself as an issue, and as a gift. They allow the peoples who live with them to think about cosmos, perception, temporality, space, earth, air, fire, and water, psyche and soma, physics. The subtitle of Pure Lust, Elemental Feminist Philosophy, marks Daly’s brilliant innovations on the elements and elementals of ancient mythologies, and on its physics as that study’s love of kinesis: motion, energy, rest, rhythm, owning one’s own limbs and embodied life. Daly both embraces and extends these interwoven strands, and furthers the relevance of their thought, their thinking process, for women and feminism. After Daly, Irigaray and new generations of philosophers and writers also elaborate the importance of thinking, and the worldly circumstances for thinking one’s own thoughts, through these same figures. Daly, Irigaray, and so many mythopoeic poets and protagonists long to know, and to fly, and to traverse the weave of the cosmos. This can happen in mythopoeic poetry because myth and physics work together from their earliest surviving tales and poems—which won’t surprise anyone who knows Neil Gaiman’s Sandman or (for the elders among us) the great Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland. Ancient mythic works identify so many of their deities with heavenly bodies, alike freely ranging among multiple regions and tiers of an imagined cosmos, mediating relations between heaven and earth, bringing the amplitude and dimensionality of the world. Daly is so strong and freeing on these histories, in her push away from the exclusions of theology. For Daly as for Irigaray following her, and then for myself, the nexus of mythic beings and movement within a commitment to feminism makes new senses of freedom and thinking for oneself—and with the great intellectual disciplines—in an airy or watery space. I’m retired now, but I never tire of Wisdom goddesses in their rage and their sense of humor (pedal pushers? one-eyed? Really?), their love of epistemology and phenomenology and flight and intimacy within the elements, of philosophical-cum-mythological poetry, of feminist studies in religion and theology. Myth is good to think with because it bespeaks aliveness itself, both as a felt state of vitality and as a process of genesis or generation, and as the order of spirits and daemons as models for women in their own vital forces. It’s such a gift to be able to find one’s most formative intellectual, professional, ethical, aesthetic, and spiritual ancestors woven into specific, fiery souls like Daly or Irigaray. I’m so lucky to have had the profession and the opportunities to think that come with being a scholar and teacher. (I say this in spite of my many experiences of rage at the incoherencies and injustices of institutions, by the way.) It’s such a gift to invoke the spirit of Mary …

(Special Post 1) "The Oldest Civilization" and its Agendas by Mago Circle Members

[Editor’s Note: The following discussion took place in response to an article listed blow by the members of The Mago Cirlce, Facebook group of Goddessians/Magoists from May 6 to May 10, 2016. Readers are recommended to read the original article linked below that has invoked the converation.] “The Danube Civilization: Oldest in the World” in The Ancient Ones upon the ruins of our ancestors, published April 3, 2016.
(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 2) Why Goddess Feminism, Activism, or Spirituality? A Collective Writing

[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. 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.] Harriet Ann Ellenberger I got involved with women’s liberation in the early 1970s, so involved that it became my life for many years. During those beginnings of what is now called “the second wave of feminism,” everything was new to us and everything was mushed together — the political, the economic, the intellectual, the emotional, the spiritual. I liked that a lot; it felt as if all the parts of myself were coming together. During that time, I learned something crucial the imagery and concepts of patriarchal religion justify and are embedded in the material structures of oppression. I don’t know which came first, institutionalized oppression (of everyone; I’m not speaking here only of women) or the religious expression of that oppression. All I’m certain of is that patriarchal religion permeates, for example, the Oxford English Dictionary, which I use all the time, in conjunction with Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language, conjured by Mary Daly in cahoots with Jane Caputi.

A Southern Hemisphere Perspective on Place by Glenys Livingstone Ph.D.

