Nancy Lankston
River in flood carries me to a new mountain.
Mountain holds me and whispers,
Bringer of the fairy light
Learn to hold the valley… learn to hold.
I rest in the lap of Isis
Sacred mother of all
Tears flow and heal.
Blood river of my ancestors
Washes over me, through me
Dark Goddess smiles.
Just dance your dance.
Just dance your dance.
I am drumming my sister awake
Blooming hills surround
Bee priestesses dance
And Her honey flows.
~Nancy Lankston
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Today I am grateful for:
1. The dark half of the year. Time to slow down, dream, reflect, contemplate. #Darkness
2. Welsh Goddess Arianrhod. She lives in a wheel of stars at the center of the night sky. Arianrhod keeps the dead safe until it is time for them to be reborn. #RestingPlace
3. Celtic Goddess Elen of the Ways. She is a whisper, a gentle wind in the wilderness. Elen shows us our true path. #WayShower
4. The bone collector, a Celtic Crone Goddess who collects the bones of the dead animals all winter and sings them across the void to be reborn. #BoneSong
5. Hindu Goddess Kali. She dances a power dance and demands we embrace our shadow. #LookInTheDark
6. Babylonian Goddess Tiamat, the primordial power and chaos of the depths. She both creates and destroys. The early patriarchal kings claimed to have destroyed Tiamat, but we all know better. #Primordial
7. Ancient feminine energies / archetypes of darkness. These dark goddesses hold so much wisdom and power. #DarkWisdom
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Originally posted on Facebook, 11/28/19
Image: Paris Catacombs by Nancy L
We are in the dark of a new moon in watery Scorpio now. And Uranus, the agent of radical change in opposition is increasing Scorpio’s normal intensity.
“The only way out is in. The only way beyond is through.” ~Bryan Ellis
The dark goddess who rules Scorpio embodies the deep truth of this quote. She beckons to us from the dark, whispering that deep healing will be ours if only we will look within and own every part of ourselves; the fears, the shame, the rage, the guilt… even the desires we won’t give voice to.
Don’t run way. Sit in your dark. Feel it’s healing power. Hold it close. Love it. Love it all.
☽☾
#KaliArianrhodInannaDurgaCailleachIxchelElen
“The Goddess gradually retreated into the depths of forests or onto mountaintops, where she remains to this day in beliefs and fairy stories. Human alienation from the vital roots of earthly life ensued, the results of which are clear in our contemporary society.
But the cycles never stop turning, and now we find the Goddess reemerging from the forests and mountains, bringing us hope for the future, returning us to our most ancient human roots.”
~Marija Gimbutas
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#SacredFeminine
#Hope
Why do I rail on and on about the patriarchy on social media? Because it is essentially a state of great imbalance in our world. We must honor and respect BOTH the male and female, both the yin and yang energies to be in a healthy, balanced state. A man named Robert Bly explained it well:
‘I Came Out of the Mother Naked’
“In every past society known, a matriarchy has preceded the present patriarchy. Just as every adult was once inside the mother, every society was once inside the Great Mother…what we call masculine consciousness is a very recent creation. Men prefer to remember back only to that point in culture when they took over….archeologists have found hundreds of statues in caves and settlement ruins…going back many centuries, and they have never found a statue of the Great Father—the statues found, all over the world, are statues of the Mother.
If it is true that mother consciousness preceded father consciousness, then two further things follow:
women at some time must have had immense power, running all areas of life: law, agriculture, division of wealth, social custom and especially religion.
there must have been a war … Beowolf I think describes the destruction of Great Mother culture in Northern Europe; it is a historical poem, and perhaps three thousand years of fighting are summed up in it.
We have then inside us two worlds of consciousness: one world associated with the dark, and one world with the light. The dark half corresponds to the consciousness developed in the matriarchies, the white to the consciousness developed in the patriarchies that followed. Mother consciousness was in the world first, and embodied itself century after century in its favorite images: the night, the sea, animals with curving horns and cleft hooves, the moon, bundles of grain. Four favorite creatures of the Mother were the turtle, the owl, the dove, and the oyster —all womb-shaped, night, or ancient round sea creatures. Matriarchy thinking is intuitive and moves by associative leaps.
Bachofen discovered that it favored the left side (the feeling side) of the body. When the Nicene Creed says Christ sits on the right hand of God, you know you are in a patriarchy.
The right hand became favored over the left, mountaintops over valleys, one and three over two and four, the square over the circle. It creates straight roads. Matriarchies are interested primarily in what is inside walls, but the patriarchies become aware of the space between walls; empires grow from patriarchies. The patriarchies plot out the ground in huge squares. In thinking, Socrates sounds the note: avoid myths – which are always stories of the Mother anyway – and think logically, in a straight line.
Father consciousness tries to control the mammal nature through rules, morality, commandments….The Chinese describe it as the south side of the mountain (on which the light always falls), the rational, the hard.
In mother consciousness there is affection for nature, compassion, love of water, grief and care for the dead, love of whatever is hidden, intuition, ecstasy. The Chinese describe it as the north side of the mountain (always in shadow), the valley of the world.
Before the white people came, Drinks Water, an old Dakota holy man, dreamed that the Indians would be defeated, and warned that when that happened, they would have to live in square houses. Black Elk mentions this in 1931. He was then living in a square house, and said, “It is a bad way to live, for there can be no power in a square. You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round…the wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours…Our teepees were round and always set in a circle.”
Men’s fear of women seems to be a fundamental emotion on this planet. It is rarely talked about, and in the U.S. it is getting worse. It is possible that when a culture refuses to visualize the dangerous mothers, men then become vaguely afraid of all women, and finally of the entire feminine side of the their own personalities. That is a disaster.”
Robert Bly, 1973