This essay is an edited excerpt from the Introduction to the author’s book PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion, which was an outcome of her doctoral research/thesis entitled The Female Metaphor – Virgin, Mother, Crone – of the Dynamic Cosmological Unfolding: Her Embodiment in Seasonal Ritual as Catalyst for Personal and Cultural Change. This doctoral work was in turn a documentation and deeper research of the Seasonal ceremonial celebrations that the author was already engaged in for over a decade. The whole of the process is here named as her “Search”. photo credit: David Widdowson, Astrovisuals. The site of seasonal ceremonial celebrations will always be significant. In my case, the place in which I have created them has been notably in the Southern Hemisphere of out Planet Earth. The fact of my context being thus – the Southern Hemisphere – had contributed in the past to my deep internalized sense of being “other”, and dissociated from my senses, since almost all stories told were based in Northern Hemisphere perspective. Yet at the same time this context of inhabiting the Southern Hemisphere contributed to my deep awareness of Gaia’s Northern Hemisphere and Her reciprocal Seasonal Moment: thus, awareness of the whole Planet. My initial confusion about the sensed Cosmos – as a Place, became a clarity about the actual Cosmos – which remained inclusive of my sensed Cosmos. PaGaian reality – the reality of our Gaian “country” – is that the whole Creative Dynamic happens all the time, all at once. The “other”, the opposite, is always present – underneath and within the Moment. This has affected my comprehension of each Sabbat/Seasonal Moment, its particular beauty but also a fullness of its transitory nature. Many in the Northern Hemisphere – even today – have no idea that the Southern Hemisphere has a ‘different’ lunar, diurnal, seasonal perspective; and because of this there often is a rigidity of frame of reference for place, language, metaphor and hence cosmology[i]. Indeed over the years of industrialized culture it has appeared to matter less to many of both hemispheres, including the ‘author-ities’, the writers of culture and cosmos. And such ‘author-ity’ and northern-hemispheric rigidity is also assumed by many more Earth-oriented writers as well[ii]. There has been consistent failure to take into account a whole Earth perspective: for example, the North Star does not need to be the point of sacred reference – there is great Poetry to be made of the void of the South Celestial Pole. Nor need the North be rigidly associated with the Earth element and darkness, nor is there really an “up” and a “down” cosmologically speaking. A sense and accountof the Southern Hemisphere perspective with all that that implies metaphorically as well as sens-ibly, seems vitally important to comprehending and sensing a whole perspective and globe – a flexibility of mind, and coming to inhabit the real Cosmos, hence enabling what I have named as a ‘PaGaian’ cosmological perspective, a whole Earth perspective. It has also been of particular significance that my Search has been birthed in the ancient continent of Australia. It is the age of the exposed rock in this Land, present to her inhabitants in an untarnished, primal mode that is significant. This Land Herself has for millennia been largely untouched by human war, conquest and concentrated human agriculture and disturbance. The inhabitants of this Land dwelt here in a manner that was largely peaceful and harmonious, for tens of thousands of years. Therefore the Land Herself may speak more clearly I feel; one may be the recipient of direct transmission of Earth in one of her most primordial modes. Her knowledge may be felt more clearly – one may be taught by Her. I think that the purity of this transmission is a significant factor in the development of the formal research I undertook – in my chosen methodology and in what I perceived in the process, and documented; from my beginnings as a country girl, albeit below my conscious mind in the subtle realms of which I knew little, to the more conscious times of entering into the process of the Search. In this Land that birthed me, ‘spirit’ is not remote and abstract, it is felt in Her red earth[iii]. Aboriginal elder David Mowaljarlai described, “This is a spirit country”[iv], and all of Her inhabitants, including non-Indigenous, may be affected by the strength of Her organic communication. It took me until the later stages of my research to realize the need to state the importance of this particular place for the advent of the research: the significance of both the land of Australia, and the specific region of the Blue Mountains in which I was now dwelling, as well as the community of this particular region, which all lent itself to the whole process. The lateness of this perception on my part, has to do with the extent of my previous alienation; but the fact that it did occur, is perhaps at least in part attributable to the unfolding awakening to my habitat that was part of the project/process. The specific region of the “Blue Mountains” – as Europeans have named them – is significant in that I don’t think that this project/process could have happened as it did in just any region. David Abram says, “The singular magic of a place is evident from what happens there, from what befalls oneself or others when in its vicinity. To tell of such events is implicitly to tell of the particular power of that site, and indeed to participate in its expressive potency[v]”. Blue Mountains, Australia: Dharug and Gundungurra Country The Blue Mountains are impressive ancient rock formations, an uplifted ancient seabed, whose “range of rock types and topographical situations has given rise to distinct plant communities”[vi]; and the presence of this great variation of plant communities, “especially the swamps, offer an abundance and variety of food sources, as well as habitats for varied fauna”[vii]. I feel that this is the case for …
(Essay) Conceiving, Imagining the New at Samhain by Glenys Livingstone Ph.D.

It is the Season of Samhain/Deep Autumn in the Southern Hemisphere at this time. In the PaGaian version of Samhain/Deep Autumn ceremony participants journey to the “Luminous World Egg” … a term taken from Starhawk in her book The Spiral Dance[i], where she also names that place as the “Shining Isle”, which is of course, the Seed of conception, a metaphor for the origins of all and/or the female egg: it is the place for rebirth. Artist: Bundeluk, Blue Mountains, Australia. The “luminous world egg” is a numinous place within, the MotherStar of conception: that is, a place of unfolding/becoming. The journey to this numinous place within requires first a journey back, through some of each one’s transformations, however each may wish to name those transformations at this time. The transformations for each and every being are infinite in their number, for there is “nothing we have not been” as has been told by Celts and others of Old, and also by Western science in the evolutionary story (a story told so well by evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris, particularly in her video Journey of a Silica Atom.) Ceremonial participants may choose selves from biological, present historical self, or may choose selves from the mythic with whom they feel connection; from any lineage – biological or otherwise. Selves may also be chosen from Gaia’s evolutionary story – earlier creatures, winged or scaled ones … with whom one wishes to identify at this time. Each participant is praised for their “becoming” for each self they share. When all have completed these journeys/stories of transformation, the circle is lauded dramatically by the celebrant for their courage to transform; and she likens them all to Gaia Herself who has made such transitions for eons. The celebrant awards each with a gingerbread snake, “Gaian totems of life renewed”[ii]. gingerbread snakes Participants sit and consume these gingerbread snakes in three parts: (i) as all the “old shapes” of self that were named; and (ii) remembering the ancestors, those whose lives have been harvested, whose lives have fed our own, remembering that we too are the ancestors, that we will be consumed; and (iii) remembering and consuming the stories of our world that they desire to change, the stories that fire their wrath or sympathy: in the consuming, absorbing them (as we do), each may transform them by thoughts and actions – “in our own bodyminds”. When all that is consumed “wasting no part”, it is said that “we are then free to radiate whatever we conceive”, to “exclaim the strongest natural fibre known” – our creative selves, “into such art, such architecture, as can house a world made sacred” by our building[iii]. This “natural fibre” is a reference to the spider’s thread from within her own body, with which she weaves her web, her home; and Spider has frequently been felt in indigenous cultures around the globe as Weaver and Creator of the Cosmos. Spider the Creatrix, North America, C. 1300 C.E., Hallie Iglehart Austen, The Heart of the Goddess, p.13 In the ceremony, participants linked with a thread that they weave around the circle, may sail together for a new world “across the vast sunless sea between endings and beginnings, across the Womb of magic and transformation, to the “Not-Yet” who beckons”[iv]: to the Luminous World Egg whereupon the new may be conceived and dreamed up. Samhain/Deep Autumn ceremony is an excellent place for co-creating ourselves, for imaginingthe More that we may become, and wish to become. This is where creation and co-creation happens … in the Womb of Space[v], in which we are immersed – at all times: and Samhain is a good season for feeling it. References: Livingstone, Glenys. PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion. NE: iUniverse, 2005 Sahtouris, Elisabet. Earthdance: Living Systems in Evolution. Lincoln NE:iUniversity Press, 2000. Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. NY: Harper and Row, 1999. Swimme, Brian. The Earth’s Imagination.DVD series 1998. NOTES: [i]p.210 [ii]a version of this Samhain script is offered in Chapter 7 PaGaian Cosmology [iii]These quoted phrases are from Robin Morgan, “The Network of the Imaginary Mother”, in Lady of the Beasts, p.84. This poem is a core inspiration of the ceremony. [iv]“Not-Yet” is a term used by Brian Swimme, The Earth’s Imagination, video 8 “The Surprise of Cosmogenesis”. [v]note that creation does not happen at the point of some god’s index finger, as imagined in the Sistine Chapel – what a takeover that is!
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.
(Slideshow) Summer Solstice Goddess by Glenys Livingstone Ph.D.

Sekhmet by Katlyn Each year between December 20-23 Sun reaches Her peak in the Southern Hemisphere: it is the Summer Solstice Moment. Poetry of the Season may be expressed in this way: This is the time when the light part of day is longest. You are invited to celebrate SUMMER SOLSTICE Light reaches Her fullness, and yet… She turns, and the seed of Darkness is born. This is the Season of blossom and thorn – for pouring forth the Gift of Being. The story of Old tells that on this day Beloved and Lover dissolve into the single Song of ecstasy – that moves the worlds. Self expands in the bliss of creativity. Sun ripens in us: we are the Bread of Life. We celebrate Her deep Communion and Reciprocity. Glenys Livingstone, 2005 The choice of images for the Season is arbitrary; there are so many more that may express Her fullness of being, Her relational essence and Her Gateway quality at this time. And also for consideration, is the fact that 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 Summer Solstice. As you receive the images, remember that image communicates the unspeakable, that which can only be known in body, below rational mind. So you may open yourself to a transmission of Her, that will be particular to you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syTBjWpw3XU Shalako Mana Hopi 1900C.E. (Hallie Iglehart Austen, The Heart of the Goddess), Corn Mother. Food is a miracle, food is sacred. She IS the corn, the corn IS Her. She gives Herself to feed all. The food/She is essential to survival, hospitality and ceremony … and all of this is transmuted in our beings. Sekhmet Contemporary image by Katlyn. Egyptian Sun Goddess. Katlyn says: Her story includes the compassionate nature of destruction. The fierce protection of the Mother is sometimes called to destroy in order to preserve well being. And Anne Key expresses: She represents “the awesome and awe-full power of the Sun. This power spans the destructive acts of creation and the creative acts of destruction.”- (p.135 Desert Priestess: a memoir).A chant in Her praise by Abigail Spinner McBride: Sheila-na-gig 900C.E. British Isles. (Hallie Iglehart Austen, The Heart of the Goddess). From Elinor Gadon The Once and Future Goddess (p.338): “She is remembered in Ireland as the Old Woman who gave birth to all races of human…. In churches her function was to ward off evil”, or to attract the Pagan peoples to the church. From Adele Getty Goddess (p.66): “The first rite of passage of all human beings begins in the womb and ends between the thighs of the Great Mother. In India, the vulva “known as the yoni, is also called cunti or kunda, the root word of cunning, cunt and kin … (the yoni) was worshipped as an object of great mystery … the place of birth and the place where the dead are laid to rest were often one and the same.” Getty says her message here in this image “is double-edged: the opening of her vulva and the smile on her face elicit both awe and terror; one might venture too far inside her and never return to the light of day …” as with all caves and gates of initiation. In the Christian mind the yoni clearly became the “gates of hell”. And as Helene Cixous said in her famous feminist article “The Laugh of the Medusa”: “Let the priests tremble, we’re going to show them our sexts!” (SIGNS Summer 1976) Kunapipi (Australia) “the Aboriginal mother of all living things, came from a land across the sea to establish her clan in Northern Australia, where She is found in both fresh and salt water. In the Northern Territory She is known as Warramurrungundgi. She may also manifest Herself as Julunggul, the rainbow snake goddess of initiations who threatens to swallow children and then regurgitate them, thereby reinforcing the cycle of death and rebirth. In Arnhem Land She is Ngaljod …” (Visions of the Goddess by Courtney Milne and Sherrill Miller – thanks to Lydia Ruyle). More information: re Kunapipi. NOTE the similarity to Gobekli Tepe Sheela Turkey 9600B.C.E., thanks Lydia Ruyle.Lydia Ruyle’s Gobekli Tepe banner. Inanna/Ishtar Mesopotamia 400 B.C.E. (Adele Getty, Goddess: Mother of Living Nature) She holds Her breasts displaying her potency. She is a superpower who feeds the world, nourishes it with Her being. We all desire to feel this potency of being: Swimme and Berry express: “the infinite striving of the sentient being”. Adele Getty calls this offering of breasts to the world “a timeless sacred gesture”. Mary Mother of God 1400 C.E. Europe (Hallie Iglehart Austen, The Heart of the Goddess). A recognition, even in the patriarchal context that She contains it all. Wisdom and Compassion Tibetan Goddess and God in Union. This is Visvatara and Vajrasattva 1800C.E. (Sacred Sexuality A.T. Mann and Jane Lyle). Sri Yantra Hindu meditation diagram of union of Goddess and God. 1500 C.E. (Sacred Sexuality A.T. Mann and Jane Lyle, p.75). “Goddess and God” is the common metaphor, but it could be “Beloved and Lover”, and so it is in the mind of many mystics and poets: that is, the sacred union is of small self with larger Self. Prajnaparamita the Mother of all Buddhas. (The Great Mother Erich Neumann, pl 183). She is the Wisdom to whom Buddha aspired, Whom he attained. Medusa Contemporary, artist unknown. She is a Sun Goddess: this is one reason why it was difficult to look Her in the eye. See Patricia Monaghan, O Mother Sun! REFERENCES: Gadon, Elinor W. The Once and Future Goddess. Northamptonshire: Aquarian, 1990. Getty, Adele. Goddess: Mother of Living Nature. London: Thames and Hudson, 1990. Iglehart Austen, Hallie. The Heart of the Goddess.Berkeley: Wingbow, 1990. Katlyn, artist https://www.mermadearts.com/b/altar-images-art-by-katlyn Key, Anne. Desert Priestess: a memoir. NV: Goddess Ink, 2011. Mann A.T. and …
(Video) A Samhain Ceremony by Glenys Livingstone Ph.D.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVRoK2XNeqw The purpose of the 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. For more full participation in the ceremony, you could have some past photos of yourself, an altar with ancestor photos, a gingerbread snake, some apples sliced up, and some apple juice. The script for this Samhain ceremony is offered in Chapter 4 of my book A Poiesis of the Creative Cosmos: Celebrating Her within PaGaian Sacred Ceremony, with all acknowledgements and references there. However I want to acknowledge here the inspiration and some text of Robin Morgan’s poem “The Network of the Imaginary Mother” in her book Lady of the Beasts, for which I was given permission in my book. I also acknowledge here the paraphrase of some words by Starhawk in her book The Spiral Dance, used in the rite of Sailing to a New World. I also use a line from the poem Song of Hecate by Bridget McKern. 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). For the rite of the Transformation Journey (remembering old selves) I use an adaptation of a children’s game “In and Out the Windows”, where each participant travels in and out of upraised and linked arms of the circle, and when ‘in’ may speak and /or show photos of themselves from the past. Some may choose to remember any self from the entire evolutionary story, with whom they would like to identify. The game seems appropriate to what each being does existentially in so many ways, over the eons as well as in our personal lives. The chant can be found on YouTube. The photos used are a collage of footage and photos from the 2024 Samhain ceremony at my place in Wakka Wakka country, South East Queensland Australia, and from previous Samhain ceremonies I facilitated over the decades in MoonCourt, Goddess ceremonial space in NSW Australia, Darug and Gundungurra country. Music credit: All music used in this video is by Tim Wheater, which has previously generously allowed me to use in my work. The pieces used are from Tim’s CD Fish Nite Moon: they are Ancient Footsteps, Fish Nite Moon, Spiritbirth, and Conception. I thank my partner Robert (Taffy) Seaborne for his participation in the creation of the video.
(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: …

(Video) 2013 Mago Pilgrimage to Korea by Helen Hye-Sook Hwang

[Author’s note: The first Mago Pilgrimage to Korea took place June 6-19, 2013. We visited Ganghwa Island, Seoul, Wonju, Mt. Jiri, Yeong Island (Busan), and Jeju Island.] Read Mago Pilgrimage Essay 1 and Mago Pilgrimage Essay 2. See Meet Mago Contributor, Hae Kyoung Ahn for “Ma Gaia Womb” chant music and Meet Mago Contributor, Helen Hwang Ph.D.
(Bell Essay 4) The Ancient Korean Bell and Magoism by Helen Hwang

Part IV Asking the Dangerous Question: How Old is the Symbol of Nine Nipples? An inquiry about the origin of an ancient female symbolism is subversive in nature. It shakes the ground of patriarchal premises come to be believed rather than understood. The question here is the provenance of the nine nipples sculpted on ancient Korean bells. A focus on the female principle that nine nipples represent hurls the inquirer into uncharted territory. Note that official [read Sinocentric] historiography of East Asia leaves no means to navigate through the beginning of gynocentric civilizations. Where there is no written history, archaeologies and mythologies are rendered anomalous if not obsolete. Thus, tracking the provenance of nine nipples is made to face a quandary, without the mytho-history of Old Magoism. The relief of nine nipples on the ancient Korean bell has its predecessors. From Silla, a wind chime called pungtak from Gameun-sa (Temple of Gameun) appears to be an immediate model. Much smaller in size (27.8 cm), pungtak is to be hung on the eaves of a pagoda or a Buddhist temple building. Given that the Gameun-sa was completed in 682 CE, the nine nipples of pungtak may well be considered as the precursor of the Sangwon-sa bell (cast 725 CE). Unfortunately, however, we are unequipped to trace the pre-Silla Korean examples of nine nipples under the standard view of Sinocentric ancient Korean history. This will need another space to discuss. That said, how old is the symbol of nine nipples? Extant ancient bronze bells with nine nipples suggest that it dates back to as early as the introduction of bronze metallurgy in East Asia. On the other hand, however, the existence of nine nipples on ancient pottery bells throws a new light on another scenario that they may predate the Bronze Age. That the use of clay preceded the use of metal is incontestable. Interestingly, a good number of ancient bronze bells with nine nipples are from the Shang dynasty (ca. 1600 BCE-ca. 1046 BCE) and the Western Zhou dynasty (1046 BCE-771 BCE) of China. Seong Nakju, in his article tracing the origin of ancient Korean bells, states that bells with the nine protruded knobs emerged for the first time between the late Shang and the early Zhou period (see Seong Nakju below in Sources). When something of the female principle, ultimately like the provenance of Mago, is dated to the Shang dynasty [Shang dynasty to be the earliest historical polity of China], it suggests that it was there before the beginning of Chinese history. On these ancient Chinese bells, the nine knobs are placed in three rows of three in its four corners just like yudu (nipples) of the Korean bell. Nonetheless, there is, among others, a distinction to be mentioned here. The nine knobs of Zhou bells are called “mae” (枚, classifier for small things, mei in Chinese) not “yudu.” The female connotation is absent in ancient Chinese bells. This gender shift or female castration to be precise, however casual it may seem, is no small factor. It has allowed a chasm in the forthcoming history of Chinese bells. Bells were no mere object for the ancients. They were the channel of epiphany, sacred in short. They represented the divine power derived from Old Magoism during which female shamans ruled. The patriarchal enthronement that took seizure in the course of history, however, marked a discontinuity and changed the nature of the bell’s symbolism to be only nominal, lacking reality. The bell as the symbol of the female principle was no longer effective under patriarchal rules. Why? It was deprived of the reality of the Goddess with which it could reverberate. Thus, it lost its ultimate purpose, to create music, in that the patriarchal ruling principle itself was not “musical,” but dissonant with the rest of the world. One who breaks the harmony can’t own the music! Bells are rendered as a thing that points to the meaning of the past. This is how bells during the era of patriarchal rules came to be objectified as a royal belonging, as seen in the Qing bell of a later time. Ancient sages or even kings and queens of East Asia may have noticed what had gone wrong with the bell and agonized to restore it, the effort for which they were praised as the great thinker or sage ruler. The imposing air of authority had to be made visual precisely because the bell could no longer do the magic, engendering the divine power. Thus, highly embellished designs and classifications of various bells were made to cover up the void. Later on, the magnitude of the bell was employed to convey (pseudo-)power, deranged from the female principle. Nonetheless, the nine nipples seemingly survived in many bells of the Zhou dynasty. I present here some specific bells such as yongzhong (a bell with a cylindrical handle on top), niuzhong (a bell with a semi-circular knob on top), and yangjiaozhong (a bell shaped like ram’s horns) to highlight the various styles of mae. After all, pyeonjong (bianzhong in Chinese, metal chime bells) is a variation of pyeongyeong (bianqing in Chinese), the stone chime bells (see Part I). This suggests that the making of ancient bells needs to be seen in a continuum rather than as a new invention in the Bronze era. However, we do not have pyeongyeongs with nine nipples. Stone chimes do not seem to have nine nipples. If ancient East Asians had not carved the nine nipples on a stone bell, then they did it on clay. Pottery bells with nine nipples are found to have co-existed with bronze bells. The level of sophistication and precision in artistry is there as well, as shown in the images. It may be, as experts would explain, that ceramic bells were created to substitute for the costly bronze bells during the Zhou dynasty. However, that should not be always the case. Prior to the Bronze Age, humans invented terracotta technology and brought it to its zenith from which, in fact, metallurgical techniques are likely to have derived. In short, ceramic bells of the Zhou dynasty suggest that the origin of nine nipples predates the …
(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 …